Reason and Revolution Read online

  REASON AND REVOLUTION

  Also Published by Routledge:

  One-Dimensional Man

  Eros and Civilization

  The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner

  Volume One, Technology, War and Fascism

  Volume Two, Towards a Critical Theory of Society

  Volume Three, The New Left and the 1960s

  Volume Four, Art and Liberation

  Volume Five, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation

  Volume Six, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia

  REASON AND REVOLUTION

  Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

  Herbert Marcuse

  2nd Edition

  with Supplementary Chapter

  First published 2000

  by Routledge

  11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

  Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

  by Routledge

  29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor. & Francis Group

  © 2000 Herbert Marcuse

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  T. J. International Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  ISBN 0–415–21450–5

  TO

  MAX HORKHEIMER

  AND THE

  INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

  Preface

  THE content of a truly philosophical work does not remain unchanged with time. If its concepts have an essential bearing upon the aims and interests of men, a fundamental change in the historical situation will make them see its teachings in a new light. In our time, the rise of Fascism calls for a reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. We hope that the analysis offered here will demonstrate that Hegel’s basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into Fascist theory and practice.

  We have devoted the first part of the book to a survey of the structure of Hegel’s system. At the same time, we have tried to go beyond mere restatement and to elucidate those implications of Hegel’s ideas that identify them closely with the later developments in European thought, particularly with the Marxian theory.

  Hegel’s critical and rational standards, and especially his dialectics, had to come into conflict with the prevailing social reality. For this reason, his system could well be called a negative philosophy, the name given to it by its contemporary opponents. To counteract its destructive tendencies, there arose, in the decade following Hegel’s death, a positive philosophy which undertook to subordinate reason to the authority of established fact. The struggle that developed between the negative and positive philosophy offers, as we have attempted to show in the second part of this book, many clues for understanding the rise of modern social theory in Europe.

  There is in Hegel a keen insight into the locale of progressive ideas and movements. He attributed to the American rational spirit a decisive role in the struggle for an adequate order of life, and spoke of ‘the victory of some future and intensely vital rationality of the American nation …’ Knowing far better than his critics the forces that threatened freedom and reason, and recognizing these forces to have been bound up with the social system Europe had acquired, he once looked beyond that continent to this as the only ‘land of the future.’

  In the use of texts, I have frequently taken the liberty of citing an English translation and changing the translator’s rendering where I thought it necessary, without stipulating that the change was made. Hegelian terms are often rendered by different English equivalents, and I have attempted to avoid confusion on this score by giving the German word in parenthesis where a technical term was involved.

  The presentation of this study would not have been possible without the assistance I received from Mr. Edward M. David who gave the book the stylistic form it now has. I have drawn upon his knowledge of the American and British philosophic tradition to guide me in selecting those points that could and that could not be taken for granted in offering Hegel’s doctrine to an American and English public.

  I thank the Macmillan Company, New York, for granting me permission to use and quote their translations of Hegel’s works, and I thank the following publishers for authorizing me to quote their publications: International Publishers, Longmans, Green and Co., Charles H. Kerr and Co., The Macmillan Co., The Viking Press, The Weekly Foreign Letter (Lawrence Dennis).

  My friend Franz L. Neumann, who was gathering material for his forthcoming book on National Socialism, has given me constant advice, especially on the political philosophy.

  Professor George H. Sabine was kind enough to read the chapter on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and to offer valuable suggestions.

  I am particularly grateful to the Oxford University Press, New York, which encouraged me to write this book and undertook to publish it at this time.

  HERBERT MARCUSE

  Institute of Social Research

  Columbia University

  New York, N. Y.

  March 1941.

  Contents

  PART I

  THE FOUNDATIONS OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The Socio-Historical Setting

  2. The Philosophical Setting

  I. HEGEL’S EARLY THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS

  II. TOWARDS THE SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY

  1. The First Philosophical Writings

  2. The First Political Writings

  3. The System of Morality

  III. HEGEL’S FIRST SYSTEM

  1. The Logic

  2. The Philosophy of Mind

  IV. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND

  V. THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC

  VI. THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

  VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

  PART II

  THE RISE OF SOCIAL THEORY

  INTRODUCTION: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIAL THEORY

  I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE DIALECTICAL THEORY OF SOCIETY

  1. The Negation of Philosophy

  2. Kierkegaard

  3. Feuerbach

  4. Marx: Alienated Labor

  5. The Abolition of Labor

  6. The Analysis of the Labor Process

  7. The Marxian Dialectic

  II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF POSITIVISM AND THE RISE OF SOCIOLOGY

