Dialectical logic

Why did "logic" become a problem?

The logic taught in school checks whether an inference such as "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal" is valid by its form alone, whatever its content. Such formal logic is indispensable for precise thinking. But when a scientist builds a new theory, as when Marx explained capitalism as a whole from the simple relation of the commodity, what path did that thought take? Formal logic can check inferences between concepts already in hand, but it does not tell us how new concepts arise and develop.

Dialectical logic is an attempt to answer this question. Real things are not fixed; they move and change because of their internal contradictions. Then the concepts that grasp them must also be not a list of fixed definitions but a movement that grows richer by following the development of the object. The idea began with Hegel, and Marxism tried to set it on a materialist foundation. In the Soviet Union the question became entangled with political disputes over what philosophy is for and whether formal logic is a "bourgeois science". Unlike the entry on dialectics in general, this entry deals with dialectics as the science of thought, that is, with the problem of logic.

What did Lenin leave behind?

The programme of dialectical logic came from the notes Lenin made while reading Hegel in the library in Bern in 1914–1915, collected as the Philosophical Notebooks. In the 1915 "Plan of Hegel's Dialectics (Logic)" he wrote: "If Marx did not leave behind a 'Logic' (with a capital letter), he did leave the logic of Capital." Capital applies to one science "the logic, dialectics and theory of knowledge of materialism (three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing)". The note was first printed only in 1930, in Lenin Miscellany XII.

применена к одной науке логика, диалектика и теория познания [не надо 3х слов: это одно и то же] материализма

In the fragment "On the Question of Dialectics" of the same year Lenin wrote that "dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism" and that Plekhanov and other Marxists had missed this point. This is called the thesis of the identity of logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge: logic must deal not only with the forms of thought but with the whole process by which thought cognizes the world, and the laws of that process are the laws of the development of the world itself.

Диалектика и есть теория познания (Гегеля и) марксизма

In the 1921 trade-union controversy, criticizing Bukharin's eclecticism, Lenin explained this logic with a simple example. A glass is an instrument for drinking, a glass cylinder and a paperweight. Formal logic stops at choosing one of these definitions, but dialectical logic goes further. First, one must study all the sides, connections and "mediations" of the object. Second, one must take it in its development, its "self-movement"; even the glass does not stay the same, and above all its purpose, its use and its connection with the surrounding world change. Third, the whole of human practice must enter the full definition of the object as the criterion of truth. Fourth, "there is no abstract truth, truth is always concrete."

диалектическая логика требует, чтобы брать предмет в его развитии, «самодвижении» (как говорит иногда Гегель), изменении.

диалектическая логика учит, что «абстрактной истины нет, истина всегда конкретна»

Why was Ilyenkov driven from the lecture hall?

In 1953 the young philosopher Evald Ilyenkov joined the dialectical materialism sector of the Institute of Philosophy, and he was running a special seminar on the logic of Capital at the philosophy faculty of Moscow University. In April 1954 he and his colleague Valentin Korovikov put forward theses "On the question of the interconnection of philosophy and knowledge of nature and society in the process of their historical development". Their central claim was that philosophy is not a "science of sciences" that solves the problems of the special sciences for them but a theory of knowledge that studies the nature of scientific knowledge. In their words, "philosophy is the science of scientific thought, of its laws and forms".

The theses collided head-on with official philosophy, for Stalin-era textbook dialectical materialism presented itself as an ontology of the most general laws of the whole world. In February and March 1955 a commission of the CPSU Central Committee's department of science and culture inspected the Moscow University philosophy faculty. Its report described the theses as "a relapse of Menshevizing idealism, long ago routed and condemned by the party", and complained that some students fled from practical politics into "pure thought" and "had not read newspapers for a long time".

On 25 and 29 March 1955 the faculty's academic council accused the two of Hegelianism and stripped them of the right to teach at Moscow University. Korovikov received a party reprimand, was dismissed from the university, left philosophy and later became an international correspondent for Pravda. Ilyenkov lost his teaching at the faculty but kept his post at the Institute of Philosophy, where he worked for the rest of his life. The Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti spoke up for him, and his first article was published in Italian in 1955. The affair shows that the 1930–1931 condemnation of Menshevizing idealism was still used as a weapon in philosophical disputes after Stalin's death. His opponents later attacked his position as "gnoseologism".

