 Why would we study Hegel, a philosopher who lived more than 200 years ago? I mean, if you ask a lot of modern or postmodern so-called thinkers, all they can think about is new ideas, new things, a new way of doing things. And they always present themselves like this kind of complete break with the past, although in reality they're just mimicking, they're just repeating what's been said many times before in history. But for these people, progress in history and progress in the history of ideas is just a figment of our imagination and has no reality to it. But if we take even a superficial look, we see that that's not really true. If we look at literature, didn't it change completely after Homer or after Shakespeare? Could it ever go back to the way literature was before that? Or if we take a look at music, could it ever be the same after Bach or after Beethoven or after Beatles? Is there a book called that? Bach, Beethoven, I think there is. Or within science, could it ever be the same after Newton, Darwin and similar people? Of course, all of this is just a closed book to these people because they never really actually take the time to even do a superficial inquiry of what they're talking about. But as Marxists, we never claim to be special or having found some kind of magical formula that no one accidentally thought about for all these thousands of years and come up with this solution. We emphatically put ourselves within a long line of thinkers going obviously through Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels but even further through Hegel, the French materialist, Aristotle, Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosophy. All of these form our heritage and in fact, our heritage is not just these people but these people as a representation of the, how do you say, common experience of mankind itself. Marx and Engels are very, very keen students of Hegel and Hegel in fact had a similar view of history, of philosophy itself. He didn't see himself as someone who just threw aside all previous history. On the contrary, he saw the scientific thought not as a history of random ideas by random people but as this progressive unfolding of truth, of scientific knowledge from lower to higher levels. Each philosophy in its own day played a progressive role, an enormous role in developing our understanding of the world and our place in it but at the same time each advance carried within it the seeds to its own downfall. Each philosophy, each set of ideas within it had its contradiction which at a certain stage meant that they couldn't play the role that they used to and therefore those ideas were then negated by a new school of thought, a new way of looking at the world which was on a higher level. So every school of philosophy and every system of thought which negated another one was bound to collapse itself and give way to another so that meant that what was true at one point in history was inadequate to explain the truth at another point. But this didn't mean that these negated schools of thought just disappeared forever, that they were just lost and just thrown aside but that the rational kernel or their essence was in fact maintained within the development of consciousness and scientific thought altogether. We can look at a school such as the Pythagorean school. Now the Pythagoreans, a lot of people don't know this but in reality they were a mystic sect, it was a religious sect which worshipped ideas and basically they were the founders of philosophical idealism but not many people know that about them but yet what a lot of people, almost every school student learns today is the scientific developments that they actually did make and which were a breakthrough for science and for maths at that time. So the essence of that school of thought was maintained, was kept, whereas all the accidental elements and sides of it was discarded. And the same we can say about throughout the history of philosophy, history of thought, that there have been many, many people who think as schools that we don't really know about or don't really know what they were about but the essence of the conclusions that they reached has been maintained within our consciousness and within our thinking. At least in general terms that's the outline of the process. Now Hegel believed that his philosophy correctly was the culmination of all previous philosophy and that it carried within it the true essence of all of these previous systems of thought. And that He was kind of the final step in this progressive approximation towards the truth, this unfolding of the truth as He would call it and our understanding of the laws of nature and of society and our place within those spheres. Now He explained that everything which rises is rational at a certain stage, every school of thought which rises is rational at a certain stage but it's also doomed by its own inner contradictions to become irrational and pass away at a later stage. Now this process of negation, this process of everything rising and then being negated and falling into the opposite is according to Hegel the key to his philosophy because it's not just something in human thought and culture and within philosophy but it's something that permeates all of human society, all of nature, all of development. He compares this with the bud which by its own essence has to develop into a flower, into blossom but by doing that, by fulfilling its own inner necessity it completely negates itself, it doesn't exist anymore it gives way to the blossom which then again disappears as the manifestation of that plant when the flower comes. You see here three stages of development of