From Hegel to Marx and Feyerabend right up to – Robert Menasse
Who wouldn’t want to ride along in the comforting company of the World Spirit—embodied in Professor Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—as it gallops through world history! Many a young person would get swept up—not just Robert Menasse. For here looms a great thinker, someone who constantly keeps the big picture in view, all and everything being made accessible to triumphant reason. Even the horrifying has its place: the bombs, the corpses, and whatever else unsavory exists. For the World Spirit makes use of the cunning of reason; more precisely, it has read up on Hegel and dutifully follows the precepts of dialectics, where the bad can spring from the good and, likewise, the good from the bad. For in world history, everything real is rational; the World Spirit itself guarantees rationality. When a young person has grasped dialectics—that is, the cunning of reason—his initial sigh of relief turns into stormy enthusiasm. The cosmos is explained to him from the perspective of the eagle.
In the 18th century and especially in the 19th, during Hegel’s lifetime, a spirit of optimism prevailed throughout Europe and particularly in Prussia. Hegel’s World Spirit was intoxicated by progress; reason seemed to rule the world; everything could only be good and keep getting better. In the course of their historical development, people are led out of slavery, stupidity, and superstition ascending constantly toward freedom. Hegel succinctly captured this attitude by trivializing, with shallow optimism, the real horrors of history as the “cunning of reason”. Many believed that the German philosopher had finally brought the Enlightenment to its final completion.
No, Prof. Hegel betrayed the Enlightenment,
and in multiple ways at that. Arthur Schopenhauer expressed this insight with his characteristic bluntness: Hegel, appointed from above by those in power as the accredited great philosopher, was a narrow-minded, tasteless, repulsive, uneducated charlatan… who, in his audacity to cobble together and concoct the wildest mystifying nonsense, reached the height of impudence. Hegel’s pernicious influence, continued, brought about the intellectual corruption of an entire generation. Like no other philosopher, the brilliant Schopenhauer made the German language shine with all the nuances of figurative thought—for that reason alone, he stood in radical opposition to Hegel, who stretched it to the point of insipidity and, through dizzying abstractions, stripped it of all reason and comprehensibility. But Schopenhauer has never managed to inspire young people with his philosophy, even to this day. According to him, the cosmos is ruled by an inherently evil, meaningless will. Only by withdrawing from the world, in the silence of contemplation, can a person understand themselves and the nature of things.
To a highly impressionable youth, such a philosophy feels like a cold shower; they crave optimism, and so they preferred to attend Mr. Hegel’s seminars. Kant, too, demanded too much independent thought; and as for Fichte, even Schiller and Goethe laughed at the latest absurdities from Jena, where the “I” had just given birth to the “Not-I”. In the second half of the century, the brilliant, self-tormenting Nietzsche fared no better. With his glorification of pure power in Zarathustra, Nietzsche was to remain a lonely thinker for the rest of his life, only to be co-opted much later by a brutal regime for its own purposes. In contrast, Hegel administers a cheap aphrodisiac to his followers. Less discerning minds are offered a kind of intellectual salvation, accompanied by the inkling that the professor’s easily readable yet mystically obscure linguistic gibberish might lead them to yet unexplored and unfathomable depths. For it is, after all, a historical fact that the omniscient World Spirit, on its wild ride through German history, swept generations of German nationalists shouting “bravo” in its wake—even including, as we have learned from his recent appearance on the radio (September 27, 2026, 2:00 p.m.), the Austrian writer Robert Menasse.
More than a century had to pass,
before another great thinker unmasked the witty windbag Hegel a second time—and this time much more thoroughly. The author of the famous work The Free Society and Its Enemies strikes the same note as Schopenhauer, but he does not merely reject; rather, he argues and substantiates his points in detail. This thinker—arguably the greatest of whom Austria can boast, and whose aforementioned work should be required reading for every democrat—has settled accounts with Hegel more thoroughly than anyone before or after him. Yet I would like to go a step further, having spoken above of the betrayal Hegel committed against the Enlightenment. A direct comparison with the Enlightenment is absent in Schopenhauer’s work and is not explicitly made by Karl Popper either. As is well known, the Enlightenment thinkers’ critique took the form of a two-front war. On the one hand, it was directed against the existing social order, insofar as it was based on inherited privileges. In the 17th and even into the 18th century, people were assigned their respective ranks—as kings, day laborers, or beggars—by birth. Yet according to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the fate of every human being was to be placed in their own hands; that was their revolutionary demand, a demand that we today take for granted. Personal knowledge and skill—and these alone—were to determine a person’s fate.
