Conspectus of Hegel’s Book
Lectures On the History of Philosophy :

Volume XIII. Volume I of The History of Philosophy.
History of Greek Philosophy

Note that this document has undergone special formating to ensure that
Lenin’s sidenotes fit on the page, marking as best as possible
where they were located in the original manuscript.

IONIC PHILOSOPHY [1]

| “Anaximander (610-547 B. C.) supposes man to develop from a fish.” (213) |

PYTHAGORAS AND PYTHAGOREANS [2]

| ...“Hence the determinations are dry, destitute of process, undialectical, and sta- tionary....” (244) | | | | negative de- termination of dialectics |
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| This refers to the general ideas of the Pythagoreans;—“number” and its sig- nificance, etc. Ergo: it is said in regard to the primitive ideas of the Pythago- reans, their primitive philosophy; their “determinations” of substance, things, the world, are “dry, destitute of process (movement), undialectical.” | | | | |
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| Tracing predominantly the dialectical in the history of philosophy, Hegel cites the |
| views of the Pythagoreans: ...“one, added to even, makes odd (2+1 = 3);—added to odd, it makes even (3+1 = 4);—it” (Eins [3] )
“has the property of making ge- rade (= even), and consequently it must itself be even. Thus unity contains in it- self different determinations.” (246) | |
| Musical harmony and the philosophy of Pythagoras: | | | | (“harmony of the world”) |
| “The subjective, and, in the case of hear- ing, simple feeling, which, however, exists inherently in relation, Pythagoras has at- tributed to the understanding, and he at- tained his object by means of fixed deter- minations.” (282) | | | | relation of the subjec- tive to the objective |
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| Pp. 265--266: the movement of the heav- |
| enly bodies—their harmony—the har- mony of the singing heavenly spheres inaudible to us (in the Pythago- reans ): Aristotle, De coelo , II, 13 (and 9) [4] : |
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| ...“Fire was placed by the Pythagoreans in the middle, but the Earth was made a star that moved around this central body in a circle....” But for them this fire was not the sun.... “They thus rely, not on sensuous appearance, but on grounds.... These ten spheres” | |
| ten spheres or orbits or movements of the ten planets: Mer- cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, the Milky Way and the Gegenerde [5] (—antipode?) invented “for an even number,” for 10 [6] | |
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| “like all that is in motion, make a sound; but each makes a different tone, according to the difference in its size and velocity. This is determined by the different distances, which bear a harmonious relationship to one another, in accordance with musical intervals; by this means a harmonious sound (music) arises in the moving spheres (world)....” | |
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| Concerning the soul, the Pythagoreans thought “ die Seele set: die Sonnenstäub- chen ” [7] (p. 268) (= dust particle, atom) (Aristotle, De anima , I, 2).” [8] | | | | An allusion to the struc- ture of matter! the role of dust (in the sunbeam) in ancient philosophy | |
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| In the soul—seven circles (elements) as in the heavens. Aristotle, De ani- ma , I, 3—p. 269. | | | | Pythagore- ans: “guesses,” fantasies on the resem- blance of the macrocosm and the microcosm |
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| And here immediately are recounted the fables that Pythagoras (who had taken from the Egyptians the doctrine of the im- mortality of the soul and the transmi- gration of souls) related about himself, that his soul had dwelt 207 years in other people, etc., etc. (271) |
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| NB: the linking of the germs of scien- tific thought with fantasy à la religion, mythology. And nowadays! Likewise, the same linking but the proportions of science and mythology are different. | |
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| More on the theory of numbers of Pytha- goras. “Numbers, where are they? Dispersed through space, dwelling in independence in the heaven of ideas? They are not things immediately in themselves, for a thing, a substance, is something quite other than a number—a body bears no resemblance to it.” 254 Quotation |fr om Aristotle?— Met- aphysik , I, 9, is it not? From Sextus Empiricus? Uncle ar| . | | | | NB |
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| Pp. 279-280—the Pythagoreans accept the |
| ether (...“A ray penetrates from the sun through the dense and cold ether,” etc.) |
| Thus the conjecture about the ether has existed for thousands of years, re- maining until now a conjecture . But at the present time there are already a thousand times more subsurface chan- nels leading to a solution of the prob- lem, to a scientific determination of the ether. | |
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THE ELEATIC SCHOOL [9]

