Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 9
Where the Method Doesn’t Carry
The reversal of subject and predicate accomplishes what Feuerbach had demanded of it: it finds the real author. It does not accomplish what Marx demands of it.
The reason lies in the subject matter itself. In the critique of religion, there is a real author from whom something was taken away — human beings, who ascribed their own qualities to God. To reverse the exchange here means: to give back what was taken away. In the case of a logical exposition, the situation is different. When Hegel defines the family as the “immediate substantiality of spirit,” whose determining principle is love (§ 158), he is not crediting the Idea with something that belongs to the family. He is saying something about the family — that it is not a mere natural given, but an ethical institution with a determinate place within the whole. This statement can be true or false. The exchange of subject and predicate settles nothing about that.
Marx does not test it either. He demonstrates the form — the Idea differentiates itself into moments — and leaves aside the question of what is being asserted in this form. In doing so, something escapes him that matters for his own position: his thesis that family and civil society are the presuppositions of the state stands close, in content, to Hegel’s determination. Hegel posits family and civil society as the finite spheres in which the state has its ground. Marx says they are the real presuppositions. What diverges is the language; whether the substance also diverges would need to be shown, and Marx does not show it.
Behind this lies a problem that reaches beyond this passage. Hegel consistently demands that method be adequate to content; one must examine what thoughts are contained in an exposition before judging the exposition. Marx invokes this demand against Hegel — he accuses him of imposing a ready-made scheme on the relations instead of letting them develop out of themselves. He does not apply this demand to his own procedure. The subject-predicate reversal is itself a scheme imposed on a text, and the question of whether it is adequate to that text is never raised.
What follows from this is no exoneration of Hegel. What follows is that the critique carries weight where it exposes an actual error — the mystifying language, the collapsing together of cognition and reconciliation, the dressing-up of the Prussian state as something necessary — and does not carry weight where it contents itself with demonstrating the form.
An example shows this in Marx’s own positive claims. In the famous passage on democracy, it says:
“Democracy is the truth of monarchy, monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy in contradiction with itself […] Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions.” (MEW 1, 230 f.)
The figure is borrowed from Feuerbach: just as man is the truth of God, so democracy is the truth of monarchy. What is missing here, though, is what carried the claim in Feuerbach — the demonstration that the qualities of the one derive from the other. Why democracy should be the truth of monarchy, and not the reverse, is asserted, not developed. Marx brings along a political conviction that stems from his own background and dresses it in a scheme that does not ground it. At this point he sounds more Hegelian than in his analyses — and is least convincing.
The same holds for the formula of the inversion. As a critique of a manner of speaking, it is justified. As a positive method — as though something were gained simply by turning things around — it does not work. The question is not whether one starts from man or from the Idea, but what is said about each.
The talk of the “true starting point” likewise rests on a confusion:
“The true starting point, spirit knowing and willing itself, without which the ‘purpose of the state’ and the ‘powers of the state’ would be unsupported imaginings, existences without essence, even impossible existences, appears only as the last predicate of the substantiality that was previously already determined as universal purpose and as the various powers of the state.” (MEW 1, 215 f.)
Marx charges Hegel with placing what is real at the end, where it belongs at the beginning. In Hegel’s exposition, what stands at the end was at first present only indeterminately; the movement from the impoverished to the rich is the form of exposition, not a claim about the order of being. Whoever equates the two criticizes an order of exposition as though it were an order of the subject matter. How the beginning is to be read is developed in more detail in Die Qualität.