Science and Philosophy in Karl Marx's Idealism: The Hegelian Legacy

ABSTRACT. A very widespread philosophical cliche is the one affirming that Karl Marx abandoned Hegelian philosophy in favor of his materialist conception of history, overturning, that way, Hegelian dialectics. Even though Marx himself stated that he was a materialist philosopher, in this essay we will try to demonstrate that Marx, despite what he wrote about his own thought, was an Idealist philosopher and the specter of Hegel (from a philosophical and scientific point of view) was always behind his reflections concerning both philosophy and science.Keywords: abstraction; dialectics; idealization; philosophy of praxis; scienceWhat is rational is real; and what is real is rational.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelIntroductionThe great period of German Idealism culminated, as it is well known, with G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy; without forgetting the other two outstanding representatives of this philosophical period, that is to say Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. The importance of German Idealism consisted, principally, in the overcoming of Kantian perspective, that was entrenched in the classical dyad phenomena-noumena.1 Immanuel Kant's contribution to philosophy and to the theory of knowledge was, undoubtedly, extremely important; at the end of the day, Hegel himself stated that since Kant shows that thought has synthetic judgments a priori which are not derived from perception, he shows that thought is so to speak concrete in itself. The idea which is present here is a great one.2 Nonetheless, Kant, especially in his Critique of Pure Reason3 and through the distinction between phenomena and noumena, diagnosed the limits (that he used to consider in'- surmountable) of the knowledge provided by intellect. Phenomena are things as they appear to the subject and they are the only knowable reality; instead, noumena are things in itself that, nonetheless, are conceivable but not knowable. Kantian perspective seemed to result into a kind of agnosticism or skepticism limited only to phenomenal reality. This kind of limitation of knowledge, this dualism or scission between object and subject (conceived as mutual impervious), was by Hegel considered as intolerable. In this respect, dialectics was an instrument that Hegel used in order to scatter the entire Kantian construction,4 while the philosopher of Konigsberg, at the opposite, used to consider dialectics as the of illusion of reason. Hegel thought that dialectics was the right method able to reach the absolute knowledge and to call a halt to Kantian dualism.In fact, according to Hegelian speculation, the absolute knowledge is none other than the end of the process of manifestation of Spirit,5 where subject and object achieve a substantial unity and not immediately, but rather in a mediate manner (that's to say in a dialectical way):The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual subject, the spontaneous becoming itself.6According to Hegel, in fact, logic is characterized by three aspects: the abstract or intellectual one, the dialectical or negatively rational one and, finally, the speculative or positively rational one. However, Hegel specify thatThese three sides not constitute three parts of Logic, but are moments of everything logically real; i.e., of every concept or of everything true in general. All of them together can be put under the first moment, that of the understanding, and in this way they can be kept separate from each other, but then they are not considered in their truth. Like the division itself, the remarks made here concerning the determinations of the logical are only descriptive anticipations at this point.7These three sides, as Angelica Nuzzo pointed out, do not belong to logic alone, for their validity is much more general. …