Engels defended Hegel – or rather, the Hegelian school – against Schelling’s attacks. He pointed out how unreasonable it was that Schelling, on the one hand, described Hegel as his own epigone, and on the other asserted that Hegel’s philosophy is misleading and has dangerous consequences for society. But Engels also took up Schelling’s new positive philosophy and its claim to entail a safe defence of Christianity. Engels grew up in a strictly Pietistic home, and was thoroughly conversant with the Bible, as well as with the various tricks in its defence. At the same time, he saw himself as a radical pursuer of the Hegelian project. He was keen to emphasize the kind of power Hegelianism had become after the death of its master.36
If we look at the effect the authorities in Berlin had hoped for, Schelling’s lectures were a fiasco. The only interest they aroused came from posterity, and the posthumous edition of his Philosophie der Offenbarung is now counted among the classics. But a development of this kind was not in the interests of the Berlin powers. In its efforts to annihilate the dragon, it had on hand other, heavier tools than philosophical lectures. Opinions proved impossible to govern, but with the institutions that lay directly in the hands of the state a better attempt could be made.
Hegel was a philosopher of the state. This is often said, but the expression can be misinterpreted. In the 1820s, he witnessed several of his best students being persecuted and even imprisoned in the hunt for enemies of the state. Cautious as always, he nevertheless got involved in their cause.37 He was already dead when the strict conservative interpretation of his political thought was given a brief official status for a few years in the 1830s. But that interpretation never reigned supreme, and Hegel himself would likely not have been satisfied with the politics that cited him.
If he himself was not a state philosopher, the state had a central place in his thought. He distinguished between different classes (social, not economic) in society. ‘Der Mittelstand’ – the middle, or general, class – held a unique position. The qualifier ‘middle’ could mean that the class found itself in the middle of the societal hierarchy, above the business class and under the nobility. But the decisive content was something else: by virtue of its education and its sense of justice, the middle class could constitute an intermediary between different interests, weigh them against each other and choose to represent reason above the combatants. Hegel counted not only the genuine servants of the state, but also university teachers very much among the middle class. It was in fact the professors who developed and conveyed the knowledge crucial for the development of the state.38
Hegel thereby ascribed a key role in society to himself and his colleagues. In emphasizing the crucial significance of the middle class, he formed part of an important tradition that had developed in earnest chiefly in Prussia after the catastrophic defeat against Napoleon. All forces had to be gathered. Those in authority concluded that the revolution was a constant threat, but a return to the old way was impossible. Prussia could not match France in military strength, or England in economic vitality. What remained was the path of education and cautious change. In this process, civil servants and academics had to take the lead. It was in that spirit that Wilhelm von Humboldt developed his ideas about a reformed school system and an entirely new kind of university in Berlin. Leading politicians Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August Fürst von Hardenberg agreed.
Modern reformism was born in this environment. Its first standard-bearers were civil servants and professors. Hegel became one of the latter when he was summoned to Berlin in 1816. His disciples, whether conservative or radical, followed his path as far as possible.
It was a thorny path from the very start. After the fall of Napoleon, Prussia joined the Holy Alliance with Russia at its head. Radical forces, especially students, demanded a modern constitution. One student, Karl Sand, took to violence and murdered the author August von Kotzebue, who had been exposed as a Russian spy. The reaction was violent, with increased censorship and other freedoms curtailed.
Hegel navigated cautiously in these troubled waters. As a professor, he enjoyed a certain freedom in expressing his opinion from the lecturer’s desk. But as soon as he went to publish, he was subject to censorship like everyone else. His summary of his political and philosophical ideas in Elements of the Philosophy of Right from 1821 is a marvel of caution; in it, he turns aside from the lectures he was holding on the subject at the same time. ‘What is rational is real, and what is real is rational,’ he says in the Preface.39 This could be interpreted as an unquestioning tribute to the established order of things: everything has already been arranged in the best conceivable way. Heinrich Heine, who was among Hegel’s enthusiastic students around 1820, claimed that, in his lectures, Hegel said that the real becomes rational and thus the goal of a process of improvement. Only recently has it been found that Heine was right. A long series of notes Hegel’s students made when they followed his lectures have been published; they point in Heine’s direction.40
Despite the ravages of reaction, Hegel did not abandon his cautious reformism. In that regard, most of his followers were faithful to him – at least for as long as they could cherish hopes of being able to work within the university system. The Young Hegelians are a good example. From their professorial chairs and through their writings, they hoped to develop Prussia and the other German states in a radical direction.
Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, who were both close to Marx during a crucial period, were among those who aimed to make a contribution within ‘the civil service intelligentsia’ (die beamtete Intelligenz). In 1840, Ruge distanced himself from revolutionary changes, which he associated with Romanticism, and he pointed out that theory and science offered a less bloody battlefield. It was there that the battle could be fought with some prospect of success, and the path of success was that of reforms.41
The other Young Hegelians cherished the same kind of hopes. Bruno Bauer, the leading figure among them, seemed to be on the way to a professorship at the theological faculty in Bonn. It was the minister of culture himself, Karl Stein von Altenstein, who cleared the way for him, and Bauer saw his happiness assured. And not just his! At a university where his own point of view – so common in Berlin – was completely unique, he wanted to see his promising young friend and fellow traveller Karl Marx as his colleague as soon as possible. And Marx was far from unwilling.
