The Bourgeois Ideology

Political Phil.

The Bourgeois Ideology

Hegel was the first to know, "every philosophy...belongs to its own time and is caught in that time's restriction." However that raises the question: How can a philosophical outlook stay alive after its "time" has passed? The answer is taken beyond philosophical argumentation to a deeper penetration of its own time. This is why the key to what is alive in Hegel's thought lies in Marx's critique of it (Marx-Engels Reader p. 5).

First, there must be an understanding of Marx's critique. It is closely bound with Hegel's idea of sublation, or aufheben - which is to negate, and thereby to preserve the inner truth of something (Ibid p.

35). It is similar to Marx's attitude to religion. It is not a matter of rejecting religious sentiment because it is untrue, without foundation, and then devising a new religious form. Rather, we have to uncover those aspects of a way of life which gave rise to religion - and then revolutionize those views. Religion is the "heart of a heartless world," so the issue is to establish a world with heart. Instead of an illusory solution, there must, in practice, be a real one.

Hegel's philosophical work is an attempt to summarize the essence of the entire history of philosophy, and for him this means and entire history. He develops an approach to understanding philosophical and historical ideas based on a dialectical process (Ibid p. 68). Basically it says that when there is a thesis its antithesis, through a crisis, there is a synthesis (p. 684-85). When two opposite forces converge, a completely new thing will result, which completely depicts Hegel and Marx's relationship.

For Marx, the synthesis is one between the master and the slave, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Ibid p. 151). However,