CONTENTS

   Immanuel Kant, born the second son of a leather worker in Konigsberg, Germany, in 1724, is regarded as the father of classical German philosophy. He is mostly remembered for his most important work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1788, in which he analyses the work of earlier philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Hume. His compatriot Hegel was born in 1770, and his most important work was The Science of Logic, published in 1812. There is a vitally important connection between these two great works, a historical process which was begun by the first and continued by the second, a historical process not in the physical sense, but in the mental sense, the history of human thought. Like our physical being, our mental being is undergoing a process of evolution, and the next stage, as we shall see, was an almighty leap, from the ideas of Kant and Hegel to the ideas of Marx.

In the process of our daily lives we must necessarily form a stream of mental images of the world external to our consciousness. These images must be connected up to make a whole, a moving picture of the moving world with which we have to cope every day. The glue which binds them together is logic, the process of understanding how each of our experiences is related to every other, and over the course of human history we have developed such concepts, what might be termed logical operators, as matter and substance, cause and effect, positive and negative, and so on. This social and historical struggle to correctly reflect the world in which we live in thought has produced two fundamental and opposing points of view, the materialist view, which holds that the material world exists independently of mankind and that human consciousness is a reflection of it, and the idealist view which is the reverse of this, holding that thought is primary and that the world external to thought is somehow the result of thought rather than its cause. The former, materialist view takes sensuous perception and experience of the external world as its starting point, while the possibility and necessity of operating with abstract logical thought processes has, over the course of history, been made the basis of idealist philosophy in a variety of forms.

   When Kant began to grapple with the question of the relation between the material world and thought, the theory of knowledge or "epistemology", there was already a long history behind it. Such questions were first seriously approached by the Greeks, who began first the materialist and later the idealist trends in philosophy. Heraclitus thought the world existed independently of human consciousness, that mankind arose historically through a process of evolution, and that everything was in a state of constant change. Parmenides held that thought was primary to the material world which was fixed and unchanging, and that all the change and motion we perceive is thought created illusion. Greek culture found its way to Europe via the Arabic incursion into Spain, becoming synthesised with Catholic Christianity during the renaissance, consequently scientific and philosophical endeavour mostly took the form of enquiry into the will of God.

    Of all the Greek thinkers it was Aristotle who had the greatest influence on European culture.  He has been described as the founder of scientific philosophy, and not without reason, for he originated a system of philosophical categories without which scientific thought is not possible. There were ten in all, Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Action, Suffering, and he described his philosophy as the science of metaphysics. “Meta” is a Greek word meaning “beyond”, and the sense of the word metaphysics is to suggest that the physical world exists outside and “beyond” the world of thought, and that the two existence independently of each other. Similarly, all the things and phenomena we perceive in the world have their own independent existence as individual things, apart from each other, although they do exist in relation to each other. Both materialists and idealists have operated according to the metaphysical method.

   One of the early exponents of this tendency was Thomas Hobbes, (1588-1679).  He accepted that the physical world existed independently of our consciousness of it and that all knowledge began with sensation, and he was therefore a materialist, but unfortunately the limitations of the metaphysical method led to serious distortions in his understanding of the world. He believed all existing things in nature to have a purely mechanical existence, and that likewise the relations between all things, all the motion we perceive, could be explained as purely mechanical motion, and even extended this view to organic nature including animals and man. In spite of such limitation the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy lived on in Hobbes’ logical method and the result was something new and for its time highly revolutionary, the first real challenge to the religious feudal system of monarchical authority.  In his main work, The Leviathan, he expounded views on relations between man and man, in other words political views, that perfectly reflected the needs of nascent bourgeois society as opposed to those of the existing feudal system. The opening paragraph of the chapter entitled Of the Rights of Sovereigns by Institution is as follows:-

   “A commonwealth is said to be instituted, when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part, the right to present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative; every one, as well he that voted for it, as he that voted against it, shall authorize all the actions and judgments, of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protested against other men.”

