Everyone’s Got a Musical Doppelganger

Rose, Hegel and ‘Politics in the Severe Style’

“In fine art, style, is indeed likewise still harsh at the start, but it is already softened more beautifully into severity. This severe style is that higher abstraction of beauty which clings to what is important and expresses and presents it in its chief outlines, but still despises charm and grace, grants domination to the topic alone, and above all does not devote much industry and elaboration to accessories”. (Hegel, 1835/1975)

“[...] the severe style still limits itself to reproducing what is present and available. In other words, while on one hand, in content it rests, in respect of ideas and presentation, on the given, e.g. on the present sacrosanct religious tradition, on the other hand, for the external form it allows complete liberty to the topic and not to its own invention”. (ibid)

“[...] it is as if nothing at all were granted to the spectator; it is the contents of substance which in its presentation severely and sharply repulses any subjective judgment”. (ibid)

Gillian Rose presents Hegel’s political theory in the ‘severe style’. (1981) In doing so she is drawing a category from Hegel’s aesthetics and applying it to his political writings – most prominent of which is the highly contested Philosophy of Right. (1821/2005) The severe style lays hold to the object, topic or work at hand without external and subjective comment or critique. As detailed in the quotations above, it presents what is ‘given’ and present but ‘sharply repulses any subjective judgment’. As such, the severe style is incomplete and consequently Hegel’s political works, if they are considered to be written in the severe style, are also incomplete. As Rose writes, the political problem “could not be resolved in the severe style”. (1981)

The Ethical Order in the Phenomenology of Spirit serves as an example here.(1807/1977) Section A ‘The Ethical Order’ presents an account of ancient Greek ethical life – a social ethic finely balanced between the spheres of the divine law and the human law, while section B ‘Ethical Action’ describes the collapse of Greek ethical life as the two spheres collide. The former can be regarded as being written in the ‘severe style’. It is a bare account of the substance of Greek ethical life, whereas the latter section casts judgment on this account and follows through the implications embedded within the first. The importance of the severe style is that Hegel is able to locate ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) – that is, reason as embodied within the practical norms and ongoing customs and conventions of a given society – within Greek culture. Once this manifest reason is pursued, however, the critique begins and when it does it is no longer politics in the severe style.

The question, then, is what value rests in the severe style which Rose places so much emphasis on. With the example cited above, the ‘severe style’ would seem to prepare a ground for critique while locating the particular Hegelian account of unfolding reason within the given political object. Of particular importance for Rose, however, is the manner in which we approach the political statements made by Hegel under the ‘severe style’. A prime example is taken from the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is real; And what is real is rational”. Read as a proposition it can be rendered as something like: “The Prussian State exists and therefore it is rational” and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right becomes a sort of justification of the Prussian monarchy of the mid-19th century. Following on from this, the active philosophy which characterised the Phenomenology of Spirit, where philosophy becomes the critical agent of “that lost sense of solid and substantial being”, is replaced by a static philosophy in the Philosophy of Right which sits idly in support of the state. However, for Rose, such statements are not to be taken this way. They assume “a grammatical subject and predicate joined by the copula ‘is’.” (1981) The grammatical subject is considered a “fixed bearer of variable accidents, the grammatical predicates, which yield the content of the proposition”. (1981) Consequently, “if the proposition is made tautologically true”, and the real is the rational and the rational is the real, “there is no point in our assent or dissent”. (1981) However, for Rose the Hegelian speculative proposition is “fundamentally opposed to the kind of formal identity which would still be affirmed by such a reversal of subject and predicate”. It is rather a grammatical state in which “the subject of the proposition is no longer fixed and abstract with external, contingent accidents, but initially, an empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences”. (1981) In short, Rose is declaring the instability of the grammatical subject and in doing so loosens and unfixes the tautological reading of “what is real is rational and what is rational is real”. “To read a proposition speculatively”, Rose writes, “means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate”. (1981) The difficulty facing Hegel was that although “he knew that his thought would be misunderstood if it were read as a series of ordinary propositions […] he also knew that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in propositional form”. This focus on grammar and propositional form becomes a political hermeneutic for Rose. The severe style of explicating the given state of affairs, and locating a possible unfolding rationality, is also, at the same time, an opening – even if it is not articulated. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Greek ethical life was described as given, before being torn asunder. According to ‘politics in the severe style’ the same operation can be undertaken following the Philosophy of Right. And today.

