Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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terminology, did not confine himself to criticism on Hegel's own terms. At the same time he still respected Hegel as a great thinker and considered his dialectic a valuable instrument for investigating the world. He also credited Hegel with having discovered, though in a mystified form, the process of man's alienation and the means by which it could be overcome.171

According to Marx none of Hegel's disciples had ever attempted to face the crucial question of the validity of their Master's dialectical method. The only exception to this was Feuerbach: 'Feuerbach is the only person to have a serious and critical relationship to the Hegelian dialectic and to have made real discoveries in this field; in short, he has overcome the old philosophy. The greatness of his achievement is in striking contrast to the unpretentious simplicity with which he presents it to the world.'172 Feuerbach had shown that the Hegelian system was merely a philosophised form of religion and equally alienating; he had thus 'founded true materialism and real science by making the social relationship of "man to man" the basic principle of his theory'.173 Marx briefly summarised Feuerbach's achievement in a letter he sent him in August 1844:

In your writings you have given - whether intentionally I do not know - a philosophical basis to socialism, and the communists, too, have similarly understood these works in that sense. The unity of man with man based on the real differences between men, the concept of human species transferred from an abstract heaven to the real world: what is this other than the concept of society!174

Continuing with the third and final section of the Manuscripts, Marx turned to look at Hegel's system. He began by copying out the table of contents of the Phenomenology, 'the true birth place and secret of his philosophy',175 and accused Hegel of making all entities that in reality belonged objectively and sensuously to man into mental entities, since for him spirit alone was the genuine essence of man. This criticism was tempered, however, by an analysis of Hegel's achievements that clearly showed how much (despite his critical comments) he owed to him. For Marx considered that, although the concept of criticism in the Phenomenology was still liable to mystify and was not sufficiently self-aware, it nevertheless went far beyond later developments; in other words, none of the disciples had as yet been able to surpass the Master. Indeed, Marx made the astonishing claim for the Phenomenology that:

It contains all the elements of criticism - concealed but often already prepared and elaborated in a way that far surpasses Hegel's own point of view. The 'unhappy consciousness', the 'honest consciousness', the

struggle of the 'noble and base consciousness', etc., etc., these single sections contain the elements (though still in an alienated form) of a criticism of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc.176

This was because the Phenomenology had understood the alienation of man, contained insights into the process of man's development, and had seen that the objects which appeared to order men's lives - their religion, their wealth - in fact belonged to man and were the product of essential human capacities. Marx summed up his attitude to Hegel as follows:

The greatness of Hegel's Phenomenology and its final product - the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle, is on the one hand that Hegel conceives of the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as externalization and the transcendence of this externalization. This means, therefore, that he grasps the

nature of labour and understands objective man, true because real, man as the result of his own labour.177

Thus although Hegel did grasp labour as the self-confirming essence of man, yet 'the only labour Hegel knows and recognises is abstract, mental labour'.178

Although Marx's language was (as often) involved, and his arrangement somewhat haphazard, this is the passage where he gave his fullest and clearest account of his debt to, and disagreements with, Hegel. Hegel thought that reality was Spirit realising itself. In this process Spirit produced a world which it thought at first was external; only later did it realise that this world was its own creation. Spirit was not something separate from this productive activity; it only existed in and through this activity. At the beginning of this process Spirit was not aware that it was externalising or alienating itself. Only gradually did Spirit realise that the world was not external to it. It was the failure to realise this that constituted, for Hegel, alienation. This alienation would cease when men became fully self-conscious and understood their environment and their culture to be emanations of Spirit. Freedom consisted in this understanding and freedom was the aim of history. In broad terms, what Marx did was to reject the notion of Spirit and retain only finite individual beings: thus the Hegelian relationships of Spirit to the world became the Marxian notion of the relationship of man to his social being. Marx said that Hegel only took account of man's mental activities - that is, of his ideas - and that these, though important, were by themselves insufficient to explain social and cultural change.

Turning to the final chapter of the Phenomenology, Marx opposed his view of man as an objective, natural being to Hegel's conception of man as self-consciousness. If man were reduced to self-consciousness, Marx

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objected, then he could establish outside himself only abstract objects that were constructs of his mind. These objects would have no independence vis-a-vis man's self-consciousness. Marx's own view of human nature was very different:

When real man of flesh and blood, standing on the solid, round earth and breathing in and out all the powers of nature posits his real objective faculties, as a result of his externalisation, as alien objects, it is not the positing that is the subject; it is the subjectivity of objective faculties whose action must therefore be an objective one.179

Marx called his view 'naturalism' or 'humanism', and distinguished this from both idealism and materialism, claiming that it united what was essential both to idealism and to materialism.

