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The philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Marx

Marx and the legacy of Kant and Hegel: After Marx had passed away, in 1886, Engels wrote a lengthy statement on the development of philosophy in Germany entitled “Ludwig Feuerbach and the Exit of Classical German Philosophy.” In it, Engels described the German labor movement as “the heir of German classical philosophy.”³² However, as will be shown later, he set the course for the development of philosophy after Marx in the direction of the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and thus away from Kant and Hegel. But it is precisely this axis formed by Kant, Hegel, and Marx that Gramsci thought about intensely in prison, in line with the Italian tradition in philosophy. These three thinkers had a lasting influence not only on the development of philosophy, but also on world history; this is indisputable, at least for Kant and Marx.

Kant

Kant and the Enlightenment: Kant (1724-1804) is considered the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment in Germany and, together with Hegel, the most important representative of classical German philosophy. This current within philosophy is usually attributed to the idealistic spectrum. Kant based his philosophy on the two central concepts of reason and freedom and thus became the representative of the rational law tradition within the Enlightenment. Because of the importance Kant’s epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of history achieved, he is often referred to as one of the important philosophical founders of the modern world. Kant is still the most quoted and discussed philosopher in the world today. The starting point in Kant’s philosophical thought was the scientific revolution of 1500 to 1800, which clashed with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Kant became world-famous primarily through two concepts: First, by the “thing-in-itself,” according to which man can only know the appearances of things, but not what they are in themselves. Secondly, by his “categorical imperative”, which was mostly interpreted as a guide for individual moral questions. In what follows, Kant is presented, according to an observation by the young Marx, as the philosopher who developed the “German theory of the French Revolution” at the end of the 18th century.³³ Gramsci explored the question of whether Kant’s theory can rightly be called one by looking at the writings of Hegel, Marx, and Engels. Also still relatively well known are the 4 questions with which Kant put his philosophy in order with cosmopolitan intent. With his answers to the four questions, Kant developed a philosophy of Enlightenment that broke with feudal-religious philosophy in all important areas. He refuted all the then current proofs for the existence of God, founded an ethics of bourgeois society as well as the political philosophy of the democratic republic. In his philosophy of history, he pointed out the path that must be taken to permanently prevent wars between nations through a process of federalization, to overcome colonialism, and to establish human rights worldwide. In his writing on “Perpetual Peace”, based on the principle of freedom of reason, he developed the goal of human history. Due to their inherent argumentative power, the principles outlined by Kant contributed to finding a way in Europe from feudal to modern bourgeois society with a democratic constitution. Currently, in the 21st century, many nations around the world are still struggling to establish and stabilize democratic republics, while in other nations, even those with a long democratic tradition, democratic freedoms are under sustained threat from within and without. Therefore, it is urgent to become aware of the core content of the Enlightenment and Kant’s philosophical treatment of the French Revolution based on his writings in the historical context.

Hegel

Hegel and the dialectic: The German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) was, after Kant, the most important representative of German idealism, which was brought to a crowning conclusion by him.³⁴ Hegel is also considered a giant in the round of great philosophers, but one who – hardly comparable to other philosophers – has been discussed and classified extremely controversially. In the 19th century, the spectrum of evaluations of Hegel’s work ranged from Marx, who repeatedly described himself as a disciple of Hegel and Hegelian dialectics as the last word in philosophy, to German Social Democracy, which considered Hegel a conservative, that is, a supporter of the Prussian monarchy. In the 20th century, Hegel was even called an early precursor of Hitler’s fascism. This already indicates the difficulties involved in accurately grasping Marx’s connection to Hegel in terms of content. Hegel’s main creative period was in the first three decades of the 19th century. During this period, Hegel saw his task as reconciling the reason of bourgeois society with a new concept of God that he had created. The reason he sought to grasp had become evident in the Industrial Revolution in England beginning in 1770, in the French Revolution, and in Napoleon I’s temporary conquest of Europe. Hegel, unlike Kant, was not a republican, although he had initially harbored sympathies for the French Revolution. Hegel became a conservative reformer after the defeat of Napoleon I and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which decided to restore the feudal rule in Europe. He first wanted to give the absolute monarchy in Germany a constitution, that is, to transform Germany into a constitutional monarchy. His philosophy of state and law was sharply criticized by Marx for this. According to Hegel, the principle of the world is a spiritual principle. Idealism took the form of an “absolute idea” in Hegel’s philosophy of history at the highest stage of development. For Hegel, the “absolute idea” formed the goal of world history, which he derived from the maximum possible development of human reason. In this context, Hegel also stands for dialectics, a very obscure subject, which usually only specialists dare to approach, but which was of great importance for Marx. The epistemological foundations of dialectics were laid by Kant with the doctrine of the concept. The clue taken as a perspective for sifting Hegel’s philosophy lies in an observation made by both Lenin and Gramsci. Both noted that the dialectic was the epistemology of both Hegel and Marx.³⁵

