Marx and Romanticism

[Zanthorus]

I was reading through Frederick Beiser's Hegel, and found the chapter on the aim of Hegel's philosophy and it's link with the aim of Romantic philosophy very interesting. I thought this could provoke some more interesting discussion than endless quarelling about dialectics.

Beiser asserts that the summum bonum towards which Romanticism strove towards was 'unity of life'. This unity is unity in a threefold sense: with oneself, with others and with nature. Unity is threatened by division and alienation, and the goal of human beings is to overcome these obstacles and (re)achieve unity.

The 'unity with oneself' is considered as the full development of all aspects of an individuals powers, and the unity of these powers into a single whole. The emphasis here is on the cultivation of unique individuals.

The 'unity with others' is concieved in terms of political philosophy. The romantics advocated a republican political ideal to achieve unity as against the atomisation of liberal civil society, as well as an ideal which was opposed to the machine-state of enlightened absolutism. The romantic political idea is a state in which the citizens participate in political administration, much like ancient Athenian democracy. However the romantics also support the freedom of the individual citizens, in opposition to the slave driven society of ancient Athens.

The 'unity with nature' is understood in less practical terms than the previous two. It essentially means having a conception of nature as a unified whole, a single indivisible substance, as in the pantheism of Spinoza.

I immediately thought while reading about this that there were interesting parralels (As well as substantial divergences) with Marx's thoughts on alienation and unity. The three basic components of unity with oneself, others and nature are all there in Marx. However Marx I think concieves these in more practical terms than the abstract ethical ideal of Romanticism. The contrast comes out particularly in the distance between the conceptions of 'unity with nature'. For the Romantics, this is merely a particular way of thinking about the world. For Marx it is the solution to the practical problem of the domination of man over nature and of nature over man, the rational regulation by the associated producers of their metabolic interactions with the natural world.

Also the Romantic ideal is underpinned by a conception of 'love' as the driving ethical ideal. Hegel already drives love back into the ethical life of the family, and Marx frequently denounces the simpering pieties of the Communists whose political allegiance is based on generalising 'love' (See for example the Circular against Kriege (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/05/11.htm)).

I would be interested what thoughts other people have on this subject.

[blake 3:17]

I think Marxism and Romanticism have a lot in common. My handle here is reference to William Blake, so I'm kinda biased.

English Romanticism developed at the time of the French Revolution and as certainly in sympathy with its left wing. Wordsworth and Coleridge later moved to the right.

The progressivist ideology of a lot of Marxist and socialist thought, with its focus on production, ignores the importance of looking backwards and the conservative basis of most resistance movements eg preserving the commons or maintaining a relationship to nature which capitalism works to destroy.

In recent years the most striking examples are the Zapatistas and indigenous socialism in Bolivia.

Do you know Michael Lowy's work?

[penguinfoot]

For Marx it is the solution to the practical problem of the domination of man over nature and of nature over man, the rational regulation by the associated producers of their metabolic interactions with the natural world

I would add - perhaps disagreeing with you, perhaps not - that in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx does devote some attention to the idea that communism will be characterized by the elimination of the distinction between natural and human/social history because human beings will, on his account, come to recognize that the human condition involves human beings having not a static but a dynamic relation to the natural world, because they constantly find themselves compelled to interact with and transform the natural world in order to support their own sustenance and are also themselves changed and transformed during the course of this interaction, such that the histories of nature and mankind are bound together, and will eventually be recognized as such. I would also argue that if there is one area where Marx does not seem to share the broader ethical and aesthetic commitments of Romanticism it is in the issue of the relationship between human subjectivity and the objective world, in that even during his later stages of intellectual development and even when discussing themes that do not immediately seem to have anything to do with issues of German philosophy - in his critiques of utopian socialism, for example - Marx places a consistent (and quite Hegelian) emphasis on the constraints imposed by historical conditions on human action, in a way that, in some respects, recalls Hegel's critique of Fichte for the latter's faith in the power of autonomous subjectivity and for his apparently failure to grasp, for Hegel, the interaction between subject and object and between is and ought in the historical process. I don't know that much about Romanticism but I do get the impression that the Romantics were attracted by the image of the fully autonomous human being whose inner drives are unleashed, and whilst Marx's vision of human flourishing may have something in common with this aesthetic, I don't think he would have sympathized with it as a substantive description of the human condition or the historical process.

[Zanthorus]

I think Marxism and Romanticism have a lot in common. My handle here is reference to William Blake, so I'm kinda biased.

English Romanticism developed at the time of the French Revolution and as certainly in sympathy with its left wing. Wordsworth and Coleridge later moved to the right.

