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Lunacharsky Articles and speeches on international politicsHegel and modernity
Published in the journal: Philosophy and Society. Issue No. 2(70)/2013
An article translated from German by a Soviet writer, publicist and critic is devoted to the influence of the views of G. W. F. Hegel on both Marxist and bourgeois philosophy; the image of the German thinker as a great revolutionary and a great conservative at the same time is affirmed.
Translation from German Ph.D. n. N. M. Severikova (Department of the History of Russian Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Of all the brilliant philosophers of the past known to the world, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is the most alive today. That which was immortal in him takes the liveliest part in the construction of human culture.
Today, the contours of the two camps, fighting among themselves for the future of mankind, are becoming more and more pronounced. At the same time, the boundaries of political, economic and ideological differences are more clearly defined, and each camp acquires the character of an integral worldview and adopts a single program of action.
At the same time, a somewhat unexpected, but in any case interesting fact is revealed that Hegel simultaneously acts as a powerful fighter of both camps and, of course, not without reservations, is recognized as the outstanding authority of each of these antagonistic currents.
This surprising fact is partly explained by a certain similarity, a kind of analogy between both trends: they are becoming dominant in modern social life, although this analogy does not prevent the existence of the most acute enmity between them.
However, one can hardly be satisfied with this explanation alone. The reason should be sought in an internal contradiction - the duality of the Hegelian teaching itself. We will dwell on this internal contradiction in more detail.
Along with the two predominant currents of human thought and activity in our day - on the one hand, Marxist-Leninist, communist, on the other hand, static, or fascist - liberalism in all its forms still plays an important role. However, we notice: every economic, every political trend or doctrine, every individual or every single work that has to do with liberalism bears the stamp of dying. Free trade, ethical individualism, parliamentarism, the old social democracy, and many other things of that kind, not only belong to the old world, but these are precisely the elements that are now hardly capable of withstanding the onslaught of new forces and circumstances.
Of course, from our, communist, point of view, the entire old world, that is, class society itself as such, is condemned. But this old world nevertheless still resists, and, as it is threatened with destruction, it changes its forms quite decisively in order to withstand the storm that has broken out, to adapt to new conditions that have made it impossible to live according to the old rules, that is, according to the principles of the American-European pseudo-democracy.
In essence, this pseudo-democratism only masked the dictatorship of the ruling classes, primarily the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. But the democratic institutions of power and the ideology corresponding to them - this complex and rather motley protective rampart of the existing dictatorship - gave rise to a whole series of phenomena, ideas, feelings, which in many respects determined the face of civilization for a whole century.
At present, the final seizure of power by a new stratum of the bourgeoisie, the bankocracy (monetary aristocracy), and at the same time a monstrous overproduction of goods create conditions under which the purchasing power of not only huge masses of people, but even the main consumer markets under capitalism, is falling sharply. As a result of this, imperialist wars inevitably arise, but at the same time class consciousness and the cohesion of the proletariat also grow, which takes on the role of the organizer of a new order, capable of eliminating the contradictions of the old order - all this, even in the eyes of the bourgeoisie itself, has turned liberalism into an unsuitable form of dictatorship. This mask is no longer able to mislead anyone, since it can no longer hide anything, and the traditional illusory conventions only stand in the way of the struggling forces.
At the present time, the working class, which in almost all countries—despite the more or less strong influence of Marxism—is still in the net of liberal Social Democracy, but is already beginning to free itself from these admixtures and is raising to its full potential the problem of the open dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary consciousness of a new society based on a planned economy and classless cooperation of an internationally united humanity.
However, in parallel, the most viable elements of the ruling classes and their ideologists, in the same way, begin to strive for open forms of bourgeois class dictatorship, which, in their opinion, it is important to sanctify with the dogma of "service to society" of this dictatorial state. At the same time, not only preserving, but also emphasizing the principle of the class hierarchy, strongly colored by nationalism. It is the nationalism or "sacred egoism" of individual states that conceals within itself the source of bloody wars, the spirit of militarism, which does not weaken at all, which is facilitated by various forms of modern pseudo-pacifism - with its armed alliances of the most powerful states, vassalage of the weakest and the deepening of colonial policy.
These are the main trends of our time.
* * *
The greatest philosopher of an organic, living whole, freely mastering the various parts of his system, the greatest philosopher of the ethical state with its problem of freedom combined with necessity—in a word, the deepest "extra" in the history of world thought—was and remains Hegel.
True, for the communist camp, far from being the most important thing in Hegel is his doctrine of the state, as will become clear from the following presentation. For us, his dialectical method, its application in logic, natural science and history, comes to the fore. This does not prevent us from appreciating Hegel, even in a greatly altered form - in Marx's words, "put on his head" - as a teacher, as a dialectician and "organic" in the struggle against mechanistic atomism, wherever it manifests itself. : be it, for example, in the theory of matter or in liberal democratism.
