Dialectical Materialism as a Practical Method
By Terry Button
Part 2 – From Thought to Practice
In the first article we began by explaining that we do not perceive the whole world at once, but only individual things within it, and that any thing which impinges on our senses is reflected into sensation as an indeterminate thought image. The thing in the external world, the identity of the source of sensation, and the image it causes in thought, are dialectical opposites in cause and effect relation. Identity, (objective, external world), is cause and has been negated into Difference, (subjective, thought), which is effect. This indeterminate beginning is determinated by a second moment of perception of the same Identity which has now changed, is different, and by grasping this difference in relation to the image already in thought, the indeterminate beginning becomes determinate in the moment of Semblance which contains the inner truth of the thing, its Essence.
We went on, in the last article, to explain that while we are now fully conscious of the thing in the external world, and can now say definitely what it is, we are not fully cognisant of its inner truth - its Essence remains in-itself, locked up inside it. The reason for this is that we were obliged to take the thing in isolation from the rest of the world of which it is a part, torn out of its context and separate from all the other things with which it is interconnected and which it reflects. It is precisely this reflection of the other things with which the thing is connected, in the thing itself, which is its truth, the Essence of the thing, so that in order to discover this Essence we must restore this reflection by placing it back in its context and interconnections. The process of taking things out of context is a bit like taking the world to pieces and such a process is analysis. Placing things back in their context, putting the world back together again, is synthesis. Since we are engaged in both analysis and synthesis in the process the two are in a unity.
All matter is interconnected and all the individual things we see are parts of the world as a whole. Since we are discussing how we deal with the world as a whole containing parts, we need to know, in a general way, how any whole relates to the parts it contains, how each part relates to the whole, and how each part relates to each other part, and in the first instance it is all a matter of Reflection.
Since each part reflects the whole and the whole reflects all of its parts, then each part reflects all the other parts through the whole. If we wish to find out how one individual part reflects the whole and how the whole reflects this individual part, then we must consider this part in isolation from the rest, that is, take it out of its context, and this is analysis. But in doing this we become conscious of how it relates to and reflects the whole, its connection with the whole, and this is synthesis. In this moment analysis and synthesis have become identical opposites and are transformed into each other in thought. To fully grasp the truth of the whole we must do this with each of its parts in turn, and as we proceed the quantity of knowledge of the relation of the parts to each other and between the whole and the parts builds up, becoming enriched with manifold contradiction. As we explained in the first article, the moment of Semblance, in which we grasped the thing-in-itself, now unfolds like the petals of a flower and the truth of the thing, its Essence, begins to emerge in a progressive way. Eventually the Essence of the thing will reveal itself fully, we say that the thing-in-itself becomes a thing-for-us. This is explained below.
We have said that we cannot perceive the whole word all at once, that thought begins from some individual thing that impinges on our senses, the identity of the source of sensation. Since we start from a part, how can we know anything more about the whole of which it is a part? We gave the following quote from Lenin in the first article:-
“First of all impressions flash by, then something emerges, - afterwards the concepts of quality (the determination of the thing or phenomenon) and quantity are developed.” (Collected Works, Vol. 38, p.319)
These impressions are indeterminate thought images of the other parts of the whole of which the thing-in-itself, (in Semblance), is a part. Upon a little reflection the reader will realize that he or she does this quite naturally. Lenin describes this process scientifically in three notes on page 221 of Volume 38 of the Collected Works:-
“1. The determination of the concept out of itself (the thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development);”
We have said that Semblance takes the form of the Indeterminate Beginning and this form persists, or rather, resists change. But as we place this thing, (form), in relation to the other parts of the whole it acquires more and more content through reflection, and with each new content the form is bound to change. As the content builds up we know more and more about the thing and can say with more certainty what it is, it becomes more determinate.
“2. The contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon;”
Like all things, the thing-in-itself in Semblance is contradictory, that is, it contains within itself its own other, what it is becoming, the difference within the identity. As we place it in relation to the other parts, (phenomenon), it is affected in some way by each of them, but not in the same way. Each of these affects, (forces), is different and they contradict one another.
