Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

(^38) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
At the end of the term I again sought the dances of the Muses and the
music of the Satyrs and in the last volume that I sent you the forced
humour of 'Scorpion and Felix' and the misconceived fantastic drama
of 'Oulanem' are shot through with idealism which finally changes
completely, dissolving into purely formal an which has no objects to
inspire it and no exciting progress of ideas.^88
But this activity, while revealing what poetry could be, at the same time
made it impossible for Marx to continue: 'These last poems were the
only ones in which suddenly, as though at the touch of a magic wand -
oh! the touch was at first shattering - the kingdom of true poetry glittered
opposite me like a distant fairy palace and all my creations dissolved into
nothingness.'^89
Not surprisingly this period of intense intellectual activity in several
fields, often involving his working through the night, ended in a period
of severe illness. Marx seems to have suffered quite severely from the
tendency to tuberculosis that killed so many of his family: the following
year his military service was put off 'because of weakness of the lungs
and periodical vomiting of blood'. And in 1841 his military obligations
were cancelled for good and he was declared completely invalid 'owing
to the sensitivity of his lungs'.^90 His doctor advised a change of scene and
Marx went to the village of Stralow just outside Berlin. Here his views
underwent radical change: 'A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was
rent asunder and new gods had to be installed. I left behind the idealism
which, by the way, I had nourished with that of Kant and Fichte, and
came to seek the idea in the real itself. If the gods had before dwelt above
the earth, they had now become its centre.'^91
Previously Hegel's conceptual rationalism had been rejected by Marx,
the follower of Kant and Fichte, the romantic subjectivist who con-
sidered the highest being to be separate from earthly reality. Now, how-
ever, it began to seem as though the Idea was immanent in the real.
Previously Marx had 'read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, but I did not
care for its grotesque and rocky melody'.^92 Now he had to resolve his
spiritual crisis by a conversion to Hegelianism - a conversion that was as
profound as it was sudden. It was probably the most important intellectual
step of Marx's whole life. For however much he was to criticise Hegel,
accuse him of idealism, and try to stand his dialectic 'on its feet', Marx
was the first to admit that his method stemmed directly from his Master
of the 1830s.
I legelianism was the dominant philosophy in Berlin where Hegel had
held the chair of Philosophy from 1818 until his death in 1831. Building
on (lie centrality of human reason propounded by Kant, Hegel had united
into :i comprehensive system the themes of German idealist philosophy