🧠 Hegel & The Problem of Logic's Subject Matter: Why Ilyenkov Is Right and the Positivists Are Dead Wrong
⚔️ I. Hegel as the Napoleon of Logic — Genius, Betrayal, and Deserved Defeat
Hegel occupies the most pivotal — and tragic — role in the history of logic as a science 🏛️
Like Napoleon, Hegel concentrated the entire revolutionary energy of an era suffocating under the dead weight of outdated thinking
He annihilated the armies of formal logic's defenders — those comfortable, complacent guardians of the old purely scholastic conception of thinking
He constructed an entirely new logical empire — only to, after his untimely death, surrender every conquered territory 💀
The defeat was self-inflicted — and therefore completely deserved 🎭
Hegel could not liberate the world from the ancient prejudices of formal logic because he never liberated himself from them
Revolution and dialectics do not forgive betrayal of principles — not even from their greatest champions
History, with characteristic irony, chose perfectly analogous institutions to exact its revenge
🎪 II. The Vienna Circle as the Congress of Vienna — Petty Legitimists Reasserting Dead Principles
The Vienna Congress deposed Napoleon — those petty dwarf-kings could not forgive his audacity in forcing revolutionary armies into the old family of legitimate rulers 👑
The Vienna Circle did precisely the same thing to Hegel 🔬
It issued a series of solemn verdicts declaring all of Hegel's conquests in logic illegitimate
It declared Hegel himself unworthy of mention in the history of logic — except as a cautionary tale of anti-scientific nonsense
The neopositivists had no choice: Hegel had so thoroughly demolished the authority and prestige of formal logic's axiomatic prejudices that the only available defensive strategy was total, willful ignorance
The defenders of purely formal logic unanimously accuse Hegel of unacceptably widening logic's subject matter 📜
Their charge: Hegel dragged into logic things existing outside of and independently of thinking
Their position: thinking is strictly one of the mental capacities of a human individual — and nothing beyond that
Their prejudice: logic studies only what can be expressed or expressible in verbal form
🕌 III. The "God" Problem — Hegel's Theological Allegories Are Not What They Seem
Hegel defines logic's subject matter as "divine thinking" and logic itself as "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit" 🌌
This formulation has served as endlessly easy target fodder for superficial critics
Critique "reduced to complaints and abuse directed at passages taken out of context" — as Ilyenkov puts it with barely concealed contempt
But these phrases must never be read literally ✝️
By Hegel's own explanation, they served an allegorical function — an attempt to be more "accessible" to contemporaries steeped in religious vocabulary
The "God" Hegel had in mind shared very little with the traditional religious entity
What does "God" actually refer to in Hegel's logic? 🔍
Even the Orthodox Christian Lord is not a simple fiction — it is an inadequate representation of something very real
It is the image and reflection of that real power which misunderstood and misperceived collective social forces exert over individual people
People's collective forces, conceived as standing against them as something alien and even hostile — this is the real referent
Under the pseudonym "God," Hegel is actually describing the real power of collective social forces over an individual embedded in the web of social connections
This is the individual understood not as an isolated atom but as "a totality of all social relations" — a formulation that points directly toward Marx 🧩
🏗️ IV. Hegel's True Understanding of Thinking — Deeper Than Any Positivist Ever Dreamed
"That thinking is the subject matter of logic, we are all agreed" — Hegel writes in The Encyclopaedia Logic 📖
Logic as science = "thinking about thinking" / "thought thinking itself"
This is not uniquely Hegelian — it is the most traditional understanding of logic's subject matter, taken to its clearest expression
The critical question this immediately forces: what IS thinking? 💭
Not a definitional question — only a concretely elaborated theory of thinking, i.e., logic itself, can answer it adequately
Engels: "The only real definition is the development of the thing itself" — a preliminary definition merely delimits the boundaries and indicates criteria for selecting facts
Hegel's analysis of existing views proceeds not by throwing them out as false 🗑️
But by explaining them as reasonable yet radically insufficient
This applies directly to the widespread psychological understanding of thinking as one of many mental capacities alongside memory, will, vision, touch, smell, attention, representation, etc.