But even for the bourgeoisie, Hegel is also acceptable only with reservations: for Junker circles and small landowners, for militaristic, church-bureaucratic and petty-bourgeois nationalist circles, the revolutionary dialectician Hegel undoubtedly poses a serious danger. But nevertheless, the bourgeoisie will not find anywhere a more convincing argument for establishing state discipline directed against the working people, for restricting individuality and freedom of private property in the name of saving the class hierarchy itself, except from the famous author of the Philosophy of Right.
Thus, Hegel turns out to be a powerful ally of two irreconcilably hostile camps, a valuable but dangerous ally. The fact that both camps rated the philosopher at the same time is also explained by the fact that Hegel’s teaching not only allows for a double interpretation, but is also dual, that is, contradictory in its very essence, for Hegel’s philosophy is a product of the unstable revolutionary era of the 18th century.
In the advanced countries the bourgeoisie seized power and brought about enormous changes in the established way of life. The best minds of the already rather numerous bourgeois intelligentsia of the German countries from their early youth were also infected with critical ideas and love of freedom. The coming morning of the Enlightenment gave us Lessing and Herder; spring thunderstorms thundered the early works of Goethe and Schiller during the Sturm und Drang period. It is characteristic that Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin dreamed of new times and argued about them in the same way that students argue today in the same Swabian seminaries.
An intense fermentation of thoughts was observed, but no boiling of minds could give rise to a living social cause: the economic and political reality of Germany did not give an opportunity for this, and the avant-garde of youth and philosophers did not have a solid support. The fate of the leaders was also predetermined: either open renegade, or various forms of opportunistic opportunism, or death in an unequal struggle against timelessness.
Hegel was so revolutionary that he saw the inevitability of the victory of new principles, or, as he put it, "the spirit in its development towards freedom," 1 which is why revolutionary elements were so strong in his teaching. Hegel could not refuse them, as Schelling did.
Noteworthy are those pages of Hegel's works where he speaks of noble natures who, faced with reality, perish not because they have not grown up to it, but because they do not want to cut anything from their ideal, even if it is clearly unattainable under the prevailing conditions. . Although Hegel, following the public, also expresses his condemnation, he morally not only justifies them, he even honors them. Here he certainly has in mind Hölderlin, a friend of his youth.
Hegel himself did not and could not follow this path: he rejected the heroic idealism of the individual who opposes himself to the public sphere. Therefore, Hegel characterizes the fate of the Jacobins of the Great French Revolution as "the triumphant death of the latest abstract subjectivism", 2 of which he considered Descartes the first representative. Hegel himself had not the slightest inclination to be such an abstract subjectivist. Therefore, his philosophy in its finished form is an amazingly logically built architectural structure, thoroughly permeated with the spirit of wise opportunism.
The "absolute" in Hegel is revolutionary. The rapid pace of recent centuries, and especially decades, prompted Hegel to consider the main problem of philosophy about the coexistence of contradictions by recognizing the principle of the unity of opposites and revealing it as movement, as development through struggle. At the very foundation of being, this lability, instability, the eternal overcoming of existence, hated by many, manifested itself.
And it was clear to Hegel himself that being, in his interpretation, had completely lost respectable rationality and ceremonial immobility. In his Phenomenology of the Spirit he says: "The true is the Bacchic intoxication which no one can escape." The absolute - the universal develops according to its own laws. However, woe not only to that “private” who lags behind the general movement or wants to move it in a different direction, but also to that which, although moving along the right path, is in too much of a hurry and ahead of time. And as a result, subjective revolutionary romance is completely condemned by scientific socialism, which determines its goals and paths not in accordance with ideal wishes, but on the basis of studying the dynamics of real social processes.
If the revolutionary offensive prepared by events had taken place, Hegel would undoubtedly have become a complete revolutionary. But at that moment there were no practical revolutionary prospects, and Hegel already acts as a defender of resignation, self-restraint, and becomes an apologist for reality, which, since it turned out to be stably stable at that time, had to be recognized as “reasonable” as well - to be recognized only because, in order to maintain respect for to himself, despite his own timidity, or rather, his impotence in the face of a difficult, in fact turned out to be trivial reality.
But the great Russian critic, the spiritual father of our progressive intelligentsia, Vissarion Belinsky, in the days of oppressive doubts about the very possibility of a successful (and in fact, impotent) struggle against the iron Russian absolutism, being delighted with the Hegelian cult of reality, wrote a reactionary article about Borodino, where he bowed before the rationality of the existing, an article of which he was later ashamed all his life.
Plekhanov, brilliantly analyzing this episode in Russian literature, also shed light on the inner, hidden motives of the forced duality of Hegelian philosophy.