the plant each of which completely negate the other one, they cannot coexist but at the same time they're necessary for the existence of each other. In his logic he starts off by asking the question, what is pure being? If we think about it, you can't really think about it, what is pure being? Being that's not determined, it's not limited, it's not in any way qualified, it's just pure being. You can't even say it because then you actually add some letters to it, you shouldn't do it because then it's not really true. It's nothing, eventually you reach to the conclusion that it's nothing, you cannot add any characteristics to it and therefore pure being immediately as you start to begin to think about it collapses into nothing because it shares the same characteristics with nothing. But this isn't just nothing now because obviously it's something because we know that it's definitely not being so it's not nothing, so it's not being we can say. And therefore even within this completely abstract thought experiment we see the fundamental law of nature that Hegel discovered that everything taken to the logical conclusion by their own inner contradiction fall into their opposite and instead of being what we have is becoming of development, of change which carries within it this constant movement from being to nothing, this constant movement from one thing to its other. This is the fundamental point that Hegel makes, that everything is in constant change and everything is constantly coming into being and passing away. As soon as a person is born you basically begin to die. Every cell which is created within our body has a certain time where it lives and then it passes away. In the beginning of our life more cells are created than die off but at a certain stage this changes to its opposite and you have the beginning of the decline or the period of decline of our lives and this at a certain stage again reaches a critical stage at which we see a rapid acceleration and then we die. Obviously our death is not the end of humanity or human society just like our birth wasn't the beginning of it. We can trace our cells back to our ancestors, to our parents and their parents and we can go back to our generations, our ancestors and we can go all the way back to the birth of humanity itself and link it again within the same process with the development of species going back through the primates and trace our roots all the way back to the first one celled organisms and even further before that before matter actually began to organize itself into living matter. Now at each step each new species or each new kind in this development represents a step forward it's on a higher level we can say within the organization of matter and that's why we see throughout the history of development of species we see the long line of species, the majority of which have gone extinct but the continuous onward progress from lower to higher levels of species and again just like in the development philosophy we see that each step forward is not like a completely random step forward and a complete reset but that it carries within it the essence and the seeds of the previous thing that it comes from every new species negates but at the same time preserves the essential aspects of the old one of course within the history of species and life there's all kinds of dead ends and steps back but in general terms that's the process that we're watching in fact we can see this whole process within the development of the human fetus which mimics the development of life since its early stages on our planet until the development of human being this constant change and the rise or fall of all phenomena from lower to higher levels that's the fundamental mode of existence of all matter but this change is not imposed from it from outside it's rather driven by its own internal contradictions just like pure being as we talked about inevitably becomes its opposite death is an outcome of the internal contradiction of life and so on and so on but this change once it happens it's not a gradual change necessarily but more like a rapid acceleration or a jump once we can see that a body reaches a certain stage of decline we see that the process takes on a rapid pace and death accures very fast or likewise after a certain period of the fetus being within a womb growing to a certain age birth is imposed very very quickly and a similar thing obviously we can see in social revolutions that once a certain society has reached a certain stage it enters into a state of decline and from here we begin to see that the contradictions between the rule of the old ruling class and the rise of the new revolutionary class begin to pile up and at a critical stage at a critical point any given accident can make all these contradictions come to the surface and we see the beginning of social revolution so it's not difficult to see that the implications of Hegel's philosophy were very revolutionary but Hegel never reached these conclusions explicitly himself it was more implied in his writings and although he sympathized with the French Revolution but politically he was a conservative but how the question is how can it be that you reached these revolutionary ideas conclusions in the sphere of philosophy and yet remain a conservative and that's what we're going to look into a bit now now throughout history we can generally divide philosophy into two camps very generally very broadly speaking we have on the one hand the camp of idealism which subsists of people who say that the fundamental basis of the world is ideas some form of ideas and that matter and everything else is kind of in one way or