When thinking is understood psychologically as individual mental capacity, a deeply doubtful hidden premise is smuggled in 🕵️
Thinking = internal speech / silent monologue
Therefore thinking is studied only insofar as it is expressible in external speech — oral or written "explication"
This ancient and seemingly natural understanding underlies the vast majority of logical theories
Historical genealogy of this prejudice 📜
First appeared among the Sophists
Found its finished, systematically expressed form among the Stoics, who articulated it as the fundamental axiom of logical investigation
The neopositivists invented absolutely nothing new here — they only equipped this ancient prejudice with a pedantic quasi-scientific form of expression
💬 V. The Catastrophic Consequences of Reducing Thinking to Language
Once thinking = verbal expression, the entire logical apparatus transforms accordingly 🔧
"Concept" = term or signifying sign
"Judgment" = utterance or sentence
"Thinking" = a procedure of constructing utterances and systems of utterances
"Reflection" = calculation of utterances
Everything is very neat and very simple — and in the exact same degree, catastrophically impoverished
Thinking as such completely disappears from the field of vision 👁️
In its place: investigation of "language" — language of science, language of art, etc.
Everything that doesn't fit the concept of "language" is delegated to other departments: psychology, epistemology, semantics, and so forth
Logic is thus successfully transformed into a section of the science of language — conveniently justified by the etymological origin of "logos" meaning "word" 🧐
The consequences for logic as science are catastrophically grave ⚠️
Logic cannot be a science of real laws of real human thinking
It can at best be a system of rules that "must be" or "may be" followed but are broken at every step
These rules can be established and cancelled arbitrarily — "conventionally" — by legitimate but equally arbitrary agreement
Logic thereby loses all claim to objectivity, independence from individual will and consciousness, and the universality and necessity of its laws
🔨 VI. Hegel's Decisive Counter-Move — Actions Speak Louder Than Words (Literally)
Hegel's counter-argument is simple, devastating, and compelling precisely in its simplicity 💥
Who said thinking can express itself only in speech?
Is speech really the singular form in which thinking can be fixed and studied in logic?
The answer is — obviously and emphatically — no
Does one not appear as a thinking being in one's actions, one's real deeds? 🏗️
Thinking reveals itself in human actions no less than in words
In real actions — in the formation of things of the external world — a human being expresses his capacity to think in a far more adequate way than in any verbal self-report
We have famous sayings precisely because everyone knows this intuitively 💬
"Spoken thought is a lie"
"A tongue is given to a man to hide his thoughts"
"Only a fool takes things on a word"
These are not about deliberate deception — they are about perfectly sincere and honest self-deception, about the radical inadequacy of verbal self-reporting about one's own actual thinking
Therefore: actions, deeds, and the things created by them are "external forms of manifestation" of thinking 🏛️🔩
They are acts of objectification of thinking, acts of its realisation and explication
The difference between words and deeds matters in logic exactly as much as it matters in real life
Finding the inadequacy of verbal self-report relative to real thinking is itself a logical operation of the highest importance
🌍 VII. Hegel Introduces Practice Into Logic — A Step of Colossal Historical Importance
Thinking manifests its force, energy, and universal patterns not only in speech 📣
But in the creation of the entire world of culture — the entire "non-organic human body" standing objectively over and against the individual
The body of civilisation: tools and temples, statues and offices, factories and political organisations, ships and toys
Everything with which human beings are involved from the moment of birth
Hegel thus introduces sensuous-objective human practice into logic ⚙️🔬
Practice that realises human intentions, plans, and ideas — not merely discusses them
Lenin regarded this as a step of the highest significance in understanding logic's actual subject matter
"Undoubtedly, in Hegel practice serves as a link in the analysis of the process of cognition, and indeed as the transition to the objective ('absolute,' according to Hegel) truth" — Lenin, 1976
Therefore: Hegel acquires full right to include objective determinations of external things within logic 🏛️
A house = embodiment in stone of the architect's intention
A machine = objective realisation in metal of the engineer's thought
The entire colossal body of civilisation = "thinking in its other-being" (Anderssein)
The entire history of humanity becomes the process of "external manifestation" of thinking's creative force 🌐
Realisation of ideas, concepts, plans, goals, and aspirations
The process of "objectification" of logical schemes guiding purposeful human activity
🪤 VIII. Hegel's Fatal Error — Practice Reduced to a Mere Phase of the Theoretical Process
