Marx's Critique of Hegel

[struggle4progress]

Marx's Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right addresses some issues that appear regularly in this forum.

The start of that work appears below, but I want to begin by laying out certain issues that I think are critical to Marx's approach.

1. The approach is humanistic: this world is the human world.
2. This world, in its current form, is a place of suffering, and humans not only naturally express suffering but also naturally protest against suffering.
3. Popular criticism of this world is typically couched in religious terms.
4. But religion, as popular criticism of this world, turns everything upside-down, because this world cannot be sustained in its current form, with its current injustices, without illusion and mystification.
5. The same social mechanisms that produce religious illusion produce secular illusions that similarly work to sustain this world in its current form; if religious illusions are eliminated, these secular illusions will dominate, until eliminated in turn.
6. Eliminating illusions would be cruel if the only object were to have humans live without illusions.
7. Eliminating illusions is essential if humans are to take charge of their own destiny to end suffering in this world.

Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

For Germany the critique of religion has been essentially completed, and the critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism.

Secular errors are discredited once their sacred expressions have been refuted. Man, who sought a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but a reflection of himself, will no longer be inclined to find a mere nonhuman semblance of himself where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The basis of antireligious criticism is the recognition that man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man insofar as he has not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man — the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they themselves constitute an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of a human essence that has yet to attain its true realization. The struggle against religion thus implies a struggle against the world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is both an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Calling for the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people amounts to demanding people’s real happiness. To call on people to abandon their illusions about their condition is to call on them to abandon a condition that requires illusions. The critique of religion is therefore, in embryo, a critique of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear the chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he will cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The critique of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and shape his reality like a man who has lost his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will revolve around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun around which man revolves so long as he does not revolve around himself.

The task of history is thus to establish the truth about this world once the otherworld has proved illusory. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms now that it has been unmasked in its sacred forms. Thus the critique of heaven is transformed into a critique of earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law, and the critique of theology into the critique of politics ...

[Zensea]

1. Sounds a lot like Buddha doesn't he?

and buddhism (which is not a religion in the ordinary sense, so I am not saying that Marx is being religious)
:)

[struggle4progress]

2. Not so very much, no.

:)

I really don't tend to see Buddhism as a theory of social structures.

Some Buddhist psychology seems quite profound, and the Buddhist ethics are good; beyond this, a number of the texts are very interesting and informative.

And Marx doesn't leave us much in the way of ideas for personal transformation.

The idea that humans ought be be adult and take responsibility for their own destinies may be common to Marx and Buddha ...

[Zensea]

3. Right here, for example

The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms now that it has been unmasked in its sacred forms.
Buddhism is one of those philosophies of unmsking self-alienation.
But I do agree with this statement
And Marx doesn't leave us much in the way of ideas for personal transformation.

[struggle4progress]

4. I agree that Buddhism provides techniques designed to expose ..

.. and eradicate self-alienating self-deceptions and that involves for Buddhists a social component, as the objective of developing a Bodhisattva mind, for example. But I still don't think Buddhism emphasizes the political or historical aspects of social change.

[Zensea]

5. that's because buddhism focuses on Now

It's frame of reference is not about history or time. It's got a different conception of such things.
As for the political aspect, it really depends on the branch of buddhism. Tibetan buddhism pays quite a bit of attention to the political (the Dalai Lama and Trungpa as examples). Zen less so.