Maoist Reading of Hegel - Button

Negativity and Dialectical Materialism: Zhang Shiying's Readingof Hegel's Dialectical LogicButton, Peter.

Philosophy East and West, Volume 57, Number 1, January 2007, pp. 63-82(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i PressDOI: 10.1353/pew.2007.0002

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NEGATIVITY AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM: ZHANG

SHIYINGS READING OF HEGELS DIALECTICAL LOGIC

Peter Button

Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University

Looking back on the intensity of the hostilities of the Cold War period, it comes

as little surprise that Western descriptions of dialectical materialism in China make

it appear to be an over-elaborate Potemkin edifice, suggesting that what from one

narrow perspective seemed to tower fantastically as the mightiest of philosophical

systems was upon minimal closer inspection entirely bereft of actual intellectual

content. The oscillation one senses in the academic rhetoricespecially in China

studieswhen it came to dialectical materialism, with visions of it as a totalized

ideological system followed by claims of its utter vacuity, probably should have

given more readers pause. Chinese dialectical materialism has been dismissed as ir-

relevant and philosophically meaninglessoccasionally in surprising fashion. Pon-

dering the relation between writings on dialectical materialism in China in the 1930s

and the overall political situation, one author of a book-length study of Chinese dia-

lectical materialism offers the following assessment:

The political situation does not form the background of the [Chinese essay on dialectical

materialism], in which the philosophical drama is played out as if in a theatre, but the

political conflict is the real content of the philosophical discussion.

The political conflict determines every philosophical statement, the relationships be-

tween the respective concepts, and indeed the time of publication.

Every development that brought about a change in the political conflict has the result

to bring about a change in the relationships between the respective philosophical con-

cepts.

Conversely, every change in the relationship between the philosophical concepts

signals forthcoming changes, or changes that have already taken place, in real political

conflicts.

Because of these reciprocal functions, none of the philosophical concepts used can

possess any intellectual content. Indeed, they are absolutely empty.

If the concepts possess no intellectual content, then they are also interchangeable. If

they are empty and interchangeable, they are no longer philosophical concepts.1

One of the many conclusions that one might draw from such withering charges

is that Chinese leftist thinkers did not merely suffer from an inadequate, partial, and

limited theoretical grasp of the protracted and bloody national struggle between

the Nationalists (KMT) and the Communists (CCP) that began in earnest in 1927

and continued almost unabated until the defeat of the former in 1949. In fact, in their

profligate appropriation of Soviet dialectical materialism terminology, they un-

wittingly deprived themselves of any capacity for theoretical reflection whatsoever.

As one of the major premises of the book just quoted is that the imported dialectical

Philosophy East & West Volume 57, Number 1 January 2007 6382

> 2007 by University of Hawaii Press63

materialism philosophy was empty to begin with and hence dead upon its arrival

in China,2 Chinese discussions of it were somehow absolutely empty. As such,

Chinese leftist political actionunder such circumstances, one could hardly call it

praxiswould seem to have been guided either by a thoroughly repressed/mystified

theoretical faculty that somehow operated in virtual independence of its possessor,

or by none at all. As the example of Zhang Shiyings work will clearly show, such a

judgment is mistaken.3

The author then goes on to install the exclusion of Chinese minds from what is

clearly co-figured4 as the (Western) philosophical tradition on the level of language.

Repeating late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, largely German, claims

about the inability of the Chinese language, because of is unique constitution, to

serve as a medium for modern natural science and philosophy, the author claims

that, as such, the original Western philosophical concepts could never be properly

translated into Chinese. Hence, the proliferation of terms such as bianzhengfa, (dia-

lectics), zhexue (philosophy), xingshi luoji (formal logic), et cetera in China could

never reflect any actual philosophical content. Rather these terms remained, for Chi-

nese, inadequately understood symbols. Thus, at the end of the book, the author

provides a neatly arranged chart of these symbols aligned in one column next

to another indicating their actual referents. For example, xingshi luoji (formal logic)

is a symbol for the Nationalist Party, while bianzheng luoji (dialectical logic) is a

symbol for the Communist Party.5 These Chinese terms cannot signify anything of

genuine philosophical content since they are not actual words, but rather symbols

for what were originally empty formulae in Soviet dialectical materialism.6 The

irony is that had the author acquired this bit of linguistic/philosophical wisdom di-

rectly through an encounter with Hegels Science of Logic, the terms of Chinese dia-

lectical materialism might have appeared a good deal less symbolic and empty. It

was, after all, this work that claimed the inadequacy of the Chinese language for

the purposes of expressing conceptual and speculative thought, though on the basis

of hearsay, it should be noted, since Hegel did not count the mastery of the Chinese

language among his numerous accomplishments.7

Indeed, the failure to treat Chinese dialectical materialism with an appropriate

measure of rigor is largely the result of the failure to engage the Hegelian dimensions

of dialectical materialism. The origin of this neglect has much to do with the author-

itative status granted to Jesuit scholar Gustav Wetters discussion of Soviet philoso-

phy in his Dialectical Materialism.8 I would argue that the problem lay less with the

obviously partisan nature of Wetters analysis than with the failure in sinological

circles to grasp the real significance of Wetters work. Wetter had written in his

preface that owing to the Hegelian terminology of dialectical materialism, a com-

pressed account of this sort can leave the reader with the impression of something

deeper lurking beneath the individual formulae of this philosophy. Only [with] a

more thorough examination of the philosophical attitudes and arguments pro-

pounded in Soviet dialectical materialism does it become evident that this is not

the case.9 Sinological accounts of dialectical materialism sometimes misconstrued

this claim to mean that, on the whole, dialectical materialism lacked philosophical

64 Philosophy East & West

content. Worse, it assumed that the terminological references to Hegel were little

more than window dressing for a theoretically bankrupt and totalitarian ideology

masquerading as philosophy.

In the summer of 1945, Wetter delivered a series of lectures at the Papal Oriental

Institute on the subject of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union. These lectures

became the basis for Wetters six-hundred-page, self-styled intellectual show-

down (geistige Auseinadersetzung) with Soviet dialectical materialist philosophy.

Rather than simply announce his own intellectual stance at the outset as in fact theo-

logically allied with the Vaticans hostility to communism, Wetter at first deflects at-

tention away from his own position.10 He faults his Soviet philosophical adversaries

for their dogmatic refusal to treat the dispute with strict objectivity in presentation of

the opposing view-point.11 Wetter finds a temporary placeholder for his own as yet

unannounced theological position in the bourgeois philosophy he accuses his So-

viet interlocutors of falsely claiming to take seriously. From the more purely secular-

humanist point of view, Wetters academic training in Western philosophy could

lend his analysis clear authority, allowing for the possibility of a dialogue of sorts

with Soviet philosophical positions. On a theological level, however, the simple

matter of faith might seem to exclude the possibility of any meaningful exchange.

For extremely compelling reasons of doctrine, this confrontation must nonetheless

take place, both as philosophy and as theology. In other words, Wetter well under-

stood that the relationship between philosophy and religion was precisely what was

at stake. Of Soviet philosophy, Wetter writes:

And that of all the historical forms of Christianity it should prove to be Catholicism which

exhibits the largest number of formal similarities with Bolshevism, albeit with the signs

reversed, is perhaps an indication that, on the other side, the opposition between Bolshe-

vism and the Catholic Church is also the most radical of all.12

What is more profoundly at stake in the deep affinities Wetter asserts between

Bolshevism (as a form of Marxism) and Catholicism (as a form of Christianity) is

not finally clear if we remain fixed in our understanding (in Hegels sense of Ver-

stand ) of this confrontation as a Cold War battle between the Catholic Church and

godless Communism.13 The repeated references to a true dialectic, which Wetter

claims is almost entirely absent in Soviet dialectical materialisma charge often un-

critically rehearsed in sinological studies of Chinese dialectical materialismoffer a

clue to the ultimate object of Wetters critique, namely Hegel. At the heart of the

contradiction between the Catholic faith and Soviet dialectical materialism for Wet-

ter is this true dialectic, or, as I will show below, negativity.14 Wetter embraces the

true dialectic not out of any commitment to Hegels philosophical project, but pre-

cisely because Hegels speculative dialectic seems to treat what is in essence reli-

gious experience. In a passage to which sinological analysts of dialectical material-

ism in China should have paid more heed, Wetter writes:

It is of much importance, therefore, that dialectical materialism has again served to make

the world picture somewhat less clear and simple, andin theory and principle, at least,

though not in actual facthas reopened an approach to the deeper aspect of things. De-

Peter Button 65

spite its campaign against any sort of mysticism, dialectical materialism, with its doc-

trine of the contradictions in the world, has restored to its adherents a feeling for the

paradox and mystery of the world and has thereby prepared a ground for the revival of

a truly philosophical sense of wonder.15

To the degree that these words genuinely characterize what Wetter found in his

lengthy study of Soviet dialectical materialism, they would likewise characterize

what one finds in Chinese dialectical materialist readings of especially Hegels

work on logic. Wetters grudging concession to Soviet philosophy suggests that a

thoroughgoing Sovietand by implication red Chineseindoctrination in dialec-

tical materialism has at least the unintended benefit of inculcating in the indoctri-

nated a sense of wonder that the rigorous distinction between faith and knowl-

edge in highly secular, liberal democratic Western societies does not allow for. For

Wetter, it is dialectical materialisms very struggle against mysticism that preserves

the possibility of the truly philosophical as the theological, though with the signs

reversed.

Derrida, in Glas, quotes Ludwig Feuerbach on the question of how to under-

stand the way Hegels work repositions philosophy and religion with respect to one

another:

Thus, already in the most central principle of Hegels philosophy we come across

the principle and the result of his philosophy of religion to the effect that philosophy,

far from abolishing the dogmas of theology, only restores and mediates them through

the negation of rationalism. The secret of Hegels dialectic ultimately lies in this alone,

that it negates theology through philosophy in order then to negate philosophy through

theology.16

Feuerbachs conclusion was that Hegel simply substitutes philosophical idealism for

religion. But as this quote suggests, the Hegelian dimensions of dialectical material-

ism engender a certain undecidability between the philosophical and the theological

that helps us account for that element of ambiguity in Wetters conclusions about

Soviet philosophy.

In short, it is far from a simple Cold War opposition between atheism and reli-

gious faith. Rather, on the one hand, there is the Feuerbachian-Marxist impulse to

reappropriate the powers of the divine that the human alienates from itself to the

God of its own creation. On the other, from Wetters perspective, dialectical materi-

alisms rejection of popular mechanistic materialism allows for the possibility of

giving to theology a properly modern philosophical investment. The question is

whether the true [speculative] dialectic can really become the preserve of human

reason, as Hegel argues, or whether the enlightenment humanist presumptive claim

to the Absolute in its twentieth-century dialectical materialist form is doomed to fail-

ure, as Wetter claims. In what follows, I offer a preliminary examination of how this

problem is negotiated in Zhang Shiyings dialectical materialist readings of Hegels

logic.

As Judith Butler notes in Subjects of Desire, the strong interest in Hegel in France

in the late 1940s emerged out of the carnage of the Second World War. Butler


writes: The destruction of institutions and ways of life, the mass annihilation and

sacrifice of human life, revealed the contingency of existence in brutal and indisput-

able terms.17 Butler goes on to quote Simone de Beauvoir, whose interest in Hegel

arose from an acute sense of the burden of history: we had discovered the reality

and weight of history; now we were wondering about its meaning.18 The notion

that the reality of history might possess some uniform meaning does distinguish this

quote from a more familiar postmodern sensibility about history. Nonetheless, in the

1940s, when He Lin first began his Chinese translation of the Encyclopedia Logic

(i.e., Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, part 1, Logic), the global

extent of those destructive forces awakened a very similar sentiment in Asia con-

cerning the nature of history and the human, and the possibility that a study of

Hegels dialectical logic might shed significant light on each.