another a reflection of that and all religion falls into this category and all philosophies in this category inevitably will fall into religion on the other hand we have the school of materialism which claims that the material world is all there is is all there exists and exists independently of us and our ideas and that our ideas are just an imperfect reflection of this material world now Hegel was waging a struggle against the weaknesses of both of these camps at his time on the one hand he was struggling against the rationalist idealists who in their search for these eternal truths had completely cut off themselves from the real objective world by more or less denying its existence or our ability to interact with it and on the other hand he was fighting against the empiricists who believed that pure sense perception was all that human beings could deal with that knowledge in essence was just like an ever increasing accumulation of facts of more and more facts without really processing them without ordering them, without having a system of categorizing and understanding the relations and the philosopher who came immediately before Hegel was Emmanuel Kant who although he made some brilliant discoveries his biggest contribution perhaps was his failed attempt to unite these two worlds and these two camps and he ended up in a dualist philosophy a philosophy which accepted the real world as existing and independent of us but also accepted the world of ideas and basically did not accept that these two had any connection with each other Kant said that although the world exists outside of our reach and independently of us but we can never know the world as it is we can never know it or the thing in itself as he called it and instead our minds are kind of inhabited by these a priori ideas which he never explained where they really came from now Kantianism as opposed to Hegelianism is very very popular in bourgeois academia today but in philosophical terms it was a dead end from the beginning now nevertheless or perhaps because of this it became the basis it was on the basis of the critique of Kant that Hegel developed his philosophy he dealt a devastating blow to Kant's idealism first he pointed out that if we're unable to perceive reality as it is and if we cannot prove the existence of anything that we're experiencing then how can we be sure at all that it exists how can we be sure at all that anything outside of our mind also our being exists at all and if we don't know this then why would Kant even bother writing all these books about this world of philosophy for people that he didn't really know or could prove existed or at least if they did maybe they didn't even understand his language it doesn't really know what he was doing right he's scribbling on these pieces of paper but Hegel went further he said that philosophy and logic in particular is a special kind of science because what is it? it's thinking about thinking it's not just ordinary thought it's thinking about scientific thinking but in any other science you can make experiments you can come with hypothesis you can somehow test them out in the real world but how do you prove your thoughts are correct how do you prove that this way of thinking is better than the other one because every man can come and say well in my brain the way I'm thinking my logic is better than yours and you have no way of proving it because we're just fighting it out in our own heads now as long as philosophy, Hegel said was kept within the realm of pure thinking but as long as thinking and thought was kept kind of isolated from the real world from the objective world that we live in then it could never overcome this and logic was always bound to have at best a very mechanical and rigid character but he overcame this by replacing this dualism of Kant with what he called absolute idealism what we would call objective idealism and what he said was that there is no distinction between the material world and the ideal world because everything is the ideal world everything is this absolute ideal universal spirit he had several names for us although he never really explained what it was but that is all of the world and this artificial barrier that we have set up between our mind, our thoughts and the real world that we see and experience are artificial and it's only by removing them that we can actually test out our thoughts within the real world and prove them right or wrong now on the one hand and so everything that we sense and experience is a part of this world spirit or this world idea and on the one hand this had a reactionary side to it because it let obscurantism religious thought basically into Hegel's philosophy but at the same time we had a very revolutionary side which meant, which was that for the first time that we could begin to deal with this ever changing extremely complex and infinite world we could begin to develop our ideas on the basis of that and we can begin to develop general laws and notions on the basis of observing this infinity complex world of ours and according to Hegel he could prove his logic by applying it to the real world and by studying the history of the sciences and thereby building a scientifically approvable logic so according to Hegel his logic was just the highest form of all the positive sciences which would eventually give its flesh now continuing on criticizing the rationalists who argued that absolute truth existed outside of the material world which could only be attained by this pure type of thinking Hegel would say that this philosophical thinking could never really come up with these great ideas of eternal truths and eternal