History of Modern Philosophy
Hegel to Marx to Dewey-The Creation of a New World
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Philosophy
Lesson: 3-8
Genre: Lecture
Track: 03
Dictation Name: RR261B3
Location/Venue:
Year: 1974
Our subject this morning is Hegel to Marx to Dewey the Creation of a New World. As a result of the developments we have thus far analyzed, for modern philosophy thus far the only real world became the autonomous mind of man, and second the problem of philosophy was shifted from knowing and understanding the world, to remaking it in man’s own image. Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, 1798 – 1857, caught the spirit of modern philosophy in his formulation of (?). You are no doubt familiar with his division of history into three stages. Very briefly, he said that the first stage was the theological or the fictitious, in which men were concerned with the meaning of things, and hence this was the age of religion. The second age was the metaphysical, or the abstract era when men were still concerned with meaning, with understanding.
But with the birth of third age, the scientific or (positivist?) men, he said, “Have now abandoned this quest for meaning, because they have come to realize there is no meaning, and they have replaced meaning with methodology. Not meaning but scientific workability thus became paramount. The idea of meaning was abandoned by modern philosophy as irrelevant. Meaning only existed in the mind of man, and man therefore was to apply his meaning to the world, not look for a correspondence between his logic and outer reality.
The great figure in philosophy after Kant was George Wilhelm Frederic Hegel, 1770 – 1831. Now it is ironic that Hegel is sometimes presented as one of the great forces of reaction. Actually, under the façade of traditionalism, whereby Hegel rose to great influence, he was perhaps the most revolutionary figure in the entire history of philosophy. Men who’ve come after him have merely developed one façade or another of Hegel’s philosophy, so that I believe we can say that Hegel was far more radical than his followers such as Max Sterner, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Marcuse, and others.
What we find in Hegel is that the language is so used, that a traditionalist, someone who is for God and country can find everything he wants and feels very content with it. But when its content is properly understood it is the most revolutionary of doctrines. His doctrine centers on his idea of Geist, mind or spirit. Spirit or mind is history, man’s history. History in Hegel is not God’s act as it has been in Christian philosophy and theology, but man’s act. Not God but the mind of man, or reason is the sovereign of the world.
Hegel wrote, and I quote: “The only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history, is the simple conception of reason. That reason is the sovereign of the world, that the history of the world therefore presents us with a rational process.” Now if I may stop there, a traditionalist may read this and say: “Yes, God is reason.” So he could agree, without realizing the radical implications of Hegel, that reason is the autonomous mind of man.
“This conviction and intuition is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such. In that of Philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by speculative cognition, that Reason — and this term may here suffice us, without investigating the relation sustained by the Universe to the Divine Being, — is Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form, — that which sets this Material in motion. On the one hand, Reason is the substance of the Universe; viz. that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence.”
How devout that sounds. Almost like Saint Paul saying: “In God we move, and live, and have our being.” Except that Hegel is talking as a Kantian. So it is the mind of man of which he speaks. On the other hand it is the infinite energy of the universe, because reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything but a mere ideal, a mere intention. Having its place outside reality, nobody knows where, something separate and abstract in the heads of certain human beings. Certain human beings, we will come to that. It is the infinite complex of things, their entire essence and truth.
Reason for Hegel is the divine in man. it is the perfect embodiment which finds itself and realizes itself in the state. Matter, the outer world that science previously was so greatly concerned about and which people associated with reality, is governed by gravity, Hegel said. By a force outside itself. So that, this is not the important realm. On the other hand, as he said in contrasting matter with spirit, or reason, “This on the contrary may be defined as that which has its center, in itself. It has not a unity outside itself, but has already found it; it exists in and with itself. Matter has its essence out of self, spirit is self contained existence.”
Now, this is freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not, I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. Now the traditional doctrine of God in Christian theology asserts the aseity of God. Aseity, A S E I T Y. Which means the self-existence, the self being of God, that God owes nothing to anything else, nor is it dependent on anything else, that God is self existence, so that what Hegel is now saying is that man, the autonomous mind of man, has aseity. It has freedom, self existence, and therefore the goal of philosophy is to bring man to a realization of his aseity, his freedom, to be dependent on nothing.
We can see therefore, that existentialism definitely lies ahead. Because what existentialism says is, that man must live without any influence from history, from state, church, school, parents, but purely out of the biology of his own being. Then only is he free, only then does he realize himself existentially. He does not allow anyone to force a nature and a pattern on him. Thus the aseity of man replaces the aseity of God.
Man is cut loose from the world of God and of matter, and politics becomes the key area of human activity. There was a reason for this; elsewhere at that time in particular as economic theory was beginning to come into its own, the philosophers felt that there was a compulsion of law. The economists were busy formulating laws in terms of which man had to live, and therefore the modern philosophers refused to deal with economics at all. They touched on every other area of human thought, but they stayed away from economics, because freedom was basic to their faith, and therefore politics was their chosen field.
Because politics they felt was free from compelling external laws, free from anything like the laws formulated by economists, free from gravity, offering freedom to man to play God, to re-make the world. The state therefore was the key, and hence Hegel said: “The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.” The essence of reason or spirit is self determination. When man realizes this and becomes truly free, when he cuts himself off from God and the external world, from the idea of law, outside of himself, then he becomes a law unto himself, and the goal of humanity is this ideal state, total anarchism in which every man becomes law unto himself. You begin to see Marx, do you not.
But of course before this can be realized that state is the divine idea, and the men of reason as they rule through the state, here you have the dictatorship of the proletariat, lead mankind into this state of total freedom.
As Hegel, went on to say; ‘All men as perfect embodiments of reason then will need no state.’ And I quote: “An existent,” That is, any existing person, “Of any sort embodying the free will, that is what right is.” Right therefore is by definition, is freedom as idea. Right is freedom, and freedom is total self determination. The logic therefore means this goal, this post historical man who is beyond history, who is totally free, who is never determined by anything outside of himself. And so the dictatorship era, the state as the divine ideal, the state as the actuality of the divine idea, to use his phrase, is that which leads man, who is still unduly influenced by things outside of himself, and to use a modern term, has not become existential, to lead him into this total freedom. This is why education has worked, being Hegelian. To make man rootless, to separate him from allegiance to the family and to the past.
In my Messianic Character of American Education I deal with how statist education in this country from Horace man to the present has worked towards this goal, it is Hegelian in essence. Now we can see how as a result of Hegel’s thinking, nationalism gained a great boost. The free self determination of national states. But beyond that the goal of anarchism, the free self determination of man, history now became God. The key to power is self determination. We should not be surprised therefore that in the 1960’s it was Hegelians like Marcuse who had a profound influence on the modern student as well as Sartre and others, and the one ethical idea that comes through loud and clear as you read the literature of the 60’s is that the ethical idea is freedom. Freedom. Morality and total freedom are identified. Because how can man be totally self determining if the ethical idea involves any kind of thou shalt not from outside of himself?
Now Karl Marx, 1818-1883 was Hegelian to the core. Not more radical, simply applying Hegel to a particular sphere. Reason was now identified with material processes, with dialectical materialism. Reason determines history for Marx, and for reason of course, with Hegel, he means the autonomous mind of man. The third of Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach declared, and I quote: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.” In Robert Owen, for example. “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
Now in a sense Marx at one and the same time talked about the economic determination of man in society, and on the other hand here denies this as a materialistic doctrine. Well, supposedly Marx was the materialist; how to explain this contradiction? Well indeed man until he finds his freedom is being determined by his economic environment, but when he realizes himself in this Hegelian sense, then he is not determined by his environment, by church state and community because the dictatorship of the proletariat will lead him out of such allegiances into his perfect freedom. So that as he comes into this perfect freedom he needs nothing. No one outside himself. Man will be able to be all things whatever his reason chooses. And so you have the very absurd statement of Marx which you will find in the volume of his early writings edited by Bottomore, and which Gary North in his book: Marx’s Religion of Revolution deals with at some length, namely that when this perfect freedom of man is achieved, when man becomes self existent, then he will be able in the morning to be a cattleman if he chooses or an expert fly caster, a brain surgeon in the afternoon and a concert violinist in the evening.
