Hegel, Part 6
Excerpts on Essence and Notion
Andy
Blunden’s two lectures, for which he chose the excerpts from Hegel that are attached
(and downloadable via the link below) begin with Being and go via Essence,
to Notion, a journey that we have already taken with him once. Hegel
also makes the same trip twice, once in the Shorter Logic, and another time in
the Science of Logic.
So
let’s just say that repetition is no bad thing when it comes to study.
We
will return to Andy’s marvellously illuminating lectures in the second
instalment of this part of our course on Hegel, but let us note for now part of
the quote from Hegel’s “Shorter Logic”
that Andy gives in the beginning of the first of these two lectures. Says Hegel:
“Most commonly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean
that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside
and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies,
most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which
time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy
has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy
has been refuted. And that in two ways. For first, every philosophy that
deserves the name always embodies the Idea: and secondly, every system
represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the
Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers
are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer
principle that follows.”
And
then at the end of the two Andy Blunden lectures, he writes: “Development is
the struggle of opposites which do not disappear”.
This
is the unity-and-struggle-of-opposites that we have picked up from Marx and
Engels but which actually comes from their predecessor, Hegel, in exactly the
manner that Hegel describes in the quotation above it.
It
is wrong and doubly wrong to say that Marx and/or Engels refuted and did away
with Hegel, as some have said and many more have assumed was the case. Hegel
remains, and will always remain, “a
factor in the completer principle that follows”.
Now
frankly, in the Communist University, we would love to find in any book the
most concise, lucid passage, and if possible a single paragraph or sentence,
that gave us the whole content of the book summed up. Through Clausewitz, Marx,
Engels and Lenin we have sought and found the richest and most concentrated
“short texts” to use for the stimulation of our dialogues.
Also
frank is Hegel - a very careful man - who has warned us from the start that he
does not want us to be doing any such thing with his work.
Be
that as it may, the four excerpts that Andy Blunden picked out on this occasion
may be the closest we come to a short text from Hegel, in his own words, which
would go towards fulfilling Lenin’s insistence that we must “thoroughly study and understand the whole
of Hegel’s Logic.”
They cover Action and Reaction, Content and
Form, Notion, and Development.
There are many cards in the
Hegel pack. These four are as near to being a “full house” as we are likely to find.
Not forgetting that our first business with Hegel is to understand what Marx got
from Hegel.
Hegel is not always obscure.
The following is clear enough:
“Real works
of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. The
content of the Iliad, it may be said, is the Trojan war, and especially the
wrath of Achilles. In that we have everything, and yet very little after all;
for the Iliad is made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that content is
moulded.
“The content
of Romeo and Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through
the discord between their families: but something more is needed to make
Shakespeare's immortal tragedy.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Excerpts on Essence and Notion.
