MARXISM: THE EVOLUTION OF UNDERSTANDING OF HEGEL’S POLITICAL ONTOLOGY

Abstract

The article deals with the evolution of understanding of Hegel’s political ontology. The author describes and analyzes parts of Hegel’s theory that were used by Marx and his followers for the formation of the materialist view of the development of human history. Marx was among the first who popularized the rejection of Absolute in a new type of philosophizing. Many thinkers concentrated their attention on the issue of Hegel’s dialectics in the mature philosophy of Marx, but the influence of Hegel on Marx showed itself not only in this aspect. The author tries to make clear that connections between two mentioned theories are much deeper. Hegel had with Marx much in common. Both of them believed that a human becomes a human solely in interaction with other people. Moreover, they rejected the possibility of positive social and individual changes beyond social interaction. Marx criticized Hegel and his followers for maintaining illusions about the fact that the world is an Idea. In addition, he ascribed to Hegel’s thoughts that the course of human history is determined by ideas and concepts, especially philosophical and religious ones. We must admit that this is a serious distortion of the Hegelian theory. Hegel really believed that the history of humankind is a story of the development of the Mind or the Spirit. But in certain parts of his system Hegel emphasized the inalienability of the Spirit from human activity in the objective world. The Spirit for Hegel is the development of consciousness of individuals, their selfrealization. The history of the Spirit embodies itself in objective social forms that are constructed, destroyed and reconstructed by humankind. Thanks to dialectical mechanisms embedded in the development of consciousness and history, the activity of Ideas is the interaction between self-knowledge, self-actualization and their practical implementation, which always has a set of goals to be achieved. Achieving goals leads to a new level of self-knowledge and the emergence of new goals. Spirit always acts through the social world (even in the case of historical personalities). Hegel believed that the accumulation of knowledge and purposeful activity of people can be considered a contribution to the collective activity of nations, cultures, even the humanity as a whole. Collective activity accumulates a reflection of oneself, as people articulate what is happening, fix it in the form of traditions. So neither Marx nor Feuerbach, but Hegel was the first who created the tendency of removing concept of God from the structure of philosophizing.