Philosophical Notebooks (Excerpts)

This is a collection of excerpts, commentaries, notes, and article type comments written by Lenin from 1895 to 1916 on philosophical issues in philosophy and natural science.The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 55 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Lenin’s work to write the Philosophical Notebooks started in 1914. The outbreak of the World War I quickly highlighted the contradictions among imperialist countries and the contradictions among various classes within each country, creating an objective situation conducive to the socialist revolution. As early as 1912 in the Basel Manifesto of the Second International pointed out that the upcoming world war would be of an imperialist nature. The Social-Democratic parties of various countries would oppose the war, causing the governments of various imperialist countries to fail and turning the imperialist war into a civil war. With the outbreak of the war, different attitudes towards the war led to the division of the Second International and some political parties were degraded to social-chauvinist parties. Their theorists Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and others used the banner of “Dialectics” to defend their betrayal in every possible way, which aroused Lenin’s vigilance. Lenin realized that only from the viewpoint of materialist dialectics could we make a Marxist analysis of the contradictions of imperialism, reveal the imperialist nature of the World War I, reveal the opportunism and social-chauvinism of the leaders of the Second International, and formulate strategies and tactics for the struggle of the proletariat.

Philosophical Notebooks has extremely rich contents, including Lenin’s profound views on the core, basic laws and main categories of materialist dialectics, his deep insight into dialectics, logic and epistemology, and his important exposition on dialectical materialist epistemology.

Lenin discussed the formation of Marx and Engels’ philosophical and political views in his 1895 notes on The Holy Family written by them. Lenin emphasized the role of Proudhon’s theory of national economics in Marx’s shift from Hegelian philosophy to Socialism. Lenin excerpted some sentences from The Holy Family to demonstrate how Marx approached the conception of “social relations of production” at that time, and clarified that Marx had almost formed a view on the revolutionary role of the proletariat. In addition, Lenin also attached great importance to scientific socialism’s founders’ principle that people and the working masses were the true creators of history and their conclusion that historical activities were the activities of the masses and would certainly expand the masses with the development of historical activities. Lenin argued that the mass was not the existence opposite to the spirit, nor was irrelevant to reality. History did not have any form of initiative. The people who created history and pushed it forward are always the people in the real world who are engaged in material production. These principles were closely related to Lenin’s struggle against idealism and Narodnik theoretical views of “the role of heroes in history” and especially the Narodnik “mob” theory and against their attempts to promote the cult of individual in history.

Lenin, in 1909 when reading Feuerbach’s book Lectures on the Essence of Religion, he excerpted form this book and highlighted Feuerbach’s achievements as a materialist and atheist and recognized Feuerbach’s materialist explanation on the inevitability of nature and the relationship between thinking and existence.

In his excerpt, Lenin highlighted the arguments in the “Lectures” that expressed Feuerbach’s materialist speculation on social views. Lenin regarded Feuerbach’s view—reasonable egoism is the driving force for historical progress—as the “germ” of historical materialism, and regarded Feuerbach’s “egoism of the oppressed who account for the majority of mankind” as Feuerbach’s view on “socialism”.

At the same time, Lenin revealed Feuerbach’s weaknesses and limitations, pointing out that both his humanism and naturalism were only superficial interpretation about materialism. Finally, Lenin also compared the Lecture on the Essence of Religion with Marx and Engels’ works of the same period, Manifesto of the Communist Party and The Condition of the Working Class in England, drawing the conclusion that Feuerbach lagged far behind Marx during this period. Lenin, in his reading notes on natural science and philosophy books in the Sorbonne Library, introduced important new books, such as Mach’s Introduction to Physics and Max Planck’s Conservation of Energy Principles, and talked about the fundamental issues of philosophy. Most importantly, Lenin listed ten philosophical schools: New Materialism, New Positivism, New Natural Philosophy Movement, Neo-Romanticism, New Vitalism, Evolutionism, Individualism, Humanities Movement, Philosophy and History, and Neo-Realism.