  1. Positive and Negative Philosophy

  2. Saint-Simon

  3. The Positive Philosophy of Society: Auguste Comte

  4. The Positive Philosophy of the State: Friedrich Julius Stahl

  5. The Transformation of the Dialectic into Sociology: Lorenz von Stein

  CONCLUSION

  THE END OF HEGELIANISM

  1. British Neo-idealism

  2. The Revision of the Dialectic

  3. Fascist ‘Hegelianism’

  4. National Socialism Versus Hegel

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PART I

  The Foundations of Hegal’s Philosophy

  Introduction

  1. THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL SETTING

  GERMAN idealism has been called the theory of the French Revolution. This does not imply that Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel furnished a theoretical interpretation of the French Revolution, but that they wrote their philosophy largely as a response to th
e challenge from France to reorganize the state and society on a rational basis, so that social and political institutions might accord with the freedom and interest of the individual. Despite their bitter criticism of the Terror, the German idealists unanimously welcomed the revolution, calling it the dawn of a new era, and they all linked their basic philosophical principles to the ideals that it advanced.

  The ideas of the French Revolution thus appear in the very core of the idealistic systems, and, to a great extent, determine their conceptual structure. As the German idealists saw it, the French Revolution not only abolished feudal absolutism, replacing it with the economic and political system of the middle class, but it completed what the German Reformation had begun, emancipating the individual as a self-reliant master of his life. Man’s position in the world, the mode of his labor and enjoyment, was no longer to depend on some external authority, but on his own free rational activity. Man had passed the long period of immaturity during which he had been victimized by overwhelming natural and social forces, and had become the autonomous subject of his own development. From now on, the struggle with nature and with social organization was to be guided by his own progress in knowledge. The world was to be an order of reason.

  The ideals of the French Revolution found their resting place in the processes of industrial capitalism. Napoleon’s empire liquidated the radical tendencies and at the same time consolidated the economic consequences of the revolution. The French philosophers of the period interpreted the realization of reason as the liberation of industry. Expanding industrial production seemed capable of providing all the necessary means to gratify human wants. Thus, at the same time that Hegel elaborated his system, Saint-Simon in France was exalting industry as the sole power that could lead mankind to a free and rational society. The economic process appeared as the foundation of reason.

  Economic development in Germany lagged far behind that in France and England. The German middle class, weak and scattered over numerous territories with divergent interests, could hardly contemplate a revolution. The few industrial enterprises that existed were but small islands within a protracted feudal system. The individual in his social existence was either enslaved, or was the enslaver of his fellow individuals. As a thinking being, however, he could at least comprehend the contrast between the miserable reality that existed everywhere and the human potentialities that the new epoch had emancipated; and as a moral person, he could, in his private life at least, preserve human dignity and autonomy. Thus, while the French Revolution had already begun to assert the reality of freedom, German idealism was only occupying itself with the idea of it. The concrete historical efforts to establish a rational form of society were here transposed to the philosophical plane and appeared in the efforts to elaborate the notion of reason.

  The concept of reason is central to Hegel’s philosophy. He held that philosophical thinking presupposes nothing beyond it, that history deals with reason and with reason alone, and that the state is the realization of reason. These statements will not be understandable, however, so long as reason is interpreted as a pure metaphysical concept, for Hegel’s idea of reason has retained, though in an idealistic form, the material strivings for a free and rational order of life. Robespierre’s deification of reason as the Être suprême is the counterpart to the glorification of reason in Hegel’s system. The core of Hegel’s philosophy is a structure the concepts of which–freedom, subject, mind, notion–are derived from the idea of reason. Unless we succeed in unfolding the content of these ideas and the intrinsic connection among them, Hegel’s system will seem to be obscure metaphysics, which it in fact never was.

  Hegel himself related his concept of reason to the French Revolution, and did so with the greatest of emphasis. The revolution had demanded that ‘nothing should be recognized as valid in a constitution except what has to be recognized according to reason’s right.’1 Hegel further elaborated this interpretation in his lectures on the Philosophy of History: ‘Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e. in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. Anaxagoras had been the first to say that Noũς governs the World; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that Thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.’2

  In Hegel’s view, the decisive turn that history took with the French Revolution was that man came to rely on his mind and dared to submit the given reality to the standards of reason. Hegel expounds the new development through a contrast between an employment of reason and an uncritical compliance with the prevailing conditions of life. ‘Nothing is reason that is not the result of thinking.’ Man has set out to organize reality according to the demands of his free rational thinking instead of simply accommodating his thoughts to the existing order and the prevailing values. Man is a thinking being. His reason enables him to recognize his own potentialities and those of his world. He is thus not at the mercy of the facts that surround him, but is capable of subjecting them to a higher standard, that of reason. If he follows its lead, he will arrive at certain conceptions that disclose reason to be antagonistic to the existing state of affairs. He may find that history is a constant struggle for freedom, that man’s individuality requires that he possess property as the medium of his fulfillment, and that all men have an equal right to develop their human faculties. Actually, however, bondage and inequality prevail; most men have no liberty at all and are deprived of their last scrap of property. Consequently the ‘unreasonable’ reality has to be altered until it comes into conformity with reason. In the given case, the existing social order has to be reorganized, absolutism and the remainders of feudalism have to be abolished, free competition has to be established, everyone has to be made equal before the law, and so on.

