Moses Hess, Marx and money

Julius Kovesi¹[1]

Moses Hess

I

The aim and scope of this discussion is limited.  I wish to explore a few themes within the Young Hegelian conceptual framework, in order to place within it Hess’s essay On the Essence of Money.  However, I prefer to talk of a ‘triadic framework’ instead of the ‘Young Hegelian conceptual framework’, for several reasons.  The phrase ‘the Young Hegelian conceptual framework’ is very vague while it pretends to be specific.  Consequently, while it gives only a rough indication of my subject matter it can invite criticism: one might justly ask what is meant by ‘the young Hegelian conceptual framework’ and be lost for an answer.

To talk of a ‘triadic framework’ also gives some unity to the themes I am exploring, while not limiting me to its specifically Hegelian version.  Triads do crop up in the writings of the Young Hegelians and it would be a mistake to see them either as corrupt versions of their classic appearance in the Hegelian system or just as oddities that can be ignored.  There can be two different kinds of variety in the triadic pattern.  One kind of variation is when the patterns themselves have different logical forces and serve different functions.  In the other kind the pattern is the same but is filled with different contents, the assumption being that the logical force of the pattern will be transmitted to the new contents.

We shall see examples of both kinds of variation and combinations of them.  The first kind, for instance, is that between (a) the triadic pattern of three succeeding ages of mankind, and (b) the triadic pattern of original unity, fallen or alienated existence and return to unity on a higher level.  We shall see both of these exemplified in Hess’s writings.  The first is his Sacred History of Mankind with the ages of God the Father, God the Son and the coming age of the Holy Spirit; the second in his present essay where he argues that money is our alienated essence and mankind will achieve a higher level of unity by overcoming this alienated state.  We shall also briefly analyse a third type of pattern, the triad of head, heart and stomach, a symbolism which recurs in the writings of Young Hegelians.  Its decipherment throws an interesting light on the similarities and differences between the views of Hess and Marx about the role of the proletariat.

The above three are different types of triadic patterns.  It is in connection with the second kind of variation, when the same type of triadic pattern is filled in with different contents, that we shall see the great significance of Hess and especially that of his present essay.  Even the title of his essay echoes Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.  Hess placed a different human essence in what he understood to be Feuerbach’s pattern of human alienation; it is not our consciousness of the infinite, that is, the consciousness of our infinity, which is projected into a Divine Being, but it is our co-operative productive work and exchange which, as our essence, is projected into an alien object, into money.

One of my brief critical comments later will concern the question whether, quite apart from the truth or falsity of the story, this triadic pattern has a power or logical force only with something like its Hegelian content, or whether its power can be transmitted to new contents.  At present I just want to note that the significance of On the Essence of Money within the whole kaleidoscope of the Young Hegelian pattern of ideas is that it replaced the content of a powerful model that dominated the Young Hegelians.  In another article Hess himself describes this move more succinctly than anywhere in the present essay:

Money in the practical life of alienated men is just as all important and ever present, just as much the source of blessedness and grace as God is in our theoretical life.  Why did not Feuerbach follow up this important practical consequence of his principle?  The essence of God, says Feuerbach, is the transcendental essence of Men and the true study of the divine essence is the study of human essence: theology is anthropology.  This is true but not the full truth.  The human essence, it must be added, is the social essence, the co-operation of various individuals for the same cause, for exactly the same interest, and the true study of mankind, the true humanism is the study of human society, that is, anthropology is socialism.  It is self-evident that the essence of God and the essence of money are identical in the same way, in the sense that it is in the same way man’s transcendental, practical externalized essence.  But Feuerbach did not come to this practical consequence.^[2]

Another concise statement of how Hess’s achievement was understood at his time is quoted in the third section of Marx’s The German Ideology dealing with the True Socialists:

Feuerbach only partially completed, or rather only began, the task of anthropology, the regaining by man of his estranged nature…; he destroyed the religious illusion, the theoretical abstraction, the God-Man, while Hess annihilated the political illusion, the abstraction of wealth, of his activity … that is, he annihilates wealth.  It was the work of Hess which freed man from the last of the forces external to him, and made him capable of moral activity…[3]

In our time great claims have been made for Hess’s essay on money.  David McLellan emphasises the influence which Hess had on Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’.  ‘Many of the themes of this article [‘On the Jewish Question’] particularly that of money and the Jewish-Christian relationship, are taken directly from an article by Hess entitled “On the Essence of Money”.’[4]  In his earlier work, after outlining shrewdly-perceived parallels between the two articles, McLellan concludes: ‘These parallels between the two texts are more than enough to justify the statement that Marx copied Hess’s ideas at this stage.’[5]  Then after quoting Professor Silberner who describes this essay as ‘one of the most important publications of early German socialist literature’ he goes on to say: ‘but it took a louder and more persistent voice to convey its message’, meaning of course the voice of Marx.[6]  Silberner, in his authoritative work on Hess’s life speaks even more strongly of the inspiration Marx gained from Hess, and he in turn quotes Cornu who described Hess as ‘une influence profonde’ on the young Marx.[7]  Tucker also emphasises the influence of this essay on Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, claiming that the reasoning there ‘turns wholly on Hess’s thesis’.[8]  Julius Carlebach disputes the hypothesis that Hess influenced the articles ‘On the Jewish Question’: ‘If anything, it is possible to argue a much stronger case to show that the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844 show signs of Hess’s influence’, and he goes on the draw parallels in the two texts.[9]  But Carlebach very wisely reminds us of several other influences working here.

Perhaps the widest claim for Hess’s essay is made by Lobkowicz.  After outlining some of the ideas of Hess’s essay, Lobkowicz claims that what Marx does in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ is ‘to articulate Hess’s ideas just sketched, to enlarge them in terms of economic analysis supplied be Engels, and then elevate them a la hauteur des principes in terms of a reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.’[10]

To these suggested connections we can add two more: Heine already described Hess as ‘one of the most outstanding of our political writers’, and it was Hess who converted Engels to communism.  In a letter to Auerbach on July 19, 1843, Hess reports that they were talking about the problems of the time, and Engels, ‘ein Anno Eins Revolutioner, schied von mir als allereifrigsten Kommunist’ (a Year One revolutionary, left me as a full-blown Communist).

Although inevitably I shall have to talk about influences, they are not my primary concern.  I shall agree with Carlebach that reading Hess’s On the Essence of Money will help us understand better what Marx is doing in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ rather than what he is saying in his articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, but not on the grounds of the type of historical data on which Carlebach based his arguments.  Instead of influences I shall be looking for the choreography of the movements of ideas.

Historical influences do not just happen.  They come about only in those configurations of conceptual forces where a new conceptual move either has to be made or is welcome.  They have to arrive when someone is already grappling independently with a train of thought, and then they provide the missing link, creating either a confluence or a combustion under the right conditions.

I intend to trace one of the configurations in a kaleidoscope of complex patterns.  I find presentations of other configurations of ideas in this field not only possible but sometimes even convincing.  The very nature of our subject matter is such that we can entertain different possibilities without having to choose between them.  Understanding here consists of seeing as many interesting possibilities and configurations as possible rather than in finding an orthodox line of development, parts of which, like tributaries, must all contribute to the final formulation of Marxism.  Anyone who looks for such orthodoxy should, I think, take Althusser’s way out and claim that there was a ‘radical break’ in Marx’s development.  Just as something radical happened on the river Jordan, so that the person who spoke after the Spirit descended on him was not merely the son of a carpenter whom his kinsmen knew and who was influenced by all the complex turmoil in Galilee and in the Judean desert, but someone who spoke with authority; so one might claim that at some time in Marx’s life there was a similar radical break.  I for my part do not think so but would like to present the essay here translated as just one of the many Dead Sea scrolls of Marxism.

In what follows I shall first give a brief outline of Hess’s life and then analyse some theoretical themes that have a bearing on the significance of Hess’s essay on money.

The first theme will be a brief consideration of Hess’s first two works, The Sacred History of Mankind and The European Triarchy where, through two different triadic patterns, Hess sets the scene for the development of the ideas we shall be concerned with.

Then I shall try to decipher the recurring symbolism of ‘head, heart and stomach’, which, I hope, will throw new light on the relationship of Marx’s ideas to those of Hess, especially with regard the problem of True Socialism and the role of the proletariat.

My final theme will concern On the Essence of Money most directly.  In it I shall show that it is neither an economic nor a sociological treatise but a transformation of certain key ideas from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.  In tracing this we shall see what it is that Hess and Marx wanted to eliminate when they wanted to eliminate money and private property, and what result they expected.  Since, as we saw, strong claims have been made for the influence of Hess’s essay on Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, I shall make some tentative comments on this problem, but my main preoccupation will be to decipher the structural transformation of both Hess’s and Marx’s conceptual systems in so far as the essay on money throws some light on these transformations.

II

Hess was born in Bonn’s Judengasse in 1812.  When he was five his parents moved to Cologne where his father established a sugar refinery.  Apparently there was no Hebrew school in Cologne and young Moses was left behind in Bonn to be educated by his grandparents.  Later Hess described his grandfather as ‘a man very learned in the Scriptures who had the title and knowledge of a rabbi without making a profession of it’.  He was only thirteen when his mother died and his father asked him to join him in Cologne.  In fact he would have liked him to join him in his firm, but there was a growing estrangement between the two.  The young Hess with his keen and restless intellect threw himself into reading Spinoza, Rousseau and Fichte, and travelled to Holland and France where he was impressed by the various socialist and liberal ideas and movements.  Although he attended Bonn University for a short time while Bauer was still teaching there, he was virtually a self-taught man.  Even more than most of the Young Hegelians, whose circle he now joined, he distanced himself from the traditions of his upbringing.  In the intellectual milieu that he now moved in outside his home, Judaism was regarded as it were symbolically, as a type, representing limitation, particularness and heteronomy.  Christianity represented the middle stage in the development of consciousness, but even Christianity had to be overcome in the highest universality.  Hess acted out in his own life that view of mankind’s development which Bauer was to express later in its most succinct form, the view that while Christians had to make only one move to emancipation, the Jews were two steps behind.  If one accepts the view that the history of mankind’s journey to full emancipation is the history of religious consciousness from Judaism through Christianity, then no wonder Hess rejected what he came to regard as narrowness and particularness–and these characteristics for a socialist also meant egoism–to dedicate himself with the same love and concern that was his grandfather’s to the universal liberation of mankind.

Even in his marriage he may have acted out his theories and ideals.  Legend has it that his wife Sibylle Pesch was a prostitute, whom he married either in order to rescue her from her way of life, or perhaps as an idealistic act of atonement for the sins of the bourgeois world.  Silberner disputes this legend, arguing that it partly originates from the disapproval of Hess’s family towards his living with an uneducated Christian girl of humble origins.[11]  Jenny Marx mentions ‘Hess und seine Frau’ as belonging to Marx’s circle in Paris in 1844, but in fact Hess and Sibylle were not officially married until 1852, after the death of Hess’s father.

My own contribution to this is the perhaps unscholarly remark that a biographer of Hess might well wish that the legend were true.  Although the social crime which would have called for such an act of atonement was thought to have been committed by the bourgeois world that had forsaken true humanity, one cannot help thinking of the Book of Hosea: ‘When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord”…  And the Lord said to me “Go again, love a woman who is beloved of a paramour and is an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes and raisins”.’  As we shall see, it was the love of cakes and raisins, ‘the sense of having’ that Hess found so abominable.

‘It was perhaps this childlike quality,’ wrote Isaiah Berlin referring to this legend, ‘Hess’s unworldliness and purity of character, rising at moments to genuine saintliness, that so deeply irritated the tough-minded “realists” among his fellow Socialists, who looked on him as a benevolent ass.  Yet, even Marx, who utterly despised him, could discover no moral vice or fault to cast in his teeth.’[12]

Hess’s first published work was The Sacred History of Mankind, by a young disciple of Spinoza, as he described himself in the title.[13]

Then in 1841 Hess published, also anonymously, his The European Triarchy.  It was published by the avant-garde publisher Otto Wigand and it brought him into the Young Hegelian circle.  While in the Sacred History it was said to be Spinoza who proclaimed the third age, now it is Hegel who stands at the threshold between the old age and the new.  By its content Hegel’s philosophy belongs to the new age but in so far as it is still a spiritual act of knowing it belongs to the previous age.  Hess refers to Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, as equally acknowledging the perfection of theory and as giving the direction to the next step, to practical action in history, by bringing the perfected theory into this world.  Thus Hess, along with Cieszkowski, gives the signature-tune to one of the main preoccupations of the Young Hegelians, the problem of how to ‘realise philosophy’, or, in terms of another symbolism, how to unite ‘head’ and ‘heart’.

During the summer of the same year, in 1841, Hess was asked by George Jung, a Hegelian liberal, to co-operate with him in founding a paper in Cologne, which first appeared in January of 1842 as the Rheinische Zeitung.  Hess was editing the paper until December when he went to Paris to become its Paris correspondent.  This was of course the paper of which Marx became the editor.  Hess first met Marx in the late summer of 1841, without converting him to communism, but about a year later he converted Engels to communism.  From the articles of this time one can have a general idea of the grand reasonings he must have used to convert Engels.  As to how he argued in person there is an interesting description of him in an intriguing document prepared for the Zurich authorities in 1843 under the title: Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz, nach den bei Weitling vorgefundenen Papieren.  It was compiled by Dr J. Bluntschli, who was then a professor of law and a councillor at Zurich.  In one of these papers ‘a correspondent from Paris’ in a letter dated 15th May 1843 reports to Weitling that Hess is a communist because he is the most consistent of the Young Hegelians, one of the purest type, and communism follows with the sharpest necessity from the Hegelian system.  ‘Hess is very effective,’ he goes on to say,

in converting the highly educated: but he talks in concepts and not directly, and so is unintelligible to those who are not highly educated.  So far all German philosophers are the same.  He realises this and says he will improve.  He also has some baroque turns of phrase… But apart from these weaknesses Hess is very good.

