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PARTISAN REVIEW .
good deal of the German idealism which they thought they were
warring against. The young Marx who had lampooned the doctors
for imagining the soul could be purged with a pill was still present
in
the dialectical materialist.
The abstractions of German philosophy, which may seem to
us unmeaning or clumsy
if
we encounter them in English or French,
convey in German, through their capitalized solidity, almost the
impression of primitive gods. They are substantial, and yet they
are a kind of pure beings; they are abstract, and yet they nourish.
They have the power to hallow, to console, to intoxicate, to render
warlike, as perhaps only the songs and the old epics of other peoples
do. It is as
if
the old tribal deities of the North had
first
been con–
verted to Christianity, while still maintaining their self-assertive pagan
nature; and as if then, as the Christian theology became displaced
by French eighteenth-century rationalism, they had put on the
mask of pure reason. But for becoming less anthropomorphic,
they were not the less mythopoeic creations. The Germans, who have
done so little in the field of social observation, who have produced
so few great social novels or dramas, have retained and developed
to an amazing degree the genius for creating myths. The
Ewig–
Weibliche
of Goethe, the
Kategorische Imperativ
of Kant, the
Weltgeist
with its
Idee
of Hegel-they dominated the minds of the
Germans and haunted European thought in general like great hover–
ing legendary divinities. Karl Marx, in the passage I have quoted
above, described the Idea of Hegel as a "demiurge":
this
demiurge
continued to walk by
his
side even after he imagined he had dis–
missed it. He still believed in the triad of Hegel: the
These,
the
Anti–
these
and the
Synthese;
and this triad was simply the old Trinity,
taken over from the Christian theology, as the Christians had taken
it over from Plato. It was the mythical and magical triangle which
from the time of Pythagoras and before had stood as a symbol for
certainty and power and which probably derived its significance
from its reference to the male sexual organs. "Philosophy," Marx
once wrote, "stands in the same relation to the study of the actual
world as onanism to sexual love"; but into his study of the actual
world he insisted on bringing the Dialectic. Certainly the one-in–
three, three-in-pne of the Thesis, the Antithesis and the Synthesis has
had upon Marxists a compelling effect which it would be impossible
to justify through reason. (It is almost a wonder that Richard Wag–
ner never composed a music-drama on the Dialectic: indeed, there
does seem to be something of the kind in the Nibelungen cycle in the
relations between Wotan, Brunhilde and Siegfried.)
The Dialectic lies deep in all Marx's work; it remained
with
