Marxist Theory

Guide to Marxist Philosophy, Social Theory and Economics

Home

Books

Contact

Links

Mailing list

Marxisttheory.org Appreciation Society

Welcome to MarxistTheory.org

Who is this?

Search

Chapter 3: Hegel and

the completion of
German idealist
philosophy

Search

Search

DESTRUCTION OF MEANING OUT

NOW

BY SIMON

The True is the Whole

Hegel
Whilst Kant took key aspects of
philosophy
forward
with
his
arguments, to some they felt he also
left
many
other
questions
unanswered. His philosophy formed
an important bedrock to ideas of
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Destruction of Meaning by Simon Hardy,

available on Amazon now.
Ever wondered why politics seems so empty
sometimes? Why media spectacle has
replaced meaningful debate? How someone
like Obama can be called a "communist" for
passing healthcare reform? How the most
successful capitalist country in the world
today, China, is run by a Communist Party?
Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

CHAPTERS

an important bedrock to ideas of

liberalism but was transcendental
philosophy
sucient
to
really
understand the human world and its
relations? It was left to other
philosophers to explore the ideas
that Kant had raised. One of these
was George Hegel, a professor of
philosophy whose philosophy in
many ways represents the highest
achievement of German philosophy.
Marx had a high opinion of both men, saying that Kant was the rst
and Hegel the last word in German idealism.
Although Hegel followed on with some of the themes of Kant, he
strongly criticised his arguments and developed concepts which were
entirely new. Hegel criticises Kant for empiricism because he sees
Kants philosophy as an attack on metaphysics Hegel for his part
wanted to maintain a form of metaphysics and incorporate it into a
historical narrative of change.
So, Kant argues there are two primary categories, phenomena and
noumena. Hegel agrees that there is a divergence between
appearance and essence, but for Hegel there is no unknowable ding an
sich. The fact that Kant argues this actually leads Kants entire
philosophy into the realm of appearances alone, since appearances
are all that we can really know this leads directly to scepticism in
the philosophical sciences. Hegel wanted to go deeper, into the
essence of things which he believes we can know. The whole of
human history is actually the struggle of the human mind to know
itself better, to reach an understanding of the what Hegel calls the
Absolute.
In Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel is exploring the system of how
the phenomena of the mind can appear to the mind itself, in other
words, how do we think? Hegel criticises two commonly held views of
the faculty of thought. The rst is that thought is the means (mittel
here understood as a tool or an instrument) through which we grasp
the absolute (ding an sich). For others thought is a passive medium
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

CHAPTERS
Introduction: What is being discussed?
Chapter 1: The Enlightenment
Chapter 2: The breakthrough in philosophy

Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists

Chapter 5: The beginnings of scientific
socialism
Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic
Chapter 7: Historical Materialism
Chapter 8: The method of abstraction
Chapter 9: Alienation
Chapter 10: Social Oppression
Chapter 11: Surplus value, the working class
and ideology
Chapter 12: Boom and bust and the limits of
capitalism
Chapter 13: Revolutionary crises under
capitalism
Methodology I: Scientific Socialism as a
World-view
Methodology II: Marxism and determinism
Chapter 14: The capitalist state, workers
state, socialism and communism (the riddle
of history solved)
Chapter 15: The Second International
Chapter 16: The debates over historical

the absolute (ding an sich). For others thought is a passive medium

through which the absolute passes to reach us. This has problems for
natural consciousness, if consciousness is a tool then it is used to
shape the thing we are thinking about, if it is a medium then it
prevents us from really knowing the truth (ding an sich) since we only
conceptualise the medium.
In Kants preface to Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that since we
cannot know the Absolute we must abandon any attempts to
investigate it and instead focus on the subjective forms. Hence his
claim that the objects must conform to our ideas and not vice versa.
Hegel rejects the view that we must use thought as some kind of
separate instrument, something that we use to understand reality
from the outside. He does so because to do so implies we are
separate from reality.
Hegelian philosophy
Hegels philosophy is complex and it is possible to only give a very
broad outline here, primarily focussing on the important aspects like
the dialect and the relations of contradiction and motion. For Hegel
the task of philosophy is to contemplate the actuality in the process of
history as it reveals itself to be part of a greater whole. All that
humanity can do therefore is to reect, Nachdenken (thinking after),
so all true knowledge occurs after the fact as Hegel famously said
the owl of Minerva begins its ight only with the onset of dusk. 1 Our
knowledge rst and foremost comes from sense certainty, the very
immediate and utterly particular act of an object impinging on our
sense. In this case it is a cup of tea which sits in front of me. I can see,
taste, touch and smell it, I know it is there because of these things.
However I cannot ascribe it as a cup of tea, because to use language
to describe any sense perception involves utilising the universal
cups of tea. It also locates it within a temporal context which by
denition limits its truthfulness (since it can at some point dry up,
becoming silt or be drunk and cease to be tea). In Hegels model the
task of our thought process is to actually liberate itself from the
material world. The material world appears immediate, but in fact
Hegels idealism means that he rejects sensory data as purely coming
from a material relationship, instead he sees consciousness as
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Chapter 16: The debates over historical

materialism
Chapter 17: Fabianism in Britain
Chapter 18: Revisionist controversy in
Germany
Chapter 19: Reform or revolution 1914-1919
Part Four The struggle for the soul of
Marxism
Chapter 20: Ultra leftism and the Third
International
Chapter 21: Hegelian Marxism, Lukcs and
Korsch
Chapter 22: Antonio Gramsci theories of
hegemony, civil society and revolution
Chapter 23: Soviet philosophy
Chapter 24: Leon Trotsky and the fight for
the International
Part Five The post war world
Chapter 25: The Frankfurt School and critical
theory
Chapter 26: Maoism in East and West
Chapter 27: The New Left
Chapter 28: Existentialism: a philosophy of
reality
Chapter 30: Structuralist Marxism
Chapter 31: Poulantzas and Eurocommunism