Hess, through his reports from Paris, and mainly by his review of Lorenz von Stein’s Socialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs for the Rheinische Zeitung was largely responsible for the transmission of French socialist ideas into the German environment.  In 1843 he contributed several articles for the Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz.  In the following year Marx wrote in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’:

It goes without saying that besides the French and English socialists I have also used German socialist works.  The only original German works of substance in this science, however,–other than Weitling’s writings–are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen and Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie by Engels…

The title of this publication was specially designed to spite the censors, as a publication with more than twenty-one pages was considered to be scholarly work and exempt from censorship.  Hess contributed to this collection the Philosophie der Tat, Die eine und ganze Freiheit and Socialismus und Kommunismus.  This latter is partly a continuation of his discussion of Stein and a further elaboration of his views already expressed in Die Europäische Triarchie on the partnership of German philosophy and French political practice.  We shall see how important this recurring theme of the unity of German philosophy and French practice is among the Young Hegelians but its present significance in the life of Hess is that here he is now in Paris during the preparation of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.  He met Arnold Ruge, with whom Marx was to edit this paper, in August 1843.  Even the title of the journal should be seen in the light of these ideas and not as an indication of some practical German and French co-operative effort.  In fact there were no French contributions to the journal, but later in one of his essays Hess refers back to the Jahrbücher as only the first step in the all-important union of German Theory and French Praxis.  It was to this journal that Hess first submitted On the Essence of Money, along with his ‘Letters from Paris’.  The essay was not published however, and was printed only a year and a half later in the Rheinische Jahrbücher in Darmstadt.

The fact that the Jahrbücher went bankrupt after the first issue cannot explain why Marx did not publish Hess’s essay on money, for we have a letter of Marx written from Paris to Fröbel, the publisher, dated November 21st, in which he writes: ‘I have had to reject the articles so far sent to me by the local people (Hess, Weill, etc.) after many protracted discussions’.  McLellan suggested that Marx ‘copied heavily from Hess’s essay presuming it would not be published’ without implying that this was Marx’s reason for not publishing it.[14]  Carlebach speculates that Hess’s dogmatic unequivocal call for the adoption of communism went too far for Marx, especially against his editorial policy.[15]  I find this unlikely, especially as Marx, at least soon after reading it, adopted so many of its crucial ideas, including the idea that communism is the resolution of our alienation.

This is only the first of the complex and controversial problems about the relationship between Hess and Marx until their final break in 1848.  Hess returned to Cologne and continued publishing articles and working in communist associations.  The following year he joined Engels in Wuppertal and organised meetings in the Gasthof in Elberfeld.  Engels wrote the most enthusiastic letters to Marx about their success, saying that everybody talks of nothing but communism, ‘there is truly communism in Wuppertal, it is really a force’.  Their only complaint was that there was not a single proletarian among them.  In view of the fact that the essay on money begins with a long quotation from ‘Queen Mab’ it is interesting to note that one of the activities at these meetings was to have readings from Shelley.

What complicates the relationship between Hess and Marx before 1848 is that it is during these years that Hess became the leading figure of the ‘True Socialists’ and it is also during these years that Marx turned against his former associates, which included the ‘True Socialists’.  He never explicitly criticised Hess however, not even in the sections devoted to the ‘True Socialists’ in The German Ideology and in the Manifesto.  In fact Hess himself contributed to The German Ideologyin the small section on George Kuhlmann.[16]

If we observe that Hess’s style would have been an ideal target for Marx’s sarcastic kind of criticism, the silence is even more puzzling.  Let us consider only the examples which Hess took from nature to illustrate his contention that man consciously sacrifices his life for the life of the species if there is a conflict between the two, and that hence love is mightier than egoism.  To prove this he says:

The hen takes up a quite unequal fight if it has to defend its chickens from an attack.  Cats will allow themselves to starve if they must, in order to satisfy their sexual desires, or in their sorrow when wicked men take away their kittens.  Nature is always concerned with the preservation of the species, with the preservation of the life of the species, with the real life-activity.[17]

Now consider against this the sensible and refreshing reference to nature in St. Matthew’s gospel: ‘Consider the lilies of the field.’  Marx’s comment on this is also refreshing: ‘Yes, consider the lilies of the field how they are eaten by goats, transplanted by man into his button-hole, how they are crushed beneath the immodest embraces of the dairymaid and the donkey driver!’[18]  Imagine what Marx could have made out of the immodest embraces of stray cats in order to ridicule Hess’s contention that love is mightier than egoism–a view that in fact Marx wanted to ridicule.[19]

George Bence, to whom I owe this lively illustration, follows Mönke in suggesting that Hess differs from the other ‘True Socialists’ in not neglecting the importance of revolutionary praxis, and that is why Marx spares him.  This presupposes the idea that Marx’s main concern at this time was to safeguard what later became some of the main tenets of Marxism. Rather, he had many other problems to contend with, and the moves he made to overcome these problems later became part of what we now know as Marxism.

I think that in this matter Hess’s personality was just as important as his theoretical views.  I do not just mean that his unworldly character made Marx reluctant to offend him, but that with Hess’s disposition for admiration and enthusiasm, his readiness to change his mind and ‘to improve’, he had the makings of a potential disciple of the sort Marx needed.  As it turned out later, he did not after all become a shadow of Marx, a ‘second fiddle’ as Engels described himself to Hermann Becker after Marx’s death.

We should also ask another question: why is it that Marx in the German Ideology criticises so many of his own recent views in general terms only, without ever referring directly to any of his own writings?

If someone changes his mind and yet would like to preserve the image that he has always been right, then he has to adopt one or another version of a historical theory of knowledge.  He has to maintain that certain theories were at one time true and correct, and in fact were appropriate and historically necessary stages in the development of Truth, while at the same time denying that they are any longer true or appropriate.  In order then to stay attuned to the development of the Truth a scheme must be created in which one can so place oneself that one’s statements are guaranteed by one’s very position within that scheme.  This cannot be demonstrated in detail here, but this psycho-conceptual device of justifying one’s own correctness while abandoning one’s views must be kept in mind as at least partially explaining why Marx is criticising both his own and Hess’s recent views without specifically criticising their own actual writings.  ‘Matters’, writes Marx in the German Ideology, ‘which are quite vague and mystical even in Hess, although they were originally, in the Einundzwanzig Bogen, worthy of recognition, and have only become tiresome and reactionary as a result of their perpetual reappearance…, at a time when they were already out of date, became complete nonsense in Herr Grün’s hands.’

On 28th July 1846 Hess wrote to Marx: ‘Necessary as it was in the beginning to tie communistic efforts to the German ideology, so it is now just as necessary to base them on historical and economic assumptions, otherwise we will never be finished with the “Socialists” or with opponents of all colours.’  He does not say that they were ever mistaken.  He tried to show that ‘True Socialism’ was justified in the early forties but was no longer so under the changed historical circumstances.

Now the only event one can think of which changed the ‘historical circumstances’ is the publication of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which had a shattering effect on the Young Hegelians.  Stirner was no ordinary opponent.  The threat did not come from his bulky and wild arguments, but from the logical force of his position within the Young Hegelian development of ideas.[20]  We shall be able to appreciate the shattering effect of Stirner only after we have analysed in the last section of this discussion how far Hess’s thesis depended on Feuerbach and how far Marx’s ideas during his Paris period were a combination of the ideas of Feuerbach and Hess.  Here I might mention a small point, referring explicitly to Hess.  Ruge’s ground for refusing Hess’s request for further collaboration at his time was that Stirner had destroyed Hess’s philosophical communism.

Hess and Engels were among the first to receive an early copy of Stirner’s work, and Engels in turn sent it on to Marx.  It was Hess who straight away got down to work writing his reply ‘Die letzten Philosophen’, while Marx and Engels, with some help from Hess, began work about a year later on their own reply, the unpublished German Ideology.[21]

However much Hess and Marx might have fought different wars, during these years they fought the same battle.  In the event they had to evacuate their positions and move to new ground, and then they themselves attacked their own previous positions.  This is why it was ‘necessary’ at the beginning ‘to tie communistic efforts to the German ideology’ but later ‘just as necessary to base them on historical and economic assumptions’.  Besides Engels, Hess was perhaps Marx’s only ally in these manoeuvres, which explains why Marx in all his criticisms of their recent theories never criticised Hess himself, or acknowledged his own involvement with those theories.

For a while Hess himself moved towards expressing his theories in economic terms.  In his article ‘Die Folgen einer Revolution des Proletariats’ published in 1847 in the Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung he argued that wages were governed by the same laws as the prices of other commodities; the value of labour, like that of other commodities, will be what it costs to produce it, hence wages will be kept at the subsistence level.

But these were not only times of revolutionary theory but also of political manoeuvrings in which Hess was too honest to be successful.  He stood by Weitling and tried to defend Kriege.  Weitling, writing to Kriege in America, was complaining about the cunning intrigues: ‘I am to be polished off first, then the others and finally their friends, whilst in the end of course they will cut their own throats… Hess and I are quite alone on this side, but Hess is boycotted also’.

One episode from all this intrigue is worth mentioning.  When in June 1847 members of the ‘League of the Just’ renamed it the ‘Communist League’ with branches among German workers in London, Brussels and Paris, they wanted to formulate their aims and ideals in a manifesto, or, as they put it at the time, in a ‘confession of Faith’, and they canvassed various branches for suggestions for such a confession.  At the end of October Engels wrote to Marx from Paris:

Strictly between ourselves, I’ve played an infernal trick on Mosi [Moses Hess].  He had actually put through a delightfully amended confession of faith.  Last Friday at the district [a Committee of the Communist League] I dealt with this, point by point, and was not half way through when the lads declared themselves satisfaits.  Completely unopposed, I got them to entrust me with the task of drafting a new one which will be discussed next Friday by the district and sent to London behind the backs of the communities.  Naturally not a soul must know about this, otherwise we shall be unseated and there’ll be a deuce of a row.[22]

It is of this that Engels wrote again to Marx a month later: ‘Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith.  I think we would do best to abandon the catachetical form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto…’[23]

With Marx’s criticism of the ‘True Socialists’ in the Communist Manifesto the final break came.  We will look at one aspect of this criticism later on when we analyse the apparent disagreement between Hess and Marx with regard to the role of the proletariat in the final transformation of mankind.  We should note however that it is in the section on the ‘True Socialists’ that Marx denounces the use of the term ‘alienation’.  Marx ends that section of the Manifesto by saying that ‘with very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature’.

Defeats of revolutions have the most varied effects on those who were waiting for them, worked for them, or participated in them.  There are many studies of what happened during and after the successful revolutions to those who worked for them; studies, too, of how they were betrayed or eliminated.  But we also need comparative studies of the effects of unsuccessful revolutions on those who were looking forward to them.  Even a small group such as the Young Hegelians might yield interesting results.

Engels added a footnote to the section on the ‘True Socialists’ in the 1890 edition of the Communist Manifesto: ‘The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble further in Socialism…’  In fact Hess’s revolutionary as well as theoretical activities continued unabated.  According to his wife he was even condemned to death in absentia, which may not be true, but no such pious legend originated about Marx or Engels.  Hess was head of the Geneva section of the Bund der Kommunisten, but more importantly he co-operated with Lassalle in the formation of the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein, the General Federation of German Workers, which is the foundation of all organised social democracy, not only in Germany but in the whole of Europe.  In 1863 Lassalle asked him to represent his movement in the Rhineland.  In his first speeches to Lassalle’s organisation in Cologne and Dusseldorf he admitted the possibility of reform, and appealed again to such favourite True Socialist notions as the ‘creative spirit of the people’ to build a better world.

Marx in London was furious.  He wrote: ‘So Lassalle collects those who were excreted from our party twenty years ago for his dung factory with which world history shall be manured.  So he has named Moses Hess his viceroy in the Rhine province.  Oh youth, oh youth, what were you thinking when you let yourself be hanged on Herwegh and Moses Hess’.[24]

A more empirical attitude characterised Hess’s work now.  Like Marx, he abandoned the ‘species-being’, though not because of Stirner’s theoretical criticisms but for empirical historical reasons.  From the abstract universality of mankind he returned to practical problems, and by turning to the particular he even returned to the community of his grandfather.  As Nathan Rotenstreich has said, ‘The return of Hess to Judaism was clearly the result of his rejection of myth and his adoption of a more genuinely historical attitude’.[25]

With his publication of Rome and Jerusalem in 1862 one can say that he became the father of Zionism and so he was the founder of two important movements originating in the nineteenth century, social democracy and Zionism.[26]

The fact that Hess abandoned the ‘iron laws of history’ in favour of ‘the creative spirit of the people’ also pointed up the difference between the two prophets.  One in London regarded the failures of 1848 as showing that the time was not yet ripe for the, still inevitable, destruction, and thus he studied yet more urgently the signs of the coming deluge.  The other, Hess, saw in 1848 a sign that after all God loved the world and would not destroy Nineveh with all its wickedness and inadequate institutions: this however was no reason to be complacent.

