1. Marx’s work centres on the
notion of true humanity as freely-associated in collective, mutual and
individual self-creation. That is the content of his critique of
political economy, which exposes the inhuman, unfree forms in which
humanity has encased itself and thus shows how the proletariat – in
Marx’s all-sided conception of that word – can find the path to
universal human emancipation.
2. This critique penetrates the
false conception of ‘single individuals in civil society’, which was
the advance/retreat of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was an
advance, because its conception of the individual free from state and
church control opened the way for huge scientific, political and social
changes. But it was also a retreat, whose effects are felt to this day,
because it put a stop to all attempts to think about ourselves as a part
of a unified self-changing world.
3. It was this Enlightenment
conception which underlay the idea of nearly all varieties of socialism.
The socialists wanted to overcome the lunacy of modern society by
rationally rearranging the social-economic connections between
‘citizens’. Each of these single individuals was left untouched until
his or her ‘circumstances’ were altered. So the work of rearrangement
had to be carried out by somebody else, an educated elite or party,
which has somehow managed to escaped the power of the old order to mould
individual consciousness. ‘Theory’ and ‘doctrine’, enterprises which
stand apart from their subject-matter, are the business of an elite of
this sort, which aims to enlighten the ignorant masses on the virtues of
some prefabricated scheme. Marx himself, far from being an advocate of
any activity like this, engages in the critique of all such plans,
which, whatever their intentions, themselves express the class divisions
of the existing social order. (2)
4. Let us look briefly at some
of the main characteristics of the Enlightenment way of thinking, the
thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when modern
bourgeois society was taking shape. This is more or less what Hegel
calls ‘the Understanding’, [Verstand, as opposed to Vernunft
= Reason]. It sees the world from the point of view of one of these
social atoms. The natural world and society looked like collections of
discrete bits and pieces, machines made up of smaller machines. When the
‘single individual’ thought about this mechanical world, he could only
think of himself as yet another machine, quite unchanged by interaction
with the rest. In trying to think about these assemblies of atoms, many
problems arose, but these could be answered if you broke each of them
into separate sub-problems.
5. The individual got his
knowledge of the world by logically decoding messages conveyed to him
through his senses. Apart from these bulletins, the knowing subject and
the object of knowledge were utterly different and separate from each
other, as were Nature and humanity. Freedom, which for this outlook
means the removal of ‘external’ restrictions on the individual, did not
exist in nature, where movement was rigidly determined. To be
‘objective’ you had to expunge everything subjective, like feeling, will
or free creative activity. This was how reason, the equipment of each
individual human, worked in opposition to superstition of all kinds,
which churchmen and monarchs instilled into the heads of the masses. The
Enlightenment’s defeat of ‘superstition’ was an advance, without doubt,
but one for which we paid a price: it walled us off from many centuries
of thought about humanity and its world, for this had almost entirely
been couched in religious terms.
6. This outlook made possible
modern natural science, which seeks ‘objectivity’ by separating its
subject-matter from everything human, that is, by separating itself from
its object. But what did that allow it to say about human society? Homo
sapiens, like all biological forms, was part of this blind rushing
about, and whether humans were put here by an absent Deity, or got here
by chance, their social relations could only be understood as given
externally to subjectivity. Political economy, and later sociology,
studied social machines, made up of atoms driven by self-interest.
However, since Reason was eternal – eternally in battle against
superstition – thought itself could not have a history: either a
proposition was eternally true or it had always been false. The social
order and its movement were governed by laws as fixed as the ones that
ruled the solar system. By the end of the eighteenth century, Rousseau
and Kant had begun to illuminate the weaknesses and contradictions
underlying this Enlightenment project. What was the rational
justification for Reason? If humans are ‘radically evil’ (Kant),
democracy is not for them, but for angels. Humans will have to be
‘forced to be free’ by the Enlighteners (Rousseau).
7. Marx spent his entire working life as a pupil and critic of Hegel.(3)
The significance of this dual relationship was lost, along with Marx’s
humanism, in the Enlightened, scientifically rational ‘Marxism’ of the
Second International. The Third International never recovered it, and in
general continued the Enlightenment tradition, despite Lenin’s heroic
effort to read Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ in 1914-5.
