The “First Turn” in Marx’s Philosophical Thought

Just as Hegel found the path to ethical life through his critique of Kant’s philosophy, so too did Marx turn from Kant to Hegel in order to overcome the opposition between the “ought” and the “is.”

正如黑格尔通过批判康德哲学找到通达伦理生活的道路一样，马克思也是为了克服应然与实然的对立才从康德转向黑格尔。

Marx’s transfer from the University of Bonn to the University of Berlin in October 1836 constituted the first nodal point in the development of his philosophical thought. In the programmatic letter he wrote to his father on November 10, 1837, Marx accurately and in detail described his life in Berlin over the preceding year, and especially the fundamental change his thought had undergone: “The curtain had fallen; my most sacred possession had been destroyed, and a new god had to be installed in its place. I turned from idealism—which, by the way, I compared with that of Kant and Fichte—to seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they had become its center.” [1]1 Marx’s letter to his father, November 10–11, 1837, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *Collected Works*, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 18. Translation slightly modified.

1836年10月从波恩大学转到柏林大学，构成了马克思哲学思想发展的第一个节点。在1837年11月10日写给父亲那封规划性的书信中，马克思准确且详细地描述了他在柏林一年来的生活，特别是思想上所经历的根本性变化：“帷幕降下来了，我最神圣的东西被毁掉了，必须用新的神来填补这个位置。我从理想主义——顺便提一下，我曾拿它同康德和费希特的理想主义作比较——转而向现实本身去寻求观念。如果说神先前是超脱尘世的，那么现在它们已经成为尘世的中心。”

This turn had both external and internal causes. As for the external cause, the mainstream thought at the University of Bonn at that time was thoroughgoing Romanticism, while the University of Berlin was a stronghold of Hegelian philosophy. Here, Marx came under Hegel’s influence through a “double mediation”: one was the teaching of Eduard Gans, and the other was his experience in the “Doctor’s Club.” [2]2 The “Doctor’s Club” (*Doktorklub*) was a circle of Young Hegelian intellectuals in Berlin that Marx joined in 1837. During his time at the University of Berlin, through this circle, Marx became thoroughly familiar with the widely divergent currents of thought among Hegel’s younger followers, among whom Bruno Bauer and Friedrich Köppen had the greatest influence on him. [3]3 Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) and Friedrich Köppen (1808–1863) were leading figures in the Young Hegelian movement. Apart from these external influences, the internal cause of this turn lay in the insurmountable obstacles Marx encountered in the process of constructing a system of legal philosophy modeled on the Kantian-Fichtean approach: “The first serious obstacle that arose here was, once again, the opposition between what is and what ought to be, an opposition inherent in idealism and the root of the subsequently produced, irremediable erroneous division.” It was precisely in order to overcome the binary opposition between the “is” and the “ought” that Marx finally decided to turn from Kant to Hegel. Therefore, to truly understand Marx’s “first turn” in philosophical thought, we must first examine the difference between Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies.

这一转向主要有内外两方面原因。就外在原因来说，当时波恩大学的主流思想是彻底的浪漫主义，而柏林大学是黑格尔哲学的重镇。在这里，马克思通过“双重媒介”接受黑格尔的影响：一个是爱德华·甘斯的教学，另一个是他在“博士俱乐部”的经历。柏林大学期间，通过这个圈子，马克思谙熟了黑格尔年轻追随者中各种路数迥异的思想，其中对其影响最大的是布鲁诺·鲍威尔和弗里德里希·科本。除了这些外在的影响，这一转向的内在原因在于：马克思在仿照康德—费希特的方式建构法哲学体系的过程中遇到了难以克服的障碍，“这里首先出现的严重障碍同样是现有之物和应有之物的对立，这种对立是理想主义所固有的，是随后产生的无可救药的错误的划分的根源”。正是为了克服“实然”与“应然”的二元对立，马克思才最终决定从康德转向黑格尔。因此，要真正理解马克思哲学思想的“第一次转向”，我们必须先行考察康德与黑格尔哲学的差别。