“3. The union of analysis and synthesis. Such, apparently, are the elements of dialectics.”
We have explained how analysis and synthesis become in unity above. As we analyse we simultaneously synthesise. Further down the same page Lenin refers to the thing as a “sum and unity of opposites”. As a unity we consider the thing from to point of view of its form, and the sum of its parts, (opposites), is its content. The individual thing-in-itself in Semblance is negated into the sum and unity of opposites according to the relations, (law), of the individual, the particular, and the universal. The parts, (opposites), in the sum and unity are related because they have some qualities or features in common, and this was of course the reason why the impressions “flashed by”. Where we have a limited group of things which are interconnected through some common inner truth, (Essence), in this way, we speak of them as being a particular group of things. While this truth is the basis of the unity of the group, it is also its limit, since the group as a whole, (unity), negates, (determines as “other”), all that lies beyond the group and which does not contain this truth. The universal truth contained in this particular group of things is that which goes beyond the limit, but at this moment of cognition we are conscious only of the particular. In order to fully understand the whole process we must consider how the beginning is concrete, and how the concrete becomes transformed into its opposite, the abstract.
We must begin by clarifying the meaning of the twin concepts of the concrete and the abstract, since they are widely misunderstood due to the false understanding placed on them by formal, non-dialectical logic. According to formal logic a concrete concept is one which relates to, (reflects), real existing things and phenomena, trains, planes, etc., while an abstract concept is one which reflects qualities or properties of such things considered apart from the thing, such as colour, shape etc. But this is a metaphysical separation of things and properties since that which has no properties or qualities at all does not exist, and can hardly be considered concrete, while no property or quality can exist without the thing it qualifies. Such relations are impossible and never occur. For dialectical logic the concrete is the real existing thing together with its qualities, an individual thing, while the abstract is the universal conception of the thing as such. To give an example, it is said that no one has yet eaten fruit – we can eat apples, oranges etc, but we cannot eat fruit as such. If we are eating fruit we are eating an apple or something. The apple is concrete, fruit is abstract, the universal.
For dialectical materialism things in the external world are both concrete and abstract, depending on their degree of development. In so far as it helps to know it, the etymological root of the word concrete is the Latin concretus which means mixed, connected up in a system of parts, while abstract comes from abstractus, which means withdrawn or isolated. The abstract is the one-sided, incomplete, un-developed. Hegel refers to the acorn as being abstract relative to the oak tree which is considered concrete since it is a synthesis of the acorn and everything else, soil, water, etc., necessary to bring the oak tree into being. But the abstract cannot exist without the concrete, there would be no acorns if there were no oak trees. If we consider a thing in the external world in a one-sided way, as an outer form, just as we first sensuously perceive it, then our concept of it is abstract, but if we proceed to connect this outer form with its inner content and consider it in this two-sided way, as we did in Semblance, then our concept of this same thing in the external world is concrete. Thus while for formal logic any given concept is either an abstract or a concrete one, but cannot be both, for dialectical logic any concept can be either abstract or concrete according to the moment of cognition reached.
Let us illustrate how we negate the opposites into Semblance in a more meaningful way. We see in the paper that there is a battle in Iraq between UN troops and insurgents in a big city. This is the Indeterminate Beginning. The next day we read that the city was bombed and it was defended by the whole population. This is the Third Term. The impressions begin to “flash by”: We make a connection between Iraq and Afghanistan, it is the same war. The next impression the flashes by is oil, then another, the whole global capitalist system which rested entirely on oil supplies. All these opposites, contents in the sum and unity of opposites, contain within themselves a wealth of content in their own right, but we are not conscious of it yet, so far they exist in thought as generalised abstractions, hence in this way we proceed from the concrete, Semblance which was a two sided unity, to the abstract.
We are now at a turning point in our practice as dialectical materialists, and this is explained in a book called The Dialectics of the Concrete and the Abstract in Marx’s Capital, by the Soviet professor E.V. Ilyenkov.