8. Hegel must be taken as a
whole. In particular, his Berlin years are crucial for what we need from
him, including his work (a) on the State (1821); (b) on the history of
philosophy; (c) on Aesthetics; (d) on the philosophy of religion; (e) on
the philosophy of history. (4)
9. Each part of Hegel’s
programme, while preserving many of the advances of the Enlightenment,
stands in opposition to its basic conceptions. In particular, where the
philosophers either discarded religion or attempted to rationalise it,
theology is central to all of Hegel’s work. After his grappling with
Christianity in his student years, his turn to philosophy [’science’ = Wissenschaft]
is inseparable from his peculiar views on God. Even when the ‘Marxists’
did bring themselves to peep into Hegel, they just couldn’t handle this
aspect. Lenin’s panic every time Hegel mentions God is comical. For
Lukacs, who knew a great deal about Hegel, his religious views are a
shameful secret.
10. When Hegel frequently
professes his Lutheran convictions, this is not, as some Young Hegelians
supposed, just an attempt to stay within the bounds of respectability
and keep his job. But what kind of Lutheran is Hegel? Here are some
peculiarities: (a) Hegel does not conceive of the Christian Trinity as
belonging to particular events in history: the Creator does his work all
the time. The Book of Genesis must be taken together with the Prologue
to John’s Gospel. The Son of God is not merely to be identified with the
historical Jesus of Nazareth. (b) God creates the world and humanity
within it because he has to, not out of free choice. He needs his
creation: without it ‘God is not God’ and without our consciousness God
is not self-conscious. (c) Hegel agrees that the Trinity is a mystery,
and identifies his own ‘speculative philosophy’ as ‘mysticism’. But this
does not imply that its truth is hidden: on the contrary, God reveals
himself through it, and Hegel sees his own system as the self-thinking
Idea which is at the same time the self-consciousness of God. (5)
(d) So when Hegel says: ‘The world is something produced by God, and so
the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a
whole is’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion), he is a million miles away from the orthodox Christian understanding of God the Creator.
11. It is important not to
overlook the depth to which Hegel’s system is penetrated by this
particular view of religion. For example, look again at the triadic
divisions which abound throughout the system:
Logic, Nature, Mind;
Universal, Particular, Individual;
Being, Essence, Concept;
Abstract Right, Morality, Ethical Life;
Family, Civil Society, State.
Each element of each triad is itself a triad. But each of these is an
expression of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and the
relationships between the members of each triad cannot be properly
appreciated unless this is grasped. At every level, Hegel is showing how
these three ‘Persons’ actively create and determine each other. Hegel
sees God creating and being created by humanity. (6) Universal, Particular, Individual;
Being, Essence, Concept;
Abstract Right, Morality, Ethical Life;
Family, Civil Society, State.
12. Hegel turns both the
Enlightenment conception of Reason and its religious opposite
inside-out. Hegel’s Reason is identified with divine wisdom. It does not
merely exist passively in human history, but expresses itself as
‘purposive activity’ in the course of that history. ‘In our knowledge,
we aim for the insight that whatever was intended by the Eternal Wisdom
has come to fulfillment – as in the realm of nature, so in the realm of
spirit that is active and actual in the world.’ (Reason in History,
p 19.) Spirit is the activity of humanity. But the consciousness of an
individual human ('finite spirit') is no more than a fragment of the
whole story, which is only found in the Self-consciousness of Spirit, an
alias for the Self-consciousness of God. (By the way, Hegel has no use
for the immortality of an individual soul, ‘finite spirit’. Only the
Infinite, the World Spirit, is eternal.)
13. A major problem arises in
many religions: if God created and maintains a world which contains
evil, was he then the creator of evil? But then what chance do we have
of making the world a decent place to live? The Catholic Church in
particular fought for centuries against any kind of dualist answer to
this conundrum. It objected to any idea that the world is a product of
both Good and Evil, ‘matter’ being the evil part. Hegel faces this
problem in a manner which entirely separates him from orthodoxy. (7)
For Hegel, Evil is a part of God’s creation. Indeed, the contradiction
between Good and Evil is the driving force of all movement and
development, and without it, there is no humanity. Thus Hegel’s account
of the Fall tears Genesis apart.
14. In this approach, Hegel
closely follows another professed Lutheran, born two centuries earlier:
the mystic shoemaker Jakob Boehme (1585-1696). Boehme is crucial, not
just for Hegel’s religious ideas, but for his entire philosophical work.
