Monday, July 1, 2019
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Introductory Remarks: The Spirit of the Times
G.W.F. Hegel's most
important work is Phenomenology of Spirit
[Phänomenologie des Geistes], published
in 1807. The current title
only became the definitive title after it was used in posthumous editions of
Hegel’s works, starting in 1832. Hegel’s
actual title was System of Science: Part One, the Phenomenology of Sprit. Geist
(“spirit” or “mind”) is the central concept of the book; in fact, the whole work may be conceived as an
attempt to scientifically ascertain the nature of Geist. In his justifiably famous Preface to
the Phenomenology, Hegel wrote “the
way to Science is itself already Science,
and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness” (Preface, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford U. Press, 1977,
p. 56).
Although Hegel’s
writing style can be ponderous and theoretically knotted, nonetheless — among
philosophers — Hegel’s Phenomenology
is widely recognized to be one of those rare, watershed moments in the history
of philosophy. Readers new to Hegel
should realize that the Phenomenology
was written when Hegel was only thirty-six years old. More significantly, Hegel struggled to
complete the book hastily and under pressure, as Napoleon’s army swept across
Europe. In October 1806, just a few days
before his publisher’s deadline — and on the day before the Battle of Jena — Hegel
watched as Napoleon himself rode through the city:
I saw the Emperor —
this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see
such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,
reaches out over the world and masters it […] this extraordinary man, whom it
is impossible not to admire. (from Hegel’s letter to Niethammer, 13 Oct. 1806)
For Hegel, Napoleon
signified the birth of a new world.
Scholars have compared the philosophical significance of Kant’s
“Copernican Revolution” in philosophy to the French Revolution. If we take this comparison seriously, then —
in its significance for the history of philosophy — Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit might be
compared to Napoleon’s audacious consolidation and dissemination of the
democratic ideals of the French Revolution.
Along these lines, Hegel argues that Absolute Spirit (absoluter Geist) is disclosed in and
through the development of human freedom in world history.
Overview: the Nature of Geist
As Hegel wrote in his
Preface to the Philosophy of Right, a
philosophy is a product of its time, and it is in and through philosophy that
an age becomes accessible to reason. If
the philosopher attempts to transcend his/her time, this effort leads only to
the vague and ambiguous, “soft element” of imagination and ungrounded opinion.
For Hegel, the essence of Spirit/Mind is freedom. All thought is purposive — or goal-oriented —
and the purpose of Geist is to actualize its essential freedom. But there is opposition or alienation between
Spirit’s (free) essence and Spirit’s (unfree) existence in the world. The development of the Phenomenology — as
well as the development of world history (according to Hegel) — revolves around
the effort to overcome this alienation between the essence of Geist and
its existence. Hegel’s
Phenomenology involves a philosophy
of redemption: rational beings
transfigure their existence and actualize their freedom through retrospective
self-knowledge. Or, to give this
a further push in the direction of Christian theology, self-alienated
subjective spirit overcomes its alienation by dying to itself and being
reborn.
Moreover, freedom can only be actualized — that is, achieved and
understood — in a dialectical way. The
process of freedom’s development thus comes into view in and through the
relations between the individual life (subjective spirit) and the social order
(Sittlichkeit, interpersonal ethical life). Absolute Spirit realizes itself only in
and through the evolution of both subjective spirit and interpersonal ethical
life. That is, the totality actualizes
its potential and realizes its truth in the process of its own self-development. In brief, the whole encounters itself in the
form of an object, and comes to know itself in the process of knowing this
object:
The notion of Geist [...] is the lineal descendant of the Kantian Transcendental
Unity of Self-consciousness and of the Absolute Ego of Fichte and
Schelling. It also claims a collateral
source in the Aristotelian nous
which, in knowing the form of an object, thereby knows itself, and which, in
its highest phases, may be described as a pure thinking upon thinking. J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971) pp.
viif.
In sum, the
self-becoming of the whole is achieved insofar as it retroactively
re-determines its own content, and this content is nature, which is the
presupposition of human consciousness.
The totality returns to itself from the otherness of nature in and
through human subjectivity, insofar as the Absolute is both Substance
and Subject. Beginning with Geist at the level of
sense perception, Hegel traces the development of Spirit through the encounter
with paradox, the conflict between the individual and society, and all of the
typical confusions, subversions, doubts and reconciliations that are inherent
to the development of intellect. All of this indicates how Hegel’s Phenomenology is not only a science of consciousness, but also
a theory of reality, a theory of knowledge, and a philosophy of history.
