Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 20
What Hegel Delivers
What one gets from Hegel is a form of order. It states which determinations must arise out of one another, what belongs together, in what sequence something builds systematically upon what precedes it, and what must already be given to a later concept within its own presupposition.
Two misunderstandings need to be kept at bay here, and both are widespread in the history of Hegel’s reception. The first takes the logic as a derivation of reality: as though one could read off from concepts what is empirically the case. It cannot do this, and Hegel, at the precise points where it matters, does not claim it can either. The second treats the logic as a mere search procedure without any yield of its own — a schema one may apply or not, as one pleases. This too misses the mark. That property comes before contract, family before civil society, the abstract before the concrete, is not an arrangement one could rearrange at will; and that an order brings forth something it cannot resolve out of itself can be shown conceptually before it is found empirically.
The most practically important yield is the determination of purposive action [Zweckhandeln]. A purpose is posited, a means is sought, the means acts according to its own constitution — and precisely because it has a constitution of its own, it can turn against the purpose it was meant to serve. This possibility is not an accident; it is built into the structure. Whoever grasps it has a tool that opens up very different sets of relations: the institution that forgets its task and comes to operate for its own sake; the tool that shapes the one who wields it; money, which was set up as a means of exchange and which, in the movement toward more, becomes the purpose itself.
Alongside the form of order stand the substantive determinations, and these make up the larger part of the work. Hegel wrote on nature and life, on the relation of body and soul, on property, contract, punishment, family, market and state, on the forms of art, on religions, and on the course of philosophy, and most of this stands not as an example of a method but as a statement about the subject matter itself. Part of it is outdated: the philosophy of nature works with the knowledge of its time, and the account of the non-European world has been corrected in many respects. That it could be corrected speaks, in fact, for the underlying design — whoever formulates determinations in such a way that they can fail against the evidence has made them testable. Whoever uses Hegel as a tool takes both: the order and the determinations, and checks the latter against what is known in the meantime.
To this must be added the distinction between task and fulfillment. What an institution ought to accomplish does not tell us whether it does so. Without this distinction, every determination of a task turns into a description of what already exists — the error that Hegel himself commits at several points, and one that has shaped half of his reception.