Gramsci's Plan: Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800

By Robin Jacobitz

Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800 is an interesting read even for philosophical nonprofessionals because ... - the philosophy of the Enlightenment is presented in comprehensible language and embedded in the 300-year struggle for the liberation of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, - the importance of reason in our knowledge, in the sciences, and in the democratic republic is elaborated based on Kant's writings, - in times of threat with Kant's philosophy a reassurance can be made regarding the foundations of the democratic republic and the worldwide spread of this form of government since the First French Republic, - Kant's "categorical imperative" must be reinterpreted as a fundamental political norm of the democratic republic, if his ethics is understood as a "German theory of the French Revolution" (Marx), - countering the postmodern discrediting of the philosophy of history by placing the current struggle for the democratic republic in the context of Kant's goal of history, which called for a democratically organized and federally unified humanity on the grounds of reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Jul 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9783347356771

Book preview

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER     1

Gramsci’s Plan and the Legacy of German Classical Philosophy

A book about Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy?

This book is intended for all those who wish to orient themselves in today’s world, who wish to learn from which philosophical disputes our present world emerged, and who are looking for suggestions as to how today’s world can be changed in a humanistic, progressive and socialistic sense. It was written with the intention to bring philosophy as a whole closer to our contemporary life; to reclaim it for today’s social disputes. Philosophy deals very fundamentally with human life and the world in which it takes place. With Kant, philosophy can be fundamentally divided into epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, and the final question, What is man? The issues philosophers address are in some ways beneath current political disputes, yet all social and political actors – from a citizens’ initiative to governments – are constantly guided by philosophical considerations. In the 21st century, a new generation has set out to avert the looming ecological catastrophes and fight the misery in the world. It is about nothing less than slowing down the capitalist world economy, which is designed for profit and growth under competitive conditions and to initiate an ecological reconstruction of the world economy based on solidarity. This task permanently raises philosophical questions today and in the future, such as the question of the cognitive capacity of meteorological science, the possibilities of human action as producer and consumer in a globalized economy, or the general chances of humanity to avoid a warlike or ecological catastrophe. Because of this situation, a study of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci seems to make sense, because his work refers to the historically unique attempt to transcend the bourgeois social order as a whole and to build a new world without war, exploitation, and colonial oppression. This attempt was made in the years 1917 to 1921 by the revolutionary movements in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, because they drew consequences from the hell of World War I and wanted to put an end to the capitalist world economy.

Oppressors and Oppressed – An essay by Antonio Gramsci from 1911: Antonio Gramsci’s generation was also confronted with a very specific world political issue. In Gramsci’s case, this was European colonialism and the threat of war that it posed. In the late 19th century, the great European states had begun to divide the entire world among themselves and build colonial empires. In the process, considerable tension arose between the imperial powers. After France occupied Morocco in April 1911, the German Kaiser sent gunboats off the coast of Morocco. With this threatening military maneuver, Wilhelm II wanted to obtain quid pro quos for accepting French rule over Morocco. Following these events, which made headlines as the Moroccan Crisis, large demonstrations against the impending war took place throughout Europe. The largest mass rally took place in Berlin in September 1911, with about 200,000 participants. In the same month, the Italian government, emboldened by a nationalist and pro-colonialist mood, declared war on Libya. Libya was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, that is, Turkey. During the course of the Turkish-Italian war, massacres of Libyan civilians were carried out by Italian troops, who dropped bombs from the air for the first time. In October 1912, victorious Italy annexed Libya and named this colony Italian North Africa. Also in 1911, Antonio Gramsci, then 20 years old, wrote an essay in school entitled Oppressors and Oppressed. In it, he protested the colonial conquests of Europeans around the world and placed resistance to them philosophically in the tradition of the Enlightenment as established by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The struggle waged by humanity from time immemorial is truly amazing. It is an incessant struggle, one in which mankind strives to tear off and break the chains with which the lust for power on the part of a single man, or a single class, or even an whole people, attempt to shackle it. This struggle is an epic that has had innumerable heroes and has been written down by historians all over the world. Men, when they come to feel their strength and to be conscious of their responsibility and their value, will no longer suffer another man to impose his will on them and claim the right to control their actions and thoughts.¹ A year later, Lenin (1870-1924) wrote an article in the Russian newspaper Pravda about the Turkish-Italian war. Lenin, the then still largely unknown leader of the Russian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks), would later become an important guiding figure for Gramsci in the years of the uprising of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20, as well as in his Prison Notebooks. In 1912, Lenin commented on the outcome of the Turkish-Italian war as follows: Italy ‘has won.’ A year ago, it invaded the Turkish territories in Africa like a brigand, and from now on Tripoli will belong to Italy. It will not be out of place to take a closer look at this typical colonial war of a ‘civilized’ state of the 20th century. What was the cause of this war? By the greed of the Italian financial magnates and capitalists who need a new market, the successes of Italian imperialism. Lenin continued as follows, What kind of war was this? A perfected, civilized massacre, a slaughter of the Arabs with ‘most modern’ weapons. The Arabs were desperately fighting back. (…) Despite the ‘peace’, in reality, the war will continue, because the Arab tribes in the interior of the African continent, far from the coast, will not submit. They will be ‘civilized’ for a long time to come – by bayonet, by bullet, by rope, by fire, by the rape of their women.² Lenin will be right in his prediction. Only towards the end of the 20th century will colonialism have been defeated everywhere on Earth. The international peace movement could not prevent the outbreak of World War I three years after the Moroccan crisis. For 4 years, the war raged over zones of influence, colonies, and national prestige, costing the lives of 17 million people. It was followed by economic crises, famine, widespread misery, and revolutions and uprisings throughout Europe, one of which took place in Italy.

Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy of praxis: Antonio Gramsci was Italian and lived from 1891 to 1937. He was born in Sardinia and grew up in modest circumstances. Because of a scholarship, he was able to begin studying literature in Turin in 1913. In the same year, he joined the Italian Socialist Party. Later he wrote articles in socialist daily newspapers. When World War I broke out in 1914, Gramsci was 23 years old. After the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918 helped end World War I, he participated in a leading position in the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20. Gramsci was thus a contemporary of Lenin (1870-1924) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), only about 20 years younger. Like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, he was one of the leading figures of the communist parties that had just been founded. Gramsci became general secretary of the Italian Communist Party in 1924, and in 1926, the police of the fascist Prime Minister Mussolini arrested him. Gramsci spent the next 11 years in prison, where he wrote the Prison Notebooks on philosophy, politics and culture in Italy and Europe in 29 notebooks of over 1300 pages. In 1937, shortly after his release, Gramsci died because of his stay in prison. His Prison Notebooks and the philosophy of praxis they contain continue to be considered a treasure of 20th century European philosophical history. In it, Gramsci undertook a critical reappraisal of the philosophy and practice of the labor movement and its social democratic and communist parties to explain the defeats of the years 1917 to 1921 and to draw conclusions from them. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci took a hard line with the entire Marxist philosophy as it had been developed after Marx’s death in 1883, from Friedrich Engels to Georgi Plekhanov, the theoretician of Russian social democracy, to Lenin and Bukharin, the leaders of the Russian Bolsheviks. His investigations culminated in the statement that this philosophy must be laid to rest.

Did Gramsci create the philosophical core of an alternative form of communism? The literature on Antonio Gramsci and his work has become unmanageably large in recent decades. His Prison Notebooks in particular have been the starting point for a great deal of discussion on the political left and in universities about Marxist philosophy, European history, the concept of hegemony, and his comments on language, culture, and the school system. So why yet another book on Antonio Gramsci? Everybody knows it: there are certain sentences that stay in your head. This is what happened to the author with a sentence formulated by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his 1200-page account of the Main Currents of Marxism in 1976: One may say that Gramsci created the ideological core of an alternative form of communism, which, however, never existed as a political movement and even less as a real regime.³ Instead of ideological core, it should better read philosophical core. And the second part of the sentence also needs correction: Gramsci was part of a social movement; he processed the struggles and defeats, the goals and forms of organization of the Turin factory councils movement in his theories as an activist and later as leader of the Italian Communist Party. If his early writings from the years of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919 and 1920 are read in the context of the Prison Notebooks, they contain the philosophical core of an alternative to Stalin’s philosophy, which was predominant, with certain exceptions, in the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991. The philosophical alternative to Stalinism does not consist mainly in the exposition of the principles of a future society, but it formulates those principles that are to be applied in a constantly developing bourgeois society to be able to take an emancipatory path out of it. Gramsci derived these principles from an independent reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy and the struggles of the Italian workers’ movement under the conditions of a democratic constitution in the years following World War I. Based on Kolakowski’s thought that Gramsci had created the philosophical core of an alternative form of communism, the author resumed reading the Prison Notebooks after the Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, published them in German.

Gramsci’s plan and the legacy of classical German philosophy: In the course of this second reading, the philosophical leitmotif that Gramsci had pursued in his Prison Notebooks emerged piece by piece. According to this, his plan was to make Marxism fruitful again as a practical philosophy for the modern world, beyond the philosophical materialism developed by Lenin and codified in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin (1878-1953). Gramsci provided his plan with the practical goal of achieving the emancipation of the subaltern classes in a global perspective. Accordingly, Gramsci’s philosophy, which he himself gave the name philosophy of praxis, is presented here as an attempt to think a way out of world capitalist society based on the practical experience of the years 1917 to 1921. What makes Gramsci unique in the tradition of Marxist philosophy is that he considered classical German philosophy, and specifically the philosophies of Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831), to be the key to understanding the philosophy of Karl Marx. He conceived of Marx’s philosophical work as a reform of Hegelianism. In this context, Gramsci also explored the question of whether Kant’s philosophy was the first annual ring of a new philosophy that goes beyond the philosophy embodied in the French Revolution.⁴ Gramsci thus intended to uncover the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of philosophical development, a line of philosophical thought that Stalinism and its precursors had fought against, successfully destroyed, and replaced with a different approach to Marx. This book intends to fill this gap in the literature on Gramsci by systematically tracing the breadcrumbs he scattered on the subject in the Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci’s Plan Part 1: Kant and the Enlightenment: The title says it all: The focus of this book, to be followed by others, is the presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s philosophical thoughts on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In Kant and the Enlightenment, the original works of Kant are presented, accompanied by Gramsci’s comments, and embedded in the historical drama that took place before, during, and after the French Revolution. To reconstruct the Kant-Hegel-Marx lineage, the writings of Kant and Hegel had to be reread, which meant, especially with respect to Kant, breaking through traditional Marxism’s deep-seated political defense mechanism against Kant. Kant and Marx are indisputably among the greats in the history of philosophy. They are considered to represent diametrically opposed currents: Kant is assigned to idealism, Marx to materialism. In the main part of this book, which follows immediately, it is explained in detail that Kant had determined the inner core of the Enlightenment as the self-thinking of man. Marx had written that the social being determines consciousness. Then, it could be assumed, it cannot have much to do with self-thinking. Moreover, Kant is undisputedly considered an important philosophical founder of modern bourgeois democracy, while Marx is considered a proponent of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By reconstructing the heritage of classical German philosophy in the philosophy of Marx, all of his theories, as well as those of Gramsci, are cast in a new light and can thus be made useful for an understanding of today’s world.

