Analysis and Metaphysics Vol.

13
2014, pp. 43–63, ISSN 1584-8574

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN

KARL MARX’S IDEALISM: THE HEGELIAN LEGACY

GIACOMO BORBONE
giacomoborbone@yahoo.it
University of Catania

ABSTRACT. A very widespread philosophical cliché is the one affirming that Karl
Marx abandoned Hegelian philosophy in favor of his materialist conception of
history, overturning, that way, Hegelian dialectics. Even though Marx himself stated
that he was a materialist philosopher, in this essay we will try to demonstrate that
Marx, despite what he wrote about his own thought, was an Idealist philosopher and
the specter of Hegel (from a philosophical and scientific point of view) was always
behind his reflections concerning both philosophy and science.

Keywords: abstraction; dialectics; idealization; philosophy of praxis; science

“What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Introduction
The great period of German Idealism culminated, as it is well known, with
G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy; without forgetting the other two outstanding
representatives of this philosophical period, that is to say Johann Gottlieb
Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. The importance of German
Idealism consisted, principally, in the overcoming of Kantian perspective,
that was entrenched in the classical dyad phenomena-noumena. 1 Immanuel
Kant’s contribution to philosophy and to the theory of knowledge was, un-
doubtedly, extremely important; at the end of the day, Hegel himself stated
that “since Kant shows that thought has synthetic judgments a priori which
are not derived from perception, he shows that thought is so to speak concrete
in itself. The idea which is present here is a great one.”2 Nonetheless, Kant,
especially in his Critique of Pure Reason3 and through the distinction between
phenomena and noumena, diagnosed the limits (that he used to consider in-

43
surmountable) of the knowledge provided by intellect. Phenomena are things
as they appear to the subject and they are the only knowable reality; instead,
noumena are things in itself that, nonetheless, are conceivable but not know-
able. Kantian perspective seemed to result into a kind of agnosticism or
skepticism limited only to phenomenal reality. This kind of limitation of
knowledge, this dualism or scission between object and subject (conceived as
mutual impervious), was by Hegel considered as intolerable. In this respect,
dialectics was an instrument that Hegel used in order to scatter the entire
Kantian construction,4 while the philosopher of Königsberg, at the opposite,
used to consider dialectics as the “logic of illusion” of reason. Hegel thought
that dialectics was the right method able to reach the absolute knowledge
and to call a halt to Kantian dualism.
In fact, according to Hegelian speculation, the absolute knowledge is none
other than the end of the process of manifestation of Spirit,5 where subject
and object achieve a substantial unity and not immediately, but rather in a
mediate manner (that’s to say in a dialectical way):
The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than essence
consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it
must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it
what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to
be actual subject, the spontaneous becoming itself.6
According to Hegel, in fact, logic is characterized by three aspects: the abstract
or intellectual one, the dialectical or negatively rational one and, finally, the
speculative or positively rational one. However, Hegel specify that
These three sides do not constitute three parts of Logic, but are
moments of everything logically real; i.e., of every concept or of
everything true in general. All of them together can be put under
the first moment, that of the understanding; and in this way they can
be kept separate from each other, but then they are not considered
in their truth. Like the division itself, the remarks made here
concerning the determinations of the logical are only descriptive
anticipations at this point.7
These three sides, as Angelica Nuzzo pointed out, “do not belong to logic
alone, for their validity is much more general. Nor should they be considered
in a succession, for they coexist in all real formations and are distinct only
logically; their status is specifically that of “moments” of a dynamic process.”8
Hegel, in clear antithesis with Kantian intellectualism, states that intellect
considers things in its fixity, abstractness, disregarding that way their real
determinations; that’s why Hegel, in the paragraph 81 of his Encyclopedia,
added that the third side of logic, that is to say the speculative or positively
rational moment, “is the self-sublation of these finite determinations on their
own part, and their passing into their opposites.”9 So, Hegel postulated the
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superiority of reason (Vernuft) on intellect (Verstand), because reason is able
to solve those oppositions that the abstract intellect used to consider isolated.
In this respect, as Jean Hyppolite stated, the difference between subjective
idealism and the concrete reason present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
is clear: “In the Phenomenology, reason seeks its truth, whereas idealism
proclaims that truth without having tested it out and without having justified
it historically.”10 Hegel put in evidence the limits of Kantian criticism thanks
to the dialectical method; in fact, according to the philosopher of Stuttgart,
historical and natural reality is none other than the articulation of a unique
spiritual process that occurs on the base of a dialectical rhythm; in this respect,
dialectics is not only a law governing reality’s process, but also a method
that enable us to reach a speculative and absolute knowledge of it.11 So, the
essential philosophical method is not external to its content, but it is the path
that builds itself; as Hegel stated in his Science of Logic, “method is the con-
sciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic.”12
The dialectical process occurs on the base of a triadic rhythm of thesis-
antithesis-synthesis (for instance, being-nothing-becoming). According to
Hegel, the dialectical process is constitutive of the entire reality which is the
expression of the Idea, that is to say the rationality immanent to things that
confers to man’s will nearly a semblance of illusion. The entire world and
man with it are ruled by a transcendental principle which put through the
entire Spirit’s rational process: this is what Hegel called the slyness of reason
(List der Vernuft), which is very similar to Vico’s Ideal Eternal History.13
The originality of Hegelian speculation can be found not only in the use
of dialectics, conceived as a method able to catch the Whole, but also in a new
analysis perspective opposed to formal logic, that according to Hegel was
the expression of common sense and of the intellect’s activity. Hegel thought
that dialectics was an overcome of the formal logic created by Aristotle and
considered for almost two thousand years the human rationality’s nucleus.
Formal logic, based on the principle of non-contradiction,14 is not able, accord-
ing to Hegel, to catch the rhythm of the becoming, just because the latter is
by its nature dialectical. Only dialectics of thought can catch the dialectics of
reality and, as a consequence, it can highlight, in a rational way, those con-
tradiction always present in history15 (that’s why Hegel stated that contradictio
est regula veri, non-contradictio falsi16). So, Hegel opposes dialectical logic
(more explicative and based on the doctrines of being, essence and concept)
to formal logic (valid for certain problems but very limited).
After Hegel’s death (1831), as it is well known, a group of Hegel’s fol-
lowers divided into two groups, that is to say the Left Hegelian and the Right
Hegelians; the latter conformed to the Hegelian principle affirming that “what
is real is rational,” because they wanted to support the unity of philosophy
and religion, while the former conformed to the Hegelian principle affirming
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that “what is rational is real.”17 Through this principle, the Left Hegelians
aimed to flake Christian religion, by them considered as something already
overcome by philosophical rationality. However, the theological nature of
this debate was not able to deeply affect on a political and social level, and
that’s why religion become to showing itself as an alienating phenomena,
especially after the publication of Ludwig Feuerbach’s works on religion.18
But, in Germany there was a strong link between religion and politics, so it
was inevitable that a movement of religious critique become rapidly a group
of political opposition.
It was during this historical phase that a young student from Trier, destined
to become a milestone of philosophical thought, gave birth to a dense critique
of Hegelian philosophy: that is to say Karl Marx. He criticized, with vehe-
mence, Hegelian idealism highlighting both its merits and limits. Even though
he openly considered himself a materialist philosopher, he never stopped
coquetting with Hegelian thought, extrapolating from it both dialectics and
the idea of science.
As we will try to demonstrate, the mighty specter of Hegel was always
behind Marxian works, that is to say a perfect example of Aufhebung of
Hegelian ascendency.

