HM_2015_Roberto Finelli-A Failed Parricide_ Hegel and the Young Marx

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A Failed Parricide

Hegel and the Young Marx

By

Roberto Finelli

Translated by

Peter D. ThomasNicola Iannelli Popham

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First published in Italian by Bollati Boringhieri Editore asUn parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane Marx,Turin, 2004.

Published with the contribution of the Dipartimento di Filosoa, Comunicazione e Spettacolo of the

University of Rome Tre.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Finelli, Roberto, 1945-[Parricidio mancato. English]A failed parricide : Hegel and the young Marx / by Roberto Finelli ; translated by Peter D. Thomas, Nicola

Iannelli Popham.pages cm. (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; volume 116)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-90-04-26978-1 (hardback : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-90-04-30764-3 (e-book)1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 2. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 3. Philosophy, Modern19th century.

4. Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1804-1872. I. Title.

B2948.M48313 2016193dc23

2015033551

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Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill , Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhof, Brill Rodopi andHotei Publishing.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without prior written permission from the publisher.Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill providedthat the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,Suite 910, Danvers, 01923, . Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.


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Contents

Preface

Between the Ancient and the Modern 1 Science and Utopia 1 Hegel and the Epistemological Circle 7 The Idea as an Organising Principle of Reality. Marxs

Anti-Materialism 14 Democritus and Epicurus: The Empiricism of the Sciences and the

Idealism of Philosophy 20 Humanity as the Negation of Nature 25 Contradictions and Meteors 28 Ancient Atomism between Hegel and Marx 33 The Comparison of Idealisms. Ancient Idealism 37 Modern Idealism 42 Philosophy, World, Young Hegelians 54 From Poetry to Philosophy. From One Father to Another 64 Formbestimmung or Formal Determination: The Keystone of Marxs

Thought 74

A Hegelian Sketch 79 Negation and Contradiction 79 Intellectualistic Subjectivity and Its Bad Innity 84 The False Innity: The Secret of Ideology 86 The Speculative Closure. From Negation-Division to Absolute

Negation 91

Between Anthropology and Logic 98 Hegel and the Young Hegelians 107

Journalism with a Philosophical Soul 109 To the Left and to the Right 109 Freedom as the Absolute 115 A Generic Ontology 122

The Deceptive Materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach 136 The Divinisation of Reason 136 Against the Self-Foundation of the Self.Thoughts on Death and

Immortality 146


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The Overturning of Subject and Predicate 159 The Criticism of Hegel 171 The Last Feuerbach 192

Marx and Feuerbach 197

An All Too Human Communism 200 A Generalised Inversion 200 The Modern World as a Binary World 213 Hegel and Modern Civil Society 223

. The System of Needs and Classical Political Economy 224. The Forms of Modern Socialisation 229

. Ethics in Civil Society 235. Civil Society and the State 241 Mental Abstraction and Real Abstraction 242 A Fusional and Symbiotic Communism 251

Bibliography 269Index of Names 279


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Preface

How does hegemony fail?How was the force of consent that the values and the culture of the ItalianLeft had conquered since 1968 and throughout the 1970s extinguished, by acapillary difusion, radically changing the common sense of the country? Howand why was that cultural and moral hegemony exhausted, giving way to asense of radical uncertainty, in the best of cases, when not a complete recant-ation and a rapid reversal of direction in the face of the rise of other principlesand values, which were only apparently manipulatory and misleading but, in

fact, very profound and hegemonic?The book gives what might be regarded as a bizarre answer to these ques-tions of our present history by narrating an episode of the past. It does so notin relation to social and political history or to sociological analysis, as the ques-tion would seem to require, but rather, in relation to the history of philosophyand in particular tothe specic relationship that was established for a few shortyears between the young Marx and the philosophy of the old Hegel.

1

The rise of new collective and individual values is always fundamental for hege-mony. I believe that the most noble and original attempt of the culture of 1968and of at least the early 1970s was that of a cross fertilisation of the two funda-mental components of modern culture: on the one hand, anti-authoritarian-ism, which aimed at an education and socialisation of the person as free aspossible from repressive institutions and the negation of individuality; and, on

the other hand, egalitarianism, which fought all the inequalities produced bythe economic mechanisms of social reproduction. What was attempted was amediation between, on the one hand, the principles of communitarianism andof solidarity that had traditionally animated the working-class movement anditspoliticalinstitutions,and,ontheotherhand,thosepartsofEuropeanculturewhich, at least since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to Sartres existential-ism and the Frankfurt School, had claimed the values of the uniqueness of eachsingle individuality, of the profound interiority of each self and the liberation

of body and desire. In other words, it was an attempt to make thinkable a formof society and civilisation in which the universality of rights and duties anundeniable achievement of modernity would lose the abstract and rhetoricalfeatures that in the real history of women and men has often become a screen


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for the dissimulation of inequalities and asymmetries, and would become agenuine condition of equal opportunities for each individual to express theirown deepest, incomparable self.

If we were to say that this was the most generous and intelligent spirit of1968 and of consequent transformations of behaviour and ways of thinking,we would be making a very synthetic and reductive judgement, in the light ofa distanced observation of those years. Those years were actually much moreconfused and complex, with a multiplicity of conicting characteristics, arrog-ant and haughty, as well as generous and sympathetic. Whoever tries to ascribetodays clarity to the intentions and projects of many of us then, very youngprotagonists of those events, would be making a great mistake. Those years

were rich, not just in ideas and projects, but also in immaturity, personalismand protagonism, in exaggerations, and in violence both sufered and enacted.Nevertheless, the attempted integration of culture and values, although falter-ingand partially unaware of itself andcontradicted by old-fashioned behaviourand ideologies, was still the most continuous and signicant axis of meaningwith which the best part of the generation of 68 tried to identify and to repres-ent itself.

The history of those years, at least with regard to the consequences we arecurrently living with and paying for today, ended up in a failure, when judged bythe standards of their most profound and original goals. This is not to say thatvarious examples of, on the one hand, more individualism and, on the other,more radical egalitarianism, have not penetrated into many diferent aspects ofnational life, in both individual and collective forms. During the decade of the1970s, the ultimate efect of this process was a genuine transformation of Italyscommon sense, which turned into a general modernisation of our countryssensibility. It resulted, in particular, in the signicant phenomenon of womensachievement of a new, matured consciousness of themselves, which has now

been historically and socially consolidated. However, on the wider front ofother forms of life, the culture of the 1970s was unable to remain at the levelof the problems generated and opened up by its own needs.

The historically unavoidable duty that such a culture failed to full was thatof bringing together the various traditions of its multiple and diverging ele-ments with comprehensive coherence, not just by using easy juxtapositionsand mere declarations of intents, but by means of experiments with praxis andthought.Suchafailuregrewfromtheinabilitytondthoseplacesandthemost

delicate and complex forms of mediation between the culture of individual-isation and the culture of solidarity. Only their connection would have beencapable of enabling the extension and organic unity of theory and ethical life that is, of philosophywith a high level of universality and strong practical inten-


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tionality wherein lies the heart of every hegemony and every true revolutionand which, as such, can only signify intellectual and moral reform.

Thecausesandobstaclesthatledtothatfailurewereofvariousanddiferent

kinds. It is sucient to think of the way that the so-called (not incorrectly)state terrorism rst, and then subsequently, in a reective way, red terrorism,dramatically regressed to the archaic and barbaric dimensions of blood andviolence.

Nonetheless,becauseoftheintrinsicallyculturalsubstanceoftheissue,herewe will discuss other kinds of considerations, which focus on the inadequacyof the ideal inspirations of those forces. The crucial point seems to lie in astructural asymmetry of a theoretical nature or, in other words, in the difer-

ent weight and importance given to those cultural galaxies that the work ofmediation and equilibrium should have brought together. Central here was thecultural identity of the Italian Communist Party (), which was based almostabsolutely and univocally on the values of egalitarianism and communitarian-ism. It quickly saw in the anti-authoritarian examples of 1968 not a hypothesisto be welcomed or discussed, but only an extraneous issue to refute and deny.

One of the major obstacles if not the most important to an adequatematuration of the ideas of 68 was the political and cultural resistance opposedby communist humanism, educated within an anthropological perspectivermly based on the priority of the physical and material needs of humanbeings and on the egalitarian requirement for these to be satised. Such ananthropology perhaps justied in times of shortages and during the rstperiod of modernity had diculty in understanding life programmes thatwere more articulated and diferentiated, and also more consonant with thatsecond phase of modernity that Italy was approaching through the circulationof commodities and mass consumption.

