Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

31

4 ° T R I E R , B O N N A N D B E R L I N 4 1

In fact, the final report on Marx's university career declared that he had 'several times been sued for debt', and he had changed his address at least ten times during his five-year stay.

His family ties were further loosened by the death of his father in May 1838. In spite of their disagreements, Marx always retained a strong affection for his father: 'he has never tired of talking about him', wrote Eleanor, 'and always carried an old daguerreotype photograph of him. But he would never show the photo to strangers, because, he said, it was so unlike the original.'106 On Marx's death, Engels laid the photograph in his coffin. The death of Heinrich Marx naturally reduced the income of the Marx family quite considerably. It also led to increased difficulties with the von Westphalen family, some of whom seem to have snubbed Henrietta Marx completely.107 At the same time Marx's interests began to turn definitely from law to philosophy. Although in his letter of November 1837 he had written to his father about the possibility of his becoming an assistant judge, he began now more and more to opt out of the formal aspects of the university. Gans died in 1839 and during his last three years in Berlin Marx only attended two courses: one on Isaiah given by Bruno Bauer and another on the drama of Euripides. Marx had entirely given up the writing of poetry and when he wished to present more poems to Jenny in 1839 he very sensibly copied some out from two anthologies that had recently appeared.

With the diminishing lack of support from his family, the choice of a career became all the more pressing, and the academic world seemed to offer the most immediate prospect of effective action. 'It would be stupid', Bruno Bauer wrote to him, 'if you were to devote yourself to a practical career. Theory is now the strongest practice, and we are absolutely incapable of predicting to how large an extent it will become practical."08 At the beginning of 1839 Marx decided to start work on a doctoral dissertation with a view to getting a university post as lecturer in philosophy - preferably at Bonn to which Bauer, increasingly under attack for his radical views, had been moved by the Ministry of Education. Throughout 1839 and early 1840 Marx was busy reading and making excerpts for use in his thesis. The general heading he gave to these notes was 'Epicurean Philosophy'. At the same time he was reading Hegel, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Hume and Kant, and his preliminary notes were very wideranging, dealing with such subjects as the relationship between Epicureanism and Stoicism, the concept of the sage in Greek philosophy, the views of Socrates and Plato on religion and the prospects of post-Hegelian philosophy.

Marx's choice of subject was influenced by the general interest that the Young Hegelians (particularly Bauer and Koppen) had in post-Aristotelian

2 2 2 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Greek philosophy. There were two reasons for this interest: firstly, after the 'total philosophy' of Hegel the Young Hegelians felt themselves in the same position as the Greeks after Aristotle; secondly, they thought that the post-Aristotelian philosophies contained the essential elements of modern thought: they had laid the philosophical foundations of the Roman Empire, had profoundly influenced early Christian morality and also contained rationalist traits of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. For Marx, too, the Stoic, Sceptic and Epicurean philosophies were 'prototypes of the Roman mind, the form in which Greece emigrated to Rome'.109 They were 'such intense and eternal beings, so full of character, that even the modern world has to allow to them their full spiritual citizenship'.'10 'Is it not remarkable', Marx continued in the Introduction to his thesis, 'that after the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which extend to universality, new systems appear which do not refer back to these rich intellectual figures but look further back and turn to the simplest schools - in regard to physics, to the philosophers of nature, and in regard to ethics, to the Socratic school?'111 In short, Marx's choice of subject was designed to throw light on the contemporary post-Hegelian situation in philosophy by the examination of a parallel period in the history of Greek philosophy.

Marx's preliminary notes for the thesis were rather obscure, partly because they were only personal notes and partly because they were often couched in the vividly metaphorical language characteristic of the Young Hegelians who saw themselves living in a general atmosphere of crisis and impending catastrophe. Bruno Bauer, for example, with whom Marx kept up a constant correspondence while he was composing his thesis, wrote in 1840: 'our epoch becomes more and more terrible and beautiful'.112 Or again: 'The catastrophe will be terrible and must be great. I would almost say that it will be greater and more horrible than that which heralded Christianity's appearance on the world scene.'115 The most interesting passage in Marx's notes was one where he dealt with the philosophical climate following on the world-philosophy of Hegel. Philosophy, he claimed, had now arrived at a turning point: 'like Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and began to build houses and settle on the earth, so philosophy, which has so evolved as to impinge on the world, turns itself against the world that it finds. So now the Hegelian philosophy.'"4 Marx believed that Hegel's philosophy had, by its very completeness and universality, become unreal and opposed to the world which continued to be divided. Thus philosophy itself had become split: 'The activity of this philosophy appears, too, to be rent asunder and contradictory; its objective universality returns into the subjective forms of the individual minds in which it has its life. Normal harps will sound beneath

T R I E R , B O N N A N D B E R L I N 2 3

any hand; those of Aeolus only when the storm strikes them. But we should not let ourselves be misled by the storm that follows a great, a world-philosophy.'"5 'Anyone', Marx continued, 'who did not understand this necessary development had to deny the possibility of continuing to philosophise after such a total system: to such a man the appearance of Zeno or Epicurus after such a thinker as Aristotle would be incomprehensible.'

What was needed was a fundamental change of direction:

In such times half-formed spirits have the opposite view to real commanders. They believe that they can make good their losses by reducing and dividing their forces and make a peace treaty with real needs, whereas Themistocles, when Athens was threatened with destruction, persuaded the Athenians to quit their city completely and found a new Athens on another element, the sea."6

Marx went on to say that in such a period two alternatives presented themselves: either to imitate feebly what had gone before or to undertake a really fundamental upheaval:

Nor should we forget that the period that follows such catastrophes is an iron one, happy if it is marked by titanic struggles, lamentable if it is like the centuries that limp behind the great period of art and busy themselves with imitating in wax, plaster and copper what sprang from Carrara marble like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, father of the gods. But those periods are titanic that follow a total philosophy and its subjective forms of development, for the division that forms its unity is gigantic. Thus the Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptic philosophies are followed by Rome. They are unhappy and iron for their gods are dead and the new goddess has as yet only the obscure form of fate, of pure light or of pure darkness.117

In the preface to the thesis itself Marx briefly outlined previous, mistaken interpretations of Epicurus's philosophy and mentioned the insufficiency of Hegel's treatment of the period. He then added a paean in praise of the supremacy of philosophy over all other disciplines, and in particular over theology. To prove his point, Marx quoted Hume: "Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought everywhere to be acknowledged, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself to every particular art and science, which may be offended at her. This puts one in mind of a king arraign'd for high treason against his subjects.'118 Thus Marx made his own the Young Hegelian criticism of the Master's reconciliation of philosophy and religion. He continued:

As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and

totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: 'Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of die crowd.' Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus: 'In one word - I hate all gods' is her own profession, her own slogan against all gods of heaven and earth who do not recognise man's self-

consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.1"

This 'self-consciousness' was the central concept of the philosophy that the Young Hegelians, and Bruno Bauer in particular, were elaborating. For them, man's self-consciousness developed continually and realised that forces it had thought separate from itself - religion, for example - were really its own creation. Thus the task of self-consciousness and its principal weapon, philosophical criticism, was to expose all the forces and ideas that stood opposed to the free development of this human selfconsciousness.120

This enthusiasm for the philosophy of self-consciousness was reflected in the body of the thesis where Marx criticised the mechanistic determinism of Democritus by contrasting it with the Epicurean ethic of liberty.121 A native of Abdera in Thrace, writing at the end of the fifth century B.C., Democritus summed up, in his theory of atoms and the void, the previous two hundred years of Greek physical speculation. Epicurus taught more than a century later in an Athens marked by the general social chaos of the post-Alexandrine epoch and was concerned to supply principles for the conduct of individuals.122 Marx began his account of the relationship of the two philosophers with a paradox: Epicurus held all appearances to be objectively real but at the same time, since he wished to conserve freedom of the will, denied that the world was governed by immutable laws and thus in fact seemed to reject the objective reality of nature. Democritus, on the other hand, was very sceptical about the reality of appearance, but yet held the world to be governed by necessity. From this Marx concluded, rightly, that Epicurus's physics was really only a part of his moral philosophy. Epicurus did not merely copy Democritus's physics, as was commonly thought, but introduced the idea of spontaneity into the movement of the atoms, and to Democritus's world of inanimate nature ruled by mechanical laws he added a world of animate nature in which the human will operated. Marx thus preferred the view of Epicurus for two reasons: firstly, his emphasis on the absolute autonomy of the human spirit freed men from all superstitions of transcendent objects; secondly, the emphasis on 'free individual self-consciousness' showed one the way of going beyond the system of a 'total philosophy'.

It was above all this liberating aspect of Epicurus that Marx admired.

A few years later in The German Ideology he called Epicurus 'the genuine radically-enlightened mind of antiquity',12' and often referred to him in similar terms in his later writings. This enthusiasm for Epicurus was also seen in the appendix (to the thesis) which attacked Plutarch and particularly his treatise entitled 'It is impossible to live happily by following the principles of Epicurus';124 taking each of Plutarch's arguments separately, Marx demonstrated that the opposite conclusion followed. Although now it makes rather dry reading and often interprets the ideas of the ancients in an inappropriately subtle Hegelian perspective, Marx's thesis was a profoundly original work. One of those best qualified to judge has written that 'it is almost astonishing to see how far he got considering the materials then available'.125

During these years Marx was not only concerned with writing his thesis. The other projects he was engaged in similarly reflected the Young Hegelian climate and the discussions in the Doctors' Club. He had planned to edit a literary review and was much encouraged, 'since, through the agency of Bauer, who plays a leading role among them, and of my colleague Dr Rutenberg, all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian School have promised to contribute'.126 But the only result of Marx's literary endeavours was the appearance of two short poems in the Berlin review Athenaeum in 1841: these poems were his first published work. In early 1840 Marx was co-operating with Bruno Bauer in editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion and was thinking of writing a similar book himself. He also considered giving a course of lectures at Bonn attacking Hermes, a Catholic theologian who had tried to reconcile religion and Kantian philosophy; like all his plans at the time, he discussed the project at length with Bruno Bauer. By the summer of 1840 Marx had finished a book on the subject and sent the manuscript to Bauer enclosing a letter to a publisher, but the book was not in fact published, and Bauer wrote to Marx about the covering letter: 'Perhaps you might write in such terms to your washerwoman, but not to a publisher from whom you are asking a favour.'127 At the same time Marx had the idea of writing a farce entitled

Fischer Vapulans using it as a vehicle to attack Die Idea der Gottheit, K. P. Fischer's philosophical attempt to justify theism. Marx was also much concerned with logical problems and wanted to devote a work to dialectic: he took extensive notes on Aristotle and discussed the question in letters to Bauer; he proposed writing a criticism of the contemporary philosopher Trendelenburg and demonstrate that Aristotle was dialectical whereas Trendelenburg was only formal.

Meanwhile Bauer was full of good advice on how to finish his 'stupid examination' and join him in Bonn. He had already written to Marx in 1840: 'You can tell Gabler [Professor of Philosophy in Berlin] of your