CU Course on Hegel, Part 8
Subject, Object and Idea
Our course on Hegel is in ten
parts. It is not exhaustive. It is designed, like all the Communist University
Courses, to stimulate dialogue, in the belief that the kind of learning that we
seek is the social and political kind of learning that happens in groups.
This part will contain only
one item, which is the eighth of Andy Blunden’s ten 2007 lectures on Hegel's
Logic. It contains several quotations from Hegel, and there will be more in
this post, below. We are not abandoning the main CU principle of relying on
original writing and (as a rule) avoiding secondary commentators.
Hegel is indispensible
because, among other things:
·
Without knowledge
of the historical Hegel and Hegelianism, it appears as if Marx and Engels came
from nowhere, whereas the development, and history, of ideas is continuous, and
dialectical
·
Without knowledge
of Hegel’s way of thinking, and in particular his Logic, some of Marx, especially parts of Capital, appears obscure,
incomprehensible or even weak and “illogical”
·
Modern philosophy
all descends from Hegel or from reactions to Hegel; it (i.e. not just Marx, but
all of Hegel’s successors) is incomprehensible without Hegel
·
The revolutionary
battle must be won in philosophy as much as anywhere else, if not more so
·
Hegel’s is the
philosophy that we need for our revolutionary practice.
Hegel is difficult for us
because:
·
His work appears
at first sight to be voluminous, self-contradictory and obscure
·
The body of
scholars that maintain Hegel’s position in public thought is too small, and
conflicted
·
Hegel offers a
real transformation, which is in itself a difficult thing to accept and to
internalise
The last line of Andy
Blunden’s lecture Subject, Object and
Idea (download linked below) contains the following:
“No-one else
has produced anything that can rival [Hegel’s] Logic; and he left
no room for imitators.”
And in the first line of his
second-last section of this lecture, “Hegel’s
critique of the individual/society dichotomy” Andy Blunden writes:
“So what we
have seen is that Hegel presented a critique of all aspects of social life by
an exposition of the logic of formations of consciousness, which does not take
the individual person as its unit of analysis but rather a concept. A concept is understood, not
as some extramundane entity but a practical
relation among people mediated by ‘thought objects’, i.e., artefacts.”
Quite so. Hegel presented a critique of social life. All of Hegel’s
“Beings”, “Essences”, “Notions” et cetera,
all the way up to and including “The Idea” and “The Spirit”, are ways of
understanding people as social creatures (or “political animals” as Aristotle called them).
This is from the “Shorter
Logic”:
“The Idea is
truth in itself and for itself - the absolute unity of the notion and
objectivity. Its ‘ideal’ content is nothing but the notion in its detailed
terms: its ‘real’ content is only the exhibition which the notion gives itself
in the form of external existence, while yet, by enclosing this shape in its
ideality, it keeps it in its power, and so keeps itself in it. The Idea is the
Truth: for Truth is the correspondence of objectivity with the notion - not of
course the correspondence of external things with my conceptions, for these are
only correct conceptions held by me, the individual person. In the idea we have
nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with
external things. And yet, again, everything actual, in so far as it is true, is
the Idea, and has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every
individual being is some one aspect of the Idea: for which, therefore, yet
other actualities are needed, which in their turn appear to have a
self-subsistence of their own. It is only in them altogether and in their relation
that the notion is realised.
“The
individual by itself does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation
of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the
individual.” (Shorter Logic, §213)
Not only does Hegel produce a
thorough working-out of the relation of the individual to society, but he also
unifies the Subject-Object dichotomy with the rest of the social logic. Without
Hegel such unification would be impossible, and we would be left with nothing
but nonsense like this cartoon:
To conclude this opening-to-discussion,
let us return to something we have quoted before. It is from an afterword of
Karl Marx’s, concerning the very work “Capital” that Lenin says cannot be
understood without Hegel’s “Logic”:
“My dialectic
method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To
Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking,
which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent
subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is
only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the
ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and
translated into forms of thought.
“The
mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago [but
although] I openly avowed myself the
pupil of that mighty thinker… with him [dialectic] is standing on its head.
It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel
within the mystical shell.”
The great Marx was arguing
against Right Hegelians and anti-Hegelians at that stage, and in defence of
Hegel. Unfortunately this saying of Marx is sometimes taken to mean that Marx
had somehow “refuted” Hegel, demolished him and sent him into the dustbin of
history, whereas the opposite is the case. Marx “openly avowed [himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker”, and he certainly
followed Hegel in believing that such “refutations” do not happen. In the
Marxian as much as in the Hegelian world, the past is contained in the present,
and is not lost.
Marx’s remark could lead to
another error. It is clear that Marx is not saying here that he, Marx, stood
Hegel on his head. He says that Hegel stood dialectic on its head. In fact, as
we have seen, Hegel’s method involves constant reversals and Marx follows Hegel
in that respect. So Marx might have better confined himself to saying that
Hegel stood dialectic on its head once
too often. We cannot say that all the reversals must be taken out of Hegel
because it is largely in this way of reversals that Hegel is able to achieve
the unprecedented transformations that he does undoubtedly achieve; and
likewise with Marx himself. What we can say is that sometimes Hegel makes
mistakes and offers a reversal that we may reject. But even then we should not
be too hasty. Andy Blunden says:
“We should
take [Hegel] at his word when he says that Spirit is the nature of human beings
en masse. All human communities construct their social environment, both in the
sense of physically constructing the artefacts which they use in the
collaborating together, and in the sense that, in the social world at least,
things are what they are only because they are so construed. The idea of spirit
needs to be taken seriously. It may seem odd to say, as Hegel does, that everything is thought, but it is no
more viable to say that everything is matter, and if you want to use a
dichotomy of thought and matter instead, things get even worse.”
