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

An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism by George Novack

Lecture

V The Dialectical Method: I

....reality, rationality, and necessity go hand-in-hand.

*

....Hegel's dialectical method is an achievement in the history of thought comparable only to Aristotle's.

1. Difference in Approach to Reality Between Formal and Dialectical Logic

....the basic laws of formal logic contain nothing but restatements of one selfsame fixed conception of identity.

....Formalism is the very breath of its life- and formalism everywhere tends to breed unconditional and unchanging formulas on the model of the three laws of formal logic, laws which profess to contain the complete content of the reality they deal with. Formalism takes specific and episodic forms manifested in nature, society, and the human mind and regards them as completely hard-and-fast, eternally fixed, unchanging and unconditional.

....These laws and categories have to be discovered by direct investigation of the concrete whole; they cannot be excogitated by mind alone before the material reality is analyzed.

....Dialecticians recognize that all formulas must be provisional, limited, approximate, because all forms of existence are transient and limited. 

....Everything that happens is not the result of arbitrary forces but the result of definite and regularly operating laws. This is true of the mental processes with which logic directly concerns itself. The laws of mental processes exist. They can be discovered, known, used.

    Dialectics incorporates within its own system and uses the apparatus of formal logic: strict definition, classification, coordination of categories, syllogism, judgment, etc. But it makes these tools of thought its servants and the servants, not the master, of the thought process. 

....The laws and ideas of dialectics, however precise and finely drawn, can never be more than approximately correct. They cannot be all-embracing and eternal. It is noteworthy that such a demand is made most often and most insistently by petty-bourgeois migrants to the Marxist movement who are still enslaved to the formalism of academic life and thought. Engels has said: "A system of natural and historical knowledge which is all-embracing and final for all time is in contradiction to the fundamental laws of dialectical thinking; which, however, far from excluding, on the contrary includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make grand strides from generation to generation." (Anti-Duhring, p. 31.)

....The true relationship between matter and the forms it assumes must be understood. They are always interdependent and arise one out of the other. But for materialist dialecticians it is the movement of matter, now expressed in natural science as mass-energy, that is decisive, not the transient or particular forms which that material movement has at any given stage and in any specific formation. Formalism is abhorrent to dialectical materialism.

....Comrade Cannon has often expressed it in the pointed remark: "There's no substitute for intelligence." The highest form of intelligence is that guided by the method of the materialist dialectic. How can this Marxist intelligence be acquired? By experience within the mass movement, by study, by critical thinking, by immersion in working-class life and struggles so that the movements, moods and mind of the masses become familiar and known. It is this social movement which has given life to materialist dialectics and which continues to inspire and promote its development by wedding it to concrete reality.

....on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world, development comes to an end. 

....The laws of dialectics are in the same boat with the law of value in political economy- and with all other laws. They have reality only as approximations, tendencies, averages. They do not and cannot immediately, directly and completely coincide with reality. If they did so, they would not be conceptual reflections of reality, but that objective reality itself. Although thought and being are interdependent, they are not identical.

2. The Lawfulness of Reality-And Its Necessity

....positive content....

...."All that is real is rational." Although this proposition is rarely made explicit in conscious terms, it guides all our practice and all our theorizing. We conduct ourselves in everyday life and in our work upon the basis of the fact that there are material things with stable relations around us, that there are regular occurrences in nature, that things change in accordance with definite laws – and that these things and their connections, these objectively recurring events and laws can be known and correctly, or as the academicians say, rationally, accounted for.

    The same rule regarding the rationality of the real prevails in the domain of theory. Indeed theory would be impossible without its direction. All scientific investigation proceeds upon the basis that things are connected with each other in definite ways, that their changes exhibit a certain uniformity, regularity and lawfulness- and that therefore their interrelations, transitions into one another and laws of development can be ascertained and explained.

....Everything that exists must have a necessary and sufficient reason for existence and that reason can be discovered and communicated to others. This conception was formulated in 1646 by Leibnitz, the great German logician, mathematician and philosopher, as "the principle of sufficient reason" by virtue of which, he says, "we know that no fact can be found real, rather than otherwise."

    The material basis of this law lies in the actual interdependence of all things and in their reciprocal interactions.

    These features of the material world secure conceptual determination and logical expression in such categories as cause and effect, determinism and freedom, etc. If everything that exists has a necessary and sufficient reason for existence that means it had to come into being. It was pushed into existence and forced its own way into existence by natural necessity. It had to struggle against all kinds of opposing forces to make room for itself in the actual world. Reality proves itself by virtue of its necessity. Reality, rationality and necessity are intimately associated at all times.

[Example: the movement for socialism]:

    ....Before Marx's day socialism was a Utopia, an age-old dream of humanity, which could not achieve reality because the necessary material preconditions were lacking. Socialism was neither real nor necessary for humanity at that stage of its development- and was therefore irrational, a daydream, an anticipation of reality.

    With the development of capitalism, socialism became for the first time a real prospect within men's reach. Marx and Engels demonstrated this in their scientific socialism.

    They disclosed in theoretical form the reality, rationality and necessity of socialism and the proletarian struggle for its realization. But this was by and large a theoretical anticipation of reality, not an immediate practical prospect. Socialism was predominantly a program and a goal, compared to the social reality of capitalism.

    But with the growth of the proletarian mass movement and the expansion of socialist ideas, socialism began to acquire more and more reality, more and more necessity, more and more reasonableness. Why? Because, as Marx and Engels pointed out, ideas become forces when the masses accept them. The first great leap from ideality to reality occurred in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which made socialism far more real than capitalism over one sixth of the earth's surface.

....every item of the real world has sufficient reason for existing and must find a rational explanation

....practice at the foundation of real knowledge.

....The materialist conception of history, for example, based itself, as Engels remarked, upon "the simple fact, previously hidden under ideological growths, that human beings must first of all eat, drink, shelter and clothe themselves before they can turn their attention to politics, science, art and religion . . ."

....What is rational from one social standpoint appears to be the height of folly from the other. Yet this apparent irrationality finds its real and its rational explanation in the contradictory interests of the two classes engaged in struggle over the division of the national income.

....To the petty-bourgeois liberals our movement, too, appears unreal, too insignificant for them to take seriously or for powerful governments to prosecute us. They "defend" us on such grounds. But we loom as significant forces to Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, because of our reality, because of the social and political power latent in our ideas. Thus their seemingly irrational persecution of the Trotskyists can be rationally explained.

....rationality, and necessity go hand-in-hand.

....This proposition seems to justify everything that exists, good, bad and indifferent. In one sense it does precisely that- and properly so. For everything that exists stands in need of theoretical justification because the very fact of its actuality gives it a valid claim upon rationality, reality and necessity.

    The conservatives and reactionaries who lean upon Hegel see only this side of his doctrines: its justification for what exists. This is the conservative side of Hegel's thought and also, if you choose, of the dialectical method in general. It constitutes an indispensable element of all dialectics, including the materialist. For things do exist and endure for a definite time. Moreover, everything that ever existed is to some degree conserved as well as destroyed by what comes out of it and after it. The past serves as the raw material for the new generations to work upon and in this way to prepare the future.

    But this is not the ultimate truth of our knowledge about reality. It is only the beginning of wisdom….