Now of course this strikes us as totally ridiculous, but if man is ultimate and if man has total capacity within himself, and if sovereignty and ultimacy reside within man, all it takes therefore is to strip man of the chains which bind him for man to flower and to become the new God of creation, whose potentiality is unlimited. Thus Marx declared and I quote: “I am nothing, but I must be everything.” and being the ultimate, the self existent, the sovereign being in creation, this was logical. Man was to realize himself. Man must remake himself, past history must be destroyed. There is nothing higher than man or beyond man, or any law other than the will of man. and therefore as he declared in thesis 10 and 11 of his Thesis on Feuerbach, The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society. The standpoint of the new is human society or socialized humanity. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point however, is to change it.
No more nonsense about understanding the world. Man must understand himself. There is nothing out there to be understood, man must understand himself, know his will, and then impose it upon a world of brute, meaningless, factuality. He imposes meaning upon the world, it does not exist there.
A new time, a new history, must begin. And so Marx declared: “The only practically possible liberation of Germany is liberation from the point of view of the theory which proclaims man to be the highest essence of man. In Germany emancipation from the middle ages is possible only as emancipation from the partial victories over the middle ages as well. In Germany no kind of bondage can be shattered without every kind of bondage being shattered, the fundamental Germany can not revolutionize without revolutionizing from the foundation. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man, the head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. The philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat. The proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality. When all inner requisites are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be proclaimed by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.”
That is, the French Revolution will be developed to its fulfillment, the whole of the past will be destroyed. Hegel had said in fragments of his System; “The triumph of man will come when man elevates himself from being a finite being to and infinite being. If you want to read a great deal of very down to earth, very common level Hegelianism, turn to Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman to a great extent is Hegel popularized. Walt Whitman began one poem by saying: “I believe in you, my soul.” In another poem, entitled Roaming in Thought after Reading Hegel, Whitman wrote: “Roaming in thought over the universe, I saw the little that is good steadily hastening to immortality, and the vast all that is called evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.” Whitman after reading Hegel also in 1860 wrote a poem entitled Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances of the idea of modern philosophy, that there is no reality out there seems like a terrible thing to doubt, he says. But, Whitman went on to say in this poem: “The epistemological question is meaningless in the face of existential experiences.’ And practically, what this meant he said: “As long as I have my experiences with my male lovers, what difference does it make to me whether there is any reality out there or not?” And so he continues: “To me these and the like of these are curiously answered.” (Such questions, epistemological.) “By my lovers, my dear friends, when he whom I love travels with me or sits after a long while, holding me by the hand; when the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surrounds us and pervades us, then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom. I am silent, I require nothing further, I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave, but I walk or sit indifferent. I am satisfied. He ahold my mind, has completely satisfied me.”
Philosophy you see now had become precisely what the hippies summed it up as being. ‘Do it yourself, do your own thing.’ The hippy movement caught the spirit of modern philosophy; do your own thing. That sums up in one expression the conclusion of all of modern philosophy. Every man his own God, and his own universe.
John Dewey was a Hegelian to the core, something that Americans do not often talk about; they seem to assume that Dewey was a great and original thinker when really his thought was an application of Hegelianism. And as a result we have today a thoroughly Hegelianized population because Dewey’s philosophy has been basic to our statist education for a couple of generations now.