For example, Hegel, who devotes about 30 pages of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy to Boehme, quotes him as saying:
Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition:
For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of
itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into
itself, as into that from which it originated, then it knows nothing of
its origin. Boehme, ‘The Way to Christ’. Hegel, ‘Lectures on the History
of Philosophy’, Volume 3, p 203.)
Hegel is also well aware that Boehme stands in a long line of
mystical monks, Catholics whose ideas were condemned by the Church.
Although Hegel only studied one or two of these in depth, they all
contain ideas which are echoed in his work.- Eriugena (= ‘born in Ireland'), also known as John the Scot (810-877), believed that God does not create the world in one go, but eternally; everything finite is contained within his infinite nature and returns to it.
- Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) was a Calabrian abbot. His account of the unity of truth and ignorance and his conception of Divine Knowledge anticipated Hegel in many ways. Joachim believes that God is knowing. His identification of the structure of the Trinity with three stages of divine history formed the basis for centuries of social struggles. The third of these stages, identified with the Holy Spirit, was about to begin at any time, when the ending of the corruption of the Church would usher in a thousand-year Utopia.
- The German monk Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) was the first to develop
the terminology of philosophy in German, translating and adapting Latin
terms. For him, God becomes conscious of himself only within his
creation. Eckhart also argues that Divine Knowledge is ‘the negation of
negation’. As with other mystics, Eckhart’s aim was the unification of
the soul with God. Christ is continually born within each believing
soul. Using a passage passed on to him by the mystic von Baader, Hegel
quotes Eckhart:
The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see Him;
my eye and His eye are the same...
If He did not exist, nor would I;
if I did not exist, nor would He. (8) - Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464) argued that God was united with his creation, so that the universe, including the human being, must be infinite and divine. This ‘coincidence of opposites’ opened the way for Copernicus (1473-1543), who cautiously published his rather scaled-down version of this idea only on his death-bed.
- Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the Nolan, was not at all cautious, openly taking Nicolas’s ideas much further. He was arrested by the Inquisition and burnt after several years of torture. (9) Hegel celebrates Bruno in several places. He praises him for asserting (i) ‘the unity of life and the unity of the World-Soul'; and (ii) ‘the indwelling presence of Reason’.
And Hegel quotes Bruno as saying
To recognise the unity of form and matter in all
things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to
penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of
Nature. We must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of
things, the maximum and the minimum.
15. Many of Boehme’s notions,
often expressed with great obscurity, were linked with the Jewish
mystical tradition called the Cabbalah, as well as with the Islamic
movement, Sufism. All three, Christian, Jewish and Islamic heresies,
maintained a centuries-long collaboration and dispute. (All this needs a
lot of study, as well as the related movements within Buddhism.)
Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism are also explicitly connected with Hegel’s
discussions of these topics. However, he combines approval of many of
these ideas with critical re-appraisal.
16. But Boehme is also a link between Hegel and another, closely related set of ideas and activities. (10)
Through his idiosyncratic mystical terminology, Boehme connects with
the Hermetic tradition via Paracelsus (1493-1541) and Bruno, both of
whom were represented in Hegel’s library, as was the magician Henry
Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535). (11)
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, translation of Greek authors,
preserved until then only by Islamic scholars, opened up new ways of
thought. The writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were widely
studied as a body of work whose roots are extremely ancient. Together
with Cabbalah, they had for centuries formed the basis for alchemy,
astrology and natural magic, but now, and for the next three centuries
or more, they were the background to the thinking of the leading figures
in European thought in the run-up to modernity. It was this
intellectual world that actually saw the birth of modern science.