The essential question is whether Rose is rescuing Hegel from a fundamental, but prevalent, misreading or rescuing Hegel in spite of himself.

Notes:

Hegel (1835/1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Vol. I-II. TM Knox (trans.) Oxford: Clarendon Press
____ (1807/1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. AV Miller (trans.) OUP
____ (1821/2005) Philosophy of Right. SW Dyde (trans.) New York: Dover

Rose, G. (1981) Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone

Comments on the opening of “The German Ideology”

Two posts below have addressed the topic of religion in relation to the early writings of Marx and Engels. I’d like to make a brief return to this as the opening of The German Ideology is worth commenting on. The text presents a clear break from the Young Hegelians on the part of Marx and Engels and the cautious and considered approach to the Young Hegelians and religion that characterised Marx’s Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right gives way to a rather caustic attack. Marx and Engels declare the aim of the text to be the “uncloaking of these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves”. (1846, p. 29) These ‘sheep’ are the Young Hegelians who, according to Marx and Engels, carry an inflated sense of world-historic importance in their writings. This is, to some extent, residue from Hegel – these early post-Hegelian philosophers assumed their statements to be carrying the same weight that they perceived in Hegel. For Marx and Engels this only exposed the Young Hegelian’s obsession with the battle of ideas (with religion being the battlefield). They write: “the entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions”. (1846, p.35) In their attack on religious ideas the Young Hegelians still remain within the realm of ideas. They remain abstract and widely irrelevant. Marx and Engels continue: “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings”. (1846, p.36) There is little doubt that Marx held broad agreement with the specifics of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, yet for Marx it held increasingly less relevance. As long as the philosophical critiques of the Young Hegelians remained abstract, then they had little actual effect. Marx and Engels’ withering criticisms that open The German Ideology are not only an attempt to articulate their break from the Young Hegelians, but also form a springboard to present their own materialistic conception of history. It is through ‘production’ that Marx and Engels can give account of both angles of their attack on the Young Hegelians. It at once pushes religion to a side issue, while also allowing for a grounded materialist account of the human condition. In this the break with the Young Hegelians reveals itself to be nothing less than an attempt to re-orient our understanding of the human being:

“Men can be distinguished from animals by cosnciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life”. (1846, 37)

The human being is defined, and redefined, through material production. The German Ideology is unable to resist some of the enlightenment baggage of the individual – “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals”. (1846, p.37) While this is too large a debate to wade into here, I would emphasise that we are always already in social relations from which the individual cannot be easily or distincly prised or regarded as prior to. Yet, that said, it is the social relations of production that become the focal point of Marx and Engels’ position in The German Ideology. There is a lot that can be said about the social relations of production and The German Ideology is a key text for laying out Marx and Engels’ ‘philosophy’, but it’s too much to enter into in this post. It is, however, important to re-emphasise Marx and Engels’ critique of the Young Hegelians in this text which serves to sever their writings from the group, while also allowing Marx and Engels to approach the human being through a materialist conception. It is often said that Marx turns Hegel on his head, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that Marx turns the Young Hegelians on their heads. The following passage reflects this:

“In direct contract to German philosophy which descends from Heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to Heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process”. (1846, 42)

References

Marx & Engels, (1846/1998) The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books.

Marx, K. (1994) ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ in Selected Writings

Massey and the production of space – some responses

Mark’s notes on Lefebvre and Hegel here were revelatory for me. He ended by saying that there is much more to be said, and that we have to return to Marx and Engels for that. This morning I read the speech Engels made at Marx’s graveside, which skims the surface of this larger debate about moving the origin of the ‘production of space’ from the Hegelian absolute to the social spaces of work:

‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.’

