July 29, 1949
Dear J:
I tried to get you on the phone but didn't succeed. Therefore I am dropping you this note to convey to you two things which have suddenly descended upon me with an overwhelming clarity.
1) When Lenin reaches the chapter1 on Absolute Idea, he is completely at home. You can feel it in his comments and in his selections. That is only partly because he has gone through the whole and reached the end, so to speak. To think that that was all would mean an idealistic conception of the relation between theory and practice. It seems to me that the reason he felt so much at home here was that this had been what was organic to him in his revolutionary practice in Russia. That is why he is on home ground, so to speak.
2) The final chapter is directed, not against the reformists, but against the counter-revolutionists within the revolution. The essence of the latter is: THEY REGARD THE REVOLUTION and the revolutionary masses2 AS A TOOL. A MEANS, WHICH GETS RID OF ONE CONTENT AND ESTABLISHED A NEW CONTENT. This new content established through the method as tool then acquires "an external determinateness" (p. 469)3 which is reflected upon externally, i.e. organised that's what the liberal anti-Tsarist revolutionary bourgeoisie wanted to do [..] capitalism, [..] labor paid at value.4
Why do I feel so sure of this?
1) Just before Hegel moves into the Absolute Idea he finished up with Kant and Fichte.5
He says (SL 234-235)6 that once action has superseded the subjectivity of purpose, once will has taken steps to make the world what it ought to be, in this process of will itself, the finitude and contradiction which are involved necessarily in will as ought, are abolished. We enter upon the unity of the theoretical and the practical idea, to that form of life which is the activity of the Notion. What else can this be except the revolution? Dialectic and history, so to speak, here leave behind those who think of the good only as possible, who remain in the realm of ought.
He says it even more strongly in the Larger Logic, (p. 454-5).7 "Presupposition in general is here transcended, that is, the determination of the Good as an end which is merely subjective and restricted in its content, the necessity of realizing it by subjective activity and this activity itself. In the result mediation transcends itself: the result is an immediacy which is not the reconstitution of the presupposition but rather the fact of its transcendence. The Idea of the Notion which is determined in and for itself is thus posited no longer merely in the active subject, but equally as an immediate actuality; and the latter conversely is posited as it is in Cognition, as objectivity which is veritable. Hereby the individuality of the subject, with which it was affected by its presupposition, has disappeared; it is thus now as free and universal self-identity: for it the objectivity of this Notion is given, and immediately present for the subject, just as much as the subject knows itself to be the Notion determined in and for itself. In this result then COGNITION is reconstructed and united with the Practical Idea: the actuality which is found as given is at the same time determined as the realized absolute end, not however (as in inquiring Cognition) merely as objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion but as objective world whose inner ground and actual persistence is the Notion. This is the Absolute Idea" (italicised in original German).
This is the latest, the highest, the final immediacy, the final leap. And precisely for that reason Hegel would not be Hegel, the dialectic would not be the dialectic if at this point precisely he did not show you the negativity inherent in this Absolute.
First, he says, let there be no question about it: (Italics in Germany orig).
"The Absolute Idea, as the reasonable Notion which in its reality coincides only with itself, is the return to Life by reason of this immediacy of its objective identity: but on the other hand it has equally transcended this form of its immediacy and contains the highest opposition within itself".
I pause a moment for the last part of that sentence to sink in.
"The Notion is not only Soul but also is free and subjective Notion, which is for itself and therefore has personality - the practical and objective Notion, determined in and for itself, which, as person, is impenetrable and atomic subjectivity - while at the same time it is not exclusive individuality, but is, for itself Universality and Cognition, and in its Other has its own objectivity for object".
Don't mix this up with Being-for-Self in the realm of Being, he is saying, with bourgeois individuality.
"Everything else is error and gloom, opinion, striving, caprice and transitoriness: the Absolute Idea alone is Being, imperishable Life, self-knowing truth, and the whole of truth".8
Is it too much to think that we and Lenin would have substituted the word Revolution, permanent revolution, every time Hegel used the word Absolute Idea.
Having established this, Hegel tells us straightforwardly (there is no chapter in Hegel as straightforward as this, as if he too by the time he reached here was completely at home) that he is not going to review all the stages by which this Absolute Idea has been reached but "What remains (therefore) to be considered here is not a content as such but the universal element of its form - that is, the method".9
He is going to tell us how all revolutions move by negativity and hence what is the difference between going along, developing with this self-developing negativity of the revolution, between that which was Lenin's method, and the method of counter-revolution.