The conclusion of the Second World War intensified the civil war between the

Communists and Nationalists, deepening the Chinese Communist Partys philosoph-

ical commitment to dialectical materialism. After the victory of the CCP in 1949, it

was well understood that the centrality of the dialectic to Chinese Marxist-Leninism

warranted further investigation. The translation and study of Hegels Encyclopedia

Logic was motivated by a desire to understand the precise nature of dialectical mate-

rialisms debt to Hegel. That the connections between the two clearly existed did

very little to clarify their exact nature. This task of working out the filiations between

Hegel and dialectical materialism was one fraught with clear political risks, given the

highly ambivalent status of Hegelian philosophy in China as both (negatively) the

crowning achievement of German idealism and (positively) the most vital source of

the dialectic for Marxism. This profound ambivalence is a characteristic rhetorical fea-

ture of Lenins enthusiastic reading of Hegels Science of Logic in his Philosophical

Notebooks, a text that was well known to Chinese and that offered abundant evidence

that a study of Hegels works on logic would help to enrich dialectical materialism.19

My reading of Zhang Shiyings work on Hegels logic is informed in part by a

desire to understand better the process by which the concept of negation gradually

loses its immediate association with the destruction of the actual, and instead comes

to be viewed as the very source of the creative.20 Zhang Shiying is preoccupied first

and foremost with a reading of both the longer Science of Logic and the shorter En-

cyclopedia Logic, which emphasizes the unique qualities of dialectical thought. I

want to show how Zhangs emphasis tends to highlight precisely those elements of

Hegels dialectical logic that can best be understood in light of Diane Cooles recent

study of a generative notion of negativity in Hegel. In other words, Zhang explores

Hegels logic from the perspective of the workings of negativity in the speculative

dialectic, precisely because the speculative seems to offer a means to escape the

dead and empty abstractions of idealist philosophy. Zhangs reading of Hegel is

clearly fraught with the political circumstances of the time, because of which any

filiation between the Hegelian dialectic and its Marxist successor could take place

only under the figure of the Aufhebung. As is well known, Hegels offerings to dia-

lectical materialism had to be shorn of their mystical trappings, preserving their ra-

tional kernel.21 Yet doing so was by no means a simple task.

Peter Button 67

Zhangs analysis focuses on the more lawful negation of the negation in a man-

ner that would lend the speculative dialectic for Chinese Marxism a legitimately

arrived at provenance. At the same time, it does so precisely in a way that would

allow negativity to manifest itself within the reified presentation of the dialectic that

so often characterizes discussions of the negation of the negation. Zhang clearly felt

that the failure to provide an adequate account of the role of negativity in the Hege-

lian dialectic could undermine its creative, revolutionary power.

Zhangs analysis at times brings him perilously close to moments in Hegels

works on logic that threaten to infect that analysis with what in late-1950s China

could easily have been conceived as the politically disastrous taint of idealism or

even mysticism. To provide but one initial example, Zhangs procedure will in-

volve carefully negotiating his way through claims such as the following in the Ency-

clopedia Logic. In the first paragraph devoted to the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel

describes the difference between the mere negative result of abstracting all determi-

nate predicates, and negativity, as such:

The negative action of withdrawal or abstraction thus falls outside of the Essencewhich

is thus left as a mere result apart from its premisesthe caput mortuum22 of abstraction.

But as this negativity, instead of being external to Being, is its own dialectic, the truth of

the latter, viz. Essence, will be Being as retired within itselfimmanent Being.23

In the oral additions (Zusatze) that follow the paragraph from the main body of the

text, Hegel further elucidates what has been stated above:

To . . . treat God merely as the supreme other-world Being, implies that we look upon

the world before us in its immediacy as something permanent and positive, and forget

that true Being is just the superseding of all that is immediate. If God be the abstract

supersensible Being, outside whom therefore lies all difference and all specific character,

he is only a bare name, a mere caput mortuum of abstracting understanding. The true

knowledge of God begins when we know that things, as they immediately are, have no

truth.24

In these Zusatze, the example of God as a merely abstract supersensible being (the

view Hegel argues that is adopted by the modern enlightenment) stands for the

flawed view of Essence as the mere caput mortuum of abstraction. The Absolute

as Essence is not some empty abstraction devoid of all predicates.25 Rather the truth

of Essence is its own dialectic contained within Being itself.

Zhangs analysis will be at pains to embrace everything in the passage above,

save, of course, the appeal to true knowledge of God. In his discussion of the ne-

gation of the negation in Hegels logic, Zhang clearly affirms that true Being

(Wesen) is just the superseding of all that is immediate.26 Further, the principle of

negativity that Zhang carefully shows enables dialectical mediation to relieve all

positivities of their immediacy, and permanence was a principle that was crucial to

understanding the revolutionary character of dialectical materialism for which the

positivity of bourgeois philosophy was the subject of repeated critique. Finally, the

complaint Hegel registers above with the abstracting understanding (abstrahier-


enden Verstand) is one that Zhang will return to repeatedly in his analysis of the

actual differences between formal logic and dialectical logic. Needless to say, Zhang

will attempt to distance his own dialectical materialist appropriation of Hegelian

negativity from the religious language in which it is so often couched in Hegels

logic. This problem speaks directly to the issue raised earlier about the relation be-

tween faith and knowledge, and Hegels desire to reconcile the two. If the Hegelian

dialectic points the way for the Chinese (or Soviet) dialectical materialist to some-

thing approximating this reconciliation, it is assuredly not for the sake of Christianity,

much less Catholicism, as such. Diane Coole argues that one must be sensitive to the

various stylistic strategies that Hegel adopts in his articulation of negativity. It is

precisely because a certain undecidability is at work in Hegels discussion of nega-

tivity that he can resonate so evocatively for both the modern Jesuit theologian and

the Chinese and Soviet dialectical materialist.

One of the major terms of Zhangs analysis of Hegel, as well as their connection

to the latters analyses of religion, is suggested in Derridas extraordinary reading of

Hegel in Glas:

They [the Jews] are preoccupied only with the invisible (the infinite subject is necessarily

invisible, insensible) but since they do not see the invisible, they remain in the same

stroke [du meme coup] riveted to the visible, to the stone that is only stone. . . . [T]hey

are incapable of seeing the invisible, of feeling the insensible, of feeling (such is the medi-

atizing, agglutinating function of feeling) the invisible in the visible, the insensible in the

sensible, of letting themselves be affected by their unity: love and beauty, the love of

beauty open to this unity of the sensible and the nonsensible, of the finite and the

infinite.27

The failure, Derrida notes, is the failure caused by the abstraction of Kantian under-

standing. For Hegel, in his Early Theological Writings, it is only with the emergence

of Christian love that it is possible to realize the dialectical unity of the infinite in the

finite, the supersensible in the sensible, and to realize the absolute, not in some ab-

stract, otherworldly form but rather within the very wealth of sensuous reality. The

development of Hegels thought from his early writings on religion through to his

later works on logic marks the gradual emergence of the conviction that the Notion

enables the rational comprehension of the infinite.28 Hyppolites lucid analysis in