It was efectively this anthropology of poverty, together with materialism

and egalitarianism of needs, and the corresponding interpretation of the cul-tural-symbolic world, that provided an answer that remained deaf to a demandfor a new humanism and a new universalism of diference. However, in elec-tion times, the very same bureaucratic and intellectual apparatus of the took advantage of the anthropological and behavioural transformation thathad spread throughout the entire country since the explosion of the studentmovement in 19689 and the new structure of industrial workers councils,which in some ways had been triggered by the former. Enrico Berlinguers

Eurocommunism was then able to turn the radical need for new forms of lifeand social organisation into an abstract and moralistic rigourism, looking toworking-class and popular self-limitation of consumerism as the key-stone of arising nation governed by the popular masses and the alliance between work-


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ing and productive classes, including both labour and capital. In efect, thisinitiative merely inverted the meaning of the anthropology of poverty that hasalways been an integral part of communist spirituality.

The intentionally avoided the historical opportunity to start a processof deconstruction-reconstruction of communist traditions, beginning from theabilitytocriticiseitsowndogmatismsandtoengagewithotheranthropologies.Only an evaluation of its own opening-up and acceptance of otherness wouldhavebeenabletogeneraterealandefectivehegemonyonthepartofapoliticaland intellectual class that had the historical merit of having lived and inter-preted the twentieth century as the emergence into social and cultural life ofimmense masses of human beings, who, until then, had been forced into such

a subordinate and almost extra-historical life that was often not dissimilar tothe rhythms and conditions of animal life.Unfortunately, this did not happen. Its most evident consequence was not

the elaboration of the self and its own identity, which is by denition oneof the abilities of a hegemonic subject, but was rather the conversion under-taken by that political personnel, in order to return to a virginal and intactpraise of the commercial-entrepreneurial culture and a vision of politics as amere technical-administrative mediation between the interests of supposedlyautonomous subjects, regarded as individually free at the moment when theyjoin the social pact. However, we know, as Hegel taught, that overturning intothe opposite of oneself is the most explicit expression of the stubbornness of asubject that, in order to rearm its inalterable identity as a subject of power,passes on from one form to another, never letting the real other penetrate intoitself.

2

The present book is a conceptual biography and is based on the same kind ofproblems mentioned above, even if it might not seem so. It returns to an issuethat appeared to have already been fully discussed and settled: the relationshipbetween the young Marx and Hegels philosophy. However, todays increasedavailability and philological precision of Marxs texts, mainly due to the new edition,aswellastheimprovementofresearchonGermanliteratureandon Hegel over the last thirty years, allows us to return to the meaning of that

relationship, so often thematised, when not even canonised, in Marxist texts.

The newGesamtausgabe (citedhereas) is published by theInternational Marx-Engels


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In my opinion, the great theoretical innovation is the chance to challenge thecanonical way in which this relationship was considered and evaluated in thepast. According to this narrative, the transition from Hegels idealism to Marxs

materialism could not, and should not, mean anything but the result, followinga linear progression, of a theory of becoming, initially conned to an abstractlevel of Idea and Spirit, and then nally found in the real activity of humanbeings and of their relations, in a historically concrete horizon.

The underlying thesis of my reconstruction breaks the order and the pro-gressive dimensions of such deductions and proposes an interpretation of therelationship between Hegel and the early Marx as characterised by a perman-ent and structural subordination of the young revolutionary intellectual to

the great philosopher from Stuttgart. This subordination lasts for a long time,for a whole period of Marxs life; when denied and repressed, it became theorigin of many hasty and not very rigorous aspects of Marxs rst theoreticalparadigm.

Therefore, as the reader will see, the substance of the connection betweenHegel and the rst Marx will basically result in a failed act, a failed parricide,and in an asymmetric confrontation between two anthropologies. Marxs earlyanthropology, it seems to me, has a symbiotic-fusional, organicistic andspiritu-alist nature, despite its claim of materialism and concreteness. This becomesparticularly clear when compared with the very original concept of the indi-vidual as werden zu sich and bei sich im andern sein [to become ones selfthrough the relation with alterity] that Hegel inscribed under the only appar-ently traditional denomination of Spirit [Geist].

As the young Marxs philosophy of subjectivity is regulated only by thetheme of equality and the organic unity of species of the human species it rejects any possible meaning regarding the value of a diferentiated indi-vidualisation. Passing through Feuerbachs deceptive materialism, it under-

takes what amounts to an anthropological regression, when compared to thecomplexity achieved by Hegels theory of subjectivity. Such backwardness andarchaism will turn up even in the subsequent materialist conception of his-tory developed by Marx and Engels. This conception, despite the profound

Foundation,participants in which include,amongothers, the International Instituteof Social

History of Amsterdam (where large number of Marxs manuscripts are held) and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The new publishing house is Akademie

Verlag of Berlin [now De Gruyter]. A rst attempt to produce a historical-critical edition

of Marx and Engelss writings (cited here as ) was undertaken by David B. Rjazanov

between 1927 and 1935. On the history of the new, see Mazzone 2002.


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originality of its interpretation of the history of human societies, fails to medi-ate between the legitimate acknowledgement given to material needs in thelife of human beings, and to the organisation of labour established to order to

satisfy them, and that immaterial need of acknowledgement of each personssingle and incomparable identity by another human being, which for HegelsPhenomenology of Spirit, and later for psychoanalysis, reveals an unavoidableresearch programme for modern anthropology.

Nevertheless, I believe that this radical decit of subjectivitism is the basisfor the most singular and fertile paradox of all Marxs work. The indiferencetowards individual history, upon which young Marxs whole communitariananthropology is based, allows Marx to succeed in that interminable undertak-

ing that is his later drafting of his mature critique of political economy. In orderto construct a science of modern society and its economic laws, Marx assumesthat individuals, far from being free and autonomous, should be conceived ofas nothing more than masks or mere dramatis personae, that is, personica-tionsandbearersofthereproductivefunctionsofthetruesubjectofmodernity,namely, capital. Capital, being made of merely quantitative wealth, can haveno other aim than that of increasing its quantityad innitumwithin its monet-ary and productive circuit, in a forced process of growth that manipulates thewhole qualitative side of life and of human beings in order to guarantee its ownaccumulation.

However, in order to understand how an abstraction could constitute realityand concretely organise social life that is, to understand how, in moderntimes, an economic principle could count as a principle of material productionas well as a principle of symbolic production the mature Marx needed tomodify the nature of the deep relationship he had with Hegel all his life. Marxhadtodistance himself from a master-father, whose complexity andtheoreticalsuperiority he could only repress during his juvenile immaturity that is,

negate in a compulsive and forced way. He needed to acquire, after the workof mourning following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and thelong years of study in London, the ability to recognise such a master-father anduse him in the diferentiation and autonomy of conception of his mature work.HereIcanonlyrefertowhatIwroteanumberofyearsagoinatextontheMarxof theGrundrisseandCapital.

See Finelli 1987.


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3

For the above reasons, I trust it is suciently clear that going back to the

Hegel-Marx connection could be useful in understanding our present. Marx-isms founding anthropology had a very idealistic and reductive vision of thehuman being, and its limitations afected the entire theoretical and practicalhistory of communist tradition.

Furthermore, I believe that inside the multiform and sometimes even con-tradictory laboratory of Karl Marxs work we can identify two fundamentaltheoretical tendencies.

Thersttendency,perceptivelydenedbyGiovanniGentileattheendofthe

nineteenth century, is that of a philosophy of praxis founded upon a subjectof an idealistic type, a subject that moves through history by means of thenegation, and then the negation of the negation, of its originary fullness. Thisis a philosophy of history where a subject necessarily loses and alienates itselfthrough labour; but, equally necessarily, and in accordance with a predenedresult, it reconciles itself with itself and with its irreducible and irrepressibleessence. This theory of praxis generates a paradigm that reduces reality in itsentirety to labour. It represents a substantial anti-naturalism, or rather, thevalorisation of nature only to the extent that it is elevated and inscribed inthe horizon of the historicity of human beings. It thus produces the simplisticvision of symbolic and political superstructures as mere reections of theproductive structure.

