Hegel-by-HyperText Resources

Thematix

§Definitions of Dialectics

• Engels' definition in Anti-Duhring or
• Engels' definition in Utopian and Scientific or
• Engels' definition in Ludwig Feuerbach.
• Hegel's definition in his critique of Kant.
• Not a "subjective seesaw of pro and con"
• Hegel's definition in Science of Logic, and
• To hold fast to the positive in its negative and
• Hegel's definition in The Absolute Idea or
• The science exhibits itself as a circle returning upon itself, the end being wound back into the beginning, the simple ground, by the mediation; this circle is moreover a circle of circles
• Dialectics, according to Hegel, was the form of thought that included the process both of elucidating contradictions and of concretely resolving them. [Ilyenkov]
• Lenin's definition in annotations on Book I,
• flexibility of concepts,
• all-sidedness,
• transitions,
• the whole of Lenin's summary of Dialectics.

§Nature - examples of Dialectics in Nature

• The syllogism may be seen in the magnet
• The child is both mediated and immediate
• Quantity and Quality in Chemistry
• Darkness and light
• Attraction and repulsion
• Gradualness and discontinuity
• The "numbers of Nature"
• Something moves,... because at one and the same moment it is here and not here
• Chance in Nature
• Development of a plant from its germ
• The germ is the Notion of the plant
• Chemism is a reflectional nexus of objectivity
• Animal wants and appetites are felt contradiction
• A hand when hewn off from the body is a hand in name only

§The Greeks - references to the Biographies

• §Heraclitus, 544 - 483 BCE,
• §Leucippus, 500 BCE,
• §Zeno of Elea, 490 - 430 BCE,
• §Socrates, 469-399 BCE,
• §Democritus, 460 - 370 BCE,
• §Plato, 428-347 BCE,
• §Aristotle, 384-322 BCE,
• §Epicurus, 341 - 270 BCE,
• §Zeno of Citium, 336 - 264 BCE,

See comments the Greeks generally:

• In the Preliminary Notion
• To know what free thought means go to Greek philosophy
• The gods of the Greeks were only particular powers of the mind

§Natural Science - Comments and Criticisms of the Methods and Concepts of Natural Science

• Newton continues to be celebrated as the greatest of philosophers
• Experience is the real author of growth and advance of philosophy
• The method of empirical science exhibits two defects
• The Atomic philosophy
• Obsession with calculation
• Compares favourably with the methods of contemporary logic
• Crude rejection of all method
• Quantitative relations must be known from the qualities or specific Notions of time and space
• Movement from analysis by means of "force" to the concept of "polarity"
• Calculus
• Calculus
• Force and matter
• The Philosophy of Identity
• The invention of "matters" to explain phenomena
• Matter as an abstraction
• The concept of Force
• Spurious explanation by "force"
• (Natural) law is not beyond Appearance but is immediately present in it
• Lenin's comment: Spurious explanation by "force"
• Determinism
• The universal of the notion is not a mere sum of common features
• "Final cause" and design in nature
• Concepts from mechanics carried into chemistry and biology
• The chemist e.g. places a piece of flesh in his retort, and then informs us that it consists of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen
• Geometry, dealing with a theme so abstract as space, has an easy task in giving definitions
• Arbitrary classification
• To geometry alone therefore belongs in its perfection the synthetic method of finite cognition
• Transgressing limits of understanding
• See Marx's comment on Natural science and philosophy

§Examples in Personal Life and Development

• How children learn language and thinking
• It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions
• States of passion
• A "real man"
• Youth and experience [and in the Shorter Logic]
• Outward behaviour and the inner self
• The child is the person "in-itself"
• Positive and negative (debt & asset, etc)
• Each man is the architect of his own fortune
• A good man is aware that the tenor of his conduct is essentially necessary
• Being "untrue to one's Notion"
• The young imagine that the world is utterly sunk in wickedness
• The absolute idea may be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime

§Social and Historical Examples of Dialectics

• 'Ought to be' in politics
• The whole of philosophy resembles a circle of circles
• A circle of circles, ...Links of this chain are the individual sciences
• Production of surplus value and philosophy
• Division of labour
• Build up of disaster for a State
• History of philosophy conforming to The Idea
• Possibilities in history
• Is the constitution a result of the nature of the people?
• It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes
• Why slavery has vanished from modern Europe?
• On the Social Contract of Rousseau
• The Good is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: this is the illusion under which we live

§Definitions of the Absolute

Hegel says: "The different stages of the logical idea are to be treated as a series of definitions of the Absolute"
The following stages are mentioned:

BEING:

• The Absolute is Being ... is the definition given by the Eleatics
• Absolute is the Nought. ...which the Buddhists make the universal principle
• The Absolute is pure Quantity. This point of view is on the whole the same as when the Absolute is defined to be Matter, viz., quantity, is no other than the principle of Materialism
• Measure, like the other stages of Being, may serve as a definition of the Absolute; ... this idea which forms the ground-note of many of the ancient Hebrew hymns

ESSENCE:

"The terms in Essence are always mere pairs of correlatives, and yet not absolutely reflected in themselves"

