 Good day, it's Professor Resnick again. Today I want to talk about the Hegelian logic. Hegel was a famous German philosopher. He was important in Marx's day, and he was one of the major philosophical figures of any day, not just Marx's day. And his contribution to Marxian theory is in the form of a causal logic, namely how entities exist. And as I told you a long time ago, we're calling this notion of dialectics, which Hegel gave to Marxism and to other studies, over determination. So the question here is to get right to it, how does class connect to non-class? That's the lesson here, using this Hegelian logic. So I'm going to begin right away with this. And you have to keep in mind now what we're going to be doing and what I'm doing is a mental exercise. It's a mental experiment. Suppose we begin our thinking, our theorizing of society with the idea of class. I've mentioned to you many, many times that this is the particular entry point that Marx provides as the way he begins to organize his theory, his understanding of life. And again, class means the extraction of surplus labor to go back to the first thing that we talked about. So that's the entry point of Marxism, the notion of class in terms of the extraction of surplus labor. In Hegel's term, this initial idea is called a thesis. It's very, very important where we begin our theorization, this thesis, the entry point, the way we begin to understand life, a thesis. If we do not say anything else about class, about this thesis, we just stop. We don't say anything else. In other words, if we do not connect this idea, this initial idea of class to any other ideas, then the notion of class is empty of meaning. So in order for something to take on meaning to concreteness, we have to connect that initial idea, that entry point of class, to everything else. Let's use another term to non-class ideas. So we have the following. The initial idea, the thesis of class, is very important, it's where we start. But until we connect non-class, I'm sorry, until we connect it to non-class, then that initial thesis, that initial idea is empty of content. So we have something that is one at the same time important where we begin, and something which is really non-important at the same moment until we connect it to non-class. We have that contradiction. For Hegel and for Marx, the synthesis of these two ideas, that is the connection between class and non-class, creates the meaning for both terms. In fact, the connection of class and non-class, the synthesis of the two, is the Marxian theory of society. You need both in order to have a concrete specific meaning for each of them. Let me go back to Mr. Hegel. For Hegel, the highest abstraction was the notion of being, B-E-I-N-G. And by abstraction was meant, you consider the idea of being itself independently or abstracting from anything else. Being refers only to the is-ness of something, high is-ness to make up a word. Let me take an example of this. You can see this lectern in front of me. This thing is brown. It's wood. It's a holder of my notes. It's roughly about 3 and 1 1⁄4 pounds. It belongs to the university. They purchased it. It's made up of particles, or you can't see them. That's what it's made up there, and it goes on and on and on. Suppose now in this example, suppose we abstract from all these different qualitative and quantitative determinations that I just presented. So what we're left with, as we begin abstractly in our mind, to erase all of these determinations. So we take away woodness. We take away brown. We take away holder of notes. We take away the particles. That's a university property. We erase all of those things. You can have a mental eraser. We erase them all. What we're left with is lectern is. That's the most abstract idea. It's possible. And that idea, after we've erased all of its qualitative and quantitative determinations, is featureless. Why? Because we have erased all of its quantitative and qualitative dimensions. So the notion of lectern, how do we jump? The notion of class is empty of meaning and content if we abstract from all the non-lectern, non-class features of each. Let's use a term that we defined before. If we take away its conditions of existence, then we are left with something which is lifeless, which has no meaning. So for each, the lectern of a class, to take on meaning, it must be connected to or related to that which it's not. That's one of the great contributions of Mr. Hegel. Let's apply this right away to traditional epistemology. Despite the fact we're finished with it, it's a good lesson. Let's consider reality or experience and thinking. So we're going to juxtapose, again, thinking and experience the two aspects of the world. Life, materiality, experience, stripped of thinking is empty. It's like the lectern if we strip away for all of its determinations. So facts or experiences are meaningless if one abstracts from thought. Why? Because thoughts help to create facts for us. That was acclaimed by Mr. Lennon, great revolutionary thinker. So reality or facts exists for us, but they only exist for us when our particular thinking comes into play. Otherwise, those facts are meaningless. Then we can ask the key question which Lennon asked. Whose thinking tells us whose facts? So Lennon wanted to produce a new set of Marxian facts, notice the adjective, for Russia, by connecting its agricultural life to a new Marxian idea, which was the class structure of Russia at the time. That would be a new set of facts that people would have to then confront using that particular kind of thought concrete that Lennon produced with that entry point of the class structure of Russia. That's the same thing with thinking. It only exists for us when our experiences come into play. And we can ask the same question we just asked of thinking, I mean of experience. And the question for thinking is, whose experiences? Workers have different experiences than do capitalists. Why? Because workers are exploited and capitalists are the exploiters. So the answer to that question tells us about whose thinking is at play. In other words, thinking the way we think, how we think, what we think about, are always relative to one's different experiences, including one's class experiences. So from a dialectical perspective, thought alone is empty as is experience. Each needs the other to take on meaning they have to be put into a relationship with one another. And that's a very different approach than rationalism and empiricism, which are basically essentialists to their thinking, which argues that each of them alone can be an ultimate cause of knowledge. And what we've just argued here from the Hegelian perspective, that's an impossibility. Because if you take them alone, they're empty of meaning. They only exist in relationship to one another. By the way, just as a footnote in this, suppose you were impressed or intrigued or whatever with this Hegelian idea, this dialectic, nothing in life exists alone. And suppose Hegel said to you after he presented this to you in what is called his logic, suppose he said to you, this idea that I just presented, the dialectic, that everything is a both cause and effect is the truth. So he said, if you understand what I just did, which is the dialectic, you'll understand everything. Because everything in life is but a form, a reflection of this truth. So if you study music or philosophy or history, they are mere reflections of this underlying cause, which is the dialectic. So if you understand the dialectic, you've got the basic key to all knowledge. You've got the truth. At that particular moment, you could provide an interesting criticism of Mr. Hegel, because he's fallen into a rationalist epistemology, despite the fact he himself provided a critique of both rationalism and empiricism. So one has to be careful with this kind of thinking, not to turn one's thinking into the absolute truth, which I think is what precisely Mr. Hegel did. That's the end of this lecture.