The Romanticism referred to in my post is early German Romanticism (The kind that influenced Hegel, hence it's being covered briefly in a book on Hegel), although from what you've just said there would be some superficial commonalities. Early German Romantics were supportive of the French revolution, Fichte even wrote a book in it's defence and became know as a Jacobin. As the tide of the revolution waned, the Romantics began to support more and more reactionary forms of politics.


The progressivist ideology of a lot of Marxist and socialist thought, with its focus on production, ignores the importance of looking backwards and the conservative basis of most resistance movements eg preserving the commons or maintaining a relationship to nature which capitalism works to destroy.

While I agree that such movements to defend pre-capitalist communitarian social forms shouldn't be dismissed, and I think Marx himself recognises the validity of these kinds of resistance in his work on the potentiality of the Russian and Indian village commune's to jump over the capitalist stage of development by eliminating the primitive and inward looking nature of these social forms which led to their dissolution in the first place, I don't think this means having to reject technological progressivism. Marx in his work on the Russian village commune is explicit that the potentiality of the Obschina is tied up with working-class revolution in Western Europe. I think the giant advances in the development of human productive powers, the demonstration of the forces that lie within the reach of human labour, is not something to be sniffed at, even if it did involve the destruction of an earlier more naive stage of the existence of the human community. The creation of the world-market and the destruction of the inward, isolated and patriarchal social forms characteristic of a good deal of human history in favour of an integrated world culture is a genuine advance in human society, in my opinion. I would tend to agree with Luccio Colleti (In his piece 'From Hegel to Marcuse') that Marxism must fight equally against the reactionary-romantic critique of capitalism as against the apologism of bourgeois ideology, the former of which will acompany the later as it's legitimate antithesis until capitalism's dying day.


Do you know Michael Lowy's work?

I'm not familiar, no.

[blake 3:17]

I jumped the gun a bit, seeing Marx being connected to Romanticism. It's the problem in this forum that anything which has reference to the dialectical is immediately on the defensive...

I suppose the common ground between Marx and Romantics, left to right, is the protest against estrangement/alienation. The three fold description you give makes sense. Would that separation into three seemingly distinct fields have made sense until the 19th century?

Lowy makes distinctions between four political streams of Romanticism -- past oriented, conservative, disenchanted, and revolutionary. You might be interested in his writing on Lukacs and Benjamin.

I need to reread Colleti's Science or Revolution? essay. I think that part of the Romantic current within Marxist thought pushes itself towards questions of meaning and culture, which don't necessarily square evenly within a positivst social science or revolutionary praxis.

[Zanthorus]

Apparently Loren Goldner and I are on a similar wavelength with regard to the connection between Marx and romanticism. The most interesting point he brings out is the connection between the romantic notion of the organic polis and Marx's notion of the human community, as well as the contrast between this organic social form and the enlightened machine-state absolutism's envisioned by enlightenment thinkers which found their reflections in the social visions of the vulgar Marxists, first in the Second International and later in Soviet Marxism:


The Enlightenment, following the French revolution, has always had its critics, such as Burke, de Maistre, Chamberlain and other figures of te 19th century counter- revolution. But there was another critique of the Enlightenment afoot in Europe well before the French Revolution, the German Sturm und Drang movement, which included figures of no less stature than Herder and Goethe, and which prepared the way for another critique of the Enlightenment, romanticism. It is true that there are few romantics today, and consequently few post-modernist nihilists waste any breath attacking "the dialectic of romanticism". The proto-romantic Sturm und Drang, and the romantic movement throughout Europe after 1800, added many elements to the revolutionary tradition. Winckelmann's study of Greek art founded a Hellenophilism which was foreign to the Latin-Roman contours of the Enlightenment in France, and pointed toward a vision of community in the polis which inspired Hoelderlin (hardly an "Enlightenment" figure) and the early Hegel, in pointed rejection of the statism of most of the French Aufklärer. Out of the work of Herder (and the lesser-known Vico) came an understanding foreign to the Enlightenment that social institutions do not derive from abstract principles but are the factum, the product of history... The romantic philosophers Schelling and Fichte developed an idea that also exists nowhere in the Enlightenment, except as adumbrated (at its end) by Kant: that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis. G.F.W. Hegel, who critiqued both the limits of Enlightenment and of romanticism, pulled all these elements into a philosophy of history that was, as Herzen said, the "algebra" of revolution. There would have been no "Theses on Feuerbach" without these figures, and hence no Marx as we know him today.

[...]

History vs. abstract principles, polis community vs. statism, the alienated human truth of religion vs. 18th-century atheism, , constitution of the world by activity vs. a mere contemplative vision of reality as "out there": all these key concepts were developed not by the Enlightenment but by Sturm and Drang, and then romanticism and idealism, they were all fundamental for Marx.http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html