In an article by the still very young Friedrich Engels, we find the following important lines that characterize the cultural position of the leaders of the idealism of the German intelligentsia at the beginning of the 19th century: “Germany ... was one disgusting, rotting and decaying mass ... And only domestic literature offered hope for a better future. This politically and socially shameful epoch was at the same time a great epoch of German literature... Each of the outstanding works of this epoch is imbued with the spirit of defiance, indignation against the entire German society of that time. Such were the works of young writers and philosophers, but over the years they lost all hope: Goethe limited himself to satire, albeit a rather bold one, and Schiller would probably have fallen into despair if he had not found refuge in science, in particular in the great history of Greece and Rome. By these two writers one can judge the position of all the others. Even the best and strongest minds of the German people have lost all faith in the future of their country.”
The greatness of Hegel comes from the greatness of the era of the great bourgeois revolutions, and his squalor comes from the squalor of the social conditions in Germany at that time. Heine, in his brilliant book On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1831 - Approx. trans. ), is quite right in pointing out that the people who in France became Robespierres and Dantons could only develop in Germany into thinkers and dreamers, become Kants and Schillers. But there was also a peculiar strength in this: all the accumulated vital energy, restrained by existing conditions, all the deepest discontent rushed along these ideological channels. The achievements of the German philosophers and poets of that time are explained precisely by this peculiar sublimation.
Only in later times, and moreover not by the radical petty bourgeoisie of the 1940s, but by the proletariat of our day, did it fall to the lot to realize what formed the basis of Hegel's ideas and Goethe's images - a great integral organization of social life and genuine, free humanity. In this sense, Engels calls the proletariat the heir of the great poets and thinkers. 3
The proletariat, however, approaches this heritage not only creatively, but also critically. The revolutionary principle contained in the works of the giants of thought at the dawn of the 19th century. in Germany, remained fruitless in terms of its implementation; moreover, it was distorted as a result of its isolation from living practice.
If one listens to the music of the Hegelian teaching, one cannot fail to hear its mighty dynamism and amazing activity. This prompted Marx, in his famous notes on Feuerbach's philosophy, to favor, in a certain sense, idealism over materialism. But here one should take into account: dialectical idealism before metaphysical, mechanistic materialism.
But how did Hegel imagine activity? Could he and his contemporaries and followers consider physical labor, technology as an activity that transforms the world? No, all this was still extremely undeveloped and seemed to be just a modest "basement floor" of the building of culture. In the same way, the activities of a political fighter did not inspire confidence after the tragic fate of the Great French Revolution and in the deadness of social life in Germany.
People with a brilliant, unusually developed intellect, occupying responsible places in the meeting room and at the pulpit, people of the word - they were the real leaders of the working class of that time and with firm confidence took their subjective position for the objective essence of being. Their ordinary environment, their ordinary labor, the ordinary tools of their labor increased immeasurably in their own eyes, they themselves became the center of the world, its factor, even its creator. In the face of "matter", which seemed to them insurmountable in its inertness, the representatives of the unarmed and essentially powerless "spirit" had only one thing left to do: to create for themselves the illusion of the otherworldly transcendental omnipotence of this "spirit".
Idealism becomes the focus of attention: it, as in a focus, reflected the desire of the theorizing intelligentsia to give itself a special weight - at least in their own eyes. With Fichte, this focus has reached amazing clarity, while with Hegel it has unfolded into a brilliant, convincing and majestic system. And since Hegel was unusually great in the field of theorizing, the system of spirit was developed by him to its full completion. This is where the paradox arose: the progressive movement of the spirit towards self-knowledge suddenly ended with the creation of a whole philosophy by Hegel.
Well, what about reality? After all, it is quite obvious: if the spirit in itself and for itself has completed its dialectical development, then the "material" reality strictly corresponding to it should have reached more or less perfection by that time. And here we see a number of disgusting contrivances of Hegel to prove the perfection of the Prussian bureaucratic monarchy.
So naturally and at the same time in a peculiar way Hegel united in himself the great revolutionary and the great conservative. However, the combination of these hypostases could not be long: it collapsed even in the Hegelian school, since Strauss, the Bauer brothers, Feuerbach soon appeared, who remained with the former intellectual exaggeration of the social significance of theoretical, philosophical thought. Although the incorporeal spirit ceased to be a substance of nature and concrete matter took its place, but in public life, even for Feuerbach and his brilliant Russian student, the great revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the intelligentsia, with its science and enlightenment, remained the main bearer of progress.
Marx caustically ridiculed the opinion of the Bauer brothers and similar radical intellectuals: as if by theoretically resolving any contradiction, they actually overcome it in this way. No! It is also necessary to remove it from reality, from solid material existence. And this requires both physical labor and real struggle.
