THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF TIME IN MARXISM: KARL MARX’S BREAK WITH THE YOUNG HEGELIANS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55877/cc.vol34.736Keywords:
Young Hegelians, Karl Marx, time, philosophical revolution, historical materialismAbstract
The concept of “time” constituted an internal and inescapable dimension of the Young Hegelians’ debates over the conception of history. Within the framework of speculative philosophy, the historical conceptions they articulated – and their corresponding understandings of time – largely inherited Hegel’s de-temporalizing tendency, in which time was subordinated to the movement of substance or of self-consciousness. More concretely, Max Stirner projected individual time onto the framework of human history, interpreting history as the unfolding of the “self”; Ludwig Feuerbach sought to restore time through his philosophy of species; Bruno Bauer, grounded in the philosophy of self-consciousness, treated “critique” as the very measure of time. Despite their internal polemics, all three failed to emancipate time from the internal structure of speculative philosophy. Confronting this impasse, Karl Marx broke decisively with the German idealist paradigm by advancing the understanding of the real human being beyond abstract anthropology and concretizing it as the subject of material production – an active being situated within determinate historical conditions and social relations. He further formulated the historical materialism, within which historical development is grounded in concrete social practice and time is redefined as a historically determinate process rather than the self-deduction of pure thought.
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