So Marx was raised in the spirit of rational humanism. And this can be clearly seen in an essay he wrote titled, "Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Career" (1835), upon graduating gymnasium at the age of 17:
"History calls those the greatest men who ennoble themselves by working for the universal. Experience praises as the most happy the one who made the most people happy....
"When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective."
—quoted in David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (1970)
So Marx began as a liberal idealist wanting to better the condition of humanity. Broadly speaking, his outlook at 17 was similar to my own at that age and probably to most of yours at that age. It's also similar to most of the student youth we encounter in, say, the "anti-globalization" protests at least in the U.S.
Marx then went to the University of Bonn in western Germany for a year. So far as we know, there was no significant change in his intellectual outlook in this period. But an incident occurred which illuminates Marx's personal character and also the character of German society at the time.
The university had the equivalent of today's fraternities in the form of tavern clubs or drinking societies. These were organized on geographical and, to a certain extent, class lines. Marx joined a tavern club of students from Trier who were mainly of bourgeois and professional backgrounds like himself. There was also a tavern club of young Prussian aristocrats—Junkers—who despised and constantly baited Rhenish bourgeois types like Marx.
And on one occasion one of these young Junkers provoked Marx into a duel with sabers—real sabers, not with tipped points and blunted blades. Marx held his own and got a permanent scar above his left eye. For the rest of his life he was immensely proud of that scar as a wound gotten in honorable class combat. "See this—I got this in a saber duel with some young Junker creep in my university days."
Origins of the Hegelian Left
The following year, Marx transferred to the University of Berlin. He arrived there at the very moment that it was becoming the main center of the main left-radical intellectual current in Germany: the left Hegelians, sometimes also called the Young Hegelians although some of them were a good deal older than some right Hegelians. This current was the product of two mutually reinforcing developments: the rightward motion in Prussian ruling circles, especially as it affected academic and intellectual life, and the internal contradictions of Hegel's philosophy.
During the so-called "wars of liberation" against the Napoleonic regime, a strong rightist tendency cohered, centrally within the Prussian nobility, which combined Christian fundamentalism—it was called Pietism—with backward-looking German nationalism conveyed by the expression "blut und boden"—blood and soil. A very good book on the emergence of the Hegelian left by an American academic, John Edward Toews, commented in this regard: "These young Junkers had experienced the war against Napoleon as a kind of Christian-German crusade against French rationalism and liberalism" (Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 [1980]).
In opposition to Christian fundamentalism and romantic German nationalism, Hegel sought to mediate at the intellectual level between the era of the French Revolution and the post-1815 period of reaction. He maintained that Prussia, as a result of the reforms undertaken during the Napoleonic period, had become a modern, rational state—a rechtstaat, a state of law. Hegel considered himself a good Christian of the Lutheran persuasion. He maintained that Protestant Christianity expressed in terms of symbols and allegories fundamental truths about God which philosophy, that is, his own philosophy, apprehended through reason.
The Christian right of the day regarded Hegel's moderate liberalism as containing the seeds of dangerous radicalism in both politics and religion. Granted, Hegel himself maintained that the laws and policies of the Kingdom of Prussia represented the highest interests of the German community. But from the same theoretical premises someone else could maintain that those interests required the overthrow of the Prussian monarchy and its replacement by a democratic republic.
The Pietists were even more virulently hostile to Hegel's views on religion than to his politics. Christianity, they insisted, must be based on faith in an unknowable God. Hegel's contention that man through reason could understand God and his works was blasphemy. One of the leading Pietists, Heinrich Leo, exclaimed that Hegel's philosophy would lure "'the children of the German nation into Satan's watchtower' where they would 'die from hunger and thirst for the word of the Lord'" (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism).
In the 1820s, the top level Prussian bureaucrats in charge of academia were relatively liberal and favored the Hegelians over the Christian rightists. However, in the 1830s the balance of political forces in Prussian ruling circles was reversed. The more liberal Hegelians were now regarded and treated as dangerous radicals. They were thwarted in their academic careers. As a consequence, some of them moved to the left as they intersected and influenced a new generation of young liberal idealists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who eventually would become truly dangerous radicals.
In their own way the Christian rightists recognized the potentially radical implications embedded in Hegel's philosophy. Hegel maintained that the broad sweep of history expressed the progressive development of the absolute spirit. But he didn't consider that this was true of everything that happened. He allowed for historical accidents. And he recognized that many institutions and cultural attitudes were dead remnants of the past devoid of spiritual vitality. As Protestants, Hegel and his followers consigned Roman Catholicism to the latter category as an outmoded superstition.
Hegel thus differentiated between existence, the German word being dassein, and reality, the German word being wirklichkeit. Dassein was the totality of that which existed empirically. Wirklichkeit represented those particular aspects of existence which corresponded to the historical development of reason. But how was one to know what was merely existent and what was really real? The answer is—one couldn't.