Yes, physical labor, but human labor, creative, transforming the social environment; and the struggle of classes, guided by knowledge of the social strata in accordance with a clear plan - this is what became the banner of the young proletariat, or, more precisely, its vanguard.
Having grown out of "Hegelianism" but having gone beyond it, Marx and Engels became not only theoretically but also practically the leaders of the entire working world: their teaching, accepted and brilliantly supplemented by Lenin, is now the philosophical, sociological and strategic basis for the state, which occupies one the sixth landmass of the Earth, where the working people are their own masters and where the majestic ideal of a classless international society and a united planned economy is realized.
Marxism, or, as we put it, the Marxist-Leninist world outlook, and the practice corresponding to it do not deny their "Hegelian" roots and are in fact inseparable from dialectics, which was first fully developed by Hegel. A deep understanding of our construction is impossible without a careful and critical study of Hegel. But we, however, are not Hegelians. Hegel's idealism, stemming from the weakness of his time, is what "cripples" his philosophical system, is his fundamental "ugliness," his dancing on his head.
“Turning over” is an excellent expression, but to move from head to foot is actually a very complicated operation. At the same time, a lot changes in the very organism of the Hegelian system. Our Party is well aware of this, and life itself constantly confirms this.
Until recently, a philosophical group flourished in our country, headed by the communist philosopher Deborin. This group has made no small contribution to the fight against mechanistic materialism, which found adherents among us, but was rejected by life itself. Excessive enthusiasm for Hegel was one of the main reasons that led this group to detachment from reality, to ambiguities in the presentation of their thoughts as a result of the abuse of Hegelian terminology and Gellerter 4 methods, but most importantly, to underestimation of everything that the Great Russian Revolution and her leader.
Hegel lives a mighty life among us, but this Hegel is in a certain way "explained", freed from his "sins" imposed on him by his time.
Benedetto Croce published in 1907 a book entitled "The Living and the Dead in Hegel's Philosophy". We also consistently separate one from the other in it. We are dialecticians, but we are materialistic dialecticians. We are for the "whole", but this whole is not a state of a ruling minority, but a dictatorship of the working majority, striving towards the organization of a classless society.
Historically, Hegel came posthumously to the proletariat, that is, living humanity, which has a rich future. The proletariat gratefully accepted all the treasures presented to it and cleansed them of the dross generated by the era of Hegel. The proletariat attached the purified teaching of Hegel to a bright salutary worldview, to the foundation of their holy war for true freedom and true brotherhood of people.
Here we should turn to the question: in what ways did the ideology of the antipode of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, follow after Hegel? Actually, this will be just a brief sketch, since it is not worth dwelling on the fate of the original right-wing Hegelianism in Germany, since it does not have a serious cultural-historical significance.
Bourgeois philosophical thought in Germany, immediately after Hegel, is characterized by a leap towards Schopenhauer and Hartmann. This could be seen as a symptom of the premature decrepitude of the bourgeoisie, if it were only about its most conservative strata, who with anxiety and annoyance were experiencing the rise of "Grunderism", the desire for expansion and the thirst for the accumulation of money. The chaotic and insatiable passion inherent in capitalism to expand production and turnover served Schopenhauer as a prototype for a blind and terrible will that senselessly creates the flow of life. This substance came to replace the idea, imposingly developing in its contradictions, striving for the fullness of self-consciousness, the assertion of self-esteem and freedom. Accordingly, in Schopenhauer, both the Hegelian unity of subject and object, so is awareness of the significance of the process of cognition itself, for the cognizable world now - this unnecessary illusory decoration - has turned into a rainbow playing over the black stream of unconscious will. Yes, and Hegel himself for Schopenhauer became just a "hatedpseudo philosopher.
The position of the idealistic intelligentsia, completely bewildered in the conditions of the powerful development of capitalism, is even more curiously reflected by the philosophy of Hartmann, where "consciousness" to a certain extent tries in vain to "overtake" the unbridled "will" and unconscious creativity in order to prove all the advantages of peace, and even non-existence, according to compared to the convulsions of existence.
The ideological path of the main groups of the bourgeoisie, however, did not follow this line of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. The gigantic creativity in the field of industry, the flourishing of capitalism in Germany, which followed a similar process in England and France, called for the active action of new ideologists, and the intelligentsia tried to satisfy the needs of big capital in the people it needed.
Least of all, the capitalists were interested in discussing issues related to the meaning of all historical development as a whole and the ultimate goal of the existence of mankind. And yet, in arbitrarily realizing their own young hopes, the capitalists inevitably had to “stumble” on conclusions that spoke in favor of socialism that denied them.
The big bourgeoisie did not like to look far into the future. In addition, the capitalists, having at that time enormous opportunities, sincerely believed in their effective force, in their power and the all-saving role of the laws of free competition. By and large, classical political economy was then the soul of European bourgeois culture, and the ideas of commercial, industrial and political liberalism became its dominant note.