Marx

The history of all society so far is the history of class struggles: Marx (1818-1882) was the communist revolutionary among the three thinkers. Marx and Engels became active on the eve of a democratic revolution against absolute monarchy in Germany. Even at a young age, Marx was considered one of the best experts on Hegel’s philosophy. Under normal circumstances, he would probably have become a professor of philosophy, but this was prevented by the repression of democratic activity. Marx adopted the concept of dialectics from Hegel, but at the same time reshaped it to free it from the mystification it had received from Hegel. What made Hegel so unique for Marx was Hegel’s discovery – in an introduction this can be said – of how history comes into being, how man mentally and materially builds his own world and in the process generates himself. This process, according to Marx, Hegel had tried to capture with his concept of dialectics. Marx’s thought and action were directed toward the overcoming of bourgeois society through the liberation of the working class from the bondage of capital. Marx interpreted human history as a history of class struggles in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” of 1848. In the “Communist Manifesto,” Engels and he pointed to communist society as the way out of bourgeois society to be fought for by the working class. The communist society was characterized in the “Manifesto” by the worldwide abolition of wage labor, the use of the socialized means of production for the free development of all people and, after the class antagonisms had ceased to exist, by a dismantling of state violence both internally and externally. The Marxian philosophy of history does not know a goal of history, but it names the next cultural stage to be reached: the communist society. The total circulation of the Communist Manifesto, which has been translated into 200 languages, is comparable only to the Bible or the Koran. After nearly 20 years of work in exile in London, Marx published his magnum opus, The Capital, a socioeconomic analysis and critique of modern bourgeois society that became known worldwide. In it, Marx analyzed the relationship between wage labor and capital and the consequences of this. Engels, from the late 1970s, took on the task of explaining the philosophical foundations of the materialist conception of history that Marx and he had developed between 1844 and 1848. In the name of Marx and Engels and on the basis of their work, the revolutions in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the workers’ uprising in Italy were undertaken at the end of World War I. Marx and Engels had occasionally used the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat to make it clear that counterrevolution had to be put down by dictatorial means if necessary. After the October Revolution of 1917, a permanent dictatorship in the name of the proletariat was established in the Soviet Union, first under Lenin and then developed further under Stalin. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed after 79 years in 1991.

On the topicality of Marx: The historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation are clearly recognizable in the 21st century: The analysis of the political economy of bourgeois society that Marx made in “Capital” has lost none of its validity at the beginning of the 21st century. At the end of his main work “The Capital,” Marx once again summarized the “historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation”: “Hand in hand with this centralization or expropriation of many capitalists by a few, the cooperative form of the labor process develops on an ever-increasing ladder, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the Earth, the transformation of the means of labor into means of labor which can be used only in common, the economization of all means of production through their use as means of production of combined, social labor, the engulfment of all peoples in the network of the world market, and thus the international character of the capitalist regime. With the steadily diminishing number of capital magnates who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, pressure, servitude, degeneracy, exploitation grows …”³⁶ Mankind has not progressed beyond the philosophy designed by Marx and the analysis of the political economy of bourgeois society that emerged on this basis, because the essential conditions to which this philosophy owes its emergence have not been overcome. The German Federal Agency for Civic Education reports that in a 2005 BBC poll for the greatest philosopher of all time, Karl Marx took first place with 28 percent. In the wake of the 2008 global crisis, Marx was also praised in bourgeois newspapers for his foresight and the prognostic power of his analysis.

32 Engels, 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Exit of Classical German Philosophy, MEW 21, p. 307

33 Marx, 1842, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, MEW 1, p. 80. Marx made this observation in the course of an argument with the reactionary natural law theory of the German jurist Gustav von Hugo (1764 –1844): “If, therefore, Kant’s philosophy is rightly to be regarded as the German theory of the French Revolution, Hugo’s natural law as the German theory of the French Ancien Régime.”

34 Between Kant and Hegel, the two idealistic philosophers Fichte and Schelling are placed, but they were not systematically discussed by Gramsci in the “Prison Notebooks” and therefore are not considered here.

35 In 1915, Lenin wrote: “Dialectics is precisely the epistemology (of Hegel and) of Marxism: it is precisely this ‘side’ of the thing (it is not a ‘side’ but the essence of the thing) that Plekhanov, not to mention other Marxists, left unnoticed. …” (Lenin, 1915, On the Question of Dialectics, LW 38, p, 343) Gramsci wrote: It is a mistake for dialectics “to be taken for a chapter of formal logic and not for a separate logic, that is, epistemolog …” (Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 16, p. 1407) and on p. 883: “historical materialism (is) not taken to be a philosophy (…) whose epistemology is dialectics …” (vol. 4, issue 7, § 29).

36 Marx, 1867, The Capital, vol. 1, MEW 23, p. 790