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

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture

IV. Hegel's Revolution in Logic

....there's a rich treasury of thought concealed under its outer shell of idealism. ....Hegel, like all other great figures of the capitalist epoch, had both revolutionary and reactionary sides. 

....The ideologists of the German bourgeoisie compensated for the economic inferiority, political feebleness and narrow aims of their class by extraordinary boldness and piercing vision in the world of thought. They carried through a revolution in the world of ideas where their more practical kindred failed to carry through their revolution in the world of practical reality. Marx characterized the philosophy of Kant, the founder of the classical German school of philosophy, as "the German theory of the French revolution." Hegel developed this "German theory" to its highest point in his dialectics.

....a necessary outgrowth of the social environment at a specific stage of its evolution, arising primarily from changes in the material relations of men

....release the new intellectual forces from their bondage to formal logic and create a new system of logic in closer conformity to the demands of the development of scientific thought?

....Revolutionary developments in the world of ideas have to be explained as the result of a preceding overturn in the material world. In fact this intellectual revolution had its real roots and its ultimate driving force in the central social revolutionary movement of the epoch: the rise and world conquest of capitalism. Note, however, that we derived the principle of this explanation from no one other than Hegel himself, who taught that any thing cannot be explained by itself and through itself, as the formalists who base themselves on the law of identity thought, but only by another and through another. And not any other, but its own other. Here we turn Hegel's method against his own conclusion- and that is precisely what Marxist materialism has done on a broad scale.

....People can and generally do remain indifferent to ideas that do not threaten the status quo or the established body of knowledge. 

....Historical conditions urgently demanded the creation of a new method of thought. 

....They revolutionized their scientific practices long before they consciously and completely revolutionized their habits and method of thought.

....Hegel's philosophy not only expressed the results of these vast movements in society and science but itself gave an impulse in many fields to movements which are still changing the world. Among these is our own Marxist movement.

....Success is not simply success, nor failure simply failure, as the formalists think and say. Every success has some failure; every failure some success in it- and they can be transformed one into the other under certain conditions. 

....What his precursors had sought, Hegel found; where they failed, he succeeded. But Hegel would never have succeeded in developing his dialectic without the failures of his predecessors. Their failures provided the preconditions and were necessary elements in his success. In the end, through Hegel and Marx, their failures became successful.

....This revolutionary idea of Kant, which was to be developed far more comprehensively and profoundly by Hegel, was the outcome of a prolonged process of philosophical labor extending over several centuries. The revolution in philosophy burst forth not all at once but unfolded by degrees. 

....Dialecticians must learn to see everyone and everything in their proper historical place, their correct proportions, in their necessary contradictions.

....The academic Hegelians fasten themselves to the conservative sides of Hegel, on everything that is dead: to his system, to his idealism, to his apology for religion. 

....As the systematizer of the dialectical method, Hegel must be regarded as the founder of modern logic, just as Copernicus was the father of modern astronomy, Harvey of physiology, and Dalton of chemistry.

....Profound changes in their conditions of life and work produced no less thoroughgoing changes in men's habits of thought. New ways of thought in industrial and scientific practice led in turn to the demand for a more developed form of logic and for a superior theory of knowledge to deal with the freshly accumulated materials of knowledge.

....He revolutionized the science of the thought process by demonstrating the limitations of the basic laws of formal logic and setting forth on new principled foundations a superior system of logic know as dialectics.

    Hegel's revolution in logic was connected with other revolutionary events. It was an integral part of that colossal social revolutionary movement which swept over the Western world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and culminated in the replacement by the bourgeois system of feudalism and of long-standing pre-capitalist forms and forces in all departments of social life.