17. As a scientific picture of
the world, many of the results obtained by the alchemists and magicians
look somewhat bizarre today. But the undoubted triumphs of the new
scientific rationalism can blind us to what is important in the world
outlook of the Hermetists. First of all, they saw that the contrasts and
oppositions between the divine and the human, and between spirit and
nature, were not unbridgeable. The cosmos was a whole, united by a
series of internal relations, correspondences and ‘sympathies’ between
its parts. In the most important of these, the connection between
humanity and nature, the human individual was a microcosm whose
structure corresponded to that of the macrocosm. Each individual
included the whole world within itself. This was an active connection:
when God created the world, he had not completed the job, and to rectify
the remaining imperfections required human subjective activity. Indeed,
the question: ‘why did God create the world?’ could only be answered in
terms of his need for humanity to do this work. Through his own
personality and imagination, the Magus called down cosmic forces, which
his knowledge enabled him to direct. This was the Great Work of
creation, in which he participated. Thus he identified himself with the
world, even with God. (You had to be careful: in the wrong hands, this
knowledge could bring demons instead of angels into the picture: big
trouble. So to become an ‘adept’ required a long apprenticeship, in
which false ideas were purged.) Boehme, and following him Hegel, used
many of these notions to link God, Nature and individual psychology.
Thus Boehme writes:
The book in which all secrets lie hidden is man
himself; he himself is the Book of the Essence of all Essences. ...He is
like unto God. ...Why do you seek God in the depths or beyond the
stars? ...Seek him in your heart, in the centre of your life’s origin.
There shall you find Him.
18. During the 17th and 18th
centuries, the Enlightenment, denouncing such notions as superstitious
nonsense, swept them aside or forced them underground. But they did not
entirely disappear. Not only did Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry preserve
some of their symbols, but Hermetic ideas as a whole remained current.
Their adherents included people like Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Shelley
and Blake. In the twentieth century, trends as diverse as WB Yeats,
Surrealism and Jungian psycho-analysis have drawn on them with
enthusiasm.
19. Opposing Enlightenment thinking at every point, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the prologue to Hegel’s system, was designed to overcome formal rationality, which walls us off from the truth. Science [Wissenschaft]
can then enter ‘the realm of pure thought’, which, Hegel explains ‘is
the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before the
creation of nature and of a finite mind.’ (Science of Logic, Introduction.)
Reason, inseparable from the Will and a part of Being, is the realm
where Nature and human spirit live and act. However, Hegel has reworked
all these trends, absorbing many aspects of the Enlightenment in the
course of his critique. In particular, Hegel’s concept of Spirit, which
is self-creating, like the heretic God, develops human social forms. For
Hegel, family, civil society and the State make up ‘objective spirit’.
Religion presents in the form of ‘picture-thinking’ (eg mythology) the
same content as philosophy develops conceptually.
20. To orthodox Christianity,
humans were united, because they were all God’s creatures. To the
Enlightenment – for instance, in political economy – the relations
between individual humans were external to them. Hegel rarely uses the
word ‘community’ [Allgemeinschaft], but when he does it usually
refers to the religious community, and all social unity, including the
State, is something spiritual.
21. Humans have been trying to
understand the world and their own place in it for a long time. This has
generally taken the form of some kind of religious or mythical account
which helped to shape the way people lived. This was how they thought
about their lives, their origins and their destiny. In modern, more
‘enlightened’ times, the attempt is made to explain the world without
such stories, dismissing them as mere superstition. But that leaves the
big question unanswered: ‘In what kind of world is it possible for
conscious humanity to exist?’ In the orthodox versions of the three big
Western religions, Almighty God, (who was, naturally, bound up with the
almighty powers on Earth), produced the whole show and wrote the script.
If you complained about how dreadful it was, you were fobbed off with a
story about free will; this was God’s alibi, a clever trick by the
Divinity to put all the blame on us mortals. (12)
Orthodoxy like this leaves no space for human freedom, for subjective
activity: the Almighty has the whole thing sown up. In particular, our
social relations are given to us by this higher power. But the atheists,
and especially the Enlightenment materialists, who easily settled this
entire discussion with the word ‘superstition’, left no more space for
subjectivity than their opponents: we are just matter in motion,
governed by the laws of Nature, they said. Spinoza had no trouble
identifying the laws of nature with God’s will, and Hegel shows that
Enlightenment and superstition in the end agree with each other.
‘Marxism’, coming up with ‘material laws of history’, locked the gates
still more securely.
22. Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804-1872) abandoned his theological studies and decided – against
parental disapproval – in favour of philosophy under Hegel in Berlin. At
the end of the 1830s, the Hegelian school started to disintegrate.
After writing some Hegelian books on the history of philosophy,
Feuerbach began to break away from the Hegelian system, and was soon the
leader of the ‘Left’ or ‘Young’ Hegelians. In 1841, he published his
chief work, The Essence of Christianity, followed by Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy and Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future.
