This review comes right after my long reflection on Hegel's "Philosophy of History", and so you can consider this the sequel and conclusion to those earlier comments. There I responded to some of Hegel's critics who point to his dialectics as the cause of contemporary left-wing obsession with thinking in terms of the negatively rational. I said that Hegel was simply noticing that great awakenings in Thought throughout world civilizations in history involved some kind of synthesis between an idea and its antithesis. But Marx, on the other hand, was a dialectical machine!
Written when he was still a Young Hegelian, his "Critique of Hegel" is a work of immaturity, which is probably why it went unpublished during his lifetime. Yet, it contains some of his most famous and notorious thoughts, including the line "Religion is the opiate of the people."
When I say this is a work of immaturity, I mean two things. First, it's not fully baked. It's half-finished. Secondly, you can tell he was a hotheaded young man full of revolutionary thoughts with no intentions to actually fight any revolution. He had a "bad chest", you know. He was going to conduct warfare on the ancien régime (Marx loved to throw French phrases around) through academic armchair quarterbacking by using the philosophical techniques of his little Hegelian club. Only, as I said, Hegel was not so into dialectics as you'd think from reading Marx. In fact, Marx wanted to turn Hegel on his head (or rather, right-side up), but he didn't really fully understand Hegel's writings, and he certainly didn't get any personal explanation or insights from Hegel himself. By the time Marx got into the academic world, Hegel was already dead.
It was actually the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, among others, who influenced Marx and his dialectics. Feuerbach felt that Hegel had taken the "human" out of human history and philosophy. Hegel was all about the State as a reflection of the Absolute, and saw History as the process of Absolute Spirit coming to know itself. That pissed off Feuerbach, who felt Hegel's main interest as a philosopher should have been "Man", not some abstract Absolute. So Feuerbach rejected Hegel's Idealism in favor of a philosophy with a more concrete and practical subject--PEOPLE.
I do get where Feuerbach was coming from. If you read Hegel for yourself, it sure does seem like theology. And it is. My biggest critique of Hegel is that he comes at philosophy from a clear bias. He was a Christian, and he wanted to understand the mind of God. He wrote some of the most beautiful and poetic intellectual explanations of the Christian Trinity I've ever read. I can't say I understand the Trinity any better, but it was lovely reading. Feuerbach was not necessarily anti-Christian, but he did believe that religions were created by humans through their anxieties and desires, a concept which Freud and the psychoanalysts would examine most famously. Feuerbach wanted a less supernatural and more empirical exploration of human values and behavior, namely from an anthropology point of view.
Marx was in the same camp, but took things way further, so much so that he eventually turned on Feuerbach and spent two essays and an entire book criticizing him. Marx's contempt for religion in this early work is palpable, which is odd considering his very liberal and tolerant stance on religion in "The Jewish Question", which he wrote around the same time. Perhaps that's because, in that treatise, Marx was simply saying that a secular state need not presuppose a lack of any religious activity, while in this book, he is directly criticizing Hegel's tying the State to spirituality. Marx was against Prussia having a state religion, and though he believed the emancipation of the people required emancipation of the State from religion, he pointed to the United States government as separate from any Church, while most of its citizens continued to be highly religious. So I don't think he was being inconsistent in addressing two separate issues, but boy does he make it clear here that he is not as tolerant of religion as his other work may have suggested!
Religion is just another form of alienation, and should be abolished, according to Marx. And he sees Hegel as an elitist waxing philosophic about the God of a monarchy that abandoned and alienated the working class, whose plight Marx sums up in one rather disturbing line of dialectical poesy: "I am nothing, and I ought to be everything." The State is not some neutral reflection of the Spirit of the Age, but a vehicle for oppression of the working class. Marx makes fun of Hegel when Hegel says things like the Spirit does such-and-such "in order to return into itself" or "to exist for itself" or "to be aware of itself". Marx calls this talk "pantheistic mysticism". But Marx's own use of dialectics borders on religious fanaticism in its own right.
The book gets tiresome with phrases like, "criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion"; or, "it is not the poverty that has arisen naturally, but the artificially produced poverty"; or, "it is not the mass of men mechanically depressed by the gravity of society, but the mass of men arising from its acute dissolution..." You can tell he was trained to think in this way, but he does this even when he is not engaged in analytic reasoning, and his knee-jerk tendency to put even plain statements into opposing terms suggests autism and not philosophical argument. At this point in his career, Marx's dialectics aren't even triadic, meaning his statements lack the characteristic tension between "concept" and its "antithesis" to synthesize a NEW concept as a resolution. Rather, the reader is just bombarded with everything presented as "It's not really A. It's MINUS A!"