NEW BOOK OUT NOW!

from a material relationship, instead he sees consciousness as

ascending by gradually emancipating itself into purer forms of
thought. Our consciousness must be a self-consciousness and it must
recognise other forms of consciousness, other objects around us.
As such, the beginning of true knowledge, or knowledge of the
Absolute, is self-consciousness. But Hegel does not think that self
consciousness is automatically given, self consciousness is in fact only
realised when it comes into contact with an external object which is
like it, another self-consciousness. The Descartian starting point for
self knowledge, I think therefore I am is up rooted and replaced with
by the act of others thinking, and my recognition of that, I come into
self realisation and conscious being. (Marx and the left wing
materialists would transform the famous I think therefore I am into I
am therefore I think)
In a sense we can use the modern concept of the Other to illustrate
Hegels point. It is only through the existence of the Other that the Us
can be formed, in opposition and by excluding that which is not Us.
But Hegel takes it a step further, w-e in fact Desire this Other which is
not Us. By desiring it we want to possess it, make it one with us, and
in doing so incorporate it into our own being. We originally start o in
an undierentiated but primitive unity with nature, before becoming
alienated from it. Only in this way does the self-consciousness come
to recognise itself as Spirit (or mind in some translations) and achieve
a higher synthesis, a unity with the world by seeing consciousness of
itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. 2
This concept is central to Hegels famous Master/slave relationship.
3 In this analogy, Hegel asks us the question, who is really the master
in such a relationship? At rst glance of course the master (slave
owner) has all the power, even the power to kill a slave if they wish,
since they are often considered no better than cattle. But if the slave
dies, then the master is left alone, unable perhaps to even cook or
clean. In this instance, who is the real master? Under capitalism the
working class seems to be the slave and in fact does exist as a wage
slave at the mercy of their capitalist masters. But if the workers strike,
then the workplace ceases to function, it ceases to make money or
produce commodities or answer the phones or type at a computer
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Beyond Capitalism? The Future of Radical

Politics co-authored with Luke Cooper from
the Anticapitalist Initiative.
Click here for more information. You can
also buy it for 8 from The Book Depository
a company probably not as bad as Amazon.

produce commodities or answer the phones or type at a computer

terminal. The master is left at the mercy of their slaves. Such an act
of slave rebellion poses the Hegelian question who really rules?
Indeed, the master must act as they do because by recognising the
other they come to hate its existence, whilst at the same time feels
love (desire) for the material goods that they can produce or the
service they provide.
What is the method by which Hegel arrives at these kind of insights?
Hegel uses a method from Ancient Greek philosophy, called the
dialectic, in so doing reintroduced it into western thought. 4 This
method is best observed in Platos writings, for instance the Republic,
where Socrates has various conversations and debates with Athenian
gentlemen. Through asking questions and working through the
answers they arrive at a higher plane of understanding, the dialogue is
the process which helps clarify the terms of the debate and arrive at a
new conclusion.
The method of the dialectic that is developed in Phenomenology is a
breakthrough as far as modern philosophy is concerned, though of
course Kant and Hegel had salvaged the idea from the ancient Greeks.
Whereas formal logic can only refer to identity and proceed along
explicit lines the dialectic analyses the relationship between content
and form and therefore allows us to overcome formal content as the
sole reach of analysis. Whereas Platos dialectic was inductive,
starting from relatively small statements and limited questions to
arrive at a universal truth, Hegel is (generally speaking) deductive, he
begins from the big idea and works out its its grounding in the world.
The dialectical approach to thinking does not see the world in fixed
categories, so much as a series of processes and motions. Everything
is a unit of many determinants, each one in possible conflict with the
others, each one not dissolving the others but forming a higher
synthesis. Within these processes are moments or rather processes
of transition, both quantitative and qualitatively, as things are
constantly becoming something else. The dialectical method sees
things as a whole, but also the parts of the whole and crucially how
they relate to each other. Importantly, contradiction is immanent
within things, change comes from within not outside. 5 The unity of
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

