Marx and his complicated relationship with Hegel's dialectics

When I began studying Marx's "dialectical method," given its Hegelian foundations and my inclination to always go to the root of whatever I am investigating, I found myself obliged to study Hegel's philosophical system. Of course, if we are talking about foundational roots in the matter of dialectics, one would have to go as far back as the very origins of philosophical thought, but I did not have time for that and concentrated on Hegel, who is the immediate source from which Marx drinks directly, and who moreover encompasses a critical assimilation of the entire historical evolution of dialectics as a philosophical resource. In doing so, I extended to the "old Hegel" — as Engels, with evident affection, referred to him in more than one letter— the same benefit I had extended to Marx: not reading him mediated or "translated" by others, but in his own terms, in his specific context.

Engels affirmed in 1859 that Hegelian dialectics represented the most developed antecedent of the method demanded by Marx's project of critique of political economy. The critique of political economy —and of the social in general, as can be inferred— demanded "capacity for abstraction", and in those "arduous terrains of abstract thought," Hegelian dialectics —recalibrated by a materialist perspective— was an effective ally of the epistemological subject against what Engels called the "stiff-legged jade of bourgeois common sense". The problem lay in the exaltation of the speculative component in Hegel, but beyond this, Marx found that there was a useful rationality in his dialectics. Because, as we shall see, the real problem is not in the speculation itself but in the basis —empirical or idealist— upon which one speculates.

Now, first of all, what was dialectics for Hegel? The man born in Stuttgart in August 1770 updated the meaning and scope of dialectics when he postulated that "contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality," and that "only insofar as something has within itself a contradiction does it move, possess drive and activity". With Hegel, dialectics is not "an external and negative doing" with respect to "the Thing itself," but is immanent to it and constitutes its own mode of being and development.

The dialectical method —which, as such, he expounds in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as "moments of all the logical-real"— is indistinguishable from its object and content. "That by which the concept is guided to advance is the negative which it has within itself; this is what constitutes the truly dialectical," we read in his Science of Logic. The idea of the labor of the concept is central to Hegel's philosophy, because that concept which works itself through —from Hegelian rationality— is the element of "the dialectical movement itself," a movement of opposition that "engenders itself, advances and returns within itself".

One may accuse Hegel of many things — it is very easy to do so without contextualizing. But he had a real, sincere interest in elevating philosophy to the rank of science. In my thesis, I argue that those who — even today — claim that Marx uses Hegelian dialectics only as a mere expository resource, as an instrument for presenting his results more effectively, do not appreciate on its own terms, whatever its ontological and epistemological limitations, the Cyclopean effort of Hegel. The man who came into his own as a philosopher at the University of Jena was not introducing a method for "expounding" but for knowing, for penetrating and unveiling the essence of the real. For him, it was in fact the only method capable of converting philosophy into "objective, demonstrated science".

Of everything I read from Hegel's work in the space of roughly a month, one passage from his Phenomenology of Spirit caught me, because it speaks of how the path of knowledge is "long," and supposes a movement "as rich as it is profound," that cannot be reduced to intuition and the uncritical correspondence of thought with received "truths," but demands a mediated conceptual elaboration. And that connects directly with the problem I attempt to resolve in my thesis: the unconditional grounding of assessments about the object in what is intuited, in common sense, in received history:

True ideas and scientific insight are won only by strenuous conceptual effort. This alone can bring about the universality integral to knowledge in its cultivated and perfected state, capable of becoming the common property of self-conscious reason at large—something completely different from the all-too-common vagueness and shabbiness of common sense, and altogether unlike that most uncommon commonplace that issues from a self-corrupting faculty of reason glutted with laziness and pretensions to genius.

Then, how Hegelian is Marx's "scientific" method? It is true that in Marx, exposition — dialectical or otherwise — is a matter of the greatest importance, even decisive. But dialectics cannot be reduced in any way to an aesthetic problem or one of expository logic. Dialectics is present in the conception of the phenomenon —that is, the presumption of permanent development, mediations, and contradiction—, in the researcher's attitude toward it —leaving no element outside the analysis—, in the conceptual ordering of empirical material, and, of course, in the exposition of the object as a concrete and thought totality.

Exposition, in the sense of textual presentation, embodies a labor of thought that is dialectical as the thing itself. Marx does refer to his works as dialectically constructed, but only because this responds to the nature of the object he treats, and to how he can best disentangle the interconnection formed by its multiple determinations, to transform their appearance into a more accomplished reproduction of their essence. Thus, expository dialectics emerges from an integral dialectics of investigation. Marx does not depart from Hegel in that the dialectical method is not external or different from the object, but in that he, Marx, moves —as a scientist— on concrete empirical terrain. "The dialectic of our heads is only the reflection of the real development that takes place in the world [...] of human history following dialectical forms," Engels writes in 1891. If the epistemological subject approaches its object as required, it "does not leave thought in peace, forcing it to express reality in its movement and in its complexity in the most exact way possible," Engels says a year later. Therefore, the "dialectical transitions" of the Grundrisse —which Engels himself found difficult to follow because he had "completely lost the habit of abstract reasoning"— did not constitute a discursive artifice, but Hegelian dialectics, demystified, as method, in action.

In the Grundrisse, dialectics appears as a method of conceptual development —whose form of exposition must be restrained to avoid a certain idealist vice— and as an immanent quality of certain phenomena. The correspondence between Marx and Engels offers keys to this debate. In a letter to Marx from 1867, assessing a partial draft of Capital he has received, Engels tells him that the presentation of the argument in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is superior. However, the dialectical development is better achieved in the new scientific enterprise, even if its exposition is less intelligible to those who do not command dialectical reasoning. Marx responds that the exposition is more intelligible in the Contribution because he has spared the reader the entire dialectical development of the expression of value, which he does deploy in Capital.

This demonstrates that in Marx, the reconstruction of the object as totality is dialectical, and that he decides how dialectical the exposition will be in correspondence with the object and the audience. In any case, Marx himself acknowledges that his mode of "expressing himself" is more strictly pure Hegelian in the chapter on the theory of value in Capital, so that everything understood as dialectical outside of this —as expository resource— refers back to the dialectics of the object and not to a rhetorical decision.

What I found when I compared what Marx writes in the disputed section "The Method of Political Economy" —from his unfinished "Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" of 1857— is a clear correspondence between his understanding of science and the Hegelian method. I did not press this argument as forcefully in my thesis because, for some, it means Hegelianizing Marx too much and would expose me to a tense debate, but facts are facts. That "path of return" from the abstract to the concrete, which Marx thematizes as the "only correct scientific method," is directly Hegelian in its formal architecture. And I find it significant that Marx does not mention Hegel at any point while expounding his conception of the scientific method, and that the first thing he does upon completing that exposition is to turn to him, not to acknowledge a debt, but to identify the problem with his philosophy. A reader unfamiliar with Hegel could traverse that entire section without suspecting where the architecture of the argument comes from. That Marx operates this way may simply reflect that he is expounding his own synthesis and feels no need to cite the source; it may also respond to the political-intellectual conditions in which he and Engels permanently operated, where theoretical affiliations, associations with one philosopher or another, and reactions to their own work were factors that mobilized them and sometimes obliged them to adopt certain positions, to limit or delimit certain influences. My reading is that both things operate simultaneously, and that the second does not cancel the first but makes it more interesting. Then, Marx writes:

The concrete is concrete because it is the synthesis of multiple determinations, therefore unity of the diverse. It appears in thought as a process of synthesis, as a result, not as a point of departure, although it is the real point of departure and therefore also the point of departure of intuition and representation. In the first path, the full representation is volatilized into an abstract determination; in the second, abstract determinations lead to the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.

This is genetically linked —again, in its formal architecture, at minimum— to the three moments of all the logical-real that constitute Hegel's dialectical method. For example, the moments of understanding and dialectical negation are subsumed within the process of investigation, in which the object is exhaustively assimilated, its "various forms of development are analyzed," and its "internal connections are discovered," as we read in the also celebrated postface to the second edition of Capital. With the distinction that the abstractions Marx refers to emerge from material reality. Hegelian dialectical negation in particular can be intuited in that necessity of transcending analysis and processing the simple determinations derived from it, which Marx prescribes. In Hegelian logic, dialectics "is that immanent transcendence in which the one-sidedness and limitation of the determinations of understanding exposes itself as what it is," and therefore "the dialectical constitutes the moving soul of scientific progress and is the only principle that confers immanent connection and necessity upon the content of science." Marx, for his part, emphasizes the necessity of "retracing the journey of return" from these simpler determinations of his object to its exposition as a "rich totality with multiple determinations and relations," as concrete thought, in a formulation very close to that of Hegel's speculative moment. Hegel states in his "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences":

The dialectic has a positive result because it has a determinate content, or what is the same, because its result is not truly abstract and empty nothingness, but the negation of certain determinations, which are preserved in the result, precisely because the latter is not an immediate nothingness but a result. This rational result, therefore, although it is something thought and even abstract, is at the same time something concrete, because it is not a simple, formal unity but a unity of distinct determinations.

Totality, concrete thought, "unity of distinct determinations." The epistemological and methodological connections are evident. It bears recalling that the Introduction of 1857 would not be published for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Perhaps by keeping it buried, Marx was able in some way to avoid more serious questioning of his debt to Hegel, and leave his relationship with him in rhetorical, poorly systematized terms. We may also assign responsibility to his health and to the fact that he devoted all his energies to something he considered more important than methodological discussion: producing a science useful for human emancipation, though of course, from his own rationality, and remembering that many things have been done in Marx's name that he would hardly have blessed.

Source for the image in the cover.