Dewey, incidentally, regarded Whitman as the seer of democracy. For Dewey both reason and man are instrumental in the creation of the great society. When the great God, history, is to be realized in a united, socialized mankind. Man, held Dewey, would not be truly man until then. As against the Biblical view of changing man by conversion and thereby changing the world because men are changed, Dewey held to changing the world through action, social action. As a result we see today the results of his activist children in the events of the last 15 years. For Dewey there could be no law, no standard beyond man. In his A Common Faith, his Yale lectures of 1934, He spoke out sharply against Biblical faith and said that it was totally incompatible with Democracy. It was a totally aristocratic religion. Because it spoke of the difference between the saved and the lost, heaven and hell, good and evil, right and wrong, and this was being anti democratic to make such distinctions. There could be no law, no standard beyond man, only totally democracy.
To say that there could be any such distinction as good and evil would be to subordinate man by coercion to an idea outside of himself. But in Dewey’s world, everyone will not be doing as he pleases. Dewey does not mean that you and I have freedom to go our own way and do our own thing, in terms of say, Von Miesian economics, or Orthodox Christianity, or Libertarian principles or whatever you may believe. Because for him, after Hegel, the basic freedom is the freedom of the mind, of reason. And therefore if you are not pure reason in terms of this Hegelian, Marxist, Dewey-ite definition, therefore you are not free, and you can be coerced into freedom you see.
And as a result, when Dewey speaks of faith in man it is not faith in man as such, but faith in philosophical man, man as reason. Perhaps it may be too cynical to say that what he does mean is ‘faith in man made in the image of John Dewey’, but certainly the implication does come through to me that I am not free, unless I am 100% in agreement with John Dewey.
Now, Nietzsche calls such a person superman, Plato the philosopher kings, Rousseau spoke of the general will that came to a consensus in an elite group, and for Dewey the same was true. Infallibility was ascribed to an element in the population that represented by their own self definition, pure reason. At this point we would have to say that Nietzsche was much more honest. Because Nietzsche made it clear that as against God, he intended to be God and claim all the prerogatives against God.
He said at one point: “But that I may reveal my heart entirely to you my friends, if there were Gods, how could I endure it to be no God? Therefore, there are no Gods.” Now in a sense, this is still the problem of philosophy. There are too many Gods, now. The philosophers, and their children. Each doing their own thing. If, man as he becomes self existent realizes himself as pure reason, and breaks all the bounds, the chains of law, becomes thereby a God and is beyond any law, beyond the jurisdiction of anyone and capable therefore of ruling for the rest of us, so that he might make us freely and we can all live freely in a world of total anarchism, then indeed we face a very serious problem, in that Gods now walk the earth, claiming that they have the right of total power, and we have no right against them because by definition every idea we hold makes it clear that we are not free and we must be coerced into freedom.
The whole direction of modern political thought is precisely this. Moreover, they have in effect said that we have no standard to judge them. There is no means now, distinction, no law, no standard, only methodology. What is good? What is growth? There is no way of defining these. And by principle we are incapable of defining them because we are ruled out of court, because we will not recognize that the autonomous mind of man is his own law.
The new world of philosophy you see, has become as small as the mind of man. But no the mind of all men, only the mind of elite men, who are the self constituted rulers into whose hands the future should be placed. In every strand of modern philosophy, and political theory this is the implication, and the result of course we have seen everywhere in the modern world. But the results of this will determine our tomorrows. Because the implications of modern philosophy are now visible in the form of totalitarian claims against all of us.
Now for instruction I’ve left time for questions, are there any questions now about what we have covered today?
[Audience Member] Could you comment about what you said about (?)
[Rushdoony] Ahh, yes, one of the key figures in theological circles is Bultman, with his ideas of demythologizing religion. Bultman’s philosophical background is in this tradition, and one of the things that Bultman does that causes a great deal of trouble to anyone who reads Bultman, and I do not recommend reading him; it’s an exercise in frustration. He reserves the right you see, as an autonomous man, and this is a problem in more and more modern thinkers, to use terms with totally different content every time. So that as you go from book to book in Bultman, you have to reorient yourself, and say now: “He uses this term in such a way, I’ve gotten a definition out of him, but now there seems to be a totally different definition.” Not only you see, in terms of modern existentialism, are we not bound by anything outside of ourselves, but we are not bound by our past, we are not bound by what we said yesterday, only by the existential moment. Thus in terms of this kind of thinking. Of which Bultman is an excellent representative, you have no right to hold me to what I said yesterday. What I said yesterday is gone. You cannot make my yesterday a law for me today, only the existential moment can govern me.
