Hegel — Value & Knowledge

Hegel has thus unlocked the key to the dynamic of bourgeois production. That consumption is equally production, and production consumption. That human beings produce not only their objects of their desires, but also their desires, they produce themselves. But, their own powers appear to them, as they do to Hegel, as alien things, as natural things, things governing them as if from above.

Hegel: “The notion of value contemplates the valuable article as a mere symbol; the article counts not for what it is, but for what it is worth”. [ Philosophy of Right ]

According to Marx’s Grundrisse corresponds to Hegel’s Logic:

1. The Introduction corresponds to the Doctrine of the Notion.
2. The Chapter on Money corresponds to the Doctrine of Being.
3. The Chapter on Capital corresponds to the Doctrine of Essence.

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Feuerbach

The whole mystery of Classical Philosophy, as well as the earlier feudal ideology, arises on the basis of the social division of labour which has placed with the non-producing classes the role of production of ideas and spiritual culture generally. Thus, the professional philosopher is forever trying to put back together what has been originally sundered. To say this is not to say that philosophy is defective, for the world has given us no other way; the passage to genuine human-natural consciousness is by way of alienated consciousness.

Feuerbach was a radical of a new kind: in 1830, at the age of 26, shortly before the death of Hegel, he was removed from his University post for atheism, and with the publication of The Essence of Christianity in 1841, was the first to “break the spell” of Hegelian Idealism, and inspired the young Marx and Engels. He moved to the countryside and lived quietly after his philosophy of the future, based on love, failed to meet support, but joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1870, two years before his death.

Feuerbach’s insight that the real subject of religion, and of Hegel’s Idealist philosophy, was earthly social relations and human needs, was the key which enabled Marx to turn the Hegelian dialectic on to its feet. Marx formulated his views through a simultaneous critique of both Hegel and Feuerbach’s contemplative “anthropological” materialism.

Although Feuerbach reads like more of an Hegelian than we are today accustomed to, the essential content of his work is the rejection of Hegel’s idealism and the explication of the earthly basis of ideology, but he does not take the Hegelian dialectic forward. That is Marx’s role..

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Chapter III

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23