“The reduction of the concrete fullness of reality to its abridged (abstract) expression in consciousness is, self-obviously, a prerequisite and a condition without which no special theoretical research can either proceed or even begin. Moreover, this reduction is not only a prerequisite or historical condition of theoretical assimilation of the world but also an organic element of the process itself of constructing a system of scientific definitions, that is, of the mind’s synthesising activity.” (Page 137)
Now that we have achieved this prerequisite, the reduction of the external world into a series of abstractions in thought, (the sum and unity of opposites), we must, so to speak, slam the whole process into reverse gear, or perhaps more correctly into forward gear, since the process of negation from the external world to thought seems more like a backward process. Lenin describes the process we have explained so far as the path from the outer to the inner. In this process we negated things in the external world into thought one at a time as separate abstractions, and this is analysis, but we placed them into a unity in the sum and unity of opposites, and this is synthesis. In this process analysis and synthesis found repeated moments of Identity and were continually transformed into each other, but analysis, (abstraction), was the dominant of these two opposites when we take the process as a whole. We say it was analysis containing synthesis. We now make the leap to what Lenin describes as the path from the inner to the outer, we must begin to build an integrated picture of the world as an interconnected whole. This will again involve synthesis and analysis as opposites being transformed into each other but this time synthesis will be the dominant opposite in the process taken as a whole, it will be synthesis containing analysis, and we shall proceed from the abstract to the concrete. We must refer to Ilyenkov once again:-
“The definitions which the theoretician organises into a system are not, of course, borrowed ready made from the previous phase (or stage) of cognition. His task is by no means restricted to a purely formal synthesis of ready- made ‘meagre abstractions’ according to the familiar rules for such synthesis. In constructing a system out of ready-made, earlier obtained abstractions, a theoretician always critically analyses them, checks them with the facts and thus goes once again through the ascent from the concrete in reality to the abstract in thought. This ascent is thus not only and not so much a prerequisite of constructing a system of science as an organic element of the construction itself. [Our emphasis]
Separate abstract definitions, whose synthesis yields the ‘concrete in thought’, are formed in the course of ascent from the abstract to the concrete itself. Thus the theoretical process leading to the attainment of concrete knowledge is always, in each separate link as well as in the whole, also a process of reduction of the concrete to the abstract.” (Ibid.)
It will help if we pause to deepen our understanding of the concrete and the abstract a little, particularly with the way in which these two opposites are continually transformed into each other. Let us return to our hypothetical case. We negate the Battle in Iraq and the defence by the people into Semblance as abstractions, and they became a concrete unity in the thing-in-itself in Semblance which contained Essence, global capitalism. But this concept was only concrete with respect to the two abstractions of which it is a unity, it remained abstract with respect to the external world. We said above that a concept was either concrete or abstract according to the moment of cognition reached. We cannot, as Ilyenkov says, proceed with this ready made abstraction, because real capitalism in the external world is not capitalism as such, but capitalism in a particular form, global capitalism, which is different to the capitalism we know from the past, what we used to call imperialism. So we negate our abstract conception of capitalism back to the external world and find the difference between the past and the present, we “check the facts” – we synthesis our abstract concept with what we find in the external world, (global capitalism as distinct from imperialism), and negate this synthesis back into thought as a new concrete concept. This concept is again abstract with respect to the external world, because global capitalism as such does not exist either, but only global capitalism in which unemployment is at a certain level, money exchange rates stand in a particular relation, the price of oil is at a particular level, and so on. In this way, through continual negations from thought to the external world and back, which involve the continual transformation of the abstract to the concrete and back, and similarly with respect to analysis and synthesis, we build up a scientific theory of the world. This is the meaning of the quote from Ilyenkov above, and we begin to see what a powerful and practical method dialectical materialism is.
We must be aware of the important difference between the path from the Outer to the Inner, and its opposite process in which we are now engaged, the path from the Inner to the Outer. In the former, having made our initial connection with the external world through the Indeterminate Beginning and Semblance, the process was one of repeatedly negating parts of the world one at a time as abstractions into thought. The latter process is different in that we are dealing always with the whole. All the knowledge we have gained so far, in the form of Semblance containing the Sum and Unity of Opposites, is carried forward with each negation from thought to the external world and back. These repeated syntheses of the content of thought and the external world have an obvious result – not only is our knowledge increased in an incremental way, but more importantly the interconnections of all the parts of the world, and the way they reflect each other, become ever more present to consciousness in the form of a further philosophical category, Existence.