Gramsci proposed to write a dramatic book about philosophy. The emergence of philosophical thoughts should be embedded in a historical drama taking place at the same time: The purpose of bringing philosophy closer to contemporary life gives rise to some unusual aspects of form and content for a philosophical book. The linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of academic philosophical literature have been dispensed with. The course of the argumentation has been substantiated throughout with quotations from the originals, not only for hedging purposes, but also to encourage further reading. The presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts is always in the foreground. The incorporation of critical statements from the secondary literature on this or any problem at the edge of the path has been largely dispensed with in favor of this stringency. Only in this way, a long ascending line in the argumentation can be realized without fraying. In this way, readers are taken on a journey to ever more complex philosophical constructions. Although the ambition was to develop the concepts systematically, it was in no way intended to write a textbook. A superior position was given to Gramsci’s proposal to write about philosophy a book that is in a sense ‘dramatic,’ a historical drama taking place at the same time …⁵ Accordingly, the presentation of the development of the thoughts of the individual philosophers is largely chronological and embedded in the historical reality in which they arose. This also takes into account a reference by Hegel, who described philosophy as the thought of its time. At this point, it is hoped that a variety of new and perhaps surprising insights and perspectives should emerge even for readers who are familiar with the material. What is known of Marx’s philosophy corresponds to the standard Marxist interpretation of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. This everyday knowledge, which has congealed into solid form and is also highly valued by bourgeois literature, must be broken up in order to pave a way for the emancipatory content of Marx’s philosophy into the 21st century. With Kant and Hegel, the highest peaks of classical German philosophy will be climbed in the first books and the processing of this heritage by Marx will be presented, in order to then dive into a philosophical abyss with Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in which parts of the world still find themselves today. This will be followed by an exploration of Gramsci’s thoughts on the defeats of the workers’ movement in the years 1917 to 1921, bourgeois hegemony and his perspective of an emancipation of the subaltern classes.

It is confusion that philosophy has to start with in the first place: A book with philosophical content is written at a certain time. It carries the spirit of the time in which it is written, and this spirit of the time includes the position of philosophy itself. In the 21st century, philosophy has continued the decline that was already evident in the preceding decades. Philosophy today is far from shaping social debates, people’s social actions, or politics, or even from being a kind of guiding science for the natural sciences and the humanities. Doubts about its own raison d’être, about its own effectiveness, and about the tasks to be tackled plague the discipline. Thus, the question is discussed whether philosophy is on the verge of abolishing itself? A book like Why Philosophy? published in 2008 is a symptom of a deep-seated crisis in the self-image of this science, which was already practiced by the ancient Greeks before our era.⁶ A contributing factor was that with the Soviet Union in 1991, the most historically significant variant of Marxist philosophy perished theoretically and practically in a great implosion, without any new emancipatory approaches emerging from it. Postmodern philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard (1923-1998) began to declare all grand narratives about the history of humanity invalid as early as the late 1970s.⁷ This reinforced the already existing doubts about the meaning of the grand narratives, that is, especially about the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.⁸ Among many postmodern philosophers, it is considered a foregone conclusion that in world history the principles of the Enlightenment have not been implemented in the sense of Kant, and that the possibility of realizing Marxian socialism/communism is no longer even conceivable. As a reflex to the state of the academic debate, on the German-language page Philosophy on Wikipedia, the philosophy of history was removed completely from the canon of the disciplines of philosophy. But perhaps in this precarious situation of philosophy in the 21st century, there also lies an opportunity, which Hegel aptly expressed in the sentence: It is confusion with which philosophy must begin at all and which it produces for itself; one must doubt everything, one must give up all presuppositions, to recover it as something produced by the concept.⁹ The impulse to break out of the confusion to acquire a philosophical view of history and a historical view of philosophy was the main motivation for beginning the study of Gramsci’s Philosophy of Practice.

On the genesis of this book: This book owes its genesis to the author’s interest in Gramsci’s writings, – an interest that already developed during his studies in Hamburg in the 1980s. The author completed these studies with a master’s thesis in the U.S. on Gramsci’s concept of international hegemony. The subsequent doctoral thesis dealt with the International Monetary Fund and the precursors of the World Trade Organization from the point of view of American international hegemony after World War II. The originally planned work on a habilitation failed in the mid-1990s due to the circumstances of the time and a number of personal reasons, the best of which is now 24 years old. The author then switched to the IT industry. Around 2010 the interest in the old notes and raw sketches awoke. Further elaboration became an intense leisure activity. A first draft, focusing on Gramsci’s writings, was nearly finished when, upon review, the realization set in that all the statements made so far hung strangely in the air. Gramsci’s central intention, to conceive of Marxism as a reform of Hegelianism and Kant’s work as the first annual ring of this new philosophy, had been far from accomplished. Marx, in this first version, was not grounded in Hegel and both together were not grounded in Kant. Therefore, the author began his intellectual journey again, reading the originals of Kant and Hegel in the context of the breadcrumbs Gramsci had scattered in his Prison Notebooks. Only by going back to Kant, from there to Hegel, and then on to Marx, did the deviation that began with the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and was continued by Engels, Lenin, and Stalin present itself no longer as a deviation but as a path into a philosophical abyss that could explain the disastrous development after the October Revolution and the murderous practice of the Soviet regime under Stalin. This course of investigation has multiplied the scope of the entire work and made it necessary to divide it into several volumes. Throughout the years, the elaboration of the findings that will be presented below has always been and remained an intellectual pleasure for me.