But perhaps his most egregious line for me is: "It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, conversely, their social being that determines their consciousness." For Marx, a person is merely a conglomerate of social relations, a material being produced and producing labor that can only be understood within the material conditions of economics and politics. When he says "social being", he is referring to a person's material existence, applying the form of reason without its object-context. It's the material world "translated into forms of thought" by a material brain, removing the Absolute and putting the human "god" of praxis in its place. He's trying to demystify thought, but his solution is just as mystifying.
Not to mention the fact that Marx's writing is even more confusing than Hegel ever could be. There are two distinct styles of Marx here:
First, there is his polemic, which introduces the main work and was written after the fact. I think when people leave reviews about this book, and say things like "short and accessible", this is the only part they read. It is short, and I would say it's more entertaining than accessible. Sometimes it was hard to know what Marx was on about. When he's really fired up, he likes to announce that he has a point to make, but then gets histrionic and dramatic in leading up to the point, rambling on with poetic turns of phrase and almost comically purple prose about the point about to made... And then never makes the point. Instead, he just works himself into a tizzy, painting the German government and aristocracy like mustachioed villains with the 1-dimensional depth and camp of a pulp adventure writer.
The second style of writing is his actual analytic critique of Hegel.
Marx intended to break down line-by-line an entire section of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right", which he does begin to do. He will quote Hegel, then repeat what Hegel says in his own words (which makes it worse), then dissect what Hegel says, and finally tell us why it's wrong. But I usually couldn't tell what arguments Marx was even making! And I tried and tried! At times it disintegrates into disjointed notes that he appends to the quotes from Hegel. When this happens, the digital version I read this on did not do a very good job delineating when Hegel was being quoted and when Marx was putting in his two cents, making whole swaths of pages almost unreadable unless you are analyzing each line over a year for your dissertation. As far as the quality of his arguments, most of the time he seemed to be nitpicking a word here, or the choice of predicate there. Perhaps some of Marx's analysis of Hegel's language is lost on me because it has more import in German. I don't know. But I do know that when something Marx said actually made sense or seemed like a good case, I realized that the same points were made in Feuerbach's earlier 1835 critique of Hegel!
In summary, we get a lot of passion here, but not a lot of substance.
So, if you are interested in understanding how the Hegelian method influenced the development of Communism, the socioeconomic situation of Germany that led to Marx's passions, the details of Marx's philosophical concepts, or just want to know what was Marx's beef with Hegel, I can't really recommend this very highly. I certainly wouldn't suggest this be the first book by Marx to start with! I would say this is primarily of interest to those who want a taste of Marx at his most raw, unfiltered, youthful, and naive.
But I can't say you'll be left with a very flattering picture. I got the sense that he was truly interested in making a splash in philosophy, but he hadn't yet really formulated his own ideas outside of his peer group. He was a novice at economics and politics at this point, and I think he was more excited about the possibility of wielding dialectics like a pair of scissors at the German constitution from his desk than really doing anything to save the forgotten man from the bourgeoisie.
I long have had sympathy for the "Spirit" of socialism (sorry, Karl) as a means to address the class divide. But as I've gotten older, I have seen that divide take on many more dimensions than just the thumb of the aristocracy, and I have seen the destruction caused in those countries who've tried the experiment. So I've had ambivalent feelings about Marx and have wanted to understand him better. This book didn't help all that much, and if anything, my particular edition left me feeling like something was really rotten in Marx's brain.
The version I read for this review is a very recent edition translated by Heinrich Conrad, who opens the book with a classic conundrum posited by Dostoevsky in his 1848 fantasy novel, "The Double":
"Imagine that you yourself are building a palace of human destiny for the final end of making all men happy and giving them peace and rest at last. And imagine also that for that purpose it is necessary and inevitable to torture to death one single human being... Your palace can be built only if he is disgraced, dishonored, and tortured. On his dishonored suffering, your palace can be built! Would you consent to be the architect on this condition? That is the question."
Do you think Hegel and Marx would answer this conundrum differently? Conrad thinks so. At first, I wasn't so sure, and if you read my review of Hegel's "Philosophy of History", you'll understand my mistake. But after reading Marx's "Critique", I'm convinced that the answer each philosopher would give to Dostoevsky's question would not only differ, but would illustrate perfectly the dangers of the Marxist dialectic.
Conrad provides a bit of a defense of Hegel at the end of the book, since Hegel never was able to respond to the criticisms of the Young Hegelians. In so doing, he quotes Hegel from his Encyclopedia: "The idea of bringing good into existence by means of the sacrifice of individuality is abandoned; for individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle... the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal."
Marx never said anything like that to my knowledge. His legacy is one of sacrificing individual rights for social equity. If Hegel had any ambivalence about the good that may have come from the fall of nations throughout history and all the death and destruction that came of the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in a harmonious State, I think that in the end he valued human life and human freedom above all else.
And I'll take Hegel's mysticism over Marx's materialism any day.
SCORE: 2 antitheses out of 5