How does it relate to formal logic?

Another great dispute concerned the relation to formal logic. Under Stalin, as the class and party character of science was stressed, traditional logic was spurned in the Soviet Union as "formal", "outdated" and "metaphysical". Supporters of dialectical logic argued that the world moves constantly and develops through contradictions, whereas formal logic grasps it only in frozen forms. The principle of non-contradiction, they held, is valid only in a limited range, and some went so far as to call formal logic "elementary" and "lower" and dialectical logic universal and "higher".

After the war this rejection stopped and the compatibility of the two was stressed. The article "Logic" in the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1954) explained that the laws of logic themselves have no class character. In the debates of the 1950s at the Moscow University philosophy faculty and in Voprosy filosofii, Vitaly Cherkesov, Mark Rosenthal and Ilyenkov stood for dialectical logic, while Valentin Asmus, Sofya Yanovskaya, Yevgeny Voishvillo and others defended formal logic. In 1960 Rosenthal wrote of an "imaginary conflict between dialectical and formal logic", recalling that Engels in Anti-Dühring had recognized both. In this climate Soviet mathematical logic and its technical applications could grow relatively undisturbed.

Ilyenkov's position was not simply to belittle formal logic. For him its rules serve to order and check knowledge already made, but they cannot deal with the process by which theoretical thought creates new concepts, grasping in concepts the real contradiction in the object and following its resolution. He therefore treated contradiction not as a mere error of thought but as the driving force of a theory's development.

What did Dialectical Logic (1974) say?

In 1974 Ilyenkov published Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory, which scholars regard as his main work in the history of philosophy. The introduction starts from the task Lenin bequeathed: "The task of creating a Logic (with a capital letter), that is, a systematically developed exposition of dialectics understood as the logic and theory of knowledge of modern materialism, bequeathed to us by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, has become especially urgent in our day."

Задача создания Логики (с большой буквы), т.е. систематически развернутого изложения диалектики, понимаемой как логика и теория познания современного материализма, завещанная нам Владимиром Ильичем Лениным, приобрела в наши дни особую остроту.

The book begins by asking what the subject matter of logic is and reconstructs the history of thought through Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte and Hegel to Marx and Lenin. The essay on Spinoza, "Thought as an Attribute of Substance", contains his materialist account of thinking not as a separate spiritual substance but as the capacity of a bodily being to move in accordance with the forms of other bodies. Later essays deal with "the coincidence of logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge", "contradiction as a category of dialectical logic" and "the problem of the universal in dialectics". Following Lenin, he concluded that "logic (theory of knowledge) and dialectics stand in a relation of complete identity, complete coincidence in subject matter and in the composition of categories".

Так что логика (теория познания) и диалектика находятся, по Ленину, в отношении полного тождества, полного совпадения по предмету и по составу категорий.

The book appeared in English from Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1977.

How is it judged in and beyond the USSR?

Dialectical logic was studied most widely in the socialist countries, above all the Soviet Union. But as the political regime hardened it could also degenerate into dogma that proved fixed conclusions and into competitions in quotation. Ilyenkov himself warned against using dialectics as a tool for proving theses accepted in advance. After the Soviet collapse, critics in Russia asked whether it is really an independent logic at all.

Outside the socialist camp the subject interested mainly left-wing intellectuals. In France Henri Lefebvre wrote Formal Logic, Dialectical Logic; on the other side Karl Popper, in "What is Dialectic?", attacked dialectical logic on the ground that accepting contradictions makes it possible to prove anything. The debate continues in other forms today, in research on non-classical logics that tolerate contradiction (paraconsistent logic) and in studies interpreting Marx's method.

What does it mean to read it today?

The question of dialectical logic is simple: how do we understand something new? Machines are good at processing information by fixed rules, but discovering the contradiction in an object and developing concepts by working it out still seems to be a task for human thought. The four demands Lenin showed with his glass, to see all connections, to see things in their development, to test them in practice and to grasp truth concretely, remain a valid guide in political analysis too.