Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh Book

Because I had just finished Hegel's Philosophy of Right , and because this book contained Marx's oft-quoted aphorism about religion being the "opium of the people," it seemed high time for me to dig into this lesser-known work of Marx's. As promised, the book begins in a flurry of linguistic brilliance as Marx spits out aphorism after aphorism about religion, history, and the German nation. (Though it should be said that Marx overuses the antithesis as a rhetorical device; every sentence is in the form "It is not the A of B, but the B of A," etc. etc.)

The book quickly goes downhill from there. Marx'never one to be organized or to-the-point, even in his published works'left this manuscript as a rambling, messy mass of thoughts. The writing is as scatter-brained as the young thinker must have been'no central thesis is developed, and his fundamental points regarding Hegel's philosophy are distributed at random throughout. It is clearly a work in progress. What's more, I suspect Marx greatly underestimated the task he set for himself in setting out to do a line-by-line criticism of Hegel, and so wisely decided to abandon the project.

Marx's central points will not surprise anyone who has read anything else by him: Hegel begins with mystical premises; Hegel is not sufficiently empirical; Hegel is a proponent of the few rather than the many, etc. Perhaps the most curious thing about Marx's criticism, however, is that does accept Hegel's dialectical mode of proceeding. In fact, so completely does Marx subscribe to Hegel's logic, that much of the book consists in Marx pointing out where Hegel didn't abide by his own system. For me, this was mildly entertaining; but it was also frustrating'as a more effective criticism of Hegel could be got by criticizing Hegel's logic itself, rather than its application.

I suppose that this book's worth lay less in its contribution to Hegel scholarship (though I bet it would be a fascinating read for Hegel scholars), than as an insight into Marx as a young man. Here we see him practicing his pen at invective, dipping his toe in philosophy, and struggling to find a perspective from which to criticize the current society. It appears that Hegel alone didn't cut it; soon he moved on to economics.