That’s a very convenient doctrine. Yes?
[Audience Member] Reverend Rushdoony, how does Will of James in his thinking fit into this stream (?)
[Rushdoony] Yes, the question is: How does William James fit into this tradition? William James was also a Hegelian, and therefore for William James there was no external reality or an external truth, there was a pragmatic one. Now, his pragmatic truth by and large was somewhat more conservative than Dewey’s, and at many point we can find ourselves heartily in agreement with it. For example, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he deals with various types of religious experience very favorably, so much so that you wonder at times if you don’t understand his philosophical background, why he is very favorable, is he not, to Christian faith, because he distinguishes between the once born believers such as Whitman, and the twice born believers as the Christians, and gives a very favorable account of the results of this. But it is only the results, not that there is any truth to this. It is the will to believe. The will to believe is a self created thing, self generated by the autonomous mind, and therefore he is heartily in favor of that. So that he is in the Hegelian tradition, he is an American existentialist of rather conservative propensities. Yes?
[Audience Member] This idea that the state is the essence of the divine, and that the state would lead men into freedom where the state would be unnecessary, As for Marx, who had the idea that the state would wither away, did any of them ever indicate how long it would take for this to happen?
[Rushdoony] No. Now only as you separate men, you see, from the burden of the past, from tradition, from faith, then men will be free. When they are as rootless as these philosophers believe themselves to be, then men will be capable of this kind of total freedom. Yes?
[Audience Member] Who developed, just briefly, the tie between the dialectics and Marx presented in Hegel’s Dialectics, when you see the beginning of Marx’s theory in Dialectics, in Hegel.
[Rushdoony] Oh yes, it’s a pure Hegelianism, he has simply taken Hegel, and applied his thinking to one sphere.
[Audience Member] But he didn’t advocate violence, a violent sort of revolution, did he?
[Rushdoony] Hegel? Hegel never advocated openly anything that would be unpopular. Hegel was a thoroughly discrete and worldly wise gentlemen. He was perhaps one of the very few philosophers who had his feet firmly planted on the ground of reality.
He knew how to get ahead, he knew how to say the right things to please everybody in the audience, and still accomplish his purpose. Now, one of the reasons, incidentally, that Nietzsche did not like Hegel, no matter how profoundly he was influenced by him, was because there was this strongly worldly wise and practical element in Hegel, and he said: “Can you imagine a real philosopher being married? Being tied down to a woman?” and so, he went all through the history of philosophy to cite all the philosophers who were not married, and in modern philosophy this was predominately the case, making a conspicuous circle around this horrible example of Hegel, because Hegel had been a practical man, a very astute, politically aware kind of person. This is why Hegel was so much more influential than these other men, he knew how to get his point across.
You know, I mentioned Nietzsche, I can’t resist passing this story on. Nietzsche was of course as violent as any man has ever been, I think he exceeded Schopenhauer in his contempt and his hatred of women. And his famous saying: “When you go into a woman, take your whip.” Well then he made the mistake of falling in love with Lou Andrea Salome. A woman who was very attractive to a wide variety of great men in the modern philosophical tradition, in fact, it was a platonic thing, but in later years Freud thought the world of her, and was very close to her. But when Nietzsche fell in love with her, she got her revenge as a woman. He was so insanely in love with her, that she was able to talk him into something in the hopes of some returns that were never granted, of actually posing for a picture in which he was harnessed to a dog cart, and she was sitting in it with a whip.
I have that picture in a book of Lou Andrea Salome, and I prize it highly. Yes?
