ON KARL MARX ERNST BLOCH AN AZIMUTH BOOK HERDER AND HERDER Azimuth defines direction by generating an arc between a fixed point and a variable, between the determined truths of the past and the unknown data of the future. 197 1 HERDER AND HERDER NEW YORK 232 Madison Avenue, New York 100 16 Original edition: Uber Karl Marx, © 1968 by Suhrkamp Verlag; from Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 vols. (passim), © 1959, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Translated by John Maxwell. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-87750 English translation © 1971 by Herder and Herder, Inc. Manufactured in the United States "._ CONTENTS Marx as a Student 9 Karl Marx and Humanity: The Material of Hope 16 Man and Citizen in Marx 46 Changing the WorId: Marx's Theses on Feuerbach 54 Marx and the Dialectics of Idealism 106 The University, Marxism, and Philosophy 118 The Marxist Concept of Science 141 Epicurus and Karl Marx 153 Upright Carriage, Concrete Utopia 159 MARX AS A STUDENT True growth is always open and youthful, and youth implies growth. Youth, like growth, is restless; growth, like youth, would lay the future open in the present. Apathy is their common enemy, and they are allies in the fight for that which has never been but is now coming into its own. Now is its day; and its day is as young and as vital as those who proclaim it and keep faith with it. If we look back to the very dawn of our daytime, we look back to the young Marx in his first years of intellectual ferment. What we can learn of one who was surely the most passionately alert of all students is encouraging, and a chal­ lenge to us, the heirs of his maturity. We still have a letter of November 1837 that the nineteen-year-old Karl wrote to his father-who lived in the same town as Jenny von Westphalen, his son's future wife. But this letter addressed to "Dearest Father" does not merely throw light on the relations between Dr. Heinrich Marx and his famous son: its fresh and creative spirit makes it a living document for every young student. Of course, this is a vivacity characteristic of the letters of great writers in their youth (one thinks of Goethe in Leipzig and Strasbourg, of Byron, of Georg Buchner). But here one can 9 ON KARL MARX sense the ardor of the great thinker to come. Even though Jenny gives occasion for a more lyrical note, this is a letter without equal as a record of a young philosopher's tempes­ tuous and far-ranging mind. The young man's every experience is heightened: "The rocks could not be sharper than my sensibility .. and art itself could not match Jenny's beauty. " Everything he sees is rich with significance, yet everything is ready to change and make room for something new in the wind."Every metamor­ phosis, " writes this student whose maturity would be so meaningful for the world's future, "is partly a swan song and partly the overture to a great new poem which, in a medley of blurred though brilliant colors, is still struggling to emerge as form." Marx responds to a world in the process of develop­ ment; to a summons and to a melody; to that which comes into being and then must pass away. Yet he checks any tendency to dream vaguely of the future; all the anticipation of a Marx-in­ becoming moves him to engage in an insatiable though exact­ ing tussle with the scholars: with law and philosophy. This is Marx as a young Faust-'-not Goethe's,but the flesh-and-blood Faust proper to the age. Three and a half years were to pass before he submitted his doctoral dissertation, and the Marx of this letter is neither the pure idealist of his poems nor a skeptic. His approach is already essentially logical and scientific, and, rather than follow the Mephistophelean counsel to "despise reason and knowledge, " he is filled with enthusiasm for these doors of entry to the world. The shape the future will take, its actuality, is being established in the ferment of the present; out of subjectivity and abstraction must emerge the face of concrete reality-the thing that really matters. The only ob­ structions are the mists of false consciousness and abstract thought, both of which Marx rejects-together with Hegel, and against him: "In the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, such as law, the State, Nature, and philosophy as a whole, the object itself must be observed as it develops. There must be no arbitrary categorizations: the rationale of the thing itself must proceed in its own course of internal con- 10 MARX AS A STUDENT tradiction and so attain to its own intrinsic unity." Mind is still the agent, but the perception of the later Marx is already apparent in the inversion-the "standing on its feet"-of the ratio of the