“Once we have read what Hegel has to tell us, and found a way of understanding it, of grasping its positive content, we want to see what has been said against it, and to see how Hegel’s views have fared in the world. In other words, before making up our own mind and subjecting Hegel’s writings to our own criticism, we look for help from other people who have made a criticism of Hegel and most importantly, we want to see how his ideas developed as part of the real movement of human history itself, what elements proved to be enduring, which aspects led to confusion and internal contradiction, with whom his ideas found favour and who denounced him.”
“During Hegel’s lifetime, Hegel himself personally dominated the propagation of his doctrine through his lectures to university students. Although he was still subject to censorship up till his death, it is a fact that his views did not substantially threaten the status quo and the ‘benign dictatorship’ of Frederick Wilhelm III in fact drew considerable strength from Hegel’s prestige.
The ten years after Hegel’s death, from November 1831 till the death of Frederick Wilhelm in June 1840 and more specifically until December 1841, was the apogee of Hegelianism. Freed from the domination of the Master, Hegel’s students took his ideas out of the confines of the University and translated his philosophy into the language of political criticism”
“Feuerbach saw that the Absolute Idea, which Hegel saw as existing outside of and prior to Nature and human life, positing and manifesting itself first in Nature and then in human culture, was in fact nothing other than God under a new name. Just as Spinoza had given God the name of Nature, Hegel had given God the name of Idea. In the political and philosophical atmosphere of the time, this was a particularly spectacular claim.” “Feuerbach agreed with Hegel on the identity of thought and being, but whereas, Feuerbach said, Hegel had proved this only within thought, Feuerbach said that it was in the nature of sense-organs to reflect their object, and in the same way, it was the function of the brain to reflect the world in concepts. The identity of thinking and being had to be explained by biology, not philosophy.”
“Feuerbach is said to have invented a simple technique for reading Hegel: to interchange the subject and predicate in each sentence, and the young Karl Marx used this method to make a start on his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843.”
“Before moving to the others who made a break from Hegel, it must be mentioned that for a huge part of the philosophical world, Hegel’s critique of Kant never took place.”
“Despite the popularity of Hegel in Germany, it was Positivism which was the dominant philosophical trend in Europe, beginning with Auguste Comte in France and later John Stuart Mill in England. It would go way beyond the scope of this article to enter into an examination of the various currents of Positivism”
“All of Hegel’s philosophy can be read as a critique of Kantianism and, implicitly, Positivism. Hegel wants to include his philosophical predecessors within the unfolding of the Idea. However, Hegel did not dispose of them; the conditions of life which had given rise to these ideologies continue in existence: social production by means of private labour, a highly developed division of labour and in particular the division between mental and manual labour and the rise of natural science. From the standpoint of Positivism, the Hegelian philosophy is pure nonsense. The assertion that ‘Being is Nothing’, for example, is (for John Sanders Peirce¹ for example) sophistry which can only make apparent sense by skating over ambiguities in the meaning of terms.”
¹ Só um ianque idiota.
“Whereas Hegel agitated against the abolition of the property qualification for voting in Britain and ridiculed populist agitation for universal suffrage, what transpired is that universal adult suffrage has become the norm and the property qualification has been abolished in all developed capitalist countries.
Whereas Hegel promoted (propertied) citizen participation in social life through the most thorough-going mediation, what transpired is that newspapers, radio, television and so on have created a world in which citizens receive a mass of information through one-way channels, broadcasting to an audience of many millions.
Whereas Hegel promoted the development of science as a single integral body of knowledge in which the transition from each to the next is the most important thing, science has developed into a near infinite myriad of disciplines that do not even speak the same language.
The irrationality of this kind of science and this system of communication and decision-making was convincingly proved by Hegel, but once the organised working class entered the scene, bourgeois society was obliged to build irrationality into the political system (a different kind of system altogether emerges when we look at the organisation of the bourgeoisie in its companies).”
“The state could not be the expression of the will of all, but had to fashion the illusion that it was. On the other hand, the development of capital has proceeded apace and what is rational in the modern world is only the inhuman logic of capital.”
“Consequently, we find that the critique of Hegel took on the form of a criticism of rationality on one hand, and on the other, a critique which aimed to preserve that which was rational within Hegel philosophy while retaining the radical materialistic thrust of Feuerbach’s critique.”
