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At the end of the term I again sought the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs and in the last volume that I sent you the forced humour of 'Scorpion and Felix' and the misconceived fantastic drama of 'Oulanem' are shot through with idealism which finally changes completely, dissolving into purely formal an which has no objects to inspire it and no exciting progress of ideas.88
But this activity, while revealing what poetry could be, at the same time made it impossible for Marx to continue: 'These last poems were the only ones in which suddenly, as though at the touch of a magic wand - oh! the touch was at first shattering - the kingdom of true poetry glittered opposite me like a distant fairy palace and all my creations dissolved into nothingness.'89
Not surprisingly this period of intense intellectual activity in several fields, often involving his working through the night, ended in a period of severe illness. Marx seems to have suffered quite severely from the tendency to tuberculosis that killed so many of his family: the following year his military service was put off 'because of weakness of the lungs and periodical vomiting of blood'. And in 1841 his military obligations were cancelled for good and he was declared completely invalid 'owing to the sensitivity of his lungs'.90 His doctor advised a change of scene and Marx went to the village of Stralow just outside Berlin. Here his views underwent radical change: 'A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder and new gods had to be installed. I left behind the idealism which, by the way, I had nourished with that of Kant and Fichte, and came to seek the idea in the real itself. If the gods had before dwelt above the earth, they had now become its centre.'91
Previously Hegel's conceptual rationalism had been rejected by Marx, the follower of Kant and Fichte, the romantic subjectivist who considered the highest being to be separate from earthly reality. Now, however, it began to seem as though the Idea was immanent in the real. Previously Marx had 'read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, but I did not care for its grotesque and rocky melody'.92 Now he had to resolve his spiritual crisis by a conversion to Hegelianism - a conversion that was as profound as it was sudden. It was probably the most important intellectual step of Marx's whole life. For however much he was to criticise Hegel, accuse him of idealism, and try to stand his dialectic 'on its feet', Marx was the first to admit that his method stemmed directly from his Master of the 1830s.
I legelianism was the dominant philosophy in Berlin where Hegel had held the chair of Philosophy from 1818 until his death in 1831. Building on (lie centrality of human reason propounded by Kant, Hegel had united into :i comprehensive system the themes of German idealist philosophy
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and in particular the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling: immanence, development and contradiction. 'The great merit of Hegel's philosophy', wrote Engels, 'was that for the first time the totality of the natural, historical and spiritual aspects of the world were conceived and represented as a process of constant transformation and development and an effort was made to show the organic character of this process.'95 Hegel started from the belief that, as he said of the French Revolution, 'man's existence has its centre in his head, i.e. in Reason, under whose inspiration he builds up the world of reality'. In his greatest work, the Phiinomenologie, Hegel traced the development of mind or spirit, reintroducing historical movement into philosophy and asserting that the human mind can attain absolute knowledge. He analysed the development of human consciousness, from its immediate perception of the here and now to the stage of self-consciousness, the understanding that allows man to analyse the world and order his own actions accordingly. Following this was the stage of reason itself - understanding the real, after which spirit - by means of religion and art - attained absolute knowledge, the level at which man recognised in the world the stages of his own reason. These stages Hegel called 'alienations', in so far as they were creations of the human mind yet thought of as independent and superior to the human mind. This absolute knowledge is at the same time a sort of recapitulation of the human spirit, for each successive stage retains elements of the previous ones at the same time as it goes beyond them. This movement that suppresses and yet conserves Hegel called Aufhebung, a word that has this double sense in German. Hegel also talked of 'the power of the negative', thinking that there was always a tension between any present state of affairs and what it was becoming. For any present state of affairs was in the process of being negated, changed into something else. This process was what Hegel meant by dialectic.94
Faced with the manifest attraction of this philosophy, Marx began to clarify his ideas by writing - a procedure he had adopted before and would adopt many times later. He produced a twenty-four-page dialogue entitled 'Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Progress of Philosophy'. For this purpose he acquainted himself with natural science, history and a study of the works of Schelling. This dialogue ended with Marx's conversion to Hegelianism: 'My last sentence was the beginning of Hegel's system and this work which had caused one endless headache . . . this my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy.'95 Thus Marx had gone through the same evolution as classical German philosophy itself, from Kant and Fichte through Schelling to Hegel.
This process of giving up his romantic idealism and delivering himself
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over to 'the enemy' was an extremely radical and painful one for Marx. I le described its immediate results:
My vexation prevented me from thinking at all for several days and I ran like a madman around the garden beside the dirty waters of the Spree 'which washes souls and makes weak tea'. I even went on a hunting party with my landlord and rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-loafer I saw . .. My fruitless and failed intellectual endeavours and my consuming anger at having to make an idol of a view that I hated made me ill.96
1 lis conversion to Hegel was completed firstly by a thorough reading of I Iegel: while sick he 'got to know Hegel, together with most of his disciples, from the beginning to end'; and secondly, by joining a sort of Hegelian discussion group: 'through several gatherings with friends in Stralow I obtained entrance into a graduate club among whose members were several university lecturers and the most intimate of my Berlin friends, Dr Rutenberg. In the discussions here many contradictory views appeared and I attached myself ever more closely to the current philosophy which I had thought it possible to escape'.97 This club, which met regularly in a cafe in the Franzosische Strasse and subsequently in the houses of its members, was a hard-drinking and boisterous company and formed the focal point of the Young Hegelian movement.
The Young Hegelians' attack on the orthodoxies of their time started in the sphere of religion - a much safer area than politics. Here Hegel's legacy was ambiguous. Religion, together with philosophy, was for him the highest form of man's spiritual life. Religion (and by this Hegel, who remained a practising Luteran all his life, meant Protestant Christianity which he considered the highest and final form of religion) was the return of the Absolute Spirit to itself. The content of religion was the same as that of philosophy, though its method of apprehending was different. For whereas philosophy employed concepts, religion used imagination. These unsatisfactory imaginings afforded only a fragmentary and imprecise knowledge of what philosophy comprehended rationally. But religion could be linked to philosophy by means of a philosophy of religion, and 1 Iegel considered that the particular dogmatic contents of the religious imagination were necessary stages in the development of Absolute Spirit. 1 lie philosophy of religion interpreted at a higher level both naive faith ;IIKI critical reason. Thus Hegel rejected the view of the eighteenthrent ury rationalists that religion did inadequately what only science was competent to do; in his eyes, religion (or his philosophical interpretation ill n) fulfilled man's constant psychological need to have an image of himself and of the world by which he could orientate himself.98
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Although in the years immediately following Hegel's death his school was united and supreme in the German universities, by the late 1830s it had already begun to split into two wings on the subject of religion. Whereas the conservative wing of the school held to the slogan that 'the real is the rational' and saw nothing irrational in the traditional representation of religion, the radical wing opposed the conservatives' complacency with a dissatisfaction that meant it wanted to destroy the dogmas enshrined in religious representations that were now said to be outdated. These representations all had to be judged by a progressive reason, not one which, as Hegel had said, only 'paints grey with grey' and thus merely recognised what already existed. For the Master had also said that an age comprehended in thought was already in advance of its time, and the radicals drew the conclusion that the comprehension of religion already modified even its content, while its form became a pure myth. This debate started with the publication of David Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1835. Having failed to extract a picture of the historical Jesus from the gospel narratives, Strauss presented these narratives as mere expressions of the messianic idea present in primitive Christian communities, myths that were never intended to be taken as real historical narratives. It was quite natural that Young Hegelian discussion should at first be theological: most members of the Hegelian school were interested in religion above all; and the attitude of the Prussian Government made politics an extremely dangerous subject for debate. Yet granted the Establishment of the Church in Germany and the close connection between religion and politics, it was inevitable that a movement of religious criticism would swiftly become secularised into one of political opposition. It was as a member of this rapidly changing movement, which had its centre in the Berlin Doctors' Club, that Karl Marx first began to work out his views on philosophy and society.
According to one of the members of the Doctors' Club, 'in this circle of aspiring young men, most of whom had already finished their studies, there reigned supreme the idealism, the thirst for knowledge and the liberal spirit, that still completely inspired the youth of that time. In these reunions the poems and essays that we had composed were read aloud and assessed, but the greatest part of our attention was devoted to the Hegelian p h i l o s o p h y . . O f Marx's more intimate friends in the club, Adolph Rutenberg had recently been dismissed as a teacher of geography and now earned his living as a journalist; Karl Koppen was a history teacher who later became an acknowledged expert on the origins of Buddhism. Koppen published in 1840 Frederick the Great and his Opponents: dedicated to Marx, the book was a eulogy of Frederick and the principles of the Enlightenment.100 The leading light in the club was Bruno Bauer,
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who had been lecturing in theology at the university since 1834 and was to be Marx's closest friend for the next four years.'01 One of his contemporaries described him as follows: 'His pointed nose, with sharp bone, |uts out boldly, his forehead is high and domed, and his mouth delicately shaped; his figure is almost Napoleonic. He is a very decided man who, under a cold exterior, burns with an inner fire. He will not brook any opposition and will sooner be a martyr to his own convictions.'102 Bauer's special field was New Testament criticism where he made a lasting contribution.
Marx himself seems to have been a lively and central figure in the club. Edgar Bauer (Bruno's brother) gave the following description of Marx in a satirical poem on club members:
But who advances here full of impetuosity?
It is a dark form from Trier, an unleashed monster,
With self-assured step he hammers the ground with his heels And raises his arms in full fury to heaven
As though he wished to seize the celestial vault and lower it to earth. In rage he continually deals with his redoubtable fist,
As if a thousand devils were gripping his hair.103
Koppen called his friend 'a true arsenal of thoughts, a veritable factory of ideas' and remarked that Bruno Bauer's The Christian State in our Time - the first directly political article of the Young Hegelians - drew largely on Marx's ideas.104 Meanwhile his life-style, which was in keeping with the studied bohemianism of the Doctors' Club, led Marx to become more and more estranged from his family. While his mother merely recommended moderation in his consumption of wine, coffee and pepper, the long 'confession' of November 1837 prompted a very tart reply from his father:
Alas, your conduct has consisted merely in disorder, meandering in all the fields of knowledge, musty traditions by sombre lamplight; degeneration in a learned dressing gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass. And a shirking unsociability and a refusal of all conventions and even all respect for your father. Your intercourse with the world is limited to your sordid room, where perhaps lie abandoned in the classical disorder the love letters of a Jenny and the tear-stained counsels of your father . .. And do you think that here in this workshop of senseless and aimless learning you can ripen the fruits to bring you and your loved one happiness? . . . As though we were made of gold my gentleman-son disposes of almost 700 thalers 111 a single year, in contravention of every agreement and every usage, whereas the richest spend no more than 500.105