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professor. Not once in a few decades was he even tempted to go beyond the
boundaries of his beloved Konigsberg. Fichte, on the contrary, besides being a
philosopher, was active in the practical pursuits of life. It was this element of action
that Fichte carried over into his philosophy. To the old conception of an external
power that directed the actions of men, he opposed the idea of the Absolute Ego, thus
converting the human personality and its activity into the mainspring of all theory
and practice.
Yet it was G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) who, more than any other philosopher,
exerted a powerful influence on Marx and Engels. His philosophy was based on a
criticism of the Kantian and Fichtean systems. In his youth Hegel had been an ardent
devotee of the French Revolution, while toward the end of his life he became a
Prussian professor and official, and his philosophy was most graciously approved of
by the "enlightened" rulers.
The question then presents itself how was it that Hegel's philosophy became
the source of inspiration for Marx, Engels and Lassalle. What was it in Hegel's
philosophy that irresistibly drew to itself the most illustrious exponents of social and
revolutionary thought?
Kant's philosophy, in its main outlines, had taken shape previous to the
French Revolution. He was sixty-five years old when the Revolution began. True, he,
too, was moved sympathetically, still he never went further than his customary
compromising and conciliatory deductions. Though with regard to the history of our
planet, as we have seen, he had already adopted the idea of evolution, his philosophic
system, nevertheless, reduced itself to an explanation of the universe as it was.
With Hegel it was different. Having gone through the experiences of the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, that epoch of colossal economic and
political changes, he viewed and explained the cosmos as a continuous process of
unfoldment. There is nothing immobile. The Absolute Idea lives and manifests itself
only in the process of uninterrupted movement -- development. Everything flows,
changes and vanishes. The ceaseless movement, the eternal unfoldment of the
Absolute Idea determines the evolution of the world in all its aspects. To comprehend
the circumambient phenomena, one must not only study them as they exist, but one
must understand how they have been developing; for everything about one is the
result of a past development. Furthermore, a thing may appear at first glance as
being in a state of immobility which on closer scrutiny, however, will disclose within
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itself incessant movement and conflict, numerous influences and forces, some
tending to preserve it as it is, others tending to change it. In each phenomenon, in
each object, there is the clash of two principles, the thesis and the antithesis, the
conservative and the destructive. This struggle between the two opposing principles
resolves itself into a final harmonious synthesis of the two.
This is how it was expressed in the Hegelian idiom. The Reason, the Thought,
the Idea, does not remain motionless; it does not remain frozen to one proposition; it
does not remain on the same thesis. On the contrary, the thesis, the thought
interposing itself breaks up into two contradictory ideas, a positive and a negative, a
"yes/index.htm" idea, and a "no" idea. The conflict between the two contradictory
elements included in the antithesis creates movement, which Hegel, in order to
underline the element of conflict, styles dialectic. The result of this conflict, this
dialectic, is reconciliation, or equilibrium. The fusion of the two opposite ideas forms
a new idea, their synthesis. This in its turn divides into two contradictory ideas -- the
thesis is converted into its antithesis, and these again are blended in a new synthesis.
Hegel regarded every phenomenon as a process, as something that is forever
changing, something that is forever developing. Every phenomenon is not only the
result of previous changes, it also carries within itself the germ of future changes. It
never halts at any stage. The equilibrium attained is disturbed by a new conflict,
which leads to a higher reconciliation, to a higher synthesis, and to a still further
dichotomy on a still higher plane. Thus, it is the struggle between opposites that is
the source of all development.
Herein lay the revolutionary potentialities of Hegel's philosophy. Though he
was an idealist, though his system was based on the Spirit and not on Nature, on the
Idea and not on Matter, he none the less exerted a great influence upon all historical
and social sciences, and even upon natural science. He stimulated the study of
reality. He inspired the study of the various forms which the Absolute Idea had
assumed in the process of its unfoldment. And the more variegated were the forms
through which the Idea manifested itself, the more variegated were the phenomena
and the processes that had to be investigated.
We shall not dwell on the other sides of the Hegelian philosophy which would
make clear why it gave such a powerful impulse for a more careful study of reality.
The more his disciples studied reality in the light of and guided by, the dialectic
method evolved by their teacher, the more evident became the radical deficiency of
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his philosophy. For it was an idealistic philosophy; that is, the motivating force, the
Creator, was, according to Hegel, the Absolute Idea, which determined existence.
This weak point in the Hegelian System called forth criticism. The Absolute Idea
seemed a new edition of the old God, the same bodiless God which such philosophers
as Voltaire created for themselves and particularly for the masses.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), one of the most talented disciples of Hegel,
finally examined his master's philosophy from this point of view. He understood
perfectly and mastered the revolutionary aspect of the Hegelian System. He
propounded, however, the following question: Can the Absolute Idea in its
development actually determine all being? To this question Feuerbach gave a
negative answer. He upset Hegel's basic proposition by pointing out the converse to
be the truth -- Being determines Consciousness. There was a time when there was
being without consciousness. The Mind or the Idea is itself the product of Being. He
regarded Hegel's philosophy as the latest theological system, for in place of a God, it
conjured up another primary Being, the Absolute Idea. Feuerbach indicated that the
various conceptions of God, Christianity included, were created by man himself. Not
God had created man, but rather man created God, in his own image. It is merely
necessary to dissipate this world of phantoms, occult objects, angels, witches and
similar manifestations of the basically same Divine Essence, to have left a human
world. Thus Man becomes the fundamental principle of Feuerbach's philosophy. The
supreme law in this human world is not the law of God but the happiness of man. In
opposition to the old theological Deistic principle, Feuerbach advanced a new
anthropological or human principle.
In his school composition, mentioned in an earlier chapter, Marx had claimed
that by a chain of circumstances operative even before a man's birth, his future
profession is predetermined. Thus the idea which followed logically from the
materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century was familiar to Marx when he was
yet at high school. Man is the product of his environment, and of conditions; he
cannot therefore be free in the choice of his profession, he cannot be the maker of his
own happiness. There was nothing new or original in this view. Marx was merely
formulating in a unique manner, to be sure, what he had already read in the works of
the philosophers to which he had been introduced by his father. When he entered the
University and came in touch with the classical German philosophy that was reigning
there, he began from the very first to expound a materialist philosophy in opposition
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