the theme of subject-predicate or being-thotrght inversion is to
be found in Feuerbach does not, of course, mean that it was an
invention of his, or in any way peculiar to his thought. It is in
fact one of the most profound and ancient themes in philosophical
history, and recurs constantly in the debate between Idealism and
Materialism. Della Volpe, for example, could properly relate
Marx's critique of Hegel to Aristotle's critique of Plato and Gali-
leo's attack on the defenders of Aristotelian-scholastic physics.
Moreover, at the points in his Crilique of Pure Reason where
Kant does most to demolish the older ontology (for example, in
the ' Note on the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection'), it is also
possible to see a critique of 'real universals'. Hence, the only
specific contribution which Feuerbach can be held to have made
is a reapplication of one aspect of this tradition in the new con-
text, the way in which he brought it to bear on Hegelianism.
I believe the vital element in this vexed question - the edge which
cuts the Gordian knot - must be sought elsewhere. The true
importance of Marx's early criticism of Hegel lies in the key it
provides for understanding Marx's criticism of the method of
bourgeois economics (and this is why he could recall and confirm
it after he had written Capital).
In Chapter 2 of The Poverty of Philosophy (1847),
'The Metaphysics of Political Economy', this
connection is brought out very well. 'Economic categories are
only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social
relations of production,' says Marx. While Proudhon, on the
other hand, 'holding things upside down like a true philosopher,
sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of these
principles'. In this manner, he goes on, 'What Hegel has done for
religion, law, etc., Monsieur Proudhon seeks to do for political
economy.' First of all by dint of abstraction he reduces 'the
substance of everything' into mere 'logical categories'; then,
having hypostatized these abstractions into substances, it is not
too difficult to retrace his steps and present real historical rela-
tionships as the objectification, the embodiment, of such cate-
gories.
Marx concludes:
If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents,
animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the
final abstraction, the only substance left is the logical categories. Thus
the metaphysicians who, in making these abstractions, think they are
making analyses, and who, the more they detach themselves from things,
imagine themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrat-
ing to their core - these metaphysicians in turn are right in saying that
things here below are embroideries of which the logical categories
constitute the canvas. This is what distinguishes the philosopher from
the Christian. The Christian, in spite of logic, has orrly one incarrration
of the Logos; the philosopher has never finished with incarnations.
as Maurice Dobb has pointed out in Chapter 5 of his
Political Economy and Capitalism (1937), its significance is far
wider. 'In making abstraction of particular elements in a situation,'
he writes, 'there are two roads along which one can proceed.'
The first is that which 'builds abstraction on the exclusion of
certain features which are present in any actual situation, either
because they are the more variable or because they are quantita-
tively of lesser importance in determining the course of events. To
omit them from consideration makes the resulting calculation no
more than an imperfect approximation to reality, but neverthe-
less makes it a very much more reliable guide than if the major
factors had been omitted and only the minor influences taken into
account.
'The second is the road which bases abstraction' not on
any evidence of fact as to what features in a situation are essential
and what are inessential, but simply on the formal procedure of
combining the properties common to a heterogeneous assortment
of situations and building abstraction out of analogy.'34
What characterizes this second method (with its indeterminate
or generic abstractions, as compared to the determinate, specific
ones of the first) is, Dobb says, that -
'in all such abstract systems
there exists the serious danger of hypostatizing one's concepts',
that is of 'regarding the postulated relations as the determining
ones in any actual situation' and so running the grave risk of
'introducing, unnoticed, purely imaginary assumptions' and
interpolating surreptitiously all the concrete, particular features
discarded in the first place. He continues:
All too frequently the propositions which are products of this mode
of abstraction have little more than formal meaning . . . But those who
use such propositions and build corollaries upon them are seldom
mindful of this limitation, and in applying them as 'laws' of the real
world invariably extract from them more meaning than their emptiness
ofreal content can possibly hold.
The resemblance to Marx's argument in the Critique could
hardly be closer. Dobb observes how for some economists
abstractions become independent of all reference to realities, and
are then hypostatized into 'laws' valid' for all situations, however
heterogeneous and disparate these may be.