within things, change comes from within not outside. 5 The unity of
opposites (in logical terms that both A and non-A co-exist) is a
contradiction which causes motion and change. This was different
from Aristotles concept of change which started from outside, from an
unmoved mover who could really only be God.
In his Science of Logic and Encyclopedia, Hegel undertakes the task of
explaining how ideas are formed and enter the world. His method
begins with the abstract and proceeds to the concrete through a series
of categories and relations, each of which deals with a different stage
in the process of and Idea as it makes its way into reality. He begins
with Being which is simply abstract pure thought, it is ideas without
any sensual results (touching, smelling, etc) and as such it is Nothing.
But Being both exists and does not exist, in the same way that an
abstract idea exists in our heads but not in the world, as such it
emerges out of Nothing, it is always becoming. Being contains both
quantities and qualities which can create new forms of Being which
Hegel calls measure, effectively the moment when numerous qualities
culminate in something which achieves recognition. Being is a stage of
simple determinate objects'[refJames, Notes on Dialectics 2p/ref]. But
Hegel was not just interested in being, he wanted to understand the
essence of thinking and social relations. It is in the second realm, that
of Essence that the contradictions emerge because it is the phase of
reflection in which ideas compete and clash with each other.
6 Essence is what happens when Being begins to take form, when the
relation of Being to not-Being and to other forms of being (other
abstract ideas for instance) begin to take shape into a common
relation, something tangible. At first as new information or data is
processed and understood there is a stage of Identity when this agrees
with what we already know, but simple Identity eventually breaks
down and gives way to a Diversity of views, then a Difference then
what Hegel calls Ground, the separation of differences into new
Identities so that the process can begin again. 7 He summarises this
process as Distinction, Relativity, Mediation. 8 At its root, this shift
from Being to Essence can be summarised as the shift from a simple
to a complex view of social relations, because in essence all relations
are mediated, they are no longer immediate. Essence contains more
complex forms of contradiction and motion, for instance between form
and content (appearance) and eventually achieves an in the unity of
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

and content (appearance) and eventually achieves an in the unity of

opposites, the unity of Being and Essence, which is the final stage of
the motion of thought the Notion.
The Notion emerges from a long process of sublation, incorporation
and re-establishment between Being and Essence, it is therefore
concrete, the highest expression of ideas and also human activity.
Whereas the previous stages examined some of the most abstract
aspects of intuition and knowledge, Notion concerns more palpable
concepts because it deals with a more concrete apparatus of thought.
It is the moment that subjective logic gives way to objective logic. The
Notion begins as as subjective concept, it is self referential. working
out its own internal mediated relations. Just as Being and Essence
have three stages of movement so does Notion, between Universal,
Particular and Individual. Universal is easy to see, the nation state is a
universal concept, the market economy is another one. Communism
is another universal idea. The Universal is very concrete and abstract
at the same time. The Particular can exist as the social, material form
of the Universal whilst the Individual is our subjectivity. For example,
ideas begin in the universal, descend into the particulars which are
made up of individuals (though not necessarily people). The notion of
God is a universal one, the Church is the particular and the individual
is Psalm 23, the Lords Prayer. After the Notion has completed its
subjective working out, it becomes Objective (although in reality this
stage would almost certainly be commensurate with the former), it
relates to the otherness in the world and establishes relations and
processes externally. Finally the Notion becomes the Idea, it takes
shape as a fully worked out and coherent argument. We can
understand the dierent sub-divisions of logic as Being in the present,
the
Essence
of
the
past
(Hegel
uses
the
phrases
Wesen ist wasgewesen ist Essence is what has been, or what is
past) and the Concept of the Notion belongs to the future, to Being as
it is to be. Hegel also explains this transition as the difference between
consciousness, self consciousness and nally, reason. There are many
other points after this in which the Concept and the Idea develop
through dierent stages and inter-relations, before nally arriving at
the Absolute Idea which is the unity of practical and theoretical ideas,
but we will return to this later.
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

To extend the analogy of the Church a little further, the idea of the
Christian God emerges in opposition to Other concepts of divinity,
salvation and worship. The ideas begin to connect to other ideas, to
elaborate and form new relations until the essence of Christianity
emerges, Jesus as the Messiah, rejection of aspects of Jewish law and
so on. The essence takes the shape of both appearance and actuality,
the cross is the appearance, the actuality of holy communion and
physical locations for worship (early churches). The notion of
Christianity has both a subjective side and an objective side, the
particulars of the Church become objective when people form
relations which constitute the church, after all the Church is nothing
without the congregation (after all, the English word Church is a
corruption of Ekklesia, meaning congregation or assembly). The
objective form of the Church is both the embodiment of and embodied
in the idea of Christianity, the life of a Christian, the Christian way of
thinking. The absolute idea of the Church made into reality is the unity
of the practice of Christian worship and the theory of salvation through
Christ. At each stage of this process there has been or remains
contradiction and even conict (the splits in the Christian Church are
proof of this), and a struggle over the essence or appearance of the
Church in reality.
If the reader takes anything away from that it should be two things.
First that each category and concept has a relationship to the rest
which inuences each process and outcome and that we can know the
result of these deliberations. Secondly, the idea of mediation is very
important in Hegel, each concept is mediated due to its relationship
and dependency on what came before and what comes after. One
example would be that the universal and the individual are mediated
by the particular. Lenin noted everything is vermittelt=mediated,
bound into one, connected by transitions. 9 meaning not only the
unity of opposites, but the transition or every determination, quality,
feature, side, property in every other. 10This notion of a mediated
relation between objects and subjects is an important part of what
subsequently came to be termed totality by 1920s Marxists. 11
As a general principle we can say that Hegel starts from the concept
of the living whole and its movement caused by contradictions and
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