Geist as Dialectical Development
Again, this development of Absolute Spirit as self-thinking thought is
not above or beyond the cosmos in some ideal realm: the Absolute
does not have a separate existence, in a “transcendental” realm of pure
Spirit. Instead of this, the absolute is
nothing but the essence actualizing
itself through the very process of its own development:
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, I have
exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate
opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing. “The path of this movement goes through every
form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Notion [Begriff] of science for its result."
(G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction, Science
of Logic Amherst, NY: Humanities
Books, 1969, p. 48)
The development of
Absolute Spirit has three aspects or phases:
1. As self-relation: Spirit has
within it the ideal totality; this is Subjective Spirit in its self-contained
freedom.
2. As reality: this is Objective
Spirit, which is Spirit realized in the form of the cosmic object or
universe. In the cosmos, freedom appears
in the mode of necessity.
3. As a union or dialectical synthesis of subject and object. This is
Absolute Spirit (cf. Phenomenology, §385).
The Absolute Spirit is both Substance and Subject, and its nature cannot
be defined abstractly, that is, apart from finite — and contingent — things and
relations:
While Hegel undoubtedly
thought that the sequence of thought-phases described in the Phenomenology — phases experienced by
humanity in the past and recapitulated by Hegel in his own thought-adventures
up to and including his own advance to the position of Science in about 1805 —
was a necessary sequence, still he did not think it the only possible necessary
sequence or pathway to Science, and certainly not the pathway to Science that
would be taken by men in the future, or that might have been taken in other
cultural and historical settings. For
Hegel makes plain [...] that he does not confuse the necessary with the unique,
that he does not identify a necessary sequence of phases with the only possible sequence that can be
taken. (J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Phenomenology
of Spirit, pp. vf.)
The truth disclosed by Hegel’s science of interpersonal Spirit is a
union (or identity) of the individual and the specific with the universal. But in this regard, it is
crucial to realize that, for Hegel, union or identity is always identity-in-difference. This inherent negativity is, for Hegel, the
spirit of all natural and intellectual life.
All identity is thus inherently “contradictory”, insofar as inner
negativity or inconsistency is the source of all dialectical development. Because both thoughts and things have
internal contradiction, what anything
“is” inherently involves what it is not:
Dialectic is, in fact,
a richer and more supple form of thought-advance than mathematical inference
[...]; dialectic always makes higher-order comments upon its various
thought-positions, stating relations that carry us far beyond their obvious
content. What is obvious, for example,
in Being is not its identity with Nothing, and what is obvious in
Sense-certainty is not its total lack of determinateness. (J.N. Findlay, Foreword, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. vf.)
A philosophical idea,
for example, does not stand alone; rather, an idea is meaningful only in the
full context of its historical development: apart from this context, the idea
cannot be evaluated or understood. In an
isomorphic way, an individual human life cannot be understood apart from its
evolutionary and environmental aspects, as well as the political, economic, and
social conditions of its existence. In sum,
both knowing and being are dialectical. To relate this Hegelian insight to
contemporary continental philosophy and psychoanalysis (both of which have been
strongly influenced by Hegel), the subject of the enunciated must be
distinguished from the subject of the enunciation, even though each of these
can only be analyzed in relation to the other.
Ontology involves
metaphysical inquiry into the nature of being and nonbeing, becoming and
changing phenomenal appearances. The Platonic
ideas — as forms of being — opened up both phenomena and empirical
generalizations for speculative, dialectical reason. With reference to Plato’s famous “Divided
Line” (Plato’s Republic, 509d-513e),
Hegel argues that reason — in
opposition to the understanding —
develops the dialectic of notions or concepts (Begriffe), and articulates the contradictory movement of notions into
each other, into that which they are not. Along these same lines, the Hegelian notion is
always already an ontological concept.
This explains why Hegel insists that phenomena must be brought to their
notion, otherwise the phenomena remain begrifflos,
"without notion". In other
words, apart from the notion, the ontological status of phenomena remains
unclarified. This indicates how the
Hegelian universal differs from an empiricist generalization. The Hegelian notion (Begriff) is not derived from common features of real, empirical
individuals. As opposed to this, for
Hegel the universal implies a totality of negative relations of difference, in
the form of a whole which realizes itself in and through the empirical.