ideas, big things like God and spirit but however big and grandiose you would portray them you could never ever really explain the infinite complexity and change and interconnection of the real world so here you had a world in the 1800s especially where science was taking these immense strides forward and all this immense wealth was coming to our hands and these philosophers in particular were building a wall around themselves and saying we can't touch this, we can't have anything to do with this we can't learn, they were isolating themselves from this new world of knowledge on the other hand you had the empiricists who argued that pure sense experience was all that was needed to understand the world and that no abstract thinking was really needed but they couldn't really explain anything either so how would you ever choose and prioritize and recognize the relationship between this infinite amount of information that we're constantly dealt with even an empiricist would never do that because when I'm sitting here looking at you guys I'm not looking at this tiny speck of dust sitting here because although in a formally empiricist way of thinking that's equal to all the other things that I'm watching here like you guys and all the other things that we're talking about obviously no one would ever think about the world in those terms yes so Hegel argued that both of these assertions the fact that you can understand things by just general abstract ideas or just by looking at things empirically could explain you know had any depth to them for him they were both equally empty and the point of philosophy is exactly to sort out the infinite number of phenomena that we see and connect and are in touch with and make sense of them and see the interconnections and the relationships and how they interact with each other and see all of these things which are not immediately visible to the naked eye now if for instance we take a chair let's take one of these chairs here I can see that well yeah that's a chair but in fact the picture of a chair that we all have in our minds would probably be nothing like this chair or any other chair that we would ever see anywhere else before because that chair that we have is kind of stripped off of its accidental elements and in fact in a way it's more true it's just the essence of what we recognize as a chair but yet it doesn't exist anywhere in the real world it's only an abstraction that we have made but at the same time this abstraction is only the abstraction made by throughout human experience of humanity of having studied and seen chairs and how they work and come to the conclusion that this is the essence of a chair so within that abstraction itself every single chair that I've ever met and many many other people have seen in their lives is portrayed and in this way what is particular and what is universal is related that in order to understand the particular you need to have an universal we all have every time we see a person the first thing is we don't go and see every single molecule every tiny building way that they're built or build one way or another but we actually recognize them as this universal human being man woman or whatever with certain traits we begin to interact with them and they also have other aspects that we need to look out for and in understanding them again we enrich our understanding of that universal general idea of a man we have the essence of human beings that we have and we begin to understand human beings on an even higher level so for Hegel the philosophical truth is concrete it's not something you attain by sitting in your room sitting at the office just writing and reading textbooks but it's something you attain by actually interacting with the world as it is and philosophical principles can't be predetermined in a schema and then pulled over the head or pasted on to the world as we know it what he said was that in order to what we need to do is to surrender ourselves to the world that we're trying to understand and discover the underlying laws and necessities that that dominated the laws and logics of his organic life so to say of the world and in doing so we'll begin to see the different patterns which replicate themselves throughout nature and throughout human society and once we begin to see this once we begin to recognize these laws and this necessity which permits all of being all of nature all of talk of abstract freedom is immediately we can discard immediately real freedom according to Hegel is the understanding of these laws which govern our nature and our society and the understanding of our place within that society and within nature but from his point of view all of these laws were merely the laws of the development of this so-called absolute spirit and you can say well this is something completely unhegelian because nowhere does this follow from his system nowhere Hegel will say don't presume anything go into the world discover it and discover its own inherent laws if we do that we'll never come across any form of absolute idea and in fact if you take the absolute spirit out of Hegel's work all the main points the essence of the main points they remain it's almost like a scaffold which is just left there after they build the house but for Hegel the history of nature and human society is the history of this absolute spirit and this spirit at some point in prehistory it's become alien to itself whatever that means and it's now returning to itself through the development of nature and especially through the development of philosophy of course within Hegel himself the spirit finally finds full cognition and supposedly is history and