Marx and the Critique of Hegelian Method

After becoming conscious of the alienating character of religion, Marx started
a very intense study of the entire Hegelian works and of his followers. The
first Marxian critique of Hegelian method can be found in a manuscript of
1843 entitled Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrecht, and edited for the first time
by David Rjazanov in 1927 with the title Aus der Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrecht.19 This manuscript is none
other than a commentary to paragraphs 261–313 of Hegel’s Grundlinien der
Philosophie des Rechts and though it is a mere critique of political nature, this
commentary contains some important methodological implications. According
to Marx, Hegelian mistake consists of an inversion of the relationship subject-
predicate, because Hegel, considering the State (that is to say the Idea) as
existing before family and civil society (and, in reality, they exist before the
State and they constitute the Subject), transforms the subject (family, civil
society, and so on) into a predicate and the predicate (the State) into a subject.
In this Marxian manuscript can be found, in nuce, his critique of Hegelian
method not as such but in its application; in effect, what is by Marx crit-
icized is the wrong Hegelian starting point, that is to say Idea. Marx knows
that in order to analyze the issue of the State, it is necessary to start from the
material base, from men really and concretely acting in the world:

46
 The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively
active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political
relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring
out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the
connection of the social and political structure with production.
The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of
the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as
they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence
as they work under material limits, presuppositions and conditions
independent of their will. The production of ideas, of conceptions,
of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with material activity
and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.
Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appears at
this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same
applies to mental production as expressed in the language of
politics, law, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men
are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men,
as they are conditioned by a definite development of their produc-
tive forces of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its
furthest forms.20
The speculative character of Hegelian philosophy was one of those elements
that Marx tried to abandon in favor of a more concrete conception; this
Marxian need, that can be found in his juvenile works, reaches its summit in
his writings on political economy; in short, Marx accepted Hegelian dialectics
as a method, but he used to criticize Hegelian way of applying it.
In this respect, let’s read Marxian “Afterword” to the second German
edition (1873) of Das Kapital:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is
its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain,
i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’
he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurges of
the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal
form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing
else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and
translated into forms of thought. The mystifying side of Hegelian
dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was
still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of
Das Kapital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant,
mediocre epigones who now talk large in cultured Germany, to
treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Less-
ing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a ‘dead dog.’ I therefore openly
avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and
there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes
of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic
suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being
47
 the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive
and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must
be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational
kernel within the mystical shell.21
In short, according to Marx, Hegelian dialectics (too abstract and speculative)
was able to reach only the formal and abstract side of things, not the real one.
Marx criticized also another aspect of Hegelian philosophy, that is to say the
teleological conception of history exemplified by the so-called slyness of
reason. 22 Hegelian philosophy of history presupposes, obviously, dialectics
but there is no such philosophy of history in Karl Marx’s thought, so it is
impossible to find in it any Leibniz’s pre-established harmony or end of
history. Let’s read a quotation taken from the Holy Family (written with
Engels):
Hegel’s conception of history presupposes an Abstract or Absolute
Spirit which develops in such a way that mankind is a mere mass
that bears the Spirit with a varying degree of consciousness or un-
consciousness. Within empirical, exoteric history, therefore, Hegel
makes a speculative, esoteric history, develop. The history of man-
kind becomes the history of an Abstract Spirit of mankind, hence a
spirit far removed from the real man.23
That way, Marx and Engels highlight, very clearly, not only the teleological
character of Hegelian conception of history but also its building block, that’s
to say the Spirit that annihilates every human capacity of making history. In
another page of the Holy Family Marx and Engels clarify their conception of
history (very similar to Giambattista Vico’s conception according to which
history is a human product):
History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no
battles. It is man, real living man who does all that, who possesses
and fight; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as
means to achieve its own aims, history is nothing but the activity
of man pursuing his aims.24
According to Marx and Engels history is nothing but a human product, so
Hegelian teleological conception of history is definitively abandoned; none-
theless, we can find in Marxian thought a particular philosophy of history
(even though not a teleological one) just because Marx puts at the summit of
his philosophy of history, as its emerging historical subject, Proletariat who
was experiencing a condition of scission or estrangement 25 (Entfremdung)
coming from the alienation generated by the capitalistic regime (see, for
instance, the division between capital and labor). In this respect, Marxian
concept of Entfremdung “is ultimately concerned with the separation of human
beings from their practical activity, from the products they create, from one
another, and from the realization of their own potential. Thus, the questions
48
of how and what human beings produce are especially important, because
Marx tied them to the question of freedom, which ultimately involves remov-
ing impediments to the development of human capacity.”26
Karl Marx, who in this respect perfectly adheres to an idealist concep-
tion,27 conceives the entire Universal History as the privileged arena where
Humanity can achieve its own essence and freedom. Man, after all, is always
historically determined and just his historicity gives him the concrete oppor-
tunity to put himself in a situation of non-passivity: in fact, reality is not
simply given. Karl Marx’ idealism, (that in this sense turns his gaze to the
Hegelian doctrines of being, essence and concept), is based on a precise phil-
osophical project where, as Costanzo Preve stated, “there is, as its subject,
the natural and generic human being historically conceived (Gattungswesen)
and, as its object, the negative side of the situations of alienation (Entfrem-
dung) and the positive side of a project of universal emancipation.”28 Marxian
address to praxis can be ascribed to a particular philosophy of history that, as
Fusaro states, is future-centric, “where the messianic hope in something
“better” that still have to come, is dialecticalized in an overturned version of
Hegelian philosophy: overturned because it is not pivot on Idea and on its
gradual space-temporal deployment, but on the “matter” of “productive forces”
and of “relations of production.’”29
Marxian separation from the Hegelian speculative use of dialectics, anyway,
emerges with a more incisiveness with the formulation (and application) of
the so-called historical materialism, that’s to say a method that aimed to
overcoming and resolve (Aufhebung) the Hegelian point of view.

Matter against Idea

Marxian historical materialism constitutes a mature separation from the Hegel-
ian conception of the Absolute Spirit, just because Marx opposes the matter
to the Hegelian idea; but what kind of matter? Obviously, Marx doesn’t refer
to the matter studied by physicians; in this case the word matter indicates a
metaphor that Marx uses in order emphasize the relevance of praxis that he
inherited both by Hegelian and Fichtean idealism (and hereinafter we will
see why).
In this respect, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity played a
fundamental role on Marxian intellectual development; in fact, Feuerbach,
on the base of a materialist critique, undermined the ontological grounds of
Christianity (even though, the result of his speculations led him to an anthro-
pological position). In fact, religion is by Feuerbach conceived as a mere
human product; so, is not God that creates man, at the opposite is man that
creates God.30

