 Well comrades, the German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831 and he was one of the greatest minds to have ever walked the earth. He had an encyclopedic knowledge within a vast array of fields of history, of science and of course about ideas. His works in philosophy in particular, his logic and his phenomenology are unparalleled in their depth, scope and detail and you don't have to agree with Hegel in order to understand that his penetrating method can raise important questions for everyone's mind. And yet, if you go to study philosophy at universities today, the chances are that you won't learn much about him or his works because here for the most part Hegel is really looked at with scorn, disliked and in particular one of the things in particular which is hated about him is his concept of progress in history. Now according to Hegel, not all societies are equal and on the same level of development. In other words have come a long way from the early stages of small groups wandering the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago to the modern society that we have today. And most importantly for him, our ideas have developed. So according to Hegel, not all ideas are on the same level. But this type of, this is so-called philosophy, this taught in academia today and in universities today. And this counts really for all the three main schools of philosophy today, the post-modernists, the positivists and the analytical philosophy. They all take a sort of a moralistic attitude to the question of culture and ideas because you see we can't say that, we can't call ideas bad or wrong except of course if it's ideas of Hegel and Marx because that is a completely different thing. All the old ideas, this is an old way of thinking and we need to look at the world in a complete new way. And here you might stop up and say, wait a minute, we're just told that all ideas are equal. There's no such thing as progress, i.e. nothing new is better than something old. And yet we have to go looking for new ideas because the old ones are not good enough. Of course this is complete nonsense, this is complete rubbish. And in reality if there's one thing which defines Hegel more than any other philosopher is his fierce opposition to this type of mental laziness, to say things, just blurt out things without thinking about the consequences or conclusions of what you're saying. And that's the method which is so rife in academia today. Now according to Hegel ideas can't just be called philosophy just because they're proclaimed. They have to be justified or rather they must be proven by their own intrinsic coherence. The question is how do we prove ideas, how do we prove the ideas on the basis of their coherence? Can't we just make up an idea ourselves and then claim that it proves itself by making up some other ideas? Well, not according to Hegel because what allowed Hegel's philosophy to advance far more than any other before him was the fact that he made the strongest case for the objectivity of knowledge. In other words, according to him truth and knowledge are objective phenomena, the independent of the individuals who think them. I can think whatever I want but that doesn't make it true. I can think that I can fly and then I go jump out of this window, well nothing will happen because I'll just fall onto the street. So I certainly won't fly, won't I? And so we can say definitively that at least some ideas are not true or not equally as true as others. But then the question is how do we arrive at objectively true ideas? How do we know things? And that's really one of the important places where Hegel made enormous advances. Now, when I was a child, I used to be, when I was very small, I used to be very afraid of fire. I thought it was bad, in other words, but then once a year in Iran where I grew up, you had this ceremony before Iranian New Year, there's fire on the streets, people are jumping over them, there's firecrackers, grenades, all sorts of fun things. And I would see them and I would think, well, you know, I was getting intrigued, let's say, and I thought, well, maybe fire is not such a bad thing, maybe it's actually fun. Then I remember one day, I was three or four years old, I was sitting with my cousin, we were playing with a lighter and this paper that we were holding caught fire and everything just started to unravel and we were panicked and luckily my uncle came in and stomped out the fire. So again, I concluded fire is bad, fire is not so good. Then I got a little bit older again, became a teenager, I developed fine motor skills, I improved my reaction time, I'd seen barbecues and birthday cakes, I knew that more or less how to go about fire. So me and my cousin started experimenting with fireworks and we said, well, we found out we could mix them, we could make bigger bombs than the ones you could buy and suddenly fire was fun again and life was good, so to say. Right until one day where this small bomb that we basically made exploded right in my hand just when I was about to throw it, it ripped apart my gloves and it hurt quite a lot. Luckily nothing was happening, I still have all my fingers, but that was my last lesson so far, that fire is bad if you're not absolutely certain on how to go about it. Formerly you can say I'm at the same position that I was as a small infant or child, obviously this is a far higher form of knowledge than the simple notions of a child. And yeah, this is a very simple anecdote, but I think it does show the general process of knowledge, the fact that by interacting with the objective world, we form general notions about it, which we then apply to the real world again when we go about our lives. And through trial and error, we move from lower to higher forms of knowledge. Now Hegel recognized this process not just in the