Philosophy
and Religion, Part 3
Hegel
George William Frederick
Hegel (1770-1831) [Image: Hegel with his students] was
not just somebody whose theories were surpassed by those of Marx and Engels,
nor was he merely a John the Baptist to Karl Marx’s Christ. Hegel was an
original, with an indelible part in the development of human thought that is
inseparable from Marx’s contribution.
Engels in his short “Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 1
- Hegel” (linked below) writes that the revolutions of 1789
and 1848 were each preceded by uproar in the field of philosophy; but there
were differences.
Whereas the French philosophers had been banned and
proscribed, Hegel had advanced in “a triumphant procession which lasted
for decades” at times with “the rank of a royal Prussian
philosophy of state”. Even in the decade following Hegel’s death, until the
lectures of Schelling in 1841 which Engels (aged 21) attended, “‘Hegelianism’
reigned most exclusively.” This was the ground in which Marxism grew,
and this is what Engels is describing in the main linked text.
One of our CU correspondents has written to say that it is
unfair to lay the blame for “mechanical materialism” at Engels’ door.
This is true, but the unfairness does not arise from prejudice. It arises
because of Engels’ ambiguous semi-filial relationship with Hegel, which causes
Engels to defend Hegel, while at the same time strongly repudiating some
aspects of Hegel’s work.
For us who are far less familiar with Hegel than were Engels
and his contemporaries, the simultaneous defence and attack can appear
self-contradictory, or worse. Stripped from the tactical context, some of
Engels’ words may appear to lend support to absolute “mechanical materialism”.
Circumstances, and tactics responding to circumstances,
played a part. Engels says: “At that time politics was a very thorny
field, and hence the main fight came to be directed against religion; this
fight, particularly since 1840, was indirectly also political.”
This proxy role played in politics by religion in 1840s
Germany is the reason for the apparent elevation of the dichotomy of idealism
and materialism, which later writers, out of context, have somehow tended to
treat like a sort of “Rosetta Stone” of Marxism, as if the ideal/material
dichotomy explains everything, when by itself it explains nothing.
The question of what, if anything, was really discarded by
Marx and Engels from Hegel is one we may look at again later in this series.
Lenin wrote: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital,
and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none
of the Marxists understood Marx!!”
Clearly, Lenin did not think of Hegel as being redundant or
superseded.
Evidence of Engels’ and Marx’s debt to Hegel is found in the
works themselves, which are saturated with Hegelian method, as Ilyenkov points
out in his work on Capital.
A good place to start learning about Hegel is Andy
Blunden’s Getting to know Hegel,
which is in turn part of Andy’s great resource called Hegel by Hypertext.
But first, the short Part 1 of Hegel’s Ludwig Feuerbach
explains a lot.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Ludwig Feuerbach,
Part 1 - Hegel, 1886, Engels.
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