12 May 2015
Introduction.
Our subject is the Absolute, or God, our contention, that God reveals Godself (at least in part) through communism of the sort that Marx envisioned, that this follows from a proper understanding of the relation of Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s, a relation which has been in my view misunderstood, oversimplified to the point of caricature. This owes in some part to Marx’s own misreading of Hegel and, in consequence of this, his own misunderstanding of the relation of his philosophy to Hegel’s. But the nature of this misreading is complex, and, as we will see in the course of this argument, it puts Marx’s philosophy into a somewhat ambiguous relation with regard to Hegel’s. On the one hand, it enabled Marx, following Feuerbach, to elaborate the anthropological implications which were implied in but never thoroughly elaborated in Hegel’s absolute idealism, i.e., his identification of the divine and human nature. On the other hand, Marx’s misreading of Hegel prevented him from recognizing his own materialist philosophy as an expression of the Absolute, conceiving his philosophy instead rather falsely in opposition to Hegel’s. Marx’s misreading of Hegel, then, at once enables Marx to move beyond Hegel, but in so doing, prevents him from recognizing it for what it is, i.e., an expression of the Absolute. If Marx’s materialism fails to recognize itself as an expression of the Absolute on account of Marx’s misreading of Hegel and a misinterpretation of his relation to Hegel, this paper seeks to reconstruct this relation on its proper basis, i.e., on a careful reading of Hegel, and explicates the implications which follow from such a reconstruction. What we find is that when Hegel is read on his own terms, his absolute idealism, being an expression of the fundamental identity of the divine and human nature, is seen to be largely compatible with Marx’s materialist philosophy, and the principal instances in which Marx departs from Hegel, largely in Marx’s criticism of the bourgeois state, can be seen as a corrective to Hegel’s bourgeois prejudices, from which it follows that the Absolute, or God, does not realize Godself through the free conscious activity of human beings within the framework of the bourgeois state, but only within the framework of communism of the sort that Marx envisioned.
The chief effect of Hegel’s philosophy was to have closed the chasm between the divine and the human. His philosophy began with a criticism of Kantian idealism which was implicitly predicated on a Cartesian metaphysical dualism of subject and object. As we will see, the post-Kantians like Hegel believed that this metaphysical dualism prevented the possibility of knowledge since it posited such a sharp distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal spheres that it prevented any intelligible explanation of their interaction, and consequently believed that the Absolute, i.e., an identity of subject and object, noumenal and phenomenal, divine and human, had to be posited as necessary condition for the possibility of knowledge. Hegel therefore dispensed with Kant’s noumenon, which was a necessary presupposition on the basis of a metaphysical dualism, but not on the basis of their own absolute idealism. Hegel’s transcendental deduction of the Absolute (subject-object identity) had immense theological implications, since for him, the Absolute was a synonym for God, which therefore implied that the divine and human nature are one. With his transcendental deduction of the Absolute, Hegel therefore close the chasm between God and human beings. For Hegel, God manifests Godself in the life of human beings, whose knowledge is nothing other than the self-consciousness of the Absolute, which is more or less aware of itself as the Absolute.
Kantian idealism represented a formative moment in the development of the secularization of philosophy. Metaphorically speaking, Kantian idealism, with its Copernican turn toward the subject, away from dogmatic metaphysics toward subjective epistemology, took a step down from the mist-enveloped regions of dogmatic metaphysics toward earth. But because of its metaphysical dualism, Kantian idealism retained a residue of heaven in the form of the noumenon, which held heaven and earth, the divine and the human apart. Hegel took another step past Kant toward the earth by dispensing with the noumenon, collapsing the divine into the human, and expounding a fully immanent metaphysics. Hegel’s philosophy, then, represents a further moment in the secularization of philosophy which has characterized its general development. But Hegel did not stop there. Unlike Feuerbach (whose work we take up in the Appendix), Hegel did not only resolve the divine into the human in the form of consciousness, i.e., abstraction, but took a further step and resolved consciousness into practical human activity. For Hegel, Spirit only realizes itself through mutual interaction, which are objectified in historically-conditioned patterns of human interaction, i.e., in practical human activity.
Up to this point, Marx’s philosophy is — setting aside his misreading of Hegel — broadly consistent with Hegel’s absolute idealism. But it is here where they diverge, where Marx goes beyond Hegel by inverting his conception of agency. Although both Hegel and Marx resolve consciousness into objective, i.e., concrete, historical human practice, they had vastly different, nearly opposite, conceptions of the means by which and the agency through which this was effected. For Hegel, Spirit was realized in the concrete historical forms of Objective Spirit through the practical agency of free human subjects. For Marx, this couldn’t be the case, because for him, human beings do not possess such free agency, and the laws of production present themselves to the human subject as coercive, external forces. The differences between Hegel and Marx resolve themselves more or less into one difference, viz., Hegel’s bourgeois prejudices. It was not only Hegel the individual, the man, or even Hegel the philosopher who was bourgeois, but rather Hegel’s philosophy as such which was bourgeois through and through, predicated on entirely bourgeois conceptions. And it was on account of Hegel’s bourgeois prejudices that, from Marx’s point of view, he not only misunderstood agency, but also led him to baptize the Prussian state as the finest realization of the Absolute, i.e., God, in history. Where Hegel believed that Spirit, divine and human, realized itself in the constitutional monarchy of the Prussian state because it was in this state that Spirit became free, Marx understood that genuine human freedom could never be realized in the form of the state because the freedom of a legal subject of the state is something altogether different from genuine human freedom, nothing more than a juridical fiction. Marx therefore understood that genuine human emancipation, the realization of human nature through freedom, could not be achieved within the framework of bourgeois constitutionality, but rather through, and only through, communism of the sort he envisioned, which could itself more or less only be achieved by way of revolution.
Marx’s criticism of the bourgeois state can therefore be seen as a correction of Hegel’s error: Spirit (for Hegel), or human nature (for Marx), realizes itself not in the framework of the bourgeois state, as hegel supposed but within the framework of communism. This has vast implications. Because Spirit, or human nature, is simply the self-consciousness of God through human beings, it follows that God realizes Godself not through free conscious human activity within the framework of the bourgeois state, but God realizes Godself through free conscious human activity within the framework of communism of the sort that Marx envisioned. This, then, is the irrefragable logical conclusion Marx’s criticism of Hegelian idealism. But on account of his misreading of Hegel, and his misunderstanding of the Absolute as a kind of quasi-animistic “demiurgos,” Marx falsely conceived his philosophy in direct opposition to Hegel’s absolute idealism, and as a result, did not recognize his own materialism as an expression of the Absolute. This left Marx: (1) ignorant of the metaphysical assumptions of his own materialism, and (2) unable to realize the logical conclusion of his own criticism of Marx, viz., that communism of the sort that he imagined is nothing short of the self-realization of God in history through the free conscious activity of human beings.
Hegel, the Absolute, and Objective Spirit.
It is a testament to the power, range, and influence of Hegel’s philosophy that there is scarcely a major modern philosopher who has not been influenced, positively or negatively, by it. As Dorrien writes, “most of the great philosophical ideas since Hegel — the philosophies of Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Bradley, Troeltsch, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Zizek, plus the schools of existentialism, psychoanalysis, absolute idealism, historicism, phenomenology, process, structuralism, and deconstruction — are rooted in his thought.”[1] Without therefore gaining some basic conception of Hegel’s philosophical project, we cannot appreciate either the magnitude or the specific nature of his influence on Marx, of particular importance in this case on account of its complexity.
I’ve given a more detailed account of Hegel’s basic philosophical project elsewhere, so it will suffice here to summarize it broadly, with emphasis given to the elements which are relevant for our present purposes.[2] Hegel, like most post-Kantian idealists, objected that for all of its merits, Kantian idealism rested on a problematic metaphysical dualism between subject and object that prevented the very possibility of knowledge which Kantian idealism sought to demonstrate. As Beiser explains, “Kantians cannot bridge the between” the subject and the object “because they make so sharp a distinction between the form and the matter of experience that they cannot explain how their interaction occurs.”[3] Kant had perhaps worked out the most compelling epistemological model on the basis of Descartes’s metaphysical dualism of subject and object, but it was this basis itself which the post-Kantians found problematic. On the basis of this Cartesian dualism, the noumenal in-itself was postulated as a necessary presupposition. For the post-Kantians, the noumenon was not only functionally useless, but also prevented the possibility of genuine knowledg,e since it posited such a sharp distinction between the noumenal sphere and the phenomenal that their interaction could not be explained. Aside from the assumption of a Cartesian dualism between subject and object, the noumenon had no compelling basis. On what basis, after all, does one posit a noumenal object which is, by definition, unknowable? As Hegel writes, Kantian idealism “takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition,” but Hegel reasoned that even then, “consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself, and hence, too, cannot test its own knowledge by that standard.”[4] From Hegel’s point of view, then, Kant had not overcome the metaphysical dualism of Cartesian philosophy, but merely “reinstated it in new terms.”[5] Kant proceeds from the fact of Descartes’ metaphysical dualism between subject and object but never explains it. He assumes rather than argues it. Hegel therefore followed Schelling in dispensing with the problematic Ding an Sich altogether. For post-Kantians like Schelling and Hegel, the “only way to ensure the possibility of knowledge” was to reconstruct the principle of subject-object identity.[6] From this point of view, subject-object identity, the standpoint of absolute idealism, was a necessary precondition of knowledge. Therefore, as Beiser tells us, “just as Kant argues in the Transcendental Deduction of the first Critique that the categories are a necessary condition of possible experience, so Hegel contends in the Phenomenology that the ideas of metaphysics,” the principle of subject-object identity in particular, “are a necessary condition of actual experience.”[7] Absolute idealism, or subject-object identity, then, was presupposed in the very possibility of knowledge, even the sort about which Kant theorized.