Thus even in Hegel's lifetime there were very significant political differences of a left-right character among his followers. His best-known protégé was Herbert Gans, a secularized Jew. Like Marx's father, Gans had to legally convert to Lutheranism in order to hold a professorship at the University of Berlin where he lectured on law and political philosophy. Perhaps because of his Jewish background, Gans was much more critical of the Prussian government from the left than was Hegel. The crown prince once complained to the minister of education that Gans was turning his students into revolutionary republicans. Incidentally, Gans was still at the University of Berlin when Marx arrived there, and he attended Gans' lectures. The old left Hegelian died a few years later. Basically, a very good guy.
The contradiction at the core of Hegel's philosophy was implicit in his most famous aphorism: what is real is rational and what is rational is real. The first implies that the world as it currently exists is perforce rational; the second that what is irrational is soon fated to disappear and be replaced by what is rational.
You may recall from the earlier session that Moses Hess listed six thinkers who influenced the young Marx. Only one of these was an older contemporary, Heinrich Heine, who was the best-known German writer of the day of radical leftist sympathies. Heine studied under Hegel in the 1820s though he was never a Hegelian. He later settled in Paris where he met Marx in 1844-45, and the two became good friends. At this time Heine commented on the rise of the Hegelian left in his usual wise guy style:
"We now have monks of Atheism [he's referring to the likes of Feuerbach and Marx], whom Mr. Voltaire, because he was an obstinate Deist, would have broiled alive. I must admit that this music does not appeal to me, but it does not frighten me either, for I have stood behind the Maestro [that is, Hegel] while he composed. To be sure, he composed with indistinct and elaborately adorned notes—so that not everyone could decipher them. Occasionally I observed how he anxiously looked about in fear that he might have been understood. He liked me very much because he was convinced that I would not betray him; I even thought him servile at that time. Once, when I expressed displeasure with the phrase 'Everything that is, is rational,' he smiled strangely and said, 'One could also read it as "everything which is rational must be".'"
—Toews, Hegelianism
The Influence of Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach
A year after arriving at the University of Berlin, Marx joined the left Hegelian circle which was organized around the Doctors' Club. Its leading figure was Bruno Bauer, and Marx became one of Bauer's main protégés over the next few years. There's some anecdotal evidence that Marx collaborated in writings which Bauer published in his own name and also in writing an anonymous pamphlet Bauer brought out. Marx himself did not publish anything in his own name until his doctoral dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy in 1841. However, since Bauer treated him as a protégé, one can reasonably assume Marx's ideas at the time were broadly similar to Bauer's.
Basically, what Bauer did was to jettison the metaphysical, semi-religious aspects of Hegel's philosophy while retaining its idealist conception of historical development. He also took the rationalist implications of Hegel's doctrines to their extreme, even absurdist, logical conclusion. Bauer maintained that what Hegel had called the absolute spirit was really the collective self-consciousness of mankind or, to use more conventional terminology, the prevailing cultural attitudes.
Many years later in a brief sketch of his own intellectual development, Marx wrote: "My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The idea that legal and political institutions express the general development of the human mind was that of Bruno Bauer, which Marx shared for a time and then transcended.
Like Hegel, Bauer viewed the history of European civilization as a progression from lower to higher levels of thought. Applying this conception to the present, Bauer maintained that by theoretical criticism he was dealing the Prussian Christian monarchical state a decisive blow against which its empirical reality could not long resist. He wrote to Marx in 1841: "The terrorism of true theory will clear the field.... Theory is now the most effective practice and we cannot yet predict in what a great manner it can become practical" (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). Once an institution was condemned in theory as historically outmoded, its fate was thereby sealed.
Bauer considered himself a revolutionary, indeed an extreme revolutionary. But the arena in which the revolution was to be made was that of ideas, indeed academia. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, Bauer exclaimed: "My blasphemous spirit would be satisfied only if I were given the authority of a professorship to teach publicly the system of atheism" (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). If only Bauer could preach atheism from a university lecture hall, thrones would be toppled across Europe from Portugal to Russia. Christian churches would be closed down for lack of believers.
Marx and Engels' first joint work, The Holy Family, written in 1845, was centrally a polemic against Bauer. Here's the crux of it:
"History does nothing, it 'possesses no immense wealth', it 'wages no battles'. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; 'history' is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims." [emphasis in original]
In the 1860s, a friend and admirer gave Marx an old copy of The Holy Family, and he reread it probably for the first time since it had been originally published. Marx wrote to Engels, "I was pleasantly surprised to find that we do not need to be ashamed of this work, although the cult of Feuerbach produces a very humorous effect upon one now."