Such an assumption, he says, has been proved by the whole course of the Logic, to be untenable: "It has turned out, not that some given object could be the foundation, to which the absolute form would be related as a merely external and contingent determination, but on the contrary that the form is the absolute foundation and ultimate truth. Thus the method has emerged as the Notion which knows itself and has for object as the Absolute, both subjective and objective, that is as the pure correspondence between the Notion and its Reality, as an existence which the Notion itself is".10
He goes on to say that up to now we have understood what the Notion is, but now we have to see that the "Notion is everything and that its movement is the universal and absolute activity, the self-determining and self-realising movement. Hence the method that must be recognized to be universal without restriction, to be a mode both internal and external, and the force which is utterly infinite, which no object can resist insofar as it presents itself as external and as removed from and independent of reason, while also it can neither have a particular nature as against it nor fail to be penetrated by it".11
I can't resist typing out some of this. It moves so easily. Also W and F and L12 don't have a copy of the LL so far as I know. But I won't retype the whole chapter.
Then again he contrasts the revolutionary dialectical concept of the Method with what I call the counter-revolutionary concept of the Method.
"In Inquiring cognition the methods is likewise in the position of a tool, of a means which stands on the subjective side, whereby the method relates itself to the object. In this syllogism the subject is one extreme and the object the other, and by its method the former attaches itself to the latter, but does not therein, for itself, attached itself to itself. The extremes remain distinct because subject, method and object and not posited as the one identical Notion". Hence at the conclusion of this type of cognition, the object "merely achieves an external determinateness through the Method".13
Note that he is talking here about Method, i.e. the form of the Absolute Idea, i.e. the new stage of identity of theory and practice which we have reached and not just about previous forms of cognition.
(1) It is absolutely necessary that the Method begin with abstract universality, abstract self-relation, the simple and universal, the in-itselfness of the Absolute (469-472). Don't be hesitant about beginning there arbitrarily with categorical unconsciousness (469).14
(2) But, "The concrete totality which is the beginning contains as such the beginning of progress and of development. As concrete it is internally differentiated: but by reason of its original immediacy the first differentiations are various. The immediacy, however, is self-relating universality and as subject, is also the unity of these various terms. This Reflection is the first stage of advance, the emergence of difference, judgement, determination in general".15
That is, you have got to see the differentiation within the Revolution, for that is after all what we are dealing with. The word for advance above is "Weitergehen" which literally means "proceeding further". You can't proceed any further unless you recognize this internal differentiation. The alternative "here is that it takes up again equally externally from the concrete that which it had left out in the abstractive creation of the Universal".16
That is precisely what Leibniz and Schelling did.17 Getting to Being-for-Self and the Absolute Idea like a shot out of the pistol, they then turned around and began putting into this bourgeois individual (Leibniz) and this revolutionary identity (Schelling) the scientific prejudices of their time - Natural science (Leibniz); Sociology (Schelling).
Against these, Hegel reaffirms what he has said in (1) and (2) above, calling them now "this equally synthetic and analytic moment of the Judgement, by which the original universal determines itself out of itself to be its own Other", and says this is to be called the dialectical moment.18
I will leave out the couple of pages where he deals with dialectic as sophistry. They are not integral to the argument.
He begins, p. 475-bottom, to review again this form of the Absolute method. "Any first term considered in and for itself shows itself to be its own other". (In the German original the word universal comes before first so that it read "a universal first"). "Taken quite generally this determination may be held to mean that what first was immediate is thus mediated and related to an Other, or that the Universal is a particular".19
The Nevada document.20
"The second term which has thus arisen is accordingly the negative of the first and (if we allow in advance for the further development) is the first Negative. From this negative side the immediate has become submerged in the Other, but the Other is essentially not the empty negative or Nothing which is commonly taken as the result of the dialectic: it is the Other of the first, the negative of the immediate: it is thus determined as mediated and altogether contains the determinations of the first".21
Hegel knew that in the developing negativity of the revolution, you didn't have to worry about the restoration of the pre-revolutionary society.
(I know that I am repeating much of the Nevada document here but it is necessary for the flow).
With the first term, it was necessary to see the Other in it, the negative in it. With the second term, "the dialectic moment consists in the positing of the unity which is contained in it" (477).22 If you can't see this unity, it is because you can't see the internal contradictory character of the determinations contained in the first negative or second term. And the reason you can't, is that you have "allowed the contradictory content which lies before it to drop into the sphere of sensuous representation, into space and time, where the contradictory terms are held apart in spatial and temporal juxtaposition and thus come before consciousness without being in contact".23 The abstract revolutionism with which Schelling began, the positivism with which he viewed the differentiations and discriminations arising from the first immediacy made him end up with a monotheistic God. "This thought makes it its first principle that contradiction is unthinkable". Who else could he have been thinking of except Schelling? Certainly not Kant and Fichte. "In point of fact formal thought does think contradiction but immediately disregards it and with the empty assertion of that principle passes over to abstract negation".24
For the rest I think I need only end with some abstracts.