“We shall reserve for such Being as is mediated the term Existence”, says Hegel in his Science of Logic. The term mediated simply means that the thing is in connection with some other thing in such a relation that this relation shows the truth of the thing, thus the positive is mediated by the negative and so on. The negative shines a light on the positive, so to speak, it shows it up for what it is, and its Essence begins to come more sharply into focus. Being and Existence relate as genus and species; all Existence is Being, but not all Being is Existence. All dogs are animals, but not all animals are dogs. Being is the immediate, a word which, with the attachment of the prefix “im”, reverses the meaning, mediated becoming not-mediated. Being as such is therefore the one-sided, abstract, indeterminate, while Existence is the two-sided, concrete, determinate, really existing thing.
We now have a picture of the whole world, or at least that much of it that lies within our sphere of perception bearing in mind all the sources of information we have at our disposal. We see all the parts in their interrelation, all the seething movement and life of the whole. We have already said that the truth or Essence of any thing, either part or whole, lies in its movement, its becoming, and now that we perceive the world as a moving, changing Existing whole we can grasp its Essence it a little deeper, more meaningful way, and to explain how we do this we need to re-examine the philosophical category of Essence. On page 144 of Volume 38 we find the following note by Lenin together with quotes from Hegel:-
“Essence as formless identity (of itself with itself) becomes matter. ‘It is the real foundation and substratum of form … If abstraction is made from every determination and Form of a something, indeterminate matter remains. Matter is a pure abstract. (Matter cannot be seen or felt – what is seen or felt is a determinate matter, that is, a unity of matter and form.)’” [Like the fruit and the apple]
A unity of Matter and Form is an Existence, but what is important here is the question of motion. Matter and motion are inseparably connected. Nowhere is there matter which is not in motion; motion is the mode of existence of matter. It is precisely the motion of matter which gives rise to forms, and a particular form of motion will give rise to a particular, (determinate), form or Existence. It is this particular form or Existence which expresses the particular Essence in each case. We have now reached a new moment of Essence in the process of its unfolding, and this moment constitutes the philosophical category of Appearance. It will be recalled that the moment of Semblance contained Essence “in itself - in one of its moments”. In Semblance the thing-in-itself contained Essence although it was not present to our consciousness, because in Semblance we experience only the outer form of the thing, but in Appearance Essence is present to consciousness.
Appearance is Essence in Existence, in the sense that Essence which is in Being has now come into Existence, it is precisely Essence which “appears”, takes on a form, and consequently now exists, but the objective laws manifested by the motion of matter demonstrate that the outer form, (Existence), and inner content, (Essence), of any thing are always in conflict, contradict each other. As a practical example of such contradiction we may take the mass media, TV, press and so on. The outer form of the media system is free speech, free reporting and commentary, but the media represents society as a whole, capitalist society, and in any case most of the media consists of capitalist private enterprise. So while the outer form is a free reporting system, the Essence is capitalism, and it is this Essence which determines the form of all reporting. Hence strikers demanding basic rights always “hold the country to ransom”, demonstrators who are attacked by the police are always “violent”, Palestinians who defend their land against illegal and violent incursion are always “terrorists”, and so on. Here is the contradiction between the outer form, Existence, and the inner content, Essence. The Form is truth, the Essence is falsehood, and it is this contradiction which imparts motion to the form, hence Appearance is a moving form.
