Negativity and Dialectical Materialism: Zhang Shiying's Reading

of Hegel's Dialectical Logic

Button, Peter.
Philosophy East and West, Volume 57, Number 1, January 2007, pp. 63-82
(Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2007.0002

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pew/summary/v057/57.1button.html

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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 irrelevant and philosophically meaninglessoccasionally in surprising fashion. Pondering 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 dialectical 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 between 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 concepts.
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 unwittingly 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 Press

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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, (dialectics), zhexue (philosophy), xingshi luoji (formal logic), et cetera in China could
never reflect any actual philosophical content. Rather these terms remained, for Chinese, 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 directly through an encounter with Hegels Science of Logic, the terms of Chinese dialectical 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 authoritative status granted to Jesuit scholar Gustav Wetters discussion of Soviet philosophy 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 compressed 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 propounded 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

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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 showdown (geistige Auseinadersetzung) with Soviet dialectical materialist philosophy.
Rather than simply announce his own intellectual stance at the outset as in fact theologically allied with the Vaticans hostility to communism, Wetter at first deflects attention 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 Soviet interlocutors of falsely claiming to take seriously. From the more purely secularhumanist 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 understood 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 Bolshevism 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 Verstand ) 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 uncritically 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 Wetter 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 precisely because Hegels speculative dialectic seems to treat what is in essence religious experience. In a passage to which sinological analysts of dialectical materialism 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-

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spite its campaign against any sort of mysticism, dialectical materialism, with its doctrine 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 dialectical materialism has at least the unintended benefit of inculcating in the indoctrinated a sense of wonder that the rigorous distinction between faith and knowledge 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 understand 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 materialism 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 religious 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 materialisms 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 failure, 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

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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 indisputable 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 concerning 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 philosophical 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 materialisms 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 feature 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 Encyclopedia 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 dialectical materialism had to be shorn of their mystical trappings, preserving their rational kernel. 21 Yet doing so was by no means a simple task.

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Zhangs analysis focuses on the more lawful negation of the negation in a manner 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 Hegelian 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 involve carefully negotiating his way through claims such as the following in the Encyclopedia Logic. In the first paragraph devoted to the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel
describes the difference between the mere negative result of abstracting all determinate 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 mortuum 22 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 negation 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-

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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 between 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 something 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 negativity 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 mediatizing, 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 understanding. 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 abstract, 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 history, and Hegel has laid the foundations of this philosophy of history. . . . Universal selfconsciousness 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

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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 measure 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 historically 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 between 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 discusses 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 irrevocably 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 Phenomenology 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

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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 suffers 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 Absolute 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

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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 throughout 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 logic 39 and that Hegels contribution on the subject renders formal logic meaningless. Zhang argues that in fact Hegels concept of dialectical 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 transition 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) separates 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 epistemological 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 traditional 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 congeries, 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

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is it possible preserve the very clarity and distinctness between the separate elements, 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 emphasizes especially those elements of the Encyclopedia Logic that show up the limitations 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 incomprehensible: and in proportion as their general culture and way of thinking vary, the epithet 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 principle 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

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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 speculative 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 special 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 subject 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. Contradictory, 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 portion 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

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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 religious 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, philosophical 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 precisely what Hegel rejects above as the view of God that one finds with modern enlightenment. 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 conservative idealism and pristinely revolutionary materialism. Indeed, Zhangs effort to establish 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 explicit 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 dialectical logic is oriented toward providing a coherent account of the speculative moment 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 negation 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 contradiction, 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

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the two terms in external opposition to one another. This is hardly dialectical negation, Zhang writes, which is based, rather, on internal negation (neizai de fouding), 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 Negativitat) is the self-moving soul of the Notion, the principle of all natural and spiritual 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 activity, 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 regarding 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 philosophicalvoid 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 materialist 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. Indeed, the very texts Meissner dismisses as philosophically absolutely empty were
precisely those that might have warned him about the dangers of conceiving the differences 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 struggle 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 postliberation 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 neglect 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 preceding analysis indicates is that Chinese dialectical materialism grappled with the problem 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 discussion indicates that a frozen, triadic dialectic failed fundamentally to account for
the dialectic as a generative, revolutionary force in twentieth-century China. We

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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 Dialectical Materialism in the 1930s, trans. Richard Mann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 4.
2 Finally, . . . Chinese dialectical materialism was composed mainly of paraphrases 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 presumed 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 documents 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 limitation 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 materialism in China. See Nick Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China (Boul-

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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 determinations 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 published 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 Redemptoris: 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 distinct opposition. Its role in dialectical logic is central to Zhang Shiyings analysis of Hegels Logic. Wetter quotes Dostoevsky on the peculiarly modern Russian 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, negativity 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).

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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 beginning 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 Enyclopedia 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 negative showed itself in Hegelian terms not merely in death, but as a sustained possibility of becoming. As a being that also embodies negativity, the human being
is revealed as able to endure the negative precisely because he could assimilate 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 constant 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 translation, it is to this latter sense that Hegel refers.
23 G.W.F. Hegel. Hegels Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University 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 determinate 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-

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lates, itself. When being appears as illusory, this is then nothing but the negativity 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 (Albany: 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 anthropocentric 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 grammatically. 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 develop, 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).
35 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 281.
36 Ibid., p. 279.
37 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 194.
38 Ibid.; Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 285.
39 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 195.

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40 Ibid., p. 169.
41 Ibid., p. 182.
42 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 227.
43 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 170; Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, p. 229.
44 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 121.
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 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975], p. 147).
46 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 121.
47 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 197.
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.
50 Hegel, Hegels Logic, p. 223.
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 malevolence 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 Phenomenology 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 Development of the Notion and the Negation of the Negation (Zhang, Lun Heigeer
de Luojixue, p. 95).

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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 contradiction, the posited dialectic of itself (Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 835).
59 Zhang, Lun Heigeer de Luojixue, p. 123.
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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