   Towards the end of the renaissance the view that the purpose of knowledge was to extend mankind’s mastery over nature, and that every individual had the capacity for enlightened reason regardless of education or status, became firmly established. This revolutionary new outlook, which became known as rationalism, reflected the historical interests of the rising capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, in its revolutionary struggle to free itself from the fetters of feudal society and extend the freedoms of the individual. A form of metaphysics, rationalism was based on the view that the inner truth of the physical world is inaccessible to the senses and comprehensible only to speculative reason, and in the first place we associate this kind of thinking with Descarte, (1596-1650).  Unlike his contemporary Galileo Descarte managed to avoid running foul of the Catholic church, although he sometimes had to conceal his real views to do so, and his writings were suppressed after his death. Descartes was a physicist and mathematician, and while he took the materialist view that knowledge is acquired through sensuous perception of the material world, he believed that all such knowledge was open to doubt, while abstract knowledge, particularly mathematics, was given to man directly by God and therefore innate to man and absolutely true. The world could only be truly known, and the errors of the knowledge of sense experience could only be corrected, through a process of deduction from such truth which was independent of sensory data, and this kind of thinking, which was part of the metaphysical tradition, came to be known as "pure reason".

   Leibnitz,(1646-1716), another great mathematician and scientist, first adopted the mechanistic materialist outlook of Hobbes, which is essentially derived empirically from experience. Later he found such theory unsatisfactory since in mechanistic theory, which sees all change in nature as being absolutely determined in a machine like way, substance, (matter), seems to be entirely passive, the cause of all motion being external to nature. By the method of pure reason Leibnitz arrived at the concept of the "monad", a finite and indivisible substantial thing which reflects the infinity of being, and provides the initial impulse for all movement and change.

   Spinoza was more consistent in his materialist outlook. He held that only nature existed and that it consisted of universal substance which was differentiated into the world of finite things, which were either extension, (the objective), or thought, (the subjective). However, when it came to the theory of knowledge Spinoza slipped into idealism in its rationalist form, regarding knowledge based on reason as being a higher order of knowledge than that based on experience. His approach to pure reason was that, like mathematics and geometry, reason could proceed on the basis of definite axioms, self evident truths that need no proof and cannot be proved, and thus made into an exact science capable of revealing absolute truth. In his main work, On the Improvement of the Understanding, he proceeds according to the formal logic of Aristotle, first stating a proposition, a sentence which contains a subject, (the thing spoken about), and a predicate, (the statement about the thing), and then presents a logical proof of the proposition.  Since this is the method adopted by the great geometer Euclid, Spinoza is said to have adopted "the geometric method".

   The English philosopher David Hume, (1711-1776), rejected rationalism. He denied that knowledge could be based on reason alone since all thought content is acquired through the senses, the viewpoint of empiricism. He went on to reason that any individual could know only his own sense impressions, and that there is no reason to believe in a world beyond them, existing independently of them. It follows from this that the necessary cause and effect relations between things is illusory and that reason can only indicate the relations between ideas. This view, which avoids any definite statement as to the existence or otherwise of the world external to thought and simply says “we don’t know”, is scepticism.

    Immanuel Kant was born, as noted above, in 1724, and it was to the question that Spinoza had posed, how can philosophy be made into a science, that he addressed himself. He regarded Hume’s empiricist view that we can be certain only of the world of sense perception, and that there was no cause and effect relation between the things we perceive, as being unscientific. At the same time he rejected the rationalist view that the truth could only be established by logical thought, pure reason, arguing that reason could not be divorced from sense perception and that knowledge is a synthesis of both experience and reason. He thought that the content of knowledge is provided by sensuous perception of the external world while reason gives knowledge its form. On page 30 of Critique of Pure Reason we read:-

   "That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of knowledge should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses?"

   This sounds thoroughly materialistic, but he continues:-

   "But although our knowledge begins with experience it by no means follows that all arises from experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we perceive through impressions, and that which the faculty of knowledge supplies itself, (sensible impression giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the element given by sense … Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its source a posteriori, that is, in experience." (Everyman edition, ISBN 0 460 87358x)

   Kant’s concept of knowledge a posteriori was simply that the external, material world does exist and is reflected in sensation and thought, and that the senses can be relied upon to correctly reflect things as they appear. "It is therefore quite correct to say that the senses do not err, not because they always judge correctly, but because they do not judge at all." (Op.Cit, p.233). However knowledge a priori, which Kant takes as the basis of pure reason, is problematical. In Kant’s mind the general question he started with, how can philosophy be made scientific, resolved itself into the question, how is thought a priori, pure reason, possible at all? How can it correctly reflect the world and all that happens in it in a systematic way?

   Such thought involves the use of concepts such as cause and effect, necessity and accident, the individual and the universal. If A is the cause of B, then B must necessarily follow A. It cannot be a matter of chance or accident and it cannot be confined to one individual case, but must rather happen everywhere A and B exist in relation to one another. But according to Hume there is nothing in experience to justify such concepts since we can only experience what is and never what must be. I can watch water boil into steam, but there is nothing in this experience to connect temperature and the allotropic state of water. For Hume any such connection was an association of ideas in the mind and had no real objective significance. But for scientific thought the faculty of synthetic judgement, the ability to connect events and facts into a whole in time and space in cause and effect relation, to systematically make necessary connections between the individual and the universal, is absolutely necessary.

   Kant’s solution to the problem is contained in his two sided, (dialectical in the formal sense), concept of knowledge given above, passive sense perception which does not judge, and spontaneous, active thought which does. This active thought always makes a spontaneous leap from the seeming accident to the necessary cause, from the individual to the universal in space and time. I see one object fall, and conclude that objects must always fall. In fact it was the consideration of space and time that gave Kant the clue he needed to advance beyond the ideas of Hume. He decided that the leap of the mind, the synthetic judgement, was at least justified in the case of space and time, since while it is impossible to conceive of an object without at the same time conceiving of the space in which it exists, it is quite possible to conceive of space without the existence of the object within it. In order to perceive the object it is therefore necessary for the mind to supply the concept of space. He reasoned similarly with respect to the existence of objects in time, and concluded that it was the proper function of the mind to give shape and meaning to all experience, and that concepts such as cause and effect, necessity and universality were valid and a sound basis for scientific thought. However, this great advance also proved to be the limit beyond which Kant advanced no further. In what many regard as the most important part of Critique of Pure Reason, the chapter entitled the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant writes:-

   "Transcendental idealism allows that the objects of external intuition – as intuited in space, and all changes in time – as represented by the internal sense, are real … But time and space, with all appearances therein, are not in themselves things. They are nothing but representations, and cannot exist outside and apart from the mind." ( Op. cit. p.356)

   The grandiose term "transcendental dialectic" hides meaning so simple as to be almost mundane. “I apply the term transcendental to all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects, so far as this mode of knowledge is possible a priori”, writes Kant. (Op.Cit. page 43). To transcend means to surpass limits, and Kant has in mind a priori thought which surpasses the limits of knowledge gained by sense perception of the external world. His conception of the dialectic was just as Aristotle had meant it. It is the formal relating of opposites, that is, the opposites, while having separate and independent existence, determine the relation between them, rather than the relation determining the opposites, which must necessarily exist in connection, as Heraclitus had described. Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism means, briefly, the idea that the perceiving mind, transcending the limits of empirical knowledge, spontaneously provides the conceptual framework to connect thought to the external world, and we note that space and time are the most fundamental of these concepts. But since space and time exist only in the mind the conditions under which the external world of real things exists is clearly incomprehensible to us:-

   "For I can say only of a thing-in-itself that it exists without relation to sense perception and experience.  But we are speaking here merely of appearances in space and time, both of which are determinations of sensibility, and not things in themselves.” (Op. Cit., p.357)

   To the extent that Kant accepts that the thing-in-itself exists independently of our experience of it he is a materialist, but the idea that space and time are not independently existing attributes of the external world, but creations of the mind, is idealism. This two-sided way of looking at the world is sometimes referred to a dualism.

    Kant’s contribution to natural science was monumental.  He was the first to postulate the extension of space beyond our own galaxy, and to suggest that the planet Earth came into being as a condensation from a gaseous nebula, and that having a beginning it would surely have an end. However, when he came to examine deeper questions such as the question of the infinity or otherwise of time and space his metaphysical, (absolute), division of the world into the world of a priori thought, and the world “in-itself”, which he held to be un-knowable, led him to believe that the method of pure reason contained inherent contradictions which could never be resolved.  He called these the antinomies of pure reason, or more particularly cosmological antinomies, an antinomy being a proposition that can be proved both correct and incorrect from the same premise.  In analysing these antinomies he proceeded in a formal manner, first stating a proposition or thesis, (a positive affirmation that something is …), and proving it by logical deduction. Having done that he stated the opposite or antithesis, (the negative of the thesis, something is not …), and proved this from the same premise as the proof of the thesis. We give one example to demonstrate the resulting antinomy or contradiction.

    Kant begins the full exposition of the first antinomy of pure reason on page 317 of Critique of Pure Reason, but since it is somewhat lengthy we shall attempt to show the nature of antinomy as such by dealing with it only in part.

   Thesis.  The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard    
to space.

    Proof. Let us assume, that the world has no beginning in time;  up to every given moment of time, an eternity must have elapsed, and therewith passed away an infinite series of successive states of things in the world.  Now the infinity of a series consists in the fact that, it never can be completed by means of a successive synthesis.  It follows that an infinite series already elapsed is impossible, and that consequently a beginning of the world is a necessary condition of its existence.  And that was the first thing to be proved.