Lenin’s excerpts of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Lectures on the Philosophy of History take a central position in Philosophical Notebooks. In his excerpts on Hegel’s Science of Logic, Lenin analyzed this book and pointed out that Hegel’s science of logic was the unity of ontology, dialectics and epistemology. Although Hegel’s logic was based on idealism, it was still of progressive significance compared with Kant’s view, in which epistemology was disconnected with ontology.

In addition, Lenin pointed out that Hegel’s science of logic contained rich dialectics thoughts, but it needed to be examined from a materialist perspective, that is, Hegel’s science of logic could not be simply copied because its mysterious ideas must be removed. In his excerpts from Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Lenin summarized Hegel’s ideas on dialectics. Hegel regarded dialectics as “pure thinking activity in concept”. Lenin took it as a definition of dialectics. Lenin regarded the unity of opposites by Hegel as the essence of dialectics, discusses Hegel’s division of dialectics into subjective dialectics and objective dialectics, and gave an incisive exposition on the objective significance of dialectics: the combination of development principle and unity principle. In his excerpts from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lenin praised Hegel for his view on how to write history. Lenin argued that it would be foolish to write history without studying, editing and summarizing history. In terms of the relationship between the material and the spiritual, Lenin strongly opposed Hegel’s view of replacing the material with the substance. Lenin argued that Hegel only replaced the real connection between the material and the spiritual with pure speculation and imagination. In terms of the nature of the state, Lenin opposed Hegel’s view that the state was realized through rationality and freedom. He argued that the state is the product of historical development. In terms of the development pattern of the world history, Lenin pointed out that although Hegel argued that the development of the world history was objective, he did not sum this up based on the objective history. Instead, he just applied his historical idealism to the world history.

Lenin discussed the historical fermentation of materialist dialectics in his many excerpts from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Lassalle’s Philosophy of Heraclitus (Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunkeln von Ephesos), and Feuerbach’s The Presentation and Development and Criticism of Leibniz’s Philosophy. Lenin studied all the history of philosophy, from Heraclitus and Democritus to the birth of Marx and Engels’ theories of philosophy. He also made in-depth Marxist evaluation of the works by these brilliant thinkers before Marx and Engels. Lenin revealed the progressive nature of these philosophers, which facilitated the development of philosophy, but also revealed the historical limitations of their views. For example, in his excerpts from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Lenin recognized part of Aristotle’s view regarding the existence and transitions into the opposites were reasonable elements of dialectics. However, when Aristotle talked about specific contradictions and transitions, he could not recognize the existence and transitions into opposites of reality. Instead, he only placed opposites in a possible state. To a certain extent, he separated matter from form, possibility from reality. Aristotle argued that only by reducing reality to potential material it could be transitioned into the opposites, which was unconvincing and unrealistic.

In his excerpts from Lassalle’s Philosophy of Heraclitus, Lenin pointed out that Heraclitus was undoubtedly one of the founders of dialectics. In Heraclitus’s view, the basic law of the world is “the law of transitions into the opposites”. However, after interpreted by idealist Lassalle, Heraclitus who was a materialist was turned into the spokesman of Hegel’s philosophy. Therefore, Lenin agreed with Marx’s conclusion that Lassalle’s book was messy and not worth reading. In his excerpts and notes on Feuerbach’s The Presentation and Development and Criticism of Leibniz’s Philosophy, Lenin pointed out that although Leibniz’s philosophy had the tendency of idealism and fideism, it also contained a very profound dialectics.

The core focus of Philosophical Notebooks is Lenin’s study on dialectics, mainly shown in his outlines and in his essays such as “Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic”, “Sixteen Elements of Dialectics”, and “On the Question of Dialectics”.

In the “Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic”, most brilliant comment of Lenin was his assertion that dialectics, epistemology and logic are consistent. He argued that dialectics, as a science about the general laws of the objective world, was a world view. As the summation and summary of the history and the development path of human cognition, dialectics could be counted as an epistemology. As a science about the laws and methods by which people can think correctly, it could be counted as a logic (and methodology). Materialist dialectics was such a trinity of science, and its system should be the same system of the three. Lenin also argued that Hegel’s Science of Logic and Marx’s Capital had similarities in methods and structures, so Lenin warned that: Marx’s Capital, especially its last article, could not be understood without studying and understanding Hegel’s entire logic.

