The Meaning of Hegel's Logic

X: The Dialectical Method

Lenin's "Elements of Dialectics"

Lenin summaries the dialectical method in his Philosophical Notebooks as follows:

  1. "The determination of the concept out of itself [the thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development];
  3. the union of analysis and synthesis".

And in greater detail as follows:

  1. "the objectivity of consideration (not examples, not divergencies, but the Thing-in-itself).
  2. the entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others.
  3. the development of this thing, (phenomenon, respectively), its own movement, its own life.
  4. the internally contradictory tendencies (and sides) in this thing.
  5. the thing (phenomenon, etc) as the sum and unity of opposites.
  6. the struggle, respectively unfolding, of these opposites, contradictory strivings, etc.
  10. the endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.
  13. the repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc., of the lower and
  14. the apparent return to the old (negation of the negation).
  16. the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa (15 and 16 are examples of 9)".
    [Philosophical Notebooks, Volume 38, Lenin's Collected Works, p221]

Lenin's list is as good as any. It might be rewarding to return to this checklist from time to time while reading Hegel.

One could hardly do better, either, than Marx's famous reaffirmation of Hegel's gains

Theses on Feuerbach
















In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.














For my part, I have identified the following features of the dialectical method:

  1. The validity of things as moments or stages of development;
  2. Not definitions, but the genesis of a thing;
  3. Knowledge begins with Immediate perception, but all knowledge is mediated: Being is Nothing;
  4. The objective immanent movement of a thing itself;
  5. Both phenomenon and essence are objective;
  6. Subjection of all concepts to criticism the source of movement and change is internal to external;
  7. The Conception of a thing as a Unity of Opposites;
  8. The discovery of the internal contradictions within a thing;
  9. Practice is the Criterion of Truth;
  10. Not the Thing or its Other but the Transition between them;
  11. The Absolute is Relative and there is an Absolute within the Relative;
  12. Negation of Negation: the retention of the positive within the negative;
  13. Quantitative change at a certain point becomes qualitative change;
  14. The struggle of form and content, the content is also a form, the shedding of form and the transformation of content into form and form into content;
  15. Cause and effect are relative moments, merged and canceled in actuality;
  16. Chance and necessity are relative moments, merged and canceled in actuality;
  17. All that is rational is real, all that is real is rational and all that is real deserves to perish;
  18. Freedom is the understanding of Necessity;
  19. The truth of actuality is a concept;
  20. Knowledge proceeds from Abstract to Concrete;
  21. The truth is concrete;
  22. Subjectivity is also Objective, objectivity includes the subject;
  23. Analysis and Synthesis are inseparable, the alternation between synthesis and analysis;
  24. The Means is realised in the End, the End is realised in the Means;
  25. Life is Cognition;
  26. Theory is the comprehension of Practice.