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Mark Cowling: the Dialectic in Marx and Hegel – an Outline

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Mark Cowling: the Dialectic in Marx and Hegel – an Outline Mark Cowling: The Dialectic in Marx and Hegel – an Outline. Paper presented to the Marxism panels of the PSA annual conference, Brighton, March 21-23rd 2016. Abstract This paper offers an outline of the relationship between the dialectic in Hegel and Marx. It identifies four major forms of the dialectic in Hegel. These are, most importantly, the dialectic of method, meaning the dialectical development of categories; the dialectic of historical development through human intellectual labour, and the conception of the social totality which results from this; the dialectic of the concrete real, as found particularly in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, and finally the dialectic of human physical labour. I then look briefly at the major forms of the dialectic in Marx. In order to do this it is necessary to divide Marx’s work into periods. I discuss the extent to which the dialectic in Marx is derived from that of Hegel. I conclude that the only part of Hegel’s dialectic which is significant in the older Marx is his dialectic of method, which suggested a scientific method to Marx. Introduction. Before going on to the main discussion, I shall give a brief account of how not to analyse the relationship between the dialectic in Hegel and that in Marx. The 1960s were characterised by an upsurge in interest in Marx’s writings in the West, notably by an interest in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM), which, in turn, was linked to a desire to distance Western Marxism from the legacy of Stalinism. One of the figures who took this approach was the French philosopher Roger Garaudy. In his account of the dialectic, to be found in his book Karl Marx – The Evolution of His Thought (Garaudy, 1964). Garaudy simply assumes that everything that Marx and Engels said at any time is valuable. He has a simplistic approach to Marx’s own statements about the relationship between his dialectic and that of Hegel. All he can come up with by taking this approach is vague generalisations: ‘Dialectics is primarily a logic of relationship. Dialectics is a logic of conflict… Dialectics is a logic of motion… Dialectics is a logic of life.’ (pp. 91-3). He also entangles himself in logical contradictions. He seems to both assert and deny that there can be a dialectics of nature. He says that dialectical thinking could not enable us to ‘understand a being not like it to any degree’ (p. 97), but also that Marxism is a ‘materialist method enabling us to grasp again the meaning of things’ (p. 82, cf. p. 134). Again, he asserts that Marx regarded the idea of the immediate reflection of the real world as the most valuable achievement of Feuerbach’s materialism (p. 85), and also says that in Capital Marx “retained (from Hegel) the movement of thought passing from the abstract to the concrete’ (p. 130). In other words we should and should not begin from the concrete-real. (In what follows I shall use the term concrete- real to refer to the material world, the tangible, the kickable. I recognise, of course, that this formula is simplistic, given that many of the concepts we used to grasp the concrete-real are highly theoretical, such as, for example, the idea of dark matter.) As a member of the PCF, Garaudy was committed to the idea that Marx’s writings are important and can provide the basis for action. In doing this it seems to me that he was laying himself and the PCF open to ridicule. I shall now set about trying to give a more precise account of the relationship, focusing particularly but not exclusively on the dialectic in Capital. The overall intentions of Hegel’s philosophy. Most books about Hegel are also, and not surprisingly, books about Hegel’s intentions. Raymond Plant’s approach to this makes a great deal of sense (Plant, 2011). He sees Hegel as attempting a solution to the problem of uniting men in society and the different areas of collective and individual life. The problem of uniting the differing areas of human life was a widespread one amongst the German intellectuals of the early 19th century. The division of labour which accompanied the rise of capitalism was seen as making people less than fully human, and also as isolating individuals from one another, tied only by the depersonalised link of market forces. German thinkers were also troubled by the disunity of Germany itself – a land united in language and culture but divided into many small principalities. A variety of solutions to this problem were proposed. Herder, Hölderlin, Schiller and Humboldt idealised the integrated life of the ancient Greek city states. Fichte and Kant favoured harmony in nature, whilst Novalis favoured mediaeval Christianity (Lobkowicz, 1967, pp. 164-5). Capitalism was particularly well developed in