individual, but in the history of knowledge as such, in the history of humanity. He didn't see himself as apart from the history of scientific thought, as if anyone at any time could just have come up with the same ideas of him, but it just so happened that it was him, because maybe he was such a genius or something. But for Hegel, the history of scientific thought was not a history of random ideas disconnected and thought out by random and disconnected people, rather it was a process, it was a social process with its own lawfulness leading from lower, more simple and primitive forms of knowledge to higher, more complex and more advanced forms of thought. And every stage of this development, you have new ideas coming in, which play an enormous role in developing our understanding of the world and our place in it, but at the same time, each advance, each set of ideas bring within it the seeds of its own downfall, so to say. And at a certain stage, these ideas become, the new ideas, so to say, become old ideas and they must give way to new ideas to come in their place. So what is true at one point in history becomes inadequate and has to be replaced by something which is more true at another. But this doesn't mean that the old ideas are just lost forever, that all the experiences that came before is just wiped off and thrown out. Their essence is fundamentally retained in the new schools of thought which appear in the place. Now let's take the Ptolemaic system. This is the old paradigm of the universe which said that the Earth was the center of our universe. Now before Ptolemy, astronomy was not really a science. There was people making, you know, developing astronomical theories, but this was kind of a secondary thing as a part of other disciplines, basically. But what Ptolemy did was that he gathered all of these fragmented pieces of theory into one great book of astronomical science. He basically synthesized all of the theories of his time. And this was a huge step forward for humanity. In essence, what he did was to establish astronomy as a specific field which could be systematically studied. And for 1,300 years, this was the basis of astronomy, essentially. And it was within this framework that you had the development of vast, you know, theory of theories, mathematical models, and so on, some of which are still relevant today within certain parameters. And it was also within this framework that you had the development of tools, of telescopes, and all sorts of aggregates which actually allowed us to see far, far further than we'd ever been able to before. And which by doing this laid the foundations for the downfall of the Ptolemy system. And you had the rise of the Copernican system, which argued that the sun was the center of the universe. Obviously not the entire truth, but it was far truer than the original notion that we had. Yes. And it was exactly precisely because of the full development of the Ptolemy system that it could be replaced by a higher form of scientific thought. And again, the same thing later on took place with the Copernican system, which was later replaced with the current model that we have today. Now within each of these models, what was true in the, the true elements of the former schools of thought remain in the context of the new discoveries and advances of science. And if we look at the situation today, the really Herculean achievements of these thinkers have now become the basic knowledge that every school kid learns in school. And they have become the foundations of the new advances which can take place of science in future generations. Now this, this process takes place throughout the history of philosophy and science. And here for us and for Hegel, the past is just, it's not just some, you know, a set of unfortunate mistakes. This is sometimes when you hear about, oh, Ptolemy exists and they're so stupid, they thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Well, in fact, for them, the Earth was the center of the universe. They couldn't see much further. The reach of humanity was not that far. And as we increased our reach, our knowledge also developed. And it was precisely because of that development that we could reach what we have today. So what we have is not accidental, disconnected theories, but rather a form of ladder where one step of development of each school of thought leads on to the next. Now for Hegel, this is not just the way that philosophy develops. This is the general laws of development itself. And he puts forward this metaphor of the plant, the life cycle of a plant where you have the seed, which is then negated by the bud, which is replaced by the bud. And then the blossom, and then at a certain stage, the blossom disappears and then the fruit becomes the manifestation of the plant. And each of these stages basically exclude the other ones. And yet they're equally necessary. And together what they form is the essence of the life cycle of a plant as a whole. At least in general terms, those are the laws of development according to Hegel. And going back to philosophy, Hegel believed that his philosophy was the culmination of all previous schools of thought. In fact, he derived his ideas from a systematic critique of all of the previous philosophies. And in this way, his doctrine was a revolutionary break, you can say, with everything that came before that. And at the same time, he meticulously tried to preserve everything that was true, the true kernel of all of those previous schools of thought. And it was in this process that Hegel found, the process of knowledge in other words, that Hegel found the key to his system. Now according to him, the process of knowledge, through this process of knowledge, through countless trials and errors, generation after generation, the human mind is molded by the objective