Logic and Existence acknowledges the fraught relation between Hegel, Feuerbach,

and Marx, in a manner that speaks to much that is at stake in Zhangs relation to

Hegel:

Man reproduces and produces himself by increasing himself. He engenders his own his-

tory, and Hegel has laid the foundations of this philosophy of history. . . . Universal self-

consciousness is the realization, through the intermediary of the struggle for recognition,

of human species being, what we used to call the essence of man. It is clear that Marx

replaces the Hegelian absolute Idea with this species being, the essence of man.29

One of the inevitable consequences of Zhangs study of the dialectic in Hegels

logic was the unsettling effect that his own analysis of negativity would necessarily

Peter Button 69

introduce into his own analysis. The kind of Marxist humanism Hyppolite reads in

Marx, with its wholehearted embrace of what Hyppolite notes, with a certain mea-

sure of rhetorical distance, we used to call the essence of man is amply present in

Zhangs discourse. This Marxist humanism emerges alongside a recognition of the

very negativity that is much more akin to what Hyppolite, via Sartre, identifies in

Hegels conception of the human: Man is the being who is not what he is, and is

what he is not.30

Zhang Shiyings focus on Hegels dialectical logic keeps the thematic of life

continually in view. Such a focus emphasizes the figurative connections repeated

throughout both the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic between a histor-

ically prior formal logic and death, on the one hand, and dialectical logic and life,

on the other.31 Hegels very clear and consistent articulation of the difference be-

tween the understanding (Verstand, zhixing) and dialectical reason becomes central

to Zhang Shiyings effort to situate the dialectical logic within Chinese dialectical

materialist thought. Toward the end of his discussion of formal and dialectical logic

Zhang quotes an early passage from the larger Science of Logic, in which Hegel dis-

cusses the ambivalent bequeathing of the traditional material of earlier systems of

logic to his own project. I quote the passage in full:

[T]his traditional material, the familiar forms of [logical] thought, must be regarded as an

extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to

be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offered is only here and there a dry

threads or the lifeless bones of a skeleton.32

It is difficult to know why we should feel grateful for these dry threads and dead

bones, nor is it immediately clear how they are to serve as an important source of

Hegels own transformation/realization of traditional logic into/as speculative logic.

With a profoundly dialectical sense of ambivalence toward earlier systems of logic

that is a constant feature of Hegels elucidation of his own logic, we find one of

many references to the figure of the dead. Hegel, throughout his works on logic,

makes frequent reference to the dead as withered material remains, sundered irrevo-

cably from spirit.33 These remains, it often seems, are human, and they are used to

characterize the failure of thought to regard itself properlythat is, the failure of

thought to discover within itself the very principle that animates it. These remains

of the dead are offered as a figure of this failure, and yet at times it is difficult to avoid

the conclusion that the scattered bones are not a mere figure or metaphor of

thoughts failure. Rather, they sometimes appear to be a virtual consequence of that

failure, and as such serve as a skull-and-cross-bones warning. We must distinguish

between the dead, as material remains, and death as such. We know from the Phe-

nomenology of Spirit that we must overcome our revulsion in the face of death.

More disturbingly, we must in fact cling to it as non-actualitynot merely come

to grips with it, through a process Hegel describes (now famously, thanks to Zizeks

book of the same title) as tarrying with the negative:

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful,

and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest of strength. Powerless, beauty hates


the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of spirit is not the life

that shrinks from death and keeps itself pure of devastation, but rather the life that

endures it and maintains itself in it. . . . It is this power, not as something positive, which

closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false,

and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary,

spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, tarrying with it.34

The life of the spirit is always in the proximity of devastation and the work of

death and keeps itself close to it. The themes of life and death haunt Hegels logic

itself, which addresses them explicitly and at length. A philosophical work devoted

in part to the traditional forms of logical judgment is hardly a place where one would

expect to find reflections that combine a discussion of the forms of thought and the

organic decay of the body. The very process that sustains dialectical or speculative

logic and contradiction (and what Coole identifies as negativity) is the very one that

sustains life. With the end of the organisms contradiction comes the end of the

organism:

[L]iving being shows itself as large enough to embrace its other [inorganic nature] which

cannot withstand its power. The inorganic nature which is subdued by the vital agent suf-

fers this fate, because it is virtually the same as what life is actually. . . . But when the soul

has fled the body, the elementary powers of objectivity begin their play. These powers

are, as it were, continually on the spring, ready to begin their process in the organic

body, and life is the constant battle against them.35

Life itself, Hegel explains at the end of the Encyclopedia Logic, is the Idea, in its

immediacy. The form that follows this initial stage of immediacy and that brings the

Idea into mediation and difference is Cognition (Erkenntnis). The unity of the initial

immediate stage of the Idea is thereby enriched by difference.36 Of course, the

Idea does not stop there, since it must continue its course until it arrives at the Abso-

lute Idea. Zhang emphasizes the finitude of Cognition in terms of its failure to grasp

the object in its organic totality:

[O]nly dialectical thought can accurately reflect the [concrete object, juti de duixiang];

the thought forms of formal logic can only grasp one side [of the concrete object] in its

isolated, static, and separate state. Naturally, it is unable to know concrete object and the

entire complexity of the truth.37

Zhang draws on Hegels analogy of a chemist who breaks down a piece of

flesh into its constituent chemical elements nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen. Hegel

comments that there is truth in the assertion that flesh is composed of these elements,

but these abstract matters have ceased to be flesh.38 Zhangs point, however, is

that this process represents a necessary step, without which true knowledge would

not be possible. Zhangs task is thus twofold. On the one hand, he wants to

approach negativity from an analysis of the dialectical method. This part of his task

involves developing a deeper understanding of dialectics and its role in dialectical

materialism as a whole. At the same time, he wants to show that the manner in

which formal logic and dialectical logic had sometimes been posed in diametrical

Peter Button 71

opposition to one another merely repeats unwittingly the errors of the former. For a

dialectical materialist merely to reject formal logic in favor of dialectical logic is to

neglect the vital role that the understanding plays in bringing clarity to the object.

Zhang extends his analysis of this basic problem in a chapter titled Hegels

Theory in the Logic of the Difference between Formal Logic and Dialectical Logic.

