Lecture 3: Marx’s Critique of Hegel (continued)

1. If one wants to conceive Marx’s writings as a unified whole, we must view them as a theory of socialist revolution. This is the fundamental intention that animates Marx’s life’s work. Marx was born in Trier in the more liberal Rhineland in 1818 to a middle class assimilated Jewish family; his father had converted to Christianity to practice law according to the recently won Prussian civil rights. Marx entered Bonn University in 1835. He transferring to Berlin in 1836, where he completed his studies and was taught by the notable reformist, Hegelian, Eduard Gans before finally receiving his doctorate from the University Jena in 1841. Marx initially dabbled in Romantic poetry but soon became involved in the group of radical young Hegelians who viewed philosophy as the critique of religious and philosophical ideas in the names of practical critique of contemporary society. Marx embraced the future orientated practico-political critique of this group.  He initially following the Young Hegelians in endorsing the Hegelian programme for the unification of the rational and the real, evaluated in terms of the rationality of the existing institutions of the state.  However, in contemporary conditions of a clear divorce between the rational notion and regressive, irrational activities of the Prussian state, Hegel’s resolution of the contradiction was sorely compromised. His philosophy is depicted in Marx’s dissertation as ‘world philosophy’ in the Aristotlean sense that it had incorporated into its system all available knowledge. However, Marx recognises that even the comprehension of ‘world philosophy’ does not resolve all contradictions, cannot terminate history. Philosophy has to become critique and explicitly challenge the existing configuration of culture and society. As an academic career was virtually impossible in light of the prevailing anti-semitism, in 1842 Marx turns to journalism. During a brief period in which censorship was relaxed, he became the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. In his journalistic activity Marx will come to question the very foundations of Hegel’s mature philosophy. However, as mentioned, he begins by endorsing the Hegelian idea of the rational state. He supplies this view of the state with a radical democratic interpretation perceiving its rationality in Rousseauian terms as an expression of the ‘general will’. However, first hand experience of contemporary politics soon leads him to contest the rationality of the state. He quickly sees through the Young Hegelian illusions that had explained away contemporary political reaction as a result of German backwardness. The problem with contemporary Prussian politics is not a temporary failure of the essentially rational Prussian State to conform to its essence. Marx makes two decisive critical points:

a. (Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel) Bureaucracy always furthers and protects its own interests.
b. (Debates on the Thefts of Wood) he comes to recognise the direct influence of dominant material interests in the framing of concrete legislation.

2. Marx concludes from this that the State does not represent the higher interests of society against the particular material concerns of civil society. It is invariably the instrument of powerful material interests. This realisation initiates Marx’s much more substantial critique of Hegel. The problem with Hegel is not only, as the Young Hegelians believed, that he fails to achieve a real (as against a philosophical) overcoming of contradictions. More than this, his whole theoretical/philosophical stance has an ideological character. Hegel philosophy expresses the existing world and its dominant power relations. He was unable to disentangle his philosophy from the existing power relations and thereby to establish a critical distance from them. His Idea has no other manifestation than the affirmation of the world as it is. It serves indirectly the interests of dominant material power and was therefore ‘ideological’. According to Marx, a theory is ideological when: 1. It represents its own particular and or material interests as community universal interests. 2. Ideology has the tendency to overrate the power of ideas and to view these as the main agents of historical change. It will be a central platform of Marx's critical theory that ideas can themselves very readily be explained as expressions of material conditions and interests and that this dynamic plays a much greater role in the processes of historical change than was ever formerly acknowledged.

3. According to Marx, the ideological function of Hegel’s philosophy is to reproduce the existing world and its hegemonic power relations enhanced by the imprimatur of authority. The other side of this acritical positivism was practical impotence. By itself, philosophy cannot actually realise the union of reason and reality. Objective material interests and powers remain dominant and recalcitrant. Hegel’s philosophy lacks the practical force to differentiate itself from the existing world and force practical change. Hegel had realised that even the rational state could not remove all irrationalities; however he did believe that it would ameliorate the worse contradictions of modern civil society. This allows him to maintain a contemplative stance and, furthermore, he does not have to nominate any real historical actors possessing the motive and incentive to challenge and set right existing irrationalities.

