Categories

A philosophical concept of the basic nature and interrelation of objective things. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle regarded category as a general concept about the nature of things. In Categories, he put forward ten categories of substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, state, action and passion, of which substance is the most important category, on which all others depend for their existence. The categories themselves do not judge things but can only be employed by us to find out true or false, right or wrong. An important philosopher of classical German philosophy, Kant regarded categories as pure concepts of the understanding and put forward four categories, including: (1) Quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (2) Quality: reality, negation, limitation; (3) Relation: inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; (4) Modality: possibility－impossibility, existence－non-existent, necessity－occasionality.

Hegel was the first person to make a comprehensive and systematic study of categories. He regarded categories as stipulations for concepts of the basic nature of things and their mutual relations. Hegel argued that Aristotle’s examination of categories was the form of formal logic, where categories are pure concepts in thinking and a process of dealing with abstract forms of living, objective things. Contrary to Aristotle, Hegel proposed that the science of logic is not an end (purpose) but a means, and only genuine actual life is the real place of life for dialectical logic, Hegel argued: In life categories are used, they are degraded from the honour of being contemplated on their own account to serve in intellectual exercise upon living content by production and interchange of the ideas appropriate thereto. Categories serve first as abbreviations, in virtue of their generality... ; on the other hand, secondly categories can be used for the closer determination and discovery of objective relations. With the help of dialectics, Hegel regarded categories as the process of change and development, and saw the interrelations between categories as the process of opposition, transformation and unity. But no matter how, Hegel only deemed the development and transformation of categories as a development process of absolute ideas, and claimed that the development of the objective world should not exceed the deduction range of conceptual categories, but should regard the elevation of the spirit to the height of freedom and truth as a higher logical undertaking: the loftier business of logic is to clarify the categories and raise mind to freedom and truth.

In Philosophical Notebooks and its manuscripts, Lenin inherited Hegel’s category system in a critical way, and corrected it to be consistent with materialism.

Firstly, Lenin agreed with Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s category theory. Lenin pointed out that Kant’s “thing-in-itself as such is no more than the empty abstraction from all determinateness”, while Hegel requested the consistence between abstraction and substance, or our actual cognition of the world. The form of logic thinking must be related to living and actual contents. Based on this, Lenin further pointed out that the categories of thought are not tools for human beings, but categories must reflect the principles of nature and the movement of the objective world. The so-called the science of logic refers to the doctrine …of the entire concrete of the world and the knowledge of it; i.e., the total, sum and the conclusion of the history of the knowledge of the world. In view of the essence of “categories” and their position in epistemology, Lenin argued that we must start from the simplest basic things to summarize categories. This summarization is neither quoting arbitrarily or mechanically, nor simply stating or asserting, but proving—testing and proving through practice. About the relationship between categories and the objective world, Lenin claimed: the net of natural phenomena is before human being. The man with instinct, or the barbarian does not separate himself from the natural world, while conscious men do… Category is some of the small phases of such process of separation, namely some of the small phases in the process of understanding the world, which are the knots that help us understand and grasp the net of natural phenomena. Categories are the result of the development of human’s abstract thinking caused by the expansion and deepening of material production practice. Practice is a decisive factor in the process of leading people from the man of instinct to the man with consciousness, and also a material factor that makes people’s abstract thinking continuously develop and evolve. It is on the basis of practice that human beings constantly summarizing and generalizing the perceptual materials of natural science and social science, acquire knowledge of the essence and laws of things through their constantly strengthened ability of abstract thinking, thus continuously enriching, testing and developing the category system. Therefore, categories are never the product of thinking: they come from the external world and guide human beings to transform it. Categories come from practice and continuously serve practice.

Lenin attached great importance to the relations, unity of opposites and mutual transformation of categories. First, categories do not exist in isolation, but always in complex interrelation with other categories. The development of categories is the reflection of the interrelation between universally connected things in thinking and is not subject to the subjective will of human beings. Lenin pointed out that the concept of human beings is not fixed; otherwise, they cannot reflect the real life. The analysis and study of concepts always require the study of the movement of concepts, their connections and mutual transformation. Second, Lenin started with the law of unity of opposites and revealed the dialectical transformation process between logical categories. Dialectics of things are the sources of ideas. Therefore, logical categories are not rigidly fixed, but in the constant process of struggle and mutual transformation of opposites. Lenin pointed out that there is a worldwide, comprehensive and living connection between all things, and the reflection of this connection in the concepts of human being, i.e., a reversed and materialist version of Hegelianism. These concepts must also be pondered, sorted out, flexible, dynamic, relative, interrelated and unified in opposition, so as to understand the world. In the end, Lenin also made a detailed study of the categories of particularity and general, causes and effects, phenomena and essence, and the opposite and inter-transformable relationship between them.