Hegel, Marx, Gramsci

Post by Jack Ten

Hegel can hardly be considered new to the philosophical scene, yet re-discovering him is akin to stumbling across an at times exciting find. Other times the experience is tiring, as when it seems possible to detect the strains of Eurocentrism even in the early 1800s in Germany (Leitch 2001: 545).

History would seem to confirm the thesis that there are no new ideas, just ideas newly uncovered, or claimed. We can be the first to uncover in our time an existing idea, thereby attaching our name to it. It is this ephemeral aspect of idea ‘ownership’ that seems the genesis of the fierce competition among thinkers to be ‘the first’, with the world as the assumed audience.

Hegel maintains that a budding idea/ movement (thesis) necessarily causes conflict (anti-thesis). The conflict creates a still newer point of view: the synthesis of the thesis and anti-thesis.

The synthesised idea is one that brings the human condition even closer to its truth. Synthesis, the resolution of conflict, seems to be the example of man coming ever closer to, what in mystical terms, would be Nirvana. Most religions at some time have been accused of a degree of mysticism. As a staunch Christian, that Hegel’s ideas would too seem to be influenced by mysticism does not seem an improbable conclusion.

It is interesting how an idea travels. In the discipline of Social Anthropology, Victor Turner is a master of the analysis of social drama. According to Turner (Turner 1987: 4), social drama has four stages:

1) a breach with social convention (Hegel’s ‘thesis/movement combines Turner’s first and second stages),

2) a crisis in which the threshold of social tolerance is exceeded and a ‘limen’ is produced: an unstable phase that is neither a part of the old nor yet part of the to-be new,

3) redress (society/group, etc seeks solutions through mediation, legal system, ritual (Hegel’s antithesis),

4) re-integration of the group into society (Hegel’s synthesis). However, the re-integrated group is different, and will never again occupy the place its forerunner once had in society.

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What Hegel seems most to promote with his levels of human understanding of self (art, religion, philosophy) is creativity. Follow your thoughts; let them unfold, he seems to say. On the other hand, responsibility and duty, he also says, lay within social relationships and are defined by them rather than by abstract rules of morality and ethics.

At the same time, however, Hegel advises that an individual’s greatest responsibility and sense of duty lay with the state – what seems to be a contradiction of thought. At the very least, such thinking is an infringement upon the freedom of thought and creativity of expression that Hegel claims to promote. Why? Because if one’s ultimate responsibility is to the state, then it is the state that will define what it is acceptable as ‘creative’ and ‘free’.

Abuse of the state’s definition will lead to Hegel’s theory of thesis (movement), anti-thesis (conflict), and synthesis.

Has Hegel described nothing more than the vicious circle of the human condition as we have conceived and live it?

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It is interesting that attempts to explain what this life is all about, what it means, seems to exist in all disciplines. Engels uses economics to offer an answer (“…the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life…” (Leitch 2001: 648).

In “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932: trans. 1959)’, Marx is especially concerned here with the origin and impact of alienation” (Leitch 2001: 648). Marx’s family converted from Judaism to Christianity to escape persecution. It is interesting to observe the possible underlying effect this may have had on Marx’s interpretation of the world through his writings. If Engels and Marx raised questions that they did not answer on the role in society of ‘writers, thinkers and intellectuals’, perhaps it was because they were ultimately, through their writing, trying to answer very personal questions that had to do with their place in life. They were ‘working through’ their existential challenges. In Marx’s case, answers came through economics; specifically through the contradictions that capitalism produces (ibid: 649).

Had he turned his attention to religion or social issues, his answer would also as applicable. 

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It is nothing less than shocking to realise the extent to which the era in which an author lives, and the author’s place within the social spheres of that era, dictate if not what the author will write then certainly how it will be done. Gramsci would seem to agree, “There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded…” (Leitch 2001: 1140), and “Mass formation has standardised individuals both psychologically and in terms of individual qualification and has produced the same phenomena as with other standardised masses: competition which makes necessary organisations for the defence of professions, unemployment, over-production in the schools, emigration, etc.” (ibid: 1143).

Bibliography

Leitch, Vincent B. et al (eds). 2001.

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831; Karl Marx 1820-1895. In:

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Turner, Victor 1987.

The Anthropology of Performance.

New York: PAJ Publications.