Hegel and the Man-God

>History, then, for Hegel, is a process by which the man-God increases his knowledge, until he finally reaches the state of absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization that he is God. In that case, man-God finally realizes his potential of an infinite being without bounds, possessed of absolute knowledge.

>Why then did man-God, also termed by Hegel the "world-self" (Weltgeisf) or "world-spirit," create the universe? Not, as in the Christian account, from overflowing love and benevolence, but out of a felt need to become conscious of itself as a world-self. This process of growing consciousness is achieved through creative activity by which the world-self externalized itself. This externalization occurs first by creating nature or the original world, but second — and here of course is a significant addition to other theologies — there is a continuing self-externalization through human history. The most important is this second process, for by this means man, the collective organism, expands his building of civilization, his creative externalizing, and hence his increasing knowledge of his own divinity, and therefore of the world as his own self-actualization. This latter process: of knowing ever more fully that the world is really man's self, is the process which Hegel terms the gradual putting to an end of man's "self-alienation," which of course for him was also the alienation of man from God. To Hegel, in short, man perceives the world as hostile because it is not himself, because it is alien. All these conflicts are resolved when he realizes at long last that the world really is himself. This process of realization is Hegel's Aufhebung, by which the world becomes de-alienated and assimilated to man's self.

>But why, one might ask, is Hegel's man so odd, so neurotic, that he regards every thing that is not himself as alien and hostile? The answer is crucial to the Hegelian mystique. It is because Hegel, or Hegel's man, cannot stand the idea of himself not being God, and therefore not being of infinite space and without limits. Seeing any other being, or any other object, exist, would mean that he himself is not infinite or divine. In short, Hegel's philosophy is severe and cosmic solipsistic megalomania on a grand and massive scale. Professor Tucker develops the case with characteristic acuity:

>For Hegel alienation is finitude, and finitude in turn is bondage. The experience of self-estrangement in the presence of an apparent objective world is an experience of enslavement … Spirit [or the world-self], when confronted with an object or "other," is ipso facto aware of itself as merely finite being, as embracing only so much and no more of reality, as extending only so far and no farther. The object is, therefore, a "limit." (Grenze.) And a limit, since it contradicts spirit's notion of itself as absolute being, i.e., being-without-limit, is necessarily apprehended as a "barrier" or "fetter" (Schranke). It is a barrier to spirit's awareness of itself as that which it conceives itself truly to be — the whole of reality. In its confrontation with an apparent object, spirit feels imprisoned in limitation. It experiences what Hegel calls the "sorrow of finitude."

>The transcendence of the object through knowing is spirit's way of rebelling against finitude and making the break for freedom. In Hegel's quite unique conception of it, freedom means the consciousness of self as unbounded: it is the absence of a limiting object or non-self.… This consciousness of "being alone with self" … is precisely what Hegel means by the consciousness of freedom.… Accordingly, the growth of spirit's self-knowledge in history is alternatively describable as a progress of the consciousness of freedom.

https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-man-god

>>10239976

Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist

>Marxism is a religious creed. This statement has been common among critics of Marx, and since Marxism is an explicit enemy of religion, such a seeming paradox would offend many Marxists, since it clearly challenged the allegedly hard-headed scientific materialism on which Marxism rested. In the present day, oddly enough, an age of liberation theology and other flirtations between Marxism and the Church, Marxists themselves are often quick to make this same proclamation.

>Certainly, one obvious way in which Marxism functions as a religion is the lengths to which Marxists will go to preserve their system against obvious errors or fallacies. Thus, when Marxian predictions fail even though they are allegedly derived from scientific laws of history, Marxists go to great lengths to change the terms of the original prediction.

>A notorious example is Marx's law of the impoverishment of the working class under capitalism. When it became all too clear that the standard of living of the workers under industrial capitalism was rising instead of falling, Marxists fell back on the view that what Marx "really" meant by impoverishment was not immiseration but relative deprivation. One of the problems with this fallback defense is that impoverishment is supposed to be the motor of the proletarian revolution, and it is difficult to envision the workers resorting to bloody revolution because they only enjoy one yacht apiece while capitalists enjoy five or six.

>Another notorious example was the response of many Marxists to Böhm-Bawerk's conclusive demonstration that the labor theory of value could not account for the pricing of goods under capitalism. Again, the fallback response was that what Marx "really meant"[5] was not to explain market pricing at all, but merely to assert that labor hours embed some sort of mystically inherent "values" into goods that are, however, irrelevant to the workings of the capitalist market. If this were true, then it is difficult to see why Marx labored for a great part of his life in an unsuccessful attempt to complete Capital and to solve the value-price problem.

>Perhaps the most appropriate commentary on the frantic defenders of Marx's value theory is that of the ever witty and delightful Alexander Gray, who also touches on another aspect of Marx as religious prophet:

>"To witness Böhm-Bawerk or Mr. [H. W. B.] Joseph carving up Marx is but a pedestrian pleasure; for these are but pedestrian writers, who are so pedestrian as to clutch at the plain meaning of words, not realising that what Marx really meant has no necessary connection with what Marx undeniably said. To witness Marx surrounded by his friends is, however, a joy of an entirely different order. For it is fairly clear that none of them really knows what Marx really meant; they are even in considerable doubt as to what he was talking about; there are hints that Marx himself did not know what he was doing."

>"In particular, there is no one to tell us what Marx thought he meant by "value." Capital is, in one sense, a three-volume treatise, expounding a theory of value and its manifold applications. Yet Marx never condescends to say what he means by "value," which accordingly is what anyone cares to make it as he follows the unfolding scroll from 1867 to 1894.…"

>"Are we concerned with Wissenschaft, slogans, myths, or incantations? Marx, it has been said, was a prophet … and perhaps this suggestion provides the best approach. One does not apply to Jeremiah or Ezekiel the tests to which less-inspired men are subjected. Perhaps the mistake the world and most of the critics have made is just that they have not sufficiently regarded Marx as a prophet — a man above logic, uttering cryptic and incomprehensible words, which every man may interpret as he chooses."

https://mises.org/library/karl-marx-religious-eschatologist

>>10240003

>Hegel's dialectic of history did not simply have three stages; history moved forward in a series of stages, each one of which was moved forward dramatically by a process of aufhebung. It is evident that the "man" who creates the world, who advances his "self"-knowledge, and who finally "returns" "Home" in an ecstasy of self-knowledge is not puny individual man, but man as collective species. But, for Hegel, each stage of advance is propelled by great individuals, "world-historical" men, who embody the attributes of the Absolute more than others, and act as significant agents of the next aufhebung, the lifting up of the Man-God or "world-soul's" next great advance into "self-knowledge."

>Thus, at a time when most patriotic Prussians were reacting violently against Napoleon's imperial conquests, and mobilizing their forces against him, Hegel wrote to a friend in ecstasy about having seen Napoleon, "the Emperor — this world-soul," riding down the street; for Napoleon, even if unconsciously, was pursuing the world-historical mission of bringing a strong Prussian State into being.

>>10240022

>"In short, Hegel's philosophy constitutes solipsistic megalomania on a grand and cosmic scale."

>The State was critical for Hegel. Again foreshadowing Marx, it is now particularly important for man — the collective organism — to surmount unconscious, blind fate, and "consciously" take control of it by means of the State.

>Hegel was quite insistent that, in order for the State to fulfill its vital function it must be guided by a comprehensive philosophy, and indeed by a Great Philosopher, to give its mighty rule the necessary coherence. Otherwise, as Professor Plant explains, "such a state, devoid of philosophical comprehension, would appear as a merely arbitrary and oppressive imposition of the freedom of individuals." But, on the contrary, if armed with Hegelian philosophy and with Hegel himself as its great leader, "this alien aspect of the progressive modern state would disappear and would be seen not as an imposition but a development of self-consciousness."