The sixteen elements of dialectics can be divided into five parts based on their nature. The first is the objectivity of dialectics. Lenin argued that Marx’s dialectics was the reflection of objective dialectics. Marx’s dialectics was unified with materialism and is opposite to idealist dialectics. it was the objective dialectical connection and dialectical movement of things. The objective principle of observation should be implemented. The way to truly realize the objectivity of consideration was “not examples not divergencies, but the thing-in-itself.” Secondly, the two basic principles of dialectics: the principle of universal connection and self-movement: the principle of universal connection was the second and the eighth, and the principle of universal connection was Lenin’s unified principle, which showed that nature, thought and matter were in universal connection and form a unity of mutual restriction. The principle of self-movement is the third, and the principle of self-movement is the development principle Lenin referred to, which showed that everything is moving, changing and developing, and that the movement of things is self-movement and has its own internal source and power. Thirdly, the law of the unity of opposites and its manifestations, namely Element 4, 5, 6 and 9. This law contains the idea that everything has internal contradictions, that both sides of the contradiction depend on each other under certain conditions to form a unity, that both sides of the contradiction transform each other under certain conditions, that the struggle between the two sides of the contradiction causes the development and development of the contradiction, and that the law of the unity of opposites has three major manifestations: the law of mutual change of quality (16), the negation of the negation (13 and 14), and the dialectical relationship between content and form (15). Fourthly, the dialectics of cognition: the process of cognition is the process of combining analysis and synthesis (7); the process of cognition is the process from ignorance to knowledge and from little to more knowledge (10); the process of cognition is the endless process from appearance to essence (11); the development and transition of form in the process of cognition (12). Fifthly, the law of unity of opposites is the core of dialectics. Lenin briefly defined dialectics as the theory of unity of opposites, namely, the law of unity of opposites is the core of dialectics. This was the first time Lenin explicitly proposed it and was a major development of Marxist dialectics. Lenin’s generalization of dialectics elements had important theoretical value, and was of great guiding significance to grasp the basic content of materialist dialectics and to study the internal logical structure of the scientific system of materialist dialectics.

In his article “On the Question of Dialectics”, Lenin proposed and demonstrated that the law of unity of opposites was the essence and core of materialist dialectics, and comprehensively expounded the law of unity of opposites and dialectics of cognitive process.

Lenin pointed out that the law of unity of opposites was the essence of dialectics and demonstrated this argument. Firstly, the law of the unity of opposites was objective and universal. Lenin confirmed that the law of the unity of opposites was a general law of nature, human society and thinking. He listed the basic contradictions in mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry and social science to prove this assertion. At the same time, he pointed out that examples were only for general explanation. Examples could not replace argumentation, and certainly could not replace laws with examples. Secondly, the interaction between opposites and unity of things was the internal source and motive force of the development of things. Whether to recognize this was the key to distinguish the two development views. Lenin pointed out that the development concept was divided into dialectical and metaphysical development concept. The former argued that development was the unity of opposites, the source of development lied in the internal contradictions of things, and development was the interruption of the transformation, leap and gradual process of opposites. The latter denied the unity of opposites and argued that the reason for development lied in the external of things, and took development as the simple repetition of similar things, that is, as the simple increase or decrease of quantities. Thirdly, Lenin pointed out that the law of unity of opposites was the fundamental law to understand things.