A living picture of the course of events comes out of the stream of letters Bauer wrote to Marx.42 Marx was a much more sluggish letter-writer; Bauer complained about missed responses just as Marx’s father had done earlier. Marx obviously wrote something, however, as Bauer’s correspondence shows. But the letters no longer remain.
Through Bauer, on the other hand, we are given a lively glimpse inside the university in Bonn. He finds it extremely wretched. His colleagues are narrow-minded, and their prejudices against Hegelianism monumental. He scares them out of their wits by announcing a lecture series on ‘The Life of Jesus and criticism of the Gospel according to John’. What chasms opened before their eyes under the word ‘criticism’!
Bauer also insistently encourages Marx to rid himself of ‘the despicable examination’ and finally become a doctor. But it is a matter of being careful in his doctoral thesis. Every indiscretion could be held against the author. You also need to think of your future bride, Bauer admonishes. If you fail to secure a career through some attack, you also cloud her future. But, he adds consolingly, once anyone has captured a professorial chair they can say what they will. The freedom of teaching as prescribed by law protects them.
Caution was not Marx’s chief virtue. When he presented his thesis, he took the opportunity to make a few magnificent and deeply untactical attacks. His older friend was shocked. But for a little while longer, there was hope for a future under the protection of the university. Bauer still lingered in Bonn. There was only one problem: the final appointment was late in coming. But it would surely soon come? And with his thesis behind him, Marx could join him.
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nbsp; There is reason to stop a moment before this thesis. It did not determine Marx’s destiny. But it says something important about both his educational path and his ideals at the time he wrote it.
The Doctoral Thesis
Marx completed his thesis swiftly and boldly. He began his work in the summer of 1840 and was finished in March the following year. He would defend his degree in Jena. The most important reason for that was that the university there lay beyond the reach of Prussian authority. It was under the protection of a few small duchies in Thuringia, with Sachsen-Weimar at their head. Another reason may have been that the teachers in Jena at the time were considered to be rather indulgent. They caused no trouble for those students who wanted to get on quickly, and Marx – so he still thought – was in a hurry to Bonn.
Only a few decades earlier, Jena had been the centre of a great intellectual development. From his lofty position in the neighbouring city of Weimar, Goethe had kept his hand on the university and seen to it that not only his fellow poet Schiller received a professorship, but also that the philosophers Fichte and Schelling could work there for a few years and gather substantial crowds of listeners below their lecturer’s desks. In only a few years, they and other young intellectual heroes had turned Jena into Germany’s most famous university towns.
But, with the Napoleonic Wars, Jena sank bank into its earlier obscurity, with mediocre teachers and students whose chief interests seemed to be beer and pranks. The leading philosopher was named Karl Friedrich Bachmann, and he could hardly be said to be particularly bright. He found himself, however, in the immediate vicinity of the best and brightest; he had sat at the feet of Schelling and Hegel, and cultivated his mineralogical interests in Goethe’s company. He remained faithful to Jena, and had received an ordinary professorship there back in 1813. Hegel was his principal master, but later on in life he began to estrange himself from the man. In the end, he frontally attacked Hegel’s method of identifying thought and being, idea and reality; he did this in 1833 with a publication titled Über Hegels System und die nochmalige Umgestaltung der Philosophie (On Hegel’s System and the New Transfiguration of Philosophy). It became his most noted work, and the subject of numerous counterattacks from Hegelians.
It was to this man, Bachmann, that Marx turned in a letter of 6 April 1841. The letter was endowed with the then-customary polite phrases of the ‘honourable Sir’ type, but otherwise it was – to say the least – straight to the point. Marx enclosed a formal letter to the faculty drawn up in Latin, his thesis manuscript, his curriculum vitae, previous examination marks and the mandatory fee, and expressed the desire that in the event his thesis could be approved, his case be expedited so that he could receive his diploma. He could only stay at his address in Berlin – Schützenstrasse 68 – for an additional few weeks, and it was important for him to receive his rank of doctor before his departure.43
Bachmann was neither frightened nor annoyed by the young man’s resolute tone. Only a week after the letter left Berlin, he was ready to deliver his opinion to the faculty of philosophy in Jena. He called Marx ‘a very worthy candidate’ and said that the thesis testified to ‘as much intelligence (Geist) and acumen as wide reading’. There was one little mistake the candidate was guilty of – in the Latin petition to the faculty he spoke of a master’s degree. This should be pointed out to him: he was to become a doctor, and that in Latin as well. Bachmann added that Marx had sent in too much money for the diploma. The excess amount would be sent back.44
That was how simply Marx earned his Ph.D. He did not need to present himself in Jena, much less defend his thesis against any opponents. In any case, he attended his conferment ceremony. He became ‘Doctor Marx’. New adventures now awaited.
