Hegel-by-HyperText Resources

1841:The World-Historic Splitin Western Philosophy

The "Expurgation of Hegelianism"

As well as having been embraced by the Prussian Monarchy as

a kind of official creed, Hegel left behind him a movement which

inspired powerful revolutionary criticism of the very official

society which had sanctified him.

The ten years after Hegel's death were the apogee of

Hegelianism. His students, who had lived under the master's spell

during his lifetime, went out and popularised his teachings and

translated them into the language of politics - or much more

correctly, translated politics into the language of Hegelianism.

In 1841, the establishment deliberatively moved to "expunge the

dragon's seed of Hegelian pantheism" from the minds of Prussian

youth. A newly-appointed Minister for Culture mobilised Friedrich

Schelling to come to Berlin and do the job.

Friedrich Schelling was the second, and in 1841, the only living

representative of Classical German Philosophy. The former

Professor of Philosopher at Jena after Fichte's dismissal for heresy,

who as a youth had been a close friend of Hegel, had both

encouraged Hegel and enlisted his support in his struggle against

Fichte. Although pushed into the philosophical background by the

great G W F Hegel, he had also out-lived Hegel.

“Ask anybody in Berlin today on

what field the battle for dominion

over German public opinion in

politics and religion, that is, over

Germany itself, is being fought,

and if he has any idea of the

power of the mind over the world

he will reply that this battlefield

is the University, in particular

Lecture Hall No. 6, where

Schelling is giving his lectures on

the Philosophy of Revelation. For

at the moment all the separate

oppositions which contend with

Hegel's philosophy for this

dominion are obscured, blurred

and pushed into the background

by the one opposition of

Schelling; all the attackers who

stand outside philosophy, Stahl,

Hengstenberg, Neander, are

making way for a fighter who is

expected to give battle to the

unconquered on his own ground.

And the battle is indeed peculiar

enough. Two old friends of

younger days, room mates at the

Tübingen theological seminary,

are after forty years meeting each

other again face to face as

opponents; one of them ten years

dead but more alive than ever in

his pupils; the other, as the latter

say, intellectually dead for three

decades, but now suddenly

claiming for himself the full

power and authority of life.

Anybody who is sufficiently

"impartial" to profess himself

equally alien to both, that is, to

be no Hegelian, for surely

nobody can as yet declare

himself on the side of Schelling

after the few words he has said -

anybody then, who possesses this

vaunted advantage of

"impartiality" will see in the

declaration of Hegel's death

pronounced by Schelling's

appearance in Berlin, the

vengeance of the gods for the

declaration of Schelling's death

which Hegel himself pronounced

in his time”.

“An imposing, colourful

audience has assembled to

witness the battle. At the front the

notables of the University, the

leading lights of science, men

everyone of whom has created a

trend of his own; for them the

seats nearest to the rostrum have

been reserved, and behind them,

jumbled together as chance

brought them to the hall,

representatives of all walks of

life, nations, and religious

beliefs. In the midst of high-

spirited youths there sits here and

there a grey-breaded staff officer

and next to him perhaps, quite

unembarrassed, a volunteer who

in any other society would not

know what to do for reverence

towards such a high-ranking

superior. Old doctors and

ecclesiastics, the jubilee of whose

matriculation can soon be

celebrated feel the long-forgotten

student haunting their minds

again and are back in college.

Judaism and Islam want to see

what Christian revelation is all

about: German, French, English,

Hungarian, Polish, Russian,

modern Greek and Turkish, one

can hear them all spoken

together, - then the signal for

silence sounds and Schelling

mounts the rostrum.

“A man of middle stature, with

white hair and light-blue, bright

eyes, whose expression is gay

rather than imposing and,

combined with a certain fullness

of figure, indicates more the

jovial family-man than the

thinker of genius, a harsh but

strong voice, Swabian-Bavarian

accent, that is Schelling's

outward appearance”. [Engels,

Schelling on Hegel, December

1841]

The audience also included the Russian anarchist, Mikhail

Bakunin, and Søren Kierkegaard, who was to be the founder of

Existentialism. Schelling's proposition was that Hegel had

confused "essence" and "existence", and what was required was a

return to a philosophy of existence. Kierkegaard ridiculed Hegel

for "reconstructing" history in retrospect, "but history has to be

lived forwards, not backwards". For his part, Engels insisted that

the youth and all enemies of the autocracy must rally to the

defence of Hegel. He characterised Schelling's proposition as a

"philosophy of revelation", or "positivism" (as opposed to the

"negative" standpoint of Reason).