    Antithesis.  The world has no beginning, and no limits in space, but is, in relation to both time and space, infinite.

    Proof.  For let us assume, that it has a beginning.  A beginning is an existence which is preceded by a time in which the thing does not exist.  On the above supposition, it follows that there must have been a time in which the world did not exist.  But in an empty time the origination of a thing is impossible; because no part of any such time contains a distinctive condition of being, in preference to that of non-being (whether the supposed thing originates from itself, or by means of some other cause).  Consequently, many series of things may have a beginning in the world, but the world itself cannot have a beginning, and is, therefore, in relation to past time, infinite.

    The first proof is false because it applies the conception of an infinite series, such as we  normally deal with by mathematical methods, to the concept of real space.  A series must necessarily have a starting point, usually 1, and real infinite space cannot be conceived of having a starting point in any direction.  Dealing thus with the first part of the thesis, (time), we shall proceed to the corresponding part of the antithesis.

    The proof of the antithesis is also false because it metaphysically separates Being from Non-Being, and as we shall see below this is a fatal mistake. However, from the standpoint of the metaphysical formal logic to which Kant adhered both proofs appeared correct, and it is proved that the world had a beginning, and at the same time that it did not have a beginning, on exactly the same grounds, but Kant had a way out of the dilemma.  Contradiction, he thought, was impossible, and could have no real existence in the real external world, the “thing-in-itself”.  If only we could know this real world then we could find in it the resolution of the antinomy, but since the thing-in-itself is unknowable then we never will. This situation places a limit to the extent to which logic, pure reason that is, can be applied to the world, and Kant concluded that beyond this limit we must have recourse to the dialectical opposite of logic, Faith, so that once again Kant is seen to be an idealist.  For all this Kant had made an enormous contribution to science and philosophy, and undoubtedly the most import thing he had done was to pose and enunciate the problem of contradiction.  However, as we shall now see, it remained for Hegel to answer Kant by unlocking the secret of antinomy.

   As we have explained, Kant advanced the science of Logic by developing the logical categories given by Aristotle, such as cause and effect, and said that to have scientific validity they must be universally true. What he failed to fully appreciate, however, was that if they were universal then they were all inter-related, united, in this very universality. And this brings us to Hegel, who discovered precisely how all categories of thought are interconnected, how they can be deduced one from another, and went on to unite all the concepts and categories of thought into a single whole system of logic.

   Hegel began by tracking down the most fundamental and universal of all categories, Being. Before any existing thing, material object or thought, can exist in any quantity or have any quality such a shape, colour, hardness or softness, it must first be. Whatever we wish to say about any object we must begin by saying "it is …". It is the "is-ness" of any thing or thought which is its Being, and what is just as important, absolutely nothing else can be included in the category of pure Being. The category of Being is abstracted from all considerations of quantity and quality such as weight, colour etc. Such an abstraction is clearly blank, void of any meaning and apart from its "is-ness" we can think nothing at all about it. It is in fact the same as nothing, the same as its own opposite. But Nothing is not simply total absence of anything at all, it is at least this category of thought, and as such has, or rather is, Being. So that within Nothing we have discovered its opposite, Being.

  Here is the great genius of Hegel. He had discovered that hidden within the category of Being was its own opposite, the category of Nothing, and vice versa. Each could be logically deduced from the other. Even more importantly, Hegel understood that the real truth of both of these things, Being and Nothing, was to be found not by taking them as separate things, (as Kant might have done), but by grasping the way in which they relate to each other. This relationship, their unity, constitutes a new category, Becoming, which Hegel describes a follows:-

   "Pure Being and Pure Nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither Being nor Nothing, but that being – does not pass over but has passed over – into Nothing, and Nothing into Being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is, therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one in the other: Becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself." (Science of Logic, Humanity Books, p.82) And later he explains, "The unity, whose moments, Being and Nothing, are inseparable, is at the same time different from them and is thus a third to them; this third in its own characteristic form is Becoming." (Op. cit. P.93)

   So now we have three categories, Being, Nothing, and Becoming, and from the unity of these three Hegel deduces a fourth, Determinacy. We have now arrived at a unity of Being and Nothing, but it is not the same unity of Pure Being and Nothing we started with when we spoke of indeterminate Being, because whereas indeterminate Being is the same as Nothing, the Determinate Being which we now have is not. Determinate being is definitely something, has become now that the process of becoming has ceased, or "settled into a moment of stability", as Hegel puts it. To put in another way, indeterminate being was simple self-identity, equal only to itself, whereas determinate being, having a logical history, is the equality, or rather identity, of Being and Nothing which have separate existence. Hegel puts it thus:

