Journalism with a Philosophical Soul

chapter 3 Journalism with a Philosophical Soul

1 ‘To the Left and to the Right’

As we have seen, realising philosophy in history was the programme of the ‘Young Hegelians’. Philosophy – as knowledge that the Absolute, the essence and principle of every being, is freedom – was completed and finished with Hegel. It was now only possible and necessary to generalise it to society as a whole by means of the praxis that is essentially a criticism of religion and of the state, because religion and the state are the institutions that most alien- ate and deprive humanity of its faculties for self-determination. When faced with the question of what we can say, schematically, separates rightwing from leftwing Hegelians – whether the Absolute is the God who becomes a man only in order to return to himself and establish complete transparency and intelligibility of himself, or whether man is God; in other words, whether the Idea, in the completeness of its articulations, is presupposed to nature and history or whether it is nothing more than the history of humanity and all the events and civilisations of which it is composed – the young Hegelians replied with reference to an entirely humanistic Absolute. For this current, Hegel’s Spirit should be interpreted and understood not in the sense of an Absolute that reflects the perfection of its logical time within the texture of historical time, as the Hegelian Right would have it, but in the entirely imman- ent sense of being synonymous with the human species seen as a unity of individuals raised up to the level of the universal of reason, since history is, in each of its moments, the struggle of men of reason against the irration- ality of the present. All the fundamental categories of Hegelian philosophy, such as essence, alienation, self-consciousness, contradiction and dialectic, are to be preserved and valorised as long as Hegel’s humanism is detached from the excesses of the contemplative idealism into which his system falls and the resultant compromise with authoritarian institutions, both religious and political, of its historic present. Thus, while the Right saw in Hegel’s philosophy the greatest ever reconciliation undertaken by philosophy with Chris- tianity, due to Hegel’s valorisation of Christ as a figure who, by realising the humanisation of God, anticipates and permits a mediation between the human and the divine in each human being, the Left criticised this exaltation of a single individuality in the face of the value of all human beings, contesting

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004307643_004 110 chapter 3 the divinity of Christ (including by means of philological critique of the New Testament).1 It is precisely this reduction of idealism to humanism that is of particular interest when reconsidering the young Marx. For, if the fundamental meaning of this identification tends towards a process of secularisation and de- sacralisation of all German culture, it also implies a process of idealisation

1 This begins with the work of 1835–6 by Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen, 2 vols.) in which the historicity of Jesus as a person is denied and the Gospels are seen as the mythical expression of the needs and aspirations of the Jewish people. In the Schlussabhand- lung at the end of the second volume, Strauss summarises the meaning of his work: ‘The results of our research have by now cancelled out, it would appear, the greater and most important part of Christian beliefs regarding Jesus, all the encouragement which he finds in them having been destroyed and all consolation withered. The infinite treasure of truth which has, for the past eighteen centuries nurtured humanity, appears irreversibly dissolved’ (Strauss 1835–6, Vol. 2, p. 591). On the differences between the various positions of the Hegel- ian Left, see Cesa 1972; Pepperle 1978; Eßbach 1988. The most in-depth work on the subject is Breckman 1999. The distinction between Right and Left within the Hegelian School is owed to Strauss, with reference to the question of the links between Christianity and philosophy and, analogously, with the sub-division in the seats in the French parliament, in the work Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu, iii, Tübingen 1838. In par- allel to the differentiation between Left and Right is the distinction, in the German debate of the time, between ‘Old Hegelians’ or Hegeliter, and ‘Young Hegelians’ or Hegelinge. The old Hegelians had been direct students of Hegel. Their members included right Hegelians strictly conceived (like Göeschel and Gabler), who defended Christianity and the the authen- tic nature of the Biblical story, disseminators and editors of Hegel’s works (such as Hoto, Marheineke, and von Henning), as well as authors belonging more to the so-called ‘centre’, such as Rosenkranz, Michelet, Haym, Erdmann and Fischer, whose theoretical works aimed to defend Hegel’s philosophy in general, not criticising the basic principles but, if anything, generalising the application of its categories and methods to every field of knowledge. The young Hegelians, on the other hand, were not direct students of the master, and were sub- stantially the same as the left Hegelians. They engaged in a radical critique of Christianity and the defence of a rational democratic state, against the confessional monarchical state. In this book, for reasons of expositional synthesis, I utilise the distinction between right and left Hegelians, and its superimposition on that of old and young Hegelians (also used, for instance, by Löwith 1964). In reality, however, it is a distinction that should be at least problematised. See, for example, Stuke 1963. It is not simply that it is difficult to define as conservative direct students of Hegel such as Michelet or Gans, or even like Erdmann and Rosenkranz, but also because it is difficult to locate on the political spectrum some of the young Hegelians themselves. It is enough to think of the transition of Bauer from the right to the left, or the figure of Cieszkowski, whose influence on the left was considerable, but who defined himself always as a ‘progressive conservative’ close to the right (Cieszkowski 1842, pp. 11–12). On this, see Tomba 2002, pp. 27–35.