But, we recall, Existence is mediated Being, and any Existence or form of Being may have many Appearances, depending on the other with which it is connected and which mediates it. In the process of cognition it is human consciousness with which Existance, (itself a form of Being), is in connection and which mediates it and gives it this particular Appearance. This is explained in quotes from Hegel, in the section on Appearance in Lenin’s notes:-
… “The latter” (thing-in-itself) “is not supposed to contain in itself any determinate multiplicity, and consequently obtains this only when brought under external reflection, but remains indifferent to it. (- The Thing-in-itself has colour only in relation to the eye, smell in relation to the nose, and so forth.)…” [The thing-in-itself is the Existence under consideration]
… “A Thing has the property of effecting this or that in an Other, and of disclosing itself in a peculiar manner in its relation to it …” “The Thing-in-itself thus exists essentially…” (Works, Vol. 38, P.149)
We should explain what Hegel means by “remains indifferent to it”. Hegel uses this formulation frequently in his Science of Logic – it simply means that in some cases, through reflection, the thing takes on a quality, (determination), which is appropriate to a particular relation with some other, but loses that quality when removed from that relation, it is not affected in any lasting way by having been it that relation. The world of such relations of sense and consciousness to the external world is the world of Appearance. Existence mediated by the human process of cognition is Appearance. But:-
“The intro-reflected self-existent world stands opposed to the world of Appearance.” (Vol. 38. P.148)
There is, quite obviously, a whole world beyond the world of Appearance. We see many things, but we will live out our lives without ever knowing anything about the substances of which they are made, their chemical compositions or molecular structure etc. This world we call the world beyond thought. Now we see the world of Appearance as a world of moving forms, and the motion we perceive gives rise to a leap in thought from the perception of the forms themselves to the perception of the forms of their motion.
These forms of motion, we notice, are not random, many repeat themselves so that when we see the same conditions arise we know in advance what the result will be; in other words there are patterns in the movement of the world, Laws of Motion. “Law is therefore the positive element in the mediation of the Apparent”, says Hegel. (Vol. 38 P.150), and the Apparent, of course, is the world of Appearance. With respect to this Lenin remarks “…the concept of law is one of the stages of the cognition by man of unity and connection, of the reciprocal dependence and totality of the world process…” On the following page Lenin quotes Hegel once again, “Hence Law is not beyond Appearance, but is immediately present in it.” So we perceive the laws of motion in nature and make abstraction from them in order to build up a theory of nature, and this can be taken at the level if the individual or the universal. At the universal level we enter the realm of social and historical experience and the exact sciences, and can illustrate this with a case from history. Isaac Newton perceived that bodies released from height moved towards the centre of the earth. This was Appearance and it was certainly a demonstration of the law of gravity. By way of further negations from the external world to thought and back, and by practical experiment, he abstracted a law of motion from the world of Appearance which he was able to express in the form of a simple equation,
s = ut - ½gt²
where sis distance, u is initial velocity, t is time, and g the acceleration due to gravity, (32.2 feet/sec²). Further to this, it was by way of exhaustive study of the external world that Marx abstracted the laws of bourgeois society, laws such as the labour theory of value, the law of the declining rate of profit, and so on. Ultimately through further generalisation of the laws discovered by the positive sciences the laws of dialectics we gave in the first article were formulated in the first place by Engels. But, as Ilyenkov warns above, we cannot base our theory upon “purely formal synthesis of ready-made meagre abstractions”, we must take each individual case as we perceive it, because as Hegel says:-
“Hence Law is not beyond Appearance, but is immediately present in it; the realm of Laws is the quiescent reflection of the existing or appearing world …” (Vol. 38, P.151)
We must take the laws of motion in each individual case as we find them in the world of Appearance rather than “apply” them from memory, because they never exist twice in exactly the same way. This is what is meant by the quiescent reflection of the existing or appearing world. The existing is the present as opposed to the past. Law is the essential relation between things, (parts), that is to say, Law manifests their mutual behaviour, the way they move and change in a “quiescent” way, how they relate as Cause and Effect. Once again we must insist that these concepts cannot be properly understood on the basis of formal logic, and we shall introduce the reader to the dialectical understanding of these concepts with a quote from Lenin:-
“When one reads Hegel on causality, it appears strange at first glance that he dwells so relatively lightly on this theme, beloved of the Kantians. Why? Because, indeed, for him causality is only one of the determinations of universal connection, which he had already covered earlier, in his entire exposition, much more deeply and all-sidedly; always and from the very outset emphasising this connection, the reciprocal transitions etc.” (Vol. 38, P162)
The explanation of Hegel’s depreciation of the Law of Causality is given very clearly by Engels:-
“This first thing that strikes us in considering matter in motion is the inter-connection of the individual motions of separate bodies, their being determined by one another. But not only do we find that a particular motion is followed by another, we find also that we can evoke a particular motion by setting up the conditions in which it takes place in nature, that we can even produce motions which do not occur at all in nature (industry), at least not in this way, and that we can give these motions a predetermined direction and extent. In this way, by the activity of human beings, the idea of causality becomes established, the idea that one motion is the cause of another. True, the regular sequence of certain natural phenomena can by itself give rise to the idea of causality: the heat and light that come from the sun; but this affords no proof, and to that extent Hume’s scepticism was correct in saying that a regular post hoc can never establish a propter hoc. But the activity of human beings forms the test of causality. If we bring the sun’s rays to a focus by means of a concave mirror and make them act like the rays of an ordinary fire, we thereby prove that heat comes from the sun.” (Dialectics of Nature, page 230). [The meaning of Hume’s remark is that though we may see one thing follow another countless times that does not mean the first is the cause of the second, it just means that it has happened that way every time so far.]