The second tendency, which efectively coexists with the rst, is instead asociology of modernity alone, and, thus, not extended to the entire history ofhumanity, as in the case of historical materialism. It is based upon capital asa principle of totality. In other words, capital is considered as a vector of theuniversalisation and assimilation of the whole, which progressivelytransforms,

throughout its history, every element of prior reality and civilisation. Presup-posed [presupposto] elements are transformed into elements posited [posto]by its logic, into products of its accumulation. At the same time, as a totalisingprinciple of social integration, it is, precisely in its nature as an element produ-cing material goods that satisfy human needs, a producer of relations betweenhuman beings and of the whole process of decomposition of a social ensembleinto classes and orders, as well as a producer of the symbolic imaginary andtheoretical rationalisations of the various social actors, by means of a singular

relation of dissimulation between content and surface.The profound heterogeneity of these two theoretical paradigms, opposed

on so many levels of mediation and contact, will later need to be analysedby means of a philologically informed understanding of the history of Marxs


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thought. What it is necessary to highlight here is the extent to which, from thebeginning, it was the rst paradigm that was imposed in a dominant fashion inthehistoryofItaliantheoreticalandpoliticalMarxisminthetwentiethcentury.

It was conjugated in the terms of the philosophy of praxis and of a humanismthat, despite its own claims to materialism, was instead intrinsically spiritualistand anti-naturalist. It was so dominant that the entirety of Italian Marxismcould be substantially described, in my view, as a Marxism without Capital.

This book, dedicated to the anthropology of the early Marx, would like tomake a contribution to understanding the dynamics of this process, beginningwith the multifaceted and contradictory soul of Marxs philosophy, whoselimitations need to be discussed again in order to understand, alongside the

dramatic inadequacies of the history of communism in the twentieth century,also the limitations and diculties of more recent history.This means that there is no possible re-actualisation of Marxs critique of

political economy, with its persistent ability to explain the world of today,without a radical self-critique of Marxism with regard to its major and fun-damental anthropological and juridico-political weaknesses. Drawing in partuponarevivalofMarxologicalstudies,Ibelievethatitwillbepossibletounder-stand better the reasons for the exhaustion of what was in the end, due to itsown limitations, only an attempt at hegemony. Its inevitable failure could onlyleave the eld clear to themiserableness andboredom of our present. However,its most fertile and acute instances will inevitably return to haunt the unre-solved problems of future history.


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, , | : ./_

Between the Ancient and the Modern

1 Science and Utopia

One of the less obvious geopolitical consequences of the fall of the Berlin wall,although very important for a limited group of experts, was the end of a hon-ourable mans extended military service. The duration of the service, almosta century, may sound amazing, but is less surprising when we know the mans

nameisKarlMarx.Thephilosopher,economistandpoliticalorganiser,alleldsin which he seems to have excelled, was called up to guard the defences ofthose unfortunate and luckless regimes answering to the name of real com-munism and of their vulgar state philosophy, called dialectical materialism.Marxwas nally given back his freedom when he was retired frommilitaryexileon the eastern borders. This freedom meant he could once again walk amongstall those who frequent the peaceful gardens of thought and respond to theirquestions, liberated from the military obligation to answer in a warlike, schem-atic and propagandistic way on serious issues concerning the history and lifeof human beings. The so-called liberation of Eastern Europe is relevant to thefollowing pages only insofar as it concerns Karl Marxs liberation, at the endof his military service and the opportunity this provides to return to discus-sions with him, over and above any presumed alignments. This will permit arenewed pleasure to be taken from the complex and original richness of hismind, without being dismayed by the limits and profound backwardness that,at times, appear to overshadow some of his thoughts.

Recommencing a productive examination of Marxs thought means, primar-

ily, discarding every myth regarding his heroic gure and his alleged, uncor-rupted love of truth, his unconditional dedication to the good myths sub-sequently distorted and betrayed by his followers. It means instead to ndwithin Marxs theoretical weaknesses the principle of those rigidities and ex-tremisms that very often characterised later forms of Marxism.

One of this books objectives is to nd within the contradictory history ofMarxs thought the multiple sources of the history of Marxism or, preferably,of the history of Marxisms. This requires an analysis of all the theories, even

in their most dicult interpretations, which consistently choose to highlightpartial and exclusive aspects of Marxs work, without undertaking the patient,global reconstruction demanded by the tortuous progression of his thought.ThepointofMarxsregainedfreedomisessentiallyhisliberationfromMarxism


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and the introduction of a new methodological approach that releases Triersphilosopher from apologetic rituals which, for over a century, have consideredhim immune to error, but thereby end up only handing him over to the turbu-

lent freedom of his own contradictions.However, humanising the hero, removing him from a celebrative alienationand returning him to the efective time and space of his work, also needs toavoid falling prey to the opposite approach of demonisation. Particularly inrecent years, and despite a few formal acknowledgements, this is efectivelywhat happened to Marxs thought, inasmuch as it is seen as lacking substantialtheoretical dignity. He is frequently accused of being unable to abandon ideo-logys passionate and deforming vision and of raising things to the objective

and dispassionate level of theory. Furthermore, it has been argued that he wasnever able to raise his thoughts to the levels of science and philosophy. Thisstudy instead aims to examine more mediated, concrete and human cong-urations, avoiding demons and gods and the celebrations of absolute evil andgood.

It is undeniable that Marx himself, from the very start, claimed an entirelyspecial status for his work or, in other words, one that was both theoreticalbut also immediately practical, in terms of its value as a tool for the organ-isation and the liberation of the modern proletariat. So much so that, begin-ning with this claimed non-speculative but fundamentally practical-politicalnature, the most profound criticisms made of Marxs theoretical works are thatthey have created an undesirable mixture of description and prescription, or,in other words, of cognitive application (that aims to describe reality as it is)and practical application (that aims to transform reality as it is hoped it willbe). The intrinsically ideological nature of Marxs work thus supposedly con-sists in the prevailing of desire over thought, which means that, even whenacknowledging his brilliant ability to identify elements valuable for the inter-

pretation of history and social life, he also stands accused of generating one ofthe most extreme and damaging combinations of all time, that of science andutopia.

The clearest conceptual formulation of this type of criticism, accordingto which the levels of real and substantial analysis in Marx are combinedwith those of the imagination and its abstractions, had already been madeby Benedetto Croce, at the end of the nineteenth century, in his HistoricalMaterialism and the Economics of Karl Marx[Materialismo storico ed economia

marxistica], with a specic reection concerning the well-known Marxiantheory of value. This theory, which Marx introduces at the beginning ofCapital,famously hypothesises that commodities in the modern market are exchangedon the basis of the amount of labour contained within them and interprets


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the reality of the society in which we live by reference, as Croce notes, to anentirely ideal and imaginary one: a society, precisely because it is composed,it is presumed, only of members who work and exchange their products in

accordance with the equality of the work they contain, is an imaginary one,conceived by means of abstractions with respect to the efective complexitiesof each real, social form of life.

Let us, instead, take account, in a society, only of what is properly eco-nomic life, i.e. out of the whole society, only of economic society. Let usabstract from this latter all goods which cannot be increased by labour.Let us abstract further all class distinctions, which may be regarded as

accidental in reference to the general concept of economic society. Letus leave out of account all modes of distributing the wealth produced,which, as we have said, can only be determined on grounds of conveni-ence or perhaps of justice, but in any case upon considerations belongingto society as a whole, and never from considerations belonging exclus-ively to economic society. What is left after these successive abstractionshave been made? Nothing but economic society in so far as it is a societyof labour. And in this society without class distinctions, i.e. in an eco-nomic society as such and whose only commodities are the products oflabour, what can value be? Obviously the sun, of the eforts, i.e. the quant-ity of labour, which the production of the various kinds of commoditiesdemands. And, since we are here speaking of the economic social organ-ism,andnotoftheindividualpersonslivinginit,itfollowsthatthislabourcannot be reckoned except by averages, and hence as socially (it is withsociety, I repeat, that we are here dealing) necessary labour.

The basic error behind the criticisms of political economy presented in Capital,

Croce claims, consists in the fact that Marx has confused the abstract with thematerial. In other words, he conceived, in the abstraction of his mind, a worldcreated according to a utopian and simplifying paradigm and surreptitiouslyturned this into the principle and measure of the real world. The very conceptof surplus value, on which the entire Marxian concept of the exploitation ofunpaid labour is based, is, therefore, only the result of an elliptical comparisonor the arbitrary and forced comparison between the real economy, diversiedinto the multiplicity of its consistent elements, and the abstract economy of an

ideal society based on a single element consisting of labour.

Croce 2001, p. 76; Croce 1914.


