Ilyenkov
DIALECTICAL LOGIC
Quite understandably we have not undertaken the task here of giving a systematic exposition of Marxist-Leninist logic. That is beyond the power of a single person, and can scarcely be done within the space of one book. We have simply tried to throw some light on a number of the conditions and premises for further work in that direction, which we consider should be a collective effort.
We think, however, that only by taking the conditions formulated above into account can such a work be successful, i.e. lead to the creation of a capital work which could rightly bear one of three titles: Logic, Dialectics, or The Theory of Knowledge (of the modern, materialist world outlook); and which could take as its epigraph Lenin’s words: "Three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing".
The creation of a Logic understood as a system of categories, of course, constitutes only one stage. The next step would have to be the realisation, actualisation of the logical system in a concrete scientific investigation, because the end product of all work in the field of philosophical dialectics is the resolution of the concrete problems of concrete sciences. Philosophy alone cannot achieve this ‘end product’; that calls for an alliance of dialectics and concrete scientific research, understood and realised as the business-like collaboration of philosophers and natural scientists, of philosophy and social and historical fields of knowledge. But in order for dialectics to be an equal collaborator in concrete scientific knowledge, it must first develop the system of its own specific philosophical concepts, from the angle of which it could display the strength of critical distinction in relation to actually given thought and consciously practised methods.
It seems to us that this conclusion stems directly from the analysis we have presented here, and that this conception corresponds directly to Lenin’s ideas both on the plane of the inter-relations of the latter and the other branches of scientific knowledge. It appears to us that, in the conceptions set out above, logic does become an equal collaborator with the other sciences, and not their servant, and not their supreme overseer, not a ‘science of sciences’ crowning their system as just another variety of ‘absolute truth’. Understood as logic, philosophical dialectics becomes a necessary coimponent of the scientific, materialist world outlook, and no longer claims a monopoly in relation to the ‘world as a whole’. The scientific world outlook can only be described by the whole system of modern sciences. That system also includes philosophical dialectics, and without it cannot claim either fullness or scientism.
The scientific world outlook that does not include philosophy, logic, and the theory of knowledge, is as much nonsense as the ‘pure’ philosophy that assumes that it alone is the world outlook, taking on its shoulders a job that can only be done by a whole complex of sciences. Philosophy is also the logic of the development of the world outlook, or, as Lenin put it, its "living soul".