Karl Marx; his life and work

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Facsimile title page of Marx's “ Buch der Liebe ’

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THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

At the time of his greatest agony of mind and soul, when he was in the throes of that conflict which was such a bitter blow to his father; and when, sick and melancholy, he burned all his \ poems and plots for novels and turned once more to a study of < Hegel in the hope of finding mental and spiritual peace, Marx{ joined himself to the “ Young Hegelians,” the extreme Left of ! the Hegelian school, and found the relief he sought in new ' friendships and intellectual interests.

There was a Doctors’ Club to which many of these young radicals belonged, including several of the instructors at the University with whom Marx had become intimate. He was invited to join the club and did so, the event proving to be the very thing needed to restore his spirits. It was a turning point ? in his intellectual career, too, so great was the influence of the ? brilliant coterie of young radical philosophers upon his mental j development. Foremost of the members of this club, and most intimate with Marx, were two of his instructors, both much j older men than himself, the celebrated Bruno Bauer and Karl * Friederich Koppen. Men of remarkable talents and great learning, they recognized Marx’s unusual gifts and treated him as a comrade and an equal.

That Marx must have been at this period an attractive personality, capable of strong and endearing friendships, is indicated by the letters of his friends, Bauer and Koppen. When Bauer left Berlin for Bonn he kept up an intimate and affectionate correspondence with his old pupil and friend. In one letter he writes: “ I often go to the Casino and the Professors’ Club, but it does not compare with our club (i. e., the

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KARL MARX

club at Berlin), which always held forth something interesting for the mind. Here they only gossip and tell jokes, and when they come together after nine o’clock they are ready to go home at eleven. The true spirit of snobbery prevails here.” In another letter he writes: “Where are the roses gone?

Only when you come to your B. Bauer will they bloom again. So-called entertaining and fun I have in plenty, but this does not compare to the walks which we were wont to take together while at Berlin.” And when Marx in turn left Berlin to join Bauer at Bonn, Koppen was disconsolate. How deeply he was attached to and influenced by Marx can only be guessed from his remark: “ With the departure of this Black Person

ality departed also his influence. Once more I possess my own thoughts and ideas, while my former reflections all came from Schutzen Street ”— this reference being to the place where Marx resided during the’latter part of his stay in Berlin.

Marx himself has said that the Young Hegelians found that the dialectical method of Hegel, in order to be rationally employed, had to be turned upside down and placed upon a materialistic basis, and the saying fairly described the aims and the result of their work. Hegel’s was in some respects the most revolutionary voice of his time. Superficial minds saw little or nothing revolutionary in his teachings, it is true, and h.e was even decorated by Frederick William III and looked upon as a bulwark of the royal Prussian government. Nevertheless, Hegel’s thought was essentially revolutionary. The famous saying, “ All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real,” might be, and in fact was, interpreted as being the statement of a conservative principle. As Engels truly says: “No philosophic statement has so invited the thanks of narrowminded governments and the anger of equally narrow-minded Liberals. Neither the narrow-minded reactionaries who blessed Hegel, nor the narrow-minded Liberals who cursed him, understood that the philosopher meant by reality not. mere existence, but existence with the sanction of necessity.

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS 53

That which is necessary is, in the long run, reasonable. Hegel’s doctrine, as applied to the Prussian State, did not mean that it was real and therefore rational, as implying approval of its existence. What it meant was that so long as it was necessary it was reasonable; that if a government exists in spite of what seems evil and unrational in its existence it is due to the faults in the subjects, which faults make its existence necessary. In other words, instead of approving the Prussian State, Hegel virtually said: “ Prussian government is as good as Prussians deserve.”

If that were all of Hegel’s philosophy it might be described as platitudinous rather than revolutionary. What is revolutionary in it is the fine recognition of the inevitability of the 1 historic process of evolution, of growth. In the course of progress the reality of yesterday becomes the unreality of today or to-morrow; it loses its necessity, which is at once its right of existence, its rationality. What was necessary, a vital reality, becomes unnecessary, loses its reality. In its place there develops a new reality, the product of present necessity as the old reality was the product of past necessity. Thus, all that is real in human history must develop unreality; all that is rational become irrational. That is its inherited destiny. And all that in the minds of men seems reasonable, however opposed to present apparent reality, becomes real.

