Routledge Library Editions karl marx
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Unfortunately this last sentence had a more serious meaning than was suggested by the sly humour which again began to show in the letter. It was dated the ioth February 1838 and Heinrich Marx had just risen from a sick bed to which he had been confined for five weeks. The improvement in his health which had permitted him to rise was not maintained and the trouble, apparently a liver disease, returned and grew worse, until just three months later on the ioth of May 1838 he died. Death came just in time to spare him the disappointments which would have broken his heart little by little. Karl Marx always realized with gratitude what his father had been to him, and as his father had borne him in the depths of his heart, so the son bore a picture of his father next to his heart until the day when he took it into the grave with him.
From the spring of 1838 when he lost his father Karl Marx spent three years in Berlin, and the intellectual life in the circle of Young Hegelians opened up the secrets of the Hegelian philosophy to him. At that time Hegelian philosophy was regarded as the Prussian State philosophy and the Minister of Culture Altenstein and his Privy Councillor Johannes Schulze had taken it under their special care. Hegel glorified the State as the reality of the moral idea, as the absolute reason and the absolute aim in itself, and therefore as the highest right as against the individual, whose paramount duty it was to be a member of the State. This teaching concerning the State was naturally very welcome to the Prussian bureaucracy, for it transfigured even the sins of the Demagogue Hunt.1 Hegel’s philosophy was not hypocritical and his political development explains why he regarded the monarchical form embracing the best efforts of all the servants of the State as the most ideal State form. At the utmost he considered it necessary that the dominant classes should enjoy a certain indirect share in the government, but even that share must be limited in a corporative fashion. He was no more prepared to consider a general representation of the people in the modern constitu tional sense than was the Prussian King or his oracle Metternich. However, the system which Hegel had worked out for himself was in irreconcilable antagonism to the dialectical method which he adopted as a philosopher. With the conception of being, the conception of non-being is given, and from the antagonism of the two the higher conception of becoming results. Everything is and is not at one and the same time, for every thing is in a state of flux, in a state of permanent change, in permanent development and decline. According to this, there fore, history is a process of development rising from the lower to the higher in uninterrupted transformation, and Hegel with 1 “ Demagogue ” was the name given to the Radicals and Liberals of the Mctter- nich era on the Continent, and as all forms of democratic agitation were prohibited by the Carlsbad Decisions in 1819 the Demagogues were outlaws. The “ Demagogue Hunt ” was the name given to the fierce campaign of persecution conducted against them.—Tr.
his universal knowledge set out to prove this in the most varied branches of historical science, though only in that form which accorded with his own idealist conception of the absolute idea expressing itself in all historical happenings. This absolute idea Hegel declared to be the vitalizing spirit of the whole world, without, however, giving any further information about it. The alliance between the philosophy of Hegel and the State of the Frederick-Williams could therefore be no more than a marriage of convenience lasting as long as each partner was prepared to minister to the convenience of the other. This worked excellently in the days of the Carlsbad Decisions and the demagogue hunt, but the July revolution of 1830 gave European development such a strong impetus that Hegel’s method was seen to be incomparably more reliable than his system. When the effects of the July Revolution, weak enough in any case as far as Germany was concerned, had been stifled and the peace of the graveyard had again descended on the land of thinkers and poets, Prussian Junkerdom hastened to dig out the old dilapidated lumber of medireval romanticism for use against modern philosophy. This was made easier for it by the fact that Hegel’s admiration was directed less to the cause ofJunkerdom than to the cause of the tolerably enlightened bureaucracy, and by the fact that with all his glorification of the bureaucratic State Hegel had done nothing to maintain religion amongst the people, an endeavour which is the alpha and omega of all feudal traditions and, in the last resort, of all exploiting classes. The first collision took place therefore on the religious field. Hegel declared that the biblical stories should be regarded in the same way as one would regard profane stories, for belief had nothing to do with the knowledge of common and real matters, and then along came David Strauss, a young Swabian, and took the master at his word in deadly earnest. He demanded that biblical history should be subjected to normal historical criticism, and he carried out this demand in his Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1835 and created a tremendous sensation. In this book Strauss picked up the threads of the bourgeois enlighten ment movement of the eighteenth century, whereas Hegel had spoken of its “ pseudo-enlightenment ” all too contemptuously. Strauss’s capacity for dialectical thought permitted him to go far more