of the living whole and its movement caused by contradictions and

interactions. This is the essence of dialectical thinking, to see
everything in motion. Everything is considered in relation to other
things, and since it is in motion the analysis must also take into
account the synthesis. Hegel primarily sees dialectical motion in
thought and concepts, not living things which is why he is an idealist.
For instance Hegel believed that the concept made up reality the
totality but for Engels it was matter in motion (as we shall see later).
In Hegels system the central dynamic of dialectics was negation;
The fundamental prejudice here is that the dialectic has only a
negative result 12 everything is in fact critique, drawing on the
contradictions between what things appear to be or claim to be and
their reality. The divergence between Being and Nothing which
produces becoming is the starting point for the constant negation of
things within themselves. The unity of identity and non-identity is the
driving force of ideas and concepts and produces constant change.
The drive of thought which yields positive results from the negation
produces the universal and seizes the particular in it. It is this
dynamic contradiction which, according to Rosa Luxemburg, is the
cutting weapon of the Hegelian dialectic.
Some have attacked dialectics as pure metaphysics a system so
vague that it can be applied to anything and therefore is meaningless.
This is based on a misunderstanding. Let us start from the world. It is
an well-worn phrase that nothing ever changes it is also totally
wrong. It would be a strange person indeed who could survey the
whole history of humanity and come to the conclusion that nothing
had seriously changed, from hunter gatherers living in caves to 9-5
workers living in apartment blocks, things have changed a great deal.
Of course what people really mean is that things like war, sexism, a
social divide between rich and poor has always existed and indeed
socialists would agree. So why do some things change rapidly but
others not at all? A dialectician would locate the phenomena which
remained constant throughout human history and analyse it within its
proper social historical context, why do wars happen? Most occur
because of a ght over resources (the sanskrit word for war translates
into wanting more cows), we can begin to construct a theory of war
linked to scarcity or a drive for greater accumulation of goods at the
expense of other people. Connected to a theory of class we can begin
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

expense of other people. Connected to a theory of class we can begin

to see how war has been used throughout history to actually create
tremendous changes. From the warmongery of Atilla the Hun and the
downfall of the Roman empire to the construction of the modern state
war has played a very important part in historical change. Of course
Hegel did not have a class analysis in his philosophy, that would have
to be added by subsequent thinkers.
Even some things which historically have remained the same, for
instance the existence of a ruling class and a subservient, subaltern
class, is only true on one level of analysis. These are categories which
must be lled with social labels. The ruling class in Rome existed in a
very dierent economic and political context to todays ruling class in
a modern liberal democracy. The intention of dialectical thinking was
to allows vulgar historical myths to be stripped away, in order to
arrive at a more authentic and well rounded analysis.
So why was this system of Philosophy so popular in Germany at the
time? When reviewing the role of Hegels logic in his own work, Marx
later commented, This dialectic is to be sure, the ultimate word in
philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the
mystical aura given it by Hegel.15 The mystical aura that surrounds
Hegels approach is the Absolute Idealism the Idea takes the form of
an actually existing independent subject, a thing out there and the
world is the phenomenal representation of this Idea. This is the core of
Hegels non-materialism, the dialectic takes place in thought, since
thinking and our conceptualisation of freedom of ideas is the
cornerstone of human development. Indeed the dialectics of nature is
only a miserable copy 13 of the dialectical journey that the concept
of freedom takes.
Hegel and history
How did this complex model of philosophy aect how Hegel saw the
development of human civilisation? In case anyone was of the opinion
that Hegels philosophy was just abstract word play and had no
bearing on his politics or historical theories, we can briey sketch out
some of German professors ideas and see how they relate to his
philosophy. He was critical of how history was approached and studied
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

philosophy. He was critical of how history was approached and studied

at the time, referring to history as the slaughter-bench at which the
happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of
individuals have been sacriced 14. In the context of the reformation
and the enlightenment, with the incredibly rapid process of
development that was taking place in nearly all corners of western
society, there was more to history than just one damn thing after
another, there had to be a purpose, a thread running through it. He
was inspired by the Enlightenment ideas of the time that history was
actually progressive, that ideas were developed and rened, and that
the human condition improved steadily over time. Hegel developed a
philosophy of History which was both idealist and teleological.
He saw history as made up of a series of societies which in a sense
were a paradigm for the time in which they existed. He argued that
the Persian, Greek and Roman empires all represented particular
stages in the development of the Geist, the spirit of reason which runs
through all of humanity. He thought that mankind was alienated from
itself, and that history would only become complete (or nished) when
the subject-object became aware of itself, when it becomes identical
with itself.
Hegel believed that the history of the world is none other than the
progress of the consciousness of freedom 15. The very early empires,
which Hegel terms the Oriental World are located in China, India and
Persia (modern day Iran). These civilisations are stationary, they
reached a certain level of development and went no further. This was
a popular idea in Hegels time, western thinkers like John Mill were
obsessed with the idea of stagnant Asian economies and fearful it
could happen to the growing European empires as well. Hegel
believed that these ancient societies were stationary because no one
had freedom apart from the despotic ruler, be they a Pharaoh or an
emperor.
When the Persian empire fought the Greek city states at the battle of
Salamis, the victory of the Greeks was in actuality a victory for the
idea of individual freedoms are personied by the Greek city states.
The torch of history passed onto Athens, a superior form of social and
political organisation. The Greek city states were the highest for of
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

