German Idealism

Why does a dictionary of Marxism include an idealist philosophy?

"Idealism" easily sounds like daydreaming cut off from reality, yet Marxists never threw this philosophy away. In "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism", written in 1913 for the thirtieth anniversary of Marx's death, Lenin called Marx's teaching "the legitimate successor to the best that humanity created in the nineteenth century in the shape of German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism". Of what Marx took from classical German philosophy, above all from Hegel's system, the main thing, Lenin wrote, was dialectics, "the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and least one-sided form".

Главное из этих приобретений — диалектика, т. е. учение о развитии в его наиболее полном, глубоком и свободном от односторонности виде

Engels put it more briefly. His Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, serialised in 1886 and published as a book in 1888, ends with the sentence "The German working-class movement is the heir of classical German philosophy." That is why this dictionary covers German idealism: Marx's and Engels's thought grew up wrestling with it, and its traces reach into the sentences of Capital.

Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung ist die Erbin der deutschen klassischen Philosophie.

What did Kant turn around?

Before Immanuel Kant, philosophy mostly assumed that our knowledge copies objects outside us. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) Kant proposed reversing this: "Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects … Let us therefore try for once whether we do not get further with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that objects must conform to our cognition." He compared the attempt with Copernicus, who, when the motions of the heavens could not be explained on the assumption that the stars revolve around the observer, tried making the observer revolve instead. Philosophers call this the "Copernican turn".

Bisher nahm man an, alle unsere Erkenntnis müsse sich nach den Gegenständen richten; … Man versuche es daher einmal, ob wir nicht in den Aufgaben der Metaphysik damit besser fortkommen, daß wir annehmen, die Gegenstände müssen sich nach unserem Erkenntnis richten

Put simply, frameworks such as space and time or cause and effect are not stuck onto the world in advance; they are the way our mind puts experience together. The mind is not a vessel that merely records sensations but actively constructs experience. Kant paid a price for this: we can know only the world as it appears to us, the phenomena, while the "thing in itself" remains unknowable. How to close this gap between knowledge and reality became the task of German philosophy for the next half-century.

How did Fichte, Schelling and Hegel try to go beyond Kant?

Kant's successors objected that if the thing in itself is truly unknowable, one cannot even say that it exists. Johann Gottlieb Fichte dismissed it as "a mere fiction with no reality at all" and put at the ground of all experience the "I" that posits itself. His Wissenschaftslehre, reworked in several versions between 1794 and 1813, explained knowledge and action as the process in which the I posits a "not-I" opposed to it and overcomes the opposition. Fichte's radical, anti-clerical reading of this philosophy in public lectures drew him into the Atheism Controversy of 1798–1799, which cost him his post at the University of Jena.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling began as Fichte's follower but soon criticised his philosophy as one-sided, attending only to the subject. Alongside Fichte's path of explaining nature from mind, he argued, there had to be a philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) explaining mind from nature, and he went on to a "philosophy of identity" in which nature and mind both issue from one Absolute. In the 1790s the university town of Jena was the laboratory where these philosophers mixed with Goethe, Schiller and the writers of the newborn Romantic movement.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rejected the very procedure of deriving everything from a single first principle. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) he wrote: "The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence completing itself through its development." The Absolute is not a principle given complete at the start but "essentially a result", only at the end what it truly is. This view of truth as an unfolding process rather than a fixed proposition is the root of the dialectics Marx later took over. Hegel taught at the University of Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831.

Das Wahre ist das Ganze. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen. Es ist von dem Absoluten zu sagen, daß es wesentlich Resultat, daß es erst am Ende das ist, was es in Wahrheit ist

What does "idealism" mean here?

These philosophers did not call themselves "German idealists". The name was introduced in the 1840s by their materialist opponents and came into neutral use only from the 1860s. In Germany the period is also called "classical German philosophy"; but the classical German philosophy of Engels and Lenin is somewhat wider, running from Kant through Hegel to Ludwig Feuerbach, who turned Hegel towards materialism.

In the same book Engels drew the line between idealism and materialism by a very simple test. "The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that of the relation of thinking and being", that is, which comes first, spirit or nature. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit, and so in the last instance accepted some kind of creation of the world, "formed the camp of idealism"; those who took nature as primary belong to the various schools of materialism. Hegel's creation of the world, Engels added, was "far more intricate and impossible than in Christianity". In Marxist writing, then, "idealism" is not an accusation of daydreaming but the name of a classification: philosophy that puts spirit at the origin of the world.

Die große Grundfrage aller, speziell neueren Philosophie ist die nach dem Verhältnis von Denken und Sein.

Hegel was not Kant's only heir. Arthur Schopenhauer accepted Kant's division between phenomena and the thing in itself but held that the thing in itself was not unknowable: it was a blind, ceaseless "will". He rejected Hegel's optimistic rationalism. German idealism was not one doctrine but a bundle of rival systems.

What did Marx and Engels inherit, and what did they discard?

Engels pictured the paradox of this philosophy. The French thinkers of the eighteenth century fought church and state, printed their books abroad and risked the Bastille; the German philosophers were professors appointed by the state, and Hegel's system, which completed the development, was "even raised to some extent to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state". Yet neither the governments nor the liberals saw that revolution hid behind these heavy, obscure sentences; "as early as 1833 at least one man saw it, and his name was Heinrich Heine".

What was revolutionary was the method, not the system. Hegel built a dialectics that sees everything as a process of coming into being and passing away, but he made that process the story of the Absolute Idea unfolding itself and tried to close it in a finished system. Marx and Engels took dialectics over as the reflection of the movement of the real world rather than of ideas; in Engels's words, Hegel's dialectics was "turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet again". The system they discarded. The bridge between was the Hegelian school that split after Hegel's death, above all the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach.

damit wurde die Hegelsche Dialektik auf den Kopf, oder vielmehr vom Kopf, auf dem sie stand, wieder auf die Füße gestellt.