thoroughly into the question than old Reimarus had done before him. Strauss did not regard the Christian religion as a fraud or the Apostles as a pack of rogues, but explained the mythical components of the Gospel story from the unconscious creations of the early Christian communities. Much of theNew Testament he regarded as a historical report concerning the life of Jesus, and Jesus himself as a historical personage, whilst he assumed an historical basis for all the more important incidents mentioned in the Bible. Politically considered Strauss was completely harmless and he remained so all his days, but the political note was sounded rather more sharply and clearly in the Hallische Jahrbucher, x which was founded in 1838 by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer as the organ of the Young Hegelians. This publica tion also dealt with literature and philosophy, and at first it was intended to be no more than a counterblast to the Berliner Jahrbucher, the stick-in-the-mud organ of the Old Hegelians. Ruge, who had played a part in the Burschenschaft move ment z and suffered six years’ imprisonment in Kopenick and Kolberg as a victim of the insane Demagogue Hunt, quickly took the lead in the partnership with Echtermeyer, who died young. Ruge had not taken his earlier fate tragically, and later on a fortunate marriage gave him a lectureship at the University of Halle. He led a comfortable life and, despite his earlier mis fortunes, this permitted him to declare the Prussian State system free and just. Indeed, he would have liked to justify in his person the malicious saying of the old Prussian mandarins that no one made a career for himself more quickly than a converted Demagogue, but this was just the trouble.Ruge was not an independent thinker and still less a revolu tionary spirit, but he had sufficient education, industry and righting spirit to make a good editor of a scientific magazine, and on one occasion he called himself, not without a certain amount of truth, a wholesale merchant of intellectual wares. Under his leadership the Hallische Jahrbucher developed into a rendezvous of all the unruly spirits, men who possess the advant age—unfortunate from the governmental point of view—of bringing more life into the press than anyone else. For instance, David Strauss as a contributor did more to hold the attention of readers than all the orthodox theologians, fighting tooth and nail for the infallibility of the Bible, put together could have done. Ruge, it is true, made a point of assuring the authorities
* The “ Burschenschaft ” movement was founded in Jena in 1815 as a bourgeois- democratic students’ organization opposed to the traditional aristocratic students’ “ Corps.” It was imbued with a libertarian and militant spirit, and in consequence it was suppressed by the decisions of the Carlsbad Congress in 1819. The “ Bur- schenschaften ” still exist, but their original significance has naturally long ago been lost.—Tr. that his publication propagated “ Hegelian Christianity and Hegelian Prussia ”, but the Minister of Culture Altenstein, who was already being hard pressed by the romanticist reaction, did not trust this assurance and refused to be moved by Ruge’s urgent pleadings for a State appointment as a recognition of his services. The result was that the Hallische Jahrbiicher began to realize that something ought to be done to break the fetters which imprisoned Prussian freedom and justice. The Berlin Young Hegelians, in whose midst Karl Marx spent three years of his life, were almost all contributors to Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbiicher. The club membership was composed chiefly of university lecturers, teachers and writers. Rutenberg, who is described in one of Marx’s earlier letters to his father as “ the most intimate ” of his Berlin friends, had been a teacher of geography to the Berlin Corps of Cadets, but had been dis missed, allegedly for having been found one morning drunk in the gutter, but in reality because he had come under suspicion of writing “ malicious articles ” in Hamburg and Leipzig news papers. Eduard Meyen was connected with a short-lived journal which published two of Marx’s poems, fortunately the only two that ever saw the light of day. Max Stirner was teaching at a girls’ school in Berlin, but it has not been possible to discover whether he was a member of the club at the same time as Marx and there is no evidence that the two ever knew each other personally. In any case, the matter is not of much interest because no intellectual connection existed between them. On the other hand, the two most prominent members of the club, Bruno Bauer, a lecturer at the University of Berlin, and Karl Friedrich Koppen, a teacher at the Dorotheen Municipal Secondary School for Modern Subjects, had a great influence on Marx. Karl Marx was hardly twenty years old when he joined the club of Young Hegelians, but, as so often happened in later years when he entered a new circle, he soon became its centre. Both Bauer and Koppen, who were about ten years older than Marx, quickly recognized his superior intellect and asked for no better comrade than this youngster who was still in a position to learn much from them and did so. The impetuous polemic which Koppen published in 1840 on the centenary of the birth 1 of Frederick the Great of Prussia was dedicated “ To my Friend Karl Marx of Trier ”. Koppen possessed historical talent in very great measure and his contributions to the Hallische Jahrbucher still vouch for this fact. It is to Koppen that we owe the first really historical 1 Should read “accession to the throne.”
