Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole¶
Core Argument¶
In his trenchant critique, Marx identifies Ludwig Feuerbach as the sole thinker to have engaged seriously with the Hegelian dialectic, uncovering genuine discoveries within its mystified form. Feuerbach’s great achievements are threefold: he demonstrated that philosophy is merely religion rendered into thought, another form of the estrangement of man’s essence; he established true materialism by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle; and he opposed the negation of negation—which claims to be the absolute positive—with a self-supporting positive grounded in itself. Feuerbach understood Hegel as setting out from the estrangement of substance (religion and theology), then annulling the infinite to posit the actual sensuous world, only to restore the abstraction. He grasped the negation of negation merely as a contradiction of philosophy with itself.
Hegel, by contrast, conceived the negation of negation as the true and only positive and the sole authentic act of being, finding only an abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history—not real human history. The Phenomenology is the secret of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel’s double error is, first, that estrangement exists only in thought-form, so the entire process culminates in absolute knowledge; second, that the vindication of the objective world appears such that sense, religion, and state power are merely spiritual entities, products of abstract mind. Hegel’s genuine achievement lies in grasping the self-creation of man as a process and comprehending the essence of labour. Yet he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour, and recognises only abstractly mental labour. His standpoint is that of modern political economy.
In Hegel, self-consciousness knows the nullity of the object because it alienates itself, positing itself as object and then superseding that alienation to be at home in its other-being. Thinghood is merely alienated self-consciousness, an abstract creature lacking independence. Marx contrasts this with real, corporeal man, a natural, objective being who posits real objects through his objective essential powers. Man is a suffering, passionate being whose objects exist independently outside him. Hegel’s negation of the negation confirms the pseudo-essence, not the true essence; superseding in thought leaves its object existing in reality, thus confirming religion, state, and so forth in their alienated form. Hegel’s philosophy takes dogmatics, jurisprudence, and political science as its objects, not real religion or state.
The positive aspect of Hegel’s dialectic is the insight that supersession of estrangement is the appropriation of man’s objective essence. Within abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis. However, this act is merely formal because man is reduced to abstract self-consciousness, and the supersession of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation itself. Hegel treats abstract thought as the true essence of man, reducing real men and nature to mere predicates of absolute Spirit. The process of self-objectification becomes an abstract, empty negation of the negation, yielding only logical categories torn from actual mind and nature. The absolute idea, comprehending itself as nothing, must abandon abstraction and resolve to intuit nature—a transition driven by boredom and longing for content. Nature, thus intuited, is only abstract nature, a thought-entity confirming logical abstractions in sensuous form. For Hegel, nature’s essence is externality itself, making nature defective and requiring supersession; mind is nature’s truth and absolute prius. The absolute is mind—the highest definition. Hegel therefore presents nature as something to be annulled, its purpose being the confirmation of abstraction.