Schelling did not, as it turned out, win much support for his

position, but the young Danish theologian Kierkegaard, declaring

the bankruptcy of Reason, can be seen as the founder of

Existentialism, which is continued through Friedrich Nietzsche,

Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and through Heidegger is a

significant component of today's philosophical cloudscape.

Existentialism appears to pick up from Schelling's denunciation of

Hegel's focus on Essence, and substitutes for Hegel's study of the

Essential genesis of notions an analysis of Being.

Arthur Schopenhauer, who had taught at the University of

Berlin for 24 semesters, and had spoken regularly to an empty

lecture hall, next door and at the same hour when Hegel lectured

to a large and ever-growing audience. In May 1825 he had

renounced his career to live as a recluse. In 1844, an obscure

Berlin bookseller accepted the manuscript of Schopenhauer's oft-

rejected The World as Will and Idea without remuneration and this

book - the founding work of Voluntarism, in the style of Classical

German philosophy but passionately hostile to its spirit - gained

Schopenhauer worldwide recognition and caused Nietzsche to

speak of Schopenhauer as his "great teacher".

In Britain, John Stuart Mill and in France Auguste Comte came

forward as the proponents of Positivism. Positivism is a difficult

thing to characterise, because like any ideology, it is intimately

connected with the fate not of any given proposition or thesis, but

with the fate of a social entity and rises and falls and transforms

itself according to the fate of the social movement it reflects.

Positivism is that current in epistemology which seeks to speak for

science; it rejects "speculation" and sees the task of philosophical

knowledge as summing up and expressing the positive knowledge

gathered by the sciences. In the first phase of its development, first

place was given to sociology; in this it expressed a belief in the

liberating power of science and the urgent need for science to

replace religion and all forms of non-scientific "metaphysical" or

religious speculation, and consequently the need for a scientific

conception of society, based on the rational analysis of the data of

the senses.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin had studied Hegel in Moscow

but had emigrated in 1840 to join the Young Hegelians in Berlin.

His later career would see Bakunin fighting in the Revolution of

1848 in Prague and Dresden, returning to Russia, exiled to Siberia,

joining the First International but finally expelled in 1872 and

founding the Narodnik and Anarchist movements in Russia - the

most extreme of bourgeois radicals, advocating immediate

insurrection and the smashing of all states.

Earlier in 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach had published his Essence

of Christianity: “with one blow it pulverised the contradiction, in

that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne

again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy ... the spell

was broken; the "system" was exploded and cast aside ... one must

have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of

it. Enthusiasm was general ... but a philosophy is not disposed of

by the mere assertion that it is false... it had to be "sublated" in its

own sense, ... the new content which had been won through it had

to be saved ...” [Engels' Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of

Classical German Philosophy].

In almost a moment, following the sacking of Kaiser Wilhelm

Friedrich's Culture Minister in 1841, sprung Existentialism,

Voluntarism, Anarchism, Positivism and Materialism!

Engels said of Schelling's 1841 speech:

"It will be our business to follow

the course of his [Schelling's]

thinking and to shield the great

man's [Hegel's] grave from

abuse. We are not afraid to fight.

Nothing more desirable could

have happened to us than for a

time to be 'The Church

Oppressed'. There the minds part.

What is not genuine is proved in

the fire, what is false we shall not

miss in our ranks. The opponents

must grant us that youth has

never before flocked to our

colours in such numbers, that the

thought which dominates us has

never before unfolded itself so

richly, that courage, conviction,

talent have never been so much

on our side as now. Hence we

shall rise confidently against the

new enemy; in the end, one will

be found among us who will

prove that the sword of

enthusiasm is just as good as the

sword of genius.

"Let Schelling see whether he

can muster a school. Many only

join him now because they are

opposed to Hegel and accept with

gratitude anybody who attacks

him ..." [Schelling on Hegel,

December 1841]

In October 1843, Engels published his Outlines of a Critique of

Political Economy, which caught the attention of Karl Marx and

the 23-year-olds struck up a correspondence. ...

