Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 22
The Symmetrical Formula
The resolution does not lie in choosing one side. It lies in determining what each side gets right and where each falls short.
Hegel gets right: Cognition can grasp its object completely. Thought has its own logic, which unfolds systematically.
Marx gets right: Cognition is not the only mode. The object has others — acting, suffering, receiving. Complete cognition of an object is not the completeness of that object.
Both insights are real, both depend on each other, and neither supersedes the other:
Cognition without practice is empty — it does not know what it is tested against. Practice without cognition is blind — it does not learn from resistance.
And What the Dispute Itself Shows
An argument by Johannes Heinrichs dissolves the alternative at a deeper level, and it is remarkable precisely because it takes the side of neither party.
The materialist position — stated most sharply by Hans Heinz Holz — runs as follows: the predicate of being cannot be drawn from thought itself; something distinct from thought must be added to thought.
The objection: the predicate of being does not encompass only material being. The reality we encounter in cognition includes the very act of cognizing — the actuality of the subject’s act.
And from this something follows for the dispute itself. Every materialist position is itself an act of thought. Whoever holds it is at that very moment performing the thing they say is insufficient. The dispute therefore cannot be settled by choosing a side — because both sides stand within the same act whose rank is precisely what they are disputing.
This is not a mediation that grants both sides the point. It is the observation that the alternative is formulated on a level that the act itself has already undercut.