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The abstractionof the materiality of human history andits multiformmotiv-ations, the exclusively ideological and imaginary concept of the law of value,the criticism of economic science according to the rules of the same abstrac-

tion, the lack of foundations for the theory of prot as the accumulation ofunpaidlabour: these are themost signicant elements criticised by Croce morethan a century ago. He accused Marx, in his construction ofCapital, of demon-strating a pernicious lack of distinction between that which pertains to know-ledge and that which pertains to the desirable or the hoped for. The materialworld of economics, conversely, is only explained, according to Croce, by begin-ning with the material usefulness of the single individual, as established by themost credited economic sciences based on marginal utility theory. Therefore,

the Marxian theory of value, which refutes the idea that the price of economicgoods is based on utility to the individual, is on principle excluded from eco-nomic science. It is, therefore, impossible not to conclude that the entire sys-tem expressed inCapitalis erroneous and, in particular, that the theory of theirreversible crisis of capitalism that is expressed in the tendential law of the fallof the prot rate is unsustainable.

The same abstraction of reality, according to Croce, further characterisedMarxs ideas in relation to the more general concept of history, in which so-called historical materialism, in an attempt to dene a consistently uniformstructure of events and by replacing spirit with matter, positions the economicfactor as the essential and determining basis for all human life. For Croce, themost authentic form of knowledge is historical and aims both to judge and todistinguish the particular form of human activity that characterises any histor-icalevent,whichis,duetoitsunrepeatablenature,alwaysdeterminedandnew.Thus, Marxs reections on history can make sense for Croce only when theyare separated from any strong and systematic theoretical claim, and when theydo not presume to present themselves as a new vision of the world animated

by a philosophy that, with its all embracing and abstract structure, cannot butcancel out the consistently original events of history.

As a consequence, historical materialism only makes sense as canons, as anexhortation to the historian to widen his or her interpretative horizons and,therefore, to take into greater account the importance of economic factors inhuman events. Marxs great merit was supposedly the fact that he theorised

the assertions of the dependence of all parts of life upon each other, and

of their origin in the economic subsoil, so that it can be said that there isbut one single history; the rediscovery of the true nature of the State (as itappears in the empirical world), regarded as an institution for the defenceof the ruling class; the established dependency of ideologies on class


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interests; the coincidence of the great epochs of history with the greateconomic eras; and the many other observations by which the school ofhistorical materialism is enriched.

If this is the opinion of one of the most eminent representatives of Europeanidealist philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not very difer-ent from the judgement of Marx made by one of the twentieth centurys mainphilosophers of science, Karl Popper. InThe Open Society and its Enemies, Pop-per profoundly criticised Marx as a theorist of historical determinism, of anassumed and anticipated vision of history that has nothing in common withthe dignity and seriousness of science. According to Popper, Marx, as a histor-

icist ideologue, did not remain within the limits of the efective prediction ofscience but expressed historical prophecies that claim to anticipate the courseof the future with absolute necessity. It is no coincidence that behind Marxstands Hegel who, for Popper, is one of the greatest theorists of obscurantismand totalitarianism. As an anti-scientic and irrationalist thinker, Hegel efect-ively posited as the basis of truth those contradictions that science insteadabsolutely excludes from the genuine progress of knowledge. Imagining dog-matic and improvable hypotheses such as dialectical progress, the conict ofopposites, their synthesis and unity, he celebrated an optimistic philosophyof history aimed at the progressive development of the Idea. In so doing, helinked his concept of Spirit [Geist] to Platos doctrine of ideas and tried to pushmodern thought, against the Enlightenment and all scientic knowledge, backinto authoritarianism andtotalitarianism. As a disciple of Hegelian historicism,Marx necessarily fell into abstract generalisations that were far removed fromreality and proposed theories such as the claim that the history of all societieshitherto is the history of class struggle, or that social life is organised accord-ing to a division between a sphere of essence and one of appearance (base and

superstructure), or that politics is entirely unable to condition the laws movingthe economy. Nor was Marx able to avoid becoming a false prophet, foreseeingthe inevitable historical passage from capitalism to communism through theopposition between increasingly simplied and radical classes, thereby assum-ingfallaciouslawsabouteconomiccyclessuchasthetendentialfalloftheprotrateand the accumulation of capital based on the concentration of ever greaterwealth, on the one hand, and increasing poverty, on the other. All these pre-dictions turned out to be false (or only valid for partial periods that have now

been superseded by modern history). Equally false, due to its spiritualist and

Croce 2001, p. 28; Croce 1914.


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metaphysical nature, is the Marxian theory of value that claims to replace thematerial causality of supply and demand with essentialist abstractions withinwhich, for Marx (who through Hegel regresses to Plato), the Platonic essence

has become entirely divorced from experience. Nonetheless, there can be nodoubt, Popper adds, regarding the fundamental and irreplaceable role playedby Marx in the development of the social sciences and their investigative meth-ods but obviously, only once Marxs emphasis on the importance of the eco-nomic sphere for social existence is subtracted from the evolutionist dialecticsof Hegelian origin.

From one century to the other or, in other words, from the judgements ofBenedetto Croce to those of Karl Popper, the gure of Karl Marx, with every

concession to his merits, appears to be crushed beneath the weight of hisabstractionsandhisnaiverelationshiptoHegel.AccordingtoCroce,heisguiltyof not correcting the Hegelian theory of opposites with that of distinctions andthereby confusing the theoretical with the practical. For Popper, he is blamedfor having wanted to conjugate science and Hegelian dialectics, presumingthat dialectical categories such as essence, appearance and contradictions canefectively grasp the material progress of events.

The opposition claimed by Popper between the methods of the natural sci-encesand the cognitive assumptions of dialectics is also operative in the liquid-ationofMarxefectedtowardstheendofthe1980sinItalybyLucioCollettiandother theorists, many of whom had initially subscribed to the school of studyand critical difusion of Marxism set up in the post World War period aroundthe gure of Galvano Della Volpe. Hegels modern dialectics, these writersclaimed, found its origins and most characteristic concepts in the ancient andmystical context of the Neo-Platonism of the third century. This resulted ininstruments whose substantially religious purpose was that of subjecting theworld of nite and material elements to the spiritual dominion of the Abso-

lute. The idealism of Hegelian philosophy consists in the non-recognition ofthe nites dignity and autonomy of existence, reducing it to being merely aphenomenal manifestation of the Innite and the Idea. Thus, Marxs work, orat least the part of it that is built on dialectics, becomes, of necessity, part of anobscurantism that rejects science, underestimates the principles of contradic-tion in relation to every scientic truth upon which it is based and presumes to

Popper 2011, p. 383.

For this kind of interpretation, see Colletti 1976, pp. 376; Bedeschi 1972, pp. 956; Albanese

1984, pp. 55146. The most signicant works by Della Volpe on this topic are Della Volpe 1972,

particularly pp. 138210 and 1969, particularly pp. 52146.


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explain the modern world with theoretical inconsistencies such as the identityof opposites, the inversion of subject and predicate, fetishism and alienation.

2 Hegel and the Epistemological Circle

From both an idealistic and an empirical and neo-positivist cultural point ofview, the decit of theoretical and scientic dignity in Marxs thought, there-fore, has generally been traced back to the excess of dialectics and the Hegelianphilosophy of history present in his works; or, in other words, to the excessof the dialectics of opposition and contradiction that force Marxist theory

towards an aprioristic and meta-historical system. The interpretative hypo-thesis proposed in this book, in an overall rethinking of Marx, is diferent.It aims to demonstrate how the dialectic of opposition and contradiction isundoubtedly a theme that is present, but which is insucient to clarify theproblems of the relationship between Marx and Hegel. For a more in-depthevaluation, we need to examine this theme in the context of the epistemo-logical circle of the presupposed-posited [Vorausgesetztes-Gesetztes], whichconstitutes the most original and innovative element of Hegels theory of truth.This represents, in myopinion, themost problematicmethodological referencein Marxs entire work, despite the various positions that his thought assumesin the transition from his youthful writings to those of the years of maturity.