Lenin took the development of philosophy history as an example and confirmed that cognition was a series of circles or spiral curves. He said, “Human cognition is not a straight line (that is, it does not follow a straight line), but infinitely approximates a series of circles or a spiral curve.” Hegel tried to fully explain the process of human cognition in Science of Logic. Therefore, from the perspective of idealism, Hegel described the development and evolution of categories as a series of circles of positive and negative combinations. However, his philosophical limitation led him nowhere. Moreover, there existed much absurdity in this series of circles. Starting from dialectical materialism and historical materialism, Lenin tried to understand the dialectical development process of the history of philosophy. He sketched out circles and curves in the history of philosophy, and listed dialectics from Democritus to Plato and Heraclitus, from Feuerbach to Bekele, Hume, Kant to Hegel, and from Hegel to Marx through Feuerbach. Lenin abandoned the external form of Hegel’s “negation of the negation” formula, which is a three-stage combination of the positive and the negative. Lenin retained the reasonable factors in it. He argued that human cognition was a process of contradictory movement, a process in which opposites transform and struggle with each other. This contradictory process must be manifested as a process in which opposites went forward repeatedly, that is, negation of the negation. Therefore, Lenin often compared this process to a series of circles or spiral curves. All these metaphors pointed to two characteristics of dialectical movement of human cognition: progressiveness and repetitiveness.

Lenin came to an important conclusion that dialectics was the epistemology of Marxism. In Lenin’s view, from the perspective of Marxism, knowledge was a reflection of the objective world. The objective world was dialectical, and knowledge was of course dialectical. The law of contradiction, that is, the law of unity of opposites, was the fundamental law of the objective world and, of course, the absolute law of cognition. Lenin pointed out that for human cognition to correctly reflect the objective world, the contradictory movement of the objective world was inevitable. We must follow the contradictory movement of cognition and keep moving forward. Marx’s Capital was a model of consciously using dialectical understanding to analyze the objective world. From Lenin’s point of view, Marx, in Capital, started with the analysis of the simplest, most common, basic, ordinary and much encountered relations in bourgeois society: commodity exchange. Marx first analyzed the internal contradiction or duality (use value and exchange value) of commodities, then to the duality of labor (concrete labor and abstract labor), and thus stripped out the contradiction between private labor and social labor. Then Marx analyzed the relation between money and value and the contradictory movement process of money into capital; discovered the secret of surplus value, revealed the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Through the demonstration of the contradictory development of capitalism, Marx revealed the inevitability of economic crisis, the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the bourgeoisie, and the inevitable victory of socialism.

Lenin pointed out that the study of general dialectics should also follow this cognitive method established by Marx. The law of unity of opposites is not only Marx’s law of cognition in Capital, but also the universal law of all human cognition. Because the movement of the objective world is dialectical, then the human cognition corresponding to the objective world should also be dialectical. Therefore, this requires us to be good at discovering the “cells” and “germ” of all dialectics elements in all understanding processes, that is, the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., such as “the leaves of a tree are green”, “John is a man” and “Fido is a dog”, etc. All these are the unity of opposites between individual and universal. The objective world is always made up of an infinite number of individual things, and there are extensive and complicated objective connections among these individual things. From these individual things, which are full of contradictory movements, we will further analyze the objective relations between the necessary and the contingent, the phenomenon and the essence, thus advancing our understanding process step by step. Therefore, Lenin said that dialectics was the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marx, which not only meant that Marx regarded the elements of dialectics as the law and element of knowledge, but also meant that the movement of human general knowledge was the development process of dialectical contradiction, and meant that dialectics was the fundamental method for human to know and transform the world, that is, the unity of dialectics and epistemology. In addition, Lenin also analyzed the categories of absolute and relative, abstract and concrete, logic and history, and revealed the dialectical nature of the cognitive process and the epistemological and class roots of idealism.