laws of our reality. And therefore, Hegel believed that the scientific study of thought in itself, of thoughts and ideas in themselves, can give us an insight into the laws of nature as such. And this is a discovery that set Hegel apart from all of his contemporaries and the vast majority of philosophers who came before him. You see, up until Hegel's time, one of the main weaknesses of all of philosophy had been that most schools of thought put forward a very rigid and unbridgeable gap between the objective world out there, everything we see and can touch and so on and sense. And the thoughts inside of our minds is what they call the so-called subject and object problem. How can thinking understand the world? How can the world connect to our thoughts and so on? But according to Hegel, this was a false way of dividing things up. This is an absolutely false division. According to him, there's only one world that exists. And this world exists objectively and independently of any one single individual and their thoughts. Human beings and our thoughts, according to him, are just a part of this objective world. And therefore, we are capable of understanding its inner workings, so to say. Of course, for Hegel, this is not a material world. Rather, it's a world of what he calls the absolute idea about what your angles once said. He said absolutely nothing about this absolute idea. This is not the, well, I mean, from what you can derive, this is not the ideas of any particular person, but a form of independently existing world spirit which permeates everything and which gives rise to all of reality. And on this basis, yes, Hegel was a philosophical idealist, i.e., for him, ideas are the primary element of the world. And all idealism in the last instance leads to religion. And Hegel was a deeply religious person. In fact, he tried to prove Christianity by way of his philosophy. But nevertheless, his form of idealism was far more advanced than any other form of idealism. And in fact, any other philosophy of his time, precisely because it was an absolute form of idealism, which means that he recognized only one single reality which exists objectively and independently of human beings. Now, this was nothing short of a revolution, really, because contrary to most of the philosophy of his time, which were often basically stale mechanistic kind of doctrines which were conjured up and kind of dragged over the world, Hegel believed that true ideas and a true philosophy could not be conjured up, could not just be imagined, but it had to be discovered by way of patient and systematic investigation into the workings of thought itself. Now, he starts this investigation on a very, very simple basis of pure being, he calls it. He says, if we have to find out where to start, we have to say, what is it that we can attribute to everything? Well, that must be being. And the most general kind of elementary form of being can only be pure being, a being which is not defined in any way, which is not determined, it's not, it doesn't have any outer limiting, we can't say, you know, this chair or that thing because that would exclude other things, essentially. So we can't put any limitations on it. It has to be pure being. And if we try to think about it, such a being does not exist. There's no such thing as pure being. Nothing exists without determinations, without boundaries, without being divided from other things. And therefore, in this pure shape, being becomes nothing because there's nothing that kind of distinguishes this form of being from nothing. There's actually nothing we can attribute it to. But this is not just some empty form of nothingness, we can definitely say that it's not pure being. And therefore, what you have, just to cut it very short, what you have is pure being becoming nothing and nothing becoming a pure being again. And here you have, therefore, a new category of becoming, of change, essentially, which encompasses both of these categories of being and nothing in itself. And what Hegel is trying to paint here is the fundamental principles of dialectics. The fact that the process of change and becoming is at the basis for all real being. That all phenomena taken to the logical conclusion will eventually turn into their opposite. Whether we talk about galaxies or stars or planets or life, things come into being and as soon as they do so, they start to pass away. And once they pass away, another process starts for other things to come into being. The constant change and the rise and fall of phenomena, in other words, is the fundamental mode of existence of all of reality. Everything changes. Everything comes into being and passes away. But this is not something that's imposed from outside. There's nothing making things, so to say, come into being and pass away, but rather is driven by its own internal contradiction. Just like we could see, just the thought of pure being inevitably impels us towards nothing. Therefore, the seeds of destruction is present in all creation and vice versa. Death is inherent to life. And life, of course, is a result of dead elements, which is the majority of nature. However, this change is not a gradual change necessarily. What we have, in other words, are periods of accumulation of contradictions, which at a certain point give way to a rapid acceleration and a qualitative change. When we have a fetus grows very steadily and slowly for nine months in the womb, and then at some point, it has to come out. And the other way, you're gonna have a long period of a declining health, but at a certain stage, death comes and hits rapidly. If you look at society, you can have long periods of accumulation of rage and anger due to the undermining of the living conditions of ordinary people, and nothing seems to happen on the surface. Everyone thinks, ah, people are