>Armed, then, with such a philosophy and such a philosopher, the modern, especially the modern Prussian, State could take its divinely appointed stand at the apex of human history and civilization, as God on earth. Thus, "The modern State … when comprehended philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world." The State, then, is "a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world"; "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth"; "The State is the march of God through the world"; "The State is the actually existing, realized moral life"; the "State is the reality of the kingdom of heaven." And finally, "The State is God's Will."[22]

>For Hegel, of all the various forms of State, monarchy — as in contemporary Prussia — is best, since it permits all its subjects to be "free" (in the Hegelian sense) by submerging their being into the divine substance, which is the authoritarian, monarchial State. The people are only "free" as insignificant particles of this divine substance. As Tucker writes,

>"Hegel's conception of freedom is totalitarian in a literal sense of the word. The world-self must experience itself as the totality of being, or in Hegel's own words must elevate itself to a "self-comprehending totality," in order to achieve the consciousness of freedom."

>>10240029

>Every determinist creed thoughtfully provides an escape hatch for the determinist himself, so that he can rise above the determining factors, expound his philosophy and convince his fellowmen. Hegel was no exception, but his was unquestionably the most grandiose of all escape hatches. For of all the world-historical figures, those embodiments of the Man-God, who are called on to bring on the next stage of the dialectic, who can be greater, more in tune with the divinity, than the Great Philosopher himself, who has brought us the knowledge of this entire process, and thereby was able to himself complete man's final comprehension of the Absolute and of man's all-encompassing divinity?

>And isn't the great creator of the crucial philosophy about man and the universe in a deep sense greater than the philosophy itself? And therefore, if the species man is God, isn't he, the great Hegel, in a profound sense God of Gods?[24]

>Finally, as luck and the dialectic would have it, Hegel was just in time to take his place as the Great Philosopher in the greatest, the noblest, and most developed authoritarian State in the history of the world: the existing Prussian monarchy of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. If the king would only accept his world-historical mission, Hegel, arm in arm with the king, would then usher in the final culminating self-knowledge of the Absolute Man-God. Together, Hegel, aided by the king, would bring an end to human history.

>For his part, King Friedrich Wilhelm III was all too ready to play his divinely appointed role. When the reactionary powers took over Prussia in 1815, they needed an official philosopher to call on Prussian subjects to worship the State, and thereby to combat the French Revolutionary ideals of individualism, liberty, reason, and natural rights. Hegel was brought to the great new University of Berlin in 1818 to become the official philosopher of that academic monument to the authoritarian Prussian State.

>>10240035

>While highly influential in Prussia and the Protestant sectors of Germany, Hegelianism was also akin to, and influential upon, the Romantic writers in England. Virtually all of Wordsworth's poetic output was designed to set forth what he called a "high Romantic argument," designed to transcend and counteract Milton's "heroic" or "great" argument expounding the orthodox Christian eschatology, in which man, as individual men, will either return to Paradise or be consigned to Hell upon the Second Advent of Jesus Christ. To this "argument," Wordsworth counterposed his own pantheist vision of the upward spiral of history in which man, as species, inevitably returns home from his cosmic alienation.

>Also dedicated to the Wordsworthian vision were Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. It is instructive that all of these men were Christian heretics, converts from explicitly Christian theology: Wordsworth had been trained to be an Anglican priest; Coleridge had been a lay preacher, and was steeped in neo-Platonism and the mystical works of Jakob Boehme; and Shelley had been absorbed in the study of the Bible.

>Finally, the tempestuous, conservative, statist British writer, Thomas Carlyle, paid tribute to Hegel's mentor Friedrich Schiller by writing a biography of Schiller in 1825. From then on, Carlyle's influential writings were to be steeped in the Hegelian vision. Unity is good, diversity and separateness is evil and diseased; science as well as individualism constitutes division and dismemberment.

>Selfhood, Carlyle ranted, is alienation from nature, from others, and from oneself. But one day, Carlyle prophesied, the breakthrough, the world's spiritual rebirth, will arrive, led by world-historical figures ("great men"), through which man will return home to a friendly world by means of the utter "annihilation of self" (Selbst-todtung).

