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GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Hegel was the central philosophical influence on Marx and Engels. One focus of
the writings of Marcuse from 1928-1933 was an attempt to study Hegel and to make
clear the Hegelian roots of Marxism. Marcuse was aligning himself with the
theoretical endeavors of Lukacs and Korsch, who in the early 1920s argued,
against positivistic Marxism, that precisely the Hegelian dialectical method is
the distinguishing characteristic of Marxism by contrast with all forms of
bourgeois thought. (173
Marcuse carries forward the Hegelian theme that man helps to create the real,
objective world and, in so doing, creates himself, that is, realizes his human
essence. Moreover, man as the creator of the world comes to know and to change
both his creation and himself; his consciousness can thereby surpass the world.
Marcuse attempted to rescue Hegel from reputation as philosophical and political
conservative. He had discovered that Hegel had a radical kernel - the
dialectical theory of negativity - and spent the rest of his life making use of
this approach in attempt to analyze and criticize ideologies and social
institutions.
The cornerstone of Hegel’s system, or world view, is the notion of freedom,
conceived not as simple license to fulfill preferences but as the rare condition
of living self-consciously and in a fully rationally organized community or
state (this is not, as is charged for example by Popper, a defense of the
totalitarian state or the doctrine that ‘might is right’, since Hegel
requires a rational state to meet very stringent conditions, including the
consent of the rational conscience of its members). History is seen as progress
towards freedom: here Hegel follows the spirit of his own age (Romanticism),
voicing a confidence in progress and purpose in the otherwise jumbled
kaleidoscope of history, but incidentally providing a dangerously intoxicating
model for all social and political movements that pride themselves that they are
on the side of the future. For Hegel such a progress is required by a proper
theory of knowledge. Hegel admires skepticism as a movement that respects the
freedom of reason, but starting from the Kantian response to skepticism he
charts in the Phenomenology the development of all possible forms of
consciousness, to the point where awareness becomes possible not of mere
phenomena, but of reality as it is in itself, identified both with knowledge of
the knowledge of the Absolute and with the moment when ‘mind’ finally knows
itself. Hegel’s understanding that to have value in my own eyes I must achieve
value in the eyes of others was arguably the foundation for subsequent social
philosophy (alienation, master/slave morality). Apart from his social and
political philosophy, one of the most important of Hegel’s legacies has been
his conception of logic (dialectic, dialectical materialism). Hegel’s own
attitude to logic is complicated by the equation between history on the one hand
and thought or spirit on the other, meaning that disharmony or
‘contradiction’ in the world is an instance of contradiction in thought.
Hegelianism - In politics the ‘New Hegelians’, including the young Marx,
found in Hegel’s dialectic the ammunition to assail the bourgeois, religious,
monarchical social order, now revealed as only a moment in the forward
development of history.
Hegel’s Ontology and the theory of Historicity was originally published in
1932 in Frankfurt as Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der
Geshichtlichkeit. Hegel’s Ontology culminates a period in Marcuse’s
intellectual development characterized as "Heideggerian Marxism,"
"phenomenological" or "existential Marxism."
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