III

Some theories, especially some theories of history, are like devices with which  people can hoist themselves into favourable positions vis-a-vis other people, or can help themselves out of predicaments when they are conceptually cornered or feel themselves conceptually defeated.  Theories can do this when they are not about an independently existing world of which we are spectators but when they are about a world in which we are participants as in a drama.[27]  To be in a predicament from which such devices can provide a way out one must already be a participant in some drama on a world stage.  The device rewrites the script.

One such theory of history is associated with the name of Joachim of Flora, a late twelfth century Calabrian monk. Joachim gave a temporal twist to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  He believed in the unity of the three Persons of the Trinity but gave them each a special age, a special sphere of influence.  It was not only respect for authority that made him continue to believe in the unity of the Trinity; it is an essential part of such a theory to show that it is the same principle which is developing and which is now coming to fruition.

The age of the Father was characterised by law and obedience.  The age of the Son, beginning from the time of Christ, is devoted to the upbringing of mankind through education, through institutions and through the sacraments to the time when, as some modern theologians would say, ‘man comes of age’.  This may sound pious and edifying until we realise the revolutionary implications of the claim that the third age supersedes the second as the second superseded the first.  Man come of age will do without institutions, without the sacraments and without the authority of those who educated him up to now.  What must make such a theory infuriating to those who are representatives of the second age is that they are not rejected as by nonbelievers.  Their conceptual system is well-equipped to cope with such a rejection.  The heralds of the Third Age patronisingly insist on the importance and even validity of the Second Age ‘for its time’, and by the help of the very logic of the Second Age they incorporate the representatives of the previous age within their own conceptual system.

One of the most important ingredients of such a theory of history was provided by the early Christians when they claimed to live in the age of Grace which superseded the age of Law, believing that their new covenant replaced the old.  The claim lifted a whole people above another people by virtue of placing themselves in a new historical epoch.  The simplest Christian was thereby on a higher level than the most learned Jew.  Another permanent consequence of the claim was that it turned the continued existence of Judaism into a conceptual oddity.

But has the promise of the New Age been fulfilled?  Is this what it looks like?  To answer this uneasy feeling, which was already in existence among the first generation of Christians, Tertullian devised the triadic version of history claiming that the present dispensation is only a transition to the age of the Spirit which is about to come.  He reported eyewitnesses who saw above the old city of Jerusalem a new Jerusalem descending.

The pattern is so attractive that one does not necessarily need to be influenced by a previous formulation of it in order to employ it when the need arises.  All the same Lessing probably had Joachim and his followers in mind when he adopted it to proclaim the arrival of the Enlightenment:

Perhaps even some enthusiasts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had caught a glimmer of this new eternal gospel, and only erred in that they predicted its arrival as so near to their own time.

Perhaps their ‘Three Ages of the World’ were not so empty a speculation after all, and assuredly they had no bad intentions when they taught that the new covenant must become as antiquated as the old has become.  There remained with them the same economy of the same God.  Ever, to put my own expression into their mouth, ever the self same plan of the education of the human race.

Only they were premature.  They believed that they could make their contemporaries, who had scarcely outgrown their childhood, without enlightenment, without preparation, at one stroke men worthy of their third age.

And it was just this which made them enthusiasts.  The enthusiast often casts glances into the future, but for this future they cannot wait…[28]

In Lessing’s view the revelation of the second age, what we normally call Christian revelation, spoke to men from the ‘outside’, it spoke to the ‘material man’, and, what might sound more of a paradox, it is polytheistic.  The revelation of the third age, on the other hand, speaks from the ‘inside’, it is the voice of reason, and (with this the paradox in the remark about polytheism disappears) it is universal.

Lessing did not say that he preferred reason to Christianity; he claimed that reason was the final revelation, its voice the real Eternal Gospel, its age the Age of the Holy Spirit for which Christianity was a preparation, valid ‘for its time’, during the time while people could not yet hear the voice of reason and thus had to listen to the teaching of the Church.  But now, as some present-day theologians would say, ‘God has taught us to do without him’.

Some might think that Lessing’s way of expressing the claims of reason is still tainted with theological and metaphysical views characteristic of his age, whereas we in our scientific age would no longer put our case his way.  But to think this only shows the attractiveness of the scheme.  For Comte, who again referred to Joachim, replaced the content of the three ages by claiming that the first age was the theological, the second the metaphysical, and that now we begin to live in the age of science.

We noted earlier that Hess’s first publication was The Sacred History of Mankind.  The Age of the Father lasted until Christ but the Age of the Son now extends to the French Revolution and the Age of the Holy Spirit is about to begin.  He subdivided each age and made various patriarchs and representative figures preside over each subdivision.  Such an elaborate scheme is very characteristic of Joachim’s detailed subdivisions of each age.  According to Joachim the new age was heralded in by St. Benedict, so his own time was already the gestation period of the Third Age.  Anyone who would simply copy the story of the three ages might want to leave such details out as irrelevant, just as manuscript copiers were wont to leave out bits of the script that did not make sense to them, but such details do serve a purpose in the scheme: they give an assurance that the third period is already under way.  In Hess’s Sacred History Spinoza replaces Benedict as the herald of the period of the Holy Spirit.  ‘With Spinoza began nothing less than the time which he [Christ] and his first disciples desired, hoped for and prophesied,’ said Hess in his Sacred History.  ‘The time of the Holy Spirit began, the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem.’

Moreover this gestation period is characterised both in Joachim and in Hess by an intensification of the conflict between the old and the new.  Thus the empirical evidence which might be against the coming of the new age becomes evidence in favour of its coming: the worse things are, the more they are evidence for the coming of the better, spiritual age; not only has the decisive event already happened but it has brought about a powerful resistance on the part of the old dispensation, which is surely the proof of its death struggle.  Some people who see themselves as actors in such a drama might even see it as their duty to conjure up and polarise the forces of evil as a service to mankind’s progress.

So Joachim interpreted the corruption of the secular clergy and of the Church as a sign and necessary prerequisite of the coming age of the Holy Spirit.  In Hess we find the increasing concentration of capital, the tendency of the rich to become richer and the poor to become poorer, as the sign of the coming new age.

Hess gives support to his argument for the three ages by an analogy from nature:

What is born in time develops in three periods.  In the first period it takes root, forms a unity, and lives internally–that is the root of life.  In the second period it grows, is divided and lives externally–that is the crown of life.  In the third it waxes, is united again and ripens–that is the fruit of life.

Weiss in his study of Hess comments on this in a footnote that political theorists in the first half of the century tend to draw their analogies from plants, animals and men, while after 1850 it is more customary to find analogies from physics and chemistry, which shows the growing prestige of science and is ‘one more indication of the transition from romanticism to realism’.[29]  This may be true of writers who merely want to use illustration.  Otherwise an analogy has a logical force of its own and its use cannot be governed by fashion or familiarity only.  Even in analogies drawn from nature there is an important difference between those drawn from plants and those that make use of the human body.  As far as I know Plato did not draw an analogy from plant life.  It would have implied growth and development.  The organic theory of society Plato wanted to illustrate can use only the human body.  Though the human body grows, growth in the analogy is not like that in a plant; the growth does not produce new shoots.  On the other hand when Maimonides wanted an illustration to show that the maker has a special knowledge of his creation, he used the analogy of a clock to illustrate this, well before the industrial age.

Joachim is a master of illustrations and apart from his triangles and his eagle the prominent illustration he uses is the tree. A tree with its root and trunk and branches, or even better, with its flowers, is the most compelling image by which to put across the Joachimite triadic view of history.  Similarly, well into the industrial age, Kandinsky made use of the same image when he argued that he was not rejecting previous forms of art.  Representational art might have been valid for its time, for a more material man who had to use perceptions from the outside.  Kandinsky’s spiritual or abstract art is only a necessary culmination of all previous developments; it is the art of the third, spiritual epoch.  All this is accompanied by a characteristically relativist theory of knowledge.

‘“Truth” in general and in art specifically is not an X, not an always imperfectly known but immovable quantity…,’ writes Kandinsky in his Reminiscences.  ‘Art is like religion in many respects.  Its development does not consist of new discoveries which strike out new truths and label them errors.’  Its development consists of illuminations which show

new perspectives in a blinding light, new truths which are basically nothing more than the organic development, the organic growing of earlier wisdom which is not voided by the later, but as wisdom and truth continues to live and produce.  The trunk of the tree does not become superfluous because of a new branch: it makes the branch possible.  Would the New Testament have been possible without the Old?  Would our epoch of the threshold of the ‘third’ revelation be conceivable without the second?  It is a branching of the original tree trunk in which ‘everything begins’.  And the branching out, the further growth and ramifications which often seem confusing and despairing, are the necessary steps to the mighty crown: the steps which in the final analysis create the green tree.

One would not expect that the third age in art, as opposed to that in the social or moral world, should be born in apocalyptic travail, or that there should be a worst time before the best can arrive, but this is how Kandinsky announced the new age:

Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world.  The interrelationships of these individual realms were illuminated as by a flash of lightning: they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided.  This lightning is the child of the darkening of the spiritual heaven which hung over us, black, suffocating, and dead.   Here begins the great epoch of the spiritual, the revelation of the spirit. Father — Son — Holy Spirit.[30]

This is no digression.  If one had the space even more attention should be devoted to the analysis of various triadic patterns throughout history, in order to understand the Young Hegelians and in particular Feuerbach, Hess and Marx.  One or another form of triadic pattern, or a combination of them, took such a hold on the Young Hegelians, that if I were another Young Hegelian myself I would like to say that the triadic pattern is their alienated essence which took on an independent existence and dominated them.  For a proper study one should analyse in more detail the variety of patterns with their various logical forces.

Hess in the Sacred History superimposed on the model of organic development another model which has elements of Feuerbach and of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge incorporated in it.  In the first age, from Adam to Christ, mankind lived in natural unity and harmony, but during this time men could not separate the universal from its concrete manifestations, they could not discern the essential nature of things.  Adam was also unaware of the conflict between fact and hope, ideal and real.  It was ‘perfection unearned’.  It was also a time innocent of private property.  During the second period the universal, the proper object of intellectual knowledge, was freed from its concrete manifestations, but at a terrible price.  The price mankind had to pay for this was the fragmentation which resulted from the separation of the ideal and the real.  In the third age the lost unity will be regained by knowing each object as a part of a total unity and by each human being becoming part of a harmonised whole.  No wonder that the third age was said by Hess to be heralded in by Spinoza.

The power of the triadic model here is different from the Joachimite model.  Here each of the first two stages has a ‘positive’ aspect and a ‘negative’ aspect.  The first stage is harmony and unity but on a primitive undeveloped level.  It is implied that there can be no further development on that stage without a drastic transformation.  This is achieved by some sort of inner spirit or essential element of the original unity escaping and freeing itself.  It can then perfect itself in its liberated form, which is the important ‘positive’ contribution of the second stage.  Its ‘negative aspect’ is that this perfection happens outside those whose essence is so perfected.

I spoke of the ‘power’ of the model advisedly.  There is no logical reason for all this to happen, and far less is there any logical reason for expecting that the alienated essence, now perfected, will return in the third stage.  Yet until one stops to ask the simplest questions about the model one has a feeling that ‘of course’ this will happen.

Rousseau operates with such a triadic model.  The ‘positive aspect’ of the first stage in his scheme is that we are free, while the ‘negative aspect’ is that we are not social.  In the second stage we are social but not free.  Although there is not alienation on a grand scale in the second stage, nevertheless one has the feeling of ‘of course’ when the third stage unites only the positive aspects of each of the previous stages and we become social beings and yet free, both on a higher stage.

Now turn the kaleidoscope slightly and we have a new configuration.  Hess begins his next work, the European Triarchy, with a claim which, as we noted, is like a signature tune for much of the Young Hegelian endeavours:

German philosophy has fulfilled its mission, it has led us to full truth. What we have to do now is to build bridges which will again lead us from heaven to earth.  What remains in separation, be it truth itself, when it remains in its high distinctness, is untrue.  Just as reality which is not penetrated by truth, so truth which is not realised, is imperfect.

As we know, Marx also, along with other Young Hegelians, wanted to ‘realise philosophy’.  We shall consider that move in the next Section.  Let us notice that the description Hess just gave us is the description of the second age, Philosophy perfected, waiting to be reunited with the world.  It is German philosophy which is perfected, and for the Young Hegelians that means Hegel’s philosophy.  In the Triarchy Hegel’s philosophy is now also one element in a further triad: it is Germany’s contribution to a triad, other parts of which are French political life and English economic life.

But to want to realise philosophy is the most un-Hegelian thing to want to do.  Not only does Hegel explicitly warn against such a project but his views on the cunning of reason should warn us that any conscious effort of ours would produce, so to speak, inadvertent results.  More important is the fact that Hegel’s philosophy is not about a subject knowing itself merely as a thinking subject, but about a subject knowing itself as it develops in nature and history.  If Hegel’s Spirit has not in fact developed in the world, in nature and history–if it has perfected itself only as a thinking subject thinking about its own thinking–then there is just no Hegelian philosophy to realise.

There were others, philosophers, who continued developing and arguing in detail about Hegel’s philosophy.  Had the Young Hegelians done this they would be called neo-Hegelians, not Young Hegelians.  The Young Hegelians’ relationship to Hegel was of a different nature: they regarded what they believed to be Hegel’s achievement as itself an event, a decisive event, not only in human but in cosmic history.  Their disagreement about Hegel’s philosophy was not the continuation of Hegel’s philosophical thinking, but a disagreement about the nature of this event and a disagreement about their own various schemes, within which Hegel’s philosophy as an event plays but one role.