What does it mean to philosophize?

To philosophize means to want to give one’s own activity a conscious direction: How is the concept philosophy used today? It has become fashionable to speak of the philosophy of a soccer team, a company or an individual style in nutrition. Philosophy in such contexts means that a set of intellectual principles should guide the actions of the soccer team, the company or the individual in order to achieve a certain purpose or to be able to successfully solve a certain task. Gramsci wrote about this in the Prison Notebooks, They say’ take things with philosophy’ have one’s philosophy, take it philosophically, etc. In these sayings, Gramsci continued, the concept philosophy takes on a very precise meaning: elemental and animal passions, impulsive and irrational actions are to be overcome by a reasoned conception of things and one’s own activity is to be given a conscious direction.¹⁰ A look at the great philosophers and academic philosophy today shows that this use of language is not wrong. Hegel formulated the concept of philosophy in its briefest form as the idea thinking itself.¹¹ For more than 2500 years, philosophy has been that discipline of the humanities that attempts to provide answers, in the form of principles, to fundamental questions of human life, of historical man with his peculiarities, abilities, and possibilities, and of human development in general. The ancient Greeks before our era, the theologians in the Middle Ages, the bourgeois rebels in the times of Enlightenment as well as the liberals, the conservatives, the socialists, and communists in the 19th and 20th centuries – they all developed principles, theories, conceptions of life and the world, which are all counted as philosophy.

The core topics of philosophy are the foundations of social orders and the great upheavals in the history of humankind: Philosophy is somehow always present in all current social, moral, and political conflicts. This is because philosophy deals with the foundations of social orders and the great upheavals in the history of humankind. Anyone who reads Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks enters an intellectual terrain that is concerned with grasping the historical continental shifts that have taken place since the Renaissance in Italy in the 16th century. Over centuries, under the sign of the Enlightenment, new forms of social coexistence emerged in Europe – at first barely discernible – which were then condensed by philosophers into principles in their own unique way. At a certain point in the development, the new principles of the bourgeoisie clashed with the existing feudal order, i.e. with the conservative forces that wanted to secure the existence of this order. The conflict ultimately erupted in a severe eruption in the global structure of the world. This eruption was the French Revolution of 1789. In the course of the revolution, a democratic republic with universal suffrage was briefly formed. The French Revolution, after many previous attempts in other nations, brought down the feudal world with its monarchs, nobles, and serfs, first in France and then almost throughout Europe. Gramsci discusses this turning point in European history in detail in the Prison Notebooks, referring to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant had drafted an epistemology, ethics, and a philosophy of history of bourgeois society, each of which, individually and as a whole, contradicted the principles of the feudal world. The October Revolution of 1917 and the revolutions that followed it in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were also a serious eruption in the fabric of the world. Based on Marx’s philosophy, an upheaval of epochs, a transition from bourgeois to a socialist society was to be brought about. Gramsci participated in this attempt through his involvement in the Italian factory council movement. His thinking in the Prison Notebooks focuses on the question of how the revolutionary events of the years 1917 to 1921 are to be evaluated and what consequences must be drawn from the defeats.

The great upheavals of the last 30 years: The last 30 years have also seen a number of serious developments that have brought down firmly held conceptions of life and the world. These include the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the end of colonialism, and the formation of a fundamentalist Islam that in the 21st century attempted to plunge the world into a war of religions. In the 21st century, the 4th Industrial Revolution is upending the relations of production. Today, global communication is based on the Internet, which is predicted to have a similar revolutionary significance in the long term as letterpress printing. The world in the 21st century can no longer be captured with the categories of the world between 1917 and 1991. Another very long-term development is that China and other large developing countries are preparing to break up the dominance of Europeans and North Americans in world markets, a dominance that has existed since the emergence of the world market in the early 19th century. As a result of the ecological crisis of the last few decades, there has been a worldwide realization that the way the highly developed capitalist industrialized countries in Europe and North America produce cannot be applied to all of humanity. Without a fundamental transformation of the global economy, the social and ecological symptoms of crisis could intensify dramatically and assume incalculable proportions. The climate catastrophe is not only casting its shadow ahead, but is already visibly taking place. With the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, a global consensus was reached in 2015 on necessary measures to improve the social and environmental conditions under which people must live. With the election of Trump as the president of the United States in 2016, the just started new phase of international cooperation was pushed aside. Trump’s policies subsequently grew into a threat to world peace and democracy specifically in the U.S. and Europe. All of these long-term developments and upheavals affect our familiar perceptions of life and the world and challenge previously valid patterns of thought and norms of behavior.