From the ideologists now it was required, first of all, concrete-scientific and technical inventive work, which, undoubtedly, was the glory of the 19th century. Of course, at the same time, a certain generalization of a huge number of individual, including private, theories and observations also became a necessity.
In France, and to some extent in England, the bourgeoisie, at the time of their early revolutionary youth, came out in the field of philosophy under the banner of mechanistic materialism. Much in it corresponded to the spirit of the bourgeoisie: the denial of the transcendent principle, which went hand in hand with the active struggle of the bourgeoisie against the church and God's anointed ones; atomism, that is, the view of the world as a result of the mutual influence of physical "individuals", independent particles; the idea of laws and order that naturally arose as a result of this; as well as the position on the complete determinism of phenomena, which provided a solid basis for empirical conclusions and techniques, etc.
But by the time the bourgeoisie matured, many things had undergone significant changes: thus, in the face of the enemy on the left, the dispute with the clergy and the remnants of God's anointed ones had already turned into a strong alliance with them; catastrophes in the market aroused a superstitious feeling that every capitalist is dependent on an irrational principle, etc.
All this led to the fact that mechanistic materialism remained only a weak left wing of that bourgeois philosophy, or, more precisely, pseudo-philosophy, which everywhere celebrated its triumph under the name "positivism", which was firmly established in the second half of the 19th century.
No one can dispute the glory of the exact sciences. But many representatives of the scientific intelligentsia were of the opinion that, while rejecting metaphysics as assumptions based on unverified facts, they were simultaneously entitled to reject other, broader generalizations, and in general any control as a kind of verification of the very foundations of knowledge, and in fact, any philosophy.
In fact, as Lenin liked to point out, this desire to do without philosophy led scientists boasting of their “objectivity” only to an unconscious dependence on poorly digested scraps of bad philosophical systems. In those cases when such scientists tried to create a truly scientific philosophy, their false criticism led to indecision and half-heartedness, to "agnosticism" so characteristic of positivism, to fruitless oscillations between idealism and materialism on the basic question of being and consciousness, etc.
As for the results of positivism in the field of history and social science in general, I will gladly borrow a few correct characteristics of these results from the idealist and neo-Hegelian Herr Croce, firstly, because they are quite apt, and secondly, because just the chapters of his The book The Theory and History of Historiography and Remarks on the Philosophy of Politics, devoted to the development of historiography, will help me move on to a characterization of the new idealism that is now replacing positivism.
Croce divides post-Hegelian philosophers into three categories: diplomatic, philological, and pseudo-philosophical. All of them are characterized by an extreme concern for reliability in the depiction of events. They completely lack an emphasis on what the historian himself considers essential and valuable: the goal of these historians is only protocol fidelity, an accurate reproduction of the chronicle of the past.
The talented historian Leopold Ranke, having become the leader of a trend (which, however, never proclaimed itself a school), tried to avoid any "partisanship", and in the most essential thing - in search of objectivity - even showed unscrupulousness. With a touch of arrogance, Ranke ironically declares that he does not take it upon himself to "educate people" about their future on the basis of the past, but only seeks to tell "how it really was."
The influence of this evasive objectivism, which made Ranke, in Croce's witty remark, a "perfectly acceptable" German historian of France to the French and a "perfectly acceptable" Protestant historian of the papacy to Catholics, was great enough, but, along with some good, brought a lot of harm.
With such historians, we are further than ever from a true recognition of our basic proposition: science is party and should be party. In fact, a truly convinced person can consider phenomena only from the point of view of his convictions, and at best, from the point of view of the convictions of his party, his class, with which he is in solidarity as an individual. However, it does not follow from this that historians-diplomats were alien to partisanship. Even Croce correctly noted that this, too, was a kind of “party spirit,” but only evasive, cunning, eclectic—in a word, the party spirit of the opportunists.
The philological requirement of careful verification of sources, it would seem, can bring nothing but benefit. But this demand, connected with the positivist spirit, as Croce rightly remarks, has led to superficiality in history, when compared with the heights achieved by the Romantics and "the great fruit of the Romantics, Hegel."
Croce expresses justified indignation about this: “In Germany, every miserable copyist of texts and collector of different versions, every researcher of the relationship of various texts and every writer of hypotheses about the reliability of this or that text considers himself a man of science and critical thought, daring not only to challenge face to Herder or Schlegel, but even to openly express his superiority over them and contempt for them, since they are "anti-methodical" people. These pseudo-scientific swagger and arrogance, coming from Germany, spread to other European countries. five
No less true is Croce's negative judgment about the "philosophizing historians of positivism" - such as Comte, Bockl, Taine, Lamprecht, Breisig. Eclecticism in the basic philosophical postulates, a mechanistic view of causality and a mechanistic theory of factors, the separation of sociology from history when the relationship between these disciplines is unclear, a tendency to simplified physiology or staticism, etc. - all this is filled with the social science of the positivists, who made considerable efforts to ensure that to build their science like the exact sciences, but they did not find the right prerequisites for this.