The nature of Geist
is to be this totalizing movement that presupposes its purpose as its end. In other words, Subjective Spirit makes
itself what it becomes: a subject is that which freely chooses — in a
retroactive, revisionary way — what it always already was to be. At any point in this process of dialectical
development, unrealized potential from the past may be re-discovered and
actualized.
Hegel argues that not
only Spirit, but existence too, is this
totalizing, redemptive movement. The structure
of the totality is such that the whole is in each part. Each part of reality, and each term in the
system of thought, implicates all others.
And insofar as the definition — and existence — of any unity is
constituted only through relations of difference with all others, any one may
be viewed from the perspective of the other.
And when considered apart from the totality of its dialectical relations
of difference, any one aspect or term is void of significance and cannot exist.
A careful reading of
Hegel thus makes it clear that in Hegelian triadic “synthesis” opposites are
not homogenously blended in a way that effaces their difference. On the contrary, insofar as the universal
inherently involves negativity, it is clear that for Hegel “synthesis” involves the positing of difference as such. To put this in contemporary philosophical
terms, synthesis is inherently disjunctive.
And, as already indicated, this Hegelian conception of universality as
negative runs counter to empiricist accounts of knowing and existence. In order to understand the Hegelian notion or
concept (Begriff), the most difficult thing for those of us trained in
the Anglo-American approach to philosophy is to first forget about empirical
generalizations or the nominalist use of the term. For Hegel, the philosophical notion is
universal; it is not merely an empirical generalization.
As Hegel himself remarks, the word is the
murder of the thing, in that the very symbolic representation of a thing
mortifies it. Moreover, the universal
cannot be understood to be merely the neutral “container” of its species. The notion is not strictly distinguished from objects, since the notion is
constitutive of objects. The distinction
between an object and a concept (which represents, qualifies, or signifies that
object) can neither be rigorously maintained nor entirely dispensed with; the
distinction between a concept and an object is itself a conceptual distinction.
Moreover, the notion is not defined in isolation, but only through
relations of difference with others, and also in relation to phenomenal
objects. Hegel discusses both the
historically contingent as well as the universal notions (Begriffe). The universal
notions that are disclosed in empirical developments are ultimately shown to be
aspects of a network that has the character of an organic unity.
From the standpoint of
the understanding (Verstand), general
representations are merely determinations made by the understanding, which must
be conceived separately and which have no existence, since only individuals exist. The illusion of the understanding is its
presumption that all categories of reason are nothing more than a self-enclosed
frame of conceptual representations, and that to make them truly “alive”, you
have to add something. This defect in
the understanding is overcome by reason (Vernunft). In opposition to the understanding, reason
discloses concepts as truly universal, that is, as defined only in relation to
one another — in a negative way — in and through a totality of differential
relations. Reason discloses conceptualization itself as a
constituent of phenomenal objects.
Conceptualizing in this sense is something concrete, not abstract. The Hegelian notion or concept (Begriff) is thought itself, in its
totality of differential relations. In
this sense — and contra Aristotle — the inherent negativity of the notion is
the only “prime mover” of dialectical development.
What
does this mean? There is a structural tension between the universal and the
particular, such that each particular one is
a perspective on the whole. Any one
(when it is considered entirely according to itself) is an empty void (cf.
Plato’s Parmenides). What any particular is — its very existence —
is thus determined in an oppositional way, through relations of difference with
all others. Since each particular is
atypical, none of the particular “instantiations” of the universal notion ever
fully actualizes the meaning of the universal.
In such ways, Hegel takes into account the moment of sheer contingency
in nature, history, and thought. Because
of this contingency (cf. the Aristotelian dunamis,
or “potentiality”), no universal can completely and consistently “totalize” its
particulars. Along these lines, Hegelian
concrete universality does not reduce the universal to the particular. On the contrary — as several recent commentaries on Hegel have shown — concrete
universality refers us to the excessive moment of inconsistency/negativity at
the heart of the universal. There
is a moment of antagonism or internal inconsistency at the heart of any
unity. Again, the one as such is
internally inconsistent, and this inherent negativity is the primum movens of dialectical development:
In order, then, that in this complete void, which is even called the holy of holies, there may yet be
something, we must fill it up with reveries, appearances, produced by consciousness itself. (Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 88f.)