By 1848, the year of publication of the Communist Manifesto,

Europe was ablaze with Revolution. For the first time, the

proletariat came on to the political scene as a force for itself. The

Revolution was defeated, with the Junkers gaining control in

Germany and the Army in France. But throughout the following

period, the working class remained the chief threat to bourgeois

society. The First International was founded in 1863, with the

Trades Councils in Britain and the rapid rise of the German Social

Democratic Party and the Paris Commune holding state power for

a short period in 1871.

The emergence of labour as a conscious social force puts a final

end to the classical period of bourgeois epistemology. The

explosion of 1841 anticipates this explosion and the irreversible

sea-change which follows. "Nature" has spoken. For bourgeois

philosophy prior to this time, the labouring masses (or what the

postmoderns call the “sub-altern” - the “congregation” who get

spoken of and to, but have themselves no right to speak) were like

Nature, something ‘beyond sensation’, the unconscious.

Irrationalism & Positivism

The period of development of bourgeois philosophy from the

1840s to the 1860s is the period in which the tendencies and forces

of a new epoch of development are formed. The period of

expansion of capitalism which followed the defeat of the

Commune in 1871 up to the exhaustion of the period of colonial

expansion and the opening of the period of Imperialism at the turn

of the century, marks the next specific period in the development

of bourgeois ideology.

From the 1840s, it is no longer possible for bourgeois ideology

to be developed in the form of a "secular religion", but ideology is

worked out in conflict within specific, separate domains of

enquiry, principally: political economy, psychology, natural

science and sociology.

The figures who launch the initial attack on Hegel, Feuerbach

and Schelling, did not gather around them a substantial and lasting

following. John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte were already well-

known by the end of the 1830s, and as it turns out, the principal

figures of the first period immediately following 1841 are Mill,

Comte and later Herbert Spencer (Positivists), Søren Kierkegaard

and Arthur Schopenhauer (the precursors to Existentialism), the

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Communists Karl Marx and

Frederick Engels.

Politically speaking, these figures cover as wide a field as it is

possible to imagine.

Without blurring the differences between Anarchism and

Communism and the class basis of these political differences, it is

not sensible to comprehend either Marxism or Anarchism as part

of the organism of bourgeois ideology. They will be considered

separately elsewhere.

The others philosophically speaking divide clearly into two

camps. Despite the mutual hostility which is a professional

prerequisite and despite the political diversity within each camp,

we have on the one hand, the "sociologists" Comte, Mill and

Spencer, and on the other hand, the "psychologists" Kierkegaard

and Schopenhauer.

The Human Condition

The young Ludwig Feuerbach expressed the common Essence of

the downfall of Hegelianism, and he has to be credited with the

fact that he launched his attack on Hegel while Hegel was still

flavour of the decade:

"Modern philosophy has realised

and negated the divine being who

is separated and distinguished

from sensation, the world, and

man. But it realised and negated

this divine being only in thought,

in reason, and indeed in that

reason that is also separated and

distinguished from sensation, the

world, and man. Namely, modern

philosophy has proved only the

divinity of mind; it recognised

only mind, and indeed the

abstract mind, as the divine and

absolute being." [s.18, Principles

of Philosophy of the Future,

published 2 years after The

Essence of Christianity, in 1843]

When Comte, for instance, says:

"The Universe is to be studied

not for its own sake, but for the

sake of ... Humanity. To study it

in any other spirit would not only

be immoral, but also highly

irrational. For, as statements of

pure objective truth, our

scientific theories can never be

really satisfactory ... It is for

social feeling to determine these

limits; outside which our

knowledge will always remain

imperfect as well as useless ... the

intellect would, under Positivism,

accept its proper position of

subordination to the heart",

there is a significant debt to Hegel, but he also is definitively

calling for an end to "metaphysics", and when Kierkegaard says:

"science, fully as much as poetry and art, assumes a mood ... an

error in modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the

exposition of thought" we can recognise something of the same

thought. The problem is that Comte's solution (which was

probably the dominant one) led to a further shattering of the unity

of human labour, with 1,001 "specialists" beavering away in their

own little area. Thus, the great synthesis which Hegel achieved,

albeit idealistically, was lost on the very people who most needed

it.