Croce skips over Marx here and confines himself to a few remarks that testify to his naivety and complete misunderstanding of Marxism. Mr. Benedetto Croce, with whom I had the honor of arguing at the last philosophical congress at Oxford, reminded me there that he himself had been an ardent Marxist in his youth. But, unfortunately, Herr Croce has completely forgotten what he once knew, and in his present evaluation of Marxism he repeats the most trivial objections.
However, this did not prevent Croce from speaking correctly about bourgeois social science in the post-Hegelian period. Although the results of his review are not encouraging, Mr. Croce is optimistic and hopes for a light in the present. I would like to know what his hopes are based on?
We can confidently assert that at the present time bourgeois positivism and its left wing, mechanistic materialism, have already been pushed into the background. The mechanistic worldview is steadily destroyed by the further progress of physics.
The insufficiency, primitiveness, and deadness of the mechanistic worldview are particularly striking now, when the liberal individualism corresponding to it in social life (free competition in industry and trade at the top and democratic "rights" at the bottom) has led capitalism to a dead end, to the edge of the abyss.
Part of the bourgeois ideologists rushed back - to all possible forms of idealism, including mysticism and blind faith. However, the most private minds of the bourgeoisie indignantly reject any form of naive fideism. But Croce, for example, does not satisfy even the strongest trends in the latest philosophical idealism - intuitionism and the philosophy of values; he gives them a not very flattering characterization: “He who criticizes natural science as an economic construction, incapable of any true knowledge, locks himself in his immediate consciousness and joins a kind of mysticism, where historical dialectics chokes and perishes. And the philosophy of values leads to dualism, which prevents recognition of the unity of history. So, looking around, we do not find a "new" philosophy - such6 And then Croce makes a rather transparent hint that such a philosophy is his own philosophy and some others related to it (for example, Meinecke).
But how does Croce himself formulate the basis of this "new" philosophy? It is the "Spirit identical to the world." 7 But this is Hegel in its purest form! And this is by no means a “new” philosophy: it is already over a hundred years old. Undoubtedly, Croce is one of the most outstanding resurrectors and renovators of Hegel. That is why we must stop there.
Despite his Marxist past, Croce was wholly and completely sided with the bourgeoisie, so his interpretation of Hegel is clearly idealistic. That character of immanent idealism, coinciding with consciousness, at the present moment even more reflects the purely intellectual limitations of Croce than was the case even in the original Hegelianism. The reality of the spirit in Croce is reduced to its creative self-consciousness in the present. Therefore, history, that is, the past, and even more so the future, really exists only insofar as it is reflected in the consciousness of the present. As a result, Croce simply denies real history, that is, the entire wealth of material events. So the historical process is, as it were, created anew and really exists only in the mind of the historian or "interpreter of history", as Troeltsch very aptly calls him, close in this sense to Croce himself.
Loud phrases to the effect that, with such an understanding, the spirit manifests itself in all the purity of its creative activity, cannot be misleading regarding the sad limitations of this world outlook, which strongly strays into solipsism. Only with the help of sophisms and a more subtle view of the spirit is Croce able to build a bridge from the personal subject to the universal subject, or objective being.
Croce's worldview bears the stamp of a narrow intelligentsia, despite his great talent and great erudition. This limitation of the intelligent layman is fully revealed to us when we become acquainted with the social views of Croce, whose ideas go no further than helpless liberalism. The freedom of any activity of the creative spirit is a nice-sounding, but empty conclusion.
When Croce begins to talk about the pessimism that has gripped the bourgeois world, he is most afraid of communism, which poses the greatest danger to him. Communism is like an eerie ghost to him; the transient traits of communism, either out of naivete or cunning, are presented by Croce as a program of communism. Communism, according to Croce, is that iron dictatorship, that voluntary abstinence and that forced poverty that can now be observed in the Soviet Union. Croce pretends that he has never heard anything about our teaching about the withering away of every state (for this purpose, as a transition, we have a temporary dictatorship), nor about the enormous universal wealth that we will come to thanks to our present material sacrifices.
We have said that Hegel is seized upon by the etatists, the fascists, but Croce is rather a liberal reconciling himself with fascism.
The situation is quite different with his former friend, Gentile. Both of these philosophers are from the school of the more progressive Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa in many respects. But Gentile, however, went much further than Croce in his immanentism: with him the spirit is everywhere equal to itself. After all, apart from the spirit, manifested in real consciousness, there is nothing. The spirit is always and everywhere free, holy and good.