In Hegelian dialectics — as in
Plato’s Parmenides — the space of the
(inconsistent) totality is the space between the abstract whole and the
particular details that elude its grasp.
To summarize, sensuous perception is particular
knowledge, while the introduction of external determinations is understanding (Verstand). Universal knowledge, however, is reason (Vernunft). The true is concrete, and philosophy has its
being in that universality which encloses the particular within it, i.e. in the
universality of the notion (Begriff). The fully concrete universality is the Idea (die Idee), defined in a negative way in
and through the totality of differential relations. Hegel’s Phenomenology
traces the development of intellect from the abstract universality of the
understanding (Verstand), to the
notion, which includes reason (Vernunft)
as an aspect of the universal. The
content of reason is developed toward the full, concrete universality of the
Idea, through which the notion is seen to be a moment of the absolute Geist.
This absolute Spirit is then shown to a self-developing, self-relating
totality of differential relations.
Reason is Spirit when
its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is
conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. […]
But essence that is in and for itself, and which at the same time
actual as consciousness and aware of itself, this is Spirit. (Phenomenology of Spirit § 438, p.
263)
Conclusion: Reason
in History
Hegel
coined the term Zeitgeist, “the spirit of the times”, and our postmodern Zeitgeist involves cynicism
regarding progress. We are relativists
who believe that everything about thinking is historically contingent, in other words, accidental and relative to its
time. But Hegel recognized that
relativism too is historically contingent: it is a phase through which thinking
passes now and again. Plato, Kant, and
(in his own way) Hegel, were all struggling against the relativism that was
fashionable in their times. Hegel describes
how ideals function in human activity.
Ideals are cultural phenomena that develop historically; philosophers
build theories, testing and refuting ideals in the dialectical struggle to
attain the truth. A moral principle, for
example, has its significance and its application in relation to other
principles: considered entirely according to itself, apart from its context, it
would be empty. As a guide for decision
and action, a rule becomes determinate insofar as it is embedded in a
particular situation and defined in relation to other rule. Moreover, the nexus of rules itself implies
“meta-rules” which indicate how and when to apply a rule.
This indicates how
Hegel’s antidote to relativism is itself thoroughly historical.
There is a kind of
universality that is negative; the universal is not an ideal in the sense of some
“positive” content that is always implicit to any system of thought. On the contrary: the universal is a kind of opposition
or antagonism around which ever-changing, thoroughly contingent, historical
constellations of thought circle and revolve.
Hegelian dialectics should thus be conceived as a process without a
Cartesian “thinking substance”, insofar as the dialectic always revolves around
a negative differential:
if Hegel’s system is
rightly described as one of absolute idealism or spiritualism, it is also
rightly described as one of dialectical materialism: it is in fact the true
dialectical materialism of which the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels
may be said to be an incompetent, amateur travesty. (J.N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute. London: George
Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1970, p. 132).
Again, Hegel associates
this internal contradiction or “abstract negativity” with freedom, and asserts
it to be the only first mover of the dialectical development of thought and
existence. The reconciliation of the
universal and the individual is not in some “higher” synthesis that mediates
the thesis and the antithesis. Instead,
dialectical analysis reveals that what the universal and the individual share
is the very split or ontological difference that runs through both of
them.
According
to the hackneyed interpretation of Hegelian dialectics that still predominates
in some circles, Hegel presumed to overcome all differences in a system of
complete rational synthesis, or “Absolute Knowledge”. There is, in Hegel, a tension between
rationalism as opposed to conflict and contradiction. But the crucial point is that Hegel locates
this very tension within reason itself.
So when reason struggles to overcome contradiction and antagonism, it is
fighting against itself, against a deep and ineradicable split that is inherent
to rationality. There is a moment of
unreason that is constitutive of reason, and this is why when reason fights its
“opposite” it is struggling against itself.
Reason for Hegel essentially involves the excess of madness (cf. the
famous “night of the world” passage from the Jenaer Realphilosophie
manuscripts).
In
Hegel’s time, Kant had already demonstrated that being is not a predicate; that
is, that existence cannot be reduced to the conceptual properties of
entities. Kant recognized the futility
of any attempt to completely define what it is that any concept
signifies. Kant bequeathed to his German
Idealist followers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) a notion of subjectivity as a
dialectical split or emptiness. But whereas
Kant’s approach to freedom implied that subjectivity involves immediate access
to subjectivity as thing-in-itself, Hegel’s approach to subjectivity never
implies this movement from the phenomenal to the noumenal. Instead, Hegelian dialectic grapples with the
problem of how — within being — phenomena, or appearances, ever arise as
such. Kant emphasizes the ontological
difference between phenomena (things for us) and noumena (things in themselves).
Hegel, however, explicitly denies the existence of noumena, and re-introduces
the difference throughout both phenomenal existence and even thought itself. If we only have access to appearances, how
could the term “appearance” as such have meaning, since there is nothing that
is not an appearance? This is Hegel’s
problematic, and he highlights the moment of fundamental negativity that
prevents any fully-realized dialectical synthesis.
But although Hegel explicitly denies that there is
any noumenal reality outside of or behind phenomenal appearances, this in no
way implies that the concept/notion “contains” all reality inside itself. Instead of reducing all of existence to
thought (or all of thought to existence), Hegel metastasizes the very difference
between thought and existence throughout both of them. The Hegelian “negation of the negation” thus does
not involve any return to positive identity.
Sublation (Aufhebung) — as the
negation of negation — results in an affirmation that is different from the
affirmation that was originally negated.
The
Hegelian dialectical process never culminates in any full synthesis that
encompasses and neutralizes all difference. Instead, Hegel makes thematic a fundamental
negativity that prevents any complete dialectical synthesis by showing that any
unification or synthesis is disrupted from within by an inconsistency/differential
that proves to be essential to the very concept in question. Subject and object are inherently mediated,
so that any “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always already
reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Hegelian dialectics does not attempt to
resolve all antagonism and efface all difference. On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that
dialectic is the very shifting movement between opposed perspectives. The famous (or infamous) Hegelian Absolute
Knowledge thus involves the insight that that there
is no neutral “perspective of all perspectives” outside of or beyond the
subject’s position of enunciation.
In sum, the self-becoming of the whole is achieved insofar as
subjective Spirit retroactively re-creates — in relation to evolving social
orders — its own potentiality. In his
emphasis on the abstract negativity of freedom, as well as the retroactive
moment inherent to dialectical development, Hegel effectively reinvents the
Aristotelian progress from potentiality to actuality. As several recent treatments of Hegelian
dialectic have shown, Hegel reintroduces the openness or potentiality of the present
into the already-completed actuality of the past. Negativity is not
reduced to a passing moment in the self-mediating process of dialectical
synthesis. Hegel’s Phenomenology preserves the difference, and posits the difference
as such, and this negativity attests to the freedom of the subject. In such ways, philosophical truth arises as a
dialectically-articulated scientific system.
Philosophical dialectic exposes the inherent, structural moment of
negativity that drives sensuous knowledge towards science. Philosophy embodies this constitutive
negativity insofar as freedom drives the dialectical process of development.
Friedrich Engels
The
state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no
less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
Friedrich
Engels, Preface to Marx’ The Civil War in France
Friedrich
Engels was born into a privileged family, but fought all his life for the
poor. The eldest son of a prosperous
textile manufacturer, young Friedrich both trained on the job at Ermen and
Engels, the company of which his father was a co-owner, and excelled at his
studies—from an early age he had an extraordinary proficiency in
languages. In a sense, this opposition
between intellectual and businessman was to define Friedrich Engels’ entire
life: he was to become a political-economic theorist, a prolific writer, and a
revolutionary, but he also worked dutifully at a job he detested for decades,
primarily in order to provide financial support to his friend and collaborator
Karl Marx. Over the course of his life
Engels wrote several influential and theoretically substantial books, as well
as hundreds of pamphlets, reviews, and articles; in fact, he actually wrote
many of the articles purportedly written by Marx, so that upon publication,
Marx would have the royalties. Engels
eventually co-authored several books with Marx, edited Marx’ work, and
translated some of Marx’ writing into English.
But Engels was also a brilliant organizer, publicist, and man of
action. Unlike Marx, Engels took up arms
and put his life on the line, fighting alongside his comrades in several
pitched battles against the forces of oppression and autocracy.
Friedrich
Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, near Düsseldorf, in the Rhine
province of Prussia. Just five years
prior to his birth, Napoleon’s defeat had led to the formation of reactionary
tyrannies throughout central Europe.
