*_Today we master Hegel_!*
*The Communist University Course on Hegel*_*
Part 4: Hegel's Logic*_
_*
Johannesburg live session, Wednesday, 19 October 2011*_
In our last session we looked at Hegel's place in history, coming after
Kant, and negating Kant, while laying the foundations that Marx was able
to build upon, without Marx having to negate Hegel.
Now we are cleared to study at what Lenin said we needed to study, in
order to understand Karl Marx's work, and in particular to understand
Marx's major work, "Capital" (Volumes 1, 2 and 3).
Lenin wrote: "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital,
and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century
later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!"
So now we are tackling Hegel's Logic.
** **
* *_Date_**:*19 October 2011 (Wednesday)
* *_Time_**:*17h00 (to 18h30)
* *_Venue_**:*_*Vincent Mabuyakhulu Conference Centre*_,
Gerard Sekoto Street, opposite NUMSA HO.
* *_Topic_**:*Hegel's Logic
* *_Course_**://Hegel
<http://domza.blogspot.com/p/philosophy-religion-hegel.html>*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*_Read_**:
*
* Excerpts from Hegel's Logic
* Andy Blunden, The Subject Matter of the Logic, 2007
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*On the excerpts from Hegel's Logic*
The first given quotation is *§62* from /The Science of Logic/. Hegel is
saying that negation leads lower forms of consciousness to a higher form
of consciousness. He says that for science it is therefore necessary to
be able to see that the negative is as good as the positive, and that
negation is what moves things on to a result; and that a result is not
an "*immediacy*", where immediacy is simple, latent, unmoved being.
Hegel is writing of the common consciousness and therefore of science,
and this view of science is the one that Marxism has.
Andy's second quotation is *§121* from /The Science of Logic/. This is
the famous Hegel! This is the Hegel that drives people crazy, or makes
them to think that Hegel is crazy. But Hegel, contrary to what appears,
is not wasting time. To say that *being is nothingness* is the beginning
of finding out what has substance, and how human beings are able on a
daily basis to create, God-like, something out of nothing.
Andy's third Quotation is *§133* from /The Shorter Logic/, where Hegel
is writing of Form and Content, as a struggle of opposites that define
each other and constantly change places. Perhaps this is a good time to
remember that this Communist University is not a didactic, but rather a
dialogic University, and so to refrain from trying to "define"
everything, but instead to leave the door open for discussion. *Asikhulume!*
Andy's last quotation, *§160-1* from /The Shorter Logic/, is about The
Notion, and brings at last what is Hegel's special gift to posterity,
something we need right now in South Africa, which is a revelation of
the nature of this thing called *Development*.
Because dialectic is not a magic for itself, but it is an understanding
of development, and how humans develop themselves as humanity. And this
is what we need to know.
To get a proper understanding of the development of collective
consciousness, whether that be taken as science in general, or as class
consciousness in particular, we rest upon Hegel's Logic, whether we are
conscious of it or not. This was Lenin's point about Hegel.
But we will not get far enough with it, unless we are conscious of what
we are doing. This is the point of Hegel, altogether.
/*Using these four short excerpts we can make real progress in our Hegel
studies, without great difficulty.*/
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