Chapter 11. Alienation, Unity and the Dialectic
1. Origins of the Dialectic. Creatology
Alienation to Marx bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late 20th century Marxoid intellectuals.
It did not mean a psychological feeling of anxiety or estrangement
which could somehow be blamed on capitalism or on cultural or sexual repression.
Alienation for Marx was far more fundamental, more cosmic.
It meant, at the very least, as we have seen, the institutions of money, specialization and the division of labor.
The eradication of these evils was necessary to unite the collective organism or species man to himself,
to heal these splits within himself and between man and himself in the form of man-created nature.
But the radical evil of alienation was yet far more cosmic than that.
It was metaphysical, a deep part of the philosophy and the worldview that Marx picked up from Hegel,
and which, through its allied dialectic, brought to Marx the outlines of the engine
It all started with the third century philosopher
Plotinus, a Platonist philosopher, and his followers, and with a theological discipline
seemingly remote from political and economic affairs, Creatology, the science of the first
days.
We have already seen, in fact, that another allied and almost equally remote branch of
theology, eschatology, or the science of the last days, can have enormous political and
economic consequences and ramifications.
The critical question of creatology is, why did God create the universe?
The answer of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and hence the answer of Catholics, Lutherans
is that God created the universe out of benevolence and love for his creatures.
And this seems to be the only politically safe answer as well.
The answer given by heretics and mystics from early Christians on, however, is quite different.
God created the universe not out of perfection and love, but out of felt need and imperfection.
In short, God created the universe out of felt uneasiness, loneliness, or whatever.
In the beginning, before the creation of the universe, God and man, the collective organic
species of course, not any particular individual, were united in one, so to speak, cosmic blob.
How we can even speak of unity between man and God before man was even created is a conundrum
History is a process by which God develops his potential, and man, the collective species,
develops its or his potential.
But even as this development takes place and both God and man develop and render themselves
Man is more perfect in and through history. Offsetting this good development, a terrible and tragic thing has also taken place.
Man has been separated, cut off, alienated from God, as well as from other men or from nature.
Hence the pervasive concept of alienation.
Alienation is cosmic, irremediable and metaphysical, inherent in the very process of creation,
or, rather, irremediable until the great day inevitably arrives, when man and God,
having both fully developed themselves, finish the process and history itself by re-merging,
by uniting once again in the merger of these two great cosmic blobs into one.
Note first how this great historical process comes about. It is the inevitable preordained
dialectical process of history. There are, as usual, three stages. Stage one is the original
Man and God are in happy and harmonious unity, a unity of pre-creation, but things, particularly
with the human race, are rather undeveloped.
Then the magical dialectic does its work.
Stage two occurs, and God creates man and the universe, both God and man developing
The Theory of Money and Credit
Evil stems from self-centeredness of individual souls, deserters from the all.
But then, finally, at long last, the development process will be completed, and stage two develops
its own Aufhebung, its own lifting up, its own transcendence into its opposite or negation,
The Reunion of God and Man into a Glorious Unity, an Ecstasy of Union, and End to Alienation.
In this stage 3, the blobs are reunited on a far higher level than in stage 1.
History is over, and they shall all live happily ever after.
But note the enormous difference between this dialectic of creatology and eschatology and
and that of the Orthodox Christian scenario.
In the first place, the alienation, the tragedy of man in the dialectical saga from Plotinus
to Hegel, is metaphysical, inescapable from the act of creation itself, whereas the estrangement
of man from God in the Judeo-Christian saga is not metaphysical, but only moral.
To Orthodox Christians, creation was purely good, and not deeply tainted with evil.
Trouble came only with Adam's fall, a moral failure, not a metaphysical one.
Then, in the Orthodox Christian view, through the incarnation of Jesus, God provided a route
by which this alienation could be eliminated, and the individual could achieve salvation.
But note again, Christianity is a deeply individualistic creed, since each individual's salvation is
what matters.
Salvation, or the lack of it, will be attained by each individual.
Each individual's fate is the central concern, not the fate of the alleged collective blob
or organism, man with a capital M.
In the Orthodox Christian schema, each individual goes to heaven or hell.
But in this allegedly optimistic mystical view, nowadays called process theology, the
only salvation, the only happy ending, is that of the collective organism, the species,
with each individual member of that organism being brusquely annihilated along the way.
Its dialectical theology, in particular its creatology, began in full flower with the
Plotinus-influenced 9th century Christian mystic, John Scotus Erigina circa 815 to
circa 877, an Irish-Scottish philosopher located in France, and continued through a heretical
underground of Christian mystics, in particular such as the 14th century German, Meister Johannes
Eckhart, approximately 1260 to approximately 1327.
The pantheistic outlook of the mystics was similar to the call of the Buddhist theosophist
socialist Mrs. Annie Besant.
As Chesterton perceptively and wittily noted, not to love our neighbor but to be our neighbor.