too selfish. They don't wanna do anything. And suddenly, you can have a situation like we see in Sudan today, three years of nothing happening, and one kind of change makes the whole thing explode. Any other revolution essentially is driven by the same fundamental principles. Now, these are not the explicit conclusions that Hegel drew, but it's not difficult to see the enormous revolutionary implications that his ideas could have. Now, these principles that Hegel developed, he did so on the basis, as I said, on a systematic investigation of the laws of scientific thinking, which for him reflects the laws of the world as such. And in fact, according to him, this mode of thinking, this mode of investigation, it comes very naturally and instinctively to all human beings. But just like before when we talked about the progress, in philosophy, both today and at his time, there are those who object very vehemently against these ideas of Hegel. According to the empiricist school, which at that time was a very primitive form of materialism which existed at Hegel's time. Today, we have a depositivist who are also a form of empiricist. Now, they say that there's no point in such investigations. They believed, and they believe essentially today, that truth can only come about via sense experience. In other words, in observing the world. And that might be true to a certain point, but however, they also maintain that there's nothing beyond the immediate appearance of the things that we see. And therefore, an investigation into the world is not gonna lead us to any form of more general notions about the reality that we live in. And the famous example of this is that if we see a million white swans, we cannot deduce on that basis that the next one we see is also gonna be white. Of course, apparently there are some black swans in Australia, but they say that we cannot, there's no lawfulness in nature. There's no general underlying currents of forming nature as we know it. And therefore, we better leave it alone. Of course, Hegel then objects and says, well, if that's the case, then we cannot utter a single word because every single word that we use is a generalization. I say me, there's a generalization of myself, not the person I am right here at this moment, but me as I've always been and developed up until now and probably into the future. And even if we say a swan, we don't refer to any particular swan, we refer to the concepts of swans, whether they're black or white. And we have a certain notion of the lawfulness of what that entails, and we expect that to be the same in other phenomenons that we see and recognize as swans. In our daily lives, everywhere we go and everything we see, we meet an infinite amount of phenomena. Every single moment. And whether we want it or not, at every single point, our minds are hard at work trying to understand the fundamental principles behind these things, the deeper nature and the causes of the things that we see. Even the most banal things you can say about making food. You need to have a basic understanding of a general properties of the ingredients you put in, whether it's carrots or whatever, salt, and how much of what you should put in or not, in order to benefit our aims, in other words. And the bigger our aims, the more important it is to understand the universal principles which underlie our world. When we start our investigation into this world, things just seem very, appear just very immediate. This is this, this is this, this is a computer. That's Jack, that's the window, that's the moon. But if you think about it, that's not a sufficient explanation. If you really think about any of these things, it's not really sufficient to give us an understanding of what this entailed. Jack is different from all other human beings. And furthermore, he and every other human being are in a state of constant change and flux. Every single moment, his body, his mind is constantly interacting with the environment around him. And none of these instances, these infinite instances of human beings, in and of themselves, can tell us much about, in isolation, can tell us much about what a human being is. So therefore, we realize, and Hegel leads us to that, that what is immediately there is not the whole truth. And we are spurred forward, so to say, to find a deeper form of truth. And try to find out what is then the common thing which goes through every single instance of human beings, for instance, I meet. These billions and billions of billions of human beings which have lived on this earth, come into being and passed away, what's the common thing that persists in every single one of them? According to Hegel, here we enter the sphere of essence. Now, what do we mean by essence? Are we talking about some magical potion that can be extracted from people, something existing independently, like a soul that's then implemented into other things? Well, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato was of this opinion, according to him, there was a realm different than our realm, more real than our realm, in which there were these archetypes, these universal archetypes or ideas, as he called them, of different phenomena. There would be something for a human and a table and all of these things that we have general words for. And then the individual phenomena that we meet in our lives today would just be crude, bad carbon copies, essentially, of these archetypes. But then, this is a very problematic thing because how can you account, how can one archetypal human account for all of these different human beings? Or all of the instances of the lives of these, would there be an archetype for a one minute old baby and a one minute and one second old baby and a one year and one minute and one year? You can go on and on. There will be a very crowded kind of other