49
 Furthermore, Feuerbach doesn’t consider religion a false kind of knowl-
edge: his reasoning deals with anthropological character of religion, which is
by Feuerbach considered as true in so far as it constitutes a kind (even though
primitive) of self-awareness of man. Marx agrees with Feuerbach’s conception
of religion, but he also enucleates its limits:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of
Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is
conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but
not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence,
in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed
abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real,
sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really
distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human
activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Chris-
tianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely
human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its
dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance
of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical,’ activity.31
Nonetheless, Marx, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
highlighted the philosophical merits of Feuerbach: “Feuerbach is the only
one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has
made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the
old philosophy.”32 However, according to Marx, Feuerbachian materialism
had to be overcome (although the positive role it played in the history of
philosophy), and that’s why Marx formulated his historical materialism which,
as it is well known, has never received a formal exposition. 33 Nonetheless,
the most famous (and clear) exposition of Marxian materialism can be found
in Marx’ “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859):
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the develop-
ment of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of productions constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political super-
structure and to which correspond definite forms of social conscious-
ness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the con-
sciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come into
conflict with the existing relations of production, or – this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations

50
 within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From
forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundations the entire superstructure is more
or less rapidly transformed.34
Marx, in this case, refers to three fundamental dependencies:
• Structure;
• Juridical and political superstructure;
• Definite forms of social consciousness.
Obviously, this is an ideal scheme that Marx uses as a method. In fact, we
know that first of all there is nature with its obstacles that push men to
develop their productive forces (hand’s man, instruments, machines, energy,
technology, informatics, and so on). To a given development of productive
forces corresponds certain relations of production (that is to say, modes of
production). At this stage a social revolution can occur, which arises from
the conflict between relations of production and productive forces). At this
point we have the structure (relations of production: for instance, the capitalist/
worker relationship, master/slave relationship, and so on). On the base of
Marxian assumptions we can state that the structure gives its imprint to the
juridical and political superstructure (the State, Constitutions, Political parties,
Laws, and so on), to which correspond definite forms of social conscious-
ness (morals, arts, religion, literature, and so on). Obviously, this Marxian
scheme cannot be conceived as a deterministic one, 35 in fact the forms of
consciousness acts on superstructure that, in turn, supports relations of pro-
ductions that produce a further development of the productive forces. While
according to the Hegelian dialectics is the Idea that alienates itself in nature
and in history, according to the Marxian materialist idealism, instead, the
man-producer is alienated in respect to his own product.
At first glance, the thesis of an elusive idealism in Marx seems to be
untenable; nonetheless, what appears on the surface sometimes hides behind
some essential details that, prima facie, escape us. In order to better outline
this issue, we need to explain the difference between Gegenstand and Objekt.
As it is well known, Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, uses the term
“object” in a dual way: Objekt, that is to say what stands in front of the sub-
ject passively, where the subject has no relationship with it and Gegenstand,
that is to say what the subject creates (metaphorically) and put in front of
himself. Let’s read, in this respect, the first Marxian these in German:
Der Hauptmangel alles bisherigen Materialismus – den Feuerbach-
schen mit eingerechnet – ist, daß der Gegenstand, die Wirklichkeit,
Sinnlichkeit, nur unter der Form des Objekts oder der Anschauung
gefaßt wird; nicht aber als menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit, Praxis,
51
 nicht subjektiv. Daher geschah es, daß die tätige Seite, im Gegen-
satz zum Materialismus, vom Idealismus entwickelt wurde – aber
nur abstrakt, da der Idealismus natürlich die wirkliche, sinnliche
Tätigkeit als solche nicht kennt. Feuerbach will sinnliche, von den
Gedankenobjekten wirklich unterschiedene Objekte; aber er faßt die