Feuerbach opened the first, historical section of Philosophy of

the Future with: "The task of the modern era was the realisation

and humanisation of God - the transformation and dissolution of

theology into anthropology." And he shows that this begins with

Protestantism. Everyone was saying that the human agency did not

justexpress something (such as The Absolute Idea), this human

"agency" was itself the issue, man was not just an "agent". This

was already implicit in the highly political way in which the

Young Hegelians were promoting philosophy, and the

establishment knew it!

Kierkegaard is on about sin; he wants to not just observe sin,

explain it, call it an illness - it must be denounced, and denouncing

sin meant real pain and suffering. He is against "scientific

objectivity", of dispassionately looking at sin as something

neutral, objective. His whole thing about moods is a knife aimed at

the whole basis of Logic, "Rationalism" (in the degraded sense of

the word) and Absolute Idea.

Schopenhauer wanted to place the human, subjective Will at the

centre of the system, not an objective thought form but a very

subjective, human, suffering, painful Will:

"every stronger or heterogeneous

affection of these sense-organs is

painful, in other words, is against

the Will; ... to make them data for

the understanding, [they must]

reach the higher degree at which

they stir the will, that is to say,

excite pain or pleasure, though

more often pain."

And Feuerbach is going in a direction which has some point of

contact with this:

"The new philosophy regards and

considers being as it is for us, not

only as thinking but as really

existing beings; thus, it regards

being as an object of being, as an

object of itself. Being as an

object of being - and only this

being is being and deserves the

name of being - is the being of

the senses, perception, feeling,

and love. Being is thus a secret of

perception, of feeling, and of

love." [s.33, Principles of

Philosophy of the Future]

Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer

Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer are united, if in little else, in

their abiding hatred of Hegel.

The object of Kierkegaard's attention is sin. In his definitive

attack on Hegel, The Concept of Dread, he points out that

"science, fully as much as poetry and art, assumes a mood ... an

error in modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the

exposition of thought". ... "but the correct mood [for consideration

of sin] is the stout-hearted opposition of seriousness. The mood of

psychology is the dread corresponding to its discovery, and in its

dread it delineates sin, while again and again it is alarmed by the

sketch it produces. When sin is treated in such a way it becomes

the stronger ... As soon as sin is talked about as a sickness, an

abnormality, a poison, a disharmony, then the concept too is

falsified. Sin does not properly belong in any science. It is the

theme with which the sermon deals, ..." Kierkegaard goes on to

say that Ethics is also not the correct science to deal with sin as

"Ethics is after all an ideal science, ... Ethics bring ideality into

reality; on the other hand its movement is not designed to raise

reality up into ideality." So it is only "dogmatics", i.e. Christian

dogma, which is capable of dealing with sin: "While psychology is

fathoming the real possibility of sin, dogmatics explains original

sin, which is the ideal possibility of sin". [excerpts from The

Concept of Dread, Søren Kierkegaard, 1844]

For Hegel "All that is rational is real, and all that is real is

rational". Outraged by the corrupt and sinful character of the

Church and society of his day, Kierkegaard it is not content to

explain or deplore it. It must be denounced: "The new ethics

presupposes dogmatics and along with that original sin, and by

this it now explains the sin of the individual, while at the same

time it presents ideality as a task, not however by a movement

from above down, but from below up."

Schopenhauer on the other hand builds a system of the type of

Classical German Philosophy, but with the Will at the centre: "The

process through which and in which the body exists, are nothing

but the phenomenal appearance of the Will, ... the parts of the

body must correspond completely to the chief demands and

desires by which the Will manifests itself; ... Teeth, gullet, and

intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified

sexual impulse." Schopenhauer's philosophy is thus given the

name of Voluntarism, seeking to resolve the scepticism of Kant by

identifying the thing-in-itself with Will (rather than Ego as with

Fichte or Nature as in the earlier Schelling).

Schopenhauer's position is, like Fichte, that of subjective

idealism: "what other kind of existence or reality could we

attribute to the rest of the material world? From what source could

we take the elements out of which we construct such a world?

