The Spectre Still Haunting

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What did Marx take from Hegel?

In answer, marxists generally trot out the line that Marx took the "rational kernel", and/or that he "turned Hegel on his head, or rather his feet".

Both are more slogans than answers, and when you press for more detail, the former gets expanded into something like "Hegel was an idealist but he had some central insights which were materialist, and Marx took these", or sometimes "Hegel's method was materialist but mystified by his ideological idealism, and Marx extracted the method". As to what these insights were or this method was, that remains vague - as does the exact nature of this "materialism".

As for the latter line, incompatible with the first, it suggests that Hegelianism is simply a coded form of Marxism, and Marx found the cypher book.

Marx was not a philosopher, and neither was Hegel. Hegel was a follower of Hermes Trismegistus - he was a hermetic mystic. Numerology and kabalism, freemasons and the illuminati, ancient symbols and word magic, animism, mystery-as-revelation and universe-as-god-approaching-self-awareness - these are the furniture of Hegel's world.

To try to read Hegel as a philosophy is like trying to read Hobbes as a romantic comedy. The result can only be gibberish and incomprehension - which is of course precisely the result of most readings of Hegel.

On the questions of what Marx took from Hegel, I suggest there are three broad kinds of things one writer can take from another:

1) Form - style, a way of writing, a choice of words and preferred grammatical forms, aphorism or prolixity, the mode of expression.

2) Content - the ideas expressed, irrespective of the words used to express them. Of course, the habit of using different words for the same idea and the same words for different ideas is a feature of form that Marx and Hegel share.

3) Values - attitudes, emotions, associations and connotations. Not completely distinct from content, but often useful to separate.

I think what Marx took from Hegel was mostly his values - with some of the content which was bound up with them.

Their attitude towards science, for instance. On the one hand, the hermetic, proto-scientific view that the universe runs on rules that can with difficulty be discovered, and through knowledge of these rules controlled. And on the other hand the equally hermetic, anti-scientific view that treating animate matter as not qualitively different from inanimate matter, is dehumanising - even evil.

Marx wasn't an animist, but he did view human life a special and valuable - for ethical, not doctrinal reasons. Plus of course, Marx was an atheist - at least to the extent of not believing in a personal creator god who answered prayers.

Their attitude towards technology and industrialisation, as on the one hand oppressive and brutalising, and on the other indicative that humanity (and for Hegel the universe) had reached an advanced stage. The next stage would incorporate and "tame" technology, putting it to work for man, instead of the other way around.

This notion that humanity moves in discrete stages towards a great predefined goal is very Hegelian, though for Marx what's inevitable is the movement in stages and the attainment of the goal, not the nature of the stages, nor their number or any necessary timetable.

Hegel of course thought that the progress of human society, human knowledge and the universe itself had already reached its end point in justice and self-awareness - embodied in his very own modest writings. For Marx, the endpoint of society at least is yet to come - but not far away.

Engels was much more a Hegelian than Marx, taking more of the content and writing style. Unline Hegel, Engels wasn't horrified by science and technology - rather, he tried to incorporate scientific discoveries into his hegelianism. A different way of taming the technical side of capitalism.

Lenin studied Hegel intensively and extensively, though largely in secret - a secrecy which may suggest a hermetic attitude to study. Lenin's notebooks and Emperiocriticism offer mutually incompatible but decidedly backward looking views of epistemology and ontology. Indeed, his ideas about science, when not simply wrong, are anachronistic precisely to the lifetime of Hegel.

Trotsky was much less hegelian. He still believed in the dialectic, and thought it was almost impossible to be a thinker or activist at all if one didn't. But the occult signs, terror of science, inevitibilism, confusion about referential language and sense experience - these are gone.

As for modern marxists, they range from sages pouring over revered texts seeking the perfect wisdom of the authors, to streetwise activists concerned with human rights and sticking it to The Man, caring nothing for theory.

It's an open question as to how much hermetic mysticism has been purged from marxism by time, and a separate question as to how much however much of it remains is a serious problem for marxism today.

We can hope that Marx is now almost free of the ghost of Hegel. I think there's a lot more still inside the hermetic box.

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