[Rough draft, I am sorry I used two men to critique two women, it was an accident. Need to flesh out relationship between existentialism and objectivism more specifically.]

 One specifically infamous concept that comes from misreading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is that it concludes with the end of all history, where the dialectic consciousness’ movement through time halts in the positive circular infinity of absolute knowing. Fukayama concretely likens this to the Japanese tea ceremony, an endless movement divorced from change and contingency. This sort of deterministic reading is central to many critics of both Marx and Hegel, and thusly the source of much great error and comedy. Marx’s shift from his young and Humanist conceptions to economic matters wasn’t also a shift toward economic determinacy, as Hegel’s meta-structure of consciousness developing as the general Notion doesn’t likewise demand a determinate adherence or coercion. Part of the genius of Gramsci’s understanding of Marxism is that he was able to grasp this aspect of Marxist thought, despite not having access to the materials where Marx and Engel’s lay this out explicitly. Some have interpreted this as a reinvention, or modernizing of Marx’s theory, but I will argue that it was not Marx’s intention to display any sort of historical determinacy, but rather a shifting, and contingent structure at both the base and super-structure of historic blocks, a position that avoids both vulgar humanism and determinacy.

Engel’s letters on Dialectic Materialism detail explicitly his contempt of those whose reading of Marx are akin to when “…Descartes declares animals to be machines…” and that he is “…sorry for the man who can write such a thing.” He notes after this the origin of the famously abused quote from Marx that he himself is not a Marxist. Marx said this in response to the French “Marxists” of the seventies who relied heavily on explaining everything by the material conditions and economic structure. Perhaps however the height of folly from the deterministic reading of Marxism comes later in Simone De Beauvoir’s introduction to her book “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, which draws the worst mistakes of Marx’s reading of Hegel together with history’s worst reading of Marx.

[She notes: “For in Hegel the surpassed terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself”; one must have skimmed Hegel’s chapters on Antigone to miss that he makes that exact point regarding existence. De Beauvoir does however seem to understand Hegel’s assertion that both individual and collective must be equally important, but goes on to establish the existentialist party-line: that this isn’t good enough, and primacy must be wholly located in the self. The existentialist position eliminates the possibility of anything outside itself, becoming inbred in the twisted maze of perpetual self-reflection. “All positions are positions of negation”, the terms set for existentialist knowledge can only be self-set terms, and therefor can only acknowledge a type of relativism.  “In Marxism,” she proclaims, “if it is true that the goal and the meaning of action are defined by human wills, these wills do not appear free. They are the reflection of the objective conditions by which the situation of the class or the people under consideration is defined”. Her assertion is that despite the emphasis in Marxism on revolutionary potential, and its contingent possibility (which she also mistakenly asserts as an “individual act”), the fact that this action is rooted in a historical and economic framework reduces it to determinacy. Assuming that being grounded in a circumstance is equivalent to a mere reflection of them asserted onto a “passive” subject is nowhere to be found in Marx (or reality). The oscillating and contingent position of the proletarian revolutionary subject is not completely ground-able any more than is its base or super-structure. The proletariat isn’t a mere “idea” divorced from its flesh and blood; it is the real people who are exploited, and notably exploited by abstractions. The simple dismissal of the idea by calling it an abstraction (besides being far from the case) is actual a rather uncreative dodge to avoid analysing the content of whats being argued against by ontologizing its form with a projection.

Marx understood the ideological position of capitalism as one that reifies abstractions as demands on the working class. The idea of surplus value itself (at the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism) is ideological and abstract; it only becomes concrete in the practice of the exploitation of real labor. The dual point of this argument is firstly that far from being a vulgar materialist, Marx understood how important ideological abstractions can be, and secondly that despite this they must come to act upon actual individual lives. When we look at those who experience this particular kind of exploitation, we have the proletariat; this is a definition and can’t be critiqued in the De Beauvoir offers any more than can the definition of “daughter”, or “fire-fighter”. If someone else makes profit based on the labour they produce, they are the proletariat. The idea that this entire class must be immediately conscious of their situation is a bourgeoisie absurdity. A part of understanding a class, without leveling it into a homogenous organism, is to recognize that within it there are individuals with different goals and orientations. Some of these goals might actually be personally gratifying at the expense of others in a similar position. Far from reducing the proletariat to an idea as De Beauvoir claims, this understanding recognizes the part to whole is a dynamic, while emphasizing that as dynamic totality the working class has the potential for contingency and power. Only an ideology festering with individual supremacy could assume that a collective has to be completely homogenous to work toward a goal together.

Like Hegel’s “Beautiful soul”, De Beauvoir thinks that any content “contains the blemish of determinateness from which pure knowing can disdainfully reject, or equally can accept. Every content, because it is determinate, stands on the same level as any other, even if it does seem to be characterized by the elimination in it of the element of particularity”. [Emphasis Hegel’s!] If we are speaking against these totalizing determinisms De Beauvoir is worried about, we might very well discuss ideologies like her’s that say all content necessarily eliminates all particularity. Without factoring in history or social positions, the particular cases simply don’t exist. This, however, doesn’t condemn them to being mere examples of those factors: those factors condition and provide content for a real, contingent, and free willed individual. How De Beauvoir got through this chapter in Hegel on morality without noticing the moments that explicitly address the flaw in her logic is staggering. Instead of responding to the arguments located there, or actually in Marx, she simply attacks both Marx and Hegel in terms of general abstractions she constructs from her personal opinions, without even quoting them or specifying which Marxists she is talking about.