Early on, Marx and Engels criticised Feurbach’s revisions for leaving his conception of man essentially a-social, a-historical and abstract. Again, Mark commented on this below. I want to hopefully open-up and extend this discussion of space by dropping some notes from my reading of Doreen Massey on here. Massey clearly came through the Marxist traditions, although her non-dogmatic, post-structuralist revisions are wide-ranging, without ever losing sight of the doing of practical politics. In her landmark work, For Space, Massey mentions Henri Lefebvre only once (2005: 17). She explains very simply how Lefebvre told us that space is thinly understood in both academic and popular discourses. Matthew Sparke, in his commentary on For Space (2007) explains how, for Massey:

‘Globalist visions of flat space, of a smooth, utterly deterritorialized global level playing field thereby frequently do service as the unexamined imaginative geography on which the player-managers of the free market seek to build their putatively non-hierarchical version of a “free world”‘.

Again, I want to return to Mark’s comments on Lefebvre and Hegel below: ‘There is a ring of the old debate between Newton and Leibniz in the priority given to empty space. The former advocated a mathematically independent absolute space… while the latter argued for a relational space dependent on the connection between objects…’ (Rainey, 2012).

Clearly the idea of space as an empty container to be filled and organised emerges from the enlightenment and has not yet left us. One only has to travel in a vehicle using (visual) GPS navigation to see how this ‘empty’ conceptualising of space has totally saturated our lives. I use ‘empty’ as both a criticism and a description of how the blank spaces around the routes in GPS maps illuminate the frontier-mentality of the technologies themselves. We might even return to the Master-Slave dialectic to argue that Self-consciousness is still very often stuck in Being-for-itself in relation to the other of globalization, and technologies such as GPS might help us to understand this via its more everyday example.

To respond to what I will massively understate here as ‘problems’, I think that it is necessary to explore Doreen Massey’s projects a little. Massey wants to move towards a concept of space in process, which is heterogeneous, uneven, characterised by ‘throwntogetherness’. She denies space as conceptually closed, space as representational, and wishes to replace these assumptions with a relational, fluid geography, which also refuses to turn geography into history in any glib manner.

Politically, she is against a ‘god’s eye view’ of space, and in this she is both feminist and a critic of the way the visual has been employed by western powers from the enlightenment up to the present day. She wants to re-conceptualise space as inter-related and multiple. Never finished, although always in the process of ‘being finished’. Essentially, what I might want to call ‘becoming-space’. Matthew Sparke describes how ‘Althusser turned the proper name “Marx” into politico-theoretical football’. Massey, he says, ‘does the same for “space”‘. Post-enlightenment conceptions of space, Sparke says, are ‘fundamentally aspatial. In other words, aspatial “space” becomes for Massey what the pre-theoretical, pre-Marxist “Marx” was for Althusser.’

Massey wants us to ‘…address the spatial counterpoint to an ethics of hospitality. A politics of outwardlookingness, from place beyond place.’ (2005: 192). She repeats this line later, asking us to ‘challenge the current exoneration of “the local” within a critical global politics, and begin to develop a local politics of place beyond place.’ (2007: 68)

So how does this work, away from her sometimes quite abstract thinking in For Space, in her much more pragmatic political writing? In an article for Soundings (2007) after the London bombings, she cites Derrida on ‘villes-franches’ – open cities, or refuge cities, where migrants may seek sanctuary. Massey says this is an inwardly positive ideology, but adds that we also need an externally-facing, positive ideology:

‘For London is not only multicultural. It is also – for instance – a heartland of the production, command and propagation of what we have come to call neoliberal globalisation. Indeed it was in London that many of its lineaments were first conceived. The City (capital C), and all the vast and intricate cultural and economic infrastructure that surrounds it, is crucial to neoliberalism. About 30 per cent of the daily global turnover of foreign exchange takes place in London; London has over 40 per cent of the global foreign equity market; 70 per cent of all eurobonds are traded in London…’ (2005: 65).

The global, political and historical context is crucial, but we can track her concerns back much further. In A Global Sense of Place (1994) Massey described contemporary postmodern life and then explained how it:

‘…emphasizes a new phase in what Marx once called “the annihilation of space by time”. The process is argued, or – more usually – asserted, to have gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage. It is a phenomenon which has been called “time-space compression”‘. (ibid).

This is David Harvey’s phrase, although she doesn’t name him. Massey and Harvey have had theoretical disagreements. David Harvey describes overcoming spatial barriers to accumulation with approaches to temporality. Massey then goes on to question the disruptedness of space-time compression as a new phenomenon and critiques some of those debates, by, again, I assume, David Harvey. ‘In other words’ she says, ‘and put simply, there is a lot more determining how we experience space than what “capital” gets up to’, particularly the way place is policed by men. Spaces are often gendered and scopic. So, perhaps in the way that Lefebvre criticised Hegelian conceptions of space, Massey attempts to move some way beyond both Marx and Harvey. She explains how increased global mobility is for some and not others, and in some directions, and not others. This has been essentially backed up by writers such as Zygmunt Bauman over the last ten years or so. As businessmen from Singapore move into the US, Pitcairn is a more isolated island because of the decline of ships as transportation:

‘In other words, and most broadly, time-space compression needs differentiating socially. This is not just a moral or political point about inequality, although that would be sufficient reason to mention it; it is also a conceptual point.’ (1994).

She then describes a striated global picture of movement, from satellites to a woman in Africa carrying water on foot, and:

‘…the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement.’ (ibid).

Again, she moves to describe migrant workers and media players, very opposite in terms of their use of ‘global movement’:

‘Or – a different case again- there are those who are simply on the receiving end of time-space compression. The pensioner in a bed-sit in any inner city in this country, eating British working-class-style fish and chips from a Chinese take-away, watching a US film on a Japanese television; and not daring to go out after dark. And anyway the public transport’s been cut.’ (ibid).

But Massey is also deeply critical of ‘taming space through timing’, as Matthew Sparke puts it. She gives an example of aborigine apologism, years later, but we may equally think of Blair in Ireland, and a hundred other examples. I think it’s also important to remember that Massey wrote For Space in 2005 and her Soundings essay on London in 2007, both just a little before the crash began proper:

‘Meanwhile, the 2005 UN Report on Human Development produces “the usual” statistics – the kind that are so bad it is difficult to know how to receive them. The world’s richest 500 people own more wealth than the poorest 416 million. And it is not just a problem of the super-rich: Europeans spend more on perfume each year than the $7billion needed to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean water. London is a crucial node in the production of an increasingly unequal world.’ (2007).

She explains how we should never remain ‘inside’, not even inside eurocentrism, and that we should always try to think through the inter-connnectedness of the global other:

‘They come because of poverty and because their livelihoods have disappeared in the maelstrom of neoliberal globalisation (and millions more are left behind). And it has to be at least a question as to whether London is a seat of some of the causes of these things.’ (ibid).

That she demands responsibility from London is exactly the political dimension of her theoretical work:

‘Most formulations of the relation between “local place” and globalisation imagine local places as products of globalisation (“the global production of the local”). It is a formulation that easily slides into a conceptualisation of the local as victim of globalisation. Here globalisation figures as some sort of external agent that arrives to wreak havoc on local places. And often indeed it is so. The resulting politics in consequence often resolves into strategies for “defending” local places against the global. Such strategies always tend to harbour a host of political ambiguities, but in the case of London (and of places like London – of which, to varying degrees, there are many) this simple story just cannot hold. For London is one of those places in which capitalist globalisation, with its deregulation, privatisation, “liberalisation”, is produced. Here we have also “the local production of the global”. (ibid: 66)