Some theologians and Scripture scholars argue that the early Christians transformed the role of Jesus in a similar way and they describe the process by the phrase ‘the proclaimer became the proclaimed’.  I suggested earlier that such claims that a decisive event has happened can create crises when people look around and see that the world does not after all look as though such an event took place.  I believe the Young Hegelians lived in such a conceptual crisis for a few years in the 1840s.  One solution to such a crisis, as we saw, is to characterise the present as a transitional age, thus saving the existence of the Kingdom by expecting it to come as a third age.

As we noted, in the opening paragraph of the European Triarchy Hess gives us a characterisation of the second age.  But there is also an additional assurance: perfection has arrived, but only in theory.  The world does not look as if perfection has arrived because the task of the present age is precisely to realise philosophy.  Some Young Hegelians argued that criticism will turn all institutions into rational institutions.  Others argued that this is the age of praxis.  Still others argued that ‘it is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself, reality must strive towards thought’.  The empirical conditions in Germany are far from being a refutation of the approach of the Kingdom; it is precisely because Germany is most backward that it will be the agency of the coming realisation of the already perfected philosophy.  This is made to look plausible by superimposing the notion of perfected theory onto our triadic model, turning the perfected theory into the perfected alienated essence against which stands the world emptied of its own essence.  Hence the sphere which is most empty and degraded is the candidate for the crucial role of receiving the perfected essence.  ‘The emancipation of Germany‘, says Marx, ‘is the emancipation of man.  Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart’.

Before we turn to the triad of ‘head’, ‘heart’ and ‘stomach’ in the next section, let us complete the picture that was formed in Hess’s European Triarchy by turning the kaleidoscope.  As the title of this work suggests, the need is for a unity of the three leading nations of Europe, each with its specific contribution: Germany with her philosophy, France with her political praxis, and England with her economic development.

We are familiar with the claim made by Marx that Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation, and ‘as the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher‘.  It is this claim which is argued by Hess in The European Triarchy.  He compared the French Revolution to the German Reformation to demonstrate that Germany too had had a revolution.  The comparison still bedevils orthodox Marxist historiographers who try to accommodate such claims about Luther in their scientific history.

The role of France is in the world of praxis.  ‘The speculative German lives in the ideal, while the action-loving Frenchman works in the real’, said Hess.  Along with Cieszkowski, Hess introduced the notion of praxis into this discourse.  This did not make it, however, less of a discourse.  It turned it into a theory claiming itself to be not a theory, it turned it into a theory claiming itself to be praxis.

We need a new Section to investigate how the proletariat replaced France as the symbol of praxis.

IV

That the coming of socialism is tied to the special role of the proletariat is supposed to be one of the crucial areas of difference between Marx and the True Socialists.  For the True Socialists socialism was a moral demand which should appeal to anyone who could respond to such demands.  As we noted, Hess appealed to the ‘creative spirit of the people’ and not to socio-economic trends and necessities.  To be sure, the coming of socialism was tied to historical factors, but only to those historical factors which indicated to so many of the Young Hegelians that ‘the hour is nigh’, and which gave them urgency and assurance that they lived in the fullness of time.  Otherwise, however, socialism should have a timeless and classless appeal.

Marx’s critique of the True Socialists in the Manifesto brings out this difference well, or, as one might prefer to say, it in part creates and constitutes the difference.  There he criticises the True Socialists for allegedly borrowing their demands for socialism from France, for being the ‘silly echo’ of French social criticism, but forgetting the different economic and political conditions of the two countries.  According to Marx’s argument, France has already had a bourgeois revolution, therefore the next, socialist, revolution was proper for French conditions.  In Germany, however, the bourgeoisie was still the growing revolutionary force destined to destroy the feudal  conditions, especially the absolute monarchy.  According to Marx, the True Socialists transferred to Germany the socialist criticism of the bourgeoisie before the conditions were ripe for such a criticism, and thereby in effect they joined forces with the absolutist feudal government: while the government resisted the bourgeoisie from above, the True Socialists attacked from below.  They should leave the bourgeoisie alone, on this assumption, or even join forces with it while it carried on its historic mission of destroying feudal conditions and establishing its liberal institutions, and attack it only afterwards.  Marx accused the True Socialists of ‘representing not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy’.

I want to argue now that Marx, at the time of writing his Introduction, Toward The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, when he first introduced the notion of the proletariat, entertained a distinctly True Socialist view of the role of the proletariat, which, because of later developments, is obscured in retrospect.  For my argument we have to understand the symbolism of head, heart and stomach in the Young Hegelian iconography and also the symbolic significance for them of France, England and Germany.

We saw in the previous Section that Hess in his European Triarchy advocated a dialectical union of the three leading nations of the time, Germany with her philosophy, France with her political life, and England with her economic and industrial developments, each contributing their historically allotted elements to the coming final synthesis.  Heine had already drawn a parallel between German philosophy and French political life in 1835, the details of which Hess criticised, but the theme was a recurring one.  Feuerbach wrote in his Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy:

The true philosopher, the philosopher identical with life and human being must be of Franco-Germandescent.  Don’t be frightened by this mixture, you German purists:  Already in the year 1716 the Acta Philosophorum declared such thoughts.  If we compare the Germans and French, then, of course, the latter’s mentality is quicker, the former’s more solid.  One could rightly say that the Franco-German temperament is the most fitting for a philosopher.  Or a child who has a Frenchman for a father and a German for a mother, must have (ceteris paribus) a good ingenium philosophicum.  Completely correct, only we must make the mother French and the father German.  The heart–the feminine principle, the sense for the finite, the seat of materialism–is a French disposition, whereas the head--the masculine principle, the seat of idealism–is German.  The heart revolutionizes, the head reforms.  The head brings things to completion, the heart sets them in motion.[31]

Let us again read Marx in his Introduction, Towards the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

But a radical revolution in Germany seems to encounter a major difficulty.

Revolutions need a passive element, a material basis… It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must strive towards thought.

… Germany, which likes to get to the bottom of things, can only make a revolution which upsets the whole order of things.  The emancipation of Germany will be an emancipation of man.  Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart.

What is important here is not only that the proletariat replaces France, but also, as we shall see, that the proletariat represents the heart.

We saw that in his long essay, On the Socialist Movement in Germany, Hess refers back to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher as being only the first step in the all-important union of German Theory and French Praxis.  More important, however, is the critical comment Hess goes on to make in the same essay, on Lorenz von Stein, who in his work on the French social movement first diagnosed the difference between the poor and the proletariat, and connected the emergence of socialism with the rise of the proletariat as a class.  Hess’s critical comment is this:

It is an error–and this error is due to the egoistic narrowness which cannot rise to a truly human outlook–yes, it is an error diligently spread by the reaction, and by Stein above all, that socialism develops only among the proletariat, and among the proletariat only as a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach.  The French have given no excuse for this error.  The French socialism comes not from the necessity of thought, not from the need of the head, not from the need of the stomach, but from the need of the heart; it comes from the sympathy for the suffering of mankind.[32]

At first sight this might indicate a difference between Hess and Marx.  As we have seen, Marx had just introduced the proletariat as an agency of revolution and here is Hess denying that the proletariat is the agency to bring about socialism.  Much of the strength of the claim that Marx at this stage of his development already differed from the True Socialists rests on this apparent difference between them.  As we saw, the argument runs that Marx, however vaguely, already recognised the important role of the proletariat, while Hess still believed in the generosity of the spirit, in the political idealism of the people, and relied on these to inspire political action.  This is what enabled Marx to criticise the True Socialists in the Manifesto for not recognising the relative development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in France and Germany.

There is, however, no difference in substance between Hess and Marx at this stage of their development.  Hess rejected the idea that the proletariat was the agency of socialist revolution only in so far as it was represented by Stein–or as Hess understood it to be represented by Stein–as acting out of selfish material interest.  If we take our clue from Hess’s claim that socialism is not ‘a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach’, nor does it come ‘from the need of the head’ but it comes ‘from the need of the heart’, we find agreement between him and Marx.  Marx is not talking about Stein’s version of the proletariat; Marx introduces the proletariat as something that Germany needs, and needs as the heart of that emancipation of which philosophy is the head.  As far as France is concerned, according to Marx, there is no need for the proletariat.  ‘In France,’ says Marx, ‘every class of the nation is politically idealistic and experiences itself first of all not as a particular class but as representing the general needs of society’.  This observation about France, just as much as Marx’s observations about the proletariat, is so removed from any empirical, historical or sociological study that it can make sense only as part of the iconography we are deciphering.

I said earlier that Marx substituted the proletariat for France as the heart.  We can see now how this happened.  In a way France is still the heart, as Germany is the head.  This is why France is politically idealistic and there is there a generosity of spirit.  Marx agreed with Hess that this appeal to the heart would do the work for France–provided that the French would learn more German philosophy as well.  But Marx was sceptical about the generosity of the German spirit.  He thought, so to speak, that if only the proletariat would become hungry enough their stomachs would turn into hearts.  It is because, as Marx complains, in Germany there is lacking a ‘generosity of spirit’ that Germany needs a proletariat as a heart.  Hess would not criticise this notion of a proletariat as he criticised that put forward by Stein.  In Germany, says Marx,

There is equally lacking in every class that breadth of soul which identifies itself, if only momentarily, with the soul of the people–that genius for inspiring material force toward political power, that revolutionary boldness which flings at its adversary the defiant words, I am nothing and I should be everything… In France it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything… In France every class of the nation is politically idealistic and experiences itself first of all not as a particular class but as representing the general needs of society… 

Where then is the positive possibility of German emancipation?

Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it…[33]

The proletariat is then introduced as the suffering Redeemer: ‘a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity.  This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.’

I have to make a short digression into what one can take to be Marx’s economic interpretation of history, in order to reinforce my claim that his notion of the proletariat grew out of the iconography of head and heart, and not from his economic interpretation of history.  I take Marx’s 1859 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as a typical exposition of what we can regard as his economic interpretation of history.  It is a miniature model of an Hegelian dialectical development.  Men, the Subject, in their productive activities create certain objectively existing conditions the purpose of which is to help those activities.  When new means of production come into being these cannot, after a while, be accommodated any more within the objectively existing conditions, and so these conditions become fetters of production.  What was a rational arrangement turns into a self-contradictory irrational state of affairs.  But why is it irrational to have steam engines under feudal modes of production?  After all, they could be used for pumping up the ornamental fountains in the gardens of Versailles, or be used as playthings by peasants’ children.  In order to create a self-contradictory state of affairs that needs to be resolved in a higher, more rational synthesis, two further conditions are needed.  One is that the new instruments should be regarded as a means of production and not regarded under some other formal aspect such as ‘amusements’ or ‘the devil’s work’.  If the invention of the steam engine is regarded as the devil’s work devised by an alchemist, rather than as a means of production invented by an engineer, then it will not come into conflict with the existing relationships of production.  The other requirement is that the standard of rationality must be identified with unrestricted production.  Only if we regard the fullest possible use of productive forces as the standard of rationality can we say that arrangements that do not help this are irrational and must give way, whether they are the land rights of feudal lords or primitive tribes, or such parts of our ‘superstructure’ as our enjoyment of the beauties of our lakes and countryside.  It is never suggested that the alleged contradiction might be resolved by curtailing the means of production.

My point, however, is not that this model is the expression of the bourgeois entrepreneurial mentality universalised, as ideology, into a philosophy of history; my point is that the proletariat does not fit into this model.  The peasants were the oppressed class of feudal society, but capitalism did not come about by peasants overthrowing the feudal lords in order to establish capitalism after a brief period of the dictatorship of the peasantry.  Why would one even think of such an absurd idea if in this historical progression the proletariat as the new oppressed class had not been cast into this role of establishing the next stage of history?  If there was a class struggle, it was not between the peasants and feudal lords: a new class grew up with the new means of production and it wanted to create more liberal institutions for its economic practices and also eventually brought forth people like Hess, Marx or John Stuart Mill who wanted to make these institutions even more liberal and human according to their image of what is human.  If we want to follow this pattern of development, we should expect within the capitalist world a new class to develop with new means of production which leaves behind the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the bourgeoisie left behind the feudal lords and peasants.

In order to claim that one has found a scientific law of history, one should be able to produce at least two examples to support that scientific hypothesis.  And we have two hypotheses here.  On one hypothesis it is the oppressed classes which by their struggle bring about the new stage of history, in which case we are committed to the claim that the peasants brought about capitalism by overthrowing the feudal lords.  On the other hypothesis it is the new means of production and the people associated with those productive forces that bring about the new stage of history, in which case the proletariat is as irrelevant as the peasants were in the previous process.

Marxism is composed of many strata and to understand Marxism one needs the skills of a geologist and an archaeologist.  My claim is that the notion of the proletariat belongs to the layer where Marx was concerned with the iconography of head, heart and stomach and not to the layer of his economic investigations, even if various forces later pushed that earlier layer into a new stratum.[34]  There are of course other elements in that layer.  Marx’s search for ‘the capability of a universal class to be really universal’[35] is part of his criticism of Hegel, and I am not disputing the view that Marx’s proletariat is also a substitute for Hegel’s bureaucracy.

As far as empirical life is concerned, the example in front of Marx and Hess was the developing bourgeoisie.  In fact Marx’s disagreement with the True Socialists in The Communist Manifesto was not over the role of the proletariat, but, without their realising it, over the role of the bourgeoisie, and I think Marx might have been right in defending their role in working for those liberal institutions that he there so eloquently described.

