Hegel: Wrestling with Desire

Abstract

For Lenin (cited in Fine 2001, 72), Hegel’s influence on Marx was so obvious that he claimed ‘it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital… without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of [Hegel’s] … Logic’. However, the extent of this influence has been and continues to be the focus of much debate, as evidenced by the works of Althusser (1996), Arthur (2004b), Colletti (1973), Levine (2012), and Reuten (2000). I argue that an exploration of Marx’s theory of human nature necessarily involves a consideration of Hegel’s work and that Marx drew on Hegel’s thought throughout his life in two respects. Firstly, Marx’s dialectic was founded in Hegel’s works on logic: in particular, Marx’s references to ‘objective being’ in his early works (1975e, 390) and to an ‘ensemble of relations’ in the theses on Feuerbach (1975g, 423) are best understood with reference to Hegel’s concept of being. Scholars such as Arthur (2003, 2004a, 2004b) and Levine (2012) have only recently concentrated on the influence of the earlier parts of the Science of Logic, where Hegel reviewed the traditional arguments regarding substance. No one, excepting Ollman (1976, 2003), appears to have closely read Marx’s approach with regard to those parts of Hegel’s works. In the second instance, I argue that key passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — namely, the ‘master/servant’ dialectic and the ‘unhappy consciousness’ — suggest the foundations for Marx’s confidence that the experience of alienation would promote ‘species consciousness’ (i.e., a more interdependent understanding of the self).