Besides the will and the representation, there is absolutely nothing

known or conceivable for us." [from The World as Will and

Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819 / 1844]

Schopenhauer has made an important progression from Kant in

that he has recognised the identity between human needs and

sensuous representation: "every stronger or heterogeneous

affection of these sense-organs is painful, in other words, is

against the Will; ... to make them data for the understanding, [they

must] reach the higher degree at which they stir the will, that is to

say, excite pain or pleasure, though more often pain." The

pessimistic tenor of Schopenhauer's philosophy is brought out

particularly sharply: experience is "pleasure, though more often

pain"! But the dualism of the subject-object relation is resolved by

totally subordinating the material world to the individual Will,

resolving the dualism in favour of the subject, for whom the outer

world is just so much "pleasure, though more often pain"!

However, within of the secular religious mentality of classical

epistemology, this subjective idealism is invariably reactionary in

its political implications because it belittles the creative function

of labour and promotes the unrestricted action of the rulers. The

resistance of Nature to the Will is "pain" which must be overcome

by greater force.

Thus both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard reject what they see

as Hegel's "rationalism", in favour of a turn inward to Faith, in the

case of Kierkegaard, and Will in the case of Schopenhauer. In both

cases the value of Knowledge is deliberatively discounted in

favour of Feeling, Reason in favour of Will (be it Divine or

human), Experience in favour of Suffering.

Both these tendencies have inspired and attracted the political

Right, and there is certainly nothing progressive or optimistic

about them. Both were religious but non-conformist, Kierkegaard

a devout Lutheran at war with the established Church,

Schopenhauer a respectable German bourgeois, with a somewhat

“New Age” interest in Hinduism.

It is easy to say that their philosophy was a negative, pessimistic

response to the rise of the proletariat, but why and how is such a

reaction expressed in such epistemology? And why at this time?

And also, there is a grain of truth: the doctrine of absolute

rationality is itself a form of secular religion, as shown by Ludwig

Feuerbach in his 1841 Essence of Christianity.

Note that Schopenhauer was not

an opponent of science. In fact,

prior to his philosophical writing,

he was himself active in natural

science (especially in the popular

business of analysing sensations).

Pragmatism as well as

Existentialism owes a debt to

Voluntarism and for example in

the form of the Operationalism of

Percy Bridgman, gets along with

natural science quite as well as

empiricism or better. The name

of "Irrationalism" which we can

attach to Existentialism and

Voluntarism and to a certain

extent also Pragmatism, should

not be taken as a term of abuse.

Irrationalism comes forward to

point out the limitations and

failures of reason and experience,

and it has its grain of truth.

Comte and Mill

The period following the expurgation of Hegelianism in

Germany has John Stuart Mill the leading figure of philosophy in

Britain and Auguste Comte in France. Both were great

synthesisers and reflected the scientific optimism of the

bourgeoisie of their time, taking their inspiration from Kant and

Hume, seemingly unmoved by either Hegelianism or its

condemnation in Germany. Each, however, respond to the changed

social conditions of Europe by the promotion of Ethics.

Mills' Ethics is that of Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham,

renowned for his theories of prison reform, should properly be

given credit as originator of Utilitarianism, but it was Mills was

systematically elaborated the theory and did so in conjunction with

political economy and his theoretical work on the foundations of

the British political system.

Comte coined the term "Positivism", by which he understood

the "third phase" of development of human society after theology

and metaphysics, in which explanations were in terms of essences,

final causes, and other abstractions. The modern positive stage, is

distinguished by an awareness of the limitations of human

knowledge. Knowledge, he held, could only be relative to man's

nature as a species and to his social and historical situation.

Absolute explanations were therefore better abandoned for the

more sensible discovery of laws based on the observable relations

between phenomena. Sociology would reduce social facts to laws

and synthesise the whole of human knowledge.

Comte was no democrat however. His notion of social

organisation imitated the hierarchy and discipline of the Catholic

church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he adopted the

notion of historical progress, and from Saint-Simon he drew the

need for a basic and unifying "sociology" to explain existing social

organisations and guide social planning for a better future.

Like Mill, he held that the underlying principles of society are

individual egoism, encouraged by the division of labour, and the

combination of efforts and the maintenance of social cohesion by

means of government and the state. However, Comte rejected

democracy, emphasising hierarchy and obedience, and like Saint-

Simon, he held that the ideal government would be made up of an

intellectual elite, utilising a kind of humanist religion in order to

secure social cohesion.

