Why We Study Dialectics According to Hegel?

Why should we teach dialectics according to Hegel?

Because Marx taught dialectics according to Hegel.

Because Engels taught dialectics according to Hegel.

Because Lenin taught dialectics according to Hegel.

Because Lenin and Engels ordered to study the dialectic according to Hegel and to interpret it materialistically.

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s “Capital”, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” Lenin, V. I. Philosophical Notebooks, Conspectus of Hegel’s book, The Science of Logic, Essence, Section Three: Actuality

About dialectics F.Engels wrote that “studying dialectics by Kant would be needlessly tiresome and thankless work, since in the works of Hegel we have an extensive compendium of dialectics” (K. Marx and F. Engels. Selected Works in Three Volumes. Vol. 3.). And what does “compendium” mean in Latin? The shortest way, the straightest road. As Aristotle gave once for all a system of formal logic, so Hegel gave mankind once for all a system of dialectical logic. Its application to the development of the dialectics of the concrete sciences is an undertaking feasible only for those who have mastered dialectical logic as such.

No other systematic exposition of dialectics was given by Marx, Engels or Lenin, and the only compendium of dialectics, taken as a dialectic of thought, as logic, remains Hegel’s “Science of Logic”. It is one of the brilliant works, written once for all.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel