Hegel and Marx

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) thought of the world as a living being.   He used the German word Geist (Spirit or Reason) to refer to the world considered as a thinking thing.  The history of the world is the story of Geist developing self-consciousness.  It is the story of reason (basically, the minds of human beings) coming to reason (discovering truths, becoming more rational and reasonable in our beliefs and our behavior).  It is the story of scientific and political progress.

This progress is not smooth but dialectical.  That is to say, it moves like a productive philosophical dialogue in which person A states some partial truth, person B states the opposite (which is also partly true), and then the truth (combining elements of both ideas) comes out.  There is a kind of logical inevitability about this progress, but we see it only in retrospect.  The job of philosophy is to describe the direction of movement that is already underway.

In history what really matters is societies or cultures.  Individuals get their identity from their culture and from their time.  We are not Cartesian selves with incidental historical or social features added on.  Rather, it is impossible to conceive of a 'pure individual' outside of all history, culture or social relations.   This means that it is impossible to judge cultural norms in any objective way.   If a society were to advocate something self-contradictory it would be irrational, and if it advocated something that it did not really believe then it would be hypocritical, but otherwise there is no stepping outside history or geography to say that one society is better than another (except in terms of our society's own, non-objective, values).

So we are bound to think that our society is the best, and indeed history suggests that there is nowhere else for us to go.  We have freedom, democracy, etc.  The one big problem of modern life is alienation.  Unlike the ancient Greeks, say, we tend to feel separated from the rest of our society.  We do not fully accept its values, or perhaps it does not even have a clear, coherent set of values.   This is why life can seem meaningless.  We need to be more community- or nationally-minded.  This can be interpreted conservatively (in terms of supporting a strong sense of national or even racial identity) or socialistically (in terms of supporting public ownership, state-sponsorship of worthy causes, and so on).  Today's communitarians tend to take from Hegel the idea that we should support and get involved in a variety of community groups, such as churches, synagogues, scout troops, local politics, etc.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the left-wing Hegelians.  He agreed with Hegel on most of these ideas, but rejected the belief that anything intellectual or spiritual was the driving force in history.  Marx believed in dialectical materialism.  That is to say, he agreed with Hegel about inevitable historical progress in a dialectical (neither smooth nor straightforward) pattern, but he argued that what leads to progress are material, physical forces.

As Marx sees it, the world is a fundamentally material place.  We are physical beings and our primary and most basic needs are physical (food, water, shelter, etc.).   How we satisfy these needs is an entirely physical matter (depending on our environment and our technology) and this is the most important fact in our lives.  If we must cooperate to hunt in order to survive, we will live in a cooperative society (although the best hunters are likely to boss everyone else around).  If the major means of producing the goods we need is not cooperative hunting but the use of machinery in factories, then society will not be cooperative.  Instead there will be a division into two classes: those who own the machinery and get rich, and those who do not and so have no choice but to work in the factories for whatever pay is on offer.  This is capitalism, according to Marx, and it provides freedom only for the capitalist ruling class (the bourgeoisie).

In other words, technology shapes the economy which shapes society which shapes our ideas about what is right and wrong, what is natural and unnatural, and so on.  If Marx meant only that economics is very important in history then he is right.  But he seems to have thought that technology somehow determines every aspect of a society, down to its exact religious beliefs, preferred arts, and so on. 

Alienation, Marx said, is a product of capitalism, which sets individuals against each other, and against the world, with its dog eat dog mentality and treatment of everything (including the environment and people themselves) as commodities to be bought and sold.  The solution is the abolition of private property and the introduction of communal ownership.  This, he said, is inevitable because an economic system that makes so many people so unhappy is bound to be overthrown once the working class sees itself not as a mass of unhappy individuals but as a class that can unite and overthrow the much smaller ruling class. 

An attempt at communism has been tried, of course, but as Marx predicted, a revolution that was not worldwide was bound to be put down by opposing capitalist nations.  And during its brief but painful existence, the Soviet Union provided no evidence of the change in human nature (away from capitalism-induced competitiveness) that Marx predicted.   His idea was that Soviet-style state socialism should pave the way for a government-free communist utopia, but there is no evidence that this would ever happen.