Reading notes: An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lectures

I. Formal Logic and Dialectics

....Logicians investigate the activities of the thought process which goes on in human heads and formulate the laws, forms and interrelations of those mental processes.

....Dialectics ....outcome of a revolutionary scientific movement covering centuries of intellectual labor. It came as the consummation of the brainwork of the outstanding philosophers of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Western Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Hegel, the titan of the revolutionary German bourgeois school of idealist philosophy, was the mastermind who transformed the science of logic by being the first, as Marx pointed out, to "expound the general forms of movement (of the dialectic) in a comprehensive and fully conscious way."

....laws of formal logic express representative features of the real world. They have a material content and an objective basis. They are at one and the same time laws of thought, of society, and of nature. This threefold root gives them a universal character.

....in itself formal logic was clearly deficient. Its valid elements became a constituent part of dialectics. The relations between formal logic and dialectics were reversed. Whereas among the classical Greek philosophers the formal side of logic became predominant and the dialectical aspects receded in importance, in the modern school dialectics occupies the front rank and the purely formal side of logic becomes subordinated to it.

....formal logic enters as structural material into the framework of dialectical logic

law of identity: A equals A. 

....The law of identity formulates the material fact that definite things, and traits of things, persist and maintain recognizable similarity amidst all their phenomenal changes

....The law of identity directs us to recognize likenesses amidst diversity, permanence amidst changes, to single out the basic similarities between separated and apparently different instances and entities, to uncover the real bonds of unity between them, to trace the connections between different and consecutive phases of the same phenomena. 

the law of contradiction: A is not non-A [signifies the exclusion of difference from the essence of things and of thought about things]

....co-existing things and kinds of things, or consecutive states of the same thing, differ from and exclude each other. 

....discerning of difference, is as necessary for correct classification as the law of identity

law of the excluded middle: [If A equals A, it cannot equal non-A. A cannot be part of two opposing classes at one and the same time. Wherever two opposing statements or state of affairs confront each other, both cannot be true or false]

........things oppose and mutually exclude each other in reality

....Why do people think and things act in the objective world in line with the theoretical generalizations of Aristotle and Newton? Because the essential nature of reality constrains them to think or act that way. Aristotle's laws of thought have as much material content and as much of a basis in the objective world as Newton's laws of mechanical motion. ". . . our methods of thought, both formal logic and the dialectic, are not arbitrary constructions of our reason but rather expressions of the actual interrelationships in nature itself." (Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, p. 84.)

*

....Common sense may be defined as an unsystematized or semi-conscious version of the science of formal logic. The ideas and methods of formal logic have been in use now for so many centuries and have become so interwoven into our processes of thought and into the fabric of our civilization that to most people they seem the exclusive, normal, natural mode of thought. 

*

....ideas of formal logic constitute the most tenacious of all theoretical prejudices in our society. Even after individuals have cast off their faith in capitalism and have become revolutionary socialists, they cannot entirely rid their minds of the habits of formal thinking which they absorbed in bourgeois life and which they continue to receive from their environment. The keenest of dialecticians can relapse at times into formalism, if they are not extremely careful and conscious in their thinking.