The Foundational Significance of Kant’s Philosophy

康德哲学的奠基性意义

As the founder of classical German philosophy, Kant played a very important role in the development of German philosophy. It was with Kant that German philosophy truly won its own “substantive content.” Among his contributions, one of the most prominent is this: he was the first to develop the active aspect of “self-activity” abstractly into the primary principle of philosophy. Kant held that there are two types of reason: theoretical reason and practical reason. Theoretical reason examines knowledge related to external objects; through the “Critique of Pure Reason,” it answers the question of how knowledge is possible, pointing out that categories such as universality and necessity cannot be found in perception, and that these categories have another source beyond perception, namely the subject, the self in my self-consciousness. For Kant, the “I think” is not a substance in the Cartesian sense, but the “logical subject” that accompanies all representations. It does not belong to what is represented, but is the formal structure of the activity of representing as such. As the “form of representation in general,” the “I think” itself possesses a transcendental apperceptive capacity; this capacity for “apperception,” which attaches to and precedes all experience, is the ground on which universally valid and necessary knowledge becomes possible. In this sense, the “I think” is not only the condition for the possibility of experience in general, but also the transcendental condition for the possibility of objects of experience. Empirical knowledge is the result of the “I think” synthesizing and connecting the manifold of sensory intuition through a priori categories of the understanding. Therefore, in theoretical reason, the self, as representation, always has a thing (the thing-in-itself) external to and opposed to it; in cognition, reason does not achieve independence, and the self does not achieve freedom.

作为德国古典哲学的奠基者，康德在德国哲学的发展中起着非常重要的作用。从康德开始，德国哲学才真正赢获自己的“实体性内容”。其中，一个最为突出的贡献是：他首次把“自我活动”这个能动的方面抽象地发展为哲学的首要原则。康德认为，有两种类型的理性：一种是理论理性，另一种是实践理性。理论理性考察与外界对象相关联的知识，通过“纯粹理性批判”回答知识如何可能的问题，指出普遍性和必然性那样的范畴是不能在知觉中找到的，这些范畴在知觉之外有着另一个源泉，即主体、在我的自我意识中的自我。在康德那里，“我思”不是笛卡尔意义上的实体，而是伴随一切表象的“逻辑主体”。它不属于被表象的东西，而是表象活动之为表象活动的形式结构。作为“一般表象的形式”，“我思”本身具有一种先验的统觉能力，这种附于并先行于一切经验的“统觉”能力是普遍必然的知识得以可能的根据。在此意义上，“我思”不仅是一般经验得以可能的条件，而且是经验对象得以可能的先验条件。经验知识是“我思”通过先天的知性范畴把多样性的感性杂多加以综合和联结的结果。因此，在理论理性中，自我作为表象，总是有一个事物（自在之物）与它彼此外在，相互反对，在认识里，理性没有达到独立，自我也没有达到自由。

For reason to achieve its own independence and freedom, it must pass from theoretical reason to practical reason. In practical reason, “reason can disdainfully reject all the material that theoretical reason necessarily provides. The will determines itself; all just and moral actions are built upon freedom; in freedom, man has his absolute self-consciousness.” To ensure the purity of practical reason, Kant distinguished the will into lower and higher faculties of desire. The lower faculty of desire, including desires, inclinations, etc., receives its determination from something else; it is merely an empirical will, unfree and lacking autonomy. The higher faculty of desire is the will itself; apart from the universal purpose it determines for itself, this will has no external, particular ends; it is absolutely autonomous and free.

理性要实现自身的独立和自由，就必须从理论理性过渡到实践理性。在实践理性中，“理性可以轻蔑理论理性所必然地给予的一切材料。意志是自己决定自己的，一切正义的和道德的行为均建筑在自由上面；在自由里人有了他的绝对的自我意识”。为了保证实践理性的纯粹性，康德把意志区分为卑下的和高尚的欲求能力。卑下的欲求能力，包括欲望、嗜好等，是从某种别的东西得到它的规定的，但只是一种经验的意志，是不自主和不自由的。高尚的欲求能力则为意志本身，除了自己决定的普遍目的之外，这种意志没有外在的、个别的目的，是绝对自主的和自由的。

Through this distinction between lower and higher faculties of desire, Kant established freedom as the fundamental principle of practical reason, and on this basis constructed a moral philosophy distinct from utilitarian-eudaimonism. Its main points can be summarized as follows: First, man is a “dual” being: as a natural being, man is unfree, subject to natural laws and the satisfaction of various desires; as a moral being, man is free, transcending all natural laws and phenomena. Second, the moral value of an action does not depend on the effect it produces, but on whether the action itself is moral. What possesses moral value is not an action performed “in conformity with duty,” but an action performed “from duty,” that is, an action performed out of respect for the moral law, not out of instinct or a preference for the actual, anticipated, or desired results of the action. Third, the moral imperative is not a conditional hypothetical imperative, but an unconditional, universal, and exceptionless categorical imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. The key to whether a maxim of action can become a moral principle lies in whether it can be universalized, and whether it would involve a contradiction when it determines itself. To prove the applicability of this universalization formula, Kant imagined the following situation in the *Critique of Practical Reason*: a person, before dying, entrusts me with a valuable deposit, leaving no written record. Kant held that I cannot universalize a maxim of denying and embezzling this money, for otherwise this maxim would destroy itself, and no one would entrust deposits to anyone else anymore. Finally, in the realm of practical reason, whatever is correct in theory is valid in practice. The superiority of deontology over eudaimonism lies in the fact that the concept of duty, in its complete purity, can be applied to everyone’s practice more simply, more clearly, and more directly than any motive derived from happiness, related to it, or mixed with considerations of it. As long as a maxim of action is theoretically confirmed as a moral law by the formula of the universal law, then the sole practical duty is to act according to the moral law, without considering the specific factual circumstances.