Ultimately, Zhangs very careful reading of the differences Hegel reiterates through-

out both the larger Science of Logic and the lesser Encyclopedia Logic is meant

to address the claim made by some that Hegels dialectical logic fundamentally

denies the status of formal logic39 and that Hegels contribution on the subject ren-

ders formal logic meaningless. Zhang argues that in fact Hegels concept of dialecti-

cal logic presupposes formal logic. Though Hegel devotes a great deal of attention to

the limitations of formal logic, he consistently does so in terms that clearly indicate

its importance. Thus, for Zhang, what Hegel accomplishes is a very clear delineation

of the role of the understanding (zhixing, Verstand) in the process of applying the

categories of formal logic.

The either this or that (feici jibi)40 that characterizes formal logic is resolved

only through the concrete concept of dialectical logic, which reveals the actual tran-

sition between the this and the that, a transition that formal logic is powerless to

account for. From the perspective of formal logic, Zhang shows that the this and

the that are mutually exclusive and that an insurmountable gulf (honggou) sepa-

rates them. Zhang is careful to point out that this does not mean that Hegel rejects

the workings of formal logic. Rather, Zhang wants to show that the position of formal

logic that is served by the understanding is an essential element of the epistemo-

logical process (renshi de guocheng).41

Zhangs discussion of this problem draws upon some of Hegels comments in

the early portions of the Third Subdivision of the Science of Logic where Hegel treats

the doctrine of the Notion. The purpose of Hegels discussion is to show how the

prior usage of the term Notion needs to be transformed in light of dialectical truth.

Hegel acknowledges, as Zhang clearly shows in his own discussion, that the tradi-

tional term Notion is both limiting and yet necessary. Our minds, Hegel claims,

are accustomed to understanding the term notion as a mere general conception

characterized by abstract generality. This way of conceiving of the notion takes

place from the perspective of the understanding.42 Zhang quotes Hegel to the effect

that this commonsense notion of the understanding does nonetheless preserve a

necessary clarity and distinctness (mingxixing):

Such is the explicit or realized inseparability of the functions of the notion in their

differencewhat may be called the clearness of the notion, in which each distinction

causes no dimness or interruption, but is quite as much transparent.43

Zhang takes this statement as a clear indication that for Hegel the purpose of

dialectical logic is not to mix two apparently opposite elements together in such a

way as to blur any distinction between themto produce what Hegel terms a con-

geries, a simple mass or heap. Zhangs example is the distinction between freedom

and necessity. He argues that only by virtue of respecting the rules of formal logic


is it possible preserve the very clarity and distinctness between the separate ele-

ments, while at the same time allowing dialectical logic to show how the two are

in fact united. Only from the perspective of the understanding does the distinctness

of one element occlude the other, that is, do the two appear irrevocably to contradict

one another.

It is ultimately the relationship between the understanding and reason that, as

Zhang shows, underwrites Hegels critique of formal logic. Zhangs reading empha-

sizes especially those elements of the Encyclopedia Logic that show up the limita-

tions of the power of the understanding in light of the speculative moment. It is this

interest in the problem of the speculative that represents the most important element

of Zhangs reading of the Logic.

I quote Hegel himself at length on the question of how to understand the

speculative:

Speculative truth, it may also be noted, means very much the same as what, in special

connection with religious experience and doctrines, used to be called Mysticism. The

term Mysticism is at present used, as a rule, to designate what is mysterious and incom-

prehensible: and in proportion as their general culture and way of thinking vary, the epi-

thet is applied by one class to denote the real and the true, by another to name everything

connected with superstition and deception. On which we first of all remark that there is

mystery in the mystical, only however for the understanding which is ruled by the princi-

ple of abstract identity; whereas the mystical, as synonymous with the speculative, is the

concrete unity of those propositions which understanding only accepts in their separation

and opposition. And if those who recognize Mysticism as the highest truth are content to

leave it in its original utter mystery, their conduct only proves that for them too, as well as

for their antagonists, thinking means abstract identification, and that in their opinion,

therefore truth can only be won by renouncing thought, or as it is frequently expressed,

by leading the reason captive.44

As I will show, what Hegel here compares to the interests of mysticism, namely

speculative truth, is precisely the truth as it emerges from the work of the speculative

dialectic. The very close connection between religious experience, mysticism, and

the speculative is a constant feature of the Logic, and, as is often pointed out, dates

back to Hegels earliest essays on Christianity and the positivity of religion.45 Hegel

makes it clear that for him mysticism in its own fashion, or, one might say, in itself,

can genuinely be regarded as the highest truth. The limitation of mysticism is that

it still regards itself abstractly, from the limited perspective of the understanding.

Mysticism passes over into genuine speculative truth once it grasps itself from the

perspective of reason, that is, regards itself speculatively. Hence, Hegel concludes:

Reasonableness, on the contrary, just consists in embracing within itself these opposites

as unsubstantial elements. Thus the reason-world may be equally styled mysticalnot

however because thought cannot both reach and comprehend it, but merely because it

lies beyond the compass of understanding.46

These comments are appended to 82, which addresses what Hegel terms

the Speculative stage. In his analysis, Zhang links this crucial passage with a later

Peter Button 73

one that discusses Aristotles own efforts to distinguish the speculative notion from

the operation of the understanding.47 Zhangs purpose is to underscore the fact that

dialectical logic contains (baohan) formal logic and that the latter is essential to the

working of the former.48

What I would like to emphasize here is the fact that in his discussion of 82,

Zhang apparently felt no need to immunize his reader against Hegels references to

mysticism quoted above. Hegels explicit identification of mysticism with the specu-

lative might well have been a cause of concern for Zhang, especially when we recall

that Zhangs book was published in the aftermath of the Anti-Rightist campaign.

Throughout his work, Zhang consistently endorses the speculative dialectic and its

necessary role in a thoroughgoing dialectical materialism. As such, the question of

whether Hegels references to God are merely rhetorical gestures designed to clarify

by means of example is left undecided. On the one hand, Hegel clearly sees in the

dialectic the capacity to know speculatively what religion can think solely in terms

of pictorial thought:

Religion is the kind and mode of consciousness in which the Truth appeals to all men, to

men of every degree of education; but the scientific ascertainment of the Truth is a spe-

cial kind of this consciousness, involving a labor which not all but only a few undertake.