The chief effect of Hegel’s philosophical project was, metaphorically speaking, to have taken a step down from heaven from Kant.[8] Just as Kant had taken a step downward from heaven past the “dogmatic metaphysicians” he criticized, Hegel took one step beyond him. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy, his turn from the known object to the knowing subject, from metaphysics to epistemology, represented a step in the secularization of philosophy. But from Hegel’s point of view, Kant did not go far enough. He worked out the most compelling epistemological account on the basis of a Cartesian metaphysical dualism of subject and object, but he never questioned it far enough. Though Kant’s criticism had effectively shut the lid on the old, dogmatic metaphysics, bringing philosophy one down from the misty realms of dogmatic metaphysics toward the earth, it retained a residue of heaven in the form of the noumenal in-itself, a necessary concept for an epistemology predicated on Cartesian metaphysics, but problematic for the post-Kantians like Schelling and Hegel who wailed against it and then dispensed with it altogether. Though Kantian idealism took a step closer to the earth from the old, dogmatic metaphysics and represented a formative stage in the secularization of philosophy, then, it did not go far enough. Hegel, following Schelling, took the next, decisive, step, dispensing with Kant’s problematic metaphysical dualism, and the noumenal in-itself with it. In the Phenomenology, he made the case for absolute idealism, the identity of subject and object, of the noumenal and the phenomenal, the divine and the human. The theological implications of Hegel’s absolute idealism were immense, not least because for him, the Absolute was simply another term for God. His transcendental deduction of the Absolute implied, as he writes, that “[t]he divine nature is the same as the human.”[9] For Hegel, human knowledge was simply the self-consciousness of God: “Anything that I think or do is ultimately God thinking and acting through me.”[10] By flattening out Kant’s metaphysical dualism, Hegel closed the chasm between the divine and the human, and transformed Kant’s transcendent God into an immanent God, realized in the thoughts of human beings. It was thus, Hegel observed, that Spirit rose from the standpoint of “Understanding,” which Kantian idealism represented, to the standpoint of “Self-Consciousness,” or “Spirit,” which was for Hegel the distinctive feature of human beings, and therefore also the fundamental between Hegel’s idealism, which was a philosophy of Spirit — manifested in society, history, and the state — and Schelling’s, which was a philosophy of life, i.e., nature. From this point of view, Spirit in the sense in which Hegel uses it is broadly compatible with “species-being” or “human nature” in the sense in which Feuerbach and Marx use these terms.[11]
But for Hegel, things didn’t stop there. “Self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged … it exists only for another.”[12] Just as he sought to demonstrate that self-consciousness (in which subject-object identity is achieved) is the necessary precondition of Understanding (represented by Kantian idealism), so he sought to show that mutual recognition is the necessary precondition of self-consciousness itself. As Hegel meticulously argues in the master-slave dialectic, “self-knowledge as a rational being is possible only through mutual recognition; in other words, the self knows itself as a rational being only if it grants to the other the same status it would have the other grant to itself. This common structure of self-awareness in mutual recognition — that the self knows itself through the other as the other knows itself through the self — Hegel calls ‘spirit.’”[13]Against the narrowness of Kant’s transcendental “I” of apperception, largely adapted from the Cartesian ego, Hegel “socializes” Kantian idealism, replacing Kant’s knowing “I” with the intersubjective “We” as the active agent of knowledge.[14]
For Hegel, the movement toward genuine self-consciousness through a struggle for mutual recognition proceeds on the basis of an inequality between two selves, “where the recognition which self-consciousness demands is all one-sided: one recognizes, the other is recognized.”[15] But as Hegel shows with typical laboriousness through the course of his argument in the master-slave dialectic, the realization of self-consciousness can never be genuinely achieved on the basis of such an unequal relation, but rather requires as it presupposes a relation of genuine equality, i.e., mutual recognition on the basis of freedom. As Beiser summarizes, consciousness “goes through several stages: desire, the life/death struggle, the master/slave conflict; and only in the end with the mutual recognition between equal and independent persons does it learn the conditions for its absolute independence: self-consciousness as spirit” (my emphasis).[16] For Hegel, then, Spirit can only realize itself through a process of mutual recognition. Mutual recognition is a necessary precondition for the possibility of self-consciousness.
If mutual recognition is the precondition of spirit, the condition for its realization, what is the precondition of mutual recognition itself? On what basis can genuine mutual recognition be achieved? Hegel is emphatic on this point. Mutual recognition can only be realized on the basis of a free and equal relationship between independent selves. As we have seen, mutual recognition cannot be realized in the framework of domination represented by the master-slave relationship. Since the “master” requires recognition from the “slave,” and since the “slave” cannot give meaningful recognition to the “master” unless the slave himself is free, mutual recognition cannot be realized on the basis of a relationship of domination, and can in fact only be realized on the basis of a free and equal relationship. As Beiser writes, “If the self and other as to one another as master and slave, then the master still does not get the required recognition of himself as autonomous and independent … The recognition of the slave is therefore of little value, if not worthless, to him. It is not the free recognition of another rational being, but it is only the humbled submission of an animal. Recognition loses all value if it comes from domination or coercion; it is only of value when it derives from the free choice and judgment of another” (my emphasis).[17] Spirit can only be realized, then, through a process of mutual recognition, and mutual recognition can only be realized on the basis of a free and equal relation between independent selves.[18] For Hegel, freedom itself is a necessary condition of knowledge. The necessary conditions of knowledge are now no longer simply epistemological but ethical and metaphysical. Reason and freedom are inextricably bound up with each other, epistemology inextricably bound up with metaphysics and ethics, and, as we will see shortly, with history as well. (Here Hegel manages to bridge the gap between freedom and reason in a more organic way than Kant had, having bifurcated them into the autonomous spheres of pure reason and pure practical reason.)
Without freedom, then, there is no possibility of reason or knowledge. It is on this account that freedom assumes such a central importance and constitutes such an overriding concern for Hegel. Freedom is not just a vague political ideal but the essence of Spirit itself, its whole end and aim and purpose. “All scholars agree,” Beiser writes, that “there is no more important concept in Hegel’s political theory than freedom. There are good reasons for such rare unanimity: Hegel regards freedom as the foundation of right, as the essence of Spirit, and as the end of history.”[19] As Hegel himself writes in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History: “As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom. All will readily assent to the doctrine that Spirit, among other properties, is also endowed with Freedom; but philosophy teaches that all the qualities of Spirit exist only through Freedom; that all are but means for attaining freedom; that all seek and produce this and this alone. It is a result of speculative Philosophy, that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.”[20]
But for Hegel, “freedom realizes itself only in history,” namely through the active agency of human beings in objectified patterns of human interaction.[21] Without the objectification of the Idea of freedom through practical human activity in concrete, objective, historical forms, freedom remains a vague and toothless idea. As Hegel writes: “Aims, principles, etc., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality — viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will — the activity of man in the widest sense. It is only by this activity that that Idea as well as abstract characteristics generally, are realized, actualized; for of themselves they are powerless.”[22] In order for the Idea of freedom to therefore become actual, it must be objectified by practical human activity into concrete, historical form.
Since self-consciousness, which is an element of Spirit, can only be realized in being acknowledged, i.e., through mutual recognition on the basis of freedom, and since these forms of mutual recognition are embodied in distinct cultural forms, which are historically-conditioned, Spirit is realized and only can be realized in history. Therefore, Hegel writes, “Spirit is to be observed in the theater of world history, where it has its most concrete reality.”[23] With this stage of the dialectic, epistemology and metaphysics move into the terrain of history, as Hegel follows philosophy outside of the rather narrow sphere of the individual self into the vastly broader domain of other selves, into sociality and intersubjectivity, into the historically–conditioned forms and patterns of mutual recognition Hegel calls “objective spirit.” As Hegel scholar Paul Redding tells us, “It is thus that Hegel has effected the transition from a phenomenology of ‘subjective mind,’ as it were, to one of ‘objective spirit,’ thought of as culturally distinct patterns of social interaction analysed in terms of the patterns of reciprocal recognition they embody.”[24] The dialectic of Spirit thus enters into the spheres of history and society. The preconditions of knowledge are now no longer only subjective, epistemological, or even metaphysical, but also objective, social and historical. Just as absolute idealism, for instance, was posited (though Hegel’s transcendental deduction of the Absolute) as a necessary condition of possible knowledge, so now mutual recognition on the basis of freedom, an objective, historical condition, is posited as a necessary condition of possible knowledge.
We have seen that Spirit can only be realized through a process of mutual recognition, and that mutual recognition can itself only be realized on the basis of freedom and equality, i.e., that spirit can only be realized through mutual recognition on the basis of freedom. Further, we have seen that because the patterns of mutual recognition are historically-conditioned, Spirit is only realized through its objectification in particular historical forms. Here we might ask what specific historical form serves as an adequate basis for the realization of Spirit in history, i.e., fulfills its precondition, mutual recognition on the basis of freedom. In what historical form is the ideal of mutual recognition on the basis of freedom realized? On this point, Hegel is explicit, and emphatic. Spirit is realized in the state. As Hegel writes, “the State … is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom.” The State, he says, “is the realization of Freedom, i.e., of the absolute final aim, and … it exists for its own sake.” Bold as these claims are, Hegel, in characteristically humble fashion, goes beyond them. Since for Hegel freedom is the substance of Spirit, which is nothing other than God’s self-consciousness through human beings, it follows that “[t]he State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it … the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity. For Law is the objectivity of Spirit; volition in its true form.”[25] For Hegel, then, the state is the form in which Freedom is actualized and Spirit realizes its objective form. And if the state is the ideal historical form in which Spirit is realized, the constitutional monarchy of the bourgeois state is the ideal form of the state. For Hegel, “constitutional monarchy is the rational form of the state because it, more than any other form of government, realizes the ideal of freedom” preserving all the best in all forms of government — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy — while dispensing with their weaknesses.[26] And if constitutional monarchy was the ideal form of the bourgeois state, the Prussian state was the ideal form of constitutional monarchy. Hence Hegel’s somewhat ridiculous claim in the Philosophy of Right regarding the “world-historical superiority” of the Prussian state: “This is the absolute turning point,” he writes. In the Prussian state, “mind rises out of this situation and grasps the infinite positivity of this its inward character, i.e., it grasps the principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity, a reconciliation with the fulfillment of which the principle of the north, the principle of the Germanic people, has been entrusted.”[27] Because Spirit was for Hegel nothing other than the self-consciousness of God through human beings, the realization of Spirit in the form of the bourgeois state, the Prussian state in particular, was nothing short of the self-realization of God in human history, the realization of the “principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human.” Not only does Hegel believe that mutual recognition on the basis of freedom can be realized within the framework of the bourgeois state, but also that the bourgeois state, the Prussian state in particular, is its very perfection, because to his mind, it is the form in which freedom is best realized. His bourgeois prejudices prevent him from recognizing the rather narrow nature of bourgeois political freedom, and thus from realizing that Spirit cannot possibly realize itself within the objective forms of which Hegel writes, i.e., within the framework of bourgeois constitutionality — all points on which Marx, as we will soon see, criticizes Hegel.