It is undoubtedly true that Marx eventually dealt explicitly with epistemolo-gical and gnoseological subjects the question of what knowledge and sciencereally are only in the relatively late writings from the Introduction of 1859 totheGrundrisse(Notebook ). It is equally true that, in his life, the problems ofdoing always dominated those of knowing, but it is also unquestionable thata profound and passionate bond with Hegels philosophy marked the start of

his thoughts. Furthermore, due to the highly original combination that HegelefectedbetweendoingandknowinginhistheoryoftheIdea,itwasimpossiblefor Marx, from the very beginning of his research and as a result of this combin-ation, not to pose the question of the nature of theory in its relation to practice,and what the identity might be of the subjectivity that such a relation implies.This is precisely the theme that Hegel attributes,par excellence, to science, andwhich, using the terminology and concepts of Hegel, we will dene as a cir-cular paradigm of the immediate-mediated-immediate or, better still, of the

presupposed-posited.This book is written in the conviction that reviving the discussion of Marx

today only makes sense if it starts with the problematic issue of this Hegeliancircle. A contrast between Marxs thought and science can only be maintained


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if the new criteria of truth and awareness that Hegel attempted to introduceinto the tradition of western thought are repressed and banished from ourknowledge of modern philosophy and culture. The various attempts to set this

new epistemological structure to work are, in my opinion, the history of Marxsintellectual development. They explain, both in their inconsistencies and theirsuccesses, the complex evolution and stratication of this thought.

The new criteria of truth and research initiated by Hegel in hisPhenomeno-logy of Spiritnd their most explicit formulation in the section ofThe Scienceof Logicentitled With what must the beginning of science be made? Hegelclaims here that true knowledge is obtained only when the process of cogni-tion and knowledge assumes the form of a circle: or, in other words, when what

appears to be a simple and immediately certain experience, alongside havinguniversal validity, reveals through its very simplicity the efective presence ofdualisms and contrasts whose opposing natures require mediation and recon-ciliation. What, at the beginning, is immediate therefore gradually proves itsintimate nature to be mediated, consisting of various levels and mediating g-ures. The radical nature of this division is tempered and discovers a terrain thatis increasingly closer to unication. It eventually nds the greatest and mostcomplete level of mediation that, by repairing the division, returns it to the ini-tial immediacy. It is identical, in its simplicity, to the original state; but, at thesame time, it is enriched by all the oppositions-mediations that it has triggered.In this sense, what is presented at the start is, in efect, only an appearancethat alludes to the interior structure that creates and produces it precisely asan appearance. As a consequence, the true nature of what is a beginning canonly be appreciated as a result.

Essential to science is not so much that a pure immediacy should be thebeginning, but that the whole of science is in itself a circle in which the

rst becomes also the last, and the last also the rst. [] In this advancethe beginning thus loses the one-sidedness that it has when determinedsimply as something immediate and abstract; it becomes mediated, andthe line of scientic forward movement consequently turns into a circle.

Knowledge is, therefore, precisely the passage from the well-known to theknown. It is the process of studying in depth a reality that from its appearancepassestoitsessence,andthenreturnsbackagain,tothestateofitsappearance.

Hegel 2010, p. 45.

Hegel 2010, p. 49.


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Now, however, its explanatory connections have been grounded and claried,by means of a series of transitions in which the explanation never looks forexternal causalities but always looks for internal ones.

Further, the advance from that which constitutes the beginning is tobe considered only as one more determination of the same advance, sothat this beginning remains as the underlying ground of all that followswithout vanishing from it. The advance does not consist in the deriva-tion of an other, or in the transition to a truly other: inasmuch as thereis a transition, it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philo-sophy is theever present and self-preserving foundation of all subsequent

developments, remaining everywhere immanent in its further determin-ations.

At rst glance, and considering its formulation in such a schematic way, it isunderstandable that this Hegelian circle can be seen as both paradoxical andregressive, given that it would seem to revive a concept of truth that, claimingto be objective and beyond the reasoning subject, returns us to the forms ofrealismandobjectivitythatKantscriticalphilosophyandtheoryofknowledge,structured around the synthetic activity of subjectivity, denitively supersededin the history of modern philosophy. In this case, Poppers criticisms of Hegel(and, consequently, of Marx), as an essentialist and pre-modern thinker, wouldappear to be entirely justied.

However, this is only valid at rst glance, since, if Hegels discourse is studiedin more depth, we can see that his theory of truth has a phenomenological-dialectical structure that locates it rmly within modern subjectivism, al-though within the context of an entirely specic and original vision of the sub-ject. In efect, the start of Hegels circle is always a fact of individual experience

that is simultaneously universal, insofar as it is present in the experience ofeveryone, something that is inevitably and necessarily present in each of us,something that is obvious and unquestionable in the immediacy and simpli-city of its presence (such as the fact that we are all sensible subjects at thestart of thePhenomenology of Spirit, or such as the assumption of the facultyof thought in general, not limited to determinate thoughts, in the Science ofLogic). However, its content, precisely due to its characteristic simplicity, is sopoor and fragile that it is unable to satisfy the identity and sense of self of sub-

jectivity in any way. Thus, the initial fact in some way makes its own insucient

Hegel 2010, p. 49.


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nature evident and, as a consequence, transforms itself and overtakes itself inthe experience of a subject who aims to look for something more substantialthrough which it can efect a coincidence with itself. This generates a long and

complex path through a multitude of gures of identication that are progress-ively less partial and insucient and at the end of which the subject achievesa perfect form of identity and reconciliation with itself.

This process of constant transformation-alteration, which goes from theabstract towards the material and which is teleologically orientated in the dir-ection of a full maturation of the self, is what Hegel calls spirit [Geist] aSubject-Spirit which, because able to pass through and unite the multitudeof various, partial forms of its identity, is presented as a universal. However,

it is nota logical-analyticaluniversal, such as that of a mind that constructs aconcept, abstracting from a complex multitude of entities the elements com-mon to individual diferences. It is, rather, a practical-experiencing universalthat is produced through the obstacles that the subject is obliged to experiencewithin itself.

The subject who is presumed, at the beginning, to be sucient and coin-cident with itself but, in efect, in a merely subjective presupposition andrepresentation of itself is actually only such at the end of the journey. It hasbecomesuchbymeansofaprocessofproductionandbecomingitselfinwhich,nally, it meets up again with the beginning. This is because only at the enddo identity and coincidence with itself, initially naively assumed and taken asgiven, acquire completeness and efective meaning.

In order to better appreciate the characteristics of this epistemologicalmodel, I refer the reader to the chapter in this book dedicated to a brief sum-maryofHegelianphilosophy.However,whatmustbenotedimmediatelyisthat

Naturally, the philosophical source from which Hegels thematisation of truth as a circlebegins cannot be other than Fichtes Doctrine of Science [Wissenschaftslehre]. This work

providesthefundamentaloriginforallofGermanidealism.Fichte,asiswellknown,bystudy-

ing in depth the Kantian lesson of the autonomy of practical reason and its unconditional

freedom, resolves the theoretical element of the I think in an entirely practical dimension,

nding the true identity of the subject in its ability to remove every presupposition [Voraus-

gesetztes] that it nds outside and before itself as a pre-given world, and to transform it, by

means of its own elaboration, into the outcome of its own production, of its own positing

[Gesetztes]. That the identity of the I is risked in this translating of the non-I into the I, of the

transformationofeverythingthatispositedbytheOtherintosomethingthatispositedbytheSelf in a removal of every outer limit, is the key to Fichtes freedom and the practical-dynamic

dimension that is the basis of the theory of the subject in all German idealism, whatever its

subsequent deviations and speculative closures may have been. On the peculiar nature of the

Hegelian concept of the truth as a circle, see Rockmore 1989.


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it should be highlighted, never suciently explicated and formalised. I amconvinced that the more fragile and less mature Marx always remained sub-altern to and inscribed within the Hegelian double circularity, whilst the more

mature and self-assured Marx broke with it. Rejecting the metaphysical circle,he was able to use only the epistemological circle, valorising it in a new them-atic continent, within a new horizon of concepts and reality. My hypothesis is,therefore, that there is a Marx who is still to be discovered and appreciated notonly because he can, at last, be extracted from the ideological xation that hasrendered him rigid and militarised; but, above all, because the diferent imagethat the more serious studies over the past thirty years have rediscovered in thegure of Hegel and his idealism reects on the image of Marx, bringing out

of the shadows a new gure that surprises and encourages us to consider histhought again. Thus, it is possible to see and the key to this suggested readinglies in this crucial passage that, as long as Marx, despite his great emphasis onpraxis, allows an essentially theoretical-contemplative identity of the humansubject to triumph (in the above-mentioned sense of a subject whose fullnessof life is only realised through the mirror of self-consciousness), he does notescape from a metaphysical and spiritualist vision of history, and thus remainssubaltern to Hegels conception of spirit as theoretical-speculative Idea. It isonly the abandonment of such an aristocratic form of anthropology, whichprivileges seeing over doing and which connes the subject within the circleof self-reection and the unconditional possession of the self, that allows himto conceive of a science of modernity based on the centrality of praxis andthe realisation, without omnipotent and mythological presuppositions, of thecircle between beginning and result.

However, proposing this reading means returning to the myth of the heroand asking oneself why it was Marx himself who cultivated such a heroicaura, giving himself up to the fortune of posterity by means of such a self-

representation. The image of himself to which Marx was always faithful is pre-cisely that of a person who has committed an absolute transgression, a personwho has overturned the entire structure of western culture and who, as a resultof this overturning, was able to propose the eschatology of communism.

I am thinking in particular above all, among the by-now vast wealth of critical literature

about Hegel, of the deepening ofHegelforschungin Germany in the work of scholarssuch as Pggeler, Henrich, Schler, and Nicolin, linked to the activities of Bochums

Hegel-Archiv, the publications of theHegel-Studien and Hegels Gesammelte Werke, edited

since 1989 by theNordrhein-Westflische Akademie der Wissenschaftenand published by

Meiner of Hamburg.


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Marx saw himself essentially as re-establishing historical being in its mostradical nature, making the material, rather than spirit, the principle and basisof reality. In this overturning, he executed the most classic parricide of which

a young German intellectual in the rst half of the nineteenth century couldever think; in other words, the parricide of Hegel, who with his thought inthe Germany of that period did not represent simply a philosophy, but ratherphilosophy as such. Marx always remained tied to this archetype of the purerevolutionary without residues (in the sense of he who enacts radical changeswithout any form of mediation). By so doing, he fell into a profound self-misinterpretation of his own theoretical work even when his thought, aboveall with his mature criticism of political economy, took paths diferent from

that of the overturning of one thing into its opposite, constructing a theoret-ical system mediated to a much greater extent by the great European culturaltraditions at both the philosophical-epistemological and historical-economiclevels. It often happens that the great spirits who inaugurate and explore newlandsandwhothrowupbridgesbetweenthepastandthefuturebecomeawareof and possess the new territories in accordance with types and forms of think-ing that belong to the world which, in reality, they have already abandoned.Thus, to use a signicant example, all Freuds work laboured under the burdenof the self-misunderstanding of claiming to legitimise the new human relation-ships revealed by the clinical study and theories of psychoanalysis accordingto the classic deterministic-quantitative model of natural science. In a similarway, in my opinion, all Marxs work is tarred by the self-misunderstanding of anauthor wanting to legitimise his thoughts and, in particular, his fundamentaldiscovery of the social unconscious of an accumulation of abstract wealth andof an impersonal principle of modern society, based on an absolute overturn-ingandtheprimacyofsensuousandmaterialpraxisoverthatwhichisspiritualand intelligible.

However, the fact is that the young Marx, like many of his contemporaries,in a crucial period of his formation found in Hegels philosophy the absolutelybest theoretical system for thinking the world. This occurred to such an extentthatitwasvirtuallyinevitablethat,followinghisyouth,theachievementofthe-oretical autonomy occurred under the banner of a rejection and metaphoricalmurdering of such a dominant and imposing authority. In other words, it wasa drastic and resolute parricide.

This, therefore, is the subject of this book: the conceptual and psychological

themes of the overturning that the young Marx enacted with regard to Hegel,

On the subject of Freuds self-misinterpretation, see Habermas 1987. See also Finelli 1998.


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butalso with regard to himself and his previous, very strong, identication withthat philosopher. The capacity andfertilityof early theoretical Marxism cannotbut measure the level of truth of its conceptual co-ordinates not only on a level

of logical consistency, but also on that of its psychological consistency; that is,in terms of Marxs mastery of the motivations and the methods with whichhe presumed to enact that murder of the father and his idealistic sophistries.Anticipating the outcome of this research and revisiting what has already beensaid previously in relation to the circle of beginning and result, my hypothesisis that all the theoretical works of the young Marx are essentially involvedin a failed parricide or, in other words, in a negation of Hegel. Its violenceand radical nature expresses, both on a psychological level and on that of

theoretical concepts, rather than a genuine overcoming, the reconrmationof Marxs subalternity and Hegels dominance. The negation was so suddenand immediate that it could not but be considered as an overturning whichdid not modify the substance of its constitutive principles on a theoreticallevel. The more mature and more responsible Marx appeared only later, whenthe bitter defeats sufered in life and in history forced him into the work ofmourning, into a burdensome toil of solitude and theoretical renement thatbrought him, amongst other things, to a more serene and meditated distancefrom Hegel. The liberation of the more original part of his mind could onlytake place with the initiation and consolidation of this distancing, albeit ina manner that remained contentious up to the bitter end, given that, evenin Marxs mature work, the presence and function of the stereotypes of hisyouthful work continue to exist, divided and contradictory, regressive anddeforming.

The moment has now arrived to enter,in medias res, into a philosophicalconsideration of the profound nature of the identication of Marx, as a youngstudent, with Hegel and his concept of the Idea.

3 The Idea as an Organising Principle of Reality. Marxs

Anti-Materialism

The story is well known. At the age of 17, in the autumn of 1835, Karl Marxmatriculated at the University of Bonn to study law, but on 22 October 1836he had already transferred to the University of Berlin where, with his fathers

In relation to the maturity of Marxs thought, see Finelli 1987, 1989, 1996b and Belloore

and Finelli 1998.


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permission, he continued his studies. The early engagement to Jenny vonWestphalen, who lived in Trier, Marxs home town close to Bonn, and thesomewhat disorderly life led by the young Karl in his rst year of study, perhaps

encouraged his father, Heinrich, not to oppose his sons desire to transfer to thepolitical and cultural capital of Germany at the time, thus creating a degreeof distance between the young student and the frivolities of the Rhineland.Marx remained for ve years in the more serious Berlin where, over ninesemesters, despite studying intensely, he only attended eleven courses, mainlyconcerned with legal subjects. After giving up law for political journalism, hegraduatedon15April1841attheageof24inthemoremodestUniversityofJena,without attending the discussion of his thesis entitledThe Diference Between

the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.This dissertation, together with its seven Berlin notebooks of preparatorywork compiled by Marx between 1839 and 1840, as well as the eight Berlinnotebooks ofExcerpta, are signicant for the purposes of this study for twobasic reasons. First, they throw light on the work method that Marx adoptedfor the rest of his life; and second, they are the only and therefore invaluableevidence of the great theoretical depth of Marxs early Hegelianism. Negatedand repressed for the practical and propagandistic reasons of the politicalbattle, these themes only re-emerged 25 years later with the drafting of theGrundrisse and Capital. The importance of these rst writings by Marx justiesthe relatively extended consideration that I will give to them.

The Diference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,of which there remains a copy of the manuscript written by another hand butreviewed by Marx with corrections and additions, is evidence of the youngstudents good command of Greek and Latin. He prepared his dissertation bymeans of a vast and humble work of translation and extracts. He used faith-ful and more or less extensive quotations from the texts he had read and to

which he often added personal reections as comments. The seven preparat-ory notebooks (the so-calledVorarbeiten) contain texts on the Democriteanand Epicurean philosophies by Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch,

The certicate from the University of Berlin, needed by Marx to take his degree at Jena,

certies that he had completed the following courses. Winter Semester 1836/37: Pandects

(Savigny), Criminal Law (Gans), Anthropology (Stefens); Summer Semester 1837: Ecclesi-

astical law, Civil Procedure (Hefter), Prussian Civil Procedure (Hefter); Winter Semester1837/38: Criminal Procedure (Hefter); Summer Semester 1838: Logic (Gabler), General

Geography (Ritter), Prussian Civil law (Gans); Winter Semester 1838/39: Inheritance Law

(Rudorf); Summer Semester 1839: Isaiah (Bauer); Winter Semester 1839/40 and Summer

Semester 1840: no courses attended; Winter Semester 1840/41: Euripides (Geppert).


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Lucretius, Seneca, Stobaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Cicero, as well as sum-mary tables of Hegels philosophy of nature contained in theEncyclopaedia ofPhilosophical Sciences. The eight Excerptanotebooks, dated Berlin 1840 and

Berlin 1841, contain translations of book (chapters 1 and 2) and the wholeof book of AristotlesDe Anima, as well as references to Leibniz, HumesA Treatise of Human Nature, SpinozasTractatus theologico-politicusand Let-ters and Karl Rosenkranzs Geschichteder Kantschen Philosophie. Furthermore,manymoreauthorsbothancientandmodernarequoted,sometimesonlyoncein both the notebooks and the dissertation. These include ancient and medi-eval commentators on Aristotle such as Thomas Aquinas, John Philoponus,Themistocles, and Simplicius, as well as modern historians of philosophy such

as Pierre Bayle, Heinrich Ritter and Johann Schaubach. All this demonstratesthe breadth of Marxs reading, the patience and philological scrupulousnesswith which he undertook his studies, equipped with the virtue of compilationtypical of a good German student of the time and already demonstrating a sur-prising speed and intelligence in his reading.

But what is now of interest is above all the extent to which Marx explicitlyusestheHegeliantheoryofphilosophicalscienceinhisdissertation,organisinghis thought in accordance with four, basic epistemological-ontological prin-ciples that will reappear in an explicit and systematic way only in the logic thatunderlies the drafting ofCapital. These four principles claim that:

Marx made extracts from Vol. of LeibnizsOpera omniain the edition of Dutens, apud

Frates de Tournes, Genevae 1628, 6 volumes. He also reads Leibnizs Meditationes de

cognitione, veritate et ideis,De primae philosophiae emendatione et de notione substantiae,

Principia philosophiae,Principes de la Nature et de la grace fonds en Raison. Marxs mother sent Karl money for his promotion to the title of Doctor on 22 October

1838 (see, , 1, p. 334). Between the end of 1838 and the start of 1839, Marx began to

study Epicurean philosophy, of which there are seven remainingHefte(notebooks). The

comparison with Democritean philosophy is fairly marginal, almost non-existent in these

notebooks. This leads us to assume that Marxs original plan to dedicate his studies to

Epicureanism as part of a broader investigation into all the post-Aristotelian philosophies

was gradually modied due to the possibility of obtaining a lectureship in Bonn with the

assistance of Bruno Bauer, using the material previously collected for a briefer and more

rapidly written text. The quotations contained in the Dissertation from the writings ofLucretius, Plutarch, Seneca, Sextus Empiricus and Clement of Alexander are the same

as those present in the notebooks. The quotations from Aristotle and his commentators,

Semplicius, Themistocles and Philoponus, as well as those concerning Eusebius and that

taken from theDe placitis philosophorum, are diferent.


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) Science is conceivable only as the realisation of the principle itself, or,in other words, in accordance with Hegelian terminology, as the circle ofcontinuity between the beginning and the result. That which is the begin-

ning of something true, in order for it not to remain only a subjective andmental hypothesis, an abstract idea, must demonstrate that it is capableof generating, beginning with itself, the articulation and multiplicity of thevariouslevels of reality. If must, therefore,be able to unify what is real, produ-cing thereby the various gures and demonstrating the internal thread thatsupports and assigns to them a systematic form. The alternative is merelyempiricism that collects the data of the experience without really unifyingit. The hypotheses it puts forward are reduced to mere abstract unications

that the individual subject wishes to impose on reality from outside its ownreection.) Itfollowsthatrealityconsistsnotonlyofmaterialdeterminations,thosethat

are empirical and able to be experienced by the senses, but also and moreimportantly, of ideal determinations or more precisely, according to Marxsterminology, of formal determinations that structure and unify empiricalreality precisely because they are not visible and perceivable within it, aswould be the case if they were determinate and particular segments of it.

) Standing between material determination [materielle Bestimmung] and for-mal determination [formelle Bestimmung] is heterogeneity. The former be-longs to the ambit of particular and nite things, the second to that of atotalising principle of connections and syntheses, a systematic principleof universalisation. Such heterogeneity passes into contradiction when adeterminateandnitegureoftherstambitclaimstoembodyandexhaustin its limits the quality and universal extension of the second. Contradic-tion, therefore, here means that the idea, in its totalising universality, cannotbe conned by the limits of the material and its gures. As a consequence,

when this occurs or when the nite claims to present itself in its particu-lar nature as a universal and absolute, it cannot help but come into conictwith itself and, therefore, negate and sublate itself. The idea is, therefore, thenon-material but objective principle of reality that binds and connects themultiple by means of the negation and sublation of all the inadequate andpartial gures of it that claim to realise and to exhaust it.

) The ontological centrality ofFormbestimmung or, in other words, its abil-ity, through its ideal nature, to organise and structure reality imposes on

1, p. 58. On the drafting of Marxs Dissertation and the state of the manuscript in

handwriting diferent from Marxs, see1, p. 735. See also Marx 1983.


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thelevelofknowledgethedistinctionbetweenobjectiveappearance[objekt-ive Erscheinung] and subjective semblance [subjektiver Schein], between theshaping of thesensibleworld whose surface refers to appearance and mak-

ing visible an objective principle of reality that is neither sensible nor visible,and a taking form of the world that depends, instead, on mere subjectiveopinion, which stops at its perception of the content and the more immedi-ate facts of its own sensibility.

These four principles, as a whole, constitute the keystone of Marxs earlythought and, since all four are philosophemes of unquestionable Hegelian ori-gin and conception, they demonstrate just how deeply the young student in

Berlin adhered to Hegels idealism.Furthermore, given the impossibility of basing science on empirical andmaterialelements,Marx,throughoutallhisworksanddespitewhatisgenerallythought about him, was never a materialist thinker precisely because materi-ality and thought, as evidenced by these rst important Marxian manuscripts,are expressionsthat are entirelyopposed andincompatible. To think efectivelymeans, in the pages of the Vorarbeiten and the dissertation, to refute every pos-

The signicanceofthe formal in Hegel,asoften occurstothisterminphilosophical use, is

polysemous. As well as being synonymous with exterior and supercial, or in other words,

that which is produced by the abstract and non-concrete activity of the intellect, it refers

tothemorepreciseandHegelianmeaningofform,asthatwhichexpandsandexceedsthe

self-imposedlimitof determinateandmaterial being.The form is that which identies the

determinate but, at the same time, reects and relates it to something else. As such, it is

that which opens to beingotherwise, thatwhich declares its non-autonomous subsistence

anditsrelationshiptotheotherthanitself.Inthissense,formmeansforHegelthatwhich

does not permit the coincidence of something with itself but, on the contrary, forces it toshun itself and opens it up to a relationship with what is beyond it. It designates the way

in which negation works and takes shape in the horizon of determinate reality, having

left behind it the indeterminacy in which, like absolute Nothing, it operated in the rst

triad (Being-Nothing-Becoming). The negation no longer as the abstract nothing but

as a determinate being and a something is only form for this something. It is being

something else. The quality, because this being something else is its actual determination

but isdistinct beforeit. It is the being for an other anexpansion of the determinate being,

of thesomething (Hegel 1975a,p.48; 91, translation modied). Thus,while ancient Greek

philosophy saw form, asmorphoreidos, as the greatest function of identity, because it iswhat circumscribes any particular thing and assigns it consistency in the autonomy of its

limit, in Hegelian philosophy, very probably through the mediation of Leibniz and Kant,

the dynamic function of form assumes importance because it resolves the determinate in

something that is ulterior to itself.


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siblematerialismandempiricism;or,inotherwords,torejecteveryperspectivethat begins from facts and particular determinations to proceed then by meansof associations and comparisons to generalisations that are inevitably exterior

to the initial assumptions. To think means, on the contrary, to conceptualiseand universalise facts, unifying them by means of an immanent vector of real-itywhich,initsbeingulteriortothegivenmaterial,is,therefore,alwaysconceptor idea. In this sense, Marx, from the very outset, is and will be whatever theidentity he assigns to the principle of the real an idealistic thinker. I meanthis in the sense that he belongs to the theoretical tradition of the valorisationof ideality that connects such profoundly diferent, pure philosophies such asthose of Plato or Spinoza or Kant or Hegel, who, whatever their diferences,

agree that perception and consciousness of the real is impossible without theunied or synthetic action of an idea as an integrating principle that cannot bereduced to the segments of reality that it unies and informs. Otherwise, dueto the absence of this ideal or transcendental principle, the very existence ofreality is rendered inconceivable, as inevitably occurs to any empirical formu-lation that claims to resolve reality into a succession of atomistic and punctualelements which, without a true unity immanent and objective to them, remainentirely external to each other. Obviously, what distinguishes Marx from theother philosophers of ideality and what, in turn, in Marxs own journey, distin-guishes the various phases of his thought, are the very diferent methods usedto identify this principle of synthesis and integration.

