New APPS

Last time, I started a thread on Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1953) and its non-humanist reading of Hegel, and how that bears on Marx interpretation.  The first step was to set some context, since Marx interpretation is always perilous, and was especially so during the 1950s, given the political demands of the French Communist Party (PCF), which were largely set by the Soviets and Stalinism.  What that meant in 1953 was to be anti-Hegelian.  I illustrated this with a passage from a speech by Georgi Zhdanov on the history of philosophy that showed both the anti-Hegelianism and the Stalinist provenance.  I promised three explanatory notes, and delivered one, which was about the selectivity of the Stalin/Zhdanov reading suppression of Hegel, which required some calisthenics around Lenin’s own engagement with Hegel.

This time, I’ll add a couple of more thoughts to situate the Zhdanov line.  To recall, he is criticizing a history of philosophy book for not emphasizing the radicality of Marx with regard to his predecessors.  Zhdanov says:

“As you see, it is a question here only of quantitative changes. But that is metaphysics. The rise of Marxism was a genuine discovery, a revolution in philosophy. Like every discovery, like every leap, like every break in gradualness, like every transition into a new condition, the rise of Marxism could not have occurred without the previous accumulation of quantitative changes – in this instance, the development of philosophy prior to Marx and Engels. But the author evidently does not understand that Marx and Engels created a new philosophy, differing qualitatively from all antecedent philosophies, however progressive they were. The relation of Marxist philosophy to all preceding philosophies and the basic change which Marxism effected in philosophy, transforming it into a science, is well known to all. All the more strange, therefore, is the fact that the author focuses his attention, not on that which is new and revolutionary in Marxism but on that which unites it with the development of pre-Marxist philosophy. This, notwithstanding the statement of Marx and Engels that their discovery meant the end of the old philosophy.”

So:

(b) The emphasis is on qualitative and quantitative change. In his “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (1938), Stalin lays out the stakes of dialectics and Hegel as follows: “Marx and Engels usually refer to Hegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This, however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from the Hegelian dialectics only its ‘rational kernel,’ casting aside its Hegelian idealistic shell, and developed dialectics further so as to lend it a modern scientific form.”  He then quotes the well-known passage from the second German edition of Capital where Marx says that his dialectical method is “exactly opposite” to Hegel’s (Capital, Penguin ed., 102).

Stalin does not quote from Marx’s response to the “ill-humored, arrogant and mediocre epigones” who thought Hegel was a “dead dog:”

“I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker … the mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner.  With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (103).

Later in the speech on the subject of qualitative change, Stalin uses the well-known example of water changing to ice.  He quotes Engels as follows:

“In physics … every change is a passing of quantity into quality, as a result of a quantitative change of some form of movement either inherent in a body or imparted to it. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice…. A definite minimum current is required to make a platinum wire glow; every metal has its melting temperature; every liquid has a definite freezing point and boiling point at a given pressure, as far as we are able with the means at our disposal to attain the required temperatures; finally, every gas has its critical point at which, by proper pressure and cooling, it can be converted into a liquid state…. What are known as the constants of physics (the point at which one state passes into another – J. St.) are in most cases nothing but designations for the nodal points at which a quantitative (change) increase or decrease of movement causes a qualitative change in the state of the given body, and at which, consequently, quantity is transformed into quality.”

Engels gets two more quotes, one on chemistry that notes that Hegel already understood qualitative change there, and then one against Dühring, “who scolded Hegel for all he was worth, but surreptitiously borrowed from him” that again name checks Hegel.  But let’s go back and look at the long passage on water and ice, because a quick check to the Engels makes the whole ‘getting rid of Hegel’ narrative a little more complicated.  Here’s what Engels says in Dialectics of Nature:

“In physics, bodies are treated as chemically unalterable or indifferent; we have to do with changes of their molecular states and with the change of form of the motion which in all cases, at least on one of the two sides, brings the molecule into play. Here every change is a transformation of quantity into quality, a consequence of the quantitative change of the quantity of motion of one form or another that is inherent in the body or communicated to it. “Thus, for instance, the temperature of water is first of all indifferent in relation to its state as a liquid; but by increasing or decreasing the temperature of liquid water a point is reached at which this state of cohesion alters and the water becomes transformed on the one side into steam and on the other into ice.” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, Collected Works, VI, p. 217.) Similarly, a definite minimum current strength is required to cause the platinum wire of an electric incandescent lamp to glow; and every metal has its temperature of incandescence and fusion, every liquid its definite freezing and boiling point at a given pressure – in so far as our means allow us to produce the temperature required; finally also every gas has its critical point at which it can be liquefied by pressure and cooling. In short, the so-called physical constants are for the most part nothing but designations of the nodal points at which quantitative addition or subtraction of motion produces qualitative alteration in the state of the body concerned, at which, therefore, quantity is transformed into quality.”

Stalin, in other words, has quietly erased the dependence of the entire interpretation on Hegel (I can’t find a scan of the original text, which appears as Chapter 4.2 of A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [= История Всесоюзной коммунистической партии (большевиков) КРАТКИЙ КУРС], but I found a digitized Russian version and the citation isn’t credited there either. It’s on p. 104). The process is subtle, but as with the afterword to Capital, Hegel is acknowledged but also subtly pushed away.  In other words, to be that anti-Hegelian is to erase both Lenin’s use of Hegel and Engels’.

(c) Stalin draws straightforward political conclusions from his excursion into natural philosophy (the following is three separate paragraphs, for apparent emphasis): “if the passing of slow quantitative changes into rapid and abrupt qualitative changes is a law of development, then it is clear that revolutions made by oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenomenon. Hence, the transition from capitalism to socialism and the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution. Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not a reformist.”

This is why getting your philosophy of nature right is of vital political importance.

***

Anyway, back to Zhdanov.  Zhdanov says of older philosophy – before the qualitative transition to Marx – that it was “not suitable as an instrument for practical action on the world, as an instrument for understanding the world” (note the apparent equivalence of these terms!).  Hegel was the last such metaphysician; Hegel:

“Attempted to erect a philosophical structure, subordinating all other sciences, pressing them into the Procrustean bed of its own categories. Hegel counted on solving all contradictions, but fell into a hopeless contradiction with the dialectical method which he himself had divined but not understood, and hence applied incorrectly.”

Thus:

“Comrade Alexandrov’s vague formulations blur the great revolutionary significance of the philosophical discovery of Marx and Engels, since he emphasizes that which connected Marx with the antecedent philosophers, but fails to show that with Marx there begins a completely new period in the history of philosophy – philosophy which for the first time has become science.”

Zhdanov sustains this with a caricature of dialectics, claiming that “Marxist philosophy is the most complete and decisive negation of all preceding philosophy. But to negate, as Engels emphasized, does not mean merely to say “no.” Negation includes continuity, signifies absorption, the critical reforming and unification in a new and higher synthesis of everything advanced and progressive that has been achieved in the history of human thought.” But that turns out to mean he should have included more on the history of dialectics.

I’ll situate Althusser and the French debate more next time.