Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 6
Why Hegel Formulates Things This Way
Hegel writes in many places as though the Idea were what acts. The passage where Marx picks up reads, in full: “The actual Idea, mind, divides itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society — as its finitude — in order, out of their ideality, to be for itself as infinite actual mind, and so it assigns to these spheres the material of this its finite actuality, i.e. individuals as a mass” (Philosophy of Right, § 262). The Idea divides, it assigns, it gives itself actuality. Before criticizing this way of speaking, one must say what it is meant to achieve — for it is not carelessness but carries four concerns, all of them legitimate.
The first is directed against the notion that the categories are merely our forms of thought, while the matter itself is constituted otherwise. What tells against this is not that the categories lie elsewhere — in things rather than in the head — but that we do not have them at our disposal. Whoever changes the determinations as suits them gets nowhere; things simply stop working out. Hegel’s talk of the concept objectifying itself records this finding.
The second is directed against the separation of thought and being into two finished domains with a chasm between them. There is no unknowable beyond — not because we reach everywhere, but because there is no standpoint from which knowing and world could be laid side by side. The distinction between inner and outer is itself a result of experience and remains open to examination within it; it is not experience’s precondition. How this works is developed in [[wahrheit:11]].
The third is directed against methodological compulsion, against schemas brought to a subject matter from outside. When it is said that the concept externalizes itself, what this records is that the transition at this point is not arbitrary: whoever approaches it differently meets resistance. The formulation ascribes to a concept an activity it does not have, yet means something testable by this — that here something does not yield.
And the fourth is directed against a thinking that stops at the finite and only ever registers limits, without ever determining anything.
These concerns are not in dispute, and whoever abandons them loses more than they gain. What is in dispute is whether Hegel’s formulations achieve them or overshoot them. [[kleine-logik:23a]] pursues this in detail and separates what is needed here only in brief: the concern from the diction.