But Engels goes on :-
“Reciprocal action is the first thing we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical union and decomposition … all of which pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action). Mechanical motion becomes transformed into heat, electricity, magnetism, light etc., and vice versa. Thus natural science confirms what Hegel has said, that reciprocal action is the true causa finalis of things. We cannot go back further than to the knowledge of this reciprocal action, for the very reason that there is nothing behind to know. If we know the forms of motion of matter (for which it is true there is still very much lacking, in view of the short time that natural science has existed), then we know matter itself, and therewith our knowledge is complete … Only from this universal reciprocal action do we arrive at the real causal relation. In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out of their general inter-connection and consider them in isolation, and then the changing motions appear, one as cause and the other as effect.” (Op. Cit., pp 231-2)
The separation of the Law of Causality into its two sides, Cause and effect, is therefore a determination of human thought, and belongs wholly to the world of Appearance. The reference to Spinoza is to his famous dictum, “substance is its own cause”. The all sided, mutually interconnected nature of the world is only one-sidedly, fragmentarily and incompletely expressed by the concept of Causality, and in order to understand the relations between things, and the world we experience, as an interconnected, interacting whole, we must deepen our understanding to the concept of Substance.
We normally think of a Substance as an Identity which has Existence and Form in its own right and does not depend on anything else. It is a familiar term of everyday use, but in the struggle to grasp the world around us in a more profound, scientific way, there is a strong tendency to invest all such concepts and categories with deeper and more profound meaning. For the science of dialectics, Substance is understood as the inner unity of the motion of matter. If we abstract from all forms of Substance we are left with matter as such, and we are aware that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that since Substance is Matter in a Determination it is easy to see how Substance is its own cause, or to put it another way, it is the active cause of all its own forms. This idea of the inner unity of the motion of matter is best understood as Reciprocity. As we have explained above, the two sides, (moments), of Reciprocity are Cause and Effect, and we generally think of Cause as active and Effect as passive. But where two things are in such relation both are substances and therefore both are active causes of their own forms. As an empirical example, heat causes water to change into steam, but in the overall result water, (effect), is just as active as the heat because it is its nature to turn into steam and nothing else.
In our struggle to grasp the world as political fighters, the particular Substances we are concerned with are such as the British government, the American government, the European Union, the IMF, the war in Iraq, and so on. The inner unity of the motion of the whole as Substance is the unity of the motion of all these parts, (forms). This grasp of the motion of the whole is potentially present once we have knowledge of all the parts and their relations, and we have now reached the moment of Actuality, a concept which, according to Lenin, is the “unity of Essence and Existence.” Existence, we recall, is the thing existing as a reality in the present, and it is in unity with Essence because we see the form and its inner truth all at once in Actuality. Existence and Essence are the moments of Actuality, that is to say they are both the whole, but different sides or aspects of the whole.
The concept of Actuality is an important moment in the whole process of cognition, because, as Lenin informs us on page 130 of Volume 38, the three moments of Essence are Semblance, Appearance, and Actuality, and taken together these moments manifest the law of the negation of the negation. In Semblance we had the outer form of the thing, which was in-itself and its Essence was not present to consciousness. In Appearance Essence was present to consciousness as an opposite in conflict with the form, negating the form. In actuality, this negation is itself negated, because form and Essence now coincide. It is the Essence which is formed, and the Form is the form of the Essence. Both Form and Essence encompass the whole as two sides or aspects.
We now have a picture of the world in its truth, not just as it is, but in its movement, what is happening, and the Possibility in the situation presents itself. The concept of Possibility expresses the objective tendency of development inherent in existing phenomena, the presence of the conditions necessary for new things to happen, new forms to come into being. Possibility begins as an empty form for which we must consciously find the correct content. Here is Lenin quoting Hegel on this question:-
“Whether a thing is possible or impossible depends on the content, i.e., on the sum total of the moments of Actuality which in its unfolding discloses itself to be Necessity.” (Vol. 38, P.157)
To invest Possibility with Necessity, to find out what must necessarily happen as opposed to what might happen, we must refer to the Essence of the whole situation, because anything of any real significance which does happen will be an expression of Essence as the ultimate cause, since Essence must necessarily manifest itself. In this way it is possible to make reasonably accurate predictions of future events, and here is the enormous advantage the dialectical materialist has over the idealist and formal thinker, because they have no idea of the real truth of the world and can never tell correctly what the necessary outcome of any situation will be, they can only guess and base themselves on quite accidental circumstances. This is the secret of Lenin’s remarkable prescience particularly in October 1917, he accurately foresaw events and was always prepared to meet them in advance.
Up to now our thought has been in direct connection with the external world in the present moment, reflecting and interacting with it through negations from the external world to thought and from thought back to the external world, and we have built up a picture of the world in its movement and truth. But there is more to consciousness than this, there is also our whole body of knowledge that we have built up in our previous lives, together with a comprehensive ideological outlook which is the result of social experience. Taken as a single whole in this general way this level of consciousness is the Notion, but we also speak of the Notion with respect to single things and phenomena. In is the generalised image of an object or phenomena in the external world, retained in consciousness without immediate action of the objects or phenomena on the senses. On page 167 of Volume 38 Lenin quotes Hegel as saying, with respect to the Notion, “Being and Essence are the moments of its becoming.” Then Lenin makes a critical note: “Should be inverted: concepts are the highest product of the brain, the highest product of matter.”
Here we see the conflict between Hegel’s idealism and Lenin’s materialism; let us describe Hegel’s method first. His Science of Logic is divided into three parts, The Doctrine of Being, The Doctrine of Essence, and The Doctrine of the Notion. It is easy to see that the whole logic manifests the law of the negation of the negation. Being is affirmation, something is, Essence is its inner truth, its motion, what it is becoming, and therefore the negation of Being, (not-Being). This negation is negated by the synthesis of Being and Essence into a new positive affirmation, the Notion, which is knowledge of Being mediated by knowledge of its Essence. For Hegel, this kind of logic had objective existence quite outside and independently of human consciousness, in the form of the Absolute Idea, which had existed from eternity and was the first creating principle of the universe. According to him the physical world of matter that we perceive through our senses is this Absolute Idea made real. This conception that logical thought has existence outside of human consciousness as a law giving cause of all existence is objective idealism. Lenin quotes Hegel again on page 169 of volume 38.
“The Notion must not here be considered as an act of self-conscious understanding, or as subjective understanding: what we have to do with is the Notion in and for itself, which constitutes a STAGE AS WELL OF NATURE AS OF SPIRIT. LIFE, OR ORGANIC NATURE, IS THAT STAGE OF NATURE AT WHICH THE NOTION EMERGES.” (Lenin’s capitals as emphasis).
