Enormously impressed with the Enlightenment epistemology of empiricism, the intellectual understanding that valid knowledge about the world can only be obtained through sense perception, Kant wondered what guarantee there was that our sensory perceptions offered a valid knowledge of the objects of these perceptions, the “things in themselves,” as he said. He concluded that there was no guarantee, that we could not know things in themselves, but that we could investigate the nature and shaping of our perceptual apparatus and thus obtain a certain form of knowledge about it, separate from perceptions, the celebrated synthetic a priori judgments.
Hegel certainly agreed with Kant’s observations on the limits of empiricism, but felt that they did not go far enough. Why assume that there was only one, static form of perceptual shaping, and that such a shaping was independent of the object of our perceptions? Rather, Hegel understood the shaping of perceptions and the object of perceptions as interactive or “dialectical”—a word Marx himself would employ to characterize his own views, although less frequently than his followers did. In Hegel’s way of thinking, the perceiving subject would interact with the object of perception so as eventually to undermine the shape and frame of the subject’s perceptions, usually because the interaction would lead to a self-contradiction in the framework of perception. This self-contradiction would bring forth a new frame, and then this interactive process would repeat all over again, resulting in yet another perceptual framework. The result of this process of repeated interaction between a thinking subject’s frame of perceptions and object of perceptions, Hegel asserted, was that the subject would eventually come to recognize the object of its perceptions, which had formerly been seen as alien and other—as “externalized” or “alienated” from itself (Hegelian concepts that would play a large role in Marx’s thinking)—as a part of, in fact, a product of itself. A subject’s consciousness of objects outside itself would ultimately be transformed into an expanded version of self-consciousness. Another, integrally related result of this process was that the individual perceiving subject would come to understand its self-consciousness as part of a cosmic, collective subject, developing throughout human history, and also coming to self-consciousness, which Hegel called Absolute Spirit or Mind.
There are two ramifications of this philosophical theory relevant to understanding its use by Hegel’s successors, including Marx. One is that Hegel saw philosophy as an imperialist branch of knowledge, incorporating all others, its methods and conclusions being reproduced in these other forms of knowledge and also affirming them. The intellectual process of the development of forms of perception, from initial, unreflective perceptions to Absolute Knowledge, the self-knowledge of the Absolute Spirit, occurred within human history. Forms of logical development were paralleled in a similar way in the physics of the natural world, or in the understanding of law, politics, and government. Wherever Hegel looked at a systematic, organized body of knowledge, what the Germans call Wissenschaft, he saw his philosophical theory. In this understanding, he was remarkably successful and influential. In the period of Hegel’s greatest influence, the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a substantial proportion of German scholarship—not just in philosophy but in history, legal and political theory, art history, linguistics, Orientalism, and, perhaps especially, theology—used Hegelian forms of reasoning.
A second point, following from the previous one, was Hegel’s understanding of his philosophical system as self-proving. If Hegel could represent his philosophy as the culmination of the systematic development throughout history of the highest forms of human intellect in philosophical reasoning, then this proved that his philosophy was the culmination of all previous philosophical reasoning. Self-consciousness became the highest form of proof for Hegel and his followers.
Although this whole line of reasoning may seem today arcane, vague, and terribly abstract, to contemporaries it packed a powerful punch. Not only guidelines for academic research and writing, Hegel’s ideas became almost a religious cult. Young men from a rationalist background in particular, for whom the doctrines of organized religion had lost their emotional impact, were strongly attracted to Hegel’s ideas, undergoing a conversion experience, almost ecstatically rejoicing in their self-understanding as part of Absolute Spirit. One of Hegel’s students, Wilhelm Vatke, wrote to his brother about his embrace of Hegel’s ideas: “You will think I am insane when I tell you that I see God face to face, but it is true. The transcendent has become immanent, man himself is a point of light in the infinite light and like recognizes like. . . . Oh, if I could only describe to you how blessed I am.”22
Such effusions were not Marx’s style, but the letter he wrote his father in November 1837, the only one preserved from his time at the University of Berlin, shows him as another worshipper of the cult of Hegel.23 It began with a blast of Hegelian rhetoric:
There are moments in life placed like boundary markers in front of an era that has run out, but simultaneously point definitively in a new direction.
In such a transitional point, we feel ourselves compelled to observe the past and present with the eagle eye of thought and so to obtain consciousness of our genuine position. Indeed, world history itself loves such retrospectives and perceives itself, which often stamps it with the semblance of retrogression and stagnation, while it is actually just throwing itself into an armchair to comprehend itself, to work through and encompass spiritually its own deed, the deed of Spirit.