menschliche Tätigkeit selbst nicht als gegenständliche Tätigkeit. Er
betrachtet daher im ‘Wesen des Christenthums’ nur das theoretische
Verhalten als das echt menschliche, während die Praxis nur in ihrer
schmutzig-jüdischen Erscheinungsform gefaßt und fixiert wird. Er
begreift daher nicht die Bedeutung der ‘revolutionären,’ der prak-
tisch-kritischen Tätigkeit.36
That way, the term Gegenstand is conceived by Marx as something that
stands in front of us, but at the same time we intertwine with it an active
relationship thanks to the transformative praxis, while the term Objekt refers
to the pure and unchangeable external object as it was conceived by the old
materialism (in synthesis, a passive acceptation of phenomenal reality). It is
clear that this distinction can be found in Fichte’s philosophy of praxis
(characterized by the dynamic Ego/non-Ego).
In fact, Fichte tries to come back to the Kantian Ich denke, but success-
ively he detached himself from the philosopher of Königsberg’s speculation.
According to Kant, the Ich denke is an empirical proposition, that is to say, it
expresses:
an undetermined proposition empirical intuition, that perception
[…] but it precedes experience, whose province it is to determine
an object of perception by means of the categories in relation to
time; and existence in this proposition is not a category, as it does
not apply to an undetermined given object, but only to one of which
we have a conception, and about which we wish to know whether
it does or does not exist, out of, and apart from this conception. An
undetermined perception signifies here merely something real that
has been given, only, however, to thought in general – but not as a
phenomenon, nor as a thing in itself (noumenon), but only as some-
thing that really exists, and is designated as such in the proposition,
‘I think.’ For it must be remarked that, when I call the proposition,
‘I think,’ an empirical proposition, I do not thereby mean that the
Ego in the proposition is an empirical representation; on the
contrary, it is purely intellectual, because it belongs to thought in
general. But without some empirical representation, which presents
to the mind material for thought, the mental act, ‘I think,’ would
not take place; and the empirical is only the condition of the
application or employment of the pure intellectual faculty.37
Kant, in antithesis to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, considers the “I think” as
the objective condition for the knowledge of objects, just because it acts, thanks
to its unifying activity, as a legislator of nature and not as its creator. 38 It
52
means that even though the “I think” acts as a synthetic mediator, nonethe-
less its activity will be always limited by (and to) phenomenal knowledge;
so, Kant’s “I think” is finite.
It is noteworthy that Fichte started his analysis taking into account Kant’s
“I think,” because the philosopher of Königsberg considered it the supreme
principle of knowledge. Fichte formulates, at the beginning of his speculation,
something similar, conceiving the Ego both the principle of the abstract and
formal knowledge and of the material knowledge (metaphorically). That way,
Fichte arrives to the conclusion that the Ego cannot be finite but infinite.
Anyway, Fichte, that had in his mind the unsolved Kantian issue of the
noumena (thinkable but not knowable), tries to solve Kantian dualism highlight-
ing the self-consciousness of the Ego, expressed by the well-known principle
of identity A=A. The Ego, according to Fichte, must put itself, otherwise it
would not be possible to think anything: “The truth is, you can not think any
thing at all without adding in thought your Ego as self-consciousness.”39 At
the same time, there is an external reality that stands in front of the Ego that
Fichte, instead, deduces from it in such a way that the Ego puts the non-Ego.
In this dialectics between Ego and non-Ego it lacks the absoluteness of the
Ego, just because it concretizes in the non-Ego (that is to say, a finite thing).
How to get out of this impasse? According to Fichte, the Ego opposes to the
divisible ego a divisible non-Ego, so the non-ego, opposed to the finite-ego,
is re-absorbed by the infinite Ego that puts it. This aspect of Fichtean phi-
losophy shares a lot of analogies with the philosophy of praxis of Marxian
Theses on Feuerbach. Scholars like Costanzo Preve, Diego Fusaro or Tom
Rockmore, have recently highlighted these analogies existing between Marx
and Hegel and Fichte.40
In this respect, for instance, Costanzo Preve stated that Marx “has never
overturned Hegelian dialectics, because he simply applied it to a new historical
subject that Hegel didn’t take into account, that is to say the capitalistic
mode of production;”41 so, an overturning of Hegelian dialectics has never
occurred in Marxian thought (an overturned cube is always a cube, as Preve
would say). In short, Marx didn’t limit himself to metabolize some essential
features of Hegelian (and Fichtean) idealism, since in his analysis of the
capitalistic mode of production the philosopher from Trier applies a specific
methodology taken from the conceptual nucleus present in Hegel’s Science
of Logic. In fact, with his scientific works like das Kapital and Grundrisse,
Marx abandons the Hegelian abstractness of the Spirit present in the Phenom-
enology (that he formally accepted) in favor of a scientific study of the
capitalistic mode of production; as we have already wrote, also in this case
we can see, once again, the specter of Hegel.

