The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination by Matthew Guerrieri
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
Ads: Link
escaping back to London.) In order to have the funds to support Marx,
whom he always regarded as the more brilliant thinker, Engels reluctantly returned
to the family firm, assuming the role of a proper Victorian businessman. After Marx’s
death in 1883, Engels kept the faith, defending Marx’s reputation, expanding and promoting
Marxist thought, and having a go at finishing the last volume of
Capital
. The bond between the two was enduring; for all their later activity and notoriety,
they never quite abandoned their identity as enthusiastic students, arguing Hegel
and history over copious amounts of beer.
In fact, it was a pub crawl from later in his life that gave us one of the few glimpses
of Marx’s musical taste. Sometime in the 1850s, when London was seemingly flooded
with revolutionaries-in-exile, Marx took Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a pair
of old Young Hegelian associates, on a quest “to ‘take something’ in every saloon
between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road,” as Liebknecht remembered it, a fairly daunting
prospect in that particular district. (Bauer, a frank advocate of terrorism, had apparently
remained a drinking buddy even after being intellectually savaged by Marx and Engels
in their “Critique of Critical Criticism”
The Holy Family
; Liebknecht would go on to be a founder of Germany’s Social Democratic party. The
Young Hegelians were always a confederation of strange bedfellows.)
At the end of this inebriated tour, Bauer took offense at the patriotic deprecations
of a group of Englishmen, and Marx joined in the drunken defense of German culture.
Liebknecht again:
[N]o other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of
music as Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music
were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the
miserable political and economical conditions from accomplishing any great practical
work, but who would yet outclass all other nations. So fluently I have never heard
him speaking English. 61
Marx never advanced anything close to a comprehensive philosophy of art; nevertheless,
dosed with liquid courage, Marx defended not the German intellectual heritage—not
Goethe, not Kant, not Hegel—but its composers, in a progression culminating with Beethoven.
Nowadays, Marx and Engels are still inextricably associated with—and blamed for—Communism
and all its disgraces. Their most lasting contribution, though, was the materialist
conception of history, a redesign of Hegel’s historical engine to run on less mystical
fuel. Marx: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor
political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called
general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in
the material conditions of life.” 62
For Marx, the best use of the dialectic was not to overcome contradictions, as Hegel
preached, but to reveal and focus them: to clarify the content, not reveal a speculative
form. History doesn’t resolve conflict, advancing toward an Absolute stand-in for
transcendental unity; history happens because of conflicts that are fundamentally
unresolvable. If you can dialectically boil your analysis down to these fundamental
conflicts—capital versus labor, say, or collective control versus anarchic individualism—you
can grasp the levers of history.
Historical materialism even informed Marx’s pub-crawl musiccritique: to note Beethoven’s achievement in the face of “miserable political and
economical conditions” was high praise indeed. Hegel thought that it was the Idea
that creates political, social, and economic conditions. Marx thought that Hegel had
things completely back-to-front. Marx often thought that way—it was a critical trick
he had picked up from one of the leading lights of the
whom he always regarded as the more brilliant thinker, Engels reluctantly returned
to the family firm, assuming the role of a proper Victorian businessman. After Marx’s
death in 1883, Engels kept the faith, defending Marx’s reputation, expanding and promoting
Marxist thought, and having a go at finishing the last volume of
Capital
. The bond between the two was enduring; for all their later activity and notoriety,
they never quite abandoned their identity as enthusiastic students, arguing Hegel
and history over copious amounts of beer.
In fact, it was a pub crawl from later in his life that gave us one of the few glimpses
of Marx’s musical taste. Sometime in the 1850s, when London was seemingly flooded
with revolutionaries-in-exile, Marx took Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a pair
of old Young Hegelian associates, on a quest “to ‘take something’ in every saloon
between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road,” as Liebknecht remembered it, a fairly daunting
prospect in that particular district. (Bauer, a frank advocate of terrorism, had apparently
remained a drinking buddy even after being intellectually savaged by Marx and Engels
in their “Critique of Critical Criticism”
The Holy Family
; Liebknecht would go on to be a founder of Germany’s Social Democratic party. The
Young Hegelians were always a confederation of strange bedfellows.)
At the end of this inebriated tour, Bauer took offense at the patriotic deprecations
of a group of Englishmen, and Marx joined in the drunken defense of German culture.
Liebknecht again:
[N]o other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of
music as Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music
were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the
miserable political and economical conditions from accomplishing any great practical
work, but who would yet outclass all other nations. So fluently I have never heard
him speaking English. 61
Marx never advanced anything close to a comprehensive philosophy of art; nevertheless,
dosed with liquid courage, Marx defended not the German intellectual heritage—not
Goethe, not Kant, not Hegel—but its composers, in a progression culminating with Beethoven.
Nowadays, Marx and Engels are still inextricably associated with—and blamed for—Communism
and all its disgraces. Their most lasting contribution, though, was the materialist
conception of history, a redesign of Hegel’s historical engine to run on less mystical
fuel. Marx: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor
political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called
general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in
the material conditions of life.” 62
For Marx, the best use of the dialectic was not to overcome contradictions, as Hegel
preached, but to reveal and focus them: to clarify the content, not reveal a speculative
form. History doesn’t resolve conflict, advancing toward an Absolute stand-in for
transcendental unity; history happens because of conflicts that are fundamentally
unresolvable. If you can dialectically boil your analysis down to these fundamental
conflicts—capital versus labor, say, or collective control versus anarchic individualism—you
can grasp the levers of history.
Historical materialism even informed Marx’s pub-crawl musiccritique: to note Beethoven’s achievement in the face of “miserable political and
economical conditions” was high praise indeed. Hegel thought that it was the Idea
that creates political, social, and economic conditions. Marx thought that Hegel had
things completely back-to-front. Marx often thought that way—it was a critical trick
he had picked up from one of the leading lights of the
Similar Books