Most mystics call upon each individual to unite with God, the One, by annihilating his individual
separated and therefore alienated self.
While the means of various mystics may differ from the Joachites or the Brethren of the
Free Spirit, whether through a process of history or through the inevitable Armageddon,
the goal remains the same.
Obliteration of the individual through reunion with God, the One, and the ending of cosmic
alienation, at least on the level of each individual.
Particularly influential for GWF, Hegel and other thinkers in this tradition, was the
early 17th century German cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme, 1575-1624, who added to this
This heady pantheistic brew, the alleged mechanism, the force that drives this dialectic through
its inevitable course in history.
How, Burma asked, did the world of pre-creation transcend itself into creation?
Before creation, he answered, there was a primal source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated,
and Distinct Literal Nothing, un Grundt.
It was, by the way, typical of Hegel and his idealist followers to think that they add
grandeur and explanation to a lofty but unintelligible concept by capitalizing it.
Oddly enough, to Burma, this no-thing possessed within itself an inner striving, a nissus,
a drive for self-realization.
It is this drive which creates a transcending and opposing force, the will, which creates
the universe, transforming the nothing into something.
2.
Hegel and the Man-God The key step in secularizing dialectic theology
and thus in paving the way for Marxism was taken by the lion of German philosophy, Georg
Friedrich Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831 Born in Stuttgart, Hegel studied theology
at the University of Tübingen, and then taught theology and philosophy at the universities
of Jena and Heidelberg, before becoming the leading philosopher at the new jewel in the
Prussian academic crown, the University of Berlin.
Coming to Berlin in 1817, Hegel remained there until his death, ending his days as
rector of the university.
In the spirit of the Romantic movement in Germany, Hegel pursued the goal of unifying
man and God by virtually identifying God as man, and thereby submerging the former into
the latter.
Goethe had recently popularized the Faust theme, centering on Faust's intense desire for divine or absolute knowledge, as well as divine power.
In orthodox Christianity, of course, the overweening pride of man in trying to achieve god-like knowledge and power is precisely the root cause of sin and man's fall.
But on the contrary, Hegel, a most heretical Lutheran indeed, had the temerity to generalize the Faustian urge into a world philosophy and into an alleged insight into the inevitable workings of the historical process.
In Professor Tucker's words, Hegelianism was a philosophic religion of self in the form of a theory of history.
The religion is founded on an identification of the self with God.
It should not be necessary to add at this point that the self here is not the individual,
but the collective organic species self.
In a youthful essay on the positivity of the Christian religion, written at the age of
of 25, Hegel revealingly objects to Christianity for separating man and God except in one isolated
individual, Jesus, and placing God in another and higher world, to which man's activity
could contribute nothing.
Four years later, in 1799, Hegel resolved this problem by offering his own religion,
in his The Spirit of Christianity.
In contrast to Orthodox Christianity in which God became man in Jesus, for Hegel, Jesus'
achievement was, as a man, to become God.
Tucker sums this up neatly.
To Hegel, Jesus is not God become man, but man become God.
This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed.
There is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine.
They are not two separate things with an impassable gulf between them.
The absolute self in man, the homo-numenon, is not mere godlike.
It is God.
Consequently, insofar as man strives to become like God, he is simply striving to be his
The Theory of Money and Credit
History, then, for Hegel is a process by which the man-god increases his knowledge until he finally reaches the state of absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is god.
In that case, man-god finally realizes his potential of an infinite being without bounds, possessed of absolute knowledge.
Why, then, did man-god, also termed by Hegel the world-self, Weltgeist, or world-spirit,
create the universe?
Not as in the Christian account from overflowing love and benevolence, but out of a felt need
to become conscious of itself as a world-self.
This process of growing consciousness is achieved through creative activity, by which the world-self
externalized itself.
This externalization occurs first by creating nature or the original world, but second,
and here of course is a significant addition to other theologies, there is a continuing
self-externalization through human history.
The most important is this second process, for by this means man, the collective organism,
Span's his building of civilization, his creative externalizing, and hence his increasing knowledge
of his own divinity, and therefore of the world as his own self-actualization.
This latter process of knowing ever more fully that the world is really man's self, is the
process which Hegel terms the gradual putting to an end of man's self-alienation, which
which of course for him was also the alienation of man from God.
To Hegel, in short, man perceives the world as hostile because it is not himself, because
it is alien.
All these conflicts are resolved when he realizes at long last that the world really is himself.
This process of realization is Hegel's Aufhebung, by which the world becomes de-alienated and
and Assimilated to Man's Self.
But why, one might ask, is Hegel's man so odd, so neurotic, that he regards everything
that is not himself as alien and hostile?
The answer is crucial to the Hegelian mystique.
It is because Hegel
and Without Limits.
Seeing any other being or any other object exist would mean that he himself is not infinite
or divine.
In short, Hegel's philosophy is severe and cosmic solipsistic megalomania on a grand
and massive scale.
Professor Tucker develops the case with characteristic acuity.