Marx followed this with two concise paragraphs (very reminiscent of the previous section on private property and communism) on the meaning of naturalism and objectivity. Nature seemed to mean to Marx whatever was opposed to man, what afforded him scope for his activities and satisfied his needs. It was these needs and drives that made up man's nature. Marx called his view 'naturalism' because man was orientated towards nature and fulfilled his needs in and through nature, but also, more fundamentally, because man was part of nature. Thus man as an active natural being was endowed with certain natural capacities, powers and drives. But he was no less a limited, dependent suffering creature. The objects of his drives were independent of him, yet he needed them to satisfy himself and express his objective nature. Thus, 'a being that does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and has no part in the natural world'.180 Marx concluded: 'To be sentient is to suffer. Man as an objective, sentient being is therefore a suffering being and, since he is a being who reacts to his sufferings, a passionate being. Passion is man's faculties energetically striving after their object.'181 This contained echoes of the eighteenth-century French materialists, Holbach and Helvetius, but the main source for Marx's ideas and terminology when discussing nature and objectivity was Feuerbach's Philosophy of the Future.l82

Following this digression on his own concept of human nature, Marx continued with his critique of the Phenomenology by emphasising that I legel seemed to equate alienation with any sort of objectivity and thus only transcended alienation in thought: the consequence was that, for I legel, man was truly human only when he was engaging in philosophy and that, for example, the most authentically religious man was the philosopher of religion. The last few pages of the manuscript degenerate into absolute obscurity. Indeed, throughout this whole section where Marx was wrestling so tortuously with Hegel's dialectic, the modern reader must

find the arguments rather difficult to follow. In so far as the arguments can be grasped, 'common sense' would tend to agree with Marx as against Hegel - though it is, of course, a Hegel refracted through Marx himself.183 What must be remembered, however, is the dense idealist fog (created particularly by Hegel's disciples) that Marx had to disperse in order to arrive at any sort of 'empirical' view.

Marx himself supplied no conclusion to the 'Paris Manuscripts' and it is impossible to draw one from such a disjointed work which included discussions of economics, social criticism, philosophy, history, logic, dialectics and metaphysics. Although each section was dominated by a separate subject, to some extent all were approached in similar fashion. Here for the first time there appeared together, if not yet united, what Engels described as the three constituent elements in Marx's thought - German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics. It is above all these Manuscripts which (in the West at least) reorientated many people's interpretation of Marx - to the extent of their even being considered as his major work. They were not published until the early 1930s and did not attract public attention until after the Second World War; certain facets of the Manuscripts were soon assimilated to the existentialism and humanism then so much in vogue and presented an altogether more attractive basis for non-Stalinist socialism than textbooks on dialectical materialism.

Seen in their proper perspective, these Manuscripts were in fact no more than a starting-point for Marx - an initial, exuberant outpouring of ideas to be taken up and developed in subsequent economic writings, particularly in the Grimdrisse and in Capital. In these later works the themes of the '1844 Manuscripts' would certainly be pursued more systematically, in greater detail, and against a much more solid economic and historical background; but the central inspiration or vision was to remain unaltered: man's alienation in capitalist society, and the possibility of his emancipation - of his controlling his own destiny through communism.

IV. L A S T M O N T H S I N PARIS

While Marx had been feverishly composing his Manuscripts in Paris, Jenny was re-immersing herself in the provincial life of Trier. She was glad to be reunited with her mother for whom she had so often wept in France; but the genteel poverty in which the Westphalen household was compelled to live and the sponging of her spineless brother Edgar depressed her. The baby, now provided with a wet nurse, was soon out

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of danger, and was the subject of long paragraphs of loving description in Jenny's letters to Marx. When her old friends and acquaintances came to see her and view the baby, she felt as though she were holding court. She fended off as best she could inquiries about exactly what sort of a job Marx had acquired in Paris. In fact she was filled with misgivings which she confided to her husband:

Dear heart, I have too great an anxiety about our future, both in the long and the short term, and I think that I shall be punished for my present high spirits and exuberance. If you can, please calm my fears on this point. People talk far too much about a steady income. I then answer simply with my red cheeks, my white flesh, my velvet cloak, my feathered hat and my fine ribbons.184

Full of anxiety she made the difficult trip to her mother-in-law whose attitude, she was surprised to find, had quite changed since the marriage. Marx's mother and his three sisters still living at home received her with open arms, a change of heart she could only attribute to the impression made by their new prosperity with the 1000 thalers sent by Jung. She finished her first letter to Marx with a delightful admonition - unfortunately little-heeded - of his style:

Please do not write in such a bitter and irritated style!!! Either write factually and precisely or lightly and with humour. Please, dear heart, let the pen run over the page, and even if it should sometimes fall and stumble and cause a sentence to do likewise, yet your thoughts stand upright like Grenadiers of the old Guard, steadfast and brave. . . . What does it matter if their uniform hangs loosely and is not so tightly laced? How handsome the loose, light uniform looks on French soldiers. Think of our elaborate Prussians - doesn't it make you shudder? So let the participles run and put the words where they themselves want to go. Such a race of warriors must not march too regularly. Are your troops marching to field? Good luck to their general, my black master. Fare well, dear heart, darling and only life.185

A later letter, however (written from a Trier grown suddenly feverish with the influx of nearly a million pilgrims to see the Holy Coat), was more worried: she was anxious to return to Paris lest Marx be led astray by the temptations of the city; at the same time she feared - and the event proved her right - that a second baby would be on its way soon after her return. 'Though the exchequer may be full at the moment,' she wrote, 'reflect how easily it empties itself again, and how difficult it is to fill it!'186 She returned to Paris in September 1844 with the wet nurse and her four-tooth baby to find that Marx had just formed the most important friendship of his life - that with Friedrich Engels.