   "Determinate being as the result of its becoming is, in general, being with a non-being such that this non-being is taken up into simple unity with being. Non-being thus taken up into being in such a way that the concrete whole is in the form of being, of immediacy, constitutes determinateness as such." (Op. cit. p.110)

   But it is important to grasp that we have only the general idea of determinacy. We know this Being is determinate, but we do not know what kind of determinacy it has, just as we can know a thing has quality without knowing what quality is has. In fact, Quality is the next category Hegel deduces. Quality is that aspect of a thing which makes it what it is, determines its identity. For example, it is the quality of hardness which determines that a certain quantity of carbon is a diamond, hence in this sense determinateness and quality are identical, and the category Quality is thus deduced from the category determinateness.

   "Determinateness thus isolated by itself in the form of being is quality – which is wholly simple and immediate. Determinateness as such is the more universal term which can equally be further determined as quantity and so on." (Op. cit. p.111)

   Hegel goes on systematically and logically deducing all the categories and concepts of modern philosophy in this scientific way, categories such as positive and negative, the finite and the infinite, until at the end of his Logic he arrives at what he calls the Absolute Idea, which we shall speak of later. For the moment it is important to note what is new in Hegel's treatment of the categories; whereas previous philosophers grasped them empirically and separately, had, so to speak, "found the world to be that way", Hegel deduced them logically and showed the relation between them, and this enabled him to make the break from formal logic and the leap to dialectical logic, or perhaps we might say the regeneration of the dialectical logic of Heraclitus but on the basis of far more advanced natural science and technology. We shall attempt to describe it.

   These three "moments", Being, Nothing, Becoming, form what became known as Hegel’s triad. The first moment, Being, is a simple affirmative statement or thesis, (something is …). The second moment, Nothing, contradicts the first, is anti-thesis, (something is not, negation of the first). The third moment, Becoming, is the unity of the first two, synthesis, which contains the contradiction between thesis and anti-thesis and at the same time continually resolves it, because Becoming is motion, which is this truth of all Being. By way of this triple rhythm, thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis, Hegel deduced his whole system of categories and their logical interconnections, starting from the universal, abstract, most general, and proceeding to the more particular, determinate, concrete. The whole of Hegel’s philosophy consists of one giant triad, The Logic, (thesis), The Doctrine of Nature, (anti-thesis), and the Doctrine of Spirit, (synthesis). Each of these itself forms a triad, for example The Logic consists of the Doctrine of Being, (thesis), the Doctrine of Essence, (anti-thesis) and the Doctrine of the Notion, (synthesis). The method is truly "dialectical", since the final term of the triad is the result of the two sided process of the unity and conflict of the first two, their vanishing in each other to become something new which is the first moment, thesis), of a new triad.

   However there was a fatal flaw in Hegel’s system. Unlike Kant, who believed that the categories existed only in thought, Hegel, seeing that Nature appeared to behave in accordance with his logical system, concluded that the categories must have objective and independent existence, that these thought entities stood above and outside mind and nature and governed the whole of existence. Nature, in fact, was nothing but thought, what he called the Absolute Idea, made real. In fact, as we shall see, the opposite is true, the categories and laws of logic are nothing but the ideal reflection in human consciousness of the way nature, (matter), behaves. Hegel had the world stood on its head.

   In spite of this Hegel's dialectical method enabled him to lay bare the secret of Kant’s antinomy.  On page 190 of The Science of Logic we find this sub-heading: “Remark 2: The Kantian Antinomy of the Indivisibility and the Infinite Divisibility of Time, Space and Matter.”  Under it we read:-

    “It is the nature of quantity, this simple unity of discreteness and continuity, that gives rise to the conflict or antinomy of the infinite divisibility of space, time, matter, etc.”