This, it seems to me, is also dialectical thinking. The focusing in and out on different scales, understanding of the contradictions of different containers of knowledge, the local, the global, etc: ‘…this global financial muscle is presented as a simple achievement. It is not reflected-upon in its intimate relation to imperialism and colonialism.’ (ibid). This has a long history which goes back to the docks and Navy in South and East London, for instance, to 18th century slave ships, the cotton trade, etc. But it still goes on: Massey says that in the ‘radical’ city of London ‘we have, we nurture, the production of the beast itself.’ (ibid: 67). She writes that:

‘The biggest growth in the urban population has been in the global South, and in the “planet of slums” that Mike Davis has documented with such power. Such places are precipitates of the selfsame processes that have helped London to ëreinvent itself” (London Plan, p13) since the decline of the 1970s and 1980s. Is this, then, another side of London as “the future of the world”? Does London also stand for this?’

Massey is essentially for a completely opened-out, truly ‘world’ city, which conceptualises itself completely beyond what Ulrich Beck and others have described describes as ‘methodological nationalism’. It strikes me that it may be possible to fuse what Mark Rainey wrote on the philosophical history of the production of space with my proposals in note form here.

Notes

Massey (1994) A Global Sense of Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Massey (2005) For Space. London: Sage

Massey (2007) ‘London inside-out’, in Soundings 32

Rainey (2012) ‘Hegelian Production: Notes on Lefebvre’s “Production of Space”‘ at http://theyounghegelians.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/hegelian-production-notes-on-lefebvres-production-of-space/

Sparke (2007) ‘Acknowledging Responsibility For Space’, an essay review of For Space by Doreen Massey http://faculty.washington.edu/sparke/massey.pdf

Hegelian Production: Notes on Lefebvre’s “Production of Space”

(Social) space is a (social) product

“To speak of ‘producing space’ sounds bizarre”, writes Henri Lefebvre, “so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it”. (1991, p.15) There is a ring of the old debate between Newton and Leibniz in the priority given to empty space. The former advocated a mathematically independent absolute space, (2010) while the latter argued for a relational space dependent on the connection between objects (1973) – and Lefebvre certainly mines the historic and “long development of the concept of space” in the opening sections of The Production of Space. (1991) Crucially, for Lefebvre, this critical history is an opportunity to pose the notion of “social space” in response to the simple idea of space as an “empty area” (1991, p.1) and the fragmentation of space into the opposed spheres of the mental (intelligible, mathematical, the space of the philosophers) and lived (sensory, practical).

Lefebvre’s key term “production” is understood through reference to both Hegel and Marx. While he is weighted towards Marx, it’s nonetheless worth exploring his use of Hegel. The following rough notes won’t make any direct reference to Hegel, but rather remain within Lefebvre’s text. Lefebvre’s account of Hegel is therefore taken as given – it’s his use of Hegel that’s of interest. His incorporation of Hegel is not uncritical and any account of Lefebvre’s use of Hegel needs to bear this in mind. Certain aspects are discarded while others are deployed.

In defining Hegelian production Lefebvre writes:

“In Hegelianism, ‘production’ has a cardinal role: first, the (absolute) Idea produces the world; next, nature produces the human being; and the human being in turn, by dint of struggle and labour, produces at once, history, knowledge and self-consciousness – and hence that Mind which reproduces the initial and ultimate Idea.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.68)

