Routledge Library Editions karl marx

It was the philosophy of self-consciousness which gave him such inspiring confidence. The Greek philosophic schools which developed from the national disintegration of Greek life and did most to fructify the Christian religion, the Sceptics, the Epicureans and the Stoics, had united under this name. They could not be compared with Plato in speculative depth nor with Aristotle in universal knowledge, and they had been somewhat contemptuously treated by Hegel. Their joint aim was to make the individual, separated by a terrible cataclysm from everything which up to them had stayed and fortified him, independent of everything outside himself and to lead him back into his inner life to seek his real happiness in the peace of the spirit, a peace which might remain unshaken whilst the whole world was collapsing around his ears.

However, declared Bauer, on the ruins of a vanished world the emaciated ego feared itself as the only power. It estranged and

alienated its own consciousness by representing its own general power as an alien power outside itself. In the Lord and Master of the Gospel story, who overcame the laws of nature with one breath of his mouth, subjugated his enemies and announced himself, even on earth, as the Lord of the world and the Judge of all things, it created a hostile brother, but still a brother, to the world ruler in Rome holding sway over all rights and carrying the power over life and death on its lips. Under the slavery of the Christian religion, however, humanity was trained so that it might prepare itself all the more thoroughly for freedom and encompass it all the more completely when it should finally be won. The eternal consciousness of self, realizing itself, understanding itself and comprehending its essence, had power over the creations of its own alienation.

If we brush aside the typical phraseology current in the philosophic language oftheday we can express in simpler and more understandable terms what it was that attracted Bauer, Koppen and Marx to the Greek philosophy ofself-consciousness. Here too they were in reality again picking up the threads of the bourgeois enlightenment movement. The old Greek philosophic schools of self-consciousness produced no one comparable to the geniuses of the old natural philosophy Democritus and Heraclitus, or of the later abstract philosophy Plato and Aristotle, but nevertheless they played a great historic tole. They opened up new and wider horizons to the human intellect and they broke down both the national limitations of Hellenism and the social limitations of slavery, limitations which neither Plato nor Aristotle had dreamed of overstepping. They greatly fructified primitive Christianity, which was the religion of the oppressed and the suffering, and only later, after it had become the religion of an oppressing and exploiting power, did it go over to Plato and Aristotle. Although generally speaking Hegel treated the philosophy of self-consciousness in a very off-hand fashion, even he expressly pointed out the great significance of the inner freedom of the individual amidst the utter calamity of the Roman world empire which effaced all the nobility and beauty of spiritual individuality with a brutal hand. The bourgeois enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century revived the Greek philosophies of self-consciousness : the doubts of the Sceptics, the hatred the Epicureans bore towards religion, and the republican sentiments of the Stoics.

In his work on Frederick the Great, whom he regarded as one of the heroes of the enlightenment movement, Koppen sounded the same note when he declared : “ Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism represent the nerves and internal system ofthe antique organism whose direct and natural unity determined the beauty




and morality of classical antiquity and which collapsed when the latter died out. Frederick the Great adopted all three and wielded them with wonderful power. They became the chief factors in his world outlook, in his character and in his whole life.” Marx was prepared to grant at least that what Koppen said here concerning the relation of the three philosophies to Greek life possessed “ a deeper significance ”.

The problem which occupied his older friends occupied Marx no less, but he dealt with it in a different fashion. He sought “ human self-consciousness as the supreme Godhead ”, tolerating no other Gods before it, neither in the distorting mirror of religion nor in the philosophic dilettantism of a despot, but by going back to the historical origins of this philosophy, whose systems represented for him also the key to the real history of the Greek spirit.

2. 
   The Doctoral Dissertation
   

When Bruno Bauer urged Marx to polish off his “ trivial examination ” finally, he had some grounds for impatience, for it was the autumn of I 839 and Marx had already been studying for eight terms, but he certainly did not suppose that Marx was suffering from any examination fever in the usual and disagreeable sense of the term or he would never have credited him with being able to bowl over the professors of philosophy in Bonn at the first encounter.

It was characteristic of Marx, and it remained so until the end of his days, that his insatiable urge to knowledge permitted him to master difficult problems quickly, whilst his merciless self-criticism prevented him from having done with them equally quickly. In accordance with his usual thoroughness Marx must have plunged into the greyest depths of Greek philosophy, and the representation of only the three systems of the philosophy of self-consciousness was no matter which could be settled in a few terms. Bauer, who turned out his own works at a great speed, much too quickly in fact for their permanence, had little undei- standing for this, much less than Friedrich Engels showed lati r on, and even Engels sometimes became impatient when Marx could find no limit and no end to his self-criticism.

