by J. Carl Mickelsen 1991
Marxian methodology is rooted in the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel, though, unlike Marx, was a philosophical idealist. It was because of this idealism, according to Marx, that in his dialectic Hegel "has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history."(1) Hegel, however, was an objective idealist, i.e., his philosophy attempted to explain the objective movement of history in terms of the self- development of the Idea. Historical development, then, is fully incorporated into and is of the essence of Hegel's philosophy. Consequently, "Hegel very often gives a real presentation, embracing the thing itself, within the speculative presentation,"(2) for it is "within empirical, exoteric history [that] Hegel makes a speculative, esoteric history develop."(3) Thus, despite his idealism and the dialectic's speculative form, "Hegel's dialectics is the basic form of all dialectics."(4) As Marx put it in the Afterword to Capital:
"The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."(5)
The Hegelian dialectic is the method of Hegelian philosophy. The fundamental presupposition which is equally the conclusion of Hegel's circular philosophical system is his well known dictum: "The True is the whole."(6) The whole, as conceived by Hegel, is the Absolute Idea (God, Reason) and "is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous development of itself."(7) Hegelian philosophy is the self-consciousness of this process - it is the Absolute's self- comprehension of the development of the Absolute as the Absolute's own self- development. As such, Hegelian philosophy is seen by Hegel to be the culmination of philosophy since philosophical consciousness, in Hegel's view, is the Idea's consciousness as consciousness of essentiality and with Hegel this consciousness has reached completion in self-consciousness.(8)
According to Hegel, the method of philosophy "can only be the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific method of knowing, since it is at the same time the reflection of the content itself which first posits and generates its determinate character."(9) Method, then, merely replicates reality and the essential "nature of the content," which method reflects, is dealt with by Hegel in logic. Here the content is devoid of the empirical for logic is "spirit's consciousness of its own pure essence."(10) Accordingly, logic replaces former metaphysics and "is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind."(11) Accordingly, method, which is the immediate reflection of this essence, "is the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic"(12) and "is nothing but the structure set forth in its pure essentiality."(13)
The structure of the whole is such as to contain an inherently dynamic moment since the totality, which is the whole, is seen by Hegel to be self-developing toward its own implicit potential -Reason realized. The basis of this development, "[t]hat which enables the Notion [Begriff] to advance itself is the ... negative which it possesses within itself; it is this which constitutes the genuine dialectical element."(14) Moreover, since the whole is a totality, a unity which is all encompassing, "the most important aspect of dialectic" is "the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative."(15) Hegel summarizes this principle of contradiction (which contains and expresses negation) and its relation to the developing and changing totality:
"All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress ... is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results ... Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite."(16)
Marx's own thought stands in an inverted and critical relation to Hegelianism. While accepting Hegel's abstract understanding of the historical dialectic, Marx rejected and criticized both Hegel's idealism and his "false positivism," that is, his implicit justification of the status quo. This was accomplished, in part, by using Feuerbach's method of "transformational criticism." This method consisted in the inversion of Hegel's subjects (the Idea or thought) and predicates (being or the phenomenal world in general), and it was used by Marx to extricate the latent truth of Hegel's philosophy which was buried within the "mystical shell" of idealism.(17)
On the basis of Feuerbach's transformational criticism and the subsequent reappropriation of Hegel, Hegel's dialectic is transformed by Marx from a dialectic of the Idea to a dialectic of human development. History is thus demystified and is understood as humanity's own creation and development of itself through labor.(18) On this materialistic basis the import of the concrete dialectic is radically altered:
"In its mystified form, dialectic ... seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary."(19)
In sum, Marxist methodology is a materialist dialectic. As dialectic, it views social reality as a historically determinate system - a concrete totality that historically develops on the basis of its immanent and contradictory elements. It is thus self-relating, self- developing, self-negating totality that gives itself its own content.(20) The materialist aspect of this dialectic is that the subject of this self-creating historical process are human beings themselves.(21) Marxist methodology, which itself is seen as reflecting the essence of historical development, is thus inherently radical: "To be radical is to grasp matters at the root. But for man the root is man himself."(22) It is also inherently negative since it views the given from the standpoint of its dissolution and from the standpoint of what it is not, i.e., from the standpoint of the development of its inherent potential, viz., human freedom. Thus viewed, the totality is seen as a system of alienation.(23)
1. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 127 (M. Milligan trans. 4th rev. ed. 1974).