For Hegel, Spirit is not realized at the level of human thoughts, i.e., as an abstraction, but only through its objectification in historical forms through practical human activity. God for Hegel reveals Godself through Objective Spirit. Hegel reasoned that self-consciousness requires mutual recognition, which is objectified in patterns of interaction which are historically-conditioned, and further, that mutual recognition can only be realized on the basis of a free and equal relationship, which was, to Hegel’s mind, fully achieved in the constitutional monarchy of the bourgeois state. For Hegel, then, bourgeois constitutionality represented nothing short of God’s self-realization through the practical activity of human beings in history. Hegel’s philosophy therefore represented an even more radical secularization of philosophy: not only was his immanent God realized in the life of human beings, but more specifically, in their practical activities.
We have seen that the chief effect of Hegel’s philosophy was to have taken a further step past Kant from the misty realms of heaven toward earth, closing the chasm that the Kantian noumenon had created between God and human beings, collapsing the distinction between the human and the divine, resolving in each into the other. But Hegel went beyond this. Not only did he resolve the human and divine nature into one, Spirit, realized in human self-consciousness, but also went on to resolve Spirit itself into practical human activity as a necessary precondition for the realization of Spirit. Spirit, then, could only be realized in Objective form, through mutual recognition on the basis of freedom, which for Hegel was realized best in the state in the form of a constitutional monarchy. In effect, then, Hegel not only closes the metaphysical chasm between God and human beings at the level of consciousness, abstraction, contemplation, etc., but also at the level of practical human activity. For Hegel, this meant nothing short of the realization of the divine through the practical activity of human subjects, realized in the bourgeois state.
Marx Beyond Hegel: Critique of the Bourgeois State, Inversion of Agency.
Marx goes beyond Feuerbach in essentially the same way as Hegel, and criticizes Feuerbach on exactly the point on which Hegel got further than he did: while Feuerbach resolved the divine into the human, his conception of human nature remained abstract, theoretical, and ahistorical. As he writes in the first of his famous theses on Feuerbach, “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.” Feuerbach, he says, “does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”[28] As a result, Feuerbach’s philosophy remains a version of what he calls “contemplative materialism.”[29] On the basis of a dualistic misreading of (absolute) idealism similar to Feuerbach’s, Marx thinks Feuerbach was right to have resolved religion into its secular basis, but “Feuerbach overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done,” namely that this secular basis stands to be resolved into its practical basis, a step which Hegel but not Feuerbach, managed to take, as Marx noted. Feuerbach resolves religion into its secular basis, but as an abstraction, a kind of universal anthropological constant, a “dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals.” As Marx writes in the sixth thesis, “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence in the the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”[30]
If after Feuerbach’s criticism of religion, the “chief thing remains to be done,” namely that the secular basis into which Feuerbach resolved religion stands to be criticized. As Marx writes in the opening lines of the Introduction to the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been largely completed.” Although this criticism has been necessary, it is not sufficient. It has played a crucial role, disillusioning “man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason,” but the time has come a new kind of criticism which must go beyond this. “The immediate task of philosophy,” Marx writes, “is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.” Like Hegel, Marx finds it necessary to move beyond a criticism of consciousness to a criticism of the objective human forms (law, politics, culture, etc.) created by concrete human practice, to transform the criticism of heaven into the criticism of earth.[31]
Up to this point, Marx’s basic philosophical position does not differ substantially from Hegel’s — so long as we correct for the misreading of Hegel involved. One might of course object that here we are guilty of ignoring the relevant points of difference between Marx and Hegel, and not without reason. Marx himself contributes to the misunderstanding, and phrases of his have lent themselves so such facile and ubiquitous caricatures. Like Feuerbach before him, Marx explicitly conceives of his philosophical method in direct opposition to Hegel’s. In one of his prefaces to Capital, he writes: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite … With him, [the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[32] It is Marx himself, then, who conceives of his material in direct antithesis to Hegelian idealism. On his reading, he turns Hegelian idealism on its head. Again, this would be fine and well were it not for the fact that it is not so much a reading of Hegelian idealism as it is a misreading, and that in the final analysis Marx does not so much turn Hegelian idealism on its head as he turns his own misreading of Hegelian idealism on its head. Marx misreads Hegelian idealism in exactly the same fashion as Feuerbach did, i.e., as a subjective idealism with a quasi-animistic Absolute as an independent subject with conscious will and agency apart from human beings. “To Hegel,” Marx writes, “the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’”[33] But this is a misreading, and it is important to stress that Hegel’s concept of the Absolute does not imply a “demiurgos,” an “independent subject” with conscious will and intention. As Beiser writes, Hegel at multiple points stresses that “the reason that governs the world should not be understood to mean a self-conscious subject or spirit. The purpose that governs the world is only its inherent form or structure, and it does not necessarily imply the intention of some agent.”[34] For better or worse, it was along these lines that Marx misinterpreted Hegel, and it was on the basis of this misreading that Marx conceived of his own project as turning Hegelian idealism on its head, a simplistic rendering which had lent itself to pervasive caricatures of this considerably more complex relation. The relevant point for our consideration is that Marx’s incompatibility with Hegel in this regard is predicated on a misreading. If Hegel’s Absolute really is such as Marx describes it, i.e., a “demiurgos of the real world,” then he is quite right to suggest that his materialism represents its inversion, but if Hegel’s Absolute is appreciated for what a more careful reading shows it to be, then the standpoint of Hegel’s absolute idealism is a good deal more compatible with Marx’s materialism than Marx himself seems to believe.
But beyond this, Marx does diverge from Hegel in significant ways, and in fact goes beyond him, but only does so, rather ironically, through Feuerbach. Somewhat paradoxically, in order to get beyond Feuerbach, Marx must go through Hegel; but in order to get past Hegel, Marx has to go through Feuerbach — through Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel no less — a point taken up in the Appendix. For Hegel, as we have already seen, self-consciousness requires mutual recognition on the basis of freedom from another conscious agent, and because these forms of mutual recognition are realized in historically-conditioned patterns of interaction, i.e., historically-conditioned forms of sociality, consciousness can only be realized in objective historical forms. Consciousness is only realized in mutual recognition, and mutual recognition is only realized on the basis of freedom and equality. In principle, Marx would have agreed with at least this much. Where he disagreed was in Hegel’s further belief that the condition of mutual recognition, freedom, was realized in any meaningful form in the bourgeois state. It was thus with his criticism of the bourgeois state and bourgeois constitutionality that Marx departed most significantly from Hegel. For Marx, “contrary to Hegel, the modern State is unable to overcome the egoism of civil society and create a genuine community” within which the conditions for mutual recognition might obtain in any meaningful sense.[35] Hegel’s bourgeois prejudices prevented him from realizing the narrowness of a merely legal and political conception of freedom, and thus from realizing that the bourgeois state did not provide an adequate basis upon which human consciousness could be realized. We will recall that for Hegel, the bourgeois state is the “form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom,” the “Divine Idea as it exists on Earth,” “that in which Freedom obtains objectivity,” with constitutional monarchy as its ideal form since constitutional monarchy, “more than any other form of government, realizes the ideal of freedom.”[36] Since the bourgeois state and bourgeois constitutionality represented a form in which substantive freedom was objectified, it adequately provided the basis for the ideal of mutual recognition.
But Marx challenges the notion that the freedom one enjoys within the framework of bourgeois constitutionality is truly meaningful, i.e., substantive freedom, and thus draws a distinction between merely “political emancipation” — corresponding to the form of freedom ensured by bourgeois constitutionality — and genuine “human emancipation.”[37] As Marx writes, “The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man.”[38] In the bourgeois state, human beings are recognized as free and equal as legal subjects, in the eyes of the law, i.e., as juridical fictions. In the sphere of bourgeois constitutionality, i.e., the state, human beings are recognized as free subjects, but in the sphere of real human existence, i.e., “civil society,” human beings are yet unfree, unequal. The constitutionality of the bourgeois state therefore bifurcates the human subject: free and equal as a legal subject, i.e., as a juridical fiction, unfree as a real, sensuous human being. “Where the political state has attained to its full development,” Marx writes, “man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence — celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community [i.e., the bourgeois state], where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and become the plaything of alien powers.”[39] Here, political community corresponds to the sphere in which the human subject exists as a juridical fiction before the eyes of the law of the bourgeois state; civil society refers to the real, practical existence of human beings, which includes the whole ensemble of their social, material, economic relations. A person who is perfectly free as a political subject, as a citizen of the state, may in reality, be entirely unfree. The average citizen in a liberal capitalist democracy gets to be free and equal, i.e., realize her political freedom, once every two years at the ballot box. Otherwise, she spends the majority of her waking life unfree and unequal, working in that totalitarian institution known as a corporation, laboring only because she is forced to do so by physical necessity. Not only does the human subject become free only in an abstract sense in the sphere of bourgeois constitutionality. Because the legal and political freedom of the bourgeois citizen is taken to be genuine freedom, it obscures her real, unfree condition. The state then becomes, like religion, the medium through which human beings realize their ideal existence: “The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom.”[40]
Marx’s criticism of bourgeois, i.e., merely political freedom had immense implications. It meant nothing short of the fact that Spirit, the self-consciousness characteristic of human beings, could never be realized within the bourgeois state. If human nature (Spirit) can only be realized through mutual recognition and mutual recognition can only be realized on the basis of substantive freedom, then it could not be realized in the form of the bourgeois state, because the form of freedom corresponding to it is not substantive, human freedom, but abstract, purely legal freedom. For Hegel, the state was the form in which Spirit objectified itself because human beings through their own free, conscious activity, create and embody these forms. From his point of view, there was no essential problem in translating reason, or consciousness, into reality, on which basis Hegel could proclaim, in his typically modest fashion, that “What is actual is rational, and what is rational is actual.”[41] But this view assumes, if only implicitly, a definite conception of human agency. It assumes, viz., that human beings possess the requisite agency, i.e., to objectify themselves in historical forms, like the bourgeois state. But as we have seen, free human agency is truncated in its bourgeois form. For Marx, human agency was limited by the laws of capitalist production, “tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.”[42] The “immanent laws of capitalist production” are even felt by individual capitalists as “external coercive laws.”[43] It is thus that Marx inverted Hegel’s conception of agency.