political organisation. The Greek city states were the highest for of
democracy yet achieved by humanity. The citizens of Athens were
part of the polity, the rule of the people, and had to take part in
regular discussions at the Agora over political matters. The problem is
that the Greek system was freedom and democracy only for some
people the entire civilisation was built on slavery and the subjugation
of women in the home. The Greeks saw slavery as a necessary
condition for the democratic rights of others, whilst they were away
making political decisions about the fate of the city their home aairs
and daily work was being carried out by the slaves 16.
On a more philosophical level, Hegel believes that the Greeks were so
tied to their sense of community within the city state that they had no
real grasp of individual freedoms, but only a sense of the collective.
Their urge to do right by their community came from an internal
impulse, not external decrees by an emperor, but it still meant that
they were not totally free, from Hegels point of view.
The collapse of the Greek empire was an inevitable result of the failure
to overcome this lack of genuine individual freedoms. The emergence
of the Roman empire was in some ways a step backwards and two
steps forward. It was a step backwards for Hegel because it was much
more authoritarian and disciplined by military rule than the Greek city
states had been, in this sense it was more of a return to the Asian
despotic model. But there was an antagonism, because at the same
time the principle of individual freedom was contained within the
complex legal judicial system, enshrined in the culture of Rome in a
way that had not been seen before. It is only with the arrival of
Christianity that humanity makes a real break through in the idea of
personal freedoms. The Christians abolished slavery, introduced a cult
of moral and spiritual love and end the use of oracles, which represent
the domination of chance over human will in the world ref]Singer P,
Past Masters: Hegel p18[/ref].
All the way through his philosophy of history we see Hegel identifying
their eternal Geist with the forms of institutions and cultures that
existed in any given stage of human society. As Hegel nished
the Phenomenology of Spirit on the eve of the battle of Jena, he spoke
about how he looked out from his window to see the victorious
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

about how he looked out from his window to see the victorious
Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte riding by on his horse. This connected
with Hegel on a very deep level, Napoleon represented the French
Revolution and the pinnacle rationalising spirit of the age, defying old
conventions along with religious obscurantism and absolutism. The
new age was being born and was nally coming to Germany. The
conclusions that Hegel drew about the world and history changed as
he grew older. After his initial enthusiasm for the French revolution he
quickly became disillusioned with its failures, ultimately adopting a
more conservative outlook. Towards the end of this life Hegel
concluded that it was in the present day Prussian state in which he
lived which was the culmination of all historical progress towards
reason. For Hegel the early 19th century was the end of history in any
meaningful sense, the state in his time was the representation of the
Divine Idea as it exists on Earth 17. Some have criticised Hegel for
justifying the status quo, point to his well known phrase: What is
rational is actual, what is actual is rational 18, as proof that he was
theorising the existance merely of the Prussian monarchy. But what
Hegel is saying is more complex, it is that that the rational choice, the
most logical and therefore progressive outcome, is actual it really
exists. Because this exists it is rational. This is somewhat of a
tautology, but rather than simply being a conservative phrase which
justies the status quo, in fact it is something that the Russian
revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin would later take up. Arguably, the
actuality of the revolution is a concept which comes directly from
Hegels concept of rationality and actuality.
His idea of history gave prime position to the idea of Reason as the
motor force of change, and it was teleological, in that everything was
moving towards a certain end point. History was on a xed trajectory
towards a set goal, it contained a narrative and was made up of
individuals striving, mostly unconsciously towards that goal. His views
were romantic and imbued with the spirit of the age, rational progress,
the contradiction between the lofty promise of modernity and the
trauma of the modern condition. The world spirit was at work, striding
the world like a colossus, always seeking to overcome alienation, the
dialectic was playing louder and louder as the falling away from the
self was met with the return to the self, as reconciliation loomed
closer and closer.
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Approaching the Absolute

As the mind develops its own faculties, urged on by the necessity of
its own self realisation, it passes through three stages. The rst is Art,
because it is beautiful and it has a moral value, it tells us some truths
about the world. The second is religion, because it is through the
religious symbols and institutions that we can practice faith and reach
God. The third, higher than even religion, is philosophy, which is the
sense of truth itself. 19This is why, despite his idealism, Hegel to some
degree a rationalist at the same time. It is also what opened him up to
criticism from the Church during his life time as an alleged atheist or
pantheist (or even a panentheist!).
Importantly, freedom in Phenomenology is not something akin to
political freedom, but is the freedom of a free mind using reason to
make rational choices. Hegel believes that our rational choices are
obscured by all the clutter of the world around us, and it is only by
overcoming this self limitation that we can truly be free. This explains
the apparent dichotomy between his claim that the entire course of
human history is the search for freedom and his conclusion that it has
ended with the Prussian monarchy. For Hegel the political forms were
not analogous to what he understood to be real freedom.
Hegel rejected the singular notion of knowledge that Kant inherited
from Descartes, whereby the individual is the nexus through which
knowledge is gained. Instead, Hegel socialises ethics into the
community, making it a collective eort of achievement. For Hegel
always a man who liked a triad there are three moments of ethics
the family, market and state, which all together form civil society (in
German brgerliche Gesellschaf). The concept of civil society is an
important one in Hegel. Whilst civil society is a struggle between
competing bourgeois and private interests the state is the actuality of
concrete freedom 20 because it not only mediates the relationship
between the atomised individual and society but it provides the moral
and legal framework for us to carry out our duty, in duty that the
individual nds his liberation. 21 For Hegel the modern German state
was therefore the pinnacle of human achievement precisely because it
allowed for the national interest to be formulated and embedded in
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