• Identity in its truth, as an Ideality of what immediately is, is a high category for our religious modes of mind as well as all other forms of thought
• The maxim of Identity, "Everything is identical with itself", is nothing but the law of abstract understanding
• Diversity has ... been transformed into a maxim: 'Everything is various or different'
• The conception of Polarity, which is so dominant in Physics, ... the more correct definition of Opposition
• Inquiry into the Grounds of things goes with the point of view which ... is adopted by Reflection
• The reflective understanding makes it its business to elicit and trace these connections running out in every direction: [Existence]
• Appearance is ... the distinction of philosophy from ordinary consciousness that it sees the merely phenomenal character of what the latter supposes to have a self-subsistent being
• The philosophy which adopts the standpoint of Substance and stops there is the system of Spinoza

THE NOTION:

• The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism ... the definition ... that the Absolute is the Notion
• The definition that the Absolute is the Object, is the Leibnizian Monad
• The theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object and there stops, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear
• The definition, which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute. All former definitions come back to this

§Comparisons of Hegel and Marx

ENGELS:

• Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverised the contradiction, ... it placed materialism on the throne again
• Ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content
• Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, one started out from his revolutionary side, from the dialectical method
• The dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet
• It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts

MARX:

• Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic ... Feuerbach's great achievement is: ...
• Hegel has merely discovered the abstract, logical, speculative expression of the movement of history
• Hegel conceives wealth, the power of the state, etc., as entities estranged from the being of man, he conceives them only in their thought form
• He sees only the positive and not the negative side of labour
• For Hegel, human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. ...On the contrary, actual estrangement [is] the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness
• having superseded religion and recognised it as a product of self-alienation, he still finds himself confirmed in religion as religion
• Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself,... whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind
• My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite

LENIN:

• In Capital, Marx applied to a single science logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge of materialism which has taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further
• The core of "Hegelianism", of abstract and abstruse (ponderous, absurd?) Hegelianism?? .. had to be discovered, understood, rescued, laid bare, refined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did
• It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic

OTHERS:

• TROTSKY: Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies
• PILLING: In his critique of the categories of bourgeois economy Marx was directly influenced by Hegel
• Hegel prepared the way for introducing the role of practice into human thought
• Hegel's idealism meant ... he was therefore obliged to represent the ascent of consciousness as one in which thought was gradually emancipated or 'purified' from sensuous reality. Marx's view here departed sharply from that of Hegel

§Thought forms and the Objective World

• Logic derived from a survey of the whole system
• The distinction between Sense, Conception, and Thought.
• Thought regarded as an activity
• By the act of reflection something is altered
• The Objectivity of Thought
• Thought is the constitutive substance of external things
• For these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the work ... the one living Mind
• The Notion constitutes a stage of nature as well as of spirit. Life, or organic nature, is the stage of nature at which the Notion emerges
• God is only nature
• Logical Idea, Nature and Mind three figures of a syllogism
• The notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, hearing and seeing must quite fail us. And yet, . . .
• The universal ... cost thousands of years to enter the consciousness of men
• The notion is the genuine first
• Neither the notion nor the judgement are merely found in our head
• A study of Logic is no more necessary to teach us how to draw correct conclusions, than a previous study of anatomy and physiology is required in order to digest
• In the idea we have nothing to do with the individual
• The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself
• The truth is that Nature is the creation of Spirit
• The Idea, in positing itself as absolute unity of the pure Notion and its reality and thus contracting itself into the immediacy of being, is the totality in this form - Nature.
• excessive tenderness for the world, to remove contradiction from it and then to transfer the contradiction to spirit.
• Language (speech) is, nevertheless, not the sole empirically observed form in which human thought manifests itself. [Ilyenkov]
• Hegel was more aware of the contradiction between the world of things outside consciousness and the world of thought than his naive critics. [Ilyenkov]

§Critiques of Kant

• See Biographical Notes on Kant, and
• Hegel's Critique of Kant's scepticism
• Hegel's Critique of the Critical Philosophy
• Hegel's assessment of Kant in the footnote in the Science of Logic
• Hegel in The Notion in General and
• When Kant comes to discuss the old and famous question: what is truth? ...
• Kant withdrew cognition from an interest in its objects for the study of the instruments
• One of Kant's great services to philosophy consists in the distinction he has made between relative or external, and internal purposiveness
• Hegel on Morality, including critique of Kant.
• See Ilyenkov's Essays from the History of Dialectics.

§Critiques of Formal Logic

• Hegel on The Law of Identity in Book I of the Logic
• The laws of logic ...are not subjected to criticism
• At the approach of this kind of syllogism we are at once seized with a feeling of boredom
• On the Law of Identity in Book II of the Logic
• On The Law of the Excluded Middle
• On The Unity of Positive and Negative
• On The Law of Contradiction
• In the Shorter Logic: 'Everything is identical with itself', is nothing but the law of abstract understanding
• Formal Logic lays down a law of thought without deducing it
• The notion is no mere form without a content of its own
• Logic is usually treated without in the least touching the question whether anything is true
• Formal Logic does not offer any proof for the advance from notion on to judgement
• The syllogism are met nowhere save in the manuals of Logic
• Lenin's comments on Hegel
• ... on Hegel
• See Ilyenkov: Hegel saw the main job facing logic as resolving the contradictions into which it inevitably fell when consciously guided by formal logic

§Unity of Opposites

• Finite and Infinite
• Force and Matter
• Identity and Difference
• Positive and Negative
• Positive and Negative in the Science of Logic
• Form and Content
• Chance and Necessity
• Cause and Effect
• Freedom and Necessity
• Subjectivity and Objectivity
• Means and Ends
• Subject and Object
• Abstract and Concrete
• Marx on the abstract v concrete, analysis v synthesis
• Marx on private and common property
• and individual and social.

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