Now we have come to a point where it is possible to see the manner in which Marx goes beyond Hegel through Feuerbach. Marx’s divergence from Hegel is predicated on an anthropological conception largely derived from Feuerbach. Through an explication of the anthropological implications of Hegel’s absolute idealism, i.e., the fundamental identity of the human and the divine, Feuerbach derives human nature, i.e., human species-being (see Appendix). Feuerbach reasoned that if consciousness of God is human self-consciousness, then the predicates normally attributed to God are in fact nothing other than human predicates — from which fact one could then derive human nature. Though many such predicates could be derived in this manner, Feuerbach resolved human nature into three essential qualities. He states it very plainly: “What,” he asks, “is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection.” As for God, so for human beings, these defining features of the human creature do not exist for any “higher end” or purpose. They are autotelic, in a certain sense, entirely superfluous and exist solely for their own sake: “Man exists to think, to love, to will … But what is the end of reason? Reason. Of love? Love. Of will? Freedom of the will. We think for the sake of thinking; love for the sake of loving; will for the sake of willing — i.e., that we may be free.”[44] Like God, human beings for Feuerbach are free, creative subjects who exhibit their nature for its own sake. While Marx reject’s Feuerbach’s treatment of human nature as a kind of abstract anthropological constant, and resolves it into practical human activity, his conception of human nature is influenced by Feuerbach’s in obvious ways. For one, his concept of human nature is explicitly anthropological in a way that Hegel’s, being implicit in his theology, are not. Marx also inherits Feuerbach’s conception of human nature as essentially free. Marx agrees with Feuerbach that freedom is the essence of human beings, though Marx, following Hegel, resolves this merely abstract essence into practical activity, free, conscious activity. As Marx writes, “The whole character of a species — its species character — is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character” (my emphasis). Marx also inherits Feuerbach’s account of human nature as autotelic. He agrees with Feuerbach that human nature exhibits itself for no higher end or aim than its own self-expression, though again, he resolves his quality into practical human activity, i.e, production. An animal, Marx writes, “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” While animals produce for one end and one end alone, viz., physical survival, human beings produce not only for the sake of their physical survival (which, obviously, they also do), but also for ends which they have freely elected for themselves, sometimes utterly superfluous ends. The end and aim of the type of production of which human beings are capable, and which in fact distinguishes them from animals, is nothing other than production itself. “An animal forms things in accordance with the standards and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to … [form] things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”[45] As the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton has suggested, for Marx, “the end of our species-being, in a kind of creative tautology, consists just in realizing itself. For Marx, as for other Romantic radicals, there is or should be no ultimate point to human existence beyond its self-delightment.” As he goes on to elaborate: “If we were asked to characterize Marx’s ethics, then, we might do worse than call them ‘aesthetic.’ For the aesthetic is traditionally that form of human practice which requires no utilitarian justification, but which furnishes its own goals, grounds and rationales … Where art was, there humanity shall be.”[46]
While some critics relegate such Romanticisms to the “early” Marx, positing a “later” Marx who supposedly dispensed with such sentimentalities, these themes are not only consistent with and form the whole basis of the Marx’s later work, but are also explicitly restated in it. As Marx writes in Capital, “We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality … He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he work, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi” (my emphasis).[47] Even in the “later” Marx, then, we have a thoroughly “humanistic” conception of human labor, i.e., production, for its own sake, according to ends elected by human beings, a characteristic which “stamps it as exclusively human.”
It was on the basis of this admittedly Romantic conception of human nature, which Marx adopted from Feuerbach, that he did not believe it, human nature, could be realized within the framework of the bourgeois state, predicated as it was on a relatively superficial conception of freedom. Lacking substantive freedom and agency within this framework, the most human thing about humans, that labor which exists for its own ends, is turned into a mere means of subsistence, and alienates us from our own species-being: “In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.”[48] As Eagleton writes, “In class society, the individual is forced to convert what is least functional about herself — her self-realizing species-being — into a mere tool of material survival.”[49] Again, this “Romantic” conception of human nature functions as the basis of Marx’s critique of capitalism not only in his early work, but also in his later work. As late as Capital, vol.1, Marx writes that in the capitalist mode of production, the worker “constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him” (my emphasis).[50] Even in the third volume of Capital, his Romantic conception of human nature is the basis not only of his critique of the capitalist mode of production, but also of his communism. He suggests here that freedom within the sphere of physical necessity “can consist only in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to and worthy of, their human nature” (my emphasis). But this is still within the sphere of physical necessity. “Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom …”[51] As Eagleton writes, “We are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity; and it is this nature which for Marx is the essence of all individuals.”[52] Because in capitalist, i.e., bourgeois society, human beings do not enjoy genuine human freedom, but only political freedom, their species-being cannot be realized within it, and remains as a result truncated, impoverished. The genuine development of human nature (free, conscious activity) can only be achieved on the basis of genuine freedom, i.e., freedom from material necessity, and this can only, to Marx’s, mind, come about by communism, the abolition of private property. Only when private property, and with it, bourgeois constitutionality, has been transcended, can human nature be realized to its fullest degree: “The supersessions of private property,” Marx writes, “is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye’ just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man.”[53]
Here it is important to recognize the fundamentally dialectical nature of Marx’s critique of capitalism. For Marx, communism is not conceived as the simple negation of capitalism, but as its determinate negation, a negation of capitalism according to its own principles. And insofar as the bourgeois state is implied by capitalism, we might add that Marx’s criticism of capitalism is a criticism of bourgeois civilization (Hegel’s ideal) according to its own ideals. As Eagleton writes, “Marxism is not a question of thinking up some fine new social ideals, but rather of asking why it is that the fine ideals we already have, have proved structurally incapable of being realized for everyone.”[54] Marx, for his part, did not reject the principles of bourgeois civilization or bourgeois constitutionality (liberty, equality, fraternity) per se. Fundamentally, he did not disagree with the Hegelian ideals of freedom, equality, and sociality in the form of mutuality. As we have seen, he just didn’t think those ideals could be realized within the framework of bourgeois civilization, i.e., the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeois state, bourgeois constitutionality, etc., and, in the final analysis, believed these ideals — not least freedom and equality, the preconditions, as we have seen, of mutual recognition — could only be achieved in a communism of the sort he envisaged. From this point of view, communism is not to be seen not simply as the abolition of capitalism, but as its fulfillment, its realization, its consummation. Communism realizes capitalism (or the ideals of capitalist civilization, i.e., bourgeois constitutionality) through its abolition. In a sense, Marx’s relation to capitalism not altogether unlike Jesus’s relation to the Law.[55] Though there are reasons for this which we need not go into, it is possible to see a certain homology between Jesus’s ambiguous (in fact, dialectical) relation to the Law, and Marx’s ambiguous relation to capitalism. Just as Jesus, precisely in violating the law, fulfills its inner principles, i.e., the “weightier matters of the law” (Matthew 23:23), so Marxian communism, precisely in abolishing capitalism, fulfills its own inner principles — liberty, equality, and fraternity. In a sense, one might say: Marx did not come to abolish the law (in this case, bourgeois constitutionality), but to fulfill the law. Or at least its inner principles, freedom and equality, which are the necessary preconditions of mutual recognition.
Now, insofar as capitalist civilization in the form of the bourgeois state represents the point of view of Hegelian philosophy, Marx’s communism is likewise to be seen not merely as the negation of Hegelian philosophy, but in some real sense, as its consummation. For Hegel, Spirit, or self-consciousness, realizes itself only in being recognized by other self-conscious agents in a process of mutual recognition, which can itself only be realized on the basis of genuine and equality. For Hegel’s part, his bourgeois limitations led him to believe that such conditions obtained, in fact in their ideal form, in the bourgeois state, but Marx demonstrated the narrowness of this bourgeois conception of freedom and equality, and showed that it amounts to little more than merely political emancipation. We saw, then, that freedom and equality, the fundamental preconditions of mutual recognition, cannot be gained in any meaningful degree within the framework of bourgeois civilization, i.e., within the framework of capitalist production, and that these ideals can only be meaningfully achieved in a communism of the sort that Marx envisioned. Moreover, since freedom and equality are the necessary preconditions of mutual recognition, which is itself in turn the necessary precondition of self-consciousness, as Hegel demonstrated in the Phenomenology, it follows that self-consciousness, or Spirit, can only be realized in communism of this sort. Now, insofar as Spirit is the self-consciousness of the Absolute, i.e., God, it follows that, on Hegelian grounds, God realizes Godself not in the bourgeois state, but, taking Marx’s criticism into account, in communism of the sort that he envisaged, a free association of producers rationally regulating their interchange with nature. From this point of view, i.e., on Hegelian grounds, modified by Marx’s critique of the bourgeois state, communism of the sort that Marx imagined is nothing other than the objective form of God’s self-realization within history.
From this point of view, the whole of Marx’s Capital can be read as if it were an additional chapter in the Phenomenology, relating to Objective Spirit in exactly the same way that every subsequent dialectical “moment” relates to the preceding moment. Just as, for Hegel, Sense Certainty resolves itself by way of its own internal contradictions into Perception, Perception into Understanding, Understanding into Reason, and so forth, so the Absolute, objectified in the form of bourgeois constitutionality, resolves itself by way of its own internal contradictions into communism. Each subsequent moment is the necessary precondition of each previous one, implied in the former, and each previous moment only realizes itself in an through every subsequent moment. There is nothing fundamentally different about the relation in which Marx’s materialism stands to Hegel’s absolute idealism, realized in Objective Spirit, than the relation in which each of the moments delineated in Hegel’s Phenomenology stands in relation to each previous moment. Communism is the necessary precondition of Objective Spirit, because Spirit can be realized on the basis of substantive freedom, which, on Marx’s grounds, only communism of the sort he envisioned can provide.