However, two factors must certainly not be overlooked : first of all the romanticist reaction and everything connected with it did its utmost to blacken the memory of “ Old Fritz ”. Koppen himself described these efforts as “ a horrible cater wauling : Old and New Testament trumpets, moral Jew’s harps, edifying and historical bagpipes, and other horrible instruments, and in the middle of it all hymns of freedom boomed out in a beery Teutonic bass ”. And secondly, there had as yet been no critical and scientific examination which did more or less justice to the life and actions of the Prussian King, and there could not have been any such examination because the decisive sources necessary for such a work had not yet been opened up. Frederick the Great enjoyed a reputation for “ enlightenment ” and that was sufficient to make him hated by the one and admired by the other. Koppen’s book also aimed at picking up the threads of the eighteenth-century bourgeois enlightenment movement, and, in fact, Ruge once declared ofBauer, Koppen and Marx that their chief joint characteristic was that they all proceeded from this movement ; they represented a philosophic Mountain Party and wrote a Mene-Mene-Tekel-Upharsin on the storm-swept horizon of Germany. Koppen refuted the “ superficial declamations ” against the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Despite their tendency to bore, much was owing to the German pioneers of the bourgeois enlightenment movement. Their one deficiency had been that they were not enlightened enough. Here Koppen was tilting chiefly at the thoughtless imitators of Hegel, “ the lonely penitents of the idea ”, “ the old Brahmins of logic ” sitting with crossed legs, eternally and monotonously gabbling the Holy Three Vedas again and again, pausing only now and then to throw a lustful glance into the world of the dancing Bayadere.
Koppen honoured “ the great King ” only as “ a great philosopher ”, but he went further in his advocacy than was permissible even according to the standards of Frederician knowledge then prevailing. “ Unlike Kant,” he declared, “ Frederick the Great did not subscribe to two forms of reason : a theoretical one bringing forward its doubts, objections and negations fairly honestly and audaciously, and a practical one, under guardianship and in the public pay, to make good what the other did ill and to whitewash its student pranks. Only the most elementary immaturity can contend that as compared with the royal and practical reasoning his philosophical theoretical reasoning appears particularly transcendental, and that often Old Fritz dismissed the hermit of Sans Souci from his mind. On the contrary, the King never lagged behind the philosopher in the man.” Anyone who dared to repeat Koppen’s contentions to-day would certainly lay himself open to the reproach of most elementary immaturity even from the Prussian historical school ; and even for the year 1840 it was going rather too far to place the lifelong enlightenment work of a philosopher like Kant in the same category as the pseudo-enlightenment jokes played by the Borussian despot on the French brilliants who were content to act as his court jesters. Koppen suffered under the peculiar poverty and emptiness of Berlin life which was fatal to all the Young Hegelians living there, and although he should have been able to guard himself against it more easily than the others, it affected him still more than it did them and it expressed itself even in a polemic which had certainly been written with all his heart. Berlin lacked the powerful back bone which industry in the Rhineland, already highly-developed, gave to bourgeois consciousness there. The result was that when the questions of the day took on a practical form the Prussian capital dropped behind Cologne, and even behind Leipzig and Konigsberg. Writing of the Berliners of the day the East Prussian Walesrode declared : “ They think themselves tremendously free and daring when they make fun of Cerf and Hagen, of the King and the events of the day, sitting safely in their cafes and joking in their familiar corner-boy style.” Berlin was in fact nothing more than a military garrison and residence town, and the petty- bourgeois populace compensated itself with malicious and paltry back-biting for the cowardly subservience it showed to every court equipage. A regular rendezvous for this sort of opposition was the salon for scandal maintained by Varnhagen, the same man who crossed himself in pious horror at the idea of even Frederician enlightenment as Koppen understood it. There is no reason to doubt that the young Marx shared the opinions expressed in the book which brought his name before the general public for the first time. He was closely acquainted with Koppen and adopted the latter’s style to a considerable extent. Although their paths soon branched off in different directions, the two always remained good friends, and when Marx returned to Berlin twenty years later on a visit he found Koppen “just the same as ever ” and they celebrated a joyful reunion and spent many happy hours in each other’s company. Not very long afterwards, in I 863, Koppen died.