The thesis Bachmann approved so quickly is of moderate size, but must still have made up a large package on its way to Jena by mail coach. A part of it has been lost, but the remainder – of which the lion’s share consists of notes with long quotes, mostly in Greek but also in Latin and French – still comes to seventy large printed pages in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. The title is impressive: Über die Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie (Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature).
The subject of the thesis is the atomic theory of antiquity. Epicurus adopted Democritus’s idea that the world consists of very small atoms moving about in empty space. In today’s history books, it goes without saying that Epicurus deviated from his master by asserting that the movements of the atoms are random, but this difference was not noticed in 1841. Leibniz placed the views of nature in Democritus and Epicurus on an equal footing, Marx pointed out. Hegel, ‘the giant (riesenhafte) thinker’, certainly saw the difference in principle but did not have time and space enough to investigate it.45 With his thesis, Marx attempted to fully demonstrate what the new thinking in Epicurus consisted of.
Marx became perhaps the first to clearly investigate the difference between the two philosophers. It was an achievement, however, that passed his contemporaries completely by. But Marx saw the work as only one part of a larger project in which Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Scepticism would be brought together. It would largely entail a careful analysis of Greek (and Roman) philosophy after Plato and Aristotle.46
There is a purpose for this declaration. To obtain a permanent position in the world of German universities, a doctorate was not enough. It also required a significantly larger, more demanding habilitation thesis. The subject of the study Marx announced would fit here splendidly. In short, he declared that he imagined a future at some university.
But let us return to the doctoral thesis. Marx did not content himself with investigating Democritus’s and Epicurus’s different conceptions of chance and necessity. He also pointed out that they both had completely different strategies for arriving at knowledge. Democritus says that he wandered throughout large parts of the world. He sought knowledge everywhere, learning from Egyptians, Persians, and Indians. Epicurus, on the other hand, calls himself an autodidact. Democritus, seeing the material world as nothing but appearances and illusion, seeks positive knowledge of it. Epicurus sees the material world as real, but disdains empiricism.
This might lead the reader to think that Marx would now put himself on Democritus’s side. But he did not. While Democritus regards nature only from the material side, Marx says Epicurus sees the connection between the material and the spiritual. According to Epicurus, two bodies that repel each other thereby also negate their relationship to each other. The relationship between them is not only real, but ideal.47
The line of thought may today seem difficult to follow, but it becomes comprehensible against the background of the philosophical terminology of the time. Like Schelling before him, Hegel had asserted the primacy of the spirit and the intellect at the expense of substance. The material can be explained from the spiritual, and not the other way around (as materialists like Democritus asserted). Even nature is run through with something spiritual, though on a lower level than the human. Simple natural events become comprehensible in terms of the spiritual. Attraction is a primitive analogue to the inclination towards each other that people can feel, and repulsion the opposite.
The material, in other words, has a spiritual side, and the spiritual a material side. Marx appears here as a good Hegelian seeking to meld idealism and realism. In their view of nature, the Left Hegelians do not much differ from the Right. Nature is not the centre of their attention, nor was it Hegel’s. Instead there is history, politics, knowledge, art, religion – in general, everything human.
For Marx, nature still appears as a reflection of the spiritual. This is, for me at least, the reasonable interpretation of the text. But there is another, nearly opposite reading. John Bellamy Foster stands by it in the previously mentioned Marx’s Ecology. According to Foster, the thesis is only Hegelian ‘in spirit’, not in substance. In other words, Marx gave lip service to Hegel but at heart had already distanced himself from him. In fact
, Foster goes further: Marx was never following Hegel, but from the beginning was captivated by the materialist tradition that reached from antiquity up to the Enlightenment thinkers.
In short, the view of society and of history that Marx developed a few years after his doctoral thesis had already been furnished with its permanent foundation in a materialist conception of the world. Foster also sees Darwin as a somewhat unwilling, hesitant materialist who with his theory of evolution filled a gap in Marx’s otherwise solid worldview.48
As I understand it, this entire interpretation entails a gross simplification. Marx’s relationship to Hegel, materialism, and Darwin was significantly more complex. On the other hand, it is easy to agree with Foster that with his thesis, Marx joined a long tradition of reading Epicurus that had gone on – periodically in secret – ever since the old philosopher’s own time 2,300 years ago. The aspect of the inheritance from Epicurus that Marx emphasizes even in the foreword to his thesis is not materialism, but the revolt against the gods and thereby against religion and the societal order in general. Marx also engages David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher. (Typical for the time, Hume is rendered in German translation and Greek authors in Greek.)
But the finale itself of the foreword is a quote from one of his most beloved dramas: Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus. In it, the rebellious Prometheus, who defied the gods by giving fire to humanity, refuses to bend his spirit to the will of Zeus. His punishment is to be chained to a rock, unable to protect himself against a vulture that eats his liver. Standing helpless, he is visited by Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Prometheus exclaims defiantly:
I can assure you that it is easier
To be prisoner here than a servant of the gods
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