The point I mean to stress here is that, if Marx’s argument is a legitimate dialectical critique of Hegelian idealism, it stands in the same relation as elements within Hegelian philosophy stand in relation to each other, or as Hegelian philosophy as a whole as Hegelian philosophy stands in relation to, say, Kantian philosophy, which corresponds to an element within Hegelian philosophy (Understanding). If this is true, then properly speaking Marx’s philosophy is the not the abolition but rather the fulfillment of Hegelian idealism, and the Absolute realizes itself not in the constitutional monarchy of the Prussian state, but in a communism of free associated producers. But on Hegelian terms, the Absolute is nothing other than God, who realizes Godself through the practical activity of human beings in history (i.e., Objective Spirit), and if this is true, then it follows that God is realized in Communism of the sort that Marx envisioned, that communist revolution is nothing other than the self-becoming of God within history. If (1) the reality of God is manifested in the life of human beings (as Hegel suggested); and (2) human reality is realized in human nature, i.e., freedom, or “free conscious activity” (as Hegel and Marx agree); and (3) free conscious activity is realized not in the bourgeois state, as Hegel believed, but in communism of the sort that Marx envisaged; then it follows that (4) God realizes Godself in communism of the sort Marx imagined, since in communism of this sort, human nature, freedom, is realized, and in human nature, God is realized; therefore, (5) social revolution is nothing other than the self-becoming of God, the realization of God in the life of human beings. Marx of course would never have expressed himself in these terms, and would probably even have rejected such an argument, on account of his misreading of Hegel, and of Hegel’s Absolute. But if we put aside such misreadings of Hegel, and understand Hegel’s Absolute in its fully human dimension, i.e., as an identity of the divine and the human, then the conclusion we have reached is logically irrefragable.
Conclusion.
Marx’s misreading of Hegel had important, though perhaps unintended, consequences. On the one hand, it prevented Marx from recognizing the fundamental contiguity (if not exactly the compatibility) of his philosophy with that of Hegel. On the other hand, it enabled Marx to eventually get beyond Hegelian idealism. Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel thus puts Marx’s philosophy into a somewhat ambiguous and contradictory relation to Hegel’s. It simultaneously enables Marx to transcend Hegelian idealism, but in so doing, occludes its fundamental contiguity with it, preventing Marx from recognizing the dialectical relationship between his own philosophy and Hegel’s, viz., as a determinate negation of it, rather than as a simple inversion.
Feuerbach showed us that religion reveals the riches of the human creature but only in such a way that the human creature is impoverished in the process (see Appendix). Religion reveals the essence of the human being, but occludes it in such a way that human beings do not recognize this nature as their own. In a similar way, Marx’s materialism reveals the essence of Hegelian idealism, i.e., the Absolute, but — on account of its misreading of Hegel — only in such a way that it fails to recognize itself as an expression of the Absolute. The materialistic implications of absolute idealism are expounded at the price of its obfuscation and dissimulation. Materialism explicates the meaning of absolute idealism but only in such a way that it does not recognize itself as an explication of absolute idealism. In a sense, absolute idealism is the religion of materialism. This is so in two ways. Firstly, absolute idealism is the soul of materialism, in the sense of beings its implicit metaphysical foundation. Secondly, absolute idealism is materialism’s own alienated self, a self which materialism does not recognize as its own. Absolute idealism is, then, the alienated soul of materialism.
Marx’s misreading of Hegel prevents him from recognizing their materialism as an expression of the Absolute. Since this means nothing short of the fact that materialism is not aware of itself (as the Absolute), the price which materialism has to pay for this is an ignorance of its own metaphysical presuppositions. Marx attempted to do away with metaphysics. But this is problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, metaphysics, as Hegel grasped, is always already implied in any kind of knowledge, and is therefore implied in the scientific exposition of that knowledge. As Beiser tells us, “Hegel accepted the traditional account of metaphysics as the foundational discipline of philosophy … he saw metaphysics as the root of the tree of knowledge, whose sap gave life to every branch and every leaf. We cannot pretend to give the specific sciences a foundation independent of metaphysics, Hegel argued, because they presuppose answers to fundamental metaphysical questions.”[56] It is not possible, then, to dispense with metaphysics, since metaphysics is always already implied in any act of knowing, and the pretension of avoiding metaphysics lapses into dogmatism because it is simply unaware of its own presupposition.[57] A definite metaphysical conception is implied whether one is aware of it or not, and from this point of view, to suggest that one has done away with metaphysics amounts in the final analysis to nothing more than saying one is not aware of one’s own metaphysical presuppositions. From a practical point of view, ignorance of one’s own metaphysical presuppositions has immense consequences. The nightmare of what called itself “Marxism” in the Soviet Union should stand as a warning to all of those who would disclaim religion and metaphysics only to create a fully metaphysical religion of their own — in this case of a decidedly demonic order.
Materialism of the sort that Marx’s philosophy represents, then, is an expression of absolute idealism which does not recognize itself as an expression of the Absolute. Inasmuch as materialism finds its most powerful expression in Marx’s communism, communism, not the bourgeois state, and certainly not the Prussian state, is to be seen as the true objective form of the Absolute, and therefore as the the fulfilment of absolute idealism. From this point of view, communism logically derives from absolute idealism, and absolute idealism can only realized through communism as its necessary precondition.
But absolute idealism is itself derived from Christian theology and is the form in which Christian theology realizes itself. I have argued this point at length elsewhere, and it is too long to repeat here, so instead I will simply assume its validity, and draw out its implications in its connection to our present subject matter on that basis.[58] As I have argued, absolute idealism is nothing other than the working out of the basic themes of traditional Christian theology, and is as such the self-revelation of God in the element of the finite. Both traditional theology and absolute idealism are expressions of the Absolute at varying degrees of self-consciousness on the part of the Absolute of itself as the Absolute. Again, I have argued this point elsewhere and will not repeat it here, so it must be assumed. The points of interest for our purposes are its implications, of which it stands to give a brief account.
We have seen that communism logically derives from absolute idealism, and that absolute idealism can only realized through communism. And we assumes here that absolute idealism is itself derived from Christian theology, that it is the form in which Christian theology realizes itself. If this is true, i.e., if communism derives from absolute idealism and absolute idealism derives from Christian theology — all of these in a logically dialectical way — then it follows that materialism in general, and Marx’s conception of communism in particular, is nothing other than the logical development of Christian theology itself, the realization of Christian theology in a more self-conscious form, and that, inversely, Christian theology finds a more self-conscious expression, however incomplete, in Marxian communism.
We have seen that, metaphorically speaking, Kant, in his Copernican turn toward the subject, from metaphysics to epistemology, represented a step down from the misty realms of dogmatic metaphysics, and that Hegel, by dispensing with the noumenal in-itself which held heaven and earth apart, thereby collapsing the distinction between the divine and the human, in turn represented a further step in this regard, a development in the secularization of philosophy which characterizes its general development, i.e., the movement away from a divine which is external to and apart from the human, and a movement toward the human. But here we have also seen that Feuerbach took a further step, drawing out the anthropological, i.e., human implications which were implied in but never systematically elaborated in Hegel’s absolute idealism. In another sense, Hegel, along with Marx, took a further step in this regard beyond Feuerbach, resolving the human essence into practical human activity. But Marx then took a further step beyond Hegel, drawing on Feuerbachian anthropology to criticize the bourgeois state, and resolve human nature into free conscious activity which can only be resolved within the framework of a communism of the sort that he imagined. Since free conscious human activity, which cannot for Marx be realized within the bourgeois state but only in communism, is a fully human, i.e., secular activity, Marx’s communism represents a further secularization of philosophy, a further step down from the misty realms of dogmatic metaphysics into the human world. But on account of his own misreading of Hegel, Marx does not recognize his communism as an expression of the Absolute, i.e., the identity between the divine and human, and remains as a result unable to grasp the full metaphysical implications of his own communism. Drawing on Feuerbachian anthropology, Marx criticizes Hegel’s bourgeois state, and resolves human nature into free conscious activity which can only be realized within the framework of communism of the sort that he imagined. Now if, as Hegel suggested, human nature can only be realized through free conscious activity within the framework of communism, and human nature is, as Hegel suggested, self-identical with the divine nature, the realization of God’s own nature within history, then it follows that God can only realize Godself in human beings through free conscious activity within the framework of communism of the sort that Marx envisioned. Since free conscious activity is fully human, i.e., secular, it follows that God reveals Godself through the element of the secular.
The shape of the general development of philosophy from Kant through Hegel and Feuerbach to Marx, then, is characterized in each of its successive phases by its secularization, its movement away from heaven toward earth, away from the divine as something conceived of as external to the human, toward the human.[59] Now, since our point is to suggest that communism is itself the logical outworking of Christian theology, i.e., a development out of principles internal to Christian theology, it is of considerable interest for our purposes that both Feuerbach and Hegel derive their own secular conception of Christianity from within Christianity itself, and see themselves as merely expositing the truth of Christianity in a form appropriate to its content, and moreover, that both do this independently of each other. For his part, Hegel identified as a Christian philosopher and saw his own philosophy as an exposition of Christianity.[60] From Hegel’s point of view, he was only expressing philosophically in concepts what the Gospel writers, not least the author of John 1:1,[61] had expressed theologically, in religious images. His absolute idealism was merely the philosophical expression of the idea implied in the Incarnation, viz., that the life of God is realized in the life of human beings. Hegel’s immanent conception of God was derived from Christianity itself. In Christianity, “[t]he divine nature is the same as the human,” Hegel writes.[62] Here Hegel paid special attention to the narratives of life of Christ, which he reinterpreted in dialectical terms. The Incarnation and Crucifixion were essential expressions of the fundamental identity of the divine and human natures. In the Incarnation, God is “sensuously and directly beheld as a Self, as an actual individual man,” Hegel tells us.[63] The Crucifixion no less than the Incarnation stressed that the life of the divine is realized in this world, that God, or the infinite, is not “out there,” separate from the finite realm.