>Finally, in Past and Present (1843), Carlyle applied his profoundly anti-individualist vision to economic affairs. He denounced egoism, material greed, and laissez-faire, which, by fostering man's severance from others, had led to a world "which has become a lifeless other, and in severance also from other human beings within a social order in which 'cash payment is … the sole nexus of man with man.'" In opposition to this evil "cash nexus" lay the familial relation with nature and fellowmen, the relation of "love." The stage was set for Karl Marx.

>>10240044

>>10240046

Communism as the Kingdom of God on Earth: From Joachim to Müntzer

So far we have dealt with reabsorption theology as a crucial forerunner of Marx's religious, eschatological communism. But there is another important strand sometimes woven in with the first, fused into his eschatological vision: messianic millennialism, or chiliasm, the establishing of a communist Kingdom of God on Earth.

Throughout its history, Christianity has had to confront the question of the millennium: the thousand-year reign of God on earth. Particularly in such murky parts of the Bible as the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, there are suggestions of such a millennial Kingdom of God on Earth before the final Day of Judgment and the end of human history.

The orthodox Christian line was set by the great Saint Augustine in the early 5th century, and has been accepted ever since by the mainstream Christian churches: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and arguably by Calvin and at least by the Dutch wing of the Calvinist church. That orthodox line holds that the millennial Kingdom of God on Earth [KGE] is strictly a metaphor for the Christian Church, which reigns on earth only in the spiritual sense. The material realization of the Kingdom of God will only arrive upon the Day of Judgment and is therefore to be confined to heaven alone.

Orthodox Christians have always warned that taking the KGE literally, what the late orthodox-Christian theorist Erich Voegelin called "immanentizing the eschaton" — bringing the eschaton down to earth — is bound to create grave social problems.

For one thing, most versions of how the KGE will come into being are apocalyptic. The KGE is to be preceded by a mighty Armageddon, a titanic war of good against evil, in which the good will finally, though inevitably, triumph.

"With no money to purchase any good, the population became slavishly dependent on handouts or rations from the power elite."

One reason for the apocalypse is a fundamental problem faced by all KGE theorists. The KGE, by definition, will consist of a society of saints, of perfect people. But if this is true, what has become of the host of human sinners, of whom alas there are legion? In order to establish the KGE there must first be some sort of mighty apocalyptic purge of the sinners to clear the ground for the society of saints.

>>10240066

"Premillennial" and "postmillennial" variants of apocalyptics accomplish this task in different ways. The pre-mils, who believe that Jesus's Second Advent will precede the KGE, and that Jesus will run the Kingdom with the cadre of saints at his right hand, achieve the purge by a divinely determined Armageddon between God's forces and the forces of the Beast and the Antichrist. The post-mils, who believe that man must establish the KGE as a precondition of Jesus's Second Coming, have to take matters more directly in their own hands and accomplish the great purge on their own.

Thus, one disturbing aspect of the KGE is the preparatory purgation of the host of human sinners. A second problem is what the KGE is going to look like. As we might imagine, KGE theorists have been extremely cloudy about the nature of their perfect society, but one troublesome feature is that, to the extent that we know its operations at all, the KGE is almost always depicted as a communist society, lacking work, private property, or the division of labor. In short, something like the Marxian communist utopia, except run by a cadre, not of the vanguard of the proletariat, but of theocratic saints.

Any communist system faces the problem of production: who would have the incentive to produce for the communal storehouse, and how would this work and its products be allocated? The first, and most highly influential, communist Christian heretic was the late 12th-century Calabrian abbot and hermit, Joachim of Fiore.

Joachim, who almost managed to convert three popes to his heresy, adopted the thesis that there are destined to be in history, not just two Ages (pre- and post-Christian) as orthodox Christians believe, but a Third Age aborning, of which he was the prophet. The pre-Christian era was the age of the Father, of the Old Testament; the Christian era the age of the Son, the New Testament. And now arrives the third apocalyptic age of the Holy Spirit, to be ushered in during the next half-century, an age of pure love and freedom, in which history was to come to an end. The Church, the Bible, and the State would be swept away, and man would live in a free, communist community without work or property.

>>10240071

Joachim dispensed with the problem of production and allocation under communism very neatly and effectively, more so than any communist successor. In the Third Age, he declared, man's material body will disappear, and man will be pure spirit, free to spend all of his days in mystical ecstasy chanting praises to God for a thousand years until the Day of Judgment. Without physical bodies, there is of course precious little need for production.[27]

For Joachim, the path to this kingdom of pure spirit would be blazed by a new order of highly spiritual monks, from whom would come 12 patriarchs headed by a supreme teacher, who would convert the Jews to Christianity as foretold in the book of Revelation. For a blazing three and a half years a secular king, the Antichrist, would crush and destroy the corrupt Christian Church, after which the Antichrist would be overthrown by the new monastic order, who would promptly establish the millennial age of the Spirit. It is no wonder that a rigorist wing of the Franciscan order, which was to emerge during the first half of the 13th century, and be dedicated to material poverty, should see themselves as the coming Joachimite cadre.

At the same period, the Amaurians, led by a group of theology students of Amalric at the University of Paris, carried on the Joachimite doctrine of the three Ages, and added an interesting twist: each age, they declared, has enjoyed its own Incarnation. In the age of the Old Testament, the divine Incarnation settled in Abraham and perhaps some other patriarchs; for the New Testament age, the Incarnation was of course Jesus; and now, for the dawning Age of the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation would emerge among the various human beings themselves.

>>10240072

As might be expected, the Amaurian cadre proclaimed themselves to be living gods, the Incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Not that they would always remain a divine elite, among men; on the contrary, they were destined to be the vanguard, leading mankind to its universal Incarnation.

During the following century, a congeries of groups throughout northern Europe known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit added another important ingredient to this brew: the mystical dialectic of the "reabsorption into God." But the brethren added their own elitist twist: while the reabsorption of all men must await the end of history, and the mass of the "crude in spirit" must meanwhile meet their individual deaths, there was a glorious minority, the "subtle in spirit," who could and did become reabsorbed and therefore living gods during their lifetime.

This minority, of course, was the cadre of the Brethren themselves, who, by virtue of years of training, self-torture, and visions had become perfect gods, more perfect and more godlike than even Christ himself. Furthermore, once this stage of mystical union was reached, it was to be permanent and eternal. These new gods, in fact, often proclaimed themselves greater than God himself.

Being living gods on earth brought a lot of good things in its wake. In the first place, it led directly to an extreme form of the antinomian heresy; that is, if people are gods, then it is impossible for them to sin. Whatever they did is necessarily moral and perfect. This means that any act ordinarily considered to be sin, from adultery to murder, became perfectly legitimate when performed by the living gods. Indeed, the Free Spirits, like other antinomians, were tempted to demonstrate and flaunt their freedom from sin by performing all manner of sins imaginable.

But there was also a catch. Among the Free Spirit cultists, only a minority of leading adepts were "living gods." For the rank-and-file cultists, striving to become gods, there was one sin and one alone which they must not commit: disobedience to their master.

Each disciple was bound by an oath of absolute obedience to a particular living god. Take, for example, Nicholas of Basle, a leading Free Spirit, whose cult stretched most of the length of the Rhine. Claiming to be the new Christ, Nicholas held that everyone's sole path to salvation consisted of making an act of absolute and total submission to Nicholas himself. In return for this total fealty, Nicholas granted his followers freedom from all sin.

>>10240073

As for the rest of mankind outside the cults, they were simply unredeemed and unregenerate beings who existed only to be used and exploited by the Elect. This gospel of total rule went hand in hand with the social doctrine of many of the 14th-century cults of the Free Spirit: a communistic assault on the institution of private property. In a sense, however, this philosophic communism was merely a thinly camouflaged cover for the Free Spirits' self-proclaimed right to commit theft at will. The Free Spirit adept, in short, regarded all property of the non-Elect as rightfully his own.

The Bishop of Strasbourg summed up this creed in 1817: "They believe that all things are common, whence they conclude that theft is lawful for them." Or as the Free Spirit adept from Erfurt, Johann Hartmann, put it, "The truly free man is king and lord of all creatures. All things belong to him, and he has the right to use whatever pleases him. If anyone tries to prevent him, the free man may kill him and take his goods."[28] As one of the favorite sayings of the Brethren of the Free Spirit phrased it, "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it."

