Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 14
Six Methodological Problems
The German Ideology contains, alongside the translations, passages in which Marx speaks about his own procedure. In the tradition, these have developed a momentum of their own that goes far beyond his actual scientific practice — in Diamat as much as in the critiques of Marx that work themselves against them. For a toolbox, they are therefore more important than much else: they show what not to touch.
Six points, each with the question: what is the concern, what holds up, and what does not.
The standpoint. Marx wants to designate the standpoint of his critique in order to prepare an understanding of the individual critiques; a polemical work against German philosophy, he says, is necessary to prepare the public for the standpoint of his economics. The concern is Hegel’s own demand: that method must be adequate to content, and that one must not approach the world with ready-made categories. But the formulation is circular. To understand the insights, a standpoint is supposedly needed that one must already have beforehand — yet how is one to acquire it, if not through the insights themselves? This standpoint-thinking comes from Feuerbach, who sets the standpoint of sensuousness against that of speculation. Hegel would reply: standpoints are one-sided, and science’s task is to sublate them, not to set one against another.
The real presuppositions. One is to begin with real presuppositions, not with dogmas. The critique of philosophers who mistake their interpretation for the matter itself is justified. But the appeal to the real is not yet, by itself, an explanation: the idealists under attack also dealt with real objects and interpreted them differently. The assurance that one begins with the real shares the structure of what it criticizes — here as there, the objectivity of what is to be explained is treated as a matter of scientific decision.
The anthropological abstraction. Human beings begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they produce their means of subsistence. This is true. It carries little weight, because nothing about particular societies follows from the most general determination. It does not say how one gets from the necessity of production to the various forms of the division of labor and of property; that requires investigating the specific relations. The abstraction has no scientific yield — it merely signals a standpoint.
Society in general. “Social” is said to mean the cooperation of several individuals, whatever the conditions, manner, or purpose. But this abstracts from precisely what would need to be explained — the conditions, the manner, and the purpose are the entire content of the cooperation. Whoever disregards this doubles the object: there is society in general, and alongside it the real societies as its forms of appearance. In Hegel, civil society is a determinate concept with determinate content; the abstraction is Marx’s own addition, made for the sake of demonstrating a standpoint.
Consciousness as sublimate. Even the misty formations in the brain, it is said, are necessary sublimates of the material life-process. It is justified to insist that consciousness is always consciousness of something and does not arise without presuppositions. But the formulation equates consciousness with false consciousness, and from this follows a contradiction with Marx’s own practice: if consciousness necessarily produces whatever the circumstances instill in it, what then is the point of critique? Marx spent his whole life criticizing false conceptions, as though something could thereby be changed. His formulation does not match his own doing. In Hegel, consciousness is precisely that which can correct itself; the Phenomenology is the path of consciousness through its own shapes.
Historical optimism. For the mass of human beings, theoretical conceptions supposedly do not exist, and whatever such conceptions they had have long since been dissolved by circumstances. It is justified to hold that upheavals arise from real conflicts and not from ideas. But the certainty that disillusionment happens by itself renders one’s own activity superfluous — and raises the question of what the polemic against the Young Hegelians was for. History has not confirmed this expectation.
What follows from this is a distinction that holds for everything that comes after. The methodological passages are self-presentation, not science. Marx’s actual analyses — of production, of class formation, of the form of the state — do not follow from them. They are investigations of determinate relations, not applications of a standpoint. Whoever wants to use Marx as a tool takes the analyses and leaves the proclamations behind.