allowed for the national interest to be formulated and embedded in

the peoples consciousness and thereby resolved the contradictions of
civil society. Living life according to the civil duty, mores and mutual
social agreements under the rule of the state is the Sittlichkeit, the
ethical life. Life is not a selsh take-what-you-can dog eat dog world,
it should be one in which the social contracts we all establish with
each other are mutually recognised and reciprocated, living to these
social determinations is the highest form of ethical existence.
The key question is does the state separate from civil society and
does it confront it? For Hegel the answer is that there is a certain
degree of harmony, that the state works as an integral part of the
whole to manage the whole. The role of government was to actualise
and maintain the universal contained within the particularity of civil
society. For Hegel there is unity in the appearance and content, these
social relations represent the objective spirit of the rational idea, they
are the absolute made manifest in the state which is acting to
negotiate and balance civil society. The unity of civil society the state
was therefore the point at which the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) begins
we can now live rational lives in an ordered world.
This concept of the civil society was crucial to Marxs early political
development, in fact as he worked through his thinking on social
structure and the possibility and method of creating change he wrote
an entire critical essay on just two paragraphs of Hegels position on
it. Ultimately, it was Marxs critique of the idea of civil society in
Hegel which contributed to the development of his socialist theory.
But Hegel did not simply praise the modern world, he was also critical
of the condition of modernity. We are not complete beings as such, we
are still alienated through our work. He wrote of how a vast number
of people are condemned to utterly brutalising, unhealthy and
unreliable labour in workshops, factories and mines, labour which
narrows and reduces their skill. From Hegels perspective every act of
labour which produces something real and outside of us is alienating.
Every kind of objectication is alienating to us, we are constantly
suering under the general malaise of modern production and labour.
Hegel also criticised the divisions between the rights and freedoms of
the individual and the existence and necessity of the community. Both
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

the individual and the existence and necessity of the community. Both
had to exist, but under capitalism they existed in an antagonistic
relationship to each other. But once again, the only way to over come
it for Hegel is through the Rechtstaat (the state of right) the
aufhebung of all the contradictions of the modern world. In
a Rechtsstaat individuals can live moral lives within civil society,
social peace can be achieved and the end of history can be reached,
namely the identical subject-object becomes aware and rational. As
such, he is a thoroughly enlightenment thinker, seeking to provide the
philosophical basis for a rational community. Hegels state is not the
kind of thing we imagine today, but, as Pelczynski explains, any
ethical community which is politically organised and sovereign,
subject to a supreme public authority and independent from other
such communities. 22
In conclusion, two possible readings of Hegels politics are possible.
The rst is as a liberal in which emphasises the individual rights within
the state and the states role in defending those rights (private
property, liberty, etc). Alternatively he can be understood from a
communitarian perspective, as a Republican calling for an organic
community and the unity of the state and the individual in an ethical
whole. Either way, Hegel also believes that the society only works
because everyone knows there place it is ethical because people
full their duties assigned to them by the social order. Whatever he
may have beenn, Hegel was certainly not a revolutionary.
Death of Hegel and the rise of the Young Hegelians
Hegels ideas were a powerful force in Germany by the 1820s, but his
life was cut short when he died on 14 November 1831. The doctors
believed it was caused by cholera, which at that time was epidemic
across Europe. Germany had been deprived of one of its chief
intellectuals. Those students inuenced by his work were now largely
divided into two groups, the Right Hegelians and the Left (also known
as the Young) Hegelians. The Right Hegelians understood Hegel in a
conservative manner, one which emphasised its compatibility with
Christianity and the orthodox support for the rational Prussian
monarchy and its state. The Left Hegelians were much more radical.
They emphasised the concepts of Reason and the teleological drive of
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

