Marxism

Marxism was occupied with developing the ideas contained in the German classical philosophy after Feuerbach. Their philosophical doctrine may to some extent be seen as the final stage of German classical philosophy.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), born at Trier in the Rhineland and an exile for much of his life in Britain, belonged to the circle of the left Hegelians. He early took up the view expressed in the slogan “Criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism”. He thought this had been successfully achieved by Feuerbach, save that we can see the slogan also in economic and political terms. Marx was greatly influenced, of course, by Hegel’s dialectical view of history. The new ingredient he added to Feuerbach and Hegel was economic analysis. So he evolved a dialectical view of historical processes based upon materialism interpreted through economic theory. It was a highly potent synthesis. Marx’s doctrines were often worked out in cooperation with, and through the financial support of Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who spent much time in England working in the family firm in Manchester. Their first work together was The Holy Family (1845), which was an attack on current ideals. Their most famous joint work was the Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” are important, and of course his most famous book is “Das Capital” (1867); the second and third volumes were brought out by Engels in 1885 and 1894). Various books were published after Marx’s death by Engels, notably his “Dialectics of Nature” (published posthumously in 1925). Mention should also be made of his “Anti-Dühring” (1878), directed against a German socialist writer.

Marx and Engels recognized that their conception of the dialectics came from Hegel. So it was not a question of their going back to some static form of materialism. For them, human beings were essentially active beings whose production changed nature and themselves. The key to understanding history was through consideration of the force of production and their changes. Other aspects of life (cultural, social and so forth) were essentially secondary, though they could have important effects on the basic economic situation. At a given point the growth of the force of production might be inhibited by aspects of the economic and social order – this would involve a contradiction which was to resolve by a revolutionary situation in which a transition would be made to a higher level of activity (for instance, contradictions in the feudal order giving rise to a new bourgeois order, in turn leading to problems resolved by a socialist revolution and the emergence of the proletariat as the leading class). As an active being the human will alienated from his product by the capitalist system: the worker adds value to matter by his labor, but that surplus value is in effect taken by the capitalist, who thus of necessity exploits his workers. This sense of alienation is reinforced by the fact that it is in the interest of the capitalist to the increase as far as possible the exploitation of his workers, leading to a revolutionary situation.

Eventually a socialist system will be established, including the dictatorship of the proletariat. In due course this will be replaced by a classless society, and the State will wither away. The struggle henceforth will be against nature. This ideal picture of the future depicts so to speak a heaven upon earth. For Marx and Engels class warfare, and eventually supreme class peace, replaces the war of the States in Hegel’s scheme. It is, that is to say, an inspiring worldview with strong practical implications.

It is worth adding a footnote on V. Lenin (1870-1924), who somewhat altered certain emphases in the system of Marxism. He was keen to defend materialism as in his “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1909) against those who tried to incorporate phenomenalistic notions from Marx. He held to copy theory of perception in which sensations mirror reality. In his work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916) he analyzed the world situation, and foresaw the uneven development of socialism because of the difference in stages of economic development in the world. It was of course Marxism-Leninism that came to be the official doctrine in Marxist countries.

Two other responses to Hegel can be regarded of wide interest none the less. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), son of a Danzig (now Gdansk) merchant was for a time in his father’s business, but studied there after at Gottingen, publishing his doctoral dissertation: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813). His biggest and most famous work was “The World as Will and Representation” (1819). He lectured briefly and unsuccessfully in Berlin, setting himself up as a rival to Hegel. In the last years of his life he became famous. Schopenhauer’s notion of representation gears in with the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. Basically we perceive the world in the guise of representations. He criticized Kant for suggesting, however, that things in themselves give rise to phenomena. On his principles he should not have done so. On the other hand, Schopenhauer pointed to the fact that in a way we do have direct experience of noumena, but in an unexpected way. We are embodied beings who experience our activity from within. So by an analogical leap Schopenhauer used this notion to interpret the world. Likewise the world, which lies “behind” phenomena, or rather the screen of representations, is Will. Schopenhauer saw that primordial drive behind outside things as brute and without defined purpose.

Given his basic model, Schopenhauer has some very shrewd things to say about the effective subordination of the understanding to the will; the fact that consciousness is just the surface of our minds; his anticipation of Freud in the notion that the will stops things from coming to the surface of our minds; his distrust of mechanistic models of the mind (and even of nature); his emphasis on the non-rational aspects of decision making; and so on. He was in many ways a highly modern figure. The escape from slavery to the will was Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation. He had a notion of patterns or forms in the world in order to make it manageable. The roots of his system are explicable through his extension of and critique of Kant. He thought of himself as Kant’s true heir, and indeed he is quite as plausible a reconstruction of Kant as any of the idealists. His solution to the problem of how to get at the noumena is of great interest and originality.

Very different was the angle from which Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) came at the problems of philosophy. His highly personal style and his strong concern for a burning Christian faith were out of the mainstream of the philosophy of the period. He had a bitter view not only of Hegel, but also of the established Lutheran Church. He did not think much of the spiritual life of an organization where pastors were civil servants. In 1838 he experienced a religious conversion, but three years later he called off his decision to enter the Church, and decided to devote himself to philosophy and spiritual writing. His writings were published under various pseudonyms as well as under his own name, a literary technique whose meaning is not altogether clear. His most important books are “Either- Or” and “Fear and Trembling” (1843), “The concept of Dread” and “Philosophical Fragments” (1844), “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”(1846) and “Sickness unto Death”(1849).

Kierkegaard had, like Hegel, his dialectics, but it was not of synthesis. There are stages on life’s way which need to be transcended. The first stage is the aesthetic stage, of sensuousness, of emotion, of poetry. But the person plunged in this life comes to realize that his self is dispersed. He lives in the cellar of a building, which has at its culmination the spiritual life. The aesthetic person is hit by despair, and then comes “either-or”. He must commit himself to rise above the aesthetic level to the next, the ethical. It involves heroism, and the ethical person thinks that he can achieve perfection, but does not reckon with sin. The consciousness of sin eventually induces a new sense of darkness, corresponding to the aesthetic person’s despair. He can overcome this only by a new act of commitment- to faith. If the tragic hero sacrifices himself for the universal (like Socrates) the religious person stands as an individual before the Absolute. Truth here is subjectivity – faith is an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation - process of the most passionate inwardness. This also is real “existence”. A man who sits in a cart letting the horse plod along without guidance exists, but the one who guides the horse and directs the cart really exists. It is this loaded and pregnant sense of existence that was later taken up by the so-called existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century: it was in that century that Kierkegaard saw system, and the system of Hegelianism, as the enemy. It pantheistically reduced the gulf between the individual and the Absolute. It washed away faith in a deluge of tepid reasoning. It did not make space in the world of the subjective passions of the individual.

Kierkegaard was taken up not just by existentialists but by Christian theologians in the twentieth century.

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