H O M E E X H I B I T I O N S G A L L E R Y M A N I F E S T O A R T  T H E O R Y L I N K S

ARMANDO ALEMDAR - A DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART SPIRIT AS ALIENATED MATTER Many of Karl Marx’s conclusions were the outcome of his reflections on Frederick William Hegel, particularly Early Writings which is impregnated with Hegel's seminal ideas. It is interesting to observe the full extent of what Marx had absorbed from Hegel and in turn the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus. In 1837 at the age of nineteen, six years after Hegel's death, Karl Marx joined the Young Hegelians. Marx had just read Hegel's lectures on fine art ( Aesthetik ) edited by H. G. Hotho and published in 1835. Bearing in mind the fact that Marx wrote almost nothing about art, much less about aesthetics, it is plausible that Hegel's Philosophy of fine art was definitive for him, that he completely demurred to Hegel on the subject of art. Five years later the young Marx, who wrote poetry, still did not differentiate between the medieval romanticism of privileged self - interest and bourgeois fetishism. His base continued to be Hegel’s Aesthetics which described as romantic all the art of modern nations, be it a medieval miniature or Dutch still life.8 Karl Marx’s renunciation of romanticism and his acceptance of the basic tenants of Hegel’s philosophy of fine art marks a transition to a more sophisticated level of cultural consciousness. Marx’s views on art and philosophy at this time have much in common with Hegel’s doctrine of the subject. For Hegel the absolute Ideal is reason in process. Gradually and dialectically idealism becomes reality. The fact that part of what the world ought to be could be realised in what it is, presented a solution to the problem of the relationship between theory and practice. The youthful philosopher was attracted to the Young Hegelians for this reason. Marx believed that it was from stillness alone that fine deeds arise, that harmony is the only soil for such deeds.9 However, two decades later Marx’s views changed. If in 1837 he considered matter as lower than spirit he now used the lower as the cornerstone for the whole structure of existence. Finally Marx rejected the Hegelian idea of the material world as alienated spirit. He maintained that man will only become one with his surroundings by an ongoing dialectical struggle of the absolute idea and the material world, not merely by his thought processes. Hegel had just thought Marx decided. For Marx and his predecessor Feuerbach consciousness is rooted in reality. The Ideal is nothing other than the material world reflected by our mind and transformed into thought patterns.10 Marx believed that these thought patterns went on ad infinitum. Nothing could be final in terms of absolute truth. Both Marx and Engels, still following a Hegelian line, believed that dialectical thinking reveals a transitory process of everything in everything. Schlomo Avineri in The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx comments: In the preface to his Philosophy of the Right Hegel postulates the this-worldness of philosophical speculation while referring to the transitional hic-rodus hic- saltus. In this respect Marx takes Hegel at his word, and tries to confront the Hegelian political philosophy with political historical reality, pointing out that though Hegel always emphasised that his idea of the state could never be identified with any particular historical state, it still should be the underlying principle of modern Political life. Hence Marx says, if the universality postulated by Hegelian political philosophy could be proved to be negated and emasculated by the modern political state, Hegel’s philosophy would disqualify itself as an adequate ideal expression of the actual world. 11 The Israeli scholar says that an understanding of Marx could be achieved only through Hegel and shows how Marx’s concept of material dialectics was born. Indeed Hegel’s philosophy is universal. “On the hundredth anniversary of Hegel's death metaphysicians called him the hope for new metaphysics ; Protestant theologians, the joiner of religion and science; …and the communists protested and tried to prove publicly that they are the only ones that use Hegel's philosophy in the correct way”.12 For the German Idealist school Hegel's philosophical theories were the culmination of philosophy because they believed that Hegel had resolved the dualism in Western philosophy - the opposition between spirit and matter. Hegel's proof that matter is one of spirit's manifestations must also have been accepted wholeheartedly by the impressionable teenager. The fact that for Hegel matter is spirit in self-alienation was not challenged by Marx until later. For Hegel, matter could not be regarded as a negation or absence of the spirit. “Hegel's positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the definitive concepts, the universal fixed thought - forms in their independence vis-a-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also of a human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction process. For example, superseded being is essence, superseded essence is concept, the concept superseded is ...absolute idea. But what then is absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to perform once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality of abstractions knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself - abandon abstraction - and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite - at nature. Thus, the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself, that only nature is something”.13 The presence of spirit confirmed by Hegel, it remained for Karl Marx to develop a philosophy concerned with the movement and the historical manifestation of matter. Every aspect of mundane existence is not a negation but an affirmation of the Idea. The revolutionary side of Hegel’s Philosophy was taken over and developed by Karl Marx...Dialectics are according to Marx a science of the principle laws of movement of the outside world as well as of human thought.14 It follows that Marx's materialist theories are the inherent dialectical process of Hegel's philosophy. This statement underlines the importance of Marx the philosopher as opposed to Marx the social theoretician, and political revolutionary. Marxism must never be considered merely as an instrument for ousting a bourgeois government. Careful analyses of the theories of material dialectics reveal that social changes would come about only by a dialectical process, a result of the interrelated development of the individual and class-consciousness. Marx's philosophical thought was reshaped by Lenin only to be later deformed beyond recognition by Stalin. This is why a misconception persists. In the last two decades of the 20th century social political events in Eastern Europe aggravated this misconception and should be seen not as a failure of Marxist theory to provide a firm basis for building a society. Too often these historical realities have been overlooked by Marxist and anti - Marxist theoreticians. A delicate balance must be found between a historical material and philosophical Marxism. The latter, - while it is a crucial starting point for individual awareness, also needs to be implemented into everyday activity, as we shall discuss later. The philosophy of Marxism must not be dismissed by reducing it to a mere utopian socialist idea. Only within time can the connection between the proletariat and philosophy exist because both are universal and because the working class carries the universal premises of philosophy: “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy. Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat its heart. Philosophy can only be realised by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realisation of philosophy”.15 When discussing the historical causes of the emergence of the proletariat in the German Ideology Marx concludes that the apparent universal nature of the working class is a corollary to the conditions of production in a capitalist society, more precisely a product of the capitalist mode of production which strives at the same time for universality on a geographical level. As Coca-Cola strives to be a world wide soft drink it also increases its share value. However, this illusion of universality equates with a bureaucracy that the capitalist countries use as a pretext for particular interests - interests which differ very little from other class interests. Marx's concept of the universality of the working class becomes historical only because he sees the proletariat as the final phase of realisation of that universality. "...a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a society that is of universal character because its sufferings are universal... (a society) that claims no traditional status but a human status...when the working class demands the negation of private property it only lays down as a principle of society what society has already made a principle for the proletariat, and what the latter already involuntarily embodies as the negative result of society."16 The spiritual essence of the material world remains the unacknowledged source of Marxist ideals, however it is the material conditions themselves as part of the dialectical process that manifest the Idea. Is it possible that in The civil war in France, Marx advocates the Hegelian principle of dialectics when he says that the existence of communist ideas preceded the conditions necessary for their realisation in the same way that capitalist ideas preceded the flowering of the bourgeoisie. Marx foresees the importance of the complete development of a capitalist society that could lay the ground for the creation of a communist one. "The communists are distinguished from other working - class parties by the fact that: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they put and bring out to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole...National differences and antagonisms between people are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding there to."17 To realise itself historically Karl Marx's philosophical achievement must be fully understood. Marxism, let us remind ourselves, calls for a proletarian movement but does not actually set the stage for a political movement fitted with organisational continuity to deal with the complex problems of political life. For Marx the political activity of the working class creates the conditions that would allow the realisation of revolutionary objectives in such a way that the proletariat would be ready when circumstances made this realisation unavoidable. Above we have seen how Marx's concepts were de-based. However his non - violent approach has a tendency to be consciously interventionist and in the same gesture seek to avoid the danger of subjective thinking. Such interventionism can be very easily misinterpreted or twisted by the unscrupulous to serve their own interventionist agendas. BACK   FORWARD