V

Hess, like Marx, talks almost interchangeably about private property and money, and they both wanted to abolish private property and money.  I do not wish to take issue with them for confusing the two, for we can separate them even conceptually only in our empirical socio-economic life, and neither Marx nor Hess was concerned with that.  When we discover what it was that they wanted to abolish we shall find that in that respect the two are indistinguishable.

Hess in On the Essence of Money writes:

For our Philistines, our Christian shopkeepers and Jewish Christians, the individual is the end, while the life of the species is the means to life.  They have created for themselves a world apart.  In theory the classical form of this inverted world is the Christian heaven… In practice therefore, in our commercial world, as it is in theory in the Christian heaven, the individual is the end, the species only the means of life.  Here likewise the life of the species is not at work in the individual and by means of him; here, just as in heaven, it is placed outside individuals and reduced to a means of them; here, in fact, it is money.  What God is for its theoretical life, money is for the practical life of this inverted world: the alienated potentiality, the bartered life-activity of men.[36]

A couple of months after Marx read this essay, he was writing some notes on James Mill in which he approved of Mill characterising money as the medium of exchange, and then went on to say:

This mediator is … the lost, estranged essence of private property, private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of man, the externalised mediationbetween man’s production and man’s production.  All the qualities which arise in the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this mediator.  Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes.  Christ represents originally 1.) men before God; 2.) God for men; 3.) men to man.

Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2.) society for private property; 3.) private property for society.

But Christ is alienated God and alienated man.  God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ.  It is the same with money.[37]

A few months earlier, in the second of his articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx had already written that ‘Money is the general, self-sufficient value of everything.  Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper worth.  Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life’.[38]

As I said earlier, my primary aim is not to trace influences.  Even if we could document precisely who read and wrote what at what time and could also document what was said when in the various Gasthauses, beer halls or coffee houses, the interesting question would still remain: Who would be influenced, by reading Hess, to write what Marx wrote?  The point I want to make is that we have to recreate a frame of mind where Hess’s remarks (or Marx’s for that matter) would not just be swept aside as strange speculations but would be taken so seriously that a man would risk the wrath of governments or be prepared to suffer exile for them, and where a wrong step in an argument would be regarded as a wrong step for mankind.

What I want to investigate is what it was they wanted to abolish when they wanted to abolish money and private property, and why they thought it should be done, or indeed would happen anyway in the progress of world history.  The abolition of private property has been advocated many times and for several reasons ever since men yearned for a better world.  But never was it argued, I think, for more grandiose reasons or with the expectation of more profound results.

Before we come to Hess and Marx I want to consider briefly two types of reasons for wanting to abolish private property, reasons which have been systematically confused with each other, and both of which are very often mistakenly thought to be Marx’s reasons.  Arguments that mistake them for Marx’s reasons usually switch back and forth between the two types of reasons.  So, for clarity’s sake, before turning to Hess and Marx we should look at them first.

We should distinguish between what I want to call the moral reason from what I want to call the economic reason for abolishing private property.[39]  The economic and moral considerations are the opposites of each other in every way.  The economic considerations are about the means of production, while the moral considerations are about private consumer goods that we want to buy or to have.  Whether the arguments are right or wrong, the economic considerations are concerned with the better functioning of our economy, with more efficient production.  These arguments do not say that we shall be better persons, but that we shall be able to produce more, or that our economic life will run more smoothly if the means of production are not privately owned.  Rather, on the contrary, it is claimed sometimes by the proponents of these arguments that–at least temporarily–economic developments should take precedence over favouring liberal institutions which would help the development of freer autonomous persons.  According to Durkheim these considerations have their origin in the modern state and the industrial mode of production, and these arguments want to connect the two; it should be the concern of the state to develop the economy, and it should be economic considerations that influence state policy.

The moral considerations are not tied to any historical conditions. They go back to Plato and come up over and over again throughout our history, as for instance in Campanella or Thomas More or in any one of a host of thinkers whose concern was to liberate us from the pernicious influence of money and the greed that is supposed to accompany it.  When St. Francis threw away all his money and expressed his loathing of it in demonic terms he did not go on to organise co-operative economic associations for the poor in order to improve their standard of living, nor did he dig sewage systems for them.  He thought that to be poor, to be without possessions, was a good thing.  When Plato recommended the abolition of private property for the rulers of his city, he did not do so because this was the best way to overtake the olive oil production of a more advanced city by the end of the second five-year plan.  He did so because the vocation of the rulers was virtue and wisdom, and this could be developed only if the sense of having, along with other inclinations toward the particular, was radically eliminated from their lives.  He did not connect, but separated, economic affairs from state affairs.  The ‘appetite’ class, the stomach of the city, had to have private property as an incentive to fulfil their vocation which was production, but those who were supposed to have wisdom and virtue could have these qualities only if their ‘sense of having’ was eliminated by making it impossible for them to have anything.

We must also note, surprising as it may seem, that the moral consideration is not concerned with the just distribution of goods.  The desire to distribute property at all, in equal or unequal rations, still originates from the ‘sense of having’, as against the moral consideration which aims at creating a better type of man by freeing him completely from the possession of any property at all and thus from the sense of having.  Marx describes this distribution of goods as crude communism in his ‘Third Manuscript’:

… The domination of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which cannot be possessed by everyone as private property… Immediate, physical possession is for it the sole aim of life and existence.  The condition of the labourer is not overcome but extended to all men.  The relationship of private property remains the relationship of the community to the world of things… This communism–in that it negates man’s personality everywhere–is only the logical expression of the private property which is this negation.  Universal envy establishing itself as a power is only the disguised form in which greed reestablishes and satisfies itself in another way… Crude communism is only the fulfilment of this envy and levelling on the basis of a preconceived minimum.[40]

Marx’s own version of communism is a ‘positive overcoming of private property as human self-alienation, and thus as the actual appropriation of the human essence through and for man.’  It is this ‘positive’ overcoming of private property which is so essential for Hess and Marx.  This leads us to a third type of reason for abolishing private property and money.  Abolishing private property here means abolishing human self-alienation.  The reason for abolishing private property is none other than the regaining of our human essence.  But now since the Feuerbachian alienated essence, God, is replaced by the Hessian alienated essence, money, and at the same time the relationship of alienated men to each other and to the world of things is described as the relationship of private property, private property and money are spoken of interchangeably.

The abolition of private property and of money will bring a new type of man on the stage of world history.  We are not talking here of moral effort or of any practical steps on the part of moral agents to achieve a better human life.  The new type of man will arrive as the culmination of cosmic history.  The end result of this history will be not only an organically organised mankind, but mankind existing on a qualitatively higher plane because of the transformation of human sense-perception.  To understand how a transformation of perception can result in an ontological transformation of both the perceiver and the perceived we shall have to turn to Feuerbach.  Such a combination of epistemology and ontology is an indispensable part of Feuerbach’s argument for the divinity of our species.  It seems however that Marx in his Paris Manuscripts did not apply it to his purpose directly from Feuerbach.  It was Hess, in his articles in the Twenty-One Pages[41], who saw how this theory of knowledge can be applied to show the dehumanising effects of private property.  Marx in his third ‘Manuscript’ refers to Hess to indicate what he means:

… private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it… Hence all the physical and spiritual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of them all, the sense of having.  Human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty so that it could give birth to its inner wealth.  (On the category of having, see Hess in Twenty-One Pages.)

The overcoming of private property means therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and aptitudes …

For not only the five senses but also the so-called spiritual and moral senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense and the humanity of the senses come into being only through the existence of their object, through nature humanised.  The development of the five senses is a labour of the whole previous history of the world.[42]

Let us sum up briefly what seems to be the theory we shall have to make sense of.  Both Hess and Marx claim that parallel to a story of alienation in terms of religious consciousness there is an alienation in terms of private property and money.  Our essence is productive life-activity and this essence is alienated into private property and money, so the abolition of private property and money will result in our regaining our human essence.  But the effect of alienation is also described in terms of our perception, both empirical and the ‘so-called spiritual (or mental) and moral (or practical) senses’.  The abolition of private property/money will result in a state of affairs which is also described in terms of a transformation of our human senses, along with the transformation of the objects of our senses, and all this has some world-historical significance.

One way of making sense of all this is not to take it seriously but to water it down to something within our everyday experience and translate it into an aesthete’s critique of cultural philistinism.  But just as it is bad sociology or anthropology to express a tribal mythology in our own familiar cultural terms so it would be shallow to read the Young Hegelians through our own preoccupations.  Rather, I shall try to make sense of these claims by placing them within the context of some of Feuerbach’s arguments.  In particular we should investigate (a) Feuerbach’s arguments for the divinity of our species, and (b) the triadic pattern of original unity, separation and return.

Feuerbach suffers from being ‘well known’ and from having been ‘placed’ in relation to Hegel and Marx by a popularly accepted line of development.  I say this by way of warning because there is often a ‘reader’s resistance’ to an exposition of a theory when the theory is both puzzling and strange and unfamiliar or even runs counter to a popularly accepted view.

Feuerbach did not argue against the existence of God but only about His location: he relocated Divinity in the human species.  And he did not argue for our divinity by turning Hegel the right way up, by making us the subject and God the predicate.  In fact we shall see him claiming explicitly that individual human beings are ‘predicates’, ‘each new man is a new predicate, a new phasis of humanity’.[43]

Feuerbach’s argument for our divinity hinges on a theory of knowledge which is at the same time an ontology.  I have coined the term, ‘episto-ontology,’ to refer to this theory which is at the same time both materialist and idealist.  ‘The essence of a being’, says Feuerbach in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, ‘is recognised only through its object; the object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own revealed being.’

As we can see, this is not only a theory of knowledge.  In the same sentence in which he claims that the essence of a being is recognised only through its object, he goes on to say that ‘the object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own revealed being‘.  So we not only recognise what an object is by observing what it, in its turn, takes as its object.  The nature of the object is determined by what it takes as its object.  This applies right through the scale of being, from inanimate objects like stones, through plants to other living organisms like caterpillars to human beings.

It is as if he applied our notion of intentional objects to the inanimate world as well, in the sense that their objects are, as it were, intentional objects.  At the same time our relationships to our intentional objects are to be interpreted in the sense in which the relationships of material objects to each other are to be interpreted.  It is in this sense that the theory is inseparably both materialist and idealist at the same time.

When Feuerbach says that ‘the object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own revealed being’, the term ‘necessarily’ is ambiguous.  If you were to put a piece of paper in front of the trumpet in an orchestra playing Mozart, Feuerbach would mean by ‘necessary relationship’ both the vibration of the paper in response to the waves coming out of the trumpet and the enjoyment of the audience in response to the music played.  This is how I recognise that one object is paper and the other object is a special type of human being, or a human being at a special level of development, i.e. a music lover.  Moreover, the objects of these objects are different:  it is waves to the one and music to the other, and the next step in this theory is that their respective objects are nothing but their own nature.

In The Essence of Christianity, after stating that ‘the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective nature’, the first example he goes on to give is this:

Thus the Sun is the common object of the planets, but it is an object to Mercury, to Venus, to Saturn, to Uranus, under other conditions than to the Earth.  Each planet has its own sun.  The sun which lights and warms Uranus has no physical (only an astronomical/scientific) existence for the Earth; and not only does the Sun appear different, but it really is another sun on Uranus than on the Earth.  The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature… Hence, each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.[44]

Feuerbach, to be consistent, should have said that if a planet has only astronomic/scientific existence for an object, then that object is not another planet but a scientist, and this is what makes him a scientist.  For a scientist there exists neither Sun nor music but only waves; and waves, light or sound waves, exist only for a scientist.

We can already see that on the basis of a theory like this, if we were inclined to claim divinity for ourselves what we would need to establish is that our object is the Infinite.  But before I come to outline how Feuerbach does this, or attempts to do this, I would like to dwell briefly on an example Feuerbach gives, the example of musical sounds.  I do this partly for its own sake, as it further illustrates Feuerbach’s theory, and partly because, through what I call the archaeology of examples, this example links his theory to Marx’s views in the manuscripts he wrote in Paris.

If thou hast no sensibility [says Feuerbach], no feeling of music, thou perceivest in the finest music nothing more than in the wind that whistles by the ear, or than in the brook which rushes past thy feet … The splendours of the crystal charm the sense, but the intellect is interested only in the laws of crystallisation.

… The animal is sensible only to the light beam which immediately affects life; while man perceives the ray, to him physically indifferent, of the remote star.  Man alone has purely intellectual, disinterested joys and passions; the eye of man alone keeps theoretical festivals.[45]

Now turn to some of the familiar passages from Marx’s third Manuscript:

It is obvious that the human eye appreciates differently from the crude, inhuman eye, the human eardifferently from the crude ear etc…. [T]he most beautiful music has no meaning for the unmusical ear–is no object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential capacities and can therefore only be so for me insofar as my essential capacity exists explicitly as a subjective capacity, because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my senses go (only makes sense for a corresponding sense)…

Sense subordinated to crude, practical need has only a narrow meaning.  For the starving man food does not exist in its human form, but only in its abstract character as food.  It could be available in its crudest form and one could not say wherein the starving man’s eating differs from that of animals.  The care-laden, needy man has no mind for the most beautiful play.  The dealer in minerals sees only their market value but not their beauty and special nature; he has no mineralogical sensitivity.[46]

This is how the ‘forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’.  There is no music if there are no musical ears, and only if I perceive what is there as music am I the type of being that I am.  If, as a being, I responded to ‘it’ not by enjoying it, but, say, by growing, then I would perhaps be a plant.  It is interesting to note how Feuerbach himself connects the division of labour to this theory.  In the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future he says:

… the object of herbivorous animals is the plant; however, by means of this object they essentially differentiate themselves from the other animals, the carnivorous ones.  Thus, the object of the eye is neither tone nor smell, but light.  In the object of the eye however its essence is revealed to us… We therefore also name in life things and beings only according to their objects; the eye is the ‘light-organ’.  He who cultivates the soil is a farmer; he who makes hunting the object of his activity is a hunter; he who catches fish is a fisherman; and so on.[47]

Hess and Marx operated with this episto-ontology.  ‘Private property made us so stupid that an object is ours when we have it,’ and so ‘the sense of having’ replaced all other senses.  This perception, the perception of all objects as commodities, reduced us and the world to a lower, in fact to the lowest level of existence, not only figuratively but literally, ontologically; and, in a reciprocal relationship, the world is also correspondingly ‘dehumanised’.