[Audience Member] Reverend Rushdoony, in your book Biblical Philosophy of History, it’s either stated or implied that all men believe in predestination systematically, they either believe in the predestination of God or the predestination of man, as you were talking about (?) Could you expand on that view?
[Rushdoony] Yes, unless you assume total chance, which logically no-one has done, a few do that for the sake of argument. You are going to assert that there is some kind of pattern, essence, structure, or predestination in the universe. And there are really only two kinds of approach to the universe. You either assert that there is a divine predestination, or you assert that there is going to be human predestination. Predestination of reality by man. and predestination is what modern political philosophy believes in, predestination of man by man. Total control. Yes?
[Audience Member] In light of that, do you term freedom, obviously this means freedom in a different sense than we understand the concept of freedom, freedom to Hegel or to Marx, freedom of the autonomous mind concept, not creative in a sense of your sphere, of economic activity, or your sphere of social interaction, or this kind of thing, because from it, what I think, from it modern philosophy uses a great deal of coercion, or else they are the only philosopher kings that are allowed to practice.
[Rushdoony] Yes, I hesitate to comment on that because it gets into such a tremendous area. Freedom is something that should be discussed in 8 lectures itself. But very briefly, when men talk about freedom, too often they have talked about absolute freedom. And this of course is what modern philosophy is talking about, as though they were God. But I am not free to flap my wings and take off. I was not free to be born, say, in England or Germany or Scotland. I didn’t have any choice about that. I’m not free to be a year younger next year, no matter how desirable I may decide that would be, you see. My freedom, thus, is not an absolute freedom. It’s a secondary freedom, the freedom of a secondary cause. And as a result, we cannot talk about freedom as such, because we have to define what kind of freedom we are talking about.
In the modern tradition, the freedom is that of aseity, the freedom of God. Now, in the existentialist tradition, which we will be dealing with tonight, Freedom is not only aseity, but its total freedom from even our own past, I mentioned that in dealing Bultman. So that, not even our yesterday’s can determine us. When Karl Barth for example talks about the freedom of God, he is talking in an existential sense. Of course, his idea of God is only a limiting concept, but he says: “God has to be free from his own nature, therefore, God can be the reverse tomorrow of what he is today. Otherwise God is not free. He cannot be determined by his own nature. So that, what we define God as being today may be what we would define, tomorrow, what we may define as the devil.
So that, this kind of freedom, even from our own past, Karl Barth projects into his limiting concept, God. So that when he talks about the freedom of God, it is not in any historical Christian sense. Yes?
[Audience Member] Even elaborating a little bit further on this freedom …?... talked about by the hippies as freedom from want, also, I interpret the constitutional freedom to be freedom to, the freedom of choice, the freedom to choose, could you elaborate a little further on that?
[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a very astute question, a very very good one, because you see, by necessity, in modern philosophy the idea of freedom has to be negative. This is why beginning with the four freedoms, Roosevelt and Churchill, the idea of freedom has been negative. They were in the tradition of the modern philosophy, because you see, I can’t have, and since we are getting into what we will deal with this afternoon or tonight when I’m speaking again on the existentialists… man has being, but no essence. This is basic to existentialism. I cannot have my own nature determining me. Therefore I have to be free from everything outside of me, and free from my own past, free from everything. What am I free for, then? Well, nothing. Except to be myself, to do as I please. What we will see later on, the absurdity this leads Sartre into. He is one of the most passionate champions of freedom the world has ever seen, and yet, when you come to the conclusion it is so prevalent a statement that it is… well, I will save that for later, but it is really amazing.
Now, the existentialists are the ones who bring all of this to their logical conclusion, and I’m a great admirer of the existentialists although as an orthodox Christian I totally disagree with them. But I like the ruthless application of their minds to carrying through the logical implications. Camus is the greatest. I heartily recommend Albert Camus, his book: The Rebel. It is a classic. But you cannot understand what has happened in the past 20 years apart from Camus.
A very, very magnificent man, tremendous thinker, and one of the most logical minds in all of history.
[Audience Member] Thank you Doctor Rushdoony.