The following century, the 14th, brought the first attempt to initiate the KGE, the first brief experiment in totalitarian theocratic communism. This attempt originated in the left, or extreme, wing, of the Taborites, which in turn constituted the radical wing of the revolutionary Hussite movement in Czech Bohemia of the early 15th century.

The Hussite movement, led by Jan Hus, was a pre-Protestant revolutionary formation that blended struggles of religion (Hussite vs. Catholic), nationality (popular Czech vs. upper-class and upper-clergy German), and class (artisans cartelized in urban guilds trying to take political power from patricians). Building on the previous communist KGE movements, and especially on the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the ultra-Taborites added, with considerable enthusiasm, one extra ingredient: the duty to exterminate. For the Last Days are coming, and the Elect must go forth and stamp out sin by exterminating all sinners, which means, at the very least, all non-ultra-Taborites.

For all sinners are enemies of Christ, and "accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. Every believer must wash his hands in that blood." This destruction was of course not to stop short of intellectual eradication. When sacking churches and monasteries, the Taborites took particular delight in destroying libraries and burning books.

For "all belongings must be taken away from God's enemies and burned or otherwise destroyed." Besides, the Elect have no need of books. When the Kingdom of God on Earth arrived, there would no longer be "need for anyone to teach another. There would be no need for books or scriptures, and all worldly wisdom will perish." And all people too, one suspects.

>>10240076

The ultra-Taborites also wove into the reabsorption theme a return to the alleged early condition of Czech communism: a society lacking the sin of private property. In order to return to this classless society, determined the Taborites, the cities, those notorious centers of luxury and avarice, must be exterminated. And once the communist KGE had been established in Bohemia, the Elect must forge out from that base and impose such communism on the rest of the world.

The Taborites also added another ingredient to make their communist ideal consistent. In addition to the communism of property, women would also be communized. The Taborite preachers taught that "Everything will be common, including wives; there will be free sons and daughters of God and there will be no marriage as union of two — husband and wife."

The Hussite revolution broke out in 1419, and in that same year, the Taborites gathered at the town of Usti, in northern Bohemia near the German border. They renamed Usti "Tabor," i.e., the Mount of Olives where Jesus had foretold his Second Coming, was ascended to heaven, and where he was expected to reappear. The radical Taborites engaged in a communist experiment at Tabor, owning everything in common, and being dedicated to the proposition that "whoever owns private property commits a mortal sin." True to their doctrines, all women were owned in common, and if husband and wife were ever seen together, they were beaten to death or otherwise executed.

Characteristically, the Taborites were so caught up in their unlimited right to consume from the common store that they felt themselves exempt from the need to work. The common store soon disappeared, and then what? Then, of course, the radical Taborites claimed that their need entitled them to claim the property of the non-Elect, and they proceeded to rob others at will.

A synod of the moderate Taborites complained: "many communities never think of earning their own living by the work of their hands but are only willing to live on other people's property and to undertake unjust campaigns for the sake of robbing." Moreover, the Taborite peasantry who had rejoiced in the abolition of feudal dues paid to the Catholic patricians found the radical regime reimposing the same feudal dues and bonds only six months later.

Discredited among their moderate allies and among their peasantry, the radical communist regime at Usti/Tabor soon collapsed. But their torch was quickly picked up by a sect known as the Bohemian Adamites. Like the Free Spirits of the previous century, the Adamites held themselves to be living gods, superior to Christ, since Christ had died while they still lived (impeccable logic, if a bit shortsighted).

For the Adamites, led by a peasant leader they dubbed "Adam-Moses," all goods were owned strictly in common, and marriage was considered a heinous sin. In short, promiscuity was compulsory, since the chaste were unworthy to enter the messianic Kingdom. Any man could choose any woman at will, and that will would have to be obeyed. On the other hand, promiscuity was at one and the same time compulsory and severely restricted; since sex could only take place with the permission of the leader, Adam-Moses. The Adamites added a special twist: they went around naked most of the time, imitating the original state of Adam and Eve.