Science Begins with What?

Highlighted text is Lenin’s underlining. The ® access his annotations.

Only recently have thinkers become aware of the difficulty of finding a beginning in philosophy.

What philosophy begins with must be either mediated or immediate. It can be neither the one nor the other.

The principle of a philosophy also expresses an objective beginning, the beginning of everything.

• This beginning has a particular determinate content — water, the one, nous, idea, substance, monad, etc.

• If this beginning refers to the nature of cognition, then it is only a criterion instead of being an objective determination
  • It is thought, intuition, sensation, ego, subjectivity itself.

What is the nature of the content?

What is the subjective particular beginning?

The beginning is made up of what?

⁹⁰ The modern perplexity about a beginning comes from the dogmatics and the skeptics.

• The dogmatics require dogmatic demonstration of a principle
• The sceptical require a subjective criterion against dogmatic philosophising

Both are based on inner revelation, faith, intellectual Intuition, etc.

• These are exempt from method and logic.

Early abstract thought was interested in the principle only as content.

But in time, it was impelled to pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process.

Thus, the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth.

• This brings with it the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle.

Thus the principle should also be the beginning.

• What is the first for thought should also be the first in the process of thinking.

⁹¹ How does the logical beginning appear?

The 2 sides from which it can be taken have already been named, either as:

• a mediated result or
• a beginning proper, as an immediacy.

⁹² Is the knowledge of truth an immediate knowledge having a pure beginning, a faith?

Or is it a mediated knowledge?

Absolutely everthing equally contains both immediacy and mediation.

• These 2 are inseparable.

The problem is that logical propositions that have immediacy and mediation lead to the discussion of their opposition and their truth.

This opposition is an effect of thinking, knowing, and cognition.

• These acts give a more concrete form to immediate or mediated knowledge.

Some people want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science of logic.

• But this is to demand that cognition be considered outside the science.
• If so then cognition cannot be clarified.®

⁹³ The beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of thought that is free and for itself, in pure knowing.

It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of consciousness.

The phenomenology of spirit is the science of consciousness.

• This science results in pure knowing.

Logic has for its presupposition the science of manifested spirit, which contains and demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the standpoint occupied by pure knowing and of its mediation.

In this science of manifested spirit the beginning is made from empirical, sensuous consciousness.

• This is immediate knowledge.

Other forms of consciousness are:

• belief in divine truths
• inner experience
• knowledge through inner revelation, etc.

These are not fit to be examples of immediate knowledge.

Immediate consciousness is also the first and that which is immediate in the science itself, and therefore the presupposition.

But in logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of that phenomenological consideration — the Idea as pure knowledge.