4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN^41and in particular the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling: immanence,
development and contradiction. 'The great merit of Hegel's philosophy',
wrote Engels, 'was that for the first time the totality of the natural,
historical and spiritual aspects of the world were conceived and repre-
sented as a process of constant transformation and development and an
effort was made to show the organic character of this process.'^95 Hegel
started from the belief that, as he said of the French Revolution, 'man's
existence has its centre in his head, i.e. in Reason, under whose inspiration
he builds up the world of reality'. In his greatest work, the Phiinomenologie,
Hegel traced the development of mind or spirit, reintroducing historical
movement into philosophy and asserting that the human mind can attain
absolute knowledge. He analysed the development of human conscious-
ness, from its immediate perception of the here and now to the stage of
self-consciousness, the understanding that allows man to analyse the world
and order his own actions accordingly. Following this was the stage of
reason itself - understanding the real, after which spirit - by means
of religion and art - attained absolute knowledge, the level at which man
recognised in the world the stages of his own reason. These stages Hegel
called 'alienations', in so far as they were creations of the human mind
yet thought of as independent and superior to the human mind. This
absolute knowledge is at the same time a sort of recapitulation of the
human spirit, for each successive stage retains elements of the previous
ones at the same time as it goes beyond them. This movement that
suppresses and yet conserves Hegel called Aufhebung, a word that has this
double sense in German. Hegel also talked of 'the power of the negative',
thinking that there was always a tension between any present state of
affairs and what it was becoming. For any present state of affairs was in
the process of being negated, changed into something else. This process
was what Hegel meant by dialectic.^94
Faced with the manifest attraction of this philosophy, Marx began to
clarify his ideas by writing - a procedure he had adopted before and
would adopt many times later. He produced a twenty-four-page dialogue
entitled 'Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Progress of
Philosophy'. For this purpose he acquainted himself with natural science,
history and a study of the works of Schelling. This dialogue ended with
Marx's conversion to Hegelianism: 'My last sentence was the beginning
of Hegel's system and this work which had caused one endless
headache ... this my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren
delivers me into the arms of the enemy.'^95 Thus Marx had gone through
the same evolution as classical German philosophy itself, from Kant and
Fichte through Schelling to Hegel.
This process of giving up his romantic idealism and delivering himself