53
Discourse on the Method
In this paragraph we will analyze the passage from a Marx-philosopher to a
Marx-scientist. Obviously, Marx remained a philosopher for all his entire life,
because his enquiries, even though sometimes particular and sectional, were
always pointed towards a general conception of the world as it was expressed
in the “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
But the relevance of Marxian theories, as they are exposed in Das Kapital, is
based on a solid methodology that is totally absent in German idealism
(except for the Hegelian one).
As the Pole philosopher of science Leszek Nowak demonstrated, Marx, in
his economic works, used to apply the method called by Nowak of ideal-
ization and concretization. The main role of this scientific approach, takes its
conceptual nucleus from the Marxian need – in turn taken from Hegel – to
separate essence from appearance, in order to catch what is more essential in
a phenomena: that is, according to Nowak, the fundamental aim of science.
But this need can be completely developed only if we turn our gaze
toward what constitutes Nowak’s theoretical starting point, both simple and
innovative, that is to say his thesis about the difference between abstraction
and idealization.
In fact, differing from what has been usually been maintained by inductive
philosophies or even by the positivist and post-positivist ones, is the latter –
according to Nowak – the core of scientific method and not the first.
This difference is explained by Nowak in the following way:
A scientific law is basically a deformation of phenomena. It resem-
bles much more the logical structure of a caricature than that of
the generalization of facts. The crucial point for a proper under-
standing of the Idealizational procedure is that it differs fundamen-
tally from that of abstraction […]. Abstraction, i.e. the omitting of
properties, leads from individuals to sets of individuals (and from
sets of individuals to families of sets, etc.). Idealization does not
do this. Omission of the dimensions of physical bodies does not
yield any set of physical bodies but the mass-point. Abstraction is
generalization. Idealization is not.42
The difference between abstractive procedure and idealizing procedure con-
sists in the fact that, while the first is applied by human intellect obtaining
universal concepts from the knowledge of particular objects (by the general-
ization of empirical facts), by “idealization,” we proceed “enclosing between
parenthesis” some aspects of phenomenal reality that we consider secondary,
in order to take into consideration the essential factors of the phenomena under
investigation. Classic abstraction finds its roots in Aristotle’s works, that used
to consider it the building block of theoretical sciences like mathematics,

54
physics, and so on. However, Aristotelian abstraction used to refer to im-
mediate reality and that’s why it’s not able to catch the deep discrepancy
between essence and appearance.
According to Nowak mature science proceeds by systematic idealizations,
so science works as follows: (1) we introduce idealizing assumptions, (2) we
formulate idealizing laws and (3) we gradually concretize and “approximate”
these laws. Nowak finds out this methodology also in Galileo Galilei, Isaac
Newton, Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, and also in Marxian critique of
political economy.
The methodological reconstruction made by Nowak is extremely important
in order to solve the vexata quaestio Hegel-Marx. By comparing Marxian
juvenile works with the mature ones, we can notice Marx’s abandon of the
Hegelian conception of the Spirit in favor of the methodology present in the
Science of Logic (in effect, Marx himself reaffirmed its relevance for the
dialectical development of his economic theories).
Nowak realizes that the theory of value exposed in Das Kapital is an
idealizational statement: in fact this theory says that “the prices of commod-
ities are formed with respect to their values (the amount of socially indis-
pensable time to produce these commodities). But that holds only under
certain conditions.”43 Let’s see these conditions. In effect, the market prices
of commodities correspond with their values only if supply and demand
equilibrate each other. Nowak schematizes this statement that way: “if x is a
commodity and the difference between the demand for x and the supply of x
equals to zero, then the price of the commodity x depends in a linear way on
the value of that commodity.”44 Then Nowak reduces this statement to this
formula:
(1) if C(x) and D(x) – S(x) = 0, then P(x) = l(V(x))
“where C(x) means that x is a commodity, D stands for the demand for x, S
stands for its supply, P is the price of x and V its value; l denotes a linear
function.”45 We can see that in the statement (1) there is an idealizing assump-
tion, that is to say D(x) – S(x) = 0. As Nowak specifies, “this does not hold
in reality, because changes of demand and supply are ordinary phenomenon
in a free competition economy. In other words, there is no economic system
which would have the demand and supply of any commodity balanced all
the time,” in fact the statement (1) “does not describe the phenomena of
creating prices, since the latter, as Marx perfectly knew, occur in a situation
of a permanent imbalance between supply and demand. And Marx does not
only formulate the statement (1) […] but even calls it the basic law for capital-
istic economy!” 46 In short, Marx, according to Nowak’s reconstruction of
Marxian economic works, used to formulate idealizing statements in order to
expose the laws of capitalistic economy but, furthermore, Marx concretizes
55
these idealizing statements in order to pass from idealized conditions to less
idealized conditions, closer to reality through the already mentioned procedure
of concretization.
In this respect, Nowak turned his gaze to what scientists do, just because
the most part of orthodox Marxists used to claim the originality of Marxism
without specifying in what this originality consists of.47
That’s why Nowak criticized the pseudo-scientific approach based not on
the explanation of Marxian scientific concepts but rather on a jungle of quo-
tations. So, according to Nowak, a methodological reconstruction of Marxian
method was necessary and in doing so he tried, first of all, to give an answer
to the most important questions concerning the contemporary methodology
of the empirical sciences, that is to say:
a. What is the methodology by which laws are introduced in the empirical
sciences?
b. How the observed phenomena are explained?
c. What is the procedure of introduction of theoretical concepts?
d. What is the base used to connect laws with experience and in particular
d1. How laws are controlled?
d2. How theoretical terms that occur in them are connected with the obser-
vational terms?
e. How the new laws are introduced in order to oust the old ones?48
According to Nowak, we can answer these questions through a reconstruction
of Marxian methodology as we can find it in Marxian economic works, which
is the same methodology applied in physics many years before by Galileo. In
effect, Marx and Engels never explained their idea of science in a very clear
and systematic way, but nonetheless we can notice that Marx used to sustain
an anti-inductive conception of science. Let’s read this Marxian quotation,
taken from the Grundrisse, concerning the method of political economy:
When considering a given country from the standpoint of political
economy, we begin with its population, the division of the popu-
lation into classes, town and country, sea, the different branches of
production, export and import, annual production and consumption,
commodity prices, etc. It would seem right to start with the real
and concrete, with the actual presupposition, e.g. in political eco-
nomy to start with the population, which forms the basis and the
subject of the whole social act of production. Closer consideration
shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction if,
for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed.
These classes in turn remain an empty phrase if one does not know
the elements on which they are based, e.g. wage labor, capital, etc.
These presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For
example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value,
56
 money, price, etc. If one were to start with population, it would be
a chaotic conception of the whole, and through closer definition
one would arrive analytically at increasingly simple concepts; from
the imagined concrete, one would move to more and more tenuous
abstractions until one arrived at the simplest determinations. From
there it would be necessary to make a return journey until one
finally arrived once more at population, which this time would be
not a chaotic conception of a whole, but a rich totality of many
determinations and relations. The first course is the one taken by
political economy historically at its inception. The 17th-century
economists, for example, always started with the living whole, the
population, the nation the State, several States, etc., but analysis
always led them in the end to the discovery of a few determining
abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, value,
etc. As soon as these individual moments were more or less clearly
deduced and abstracted, economic systems were evolved which
from the simple [concepts], such as labour, division of labour, need,
exchange value, advanced to the State, international exchange and
world market. The latter is obviously the correct scientific method.
The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determi-
nations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore appears
as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point,
although it is the real starting point, and thus also the starting point
of perception and conception. The first procedure attenuates the
comprehensive visualisation to abstract determinations, the second
leads from abstract determinations by way of thinking to the repro-
duction of the concrete.49
Marx prefers the second procedure because he conceives the abstraction dif-
ferently from what has been upheld by an inductive or empiricist way; in fact,
in Marx the concrete is not a starting point but rather a result. The concrete is
concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the
diverse. In this respect, the term “abstraction” is not something opposed to
real life: in this case the abstraction has a gnoseological function; it aims to
select, from the immense collection of data, the essential elements of the
phenomena investigated. However, abstraction is not conceived as an end in
itself, because we need to make a synthesis of those elements abstracted from
the phenomena in order to recompose them in a unity, that is to say the unity
of the diverse.
But how we can conciliate this anti-inductive conception with the Marxian
statement according to which praxis is the criterion of truth (in this case, of
the conceptual one)? Nowak is aware of this difficulty and that’s why he
claims that the Marxian concept of praxis “includes also the scientist’s praxis:
the execution of observations, the experiments, and so on.”50 Hence, Marxian
praxis presupposes a theoretical knowledge, so its notion of praxis is com-
57
pletely different from the neo-positivist one, because the latter is based on pure
observation. In fact, according to Marx, the mere description of the observed
economic facts cannot conduct us to the discovery of the regularities con-
cerning the phenomena investigated, and that’s why in order to expose the
laws of political economy «we have to abstract from its obstacles».51
The fundamental aim of Marxian methodology is to catch the essential
aspect of a given phenomena by the procedures of idealization and concreti-
zation. Thanks to the reconstruction made by Nowak we can also understand
the real meaning of the following Marxian quotation: “All science would be
superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly
coincided.”52
As we have previously said, the specter of Hegel appears once again in
Marxian speculation, in fact Marxian methodology is based on two essential
elements of Hegel’s Science of Logic (very often considered, wrongly, as a
pernicious dependence): first of all, the need to separate essence from appear-
ance, and secondly, an anti-inductive logic based on a different way of con-
ceiving the procedure of abstraction.53 In fact, according to Hegel, in opposition
to the classic Aristotelian abstraction, “abstractive thought, therefore, is not
to be regarded as the mere disregarding of a sensuous material which does
not suffer in the process any impairment of reality; it is rather the sublation
and reduction of that material as a mere appearance to the essential, which
is manifested only in the concept.”54 Marx, exactly like Hegel, conceives the
abstraction as the reduction of the matter to the essential through an active
transformation of the sensuous material by the intellect, in order to catch
what lies behind the phenomenal reality; so, as we can see, Marx inherits
from Hegel both his dialectics and the idea of science.

