Towards A "Real Reality":A Study Of Reality From The Young Hegelians To Historical Materialism

Walter Schulz emphasizes that post-Idealism after Hegel is committed to critiquing Idealism Philosophy in terms of reality.The Young Hegelians,as postIdealism,took the concept of reality as the foundational,presuppositional concept of their theory,constructed a different view of reality,and were thus the philosophers with a different view of reality.Etymologically speaking,reality includes both the established existing determinate empirical reality,which is determinate,and the process by which the empirical reality is made so,which is shown to be processual.This constitutes the basic meaning of ’reality’ in the philosophical sense.The philosophical tradition is a very convenient point of entry for an examination of the Young Hegelians’view of reality.In terms of philosophical tradition,the Young Hegelians’ view of reality has two philosophical origins.The one is its indirect philosophical origins,which refers to the Aristotelian view of reality and the Enlightenment philosophical view of reality.They are distinguished from the existing and emphasize activity and process.Besides the Enlightenment view of reality also emphasizes the shaping of an entirely new social reality at the practical level.The other is its direct philosophical origin which is the Hegelian view of reality.Strictly speaking,Hegel’s view of reality inherited from Enlightenment philosophy is fundamentally a view of empirical social reality as an essential reality derived from the rational spiritual itself.This essential reality represents the German Idealism view of reality from Kant to Hegel.In this tradition,knowing the self is knowing the world.It means reality is first and foremost directly related to and defined by essence,reason,ideal and logic and that nature as reality has not been given sufficient attention.The Young Hegelians criticized Hegel’s essential reality which is essentially the spirit and replaced it with an essential reality from reality which is called "the argument for philosophy in non-philosophy" by Schulz and which were explored with little success by the early German Romantics and Schelling.Both Hegel and the Young Hegelians had a claim to philosophical realism in their conception of reality.This suggests that the Young Hegelians’ views of reality are both critical and inherited from the Hegelian view of reality.Besides these philosophical traditions,the Young Hegelians’ views of reality is also linked to the social history in which it is embedded.This social history is the situation of its time and the problem of its time that it needs to solve.In response to the problem of the time,the Young Hegelians’ views of reality,with the theoretical goal of moving towards a "real reality",presents various views of reality,such as the inner individual reality,the liberal view of reality,the natural reality and the social reality.An exploration of the Young Hegelians’ views of reality shows that "the argument for philosophy in non-philosophy" should emphasize the natural and social characteristics of reality,and stress two kinds of views of reality:natural and social reality.Natural reality was advocated by Feuerbach and subsequently promoted by Nietzsche who was logically a companion of the Young Hegelians.Social reality underwent a revolutionary transformation via Hess to Marx and Engels.There are two fundamental points existing in the view of reality from the Young Hegelians to historical materialism to be highlighted.Firstly,when it comes to the Young Hegelians,there were diverse views of reality among the writers of this school rather than only Feuerbach’s view of reality.Secondly,in terms of the relationship between views of reality of the Young Hegelians and that of the historical materialism,the latter couldn’t but be influenced by the diverse views of reality of the Young Hegelians.These two basic points are typically reflected in this vein of the Young Hegelians:from Feuerbach’s natural reality to Hess’s social reality and then to Marx and Engels’active assimilation of Feuerbach’s natural reality along the path of Hess’s social reality.Specifically,Feuerbach was the first to advocate natural reality in the Young Hegelians,which are based on the transformation of the view of nature by modern natural science and which is a strange combination of an Enlightenment view of nature and a romantic view of nature.It is presuppositional,foundational and ontologically significant.Nietzsche as a companion of the Young Hegelians logically,promoted a more creative natural reality than Feuerbach’s,which is the life of reality,or the will to power.It does not have anything that doesn’t belongs to itself,which means there is nothing imposed on itself externally,or which refers to the essential principle.On the contrary,all that the life of the will to power has are the natural characteristics of the life itself,and the hierarchy that is formed from it.It rejects anything external to itself,rejects the attainment of perfection,recognizes difference,and inherently entails the selfimprovement and self-transcendence of real life.Dionysus or Superman,which Nietzsche revered,is the embodiment of real life.Thus,in