72
PARTISAN REVIEW
answer. Hegel claimed that the discovery of the dialectical movement
as a universal law ruling both human reason and affairs
and
the
inner "reason" of natural events, accomplished even more than a
mere correspondence between
intellect us
and
res,
whose coincidence
pre-Cartesian philosophy had defined as truth. By introducing the
Spirit and its self-realization in movement, Hegel believed he had
demonstrated an ontological identity of matter and idea. To Hegel,
therefore, it would have been of no great importance whether one
started this movement from the viewpoint of consciousness, which
at one moment begins to "materialize," or whether one chose as start–
ing point matter, which, moving in the direction of "spiritualization,"
becomes conscious of itself. (How little Marx doubted these funda- •
mentals of his teacher appears from the role he ascribed to self-con–
sciousness in the form of class-consciousness in history.) In other
words, Marx was no more a "dialectical materialist" than Hegel was
a "dialectical idealist"; the very concept of dialectical
movement,
as
Hegel conceived it as a universal law, and as Marx accepted it,
makes the terms "idealism" and "materialism" as philosophical sys–
tems meaningless. Marx, especially in his earlier writings, is quite con–
scious of this and knows that his repudiation of the tradition and of
Hegel does not lie in his "materialism," but in his refusal to assume
that the difference between man and animal life is
ratio
or thought,
that, in Hegel's words, "man is essentially spirit." His turning-about,
like Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's, goes to the core of the matter;
they all question the traditional hierarchy of human capabilities or,
to put it another way, they ask again what the specifically human
quality of man is; they do not intend to build systems or
Weltan–
schauungen
on this or that premise.
The allegory of the cave is told by Plato in the context of a
strictly political dialogue searching for the best form of government
in the sense of the best way to organize the living-together of men.
As such, the story contains not so much Plato's doctrine of ideas as
the relationship and applicability of this doctrine to the political realm
of a common world, and, at the same time, tells the story of the
philosopher in this world as though it were his concentrated biog–
raphy, the life of
the
philosopher. Important in our context is the fact
that the transcendence of the ideas, their existence outside the cave