The second front concerned this knowledge and skill itself. It was understood that the worldviews of earlier cultures were mythical fabrications. In one, the world had emerged from an egg; in another, it was built upon the back of a turtle; the Jews attributed its creation to a seven-day rest by their God, Jehovah. But there should and could be an entirely different kind of knowledge, as the great Newton had just discovered—a provable knowledge that, in the best case, could be repeated and demonstrated by anyone at any time through experimentation. This was no longer a matter of subjective imagination, as handed down in legends, fairy tales, myths, and articles of faith, but rather of objective knowledge.
Hegel betrayed both strands of the Enlightenment. If his assertion is true: What is rational is real;and what is real is rational, then any rebellion against the status quo and the self-created privileges of the ruling class is irrational—and therefore cannot and must not be real. Hegelian scholars claim that, for Hegel, “reality” by no means refers to everything that actually exists. That is correct. But that is precisely where the problem lies: Hegel endows a philosophically defined concept of reality with normative rationality, thereby turning history into a process whose outcome is already philosophically predetermined. If the statement is to make any sense at all, then remaining passive becomes the primary civic duty, even though Hegel here too excels at throwing up smoke screens: if a revolution was successful, then it simply became real and, eo ipso, ended up becoming rational as well. In other words, the concept of reason is stripped of any possible content. Such glorification of power must transform the state into the Ens Realissimum. Hegel: This substantial unity [of the state] is an absolute, immutable end in itself, in which freedom attains its highest right, just as this ultimate end holds the highest right over the individuals, whose highest duty is to be members of the state. A statement of downright fantastic—one might say, absolute—nonsense, in which freedom and unconditional submission (substantial unity) are equated through dialectical sleight of hand. Incidentally—but of course by no means unintentionally—the Prussian apparatus of power is elevated to the ultimate purpose of history.
But no, a young defender of Hegel
might now jump to the latter’s defense—it could be Robert Menasse, who, looking back on his own life, recently came out as an admirer of the great dialectician Hegel. That, he would probably argue, is far too simplistic a view; Hegel, of all people, could not have seen Prussia as the ultimate goal of history. No one emphasized the idea of development quite as Hegel did. As the greatest son of the Enlightenment, he proved his point by projecting light and salvation from the darkness into the future.
Unfortunately, this is a mere fallacy! Hegel not only turned his back on the revolt against privilege; he also thoroughly misunderstood the idea of development. Nietzsche may be right when he says of the Germans: We Germans are Hegelian, even if Hegel had never existed, insofar as we (unlike all Latin-speaking peoples) instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and richer value to becoming and development than to what ‘is.’ But Nietzsche, if at all, probably read Hegel only superficially—how could this great master of language not have recoiled in horror at Hegel’s hackneyed, unbearable style? Yet Hegel completely misinterprets the idea of development, ascribing to it a meaning the totally differs from that of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment thinkers saw the progress of humanity
in the discoveries of the natural sciences; for them, this progress was among the indisputable achievements. Moral progress was just as important to them, but by no means a foregone conclusion because long struggles lay ahead for the peoples, and no one knew if or when they would be won.
In Hegel’s works, this sequence is arbitrarily turned on its head: for him, moral progress from the earliest times to the present is a given, since the World Spirit has no other task than to lead humanity into the realm of freedom—whatever that may mean. Unfortunately, Hegel’s philosophy of history is diametrically opposed to all known facts; it is—to put it bluntly—outrageous nonsense. Based on everything we know today, it was precisely at the beginning of their history that people enjoyed a degree of freedom never again seen over the course of millennia. In the small hordes of nomadic hunters and gatherers, every individual was vital to the group’s survival; this resulted in a level of equality that was completely lost during the five millennia of the great agrarian societies between 3000 B.C. and 1800 A.D. Hegel’s historical fantasies conjure up a simplistic, optimistic worldview for the uninitiated: everything begins in darkness and ends in light—a view contrary to historical truth.
Does the fascination with this radical simplification
lie simply in the power of its populist allure as a fictitious World Spirit makes everything steadily more beautiful and better with each new century? I believe that this explanation is insufficient. German Romanticism teaches us why there is more to be said. It has produced some of the most beautiful works of German poetry—one need only think of Joseph von Eichendorff. Romanticism, however, must face the accusation that it tended toward reaction. Friedrich von Hardenberg, alias Novalis, longed for a return to the Middle Ages, when the world was still enchanted and had not yet been desolated and stripped of meaning by the emerging sciences. In his essay “Christianity or Europe,” written in 1799, he articulated this desolation and loss of meaning: /The scientific way of thinking/ extended quite naturally and logically to all objects of enthusiasm, denouncing imagination and emotion, morality and the love of art, the future and the past, placed humanity at the very top—with great difficulty—in the hierarchy of natural beings, and reduced the infinite creative music of the universe to the monotonous clatter of a monstrous mill, driven by the current of chance and floating upon it—a mill in and of itself, without a builder or miller, and in fact a true perpetual motion machine, a mill that grinds itself.