What was it about Feuerbach's ideas at this juncture that had such an immediate and powerful impact on Marx, Engels and other left Hegelians? Feuerbach argued that Hegel's concept of absolute spirit and its derivative, Bauer's idea of the general development of the human mind, shared the same basic premise as traditional Christianity and other religions. An imaginary entity created by men's minds was elevated above real, living human beings. Men came to believe that they were dominated by what was in fact the product of their own thoughts. As Engels later explained:
"With one blow it [Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity] pulverised the contradiction, by plainly placing materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence." [emphasis in original]
—Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)
Feuerbach himself summarized his ideas in this way: "The new philosophy deals with being as it is for us, not only as thinking, but as really existing being.... It is the being of the senses, sight, feeling and love" (quoted in David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx [1969]). A few years later Feuerbach carried his view that the behavior of man in society was governed by his biological make-up a step further. He maintained that the actions of individuals and groups were strongly influenced by their diet, by the kind of food they ate. One can understand why this idea would have a special appeal for a German intellectual. In German, the third person singular of the verb "to be" and "to eat" is a homonym: Man ist was man isst. One is what one eats.
Feuerbach was a materialist in terms of man and nature. But he was an idealist in terms of man and man, of man in society. Like Bauer and other left Hegelians, he believed in the liberating power of ideas. Once men recognized that they themselves had created God as an all-powerful entity, they would reappropriate the powers which they had alienated to an imaginary deity. Thus he wrote: "To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must become nothing." But a recognition of the illusory character of God does not imbue man with latent powers of which he was previously unaware. It does not increase the material wealth and productive forces of society. Rejection of religion removes an important ideological barrier to progressive social struggle on the part of the exploited and oppressed. But atheism does not in itself constitute such social struggles.
Furthermore, one can be an atheist and also believe in, so to speak, cynical self-interest. "There's no God. There's no heaven or hell. I'm going to get mine here and now. Screw the rest of the world. I'm looking out for number one."
Here we come to the second major aspect of Feuerbach's idealism, his concept of the "religion of humanity." Man, he argued, was a social animal. The well-being and happiness of an individual depend upon his cooperation with the fellow members of his species, on their respect and affection for him. Thus he wrote: "Only community constitutes humanity.... That the thou belongs to the perfection of the I, that men are required to constitute humanity" (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). However, society not only unites individuals for their common interests; it also divides them into classes and other groups based on conflicting material self-interest.
Marx Becomes a Communist
Even in this period when Marx was most strongly influenced by Feuerbach, he was beginning to understand the primacy of material self-interest and class divisions in society. How so?
The rightward motion in the Prussian ruling classes not only propelled some liberal Hegelian intellectuals to the left; it also resulted in a more oppositional mood among some elements of the liberal bourgeoisie. In late 1841, Moses Hess convinced a number of wealthy liberal businessmen in the Rhineland to finance a newspaper whose contributors and staff would be heavily drawn from left Hegelians. One of the main backers, Ludolf Camphausen, later became Prussian prime minister during the Revolution of 1848. The paper was called the Rheinische Zeitung and subtitled "For Politics, Commerce and Industry." Politics was a code word for liberal reform, which was linked to the progress of commerce and industry.
Given Marx's reputation as a left Hegelian and protégé of Bruno Bauer, he could not get an academic appointment. So Bauer suggested he contribute to the Rheinische Zeitung, which he did. He soon became de facto and then official editor of the paper. According to Marx's own later testimony, it was as a result of his involvement with the Rheinische Zeitung that he began to develop a materialist understanding of society.
As an academic intellectual, Marx had been concerned almost exclusively with questions of philosophy and history. He had little if any interest in current events. He was far more knowledgeable about the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy than about the different political tendencies in the Germany of the day.
But as editor of a newspaper, Marx had to think about and make judgments on current events. That was his job. Shortly after becoming editor, Marx wrote an article strongly critical of a proposed law imposing harsher penalties on the theft of dead wood from privately owned forests. This was an important source of heating fuel for poor people in the countryside. Along similar lines, the paper ran a series on the economic distress of farmers in the Moselle valley who grew grapes and made them into wine.
Marx came to recognize that differences over laws protecting property, differences over the causes and solutions to poverty did not express differences over abstract concepts of justice or economic doctrine. Rather they expressed conflicting material interests, ultimately conflicting class interests. As Marx later wrote:
"In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly on thefts of wood and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Mosel peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions."
—"A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
Marx's growing recognition of the primacy of material interests and class divisions in society did not lead him immediately and directly to communism. He remained within the political mainstream of the left Hegelian movement. The extreme left wing was represented by a coterie of intellectuals in Berlin who called themselves die Freien (The Free). Among them were a young Russian nobleman, Mikhail Bakunin, and the son of a wealthy western German textile manufacturer, Friedrich Engels. Die Freien combined a bohemian lifestyle with anarcho-communist political posturing.
In a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx joked that he had thrown out more contributions from die Freien than had the official government censor. He described them as "scrawls pregnant with world revolutions and empty of thought, written in a slovenly style and flavoured with some atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied)." Marx did not reject and oppose communism at this time. Rather he was not convinced of its theoretical and practical validity as expounded in the mainly French communist literature of the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment