Isaiah Berlin [Feuerbach's Supposed Objection to Hegel] Reply to Orsini

7/30/2019 Isaiah Berlin [Feuerbach's Supposed Objection to Hegel] Reply to Orsini

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[Feuerbach's Supposed Objection to Hegel]: Reply to OrsiniAuthor(s): Isaiah BerlinReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1969), pp. 91-95Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

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REPLY TO ORSINI

BY ISAIAHBERLIN

ProfessorOrsinibringstwo specific chargesof unequalgravity againstme. He accusesme (a) of describinga referenceby Marx to the writingsof Feuetbachin a way that is inaccurateto the point of being misleadingand (b) of seriouslymisrepresentingFeuerbach'scriticismof Hegel, and,as a direct consequenceof this, making unjust charges against Croce.

On (a) I plead guilty. If Professor Orsini had confinedhis strictures

to my bibliographicalshortcomingsI should, without more ado, haveacknowledged heir justice and, after due acknowledgment,aken steps to

correctthe relevant referencein the text of my book on Marx to whichhe refers. I am, however,far moreconcernedabout ProfessorOrsini'smore

seriouschargescollectedunder (b). These seem to me baseless, and I seeno reason for withdrawing he relevant statements either in the review orthe book in which Professor Orsini discovered them.

(a) Firstly, Marx on Feuerbach.When Professor Orsinipoints out that

Marxnot only did not, but couldnot, reviewFeuerbach'sTheses on Hegel-ian Philosophy,because no such work can be found in the twelve (surelynot twenty?) volumesof Feuerbach'scollectedworks,what he says cannotbe controverted.The documentof whichI had been thinking (and to whichI shouldhave made a moreprecisereference)is not a review but a letter,written by Marx on March 13, 1843 to Arnold Ruge, in which he refers

not, indeed, to Theses on Hegel, for that is not the title of Feuerbach'swork in question,but to his VorlaiifigeThesen zur Reformationder Phi-

losophie, (in fact the philosophyof Hegel) which appeared,as Professor

Orsinicorrectlystates, with Marx'sown article on the Prussian censorshipin Ruge's Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik

(MEGA 1/2 pp. 305-306). In this essay Feuerbachexpoundssome of theanti-Idealist doctrinesto which Marx alludes in his Theses on Feuerbachand elsewhere.ProfessorOrsini,it is clear, accepts Mehring'sassertion inhis Karl Marx (pp. 52-53 of the English translation) that it was indeedthis work by Feuerbach,and not, as Engels asserts,the celebratedEssence

of Christianity, hat provedto be "a revelation for Marx,"but I have never

felt at all convincedby Mehring'sargument.It has always seemed to methat Engelsprobablyknew the facts; but that in any case, an even clearerformulationof the relevantthesis is to be found in Feuerbach'sZur Kritikder Hegel'schenPhilosophie (writtenin 1839,two years beforeDas Wesendes Christentums)-an essay which Marx,who refersto Feuerbach'sviewseven before 1839, can scarcely not have known. Marx was, after all, notnotable for acknowledgingntellectualdebts. It was this work that, thirtyyears ago, I misnamedTheses on (insteadof Critiqueof) the Hegelian phi-

losophy, and supposedto have been the subject of Marx's "review," .e.,letter to Ruge.For this confusionof titles with references apologize.

91







92 ISAIAH BERLIN

(b) Now as to the weightier charges. In the Critique Feuerbach advances

the proposition, which he is to repeat in many guises later, that Hegel'sefforts to deduce the real from the ideal, existence from essence, only suc-

ceed in establishing in the conclusion what had been assumed in the prem-isses: that Hegel can extract whatever he wishes-e.g. the historical process-out of the category of pure Being because he has already inserted all that

he needs into it at the outset. Let me cite Feuerbach's words from the

Critique of Hegel of 1839: "The Absolute Idea . . . posits itself in advance

as the truth. What it posits as the Other, already posits in its very essence

the truth of the Absolute Idea again. The proof is therefore purely formal,"

i.e., circular.1 What these dark words come to (pace Professor Orsini's ad-

miration for Feuerbach's "terse and vigorous" style) isthat the "deduction"

of the real world from the Idea only works because all the characteristics

of the real world have been previously imported into the Idea, and that

therefore all that is being proclaimed by Hegel is that things are as theyare in the real world because they are as they are in the Idea, which, ac-

cording to Feuerbach, is nothing but a mythological projection of, and re-

quires to be translated back into, the real, empirical world of which it is a

kind of transcendent copy. Indeed, this is the very process of "demythologis-

ing" of which Feuerbach was one of the original champions, a method which

Marx later used to such devastating effect. In the Holy Family 2 Marx says"the speculative philosopher ... smuggles the well known characteristics of

the apple and the pear as they are in experience into the logical determina-

tions which he affects to have discovered" and then pretends to "deduce"

them as "differentiations" of an "organic whole" or (concrete) "universal,"which he calls "the fruit." This is pure Feuerbach. In the previous year, to-

wards the end of the Paris MSS., Marx gives this account of Feuerbach's

dialectic: "Hegel begins from the alienation of substance . . . from the in-

finite, abstract universal . . . i.e. in ordinary language, from religion andtheology. Then he supersedes the infinite and posits the real, the perceptible,the finite and particular (philosophy, supersession of religion and theology).Then he supersedes the positive and re-establishes the abstraction, the in-

finite (restoration of religion and theology)." This is the circle which Marx,in my view quite correctly, regards as the heart of Feuerbach's critique of

Hegel. Feuerbach's central thesis is that "the abstract understanding can

only give things names" not create entities; empirical characteristics are first

transmogrifiedinto

mysterious metaphysical entities,and then used to ac-

count for their own original empirical selves, which they are held, in some

sense, to have generated.Professor Orsini complains that I have reduced Feuerbach to a nominal-

ism that might "have come straight out of an Oxford Common Room of the

present day." Indeed, and why not? When, for example, Feuerbach says

"my brother is called Johann, Adolf, but in addition there are innumerable

others called Johann, Adolf. Shall I then conclude from this that my Johann

is not a reality, that only in Johannheit is the truth? For sense perception

1Quotedfrom Feuerbach'sCollectedWorks,II, 20, by Sidney Hook in From

Hegel to Marx (London,1936), 226-27.







REPLY TO ORSINI 93

all words are names, nomina propria . . . only signs to be used to achieve

the ends ... in the shortest way." 3 What is there in this passage to which

an "Oxford nominalist" could take exception? Whether the Absolute Idea

is Hegel's equivalent of God, or a mythical projection of the real world

(which to Feuerbach is the same), makes no difference to the central thesis

of the positivist creed-that to find the origin of things in the Absolute Idea

is to invent imaginary entities and realms of theology and transcenden-

tal metaphysics, which can and should, in the interests of truth, be "demysti-

fied" into their unmysterious empirical bases. Indeed this doctrine is Feuer-

bach's link with eighteenth-century materialism-a commonplace of all

monographs on Feuerbach and histories of western ideas. On this view, to

explain empirical phenomena by reference to an impalpable Geist or "Ab-solute" (or, in the case of history, the Zeitgeist), is to explain these phe-

nomena in terms of an occult relationship to a mythical version of them,

i.e., to pretend that a heavily disguised form of the original question is

itself the answer to it. This is the tautology of which I spoke, and which

Professor Orsini fails to find in Feuerbach. Yet this reduction of a priori

metaphysics to empirical states of mind or feeling-in Feuerbach's case

a reduction to propositions of psychology-is the weapon which made a

deep impressionnot on Marx

alone,despite all his strictures, but on

others, from Wagner to Lenin. It is at once one of Feuerbach's primaryclaims to fame and the central thesis of naturalist positivism of all

breeds. When Marx in a celebrated passage of Das Kapital says that the

ideal is only the material world reflected by the human mind, he is echoinghis own summary of Feuerbach's theses in the Paris MSS. cited above, a

position he shares with Holbach and his fellow materialists of the eighteenth

century, with Feuerbach, Bakunin, Comte, as well as the nominalists and

positivists of our day, influenced by the development of modern logic and

analysis, some of whom are undeniably members of the Oxford CommonRooms to which Professor Orsini has directed a rhetorical flourish. I cannot,

therefore, see where I have gone astray. It seems to me that I merely reaf-

firmed what has always been considered Feuerbach's just historical due. And

this brings me to Croce, and Professor Orsini's complaint that I criticize

Croce for ignoring Feuerbach's central objection to Hegel's metaphysics;

which, according to my opponent, Feuerbach never propounded.That Feuerbach did propound it seems to me sufficiently established by

the quotations I have given (even if we pay no attention to the general con-sensus of scholars). But when Professor Orsini assumes that my motive for

so perversely denying Croce and Collingwood a place "among the intel-

lectual innovators of our time" comes solely from my belief that they failed

to meet the arguments of Feuerbach and Marx, this is not so. My sole and

sufficient reason for making this historical judgment is that it asserts a his-

torical fact. It seems to me that no reasonably objective historian of philos-

2MEGA abt. 1 Bd. 3p.

231.3Quotedby Sidney Hook, ibid. Hook's translationsand account of the matter

seemto me quite correct.







94 ISAIAH BERLIN

ophy could deny (even if he thought it a disaster,as Russell, for example,regarded he influenceof Kant, or Broad that of Hegel) that it is the new

logic, whichbeganwith Frege and Russell, and the new analytic movement

closely connectedwith it, and not the neo-Idealist school, that constituteda turningpoint in the historyof modernphilosophy.This truismwas, in anycase, only an obiterdictum in a review concernedwith Croce'sopinionsinthe translatedcollectionthe title of which ProfessorOrsini,I expectrightly,considers nappropriate. did not wish to do an injusticeto a thinkerwithwhose views I did not feel myself to be in particular sympathy. Conse-

quently, it seems to me, that I almost lean over backwards n describingCroce as a civilized, original, illuminating,penetratingthinker, a man of

humane,fastidious,and generousculture,the possessorof a richly imagina-tive mind,with a gift for originaland freshaperQus.Yet noneof this, I fear,satisfies ProfessorOrsini.For my crime is not only to be myself blind tothe true characterand value of Croce,althoughthis would have been bad

enough,but to have caused similar blindness in others.Accordingto Pro-fessorOrsini,it is I, and none other,who have spreada heresy (by meansof a short review) which has seeped into the opinionsof ProfessorGuido

Calogero,Father Vincent Turner,and (via, I gather,Mr. Turner'sessay)ProfessorEdgarWind.These distinguished hinkers do not need me to de-

fend them against ProfessorOrsini's thunderbolts.So eminent an Italianthinkerand philosophical cholar as ProfessorCalogeromay be assumed,I

think,to have arrivedat his opinionof Croce's houghtindependentlyof mybrief remarksin the pages of Mind in 1952. Nor need Father TurnerorProfessorWind be suspectedof derivingtheir convictionsof the fallacies of

Hegel's Idealism,or of the criticismsof it by Feuerbach,from a few lineswritten by me, even if they do me the honor of agreeingwith me on these

points. But, of course,ProfessorOrsiniis perfectly right in supposingthat

I regard Feuerbach's (and Marx's) criticisms of Hegel in this regard aspossessingsubstance;and that I think that Croce's ailure to meet them,his

hostilityto naturalisticexplanationsof historical,and,in particular,aestheticand cultural developments-in short his "spiritualism"(despite his dis-avowals of belief in transcendent ntities outsideempiricalexperience),and,indeed,his inability to free himself from hypostatizingempiricalconceptsand categories-that I think that all this does vitiate his and every otherIdealism.This is, I take it, the view common o myself and to my threeemi-nent "victims,"whichProfessorOrsinideplores.He may, on this, standwith

Hegel and Croce and not with Feuerbach,ProfessorCalogeroor the empiri-cists; but I cannot for the life of me see whereI can be considered o have

misrepresentedHegel, Croce,Collingwood,or anyone else.These seemto me the only matters of seriousimportanceraisedby Pro-

fessorOrsini.Thereremainsthe questionof Croce'sview of Feuerbach. donot know whether Croce anywhere discussed Feuerbach'sviews at anylength. ProfessorOrsini does not tell us. My assumption-not, it seems tome, wildly eccentric-was that Croce,who abhorredpositivismandnatural-

ism, couldnot have thoughthighly of Feuerbachwho was, to say the least,plainly influencedby such views. But on this ProfessorOrsini,who has,







REPLY TO ORSINI 95

after all, written an admiringmonographon Croce, speakswith authority,and I defer to his expert opinion.He tells us that Croce wrote sympathet-

ically about Feuerbach'sfollower,Eugen Dihring. If Croce could admire

Diihring,who but for Engels' famous onslaught,would have been utterly(and justly) forgotten, t is, I admit,difficult o be sure what he might nothave thought;his polemicagainst Comte and his followers,on which I re-

lied, is evidentlynot a dependablepointer.PerhapsCrocethoughtthat con-

sistency is a virtue of small minds. At any rate I am ready to retractmyrash extrapolation f only to please ProfessorOrsini,whose view, on this,must, I assume,carryweight.

As to my characterization f Feuerbach's iterary style, ProfessorOrsiniis entitled to his preferences,and I to mine. Brought up as we evidently

have beenin somewhatdifferentphilosophical raditions,this is perhapsun-avoidable.FortunatelyProfessor Orsini'sown style, despitehis admirationfor them, does not seem to have been influencedby Hegel, Feuerbachoreven Croce.For he writes so clearly andpungentlythat I have had no diffi-

culty in understandinghis assertions,and therefore in concluding hat be-

yondmy avowedbibliographical rror,andmy naive belief that Crocewas aconsistentanti-positivist,I have no need to apologizeeither to the reader,or to my three distinguishedcontemporarieswho have, accordingto mycritic,so blindlyfollowedme into the anti-Idealistabyss-least of all to the

learned, mordant,but (I cannot help thinking) over-zealouschampionofCroce,ProfessorG. R. G. Orsinihimself.

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