Like the other Left Hegelians, Feuerbach was first of all concerned
with religion. Unlike some of his fellow-rebels, however, he did not
merely denounce religion, which he described as ‘the first and indirect
self-consciousness of man’. Where his teacher Hegel had made human
self-consciousness the way that God is conscious of Himself, Feuerbach
makes ‘what man knows of God’ an upside-down form of ‘what man knows of
himself’. Religion is a projection of the best of humanity, ‘the human
essence’, human feeling, willing, thinking, love, on to something which
appears as other than human, the product of imagination [Phantasie]. But this is the root of human enslavement.
Man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his
essence into objectivity and then makes himself the image of this
projected image of himself thus converted into a subject, a person; he
thinks of himself as an object to himself, but as the object of an
object, of another being than himself. (Essence)
Feuerbach sees the demystification of this process as the way to
freedom: ‘What in religion is a predicate we must make into a subject’.
Describing Hegel’s ‘theological idealism’, he says that ‘man’s
consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of God. ... Thus does
absolute philosophy externalise from man his own essence and activity.’ (Principles)
Theology, not religion, is Feuerbach’s target. When it formalises the
study of God, theology becomes ‘the worst enemy of the awakened spirit’.
In his earlier writing, Feuerbach had quoted Boehme’s personal
understanding of God with approval. Now, he praises Boehme for
understanding that God has His material body in nature. His critique of
Hegel is that the formal reasoning of the Hegelian system is disguised
theology, excluding the personal. (13)
But in this, Feuerbach is criticising the whole of philosophy,
philosophy as such. That is what he means by ‘the new philosophy’.
Just as theology transforms the determinations of man
into divine determinations – through depriving them of their own
determination by which they are what they are – so also in precisely the
same way does philosophy deprive them. ... So does absolute philosophy
externalise and alienate from man his own essence and activity. Hence
the violence and torture that it inflicts on our minds. (Principles)
‘The new philosophy makes man – with the inclusion of nature as the
foundation of man – the unique, universal and highest object of
philosophy.’ (Principles) As he famously explained himself: ‘My religion is – no religion. My philosophy – no philosophy.'
23. Does Feuerbach represent a
step backwards from Hegel towards the Enlightenment? Yes and no. It is
more of a sideways move. While it does not ignore Hegel’s critical
attitude to Kant and his predecessors, it still denies its religious
implications and re-establishes the Enlightenment’s view of the human as
an isolated individual. The only social relation Feuerbach knows is the
‘love’ (what kind is unspecified!) between two characters called ‘I’
and ‘thou’. To illustrate all this, it might be helpful to sketch
briefly the history of Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological proof of God’s
existence. Tidied up by Descartes, this says that, since God is the most
perfect being we can conceive, and since perfection must surely include
existence... . Kant famously and unceremoniously knocked this on the
head: if I think I have 100 talers in my pocket, that is not the same as
actually having them!
Hegel is not impressed with this wisecrack. ‘When we speak of “God”,
we are referring to an object of quite a different kind than one hundred
talers’. ‘The true cognition of God begins with our knowing that things
in their immediate being have no truth.’ Feuerbach (Principles, para 25), however, wants to re-establish Kant’s argument against Hegel’s mockery.
24. Karl Marx, when he submits
his Doctoral Thesis in 1841, is quite cheeky about religious ideas in
general, of course. But he agrees with Hegel that Kant has proved
nothing.
The proofs of the existence of God are ... mere hollow tautologies.
Take for instance the ontological proof. This only means: ‘that which I
conceive for myself in a real way (realiter) is a real concept
for me’ something that works on me. In this sense, all gods, the pagan
as well as the Christian, have possessed a real existence. Did not the
ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Delphic Apollo a real power in the
life of the Greeks? Kant’s critique means nothing in this respect. If
somebody imagines that he has a hundred talers, if he believes in it,
these hundred imagined talers have for him the same value as a hundred
real talers. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his
imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity
has incurred debts on its gods.The analogy between religion and money was to remain a focal point of Marx’s work for the rest of his life. But before he can even begin to clarify this powerful notion, he has to undertake a critique of Enlightenment political ideas.