For Hegel, alienation is finitude, and finitude, in turn, is bondage.
The experience of self-estrangement in the presence of an apparent, objective world is
an experience of enslavement.
Spirit, or the world-self, when confronted with an object or other, is ipso facto aware
of itself as merely finite being, as embracing only so much and no more of reality, as in
is extending only so far and no farther.
The object is, therefore, a limit, grenze.
And a limit, since it contradicts spirit's notion of itself as absolute being, that is,
being without limit, is necessarily apprehended as a barrier, or fetter, schranke.
It is a barrier to spirit's awareness of itself as that which it conceives itself truly to
be the whole of reality.
In its confrontation with an apparent object, spirit feels imprisoned in limitation.
It experiences what Hegel calls the sorrow of finitude.
The transcendence of the object through knowing is spirit's way of rebelling against finitude
and making the break for freedom.
In Hegel's quite unique conception of it, freedom means the consciousness of self as
unbounded. It is the absence of a limiting object or non-self. This consciousness of
being alone with self is precisely what Hegel means by the consciousness of freedom. Accordingly,
the growth of spirit self-knowledge in history is alternatively describable as a progress
of the consciousness of freedom.
3. Hegel and Politics
Typically, determinist schema leave convenient implicit escape hatches for their creators
and advocates who are somehow able to rise above the iron determinism that afflicts the
rest of us.
Hegel was no different, except that his escape hatches were all too explicit.
While God and the Absolute refer to man as collective organism rather than to its puny
Money and Negligible Individual Members.
Every once in a while, great individuals arise, world-historical men, who are able to embody
attributes of the Absolute more than others, and act as significant agents in the next
big historical aufhebung, the next great thrust into the man-god or world-souls advance in
its self-knowledge.
College.
Thus, during a time when most patriotic Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's
imperial conquests and mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel reacted very differently.
Hegel wrote to a friend in ecstasy about having personally seen Napoleon riding down the city
street.
The Emperor, this world's soul riding on horseback through the city to the review of
of His Troops, it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such a man.
Hegel was enthusiastic about Napoleon because of his world historical function of bringing
the strong state to Germany and the rest of Europe.
Just as Hegel's fundamental eschatology and dialectic prefigured Marxism, so did his more
directly political philosophy of history.
Thus, following the romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, in an essay in 1795, claimed
that the equivalent of early or primitive communism was ancient Greece.
Schiller and Hegel lauded Greece for the alleged homogeneity, unity and harmony of its polis,
which both authors gravely misconceived as being free of all division of labor.
The consequent Aufhebung disrupted this wonderful unity and fragmented man.
But the good side of the new historical stage, it did lead to the growth of commerce, living
standards and individualism.
For Hegel, moreover, the coming stage, heralded by Hegel's philosophy, would bring about a
reintegration of man and the state.
Before 1796, Hegel, like many other young intellectuals throughout Europe, was enchanted
by the French Revolution, individualism, radical democracy, liberty and the rights of man.
Soon, however, again, like many European intellectuals, Hegel, disillusioned in the French Revolution,
turned toward reactionary state absolutism.
In particular, Hegel was greatly influenced by the Scottish statist Sir James Stewart,
a Jacobite exile in Germany for a large part of his life, whose Inquiry into the Principles
of Political Economy, 1767, had been greatly influenced by the ultra-statist German 18th
century mercantilists, the Cameralists.
Hegel read the German translation of Stuart's Principles, which had been published from
1769 to 1772, from 1797 to 1799, and took extensive notes.
Hegel was influenced in particular by two aspects of Stuart's outlook.
One held that history proceeded in stages, deterministically evolving from one stage
of Change, nomadic, agricultural, exchange, etc. to the next.
The other influential theme was that massive state intervention and control were necessary
to maintain an exchange economy.
It comes as no surprise that Hegel's main disillusion in the French Revolution came
from its individualism and lack of unity under the state.
Again, foreshadowing Marx, it became particularly important for man, the collective organism, to surmount unconscious blind fate, and consciously to take control of his fate via the state.
And so, Hegel was a great admirer not only of Napoleon the mighty world conqueror, but also Napoleon the detailed regulator of the French economy.
Hegel made quite evident that what the new developing strong state really needed was a comprehensive philosophy contributed by a great philosopher to give its mighty rule coherence and legitimacy.
Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension, would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interest.
We need make only one guess as to what that philosophy or who that great philosopher was supposed to be.
And then, armed with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel himself as its fountainhead and great leader,
this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear
and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness
By regulating and codifying many aspects of social practice, it gives to the modern world a rationality and a predictability which it would not otherwise possess.
Armed with such a philosophy and with such a philosopher, the modern state would take its divinely appointed stand at the height of history and civilization as God on earth.
Thus, the modern state, proving the reality of political community when comprehended philosophically,
could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of spirit, or God, in the contemporary world.
The state, then, is a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world.