De Beauvoir’s critique begins by noting: “Like all radical humanism, Marxism rejects the idea of an inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel…only the will of men decides…” The conflations here are so dense they are difficult to parse through, but to begin with “radical humanism” is a label I think few Marxists would agree well characterizes them. Also putting Kant and Hegel in the same camp carries almost as much problems as placing Marxism in their trajectory in such a wholesale manner. Where Marx took from Hegel, he was incredibly critical of him. Marxist’s like Althusser even assert that the Hegelian portions of Marx could be completely dispensed with without hurting the idea (though I will note I disagree with this assertion). Finally to make this abrupt severance between human objectivity and an external objectivity is a gross reduction. The Marxist project is centrally concerned with human’s relation to the material: what someone who couldn’t get around the distinction would call “objects”. The proletariat only develops as a subject because it works with and through material. This idea comes from Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, and is the grounds from which Marxism interpreted that we understand subjectivity as always related to the real, external, and physical world, which shapes and is shaped by the human subject (thus the materialism part of dialectic materialism). The moving dialectic isn’t a simplistic collective agent rolling above reality: the main point of Marx’s critique of Hegel was (unjustly) that Hegel made exactly this mistake. The part is necessary to a whole, the subject necessary to the object: without both there can be neither.

De Beauvoir continues: “In the present moment of the development of capitalism, the proletariat can not help wanting its elimination as a class. Subjectivity is re-absorbed into the objectivity of the given world”; now, it seems this is a direct contradiction of her version of Marxism she critiqued earlier as one that “rejects the idea of an inhuman objectivity”… De Beauvoir cannot grasp that perhaps the division between those two elements in the first place has some issues, or that it needn’t always be one extreme or the other (If I, as a downright fanatic, am saying this there really must be an issue). Most of her argument hinges on having set Marxism up as nearly equivalent to determinism, and then of course she can enjoy kicking over this crude castle of sand she’s built and written “Marxism!” on.

In the next paragraph De Beauvoir continues to make a straw man absurdity of the Marxist position by claiming that to the Marxist “…this movement [the revolution] appears so essential […] that if an intellectual or a bourgeois also claims to want revolution, they distrust him.” I am unsure where you could reasonably (or possibly) source the idea that Marxists don’t trust intellectuals (my critique would actually be the exact opposite…). Besides, a great number of bourgeois became class traitors, not to mention the fact that that before Marxism there is a long history of bourgeoisie figures who recognized class oppression (Owen, Rousseau, Comte…). Few Marxists would say the bourgeoisie are determined by their class to be totally beyond sympathizing and aiding the struggle of the proletariat, though I think there was a certain wisdom in the Russian muzhik’s distrust of the sympathetic members of the bourgeois. It is not a determination but a propensity for those in power to serve their own interest; if there is some evidence in Marxist thought to the contrary of this it is certainly not actually presented by De Beauvoir.


The extreme but logical conclusion of the existentialist position is the Objectivist position (in the Randian sense). Hegel describes the Beautiful Soul: “Conscience is free from any content whatever; it absolves itself from any specific duty which is supposed to have the validity of law. In the strength of its own self-assurance it possesses the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to loose”. The division in this chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit is on Morality in Spirit, which subdivides into the Beautiful Soul, and then once again into “The Moral Genius”, a character that leaves the world it sees as evil or lazy to form a kind of cult. Ironically, this is where we can locate more specifically where Miss Rand falls into Hegel’s scheme. Rand would be alarmed and furious to know that Hegel deals with her ideas in the same exact attack that could be directed toward the full-time members of the rainbow family (or any modern hippy separatists). Rand’s idea that all the successful and hard working people should separate from the evils of collective society and form their own community is a very curious proposition for a militant individualist. We can use here the reverse of one of De Beauvoir’s arguments: “It appears evident to us that in order to adhere to Marxism, to enroll in a party, and in one rather than another, to be actively attached to it, even a Marxist needs a decision whose source is only in himself.”[emphasis mine]. I am very curious how Miss De Beauvoir would suppose someone could join such a group if the group didn’t exist to join, and if there were no social pressure or value derived from joining one. The fact is that people often gravitate to and choose Marxism for themselves because it corresponds to their interest as part of a class: both part and whole are necessary. Here she falls into the trap that a number of the characters in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit fall into: not recognizing that exact opposites have a deep connection, and can often be approached with the same string of logic (continuing with her straw man approach she seems to characterize Marxists here as arguing blatantly against “freedom”: a pathetic trick akin to when conservative news brilliantly deduces that “terrorists” attack us because they “Hate our freedom”).

