MARX’S INVERSION OF HEGEL’S DIALECTIC

Followup to the Hegel piece below.

Marx is greatly influenced by Hegel’s dialectical theory. Yet, at the same time he is bothered by Hegel’s mystification of the dialectic: “with him it [the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”(1) The rational kernel being the conception of the self creation of man as a process, labor as the essence of man, humanity’s alienation (estrangement) from their social world and the dialectic of negativity as the motor of social change:

The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labor.(2)

Thus, while Hegel grasps these concepts he mystifies them by locating them within the mind, a product independent of material experience: “Hegel’s Encyclopaedia …is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind.”(3) The result of situating self-objectification within the mind is that alienation becomes that of thought – the alienation of consciousness. Alienation fails to be grounded in the social relations between material practice and the corporeal body:

Logic…is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and the real man: abstract thinking…the whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e.) absolute thought.(4)

Subsequently, alienation - the objectification of the powers of humans – is merely the loss of power over thought and the objects of thought. Alienation is not grounded in material processes and is therefore not alienation of the worker from the product of their labor, from the act of production, from their species being and from other men. (5) For Hegel,

the appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects— indeed, alien objects—is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought, i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and movements of thought.(6)

Since man only alienates thought, all that he can reclaim is his thought. Hegel’s confinement of alienation to consciousness results in man being unable to reclaim power over the commodities that are alienated during the course of capitalist production. Under Hegel’s scenario, dealienation is merely the supersession of an alienated abstract man and his alienated abstract thought. Subsequently, alienation not grounded in material reality and the relations of men and nature is one ‘torn from real mind and from real nature.’ While the Phenomenology of the Spirit ‘grasps steadily man’s estrangement’ it fails to escape the realm of consciousness and place man in his material world. For that reason, Hegel’s man appears not in his corporeal form but merely as mind.

Despite Marx’s critique of Hegel for constructing concepts that reside solely in consciousness and therefore in abstraction from nature and material man, Marx praises Hegel for realizing the importance of these concepts. Foremost is Hegel’s conception of labor as the essence of man. Even though Hegel’s labor is only that of ‘abstractly mental labor’, he conceives of the process of abstract mental labor as one of alienation, as the objectification of thought and eventually its dealienation through the realignment of reality with thought – the unification of what is and what ought to be.(7) Moreover, Hegel formulates supersession as a process of transcendence involving the recombination of the self and their alienated objects. Through supersession the individual reappropriates the object of their estrangement by ending the alienating nature of reality: “supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self…the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world.”(8) The culmination of which is that Hegel posits a process of alienation/disalienation as the nodal point around which the concept of labor fluctuates.(9) Hegel’s formulation of the process of alienation/disalienation is itself an example of another concept central to his theory, the negation of the negation. Through his creation of each concept he conceives “of each of them first as negation—that is, as an alienation of human thought—and then as negation of the negation—that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought.”(10) Following Hegel, Marx perceives this negativity to be the positive and creative force in history. Nonetheless, Marx flips this principle on its head and places the negation of the negation in the material world, positing the advent of communism and the death of capitalism as the material realization of the negation of the negation.

Marx therefore adopts from Hegel a certain conceptual framework that seeks to relate appearance and essence within a social totality where concepts are always in motion.(11) For instance, Marx separates value into its form of appearance, exchange value, and its essence, abstract labor.(12) Moreover, concepts can only be understood through their reciprocal relation to one another and their connection within the totality, which for Marx was the totality of capital. Subsequently, concepts form a unity through the contradiction of opposites, e.g. commodity as use-vale and exchange-value, mode of production as relations of production and forces of production.(13) In addition, the movement of phenomena, including the totality, is based upon the ongoing contradiction between the reciprocally related phenomena, e.g. capital and labor, use value and exchange value, wages and profits, relations of production and forces of production.(14) All of these presuppositions form the basis of dialectical theory and method.

1) Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (New York: Penguin Books, 1976[1990]), p. 103.
2) Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York: International Publishers, 1964[1988]), p. 177.
3) Ibid., p. 174.
4) Ibid., p. 175.
5) Ibid., p. 178.
6) Ibid., p. 175.
7) Ibid., p. 177.
8) Ibid., p. 187.
9) Ibid., p. 188.
10) Ibid., p. 190.
11) Marx, Capital Volume I, p. 18.
12) Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (San Francisco: AK Press, 1979[2000]), p. 111.
13) Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973[1993]), p. 39, 41.
14) Marx, Capital Volume I, p. 18.

HEGEL’S DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Excerpt from a paper I was working on for class. the basis of the paper is a critique of positivism. Up next is Marx's "inversion" of Hegel's dialectical method.