Philosophies as conceptions of life and the world

For Gramsci, every articulation of a certain conception of the world and life is a partial aspect of a philosophy. Religions also articulate such conceptions of life and the world. Philosophies and religions are not arbitrary opinions that one may or may not have. The great historically relevant philosophies and religions express binding principles of human societies designed for the long term. The behavioral norms derived from them are actively implemented by people in their practical everyday life, otherwise the existing social network threatens to break apart. Theoretical principles and practical norms of behavior are the subjects of countless conversations between people in every society at all times. In Europe before the Enlightenment, the priests were responsible for firmly anchoring such a conception of the world and life in everyday mind and for maintaining it. With the decoupling of philosophy from religion in the course of the Enlightenment, philosophy became an academic discipline and thus, as Gramsci observed, the culture of a limited intellectual aristocracy that failed to convey the moral and scientific content of philosophy as a whole.¹²

What questions does a philosopher deal with at a professional level? A philosopher tries to answer such basic questions as: Why do I know that a table is a table or why do we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun? Under what conditions can a particular scientific statement be considered true? Are there eternal truths or are all truths only relative, that is, historically bound knowledge? Does God or a higher being exist who guides or at least influences our destinies? Does man possess free will and can therefore act historically independently, or is he a being controlled in his actions by nature or a god? How do social norms and laws come about? Which of these norms should I abide by and which should I rebel against? What holds a society together at its core? By coercion and punishment, economic necessity, delusion, bribery, or certain social consensuses? Is human history forever characterized by a war of religions, of peoples, and races in the struggle for survival and a place in the Sun? Is there any progress in history or is humanity moving in circles in ever-new catastrophes and massacres? Has the end of history been reached with the liberal bourgeois society or are approaches to an overcoming theoretically presentable and practically recognizable? Finally the question: How can the nature of man be determined? Has it remained constant over the centuries or has it changed? Based on the answers to such questions, the great philosophical drafts of Kant, Hegel, Marx and many others were developed, in which also directly practical consequences for the actions of humans were pointed out.

In philosophy, there have been different currents, schools and systems from the beginning: Each current in philosophy strives to present its own conception of life and the world in a bundle of principles free of contradictions (consistent) and in their inner connection (coherent). Thus, there were and still are theologians and atheists in philosophy. For some, it is impossible to gain an understanding of human life without God, for others a being superior to man cannot and must not be a principle of explanation of the world. In the last two centuries, the history of philosophy has been marked above all by the dispute between idealists and materialists. The idealists are those who hold God or the human mind to be the primary thing from which life and the world are to be explained. Materialists are those who hold matter or nature to be the primary. Often, within these currents, schools of a great philosopher are formed, such as the Kantian school or the Marxist school. In the 20th century, i.e. before the general loss of importance of philosophy, it was quite common to determine the relationship between philosophy and politics in such a way that philosophy provided the basic answers. Politics then had the task of translating the principles and goals provided by philosophy into practical strategies and tactics. Thus, in the Cold War period, the bourgeois and communist worldviews confronted each other. Philosophy was an assurance for the politicians in both camps that they were on the right path.

Philosophy continually develops solutions to practical problems raised by the historical process: Gramsci’s conception of philosophy differed gravely from ideas common today. For him, philosophy did not consist of airy mind games or conversations at the regulars’ table. Philosophy for him was not a hodgepodge of highly intellectual texts, not a matter for experts at universities. In fact, in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci develops step by step the conception that every truly significant philosophy arose from the thoughts and actions of people in their time. Philosophers of profession grasp only a historical need, a problem, a task, a question, which has arisen from the thinking and doing of people in their time, and express it in an individual way. In doing so, the individual philosopher relies on a particular current within philosophy and usually proceeds as if his philosophy were an examination of or an unfolding of the preceding philosophy, of the concrete individual works of the preceding philosophers.¹³ However, according to Gramsci, this circumstance, which produces a language and content of its own, should not obscure the fact that philosophy does not develop out of other philosophy, but is a continuous solution of problems which historical development prescribes …¹⁴ In this respect, the great philosophical works are characterized by the fact that they addressed very specific pressing problems in their time. They struck a social chord precisely because they provided answers to the needs of a very particular everyday life, that is, answers to the needs of those who actually make history. With this conception, Gramsci brought philosophy back from the world of abstract intellectual explorations to the ground of history, to the ground of human needs, their satisfaction, and the necessities associated with them.

History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes: Kant’s work represents a profound turning point in the history of philosophy because he rejected all evidence for the existence of God as unfounded and reduced God to a moral quantity in which the individual may or may not believe. Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy proclaimed man’s self-determination beyond religion. In Hegel’s philosophy, religion again took on a prominent role. Hegel undertook a fusion of God and human reason, the result of which was to lead to a history of man whose goal had been determined in advance by God. In 1845, in their first book together, Marx and Engels defined their position regarding the relationship between religion and history as follows: Once man has been recognized as the essence, the basis of all human activity and conditions, the conception of history must be purged of all divine or other comparable factors of influence. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does, possesses, and struggles through it all … Human history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes.¹⁵ A few years later Marx returned to this thought and clarified his conception of history as follows: Men make their own history, but they make it not of their own free will, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances immediately found, given and handed down. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an alp on the brains of the living.¹⁶ For Gramsci, this principle of the conception of history developed by Marx and Engels had fundamental significance; it permeates his entire work. History is the history of social conditions created by human beings. People make their own history, but always under certain mental and material conditions created by themselves.

All men are philosophers and only they make human history: It is a concern of this book to develop in readers an understanding of what philosophy in Gramsci’s sense really is and can be today. Gramsci had nothing to do with an academic discipline plagued by self-doubt and marked by a loss of meaning. In the Prison Notebooks, philosophy was given an overriding importance and practical relevance by the lives of people, and thus for the lives of all people. Thus, he wrote in the Prison Notebooks: "One must destroy the prejudice that philosophy is something very difficult due to the fact that it is a special activity of a certain category of scientists, the professional philosophers or system-atists.

