Hegel's Idealism & Marx's Materialism

This is an introductory discussion of the life and thought of Hegel and Marx from the Great Ideas in Philosophy series. Hegel was an important and influential 19th century German philosopher, best known for his dialectic, absolute idealism, and historicism, among various other things. The Hegelian dialectic is the process in which everything changes, based on the triad: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Hegel's idealism rejected the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself and instead embraced a monistic vision of the world in which everything forms an organic, interconnected, rational whole. Nothing is true or real except the whole. Not only a thinker of totality, Hegel was a historicist thinker who rejected the notion that ideas are static and fixed (e.g. the concepts of human nature and morality, as well as the concept of reason itself). Things can only be understood by understanding their historical context, which, for Hegel, is a process which changes and develops, having an underlying meaning or significance. So not only is there history in reason, but there is reason in history. For Hegel, history progresses towards its endpoint of ever greater freedom, driven by constant conflict and struggle for such freedom via the dialectical process. Like Hegel, Marx also was an influential German thinker. As a young or left Hegelian, he adopted much of Hegel's system, but substituted a kind of materialism for Hegel's idealism. This meant that rather than ideas underlying everything and driving historical change, it was the material and economic conditions which determine one's ideas, culture, and historical development. (My Description)

#philosophy #hegel #marx

[ChristopherAtkins]

What was the original film called? Thanks for posting this.

[dionysianapollomarx]

This is wrong though. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis isn’t Hegel’s.

[Zagg]

Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is not the Hegelian dialect.

[yawnandjokeoh]

Marx never used the term ‘dialectical materialism’ Plekhanov coined term well after Marx was dead. It’s really annoying how many times this is falsely attributed to Marx. Does anyone actually research Marx or do they just plagiarize other who have plagiarized others? I see and hear this particular mistake over and over.

[ginogarcia]

this is really naive but could one say that the negation of being would be like a negative being? like 1 + -1 becomes 0.

[Sagnikmay]

Why did you delete Kant's epistemology? 😕

[davidcsercsics]

Why synthavoice? If I want to listen to speech from a computer narrator is built into Windows and there is VoiceOver built into iOS? A shame because your content is usually stellar.

[RosaLichtenstein]

This video completely ignores Marx's clear rejection of philosophy from the mid-1840s onwards, saying things like this:

"Feuerbach's great achievement is.... *The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the alienation of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned...."* [Marx, '1844 Manuscripts'. Bold added.]

*“One has to 'leave philosophy aside'…, one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality….* Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love." [Marx and Engels, 'The German Ideology'. Bold added.]

"One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. *Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content.* The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.

"We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-bourgeois conditions. *The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life."* [Ibid. Bold added.]

*"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.* The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. *Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch...."* [Ibid. Bold added.]

"It can be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, lose their antithetical character, and hence their existence as such antitheses, only in the social condition; it can be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible only in a practical way, only through the practical energy of man, and how their resolution is for that reason by no means only a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, *a problem which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it treated it as a purely theoretical problem."* [Marx, '1844 Manuscripts'. Bold added.

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." [Marx, 'Theses on Feuerbach'.]

So, according to Marx, "philosophy is nothing but religion rendered into thought"; it must, therefore, be "left aside", and one has to "leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality". That is because Philosophy stands in the same relation to the "study of the actual world" as masturbation does to sexual love. Furthermore, Philosophy is based on "distorted language of the actual world", empty abstractions and fabricated concepts. No wonder then that Marx contrasts practicalities (and a desire to change the world) with the pursuit of that empty and incoherent, ruling-class discipline, Philosophy.

In fact, after the mid-1840s, there are no positive, and very few even neutral comments, about Philosophy in Marx's work (and that includes his letters).

[Mujangga]

Max Stirner could eat them all for breakfast.

[Booer]

this video was filled with continued disinformation in the modern internet age. marx wasnt so anti theological (he was a good hegelian so he knew better than to make assertions boldly like that)- so no about the bit where you say the opium of the masses. (it was referring to the only thing that gives them hope in a world of depravity- not just in a stupor but left also with no alternative hope). and the bit about hegels tripart system- thats Kant not hegel. also for hegel marx leaves out the problem of knowledge which was a big part of what made german idealism what it was...thats not to discount marx's obvious contribution to applied philosophy in the sciences.

[fortunatomartino]

Leave it to th descendants of isreal
Europe got another burden to mankind

[mentalitydesignvideo]

When is that Marx lived in deep poverty? He came from immense riches and married into immense riches.