history as a whole is beginning to come to an end so here we have Hegel's who struck a blow to all schematism all formalism nothing is absolute nothing remains for everything rises and passes away there's no system we cannot drag any schemas over the real world and yet he creates the biggest system of them all and the most complex schema and tries to drag this onto the world although there's nowhere in the world any proof of the existence of the absolute spirit but how can we explain why Hegel did that first of all we have to understand that Hegel was a Christian and he came up through the school of German idealism that's the tradition that he belonged to a school of thought which at that time was far richer than the British empirical school of philosophy for instance and Hegel was looking at history and a society from the point of view of philosopher and seeing his field as the driving force of history but also why was he doing that the society that he lived in Germany was perhaps the most backward society of Europe because of the 30 years war the development of Germany had been withheld German capitalism came late to this scene and here you had this relatively backward country in which literature was the highest and most developed aspect and of course this formed the view that Hegel took to society he saw himself philosophy and literature as the decisive driving force of society and this he kind of imposed on the rest of history as well seeing the history of philosophy as the driving force of all of societies at least that's my hypothesis yes but the problem was also another one in that time of Hegel was just before the great breakthroughs that we saw in science in the 19th century in chemistry and biology and geology all of these sciences which took enormous steps forward and which proved the dialectical method within nature the dialectical dialectics is the mode of development and mode of movement throughout of nature all of this was kind of a closed book to Hegel and the sciences that he had access to were for most part mechanical sciences such as mechanics or astronomy which at that time was sort of mechanic because it was these great bodies and didn't go into the maybe finer details of it yes and exactly because he anticipated all of these developments because he came before it his system ended up being flawed and it was Marx and Engels who had to salvage the revolutionary kernel of Hegel's philosophy and as they put it turn him right side up now from a Marxist point of view there is no difference between the ideal and the material world there is only the material world human beings and human mind is a product of matter at a certain stage organized in a particular way and our thoughts are just the imperfect reflection of that material world dialectics is not the laws of thought and idea which is then imposed transcends all of nature but it's inherent laws of nature themselves and by our interaction with this world and with nature we're able to discover these laws Lenin said that Marxism was almighty because it's true and it sounds like a very prophetic and religious statement but actually it's a very profound thing to say in my opinion because in that Marxism stands out from all other philosophies that came before it in that it's not a system that tries to impose a certain way of being on nature but sees nature and the laws of nature that we can deduce from it as its own content and therefore whatever nature and laws of human society shows us that is the truth and that is what Marxism aims at incorporating into its principles and if it's not our principles which will change and not the other one therefore it's a method which which can last in any given situation in that sense it's also not a philosophy in the traditional form of philosophy it doesn't have a fixed schema but it's more like a method of viewing the world and human society mankind from Marxist point of view is nothing but matter conscious of itself and it also follows its own it also objects to its own laws individuals obviously we think at least that we're free to make the choices and decisions we want to in our lives but if we take just a little step back from a bird's eye view we immediately see that there are iron laws which operate independently and often completely opposed to the wills of every single individual I don't know if there was a lead off unfortunately I didn't see it about psychology but just the other day I was thinking about this explosion of big data that big companies and our mining data of how we act and they know every single move we make and then they have these algorithms go through and find patterns in the way that we behave and these patterns are actually relatively effective in predicting what we're going to do at any given time and this is just the beginning of this form of science the same we can say about psychology and other sciences it's only the beginnings of it but what we're beginning to see is that there are laws which control human behavior and human development that individual conscious human beings are not really loads over now for instance the majority of ordinary people want to live a peaceful life and in fact probably the people who want to have who are the most determined to live a peaceful and calm life are constantly running into capitalism as an insurmountable obstacle to living this where every single day we're pushed aside, we're pushed at the job we're put under all kinds of pressure in the family and society and everywhere we go by capitalist society which impedes our very very modest wish to live a perfectly ordinary non-eventful and harmonious life and hence because of these