The substance of the two is the same; but as Homer says of some stars that they have two

namesthe one in the language of the Gods, the other in the language of ephemeral

menso for that substance there are two languagesthe one of feeling, of pictorial

thought (Vorstellung), and of the limited intellect that makes its home in finite categories

and inadequate abstractions, the other the language of the concrete notion.49

In other words, the object of knowledge for religion and philosophy does not

change; it is only the manner of comprehending the object that differs. For Zhang,

the dialectic offers the most scientific means to grasp the same essential content.

As Zhang well knew from his reading of Lenins Philosophical Notebooks, what was

often at stake was simply language. Thus, despite the fact that Hegel explicitly states

in his discussion of the Doctrine of the Notion that the position taken up by the

Notion is that of absolute idealism,50 Lenin is still moved to speak of the Science of

Logic in the following manner:

It is noteworthy that the whole chapter on the Absolute Idea scarcely says a word about

God (hardly ever has a divine notion slipped out accidentally) and apart from that

this NBit contains almost nothing that is specifically idealism, but has for its main sub-

ject the dialectical method. The sum-total, the last word and essence of Hegels logic is

the dialectical methodthis is extremely noteworthy. And one thing more: in this most

idealistic of Hegels works there is the least idealism and the most materialism. Contra-

dictory, but a fact!51

What often goes unremarked about this well-known passage is that for Lenin the

absence of any reference to God is sufficient to warrant this endorsement of this por-

tion of the Science of Logic as mostly free of idealism. Merely by virtue of the fact

that Hegel resists the tendency so apparent in the later Encyclopedia Logic to invoke

God in his description of the Absolute Idea is Lenin willing to conclude that there is


the most materialism in this, Hegels most idealistic, work. One might say that

what has happened is that Lenin has taken Hegel at his word regarding the manner

in which religion grasps the Absolute. For Hegel to use the language of religion is

simply Hegel describing in pictorial thought what he has already explained in

scientific terms. The analogy is perfectly valid so long as we consistently recall

that Hegels own elucidation of the dialectical method already supercedes reli-

gious thinking. The failure of philosophical idealism for Lenin lay in its one-sided,

exaggerated, extreme . . . development (inflation, distension) of one of the features,

sides, facets of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter, from Nature,

apotheosized.52 To rephrase this claim in terms of Zhangs analysis above, philo-

sophical idealism fails when it views itself abstractly from the limited perspective of

the understanding and then goes on to absolutize its own failure. Again, this is pre-

cisely what Hegel rejects above as the view of God that one finds with modern en-

lightenment. It is precisely this God that the atheism of dialectical materialism

rejects.53

For Zhang what matters is that the clear distinction between the moribund

thought forms of traditional logic and the speculative dialectic be preserved. The

speculative dialectic is read carefully enough in Zhangs work to begin to unravel

the very neat and politically comforting symmetry between a corrupt and conserva-

tive idealism and pristinely revolutionary materialism. Indeed, Zhangs effort to es-

tablish a legitimate space for the role of the logic of understanding and formal logic

within the process of the dialectic should be understood, in part, as enabling a more

nuanced, dialectical reading of the relation between idealism and materialism.

Zhang in the 1950s, and certainly Lenin in 1915, went to Hegels logic with the ex-

plicit interest of discovering in the Notion (gainian, Begriff) the wealth of concrete,

sensuous, material reality, yet a material reality that was not held dumbly in the

thrall of the immediate experience of the ineffable.54 Zhang clearly understood

that the only materialism that mattered was one arrived at through a concrete notion.

Anything less would be the stupid materialism that Lenin complained about in his

Philosophical Notebooksa materialism that would be of little revolutionary value.

As I have shown, Zhangs interest in the relationship between formal and dialec-

tical logic is oriented toward providing a coherent account of the speculative mo-

ment in the dialectic. He devotes the fifth chapter of his book to an analysis of the

negation of the negation.55 What Zhang shows is that the very concept of nega-

tion itself can be misapprehended from the limited perspective of formal thinking.

He refers to a passage in the final pages of the Science of Logic that addresses the

problem of contradiction. Hegels point is that though formal thinking can think con-

tradiction, it can do so only as the unthinkable. What is unthinkable for formal

thinking is any possibility of thinking the contradictories in any manner other

than in juxtaposition and in temporal succession.56 Hegel writes: Formal thinking

does in fact think contradiction, only it at once looks away from it, and in saying that

it is unthinkable it merely passes over from it into abstract negation.57 The failure of

formal thinking is simply that it conceives of the negation of the negation merely as a

sequence of such abstract negations. Such a conception of negation merely places

Peter Button 75

the two terms in external opposition to one another. This is hardly dialectical nega-

tion, Zhang writes, which is based, rather, on internal negation (neizai de foud-

ing), in which the negative contains the positive.58

It is precisely here in the context of Hegels notion of internal negation

that Zhang most fully affirms the place of negativity at the very core of dialectical

materialism:

Precisely for this reason, the source of the movement and transition of the Notion exists

within the Notion itself, not outside of it. Hegel says, inner negativity (innere Nega-

tivitat) is the self-moving soul of the Notion, the principle of all natural and spiri-

tual life. . . . Negativity constitutes the turning point of the movement of the Notion.

It is the simple point of the negative relation to self, the innermost source of all activ-

ity, of all animate and spiritual self-movement, the dialectical soul that everything true

possesses and through which alone it is true.59

As this quote makes quite clear, Zhang understood that negativity lay at the very

core of dialectical materialism. The identification of negativity as the dialectical

soul of truth occurs in Zhangs text without any of the kind of qualification regard-

ing the dangers of idealism that one might have expected. It hardly needs saying that