However, when Engels was only seventeen, while working as an apprentice
to his father’s export agent in the seaport city of Bremen, he was already
publishing writings which showed that he was fully aware of the new
revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe. In
1839 young Friedrich published the anonymous Briefe aus dem
Wuppertal [Letters from Wuppertal], a scathing exposé of
the backwardness, hypocrisy, and prejudice of his home region. Significantly, even this piece of juvenilia
involves analysis of class antagonism: Engels painted a vivid portrait of
exploitation, and the physical and mental degradation of the workers in the
coal mines, tanneries, and textile mills.
Letters from Wuppertal documents the destructive effects of
industrialization in Engels’ home district, and draws attention to the function
of religion in diverting the local population away from realizing the rapid
degeneration of their society and environment.
By the time he left Bremen, although he was only twenty years old,
Friedrich Engels had already anonymously published thirty-seven short texts,
including articles, reviews, translations, and poems. Many of his early writings have an atheistic,
revolutionary-political strain that the stolid Engels clan would have found
disconcerting, to say the least.
Engels
served his obligatory year with the Prussian army in 1841-42. Because he was stationed in Berlin, he was
able to attend lectures at Berlin University, including the inaugural lecture
series given by the conservative German Idealist philosopher Friedrich von
Schelling. At Berlin University, Engels
further developed his proficiency in languages and also threw himself into the
study of philosophy and political theory.
Significantly, he was not overly impressed by the elderly Schelling’s
lectures, which consisted largely of diatribes against Schelling’s deceased
rival, G. W. F. Hegel. Engels, always a
voracious reader, immersed himself in the study of Hegel, particularly Hegel’s
philosophy of history. He soon began to
conceive human history as developing through revolutionary struggle, and the
social antagonism between the oppressors and the oppressed. Engels’ classmates in Berlin included various
members of the leftist group known as the Young Hegelians, and after becoming
associated with these radical followers of Hegel, he turned much more active
and audacious as a journalist. Engels
was soon to publish (under the pen name Oswald) several widely-read and
influential critiques of Schelling’s philosophy.
Here
again we encounter the split or antagonism that defined Engels’ existence:
while doing his duty as a Prussian citizen and serving in the army, he studied
philosophy and wrote passionate, leftist critiques of the most acclaimed living
philosopher in Christian-monarchic Prussia.
Throughout his life Engels paid just enough attention to his
responsibilities as a member of the middle class to secure a steady income, but
covertly he was doing everything in his power to promote the interests of the
radical left and the working class, and thus to undermine the very bourgeoisie
of which he was—at least nominally—a member.
In
1842 Engels moved to Manchester, England, at the centre of the British
Industrial Revolution. He worked as an
accountant in the English branch of Ermen and Engels, and studied political
economy in his spare time. Engels was
outraged by the misery and poverty of the factory workers in the squalid slums
of Manchester; but because he had arrived shortly after the Chartist general
strike of 1842, he grasped immediately the revolutionary potential of a unified
and educated working class. By this
time, Engels had already met the communists Moses Hess and Karl Marx, editors
of the Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels contributed several studies of the economic conditions from which
class antagonism arises, and became one of the correspondents in England for
the Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels’ writings from this period are remarkable in that they combine
Hegelian dialectics with atheistic socialism in order to forge a perspective
that was universal but purely human.
Having observed firsthand the methods of factory production, the
struggles of labourers, and the results of class antagonism, Engels’ astute
articles from England drew the attention of the relatively detached and
idealistic socialists in Germany to the cost in real human suffering of the
so-called “free-market” system. Engels’
unique approach conjoined political philosophy and social science, and this
orientation decisively influenced later critical analyses of political economy,
such as those of his friend and—after 1844, collaborator—Karl Marx. Engels’ essay “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der
National-Ökonomie” [Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy] was
published by Marx in 1844 in the Deutsch-französische Jarbücher. This article analyses capitalist economic
theories, including those of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John
Ramsay McCulloch, and James Mill. Engels
argues that this body of so-called “theory” is in fact nothing more than a
pseudoscientific justification of the exploitative practices of
capitalists. In Engels’ view, any
approach to human relationships that emphasizes competition over cooperation is
not only mistaken—insofar as it ignores the fundamentally
interrelational dimension of human nature and society—but also immoral:
In
other words, because private property isolates everyone in his own crude
solitariness, and because, nevertheless, everyone has the same interest as his
neighbour, one landowner stands antagonistically confronted by another, one
capitalist by another, one worker by another.
