From: "Mustafa Cemal" <cemal-at-mag.net.tr>

Subject: What exactly does Marx mean when he inverted Hegel's dialectic?

Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 08:26

Dear Andy, You included MS-WORD versions of the tables, thank you very much for your labour. I have been out of Istanbul. I could just start to study. I am delighted that you had found my comments fair. Your reservation is right, I had to emphasise the necessity to suppress the bourgeois counter-revolution.

To Lao Kam To:

I have tried to answer to Lao Kam To's questions below.
See also Andy's response lau-2.txt

a) In what sense is Hegel's philosophy idealism? or is Marx's interpreation idealism?
b) What exactly does Marx mean when he inverted Hegel's dialectic? lau2.txt

I think, these questions can be answered spontaneously if we can see the difference between what Marx and Hegel understand by the unity of the particular and universal. Let me start with an anecdote Hegel quotes from Plato: "When Plato spoke of tableness and cupness, Diogenes the Cynic said: I see a table and a cup, to be sure, but not tableness and cupness. - Right, answered Plato, for you have eyes wherewith to see the table and the cup, but mind, by which one sees tableness and cupness, you have not." (The History of Philosophy, p. 29)

In the dialogue, Plato assumes we have another sense organ that is mind, which senses universals: just as we have sensory acquaintance with particulars, we have apperception of universals by mind. Therefore, there is no problem about the reality of universals more than the reality of particulars.

For Hegel, on the one hand universals are nothing but ideas abstracted from many particulars; and on the other hand, we have sensory acquaintance with particulars only in so far as we have beforehand universals that characterize and differentiate particulars. Hegel divides Notion as Universal Notion and Particular Notion. While the universal Notion is the quality common to many, the particular Notion is the quality, which distinguishes two things. Notion is the unity of particular and universal notions.

Hegel exalts Plato as dialectician: "Plato ? grasped in all its truth Socrates' great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since, according to him, the absolute is in thought, and all reality is Thought. He does not understand by this a one-sided thought, nor what is understood by false idealism which makes thought once more step aside and contemplate itself as conscious thought, and as in opposition to reality; it is the thought which embraces in an absolute unity reality as well as thinking, the Notion and its reality in the movement of science, as the Idea of a scientific whole.." (The History of Philosophy, p. 1) Hegel writes; "it is the thought which embraces in an absolute unity reality as well as thinking, the Notion." Here, "thinking" is taken as conscious thought that is thinking of individual mind. "Thought" is different from conscious thought and corresponds to "man's inner and spiritual nature" which for Christian Religion is "man's true nature."

Whereas, for Marx there is neither human nature, nor God and "Thought" is nothing more than social consciousness. We use grammar without knowing the rules of grammar, we use concepts without knowing their exact definitions. Concepts are produced unconsciously within social medium during the historical process. Philosophy begins in the midst of affluence of unconscious concepts, therefore doing philosophy is getting up self-consciousness. It is this individual unconsciousness that I refer to as social consciousness, which is the unity of thinking and reality.

Mustafa Cemal cemal-at-mag.net.tr