lowland Scotland, and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment concerned themselves with the problem of the development of capitalism. German thinkers frequently saw history as comprising three stages: primitive harmony, alienation and division and final reconciliation. The second stage corresponded to the unhappy present. The third stage was at hand. Symptoms were the realisation of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the French revolution and the rise of German philosophy. Seen in this way, the central themes of the work of both Hegel and Marx can be seen as part of the German ideology of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This search for a solution to disintegration and alienation makes sense of Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (Hegel, 1948). In these he goes through a startling series of religious changes, but these changes have in common a search for a practical solution to the bifurcations and discord of contemporary German life. Around 1800 Hegel started to see philosophy as the solution to bifurcation and discord, and started to lay the foundations of his mature philosophy. Hegel’s mature philosophical system is first seen in his Phenomenology (Phänomenologie des Geistes) of 1807 (Hegel 1931). He sees the process of world history as the gradual reconciliation of opposites, and the unification of Spirit (Geist) with itself in a mediated fashion, and its return from self-alienation. Along with this development goes that of self-consciousness. Spirit is at first a very simple form of consciousness, but becomes increasingly elaborate and all- embracing. The Cunning of Reason enters in that, in pursuing their goals, the individuals and traces of history also play their part – without particularly meaning to – in the development of unified, self-conscious Spirit. Individuals who have a particularly clear sense of a ‘her universal’, though not of the goal of World History itself (which is the Idea), and make it their own purpose, are called World Historical Individuals – examples would be Julius Caesar and Napoleon. At all stages of history and philosophy provides reconciliation through understanding (in the everyday sense rather than the Hegelian one), and religion, art and the state also do so, although each less explicitly than the one before. As Hegel’s philosophy comes at the end of world history up to the present it is actually the culmination of world history. Hegel as a philosophical encyclopaedist. There is a good case to be made for considering Hegel as a philosophical encyclopaedist. He called the version of his system that he used for teaching the Encyclopaedia (see Hegel, 1892, 1970, 1971) and there is much about it that parallels other writers of encyclopaedias in his day. There was a very wide desire for structured knowledge. The scientific books of his day were frequently structured as a progression from simple to complex. The levels which Hegel used in his Philosophy of Nature reflected those of the science of his day. The account here follows that of Petry in his introduction to his translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Hegel 1970). Hegel aimed to divide knowledge into levels, hierarchies spheres. Within a sphere there are levels and hierarchies, and spheres of parts of more comprehensive spheres, where they are levels arranged in hierarchies. The biggest sphere is Encyclopaedia itself, which has as levels Logic, Nature and Spirit (Petry/Hegel, 1970, p. 31). According to Petry, the Logic concludes with the Idea, which is the most complex category that Hegel could formulate in this sphere. Hegel then moves on to the next sphere, which is Nature, and starts with its least complex level, space (Petry/Hegel, 1970, p. 45). To some extent, Petry’s version of Hegel regards the relationship between philosophy and the world as a heuristic one. Knowledge would be seen as independent of the world, which the Encyclopaedia helps us to understand. Although I shall be arguing subsequently that the relationship between theory and the real world in Marx’s Capital is of this nature, this is not a plausible account of Hegel’s philosophy. The more plausible view is parallelism – the idea that both Logic and Nature are internally consistent and are part of a united system – they are both fully realised in the Idea. Several commentators take an approach of this sort (see, for example, Mure, 1940, chapter 8; Hyppolite, 1953, pp. 74, 91-2, 129-31, 1969, p. 169; Stirling, 1865,Vol.1, pp. 26-7). In support of this approach, Hegel sees nature as fossilised intelligence, which was a relatively respectable scientific view in the early 19th century. He is clear that his categories are universally present – an example might be Being and Nothing at the beginning of his Logic, but even at the highest stages of the Logic Hegel includes what seems like empirical material (Hegel, 1969, pp.
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