worlds, so to say. And would there be archetypal forms for Aristotle and Socrates and Jack and every other human being that's ever existed? Sorry, he can take it, don't worry. He's got the thick skin. Well, the fact is that as we investigate nature, we cannot see any trace of such universals interfering in it. In fact, in every phenomenon that science has investigated, the explanation of it has come on its own account. Biology today is fully capable of explaining to a large extent the mechanisms that go into forming a human being from the first cell divisions to an adult human being and even right up until their death. And we can see that the basis for human development is not some outer force that's interfering and kind of molding us, but it's the inner contradictions of the cells in the body, the human beings and human society itself that forms us biologically, socially, and so on. And it's this constant interplay with the environment and with itself that every phenomenon basically develops, comes into being, and goes out of it. So what we and Hegel call essence, in other words, is merely the sum total of the relations of different phenomena in their interaction, which then give rise to simple principles. In other words, laws which determine the development of different things, the hydrogen atom, for instance, due to its composition, has a positive charge. The oxygen atom has a negative charge, more or less twice the strength of the hydrogen, and therefore, two hydrogen atoms can bond with one oxygen atom to form a water molecule. The law of water in this manner is not something superimposed, but it's the result of the inner contradictions of the atoms themselves. The essence of phenomena, in other words, is not something separate from them, but it's a part of them and is a sum total of their relations. And the laws which come out of this, the principles behind the development of these contradictions, those are the laws that philosophy must set itself about to uncover at the most general level. However, of course, there's a problem here, as I explained before, Hegel is an idealist. For him, all of these things are a reflection in the final analysis of this world spirit, the absolute idea that is essentially God, which underlies the whole of our reality, the reality that we experience. The problem is that Hegel here falls in the same trap as the people that he was criticizing. This man who is so opposed to schematicism of dragging something on top of reality has essentially created the biggest and most convoluted schema of them all. But if we look at the nature of reality, where is this world spirit? Where is any trace of this world spirit or of this absolute idea? There's nowhere to be seen. And the problem, of course, is that Hegel actually anticipated the greatest revolutions in science that took place in the 19th century, all of which would show that dialectics are not the laws of some mystical element, the mystical creature, but the essential laws of nature itself. Yes, and that is, sorry, yeah. And that is the fundamental difference between Marxism and Hegelianism, that we are philosophical materialists, which means that for us, there's only one world, and in that we absolutely agree with Hegel, but this is not the world of God or spirit or idea, this is the sensible material world that we live in and we experience everything. In other words, it's nature, and there's nothing beyond this nature. In other words, nature is absolute, and nature is fundamentally lawful in itself, whereas for Hegel, objective ideas, ideas where the formative principles of nature, we believe that nature is in itself self-organizing. Human beings are material beings, and our thoughts and our ideas are just reflections of the material world that we engage with and that we interact with. The task of philosophy for Marxist is not to conjure up a schema or a law of reality and then drag it kind of extrapolated on top of it, but it's to uncover these laws by investigating nature and society as itself with an uncompromising materialist outlook. And in this sense, we can say that that philosophy really ends with Hegel and that Marxism, which picks up from where Hegel left, is not a philosophy in the classical sense of it. It's not a fixed schema, it's not a good idea or a genius idea or educated guess that we try to drag on to the world. It's a method of viewing the world and our society and a tool to discover its inner lawfulness in order to assist humanity in reaching the goals and aims that it set itself. But it doesn't mean that we discard Hegel, we just throw him out into the dustbin and say, oh, it doesn't matter, he got it all wrong. Or the many, many great philosophers who came before him. We don't claim that we somehow found this magical formula that will just happen to be lost and that no one just happened to think of it until Marx and Engels did for thousands of years. And just like Hegel, we don't see the rise and fall of ideas, the history of ideas as a random process. But we see it as a continuous process generation upon generation, moving from lower to higher forms of thought in a progressive approximation to the truth about the laws of nature and the world that we live in. We see Marxism as an expression of the condensed experience of the whole of mankind itself. And we put ourselves emphatically after a long line of thinkers going from the ancient Greeks, Socrates, Aristotle, the French materialists, Hegel, and so on. All of these, they form our heritage. And while we're not blind to the shortcomings, we must defend them and the treasure trove of ideas that they left us from all of these attacks that we see in academia coming from the defenders of the established order, so to say, as a means to promote ignorance and regression. I'll end it there. Thank you very much. Thank you.