By introducing practice, Hegel takes a step toward materialism — but immediately betrays it ☠️
Practice is considered by Hegel not as such — not as "real, sensuous activity" (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)
But only as an external form of manifestation of thinking — only as thinking in its "external" phase
Practice = exclusively a criterion of truth, a testing ground for thinking that already occurred outside, before, and entirely independently of practice
The French Revolution as Hegel's most damning illustration 🗡️🩸
Hegel interprets the Revolution as the process of realisation of Enlightenment ideas — thoughts of Rousseau and Voltaire
Robespierre appears as a "practical Rousseau"
The guillotine as an instrument for realising the Idea of "absolute equality"
The failure of Robespierre's policies = a practical manifestation of the abstraction and non-dialecticity of the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity
Hegel therefore never reaches the real practical causes of the Revolution — he simply accepts the participants' ideological illusions as the actual causes 🤦
Marx's verdict in Theses on Feuerbach 📌
"Idealism, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such"
Practice considered extremely abstractly — one-sidedly and only in those characteristics that connect it to thinking
🧬 IX. The "Narrow Professional Blindness" of the Logician — Hegel's Most Characteristic Sin
Hegel commits the sin of narrow professionalism that refuses to know the limitations of its own specialised concepts 🔬
The "genuine mystery" of any event in the universe seems to him to be found in the pure, absolute, dialectical schemes of human thinking's inner workings
Human thinking itself is thereby mystified — turned into a cosmic force opposed not only to the individual but to the whole of humanity
The analogy with the overreaching chemist is precise and devastating ⚗️
As long as the chemist considers the universe exclusively from chemistry's categories — fine
But as soon as he claims his specialised concepts express the "genuine essence" of the Sistine Madonna or the living cell or the golden coin — his professionalism shows its catastrophically negative side
Physics "reduced" to mathematics, mathematics "reduced" to logic — the whole Kantian spiral of "regressive synthesis" that terminates in neopositivism 🕳️
Hegel's advantage over positivists remains decisive 💎
He understands thinking and its categories in a deeper and more genuine way than all positivists taken together
But idealism's weakness is still fatally present: human thinking is mystified into a cosmic force, its origins rendered inexplicable
🌀 X. Where Does Thinking Come From? — The Question Hegel Cannot Answer
Hegel's entire system is constructed to avoid this question 🚫
Having raised human thinking — not individual thinking but the thinking of humanity — to the level of "divine" power
Hegel simply pretends that the absence of an answer is itself the only possible philosophical answer
The capacity to think does not "come from" anywhere — it simply manifests and expresses itself
It is "absolute," "divine," a creative power present in human beings from birth
This is precisely where the falsehood of Hegel's idealism is concentrated 💀
Not the thinking of a mystically isolated individual — Hegel does correctly understand thinking as collective, social, historical
The forms and laws of thinking = those faceless schemes that stand over against each individual thinking being
Realised not in mute monologue but in dramatically tense dialogues and confrontations between consciously thinking individuals
I.e., in historical events, in the changing of the external world
The subject matter of logic in Hegel's sense: thinking as a "natural-historical" process achieved in concert by millions of individuals connected into one "thinking being" in constant dialogue with itself 🌐
This is the real prototype for Hegel's portrait of "God" and the "absolute spirit"
Far more sophisticated and realistic than any psycho-physiological account of individual cerebral activity under the frontal lobe
🔄 XI. The Reversal — "In the Beginning Was the Word": Hegel's Concession to the Enemy
Having started with the correct thesis that logical schemes manifest in chains of words AND chains of actions ✅
Hegel returns to the idea that "in the beginning was the word" — the axiom of St. John and Rudolf Carnap in equal measure 😬
The "naming power" (Namengebende Kraft) — verbal self-report about what is taking place "inside the spirit" — is given primacy in time and in essence
The word — logos in its verbal appearance — is declared the FIRST form of the "determinate being of spirit" 📜
The spirit "awakens to independent life" the moment it creates a mirror out of itself — and that mirror is word, language, speech
Only after becoming conscious of itself in and through the word does "thinking" externalise itself in tools, things, temples, nation-states
All of material civilisation presented as secondary, derivative, dependent on the prior verbal self-consciousness of spirit
Lenin's two large question marks are devastating ❓❓
"History of thought = history of language??"