Feuerbach could not have derived this from Hegel, since he misread Hegel. But Feuerbach, no less than Hegel, saw himself as doing nothing more than explicating the meaning of Christianity itself in philosophical form, translating its images into concepts, and refers to his work as “a faithful, correct translation of the Christian religion out of the Oriental language of imagery into plain speech.”[64] And Feuerbach’s secular conception of Christianity, no less than Hegel’s, was derived from Christianity, from the exact same principle no less, viz., Incarnation. On this point he is emphatic. “It is not I,” he stresses, “but religion that worships man … it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not man” since religion itself “makes God become man, and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, having a human form, human feelings, and human thoughts, the object of its worship and veneration.” As Feuerbach emphasizes here, he is not interpreting Christianity according to external principles, but according to its own internal principles. He cautions the reader to remember “that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.”[65] For Feuerbach, as for Hegel (as also, we might add, for theologians like Bonhoeffer), secularism is directly given in the concept of Christianity itself. From this point of view, the secularization of reason which characterizes the general development of philosophy from Kant through Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, is derived from principles internal to Christianity itself.
Insofar as materialism, exemplified by Marx’s philosophy, does not recognize itself as an expression of the Absolute, exemplified by Hegel’s philosophy, hence, as a logical development of principles internal to Christianity, it represents an expression of the Absolute which is not fully, but only partially, conscious of itself as the Absolute, and represents therefore an expression of the Absolute which is conscious of itself as the Absolute at a relatively low level. In order for materialism to move beyond its own incompleteness, it must become conscious of itself as an expression of the Absolute, for only then will it have been put into self-conscious form; only then will it have become fully conscious of itself, i.e., self-conscious. Only then will it have an accurate idea of itself, as opposed to the incomplete idea it has of itself insofar as it is expressed by Marx. The only way beyond Marx is, somewhat paradoxically, through Hegel. In order for materialism to become fully self-conscious, it must be bathed in the aether of the Absolute. Only then will we have restored to Marxist materialism its proper metaphysical basis. Or, perhaps more precisely, only then will the implicit metaphysical foundations of Marxist materialism have been rendered explicit, and only then would it have become, in this sense, fully self-conscious, aware of its own metaphysical presuppositions.
This is all fine and well from a theoretical point of view. But from a practical point of view, what is entailed in “bathing materialism in the aether of the Absolute,” i.e., bringing materialism into self-conscious form? In a sense, we have already answered the question. In part, it means realizing that materialism is an expression of absolute idealism, which we have already seen. But what still remains is for this to be thoroughly demonstrated, and such a demonstration can consist in nothing other than a thorough and systematic exposition of the necessity of the proposition, i.e., an exposition of its self-movement, which consists in “becoming an other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly in taking back into itself this unfolding,” an exposition of the actuality of the whole which “consists in those various shapes and forms which have become its moments.”[66] In this case, the demonstration would properly consist in a systematic exposition that traces the self-becoming of the Absolute, which involves tracing the dialectical self-movement of consciousness in its expression in Christian theology through its various shapes into consciousness in its expression in communism, i.e, in demonstrating and deriving the logical necessity of communism from Christian theology. Practically speaking, such a proof resolves itself into a demonstration of the manner in which the principal elements of Christian theology (e.g., God, human beings, law, sin, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, eschatology etc.) resolve themselves, of their own necessity, into their own shapes such as they are found in the materialist philosophy of communism (species-being, dialectics, structural oppression, contradiction, revolution, etc.). One would have to show how a faithful application of the logic of Christian dogma transforms it into the materialist philosophy of communism.
APPENDIX: Feuerbach’s Inversion of the Predicate and Anthropological Turn.
In a sense, Feuerbach’s contribution to philosophy was to have “inverted” Hegel. If for Hegel, human knowledge was nothing other than the self-consciousness of the Absolute, or God, then for Feuerbach, God was itself nothing other than the self-consciousness of human beings, though we are often unaware of the fact. Where Hegel could say that human knowledge and its development was nothing other than the Absolute’s knowledge of itself, or God’s knowledge of Godself, through finite human subjects, Feuerbach could now say that the Absolute’s knowledge of itself was nothing other than human knowledge about itself at a lower level of self-consciousness. This, at least, is the manner in which Feuerbach understood his own relation to Hegel. As he writes, “in the sphere of strictly theoretical philosophy, I attach myself, in direct opposition to the Hegelian philosophy, only to realism, to materialism…” (my emphasis).[67] From Feuerbach’s point of view, Hegelian idealism had the relation of thought to reality upside down; it generated reality from thought, generated matter from the idea. As he elaborates: “I unconditionally repudiate absolute, immaterial, self-sufficing speculation, — that speculation which draws its material from within … I do not generate the object from the thought, but the thought form the object; and I hold that alone to be an object which has an existence beyond one’s own brain.”[68] Feuerbach describes his own materialism, in opposition to Hegelian idealism as generating “thought from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the senses.”[69]
In a sense, Feuerbach simply dispenses with the Absolute. Just as Hegel dispensed with the in-itself which Kant had postulated as a necessary presupposition of knowledge, so Feuerbach simply dispenses with the Absolute which Hegel had postulated as a necessary presupposition of knowledge. From the point of view of Hegelian idealism, there was no basis upon which one could legitimately posit the noumenal in-itself (since it was by definition unknowable). Likewise, from the point of view of Feuerbachian materialism, there is no basis upon which one can legitimately posit the Absolute, since it too, is by definition unknowable, or at least the absolute idealists never made a strong case for it. As Dorrien writes, “the absolute idealists made a stronger argument about the possibility of knowledge than about how they knew that their knowledge participated in divine self-knowledge … Schelling and Hegel made a strong case for absolute idealism as an alternative to not knowing much of anything. But Schelling and Hegel, on their terms, could not say how any knowing subject, such as either of them knew that he had absolute knowledge. For Schelling and Hegel did not know the absolute; on their terms, it was only the absolute that knew itself.”[70] That being the case, one could ask, why then posit the Absolute at all? Feuerbach, then, simply dispenses with the Absolute. He will still make practical reference to it, but only insofar as it is the projected reality of human beings, not, as in Hegel’s case, as something with its own ontological basis. From an ontological point of view, Feuerbach’s Absolute has only a regulative, not a constitutive status.[71] Feuerbach and Hegel both speak of the Absolute, or God, but diverge on the question of its ontological status — Hegel ascribing the Absolute a constitutive, i.e., an autonomous and absolute ontological status, Feuerbach ascribing it only a regulative, i.e., relative and provisional ontological status.
Having dispensed with the Absolute as an ontologically autonomous substance, Feuerbach is in a position to invert the Hegelian equation. Where for Hegel, human knowledge was the Absolute’s self-consciousness, for Feuerbach, the opposite was true. As he writes, “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest man, and by the man his God; the two are identical.”[72] From Feuerbach’s point of view, Hegel understood the relation of human beings to God backwards. Hegelian philosophy generates matter out of thoughts, and saw sensuous human beings as mere predicates of God, an idea. Because Hegel got the whole relation backwards, Feuerbach inverted the predicate in order to put it into proper form. For Feuerbach, the human being was not the predicate of God, but God the predicate of the human being: “if the divine predicates are attributes of the human nature, the subject of those predicates is also of the human nature.”[73]
From this point of view, Feuerbach’s criticism represents a further development of the secularization of philosophy from Kant through Hegel. If Hegel took one step past Kant in secularizing philosophy, Feuerbach took one step past Hegel. Hegel transcended Kant’s dualism which held the divine and human worlds apart. He dispensed with the Kantian noumenon, bridging the metaphysical chasm between God and human beings, but got the relation backwards, and in Hegel’s system, human reality, i.e., sensuous material reality, appeared as the result of the Idea. The human appeared as a predicate of the divine. Feuerbach dispensed with the Absolute as an ontologically autonomous substance, and reversed the predicate. Metaphorically speaking, Feuerbach represents a further step down from heaven toward the earth. Just as Kantian philosophy, though it was an advance in this regard from the old, dogmatic metaphysics, retained a residue of heaven in the form of the noumenon which held God apart from human existence, so Hegelian philosophy, though it was an advance in this regard on Kantian philosophy, also retained a residue of heaven in the form of the Absolute.
The only problem with this account is that it is predicated on a misreading of Hegel’s absolute idealism. When Feuerbach suggests that his philosophy is situated in “direct opposition to the Hegelian philosophy,” he explains that the latter “generate[s] the object from the thought,” which would be an appropriate description if only it were not a gross misreading of Hegel. Feuerbach reads Hegel as a kind of dogmatic metaphysician engaged in exactly the kinds of speculative metaphysics which Kantian idealism criticized, and seems to believe that for Hegel, the Absolute is some kind of spiritual substance which generates matter out of itself, but this cannot be sustained on any careful reading of Hegel.[74] Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel is not entirely unreasonable, for a number of reasons. In the first place, the hopelessly obscure nature of Hegel’s writing makes him torturously difficult to understand. Secondly, Hegel himself speaks of the Absolute in quasi-animistic terms which lends itself to the kind of misreading which Feuerbach maintains. Thirdly, Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel is in fact a very common misreading of Hegel, and had been for a long time the dominant (mis)interpretation of him.[75] It is therefore not entirely unreasonable for Feuerbach to have misread Hegel. But it is a misreading nonetheless.
