ABSTRACT
The most ingenious of all the disguised theologians, the “master wizard” as Marx called him, was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who dominated German intellectual life when Marx was young. Plato had said that the real ideas, conceived as changeless, are to be studied and arrived at by a debating or dialectic process, a process of affirmation, contradiction, and reconciliation of the opposing views. It is a Divine Mind evolving with logical necessity and with intense creative emotion like a deadly serious, soulfully important, and noble and inexorable parlor game of dialectic, toward the goal of “self-realization.” Marx himself spoke of the “higher life-form toward which the existing society tends irresistibily by its own economic development,” and declared on this ground that the workers “have no ideal to realize, they have only to release the elements of the new society which the collapsing bourgeois society carries in its womb.”.
