(In the fierce battle against
Mind and Thought Control, and vice versa, in the merciless attacks of Ideology
on Emancipation, many logical arguments are just flung ad hominem
against the respective opponents, without caring what Kant, Hegel or Marx
really thought or taught. To
throw some light on scientific and philosophic critique and criticism of
their Patrian Philosophy, ad arbitrium, with stringent academic
delight, we post these two reflections on Carl Zimmerman's Marx.com.)
Introduction
For Hegel, History progresses from primitive tribal life to the modern more adequate, fully rational State. The historical process ends up in the complete self-understanding of the "absolute", in the totality of everything which exists. He applied this system in detail to history, logic, ethics, aesthetics, politics and religion, and as such developed a huge, complex philosophical system which has the Dialectic as its core.
After the death of Hegel in 1831, his followers gave their own interpretations of his philosophic teachings, of What Hegel Really Meant; and in accordance with the Dialectic of their teacher, they rapidly developed Right a n d Left Hegelian schools. On the Right were the Old Hegelians, very conservative, religious and Christian ; on the Left stood the Young Hegelians, very revolutionary, atheist and scientific socialist.
The Right, following the views of the later Hegel, claimed that the historical dialectical process culminates in the Prussian State, and that the Absolute is identical with traditional Protestant conceptions of God the Almighty. Of course, we can clearly see its "historic social order", its defence of the new bourgeois ideology, and its vehement struggle against feudalist religious absolutism. For them, the "real", the Prussian State, was "rational". Of course, they enjoyed the political support of the very Prussian State, which they adored ; nonetheless, this school did not produce major thinkers ; by 1860, the Right Hegelians were already fading away into absolute oblivion.
The "Left" Hegelians
Of greater significance are the Left
Hegelians ; their school has produced eminent figures such as Ludwig
Feuerbach, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. These Young Hegelians
interpreted the Dialectic in
a radical democratic, atheistic revolutionary manner. For them, only
the "rational"
was "real". This was "revolutionary".
The "real", the existing economic order, including its prevailing
religious, ideological, political and philosophic superstructure, is inadequate
; it has to be revolutionized, to be made more "rational". According
to them, this truth is logically entailed in the very laws of Hegel’s Dialectic.
However, not like Hegel, they were convinced that the historical process
would not end in the 19th century, and certainly not in the
Prussian State or Lutheran Protestantism.
We should not forget that, although they were socialist, the Young Hegelians were not anti-capitalist. According to most of them, the revolutionary changes have to take place within the very framework of the Patria. Capitalism was seen as a necessary transitional stage towards Socialism. These essential changes are to be driven forward by the "class struggle", and by the dialectical dynamo of social revolution.
Marx himself was fascinated by capitalism, explaining to the colonial
world, that the best thing that ever could have happened to it, was the
very introduction of European conquest, slavery and civilization. Also
he informed the colonial world that it could now already see its future
in the mirror image of the advancing industrialized countries. He even
expected the socialist revolution to triumph in his own lifetime ;
at first, in countries like England, France, Germany and the United States
of America, and thereafter, in the rest of the world.
In his book, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 2 vol. (1835-36; The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined), David Friedrich Strauss reinterpreted the mission of Jesus Christ on Earth. For its Age, this book certainly acted as a highly-explosive anti-feudalist time bomb. According to him, Christ’s mission was simply a parable of the Hegelian Truth, that Being is simply the dialectical unity of Spiritual and Human Essence, of Divine and Human "Nature". No further comments!
Ludwig Feuerbach, in his work, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) , went even a step further ; he stated that the species homo sapiens itself had reproduced religion as a projection of its very own godliness, and that therefore, Man himself is the "new religion". In that case, at that stage, Man is Protestant Religion, is the Lutheran God.
Some Young Hegelians, like Max Stirner,
began to interpret the Hegelian Dialectic
in a psychologistic manner, deriving from it very radical philosophic and
political views. Stirner argued that human
self-consciousness is the highest manifestation of reality.
For this very reason, he became the "father" of anarchism, and of aristocratic
egoistic individualism.
Marx and the Hegelian Dialectic
It was Karl Marx who placed the Hegelian Dialectic , not in abstract realms, but in real concrete life, in the material conditions of historical evolution and revolution. He explained the Hegelian dialectical development from the inadequate to more adequate entities as the process of primitive economic modes of production toward more sophisticated ones, culminating in Communism. The dialectical process does not terminate in some nebulous absolute divine "Milky Way", but in the classless communist society.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the Hegelian movement was declining in Germany, but it still exerted a powerful influence on university life in the fields of philosophy, politics and aesthetics ; as Neo-Hegelianism it spread rapidly to Britain, Italy and the United States. Especially in England it contradicted empiricism and utilitarianism, and it allowed intellectual compromises, "gentlemen agreements", to be made ; Hegel was modernized to act as a reconciliatory platform between Science and Religion, between individual freedom and State hegemony. Famous Neo-Hegelians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were thinkers like F.H. Bradley and J.E. McTaggart in Britain, Josiah Royce in the United States, and Benedetto Croce in Italy. Thereafter due to the domination of positivism and empiricism in Europe, Hegelianism rapidly began to decline.
However, thanks to the French historian Jean Hyppolite, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, towards the middle of the 20th century, Hegel again dominated in the fields of sociology, literature, aesthetics and politics, not as a philosophical system, but rather many of his philosophic ideas were integrated in various philosophic or political theories. Also his dialectical method was preserved in all types of Marxist movements.