通过对卑下的和高尚的欲求能力的区分，康德把自由确立为实践理性的基本原则，并在此基础上建立起一种不同于功利主义—幸福论的道德哲学。其要点可归纳如下：第一，人是“二重性”的存在：作为一个自然的存在物，人是不自由的，要受制于自然规律和各种欲望的满足；而作为一个道德的存在物，人是自由的，超出一切自然规律和现象。第二，一种行动的道德价值不取决于它所产生的效果，而取决于它本身是否是道德的。拥有道德价值的不是“合于义务”的行动，而是“出于义务”的行动，是出于对道德法则的尊重而行动，而非出于本能或对行为的现实的、期待的或想要达成的结果的偏好而行动。第三，道德命令不是有条件的假言命令，而是无条件的、普遍且无例外的绝对命令：要这样行动，以使你能够意愿行动的准则成为一项普遍的法则。一个行动准则能否成为道德准则的关键，在于它能否普遍化，在于它于自己决定时是否会有矛盾。为了证明这一普遍化法则的适用性，康德在《实践理性批判》中设想了如下情形：一个人在死前委托我照管一笔价值可观的寄存物，而没有留下任何字据。康德认为，我不能使一项否认和独吞这笔钱的准则普遍化，否则这条准则将会自我毁灭，任何人都不会再委托他人寄存了。最后，在实践理性的领域，凡是理论上正确的东西，在实践上都是有效的。义务论优于幸福论就在于义务概念以其完全的纯粹性，较之任何出自幸福的或与之相关的以及掺杂着对它的考虑的动机，能更简单、更明确、更直接地运用于每个人的实践。只要一个行动准则在理论上被普遍法则公式确认为道德法则，那么实践上的唯一义务就是根据道德法则去行动，而不用考虑特定的事实处境。

But precisely because of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason and the ubiquitous binary distinctions in his philosophical system, Kant’s moral philosophy began to expose its own defect of dualism. The principle of free will is established by distinguishing the lower and higher faculties of desire; this principle does not eliminate the opposition between them; on the contrary, it takes this opposition as the premise of its own existence. Just as theoretical reason is opposed to objective sensory material, so too is practical reason opposed to practical sensibility, impulses, inclinations, etc. As the universal opposition between the “ought” and the “is” is placed at the center of practical philosophy, the reality of morality, the factual situation of man in society and the state, becomes a secondary difficulty; human freedom and value become an eternally unrealizable “ought”; and the relationship between philosophy and the reality of practice becomes an insoluble problem.

但也正因为理论理性和实践理性的区别以及其哲学体系中无所不在的二元区分，康德的道德哲学开始暴露出自身的二元论缺陷。自由意志原则是通过区分卑下的和高尚的欲求能力而设定起来的，这一原则没有消除两者之间的对立，相反它把这种对立当作自己存在的前提。正如理论理性同客观的感性材料相对立一样，实践理性也和实践的感性、冲动、嗜好等相对立。随着普遍的应然与实然的对立被置于实践哲学的中心，道德的现实性、人在社会和国家中的事实处境，就成了次要的疑难，人的自由和价值也就成了一个永远无法实现的“应当”，哲学与实践的现实性之关系也就成了一个不可解决的难题。

Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Philosophy

黑格尔对康德道德哲学的批判

In response to this defect, Hegel subjected Kant’s moral philosophy to a severe critique. Hegel held that elevating the principle of freedom to the pivot around which humanity revolves was indeed commendable, but the greatest shortcoming of this principle was that “it is purely formal”; apart from identity, self-consistency, and universality, it is nothing else. Whether in the theoretical or the practical domain, this empty, formal legislative principle cannot attain reality. Any particular determination—even two opposing determinations, “property rights” and “no property rights”—can pass the test of universalization as a law. Kant believed that the moral law concerning property was that one should respect the property of others, because the opposite of the entire teaching could not be a universal law. This is certainly correct. But this moral law from the outset presupposes “property”: only if there is property is there a need to respect property. Without property, one may also not respect property. If I do not presuppose property, then there is no contradiction in the act of theft. Proceeding from this critique, Hegel drew an important conclusion: rather than saying that morality is a situation of inner freedom in which we can reflect on it, it is more accurate to say that morality means living according to the customs of a particular state. The realm of ethical life is not a result defined and constructed by “consciousness of freedom” in the Kantian sense—a “situation that enables us to have inner freedom to reflect on it”—but rather a realm of objective spirit. Therefore, only by transcending the merely moral standpoint of the Kantian type can one enter the genuine realm of ethical life.

