Philosophy and Religion, Part 2a
Philosophers
Johannesburg, 2004
The Communist University
started in June, 2003, more than eleven years ago. The main text linked below
was prepared for the CU when it was six months old (it has since been
re-written, so that it is shorter). It is an attempt to walk through the
history of philosophy using the problematic of individual-versus-society as the
binding dialectical theme. As well as a chronicle of philosophical thought, it
includes a diagram that traces the present-day contending schools back to a
split that took place around where Marx and Engels come into the picture, in
the early 1840s. That great parting of the ways was marked by a specific set of
circumstances, which is worth describing and referencing.
Berlin, 1841
Hegel died in November, 1831,
when Karl Marx was 13 and Frederick Engels 11. Ten years later, Marx graduated
from the University of Berlin and was awarded a doctorate of philosophy by the
University of Jena, shortly before his 24th birthday. Also in 1841, Engels was
sent to Berlin to spend a year with the Artillery Guards. There is no record of
Marx and Engels meeting in Berlin at this time. Their first recorded meeting
was in Cologne, in November, 1842. Marx was by then editing a magazine called
the Rheinische Zeitung (it was his
first job) while Engels was on his way back to Manchester to recommence working
in his father’s company. The two teamed up permanently in Paris two years
later, in 1844.
In the same year of 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach published his “Essence of Christianity” of which Engels later
said: “…the spell was broken; the
"system" was exploded and cast aside ... one must have experienced
the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was
general.” During the next part, we will look at the book Ludwig Feuerbach and the end
of German Classical Philosophy, which Engels wrote forty-five years
later, in 1886, about the effect of Feuerbach’s intervention.
Meanwhile along came F W J Schelling, who had been a
colleague and rival of Hegel’s, and had struggled in the great man’s shade. In
1841, at the age of 66, Schelling was suddenly made a Prussian privy councillor
and member of the Berlin Academy, with a political instruction to give lectures
at the university against Hegel, so as to demolish Hegel’s reputation, ten
years after Hegel’s death.
Hegel’s philosophy had long
been the pride of the Prussian establishment, but it had turned out to be
potential weapon in the hands of the proletarian class then growing with the
spread of capitalism in Germany. In Berlin, philosophical uproar had begun,
involving the “Young Hegelians”, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and others. The
revolutions of 1848 were only a few years away.
Schelling was appointed with
an instruction to debunk Hegel. His lectures attracted a sensationally
distinguished audience, which included Engels, who said: "It will be our business to follow the course of his [Schelling's]
thinking and to shield the great man's [Hegel's] grave from abuse. We are not
afraid to fight.” Others present included the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, and the great Swiss
humanist historian of the Renaissance, Jacob
Burkhardt.
A good account by Andy
Blunden of this “world-historic” philosophical event can be found here
on MIA.
In 1842, Engels published a
work known as “Anti-Schelling”,
which includes in its Chapter 5 the following classically dialectical line: “Only that freedom is genuine which contains
necessity…”
Engels was 21 when he started
writing “Anti-Schelling”. In contrast to Doctor Karl Marx, Engels was at that
stage a military cadet who had never been to university (and never did go). Yet
he was bold enough to challenge the official state philosopher, in print. The image
above is of Engels in 1841, in his military uniform.
In terms of my rough
chronology of philosophers in today’s text, this was the situation following
Hume, Rousseau and Kant, and when Marx and Engels came in. Seven years prior to
the revolutions of 1848, where the proletariat appears for the first time as a
crucial revolutionary actor and subject of history, this was the moment when
philosophy split into its subsequent fragments, of which the contending
philosophical schools of today are the direct successors.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Philosophers, 2004, Tweedie.