They emphasised the concepts of Reason and the teleological drive of

human history towards a more rational and just society. They
disagreed with the German liberal programme at the time that a
constitutional monarchy was the highest form of statehood. They
wanted to explore more radical democratic options, ones that
emphasised collective freedoms and a criticism of the new powers as
much as the old. It was from the intellectual debates among the left
Hegelians that the young Marx and Engels were to fully explore and
finally grasp scientific socialism.
To some degree the Young Hegelians were one of the most important
intellectual movements in Germany at that time. Their inuence was
growing in various universities and they acted as persistent critics of
the Prussian monarchy, the church and even the emerging bourgeois
capitalist order, through people like Feuerbach who advocated a true
socialism (which Marx and Engels would later criticise in the
Communist Manifesto). One of the young Hegelians, David Strauss
published a book, The Life of Jesus in 1835. This book was a
deconstruction of the Gospels and caused a tremendous controversy
for its atheism. It was reective of a wider trend within the Left
Hegelians to identify with the alleged pantheism within Hegel,
although some, such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, drew
more radical conclusions.
When the new King of Prussia, Fredrick William IV came to power in
1840, he was initially welcomed by even some of the radical students,
who believed that he would further the pace of democratic reform and
national unity. Many hoped hoped he might be an enlightened despot
like Fredrick the Great or Joseph II of Austria. Their hopes were cruelly
dashed, William IV, although he briey allowed more press freedom
than hs father had, he actually turned back the clock on progress in
the German states, promoting a romanticist ideal of the organic
community (a phrase not unfamiliar to Hegel) and refusing to allow a
constitution to be drawn up, in the hopes of slowing down moves
towards more democracy. Left Hegelians like David Strauss satirised
the reforms by William IV, comparing him to the Roman emperor
Julian who attempted to restore Paganism to the Roman empire after
the death of Constantine. Strauss of course, thought that William IV
would eventually fail just as Julian had before him.
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

As part of their counter reforms William IV and his advisor Christian

Bunsen wanted the naturalist philosopher Fredrich Schelling teaching
in Berlin. Schelling had been recommended to Fredrick William by his
nephew, the Crown Prince Maximillian of Bavaria. At this time Berlin
was the heart of Hegels intellectual authority, even after his death,
and had the greatest number of Young Hegelians studying there. The
two philosophers had a history together stretching back to their
student days, Schelling and Hegel had been room mates at university
in 1790. Legend has it that they celebrated the French revolution,
along with the Friedrich Hlderlin who went onto become a famous
poet, by going onto a hill and planted a liberty tree . They even
translated La Marseilles, the anthem of the French revolution, into
German, though no reports survive as to whether the rendition carried
the same lyrical power of the original.
When the students, including Schelling, formed a readers club to study
Kant, Hegel did not join, claiming that he was too busy reading
Rousseau. After university they both traveled to Jena where Schelling
and Hegel worked together editing a journal The Critical Journal of
Philosophy. But Schelling was forced to leave the city due to an
undisclosed personal scandal. It was with the publication
of Phenomenology of the Spirit in 1807 that Hegel broke with
Schellings philosophy. The two became opponents after that, and
Schellings brand of naturalism began to loose popularity in the
universities.
The Minister for culture appointed Schelling to go to Berlin with a brief
to purge the university of Left Hegelianism. His inaugural lectures
were widely publicised and attended by peoples whose names would
go down in history, men like Mikhail Bakunin, Sren Kierkegaard and
Friedrich Engels key thinkers of anarchism, existentialism and
socialism. Schelling started his lecture with the words I feel the full
signicance of this moment, I know what responsibilities I have taken
upon myself. How could I deceive myself or attempt to hide from you
what is made evident simply by my appearance at this place. 23 The
audience listened intently to his lecture, sensitive to the political
moment which was happening in this philosophical counter revolution.
Afterwards, Engels wrote in a report of the event for a Hamburg
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Afterwards, Engels wrote in a report of the event for a Hamburg

newspaper; If you ask any man in Berlin who has any idea at all
about the power of the spirit over the world, where the battle site for
control over German Public Opinion in politics and religion, thus over
Germany itself, lies, he would answer that the battle site is at the
University, and specically in Auditorium Number 6, where Schelling is
lecturing on Philosophy of Revelation. 24
Engels was not exaggerating. This was not some simply some obscure
philosophical dispute. After all the king believed that the philosophical
question was ineluctably bound up with the wider issues of cultural
and political counterreforms which he was committed to. In that sense
Auditorium Number 6 was one of the central battlegrounds, a battle
which would ultimately culminate in the revolutions of 1848-49 that
shook Europe.
Many in the Prussian state and wider German society did not have a
problem with Hegel as such, he had after all been considered the
(un)ocial national philosopher, but now it seemed some of his
followers had gone to far. Bruno Bauer, Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach
were causing too much disturbance, their atheist propaganda and anti
monarchical politics were dangerous and had to be confronted. As
Engels pointed out, Hegel may have been dead ten years but he was
more alive than ever in his pupils. 25 Schelling for his part had been
intellectually dead for over three decades, and now this living
philosophical corpse had been dug up to purge the minds of German
youth. Schellings mission at the university was to root out as he saw
the methodological errors within Hegel that had led to this state of
aairs. His brand of positive-philosophy stated that only divine
revelations could have any true, higher meaning, and anything
derived from rationalism or logic was alwasy inferior. This was a
theological counter-attack against German idealism.
No doubt as Fredrich Engels sat in the audience at auditorium number
6 listening to Schelling he would have had a look of disdain on his
face. In his youth he was a bohemian young man, disrespectful to
authority, estranged from his father and scornful of the obligations of
German society at the time, such as military service. Yes, Engels was
a draft dodger. Engels initial motivation for moving in increasingly
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