Here, the emotionally driven rebellion against the new worldview was articulated by a natural scientist who had become a poet. Novalis knew what he was talking about. What significance does humanity—with its imagination, its feelings, and its enthusiasm—have in a world that obeys only the mechanics of natural laws? In such a world, nature and humanity will in turn devalued as mere machines. Novalis expressed his insight through the image of a “self-grinding mill.” And it was precisely against this mechanization of the mind and life that he and German Romanticism protested. In the final decade of the 18th century, the creative self and its freedom were placed at the center of a new attitude toward life. Hegel adopted this attitude, transformed it into a complacent optimism, and embodied it in his “World Spirit,” this secularized image of the Christian Good Lord.
With this programmatic optimism,
populism and wishful thinking had made their way into philosophy. Kant, with his North German sobriety, reached only academic thinkers, whereas Hegelian populism was just as popular among those in power as it was among students. As Popper puts it bluntly, Hegel’s success marked the beginning of the ‘period of dishonesty’… and the age of irresponsibility…; it was the beginning of a period of intellectual dishonesty at first, and later—as one of its consequences—moral dishonesty; it was the beginning of a new age dominated by the magic of high-sounding words and the power of jargon.
One could also put it this way: populist wishful thinking was to subject philosophical thought to moral imperatives. The World Spirit cannot help but lead humanity toward ever greater freedom—whatever that may mean. Anyone who imposes such a program upon themselves must invent his chosen reality and, in doing so, become blind to the reality right before their eyes. This slide into dishonesty is, of course, readily concealed—both by Hegel himself and by his disciples—concealed behind the splendid garb of moral superiority, as seen, for example, in Paul Feyerabend. For this man, the objections of reason hold no significance if they stand in the way of moral imperatives. Thereby, like Hegel, he easily makes friends, especially among young people—and, as Robert Menasse demonstrates, not only among these. Does it not testify to a noble disposition when Feyerabend insists that the worldviews of all cultures are equally true? Does Paul Feyerabend not prove himself, with such an objection, to be a defender of human equality and equal rights? We know that Feyerabend was a dissident student of Karl Popper who rebelled against what he called the compulsion of method—that is, against the notion that our current worldview gives us an advantage over those of other cultures and their ways of conceiving the world.
As a moral stance, this protest makes sense,
all the more so since today—unlike Hegel—we hardly dare to claim moral superiority over earlier times. As a purported epistemological insight, however, Feyerabend’s objection is nothing more than sensationalist “epistemological anarchism.” Every historian knows that the magical worldviews of earlier cultures helped people form a picture of reality that often guided their behavior toward one another and toward the natural world in a harmonious way. Morally speaking, life may have been far more satisfying than it is for us. But that did not prevent these cultures from being conquered—and often completely wiped out—by technologically superior colonizers, from the distant past right up to the present day. This did not happen because the conquerors possessed better magic, but because they had, for instance, much better weapons, that is a better understanding of nature and its laws. In other words, they possessed objectively superior knowledge and skill. For nature and its laws apply independently of all human wishful thinking—in precisely this sense, they are “objective” (even if the process of our understanding of nature constantly expands this knowledge and, not infrequently, modifies it as well).
No, we do not have to submit to the compulsion of method (Methodenzwang), but if we want to survive, we must accept the established knowledge about nature and its findings—it constitutes the only objective reality for us (that is, one that exists independently of our will and desires).
