BY GEORGE NOVACK -
(Mcrit Publishers,Now York. The nine. lectures printed in this book were delivered to a New York audience in 1942. This fourth edition, which contdna the leoture on "The oategories of dialectionl logic", indicstes the inoroasing domand for the book in the sixties. Tha growth in thia demand is somothing that cannot be easily explained by those who maintain that "dialectics ja mystioal nonsense that no sensible person can comprehend or apply." It,ean,on the other hand, be easily understood by thosa who have grasped the essentials of dialecticsl logic. In fact, tha history of this boak might well be used as an illustration of its theme. That is to say, the increasing demand is not sieply a revlection of its intrinsic merits of a rare and illuminating clerity; it reflesta also tha growling urgency of the need for c 2cadal transformation that will eliminate the threst of annihilation that hmga over the entire human species. More and mora people are torinnine to understend that the required transformation is contingent upon the ric lutionary abolition of eapitalism from the whole world. They are reciising, too, that most of the professedly revolutionary partica have no intention of ever leafing « revolution» Thus, if one wishse to know whioh party to join, one must begin by equipping oneself with a knowledge of the principlea of dialectical materialisn. Novyack's book provides an excellent introduction to that knowledge. Henas tha increasing denm4d-
By aterting with an examination of the axioms of fermal logic, the suthor traces the historical development of the science of logis, point=+« ing out that human thought develops and changea with human society. The axioms of formal logic are valid only if we asaume that the universe to which they apply ia static and uncdiaging- But the real world is always changing; "complex forms of motion, evolution of tha spociea, tha development of sociaty preacnt formal logic with difficulties--.The unquestionable universal process (of change /forms the material foundation of the theory of dialectical logic." Dialectics, then, emerges from a Oritical examination of formal loeis,y end its: limitations.
Novack gives us a very clear picture of the sortribution that Hegel nade to the sonstruation of a logic of changes, and of the radical dagelopment from this effected by Marx when he aubstituted a materialist philosophy for Hegel's idealism. "Marxist logic - the dislectis - takes an unambiguous stand on the relations between the laws and forma of thought and the rest of reality. What goes on in the minds of men,both in substance and atructure, is inseparable from what happens in their sooial relations amd the physical world."
"Just aa Marxiam denies the eternal reality of oapltalisn, so does it deny eternal validity to the forma of thought most charactaristic of such glass societies as capitalism." Using talling examples taken from oontemporary history, both in the lectures and in the praface to the third edition (1963), Novack vividly illuatrates the dinlestical process- "The soience of logic", he writes,” has to break through and amagh the petrified shell of formal logic." It ia difficult for ua to rid our sinds of habits of formal thinking , absorbed from aociaty, but Novack leaves no doubt about the superiority - and necassity for the use of the dialeotge in our thinking: