by Peter Watson
What he tried to show, what he thought was the most vital question, was that subjective consciousness and objective existence must always involve an “irreducible duality.” It was the task of philosophy to go beyond this outlook, to the point where “our familiar conceptual schemes dissolved.” Like Schelling, only more so, Hegel conceived spirit as an entity involving development toward an end “in which it might be said to achieve confirmation of its own being.”7 In everyday terms, the history of the world was to be understood as a teleological process, whereby spirit first revealed itself in some form that expressed its eventual possibilities. This was a process that occurred at two distinct levels. In one, spirit manifested itself “unconsciously” in producing natural phenomena, not just individual objects but societies and civilizations, entities that represented concrete expressions of different stages of evolution toward a progressively fuller consciousness and self-understanding. At the second level, Hegel emphasized that development could be understood historically, the successive patterns in life and culture being the successive embodiments of spirit. Hegel’s fundamental idea was that, as distinct (social) forms and institutions evolved, together with advances in thought that provided fresh modes of interpreting experience, “spirit gradually moved toward an ever deeper comprehension of its own nature.” The end point was what he called “absolute knowledge,” a state of philosophical understanding “in which spirit finally came to recognise that the entire world, in all its varied manifestations, was the product and articulation of itself.” “Absolute knowledge” marked a form of understanding in which spirit, as a result of philosophical reflection and understanding, “returned to itself.” In this way, the external objective world, and the internal subjective world would be unified, and the original condition of self-estrangement, or self-alienation, was overcome.8
There are fairly obvious parallels here with the traditional Christian dogmas of the Fall, atonement, and redemption. Hegel himself conceded as much and even admitted a correspondence between the idea of God and his notion of absolute spirit. He was, if you like, struggling with a post-Christian/pre-Darwinian understanding. But in fairness, Hegel’s absolute spirit was not seen as a transcendent personality, over and above the universe or independent of it.9 This was a very important sense in which Hegel’s philosophical system was not religious.
The details of his system were set out in two principal works: in the early (and fairly abstract) Phenomenology of the Spirit; and the more explicitly historical Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History), published posthumously.10 The crucial aspect of man’s condition, according to Hegel, is a repeated oscillation between man’s “self-created social world” and his evolving attitudes toward that environment. There is a continual “dialectic” between the creative and critical periods of the process. As social and political circumstances evolve, spirit reveals itself in the deeper understanding of the essence of man, which Hegel identifies as the development of freedom. History manifests itself in successive civilizations which reveal an increasing self-consciousness and freedom as men acquire “a fuller grasp of their own needs and a profounder recognition of the relations in which they stand to one another.”11 “Master-slave” societies give way to individualistic ones, which are in turn displaced by the notion of a social order where “mutual respect between persons supersedes antagonism and distrust.” True freedom would be achieved insofar as an individual’s inner potentialities are realized in a world he himself had created and in which he found himself “at home.”12
Hegel’s philosophy was comprehensive and intended to be (Nipperdey called it “the tyranny of abstraction”). It was, nonetheless, in social and historical theory that he was to exert most influence, even if that influence resulted from a reaction against him by radical writers who turned some of his ideas upside down.
THE HEGELIAN AFTERMATH
To begin with, Hegel was regarded as a reassuring force. His account of history implied that what had evolved was for the best, confirming the institutions of society rather than seeking to change them in favor of something better.
Hegel died in 1831. Beethoven and Schubert had died not long before, and Goethe was to die the following year. The world was changing. In parallel, there emerged in the late 1830s and early 1840s a group of German intellectuals who came to be known as the “Young Hegelians” and put forward the far more aggressive view that the real meaning of Hegel’s doctrines had either been overlooked or misconstrued, and that the implications were far more radical than most people wanted to believe.
It is difficult for us now to think ourselves back into the mind-set of those times, but the truth is that, in the 1820s, Hegel’s philosophy had become supreme in Germany. It was strongly supported by the minister of culture, Karl Altenstein, and centered around the Berliner-Kritische Association, founded in 1827 as a home for the Hegelian periodical Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. In 1832, the year after his death, an association was formed in Berlin of Hegel’s most intimate friends and pupils, which continued as the intellectual backbone of the school, to propagate Hegel’s teaching and prepare an authorized edition of his works. So powerful was his system that many believed Hegel’s philosophy was the ultimate one, the culmination of all philosophical thought, and that there was little else to do except work out the details Hegel hadn’t had time to pursue. Inevitably, however, differences among the Young Hegelians began to show themselves.13
In practice, several of these young radicals were the first to raise ideas that Marx was to consolidate into his own all-embracing theory. In 1835, for example, David Strauss (1808–74) published Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus). Educated to begin with at Tübingen under the iconoclastic Old Testament scholar F. C. Bauer, Strauss transferred to Berlin to attend Hegel’s lectures shortly before his death.14 Hegel seems never to have been very interested in the historicity of the Gospels, but Strauss thought they were the essence of Christianity, myths that reflected “the profound desires of the people.”15 He understood the Gospels as “imaginations of facts” thrown up by the collective consciousness of a society at a specific (Hegelian) stage of development. This implied that the very idea of revelation and incarnation was but a phase on the way to something higher, better, freer. The effect of Strauss’s book was sensational—one review described Strauss as the “Ischariot of the day”—but in the context of Marx it had two consequences.16 One, it helped confirm his loss of faith. Two, in the heavily censored society of the times, where political discussion was fraught with danger, biblical criticism allowed the development of philosophical/sociological thinking in relative safety.