Menasse hails Paul Feyerabend as an idol without realizing that, alongside positive dogmatism, there is a negative counterpart. When someone claims that everything must be exactly as it is, that is positive dogmatism. Such determinism ranges from Spinoza to 19th-century natural science and reappears in Hegel’s postulate of reason. It is still advocated by Bertrand Russell1 and recurs in many religions, for example in Muslim fatalism. The negative variant of dogmatism, as Paul Feyerabend sets it forth in his “anything goes” theory, asserts, on the contrary, that everything could also be completely different. While this claim allows some people to revel in the thrill of freedom, it also blinds them to reality. Fortunately, many things can indeed be changed—but many others simply cannot. Reality is far more complex than it appears in the minds of dogmatists. Political expertise consists in knowing the boundary between the two; populism lies in blurring or denying it.2
Hegel’s disciples have retained both:
the craving for a moral mission as well as dishonesty. With greater insight than anyone else—including the Christian church, which should have followed the love for one’s neighbor—Karl Marx recognized what inhuman exploitation meant for the affected workers in the early days of capitalism. The greatness of the German social reformer lies, to this day, in his clear recognition and unambiguous condemnation of the crimes committed against people treated like slaves in the new factories. But, unfortunately for him, Marx was schooled in Hegel’s dialectic. Thus, he was able, on the one hand, to praise the proletarian as a human ideal and, on the other hand, to throw that very person out the door of his house when he got too close to him personally. Helene (“Lenchen”) Demuth was Marx’s long-time domestic servant and had a son, Frederick Demuth, in 1851— some see him as Marx’ illegitimate son. Later, the young man was no longer allowed to enter the Marx household through the front door; his mother he could only see in the kitchen. Engels was more humane. He had more than just a “relationship” with an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns. Her sudden death therefore hit him particularly hard. Lewis Mumford comments on what happened that day with the following words: Yet day came when Engels was cut to the quick by Marx unfeeling comments upon the death of the girl Engels had loved and lived with /for twenty years/: a day when he marveled over the sympathy and understanding of some of his commercial friends. That day was almost for Engels an awakening: almost but not quite; the doctrinaire prevailed.
Dishonesty is the dark flip side of dialectics, which in Hegel culminates in the identity of the non-identical. In Marx, it is additionally evident in his willingness to bow before the supposedly eternal and ironclad laws of natural science. As a dogmatist he absolutely needed such an ironclad and eternal law for his new social theory, so that it would be above all polemics. The ultimate goal of history for him is not, as it is for Hegel, a vaguely understood realm of freedom, but the rule of the proletariat. He elevates this rule to a law of history, supposedly just as timelessly valid as any law of nature. And at the same time, he performs his own dialectical masterpiece: Hegel’s freedom is transformed into a dictatorship—that of the proletariat—a surprising identity of the non-identical. Let’s summarize: Hegel had formulated a theory of history that has been empirically refuted; following in his footsteps, Marx developed a theory of society that suffered exactly the same fate of being empirically false. Instead of ruling the world, the proletarian today appears on the red list of endangered species. And social democracy only became a compelling movement after it broke with Marx and dedicated itself exclusively to the fight against injustice. For therein alone lies the legacy of the German reformer, which is still admirable today.
The dishonesty rightly lamented by Popper and glossed over by Robert Menasse’s
naive admiration for Hegel is also evident in other movements that refer directly to Hegel and Marx. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno ask themselves why the Enlightenment—which was supposed to free humanity from the grip of myths, superstition, and foreign domination—could turn into new forms of domination and bondage. The founders of the Frankfurt School had lived through the horrors of the Nazi era. Against this backdrop, it seemed impossible to view the crimes of that time merely as a ruse of reason employed by the World Spirit employs for its own lofty purposes. Here, the niceties of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics failed—a dialectic that allowed freedom to be reinterpreted as dictatorship or the noble proletarian as despised service personnel. And can we still accept Hegel’s ominous view of the state as the identity of the non-identical, which empowers him to do whatever he likes? Today, for example, an aggressive state need not shy away from invading a sovereign neighbor whose borders it had previously promised to uphold by treaty (namely, in the 1993 Budapest Memorandum). In the Hegelian context, the fact that the aggressor, just one week before the invasion, vehemently dismissed this intention as a ridiculous insinuation appears, at best, as a trivial detail. Vladimir Putin has mastered the tricks of dialectics just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. A fascist, militaristic state—which is now squandering its entire national budget on bombs and soldiers—declares to the world with unparalleled impertinence and shamelessness that its national purpose is to denazify and demilitarize the free citizens of a sovereign country.
The Frankfurt School was an intellectual movement that, in its own way, understood the subtleties of dialectics. While Hegel had attempted a “theodicy” of evil by retouching it out of reality as the cunning of reason, such a whitewashing of reality was no longer possible after the Nazi era. Instead, the Dialectic of Enlightenment bitterly laments the alleged failure of reason, because the good extolled by the Enlightenment can, in fact, also bring about evil.
With the concept of instrumental reason,
The Dialectic of Enlightenment does, however, touch upon a genuine problem that directly affects the worldview of the new sciences. We should not forget that their most outstanding proponents were – almost without exception – opponents of existing religions and the social order. The Enlightenment arose, as already mentioned, as a rebellion against inherited privileges and against all faith that cannot be transformed into provable knowledge. But what about this knowledge? Would it ever be as comprehensive as religious knowledge, which rests on the shoulders of an omniscient God?
