Dialectic Forum

The simple basic determination or common form of the collection of such forms is identity which, in the logic of this collection, is asserted as the law of identity, as A = A, and as the principle of contradiction. So much has healthy common sense lost respect for the school which still holds on to such laws of truth and still busies itself with them, that it ridicules the school and regards as insufferable anyone who believes that in following such laws one actually says anything at all: the plant is a – plant; science is – science; and so on in infinitum. Regarding the formulas that define the rules of inference which in fact is a principal function of the understanding, however mistaken healthy common sense might be in ignoring that they have their place in cognition where they must be obeyed, and also that they are essential material for rational thought, it has nonetheless come to the equally correct realization that such formulas are indifferently at the service just as much of error as of sophistry, and that, however truth may be defined, so far as higher truth is concerned ... they are useless – that in general they have to do only with the correctness of knowledge, not its truth.
(SL, p. 18, Cambridge edition)

What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.