This all connects again to Miss Rand who doesn’t see that her community of radical individuals is just what she says it is: a community. It is hardly a stretch to see how Rand’s ideas are similar to those described by Hegel’s Moral Genius, who “knows the inner voice of what it immediately knows to be a divine voice; and since, in knowing this, it has an equally immediate knowledge of existence, it is the divine creative power which in its Notion possesses the spontaneity of life. Equally, it is in its own self divine worship, for its action is the contemplation of its own divinity.” Let’s compare this with a line from Rand’s Anthem: “And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: I”. “I” of course does and doesn’t refer to Rand herself; it is the universal “I”, the leveling reduction of the wealth of humyn life into an abstract category. Hegel explains: “This solitary divine worship is at the same time essentially the divine worship of a community, and the pure inner knowing and perceiving of itself advances to the moment of consciousness. The contemplation of itself is its objective existence and this objective element is the declaration of its knowing and willing as something universal.”[believe it or not the emphasis is Hegel’s again]. The objective-subjective split is erased in this “moral” form of consciousness; the self-validation is immediately the content of morality itself. Far from saying it must act a certain way though it is wrong to do so, or that it acts from cowardice, this form of consciousness thinks selfishness is virtue (See Rand’s book The Virtue of Selfishness). I think people are mistaken in approaching Rand’s philosophy as simply espousing the Hobbesian dog-eat-dog capitalist world: it is an explicitly moral format, even dogmatically so. Calling the “content” of individual thought “Objective” is to say that it immediately takes its own position to be the truth, closing the gap between part and whole, subject and object. As we will see, however, this immediacy and dogmatic self-orientation quickly falls apart.

Referring to the attempted isolation of the Moral Genius, Hegel explains: “It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being and put its trust in the absolute difference [between thought and being]. The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of emptiness”. Hegel even describes it further, saying, “its light dies away within it”, which is a cute coincidence if we consider that the individualist hero of Rand’s Anthem asserts his power in re-inventing the light bulb. Like De Beauvoir, the abstract and empty Universalist conception of subjectivity will be forced into recognition of the bored, contentless position it occupies: whether at an individual level, such as when this happens to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or collectively in the isolated community of those who think they have the right idea compared to society with all its evils (it might be a bit of a stretch but I want to at least bring up Trotsky’s critique of one state socialism as a social mode doomed to failure). The individual is a necessary moment of the collective, and the fall into championing either side is not only dangerous, but in many ways nearly the same position: the two sides are dialectically related. On a less complex level, it is not a stretch to say the individualist rhetoric and the people that espouse it bear a remarkable similarity (usually white, and male…), leading them to act like what I call “Randroids”.

Marx and Engel’s project was to recognize the intensive pull of and conditioning by material conditions, without assuming they are totalizing: a point Gramsci does more justice to in his more in depth analysis of the relationship between base (material) and super-structure (ideology). If the ideological forces can contingently shift in positive directions, oppressive power can condition these possibilities, but not totally defeat them with simple brutality. We can see many situations like this throughout history, and power has certainly learned from these situations. If the United States felt like it could simple bash its subjects into submission it would do so, as it does in the third world countries where it can get away with it. But here, and increasingly in other places in the world, it relies on a notion of power which is less force-oriented, and more directed ideologically. This is a dangerous turn for the people, but also for theory as many post-modernist thinkers misread this as a complete erasure of central power. Marxism is valuable for me because it can offer an incredible critique of either side without falling into the binary logic. It can consider the relationship between ideology and economics, and should (as Marx himself did) recognize that our economic situation is ideological, and vice versa. Arguments that reduce all understanding of history and society to a type of coercive imposition on a subject are equally as short sighted as those which say any type of collective project is authoritarian; and both are equally unintelligible. The issues of the Moral Genius in Hegel do eventually develop into a new form: the “ acting consciousness”, an updated version of Hegel’s Antigone. The possibility of the rest of the Phenomenology comes from acting-consciousness confessing to judging-consciousness—a new version of Creone’s collective social expectations and laws. I personally see little hope for the Objectivist reaching the point of the confession, and have trouble with Hegel’s limiting of legislative transgression to the individual act. Instead I would offer the solution of a collective that acts in transgression for the sake of creating a new social universal. The perpetual transgressive mode Hegel details must be true for the collective revolutionary subject as well, even after we consider that a collective has an internal part to whole logic. This continual dialectic reconstitution of social norms and economic structures is the real aim of the proletariat, a party that seeks fluidity, and contradicts the misreading of Marxism as deterministic. I suppose for myself, the last section of the chapter of Spirit would have been more rightfully titled “Class War”, though I guess that was Marx’s thought as well.


-Hegel, G.W.F Phenomenology of Spirit, New York, NY Oxford University Press,1977
-De Beauvoir, Simon The Ethics of Ambiguity New York, NY Citadel Press, 1948 
-Engels, Friedrich ”Letters on Dialectic Materialism” Marx & Engels Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy Ed. Lewis Feuer, New York, NY Doubleday Publishing, 1959
-Rand, Ayn. Anthem. London: Cassell, 1946

-M