This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks, by way of explanation and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic -- both in general and in particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as about its relation to the modern critical movement.
Modern German criticism was so pre-occupied with the old world, and so entangled during the course of its development with its subject-matter, that it had a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticism, and was completely unaware of the seemingly formal but in fact essential question of how we now stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic. The lack of awareness about the relation of modern criticism to Hegelian philosophy in general and to the dialectic in particular has been so pronounced that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer are still, at least implicitly, imprisoned within Hegelian logic, the first completely so and the second in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition to Strauss, he substitutes the "self-consciousness" of abstract man for the substance of abstract nature) and even in his Das entdeckte Christentum . For example, in Das entdeckte Christentum we find the following passage:
"As if self-consciousness, in positing the world, that which is different, and in producing itself in that which it produces, since it then does away with the difference between what it has produced and itself and since it is only in the producing and in the movement that it is itself -- as if it did not have its purpose in this movement," etc.
[ Bruno Bauer, Das entdeckte Christentum, Eine Erinnerung an das achtzehnte Jahrhundert une ein Beitrag zur Krisis des neunzehnten, Zurich and Winterthur, 1843, p.113 ] Or again:
"They (the French Materialists) could not yet see that the movement of the universe only really comes to exist for itself and enters into unity with itself as the movement of self-consciousness."
[ Bauer, ibid., p.114 f. ] These expressions are not even different in their language from the Hegelian conception. They reproduce it word for word.
How little awareness there was of the relation to Hegel's dialectic while this criticism was under way (Bauer's Synoptiker ), and how little even the completed criticism of the subject-matter contributed to such an awareness, is clear from Bauer's Gute Sache der Freiheit, where he dismisses Herr Gruppe's impertinent question "and now what will happen to logic?" by referring him to future Critics.
But, now that Feuerbach, both in his "Thesen" in the Anekdota and in greater detail in his Philosophie der Zukunft, has destroyed the foundations of the old dialectic and philosophy, that very school of Criticism, which was itself incapable of taking such a step but instead watched while it was taken, has proclaimed itself the pure, resolute, absolute Criticism which has achieved self-clarity, and in its spiritual pride has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world, which comes into the category of the "masses", and itself. It has assimilated all dogmatic antitheses into the one dogmatic antithesis between its own sagacity and the stupidity of the world, between the critical Christ and mankind -- the "rabble". It has daily and hourly demonstrated its own excellence against the mindlessness of the masses and has finally announced that the critical Day of Judgment is drawing near, when the whole of fallen humanity will be arrayed before it and divided into groups, whereupon each group will receive its certificate of poverty. The school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an occassional roar of sarcastic laughter from its Olympian lips. After all these delightful capers of idealism (Young Hegelianism) which is expiring in the form of Criticism, it (the critical school) has not once voiced so much as a suspicion of the need for a critical debate with its progenitor, the Hegelian dialectic. It has not even indicated a critical attitude to Feuerbach's dialectic. A completely uncritical attitude towards itself.
Feuerbach is the only person who has a serious and critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made real discoveries in this field.
He is the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The magnitude of his achievement and the quiet simplicity with which he present to to the world are in marked contrast to the others.
Feuerbach's great achievement is:
(1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed in thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of the estrangement of man's nature.
(2) To have founded true materialism and real science by making the social relation of "man to man" the basic principle of this theory.
(3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positively grounded in itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting-point, in the following way:
Hegel starts out from the estrangement of substance (in logical terms: from the infinite, the abstractly universal), from the absolute and fixed abstraction. In ordinary language, he starts out from religion and theology.
Secondly, he supercedes the infinite and posits the actual, the sensuous, the real, the finite, the particular. (Philosophy as supersession of religion and theology.)
Thirdly, he once more supersedes the positive, and restores the abstraction, the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology.