2. K. Marx & F. Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism 71-72 (R. Dixon & C. Dutt trans. 2nd ed. 1975).
3. Id. at 100.
4. K. Marx, "Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann March 6, 1868," in K. Marx & F. Engels, Marx/Engels Selected Correspondence 187 (3rd rev. ed. 1975).
5. 1 K. Marx, supra note 13, at 20.
6. G. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 11 (A.V. Miller trans. 1977).
7. Id. at 11.
8. In Hegel's view, the whole is the Idea. Ordinary consciousness is thus the Idea's own consciousness. The object of philosophy, however, is the Idea. Thus, philosophical consciousness is the Idea's consciousness of the Idea. Prior to Hegel, though, the Idea was consciousness of the Idea as other than itself, i.e., the Idea was self-alienated and did not comprehend this immanent relationship. With Hegel's philosophy, however, this consciousness becomes explicitly self-conscious for Hegelian philosophy comprehends consciousness of the Idea as the Idea's own consciousness. It is only at this stage that the Idea becomes itself - the Absolute Idea.
9. G. Hegel, supra note 3, at 27.
10. Id. at 51.
11. Id. at 50.
12. Id. at 53.
13. G. Hegel, supra note 66, at 28. "Hegel simply reinterpreted the basic categories of Aristotle's Metaphysics and did not invent new ones. ... Hegel did not discover the dynamic of reality, nor was he the first to adapt philosophical categories to this process. What he did discover and use was a definite form of dynamic, and the novelty of his logic and its ultimate significance rests upon this fact. The philosophical method he elaborated was intended to reflect the actual process of reality and to construe it in an adequate form. H. Marcuse, supra note 1, at 122.
14. G. Hegel, supra note 3, at 55. "Hegel repeats over and over that dialectics has this 'negative' character. ... In all these uses 'negative' has a twofold reference: it indicates, first, the negation of the fixed and static categories of common sense and, second, the negative and therefore untrue character of the world designated by these categories. As we have already seen, negativity is manifest in the very process of reality, so that nothing that exists is true in its given form. Every single thing has to evolve new conditions and forms if it is to fulfill its potentialities." H. Marcuse, supra note 1, at 123.
15. Id. at 56.
16. Id. at 54.
17. L. Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (1843). Marx's conclusions did not follow immediately from the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel but are themselves mediated by that critique. Feuerbach's method inverts Hegel's subjects and predicates but the Hegelian scheme is not thereby accepted merely in an inverted form. Rather, it is only on the basis of Marx's independent research in political economy that an inverted Hegel is accepted. Marx "begins his analysis without presupposing Hegelian logic. Only while carrying out his analysis does he discover in the relationship between wage labor and capital the peculiar domination of living labor by dead labor [capital] that can be decoded materialistically as the 'rational core' of the idealist dialectic." J. Habermas, On Society and Politics: A Reader 51 (1989).
18. This development occurs in an alienated mode. See generally B. Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971).
19. 1 K. Marx, supra note 13, at 20.
20. Epistemologically, this content can only be understood in reference to the totality and the process of becoming what it is not.
21. Marx sets out the "materialistic basis" of his method in Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (S.W. Ryazanskaya trans. 1970) at 20-22. Here Marx asserts that the economic structure of society, specifically the social relations of production and the corresponding material forces of production, constitute the "real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure." Id. at 20. While there has been considerable debate regarding the usefulness of this dichotomy in the era of monopoly capitalism (see Hutchinson & Monahan, supra note 7, at 219-27) this conception is totally consistent with the notion of humans as the historical subject since these relations are the human's own relations and the material forces are themselves the product of human activity - social labor. Thus, Marx is not dealing with "a process without a subject" as Althusser and other structuralists claim. L. Althusser, Politics and History 185 (1972). Rather, Marx is dealing with a subject that is in its "pre-history," an alienated subject - analogous, in the Hegelian scheme, to the Idea pre-Hegel - that is not self-consciously controlling its own relations. For an extended critique of Althusser see A. Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History (1981).
22. K. Marx, Introduction: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', in Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', supra note 10, at 137.
23. For Marx, as for Hegel, "alienation" signifies the contradiction between the historical subject's existence and essence. The human essence, in Marx's conception, is "free-activity" and the "true realm of freedom" is "that development of human energy which is an end in itself." 3 K. Marx, supra note 13, at 820. This conception of the human essence "is unique to the extent that [the] image of man transcends man's historical situation, yet it derives not from any metaphysical premises, but from an analysis of human history as a projection of human activity." S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx 85 (1968).