| In speaking of the Eleatic school, Hegel says about dialectics : |
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| ...“We here” (in der eleatischen Schule [10] ) “find the beginning of dialectics, i.e., simply the pure movement of thought in Notions; likewise we see the opposition of thought to outward appearance or sen- suous Being, or of that which is implicit to the being-for-another of this implicit- ness, and in the objective existence we see the contradiction which it has in itself, or dialectics proper....” (280) See the next page. [11] | | | | what is dialectics? (α) (β) |
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| Here are essentially two determinations (two characteristics, two typical features; Bestimmungen, keine Definitionen [12] ) of dialectics [13] : α) “the pure movement of thought in Notions”; β) “in the (very) essence of objects (to elucidate) (to reveal) the con- tradiction which it (this essence) has in itself ( dialectics proper ).” In other words, this “fragment” of He- gel’s should be reproduced as follows: Dialectics in general is “the pure move- ment of thought in Notions“ (i.e., putting it without the mysticism of idealism: human concepts are not fixed but are eternally in movement, they pass into one another, they flow into one another, otherwise they do not reflect living life. The analysis of concepts, the study of them, the “art of operating with them” (Engels) [14] always
demands study of the movement of concepts, of their inter- connection, of their mutual transitions). In particular, dialectics is the study of the opposition of the Thing-in-itself (an sich), of the essence, substratum, sub- stance—from the appearance, from “Be- ing-for-Others.” (Here, too, we see a tran- sition, a flow from the one to the other: the essence appears. The appearance is essen- tial.) Human thought goes endlessly deeper from appearance to essence, from essence of the first order, as it were, to essence of the second order, and so on without end. Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects: not only are appearances tran- sitory, mobile, fluid, demarcated only by conventional boundaries, but the es- sence of things is so as well. | | | | Hegel on dialectics (see the previous page |
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| Sextus Empiricus presents the point of view of the Sceptics as follows: |
| ...“Let us imagine that in a house in which there are many valuables, there were those who sought for gold by night; each would then think that he had found the gold, but would not know for certain whether he had actually found it. Thus philosophers come into this world as into a great house to seek the truth, but were they to reach it, they could not tell whether they had really attained it....” (288-289) | | | | the compari- son is a tempting one... |
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| Xenophanes (the Eleatic) said: |
| “Did beasts and lions only have hands, Works of art thereby to bring forth, as do men, They would, in creating divine forms, give to them What in image and size belongs to them- | | | | Gods in the image of man |
| selves....” (289-290) “What especially characterises Zeno is dialectics, which ... begins with him....” (302) “We find in Zeno likewise true objective dialectics .” (309) (310: on the refutation of philosophic systems: “Falsity must not be demonstrat- ed as untrue because the opposite is true, but in itself....”) |
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| “Dialectics is in general α) external dia- lectics, in which this movement is differ- ent from the comprehension of this move- | | | | dialectics |
| ment; β) not a movement of our intelli- gence only, but what proceeds from the nature of the thing itself, i. e., from the pure Notion of the content. The former is a manner of regarding objects in such a way that reasons are revealed and aspects of them shown, by means of which all that was supposed to be firmly fixed, is made to totter. There may be reasons which are altogether external too, and we shall speak further of this dialectics when deal- ing with the Sophists. The other dialectics, |
| however, is the immanent contemplation of the object: it is taken for itself, without previous hypothesis, idea or obligation, not under any external conditions, laws, grounds. We have to put ourselves right into the thing, to consider the object in itself and to take it in the determina- tions which it has. In regarding it thus, it” (er) (sic!) “shows from itself that it con- tains opposed determinations, and thus transcends itself; this dialectics we more especially find in the ancients. Subjec- | | | | objective dialectics |
| tive dialectics, which reasons from exter- nal grounds, does justice when it is granted that: ‘in the correct there is what is not correct, and in the false the true as well.’ True dialectics leaves nothing whatever to its object, as if the latter were defi- cient on one side only; but it disintegrates in the entirety of its nature....” (p. 311) |
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| With the “principle of development” in the twentieth century (indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century also) “all are agreed.” Yes, but this superficial, not thought out, accidental, philistine “agree- ment” is an agreement of such a kind as stifles and vulgarises the truth.—If every- thing develops, then everything passes from one into another, for development as is well known is not a simple, universal and eternal growth, enlargement (respective dim- inution), etc.—If that is so, then, in the first place, evolution has to be under- stood more exactly, as the arising and passing away of everything, as mutual transitions.—And, in the second place, if everything develops, does not that apply also to the most general concepts and categories of thought? If not, it means that thinking is not connected with being. If it does, it means that there is a dialec- tics of concepts and a dialectics of cogni- tion which has objective significance. + | | | | Regarding the question of dialec- tics and its objective significance... |

| NB | | | I. II. | The principle of develop- ment... The principle of unity... | + In addition, the uni- versal principle of de- velopment must be com- bined, linked, made to correspond with the uni- versal principle of the unity of the world , nature, motion, matter, etc. |

| “Zeno’s treatment of motion was above all objectively dialectical....” (p. 313) |
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| ...“Movement itself is the dialectic of all that is....” It did not occur to Zeno to deny movement as “sensuous certainty,” it was merely a question “nach ihrer (move- ment’s) Wahrheit” (of the truth of move- ment). (313) And on the next page, where he relates the anecdote how Diogenes the Cynic, of Sinope, refuted movement by walking, Hegel writes: | | | | NB. This can and must be turned round : the question is not whether there is movement, but how |
| | | | | to express it in the logic of concepts |
| ...“But the anecdote continues that, when a pupil was satisfied with this refutation, Diogenes beat him, on the ground that, since the teacher had disputed with reasons, the only valid refutation is one derived from reasons. Men have not merely to sat- isfy themselves by sensuous certainty, but also to u