Hegel’s meaning is that when the Absolute Idea has progressed the unfolding of the universe so far that organic life has come into being, then it is possible for the Notion to exist, because there are thinking brains in which it can arise. But Lenin corrects Hegel from the materialist standpoint. In the margin he makes a comment of the greatest importance. “The ‘eve’ of the transformation of objective idealism into materialism.” For materialism it is indeed true that the Notion emerges at that stage in the history of the universe at which thinking beings have evolved, but they have evolved as a result of the infinite movement of matter and it is not its cause; thought is the highest product of the motion of matter and not its first principle and cause. The “transformation of objective idealism into materialism” is accomplished by reading Hegel’s statement materialistically instead of idealistically. It is a moment of Identity between objective idealism and materialism, through which the opposites are transformed into each other. This is what Lenin means by “should be inverted”.
So now we have two things in connection, (unity), the picture of the external world, the objective, as it is and as we sense it in the present, which we have developed through the process of cognition, and our body of knowledge, the subjective, the Notion, which we have carried forward from the past. The present is a finite moment in time, the Individual, and the Notion is the Universal, the infinite movement of human thought. It is the direct connection between thought and the external world, but unlike the direct connection which occurred at the Indeterminate Beginning in which the movement was from the external world the thought, now the movement is in the opposite direction, from thought to the external world. In this movement, (negation), the objective is the Difference, (negation), within the Universal, the Notion, which is Identity. This negation is now negated through the synthesis of the Subjective and the Objective in a new concept, the Idea. On page 194 of Volume 38 Lenin explains the Idea thus:-
“The Idea (read: man’s knowledge) is the coincidence (conformity) of Notion and objectivity (the (“universal”). This first. Secondly, the Idea is the relation of subjectivity (=man) which is for itself (=independent, as it were) to the objectivity which is distinct (from the Idea)…”
So the idea is the relation between thought, (man), and the external world. This is the Theoretical Idea. Lenin goes on:-
“Subjectivity is the impulse to destroy this separation (of the Idea from the object).”
The “impulse”, often referred to as the subjective impulse, expresses mankind’s need to change nature to subordinate it to his needs, the instinctive struggle with nature in order to survive. All creatures have this need, but only man does it at this conscious level. This is the Practical Idea. For Marxism, the highest point of theory is practice, for two reasons: Firstly, it provides the only reliable proof that our Theoretical Idea is correct. Engels explains this in Dialectics of Nature:-
“If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian incomprehensible ‘thing-in-itself’. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such ‘things-in-themselves’ until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the ‘thing-in-itself’ became a ‘thing-for-us’, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.”
Secondly, and just as importantly, our knowledge of the world we are trying to change through practice is never quite complete, hence the result of our practice is never quite what we expect, and this difference, between what we expect and what actually happens, is a source of new knowledge which enables us to quickly correct and adjust our practice to achieve a better result. Finally, our attitude to the result of our practice must be strictly objective and materialist. By our practice we change the world, negate out a new form or forms, but just because these are our own creations, that doesn’t mean we know all about them because while we may bring a new form into Being it is the external world that provides its content, and this cannot be fully known in advance. Nor can we predict what secondary changes will result from our immediate practice. Hence we must step back and perceive the change we have wrought as a new Identity of our source of sensation and negate in into thought as a new Indeterminate Beginning just as we did right at the beginning of the process of cognition, and begin the whole process again. And so on.
We have explained that the external world exists independently of human consciousness and thought is a reflection of it. The world is in constant movement and change, and it is obvious that a change must occur before thought can reflect it, so that thought always lags behind the changing external world. This is true at both the individual and universal level, the indeterminate beginning and the Notion. However, with our scientific method we can progressively reduce this lag, achieving ever closer approximations of the truth, the world-in-itself as opposed to the world of Appearance. We shall never quite close the gap, but we shall be far ahead of the idealists and formal thinkers who cannot distinguish the necessary from the accidental, and often proceed on the basis of empty abstraction and thought created ideas of the world. Here is the secret of the enormous successes that have been achieved by the scientific method of Marxism in the past, and it is the reason why Marxism is the only method by which all that is new in the world, Global capitalism, global warming etc. can be understood, and the necessary practice to resolve the problems mankind is faced with be undertaken.
Terry Button, September 2006
