It is necessary to establish the limitation of this Course on the relationship of Philosophy to Revolution. It is, of course, impossible to deal with Hegel's Work in so brief a time as we have allotted ourselves. Therefore, instead of dealing with it in terms of its own development, we are, in fact, limiting ourselves to reading only those passages which Lenin singled out, and even these in very abbreviated form. Lenin, in turn, gave very unequal space to the various books (the two volumes of Science of Logic constitute three books, the Doctrine of Being, the Doctrine of Essence and the Doctrine of the Notion).
Thus, Lenin's Notes, plus the quotations from Hegel constitute 159 pages whereas the two volumes of Hegel number nearly one thousand pages, especially when you consider that Lenin included also certain quotations from what is known as the "Smaller Logic". (Hegel's Logic in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) Lenin gives 15 pages to the prefaces and introduction which take up some 45 pages. Yet the whole of Book I, 325 pages, take up only 25 pages of Lenin. To Book II (190 pages), are given 40 pages of Lenin; while to 'Book III (275 pages) Lenin devotes as much space as to all the others combined, 70 pages. Clearly, not every section was of equal importance. What is most important to us of the twentieth century is that Lenin devoted the most time to the Doctrine of the Notion, or what I have called the method, the way in which a new society is born. Since the last section of the book, the Absolute Idea, will be the point of concentration in the new book, Philosophy and Revolution, it is as well that we begin with a quotation from Part II -- Why Hegel? Why now?
The structure of the Science of Logic shows no straight line to the Absolute. It is a circle in which each realm -- Being, Essence, Notion -- has its own absolute, and each starts afresh on new ground. What is of the essence is that each group of categories "perished" because it could not express the concrete totality. Thus new "names" weren't merely superimposed upon them. Rather they emerged out of the objective pull of history. Insofar as Hegel is concerned, to accept any category at face value is an "uninstructed and barbarous procedure." Conceptually, the absolute that arises for any period has a relative in it even as there is an Absolute in every relative. This is so, not because the absolute in say the Doctrine of Being is of a rather lowly kind -- Absolute Indifference -- which, though a transition to Essence "does not attain to Essence." Even when we have done with the categories of Being -- Quality, Quantity, Measure -- and reach the Doctrine of Essence; there too the Absolute is relative. The new categories -- Identity, Difference, Contradiction, Ground, Appearance, Existence, Actuality -- no doubt express the essential nature, as against what we may call a market appearance, nevertheless the Absolute here can, again, not just be "taken over" by the Doctrine of the Notion. And this despite the fact that the final section, Actuality, begins and ends with Absolute, it is not this Absolute which "carries over" into the Doctrine of Notion, "the realm of Subjectivity or Freedom."
Without understanding why this is so, the tendency would be to dismiss Hegel's Absolutes either as being no more than a "natural" for each "pinnacle" reached, or to consider that the movement to the Absolute is no more than a regression to the absolute idealism of philosophers who hide from reality. The truth is that precisely because it is the pull of objective history towards real freedom, each subsequent age reads Hegel differently.
We are finally ready to turn to Hegel himself, beginning with where we ended in the first lecture on the movement and the path of self-construction that Hegel himself underlines as critical and that Lenin singles out as the quintessential directly after Hegel's Statement, "it is the nature of the content and that alone which lives in philosophic cognition" (Hegel I, p. 36) When Hegel Writes that "it is along this path, of self-construction alone that philosophy can become objective, demonstrative science," and talks about the movement of consciousness "like the development of all natural and spiritual life", Lenin writes:
Turn it around: Logic and the theory of knowledge must be derived from "the development of all nature and spiritual life." (Lenin, p. 88)
In the preface to the second edition of Hegel's Work -- two full decades separate the first preface from the second, written at the end of his life -- he speaks about the rise of philosophy presupposing "a long stretch of road already traversed by the mind of man" so that, on the one hand, "those interests are hushed which move the lives of people and individuals" and that, on the other hand, these categories of logic are indeed "abbreviations", words that epitomize "the endless multitude of particulars of external existence." This universalism of a category stirs Lenin's mind and will bring forth the first reference to what is concrete for Lenin: Marx's Capital, expanding Hegel's expression of the relationship of the universal to the particular and stressing:
A beautiful formula: "not merely an abstract universal, but a universal which comprises in itself the wealth of the particular, the individual, "the single" (all the wealth of the particular and single!)!! Tres Bien! (Lenin, p. 99)
Lenin had already summarized to himself the first "definition" of what a category is:
Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things," i.e. of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i.e. the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world. (Lenin, pp 92-93)
In a word, in studying the categories, the principles of logic, we are, in fact, studying also the objective movement of history itself, and Hegel himself keeps talking about "the strong knots", the "foci of the arrest and direction" that are formed in the mind out of a whole web. Lenin asks himself:
How is this to be understood? Man is confronted with a web of natural phenomena. Instinctive man, the savage, does not distinguish himself from nature. Conscious man does distinguish, categories are stages of distinguishing, i.e., of cognising the world, focal points in the web, which assist in cognising and mastering it. (Lenin, p.93)
Where the significance of categories preoccupied Lenin as he read the preface to the second edition, the question of what Hegel called "the necessity of connection" and "the immanent emergence of distinctions" is what appears to him most important in the Introduction:
Very important!! This is what it means, in my opinion:1. Necessary connection, the objective connection of all the aspects, forces, tendencies, etc. of the given sphere of phenomena;2. The "immanent emergence of distinctions" -- the inner objective logic of evolution and of the struggle of the differences, polarity. (Lenin, p.97)
Reading becomes much tougher for Lenin as he approaches the specific sections of the Doctrine of Being than when he read the more generalized prefaces and introduction. But he keeps being very pleasantly surprised, after the many notations to himself that he is reading Hegel "materialistically" that he finds germs of this materialism in Hegel himself. It is Hegel who writes "What is first in science has had to show itself first, too, historically." And it is Lenin who writes: "It sounds very materialistic".
There are passages when it would seem that Lenin already knew the whole of the Logic since what will appear at the end, that is to say, if one had to summarize the dialectic in a single sentence, it would be sufficient to say it is the unity of opposites, is said right here:
Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical, under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another, -- why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another. (Lenin, p. 109)
And yet, it would be totally wrong to think that he had grasped all the ramifications of what he had written. We are, after all, only the realm of Being which, translated in terms of economics would be the "market" or commodity exchange rather than in production. He himself realized that despite the "correct definition" of the dialectic as the unity of opposites, he had then not worked out all the implications of this. This is why he had written to the editors of the Russian Encyclopedia, Granat, to whom he had just submitted the essay "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism" which had, indeed, been the first time that a popularization of Marx contained so much on the philosophy of Marxism, asking the Encyclopedia editor whether they could not return the essay to him for some new additions on dialectics. And it is indeed only when he comes to the realm of Notion that he will insist that it is impossible to understand Marx's Capital "especially Chapter I without understanding the whole of the Logic:"
What is comprehensively grasped in this first section of Book I is movement and all-sidedness of the dialectic:
Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear to be dead and shows that there is movement in them. Finite, that means moving to an end: Something, means not that which is Other. Being in general, means such indeterminateness that Being=not-Being. All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites, that is the essence of the matter. This flexibility, applied subjectively - eclecticism and sophistry. Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e. reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world. (Lenin p.110)
The most important new "discovery" that Lenin makes in this section is the relationship of the ideal to the real. We must remember that Lenin is reading this at the outbreak of World War I, when the betrayal by the Second International made it clear that it just wasn't enough to be "materialists", that something was very wrong in having concentrated on the "economics" of Marxian doctrine and to have acted as if idealism is purely "subjective" rather than a unity of the subjective and objective. Indeed, in a certain sense, it could be said that it was the new appreciation of the significance of the ideal that had sent Lenin to read Hegel's Logic. Thus, it is not only the history of man, but the history of thought which has significance for Lenin and he notes how many "Observations" Hegel makes after he has stated a certain position in order to relate that position to all of the other thinkers. The first chapter of this book, for example, has only three short paragraphs, called Being, Nothing, Becoming, after which Hegel makes no less than five observations stretching over 25 pages, tracing philosophy from the Orient to the Greeks to Spinoza and Kant. In Chapter III, Being For Self, which happens to be where we are now, it is the observation on the Ideality of Leibnitz (Hegel I, pp 173-176) that makes Lenin speak out both for the profundity of the transformation of the ideal into the real and against vulgar materialism:
The thought of the Ideal passing into the real is profound: very important for history. But also in the personal life of man it is clear that this contains much truth. Against vulgar materialism. NB. The difference of the Ideal from the material is also not unconditional, not inordinate.Obviously, Hegel takes his self-development of concepts, of categories, in connection with the entire history of philosophy. This gives still a new aspect to the whole Logic. (Lenin p.ll4)
(I should also add, since we are doing a great injustice to Hegel by skipping so much in this book and by not going into the categories themselves, that I do have complete outlines of each of the major works of Hegel and it will be possible for those who wish to study the work in greater detail after finishing this course to consult these notes. In the case of Science of Logic, the outline was made on January 26, 1961)
The final section of Book I, Measure, is where Lenin makes the greatest leap forward. I am not copying Mao but Lenin himself, who, in this section as he approaches the Observation on Nodal lines, writes the word "Leaps!", repeats it three times, further stresses it by writing: "interruptions in gradualness", and further surrounding these with all sorts of intricate lines I cannot describe (look them up yourself in Lenin, p. 123) and the essence is contained in the following quotations:
It is said natura non facit saltum; and ordinary "imagination when it has to conceive an arising or passing away, thinks it has conceived them (as was mentioned) when it imagines them as a gradual emergence or disappearance. But we saw that the changes of Being were in general not only a transition of one magnitude into another, but a transition from the qualitative into the quantitative and conversely; (Hegel I, p. 389)
Here what we should hold in mind is that the leap is where quantity reveals that it is just quality superceded and absorbed but not annihilated even as, to use words we know better, abstract labor degrades the concrete laborer but cannot destroy him, for he is "Subject", that is to say, the active human being whose "quest for universality" is only the more intense by this degradation of the capitalist process of production. The point is that even before you come to the essential process of production (or what in Hegel is the Doctrine of Essence), the dialectic of development, the transformation of quality into quantity and quantity into measure (which is on the very threshold of essence) is present.
You will see Lenin get along swimmingly as soon as we reach Essence, and so, I hope, will we.