In relationtoMarxsidealismin thedoctoraldissertation, even thewords of thededication

that Marx addresses to Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, an elderly functionary of the pro-

vincial Prussian government, who was the half-German and half-Scottish father of Jenny,

are signicant. For the young Marx, he was a gure of fundamental cultural reference and

of education as a free spirit. May everyone who doubts of the Idea be so fortunate as I,to be able to admire an old man who has the strength of youth, who greets every forward

step of the times with the enthusiasm and the prudence of truth and who, with that pro-

foundly convincing sunbright idealism which alone knows the true word at whose call

all the spirits of the world appear, never recoiled before the deep shadows of retrograde

ghosts, before the often dark clouds of the times, but rather with godly energy and manly

condent gaze saw through all veils the empyreum which burns at the heart of the world.

You, my fatherly friend, were always a livingargumentum ad oculosto me, that idealism

is no gment of the imagination, but a truth (1, p. 28). On the character of J.L. von

Westphalen and his cultural and political openness, see Monz, von Krosigk and Eckert1973, and, in particular, the letter of 7 April 1831 sent by von Westphalen to F. Perthes in

Gotha (pp. 1319). The father of von Westphalen had been the head of the armed forces

during the Seven Years War, while his mother, the Scottish Anne Wishart, descended from

the counts of Argyll, a family with a considerable role in Scottish history.


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However, let us return to the young Marxs doctoral dissertation and askourselves what the deepest motivations are in its composition, over and abovethe conclusion of a young philosophers university studies and plans for future

employment.

4 Democritus and Epicurus: The Empiricism of the Sciences and the

Idealism of Philosophy

Why did the young Marx write a dissertation on ancient philosophy, choosingthe subject of the comparison between the atomism of the fth century

Democritus and that of the fourth century Epicurus? The answers to thisquestion may be multiple.One may be that a thesis on ancient philosophy, given Marxs good classical

education, could have provided the easiest solution for the conclusion of histroubledpathofstudy.AnothermayhavebeenbecauseayoungHegeliansuchas Bruno Bauer, with whom Marx had established an intense relationship dur-ing his Berlin period, had already valorised, in the wake of Hegel, Greek post-Aristotelian philosophy and Christianity itself as the cultural context withinwhich, after the objectivism of the great systems of Plato and Aristotle, themeaning of the subject as an individual and a person were opened up. Yetanother reason may have been that Epicuruss atheism was part of that radicalcritique of religion in which all the young Hegelians found the most unifyingsense of their theoretical and civil commitment, over and above the comprom-ises which, in their opinion, their master, Hegel, had made on the terrain of theconnections between religion and philosophy.

These are all possible answers,which are partially credible; but the most pro-found reason lies in the fact that Marx used the ancient to think about and

problematise the modern. He studied the post-systematic philosophies of clas-sical Greece to meditate on the contemporary situation closest to himself.In particular, it was used to reect on the cultural-political experiences thathe was personally undergoing, as a budding German intellectual caught in aforce eld between, on the one hand, the Hegelian system with its theory of

The dissertation on Greek atomism was part of a work that Marx wanted to write on

post-Aristotelian philosophy in general. See the fragment written by Marx in which hesays that The treatise that I herewith submit to the public is an old piece of work and was

originally intended as part of a comprehensive exposition of Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptic

philosophy. At present, however, political and philosophical arrangements of an entirely

diferent kind prevent me from bringing such a task to completion (1, p. 106).


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the concluded maturation of modern history within the developed frameworkof reason, and, on the other, the followers and continuers of Hegelian philo-sophy, with their need for further revolutions and rationalisations of reality,

suchas,forexample,theJunghegelianeroftheBerlinDoktorclubofwhichMarxquickly became an assiduous member with a not inconsiderable role. Thus,Marx writes about the past in order to write about the present. In his opinion,what allows the association of post-Aristotleanism and post-Hegelianism, ona philosophical level, is precisely the fact that both were historical and the-oretical times characterised by subjective self-valorisation. The dissertation,in its entirety, is an intense reection on the value of individuality and on itscapacity, or lack thereof, to move and transform reality. The outcome to this

problematic is resolved, for the graduating Marx, in the conclusion, which isalso of Hegelian inspiration: namely, the claim that the forces of individualconscience are entirely insucient for grasping and shaping the forces of real-ity.

After the famous letter to his father of 1837 and the self-criticism of his rstromantic identity (to which I will refer later on), the dissertation, the Vor-arbeitenand the BerlinExcerptatherefore constitute the most explicit docu-ment of the young Marxs rejection of a supposed capacity attributed to theindividual subject to confront reality. Nonetheless, it should be noted that thisvery claim on Marxs part of a non-individualistic idealism, capable of efect-ively tapping into the complexity of the real, at the same time expresses a notunconditional adhesion to Hegel, at least insofar as Hegels idealism alreadyappeared to the early Marx to tend towards an unequivocal, speculative andcontemplative polarity marked, due to its excess of theoreticity, by the absenceof a practical and transformative dimension that for the young man fromTrier, at least cannot but be present in a principle of totality.

What the dissertation and theVorarbeitenpresent in the framework of the

ancient is the dilemma of how to continue the anti-individualist dimensionof Hegelian idealism while subtracting it from the theoretical asymmetry thatrisks deforming the objectivity of the Idea into the abstract and separate char-acter of an Idea that is far from the world of actions. This would appear to be

The small Hipper caf in Berlin on Franzsische Strasse was the meeting point of young

Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Carl Friedrich Kppen and Adolf Rutenberg, who hadfounded theDoktorclubin 1837. The letters sent to Marx between 1839 and 1841 by Bauer

and Kppen give an account of the role played in the group by the young man from Trier.

See Bauers letters (11 December 1839 and 31 March 1841) and Kppens (3 June 1841) in,

respectively,, , 1, pp. 33551, 3603.


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for Marx the most relevant characteristic of the whole of Greek philosophy, thedevelopment of which, from thepre-Socratictothepost-Aristotelians, followedthe various identities that the gure of the scholar, thesophs, took on in turn

with respect to the community of which they were part. This establishes arelationship between the intellectual and the community, a relationship that,fortheyoungMarx in Berlinstudying antiquity, contains insucientmediationthroughout the entire development of Greek philosophy. It is understood as anindicative expression of a knowledge that, by remaining apart from the lives ofthe majority, is unable to become praxis and a collective habit of life.

But let us take one problem ata time. Let us primarily consider what the fourtheoretical points are by means of which Marx valorises, in terms of a theory of

physics, idealism and Epicurean philosophy over empiricism and Democritusspositive knowledge.

a) Democritus is not a thinker in the most rigorous sense of the expression. Heisonlyamaterialistandanempiricist.Forhim,theatomisonlyamaterialprin-ciple from which it is impossible to deduce and develop the reality of the worldas it materially appears to our eyes: Sensuous appearance, on the one hand,doesnotbelongtotheatomsthemselves.Itisnotobjectiveappearance[objekt-ive Erscheinung], but subjective semblance [subjektiver Schein]. The true prin-ciples are the atoms and the void, everything else is opinion, semblance.Democritus does not posit any continuity between the atom and the worldthatappearstothesenses,becauseamaterialisticprinciplepositsoutsideitself,outside its materiality, all the other sensible entities and phenomena. A merelymaterial principle is passive, it cannot generate, by its own volition, the con-creteness and polymorphous nature of the world; as such, it remains only anabstract hypothesis, a merely intellectual and not concretely real principle ofuniversality. If anything, because it derives from a reection that is only exter-

ior to the sensible multiplicity, it presupposes the latter rather than foundingand explaining it. For Democritus [] the atom is only the general object-ive expression of the empirical investigation of nature as a whole. Hence theatom remains for him a pure and abstract category, a hypothesis, the resultof experience, not its active [energisches] principle. This hypothesis remainstherefore without realisation, just as it plays no further part in determining thereal investigation of nature.

1, p. 39. The quote contained in Marxs passage is taken from Diogenes Laertius,De

clarorum philosophorum vitis, , 434.

1, p. 73.


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Epicurus, on the other hand, is a proper philosopher because he sees theatom as anarch, a non-material principle from whose actions he necessarilydeduces the forms and happenings of the world of phenomena. For Demo-

critus the atom means onlystoichion, a material substrate. The distinctionbetween the atom as archandstoichion, as principle and as foundation,belongs to Epicurus.

b) Epicurus constructs a science, in contrast to Democritus, because he con-ceives of a system of the real in the light of the contradiction between essenceand existence or, in other words, between formal determination or universaldetermination and particular determination or material determination. The

real is such, therefore, only insofar as it is the realisation of a principle that con-tradicts every determinate and partial realisation of itself. Epicurus objectiesthe contradiction in the concept of the atom between essence

HM_2015_Roberto Finelli-A Failed Parricide_ Hegel and the Young Marx

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