It will therefore be necessary to show that all men are philosophers.¹⁷ Philosophy and history of philosophy do not exist because a philosopher thinks in a particular way and puts that thinking on paper in a book. Human history and social relations are produced and brought forth by all men themselves in daily practical work. Thus, it becomes clear that in the practical work of making history, ‘implicit’ philosophy is also made, which will be ‘explicit’ insofar as philosophers work it out coherently (…).¹⁸ Individual as well as social life – history making in this sense – already contains a certain philosophy, may it be present and clear or blurred and inconsistent. Every human being realizes, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, in the shaping of his relations with his fellow human beings, in his political ideas and decisions, and in his intellectual and representational work, a set of principles that can be assigned in one way or another to a particular philosophy. Gramsci wrote about this: By one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a certain grouping. One is a conformist of some conformism … (…) One’s conception of the world responds to certain problems posed by reality, which are quite definite and ‘original’ in their actuality.¹⁹ People express the meaning of their individual actions, their significance and their position in the social context in philosophical terms, – each with quite different practical consequences. If history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes, then it must have been the fundamental philosophical decisions of men in their time that in one way or another made the world what it is today. The world at the beginning of the 20th century that Gramsci wrote about was also a product of people’s activity, and this includes the philosophical conceptions that came into play in their everyday lives as well as their decisions at the turning points of history. This guiding idea will be illustrated below by looking at the importance of the Enlightenment in the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, and later by looking at the Great October Socialist Revolution" of 1917, that is, the failed attempt to find a way out of bourgeois and into a socialist society.

1 Gramsci, 1911 (probably), Oppressors and Oppressed, in: Antonio Gramsci – Selections of Political Writings 1910-1920, selected and edited by Quentin Hoare, International Publishers, New York, 1977, p. 3. This is Gramsci’s first article in the Selections.

2 According to a note from Wikipedia on the page Turkish-Italian War. Lenin, 1912, The End of the War between Italy and Turkey, Lenin Works, vol. 18, Pravda, no. 129, September 28, 1912, p. 329/30

3 Kolakowski, 1976, Main Currents of Marxism, W. W. Norton & Company, first edition in Polish, quoting from the English edition, 2005, p. 988.

4 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, ed. Klaus Bochmann and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, 1991-2002, vol. 6, issue 11, §49, p. 1461

5 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 10, p. 471.

6 Sandkühler, 2008, What for Philosophy? Ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main

7 Lyotard, 1979, The postmodern knowledge, ed. by Peter Engelmann, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 9th ed. 2019. In the 2009 preface (p. 18), the editor Bernd Engelmann quite rightly wrote: Socially effective, however, the book became not so much through these analyses (about postmodern knowledge; the author), but through the use value of its basic thesis of the dissolution of grand narratives as recognized patterns of legitimation of knowledge.

8 See in Lyotard, 1979, the section 10. Delegitimization. P. 99 The grand narrative has lost its credibility whatever mode of unification has been assigned to it: speculative narrative or narrative of emancipation.

9 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel works, vol. 18, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 445/6

10 Gramsci, 1929-935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 21, p. 1272 and vol. 6 issue 11, § 12, p. 1379

11 Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel works, vol. 10, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 393, § 574

12 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 3, p. 461

13 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 31, p. 1284/5

14 Ibid, p. 1284

15 Marx/Engels, 1845, The Holy Family, MEW 2, all on p. 98

16 Marx, 1852, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MEW 8, p. 115. In the German Ideology (MEW 3, p. 20) Marx and Engels wrote already in 1846: It is the real individuals, their action and their material conditions of life, both those found and those produced by their own action. These conditions can thus be stated in a purely empirical way.

17 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 204, p. 1055/6 and similarly Gramsci, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1375

18 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 31, p. 1285

19 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1376

Kant asked four questions with a cosmopolitan purpose

Kant’s order for a philosophy with a cosmopolitan purpose: Before the modern European philosophy, which originated in the epoch of the Enlightenment, there was already the Chinese, the Indian, the Oriental, and the Greek philosophy as well as the Catholic religion as philosophy of the feudal Middle Ages in Europe. Accordingly, philosophy deals with an unmanageable number of topics. How can a selection be made from this abundance, how can an order, how can a red thread look like, which structures the philosophical explorations of Gramsci meaningfully? A reading of the relevant passages in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks revealed that Gramsci himself chose a classical order. Gramsci took this order in philosophy from Kant’s work; it is formed by four questions. These questions are:

1. What can I know?

2. What should I do?

3. What can I hope for?

4. What is man?²⁰

The meaning of these questions will be briefly sketched below to give readers a somewhat expanded idea of what philosophy means in this book. Kant intended these four questions to describe the field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan meaning.²¹

With the concept cosmopolitan, Kant contrasted a bourgeois world order, conceived by him, with the declining feudal world in the late 18th century. Kant elaborated his Enlightenment philosophy based on these four questions as an alternative to the philosophy that prevailed in feudal society. His answers to these questions capture man as a being who has the potential to think and act independently as a rational being, as a citizen of the world and a democrat who, together with all other citizens, gives himself his own laws and thus his dignity.

