Part 5
“Immediacy”: Unselfconscious
Being
Being, Essence and Notion
The three divisions of the Logic
Lenin wrote: “It is
impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital… without having thoroughly
studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.” Our mission, given by
Lenin, is therefore to thoroughly study and understand the whole of Hegel’s
Logic.
We soon find that there are
actually two Logics: The Shorter Logic, and The Science of Logic; but
they are similar, and are both divided by three main headings: Being, Essence and Notion.
This time we are going to
reverse the order and take Andy Blunden’s lecture as the main item, simply
because Andy has done a great job.
There is a movement from
Being, through Essence, to Notion. This is not to deny the importance of the
argument and the detail, but to say that what distinguishes Hegel’s Logic is
that it shows how things develop from nothing to something. It is not a static
philosophy of positions and definitions. Nor is it an owners’ manual for the
mind. It is a science of creation, and
development. The beginning is Being, which is “immediate”, with as yet no past
and no future. Hence our illustration of the unselfconscious puppy-dog, above.
The following are extracts
from Andy Blunden’s lecture, finishing with a reference back to Marx’s Capital,
that may assist readers to get a quick overview of Andy’s overview of Hegel’s
“Logic”:
“I should
mention here as an aside that all Hegel’s major works have the same structure:
he identifies the simple concept or notion which marks the unconditioned
starting point for the given science, and then he applies the method, the model
for which is given in the Logic, in order to elaborate what is implicit in the
given concept; he develops ‘the peculiar internal development of the thing
itself.’
“So, the
Logic begins with a critique of Being, what is contained in the concept of
‘Being’. The Logic is really the study of concepts; so, the Concept is the
truth of Being, whilst Being is the Concept still ‘in itself’. The Third Book
of the Logic is the Doctrine of the Notion (or Concept which is same thing),
that is, the Concept for itself. But in the Doctrine of Being, the Concept is
still just ‘in itself’.
“If there is
to be some thing amidst the infinite coming and going, the chaos of existence,
the simplest actual thing that can be is a Quality, something that persists
amidst change. And if we ask what it is that changes while it remains of the
same quality, what changes when the thing still remains what it is, then this
is what we call Quantity. But a thing cannot indefinitely undergo quantitative
change and remain still what it is, retain the same quality; at some point, a
quantitative change amounts to a change in Quality, and this Quantitative
change which amounts to a Qualitative change, the unity of Quality and
Quantity, we call the Measure of the thing.
“Thus there
are three grades of Being: Quality, Quantity and Measure. We apply these
categories to things that we regard as objects, the business of the positivist
sociologist, the observer. Even a participant in a not yet emergent social
change or sociological category, has to play the role of sociologist to be
conscious of it.
“Essence is
reflection… When people reflect on things, they do so only with the aid of what
they already know. So reflection is a good term. It is new Being, reflected in
the mirror of old concepts. It’s like what Marx was talking about in the
“Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”:
‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied
with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not
exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously
conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names,
battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world
history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.’ (18th Brumaire, I)
“The third
part of the Logic is the Doctrine of the Notion. Notion is a translation of the
German word Begriff which is
also translated as ‘concept’.
“The Doctrine
of the Notion begins with an abstract notion,
and the process of the Notion is that it gets more and more concrete.
“The first
section of the Notion is Subjectivity, or the Subject. And here for the first
time we get a glimpse of Hegel’s conception of the subject: it is not an
individual person in any sense at all, but a simple element of consciousness
arising from social practices which implicate the whole community, reflected in
language, the whole social division of labour and so on.
“The process
of the Doctrine of the Notion is the abstract notion becoming more and more
concrete. This process of concretization takes place through objectification of subjectivity, that
is, through the subject-object relation. The first thing to grasp about the
Object, which is the second division of the Doctrine of the Notion, is that the
Object may be other Subjects, Subjects which are Objects in relation to the Subject
or Subjects which have become thoroughly objectified. Objectification is not
limited to the construction of material objects or texts; it’s a bit like
‘mainstreaming’, or being institutionalized. The process of development of the
Subject is a striving to transform the Object according to its own image, but
in the process the Subject itself is changed and in the process of
objectification becomes a part of the living whole of the community.
“The unity of
Subject and Object, the third and last grade of the Doctrine of the Notion, is
the Idea. The Idea can be understood as the whole community as an intelligible
whole, it is the summation of the pure essentialities of a complete historical
form of life. It is the logical representation of Spirit, or of the development
and life of an entire community,
in the form of a concrete concept.
“So the
starting point of a science is the Notion which forms the subject of the
science, not Being. This is worth mentioning because there is a widespread
fallacy about the relation between Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic. Some
writers have put Capital up against the Logic, and in an effort to match them,
start by equating the commodity relation with Being, on the basis that the
commodity relation is the “simplest relation” or on the basis that the
commodity relation is immediate. But the first thing to be done in a science,
according to Hegel (and Marx followed Hegel in this), is to form a Notion of
the subject, the simplest possible relation whose unfolding produces the
relevant science. In the case of Capital, this abstract notion, the germ of
capital, is the commodity relation. In the case of the Philosophy of Right, it
was the relation of Abstract Right, that is private property. The problem of
the origins of value or of the commodity relation is a different question, and
Marx demonstrates his familiarity with the Doctrine of Essence in the third
section of Chapter One, where the money-form is shown to emerge out of a series
of relations constituting historically articulated resolutions of the problem
of realizing an expanded division of labour.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Hegel’s
Logic - Being, Essence and Notion, 2007, Blunden.