contrast to Feuerbach’s sensual natural reality,which retains both the hostility of the Enlightenment’s view of nature and the mystification of nature in the Romantic view of nature,Nietzsche’s natural reality rejects anything unnatural and constructs a view of natural reality that always retains an affirmation of real life itself,starting from the natural endowment of real life itself.A turn towards social reality emerged in the Young Hegelians from Feuerbach onwards.It was initiated by Hess.Hess’s social reality was an ethical socialism based on an essential community.The young Marx and Engels following Hess’s social reality,were continuously towards a true social reality.Their path towards a real social reality is a path of scientific dissection of social reality.The social reality of the young Marx and Engels thus differed from that of Hess at the beginning.However,both criticize capitalist social reality,which is not in itself unique to them.This critique was also present in the Young Hegelians such as Bauer,Feuerbach and Stirner,but in this critique they only reached the recognition of a universal capitalist social reality.Unlike these,Hess and the young Marx and Engels searched for a social reality that could replace the capitalist social reality.However,their social realities are based on an ethics and a material production respectively.Moreover,social reality in the Young Hegelians fully adopted Feuerbach’s natural reality.Feuerbach soon provoked a sharp critique by Stirner.However,while Stirner criticized Feuerbach’s abstract man,he actively absorbed Feuerbach’s nature.Thus,Stirner’s egoist is first and foremost an empirical individual with corporeality.Hess,along with the young Marx and Engels in their critical response to Stirner,also tried to assimilate nature into their own social reality.However,Hess always with free action as the fulcrum,still constructed a view of nature that was essentially spiritual,not unlike Hegel’s.Unlike Hess,the young Marx and Engels always took a view of nature based on practice,which differed from Feuerbach’s and Hess’s nature and which formed the basic underpinning of the natural dimension of their later historical materialist social reality.The real social reality of Marx and Engels was the social reality of historical materialism and the scientific ’anatomy of civil society’.It was also based on the active incorporation of many ideas of the young Hegelians and not essentially based on an essential community,but on material production.With material productive activity as its base,the social reality of historical materialism reveals three intrinsically related dimensions:the social,natural and methodological dimension.Of these,the social dimension is the focus,which exhibits a scientific historical dialectic and which analyzes the structural as well as the historical characteristics of social reality,in particular analyzing and criticizing the social reality of capitalism.By doing so,it shows the way out of the social reality of capitalism and into a communist society through socio-historical dialectics.Its natural dimension shows a socio-historical nature which however socio-historical,is foundational and presupposed.More crucially,this view of nature also critiques the Enlightenment view of nature held by the reality of capitalist society.Marx and Engels emphasized this in criticizing political economy and researching the dialectic of nature respectively.In either dimension,a methodology in which the empirical method and the dialectic are intrinsically identical is included in the social reality of historical materialist.Thus,in the Young Hegelians’ views of reality,the natural reality advanced by Nietzsche,who was along the line of Feuerbach’s natural reality,digs deeper inwards from real life itself to its natural endowments,demonstrating a great affirmation and self-improvement of real life.The natural reality of Nietzsche evidently differs from that of Feuerbach which still essentially retains the principle of essentiality.In contrast to Nietzsche’s natural reality,the social reality of historical materialism actively absorbs natural reality,but is committed to the outward excavation of the socio-historical structure of social reality,advocating that the social reality of communist provides a field for real individuals to express themselves.In historical materialist social reality,the social dimension is the focus;the natural dimension is affirmed,but never the focus.Even though historical materialist social reality discusses nature,the kind of nature is in a foundational,presuppositional position and is fundamentally a nature of sociohistorical practice.Thus,Feuerbach’s advocacy of natural reality is not yet complete in breaking down the principle of essentiality.It is Nietzsche that opens up a new realm of natural reality along Feuerbach’s natural reality.From the perspective of the path of excavating the views of reality,Nietzsche’s natural reality digging deeper inwards into natural reality and historical materialism’s social reality digging deeper outwards into social reality are not unrelated to each other,but complementary.And both two together constitute two innovative views of reality in the Young Hegelians’ view of reality.