4. In a very general sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is correct but it is also exaggerated and simplifying. He is correct insofar as Hegel’s speculative standpoint does commit him to a contemplative, backward looking rather than an activist, future orientation to the world. However, it is not completely fair to say Hegelian philosophy is positivist and only concerned to philosophically reproduce reality just as it is. Hegel views philosophy as the exploration of the rational and this means not the setting up of a theoretical world, or utopia “beyond” the contemporary society but the “comprehension of the present and the actuality (Wirklichkeit). Consider his famous double-barrel formulation from the preface to The Philosophy of Right: ‘What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.” (Was vernüftig ist, das ist wirklich: und was wirklich ist, das ist vernüftig.)P20. The translator renders “wirklich” as “actual” rather than “real” because he wants to make clear that the “present”, which we would normally consider to be “real” because it exists, is not so for Hegel. For him, social facts and institutions may indeed be “existing” but not “actual”(wirklich) or real in the metaphysical or value sense of possessing an immanent rationality in tune with the inner truth of spirit. This reading of Hegel’s famous Dopplesatz is confirmed by an earlier version of his lectures in Heidelberg lectures from 1817. We know that Hegel published The Philosophy of Right at a time of political crisis and growing political reaction and was required to submit the 1820 manuscript to the censor. We know that he did revise it but we cannot know for sure what the contents of this revision were. However, if we compare it to the earlier Heidelberg one striking difference is an alternative formulation of the Dopplesatz that stresses the future instantiation of the rational: that the rational must happen (was vernünftige ist, muss geschehen (Heidelberg Lectures, pp 221, 242). This suggests that Hegel may have thought it advisable to tone done the future orientation of this formulation that stresses the necessity for the rational to come into existence and replace it with the more ambiguous formulation stressing the rationality of the “wirklich”. The task of philosophy follows from this insight. That is, to consider the natural and spiritual world from the standpoint of their rationality. Clearly not everything in the existing world is rational and there is a level of accidentality and particular content in the world over which philosophy has neither command nor the capacity to prescribe. However, the task of philosophy is to concentrate on that rational thread; what Hegel calls the “immanent substance” in “the semblance of the temporal and the transient”, the “the eternal” in the “present”P20.This is why philosophy cannot issue instructions about how the world ought to be. For Hegel, the philosopher is constrained to reflect upon the product of past spiritual endeavour and discover its rational thread. He cannot anticipate this activity without risking entanglement in merely subjective musings that bear no relation to unfolding rationality.

Lecture 3: The Novelty of Critical Theory

1. One of the most important results of this critique of Hegel, as the representative of philosophy in general, was the conclusion that all theory has practico-material determinations. Hegel believed his retrospective-speculative standpoint allowed him to transcend such limited determinations yet, Marx argues, this turned out to be an ideological illusion. Hegelian theory rested upon, and unconsciously legitimated the standpoint of existing nascent bourgeois society. Marx, on the other hand, does not deny the practico-material determinations of his own theory. Within a year Marx will assert that his theory expresses the condition, needs and aspirations of the proletariat. In this theory, the self-understanding of the proletariat will be articulated and clarified from the perspective of its long-term interests.

2. If one takes this unifying revolutionary perspective away Marx’s writings fall into a number of different academic disciplines. It is this animating intention towards revolution that gives to his theory the look of a completely new type of theory. Socialist revolution is not simply Marx’s subjective stance nor is his theory only about socialist revolution; he does not simply describe revolution from an external or impartial standpoint; rather revolution is built into the cognitive conceptual centre of the theory itself. The concepts and the problematics of the major works gain their meaning and significance from this fundamental intention. Marx uses concepts to analyse, theorise and to overcome the existing empirical facts of capitalist society: the main target here is the antagonistic relationship between wage labour and capital.

3. But, according to Marx, this does not reduce his theory to an ideology. The theory also makes claims to truth that will be specified in a moment. However, it posits no aims other than revolution: it posits a radical change in social arrangements that will allow men to overcome the most fundamental form of social disadvantage and consciously create their own future. Theoretically, Marx’s theory sits very uneasily within the conventional the fact/value distinction. It does not describe a fact nor does it acclaim a value. Marx adopts this very idiosyncratic stance because he believed that traditional philosophical theory was caught in an impotent dualism. It either necessitated an uncritical acceptance of the facts (Hegel’s objectivism) or an unreal criticism in the name of subjective ideals (The Young Hegelians). Neither actually changes the world. This means that philosophy is doomed to reproduce reality. It either describes an ‘is’ or it counter poses to it as ‘ought’, some ideal value which, nevertheless, merely reflects the existing reality it opposes and is merely subjective and impotent. Marx concludes that philosophy must be overcome.