However, the “ trivial examination ” presented other difficulties, if not for Bauer then for Marx. Whilst his father was still alive Marx had decided on an academic career without thereby abandoning completely the choice of a practical pro-




fession, but with the death of Altenstein the most attractive feature of a professorial career and one which might have made up for its numerous disadvantages began to disappear, namely, the comparative freedom granted to philosophers in their university chairs. Bauer himself never tired of pointing out that the academic gown was good for nothing else.

And, in fact, it was not long before Bauer discovered that even the scientific investigations of a Prussian professor could not be conducted entirely without let or hindrance. After Altehstein’s death in May 1840 the Ministry of Culture was taken over for a few months by Privy Councillor Ladenberg who showed sufficient piety towards the memory of his old superior to make him want to fulfil the latter’s promise to provide Bauer with a permanent appointment in Bonn. However, immediately Eichhorn was appointed Minister of Culture the Theological Faculty in Bonn rejected the appointment of Bauer as professor on the ground that it would disturb the harmony of the faculty. Under Eichhorn it succeeded in summoning up that rare heroism which German professors display when they are sure of the secret approval of their superiors.

Bauer had spent his autumn holidays in Berlin and was on the point of returning to Bonn when the news reached him. A discussion immediately took place in the circle of his friends as to whether or not an irreparable breach had already occurred between the religious and the scientific schools, and whether a supporter of the latter could reconcile membership of a theological faculty with his scientific conscience. Bauer himself maintained his optimistic attitude towards the Prussian State and rejected a semi-official proposal made to him that he should occupy himself with literary work and receive a grant from the State funds the while. He returned to Bonn full of fighting spirit and in the hope that together with Marx, who was soon to follow him, he would be able to bring the crisis to a head.

Neither of them abandoned the idea of issuing a radical journal together, but Marx’s prospects of an academic career at the Rhenish University now appeared decidedly poor. As the friend and assistant of Bauer he had to reckon with a hostile reception at the hands of the professorial clique in Bonn, and nothing was further from his thoughts than to curry favour with Eichhorn or Ladenberg, as Bauer advised him to do in the justifiable hope that then everything in Bonn would be “ all right ”. In such matters Marx’s ideas were always very strict, but even had he felt inclined to trust himself on such a slippery path it was easy to foresee that sooner or later he must lose his balance, for Eichhorn was not long in showing his true colours.

In order to finish off the decrepit mob of fossilized Hegelians at the University ofBerlin once and for all he appointed a professor named Schelling as Rector, a man who had come round in his old age to a belief in revelation, and he disciplined the students of Halle University who had drawn up a respectful petition to the King as their Rector begging him to appoint Strauss to a professorship in Halle.

With such prospects Marx as a Young Hegelian decided not to take his examination in Prussia at all. He had no desire to give the zealous satellites of Eichhorn a chance of plaguing him, though he had no intention of evading the struggle. Quite the contrary, in fact, and he decided to take his doctor’s degree at one of the smaller universities and then to publish his doctoral dissertation as a proof of his knowledge and capacity, together with a challenging forewotd, and after that to settle down in Bonn and publish the proposed magazine with Bauer. In this way Bonn University would not be completely closed to him because, as Doktor Promotus of “ a foreign university ”, he would have only one or two formalities to comply with in order to be given the freedom of the university as an independent lecturer.

This was the plan that Marx actually carried out. On the 15th April he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in his absence by the University ofJena on the basis of a written dissertation dealing with the differences between Democritean and Epicurean natural philosophy. This dissertation was an anticipatory part of a larger work in which Marx intended to deal with the whole cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy in its relation to Greek speculative philosophy as a whole. For the moment he demonstrated this relation on the basis of one example only and in connection with only the older speculative philosophy.

Amongst the older natural philosophers of Greece Democritus was the one who had adhered most closely to materialism. Out of nothing nothing can come. Nothing that is can be destroyed. All change is nothing but the joining and separation of parts. Nothing happens fortuitously and everything that happens happens with reason and necessity. Nothing exists but the atoms and empty space, everything else is opinion. The atoms are endless in number and of an infinite variety in form. Falling eternally through infinite space the larger atoms, which fall more quickly, collide with the smaller atoms, and the material movements and rotations which result are the beginning of the formation of worlds. Innumerable worlds form and pass away, co-existently and successively.

Epicurus took over this conception of nature from Demo




critus, but he made certain alterations. The most famous of these alterations consisted in the so-called “ swerve of the atoms ” . Epicurus contended that in their fall the atoms “ swerved ”, that is to say, that they did not fall vertically, but in a deviation from the straight line. From Cicero and Plutarch to Leibniz and Kant Epicurus has been thoroughly ridiculed for propounding this physical impossibility, and he has been dubbed an imitator of Democritus who merely botched the model which he took from his master. However, parallel with this condemnation of its physical absurdity, there is a tendency which regards the Epicurean philosophy as the most highly-developed materialist system in the classic world, thanks largely to the fact that it has been perpetuated in the didactic poem of Lucretius,1 whereas only insignificant remnants of the philosophy of Democritus have weathered the storm and stress of the centuries. Kant dismissed the swerve of the atoms as “ an insolent invention ”, but nevertheless he recognized Epicurus as the most noble philosopher of the senses as against Plato the most noble philosopher of the intellect.