These questions and their attempted solutions indeed comprise the innermost core of philosophy: The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) wrote in 1941 on the topicality of Kant’s questions: These questions and their attempted solutions indeed comprise the innermost core of philosophy, its interest in the essential possibilities of man in the midst of the misery of real existence.²² By focusing on these 4 questions, the discussion of other philosophical questions and methods is not meant to be disparaged. Generalizing, however, it can be said that every philosophy of historical standing has answered these four questions in one way or another, directly or indirectly. The reasoning for the fact that just these 4 questions have to be in the foreground in a historical consideration of man, as well as the exposition of their inner architecture, will run through the whole chapter Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800.

What can I know?

The question What can I know? breaks down into four topics:

1. Into epistemology with the question of how knowledge is gained,

2. the philosophy of science with the question, how is scientific research conducted and how is the character of its results to be determined,

3. the philosophy of religion with the question, what can I know about God, and

4. the philosophy of history with question, what can I know about human history.

Epistemology: How is knowledge gained? The philosophical field of epistemology refers to the prerequisites, conditions, and possibilities of humans to gain knowledge and to condense it into knowledge. The basic questions are: What is knowledge and how does it come about? Linked to this are further questions: How does man think? How are the phenomena of the external world processed in human consciousness? How do theoretical insights become practical knowledge? What is the truth of the acquired knowledge? Are there eternal or absolute truths? In epistemology, starting from the feudal Middle Ages through the Enlightenment up to Kant, Hegel, and Marx and his successors, different currents developed, which will be presented in the following. At the center of Kant’s epistemology was the Copernican Revolution, i.e. the replacement of religious ideas about the conditions in nature by concepts of reason. From this, Kant developed his doctrine of the concept, based on the premise that all knowledge requires a concept.

The philosophy of science: How is scientific research conducted and how is the character of its results to be determined? From the various currents in epistemology developed quite different conceptions of how scientific research is conducted. Is the work of God recognized, are the recognized laws taken from nature, or does scientific research consist of reasonable constructions, the content of which is verified by the phenomena of the world. A distinctive feature of Gramsci’s philosophy lies in the fact that he links the prevailing epistemology in each case with a scientific worldview. With a scientific worldview, a picture of the Earth in the universe is drawn, in which the scientific knowledge of humankind is summarized. Gramsci discusses a total of four different worldviews: The religiously influenced Ptolemaic worldview of the late Middle Ages, the mechanical worldview of Isaac Newton, which is considered a scientific breakthrough in the epoch of Enlightenment, a mechanistic worldview that became dominant in the 2nd half of the 19th century, and the relativistic worldview that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and is associated with the name Albert Einstein. The study of scientific worldviews, their formation, and the transition from one worldview to the next results in a theory about theories and is today called the philosophy of science.

The philosophy of religion: What Can I Know About God? From the wide field of the philosophy of religion, only Kant’s central epistemological question will be singled out here; it is: Is God?²³ Kant proved that all the then current proofs of God’s existence were untenable. He further stated that God could not be proved even in the appearances of the world. The results of his investigation into the existence of God and Christian dogmatics led to a critique of religion and especially of Christian denominations.

The philosophy of history: what can I know about human history? The philosophy of history does not refer to individual events, processes and results in human history. The question What can I know? is aimed at the whole of human history, at the major epochs and epoch transitions in history. Philosophies of history can be divided into two parts: Into a part that justifies the criteria for the data to be collected, arranged, and studied in history. From this results the historiography. The second part consists of an interpretation of the established data. Are progress or regression recognizable tendencies in human history, is mankind treading water, or can only chaos – without pattern or tendency – be established? Kant, Hegel, and Marx each developed their own philosophy of history. The best known is that of Marx, who wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.²⁴ After the philosophies of history of Kant and Hegel have been introduced to the readers, the content of the classical German philosophy in Marx’s philosophy of history can be uncovered as well as the innovations he made can be worked out. After this work is done, the transformations that Marx’s materialist conception of history underwent in the work of his companion Engels, in the German Social Democratic Party philosopher Kautsky, and the Russian Marxists can be noted. Gramsci’s philosophy of history follows the Kant-Hegel-Marx line and contains a strict rejection of the determinism of that variant of historical materialism which, based on the remarks of Engels and Lenin, prevailed in the Soviet Union and from there became a world-historical power.

What should I do?

From the ethics of bourgeois society, Kant developed the political philosophy of the democratic republic: With the question What shall I do?, the field of ethics is entered in philosophy. Kant used the German term Sittlichkeit, which is no longer in use today, instead of ethics. In the following, ethics, i.e. morality in Kant’s non-religious sense, is not understood as the discussion of individual moral or legal norms that the individual should follow. Rather, the ethical discussion centers on the question of the nature of the social order from which individual moral norms and state laws emerge. Based on the Copernican Revolution, Kant examined the question of how to determine the ethical relations between people in bourgeois society. If they are relations between equal rational individuals and no longer those between master and servant, then it follows that norms and laws no longer arise and become valid through the religiously based dictates of a feudal monarchy, but through legislation in the democratic republic. Kant’s doctrine of the ethics of bourgeois society thus becomes political philosophy, that is, the philosophical justification of a new social procedure through which bourgeois freedom is given a framework and democratically legitimized general laws can come into being.

