These notes are addressed more to the teachers than to the pupils. Since, however, each member of the class is both teacher and pupil, it is addressed to all and the demand is that each person, who is to lead a class, has to read these notes and the relevant material before the session begins. The notes are hardly more than indications of where to look for the problem. There are no "illusions". At best they hope to lead to a conception of method which one can practice.
The great difficulty of plunging into Hegel directly makes it necessary to establish the historical points of departure, not only for Hegel but for our life and times. We have, in fact, four points of departure: (1) the French Revolution, which formed Hegel's point of departure, although he most often would refer to the writings in philosophy during that period rather than to the period "in and for itself". There is no doubt, however, both in his historic writings and in the Phenomenology of Mind that it is the historic event that he considered the greatest and the measure of philosophy itself. (2) The 1848 revolutions and the 1871 Paris Commune which were the great historic events of Marx's time. (3) From World War I to 1924, the decade from the time Lenin began to re-read Hegel's Science of Logic until his death. And, (4) our own post-World War II world.
A good way to prepare ourselves for both the historic periods and Lenin's notes as well as Hegel himself is by way of reading the following sections in Marxism and Freedom:
(1) "The Philosophers and the Revolution: Freedom and the Hegelian Dialectic", (pp. 33-37) which relates Hegel to the French Revolution and cites Marx on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind.
(2) "Hegel's Absolutes in our Age of Absolutes" (pp. 37-44), especially the references to Russian Communism's 1947 revisions on the dialectic and its 1955 attack on Marx's Humanist Essays.
(3) "Lenin and the Dialectic: a Mind in Action" (pp. 168-172) dealing with the break in Lenin's thought caused by the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of the Second International.
(4) "The Irish Revolution and the Dialectic of History" (pp. 172-176) which is the historical instance where Lenin applied his new conceptions of the dialectic to an actual revolution and forced the center of his theories on self-determination of nations, that is of the essence for our own age.
(5) Above all, you must read through, as a whole, without stopping to see whether you "really" understand, Lenin's Notes on Hegel's Science of Logic as they are abbreviated in the first edition of Marxism and Freedom (pp 327-355).
The two-fold reason for reading through the whole Abstract without questioning one's understanding of any single point in it is this: (1) to have at least a glimpse of the whole, it is important to get the rhythm, to follow the movement. (2) Since all of the rest of the month or six weeks will be taken up in the detailed studying of Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks, alongside the actual passages in Hegel, to which Lenin referred in his Commentary, it does not matter, in a first reading, that we have let many undigested passages pass us by. The important thing is to hold on to some reality, to the concrete as one works his way through the underlying philosophy, not to let oneself get bogged down by the Hegelian "language". Remember, always, that it was not an abstruse philosopher but a practicing revolutionary who felt the compulsion to go to the original sources of Marxism in Hegel's own Works at the very moment when the world was collapsing all about him in the Holocaust of World War I.
When Lenin asked the editors of Under the Banner of Marxism to constitute themselves as a "Society of Materialist Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic" and to print excerpts from Hegel's own works, he did not mean anything as simple as the vulgar explanation of the necessity for standing Hegel "right side up". The materialist reading of Hegel, the need to stand him "right side up" meant to Lenin that Hegel, although he had been standing on his head; had so great and objective a validity in and for himself that he simply must be read, must be allowed to speak for himself, no matter how difficult he sounds, but the editors could help this process, must help because, as he put it; "dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism."
Let us round out this very crowded evening of discussion by grappling with three quotations from Hegel's "Preface to the Science of Logic. The first is a challenge to the structure of logic to re-organize itself:
The complete transformation which philosophical thought has undergone in Germany during the last five-and-twenty years and the loftier outlook upon thought which self-conscious mind has attained in this period, have hitherto had but little influence on the structure of Logic. (Hegel1, p. 33, I.)
The reference to the 25 years refers to Kant's work on the eve of revolution and after the revolution, but in fact he is referring, as is clear from the following, to all of the philosophic writings:
... there are no traces in Logic of the new spirit which has arisen both in Learning and in Life. It is, however (let us say it once for all), quite vain to try to retain the forms of an earlier stage of development when the inner structure of spirit has become transformed; these earlier forms are like withered leaves which are pushed off by the new buds already being generated at the roots, (Hegel I, p.35).
Hegel then spells out that a philosophical meeting of the challenge of the times demands a totally new method:
... this movement is the Absolute Method of knowledge and at the same time the immanent soul of the Content of knowledge. It is, I maintain, along this path of self-construction alone that Philosophy can become objective and demonstrated science. (Hegel I, pp 36-7)
The movement, the imminent or inherent, and what we will get to know as "the path of self-construction" will from now on form the pivot of all that we will study in the rest of the course.
1 In those notes, Hegel will always stand for Science of Logic, Volumes I and II and Lenin will always refer to his Philosophic Notebooks, which constitute Vol.38 of his Collected Works.