‘Production’, as described here, is not given a spatial understanding. This is rather a broad account of the philosophy of Hegel and ‘production’ is located in the action or type of movement undertaken by the absolute idea in its full, self-conscious realisation. There are hints of a notion of circulation within this account, as seen in the re-production of the absolute idea. While I suspect “Mind” (Geist) may have a more primary role in Hegel’s thought than Lefebvre’s above statement suggests, what remains important is identifying Lefebvre’s account of the productive movement within Hegel. For Lefebvre, it is triadic and hinges on the term “concrete universal”. (1991, p. 15) The “concrete universal” is constituted as a relation between the general, the particular and the singular – or the logical-epistemelogical, the descriptive and the sensory, respectively. What is significant is that the interrelation between these three notions, under the “concrete universal”, provide a means to escape the “straightjacket” (1991, p.39) of dualisms that pervade western thought. These particularly relate to space, which Lefebvre regards as being traditionally divided between ideal space as mental categories and real space as the lived space of social practice. (1991, p. 14) Philosophy has abandoned its own roots in the real space of the Greek polis and has instead perpetuated this dualism. However, universal notions, such as the concrete universal of Hegel, “seemingly belong to philosophy” but also “extend beyond philosophy”. (1991, p.14) In doing so, the concrete universal provides a means to produce a unified account of the fragmented notions of space. Lefebvre writes:

“the aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended separately [...] The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical -nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemelogical space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias”. (1991, pp. 11-12)

The triad of the particular, the general, and the singular within Hegel’s “concrete universal” are read as space that is perceived, conceived and lived. (1991, p. 39) These are interrelated rather than fragmented and correspond, in turn, to the wider concepts of spatial practice, representations of space and representational space. (1991, pp. 38-9)
Spatial practice is the space that is set-forth by a society. It is society as “revealed through the deciphering of its space”. (1991, p.38) Representations of space are designed and conceptualised space and representational space is “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols”. (1991, p.39)

However, this all said, Hegel still remains merely preliminary for Lefebvre. Lefebvre discards a directly Hegelian space as being a “fetishization of space in the service of the state”. (1991, p.21) According to Lefebvre, the Hegelian project propounds an end of history which he defines accordingly:

“The Hegelian end of history does not imply the disappearance of the product of historicity [...] What disappears is history, which is transformed from action to memory, from production to contemplation. As for time, dominated by repetition and circularity, overwhelmed by the establishment of an immobile space which is the locus of the environment of realized Reason, it loses all meaning” (1991, p. 21)

Important here is the identification of an “immobile space” that serves to reduce “production to contemplation”. Hegel’s space, according to Lefebvre is non-productive when Reason (read Geist) is realised. What remains important, for Lefebvre, is not to draw on a directly Hegelian space, but rather to utilise the apparatus of the “concrete universal” to reveal a unified theory of space. To realise Lefebvre’s maxim: “(Social) space is a (social) product” (1991, p.26) it is necessary to turn to Marx and Engels and their account of production. Generally speaking, the human being is defined according to production: “What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.” (Marx & Engels, 1998, p.37) More precisely it is the circulation of products that begin to shape social space, for Lefebvre. There is much more to be said here.

Notes:

Leibniz G. (1716/1973) ‘Correspondence with Clarke’ in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings. Morris M. & Parkinson G.H.R (trans.). Parkinson G.H.R (ed.) London: J M Dent.

Lefebvre, H. (1974/ 1991) The Production of Space, D Nicholson-Smith (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Marx & Engels, (1846/1998) The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books.

Newton I. (1687/ 2010) The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Baltimore: Eigal Meirovich.

Engels, religion, man

I just wanted to add a quick additional reference in response to Mark Rainey’s great post below, on Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ was written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and signed ‘Frederick Engels in Manchester’. It was written in 1843 and published in 1844. Marx met Engels in 1842, but this work can be thought of as a kind of default love letter between them, as their relationship developed. Engels described the eighteenth century and its revolutions as essentially dialectical, with republic-monarchy, materialism-spiritualism, and we can track the rise of romanticism in this. ‘Likewise’, Engels says, ‘…the economic revolution did not get beyond antithesis’, and ‘materialism did not attack the Christian contempt for and humiliation of Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute confronting Man.’ (1973 [1844]: 198).

That this point is up-fronted in Engels’ ‘Critique of Political Economy’ seems to underscore, for me, Mark’s notes below on how these questions of religion ‘ground the early Marx within the concerns of the Young Hegelians and perhaps explain, to some extent, why Marx needed to use the critique of religion as an entry point into his own thought.’