25. For over two years, Marx is a great admirer of Feuerbach. This covers the period of some of his most important early work: the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, the Introduction to this, On the Jewish Question, the Holy Family and, above all, the Paris Manuscripts of 1844.
And yet, whatever Marx himself might have thought, these works give a
very different content to Feuerbach, even when Marx uses the same words.
Look, for example, at the famous passage on religion from the
Introduction.
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes
religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-
consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found
himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being
encamped outside the world. Man is the world of men, the state, society.
This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted
world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the
general theory of that world, its encyclopedic point d'honeur,
its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its
universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic
realisation of the human essence, because the human essence has no true
reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight
against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious
distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also
the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx is not an atheist, merely saying ‘No’ where religion says
‘Yes’. His fight against all mystification preserves its truth and makes
it available to everybody. As he explains in a letter of late 1842,
I requested further that religion should be criticised
in the framework of criticism of political conditions rather than that
political conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion,
since this is more in accord with the nature of a newspaper and the
educational level of the reading public; for religion itself is without
content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the
abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will
collapse of itself. Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk of
philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label ‘atheism’
(which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to
listen, that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the
content of philosophy should be brought to the people.
Marx follows Feuerbach in tracing the basis of religious belief in
human life, but while Feuerbach locates this in individual human
psychology, Marx is concerned chiefly with the social conditions of the
human.
26. In 1844, Marx embarks on
his life-long task: the critique of political economy. In his reading of
James Mill, he turns again to the analogy between economic relations
and religion:
Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he
is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised;
the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes
the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this
alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man
regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power
independent of him and them.
This analogy of Christ as the mediator and monetary relations was to
recur many times in Marx’s work. It enables him to begin to grasp the
nature of social relations in general and the process through which
social labour creates the truly human and opens the path to human
freedom. At the same time, in its modern alienated forms, it blocks this
path.
27. The last of the Paris Manuscripts, ‘Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole’,
begins with some of Marx’s most fulsome praise of Feuerbach. And yet
the ideas Marx begins to develop here leave Feuerbach far behind. Marx
enters into a detailed critical discussion of the last chapter of
Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘Absolute Knowing’. Philosophy
transcends ‘Revealed Religion’, which, Hegel says, is defective only in
that it has not made ‘its actual self-consciousness the object of its
consciousness’. Having learned from Feuerbach that Hegel makes the human
being ‘the same as self-consciousness’, Marx is able to transform
Hegel’s upside-down picture into an understanding of man as a ‘human
natural being’, not an isolated individual, but a social being.
As everything natural has to come into being, man too
has his act of origin – history – which, however, is for him a known
history, and hence as an act of origin, is a conscious self-transcending
act of origin...
Within his inverted philosophical picture,
Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis –
conceives man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the
manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the emergence of
species-consciousness and species-life.
28. It is some time in 1845
before Marx has seen how great was the distance between his critique of
Hegel and that of Feuerbach. When he scribbles down his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, this is how he begins:
The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis],
not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition
to materialism, was developed by idealism – but only abstractly, since,
of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.
Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, differentiated from thought-objects,
but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In
Das Wesen des Christenthums, he therefore regards the
theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while
practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of
appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’,
of practical-critical, activity.
The doctrine which called itself ‘Marxism’ was never able to handle
this. Plekhanov, the man who formulated the main ideas of ‘Marxism’ –
‘dialectical materialism’, ‘historical materialism’ etc. – never brought
himself to discuss this text, and nor did his most famous pupil, VI
Lenin. Marx criticises materialism as it had grown up in the eighteenth
century and lumps Ludwig Feuerbach’s materialism together with it. The
defect of this outlook, Marx explains, is that it is able to grasp
knowledge only in opposition to both the object of knowledge and the
knowing subject. It could not understand the activity of knowing the
world in terms of the rest of human social and individual activity. It
was German idealism – not just Hegel but Fichte and Schelling too –
which ‘developed the active side’. We have been discussing the long
tradition of religious and magical thought associated with this
achievement.
29. Thesis 3 is also important here.
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of
circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by
men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must
therefore divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to
society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human
activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only
as revolutionary practice.
So the ‘active side’ is not just a matter of material productive
activity. It also arises if you consider the transformation of the
social relations and conditions within which production takes place.