According to this view, then, Truth is not to be regarded as a fixed quantity, unchanging, to be conveniently compressed into formulae, but rather as the process of knowledge itself. Truth is not an absolute quantum of knowledge, but an endless becoming, and what is true for one age, the sum of its knowledge, ceases to be true for another age with larger knowledge. The revolutionary importance of this contribution of Hegel to philosophy can only be understood when we have equipped ourselves to see philosophy as it was in Hegel’s day. And what it did for philosophy it did likewise for history. Just as the great philosopher made it impossible to think of Truth as

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KARL MARX

something absolute and final, so he made it impossible to think of the historical process coming to a stop, finding conclusion in absolute perfection, the perfect State. All historical epochs are only so many stages in the endless evolutionary process, man’s climb from lower to higher planes. Every step in that progress is necessary and useful, a product of existing circumstances. But as new conditions develop the necessity for a new and higher social form, it has in its turn to give way. Where there is consciousness of this process of change, it is possible for human effort so to cooperate with the blind forces as to bring about the transition peacefully. But where this consciousness is lacking, and instead there is striving against the inevitable, the transition must be by force. It was this reasoning which made Hegel so enthusiastic over the French Revolution.

It will be seen later that the Hegelian philosophy was a necessary approach to Marxism, that the latter is indeed the direct descendant of the former. Without Hegelianism Marxism would have been impossible. Still, Hegel was far from reaching the modern Marxist point of view. He was essentially an ideologist. According to his view, behind the great historical process and development is the Absolute Idea, existing from eternity, and the progression itself is simply the process of the Absolute, or, in the language of a cruder theology, the manifestation of God. Thus the Absolute Idea is made the eternal source of progress, pre-existent to the universe — a “ fantastical survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane Creator,” as Engels observes in his discussion of Feuerbach’s philosophy.

It was against this fantastic ideological element in Hegelianism, its self-contradictions, that the Young Hegelians directed their attack, in which young Marx found at least a t partial solution of his difficulties. These young radicals of the I Extreme Left, of whom Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach t were the leading spirits, regarded Hegel’s Absolute Idea as an


THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

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illegitimate interpolation into his philosophy. Instead of re- » garding the logical forms as being due to a self-revealing Absolute, they regarded them as being due to human thought. | Man thus became the creator of the Absolute — of God. The j material universe became the starting point from which ideas f must be traced, the reverse of Hegel’s thought.

The rise of the Young Hegelians, or Philosophic Radicals, $ as they were sometimes called, may be ascribed, though more , or less arbitrarily, to the publication in 1835 of Strauss’s | Leben Jesu; at any rate, the daring manner in which Strauss rejected all that could not be naturally explained, and the controversy which the book produced, made the new school possible. Bruno Bauer in his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes, published in 1840, and his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, published in 1841, carried the movement onward. But it was Ludwig Feuerbach who sys- t tematized the revolt of the new school. In his Critique of Hegel, published in 1839, and, more especially, his Wesen des j Christenthums, published in 1840, Feuerbach sounded the first : full notes of the materialistic reaction from Hegelian idealism. ' The effect of the former book in Germany was tremendous. Its relatively popular style, and its freedom from abstruse terminology, secured for it a large audience. Upon young Marx the effect of the book was too great to be easily overesti-1 mated. In spite of many critical reservations he received it j enthusiastically, as may be seen from Der Heilige Familie, his ■ first work written in collaboration with Engels, published in ‘ 1845. _

Feuerbach boldly rejected Hegel’s concept of the Absolute ^ Idea and “ placed materialism on the throne again without any [ circumlocution.” The senses, he declared to be the sole sources > of knowledge. “ God was my first thought, Reason my sec- ( ond, Man my third and last,” he said. The only God for ! Feuerbach is man, not the individual but the collectivity: ? “ Man by himself is but man; man with man, the union of I

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and Thou, is God.” *His materialism was of the most mechanical kind, a harking back to the narrowest forms of the most narrow and mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. Man was but a machine, or part of a machine. He revamped the bold materialism of the eighteenth century, that men are absolutely the product of their environment, without recognizing— what Marx at once recognized — that this is not absolutely true, that men may and do exert considerable influence upon their environment. There probably was never a more sweeping statement of mechanical materialism than I Feuerbach’s celebrated saying that man is what he eats, Der I Mensch ist mas er isst.