The real leader of the Young Hegelians in Berlin was not Koppen, however, but Bruno Bauer, who was officially recognized as an orthodox pupil of the master, particularly as he had shown great speculative arrogance in an attack on Strauss’ Life of Jesus, a proceedingwhich earned him anenergeticdrubbing from Strauss. Bauer enjoyed the protection of the Minister of Culture, Alten- stein, who regarded him as a very promising and talented young man. However, Bruno Bauer was not a careerist and Strauss turned out to be a poor prophet when he declared that Bauer would end his days in the “ petrified scholasticism ” of the orthodox chieftain Hengstenberg. On the contrary, in the summer of 1839 Bauer came to grips with Hengstenberg who wanted to present the God of the Old Testament, the God of anger and vengeance, as the God of Christianity. The literary exchanges which resulted remained well within the limits of an academic polemic, but they were sufficiently sharp to cause the decrepit and very much alarmed Altenstein to remove his protege from the suspicious glare of the orthodox, who were as vengeful as they were simon pure. In the autumn of 1839 he sent Bauer to the University of Bonn as a lecturer with the intention of appointing him to a professorship before the end of the year. But Bruno Bauer, as his letters to Marx indicate, was already in a period of intellectual development which was to take him far beyond Strauss. He began a criticism of the Gospels which finally demolished the last ruins which Strauss had left still stand ing. He contended that there was not an atom of historical truth in the Gospel story, that everything in it was the product of fantasy, and that Christianity was not forced as a world religion on the classic Grreco-Roman world, but that it was the natural product of that world. With this development he took the one path which offered a possibility of scientifically investigating the origin of Christianity, and it is not without good reason that our contemporary fashionable, court and salon theologian Harnack, who is at the moment engaged in furbishing up the Gospels in the interests of the ruling classes, roundly abuses any attempt to proceed along the path opened up by Bruno Bauer. Whilst these ideas were beginning to mature in Bruno Bauer’s head Karl Marx was his inseparable companion and Bauer recognized his nine year younger friend as a most capable brother in arms. He had hardly settled down in Bonn when he began his attempts to persuade Marx to follow him. A club of pro fessors in Bonn was “ simple Philistinism ” compared with the Hegelian club in Berlin, he declared. The latter had at least always been a centre of intellectual interests. There was also plenty of amusement in Bonn, what they called amusement there, but he had never laughed so much in Bonn as he had in Berlin when he had no more than crossed the street with Marx. Marx should polish off his “ trivial examination ” finally (after all only Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibniz were necessary), and stop taking such farcical nonsense seriously. He would find the Bonn philosophers easy game. And, above all, a radical publication was necessary, one they could issue jointly, for the Berlin chit-chat of the Hallische Jahrbiicher was no longer tolerable. He felt sorry for Ruge, but why on earth didn’t the fellow drive the vermin out of his paper ?Bauer’s letters sound revolutionary enough at times, but it is always a philosophical revolution he has in mind and he was far more inclined to count on the support of the State than on its hostility. He had hardly written to Marx in December 1839 that Prussia seemed destined to make progress only on account of its Jenas, though naturally such battles need not always be fought over a hecatomb of corpses, when a few months later— following on the almost simultaneous decease of his protector Altenstein and the old king—he pledged himself to “ the highest idea of our' State life ”, the family spirit of the princely House of Hohenzollern which had devoted four centuries of high-minded effort to the settlement of the relations of Church and State. At the same time Bauer promised that science would not falter in its defence of the State idea against the usurpation of the church. The State might err, it might become suspicious of science and use the weapon of intimidation, but reason belonged too innately to the State for it to err long. The new King answered this homage by appointing the orthodox reactionary Eichhorn as Altenstein’s successor, and Eichhorn immediately proceeded to sacrifice the freedom of science, as far as it was connected with the State idea, that is to say, the freedom of academic teaching, to the usurpation of the church. Politically considered, Bauer was far less reliable than Koppen, who might have made a mistake concerning one Hohenzollern who surprisingly rose above the general family level, but was not likely to make any mistake concerning “ the family spirit ” of that princely house. Koppen was by no means so thoroughly at home with the Hegelian ideology as was Bauer, but it must not be overlooked that the latter’s political short-sightedness was only the reverse side of his philosophical acumen. He discovered in the gospels the intellectual deposit of the time in which they had originated, and he was of the opinion—and considered from a purely ideological standpoint it was not illogical—that if even the Christian religion with its turbid ferment of Grceco-Roman philosophy had succeeded in overcoming the culture of the classic world, then the clear and free criticism of modern dialectics would succeed still more easily in shaking off the incubus of Christian- Germanic culture. Yüklə 0,87 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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