Both men assisted in promoting women's suffrage in the wake

of the tragic death of the love of their life, and both were

advocates of reform of various kinds within their own country. In

philosophy, both emphasise the rational analysis of the data of

perception and give priority to social development.

In these two "progressive" bourgeois gentlemen, we see in

classic form the national characteristics of British and French

philosophy: Mill, an ethic based on the laws of the political

economy of laissez faire capitalism, Comte, an ethic of the benign

dictatorship of Reason based on laws of socio-historical formation

of knowledge and belief.

A New Period of Essential Development

December 1841 marks a discontinuity of spectacular sharpness

in German philosophy. Just as in Einstein's physics there can be no

simultaneity of events separated in space, so also, in the broader

European scene, the rupture of 1841 is manifested in an array of

changes, reflecting a common underlying process of

transformation, which in turn has its social spectacle in the

Revolutions of 1848.

In the period prior to 1841, European civilisation was working

out social-historical problems in a domain of thinking which had

been separated out from the whole, concrete life of society, the

Theory of Knowledge, an abstraction made possible by the highly

developed division of labour, and in particular the exploitation of

wage labour.

I have characterised this struggle as an alienated formulation of

the struggle to understand the relation of human labour and human

needs. But this by no means takes away form the fact that real

conquests were made in the Theory of Knowledge. Human society

was long, long ago shattered by the social division of labour, and

the transcendence of this rupture is a long drawn out historical

struggle. The mystical character of the process follows from the

limitations imposed on professional thinkers under conditions

where the real contact with Nature, real production and the real

satisfaction of natural human needs is unspoken and unconscious

because the producing class itself is silent. Well, it is not silent -

but it is not heard.

The period of transformation of bourgeois ideology we are

looking at is the period, in Britain, from the publication of the

People's Charter in 1838 which continued up to the final Chartist

demonstrations in 1848, the same year which saw the popular

uprising in Paris in February, bringing down the July Monarchy,

the rioting in Vienna which led to the fall of Metternich and the

emancipation of the peasantry, the nationalist uprisings in

Hungary, the movement for representative government in

Germany and the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and

leads up to the founding of the First International and The

American Civil War in 1863 and the Paris Commune in 1871. The

uprisings and revolutions of 1848 are all defeated but all in one

way or another see many of their objectives achieved during the

period of relative stability and prosperity which followed.

The theory of knowledge has already gone as far as it can go in

the 1844 Manuscripts of Karl Marx. But the bourgeoisie has

already declared for the expurgation of Hegel and young Marx's

investigations have arrived at the founding of the Communist

League and publication of the Communist Manifesto calling for

the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Meanwhile mechanics has attained a fairly high level of

development, but science generally is however still at an

embryonic level insofar as it relates to the human condition. The

Origin of Species is not to be published until 1859, while the

science of psychology is still embroiled in mysticism. Helmholtz

formulates the law of conservation of energy in 1847 and his work

on nerve signals and body heat during the 1850s cut the ground

away from vitalism. The sciences of anthropology and sociology

begin from this period.

In other words, speculation about the human condition had

taken bourgeois society as far as it could, it was now necessary to

begin the positive enquiry and work out the details. In a sense, one

must give Comte his due: in declaring the end of the period of

metaphysical speculation and the beginning of the period of

natural scientific investigation with sociology at the centre, he

stated with fair accuracy exactly what was taking place.

Hegel himself had expressed the same idea in his Lectures on

the Philosophy of History:

Anaxagoras was the first to

enunciate the doctrine that

Understanding generally, or

Reason, governs the world. It is

not intelligence as self-conscious

Reason, - not a Spirit as such that

is meant; and we must clearly

distinguish these from each other.

The movement of the solar

system takes place according to

unchangeable laws. These laws

are Reason, implicit in the

phenomena in question. But

neither the sun nor the planets,

which revolve around it

according to these laws, can be

said to have any consciousness of

them.

A thought of this kind - that

Nature is an embodiment of

Reason; that it is unchangeably

subordinate to universal laws,

appears nowise striking or

strange to us. We are accustomed

to such conceptions, and find

nothing extraordinary in them.

