RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA

Lecture IV: Book III¹ Subjective Logic or The Doctrine of Notion

1967

With the Notion, we reach, at one and the same time, that which, in philosophic terms, is oldest, most written about, and purely intellectualistic; and, from a Marxist point of view, least written about, most "feared" as idealistic, unreal, "pure" thought, in a word, a closed ontology.

And yet, it is the Doctrine of the Notion that develops the categories of Freedom and, therefore, should mean the objective and subjective means whereby a new society is born. It is true that, consciously for Hegel, this was done only in thought, while in life all contradictions persisted. But what Hegel did "consciously" does not explain away the objective pull of the future on the present, and the present as history (the French Revolution for Hegel), and not just as the status quo of an existing state. Be that as it may, let's follow Hegel himself. A sweeping and concrete historic sense saved Hegel from both the introspection and empty absolutes of his philosophic contemporaries and from Kant's Critique that, nevertheless, kept object and subject worlds apart:

It will always remain a matter for astonishment how the Kantian philosophy knew that relation of thought to sensuous existence, where it halted, for a merely relative relation of bare appearance, and fully acknowledged and asserted a higher unity of the two in the Idea in general, and, particularly, in the idea of an intuitive understanding; but yet stopped dead at this relative relation and at the assertion that the Notion is and remains utterly separated from reality; so that it affirmed as true what it pronounced to be finite knowledge, and declared to be superfluous and improper figments of thought that which it recognized as truth, and of which it established the definite notion. (Hegel, Vol. II, p. 226)

On the relationship of Hegel to Kant, Lenin wrote:

Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract -- provided it is correct (NB) (and Kant, like all philosophers, speaks of correct thought) -- does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc. in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely, From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice, -- such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap, (Lenin, p. 171)

On the very next page, Lenin again shows that the concrete he had in his mind in reading Hegel was Capital and its economic categories. Thus:

"Here, too, Hegel is essentially right: value is a category which dispenses with the material of sensuousness, but it is truer than the law of supply and demand." (Lenin, p. 172)

Indeed, where, in the Doctrines of Being and Essence, Lenin had two references to Capital, here in the Doctrine of Notion, he has no less than 13 references. Not only that, the references move from seeing parallelisms between Logic and Capital to the break with all (including himself) previous interpretations by Marxists. It is here that Lenin will write the categoric aphorisms:

Marxists criticised (at the beginning of the twentieth century) the Kantians and Humists more in 'the manner' of Feuerbach (and Buchner) than of Hegel. (Lenin, p. 179)

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, p. 180)

But we are forcing Lenin to run ahead of himself, so we better retrace our steps to the end of the introductory section, "On the Notion in General", as he enters Section I, Subjectivity. The first time he meets the specific categories in Book III -- Universal, Particular, Individual -- and notes: "These parts of the work should be called: a best means of getting a headache!" But he no sooner said it than he began developing all sorts of new concepts:

Obviously, here too the chief thing for Hegel is to trace the transitions. From a certain point of view under certain conditions, the universal is the individual, the individual is the universal. Not only (1) connection and inseparable connection, of all concepts and judgements, but (2) transitions from one into the other, and not only transitions, but also (3) identity of opposites -- that is the chief thing for Hegel. But this merely "glimmers" through the fog of extremely abstruse exposition. The history of thought from the standpoint of the development and application of the general concepts and categories of the Logic -- That's what is needed! (Lenin, p. 177)

By the time he had reached the third chapter (The Syllogism) in that section where Hegel could be said to have broken down the division between objectivity and subjectivity, it is as if a whole new world has opened up before Lenin. He reads Hegel's statement: "All things are a Syllogism, a universal which is bound together with individuality through particularity; but of course they are not wholes consisting of three propositions" (Hegel II, p. 107) Lenin not only draws the parallel between Capital and Marx, and rejects previous interpretations of Hegel, insisting that (as we quoted previously) it was impossible to understand Capital without understanding the whole of the Logic, but he also gets a new appreciation of the Logic as something that can be used for his age:

NB. to be inverted. Marx applied Hegel's dialectics in its rationale form to political economy.

The formation of (abstract) notions and operations with them already includes idea, conviction, consciousness of the law-governed character of the objective connection of the world. To distinguish causality from this connection is stupid. To deny the objectivity of notions, the objectivity of the universal in the individual and in the particular, is impossible. Consequently, Hegel is much more profound than Kant, and others, in tracing the reflection of the movement of the objective world in the movement of notions. Just as the simple form of value, the individual act of exchange of one given commodity for another, already includes in an undeveloped form all the main contradictions of capitalism, so the simplest generalization, the first and simplest form of notions (judgments; syllogisms, etc.) already denotes man's ever deeper cognition of the objective connection of the world. Here is where one should look for the true meaning, significance, and role of Hegel's Logic. This NB. (Lenin, pp. 178-179)

For us to be able to see those objective world connections, we must tarry a bit more with those categories -- Universal, Particular, Individual. They characterize not only the movement of the Logic as a whole and in its Individual parts; they also characterize the movement of all development in theory and in life. If you write, for Universal, Socialism; and for Particular, you assume a specific historic period in which, say, the Russian Revolution took the form of nationalized property; and for Individual, that is to say the concrete realization of a Universal, you write the self-activity of man which makes the population "to a man" the controllers of their own destiny in production and in the State; you can see what a very big gap there is between not only the Universal and the individual, but between the Particular and the individual, so big a gap, in fact, that the Particular may never reach the Individual, may get transformed into its very opposite. That is why Lenin, even before he summarized the dialectic as the unity of opposite, paid so much attention to transitions:

The transition from the syllogism of analogy (about analogy) to the syllogism of necessity, -- from the syllogism of induction to the syllogism of analogy -- the syllogism from the universal to the individual -- the syllogism from the individual to the universal -- the exposition of connection and transitions (connection is transition) that is Hegel's task. Hegel actually proved that logical forms and laws are not empty shells but the reflection of the objective world. More correctly, he did not prove, but made a brilliant guess. (Lenin, p. 180)

It is not as easy to follow through the transitions, to work out the relationships of Universal, Particular, and Individual so it appears when someone else has worked out something that has already been proven by history. A revolutionary like Leon Trotsky "got stuck" in that Particular form because it was a necessary form and the actual historic appearance in the Russian Revolution. It is this which has us by the throat or rather had Leon Trotsky by the throat, and he never did return to test what the Individual was either logically or in the concrete life of the population; he merely took for granted the Universal and concluded that "therefore" it was also so in the concrete, or was on the way to being so.

Measure your comprehension of the logical development against a concrete subject. For example, we consider the question of self-determination of nations now, related to what Lenin wrote about it after he had gone through the Logic (read those articles either in the Selected Works, Vol. V, part IV, or in the Collected Works, Vol. XIX.) And then reread it all, after you have completed the Logic, always keeping before you Hegel's statement in the Absolute Idea, "the self-determination in which alone the Idea is, is to hear itself speak."

Now return to Lenin on the Logic as he comes to Section II, Objectivity. You must read for yourselves, pages 187 to 188 since this is one of the times when he divides a page in two and on one side writes directly what Hegel says, and on the other side, "translates" it into Materialist Dialectics. I can only quote one phrase from it:

At the beginning, man's ends appear foreign ("other") in relation to nature. Human consciousness, science ("der Begriff"), reflects the essence, the substance of nature, but at the same time this consciousness is something external in relation to nature (not immediately, not simply, coinciding with it.) (Lenin, p. 88)

which again gets translated into:

In actual fact, men's ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it, -- they find it as something given, present. But it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world ("freedom").

((NB All this in the paragraph on "The Subjective End." NB)) (217-221)

(Lenin, p. 189)

The point throughout Section II, Objectivity, is that, in his "translations" now, Lenin, far from stressing that he must read Hegel "materialistically" now emphasizes that "the germs of historical materialism" are in Hegel. Thus, Lenin capitalized and bold-faced, and wrote: "Hegel and Historical Materialism" alongside the statement from Hegel: "In his tools man possesses power over external nature, even although, according to his Ends, he frequently is subjected to it." (Hegel II, p. 388). Once again he relates the categories of Logic to human practice:

When Hegel endeavours -- sometimes even huffs and puffs -- to bring man's purposive activity under the categories of logic, saying that this activity is the "syllogism" (Schlub), that the subject (man) plays the role of a "member" in the logical "figure" of the "syllogism", and so on, THEN THAT IS NOT MERELY STRETCHING A POINT, A MERE GAME, THIS HAS A VERY PROFOUND, PURELY MATERIALISTIC CONTENT. It has to be inverted: the practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the repetition of the various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms. This nota bene. (Lenin, p, 190)

and again:

Remarkable: Hegel comes to the "Idea" as the coincidence of the Notion and the object, as truth, through the practical, purposive activity of man. A very close approach to the view that man by his practice proves the objective correctness of his ideas, concepts, knowledge, science. (Lenin, p. 191)

This does not mean, as Mao has interpreted, that all that remains is practice. Quite the contrary. Lenin no sooner reaches the third section, the Idea, when he stresses that (1) this section contains "the very best of the dialectic," and (2) that not only for Hegel does practice refer to practice in the theory of cognition, but for Marxists the theoretic has an objective validity all its own; indeed, without it, the practice would be insufficient to bring about a successful revolution. (Be sure to read pages 304 to 308, "The Philosophy of the Yenan period: Mao perverts Lenin" in Marxism and Freedom).

Although we will leave the last chapter of this section to a separate lecture, it is clear here that Lenin no longer counterposes subjective and objective as the twain that never meets:

Logical concepts are subjective so long as they remain "abstract", in their abstract form, but at the same time they express also the Things-in-themselves. Nature is both concrete and abstract, both phenomenon and essence, both moment and relation. Human concepts are subjective in their abstractness, separateness, but objective as a whole, in the process, in the sum-total, in the tendency, in the source. (Lenin, p. 208).

Because of this profound grasp of the inter-penetration of objective and subjective, Lenin makes the leap to recognizing the creativity of consciousness: "Alias: Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it." (Lenin, p. 212), which he further extends to the transformation of reality: "that the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity." (Lenin, p. 213). Again and again, he relates activity to transformation and on that note will approach the Absolute Idea:

The activity of man, who has constructed an objective picture of the world for himself, changes external actuality, abolishes its determinateness (= alters some sides or other, qualities, of it), and thus removes from it the features of Semblance, externality and nullity, and makes it as being in and for itself (= objectively true). (Lenin, p. 218)

Author's Footnotes

¹ Book III is with Book II in Volume II; hence the reference to Hegel's Science of Logic will continue to be, simply, Hegel, II p.

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