Feuerbach seems to think of the Hegelian Absolute, or God, in animistic terms, as a spiritual being, a kind of metaphysical demiurge that generates matter out of itself.[76] But this misconstrues Hegel’s conception of the Absolute as some kind of being with consciousness and will. For Hegel, to assert the identity of thought and being, is, following Schelling, to see both thought and being as different attributes of the same substance, but sharing the same essential structure. Following after Spinoza and Schelling, Hegel’s absolute idealism posited that “the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real — however one formulates the opposition — are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance” — the Absolute which includes the identity of subject and object.[77] Schelling and Hegel deduced the identity of subject and object as a necessary condition of possible experience. Following Fichte, they understood that there was only one possibility which could meet this condition, viz., self-consciousness, since it is only in self-consciousness that the knowing subject and the known object are one and the same, with the Absolute as the subject of subject-object identity, as the self of this self-consciousness.[78] On this basis, the assertion that knowledge is the self-consciousness of the Absolute is to say that thought and being, subject and object, being merely different attributes of the same substance, share the same fundamental structure: thought inheres in matter. The Absolute is itself “neither subjective nor objective because it is the form or structure that inheres equally in both.”[79] To suggest that thought inheres in or is immanent in matter is not to suggest a kind of quasi-animism or monistic idealism. Hegel’s monism is closer to Aristotelian than Platonic idealism: the thought that inheres in matter governs it by a logical necessity inherent in the structure of matter itself, presupposing no self-conscious agent: “The purpose that governs the world is only its inherent form or structure,” Beiser writes, “and it does not necessarily imply the intention of some agent.”[80]
For Hegel, then, the Absolute is neither subjective nor objective, because it by definition transcends the false dualism between them. It cannot therefore be either charged with generating matter out of thought (idealism) or of generating thought out of matter (materialism) because, from Hegel’s point of view, such a distinction is in the first instance predicated on a false dualism between thought and matter, subject and object, the very dualism which Hegel sought to transcend, the very opposition which was in fact the major point of his absolute idealism. But, on dualistic presuppositions, Feuerbach misreads Hegel as a subjective idealist, opposing himself to this as an objective materialist. He reads his own dualism into Hegel, and sets himself on the other side of that onto which he put Hegel, though Hegel would have rejected the false opposition altogether. As Beiser writes, “According to Hegel’s absolute idealism … the whole dispute between materialism and idealism is misconceived. The absolute idea is neither subjective nor objective because it is the form of structure that inheres equally in both. We cannot reduce the subject down to the object, as if it were only material, and neither can we reduce the object down to the subject, as if it were only ideal.”[81]
On Feuerbach’s reading, as a subjective idealist, Hegel generates matter from thought, conceives the object out of the subject, from which it follows in the sphere of religion that the God the self-thinking subject generates human existence out of Godself. For Hegel, on this reading, the human being is nothing but a mere predicate of God. It is on this basis that Feuerbach’s inversion of the predicate is predicated. But this basis is itself problematic. Hegel was neither a subjective idealist nor an objective materialist, since the whole point of his absolute idealism was the transcend the false dualism between subject and object. On this basis, Hegel believed that divine and human nature are one. One does not “generate” the other: the divine does not generate the human any more than the human generates the divine; both are rather implied in one another, realized in and through the other. Now, inasmuch as Feuerbach’s inversion of the predicate was based on a misreading of Hegel, it did nothing from a purely theoretical point of view to go beyond Hegel, since an inversion of an identity is nothing other than the restatement of this identity in other terms.
To deal in symbolic terms, if it is true that for Hegel, A > B, where “A” represents God, “B” represents human beings, and “>” connotes a generative relation, then it follows that Feuerbach’s inversion, B > A, is valid. But A > B was never true for Hegel, whose conception of this relation would here be represented appropriately by the form A = B, where “=” connotes mutual dependence. Now, if it is true that for Hegel A = B, then an “inversion” here would amount to little more than a restatement of this relation in different terms, a simple reversal of the expression: B = A. Which is in fact what Feuerbach’s philosophy amounts to.
From a purely theoretical point of view, then, Feuerbach does not meaningfully transcend Hegelian idealism, though he doesn’t realize it. Counterintuitive as it might seem, Feuerbach’s materialism is still largely compatible with Hegelian idealism, understood properly. Now one might, with reason, object that this ignores relevant points of difference between the two, viz., that while Hegel’s philosophy ascribes the Absolute ontologically constitutive status, Feuerbach dispenses with the Absolute as such, granting it only a regulative status — but here I would again stress that the difference here rests on a misreading of Hegel’s Absolute as something apart from the objective, human sphere, and that as a result, Hegel and Feuerbach are speaking of the Absolute in entirely different terms. The Absolute with which Feuerbach dispenses is not the Absolute in any sense of the term in which Hegel uses it at all. Beyond this, I would stress that my point is not to suggest that Feuerbach’s philosophy the same or even consistent with Hegel’s in every detail, or that everything Feuerbach wrote could well have been written by Hegel himself (though this is often the case), but rather to suggest that, at the broadest level, Feuerbach’s materialism is not incompatible with Hegelian idealism, properly understood, that they are broadly consistent. At a sufficient level of detail, there will always be differences to be found, and at a sufficient level of abstraction, there will always be similarities to be found. The relevant question for our purposes is whether the level of abstraction at which these similarities obtain is meaningful, and my contention is that the level of abstraction at which similarities obtain between Hegelian idealism and Feuerbachian materialism is sufficient to characterize Feuerbach’s materialism as being broadly consistent with Hegelian idealism.
From a purely theoretical point of view, then, Feuerbach’s materialism is broadly consistent with Hegel’s brand of idealism, and Feuerbach’s “inversion” of Hegel amounts to little more than the restatement of Hegel in different terms. His inversion of the predicate is tantamount in the final analysis to the reversal of an equation. Where Hegel had suggested that divine nature is the same as human nature, Feuerbach simply reversed the identity in his assertion that the human nature is the same as the divine. This is at least so from a purely theoretical point of view. But from a practical point of view, it had important consequences, viz., in its clarification of themes where were implied in but never fully elaborated in Hegel’s philosophy. If Hegel had theorized the identity of divine and human nature, which he did, he wrote a good deal more about the divine, or about the human in divine terms, than he did about the human, or about the divine in human terms, which Feuerbach did. Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel enabled him to explore areas which, practically speaking, Hegel simply did not elaborate on, and which Marx would later pick up on to transcend Hegel, viz., anthropology. Although Feuerbach’s reversal of the Hegelian identity (of divine and human nature) is predicated on a misreading of Hegel which obscures the relationship between Feuerbach’s materialism and Hegelian idealism, it also enables Feuerbach, practically speaking, to focus on the human dimension of the equation which, while implied in Hegel’s metaphysics, is never to my knowledge fully elaborated — at least not to the degree in which it is elaborated in Feuerbach’s work. From this point of view, then, we can think of Feuerbach’s anthropological turn as an elaboration and explication of themes which are implicit in but never fully worked out into explicit form in Hegelian philosophy.
Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel enables him to go into significantly more detail about the anthropological, i.e., human dimension of the divine-human relation. Though he is unaware of having misread Hegel, he is self-conscious about his reconceptualization of theology as anthropology and explicitly conceives of his work in these terms. As he writes in the preface to The Essence of Christianity, “in the first part I show that the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject.” And he goes on to confess that “while reducing theology to anthropology,” he “exalt[s] anthropology into theology.”[82]
Although Hegel’s absolute idealism implied a fundamental identity between divine and human nature, he never explicated what it meant for the divine nature to be identical to human nature from a human point of view. Hegel, i.e., never explicated the anthropology implied in his theology. It was left to others like Feuerbach to work out these implications. As we have already seen, for Feuerbach, consciousness of God is human self-consciousness: “what a man declares concerning God, he in truth declares concerning himself.”[83]
The identity of the divine and human nature had immense implications for Feuerbach. If all of our knowledge of God is in fact knowledge of ourselves, then it follows that everything we believe to be true about God is in fact true of ourselves. For Feuerbach, the “essential difference” between the human creature and all other animals is consciousness, but “consciousness in the strict sense,” which is “present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.” From this point of view, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is the fact that human beings are conscious of their own “essential nature.” Where other animals have only instinct, for which “the inner life is at one with the outer,” human beings are self-conscious creatures who make their own nature an object of consciousness. But not only do human beings make their own nature an object of consciousness; they also objectify it, i.e., externalize their nature in the form of an object. “Man is nothing without an object,” Feuerbach writes, “But the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective nature.” Not only, then, do human beings make their own nature an object for their own consciousness, but they do so by objectifying it in an external object. But if this external object is nothing other than the objectification of human nature, then consciousness of this object is in fact self-consciousness: “In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted with himself; consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of man.”[84] This in turn has immense implications for our own knowledge of human nature. If these objective forms are nothing other than the forms in which we externalize our own nature, then they function like mirrors: looking into these objects, we see ourselves. The objective forms in which human nature is externalized are viewing glasses which afford us an insight into human nature: “Whatever kind of object, therefore, we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature; we can affirm nothing without affirming ourselves.”[85]
And for Feuerbach, no object is more important for human beings, and thus more indicative of their essential nature, than religion. Religion is the chief object in which human beings become conscious of their own essential nature by externalizing it into objective form. As he writes, “Religion, being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then identical with self-consciousness — with the consciousness which man has of his nature.” In “religion,” Feuerbach writes, “consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide.” But if religion is an object in which human beings contemplate their own nature in an external form, then all of the characteristics of these objects generally apply to religion specifically, with immense consequences: “the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. As as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge.” Like all other such forms, religion affords us a glimpse into our own nature. Religion, for Feuerbach, is therefore “the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”[86]
Because knowledge of God is in fact nothing other than self-knowledge, to perceive God is rather like looking into a mirror: looking at God, we see ourselves. And “what a man declares concerning God,he in truth declares concerning himself.” As Feuerbach writes, “The mystery of the inexhaustible fulness of the divine predicates is therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable, but, consequently, phenomenal being.” Everything that we believe to be good and true and beautiful about God is in fact good and true and beautiful in us: “so long as man adores a good being as his God, so long does he contemplate in God the goodness of his own nature.”[87]
But though human beings may externalize their own nature in objective forms like religion, they are not necessarily aware of the fact that what they are contemplating is in fact their own nature. When religion “is designated as the self-consciousness of man,” Feuerbach writes, “this is not to be understood as affirming that the religious man is directly aware of this identity [between human beings and God]; for, on the contrary, ignorance of it is fundamental to the peculiar nature of religion.” In religion, “[m]an first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being … Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature.”[88]
In religion, then, human beings contemplate their own nature, but do not recognize it as their own nature. It appears instead external to our nature, and our own attributes are appear to belong to a separate being — God. We are not conscious of the fact that religion is our own self-consciousness. While religion contains the secrets of our own nature, it also embodies them in a form which obscures the fact that this nature is our own. In attributing the characteristic features of our own nature to a being external to us, we impoverish ourselves: “man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God.”[89]
This puts religion into a somewhat contradictory relation with itself. “Man — this is the mystery of religion — projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject; he thinks of himself [as] an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another being than himself.”[90] On the one hand, as an objective form in which human nature is externalized, religion is human self-consciousness and as such provides us insight into our own nature. On the other hand, while we contemplate our own nature in religion, it is such that we do not recognize it as our own, and in ascribing it to an external being, impoverish ourselves. Because the predicates of God are nothing other than externalized and objectified human predicates, religion reveals the riches of human nature, but at same time, it does this only in such a way that we not only fail to recognize the attributes of this nature as our own, but in attributing them to something else, impoverish ourselves. Religion reveals the riches of human nature only by impoverishing the human creature.