Conclusion
Contrary to what has been usually maintained, we identified a lot of Hegel-
ian and Fichtean themes in Marx’s works, who elaborated a real philosophical
science (philosophische Wissenschaft) in the wake of Hegel and Fichte. None-
theless, because of several hermeneutic mistakes, the peculiarity of Marxian
critique to Hegel has never been interpreted the right way and in this respect
the systematization of Marxian thought made by Friedrich Engels played an
essential role. In fact, Marx never exposed a doctrinal system while Engels
diffused Marxian thought as if it was a monolithic and systematic doctrine.
Further, Engels interpreted the history of philosophy with the following di-
chotomy: idealism/materialism. That way Engels forced all the Marxist inter-
preters to deny the Hegelian legacy in an aprioristic and hasty way. Marxian
philosophy is connected with its critique of capitalist society, where this

58
critique coincides with a philosophy that aims to investigate those overall
and holistic aspects of society. In this respect Preve rightly said that:
Marxian critique of political economy is not an ‘economy’ in the
sense of Smith and Ricardo, but it is a ‘philosophical science’ in
the sense of Fichte and Hegel, because it critically asks the holistic
set of capitalistic society, along with its various religious, political,
sociological and cultural aspects organically interconnected.55
In this essay we tried to highlight the idealist nature of Marxian philosophy
(as the philosopher Giovanni Gentile did for the first time56) and even though
Marx himself said that he was a materialist philosopher in order to criticize
every form of idealism in philosophy, we can use, against Marx, his own
hermeneutic principle affirming that we cannot judge a man by his own idea
of himself. At the end of the day, Marx acted toward Hegel exactly in a
Hegelian way: he overcame those aspects of Hegelian philosophy that he con-
sidered unilateral conserving, at the same time, the positive ones57 (Aufhebung).