And the state stands above all.
It is spirit, which knows itself as the universal essence and reality.
And the state is the reality of the kingdom of heaven.
And finally, the state is God's will.
Of the various forms of state, monarchy is best, since it permits all subjects to be
free in the Hegelian sense by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is
is the authoritarian, monarchical state.
The people are only free when they are insignificant particles of this unitary divine substance.
As Tucker writes, Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the
word.
The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or, in Hegel's own words,
must elevate itself to a self-comprehending totality in order to achieve the consciousness
of freedom.
Anything short of this spells alienation and the sorrow of finitude.
According to Hegel, the final development of the man-god, the final breakthrough into
totality and infinity, was at hand.
The most highly developed state in the history of the world was now in place.
The Existing Prussian Monarchy Under King Friedrich Wilhelm III
It so happened that Hegel's apotheosis of the existing Prussian monarchy neatly coincided
with the needs of that monarch.
When King Friedrich Wilhelm III established the new University of Berlin in 1818 to assist
in supporting and propagandizing for his absolute power, what better person for the chair of
The King and his absolutist party needed an official philosopher to defend the state from the hated revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution, and to justify his purge of the reformers and classical liberals who had helped him defeat Napoleon.
As Carl Popper puts it, Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving
the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, especially Heraclitus and Plato.
Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom
and reason.
Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism.
Hegel is the missing link, as it were, between Plato and the modern forms of totalitarianism.
Most of the modern totalitarians know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have
been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism.
They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation.
On Hegel's worship of the state, Popper cites chilling and revealing passages.
The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.
We must therefore worship the state as the manifestation of the divine on earth.
The state is the march of God through the world.
The state must be comprehended as an organism.
To the complete state belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought.
The state knows what it wills.
The state exists for its own sake.
The State is the actually existing realized moral life.
All this rant is well characterized by Popper as bombastic and hysterical Platonism.
Much of this was inspired by Hegel's friends and immediate philosophical predecessors,
men like the later Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, Schiller, Herder and Schleiermacher.
But it was Hegel's particular task to turn his murky doctrines to the job of weaving
apologetics for the absolute power of the extant Prussian state.
Thus Hegel's admiring disciple F. J. C. Schwegler revealed the following in his History of Philosophy.
The fullness of his, Hegel's, fame and activity, however, properly dates only from his call
to Berlin in 1818.
Here there rose up around him a numerous, widely extended and exceedingly active school.
Here too he acquired, from his connections with the Prussian bureaucracy, political recognition
of his system as the official philosophy.
Not always to the advantage of the inner freedom of his philosophy or of its moral worth.
With Prussia as the central focus, Hegelianism was able to sweep German philosophy during
During the 19th century, dominating in all but the Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria.
As Popper put it, having thus become a tremendous success on the continent, Hegelianism could
hardly fail to obtain support in Britain from those who felt that such a powerful movement
must after all have something to offer.
Indeed, the man who first introduced Hegel to English readers, Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling,
Hayek has admiringly remarked the year after Prussia's lightning victory over Austria.
Is it not indeed to Hegel, and especially his philosophy of ethics and politics, that
Prussia owes that mighty life and organization she is now rapidly developing?
Finally, Hegel's contemporary and acquaintance, Arthur Schopenhauer, denounced the State Philosophy
Philosophy Alliance that drove Hegelianism into becoming a powerful force in social thought.
Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a tool, from the other side as a
means of gain.
Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light just as a byproduct?
Governments made of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars made of
with it, a trade.
In addition to the political influence, Popper offers a complementary explanation for the
otherwise puzzling widespread influence of GWF Hegel, the attraction of philosophers
to high-sounding jargon and gibberish almost for its own sake, followed by the gullibility
of a credulous public.
Thus Popper cites a statement by the English Hegelian, Sterling.
The philosophy of Hegel, then, was a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was, for the
most part, unintelligible.
Profound for its very unintelligibility, lack of clarity as virtue and proof of profundity.
Popper adds, Philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of
the atmosphere of the magician.
Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those things with
which religion deals, but not in a way which can be revealed unto babes or to common people.
It is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and the theology of
the intellectuals, of the learned and wise.
Hegelianism fits these views admirably.
It is exactly what this popular superstition supposes philosophy to be.
4.
Hegel and the Romantic Age
GWF Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought.
He was only one, if the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic, of what
must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age, the celebrated Age of Romanticism.
In different variants and in different ways, the Romantic writers of the first half of
the 19th century, especially in Germany and Great Britain, poets and novelists as well
as philosophers, were dominated by a similar creatology and eschatology.
It might be termed the alienation and return, or reabsorption myth.
God created the universe out of imperfection and felt need, thereby tragically cutting
man, the organic species, off from his, its, pre-creation unity with God, while this transcendence,
This Aufhebung of creation has permitted God and Man, or God-Man, to develop their, its
faculties and to progress.