thing. Obviously the writer of this letter is not wrapped up in himself. Though his quest for knowledge is no uniform, untroubled process, but one which has known blind alleys and moments of obscurity, it is always undertaken anew, moves ever onwards. Marx describes the quantity of writing he has done: poems, a vast opus on the philosophy of law, a dialogue, notes, notes, notes; manuscripts which ended in anguish or self-reproach; and his voracious reading and expeditions a­ cross and straight through the globus intellectualis; yet all related with the eagerness of an explorer in virgin lands. This optimism contrasts remarkably with the merely imitative intel­ lectual spirit predominant in post-Hegelian Berlin-a twilight feeling, as if somehow nothing really impressive could be produced after Hegel, by whom the world had been thoroughly schematized; as if the "world spirit" had arrived philosophi­ cally in Hegel's teaching, and all that was left for young philosophers was to transplant it from its initial Berlin res­ idence to the left, or subjective and "critical," side of "self-consciousness." The stirrings of the 1848 revolution were not felt in this environment, and were not produced by an idealism which the left Hegelians had endowed with a spurious rigor and clarity. The opposed wretchedness of the period before the March Revolution of 1848 was only increased by an apathy which was unopposable on an idealistic basis-an intellectual decadence which continued to affect the entire prescriptive philosophy of the nineteenth century, apart from Marxism. The most obviously unique characteristic of the young Marx was his objective and youthful vigor amid the surrounding post-Hegelian decay. The young philosopher was concerned essentially neither with himself nor with the insipid flatlands about him; instead he reflectedthe light of a world that had not yet come to be but on whose horizon he stood. The letter of 11 ON KARL MARX 1837 and the doctoral dissertation of 184 1 are wholly free of the lethargy of idealism; and more than a knowledge of Feuerbach enabled their author to see the era not as one of mellow decay but as a turning point-a material turning point, ,with Marx as the discoverer of the new. Hence the wholly public self-consciousness of the young Marx: a self-awareness concerned with the actuality of the future as the future of actuality. His genius accorded with the revolutionary mandate of the age; the subjective and objective suasions to shape the future were allied. Rosenkranz, a contemporary Hegelian, offered a formulation in his Psychology (1843) that found its living exponent in Marx: "The characteristic quality of genius is not, like that of talent, a formal versatility (even though it , can enjoy that too), but a realization of what is objectively , necessary in a certain sphere as its individual destiny. Accord­ ingly, a man of genius is properly exercised only in the development of history, for he must pass directly beyond everything that is merely given, as it is, and obtain as personal gratification that which, according to the objective process of the matter, is really timely. He prevails with a daemonic force in the accomplishment of this task; apart from it he is powerless, and despite his undoubted versatility in the acquisi­ tion of knowledge can achieve nothing really new." Of course, "personal gratification" did not apply to the young Marx; he went beyond the implications of this bourgeois term in being moved by objective optimism-a mutual illumination in which no distinction might be made between the individual and his task. The student's letter and the dissertation offer fore­ glimpses of what Marx was to write not so long after-in 1843: "Just as philosophy discovers its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat discovers its intellectual weapons in philosophy" (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). No longer overawed by his mentor, Marx took what was living in Hegel's philosophy, and became his true heir in making the proletariat's right to inherit the earth his prime concern. And so the young Marx asserted his youthful spirit and 12 MARX AS A STUDENT affirmed its true value. He was not one of the many famous young men who have been lauded for their retreat into the self, into the world-weariness of the solitary guardian of a precious inner flame. Nor did he practice a stoic aloofness from the affairs of the world, but dismissed such an attitude as tant­ amount to the behavior of the moth which, "when the univer­ sal sun has gone down, seeks the lamplight of a private world." Least of all was the apprentice dialectician lacking in a sense of history, conceived as mediation and transition.