Hegel, Part 1
Hegel and Marxism
G W F Hegel refused to make anything easy. Towards the end of his Introduction to the
Encyclopaedia (1830) he wrote:
“As the whole
science, and only the whole, can exhibit what the Idea or system of reason is,
it is impossible to give in a preliminary way a general impression of a
philosophy. Nor can a division of philosophy into its parts be intelligible,
except in connection with the system.”
This could mean: Until you
know it, you can’t know it. It is not helpful!
But in practice, even Hegel
fails to be completely impossible. The same “Introduction to the Encyclopaedia”
is actually one text of Hegel’s that can be read relatively normally. We will
come to it later in this first part of our course on Hegel.
We are not going to “learn
Hegel” in its entirety in ten weeks, or at all. Instead, we are looking for the
salient points – the ones that stick out – so that we can have some dialogue
about them.
We will begin with Karl Marx,
because in this course we are particularly looking at the relation of Hegel to
Marx. So we may as well allow Karl Marx to explain that.
Marx got his doctorate in
1841 with a dissertation on the Philosophy of Epicurus. This was his only overt
work on philosophy. Immediately thereafter, he got involved with the Rheinische Zeitung magazine project,
soon becoming the editor. Marx then wrote a lot, including sometimes about
Hegel, until 1845 when, as we have argued elsewhere, he and Engels become for
the first time “Marxists” in full, coinciding with their joint writing of the “Theses on Feuerbach” and “The German Ideology”.
Perhaps Marx never was a
“Marxist”. He is supposed to have denied it. To think of him as a “Marxist”
critic of Hegel, in 1844, is certainly an anachronism. Nevertheless, Marx was
probably the best critic of Hegel alive at that moment, among many of them who
had sprung up from the official Prussian 1841
Expurgation of Hegel, onwards.
We take Marx’s famous “Introduction
to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” first (download linked below). The full
book, “Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, can also be found on the Marxists
Internet Archive. In the Introduction, the not-yet-Marxist Karl Marx writes:
“The
criticism of the German philosophy of state and right, which attained its most
consistent, richest, and last formulation through Hegel, is both a critical
analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the
resolute negation of the whole manner of the German consciousness in politics
and right as practiced hereto, the most distinguished, most universal expression
of which, raised to the level of science, is the speculative philosophy of
right itself.”
Marx’s “Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy in General”,
also, like the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, never published in his
lifetime, is given here primarily because it moves around Hegel’s works in a
way that may assist readers to begin to mark out some of the salient points
(download linked below).
For
an example of the confident way that the young Marx writes about Hegel, and for
some hints of things to come, and possible ways forward, see this passage:
“There is a double error in Hegel. The first emerges most clearly in the Phänomenologie, the birth-place of
the Hegelian philosophy...
“The
outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and
of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating
principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process,
conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as
transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective
man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour.
“We shall now
demonstrate in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness and limitations as they are
displayed in the final chapter of the Phänomenologie, “Absolute Knowledge” – a chapter which
contains the condensed spirit of the Phänomenologie, the relationship of the Phänomenologie to speculative
dialectic, and also Hegel’s consciousness concerning
both and their relationship to one another.”
In that case one could read
the whole of this passage of Marx’s, and then read the final chapter of the
Phenomenology, (in German, “Phänomenologie”)
and then one would have appreciated some of the strength and the weakness of
Hegel, at least as Marx saw them. It is through Marx, as much as through
anyone, that the legacy of Hegel stands as large as it does in the world today.
To put the matter fully in
Karl Marx’s hands for the moment, we can quote from his Afterword
to the 2nd German edition of “Capital” Volume 1 (1873). Here, Marx
“openly avows himself the pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel]”, and quite briefly
explains why:
“My dialectic
method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To
Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking,
which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent
subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the
external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is
nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and
translated into forms of thought.
“The
mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at
a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first
volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant,
mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large
in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn
in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly
avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the
chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar
to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means
prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a
comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It
must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel
within the mystical shell.
“In its
mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to
transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational
form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire
professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative
recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the
recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up;
because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid
movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than
its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its
essence critical and revolutionary.”
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The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Intro, 1844, and Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy in General, 1844, both by Karl Marx.
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A PDF file of the reading text is attached
·
To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