Mark ends by saying that what ‘remains interesting is that Marx utilises religious language to explain this thought within the text’, and so I wanted to add that Engels’ also describes the ‘artless’ Catholicism of the mercantile system, and Adam Smith as ‘the economic Luther’. There are other references to Christianity as this essay unfolds, and Marx expands on Engels’ description of Smith-as-Luther in his 1844 manuscripts (1973 [1844]: 128). More importantly though, we can maybe return to Hegel here to describe how philosophical ideas of the past are not rejected but preserved and changed as history develops, in ‘sublation’, or ‘aufheben’.

Notes

Engels in Marx, K. (1973 [1844]) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. London: Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. (1973 [1844]) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. London: Lawrence and Wishart

See also Rainey (2012) http://theyounghegelians.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/notes-on-religion-in-toward-a-critique-of-hegels-philosophy-of-right/

Notes on Religion in ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

The question of religion hung heavy over the Young Hegelians. [McLellan, 1969, p. 6] Once Hegel had passed away, questions over his relationship to Christianity remained – his avowed Lutheranism mingled with ambiguous suggestions that divine knowledge was actually human self-consciousness. (Slavoj Žižek takes the baton and runs with this latter point in The Monstrosity of Christ [2009]). The following comments are not an attempt to answer these questions, but they do provide a backdrop to Marx’s opening comments in Toward a Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: Introduction. [1994]

Feuerbach suggested a thought experiment: Suppose you were on a planet or comet and were presented with a couple paragraphs of Christian theology. What could be inferred? “It would infer only that there are thinking beings on earth; it would find in the determination of the earth inhabitants regarding their god only determinations of their own being”. [1966, p.10] For Feuerbach, God was a projection of man or in his words, “the essence and attributes of the subject would be derived from the essence and attributes of the object. [ibid] In view of this the aim of critical thought was to invert religion’s account of itself so “that which is object in theism is subject in speculative philosophy”. [ibid].

Marx is writing with this in mind. His analysis is similar, but also different and the differences are what are expressed in the opening of Toward a Critique. “Man makes religion”, writes Marx, but he also adds, “Man is the world of men, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because they are in an inverted world”. [1994, p.28] Religion itself is not the target, it is a symptom. The target is the material situation which creates the need for religion. The critique of religion, most prominently provided by Feuerbach, can only ever be an indirect critique. Marx writes, “The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion”. [ibid] From here Marx is able to stake his own claims on the task of philosophy and what should be the focus of critique: “the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. [1994, 10-11] The direct objects are laid out and it took an analysis of the critique of religion to do so. Marx’s Toward a Critique is a famous text for a number of reasons – often for the quotable statements it gives (it is here that Marx says religion is the opium of the people) – it is also in this text that Marx first identifies the proletariate as the heart of emancipation.

Nothing new has been said in these notes. But they do ground the early Marx within the concerns of the Young Hegelians and perhaps explain, to some extent, why Marx needed to use the critique of religion as an entry point into his own thought. What remains interesting is that Marx utilises religious language to explain this thought within the text.

Notes:

Feuerbach, L. (1966) Principles of the Philosophy of the Future Manfred Vogel (trans.) New York: Bobbs-Merrill.

Marx, K. (1994) ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ in Selected Writings

McLellan, D. (1969) The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx London:
Macmillan Press

Žižek, S. ‘A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity’ in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? London: MIT Press. (2009)

Kierkegaard and Hegel

Here is a link to Mark Rainey’s piece on Kierkegaard and Hegel:

http://edifyingdiscourse.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/from-kierkegaard-to-hegl/

Introduction

This site was created to discuss Hegel, but it is not limited to that topic. Naming this site ‘The Young Hegelians’ clearly also leads the topic on into Marx, Engels, and the Marxist traditions more widely. This site attempts to be forward-facing in its exploration of the history and theory of its subjects.