a draft dodger. Engels initial motivation for moving in increasingly

radical circles was no doubt his distaste at his own upbringing in his
home town of Barmen, located in the Wupper valley. He described it
as the Zion of obscurantism, and satirised it in a series of articles
and letters in the newspapers of the Young German movement.
Engels was the type of young man who organised moustache
evenings with other young male friends growing facial hair as an act
of rebellion and to look more Italian. Certainly he was a renegade, but
not yet a revolutionary. However he was grappling and thinking about
some of the most exciting ideas in the world, namely what was wrong
with it and how to change it. He wrote to Fredrich Graeber; I cannot
sleep at night time, because the ideas of the century march through
my head. Engels, like most Young Germans was a proud nationalist,
who desired the unication of Germany into a single state. He
considered Fredrick the Great as an important reformer and was
disappointed by the failure of unication which was dashed against the
rocks of the Prussian aristocracy. In these days the desire for
unication was a progressive urge, as it fought against the power of
feudal princely kingdoms, demanding a modern united capitalist state
as England and France had forged. It was in a letter in November 1839
that he wrote to Graeber and announced; I am at the point of
becoming a Hegelian. I cannot be certain now whether I will make the
change, but Strauss provided me with insights into Hegel that made
his system very plausible. [Hegels] history of philosophy strikes me
beyond doubt as written from his soul.
The year of 1841 is therefore something of a turning point.
Feuerbachs book the Essence of Christianity was published.
Elsewhere in Germany a young Jewish student called Karl Marx was
completing his doctoral theses in philosophy, titled The Dierence
Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.Marx
had been born in 1818 in a well to do family, going onto university to
study jurisprudence. Whilst studying he lost interest in legal theory
and became increasingly inspired by philosophy, coming under the
sway of the popular Hegelian ideas. In his doctoral theses on Epicurus
and Democritus he conducted a study of the atomist school of thought
of the ancient Greeks. Marx refers to the dierences of opinion
concerning the role of atoms, Democritus claimed that only moved in
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

concerning the role of atoms, Democritus claimed that only moved in

a straight line or were repulsed from one another, but Epicurus posited
three possible paths for an atom to travel, in a straight line, curved
and the repulsion of many atoms. Even from his university studies
Marx was learning about matter, motion and the question of material
reality distinct from the world of ideas. These ideas had been
blasphemous in the middle ages, after all, Epicurus ended up in
Dantes Inferno for the sin of materialism. But in the context of the
enlightenment and the progress of knowledge, Marx was moving
rapidly in the direction of rejecting idealist philosophy and ideas and
towards a materialist world view.
After his academic hopes fell through as the Prussian monarchy
carried out a purge of radical and atheistic university professors during
the intellectual counter revolution, Marx turned to journalism, nding
an outlet for his energies and increasing passion to engage in political
and social matters. He found work at the Rheinische Zeitung and
within a short space of time it became an increasingly oppositional
paper critical of the Prussian authorities. He soon has a run in with the
censor and is forced to leave Germany for exile to France, eventually
ending up in Britain. The mood of Europe was ripe for new ideas and
revolutions. The growth of capitalism had brought without a growth in
the misery of the working classes and terrible conditions of existences
for proletarians in the cities and towns. Many people were looking to
change the world, or at least challenge the capitalism system
somehow. Before we consider Marxs contribution to this, we should
take a quick detour to examine some of the other anticapitalist ideas
which existed around the same time.

Did you like this? Share it:

Tweet

Like 32 people like this. Sign Up to see what your friends like.

Notes:
PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

1. Hegel, Philosophy of Right pxxi

2. The Phenomenology of Mind 438
3. System of Ethical Life
4. Most fully explained in The Science of Logic from 1812. Kant refers to it in his writings but
not in a systematic way as Hegel does.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

Throughout Science of Logic, eg 78, Shorter logic 41

Hegel Science 112
Hegel Science 115-117
Science of Logic 116
Lenins conspectus of Hegels science of
logic http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch01.htm
Lenins notes on dialectics http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/conslogic/summary.htm
Hegel wrote in 1812 that There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or
anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation The Science
of Logic
Hegel Science of Logic 1794
Cited by Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of German Classical
Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), p43
Hegels Philosophy of History, part 3 Philosophic History
Philosophy of history 21
Philosophy of History
Hegel Philosophy of History 41
Philosophy of Right p xix also translated as what is rational is real and what is real is
rational
Philosophy of the Mind sections on the Church and the philosopher
Philosophy of Right para 260
Philosophy of Right para 149
Pelczynski A, 1984 The State and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press
Towes J E, 2004, p1
Engels, MECW Volume 2, p. 181
ibid

Comments
0 Comments

PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Add a comment...

Facebook Comments Plugin

POSTED IN H EGEL: TH E COMPLETION OF GERMAN PH ILOSOPH Y| TAGGED ABSOLU TE

IDEALISM, DIALECTICS, EN LIGH TEN MEN T, GERMAN , H EGEL, IDEALISM, PH ILOSOPH Y |
LEAVE A COMMEN T |

Chapter 2: The breakthrough in

Chapter 4: The early utopian socialists

philosophy

Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.

Proudly powered by WordPress

Theme: Mixfolio by Graph Paper Press.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.

PDFmyURL lets you convert a complete website to PDF automatically!

Accept

Read More