Naturally, Marx did not deny the physical unreasonableness of the Epicurean philosophy and he condemned “ the reckless irresponsibility of Epicurus in the explanation of physical phenomena ”, but he pointed out that the only test of truth for Epicurus was the evidence of his senses : Epicurus believed the diameter of the sun to be two feet because it looked so to his eyes. However, Marx did not content himself with dismissing these evident absurdities with a phrase or two, but set himself to track down the philosophic reason in the physical unreason. He acted in accordance with the fine words he had used in honour of his master Hegel in a note to his dissertation pointing out that a philosophic school whose master had committed a sin of accommodation should not blame him, but seek to explain the accommodation from the inadequacy of the principle in which it must have its root, thus turning into a progress of science what must appear a progress of conscience.

That which was an end in itself for Democritus was nothing but a means to an end for Epicurus. Epicurus did not aim at an understanding of nature, but at a view of nature which would support his philosophic system. The philosophy of selfconsciousness as it was known to the classical world, fell into three schools, and according to Hegel the Epicureans represented the abstract individual consciousness of self, and the Stoics the abstract general consciousness of self, both as one-sided dogmas opposed immediately on account of their one-sidedness by the

1 De Rerum jVatura.—Tr.

Sceptics. Or, as a later historian of Greek philosophy expressed the same relation : in Stoicism and Epicureanism the individual and the general aspects of the subjective spirit, the atomistic isolation of the individual and his pantheistic surrender to the whole, faced each other irreconcilably with the same claims, whilst this antagonism was neutralized in Scepticism.

Despite their common aims, the Epicureans and the Stoics were led far away from each other by their different starting- points. Their surrender to the whole made the Stoics philosophically into determinists for whom the necessity of every happening was axiomatic, and politically into convinced republicans, whilst in the religious sphere they were unable to free themselves from a superstitious and restricted mysticism. They looked for support to Heraclitus, in whom the surrender to the whole had taken on the form of the most uncompromising selfconsciousness, though they treated him with as little ceremony as the Epicureans treated Democritus. On the other hand, the principle of isolated individuality made the Epicureans philosophically into indeterminists, into proclaimers of the free-will of each individual, and politically into patient sufferers—the biblical exhortation : be subject to the authorities which have power over you, is a heritage of Epicurus—whilst at the same time it freed them from all religious bonds.

Marx then shows in a series of trenchant investigations how “ the difference between Democritean and Epicurean natural philosophy ” can be explained. Democritus concerned himself exclusively with the material existence of the atom, whereas Epicurus concerned himselffurther with the atom as a conception, with its form as well as its matter, with its essence as well as its existence. Epicurus regarded the atom as being not only the material basis of the world of phenomena, but also the symbol of the isolated individual, the formal principle of abstract individual self-consciousness. From the vertical fall of the atoms Democritus concluded the necessity of all happenings, whilst Epicurus caused his atoms to swerve from the straight line in their fall, for otherwise where—as Lucretius, the best- known interpreter of Epicurean philosophy, asks in his didactic poem—would be free will, the will of the living human being wrested from the inexorable course of fate ? This contradiction between the atom as a phenomenon and the atom as a conception is evident throughout the whole of the Epicurean philosophy and compels it to adopt that utterly arbitrary explanation of physical phenomena which was subjected to such ridicule even in the classic world. The contradictions of Epicurean natural philosophy are reconciled only in the movements of the heavenly




bodies, but at the same time the principle of abstract individual self-consciousness is destroyed in face of their general and eternal existence. Epicurean natural philosophy thus abandons all material mummery and Epicurus fights as “the greatest Greek enlightener ”, as Marx calls him, against the tyranny of religion intimidating man with a baleful glance from the heights of heaven.

In this his first work Marx reveals himself as a constructive thinker, even if one contests the details of his interpretation of the Epicurean philosophy. In fact, his independent thought becomes even more clear then, because the only possible objection can be that Marx developed the basic principle of Epicureanism further and drew clearer conclusions from it than Epicurus did himself. Hegel declared that the Epicurean philosophy was thoughtlessness on principle, and it is certainly true that its originator who, as a self-taught man, attached great importance to the language of the common people, did not clothe his thoughts in the speculative phraseology of Hegelian philosophy with which Marx explained it. With this dissertation the pupil of Hegel draws up his own certificate of maturity. He uses the dialectical method in a masterly fashion and his style shows that vigour of expression which always characterized the language of his teacher Hegel, but which was so sadly lacking in the ranks of his camp-followers.