针对这种缺陷，黑格尔对康德道德哲学作了严苛的批判。黑格尔认为，把自由原则提升为人所赖以旋转的枢纽，这固然值得称许，但这个原则的最大缺点是“它纯全是形式的”，除了同一性、自我一致性、普遍性之外不是任何别的东西。不论在理论方面或实践方面，这种空洞的、形式的立法原则都不能达到实在性。任何特定的规定性，甚至是两个对立的规定性——“财产权”和“无财产权”——都能通过普遍化法则的检验。康德认为，关于财产的道德律是应该尊重别人的财产，因为整个教训的反面不可能是一个普遍法则。这诚然是不错的。但是，这个道德律从一开始就把“财产”设为前提：有财产，才需要尊重财产。没有财产，也就可以不尊重财产。如果我不以有财产为前提，在偷窃行为里就不存在矛盾。从这种批判出发，黑格尔得出了一个重要的结论：与其说道德是某种我们可以对它进行反思的内在自由的情境，毋宁说道德是按照某个国家的习惯生活。伦理生活的领域不是一个由康德意义上的“自由意识”加以规定和建构的结果、一个“使我们具有对它进行反思的内在自由的情境”，而是一个客观精神的领域。因此，只有超越康德式的单纯道德观点，才能进入真正的伦理领域。

Having examined the differences between Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy, we can draw three basic inferences concerning the “first turn” in Marx’s philosophical thought. First, this turn was not merely some accidental interest but manifested itself as something internally necessary and inevitable in the initial course of Marx’s thought. It was precisely this internal necessity that compelled Marx to turn the viewpoint he had “previously detested” (Hegelian philosophy) into “his own idol.” [4]4 Marx’s early intellectual development included a period of engagement with Kant and Fichte before he turned to Hegel. The phrase “previously detested” refers to Marx’s earlier rejection of Hegelian philosophy, which he later embraced. Second, this turn was a crucial step in Marx’s shift of focus from Kantian idealism to Hegelian philosophy. If earlier Marx was closer, in terms of philosophical worldview, to Kant-Fichtean idealism, then after this point Hegelian philosophy increasingly and unequivocally became a fixed point amid the flux of phenomena. Third, just as Hegel found the path to ethical life through his critique of Kantian philosophy, so too did Marx turn from Kant to Hegel in order to overcome the opposition between “what ought to be” and “what is.” Although this turn was influenced by various external factors, including the “Doctors’ Club,” [5]5 The “Doctors’ Club” (Doktorklub) was a group of Young Hegelian intellectuals in Berlin that Marx joined in 1837, which influenced his turn toward Hegelian philosophy. Marx’s way of dealing with Hegelian philosophy manifested its own uniqueness from the very beginning. What attracted Marx to Hegel lay neither in the grandeur and profundity of the Hegelian system, as emphasized by the Old Hegelians, nor in some particular aspect of the Hegelian system seized upon by the Young Hegelians, but rather in the immense impact Hegel had in putting an end to the dualistic tendency that Kant had bequeathed to classical German philosophy. From this immense impact, Marx saw a possibility of “realizing” philosophy. This insight not only distinguished Marx from the various Hegelian schools but also determined the path of his subsequent philosophical research.

在考察了康德与黑格尔哲学的差别之后，关于马克思哲学思想中的“第一次转向”，我们可以作出三个基本的推论。第一，这一转向并不只是某种偶然的兴趣，而是表现为马克思最初思想进程中内在的必要和必然的东西。正是这种内在必然性，迫使马克思把他先前“所憎恶的观点”（黑格尔哲学）变成“自己的偶像”。第二，这一转向是马克思的关注点从康德理想主义向黑格尔哲学转向的关键一步。如果先前马克思在哲学世界观上更接近于康德—费希特的理想主义，那么在此之后黑格尔哲学就越来越明确地成为变幻不息的现象中的一个固着点。第三，正如黑格尔通过批判康德哲学找到通达伦理生活的道路一样，马克思也是为了克服应然与实然的对立才从康德转向黑格尔。这一转向虽然受到了包括“博士俱乐部”在内的各种外在因素的影响，但马克思处理黑格尔哲学的方式从一开始就表现出自己的独特性。黑格尔对马克思的吸引之处，既不在于老年黑格尔派关注的黑格尔哲学体系的宏大和深邃，也不在于青年黑格尔派抓住的黑格尔体系的某一方面，而在于他在终结康德留给德国古典哲学二元论倾向方面所产生的巨大影响。从这种巨大的影响中，马克思看到了一种“实现”哲学的可能性。这种洞见不仅把马克思同形形色色的黑格尔学派区分开来，而且也规定着马克思此后的哲学研究道路。

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