HEGEL’S DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY(1)
Hegel’s philosophy constituted an amalgamation of the enlightenment exposition of reason as the harbinger of freedom and the romantic notion of historical progression as an organic process.(2) Through the utilization of reason, Hegel sought to empower individuals as masters over themselves. However, in opposition to positivism, rational society and thus the realization of freedom are not born through separation from and domination over nature. For Hegel, freedom through reason is produced in the course of the “subject’s entering the very content of nature and history.”(3) The historical process of the actualization of freedom is only possible through the dialectical interplay of the subject and object. His theory thereby broke with the general inclination of enlightenment thinking that articulated a fixed subject-object hierarchy. Moreover, Hegel’s philosophy, whose foundation is dialectical, revolves around a subject-object relationship that is encased in a continual process of conflict and negativity and therefore an unrelenting historical movement.

The articulation of a concept of reason that contains a ‘spirit of contradicting’ leads Hegel into a critical intercourse with the Kantian dualism of form and content and positivism’s reification of the social world. His exposition of the dialectic is a critique of Kant’s epistemological framework “dissociating form from content, thought from the ‘thing-in-itself’, and the faculty of knowing from the object of knowledge” as well as positivism’s endeavor to confine truth to a given state of existence.(4) Instead of separating subject/object, form/content or attempting to create a system of independent fixed things, Hegel puts forth the statement that there exists a relation between subject and object, one born from their antagonism as opposites that is the moving, generating principle of history: “in being and in thought negativity is creative, it is the root of movement and the pulse of life.”(5)

Hegel’s thought is organized around the conception that only through the transformation of subject and object in unison can freedom be realized: only through the incorporation of the object into the subject can the subject undergo a development towards the actualization of their potential.(6) Truth is not to be sought in objects that are independent of the knowing subject, for subject and object mutually constitute each other. The unity of a thing, its truth, is determined neither through its separation from others as a particular within the general nor in its existence at a given state of space and time. Positivism’s whole project is founded on an inaccurate premise: that the subject can be removed from their relationship with the subjective world and that the objective world can be frozen in space-time. Hegel argues that to know the thing is to know it through its relations, its oppositions and its contradictions because phenomena are always in a state of movement from actuality to potentiality due to their content of negativity. In fact, positivism’s conflation of existence with the real, the potential, and the essence not only leads to the reification of social reality but also denies the demands for fulfillment of the ‘ought’ implicit in phenomena.

As was alluded to in the prior sentence, Hegel employs the distinction between appearance and essence to critique the separation of form and content, the isolation of social phenomena and the reification of the social world. In stark contrast to positivism, dialectical thinking conceptualizes the appearance or existing form of things in contrast to their potentiality. Through emphasizing the contradiction inherent between phenomena, do to their essence of negativity, dialectical thinking underscores the discrepancy between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. The current state of being of any thing is only a temporary moment towards the realization of its potential. Each thing is not to be concretely understood based upon its present reality, for its potential is held back by its ‘determinate conditions’. Only through the negation of its existing conditions can the thing transition to a stage closer to its ‘ought’. Hegel’s emphasis on the negativity of being and the historical movement from actuality to potentiality produces a critical and positive conception of social change: “in being and in thought negativity is creative, it is the root of movement and the pulse of life.”(7)

Intertwined with Hegel’s conception of ‘negativity’ and contradiction are the notions of labor and alienation (estrangement). Labor is a vital activity within Hegel’s system because of its centrality in the relationship between subject-object and in its basis as the mechanism for overcoming alienation. Through labor, humanity as subject is able to bring the object into them and overcome their current state of existence. Thus, labor becomes the mechanism through which transcendence is possible, as it enables humanity to enter into nature and history and thereby transform them while transforming themselves. Additionally, the active transformation of subject/humanity and object/ nature through labor assists in dealienating the reified world through demonstrating that it is humanity who constructs this world. For Hegel, it was through labor than humanity is able to overcome alienation: “the estrangement between the objective world and the subjective world.”(8)

Hegel’s philosophy emphasizes the essential features of the dialectic: the relational nature of subject and object, the historical and contradictory qualities of phenomena and the distinction between appearance and essence. These notions are front-and-center in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, which seeks to investigate and explicate the concept that “world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”(9) History being the gradual elimination of self-alienation: “the tension between (its potentiality and its actuality) what it is in itself, subjectively, in its inner purpose and essence, and what it really is (objectively), is thus abolished. It is with itself (actualized), it has itself objectively before itself.”(10) Freedom is thereby actualized when the individual has ‘power of self-determination’, a culmination of the subject’s ability to transcend historical determinations through their negation vis-à-vis their subsumption into themselves.

(1) This synopsis of Hegel’s philosophical theory is extracted from two books: Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (New York: Humanity Books, 1941[1999]) and Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968).
(2) Irving, M. Zeitlin, Marxism: A Re-Examination (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1967), p. 2.
(3) Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 7.
(4) Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, p. 25 and Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 113.
(5) Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, p. 33.
(6) Ibid., pp. 37-39.
(7) Ibid., p. 33.
(8) Ibid., p. 77.
(9) G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc, 1953), p. 24.
Ibid., p. 90.