In this discord of identical interests resulting precisely from this
identity is consummated the immorality of mankind’s condition hitherto; and
this consummation is competition.
(“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, Marx/Engels, Collected
Works, London 1975, vol. 3, p. 418)
Despite
Engels’ later deferential attitude toward Marx, there is no doubt that early on
in the relationship Engels’ critique of political economy impressed Marx
deeply, and was instrumental in shaping Marx’s own views. Engels’ observations and research led to the
publication in 1845 of what is perhaps his masterpiece, Die Lage der
arbeitenden Klasse in England [The Condition of
the Working Class in England]. Here
is how Engels begins:
Working
men!
To
you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German countrymen
a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your
hopes and prospects. I have lived long
enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to
their knowledge my most serious attention, I have studied the various official
and nonofficial documents as far as I was able to get hold of them—I have not
been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge
of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your
everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness
your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. (Marx/Engels, Collected Works,
London 1975, vol. 4, p. 296)
The Condition of the Working Class in England documents the brutality of the capitalist system:
competition between factory owners induces them to pay their workers minimal
wages, while squeezing out as much labour as possible. These circumstances put the workers in
competition against one another for jobs, and create a pool of unemployed
workers. The desperate situation of the
unemployed induces them to work for lower wages and under worse conditions than
anyone else, and this holds down wages, prevents the improvement of working conditions,
and hinders the organisation and empowerment of the proletariat. Obviously a workers’ strike is futile if the
unemployed are ready to step immediately into the vacated positions and work
under poor conditions for low wages.
Engels described the book in a letter to Marx on 19 November 1844:
I
shall be presenting the English with a fine bill of indictment; I accuse the
English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes
on a massive scale, and I am writing an English preface which I shall have
printed separately and sent to English party leaders, men of letters and
members of Parliament. That’ll give
those fellows something to remember me by.
It need hardly be said that my blows [...] are meant for [...] the
German bourgeoisie, to whom I make it plain enough that they are as bad as
their English counterparts.
(Marx/Engels, Collected Works, London 1975, vol. 38, pp.
9-11)
This
influential book not only gives accurate and sympathetic descriptions of the
appalling conditions under which the factory workers lived, worked and
died. In addition, it also indicates how
these conditions might be changed; in short, the book contains a social history
of England, an investigation of the factory system, and a political-economic
critique of capitalism. Writing near the
end of his life, Engels referred to his time in Manchester as follows:
While
I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic
facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing
of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force;
that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class
antagonisms; that these class antagonisms [...] are in their turn the basis of
the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all
political history. (Marx/Engels,
Selected
Works, London 1968, p. 436)
In 1844
Engels visited Marx in Paris, and this was the beginning of their lifelong
collaboration. Engels was to remain on
good terms with Marx even though Marx censured, at one time or another,
virtually every other significant communist or socialist thinker. Marx and Engels co-authored Die Heilige Familie
oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten [The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism:
Against Bruno Bauer and Company]. The Foreword, written by Engels, begins: “Real
humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which
substitutes ‘self-consciousness’
or the ‘spirit’
for the real individual man [...]”. Marx and Engels argued that philosophers such as Edgar
and Bruno Bauer were poor socialists because they were too mystical and
idealistic; they neglected real empirical observations and also disengaged from
political struggle. The Holy Family reveals
the dangers of rejecting practical activity and preoccupying oneself with
speculative, anti-revolutionary theories of gradual philosophical
enlightenment. Against this detached and
utopian “pure” socialism, Engels and Marx showed that true understanding is not
based simply on abstract concepts, but also on empirical observations of the
material conditions of existence, as well as a comprehensive grasp of economic
interrelations and social antagonism.
In
1846 they wrote Die deutsche Ideologie [The
German Ideology], in which they argue that the approach of such German
socialist philosophers as Ludwig
Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner was too conceptual and too
speculative. Engels’ and Marx’
materialist version of Hegelian
dialectics treated capital not as a personal power but as a collective, social
power:
The ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society,
is at the same time its ruling intellectual
force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal,
has control at the same time over the means of mental production. (The German Ideology,
London 1965, pp.37f.)
