Die "Verwirklichung der Philosophie," Subjektivität und Verobjektivierung im Denken des jungen Marx (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 357 Katharina Comoth. Die "'Verwirklichung der Philosophie, ""Subjektivitiit und Verobjektivierung im Denken desjungen Marx. Bonn: Bouvier, 1975. Pp. vii + 55. Katharina Comoth presents to us a polemic against polemics with her study of the development of the thought of the young Marx from the nominalist philosophy of his dissertation notes to the political negation of philosophy in its actualization. Her study is unsympathetic to the totalitarianism she attempts to show to be implicit in Marx's thought, and comprises an appeal to return to philosophy free of dogma, which seeks truth rather than power. Though much of her criticism is well founded (based on selected quotations), I cannot agree with her conclusions, and l believe them to be based on an incomplete understanding of Marx's vision in his early works. Comoth begins her critique by pointing out the basic problematic methodological relationship between the Scholasticism of Aquinas (in which philosophy served as the handmaiden of theology) and Marxism (in which philosophy serves as the handmaiden of ideology); each incorporates both the speculative and the practical; the "sacred doctrine" of each stands above all ancillary sciences. Their concepts, she says, are absolute without being universal. She points out that Marx acclaimed Duns Scotus the "scholastic materialist" and claimed that nominalism is the principal element of materialism: universals are but names, and truth resides only in individuals. Only the isolated can be absolutely stipulated. The distortion of Aristotelian metaphysics is, Comoth claims, complete in nominalism. Ideology is nothing more than a sophism of practical reason, except that the medieval and modern functionaire seeks more than sophistic rhetoric; he seeks the absolute actualization of his dogma. She points out that idiologia contains not idea but rather idia, the particular, deduced, abstracted. The classical philologists have translated idiologia as "ideology" and created an apparent context. How Comoth has proved, here and further on, a necessary logical identification of nominalism with totalitarian ideology is not clear to me, but it is clear thdt she is trying to establish more than a de facto identity. After laying the foundation for her critique of Marx's nominalism (materialism), Comoth begins a critique of the Hegelian (dialectical) aspect of Marxism. The methodological origin of Hegel's idealism lies in theology: philosophy has no object but God and is rational theology; truth serves God. Hegel set out to create a rational mythology in the service of ideas. Philosophy must, he said, become mythology to be understood by the "Volk." Truth exists only within a subjective system; only within a system is "true knowing" possible. This, according to Comoth, is the idealistic component of Marxism. The actualization of the absolute abstract is Hegel's "Truth," "Reality," or "Concrete." Comoth's critique of Hegel is that this is a perversion of Plato, a closed synthetic system rather than Plato's open hypothesis, resulting in the identity of truth with its becoming. The "rational"-"organic" totalitarian historical concept of "absolute idealism" makes the positing of meaning in history by free human beings impossible. Rather, she says, quoting Jacob Burckhardt, history is the "place of freedom" and has to do with the incalculable changes caused by humans. Comoth now turns to the task of tracing the development of Marx's thought from the nominalism of his early dissertation notes to the overthrow of philosophy in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. For this task she quotes so extensively that more than half of the remaining study is quotation, but it is to her credit that she does present some heretofore not widely studied material that casts light on the early development of Marx's thought. Marx, in his dissertation notes, interpreted Greek philosophy from the viewpoint of modern nominalism, and in his synthesis of Epicurus, Hegel, and Feuerbach he founded the "science of self-consciousness." In order to free himself from the hostile-to-nature and a priori perspective of rationalism he turned to the physics of the "natural scientists"--Epicurus, the Stoics, and the skeptics-who together formulated the perfect construction of self-consciousness. The 358 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY atom, he said, should be the unmediated form of the concept. Marx proclaimed that the exchange of Hegel...