Marx And Engels's Critical Study On The Mysticism Of Hegel's Dialectic

From the connotation of dialectics,dialectics was first presented in the form of dialectical spirit,including love,hate,nous and logos.From the etymology of dialectics,dialectics first existed as a tool of cognition,including Socrates’ "spiritual midwifery" and Plato ’ s method of positive and negative discourse.Later,the Neo-Platonist Plotinus proposed the "emanation theory" to overcome the contradiction between the unmoving dialectical spirit and the unchanging physical entity,which eventually fell into mysticism.Hegel’s "Idea" did not try to overcome the contradiction between the dialectical spirit and the physical entity,but gave the entity an innate dynamic,thus rigidifying the way the "Idea" moves and circulates,and finally mystifying the dialectic.The critique of the mystical aspects of Hegel’s dialectic that Marx refers to 30 years ago in his postscript to the second edition of Capital is taken from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law and the Holy Family.In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,Marx criticizes the false arguments resulting from the mystical approach of Hegel ’ s philosophy of law from an epistemological point of view.Marx ’ s methodological criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of law has four main points: First,Hegel equates himself with Jehovah.Second,Hegel treats "the idea and spirit of reality" as the essence and the cause,and the essence of spirituality is idealism,while the cause of spirituality is mysticism,thus giving his theory the character of theological determinism;third,logic does not provide a logical tool to explain the necessity of the connection of things and the necessity of their evolution,but uses Fourth,it blurs the difference between the general and the particular and the historical difference between concepts,thus equating the particular with the general and the present with the past,and all the reasoning is agreed to be repeated,which makes the dialectic lose its revolutionary nature.The merit of Hegel’s philosophy lies in revealing the process of thought renouncing itself,but he turned this process into a method of knowing that can be universally applied,and eventually fell into the rut of religious mysticism.Marx pointed out in The Holy Family that what general discursive philosophy does is merely to abstract individual things into general ideas,and to apply logic mystically to general ideas,thus concocting mysterious connections between sensible things.Marx’s critique of the mysticism of the "Holy Family" philosophy of thought is threefold.First,Powell’s equation of it with Jesus;second,the simple application of Hegelian logic;third,the method of cutting differences in reality to create ideas as the essence of things is not useful for understanding things;and fourth,the evolution of ideas as the cause of differences and changes in reality is harmful for discovering the true essence of things.The analysis of Marx ’ s letters and works related to dialectics leads to the following conclusions.First,dialectics is a narrative method of organizing materials;second,the method of raising abstraction to concrete,the unification of history and logic,and the method of criticism and revolution do not involve the essence of dialectics,but are characteristic of dialectics as a scientific method;third,Marx does use Hegelian dialectics,but only the general form of Hegelian dialectics,and in addition to this general form gives the narrated elements with empiricist intelligibility and conceptualanalytical necessity.From the correspondence between Marx and Engels,it is clear that Marx and Engels agree more than they disagree on dialectics,and that Marx’s dialectics can be understood with the help of Engels’ work.In Engels’ view,Marx’s dialectics mainly contains three major laws of transformation of quantity and quality,unity of opposites and negation of negation.These three laws are not the dogma of formal logic,which deduces "money becomes capital" not by "quantitative change causes qualitative change",but by means of the categories of quality,quantity,opposition,unity and negation,and by means of the inherent connection between the elements of things concerning these categories.The new understanding of the original thing is formed by regrouping things according to the inherent connections between the elements of the thing and these categories.In this way there is nothing mysterious or incomprehensible about the dialectic.In general,Dialectic of Reasonable Forms has three crucial functions.First,the function of creation of concepts,forming concepts based on such categories as quantity,quality,opposition,unity and negation.Second,the retrospective function of the concept,the analysis of the concept,and in the word add the empirical provisions of the categories of quantity,quality,opposition,unity and negation,so that the original concept to get new content.Third,the inference function of the concept.It is the transition to a new concept based on the change of the internal relations of the concept,thus realizing the change of the concept.Dialectics is a method that uses such categories as quantity,quality,opposition,unity and negation to give new and specific regulations to things in the narrative and to reveal the changes in the concept of things.