Already, in this introduction, Marx, in good Hegelian fashion, identified himself with the world-historical deed of Spirit achieving consciousness of itself. More practically, he informed his father of his intellectual development, during his first year at the University of Berlin, and of his efforts to write a philosophy of law based on the ideas of Kant. But, Marx explained, reiterating Hegel’s critique of Kant, his efforts failed, because they assumed that perception and analysis were independent of the object, “where the subject runs around the object . . . [posing] arbitrary categorizations,” whereas, as Hegel would find appropriate, “the reason of the thing itself must as self-contradictory move onwards and find its unity in itself.” Marx then described his introduction to Hegelianism: “A curtain had fallen, my most sacred [sic] had been torn apart, and new gods had to be inserted. . . .” Becoming acquainted with Hegel “from beginning to end . . . ever more firmly, I chained myself to the current world philosophy. . . .” After receiving this inspiration, Marx “ran like mad in the garden on the filthy water of the Spree . . . ran to Berlin and wanted to embrace every day laborer standing on street corners.” He ended his letter, in exalted literary fashion, by explaining that he had been writing for hours, it was 4 a.m., and his candle had burnt down to the end.
Having bared his soul to his father, Karl was probably not expecting the savage and hostile response he received to this letter, which initiated a period of crisis in his life. Heinrich was in no mood when he sat down on December 9, to let his son know what he thought of his new Hegelian beliefs. What angered him was not his son’s interest in philosophy or literature in place of jurisprudence, or the hints that a scholarly rather than a juridical career might be in the offing. Karl, in his long letter to his father, had been careful to preserve his options, and remained, for all his years at the University of Berlin, formally enrolled in the faculty of law. Nor was Heinrich averse to a possible change in his son’s career. He had welcomed Karl’s literary interests, wondering if they might enable him to advance more quickly than other aspiring jurists (as he would need to, in view of his engagement to Jenny), suggesting that Karl write an ode in honor of Prussia for the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Heinrich had even been open to the idea of his son aspiring to an academic position.24
Rather, it was the touchy issue of his son’s lack of progress toward an appropriate manhood that put his father into a rage. Karl had “taken on an obligation possibly beyond his years, but for that reason all the more sacred to sacrifice himself for the well-being of a
girl who . . . had made a great sacrifice . . . of her prospects . . . chained herself to the destiny of a younger man.” Yet what had he done? In Bonn, he had been the “wild ringleader of wild lads,” but his record in Berlin was worse. “Disorderliness, dull floating around in all areas of knowledge, dull meditation in front of a darkling oil lamp; running wild in the scholars’ night-gown and with uncombed hair, instead of running wild with glasses of beer. . . . And here, in this workshop of senseless and purposeless learnedness, this is where the crop will ripen, that will nourish you and your beloved, the harvest will be gathered that will serve to fulfill your sacred obligations?”
In this letter, for the first time, Heinrich sharply criticized Karl’s financial acumen, condemning him not just for poor bookkeeping but for excessive spending. Yet even here, the criticism was not so much for Karl’s wasting money as for his lack of order and progress:
As if we were little men made of gold, the Herr son, against all agreements, against all custom, disposes of 700 talers in one year, while the richest cannot even spend 500. And why? I’ll be fair; he’s no wastrel, no spendthrift. But how can a man who every week or two invents new [philosophical] systems, and must tear up the old, laboriously created works, how can he descend to petty matters? How can he subordinate himself to petty order? Everyone has his hand in his pocket, and everyone cheats him . . . but a new money order is once again soon written.
Finally, Heinrich formulated his indictment: his son was squandering his talents, deploying his intellect in useless ways rather than forwarding his career. “My clever, talented Karl” was busy spending sleepless nights in his room, inventing and rejecting philosophical theories, “hunt[ing] up the shadow of learnedness.” He was not attending lectures or sitting for exams. Nor was he following his father’s advice to pay visits to influential, well-connected individuals who would help him in his career. In short, Karl was wasting the family’s commitment to him, wasting its resources, failing to take the proper path to manhood. Heinrich concluded by ordering his son to come home for the Easter vacation in 1838, in effect demanding that he would then have to put matters in order. Heinrich had admitted at the start of his letter that his bad mood was in part the product of a constant and unshakable cough, with which he had been plagued for nearly a year. That summer he had been to Bad Ems, to take the waters, but they brought him no relief. Neither Heinrich nor his doctors, who thought his cough came from gout, knew it, but the tuberculosis that would kill him had reached its final stages. A month after writing this letter, he had to take to his bed, which he would never leave.25
Karl did travel to Trier during the Easter recess in 1838, the one time in his four years at the University of Berlin that he returned home. While deeply Catholic Trier was celebrating Christ’s tormented death and glorious resurrection, the Marx family was stuck in the phase of torment. The visit must have been very difficult for Karl, verging on the nightmarish. The father whom he loved and respected, for all their differing views, lay on his deathbed. Meeting Jenny, after a year and a half of separation brought no relief, but instead made Karl’s emotional situation worse. Under the pressure, Karl and Jenny had an angry fight, in the course of which he called her a “crude, common girl,” and threatened to denounce her to her brother Edgar, then Karl’s fellow student in Berlin. Realizing that he was about to destroy the ties to the woman he loved, and whose emotional support he needed even more now, Karl apologized in time to avoid the worst. But his angry outburst nourished Jenny’s fears of what might happen if his passionate attachment to her were to grow cold, and left the future of their relationship in doubt. After this disastrous visit, Karl left Trier on May 7, 1838; his father died three days later. Only after Karl was back in Berlin did he receive the news of his father’s death, which affected him deeply, as Edgar von Westphalen reported in a letter to Henriette Marx.26