"The negativity which has been considered is the turning point of the movement of the Notion. It is the simple point of negative self-relation, the innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement, the dialectic soul which all truth has in it and through which it alone is truth".25
"The second negative, the negative of the negative, which we have reached, is this transcendence of the contradiction, but is no more the activity of an external reflection than the contradiction is: it is the innermost and most objective movement by virtue of which a subject is personal and free".26
Note: you cannot have this second negative as internal and dialectical unless you had the first.
"This negativity (the second), as self-transcending contradiction is the reconstitution of the first immediacy, of simple universality... this result is truth. It is immediacy as well as mediacy: but it is not properly comprehended by forms of judgement like 'the third term is immediacy and mediation', or 'it is their unity': for it is not a quiescent third term but as this unity, is self-mediating movement and activity. At the beginning was the universal: the result is the individual, the concrete and the subject: what the former is in itself, that latter is now equally for itself; the universal is posited in the subject. The first two moments of the triplicity are the abstract and false moments, which for this very reason are dialectical and make themselves into the subject by virtue of this their negativity".27
"The method of truth too knows the beginning to be incomplete because it is beginning, but also know this incomplete term in general as necessary, because truth is only self-coincidence, through the negativity of immediacy" (484).28
Then follows the paragraph beginning "That impatience whose only wish is to be behind the (whether in the form of beginning, object, finite, or any other form) and to be immediately in the absolute, has nothing before it as object of its cognition but the empty negative, the abstract infinite".29
I hope this (see J's letter, July 11)30 now seems integral to the whole movement of the Absolute Idea.
"The pure immediacy of Being, in which at first all determination appears to be extinct or omitted by abstraction, is the Idea which has reached its adequate self-equality through mediation, that is, through the transcendence of mediation".31
This movement through immediacy, and mediation, and return to immediacy and then again mediation, is thus the whole movement of the Logic.
I begin this a note,32 but the thing has carried itself through five pages. It was not my "external reflection" but a kind of self-movement.
As ever,
G-
1 Lee is referring to the final section, (on the Absolute Idea), of Hegel's Science of Logic, (Larger Logic).
2 The text in a different font colour and italicised are handwritten additions made by Grace Lee (Boggs).
3 The page number appears to be a reference to the edition of Hegel's Science of Logic that Grace Lee was reading.
4 Some of the handwritten text is difficult to decipher.
5 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher and scientist. He was the pre-eminent German philosopher of his day, and is still more influential in mainstream philosophy and social science than Hegel. Kant tackled the key philosophical problems posed by the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. He developed a philosophy riddled with contradictions. Hegel built on Kant's work and argued that contradictions were not simply features of some philosophical dilemmas, but were a feature of all thought, and that thought developed through contradiction. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), was a German philosopher and supporter of the French Revolution. After the death of Kant, he was considered the pre-eminent philosopher in the German speaking world. He critiqued the dualism in Kant's thought, particularly the idea of thing-in-itself. His critique of Kant influenced Hegel's own thinking.
6 'SL' is an abbreviation of 'Shorter Logic', a colloquial name for Hegel's Part One of The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences), (1830).
7 'LL' is an abbreviation of 'Larger Logic', a colloquial name for Hegel's Science of Logic, (1812-16). The quoted passages are #1779 and #1780 from the section 'The Idea of the Good'.
8 The quoted text is from #1781. Which is the opening paragraph of 'The Absolute Idea' section of The Science of Logic.
9 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1783.
10 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1784.
11 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1785.
12 W is possibly William (Willie) Gorman (party name for Morris Goelman), F is Freddy Paine & L is Lyman Paine.
13 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1785.
14 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1786-#1788.
15 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1789.
16 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1789.
17 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German polymath and a critic of Spinoza, who was one of his contemporaries. Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) was a German idealist philosopher and poet, who developed a critique of Kant. Hegel and Schelling were close friends, but Hegel considered Schelling's critique of Kant to be limited.
18 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1791.
19 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1795.
20 'Notes on the Dialectic', (or 'The Nevada Document'), was written by CLR James in late 1948. It was written as an internal discussion document and circulated, chapter-by-chapter as each was written, amongst the JFT membership. After the break-up of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the document circulated, in mimeographed form, amongst the various organisations that James played a leadership role in. It was eventually published, with a new introduction by James, as Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1980), by Allison and Busby in London and Lawrence Hill in the USA.
21 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1795.
22 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1797.
23 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1798.
24 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1798.
25 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1799.
26 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1799.
27 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1803.
28 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1812.
29 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1813.
30 This appears to be a reference to a letter which is not included in this collection of correspondence.
31 Hegel, The Science of Logic, #1815.
32 Part of the text has been overwritten.