The Catholic critic Chiacchetti rightly points out that Gentile, in his all-spirituality, drowns not only values, but also differences: in this single spirit, in the end, even evil becomes good. And Gentile considers Hegel to be just a pillar of a vague liberalism. Gentile is not only the official philosopher of fascism - he is also the Minister of Education. 8 And it is impossible to read Gentile's grandiloquent pedagogical writings "Sommario di pedagogia" without indignation.
Here I will not dwell on a number of Gentile's bombastic phrases about idealistic education. The essence of the book is the solution of issues of misconduct, discipline and punishment, based on the philosophy of a single spirit, which is everywhere holy and good ...
And how, indeed, are crime and punishment possible in this ocean of all-spiritual creativity? Without resolving this issue, one cannot even think of becoming a philosopher of fascism! No matter how much Gentile tries to prove that the inevitable violation of the law is followed by its inevitable restoration through punishment, no matter how much he refers to Kant and Dostoevsky, his whole teaching remains not only empty, but outrageous. In the light of the class theory of the state, one wonders at the mixture of Gellerterian naivety of the scientist and cynicism contained in his premises: that the proletarian "I" voluntarily created a bourgeois regime and itself demands, as its right, punishment for protesting against exploitation.
We believe that fascism, with some effort, could "find" its justification in a suitably crafted Hegelianism; in any case, he should have looked for something better for himself than the philosophy of Gentile, the monotony of which horrified even Croce.
But perhaps Fascism will have a closer connection with the Catholics than hitherto; it is in the last two encyclicals - the papal letters - that Catholicism seriously declares its candidacy for the role of leader of that idealism that the bourgeoisie needs.
Neo-Hegelianism in German philosophy is more interesting than in Italian. Here we must emphasize that we are interested in the socio-political side of Hegelianism. It goes without saying that this aspect of the work of the great philosopher is closely connected with all other aspects of his scientific research. However, one cannot fail to recognize the enormous work that German philosophy has done at the present time in the field of studying and using the works of Hegel. To the works of the first Hegelians, and to the old, but still far from useless works of Kuno Fischer, one can add the studies of Bart, Rosenzweig, Dilthey, Nohl, Glockner, Groner, Leese. The works of Hegel, supplemented and with interesting comments, are published under the editorship of Pastor Lasson. And finally, of exceptional importance is the remarkable study of Hering, 10dedicated to the objective reconstruction of the process of development of Hegel's ideas and terminology.
Of all this wealth, to which one can rank a number of other works indirectly connected with Hegel, I will focus on only a few.
First of all, more detailed consideration deserves the thoughts that Pastor Lasson based the edition of Hegel edited by him and which are set out in the general preface to the book: Georg Lasson, pastor in the church of St. Bartholomew. Berlin. "Hegel as Philosopher of History".
Quite rightly, Lasson points out that the questions of the social plane worried Hegel more than others, and that it was precisely these questions and the practical and journalistic goals associated with their solution that, one might say, determined everything else in the works of the great philosopher. In this, by the way, Lasson Goering fully and completely supports Lasson, who also agrees with the pastor's statement that Hegel's socio-philosophical ideas are of great importance for our time as well.
But what, in fact, is most liked by the industrious learned pastor in Hegel?
With the greatest sympathy, he expounds the teacher's thoughts that the constitution of every society is determined by its inner essence. How “deeply” Herr Lasson understood Hegel in this is evident from his assertion that China and Russia could again become orderly powers after the restoration of the monarchies. Already here one can see what profound static "sclerosis" strangles Hegel's revolutionary dialectic in Lasson. At the same time, it would not be at all difficult to understand that with the change in the internal essence of the people, the external constitution must also change.
Or the words of Heraclitus, which at the same time were the words of Hegel - "Everything flows, everything changes" - do not refer to "peoples" and they remain unchanged? Or can Germany, too, come to an "orderly" state only by returning to a monarchy?
Most of all, Mr. Lasson is afraid that Hegel might be considered a democrat and a revolutionary.
Hegel, it is true, was in love with the democracy of Athens. True, he called the French Revolution "a beautiful sunrise." 11 But what happiness! - after all, the Athenian democracy, according to Hegel, was condemned by reality itself, and it was Hegel who pointed out that this democracy could exist only until - as a result of the development of industry and trade - bourgeois individualism manifested itself. The beautiful democracy of antiquity turned out to be buried forever, and with a heavy heart Hegel is looking for a more prosaic regime, with compromise orders, which he finds in the Prussian monarchy.
Only M. Lasson forgot that bourgeois idealism, in its turn, is not eternal and that socialism, for example, after putting an end to it, will be able to create all the conditions for the brilliant equality that so delighted Hegel. Although Pastor Lasson sympathetically reacted to the words of condemnation that, following the verdict of history, Hegel uttered with a sigh over the conflagration of the Great French Revolution, Lasson cannot deny that Hegel characterized other revolutions as legitimate.
