Karl Marx: A Biography

KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

over to 'the enemy' was an extremely radical and painful one for Marx.

I le described its immediate results:

My vexation prevented me from thinking at all for several days and I

ran like a madman around the garden beside the dirty waters of the

Spree 'which washes souls and makes weak tea'. I even went on a

hunting party with my landlord and rushed off to Berlin and wanted to

embrace every street-loafer I saw. .. My fruitless and failed intellectual

endeavours and my consuming anger at having to make an idol of a

view that I hated made me ill.^96

1 lis conversion to Hegel was completed firstly by a thorough reading of
I Iegel: while sick he 'got to know Hegel, together with most of his
disciples, from the beginning to end'; and secondly, by joining a sort of
Hegelian discussion group: 'through several gatherings with friends in
Stralow I obtained entrance into a graduate club among whose members
were several university lecturers and the most intimate of my Berlin
friends, Dr Rutenberg. In the discussions here many contradictory views
appeared and I attached myself ever more closely to the current philo-
sophy which I had thought it possible to escape'.^97 This club, which met
regularly in a cafe in the Franzosische Strasse and subsequently in the
houses of its members, was a hard-drinking and boisterous company and
formed the focal point of the Young Hegelian movement.
The Young Hegelians' attack on the orthodoxies of their time started
in the sphere of religion - a much safer area than politics. Here Hegel's
legacy was ambiguous. Religion, together with philosophy, was for him
the highest form of man's spiritual life. Religion (and by this Hegel, who
remained a practising Luteran all his life, meant Protestant Christianity
which he considered the highest and final form of religion) was the return
of the Absolute Spirit to itself. The content of religion was the same as
that of philosophy, though its method of apprehending was different. For
whereas philosophy employed concepts, religion used imagination. These
unsatisfactory imaginings afforded only a fragmentary and imprecise
knowledge of what philosophy comprehended rationally. But religion
could be linked to philosophy by means of a philosophy of religion, and
1 Iegel considered that the particular dogmatic contents of the religious
imagination were necessary stages in the development of Absolute Spirit.
1 lie philosophy of religion interpreted at a higher level both naive faith
;IIKI critical reason. Thus Hegel rejected the view of the eighteenth-
rent ury rationalists that religion did inadequately what only science was
competent to do; in his eyes, religion (or his philosophical interpretation
ill n) fulfilled man's constant psychological need to have an image of
himself and of the world by which he could orientate himself.^98