Understanding "The German Ideology"

[Alet]

Recently I've started to read "The German Ideology". Everything was fine until it started with Bruno Bauer. I'm a novice when it comes to philosophy and he uses many terms which don't mean anything to me and formulations I can hardly understand. It seems like I have to get basic understanding of maybe Hegel's and Feuerbach's philosophy to fully comprehend Marx' critique, but I don't really know. So, do you have any advices so that I have enough background knowledge to start reading it again?

[G4b3n]

Try posting excerpts of what you are having trouble with. Then perhaps someone can try to frame it in a more understandable context.

[Alet]

First of all, what is the polemic between Feuerbach and Stirner about?


“Hegel combined into one Spinoza’s substance and Fichte’s ego; the unity of both, the combination of these opposing spheres, etc., constitutes the peculiar interest but, at the same time, the weakness of Hegel’s philosophy. [… ] This contradiction in which Hegel’s system was entangled had to be resolved and destroyed. But he could only do this by making it impossible for all time to put the question: what is the relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit…. This was possible in two ways. Either self-consciousness had to be burned again in the flames of substance, i.e., the pure substantiality relation had to be firmly established and maintained, or it had to be shown that personality is the creator of its own attributes and essence, that it belongs to the concept of personality in general to posit itself” (the “concept” or the personality”?) “as limited, and again to abolish this limitation which it posits by its universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its inner self-distinction of its activity” (Wigand, pp. 86, 87, 88). [Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”]

What are Spinoza's substance and Fichte's ego? How did Hegel combine them and how are they contradictory? And what does he mean by the "relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit"?

[will franklin]

First, Spinoza’s metaphysics: a singular substance of two parts, mind and extension into nature. This monism, of course, stood in sharp distinction to Cartesian dualism.

Moreover, Spinozan monism, as written in the ‘Ethics’, is an all-encompassing system that can account for all human activity. In other words, the great Spinozan question, “What can the body do’ is answered in various modes, consisting of chapters.

Now the debate centers upon Hegel’s famous lectures on Spinoza, ostensibly known by heart by his tribe of followers, including all of the cited, plus Marx. Therein, Hegel accepted Spinoza’s monism as revolutionary, yet containing a major fault which he would amend and move forward.

In brief, Hegel lectured that Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ lacked a method by which a thinking subject might evolve and progress. It could not, for example, account for tangible progress in the sciences because it implies that knowledge is not something that’s concretely gained—thereby changing mindedness—but rather immanent.

Enter Fichte, a post-Kantian figure (ie not of the Hegelian tribe) who wrote that the limits of knowledge are human desires which, in the very least, direct intellectual inquiry. This, simply, was his understanding of Kant’s Third Critique: an open conflict of the faculties instead of a harmonic conversion into the aesthetic experience, or the ‘sublime’.

Now to make a long story short, Hegel took this Fichte- ball and ran with it, in the name of a thinking and negating subject. Hence, the ‘dialectic’. In other words, for Hegel, the Spinozan universal mind was not a reality, but a teleology. Through the process of negation and synthesis, the reflective individual can arrive at the all-encompassing goal of the universal mind that was set by Spinoza—mistakenly, as it were, as a metaphysical reality.

Of course, as we all know, the Marxian critique of the entire movement of German Idealism states that material forces of production, by evolving, change both the form and content of thought itself. The dialectical process, in a word, is material.

To this end, I would say that what one German Idealist said to another by way of tweaking Hegel is somewhat irrelevant because… first, the supersession by Marx of the entire school of thought. Then next, we have an ongoing debate as to whether or not Hegel’s understanding of Spinoza is accurate.

If not (which I believe), then it’s far better to relate Marx back to the pure Spinozan tradition as described, for example, by Deleuze and Negri. Herein, for example, there is no teleology within the Spinozan text over which one must agonize and insert an ad hoc dialectical process to make ‘sense’ of history. This would indicate a Marx of pure immanence.




First of all, what is the polemic between Feuerbach and Stirner about?



What are Spinoza's substance and Fichte's ego? How did Hegel combine them and how are they contradictory? And what does he mean by the "relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit"?

[Dialectical_Materialist]

Will, that's excellent work

[The Idler]

Theses on Feuerbach is a shorter version of the German Ideology if that's any help?