Tragic alienation will continue until that day, inevitable and determined, in which God
and Man will be fused into one cosmic blob, or rather, being pantheists, as was Hegel,
Until man discovers that he is man-god, and the alienation of man from man, man from nature,
and man from god will be ended, as all is fused into one big blob, the discovery of
the reality of, and therefore the merger into, cosmic oneness.
History, which has been predetermined towards this goal, will then come to an end.
In the Romantic metaphor, man, the generic organism of course, not the individual, will
at last return home.
History is therefore an upward spiral towards man's determined destination, a return home,
but on a far higher level than the original unity or home with God in the pre-creation
epoch.
The domination of the Romantic writers by this paradigm has been expounded brilliantly
by the leading literary critic of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams, who points to this leading strain
in English literature stretching from Wordsworth to D. H. Lawrence.
Wordsworth, Abrams emphasizes, dedicated virtually his entire output to a heroic or high-Romantic
argument, to an attempt to counter and transcend Milton's epical poem of an orthodox Christian
view of man and God, to counter Milton's Christian view of heaven and hell as alternatives for
individual souls, and of Jesus' second advent as putting an end to history and returning
man to paradise, Wordsworth, in his own argument, counterpoises his pantheist vision of the
the upward spiral of history into cosmic unification and man's consequent return home from alienation.
The eventual eschaton, the kingdom of God, is taken from its Christian placement in heaven
and brought down to earth, thereby, as always, when the eschaton is immanentized, creating
spectacularly grave ideological, social and political problems.
Or, to use a concept of Abrams, the Romantic vision constituted the secularization of theology.
Greek and Roman epics, Wordsworth asserted, sang of arms and the man, hitherto the only
argument heroic deemed.
In contrast, at the beginning of his great Paradise Lost, Milton declares, That to the
height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence and justify the ways of
of God to Man.
Wordsworth now proclaimed that his own argument surpassing Milton's was instilled in him
by God's holy powers and faculties, enabling him, presaging Marx's yearnings, to create
his own world, even though he realized in an unwanted flash of realism that some called
it madness.
For there passed within him genius, power, creation and divinity itself.
Roth concluded that this is, in truth, heroic argument, an argument not less but more heroic
than the wrath of Stern Achilles.
Other Englishmen steeped in the Wordsworthian paradigm were his worshipful follower Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats and even Blake, who, however, tried to blend Christianity and pantheism.
All these writers had been steeped in Christian doctrine, from which they could spin off on
from their own heretical pantheistic version of millennialism.
Wordsworth himself had been trained to become an Anglican priest.
Coleridge was a philosopher and a lay preacher who had been on the edge of becoming a Unitarian
minister and was steeped in neo-Platonism and the works of Jacob Burma.
Keats was an explicit disciple of the Wordsworthian program, which he called a means toward secular
Salvation, and Shelley, though an explicit atheist, idolized the sacred Milton above
all other poets and was constantly steeped in study of the Bible.
It should also be noted that Wordsworth, like Hegel, was a youthful enthusiast for the French
Revolution and its liberal ideals, and later, disillusioned, turned to conservative statism
and the pantheist version of inevitable redemption through history.
The German Romantics were even more immersed in religion and mysticism than were their
English counterparts.
Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Hölderen, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte were all theology students, most of them with Hegel at the University
of Tübingen.
All of them tried explicitly to apply religious doctrine to their philosophy.
Novalis was immersed in the Bible.
Furthermore, Hegel devoted a great deal of favorable attention to Boehm in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and Schelling called Boehm a miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind.
Moreover, it was Friedrich Schiller, Hegel's mentor, who was influenced by the Scot Adam Ferguson to denounce specialization and the division of labor as alienating and fragmenting man.
and it was Schiller who influenced Hegel in the 1790s by coining the explicit concept
of Aufhebung and the dialectic.
In England, several decades later, the tempestuous conservative statist writer Thomas Carlyle
paid tribute to Friedrich Schiller by writing a biography of that romantic writer in 1825.
From then on, Carlyle's writings were permeated with the Hegelian vision.
Diversity is good, and diversity or separateness is evil and diseased.
Science as well as individualism is division and dismemberment.
Selfhood, Carlyle ranted, is alienation from nature, from others, and from oneself.
But one day there will come the breakthrough, the spiritual rebirth, led by world historical
Figures, Great Men, by which man will return home to a friendly world by means of the utter
cancellation, the annihilation of self, zelbst tutung.
Finally, in Past and Present, 1843, Carlyle applied his profoundly anti-individualist and,
one might add, anti-human vision to economic affairs.
He denounced egoism, material greed and laissez-faire, which by fostering the severance of men from
each other had led to a world which has become a lifeless other, and in severance also from
other human beings within a social order in which cash payment is the sole nexus of man
with man.
In opposition to this metaphysically evil cash nexus lay the familial relation with
with Nature and Fellow Men, the Relation of Love.
The stage was set for Karl Marx.
5.