    On previous pages Hegel deduces the concept of quantity according to his dialectical method and characterises it as “the unity of the one and the many”.  A quantity is always one unity of many ones; a heap of stones is one heap but many stones. A foot of space is one foot but twelve inches. Seen from the side of the twelve inches the space is divided up into limited or discrete parts, but since each inch is space of the same quality they flow into each other into one whole foot, and seen from this side space in continuous. Whether we see the one foot or the twelve inches makes no difference to the fact that we have the whole in view, hence discreteness and continuity form a “simple unity”. Hegel begins his solution of Kant’s antinomy as follows:-

    “In the usual ideas of continuous and discrete magnitude, it is overlooked that each of these magnitudes contains both moments, continuity and discreteness, and that the distinction between them consists only in this, that in one of the moments the determinateness is posited and in the other it is only implicit.” (Op. Cit. page 200). This is Hegel’s scientific way of saying that when we positively say that quantity is discrete, we are implicitly saying that it is continuous, and vice versa.  But Kant was trapped in formal, (metaphysical, non-dialectical), thought, so that for him quantity had to be seen as either discrete or continuous but not both at once.

     In the first proof given above, (the Earth had a beginning), the premise is based on the conception of time as discrete quantity, “a series of successive states”.  A successive state can only be conceived of as a finite division of time, and if the whole of time is an aggregate of finite divisions, then the sum or aggregate of these finite divisions must itself be finite, whatever the number of divisions.  Hence the proof is nothing but the explicit expression of what is contained implicitly in the premise.

    In the second proof given above, (the Earth had no beginning), the premise is “empty time”, time that contains “no distinctive condition” in other words, continuous quantity, a conception that does not contain any idea of limit and division and therefore any idea of beginning or end. Hence the Earth is seen as having no beginning and once again the conclusion is contained in the premise.

    It is here, in this criticism of Kant, that we see most concretely the huge contribution that Hegel made to scientific thought, the renewal of the ancient dialectic of Heraclitus in a sharply developed and deepened form. Kant thought that contradiction was impossible, and that if something appeared contradictory, (antinomial), then thought was a fault, but Hegel explains the mistake:-

    “In the first place, contradiction is usually kept aloof from things, from the sphere of Being and of truth generally; it is asserted that there is nothing contradictory. Secondly, it is shifted into subjective reflection by which it is first posited in the process of relating and comparing.  But even in this reflection, it does not really exist, for it is said that the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought.  Whether it occurs in actual things or in reflective thinking, it ranks in general as contingency, a kind of abnormality and a passing paroxysm of sickness.”  (Op. Cit. page 439)

    Hegel knew that contradiction was real, that the world and everything in it must be seen not in its stillness and death but in its movement and life, according to the law we have outlined above, Being-Nothing-Becoming, but he mistakenly thought that the external world was thought made real.  On the basis of what was correct in Hegel, Karl Marx was able to show what was incorrect.

   In the early part of the 19^th. century when Marx and Engels were students, Hegel was the dominating influence on German social and scientific thought. The two students were, like many others, enthusiastic Hegelians, but they were by no means uncritical and did not accept Hegel’s idealist view that nature was the result and product of human thought, the "absolute idea made real". On the contrary, they took the materialist view that thought is the reflection of the physical world external to human consciousness, the world of matter, which is in constant motion and ever changing and developing into new forms. As it turned out Marx was the equal of Hegel in this conflict of ideas, for he did not simply bring argument to bear to disprove Hegel’s view, externally as it were, to Hegel’s own logic; he turned Hegel’s own logic against him. Beginning from Hegel’s own precepts, and by a process of deduction which accorded with Hegel’s own method, Marx deduced the independent existence of the physical world of nature:-. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he wrote:-

   "Hegel’s positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the definite concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also of human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction process. For example, superseded being is essence, superseded essence is concept, the concept superseded is … absolute idea. But what, then, is the absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to perform once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality of abstractions or the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself – abandon abstraction – and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite- at nature. Thus the entire logic is a demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing in itself; that only nature is something."  (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Vol.3, Lawrence and Wishart, page 343).

   This passage expresses the moment of the leap, when Marx became a Marxist, when Marxism came into being.  The “estrangement of the human being” refers to the position of humanity as a species in conflict with the rest of nature, taken abstractly as a general identity, the Essence of which is human thought. Man is an animal which thinks and reasons, hence the thought forms which have been created through reason are ultimately “the result of the estrangement”.  Marx does not disagree with this, indeed he regards it as being a positive achievement, but he sees Hegel’s conclusion that the final result of this process of abstraction, (each abstraction being superseded in turn), is the absolute idea, as being entirely unfounded.  As we know, Hegel believed nature to be the absolute idea made real, but Marx shows, by Hegel’s own logic, that abstract thought is nothing in itself and only nature is real. “Abstraction comprehending itself knows itself to be nothing”, all that is left is nature, and our own material being as part of nature.

