Hegel, Part 4
The Logic
Some academics try to
illustrate Hegel with diagrams, like the one above. They don’t help very much.
The following one is supposed
to represent the scheme of Hegel’s “Encyclopaedia”, as if it was the world
represented by an unfamiliar projection:
What this diagram suggests,
among other things, is that Hegel’s headings (or constructs) are not eclectic
or random, but do form part of an organic, or concrete, whole, as you would
expect from the one who bequeathed “The Ascent from the Abstract to the
Concrete” to Marx and Engels. Here below is another diagram, allegedly showing
Hegel’s “11 forms of dialectic”. We must resist the temptation to reduce Hegel
to the level of a corporate inspirational speaker. But we may be reassured to
know that Hegel’s dialectical concerns (e.g. Unity and Struggle of Opposites;
Particular and General; Being and Nothingness; Form and Content; Cause and Effect)
are not infinite in number, but are actually quite few.
At least it is reassuring to
be able to feel that such organic-seeming totalisations of Hegel as the above
two-dimensional diagrams are possible. It is also useful to be shown that
Hegel’s system is not the relentless march of the triads that the diagram at
the top and some of its variations are apt to suggest. The shape is neither
even, nor symmetrical. Hegel’s thought is not strained. It takes its own shape.
The indistinctness of the
diagrams is not a big problem at this stage. We would not want to take them too
literally or to trust them too much. They are not Hegel’s work and the present
distance from where we are now to the point of being able to check the diagrams
against Hegel’s actual work is long. It would require us to read and internally
digest several of the most difficult books ever written, on the way.
But we don’t need to do all
that. Marx is going to straighten out Hegel for us, anyway. What we need is
enough of Hegel so as to fully understand Marx, in keeping with the task set
for us by Lenin*. Lenin says: If you don’t have Hegel, or at least his “Logic”, then you don’t have Marx. We
are going to get sufficient of Hegel in this course so as to have our Marx on a
firm foundation.
The way we will begin this
part is with a few spots that we will locate and explore. They will be tiny in
relation to the whole but they will furnish is with some reference points, as
well as begin to make us used to the great man’s style.
At the end of this part, we
will take a very much larger portion of Hegel for reading. We must not have a
course where we end up still being virgins in relation to the works of the main
writer that we are studying. In between, we will look at what Andy Blunden has
written about Hegelian Logic and also try to get some assistance from Communist
University standby Tony Buzan. So there will be four instalments altogether
within this fourth part of our course on Hegel.
So in this instalment we are
using a compilation of four short extracts from Hegel’s Logic and The Shorter Logic
(see the link to the download, below). Hegel’s work is usually divided into
numbered passages (not always single paragraphs) that are usually given a sign
such as § or φ.
Andy’s first given quotation
is §62 from The Science of Logic. Hegel is saying
that negation leads lower forms of consciousness to a higher form of
consciousness. He says that for science it is therefore necessary to be able to
see that the negative is as good as the positive, and that negation is what
moves things on towards a result; and that a result is not an “immediacy”,
where immediacy is simple, latent, unmoved being.
Hegel is writing of the common consciousness and therefore of science,
and this view of science is the one that Marxism has.
Andy’s second quotation is §121 from The Science of Logic. This is the famous Hegel! This is the
Hegel that drives people crazy, or makes them to think that Hegel is crazy. But
Hegel, contrary to what appears, is not wasting time. To say that “being is
nothingness” is the beginning of finding out what has substance, and how human
beings are able on a daily basis to create, God-like, something out of nothing.
Andy’s third Quotation is §133
from The Shorter Logic, where Hegel
is writing of Form and Content, as a struggle of opposites that define each
other and constantly change places. Perhaps this is a good time to remember
that this Communist University is not a didactic, but rather a dialogic
University, and so to refrain from trying to “define” everything, but instead
to leave the door open for discussion. Asikhulume!
Andy’s last quotation, §160-1 from The
Shorter Logic, is about The Notion, and brings at last what is Hegel’s
special gift to posterity, something we need right now in South Africa, which
is a revelation of the nature of the thing called Development.
Because dialectic is not a magic for itself, but it is an understanding
of development, and how humans develop themselves as humanity. And this is what
we need to know.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Excerpts from Hegel's Logic.
* “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. Consequently,
half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” – Lenin