4. The new theory cannot resort to transcendent explanations, it has to be radically immanent. History is nothing more than the result of the totality of human actions: the concrete social interrelations and interactions between individuals. But, at the same time, Marx has a transcendent aim: the overcoming of the congealed result of those actions as expressed in the inegalitarian structure of existing society. The theoretical problem confronting Marx’s new critical theory is to bring his immanent mode of explanation into accord with his transcendent aim in a practical way. The task is to specify how the crisis character of bourgeois society will be overcome by a new form of society while avoiding the dualism that has plagued the history of philosophy. Marx’s solution to this dilemma involved the radical transformation of theory. This requires the abandonment of the contemplative standpoint: theory can no longer purport to be the conditionless reflection of the subject where the subject is each and every rational ego. As contemplation does not overcome the existing empirical facts, as it is not a material force, critique must be something other than philosophy. For a theory to be truly radical, to be revolutionary, it must be an expression not of mere subjective reflection but an expression of objective social conditions and forces, of the aspirations of a definite, potentially radical agent in their practical life situation. This theory cannot remain external to the situation it described but rather must be a critical co-constitutant of the practical situation itself. The theory is a an agent within the determining historical struggle itself insofar as it interprets the meaning of that struggle and its possibilities on behalf of the oppressed, potentially revolutionary collective subject

5. The overcoming of philosophical dualism - of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ involves the transformation of the meaning of ‘is’ and ‘ought’. This polarity can be overcome if theory can locate existing subjective forces and intentions that strive towards a radical transformation of society. But these forces cannot be arbitrary or chance. The practical forces striving for change must be shown to be objective structural elements within the existing dynamic and contradictory social reality. For Marx, ‘is’ and ‘ought’ are not just conceptual categories but expressions or moments of the immanent process in dynamic social reality. They express the poles of a real conflict in society. Social reality is constituted out of struggles in which both ‘is’ and ‘ought’ are real, concrete social forces.

6. Marx views his critical theory as the expression of the conditions and aspirations of one of the social agents in this struggle. But this social conditioning does not, as said above, render critical theory a mere ideology. Its theoretical aim is still truth. However, this “truth” is not that of mere correspondence, one that merely reproduces reality just as it appears statically. To be true, a theory must explain its object. But the automatic reproduction of what exists cannot be such an explanation when reality is dynamic, always a site of struggle and perpetual renewal. We could say that critical theory attempts to synthesize into a single paradigm the strengths of scientific and hermeneutical understanding. The former focuses primarily on explanation in the sense of the subsumption of an individual event or elements to a law or a class of phenomena. For example Marx will point to the structural conditions (classes, capital, wages, the life conditions and the interests) that explain the law like contradictory reproduction of bourgeois society. But society is not an inanimate object like the other “facts” you might find in physics: it has an irreducible subjective dimension. This means that consciousness or self-understanding is a crucial and dynamic co-constituent of the social “fact” we call bourgeois society. Of course, it is possible to treat society as if it was an object and simply describe social processes from a supposedly external standpoint. This is done in much social science and can be justified in some instances. However, this requires the theory to relinquish any active engagement in a practical transformative role. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, favours understanding as a holistic penetration or empathetic immersion in the object of study as a subject, a quest for meaning and the transmission of meaning. However, unlike hermeneutics, critical theory aspires not just to understand and interpret the existing consciousness of the workers but also to change it. Critical theory is also committed to a communicative function that implies a relation between subjects. Critical theory is therefore also envisaged as inter-subjective communication. Critical theory attempts to weld both explanation and communication as both necessary conditions for the truth of a social theory. So Marx will account for the widespread human misery and suffering of the workers by locating the causal regularities that reproduce bourgeois society and structure the experience of the typical social actors. However, human misery is not simply a “fact” independent of the subjective experience of it; the theory must also communicate the meaning of these contradictions. Participation in social activity creates needs and abilities in the worker that the current social arrangement cannot contain; it opens up new objective possibilities. Yet these needs remain in the present suppressed, muted or not fully understood. Such contradictions and the fluidity they create engender social struggles around these conditions and have within them the seeds of new forms of consciousness and forms of social possibility that are only now becoming visible on the horizon of a new stage of historical development. Marx argues that this communicative function critical theory will transform consciousnesses and politicise class struggle.