In the chapter “Doctrine of Being” in the “Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic”, Lenin discussed in detail the law and categories of being and noting, finity and infinity, quality and quantity, essence and appearance, cause and result, negation of the negation, etc. When talking about what science should begin with, Hegel proposed that “being” and “nothing” were not absolutely opposite, they could change and transform each other, and “being” could be born from “nothing”. Lenin pointed out that it was this point that meant the unity or indivisibility of “being” and “nothing” and everything was in an intermediate state between “being” and “nothing”. When talking about “thing-in-itself”, Lenin discussed Hegel’s thought that “thing-in-itself” was equivalent to “nothing”. Lenin pointed out that the “thing-in-itself” was generally an empty and lifeless abstraction. In life, in movement, everything was always “itself” but also “for other” in relation to other things, changing from one state to another. In response to Hegel’s criticism of Parmenides and Spinoza’s separation of the absolute and the relative, the infinite and the finite metaphysics, Lenin made a critical transformation of Hegel’s viewpoint, and on this basis clarified their correct relations. Lenin said, “the absolute and the relative, the finite and the infinite = parts and stages of the same world.” This means, on the one hand, absolute and relative, finite and infinite are not dialectical process of absolute spiritual development, but objective relations of the material world; on the other hand, there is no insurmountable gap between the absolute and the relative, the finite and the infinite, the two are inseparable, the opposition between the two is relative; finally, the absolute and the relative, the finite and the infinite are interrelated with each other. Hegel gave a critical explanation to Kant’s sphere of quality in the twelve spheres. In Hegel’s view, continuity and discontinuity were the two basic attributes of quantity. Lenin argued that this judgment explained the interdependence of the opposites, so he gave it a high evaluation and called it “real dialectics”. At the same time, Lenin paid special attention to Hegel’s view on “quality” and pointed out that the category of quantity and quality embodied the unity of progressive development and leap-frog development. The deepening of human understanding often included the general form of raising the understanding of quantity to the regulation of quantity, namely, the understanding of quality and degree.

In the chapter “Doctrine of the Essence”, Lenin affirmed Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s view and other agnosticism. He pointed out that in Kant, Hume and Mach’s view, essence did not exist or could not be recognized, and the sphere of knowledge was only direct existence, only illusion or phenomenon without essence. In Hegel’s view, the basic premise of understanding was not to admit the existence of things that could not be understood. The way of understanding was to achieve the consistency of essence and direct existence. Lenin advocated that the essence of Hegel’s dialectics was to link development, movement and contradiction, and to regard contradiction as the real source and power of movement. On this basis, Lenin affirmed Hegel’s view to take law as a static reflection of the phenomenal world. He argued that Hegel correctly grasped some basic features of the law in the objective world. Lenin said that law and essence were the same kind of concepts that expressed people’s deepening understanding of phenomena, the world and so on, or more precisely, concepts of the same degree. Lenin spoke highly of Hegel’s idea that the phenomenal world and the essential world were contradictory bodies of unity of the opposites. At the same time, Lenin pointed out that Hegel only paid attention to the mutual independence, mutual connection and mutual foundation between the phenomenal world and the essential world, but not paid enough attention to the conditional mutual transformation between the two. As for Hegel’s discussion on causality, Lenin pointed out that the cause and effect must be explained by abundant facts in natural history, philosophy history and technological development history. The objectivity and relativity of causes and results should be fully explained. He pointed out that the process of human cognition was an infinite process from phenomenon to essence, from primary essence to advanced essence on the basis of practice, and was also an infinite process in which human beings continuously knew the substance and cause of things. In addition, Lenin also made clear stipulations on the concept of practice. He further deepened the study of a series of issued related to cognitive dialectics such as existence and thinking, practice and cognition, sensibility and rationality, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, truth and fallacy, absolute truth and relative truth, purpose and means, and displayed the rich content of cognitive dialectics.

The creative study of Marxist philosophy and Marxist dialectics and the profound scientific analysis of the new era are the basis of Lenin’s great discoveries. These discoveries equipped the proletariat with new socialist revolutionary theories. The Philosophical Notebooks are full of Marxist philosophical spirit closely related to real life, to the struggle of the working class and to the Party’s policies. Judging from the materials prepared for this book, it seems that Lenin planned to write a monograph on materialist dialectics, but this plan was not fully realized. In spite of this, to grasp the theoretical basis of scientific communism, i.e., the Marxist philosophy, studying Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks is still an indispensable valuable source.