Zhangs detailed treatment of the relationship between dialectical and formal logic

in Hegels works on logic has nothing whatsoever to do with some philosophical-

void struggle of the symbols, as Meissner suggests in his conclusion. Indeed,

what is striking about such a claim is that it was precisely Chinese dialectical mate-

rialist appropriators of the Hegelian dialectic like Zhang who so clearly understood

that to hold dialectical and formal logic in external opposition to one another, as is

consistently done in sinological treatments of the subject, was to miss the point. In-

deed, the very texts Meissner dismisses as philosophically absolutely empty were

precisely those that might have warned him about the dangers of conceiving the dif-

ferences between the two forms of logic so abstractly that they ended up having no

more meaning for him than simple ciphers for the CCPs military and political strug-

gle against the KMT.60

So little research has been done in the West on the important role that Chinese

studies of Hegel such as Zhang Shiyings played in the development of dialectical

materialism that it is simply too early to assess its actual significance for postlibera-

tion Chinese philosophy.61 I would argue that the failure to provide an adequate

account of the Hegelian dimensions of Chinese dialectical materialism has long

imposed grave limitations on our understanding of it. Far worse, this wholesale ne-

glect of precisely what Chinese fully understood as essential to their grasp of what

was dialectical in dialectical materialism, namely a careful study of Hegels logic,

merely provided an excuse to dismiss it as philosophically stunted. What the preced-

ing analysis indicates is that Chinese dialectical materialism grappled with the prob-

lem of how to affirm a notion of the dialectical that would acknowledge negativity

as a mobility or energy that underlies, invades and produces reason.62 Zhangs dis-

cussion indicates that a frozen, triadic dialectic failed fundamentally to account for

the dialectic as a generative, revolutionary force in twentieth-century China. We


have even further to go before we can fully understand the variety of ways in which

the Chinese revolutionary thought itself suffered from the very limitations Coole

identifies in Hegel and Marx, who both evince an ambiguous relation to the very

negativity they otherwise champion. If this productive and creative negativity could

be identified and affirmed as central to what was dialectical in Chinese dialectical

materialism, it could just as easily be abandoned, as the complex historical course

of the Chinese revolution clearly suggests.

Notes

1 Werner Meissner, Philosophy and Politics in China: The Controversy over Dia-

lectical Materialism in the 1930s, trans. Richard Mann (Stanford: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 1990), p. 4.

2 Finally, . . . Chinese dialectical materialism was composed mainly of para-

phrases taken from translations of Soviet manuals in the 1930s, which were of

questionable value anyway (ibid., p. 191).

3 Zhang Shiying, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue (On Hegels Logic) (Shanghai:

Renmin Chubanshe, 1959). Zhang Shiying was born in Wuhan in 1921. After

graduation from the Department of Philosophy at Southwestern Associated

University (Xinan Lianhe Daxue) in Kunming in 1946, he taught both there

and at Wuhan University. In 1952, Zhang joined the Department of Philosophy

at Beijing University.

4 The analysis tends to engage in the practice of what Naoki Sakai has termed

suturing, namely the forging of a continuous position with what one posits as

ones own proper philosophical tradition. Sakai writes: Indeed, what is pre-

sumed in this tacit expectation [of familiarity and intimacy with the works of

ones own tradition] is that, since the student and the authors of those docu-

ments both belong to the same Japan, there must be some common ground

that the foreigner could never share (Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity:

On Japan and Cultural Nationalism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1997], p. 45).

5 Meissner, Philosophy and Politics in China, pp. 174179.

6 Ibid., p. 182. Even Gustav Wetters hostile though comprehensive treatment of

Soviet dialectical materialism (see below) does not go this far. I should add that

Nick Knights work on the Chinese Marxist philosopher Li Da offers one of the

very few sustained and engaged treatments of Chinese dialectical materialism.

Knights work clearly shows the degree to which Li Da had developed a very

comprehensive understanding of dialectical materialism. The primary limita-

tion of Knights book is that like most others on the same subject it fails to

make any effort to account for the Hegelian dimensions of dialectical material-

ism in China. See Nick Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China (Boul-

Peter Button 77

der: Westview Press, 1990). The same limitation holds very much true for

Joshua Fogels work on Ai Siqi. See Joshua Fogel, Ai Ssu-chis Contribution to

the Development of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1987).

7 Pondering the supposed superiority of the German language for philosophical

purposes, Hegel writes in his preface to the second edition of the Science of

Logic: It is an advantage when a language possesses an abundance of logical

expressions, that is, specific and separate expressions for the thought determi-

nations themselves; many prepositions and articles denote relationships based

on thought; the Chinese language is supposed not to have developed to this

stage or only to an inadequate extent (G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans.

A. V. Miller [Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1969], p. 32).

8 Gustav Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of

Philosophy in the Soviet Union, trans. Peter Heath (London: Routledge and K.

Paul, 1958).

9 Ibid., p. xi.

10 Wetter, Der Dialektische Materialismus: Seine Geschicte und sein System in

Der Sowjetunion (Wien: Herder, 1952), p. v. Wetters work was initially pub-

lished in Italian; see Gustav A. Wetter, S. J., Il materialismo dialettico sovietico

(Turin, 1948).

11 Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. x.

12 Ibid., p. 560. Wetter invokes Pope Pius XIs 1937 encyclical, Divini Redemp-

toris: Venerable brethren, see that the faithful are put on guard against these

deceitful methods. Communism is intrinsically evil, and therefore no one who

desires to save Christian civilization from extinction should render it assistance

in any enterprise whatever (Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 561).

13 The faculty of understanding for Hegel fixes concepts and holds them in dis-

tinct opposition. Its role in dialectical logic is central to Zhang Shiyings analy-

sis of Hegels Logic. Wetter quotes Dostoevsky on the peculiarly modern Rus-

sian form of atheism: Our people are not only becoming atheists, but believe

in atheism as if it were a religion (Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 560).

14 The discussion that follows regarding negativity owes much to Diane Cooles

exemplary analysis of the same in her book Negativity and Politics. Cooles

work is especially helpful, since she is as adept in examining what is sclerotic,

fossilized, and simply stifling in Hegel as she is in following the course of those

other registers of negativity in Hegel where, very often in spite of himself, neg-

ativity becomes generative, creative, and productive. It is this latter sense of

negativity, Coole argues, that appears in much of poststructuralist thought. See

Diane Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to

Post-Structuralism (London: Routledge, 2000).


15 Ibid., p. 562; emphasis added.

16 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska, 1986), p. 202.

17 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century

France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 62.

18 Ibid., p. 62.

19 He Lin organized a yearlong seminar on studies in Hegels philosophy begin-

ning immediately after liberation in 1949. In the first semester, participants read

the Encyclopedia Logic in both German and English, alongside He Lins own

translation in progress. In the second semester they read Lenins Philosophical

Notebooks (Heigeer, Xiao luoji [System der Philosophie, Erster Teil: Der

Logik], trans. He Lin [Taibei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshu Guan, 2000], p. 10).

Zhangs study of Hegel focused on both the Science of Logic and the Enyclope-

dia Logic, hereafter collectively referred to as Hegels Logic.

