f22 2 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Greek philosophy. There were two reasons for this interest: firstly, after
the 'total philosophy' of Hegel the Young Hegelians felt themselves
in the same position as the Greeks after Aristotle; secondly, they thought
that the post-Aristotelian philosophies contained the essential elements
of modern thought: they had laid the philosophical foundations of the
Roman Empire, had profoundly influenced early Christian morality and
also contained rationalist traits of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
For Marx, too, the Stoic, Sceptic and Epicurean philosophies were 'proto-
types of the Roman mind, the form in which Greece emigrated to
Rome'.^109 They were 'such intense and eternal beings, so full of character,
that even the modern world has to allow to them their full spiritual
citizenship'.'^10 'Is it not remarkable', Marx continued in the Introduction
to his thesis, 'that after the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which
extend to universality, new systems appear which do not refer back to
these rich intellectual figures but look further back and turn to the
simplest schools - in regard to physics, to the philosophers of nature, and
in regard to ethics, to the Socratic school?'^111 In short, Marx's choice of
subject was designed to throw light on the contemporary post-Hegelian
situation in philosophy by the examination of a parallel period in the
history of Greek philosophy.
Marx's preliminary notes for the thesis were rather obscure, partly
because they were only personal notes and partly because they were often
couched in the vividly metaphorical language characteristic of the Young
Hegelians who saw themselves living in a general atmosphere of crisis
and impending catastrophe. Bruno Bauer, for example, with whom Marx
kept up a constant correspondence while he was composing his thesis,
wrote in 1840 : 'our epoch becomes more and more terrible and beauti-
ful'.^112 Or again: 'The catastrophe will be terrible and must be great. I
would almost say that it will be greater and more horrible than that
which heralded Christianity's appearance on the world scene.'^115 The most
interesting passage in Marx's notes was one where he dealt with the
philosophical climate following on the world-philosophy of Hegel. Philo-
sophy, he claimed, had now arrived at a turning point: 'like Prometheus
who stole fire from heaven and began to build houses and settle on the
earth, so philosophy, which has so evolved as to impinge on the world,
turns itself against the world that it finds. So now the Hegelian philo-
sophy.'"^4 Marx believed that Hegel's philosophy had, by its very complete-
ness and universality, become unreal and opposed to the world which
continued to be divided. Thus philosophy itself had become split: 'The
activity of this philosophy appears, too, to be rent asunder and contradic-
tory; its objective universality returns into the subjective forms of the
individual minds in which it has its life. Normal harps will sound beneath