This is an ontology and not just an aesthete’s complaint about our vulgarity.  However, the aesthete’s prejudice does come through, in that neither Hess nor Marx argue why it is more human to see the beauty of minerals than to make steam engines out of iron, and why it is against nature, akin to a medieval natural-law sense of ‘against nature,’ to do the latter rather than the former.  When Marx says that ‘a dealer in minerals has no mineralogical sense’ he does not explain why we all ought to be lapidarists rather than only some of us.

But we still have to return to Feuerbach to see how he argues for our divinity and for the alienation of our divinity.  As I remarked, in order to show that we are infinite he has to show that our object is infinite.  And indeed this is what Feuerbach is doing in the first chapter of The Essence of Christianity.  There are however at least four or five different senses of ‘infinity’ in these pages and Feuerbach moves from one to the other almost imperceptibly.  There is a sense in which everything is infinite.  Then there is the sense in which only we, as against the brutes, are infinite in that we have consciousness.  This kind of infinity itself has two varieties; one is that we are infinite because we are conscious of the infinite, the other that we are infinite because everything and anything can be the object of our thought.  In the last two crucial senses the imperfect individual is contrasted with the species which is infinite and then with mankind as a collective.  I say this not so much to show some inconsistency but because the last two senses will be crucial for illuminating Hess’s remarks on the Christian heaven and on egoism and because they are also the proper targets for Stirner’s criticism.

In a sense for Feuerbach everything is infinite, for the limit of any creature’s perception is the limit of its world and in this sense even a caterpillar is infinite.  ‘A being’s understanding is its sphere of vision.  As far as thou seest, so far extends thy nature; and conversely.  The eye of the brute reaches no farther than its needs, and its nature no farther than its needs.  And so far as thy nature reaches, so far reaches thy unlimited self-consciousness, so far art thou God.’[48]  But the genuine sense of infinity comes with consciousness.  By definition, ‘consciousness, in the strict proper sense, is identical with consciousness of the infinite’.  ‘The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.’[49]

In a very important little footnote on this page Feuerbach says:

The obtuse Materialist says: ‘Man is distinguished from the brute only by consciousness–he is an animal with consciousness superadded’; not reflecting, that in a being which awakes to consciousness, there takes place a qualitative change, a differentiation of the entire nature.

It is in this sense that Feuerbach wants to say that it is religion that distinguishes man from the brute; not in the sense in which we talk about a religious person or a religious institution but in the vacuous sense in which even an atheist is, insofar as he is a conscious being, a religious being.  It is in this context that we should read Marx’s claim in The German Ideology that it is not religion that distinguishes us from the brutes but the fact that we produce, while in the ‘Manuscripts’ he still follows Feuerbach:  ‘The animal is immediately one with its life-activity… Conscious life-activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life-activity.  It is just because of this that he is a species-being’.

The sense in which even the brute is infinite leads Feuerbach to the crucial claim that it is the species and not the individual which is infinite.  The brute is not aware of any limitation but man is, though allegedly this rests on an error, partly on an intellectual and partly on a moral error:

Every limitation of the reason, or in general of the nature of man, rests on a delusion, an error.  It is true that the human being, as an individual, can and must–herein consists his distinction from the brute–feel and recognise himself to be limited; but he can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only because the perfection, the infinitude of his species, is perceived by him, whether as an object of feeling, of conscience, or of the thinking consciousness.  If he makes his own limitations the limitations of the species, this arises from the mistake that he identifies himself immediately with the species–a mistake which is intimately connected with the individual’s love of ease, sloth, vanity, and egoism.  For a limitation which I know to be merely mine humiliates, shames, and perturbs me.  Hence to free myself from this feeling of shame, from this feeling of dissatisfaction, I convert the limits of my individuality into the limits of human nature in general.[50]

This imprecise sense of the infinitude of our species is replaced or specified a few pages later by the notion of our species as a collectivity of which the members complement each other in such a way that the whole conglomeration adds up to an infinity.

Each new man is a new predicate, a new phasis of humanity.  As many as are the men, so many are the powers, the properties of humanity.  It is true that there are the same elements in every individual, but under such various conditions and modifications that they appear new and peculiar.  The mystery of the inexhaustible fullness of the divine predicates is therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable, but, consequently, phenomenal being…. One man is a distinguished musician, a distinguished author, a distinguished physician; but he cannot compose music, write books, and perform cures in the same moment of time.  Time, and not the Hegelian dialectic, is the medium of uniting opposites, contradictories, in one and the same subject.[51]

The striking relationship of Feuerbach to Hess’s message in On the Essence of Money comes out when we see how in the section on ‘Christianity and Heathenism’ Christianity is made into the villain of the piece.  According to Feuerbach, ‘The ancients sacrificed the individual to the species; the Christians sacrificed the species to the individual…. [But] the Christians are distinguished from the heathens in this, that they immediately identify the individual with the species…’[52]  To do this, for Feuerbach, is also a sign of egoism.

This leads us back to the passage I quoted from Hess’s essay on money at the beginning of this section.  He begins part V of his essay, from which I quoted the passage, by saying: ‘The individual elevated to an end and the species debased to a means: that is an absolute reversal of human and natural life.’  Feuerbach’s idiosyncratic notion of Christianity is Hess’s model for his ‘inverted’ world.  ‘In theory the classical form of this inverted world is the Christian heaven.’  What Hess did was not only to replace the Feuerbachian alienated essence, God, with money, but to argue for some sort of relationship between the two which is an embryonic version of economic base and theoretical superstructure.  It is somewhat confused, but not more confused than Marx’s similar double-decker view of economic and religious life in his second article ‘On the Jewish Question’.

‘Christianity is the theory, the logic of egoism.  The classical basis of egoistic practice, on the other hand’, says Hess, ‘is the modern Christian commercial world’.  He also describes the practitioners of this modern Christian commercial world as ‘Christian shopkeepers and Jewish Christians’ for whom ‘the individual is the end, while the life of the species is the means to life’.  Not always, but often, the economic base takes primacy in our emancipation.  ‘We may emancipate ourselves theoretically from the inverted world-consciousness as much as we please, but so long as we have not escaped it in practice, we are obliged, as the proverb has it, to hunt with the pack.’

Although at the end of his second article ‘On the Jewish Question’ Marx also comes down on the side of the empirical base as the prime agency of change, he does so not for any sound or unsound sociological reasons but as a further move in the choreography of symbolic characters.  He does it, as we shall see, to short-circuit the triadic progression of Judaism, Christianity and full emancipation.  In the bulk of the article, however, the causal connections between the two levels run both ways, and we shall discover only a thin line of reason why this should be so.

‘The Christian egoism of eternal bliss in its practical fulfilment necessarily becomes the material egoism of the Jew,’ says Marx; ‘heavenly need is converted into earthly need…’  In the very next sentence, however, he reverses the direction:  ‘We do not explain the Jew’s tenacity from his religion, but rather from the human basis of his religion, from practical need, from egoism.’[53]  Hess, by replacing Feuerbach’s egoistic Christian heaven with the world of egoistic Christian shopkeepers and ‘Jewish Christians’, while keeping the Christian heaven as a sort of theoretical counterpart, with reciprocal relationships between the two, generated the theory of economic base and superstructure.

In order to see whether there are any important connections between Hess’s views and Marx’s two articles ‘On the Jewish Question’ we have to turn to the other topic we set out to investigate: the triadic pattern of original unity, separation and return.  So far we have only investigated Feuerbach’s argument for our divinity, and we saw that he operated with several notions of ‘infinity’ in arguing for the infinity of our species.  Some of Feuerbach’s arguments rested on what I called his ‘episto-ontology’.  Hess and Marx made substantial use of this theory in their characterisation of our alienated state.  To conceive and to practise our relationship to each other and to the world as the relationship of private property is akin to perceiving the world and each other through the ‘sense of having’, and this has drastic ontological consequences both for us and for the world we perceive.

Feuerbach then slides into another sense of the infinity of our species.  This is not an infinity he argues for by claiming that our object is infinite and we are what our object is.  This other sense of the infinity of our species is the sense in which mankind as a whole makes up an infinitely perfect organic being where individual imperfections and limitations are compensated for by corresponding virtues in others.  Christianity is then, oddly, taken to task for regarding each individual as somehow perfect and identical with the species, as against the proper view which is that each individual is a partial predicate of the perfect whole.  This is then taken over by Hess as ‘the inverted world’ of the Christian heaven, as the theory, the logic of egoism.  This egoistic heaven is realised in the individualist bourgeois world and in the political and human rights of individuals: ‘… the egoism of heaven was also achieved on earth… Practical egoism was sanctioned by declaring men to be single individuals, … by proclaiming human rights, the rights of independent men, … and so making out isolated persons to be the free, true and natural men’.[54]  These are the rights that Marx criticised in his comments on the American constitution.

But Feuerbach is better known for the claim that God is our alienated, projected essence.  We have seen however that as individuals we have to project the best of our nature onto our species.  It would be ‘egoistic’ and ‘Christian’ to do otherwise.  It was precisely because we tended to project our failings onto our species through claims like ‘to err is only human’, that we obscured from ourselves the truth that on the contrary, the essential human nature, our species, is perfect.  What Feuerbach considers to be wrong with the Christian theological view of God is that it is an overprojection.  He does not express it in these words, but his point is that divinity is projected further than it should be.  It is as if in casting our essence onto mankind it leapt off as in a game of ducks and drakes and ended up in heaven.

However, this looks like overprojection only if we take real individual human beings as our starting point.  It did not look like overprojection to Feuerbach, Hess and Marx, but only as a simple projection or alienation of our essence; for to them the organic unity of mankind was the natural order of things.  This natural unity which existed during a heathen or a primitive stage of human development was torn asunder by Christianity, and now we are waiting for the reunion which will result in unity on a higher level.  We saw this model already in Hess’s Sacred History of Mankind.

As Hess presents it, in the first stage the human essence is united to us but in an undeveloped manner and scattered among our communities.  The positive aspect of this stage is that we are united with our essence in, however, an undeveloped form.  Our essence however cannot develop or perfect itself in this stage.  In the next stage our essence is liberated from its scattered embodiments and in its liberated form attains its perfection.  It does this, however, outside ourselves, turning us into scattered individuals, into lifeless, alienated beings.  In the third stage there are two possibilities.  One is the communist, the other the anarchist model.  Or, to give them philosophical nicknames, one could be called the Spinozistic model, in which each individual is taken up into one perfect being as an indivisible part of a whole, the other the Leibnizian model, where each individual is a complete monad mirroring all aspects of the universe.  In both models the perfected essence is, as it were, re-contained, and this is the culmination of the whole development.

I would like to show first that Hess’s influence is not evident in the first of Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’.  Marx in that article speaks of our human essence as being political life, rather than the Hessian mutual exchange between productive human beings.  It is only in his notes on James Mill, which he wrote a few months after reading Hess’s essay on money, that Marx himself spoke of the Hessian mutual exchange, rather than political life, while setting out his triadic model.  Still later, in The German Ideology Marx spoke of productive forces rather than political life or mutual exchange as being the true human essence.

I would like now to quote extensively from the first of Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, partly to substantiate my view and partly because the manner in which Marx presents his theory is at the same time one of the best explanations of the workings of this model, a much better commentary on it than I could give.  Moreover Marx explicitly draws the analogy with the original content of the model which was the model of alienation in terms of religious consciousness. The first stage in this case is not located in prehistoric time but in feudal times:

The old civil society had a directly political character, that is, the elements of civil life such as property, the family, the mode and manner of work, for example, were raised into elements of political life in the form of landlordism, estates and corporations… Thus the vital functions and conditions of civil society always remained political, but political in the feudal sense…

Then in the next stage,

The political revolution … abolished the political character of civil society.  It shattered civil society into its constituent elements–on the one hand individuals and on the other the material and spiritual elementsconstituting the vital content and civil situation of these individuals.  It released the political spirit, which had been broken, fragmented and lost, as it were, in the various cul-de-sacs of feudal society.  It gathered up this scattered spirit, liberated it from its entanglement with civil life, and turned it into the sphere of community, the general concern of the people ideally independent of these particular elements of civil life.[55]

We see here a vivid description of how the political element, which in the feudal society was scattered and fragmented but in a primitive way united to individuals and communities, was liberated and became universal, leaving behind the individuals now merely fragmented without the political element.

Political emancipation is a reduction of man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic independentindividual on the one hand and to a citizen, a moral person on the other.