NOTES

1. On German Idealism, see Beiser (2002), Hammer (2007), and Limnatis (2008).
2. Hegel (1995), p. 430.
3. See Kant (1855).
4. According to Gary Dorrien, Hegel didn’t try to scatter the entire Kantian
construction, but rather he “synthesized the riches of Kantian and post-Kantian ideal-
ism,” Dorrien (2012), p. 200.
5. On Hegelian theory of spiritual property, see Bauer (2006), pp. 51–91.
6. Hegel (1977). On Hegel’s Phenomenology see Kojève (1980).
7. Hegel (1991), § 79.
8. Nuzzo (2010), p. 15.
9. Hegel (1991), § 81.
10. Hyppolite (1974), p. 230. Obviously, from this point of view, Hegel’s logic
is also an ontology: see de Boer (2004), pp. 787–822.
11. See Burbidge (2007).
12. Hegel (2010), p. 33.
13. See Vico (1978). In this respect, the analogies between Hegel and Vico have
been noted by the Italian neoidealist philosopher Benedetto Croce: See Croce (1913),
p. 51.
14. Aristotle (1999).
15. See Carlson (2007).
16. See Hegel (1928).
17. Hegel (2008), p. xix.
18. See Feuerbach (1967).
19. See Marx-Engels (1927), pp. 401–553.
20. See Marx-Engels (2004), pp. 46–47.
21. Marx (1972), pp. 27–28.
59
 22. See Hegel (1953).
23. Marx-Engels (1975), p. 85.
24. Ibid., p. 93.
25. See Weyher (2012), pp. 341–363.
26. Patterson (2009), p. 58.
27. See Borbone (2012).
28. Preve (2009), p. 82.
29. Fusaro (2009), p. 99.
30. This kind of anthropologization of the gods can be also found in Epicurus,
who stated that “The man who denies the gods of the many is not impious, but rather
who ascribes to the gods the opinions of the many,” Epicurus (1994), pp. 28–29.
31. Marx ([1886] 1996), p. 82
32. Marx (1974), p. 126.
33. See Berlin (1959), p. 121.
34. Marx (1975), pp. 425–426.
35. Many philosophers, in effect, claimed that Marxian thought was too deter-
ministic but, in reality, Marx never accepted a teleological and deterministic view of
life. See, for example, his doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, where
Marx refused the deterministic atomism of Democritus in favor of Epicurus’ clinamen
(that is to say the spontaneous microscopic swerving of atoms). On this topic in the
light of German idealism see McIvor (2008), pp. 395–419.
36. Marx (1969), p. 533.
37. Kant (1885), p. 249–250 footnote.
38. As Kant stated in his Critique of the Power of Judgment: “For the faculty of
cognition only the understanding is legislative, if (as must be the case if it is con-
sidered for itself, without being mixed up with the faculty of desire), it is related as a
faculty of a theoretical cognition to nature, with regard to which alone (as appear-
ance) it is possible for us to give laws a priori concepts of nature, which are, strictly
speaking, pure concepts if the understanding,” Kant (2010), pp. 65–66.
39. Fichte (1808), p. 71.
40. See Fusaro (2009); Preve (2004) and Preve (2007a); Rockmore (2002), p. 66,
and Rockmore (1980).
41. Preve (2007a), p. 80. On the relationship between Marx and Hegelian dia-
lectics see also Fineschi (2006) and Finelli (2004).
42. Nowak (1992), 10–11.
43. Nowak (1980), p. 3.
44. Ibidem.
45. Ibidem.
46. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
47. See Coniglione (2010), p. 226.
48. See Nowak (1980).
49. Marx (1986), pp. 37–38.
50. Nowak (1977), p. 16.
51. Marx (1968), p. 441.
52. Marx, (1972), p. 228.
53. See Coniglione (1990), pp. 61–88.
60
 54. Hegel (2010), p. 519.
55. Preve (2007b), p. 64.
56. See Gentile (1958).
57. In my opinion, Luca Basso is completely wrong when he says that Marx
“does not understand Aufhebung in Hegelian terms as an overcoming of the one-
sidedness of the preceding moments that conserves the positivity of their positing.
For him, it is, rather, an abrupt rupture with the present and a fracture that cannot be
rejoined” (Basso, 2012, p. 149).

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