And I have mentioned this

extraordinary occurrence, partly

to show how history teaches, that

ideas of this kind, which may

seem trivial to us, have not

always been in the world; that on

the contrary, such a thought

makes an epoch in the annals of

human intelligence. Aristotle

says of Anaxagoras, as the

originator of the thought in

question, that he appeared as a

sober man among the drunken.

Socrates adopted the doctrine

from Anaxagoras, and it

forthwith became the ruling idea

in Philosophy, except in the

school of Epicurus, who ascribed

all events to chance.

"I was delighted with the

sentiment," - Plato makes

Socrates say - "and hoped I had

found a teacher who would show

me Nature in harmony with

Reason, who would demonstrate

in each particular phenomenon

its specific aim, and in the whole,

the grand object of the Universe.

I would not have surrendered this

hope for a great deal. But how

very much was I disappointed,

when, having zealously applied

myself to the writings of

Anaxagoras, I found that he

adduces only external causes,

such as Atmosphere, Ether,

Water, and the like." It is evident

that the defect which Socrates

complains of respecting

Anaxagoras's doctrine, does not

concern the principle itself, but

the shortcoming of the

propounder in applying it to

Nature in the concrete. Nature is

not deduced from that principle:

the latter remains in fact a mere

abstraction, inasmuch as the

former is not comprehended and

exhibited as a development of it -

an organisation produced by and

from Reason. I wish, at the very

outset, to call your attention to

the important difference between

a conception, a principle, a truth

limited to an abstract form and

its determinate application, and

concrete development.

[Philosophy of History,

Introduction]

The problem is that the Theory of Knowledge has been left as

"unfinished business".

What is more, European society is undergoing a further leap in

the social division of labour, and the pursuit of the natural sciences

will be manifested in a division of labour in the production of

ideas which further exacerbates the problem. British political

economy and French social theory have the elements of the

puzzle, but they cannot put it all together. The German bourgeoisie

has suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of the Junkers, and

German Idealism has been debunked.

This time marks the beginning of a new epoch of essential

development of bourgeois ideology. Nature has spoken. In

searching for an understanding of the human condition, one side,

which I will call Irrationalism, wants to turn away, to turn inward,

rejecting the value of knowledge in favour of Faith or Will; the

other side,Positivism seeks an ethic of knowledge based on the

accumulation of the positive knowledge of the sciences.

An Historic Split

The essential reason for this rupture in bourgeois ideology is the

birth of a self-conscious workers' movement. Foremost among

those who gave voice to this new historic force is Karl Marx.

Marx's theory developed on the basis of bourgeois society and the

whole history of bourgeois thought; it was not an transcription of

the thoughts of proletarians and nor did it base itself on a non-

existent "proletarian culture". It is nevertheless the theoretical

expression of the social interests and historical destiny of the new

social force to which bourgeois society had given birth. It is the

independent historic destiny of the working class which gives to

Marxism its essential character. Try as it may, bourgeois ideology

can no longer represent the "whole people".

The split within bourgeois ideology comes from the fact that it

has recoiled from monism and returned to one or another form of

scepticism.

However, the proletariat exists only as a part of bourgeois

society. Any ideology which expresses its fate, must also share its

fate. Revolutionary socialist ideology has its own essential path of

development, different and distinct from that of bourgeois

ideology. However, the two intersect and mutually affect one

another. Without for a moment suggesting that Marxism develops

in some pure and independent way, isolated from the development

of bourgeois culture, it is still necessary to recognise two distinct

organisms - bourgeois and revolutionary-socialist ideology.

Anarchism and Communism

Revolutionary socialist ideology also developed in a struggle.

Both theoretical anarchism and modern socialism sprung from the

dissolution of the Young Hegelians and drew upon the whole of

bourgeois culture. The struggle between Anarchism (Bakunin,

Proudhon, and others) and Communism (Marx and Engels) was

the principal axis of development of the workers' movement

throughout the next two generations including the First

International, the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution.

Andy Blunden, 1998.

Further reading

• Principles of the Philosophy of the Future , Ludwig Feuerbach 1843

• Attack on Hegel , by Friedrich Schelling, 1841

• Schelling & Hegel , Engels 1841

• The Concept of Dread , Søren Kierkegaard 1844

• Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts

• Theses on Feuerbach , Marx 1845

• God & the State , Bakunin 1872

• “Ludwig Feuerbach” , Engels 1880

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