In
early 1846 Engels and Marx set up the Communist Correspondence Committee in
Brussels. Their plan was to organize and
to unify socialist leaders and politically aware workers in different European
countries. Influenced by this plan,
English socialists convened in London in June of 1847. This congress reformed an already existing
organization, the “League of the Just”, and renamed it the “Communist
League”. The new organization also
adopted a motto suggested by Engels and Marx: “Proletarians of all countries,
unite!” In 1848, Engels settled permanently in England, in
order to work in the textile factory and provide financial support to
Marx. In February 1848, Engels and Marx
published a programmatic statement, written in German, for the international
Communist League. Engels wrote the first
two drafts, and then Marx provided most of the finishing touches. In its final, published form this slim
pamphlet was titled by Engels Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei [The
Manifesto of the Communist Party] or, as it is more commonly known today, The
Communist Manifesto. The most widely
read political treatise of all time, this concise masterpiece has proved to be
even more influential in human history than its predecessors, the American Declaration
of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen (1789). The Communist
Manifesto contains a precise and trenchant critique of the global effects
of industrial capitalism, especially the way that human relations are redefined
in terms of market relations, and persons themselves come to be viewed as
commercially exchanged commodities.
These descriptions of how social relations have been dehumanized
by developments in systems of production are just as relevant today as when
Engels and Marx first wrote them:
The
bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and
looked up to with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage-laborers. The
bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced
the family relation to a mere money relation.
(The Communist Manifesto, p. 5)
Most importantly, Engels and Marx interpreted
historical developments in terms of dialectical materialism, and showed that
the key to understanding political events is insight into the conflict of
economic interests; thus the allegedly apolitical character of the economic
sphere is an illusion. This means that
the primary locus in the struggle for human emancipation is not the realm of
politics, but relations within the system of production. Far from indicating a naive economism, this
is an insight that remains valid today.
It was further elaborated in the early twentieth century by Max
Horkheimer and other theorists of the Frankfurt School of Western Marxism, and
more recently by the contemporary Western Marxists Fredric Jameson, Alain
Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. As Zizek puts
it, the economy functions as a formal structuring principle; it is a global,
generative matrix (something like a Kantian transcendental condition of
possibility), and is the secret point of reference of political struggles.
During the period of their closest collaboration
(1844-1848), the writings and the political interventions of Engels and Marx
were unique, even when compared to the works of other socialists. While other forms of socialism shared the
belief that private ownership of the means of production must be replaced by
cooperative management, Engels and Marx went far beyond this. In the first place, they revealed the extent
to which all recorded history has been the history of class struggles, and
disclosed the profound antagonism between the working class and the
bourgeoisie. Their aim was to transform
socialism from a utopian fantasy into a reality, and they tried to teach other
socialist intellectuals that the working classes need not be feared, but only
educated, united, and guided. More than
any other revolutionary intellectuals of their time, Marx and Engels educated
and inspired the working classes, and turned suffering, exploited labourers
into a unified force to be reckoned with.
They provided hope to workers and socialist intellectuals alike, by revealing
the extent to which capitalism undermines itself, due to an inherent limitation
or self-contradiction.
The claim that capitalism undermines itself is not an
indication of economic determinism; rather, it involves the dialectical insight
that the inner limitation and weakness of capitalism is the obverse of
capitalism’s strength. Put simply,
capitalism negates itself insofar as the pure focus on ever-increasing profits
turns out to be unprofitable. This means
that the inherent self-negation of capitalism is irresolvable, because capitalist
circulation cannot endlessly reproduce itself on its own. Insofar as the development of the productive
forces of capitalism deprive the majority (the workers) of property and
concentrate more and more property in the hands of an ever-shrinking group of
capitalists, capitalism furthers one of the goals of socialism, namely the
abolishment of private property. And the
more the capitalist squeezes surplus value out of the workers, the more he will
have to provide means of subsistence for his workers. As Slavoj Zizek points out, this inner
contradiction of capitalism is manifested in the phenomenon of the charitable
capitalist: in order to sustain the cycle of expanded production, capitalism
depends on an extra-economic charity.
Today, in light of the looming ecological catastrophe
and the dismantling of the welfare state, such basic insights of Engels and Marx remain
vitally relevant. And insofar as post-Fordist
capitalism excludes and disenfranchises more and more workers around the globe,
the spectre of communism continues to haunt the world.
Friedrich
Engels died of throat cancer in London on 5 August 1895. When he heard the news, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
wrote: “After his friend Karl Marx, who died in 1883, Engels was the finest
scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world.”
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