Then, in the third stage:

Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognized and organized his powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete.[56]

Marx draws a clear parallel with the Feuerbachian model.  In the second stage, the stage of political emancipation, when the political spirit is liberated, the political state does achieve its perfection and universality, but this perfected universality now stands over against us, as God stood over against us in our religious alienation.  Some of the phrases in which Marx describes this do echo Hess, but, as I said, the content is not yet Hessian.

Where the political state has achieved its full development, man leads a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, not only in thought or consciousness but in actuality.  In the political community he regards himself as a communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.  The political state is as spiritual in relation to civil society as heaven is in relation to earth.  It stands in the same opposition to civil society and goes beyond it in the same way as religion goes beyond the limitations of the profane world, that is, by recognising, re-establishing, and necessarily allowing itself to be dominated by it.[57]

It is worth stopping to see what this triadic development Marx which presents to us means in practical terms.  It is tempting to assume that since political emancipation was a good thing, however partial it was in its achievements, the next emancipation, social emancipation, will be an even better thing, completing what political emancipation left undone.  The story however has a happy ending only in terms of our triadic sacred history.  In real terms the picture looks quite different.

Before political emancipation the possession of various political rights depended on man’s status, whether as peasant or lord, Jew or Christian, Catholic or Dissenter.  In simple terms, political emancipation made all these and other differences irrelevant for the possession of political rights.  It indeed separated, if one wants to put it that way, the political element from one’s social life.  The possession of political rights now does not depend on a man’s being a Christian or a Jew, on being the lord of the manor or a pioneer settler in New England.  The struggle for this ideal was and is long and it is a different struggle from the one which tries to eliminate or ameliorate our social disadvantages and problems.  When the Jews in Germany, like Catholics and Dissenters in England, tried to gain political emancipation they did not regard their respective religions as disadvantages–like poverty–that they wanted to be rid of.  They wanted political rights because they wanted to practise their religions unhindered by political restrictions.  Marx’s point about political emancipation was just the opposite of this: the fact that you are a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim or a believer in the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime is taken by him to show that you are still a limited, partial being.  Social emancipation is not a further improvement on political emancipation but is its reverse.  It aims to eliminate that for the practice of which political emancipation was demanded.  This applies not only to religion but to anything in which one has an interest and for the sake of which one would wish to form what Rousseau described as a ‘partial association’ such as a trade union or a students’ or a writers’ association.  The claim that only those who possess the universal and true consciousness can express the will of society is already present here in the ‘early’, supposedly ‘humanist’, Marx.  It is significant that Marx quotes Rousseau towards the end of this article.

Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a nation must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature and transforming each individual who is in himself a complete but isolated whole, into a part of something greater than himself from which he somehow derives his life and existence, substituting a limitedand moral existence for physical and independent existence.  Man must be deprived of his own powers and given alien powers which he cannot use without the aid of others.[58]

The triadic sacred history is not empirical history, and the remedies it prescribes are not remedies of this world.  We are asked to envisage a kind of substance which continues to be the same throughout its development; it attains perfection while separated from us, and the remedy for the imperfections of mankind is for us to be reunited with this perfected substance which is really our essence.  This can be transcribed into Rousseau’s language by saying that in our fragmented state we are like Rousseau’s individuals following our particular wills, while when we are in the possession of our universal essence we express the General Will.

Hess envisages this essence almost literally as the organic life-giving and sustaining substance.  ‘Life is the exchange of productive life-activities… What is true of the bodies of small units is also true of large … social ones’.[59]  The social world is envisaged by Hess as a large organic body where mutual exchange is like the nervous system and the circulation of the blood in the body.  When this essence is alienated and turns into money Hess describes it as if our blood had been solidified into money.  ‘Money is the congealed bloody sweat of the wretched who bring to the market their inalienable property, their most intrinsic powers, their life-activity itself, so as to exchange it for its caput mortuum, a so-called capital, and to dine like cannibals off their own fat… Because money, which we live off and for whose acquisition we work, is our flesh and blood, which, in its alienated form we must struggle for, grab and consume.’[60]

Here the organic analogy is no longer a tree.  The dead branches of the tree could not be used as an image for the purpose Hess has in mind here.  One might describe members of a movement one wants to be rid of as ‘dead branches’ to indicate that they should be left behind for good, and to reassure oneself that they are not living opponents who diminish the life of one’s own movement.  Now Hess wants to introduce an evaluative distinction in terms of what is ‘natural’ into a world the whole of which is supposed to be ‘nature’.  He achieves this by distinguishing between a living, organic body and dead matter.  ‘This general trash, money, is not an organic, living body.  Yes, it is supposed to represent the social body, the organic species-life and our social relationships; but it cannot do this because by its very nature it is inorganic and without articulation or inner differentiation; it is nothing else but a dead matter, a sum or number.’  Part XII of On the Essence of Money is an especial elaboration of this theme.  Here he also makes use of the Lockean notion of property as the extension of one’s body, through the shades of meaning in the German words ‘Eigenthum’, property, and ‘eigenthümlich’, that which is proper.  ‘Money can never be property [Eigenthum] … it must appear improper to man [dem Menschen nicht Eigenthümlisches betrachten werden] … The man of honour, the genuine man, is so wholly identified with his property, with his real social possessions, that he is fused into and absorbed in it as his soul is with his body’.[61]  Part XII of Hess’s On the Essence of Money reads more like the attitude of the gentry or of the aristocracy to the rising commercial world than the voice of someone from the next stage of historical development after capitalism.

The cruder expressions of organic analogies could not have been to Marx’s taste, though there are echoes of such analogies in his early writings, and so there should be, because part of the evaluative force of Marx’s writings does rest on what is presented as natural, living, organic and proper.  Marx did however take over the real content of Hess’s essay, which is that our essence is productive life activity and exchange, and it is this which is alienated in money.  So, within a few months in the development of Marx’s thought, the role which he had assigned to political life was now assigned to productive life activity, and in the second stage of the triadic development, in place of the Christian God, it is money rather than the perfected political state which dominates us.  In his ‘Comments on James Mill’ Marx wrote:

… the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man … It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me.

We noted earlier, quoting from this same passage, that money is ‘the alienated species-activity of man’.[62]   Perhaps the neatest way Marx puts the case is in his Paris Manuscripts:

The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him.  It is the same in religion.  The more man attributes to God, the less he retains in himself.[63]

About two years later Marx assigned yet another content to our essential natures.  It might look as though there is only a shift of emphasis from ‘exchange of productive life-activities’ to ‘productive forces’ but the shift indicates Marx’s move away from his earlier philosophical positions and from his Young Hegelian friends.  But however much he moved to new ground, the triadic pattern of sacred history is still the pattern of movement of productive forces in The German Ideology.  In this new version Marx discusses what he calls the ‘natural division of labour’:  for one individual it could be, say, shoemaking, for another carpentry, and so on.  The productive forces are themselves fragmented but united to individuals.  Under the capitalist mode of production these productive forces are separated from the individuals and belong to them only insofar as they constitute property.  Even in the case of the capitalists who alone are assumed to have property, this new relationship between individuals and productive forces no longer constitutes an organic unity; even capitalists are alienated because even their relationship to productive forces is now in the form of private property.  This is then the second stage:

Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property … On the other hand standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who robbed thus of all life-content, have become abstract individuals…[64]

In the third stage everything falls into place:  ‘the appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves’.  Furthermore, just as in the second stage the alienated essence has to be perfected before it can return, the productive forces have to be perfected in their alienated form in the capitalist mode of production, before their return in socialism.

Earlier in this section we had to consider different reasons for wanting to abolish private property and money, in order to distinguish them from reasons Hess and Marx had for wanting to do so.  Unless we understand these reasons we cannot fully appreciate that there are arguments for saying that nationalising the means of production results not only in practical changed social and economic arrangements but also in the arrival of an ontologically and morally new man on the stage of world history, though few would put it so eloquently as to say that it would result in ‘the true resolution of the antagonism between men and nature and between man and man’ and that ‘it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species.  It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution.’[65]

Shortly, I shall make a few critical comments about the whole logical scheme, especially about the logical blindspot which allows us to assume that the power of a formal structure which received its original impetus from a specific content can be indefinitely transmitted to new and different contents which are successively put in place of that original content.  First however I would like to make a few observations about the second of Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, and again I limit my observations to further decipherment of the triadic model.

Carlebach’s detailed arguments to show that Hess did not influence Marx’s articles ‘On the Jewish Question’, which rest mainly on the accurate dating of the compositions of the respective documents, could allow for an influence on the second of Marx’s articles, for I can well imagine that Marx could have written such a short angry outburst in a matter of hours, and these hours could be fitted in somewhere between Marx’s reading of Hess’s essay on money and the publication of the Jahrbücher.  What would be hard to comprehend however is how the reading of Hess could explain such an outburst.

I am fully aware that I am dealing with a very delicate problem here.  At one extreme Marx’s remarks could be interpreted as an uncharacteristic aberration on his part, and on the other they could explain most of his life’s work.  Luckily I have the excuse of restricting myself to the variations of the triadic pattern.[66]  I shall concentrate on Bauer’s claim that while the Jews have to take two steps to full human emancipation, the Christians need only take one.  Bauer’s actual argument is more subtle, but here we have a triadic progression, a progression that Hess himself lived out in his own life before he returned to Judaism.

Now if an orthodox Benedictine monk would read Charles Reich’s The Greening of America he would not be offended if he found that according to the arguments of that book he might belong to ‘consciousness one’ or ‘consciousness two’ and that he would have to make one (or two) steps to reach ‘consciousness three’.[67]  The reason why he would not be offended is that as long as he is an orthodox monk he would not think for a moment that this is the direction in which history is going and he would not think that he has to make any steps at all.  My guess is that an orthodox Jew would similarly be un-offended by Bauer’s argument and would not know what Bauer is talking about except as an odd theory; certainly he would not apply the invitation to himself to take two steps while he is outside the Young Hegelian conceptual framework.  Bauer’s suggestion could seem rather impertinent only to someone who is using the Young Hegelian roadmap to find his way in the world.

Whether Marx was offended or not, he certainly made a master-move to short-circuit Bauer’s triadic development, even though his master-move created or reinforced a tragically misguided symbolism.  In reply to Bauer, Marx asserts that Christianity did not overcome Judaism.  Christianity is not the second stage.  These are daring and revolutionary remarks in the context of the Young Hegelian conception of history–indeed in the whole Christian conception of history.  But now comes the hitch.  The Judaism which is still continuing is the world that Hess described as the world of ‘our philistines, our Christian shopkeepers and Jewish Christians’.  Hess also uses startlingly gory language:

Money is social blood, blood externalised, blood which has been shed.  The Jews, whose world historical mission in the natural history of the world of social animals was to evolve the predator out of mankind, have at last fulfilled the work they were called to.  The mystery of Judaism and Christianity is revealed in the modern Jewish-Christian world of shopkeepers.[68]

It is however on the structure of Marx’s argument rather than merely on his language that we might detect some Hessian influence.  After eliminating Bauer’s three stages and indeed the Christian view (before Joachim added the third stage) that Christianity overcame Judaism, Marx recreates the second stage of the triad in the form in which we have met it in Hess.  The reason why Christianity could not overcome Judaism was that Christianity was ‘too noble, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the blue.’  Judaism whose essence is practical need is still continuing in our civil society; civil society is its continuation.  Thus we get the double-decker universe we considered earlier.  ‘Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity.’  As it should be in the second stage, the ideal is perfected: this application of Christianity ‘could only become universal after Christianity as a religion par excellence had theoretically completed the alienation of man from himself and from nature.  Only then could Judaism attain universal dominion and convert externalised man and nature into alienable and saleable objects subservient to egoistic need, dependent on bargaining.’

The content of the triadic model in Marx’s second essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ differs markedly from that in the first of his articles.  Although Hess’s influence is not as clear as it is on his notes on Mill, Hess’s gruesome imagery and his double-decker triadic pattern might have given hints to Marx as to how to tackle Bauer whose views preoccupied him at the time.  Not that Marx copied Hess.  It was Feuerbach, not Hess, who wrote that ‘Judaism is worldly Christianity; Christianity, spiritual Judaism’, and that ‘Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity’.[69]  If Hess had an influence it was in providing a pattern within the choreography of symbolism.  To fully appreciate that the second of Marx’s essays just as much as the first is constructed on a triadic pattern but with a different content we should observe that the third stage, the resolution, is again expressed in terms of overcoming the conflict ‘between the individual sensuous existence of man and his species-existence’ by transcending it.

When society succeeds in transcending the empirical essence of Judaism–bargaining and all its conditions–the Jew becomes impossible because his consciousness no longer has an object, the subjective basis of Judaism–practical need–is humanised, and the conflict between the individual sensuous existence of man and his species-existence is transcended.  The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.[70]

In this strange last sentence, ‘Jew’ stands for the actual Jew and ‘Judaism’ for the universalised egoism that has been realised in civil society and idealised in Christianity.  Marx talks here about the religious nature of the Jew and about the consciousness which is a reflection of the conditions of civil society.  This consciousness will disappear when that of which it is a reflection is transformed.  According to the logic of this model, however, this reflection should be Christianity and not the Jewish religion, which according to Marx was always practice, not theory, and is now continuing in civil society.  Indeed, as we know, he will talk of Christianity and our whole intellectual life, and it is in its later version that we meet the familiar tag that ‘religion will wither away’ and that all our intellectual life is but a reflection of our economic base.  Much has been written by some historians and sociologists taking this view as their scientific theory of history.  Marx never made this view clear, and never gave arguments for it, but here we can see its origin.