Almost all natural scientists up until the end of the 19th century answered this question in an unambiguous and, from today’s perspective, decidedly dogmatic manner. Yes, they said, the sciences render faith superfluous, for their knowledge is potentially infinite, since every event in nature, without exception, obeys laws: a mind trained in all the laws of nature could (as Pierre-Simon de Laplace put it) theoretically predetermine the entire future of the universe – just as an omniscient God.
Today, only those stuck in the past still claim this (among whom the otherwise brilliant Bertrand Russell remained until his death)1. Chance—which sets clear, insurmountable limits on human knowledge and thus also on human power—was only discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in quantum physics. Yet the fact that it is omnipresent in social life—this elementary insight—is still diligently suppressed to this day. It was this oppressive image of the world as a lifeless machine that had so terrified Novalis.
The Enlightenment recognized the limits
of its new-found reason only very late—that alone is the criticism one may justifiably level against it. The fact that the natural sciences explore and utilize objective laws of nature—that is, laws independent of any wishful thinking—represents just as indisputable an expansion of knowledge as the approach of the social sciences, which reveal the “quasi-laws” that humans, as social beings, impose upon themselves in order to curb through commands and prohibitions the Hobbesian anarchy of unregulated coexistence. Far from freeing thought from dogmatism, Paul Feyerabend, with his mantra of “anything goes”, championed a populist anarchism that has never existed in nature and for good reason was never allowed to exist in society. There is no need to invent a Leviathan, as Hobbes did, to protect against anarchy. A democracy, if based on consensus, guarantees peaceful coexistence in a much more effective way. Karl Popper reflected on this issue far more deeply than his rebellious student.3 It is regrettable that a writer as perceptive as Robert Menasse—a novelist who, in his most recent works, convincingly championed the European project, that is, a supranational order aimed at uniting Europe—displayed an unmistakable sympathy for populist demagogues early on when he defended a far-right extremist like Jörg Haider.4 And it is even more deplorable that he remains, to this day, susceptible to the dangerous games of dialectics and to the mind-numbing poison of the identity of identity and non-identity. As a youthful transgression, this is, at best, understandable and excusable, but not as a statement made by a mature man.
1 Russell: It is thought that matter consists of electrons and protons, which are of finite size and of which there are only a finite number in the world. Probably their changes are not continuous… The laws of these changes can apparently be summed up in a small number of very general principles which determine the past and the future of the world when any small section of its history is known… There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing, and it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken.
2 Pure idealism denies any resistance from reality, since we supposedly create it ourselves. Bishop Berkeley, Fichte in Germany, and the Vedanta in India developed this doctrine of absolute freedom. Poets and novelists have always felt a kinship with it, because they themselves—at least on paper—are also world creators. In a sense, all poets are idealists because they create realities, but that is precisely why they rarely make good political leaders. As a novelist, Menasse is free to pay homage to Feyerabend; but if he does so as a political thinker, he cannot be taken seriously.
3 Three years after the publication of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the so-called “positivism controversy” erupted in 1961, initially between Popper and Adorno; later, Habermas and Adorno also joined the debate. The controversy was ill-fated from the start, for Popper had (and in this he agreed with Adorno) clearly distanced himself from positivism. In my view, only Habermas brought an argument to the table that highlights the limitations of Popper’s piecemeal social engineering. Society is guided by interests—I am speaking of will and desire—interests that include hopes, utopias, and even notions of salvation. This element of the social sciences is completely absent from the natural sciences.
4 Menasse in Ein verrücktes Land. Falter No. 41, 1995: Undoubtedly, Austria has undergone a process of normalization over the past ten years that has only now made this country comparable to other Western democracies. This process of normalization is essentially thanks to two politicians: the classic Enlightenment figure Kurt Waldheim and the new leftist Jörg Haider. In this ironic statement, the ill-fated dialectic of Hegel and the Frankfurt School rears its head. According to Menasse, Kurt Waldheim and Haider fulfilled a positive function because they rescued the country from its alleged political stagnation. Should we now applaud Herbert Kickl, Alice Weidel, or Marine Le Pen simply because they are shaking up politics in Europe and thereby putting Hegel’s alleged cunning of reason” into practice? Whether intended ironically or not, Dialectics as understood by Hegel and his followers remains an irresponsible juggling act, a sophisticated intellectual game with supposed identities between things by no means identical. When Menasse made his ill-famed statement he should have rather asked himself whether social partnership has served the people of Austria well or whether a populist like Haider would serve them better. That alone would have been an acceptable discussion.
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