From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Mon Oct 10 2005 - 21:50:10 EDT
The folowing message from Andy Blunden is being foorwarded with his permission./ In solidarity, Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@marxists.org> Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 6:57 PM Subject: Re: thread on OPE-L Look I think the response to this observation misses the point a lot. There seems to be a determination to fit people into Engels' "two great camps" and then, were that not enough, to take the entirety of a writers' corpus and lump it into a fixed box, as if it appeared Aristotle-like as the manifestation of the category into which the writer had been fitted. So, Hegel is an idealist and not a materialist, therefore everything he writes is idealist, therefore the argument about ideas and cultures being the product of development of the forms of labour and organisation of production is after all just in the service of Spirit. So that there is no misunderstanding, I don't for a moment propose that there is a fixed doctrine called "historical materialism" and A Smith, Hegel, Marx and Engels all subscribed to it. Each of these writers interconnected as they are had their own take on history and this developed over time and from work to work. But if you are interested in Hegel's writing, in understanding it, and for that matter in better understanding Marx, then you have to work out what all this stuff about Spirit means. Hegel has something very important to say to those of us who get tied up in abstract conundrums, and it's sometimes difficult to grasp. I will never forget the revelation it was for me, as someone struggling to undnerstand Spinoza for the first time, when someone pointed out that he was a Pantheist and everytime he mentioned "God" I should read "Nature." I could then apply what I learnt here to listening to my "scientific" friends who went on about the work of "Nature", and everytime they said "Nature" I heard "God". Now, Hegel's Spirit is not Spinoza's God or modern science's Nature, but it is a very rich concept indeed. The key to understanding it is watching it grow in Hegel's mind. Should one have to tell a "historical materialist" about such an idea? In "System of Ethical Life" - which Hegel was working on during his collaboration with Schelling, but completed in his first year after Schelling left Jena - you can see Hegel working out how ways of thinking, culture and so on, develops on a material base. Put all this in the context of the problems of western philosophy and in particular the legacy of conundrums left over by Kant, and that Hegel was obviously engaged in trying to overcome these problems. "Ethical Life" is about 80% history and 20% metaphysics. In later works the balance shifts, so "Ethical Life" gives us a real window into what Hegel is trying to do and where he is coming from. Feuerbach's and obviously even more so, Marx's, critique of Hegel is a lot more than calling him as idealist. Why do people like Marx and Lenin always praise Spinoza when Spinoza thought that the entire material world was the body of God? Obviously they see right past the question of God. Look at Marx's attitude to God in the 1844 Mss. Sure Marx criticises Hegel for it all being "the work of Spirit" and this is true, but Marx also saw that this Spirit was the entire culture, inclusive of the forces of production (as they would come to be known), religion, politics, etc., taking the whole problem away from individual consciousness and brainpower, sensation, individualism and so on, into the worlkd of politics, culture and history. The methodological point of removing the pre-existing spirit ostensibly manifested by the work of Man opens important doors, enabling Marx to rethink Hegel's work. Andy -- Andy Blunden Marxists Internet Archive
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