Marx and Left Revolutionary Hegelianism
Hegel's death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history
of Hegelianism.
Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead and history
continued to march on.
So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state
of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either.
But if it was not the final phase of history, then mightn't the dialectic of history be
getting ready for yet another twist?
Another Aufhebung?
So reasoned groups of radical youth, who, during the late 1830s and 1840s in Germany
and elsewhere, formed the movement of young or left Hegelians.
Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming
apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state, a revolution that would really
bring about the end of history in the form of national or world communism.
One of the first and most influential of the left Hegelians was a Pole, Count August Czeskowski,
1814-1894, who wrote in German and published in 1838 his Prolegomena to a Historiosophy.
Czeskowski brought to Hegelianism a new dialectic of history, a new variant of the three ages of man.
The first age, the age of antiquity, was, for some reason, the age of emotion, the epoch
of pure feeling, of no reflective thought, of elemental immediacy and unity with nature.
The spirit was, in itself, on sich.
The second age of mankind, the Christian era, stretching from the birth of Jesus to the
death of the great Hegel, was the age of thought, of reflection, in which the spirit moved toward
itself, in the direction of abstraction and universality.
But Christianity, the age of thought, was also an era of intolerable duality, of man
Men separated from God, of spirit separated from matter, and thought from action.
Finally, the third and culminating age, the coming age, heralded by Count Cheskovsky,
was to be the age of action.
In short, the third post-Hegelian age would be an age of practical action, in which the
thought of both Christianity and of Hegel would be transcended and embodied into an
and Act of Will, a final revolution to overthrow and transcend existing institutions.
For the term practical action, Cheskowski borrowed the Greek word praxis to summarize
the new age, a term that would soon come to acquire virtually talismanic influence in Marxism.
This final age of action would bring about, at long last, a blessed unity of thought and
and Action, Theory and Praxis, Spirit and Matter, God and Earth, and Total Freedom.
Along with Hegel and the mystics, Cheskowsky stressed that all past events, even those
seemingly evil, were necessary to the ultimate and culminating salvation.
In a work published in French in Paris in 1844, Cheskowsky also heralded the new class
destined to become the leaders of the revolutionary society, the intelligentsia, a word that had
recently been coined by a German-educated poll B.F. Trentowski, who had published his
work in Prussian-occupied Poznan.
Cheskowski thus heralded and glorified a development that would at least be implicit in the Marxist
movement.
After all, the great Marxists including Marx, Engels and Lenin were all bourgeois intellectuals
rather than children of the proletariat.
If not in theory, this dominance of Marxist movements and governments by a new class of
intelligentsia has certainly been the history of Marxism in praxis.
This dominance by a new class has been noted and attacked from the beginnings of Marxism
until the present day, notably by the anarcho-communist Bakunin and by the Polish revolutionary Jan
Wachlaw Maciejski, 1866-1926, during and after the 1890s.
It was also a similar insight into the German Social Democratic Party that prompted Robert
Michels to abandon Marxism and develop his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy that all organizations,
Whether private, governmental or Marxist parties will inevitably end up being dominated by a power elite.
Tchaikovsky, however, was not destined to ride the wave of the future of revolutionary socialism,
for he took the Christian messianic rather than atheistic path to the new society.
In his massive, unfinished work of 1848, Our Father, Tchaikovsky maintained that the new age of revolutionary communism
Communism would be a third age, an age of the Holy Spirit, shades of Joachism, an era
that would bring a kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Thus the final kingdom of God on earth would reintegrate all of organic humanity and would
erase all national identities, with the world governed by a central government of all mankind
headed by a universal council of the people.
But at the time, the path of Christian messianism was not clearly destined to be a loser in
the intra-socialist debate.
Thus, Alexander Ivanovich Hertzin, 1812-1870, a founder of the Russian revolutionary tradition,
was entranced by Cheskovsky's brand of left Hegelianism, writing that the future society
is to be the work not of the heart, but of the concrete.
Hegel is the new Christ, bringing the word of truth to men.
And soon, Bruno Bauer, friend and mentor of Karl Marx and the leader of the Doktor Club
of Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, hailed the new philosophy of action in late
1841 as the Trumpet Call of the Last Judgment.
But the winning strand in the European socialist movement, as we have indicated, was eventually
to be Karl Marx's atheism.
If Hegel had pantheized and elaborated the dialectic of Christian messianics, Marx now
stood Hegel on his head by atheizing the dialectic and resting it not on mysticism or religion
or spirit or the absolute idea or the world mind, but on the supposedly solid and scientific
foundation of philosophical materialism.
Marx adopted his materialism from the left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly his
work on The Essence of Christianity, 1843.
In contrast to the Hegelian emphasis on spirit, Marx would study the allegedly scientific
laws of matter in some way operating through history.
Marx, in short, took the dialectic and made it what we can call a materialist dialectic
of History.
A lot of unnecessary pother has been made about terminology here.