Taken by itself, this description of Feuerbach’s materialism conveys a wrong impression of his philosophy, however. He whose chief merit as a philosopher lay in the exposure and refutation of the ideological element in Hegel’s philosophy ! was himself an ideologist, a victim of mental dualism similar To that which limited Hegel. He summed up his position by I saying: “ Backward I am in accord with the materialists, but

f not forward.” By a curious mental trick, the mind that so clearly perceived the dependence of moral and intellectual phenomena upon material conditions, conceived the idea of reversing the relation. Starting from the etymology of the word religion, from religare, to tie or bind together, he regards every bond between human beings as a manifestation of religion. That these bonds, such as friendships, sex-love, kinship, have no connection with religion in the historical significance of that term, but are the products of necessity rooted in material conditions, matters not to Feuerbach. He vainly imagines that to the word “ religion ” can be given a new significance, and that the unity and fellowship of mankind can be brought about if a new religion of humanity be created. The anthropomorphic Deity and Hegel’s abstract Absolute Idea being for him alike impossible, he sets out to make God of a different ideological abstraction — Unity. Hence the signifi


THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

cance of his saying “ Man by himself is but man; man with man, the union of I and Thou, is God.” The barrenness and sterility of Feuerbach’s religion of Humanism need no demonstration. It failed just as Positivism with the added element of sacerdotalism has failed. Countless experiments have been made, aiming to establish a religion based purely upon human love, but none has ever succeeded as a religion in any adequate sense of the word. Cults, little coteries of adherents, more or less brilliant and gifted, have been formed, but there has been no successful religious movement. The nearest ap- > proach to a religious movement which resulted from Feuer- ' bach’s ideological Humanism was that sentimental, academic, j and literary Socialism, represented by Karl Gruen and others, j — the so-called German or “ True ” Socialism — which Marx ; and Engels so scathingly denounced in the Communist Manx- festo. Like an epidemic, a hazy, sentimental propaganda of : brotherly love swept over Germany, but it passed away, leaving - no trace of its existence.

This somewhat detailed account of the Young Hegelian movement has borne us some distance from the chronological sequence of the life of Marx, and involves a retracing of our steps. But without such a mental picture of the movement into which he entered while at Berlin most of Marx’s life must be incomprehensible to us, and anything like a correct estimate of his work impossible. Just as the work of Hegel was a necessary approach to modern scientific Socialism, or Marxism, so the work of Feuerbach was a further step in the same direction. Like Hegelianism, the philosophy of Feuerbach stopped far short of the conclusions later reached by Marx. It was, however, an intermediate and a necessary link in the chain of philosophical development. The three names — Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx — are inseparable.

Bruno Bauer, who for five years had served as a licentiate of Theology at Berlin University, was transferred to Bonn in 1839. Originally a “true” Hegelian, belonging to the

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Extreme Right, he had gradually become one of the leaders of the Extreme Left, the Young Hegelians. Impetuous and warm-hearted himself, Bauer had become devotedly attached to young Marx, who was equally impetuous and warm-hearted. By the end of his first year at Berlin Marx was engrossed in a scheme for the publication of a radical review in collaboration with Bauer, and the idea seems to have dominated the minds of both men for many months, even after Bauer’s removal to Bonn. It is significant of the respect which the older man entertained for the younger that he always addressed him as his “ coworker.” When he decided to go to Bonn, Bauer ' sought to persuade Marx, who was then in his eighth semester, i to make special efforts to obtain the degree of Doctor of /Philosophy as speedily as possible, and to secure a position as I lecturer in philosophy at Bonn. This plan would not only reunite the friends, but would perhaps make it possible for them to issue the periodical of which they had dreamed so

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long. Marx was not averse to this arrangement, for his affec-
tion for Bauer was very real and sincere. But in the back-
ground of his thoughts there seems always to have been the

, hope that he might obtain a professorship at Berlin.

