Methodological addendum

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In this text, the words marked in bold are important terms of Hegelian philosophy, listed here with their original non-English forms provided.

Our field is dialectics. It is defined as science of development and is opposed to metaphysics — a point of view from which nothing ever changes. I am a dialectical materialist and the important definition which starts our work is that dialectical materialism and dialectics in general are a method. It’s a very basic word which is defined well by the dictionary and its etymology. Modern meaning of this word is that of a systematic process while originally in ancient Greek it meant a way of cognition.

First things first, every process has a goal, every path has its end. So we should set a goal for our method to achieve. This goal is to comprehend (deutsch. begreifen рус. понять) some subject, or, speaking in the strict philosophical language, express it in a notion (deutsch. begriff рус. понятие) — the generalized image of something. Next, we’ll see how deep the concept of notion goes.

For this purpose we will use methodology that was created by Karl Marx for his «Das Kapital», then studied well by a soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov: the method of ascending from abstract to concrete (рус. восхождение от абстрактного к конкретному; russian notion конкретный is traditionally translated as concrete, to separate it from the notion of specific (which is the literal translation of the word), regardless of this word sounding strange for an english ear and usually having another meaning). We’re even right to say that the famous «Das Kapital» is three books that fully disclose a notion of capital. By disclosing I mean рус. вскрывать and synonymic exposing which is рус. обнажать — to reveal the sense of a subject.

For the readers unfamiliar with marxism I shall make a bit of explaining of different philosophical notions. It starts with defining notions of abstract and concrete, which in everyday language remained unchanged from the meanings used in medieval scholastics and don’t represent a (left) hegelian understanding. We can start with abstract.

So, Marx’s abstract means separate, i.e. notion or even an example that was taken to characterise something (as I summarise Ilyenkov’s definition of «divorced from a given connection and considered by itself only»); it is inherently one-sided, poor and undeveloped. The process of choosing such notions is called abstracting the abstractions (roughly translated from рус. отвлекать абстракции).

Marx directly characterized concrete as unity in diverse (summary by Ilyenkov, рус. единство во многообразии). The term means that we have issued a notion that fully characterizes a subject, discloses all of its important sides. This definition becomes more clear when we use two notions of dialectics at once, — concrete-universal, where universal is a general judgment about many similar objects. Conrete-univeral means that our notion is universally useful. And, of course, the truth is always concrete.

From all of this, our ascending method becomes obvious: we shall abstract some abstractions, build a conceptual framework, and then make some conclusions, which have to be in a concrete-universal notion.

Now that we discussed the method itself, we can cover some of its major notions. Some of these notions were previously systemized and called the Categories of Dialectics but in this brief introduction I wiil not use that notation and I can’t describe every notion of dialectics like it’s some kind of vocabulary. Choosing them, I highlighted the most useful.

Being, Nothing and Becoming is deutsch. Sein, Nichts, Werden (рус. Бытие, Ничто, Становление), which are fundamental notions of Hegel’s philosophy. The Being in the beginning of Hegel’s «Science of Logic» is the pure Being not mediated by anything, thus it becomes Nothing as pure Being devoid of everything can’t be anything other than Nothing itself. The dialectical process between Nothing and Being we call Becoming. Thus, we can conclude that a pure being of something is also its absence.

If we want to know how, then we need a notion of necessity (рус. необходимость), — the opposite of contingency (рус. случайность). Contingent events are caused by outer factors, and necessary events are determined by internal structure of subjects.

The matter (рус. материя) is the objective reality that comes to us in a feeling; the consciousness (рус. сознание) is a process in a special piece of matter called the brain that reflects other matter. These are the two definitions forming Lenin’s reflection theory (рус. теория отражения) — the solution to The Main Question of Philosophy (рус. Основной вопрос философии, sometimes described in english as the Mind-Body Problem). The question itself sounds like «What’s first — the matter or the consciousness?»

The position of a dialectic is that everything has its development, the position of a materialist is that objective reality exists and comes first. This is a basic axiomatics of dialectical materialism, the narrow list of definitions which don't require proof. Instead, such definitions are proven by practice.

Sometimes we’ll discuss different kinds of acts of activity (рус. деятельность) including practice. Hegel uses activity as another basic word, but we can describe it in modern dialectics by Vygotsky definition as a process of interacting with the world. E.g. labour is an activity dedicated to change it. Practice is a material activity. It determines any other activity, thus interacting with objective reality is the source of mind, political, etc. activities.

Out of some definitions we may conclude the essence (deutsch. Wesen) of the subject. We can define it as a true meaning of something, which is achieved from Being by Becoming resulting in a Notion. Essence is opposed to Phenomenon, meaning abstract exposure of essence in the world.

By common I mean рус. общее, and by specific — рус. частное or особенное. Both do not have an adequate traditional translation, as the English philosophical field does not use these categories. The common is what something has in common with something else, the specific is what makes it unique. Both terms were translated by me.

The particular (рус. единичный) is opposed to (mentioned in the beginning) universal and might be an abstract moment (construction element) of something, while being a particular entity that becomes unique because of the specific. Thus, it can be an example, abstract, but cannot have a universal meaning.

Two notions can be in dialectical opposition (рус. противоположности) forming a dialectical pair (рус. диалектическая пара) that has dialectical contradiction (рус. противоречие) which represents their development (рус. развитие) which we'll be ready to describe soon.

Basically, this means that one notion which doesn’t contain anything of another (thus their dialectics lie purely in the field of relation between objects) — negates one another.

Overcoming (deutsch. Aufheben) means such a result of dialectical contradiction when the contradiction is no longer relevant or makes any sense, but the former notions have been preserved as part of a new one. The overcoming is directly connected to negation and negation of negation — negating the first negation that we called a contradiction, thus resulting in the overcoming.

Categories of quantitative (рус. количество) and qualitative (рус. качество). The qualitative change is the change that helps an entity obtain a new quality — some property it didn't have before. Thus, as quantitative changes accumulate, no matter how small and seemingly meaningless they are, at some point they lead to such an occasion.

To sum it all up, development is the constant movement towards obtaining new qualities as a result of overcoming contradictions, which happens as negation of negation.

That finishes our system.