The other Young Hegelians whose more specific ideas Marx would adapt included August von Cieszkowski, who was the first to argue that “it was not enough to discover the laws of past history—men must use this knowledge to change the world” Lorenz von Stein, who first determined that industrialization meant a reduction in salaries for the proletariat who, for that reason, “can never possess private property” and Arnold Ruge, who stressed that man was defined by his social relations and that it was through work that he expressed himself. Many of these views had emerged through the discussions in the so-called Doktor Club in Berlin, from 1837 on, where an orthodoxy had also developed that Hegel’s real thought had been concealed while he was alive and that his philosophy, at one time felt to be reassuring, actually contained “revolutionary tendencies.” These figures were, however, all overshadowed by three others of greater significance: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, and Friedrich Engels.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LUDWIG FEUERBACH
Ludwig Feuerbach’s widely read and much-acclaimed Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) was published in 1841 and carried on the transformation in the critical study of Christianity already begun by Strauss and others.17 However, Feuerbach was not content merely to update and polish Hegel: in the new German tradition, he subjected Hegel to a thorough critical analysis. Feu
erbach thought that Hegel had made a crucial mistake, that existence comes before thinking. Thought, Feuerbach said, was naturally dependent on a “sensuously apprehended natural world of objects and events.” Humans are part of that world and only by reference to it are meaning and content generated. Philosophy, therefore, cannot begin at the opposite end, as it were, and use pure conceptions as a starting point.18
In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach tried to show this process operating in religion. Religion, he argued (and this was well before Freud), “implied the projection by man of his own essential properties and powers into a transcendent sphere in such a way that they appeared before him in the shape of a divine being standing over and above himself.” “The divine thing,” he went on, “is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective—i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being.” In worshipping God, man is worshipping himself. But this was not necessarily a bad thing or a dead end. Historically considered, Feuerbach says, worship has helped man to a greater understanding of himself and what he can hope to become. The negative side, he thought, lay in the fact that the idealized conception of the divine inevitably led men to diminish their own status, to a self-impoverishment of the earthly realm.19 This gap between the possible and the actual was a description of our alienation, and destiny was to be understood “not in terms of the absolute’s return to itself through self-knowledge, but in terms of man’s return to himself through the recognition and realisation of his own powers and possibilities.” This was Kant Hegelianized.
The young Karl Marx (1818–83) was greatly influenced by Feuerbach (in fact, for a time Feuerbach was more important than Marx). In particular, there was Feuerbach’s idea that anthropology and physiology were the most fundamental of sciences. This contributed to Marx’s central idea—that the “humanisation of nature” and the “naturalisation of man” are what philosophy should seek to achieve. Feuerbach produced in Marx the conception of man “as a being whose very essence is modified by his contact with nature and his fellow men in society.”20
And this is how Marx, following Feuerbach, came to regard Hegel’s conception of alienation as central. But while Feuerbach had concentrated on the idea of alienation as central to the religious experience, for Marx, alienation—man’s self-estrangement—was intimately linked to his concrete social situation.
Another precursor of Marx was Moses Hess, also a Young Hegelian. His Heilige Geschichte was the first expression of coherent socialist thought in Germany. His aim was to explore how mankind “can regain union with God now that the original harmony has been lost,” and it too was an attempt to reconfigure Hegel.21 In a subsequent book, Die europäische Triarchie, Hess argued that the abolition of private property was essential to any new social order, that “spiritual alienation” could only be removed once the “servile classes” were relieved of economic exploitation. He, like others, believed that revolution would come first (or next) in England because the divisions between wealth and poverty were greatest there. Hess and Marx encountered each other in Bonn in 1841, with Hess subsequently describing Marx as “Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel rolled into one.”22 “Money,” insisted Hess, “is the worth of men expressed in figures, the hallmark of our slavery.” For Marx, “Money is the jealous God of Israel beside which no other God may exist.”23 After Marx had moved from Bonn to Cologne in 1842, he and Hess attended the lectures of Bruno Bauer together. Hess shared with Marx the view that Germany was “a more theoretical nation” than any others, and that that too was a form of alienation. For a short time, as David McLellan has observed, Hess was setting the pace.
“PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT INTELLECTUAL COLLABORATION OF ALL TIME”
Marx, says Bruce Mazlish, was one of the “Essenes” of early socialism.24 This is meant to imply a certain religious and ascetic quality but in fact Marx defies easy generalizations. At times he saw himself as a scientist, invoking the name of Darwin as an analogy to his own role in discovering laws, not of “natural technology” but “of human technology.” In the late 1830s, at the very end of the Romantic period, Marx himself wrote poetry and forged a friendship with Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Georg Herwegh, poets who will be discussed in Chapter 14. But as Mazlish also points out, the spread of Marxism is analogous to the expansion of Christianity and Islam. 25 “Some argue that Marx is heir of the tradition of the great Jewish prophets, thundering forth at mankind…But Marx received that tradition in its Lutheran form, as a result of being raised a believing Christian. Marx, needless to say, did not remain a believing Christian, any more than Luther was a forerunner of communism…What they do share…is a rhetorical structure, namely the characteristic articulation of the apocalyptic tradition that moves step by step…from the original condition of domination and oppression to the culmination of perfect community.”26 Although he became a militant atheist, “a scoffer at the ‘union with Christ,’” the function of religion, its place in our psychology, remained of central importance to Marx, and this is why he found Hegel and Feuerbach so attractive. Hegel didn’t say as much explicitly, but Marx felt that he—and all of mankind—had been taken in by religion. And he thought he had advanced on Hegel when he said, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), that “Men make their own history; but…not…under conditions of their own choosing.”
Influenced by his father, a successful lawyer, Marx originally studied jurisprudence.27 When he graduated from the Gymnasium in Trier, his school reports show him to have been “well grounded” in knowledge of the Christian faith, to have an aptitude for ancient languages, less for French and physics. (In fact, Marx was eventually able to write fluently in French and English as well as German.)
Inside a year or so at Bonn University he had changed course, to philosophy and, at his father's insistence, moved to Berlin. His letters to his father show that he was much influenced by Hegel and that he saw his own life in dialectical terms. He had his inner struggles but thought of them as “logical” for a man in his historical and social position. Immersed in these struggles, he came to know some of Hegel’s other disciples and joined the Doktor Club composed of Young Hegelians.28 It was there that he met Bruno Bauer and his brand of radicalism.
This radicalism was worn uneasily at times. The woman Marx married, Jenny von Westphalen, represented his first success in life. By any standards, she was a catch. In one of his letters, Marx wrote: “I am asked daily [this was 1862] on all sides about the former ‘most beautiful girl in Trier’ and ‘Queen of the ball.’ It is damned pleasant for a man when his wife lives on in the imagination of a whole city as a delightful princess.”29 Marx insisted that on her calling card Jenny use the words “née von Westphalen.”
The marriage endured—and she was a great practical help to him—but it went through a bad patch around 1850, about the time their first child died and when, to escape, he decamped to the British Museum, in the evenings seeking consolation with another woman, Helene Demuth, the Marxes’ servant. The following year, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Marx’s role being kept secret at the time and only made public by chance much later. Engels accepted paternity of the boy and Marx never acknowledged him. (Engels told all this to Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, on his deathbed.)30
Marx’s affiliation with Bruno Bauer and other leftist Hegelians ended his chances of becoming a university teacher. However, he proved himself an able journalist with the Rheinische Zeitung which, under his direction, doubled its circulation. In the 1840s, industrialization was beginning to appear in Germany, and social and economic issues loomed larger and larger and were growing more complex, as they had done in England during the previous century and as Engels and Marx both realized. Socialist and communist solutions (much the same at the time) were on everyone’s lips in advanced circles. But Marx had not yet embraced these theories. In 1842, in a famous article he wrote on the theft of w
ood, he defended—mainly in legal terms—the traditional rights of the peasants to the gathering of dead wood against the growing need of industry. Private property was yet to become his central concern.31
Gradually—and not so gradually at times—Marx grew irritated with the interference by the government censor in regard to the Rheinische Zeitung, and in March 1843, he resigned just as the paper was being closed down. His career as a full-time journalist had lasted barely a year, and he now began his life of exile as a professional revolutionary.
He went first to Paris. He thought he could continue as a journalist, agreeing with Arnold Ruge to serve as a coeditor of a new periodical. Titled the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (the German-French Annuals), it was intended to be an international outlet. However, the Jahrbücher appeared only once, in a double number but without any French authors, so it was scarcely annual and scarcely international. That one issue, nevertheless, contained three seminal articles, two by Marx, “On the Jewish Question” and the introduction to “Contributions to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” together with Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” Marx had been impressed by Engels when the latter came through Paris, when they spent ten uninterrupted days in each other’s company, “thus laying the basis for the most successful and significant intellectual collaboration of perhaps all times.”32 This was no thanks to the French who, despite their own revolutionary credentials, expelled Marx and Ruge in January 1845 and closed down their periodical.
Undeterred, Marx and Engels founded the German Correspondence Committee, intended to keep communists in different countries in touch with each other (a forerunner of future Communist Internationals). The following year they organized a German Workers’ Society and helped with the League of the Just, a radical secret society. Marx was growing increasingly proactive. In addition to the activities described above, he was helping to arm the workers in Brussels for revolution, making use of his father’s legacy. He was found out and expelled and moved back to Paris, then to Cologne, where he founded yet another new periodical devoted to the revolution.