Many Marxist apologists have fiercely maintained that Marx himself never used the term dialectical
materialism, as if mere non-use of the terms lets Marx off the hook, and also that the
concept only appeared in such later works of Engels as the Antiduring.
But the Antiduring, published before Marx's death, was, like all other such writings of
Engels, cleared with Marx first, and so we have to assume that Marx approved.
The fuss stems from the fact that the term dialectical materialism was widely stressed
by the Marxist-Leninist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, these days generally discredited.
The concept was applied by Engels, who, of the two founders, was particularly interested
in the natural sciences, to biology.
Applied to biology, as Engels did in the Antiduring, dialectical materialism has an
unmistakably crazy air.
In an ultra-hegelian manner, logic and logical contradictions, or negations, are hopelessly
confused with the processes of reality.
Thus, butterflies come into existence from the egg through negation or transcendence
of the egg.
They are negated again as they die.
And the barley corn is negated and is supplanted by the barley plant, the negation of the corn.
The plant grows, is fructified and produces again barley corns.
And as soon as these are ripe, the ear withers away, is negated.
As a result of this negation of the negation, we have gained the original barley corn, in
a quantity 10, 20 or 30 times larger.
Furthermore, Marx himself, and not only Engels, was also very interested in Darwin and in
biological science.
Marx wrote to Engels that Darwin's work serves me as a basis in natural science for the class
Struggle in History, and that this is the book which contains the basis in natural history
for our view.
By recasting the dialectic in materialist and atheist terms, however, Marx gave up the
powerful motor of the dialectic as it operated throughout history, either Christian messianism
or providence or the growing self-consciousness of the world spirit.
How could Marx find a scientific materialist replacement newly grounded in the ineluctable
laws of history that would explain the inevitability of the imminent apocalyptic transformation
of the world into communism?
It is one thing to base the prediction of a forthcoming Armageddon upon the Bible.
It is quite another to deduce this event from allegedly scientific laws.
Setting forth the specifics of this engine of history was to occupy Karl Marx for the
rest of his life.
Although Marx found Feuerbach indispensable for adopting a thorough-going atheist and
materialist position, Marx soon found that Feuerbach had not gone nearly far enough.
Even though Feuerbach was a philosophical communist, he basically believed that if man
If man foreswore religion, then his alienation from his self would be over.
To Marx, religion was only one of the problems.
The entire world of man, the Menschenwelt, was alienating and had to be radically overthrown
root and branch.
Only apocalyptic destruction of this world of man would permit true human nature to be
realized.
Only then would the existing un-man truly become man, mensch.
As Marx thundered in the fourth of his theses on Feuerbach, one must proceed to destroy
the earthly family as it is, both in theory and in practice.
In particular, declared Marx, true man, as Feuerbach had argued, is a communal being,
Gemeinwesen or Species Being, Gattungswesen, Although the state as it exists must be negated
or transcended, man's participation in the state operates as such a communal being.
The main problem comes in the private sphere, the market or civil society, in which unman
acts as an egoist, as a private person, treating others as means and not collectively as masters
and in existing society, unfortunately, civil society is primary, while the state or political
community is secondary.
What must be done to realize the full nature of mankind is to transcend the state and civil
society by politicizing all of life, by making all of man's actions collective.
Then real individual man will become a true and full species being.
But only a revolution, an orgy of destruction, can accomplish this task.
And here Marx harkened back to the call for total destruction that had animated his vision
of the world in poems of his youth.
Indeed, in a speech in London in 1856, Marx was to give graphic and loving expression
to this goal of his praxis.
He mentioned that in Germany in the Middle Ages there existed a secret tribunal called
the Femgericht.
He then explained, if a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner
was doomed by the fame.
All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross.
Murray is the judge, its executioner, the proletarian.
Marx in fact was not satisfied with the philosophical communism to which he and Engels had separately
been converted by the slightly older left-Hegelian Moses Hess, 1812-1875, in the early 1840s.
To Hess's communism, Marx, by the end of 1843, added the crucial emphasis on the proletariat
— not simply as an economic class, but as destined to become the universal class when
communism was achieved.
As we have indicated above, Marx actually acquired his vision of the proletariat as
the key to the communist revolution from the 1842 work of Lawrence von Stein, an enemy
of socialism, who interpreted the socialist and communist movements as rationalizations
Marx discovered in Stein's attack the scientific engine for the inevitable coming of the communist revolution.
The proletariat, the most alienated and allegedly propertyless class, would be the key.
Marx had now worked out the outline of his secular messianic vision,
Vision, a material dialectic of history with the final apocalyptic revolution to be achieved
by the proletariat.
But how specifically was this to be accomplished?
Vision was not enough.
What scientific laws of history could bring about this cherished goal?
Fortunately, Marx had a crucial ingredient for his attempted solution close at hand,
and the Sansemonian concept of human history as driven by an inherent struggle among economic classes.