This identification — even if less crude than neopositivism's version — is the same ancient prejudice in Hegelian dress
Hegel punished by history for this opportunism: like Napoleon at Waterloo and St. Helena ⚓
The textual evidence is overwhelming 📚
Phenomenology of Spirit opens with the contradiction between "sense certainty" and its inadequate verbal expression in "this," "now," "here"
In the aesthetics: art's evolution is presented as ascent from stone and bronze through sound to poetry — the most "adequate" embodiment
Progress runs from stone to word — the exact inversion of what materialism demonstrates 🔃
⚒️ XII. Materialism Turns Hegel Right-Side Up — The Correct Sequence
Before a person learns to speak, he must act in the world of real things not created by him 🌿
The skill of treating things of the external world in accordance with their own form and measure
Coordinating actions in relation to the external measure and form of things
This is formed — both in anthropogenesis and in individual development — earlier than the capacity to use language
And far earlier than any capacity to treat the word itself as a special subject matter
Lenin's commentary on Hegel's "syllogism of action" is decisive 🔑
"For Hegel action, practice, is a logical 'syllogism', a figure of logic. And this is true! Not, of course, in the sense that the figure of logic has its other-being in the practice of man (= absolute idealism), but vice versa: man's practice, repeating itself a thousand million times, becomes consolidated in man's consciousness by figures of logic. Precisely (and only) on account of this thousand-million-fold repetition, these figures have the stability of a prejudice, an axiomatic character" — Lenin, 1976
All logical schemes without exception 🔢
Express themselves and show themselves primarily NOT in human language as Hegel postulates
But as constantly repeated schemes of external, objective, objectively conditioned human activity
Brought to consciousness in language only much later — the picture is exactly the opposite of Hegel's
Materialism rescues philosophy from the necessity of positing "pure," "divine" thinking that mysteriously existed before all forms of its own "determinate being" 🛡️
That "thinking" — as Hegel assumes it — never existed and never will exist
Thinking as specifically human capacity does not "wake up to self-consciousness" but originally emerges in the process of immediate, objective human activity
🏆 XIII. The Correct Materialist Definition of Logic's Subject Matter
All logical schemes, figures, and rules are correctly understood as 🌐
Correctly understood general relations between things of the external world
NOT as specific relations between "signs"
This applies both to elementary schemes of traditional formal logic and to the complex dialectical relationships first systematically developed in Hegel's logic
Forms of thought = logical forms 🧱
Were, remain, and forever will be — regardless of all idealist fantasies about them — only correctly understood forms of the external world
In the transformation of which is found the very essence of human life's activity
Dialectics = science of universal forms and laws governing both "being" (nature plus society) and "thinking" (conscious human activity) ♾️
This is the logic of contemporary materialism
Which, according to Lenin, "has taken everything valuable from Hegel and developed it further"
The "word" (language) from this point of view 🗣️
Is one of the forms of the "determinate being of thinking"
In no case the only form (contra neopositivism)
Not the first either in time or in essence (contra Hegel)
This is precisely where Hegel made his most serious concession to the verbal-scholastic tradition — a "debt to old formal logic" that represents one of the gravest consequences of his idealist position
The final verdict on Hegel's great failure ⚖️
His logic could not become the logic of real scientific acquisition of knowledge of nature and history
Because he identified the history of thought with the history of language — however subtly
Because practice remained for him only a phase of the theoretical process rather than its actual foundation
Because the word remained for him the most worthy and adequate form of thinking's external realisation — sliding him inexorably back onto the tracks of formal interpretation that led bourgeois thought straight into the dead-end of neopositivism 🕳️
As the saying goes: in for a penny, in for a pound 💀