However, in this work Marx is still completely on the idealist basis of the Hegelian philosophy and the most surprising thing about it for the present-day reader is the unfavourable verdict passed on Democritus. Marx declares that all Democritus did was to put forward a hypothesis which represented the result of experience and not its energizing principle, and that therefore this hypothesis was never fulfilled and never materially influenced the practical investigation of natural phenomena. On the other hand he praises Epicurus as the founder of the science of atomism, despite the latter’s arbitrariness in the explanation of physical phenomena and despite the abstract individual self-consciousness he preaches, although, as Marx admits, this neutralizes all real and authentic science because it is in the nature of things not the individual unit which prevails.

To-day the matter is no longer open for discussion. As far as there is any science of atomism, and as far as the theory of the elementary particles and the development of all phenomena as a result of their movement has become the basis of the modern investigations into natural phenomena, explaining the laws of sound, light and heat and the chemical and physical alterations in material bodies, Democritus was the pioneer and not Epicurus.

However, for the Marx of that period philosophy, or to be more accurate, abstract philosophy, was so completely science that he came to a conclusion which we should hardly be able to understand to-day but for the fact that the very essence of his character was revealed in it.

As far as Marx was concerned, living always meant working and working fighting. What turned him against Democritus therefore was the lack of an “ energizing principle ” or, as he put it later on, “ the chief weakness of all previous materialism ”, the appreciation of the thing, the reality, sensualism only in the form of the object or the idea and not subjectively, not in practice, not in human sensual activity. And on the other hand, what drew him to Epicurus was the “ energizing principle ” which permitted this philosopher to revolt against and defy the crushing weight of religion. '

Weder von Blitzen geschreckt, noch durch das Geraune von Gottern, Oder des Himmels murrenden Groll. . . .1

The foreword which Marx intended to publish together with the dissertation and which he dedicated to his father-in-law breathes an unquenchable and fierce fighting spirit. “ As long as one drop of blood still pulses through the world-conquering and untrammelled heart of philosophy it will always defy its enemies with the words of Epicurus : ‘ Not he is Godless who scorns the Gods of the multitude, but he who accepts the opinions of the multitude concerning the Gods.’” Philosophy does not reject the avowal of Prometheus :

Mit schlichtem Wort, den Gottern alien heg’ ich Ha^.2

And to those who complain of the apparent worsening of their state it replies as Prometheus replied to Hermes, the servant of the Gods :

Fur deinen Frondienst gab’ich mein unselig Los,

Das sei versichcrt, nimmermehr zum Tausche dar.3

Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the philosophic calendar. This was the closing passage of Marx’s defiant foreword, which alarmed even his friend Bauer, but what seemed to the latter to be “ unnecessary temerity ” was in fact no more than the simple avowal of a man who was destined to be a second Prometheus both in struggle and in suffering.

1 Frightened neither by lightning, nor the threats of the Gods,

Nor the growling thunders of Heaven.

* In simple truth, I harbour hate ’gainst all the Gods.

3 For your vile slavery, be assured,

Never would I change my own unhappy lot.

32 KARL MARX

2. 
   The Anekdota and the Rheinische Zeitung
   

Marx had hardly pocketed the diploma of his new-won dignity when all the plans he had built up for his future collapsed as a result of further blows delivered by the romanticist reaction.

In the summer of 1841 Eichhorn mobilized all the theological faculties in a shameful campaign against Bruno Bauer on account of his criticism of the Gospels, and with the exception of Halle and Konigsberg all the universities at once betrayed the principle of Protestant academic freedom and Bauer had to give way. With this all hope of Marx obtaining a foothold at the University of Bonn disappeared.

At the same time the plan for the issue of a radical philosophical journal also collapsed. The new King considered himself a supporter of the freedom of the press and at his instance a mitigated censorship order was drawn up. At the end of 1841 this order actually saw the light of day, but it was then seen that the freedom of the press was to be limited to a romanticist whim. The freedom of the press as understood by the King was also demonstrated in the summer of 1841 when an Order in Council was issued calling on Ruge to submit his magazine, which was printed and published by Wigand in Leipzig, to Prussian press censorship or to make up his mind to its prohibition in the Prussian States. This action enlightened Ruge sufficiently concerning his “ free and just Prussia ” to cause him to move to Dresden, where from the 1st July 1841 he issued his magazine as the Deutsche Jahrbucher. At the same time and on his own initiative he adopted that sharper tone which both Bauer and Marx had missed in his previous writings, and this made them decide to contribute to his publication rather than found one of their own.