It must be confessed that the occasional bitterness in which Engels
indulges is to be deplored, in a work of so essentially intellectual a
character, but it is little to be wondered at. His contempt for
university professors and the pretentious cultivated classes, who claim
so much upon such slight grounds, is not strange, when we consider the
honest labors of himself and his colleagues and the superficial
place-hunting of the recognized savants. He loves learning for its own
sake, for the sake of truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot feel
anything but scorn for those who use it as a means to lull the
consciences of the rich, and to gain place and power for themselves. The
degradation of German philosophy affects him with a real sorrow; the
scholar is outraged at the mockery. "Sterility," "eclecticism," these
are the terms in which he sums up the teachings of the official
professors, and they are almost too gentle to be applied to the
dispiriting and disheartening doctrines which are taught to the
English-speaking student of to-day under the name of economics or
philosophy.
In the first part of his pamphlet, for it is little more in size, Engels
gives a short and concise account of the work of Hegel and the later
Hegelian School. He shows how the philosophy of Hegel has both a
conservative and a radical side and how conservatives and radicals alike
might, (as a matter of fact they did), each derive support from his
teachings, according to the amount of stress laid respectively upon the
great divisions of his work, the "System" and the "Dialectic."
The Extreme Left developed through the application of the dialectic,
and applied the philosophic doctrine thus derived to the criticism of
existing political and religious institutions. This resulted in the
gradual throwing away of the abstract part of the Hegelian philosophy,
and in the study of facts and phenomena to an ever-increasing degree.
Marx had, in his youth, allied himself with the "Young Hegelians," as
this school was called, and this fact had no slight influence upon his
subsequent career. His critics lay the blame for much of the obscurity
of language from which "Capital" in particular suffers, at the door of
this training. His painful elaboration of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, his insistence upon the dialectic, and his continual use of
the Hegelian philosophical expressions are due to his earlier
controversial experiences. Still, on the other hand, his patient
investigation of actual facts, his insistence on the value of positive
knowledge as compared with abstract theory, and his diligent and
persistent use of blue-books and statistics, were in a great measure
results of the same training.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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