Marx now knows that freedom has to include the creation by humans of the
relation between them. It is worth recalling here a well-known passage
in the German Ideology, written just after the Theses.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this
communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the
alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessarily, an alteration which
can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this
revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class
cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class
overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of
all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
Here too, when he speaks about the communist revolution, Marx is
focussing on the notion of self-change. ‘The alteration of men on a mass
scale’ can only be the work of these same humans. He never had any time
for transformation brought about by people at the top, well-meaning
chaps who could be trusted to look after the interests of the little
people.
30. A major task still lies ahead, for I have not touched Marx’s most important – and unfinished – contribution: Capital.
I think that reconsideration of many familiar passages in all three
volumes would show a different side if read in the light of Hegel’s
theological ideas and Marx’s critical reworking of them. (Two examples:
in Volume 1, like Chapter 1, Section 4, ‘The Fetish-Character of
Commodities':
The veil is not removed from the countenance of the
social life-process, ie the process of material production, until it
becomes production by freely-associated men, and stands under their
conscious and planned control.
Or Chapter 7, Section 1, on ‘The Labour Process':
‘He acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.’
Just to suggest what this might yield, let us look at a few sentences
from the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. (This is the
planned Part 7 of Volume 1 which Marx decided not to include.)
...Hence the rule of the capitalist over the worker is
the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the
product over the producer. For the commodities that become the
instruments of rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of
capital itself) are mere consequences of the process of production; they
are its products. Thus at the level of material production, of the
life-process in the realm of the social – for that is what the process
of production is – we find the same situation that we find in religion
at the ideological level, namely, the inversion of subject into object
and vice versa. Viewed historically this inversion is the indispensable
transition without which wealth as such, ie the relentless productive
forces of social labour, which alone form the material base of a free
human society, could not possible be created by force at the expense of
the majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than
it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual
energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of
himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. (14)
Here we can see Marx’s acceptance of Feuerbach’s influence and as
well as that of Hegel’s counter-influence, and the critique of both.
Behind Hegel stretches centuries of mystical heresy. In front of Marx
lies the prospect of a human society, one in which humans, social
individuals, freely associate in creating their own life and their own
interrelations.NOTES
(1) Loren Goldner. Vanguard of Retrogression: Postmodern Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital, (Queequeg Publications, PO Box 672355, New York, NY 10467).
(2) I used to link the critiques of political economy and Utopia
with the critique of Hegeliandialectic, but I now want to place this
third critical operation on a separate plane, for it includes and
underlies each of the other two.
(3) Those who say that Marx did not completely understand Hegel
are, of course, absolutely correct. Every great thinker must yield a
mass of ideas which transcend any particular reading of his work. That
is why Marx continually returned to Hegel to win yet further insights
and to criticise him anew. Naturally, similar considerations apply to
any reading of Marx.
(4) Note how these cover the items which Marx listed in the ‘superstructure’ in his 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy.
Marx’s idea of ‘free association’ implies the transcendence of each of
these fields, that is, their dissolution in a human world of free
creation.
(5) See, for instance, the last paragraphs of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Mind, including the final quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Compare Hegel’s concluding three syllogisms, relating Universal,
Particular and Individual, with the syllogisms of the holy Trinity, as
few paragraphs earlier.
(6) The picture by MC Escher, in which each of two hands draws
and is drawn by the other, might be a helpful illustration here.) In
each triad, the third term not only reconciles the opposition between
the first two, but contains and preserves it.
(7) No wonder he was denounced while he was at Berlin, as both
atheist and pantheist. In reply, he aggressively defended his Lutheran
orthodoxy.
(8) It turns out that this is a Hadith, a saying much loved by the Sufis.
(9) To make its Christian point quite clear, the Inquisition also carefully smashed his bones to pieces.
(10) Glenn Magee’s book Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, (Cornell 2001), was one of the starting-points for this work.
(11) Goethe’s Faust is a mixture of Paracelsus and Agrippa. Hegel’s friend Goethe was a practising alchemist.
(12) Buddhism is quite another matter, I'm told.
(13) It is also worth remembering that, in defending himself
against the accusations of atheism and pantheism, Feuerbach wrote a book
about Martin Luther, trying to show that the Great Reformer took his
side in the argument.
(14) Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Edition, p 990.
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