   It was in reference to this that Engels was later to say, famously, that Hegel was standing on his idealist head and Marx stood him on materialist feet. The two great men understood that in the human process of cognizing the external world of nature, the movement of thought, which consists in the continual transformation of concepts and categories into one another, is not its own independent movement, but the movement of the material external world which it reflects. The case of such thought processes given above, Being-Nothing-Becoming, is universal truth and is objective as well as subjective, that is, it describes the motion of all the matter in the universe and every individual thing that exists including human thought. The materialist interpretation of Hegel’s method understands that the outer Form of any thing we perceive is its Being, and the opposite which can be deduced from it, (as Hegel deduced Nothing from Being), is its own inner Content, which manifests the Essence, (truth), of the thing. Nature is dialectical, that is, all progress takes place as the result of the unity and conflict, interpenetration and transformation of these opposites. Hegel’s idealist method had been placed on objective, materialist foundations and the great leap had taken place, and it was a truly gigantic leap for the human race, because what had been attempted by the Greeks, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel had finally been achieved, thought had been placed on a truly scientific basis.

   There are of course countless examples in history in which slow and painful accumulation of knowledge has resulted in a sudden leap for science and philosophy. Indeed it was Hegel himself who, in re-introducing the dialectics of Heraclitus into the world of modern science, demonstrated that this generally repeated pattern of change was not at all accidental, but was in actual fact a manifestation of a general law of motion of developing human thought, what he called the law of the Negation of the Negation.  A brief explanation of this is necessary to the understanding of the leap in question.

   Above we have described Hegel’s method of procedure, which begins with thesis, proceeds to anti-thesis, and then to synthesis. Thesis is a positive statement of Being, something is;  but everything is in motion and change, is Becoming something else. Everything which comes into being is immediately passing away, not just disappearing into thin air, but being transformed into its own opposite. To be born is to begin to die, or to put it another way, life contains its own opposite, death, within itself from the moment it comes into being, into which it is being transformed. In every moment during its existence, therefore, every thing or Identity contains within itself its own particular Difference, some new and developing quality which is the opposite of the defining quality of  the Identity, the quality of the new thing which is coming into being as the particular opposite of the original Identity. The death of any thing is always the birth of something new. Neither matter nor energy can be destroyed but always reborn in some new form. Identity and Difference correspond to Thesis and Anti-thesis, since Difference is the Negative of Identity. In Anti-thesis Identity “is not”, is “going away”, being “negated”. 

    We have now arrived at the first negation in the law of the Negation of the Negation, and it is said to be Quantitative Negation, corresponding in this context to the historical period of slow and often difficult acquisition and quantitative accumulation of scientific knowledge and wisdom we have referred to above. This is indeed a process of negation, because old theories are continually being proved false, negated, by new ones, such as the discovery that the Earth goes round the Sun instead of vice versa. What is the significance of the second negation? It is not simply a repeat of the first.  The first was Difference emerging from Identity, two sides coming apart as the quantity of the Difference between them increases, a process of analysis, but the second negation is the opposite of this, these two sides returning to themselves to form something new, a new Identity, and the joining together of things is synthesis, the last of the three moments of the law of the Negation of the Negation, thesis, analysis, synthesis. However, the really important thing is to grasp that the second Negation is not Quantitative, a process of accumulation through time, but Qualitative, a sudden leap to something new, a transformation from the old Identity to the new Identity. This explanation has been necessary in order to explain that the transformation of the ideas of Kant and Hegel to those of Marx was a great leap for mankind. The Negation of Kant by Hegel was first Quantitative Negation, analysis, and the Negation of this Negation by Marx was Qualitative Negation, synthesis, the leap to a new Identity. Let us consider this process from the standpoint of its actual historical content.

   Kant provides us with thesis:  The world, (thing-in-itself), exists but is unknowable. (This is materialism). The mind has separate existence and determines the existence of the thing-in-itself as we know it. (This is idealism).

    Hegel provides the anti-thesis. The world does not exist, and this anti-thesis is first, quantitative negation, because, by way of his scientifically correct dialectical logic, Hegel develops Kant’s idealism to the limit to which idealism can be taken, “only thought exists”.

    Marx gives us the synthesis which negates the negation of Kant by Hegel.  He synthesises Hegel’s logic with the other side of Kant, his materialism, by showing that nature itself is dialectical, that dialectical motion is the mode of existence of matter, and that dialectical thought is its reflection in human consciousness.  But in the negation of the negation we find something new, not just change, mere re-arrangement, but the leap, new positive development, and it is this new development which is of such crucial importance for humanity, because as well as placing thought in general on a scientific basis it was nothing less than the beginning of a whole new science, the science of human society itself as a developing historical process.  Engels explains how the two great men began this work:-

    “In nature – in so far as we ignore man’s reaction upon nature – there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation.  Nothing of all that happens – whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable on the surface, or in the ultimate results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents – happens as a consciously desired aim.  In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals;  nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim.  But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws.  For here, also, on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface.  That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation or the means of attaining them are insufficient.  Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.  The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than intended.  Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance.  But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.”   (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Progress Publishers pamphlet, page 42).

    And Marx and Engels did indeed discover these laws:-

   “When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the driving powers which – consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often unconsciously – lie behind the motives of men who act in history and which constitute the real ultimate driving forces of history, then it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of the people in each people; and this, too, not merely for an instant, like the transient flaring up of a straw-fire which quickly dies down, but as a lasting action resulting in a great historical transformation.  To ascertain the driving causes which here in the minds of acting masses and their leaders – the so-called great men – are reflected in conscious motives, clearly or unclearly, directly or in an ideological, even glorified, form – is the only path which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway both in history as a whole, and at particular periods and in particular lands.  Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much upon circumstances.  The workers have by no means become reconciled to capitalist machine industry, even though they no longer simply break the machines to pieces as they did in 1848 on the Rhine.”  (Op. Cit, page 44).

   Engels goes on the show that since the European peace of 1815 three great classes, driven by their material interests, have been in contention for political and social supremacy, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class, and the new working class, the industrial proletariat, and that the movement of history is nothing but the working out of the conflict between these classes according to the dialectical laws of nature, with the capitalist class rapidly becoming by far the most powerful and imposing its economic system on society. In another work he explains how the change from the small scale production carried out by individual artisans in their own workshops, using their own means of production, to the capitalist system resulted in a fatal contradiction which would ultimately be the downfall of capitalism:-

    “Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialised means of production and socialised producers.  But the socialised producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after the change, just as they had been before, i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals.  Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception.  

   Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, though it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labour of others.  Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists.  The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised.  But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market.  The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests … This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalist character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today.”  (F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

   This, like all contradictions, took on its own movement and life, unfolding quantitatively as the capitalist system progressed, finding expression in what we now know as the inherent crisis of capitalism, the direct cause of all economic crises and competition between capitalists which results in trade war and actual warfare between nations.  Marx began to trace the life of this contradiction by analyzing the single commodity which he describes as the “cell” of the capitalist mode of production.  As with Hegel, Marx starts from Being, but unlike Hegel he starts from the Being of the external, material world which exists independently of thought, not abstractly from the concept Being. The very first paragraph of Das Kapital reads:-

   “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity."

  Having discovered the dialectical laws of motion that govern the development of human society, Marx was able to unlock the secret of capitalist political economy. He observes that a commodity is a useful thing, a value, which is produced by the capitalist for the purpose of being exchanged for some other commodity, through the medium of money, rather than for his own personal consumption. Its value is determined by the socially necessary labour time taken to produce it.  Its outer Form, (Being), is "use-value", and its contradictory internal opposite, its Content, is its "exchange-value", the ratio in which it will exchange with other commodities in the market.

  We can see that the two opposite sides or aspects of the act of commodity exchange in the market encompass the contradiction contained in the capitalist mode of production explained by Engels above. However, we see that the two sides, form and content, have been transformed into each other. The form of the capitalist mode of production, socialised labour, is now contained in the commodity as its content, value, since labour produces all value. The content of the capitalist mode of production, private appropriation, has become the form, use value, of the commodity, since the use-value of the commodity to the capitalist is only as a means of appropriation of value by way of exchange on the market. But we note that a development has taken place, because in the act of exchange the capitalist appropriates more value than he appropriated in the process of production, an increment which Marx calls surplus value.

   In similar manner, according to the dialectical laws of nature, the unity, conflict and transformation of opposites and the law of negation, Marx traces through the unfolding contradiction contained in the commodity, which is the cell of the capitalist mode of production, and scientifically describes the whole of capitalist political economy, and shows that it leads inexorably to the transformation to the socialist system, that is, the negation of the contradiction explained by Engels above by socialising the mode of appropriation so that it is compatible with the socialised mode of production.  Marx made a true science of political economy, and so empowered mankind to take conscious control of its own destiny, and not before time.  Environmental change is threatening us with extinction, and our only hope of survival is through strictly planned production and distribution.

First published 200
Re-written August 2008 

Terry Button.