Logic and History

Important pair of categories that reveals the laws and methods of man’s thinking activity. The unity of logic and history is a basic principle of dialectical thinking. The category of history contains two meanings: one refers to the historical development process of the objective reality itself; the other refers to the historical development process of human knowledge that reflects the objective reality, i.e., history of science, history of knowledge, history of philosophy, history of language development, etc. The category of logic refers to the motion of the concept from the abstract to the concrete, as well as the order, levels and relations between concepts. The unity of logic and history is the law of motion of knowledge. Dialectical thinking should follow the principle of the unity of logic and history and use the logical method and the historical method in combination.

The coincidence of logic and history is an important principle and method for dialectical thinking to construct scientific knowledge systems and theoretical structures, as well as the intrinsic requirement of the principle of rising from the abstract to the concrete. The coincidence of logic and history contains a dual meaning: Firstly, the development of logic is in agreement with the history of development of human knowledge; secondly, the development of logic is in agreement with the history of the development of the objective reality. The history of the development of knowledge is a reflection of the objective reality and human practical activity. Engels pointed out: “The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one. This, however, is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences. The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the historical course.” History is the basis of logic, and logic is the reproduction of history in theoretical thinking and is derived from history. Therefore, the logical order of a conceptual system should be in agreement the objective historical order and the order of the development of knowledge. The coincidence of logic and history is not rigid, not a one-to-one coincidence. Logic is the “corrected” history. Such correction first of all manifests itself as a “correction” of history by the logic according to the laws of history, in which the logic discards individual, accidental details of history and catches the mainstream and the whole, discards the accidental and catches the necessary, discards the twists and turns and deviations and catches the basic clue, thus forming a theoretical conceptual system that makes it possible to grasp the inner laws of development of history in their “pure form”. Moreover, as “corrected” history, logic has, under certain conditions and within certain limits, a certain independence of its own and can diverge from the order of development of history and does not need to follow on the heels of the concrete course of development of history everywhere.