For Marx it was not an easy matter to obtain the coveted .degree, so necessary to an academic career. The irregularity i of his studies, and the uncompromising independence of his | judgment were formidable obstacles. Above all, there was I his impatience and his scorn for many of the petty details involved in the examinations. Like many another genius, he found the greatest difficulty in passing examinations which men of less ability could pass with ease. Bauer knew this weakness of his former pupil, and had no sooner taken up his new position at Bonn, in the fall of 1839, than he began to write to Marx, earnestly begging him to get through with the “ old examinations.” This was the burden of his very first letter from Bonn, in which after some encouraging words concerning the prospect of a position at Bonn University, he wrote:

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

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“ Only see that (I know that all reminder of it is unpleasant to you, but it cannot be helped) you get through with those nasty examinations, so that you may devote yourself entirely to your logical work. . . . Write to me how everybody is getting

along, and with it drop a word or two how you are getting on with the examinations.” And on March i, 1840, he writes again, almost desperately: “ See to it that you wake

up! . / . End at last all loitering and negligence, which

is nothing but insanity. You know that your examination is a mere farce. If you were only here we could talk matters over together.” At the end of the same month he wrote again: “ If you could come to Bonn this haunt would then

probably become the chief object of universal attention, and we could from here, at the right time, bring about the crisis.” It is evident that Bauer was contemplating some radical action and wished for Marx’s assistance. “ The dogs could not do anything against us; they fear us, but they are very vicious,” he wrote. Marx continued to dally, however. During the summer of 1840 he devoted much time and thought to the ? controversy which had been waged with so much bitterness | of feeling from the early thirties over the “ heretical ” works of j the Catholic theologian, Georg Hermes, which were con- < demned by papal bulls in 1835. He began negotiations j through Bauer for the publication of a work to be called \ 'Hermesianismus, but nothing came of it. Of a letter which he sent Bauer, to be given to the publishers, Bauer wrote: “You could very well write a similar letter to your washwoman, but not to publishers whom you expect to accept your work, and whose attention you have yet to attract.” After many fruitless efforts on Bauer’s part to secure a publisher J for the work, the project was abandoned and Marx devoted himself with greater earnestness to the preparation of the thesis for his degree. This was a study of the Epicurean philosophy, radical and controversial in its character, and both Marx and Bauer feared that it would cause the withholding of the degree.


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KARL MARX

The letters which Bauer wrote to his friend at this period are full of warning and fear as to the result of submitting such a thesis.

. Meantime, the King, Frederick William III, died on the I 7th of June, 1840, and his son, Frederick William IV, as-

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cended the throne. The accession of the new monarch gave rise to the wildest hopes on the part of the young liberal ele

ments in the universities. As Prince, the new monarch had studied under Savigny and had been a warm patron of the arts. There was a popular movement of students at Berlin in favor of electing the new King rector of the university, and a petition inviting him to accept that position was drawn up by some of the students and forwarded to him. The severe punishment which was meted out to them for this showed at once how utterly misplaced their hopes had been. To dis- 1 courage all liberal tendencies, reactionaries were appointed to | the faculty, and, worse than all, in October, Eichhorn, a reactionary of reactionaries, was made Minister of Education.

| Laudenberg, who since May had been acting minister, had ! been disposed to appoint Bauer Professor of Theology at Bonn ; in spite of the protests of a conservative faculty, but with Eich- horn’s appointment any hopes of such promotion which Bauer might have entertained fell to the ground.

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This was quite as serious for Marx ^s for his friend. With
reaction so strongly entrenched, what likelihood could there

be of his radical and uncompromising essay securing a degree?

Not to obtain the degree would be almost a calamity. Such a
failure would almost certainly prejudice Jenny’s family against
him; it would make it difficult for him to obtain any kind of
a position enabling him to provide a home for his beautiful
bride-to-be, who had already waited for him so long; moreover,
the need of helping his mother and his brothers and sisters was
weighing heavily upon his mind. True, he might perhaps en-
list the powerful support of Jenny’s brother, Edgar von West-

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