Re: Of Spirit and Fire (and Ghosts)

Ha :). No, I haven't read _Spectres of Marx_ or _Das Kapital_. I've
read Hegel's _Elements of the Philosophy of Right_, Marx's _Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right_, the Cambridge Companion to Hegel, then
moved on into Lukacs, and then on into the Frankfurt school.

So I'm pretty unfamiliar with the later Marx, anyway. There's no
question that Marx appropriated Hegel's dialect, but the _Critique_
didn't seem to appropriate the transcendental elements of it. In fact,
it was pretty hostile to them. Same thing with science. You can have
all these things, along with Material and Class, and still think Man is
a Piece of Meat. I think orthodox Marxism was pretty committed to
materialism, and the Frankfurt School guys disliked orthodox Marxism for
that reason -- not that they were immaterialists, but that they didn't
appreciate the limitations imposed by any orthodoxy, including
materialism.

I know I have holes in my reading, though, and I've seen different
pieces on the web that talk about transcendentalism and Marx, but it
seems that the mind is held up as the transcendent -- there's nothing
immaterial about it.

Now, you can argue that class, etc., replaces the immaterial
transcendent (such as God) in Marx and serves as an organizing principle
of his thought (Stirner argued just that, in fact, from an Egoist
perspective), but this is hardly anything like Hegel's Absolute Spirit
as I understand it.

Jim

Omlor@aol.com wrote:

> Nope, Jim,
>
> A close reading of both the early manuscripts and the later Kapital
> suggests to me that Marx may have written about wanting to divest
> Hegel of all that fabulous nonsense, but he did quite the opposite --
> he thoroughly reinscribed it into and through his own work in the form
> of a number of other transcendental figures, including some borrowed
> from Hegel (like "Science" and "Dialectics") and some of his own
> creation (like Material and Class). They haunt his work like a
> spirit, through and through.
>
> But you already knew that, didn't you? Because you've read Specters
> of Marx. :)
>
> --John

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Received on Tue Aug 5 21:40:02 2003