“Up until the Expurgation of Hegelianism, thinking was not divided up into separate domains of Ethics, Epistemology, Ontology, Logic and so on, alongside the various social and natural sciences such as Politics, Economics, Physics or whatever. Rather, since the founding of these sciences in ancient Greece, they were seen as aspects of a whole, and all the great philosophers saw all these aspects as inseparable. For example, Spinoza entitled his major work Ethics, but the form of the work is that of a geometric theory and its content addressed as much to the problem of knowledge. The early political economists saw themselves as engaged in a study of ethical problems rather than as students of a branch of science called economics. Consequently, it is no surprise that Hegel’s works do not contain a separate treatise on Ethics, but rather, the concept of Sittlichkeit, or ‘Ethical Life’, and Good unfold themselves inextricably within a philosophical system alongside Truth, Syllogism, Reason, Cognition and so on.
Beginning particularly with John Stuart Mill, bourgeois science differentiated itself into an Ethics called Utilitarianism and a science called Economics. But the two are really opposite sides of one and the same conception, right up to today, when ethics has degenerated to become a specialised branch of mathematical decision-theory which in turn is applied in the development of the newest theories of economic science using information theory and venturing into the mathematics of complexity.”
“In the 1843 Critique, Marx is working with tools largely adopted from Feuerbach, but nevertheless making his own observations, quite distinct from what Feuerbach has had to say. And it is these aspects of the Critique that I want to highlight, taking for granted, for the moment, the criticism Marx makes of Hegel’s idealism.”
“Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common with one another; they neither need nor complement one another. The one does not carry in its womb the yearning, the need, the anticipation of the other.”
“…each extreme is its other extreme. Abstract spiritualism is abstract materialism; abstract materialism is the abstract spiritualism of matter.”
“In regard to the former, both North and South Poles are poles; their essence is identical. In the same way both female and male gender are of one species, one nature, i.e., human nature. North and South Poles are opposed determinations of one essence, the variation of one essence brought to its highest degree of development. They are the differentiated essence. They are what they are only as differentiated determinations; that is, each is this differentiated determination of the one same essence. (…) Truly real extremes would be Pole and non-Pole, human and non-human gender. Difference here is one of existence, whereas there difference is one of essence, i.e., the difference between two essences. in regard to the second, the chief characteristic lies in the fact that a concept (existence, etc.) is taken abstractly, and that it does not have significance as independent but rather as an abstraction from another, and only as this abstraction. Thus, for example, spirit is only the abstraction from matter. It is evident that precisely because this form is to be the content of the concept, its real essence is rather the abstract opposite, i.e., the object from which it abstracts taken in its abstraction – in this case, abstract materialism.”
“because only the extreme is true, every abstraction and one-sidedness takes itself to be the truth, whereby a principle appears to be only an abstraction from another instead of a totality in itself;
the decisiveness of actual opposites, their formation into extremes, which is nothing other than their self-knowledge as well as their inflammation to the decision to fight, is thought to be something which should be prevented if possible, in other words, something harmful;
their mediation is attempted. For no matter how firmly both extremes appear, in their existence, to be actual and to be extremes, it still lies only in the essence of the one to be an extreme, and it does not have for the other the meaning of true actuality.”
“Thus it was that it was Marx who first levelled against Hegel the charge of totalisation. In 1843, Marx saw the inherently reactionary import of Hegel’s drive to subsume all opposites under a single essence, that the mutual reconciliation society was incompatible with the emancipation of labour; that the contradiction between free, voluntary labour and capital (i.e. wage labour) is irreconcilable; that while the property-owners could reconcile their opposing interests, and the proletarians could achieve consensus, there could be no ultimate consensus between the exploiters and the exploited.”
“The proletariat is defined as the class of sellers of labour power, and such a conception is meaningless outside of a society in which the division of labour is based on the transformation of all labour into the form of commodities for purchase and sale.
Consequently, a true conception of capital requires the recognition of the working class as essentially alien to capital! It reaches its truth, its freedom, only by the abolition of the system of wage labour. Such a transformation of the proletariat can only be conceived as the shedding of the form of wage labour, since the content is not wage slavery, but free, voluntary association!”
“Such a conception is a complete break from Hegel, a negation of the negation of positivism in the sense that Hegel’s overcoming of the subject-object dualism is overcome again with the assertion of the independence of the agent of history, which is the exploited class of bourgeois society.”
Seclusão Anagógica 