So let us note that Hegel at least taught this to Pastor Lasson. Mr. Lasson especially likes that Hegel speaks of wars as the driving force of progress, and not of revolution. Indeed, in the first case, the state, so dear to the heart of the modern bourgeois, appears as a whole.
It seems indisputable to M. Lasson that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat of one and the same country form a single whole, while the proletariat of two different countries are two quantities alien to each other. But this is a profound delusion: the history of the last war and the Hegelian philosophy of war put forward not classes, but peoples, as the main actors in world history and the "universal court".
We must do justice, however, to Mr. Lasson. He is not to the extent that one might expect, closed in his bourgeois.
Among the influential cultural historians who in Germany can be counted among the Hegelians of the bourgeois type, I want to single out only two: Troeltsch and Spengler. Troeltsch considers himself a Hegelian and emphasizes the immortality of the foundations of the Hegelian dialectic. In this regard, he extends his hand to Croce, to whom he (as well as Gentile), unfortunately, is too close. His formula of a self-forming and self-contemplating universe is extremely close to the statement “auto cjscienza il soggetto che conosce se stesso” (self-consciousness is a subject that knows itself). Troeltsch repeatedly emphasized the direct activity of the spirit, and his monadology is saved from solipsism and monotheism (which also threatened Croce) only by affirming the existence of God.
Correcting Hegel by appealing to a transcendent God, and all this in order to have “unbestaimmten Vertrauern” (“indefinite trust”), is very little.
Another thing is Spengler. But is Spengler a Hegelian? Of course, he differs in many respects from the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit, but without Hegel he is completely unthinkable. And the picture of the change of cultures, however, not connected in a single chain, but scattered - in isolation from one another, and the laws of development of each culture within itself - all these are just variants of Hegelian constructions.
However, even before Spengler, the Russian Hegelian Strakhov built similar versions, and they turned out to be strikingly similar to Spengler's designs. The Prussian ideal of Spengler, for the sake of whose victory (an impossible victory, of course) the death of the entire “Faustian culture” is proclaimed, is the worst thing that could be found in Hegel, but Spengler’s argument is almost completely taken from Hegel.
As the camera obscura reflects all colors, so all the strengths and weaknesses of Spengler's main work and additions to it are reflected in his recently published book Man and Technology. Notes on the Philosophy of Life.
It would be very interesting to dwell on this strange work in more detail, but I do not have time for that now. Most importantly, the book is full of contradictions. But above all, she is full of malice. It is full of hatred for capitalism, the culture of big cities, but even more filled with hatred for the proletariat, for communism. The author does not hide disappointment in his own world and despondency bordering on despair. The inexorable dialectic of development is leading American-European culture to degeneration and death. One must have the courage to die - this is the meaning of Spengler's teaching, which he by no means denies.
Unfortunately, we cannot continue our review. But we affirm that in the camp of bourgeois Hegelianism, as in the entire bourgeois world, complete confusion reigns. The most energetic fall into despair, others completely refuse to judge the future, and if anyone speaks of the struggle for existence, he does not indicate any means for this. They cling to the state as a whole, to the compromise of "corporations" in the state, to state discipline. But in order to make all this lasting, it is necessary to finally and physically enslave the awakened and awakening proletariat. And right are those who, like Spengler, understand the obvious impracticability of this.
Hegel will not save bourgeois society. But Hegel, the founder of dynamic philosophy, Hegel, who provides the key to understanding the revolutionary essence of history and nature itself, will help the new society to be born and strengthened.
No matter how different the attitude towards Hegel on the part of bourgeois philosophers and communists, no matter how contradictory his interpretations and assessments of certain aspects of his philosophy, cooperation between us is still possible on the basis of the study and use of Hegel. Understanding this allows us to learn a lot from the brilliant Western students of Hegel. Of course, we will argue bitterly with them on many issues. But the dispute is one of the best and, moreover, truly Hegelian forms of cooperation.
A. Lunacharsky.
In German text: “Geistes in seiner Entwicklung zur Freineit“.
In the German text: “triumphalen Untergang des abstrakten neuesten Subjektivismus“. - Right there.
Marx K., Engels F. Op. - T. 2. - S. 561-562.
Gellert Christian Fürchtegott (1715–1769) German writer of the Enlightenment, fabulist.
Croce B. Zuz theory and history of historiography. — p. 245.
Croce B. Op. cit. — S. 249. ↩
In the German article, “der Geist, der Mit, der Welt zussammenfällt“. — C. 57.
The German text misspelled: cultures. ↩
In the German text, the surname is erroneously indicated: Croce (p. 58).
Haering Th. Hegel. His will and his work. — Vol. 1–2. — Leipzig, 1929–1938.
In German text: “herrlichen Sonnenaufgang“ (p. 59).