I described Marx’s move in his article as a master-move, but it is so only insofar as it was a transformation of Bauer’s three stages into the three stages of Hess’s and his own sacred history.  Otherwise I did not mean it as a word of praise.  Sometimes it is argued in Marx’s favour that he did not talk about the real actual Jews but about a type, but this is precisely what is wrong with what he does.  But even by the standard of his own conceptual pattern and symbolism it is a confused piece of work.[71]   My main critical comment however is not about the confused version of the conceptual framework we have been surveying but about its purest form.

The original use of the alienation model, or the use which gave it its power, was a certain creation story combined with a theodicy explaining the existence of evil and imperfection.  Creation is the externalised objectified Deity, and the imperfection of creation is gradually eliminated by the gradual struggle of this alienated essence to become again what it is supposed to be, divine.  This optimistic view of progress and history makes sense only if it is rationality which tries to realise itself by the gradual elimination of contradictions in progressive stages.  Only in connection with what is rational can we talk of contradictions, and only that which wants to achieve rationality wants to do so by eliminating its contradictions.  Here God’s relation to nature and history is God’s relation to Himself in an externalised manner.  Now already the Feuerbachian version of this story should not make sense.  The feeling that it does make sense needs to be analysed.  If for the sake of argument we suppose that God made us, then reversing the argument we suppose that we, on the contrary, made God, it is clear that the suppositions of making, the makings in question, are very different.  The claim that God created us is a claim about a real movement, about the coming into being of some objective entity, the world.  The claim that we created God is not a claim to the effect that we brought into being a real existing entity; rather it is the denial of the existence of a supposed entity.  By eliminating an ‘alienated essence’ we are not re-absorbing into ourselves a really-existing essence, but are eliminating an imaginary object; and we are left as we were before, only now without thinking about an imaginary object.  The claim that ‘God is really man’ may be true or false but, if it makes sense at all and is not just a meaningless metaphor, it makes sense only if there is a Divine being who either chose to become human in a special act of Incarnation, or happened to become human through alienating Himself.  If, however, the existence of a supposed Divine being is a mere stage in the development of our religious consciousness, then the claim ‘God is really man’ is a figurative and misleading way of denying His existence, and all the statement means is that ‘man is really man’.

If imperfect beings project a perfect Being above themselves, then it is true that one has to do something practical to cure the imperfection.  What certainly does not follow however is that the cure will result in perfect beings.  It is a fallacy to suppose that a person who is cured of imperfection will be as perfect as the Being that he was imagining as a result of his illness.  Someone who with distorted vision keeps seeing giants will not himself become a giant if we restore his proper eyesight.  He will have his eyesight corrected, and stop seeing giants.  The man might even become more wretched and full of angst, having lost his imaginary giants whom he also imagined to be his protectors.  For better or for worse, however, one can see how Feuerbach’s recommendation to us to rid ourselves of the idols that dominate us would have some effect, precisely because they are imagined idols.  Here I am myself trying to get rid of a conceptual model that holds some of us captive.  If however we replace our imagined idols with money, steel works, coal mines and factories, then however much it is true that we have to manage them better than we do, our triadic model cannot cope with them.

The curious logic of preserving the power of the story when the original content from which it derived its power no longer exists, is beautifully illustrated by a Peanuts cartoon.  Lucy and Linus are looking at something which is lying on the ground.  ‘Well look here!’ says Lucy, ‘A big yellow butterfly.  It’s unusual to see one this time of year, unless of course, he flew up from Brazil … I’ll bet that is it!  They do that sometimes, you know … They fly up from Brazil and they …’  ‘This is no butterfly … This is a potato chip!’ interrupts Linus.  ‘Well, I’ll be!  So it is!  I wonder how a potato chip got all the way up here from Brazil’.[72]

Feuerbach once remarked that ‘”the absolute Spirit” is the “deceased spirit” of theology which as a spectre haunts the Hegelian philosophy’.  Indeed the ‘deceased spirit’ still haunts Hess’s and Marx’s systems, as the idea that big yellow butterflies come from Brazil still haunts Lucy when she is confronted with a potato chip.            

---

[1] Several years ago, after I translated Moses Hess’s essay ‘On the Essence of Money’, I asked Professor Peter Heath of the University of Virginia whether he would be kind enough to read it.  The result of this request was such a drastic transformation of my text that had my original version still not weighed on his elegant style I would have liked to call this a joint translation.

While Peter Heath so improved on my English translation of a German text, my wife did her best to improve the English of my English discussion of Hess’s thought.   Though she wished I would turn to saner subjects, she helped with more than style.

Professor Eugene Kamenka wrote copious helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.  Though he did not see this present completely rewritten text I would like to express my gratitude for his earlier comments as well as for his constant help whenever one turned to him.

Anyone who writes on Moses Hess cannot help but be indebted to Professor Silberner’s authoritative work on the life of Hess.  I also relied on Professor John Weiss’ work, and of course on Professor Isaiah Berlin’s lively essay.  Finally I would like to thank Robert Castiglione, who helped me to clarify so much while we were disentangling the complexities of Feuerbach.

[2] ‘Über die sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland,’ Neue Anekdota, Darmstadt, 1845, in Moses Hess, Philosophische und Sozialistische Schriften, ed. W. Mönke (Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1980) 2nd ed., 293-94.

[3] Marx is quoting here from F.H. Semming, ‘Communism, Socialism, Humanism’, in Rheinische Jahrbücher, 1845, Vol.1.  He quotes it in The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 95-96.

[4] David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1970), 141.

[5] David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969), 158.

[6] Ibid., 158.  The reference to Silberner is to Edmund Silberner, ‘Die Tatigkeit von Moses Hess’, Annali, Milan, 1963, 431.

[7] Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden: Brill, 1966).  Silberner discusses the problem on pages 184ff.  For the reference see page 192.

[8] Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 112.

[9] Julius Carlebach, ‘The Problem of Moses Hess’s Influence on the Young Marx’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, Vol.18, 1973, 27-39.  The article also forms part of Chapter VI of Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

[10] N. Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 292.

[11] For Silberner’s arguments see E. Silberner, op. cit., 166-169.  Jacob Leveen in his brief pamphlet on Hess writes that ‘Hess took for his wife a Christian woman, whom he had nobly rescued from a life of prostitution’.  A nice little point is that in the British Library copy of this pamphlet someone has crossed out the word ‘prostitution’ and written ‘degrading poverty’ on the margin as a replacement.  Hess was in no position to rescue anyone from degrading poverty, but the legend of the noble act must go on.  (Leveen’s pamphlet Moses Hess was published in London in 1926.)

[12] Isaiah Berlin, Life and Opinions of Moses Hess, 1957 Lucien Wolf Memorial Lectures (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, 1959), 10-11, reprinted in his Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1979).

[13] Moses Hess, Die Heilige Geschichte der Menscheit (Stuttgart, 1837; reprinted Hildesheim, Gerstenberg, 1980).

[14] David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 155.

[15] Julius Carlebach, ‘The Problem of Moses Hess’s Influence…’, 30.

[16] Hess’s co-operation in The German Ideology is discussed by W. Mönke, ‘Über die Mitarbeit von M. Hess in der “D.I.”’, Wissentschaftliche Annalen, Vol. 6, 1957.

[17] See Hess’s essay, page below 248.

[18] The German Ideology, 102.

[19] I owe this point to György Bence’s article on Hess, ‘Moses Hess a filozofiatörtènelemben’, in Magyar Filozofiai Szemle, Budapest, 1967, Vol.XI, No.2, 262.

[20] To be fair, one must quote Ruge’s remark in one of his letters that Stirner was responsible for ‘the first readable book in philosophy that Germany has produced.’  On Stirner’s crucial role in the development and disintegration of the Young Hegelian movement see especially Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ‘Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.39, 1978, 451-463; Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice; and Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (London: Constable, 1965).  I took Bauer’s remark from Stepelevich’s article, page 457.

[21] There exists now a translation of Hess’s article ‘The Recent Philosophers’ in Lawrence S. Stepelevich’s anthology The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[22] Engels to Marx, 25-26 October, 1847, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-1994), 47 Vols, Vol.38 (1982), 138-139.

[23] Engels to Marx, 23-24 November, 1847, Marx, Engels: Collected Works, Vol.38, 149.

[24]  Marx to Engels, 15 August 1863, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961-1991), 43 Bande, Band 30 (1964), 369.

[25] Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘For and Against Emancipation–The Bruno Bauer Controversy’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, London, 1959.

[26] That the two were not unrelated in Hess’s mind is well argued by Shlomo Avineri, ‘Political and Social Aspects of Israeli and Arab Nationalism’ in Eugene Kamenka, ed., Nationalism (Canberra: Australian National University, 1973).

[27] See Julius Kovesi, ‘Marxist Ecclesiology and Biblical Criticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Jan.-March 1976, Vol.37, No.1., pages 93-110, and above pages 93-116.

[28] Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘The Education of the Human Race’, in Lessing’s Theological Writings, tr. and ed. by Henry Chadwick (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956), 97.

[29] John Weiss, Moses Hess, Utopian Socialist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960), 69.

[30] Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’ in Modern Artists on Art, ed. by Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 38-40.

[31] Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy’, first appeared in Arnold Ruge’s Anekdota, 1843.  The present translation is by Daniel Dahlstrom in Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians, 164-65.

[32] Auguste Cornu and Wolfgang Mönke, eds., Moses Hess, Philosophische und Sozialistische Schriften (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961), 303.

[33] The Writings of the Young Marx, ed. and tr. by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 261.  Hereafter: Easton and Guddat.

[34] It is interesting to see Engels’ reference to ‘the egoism of the heart’ in a letter to Marx on the 19th November 1844. After referring to Hess’s views on Feuerbach and Stirner, Engels goes on to say: Hess ‘also hates any and every kind of egoism, and preaches the love of humanity, etc., which again boils down to Christian self-sacrifice.  If, however, the flesh-and-blood individual is the true basis, the true point of departure for our “man”, it follows that egoism–not of course Stirner’s intellectual egoism alone, but also the egoism of the heart–is the point of departure for our love of humanity, which otherwise is left hanging in the air.  Since Hess will soon be with you, you will be able to discuss this with him yourself.’  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, Vol.38, 12-13.

[35] Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 50.

[36] See Hess’s essay, below page 243.

[37] Karl Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill…’, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, Vol.3, 212.

[38] Easton and Guddat, 246.

[39] I have based my distinction on a similar one made by Durkheim in his Socialism and Saint Simon.

[40] Easton and Guddat, 301-302.

[41] George Herwegh, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1977).

[42] Easton and Guddat, 307-309.

[43] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. by George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957), 23.

[44] Ibid., 4-5.

[45] Ibid., pages 9 and 5.

[46] Easton and Guddat, 308-310.

[47] Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, tr. by M.H. Vogel (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 9.

[48] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 8; see also 17.

[49] Ibid., 2-3.

[50] Ibid., 7.

[51] Ibid., 23.  Echoing the familiar tag ‘The king is dead, long live the king’, Marx writes in his third Manuscript: ‘Deathseems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual, and to contradict the species’ unity, but the particular individual is only a particular generic being and as such mortal’ (Easton and Guddat, 307).

[52] The Essence of Christianity, 152 and 154; see also 158-159.

[53] Easton and Guddat, 248.

[54] See Hess’s essay, below page 250.

[55] Easton and Guddat, 238-239.

[56] Ibid., 241.

[57] Ibid., 225.

[58] Rousseau, Social Contract, Book II, quoted by Marx in Easton and Guddat, 241.  The italics are Marx’s.

[59] See Hess’s essay, below page 237.

[60] See Hess’s essay, below page 244.

[61] See Hess’s essay, below page 256.

[62] Karl Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill…’, Marx-Engels: Collected Works, Vol.3, 212.

[63] Easton and Guddat, 289-290.

[64] Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 65-66.

[65] Easton and Guddat, 304.

[66] For a proper study of the problem, see Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism and Rotenstreich, ‘For and Against Emancipation, The Bruno Bauer Controversy’.

[67]  Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution is Trying to Make America Livable (New York: Random House, 1970).

[68] See Hess’s essay, below page 259.

[69] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 120-121.

[70] Easton and Guddat, 248.

[71] To my amazement Istvàn Mèszàros gives the impression that Marx, and he himself following Marx, is talking about actual history in his views about Judaism.  See Mèszàros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970).

[72] Peanuts Treasury by Charles M. Schulz (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).

1. Several years ago, after I translated Moses Hess’s essay ‘On the Essence of Money’, I asked Professor Peter Heath of the University of Virginia whether he would be kind enough to read it.  The result of this request was such a drastic transformation of my text that had my original version still not weighed on his elegant style I would have liked to call this a joint translation.
   
   While Peter Heath so improved on my English translation of a German text, my wife did her best to improve the English of my English discussion of Hess’s thought.   Though she wished I would turn to saner subjects, she helped with more than style.
   
   Professor Eugene Kamenka wrote copious helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.  Though he did not see this present completely rewritten text I would like to express my gratitude for his earlier comments as well as for his constant help whenever one turned to him.
   
   Anyone who writes on Moses Hess cannot help but be indebted to Professor Silberner’s authoritative work on the life of Hess.  I also relied on Professor John Weiss’ work, and of course on Professor Isaiah Berlin’s lively essay.  Finally I would like to thank Robert Castiglione, who helped me to clarify so much while we were disentangling the complexities of Feuerbach. ↩︎