A number of Marx’s biographers have suggested that Marx himself was ill with tuberculosis at the time, citing the result of an 1841 draft physical that found him unfit for military service because of “repeated spitting of blood.” 27 If this were so, he would not have lived another four decades. The spitting of blood might have been the result of a bad case of pneumonia or bronchitis—or might not have existed at all. Both Heinrich and Henriette had arranged for a private physician’s report for the Prussian military authorities, for the purpose of emphasizing their son’s physical ailments. This desire to shield a son from the army was not at all uncommon among the German upper middle class of the time; the newer ideal of serving as a young man’s patriotic duty was still making slow headway, particularly among the reluctant Rhenish subjects of Prussia’s monarchy. Writing an ode in honor of Prussia’s military glory, as Heinrich suggested Karl do, was one thing; actually contributing to it was rather another.28
If Karl’s physical health was not affected by his father’s death, his future plans and aspirations certainly were. All of the careers he envisaged presupposed a healthy father with a substantial income, a good portion of which he could expend supporting his son for years. Now the possibility of that support was gone. The Marx family still enjoyed a reasonable affluence from the property it owned, primarily from Henriette’s dowry and inheritance. A decade after her husband’s death, and after outfitting three daughters with dowries, Henriette still received the eminently respectable income of 1,200 talers a year.29 But this sum would not support Henriette and her other children and simultaneously keep Karl in the fashion to which he had become accustomed. As a result, Karl’s thoughts turned toward his inheritance, his share in his father’s estate.
Karl was still a minor when his father died, but the Napoleonic Code (to the considerable anger of later nineteenth-century feminists) did not recognize widows as the guardians of their own children. So Karl received a court-appointed guardian, one of Heinrich Marx’s colleagues, the Trier attorney Johann Heinrich Schlink. He had the difficult task of mediating between the son, pressing for his inheritance, and the widow, reluctant to make expenditures. Schlink was an admirable guardian, even traveling to Berlin to meet Karl personally and hear his complaints. It was very likely Schlink’s mediation that brought about an interim settlement. Karl received from Henriette 160 talers in 1838, supposedly to cover the costs of his obtaining his doctorate, and she lent him a further 950 talers against his share of his father’s estate and as an advance against his share of her estate, upon her eventual death.30
There was nothing particularly unusual about disagreements between widows and their children over an estate, or about the interim settlement Henriette reached with Karl. Both were features of nineteenth-century family property arrangements under the Napoleonic Code. But in this particular case, the circumstances of Marx’s engagement and the relationship between the Marx and Westphalen families brought an additional element of emotion and rancor into the situation. As an argument for the interim settlement, Karl let his mother know, via his guardian, that without the necessary funds he would be unable to finish his studies, and Jenny would have no choice but to reject him. Lending money to her son meant that Henriette had to continue her connection with the Westphalens, who had quite pointedly snubbed her after her husband’s death, refusing to pay a condolence call, and not receiving Karl Marx’s brother Hermann, when he came to pay a call on them: “. . . you will never make the moral sacrifice for my family as we have all made for you . . . you can never replace what we have all tolerated and suffered for you,” Henriette told Karl.31
Karl did succeed in obtaining enough money to pay for the rest of his Berlin studies, albeit at the cost of increasing tension with his mother. Although his circumstances were more straitened after his father’s death, his previous disorganized and careless life continued. On several different occasions between 1838 and 1840, he ran up a tab with a tailor, a dry-goods merchant, and a book dealer, and was unable or unwilling to settle. The frustrated creditors were still trying to collect via the university’s student disciplinary system after Marx had left Berl
in.32
All these measures were interim solutions to his financial problems, predicated on the assumption that he would eventually have a secure, well-paying position. Partly as a result of general economic trends, but mostly because of Marx’s intellectual and political radicalism, this position would never materialize, so that the interim measures of the years 1838 to 1841 became the rule over the following quarter century. He would continue to try to make up for his lack of income by borrowing money from his mother or her family; he quarreled with them over his inheritance; he filled in the gaps with an irregular income from writing, and miscellaneous funds from anyone who would lend him the money, or give it to him outright.
Naturally, in 1838 Karl could not foresee these long-term consequences. In the shorter term, though, he went through a period of personal realignment and drift, as he came to terms with the emotional and economic impact of his father’s death. He stopped attending lectures in the faculty of law and gradually gave up plans for a juridical career. For at least part of 1839, he was preoccupied with defending his and Jenny’s honor, preparing for a duel with a Berlin acquaintance, possibly Werner von Weltheim, Jenny’s stepcousin, who had taunted Karl about Jenny’s brief first engagement. It took the combined efforts of Jenny, her brother Edgar, and Eduard von Krosigk, the cousin of Weltheim’s fiancée, to call it off before the two young men met with pistols at twenty paces.33
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