Through an explication of the anthropological implications of Hegel’s absolute idealism, i.e., the fundamental identity of the human and the divine, Feuerbach derives human nature, i.e., human species-being, which will be crucial for Marx to later move beyond Hegel in a way that Feuerbach, as will shortly see, still fundamentally does not. Inasmuch as Feuerbach’s anthropological turn, his emphasis on the human dimension, explicates themes which are implied but not otherwise elaborated in Hegelian idealism, it represents a further secularization of reason, though not exactly in the manner in which had previously been thought. Where on Feuerbach’s reading it would have seemed that this further development in the secularization of philosophy consisted in his having dispensed with the Hegelian Absolute, we have seen that though Feuerbach does indeed dispense with an Absolute, it is not Hegel’s. Feuerbach misread Hegel, and on this basis, conceived his philosophy in opposition to it. But a more careful reading reveals that Hegelian idealism is in fact a good deal compatible with Feuerbachian materialism than the latter seems to realize, if only because Hegel’s absolute idealism transcends the whole opposition between idealism and materialism. On this basis, the development of the secularization of philosophy to which Feuerbach’s contribution corresponds consists in something else altogether, viz., in his having explicated and elaborated the anthropological implications which are implicit in but never systematically expounded in the theology predicated on Hegel’s absolute idealism. While Hegel noted the fundamental identity of the divine and the human, he only worked out the implications of one half of this equation. Feuerbach, explicating these, thus extended the secular logic of Hegel’s theology, taking a further step down from misty realms of heaven onto the earth, from God on high to the human being here below.
But Feuerbach hardly went far enough, and though in one sense, Feuerbach went beyond Hegel in this regard, there is another sense in which Hegel went further than even Feuerbach. Though Feuerbach resolved the divine into the human, he did not take the further step, which Hegel did (as did Marx), and resolve the human into practical historical activity. As a result, his materialism remained essentially ahistorical, exactly the point upon which Marx would later criticize him. Insofar as Hegel resolved a merely abstract and theoretical conception human beings into a practical and historical one through his resolution of Spirit into Objective Spirit, he went beyond Feuerbach’s still merely abstract, theoretical conception of the human subject — a point to Hegel’s credit noted by Marx, who suggests that the “outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome … is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man … as the outcome of man’s own labor.”[91] I.e., while Feuerbach’s materialism and his concept of objectified human nature remained abstract, theoretical, and ahistorical, Hegelian idealism took a further step and resolved human nature conceived in the abstract into practical human activity, realized in labor.
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx all grasp a partial truth and miss another. Hegel grasps Absolute idealism in the form of Objective Spirit, i.e., he understands that human nature and divine nature are one, and that because human nature expresses itself not only as contemplation, but as practical activity, God manifests Godself in the practical activity of human beings. But Hegel fails to fully explicate the anthropological implications of his absolute idealism, and fails to recognize the inadequacy of bourgeois state. Feuerbach does explicate the anthropological implications of Absolute idealism, but on account of his misreading of Hegel, he does not recognize it as such, and in fact falsely conceives it in opposition to Hegelian philosophy. Feuerbach also misses the practical dimension of human existence, and his materialism remains as a result, abstract, ahistorical materialism. Marx, like Hegel, resolves human nature into practical activity, and in so doing goes beyond Feuerbach. And just as Marx goes beyond Feuerbach through Hegel, he goes beyond Hegel through Feuerbach, grasps the inadequacy of bourgeois state, on the basis of an anthropological conception he adopts and adapts from Feuerbach. Marx, then, goes beyond by Hegel and Feuerbach by appropriating what each of them got right to get past what the other got wrong. Because Marx’s criticism of Hegel drew on the anthropological implications of absolute idealism which Feuerbach elaborated — though Feuerbach, owing to his misreading of Hegel, did not recognize it as such — his criticism of Hegelian idealism was dialectical and Marx’s conception of communism represented, as a result, not a simple but a determinate negation of absolute idealism, not just its abolition, but its fulfilment. But Marx, on account of the misreading of Hegel that he shares with Feuerbach, does not recognize it as such, and remains unaware of the metaphysical presuppositions of his own materialist viewpoint.
Notes:
This paper was written for a course with Jan Rehmann, “Encounters With Social Theory,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, Spring 2015.
[1] Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2012, p.160.
[2] See Kelly Maeshiro, “Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God,” Essays, 01 May 2015, http://www.kellymaeshiro.wordpress.com, accessed 13 May 2015. Parts of this paragraph are adapted from this essay. For a broad overview of Hegel’s philosophy, see also Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, pp.159-242; and Frederick Beiser, Hegel, New York: Routledge, 2005.
[3] Beiser, Hegel, p.106.
[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp.47,54.
[5] Beiser, Hegel, p.104.
[6] Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.538.
[7] Beiser, Hegel, p.170.
[8] See Kelly Maeshiro, “Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God,” op. cit.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.536.
[11] Beiser, Hegel, pp.110-2.
[12] Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit., p.187.
[13] Beiser, Hegel, p.177. For master-slave dialectic, see Hegel, Phenomenology, pp.111-9; Quentin Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Fordham University Press, 1987, pp.90-124.
[14] See Beiser, Hegel, p.177.
[15] Lauer, Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, p.104.
[16] Beiser, Hegel, pp.181-2.
[17] Ibid., p.189.
[18] Ibid., p.184.
[19] Ibid., p.197.
[20] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988, p.16.
[21] Beiser, Hegel, p.261.
[22] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004, p.21.
[23] Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004, p.19.
[24] Paul Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta, 22 July 2010, accessed 02 May 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel.
[25] Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, op. cit. p.38.
[26] Beiser, Hegel, p.252.
[27] G.W.F. Hegel, qtd. in Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.391.
[28] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York: Norton, 1978, p.143.
[29] Ibid., p.145.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp.53-4.
[32] Karl Marx, Preface to Capital, vol.1, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York: Modern Library, 1906, p.25.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Beiser, Hegel, p.68.
[35] C.J. Arthur, Introduction to Karl Marx, The German Ideology, part 1, ed. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1988, p.7.
[36] All quotes repeated from above; for sources, see corresponding footnotes.
[37] This paragraph is adapted from Kelly Maeshiro, “How Shall We Be Free?” Essays, 08 April 2014, http://www.kellymaeshiro.wordpress.com, accessed 16 May 2015.
[38] See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York: Norton 1978, pp.31-2.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid., p.32.
[41] G.W.F. Hegel, qtd. in Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.208.
[42] Marx, Preface to Capital, vol.1, p.13. This should be understood in any strictly deterministic sense; see Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
[43] Marx, Capital, vol.1, p.649.
[44] Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p.3.
[45] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.76.
[46] Terry Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp.18-20.
[47] Marx, Capital, vol.1, p.198.
[48] Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp.76-7.
[49] Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, p.20.
[50] Marx, Capital, vol.1, p.625.
[51] Marx, Capital, vol.3, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.441.
[52] Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, p.27.
[53] Marx, qtd. in Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, p.23.
[54] Eagleton, Marx and Freedom, p.43.
[55] See Kelly Maeshiro, “All that is Holy: Jesus, Dialectics, and the Law as a Self-Consuming Artifact,” Essays, 28 April 2014, http://www.kellymaeshiro.wordpress.com, accessed 18 May 2015.
[56] Beiser, Hegel, p.53.
[57] Ibid., p.109.
[58] See Kelly Maeshiro, “Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God,” op. cit.
[59] Parts of this paragraph (re: Hegel) are adapted from Maeshiro, “Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God,” op. cit.
[60] Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, pp.190, 222-3.
[61] For Hegel’s reliance on John 1:1:, see Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.165.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Feuerbach, Preface to Essence of Christianity, p.xxxiii.
[65] Ibid., p.xxxvi.
[66] G.W.F. Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, pp.32,7.
[67] Ludwig Feuerbach, Preface to The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper & Row, 1957, p.xxxiv.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Ibid., p.xxxv.
[70] Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, p.538.
[71] Rather as Kant gave the concept of organism regulative where Hegel gave it constitutive ontological status.
[72] Feuerbach, Preface to Essence of Christianity, p.12.
[73] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p.25.
[74] See Beiser, Hegel, op. cit.
[75] See Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, op. cit.
[76] This paragraph is adapted from Kelly Maeshiro, “Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God,” op. cit.
[77] Beiser, Hegel, p.64; Beiser, “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Beiser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.6.
[78] Beiser, “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, p.12.
[79] Beiser, Hegel, p.69.
[80] Ibid., p.68; see also Paul Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta, 22 July 2010, accessed 02 May 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel.
[81] Beiser, Hegel, p.69.
[82] Feuerbach, Preface to The Essence of Christianity, p.xxxvi-ii.
[83] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p.29.
[84] Ibid., pp.1-5.
[85] Ibid., p.6.
[86] Ibid., pp.2,12-3.
[87] Ibid., pp.23-9.
[88] Ibid., p.13.
[89] Ibid., p.27.
[90] Ibid., p.30.
[91] Karl Marx, qtd. in Lauer, Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, p.102, note 12.
Essays 