  According to Hegel, the French Revolution enunciated reason’s ultimate power over reality. He sums this up by saying that the principle of the French Revolution asserted that thought ought to govern reality. The implications involved in this statement lead into the very center of his philosophy. Thought ought to govern reality. What men think to be true, right, and good ought to be realized in the actual organization of their societal and individual life. Thinking, however, varies among individuals, and the resulting diversity of individual opinions cannot provide a guiding principle for the common organization of life. Unless man possesses concepts and principles of thought that denote universally valid conditions and norms, his thought cannot claim to govern reality. In line with the tradition of Western philosophy, Hegel believes that such objective concepts and principles exist. Their totality he calls reason.

  The philosophies of the French Enlightenment and their revolutionary successors all posited reason as an objective historical force which, once freed from the fetters of despotism, would make the world a place of progress and happiness. They held that ‘the power of reason, and not the force of weapons, will propagate the principles of our glorious revolution.’3 By virtue of its own power, reason would triumph over social irrationality and overthrow the oppressors of mankind. ‘All fictions disappear before truth, and all follies fall before reason.’4

  The implication, however, that reason will immediately show itself in practice is a dogma unsupported by the course of history. Hegel believed in the invincible power of reason as much as Robespierre did. ‘That faculty which man can call his own, elevated above death and decay, … is able to make decisions of itself. It announces itself as reason. Its law-making depends on nothing else, nor can it take its standards from any other authority on earth or in heaven.’5 But to Hegel, reason cannot govern reality unless reality has become rational in itself. This rationality is made possible through the subject’s entering the very content of nature and history. The objective reality is thus also the realization of the subject. It is this conception that Hegel sum
marized in the most fundamental of his propositions, namely, that Being is, in its substance, a ‘subject.’6 The meaning of this proposition can only be understood through an interpretation of Hegel’s Logic, but we shall attempt to give a provisional explanation here that will be expanded later.7

  The idea of the ‘substance as subject’ conceives reality as a process wherein all being is the unification of contradictory forces. ‘Subject’ denotes not only the epistemological ego or consciousness, but a mode of existence, to wit, that of a self-developing unity in an antagonistic process. Everything that exists is ‘real’ only in so far as it operates as a ‘self’ through all the contradictory relations that constitute its existence. It must thus be considered a kind of ‘subject’ that carries itself forward by unfolding its inherent contradictions. For example, a stone is a stone only in so far as it remains the same thing, a stone, throughout its action and reaction upon the things and processes that interact with it. It gets wet in the rain; it resists the axe; it withstands a certain load before it gives way. Being-a-stone is a continuous holding out against everything that acts on the stone; it is a continuous process of becoming and being a stone. To be sure, the ‘becoming’ is not consummated by the stone as a conscious subject. The stone is changed in its interactions with rain, axe, and load; it does not change itself. A plant, on the other hand, unfolds and develops itself. It is not now a bud, then a blossom, but is rather the whole movement from bud through blossom to decay. The plant constitutes and preserves itself in this movement. It comes much nearer to being an actual ’subject’ than does the stone, for the various stages of the plant’s development grow out of the plant itself; they are its ‘life’ and are not imposed upon it from the outside.

  The plant, however, does not ‘comprehend’ this development. It does not ‘realize’ it as its own and, therefore, cannot reason its own potentialities into being. Such ‘realization’ is a process of the true subject and is reached only with the existence of man. Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for he alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of ‘notions.’ His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason. We encounter here the most important category of reason, namely, freedom. Reason presupposes freedom, the power to act in accordance with knowledge of the truth, the power to shape reality in line with its potentialities. The fulfillment of these ends belongs only to the subject who is master of his own development and who understands his own potentialities as well as those of the things around him. Freedom, in turn, presupposes reason, for it is comprehending knowledge, alone, that enables the subject to gain and to wield this power. The stone does not possess it; neither does the plant. Both lack comprehending knowledge and hence real subjectivity. ‘Man, however, knows what he is,–only thus is he real. Reason and freedom are nothing without this knowledge.’8