pressures the pressures of the crisis of capitalism puts on these people you see that the people who are most determined to live a normal and tranquil life are pushed towards drawing more and more radical and more revolutionary conclusions contrary to their wishes and that in fact is the driving force of all revolutions the time where this consciousness this conservative consciousness switches over and becomes a revolutionary one and catches up with the objective situation and if we look at human history the laws are even more striking before anything human beings have to eat have to sleep and they have to subsist themselves but in trying to do so we have to develop tools machinery and the means of production to do this essentially now at a certain stage in the development of human society the development of these means of productions mean that we create a certain a little bit of a surplus value we begin to produce a little bit more than we can all consume and that means that a small group of people are able to live without having to toil day and night basically and that's when we see the rise of class society which on the one hand was connected with enormous barbarism but on the other hand drove forward human development immensely and at each stage of class society we see that the development of productive forces leads to enormous steps forward for humanity itself the rise of class the early slave societies for instance especially what we see in Greece coincides with the explosion of flowering, of culture of philosophy on a completely unprecedented scale especially in in ancient Greece but here again we see that philosophy was not the driving force of this movement, the Hegel would say well the Greek had this beautiful artful spirit and that's why they reached this philosophy but the Greek philosophy was driven by the class contradictions which were rising in Greek society itself and in fact we see those class contradictions within the Greek philosophers as well for instance the idealist camp we see the most consistent idealist Plato and Pythagoras they were mainly from the aristocratic class and they had this idea it was a class in a complete dead end in a crisis and their ideas was all about escaping this world which is unreal and going to some other perfect world which is more real than the one that we live in on the other hand you had the materialist philosophers in ancient Greek who were mainly for the most part from the trading class you can say the embryonic bourgeois class maybe of traders people who would travel, who would study different sciences and who would look at society from a materialist point of view and it was within that kind of context that these form of ideas essentially developed now of course slavery as well as slave society reached its apex in ancient Rome and buckled under its own contradictions and from its ruin we saw the rise of feudalism and from within feudalism we again saw the rise of capitalism and at each stage the development of a given class society develops to its full extent which then again leads to its downfall and its supersession by a new form of society and also within each of these societies we see that the revolutionary classes carry within them their own revolutionary history capitalism is sorry philosophy revolutionary philosophy capitalism itself came to power on the basis of a very ferocious struggle against feudalism and religious obscurantism it came to power fighting for the truth of shedding light on everything that was hypocritical and irrational in human society and its victory was a huge step forward for humanity as a whole and under its rule the means of production was developed to the productive forces was developed to unheard levels which means that today essentially as we know we have all the means at our disposal potentially to solve all the main problems of humanity and raise all of humanity out of this barbarism but the system itself is incapable of doing so and instead pushing humanity further down this line of this line of barbarism and therefore it becomes irrational and its no longer in fact is no longer in favor of the truth and the truth is the Marxist or the working class who is now the revolutionary class is the only standard the barrage of the truth our philosophy is more than anything to find the truth because the truth essentially shows irrationality and the incompatibility of capitalist society with the the whole of society and human proxies as it is and within capitalism of course the society creates its own gravediggers in the form of the working class which can once and for all lead humanity out of this barbarism now freedom from Marxist point of view in this sense consists in recognizing this process in recognizing that in spite of everything we try to do all of us try to improve our lives and our immediate surroundings as best as we can some people go study engineering or to become doctors or they find one way or another to improve their lives and push society forward the way they can but Marxism is the understanding that whatever we do all of these things in the final analysis is going to be futile because we have this gigantic monstrous obstacle in form of capitalist property relation in front of us that leads humanity from all of this progress in general and therefore the only the freedom is the recognition of the only true thing the only way to spend our lives and spend our energy is to put it in the direction that history is going already in the direction of overthrowing of capitalism ending this dead end of class society that it has reached for a new society without classes for true free development of human society