20 Judith Butler discusses this change of focus in postwar Hegel studies in the

West, describing the shift in emphasis in French readings of Hegel: The nega-

tive showed itself in Hegelian terms not merely in death, but as a sustained pos-

sibility of becoming. As a being that also embodies negativity, the human being

is revealed as able to endure the negative precisely because he could assimi-

late and recapitulate negation in the form of free action (Butler, Subjects of

Desire, p. 62). Again, this theme is one examined in detail by Diane Coole in

Negativity and Politics.

21 Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, trans. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W.

Norton Company, 1978), p. 302.

22 Death, both figuratively and literally as the deaths head or skull, is a con-

stant feature of the Logic and one central to Zhangs analysis, discussed below.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines caput mortuum as Alch. and Chem.

The residuum remaining after the distillation or sublimation of any substance,

good for nothing but to be flung away, all vertue being extracted (Willis

1681) (www.oed.com [accessed June 9, 2004]). As Wallace notes in his trans-

lation, it is to this latter sense that Hegel refers.

23 G.W.F. Hegel. Hegels Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1975), p. 162.

24 Ibid., p. 164.

25 Coole refers to this as simple negativity: At first, then, reflection sees the

pure being of essence as the (external) negation of everything determinate,

such that essence (lifeless and empty, simple negativity) confronts determi-

nate being as its first negation. . . . But eventually, reflection realizes that these

are merely abstract oppositions and that the negativity of essence is not alien to

being but rather, its own infinite movement as it mediates, and thereby sub-

Peter Button 79

lates, itself. When being appears as illusory, this is then nothing but the nega-

tivity of essence, whose intrinsic nothingness is the negative nature of essence

itself (Coole, Negativity and Politics, p. 49).

26 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 164.

27 Derrida, Glas, p. 48.

28 Butler, Subjects of Desire, p. 84.

29 Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Al-

bany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 180.

30 Ibid., p. 184.

31 Butler indicates a similar focus in Hyppolites reading of the Phenomenology of

Spirit : Hyppolite stops Hegels phenomenological narrative further back, at

the moment of life and the infinite labor of desire (Butler, Subjects of Desire,

p. 80). In Hyppolites attempt to overcome the limitations of Kojeves overly an-

thropocentric reading of Hegel, he privileges the category of Life.

32 I have modified Millers translation. Zhang uses the German original of the

Science of Logic alongside He Lins Chinese translation of the Encyclopedia

Logic. See Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 195; Hegel, Science of Logic,

p. 31. Emphasis added.

33 Indeed Logic, like Spirit, might be interpreted now as a figurative device

designed to present a process that is itself unrepresentable logically or gram-

matically. For the very dynamism of dialectics, with its fluid conjunction of

parts and whole, preservation and transcendence, (Aufhebung), identity and

non-identity, suggests an inconceivable heterogeneity lodged at the heart of

dialectics and invoking the negativity of the negative itself (Coole, Negativity

and Politics, p. 51).

34 G.W.F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1977), p. 19. Hyppolite quotes this passage at greater length

in Logic and Existence. He comments that Hegelian thought transcends the

distinction between pure humanism, the one his unfaithful disciples will de-

velop, and absolute speculative life. Without ignoring the other aspect (pure

humanism) and the Hegelian texts that could justify it, we believe that Hegel

has chosen the speculative conception, beings self rather than the human

self (Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, p. 107).


36 Ibid., p. 279.

37 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 194.

38 Ibid.; Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 285.



40 Ibid., p. 169.

41 Ibid., p. 182.


43 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 170; Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, p. 229.


45 Hyppolite addresses this problem through his reading of Hegels Logic: In the

Fragment of a System, Hegel had written that the movement from the finite to

infinite life is religion, not philosophy. If later, in the Logic, [Hegel] managed to

express in rational form an intuition of the very being of life or the self, which

he earlier declared could not be thought through, we should not conclude from

this that nothing remains of the first intuition, the kernel from which his whole

system developed (Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenom-

enology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman [Evanston: North-

western University Press, 1975], p. 147).



48 Ibid.

49 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. xxxix; italics appear in the German original. See

G.W.F. Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), vol. 8, p. 24.


51 Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing

House, 19601972), vol. 38, p. 234.

52 Quoted in Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 122.

53 Wallace quotes a letter from Hegel that specifically addresses the problem of

atheism: [A]ll speculative philosophy on religion may be carried to atheism;

all depends on who carries it; the peculiar piety of our times and the malevo-

lence of demagogues will not let us want carriers (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic,

p. xxxix). What Hegel recognizes here as an implicit possibility of speculative

philosophy was naturally embraced in the dialectical materialist reading of the

dialectic.

54 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 87.

Hyppolite refers to the discussion of sense certainty early in the Phenomenol-

ogy of Spirit: The feeling of the ineffable can appear infinitely profound and

infinitely rich to itself, but it can give no proofs and it cannot even test itself

lest it give up its immediateness (ibid.).

55 The chapter is titled Hegels Thinking in the Logic on the Circular Develop-

ment of the Notion and the Negation of the Negation (Zhang, Lun Heigeer

de Luojixue, p. 95).

Peter Button 81

56 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 835.

57 Ibid., p. 835.

58 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 123. As Hegel phrases it in the larger

Science of Logic: [F]or it is the negative, but the negative of the positive, and

includes the positive within itself. It is therefore the other, but not the other of

something to which it is indifferentin that case it would not be an other, nor

a relation or relationshiprather it is the other in its own self, the other of an

other; therefore it includes its own other within it and is consequently as con-

tradiction, the posited dialectic of itself (Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 835).


60 What Chinese discussions of dialectical logic like Zhangs make clear is that

the most minimal methodological demand is that we follow Zhang carefully

in his reading of Hegel, letting Zhang guide us in our reading of (his) Hegel.

Until we have made some effort to do so, we are hardly in a position to stand

in judgment on the quality of Chinese discussions of (Western) philosophy.

61 In a footnote Meissner mentions an unpublished dissertation written in 1977 in

Germany by Robert Schumann, Die Formale Logik und ihr Verhaltnis zum

Dialektischen Materialismus. Eine Philsophische Debatte in der Volksrepublik

China (Formal logic and its relation to dialectical materialism: A philosophical

debate in the Peoples Republic of China). Meissner provides no substantive

discussion of the work and comments simply that [Schumann] examined the

articles, however, as to their philosophical contents. . . . As I have argued,

that is precisely what is required.

62 Coole, Negativity and Politics, p. 73.


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