The class struggle, along with historical materialism, was to be an essential ingredient for the Marxian material dialectic.
6. Marx as Utopian
Despite Marx's claim to be a scientific socialist, scorning all other socialists whom he dismissed as moralistic and utopian,
it should be clear that Marx himself was even more in the messianic utopian tradition than were the competing utopians.
For Marx not only sought a future society that would put an end to history,
He claimed to have found the path towards that utopia inevitably determined by the laws of history.
But a utopian, and a fierce one, Marx certainly was.
A hallmark of every utopia is a militant desire to put an end to history,
to freeze mankind in a static state, to put an end to diversity and man's free will,
and to order everyone's life in accordance with the utopian's totalitarian plan.
Many early communists and socialists set forth their fixed utopias in great and absurd detail,
determining the size of everyone's living quarters, the food they would eat, etc.
Marx was not silly enough to do that, but his entire system, as Thomas Molnar points out,
Marx's quest for utopia was, as we have seen, an explicit attack on God's creation and a ferocious desire to destroy it.
The idea of crushing the many, the diverse facets of creation, and of returning to an allegedly lost unity with God, began, as we have seen, with Plotinus.
As Molnar sums up,
be preferable to creation.
Short of this solution, they propose to arrange a world in which change is brought under control
so as to put an end to a disturbingly free will and to society's uncharted moves.
They aspire to return from the linear Hebrew-Christian concept to the Greco-Hindu cycle, that is,
to a changeless, timeless permanence.
The triumph of unity over diversity means that for the utopians, including Marx, civil
society with its disturbing diversity can be abolished.
Molnar then makes the interesting point that where Hayek and Popper rebut Marxism by demonstrating
that no mind, not even that of a politburo equipped with supercomputers, can overview
Marx agrees with them, but he wants to abolish the marketplace and its economic as well as intellectual, legal, political, philosophical, religious, aesthetic, components, so as to restore a simple world, a monochrome landscape.
All well and good, but as the history of communist countries has shown, there are not many followers
of Marx who are willing to settle for a world where no economic calculation is possible,
and therefore where production collapses and universal starvation ensues.
Substituting in Marx for God's Will or the Hegelian dialectic of the world's spirit
or the absolute idea is monist materialism in its central assumption, as Molnar puts
it, that the universe consists of matter plus some sort of one-dimensional law immanent
in matter.
In that case, man himself is reduced to a complex but manipulable material aggregate,
living in the company of other aggregates and forming increasingly complex super-aggregates
called societies, political bodies, churches.
The alleged laws of history, then, are derived by scientific Marxists as supposedly evident
and imminent within the matter itself.
The Marxian process towards utopia, then, is man acquiring insights into his own true
But this process is rife with self-contradictions. For example, and centrally, how can mere matter gain insights into its nature?
As Molnar puts it, for how can matter gather insights? And if it has insights, it is not entirely matter, but matter plus.
In this allegedly inevitable process of arriving at the proletarian communist utopia after the proletarian class becomes conscious of its true nature, what is supposed to be Karl Marx's own role?
In Hegelian theory, Hegel himself is the final and greatest world historical figure, the man-god of man-gods.
Similarly, Marx, in his view, stands at a focal point of history as the man who brought
to the world the crucial knowledge of man's true nature and of the laws of history, thereby
serving as the midwife of the process that would put an end to history.
Thus Molnar.
Like other utopian and gnostic writers, Marx is much less interested in the stages of history
up to the present, the egotistic now of all utopian writers, than in the final stages
when the stuff of time becomes more concentrated, when the drama approaches its dénouement.
In fact, the utopian writer conceives of history as a process leading to himself, since he,
the ultimate comprehensor, stands in the center of history.
It is natural that things accelerate during his own lifetime and come to a watershed.
He looms large between the before and the after.
The achievement of the Marxist utopia is, moreover, dependent upon leadership and rule
by the Marxian cadre, the possessors of the special knowledge of the laws of history,
Who Will Proceed to Transform Mankind into the New Socialist Man by the Use of Force
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the existence of evil is accounted for by the free will
of the individual.
In monist, determinist systems, on the other hand, all history is supposed to be determined
by fixed laws, and therefore evil can only be apparent, while really acting in a deeper
All apparent evil must be truly good, and serves some sort of determined plan, whether
it be the unfolding of the God-Man or an atheistic version thereof.
Coercing people by a cadre in order to create a new socialist man cannot be evil or unacceptable
in a just society.
On the contrary, it is the duty of the Marxist vanguard, they who are the servants of the
next inevitable stage of history, to impose such a regime.
This is a duty to history, that alleged entity to which the cadre are in service, and who,
which, is destined to judge the actions of the past, to judge them as moral or immoral,
is either advancing the birth of the allegedly inevitable historical future or of thwarting
such birth.
In short, history or the cadre has the privilege and duty of judging any person or movement
as being either progressive, that is, advancing the determined march of history, or reactionary,
retarding that inevitable march.