Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 25

Kai Froeb

The Double Inheritance

What became of this halving can be read off from two traditions that fought each other while sharing the same gap.

Diamat reinvented the sciences—a positive doctrine of the world that, for art, law, and religion, pieced together from Marx’s letters and scattered writings what Hegel had developed systematically. As a rule, this is a step backward: more dogmatic, less reflective.

Critical Theory and structuralism buried the difference in another way—by shifting it into an immanently closed negativity that does presuppose the other but no longer makes it conceptually graspable.

Both miss what Marx was aiming at: the practical recognition of what does not coincide with the concept—but also does not lead back behind it.