Kant formulated a series of demands on rationally acting people, which he called imperatives: Even before the French Revolution, Kant outlined an ethics of civil society that had developed over several centuries in Europe, especially in urban life. Based on his epistemology, Kant reasoned in his ethics that every human being had, in principle, the capacity to think and act rationally. In Kant’s ethics, the mutual recognition of human beings as rational beings who set their own ends formed the basis of human and civil rights and universal suffrage, which were later demanded by the French revolutionaries. In his rational law variant of the Enlightenment, Kant developed an ethics that contained a series of duties that individuals must fulfill if they are to act rationally. Kant referred to the call to act in a particular way as an imperative. An imperative is the concentrated form of a response to the question What shall I do? The individual, endowed in Kant’s ethics with consciousness, with the capacity to judge and to self-determine his actions, is placed at the center of the invocation. The culmination in a whole series of imperatives was Kant’s so-called categorical imperative.

Kant and Marx are among the very few philosophers who formulated imperatives: There are only a few authors in the history of philosophy who gave an answer to the question What should I do? in the form of imperatives. Kant and Marx formulated such imperatives. In the sections on the epistemology of Kant and Hegel, it will be seen that classical German philosophy established the existence of an individual consciousness and the freedom of the will. An individual consciousness capable of independent judgment and thereby of action guided by reason is the prerequisite for an imperative that appeals to individuals to make any sense at all. An appeal to a being that is in any case controlled by others would be a useless undertaking. Having outlined the content and meaning of Kant’s and Marx’s imperatives, Chapter 5, The Categorical Imperatives of Kant and Marx, explores the question of the relationship between Kant’s imperatives and Marx’s imperative appeals. Do they contradict each other or are they even mutually exclusive? Or do Marx’s imperatives presuppose the realization of Kant’s categorical imperative? For the ethics of a philosophy, Gramsci used the expression philosophy with a corresponding norm of behavior in the Prison Notebooks. This is one of his key concepts; it refers to the embedding of imperatives in a coherent set of answers to all four of Kant’s questions.

What can I hope for?

What can I hope for? is a question in the philosophy of history and discusses a future of humanity that can emerge from human action: In epistemology, the philosophy of history discusses the question: what can I know about human history in retrospect? The question What may I hope? is also a part of the philosophy of history, but reflects on developments that may arise in the future of humanity. Kant’s third question does not refer to any utopian states or religious hopes in divine intervention in human history. In this third question, the answers to the questions What can I know? and What should I do? are drawn together and considered under the following question: if I now do what I ought, what may I hope for as then?²⁵ The answer to the question thus understood, What may I hope? aims at the rational individual’s accounting, under his or her respective time-bound presuppositions, for the possible outcomes that result from his or her actions according to the imperatives. Philosophies in which human history is predestined by God, nature, or other forces beyond the agency of human beings cannot pose the question of the prospects of one’s own actions at all, or only in a limited way. Deterministic philosophies of history, for example, claim that a result that is already laid out in history can only be helped to a breakthrough.

The question What may I hope for? is the invitation to give oneself an account of the possibilities and perspectives of one’s own actions: In Kant’s posing of the question already lies a principled antithesis to any kind of historical determinism and fatalism. Gramsci adopts such a perspective on human history. For Kant, the hope that is linked to one’s own action refers to the overcoming of feudal society through the establishment of democratic republics. For Marx, acting in accordance with his imperatives points to the perspective of transition to a global socialist society. The question What may I hope for? is the call to account for oneself in a conflict of social forces – that is, on principally uncertain terrain – about the possibilities, the limits, and the perspectives of one’s own actions.

What is man?

For Kant, the question What is man? refers to what man, as a freely acting being, can make of himself: Kant’s fourth question is What is man? Anthropology, the science of man, also asks this question. This science deals with the biology, physiology, and psychology of man. Kant determined the difference between anthropology and philosophy in his late work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View of 1798 as follows: The physiological knowledge of man goes to the study of what nature makes of man, the pragmatic to what he makes, or can and should make, of himself as a freely acting being.²⁶ Kant’s fourth question thus foregrounded the historical and moral consideration of man. Gramsci shares this starting point, which is essential to an understanding of the fourth question. Philosophy cannot be reduced to a naturalistic ‘anthropology,’ that is, the unity of the human species is not given in the form of the ‘biological’ nature of man …²⁷

Kant explained the philosophical content of the fourth question by stating that the first three questions relate to the last.²⁸ Built into Kant’s architecture of the four questions is that the answers to the first three questions already contain the most important elements of an answer to the fourth question. Thus, any philosophy, insofar as it has answered the first three questions, should also have ready an answer to Kant’s pragmatic question, What is man?

What is man? becomes the question about the essence of man: Kant’s fourth question can be transformed into the question What is the essence of man? The question of the essence of man and the answers given to it form a fork in the road at which philosophy divides into two fundamentally different currents. More precisely, the question is: Is the essence of man historically fixed, that is, unchangeable in time, or is it subject to historical change? One of the two currents has its starting point in the determination of a natural or spiritual substrate such as race, descent, genes, blood, or religion, soul, culture, and develops from this a largely unchanging nature of man throughout all historical epochs. The other current is prominently represented by Kant and, in his wake, by Hegel and Marx. According to Kant, the freely acting human being unfolds his powers in the process of historical development: his essence cannot be fixed. Therefore, for Kant, man remained a thing-in-itself, unknowable in principle, which determines itself through its reason under the condition of freedom. Despite this principled determination, Kant recognized something specific in the everyday mind of people in his time, and this is what his entire Enlightenment philosophy stands for: after modern natural science prepared the end of feudal society and man was able to recognize the laws recognized in nature as his own and no longer as those of a god, man, according to Kant, should be able to live under reasonable laws, that is, under his own laws in the democratic republic. For Hegel, too, the history of man is the history of the production of his being and thus a process determined by freedom. In Hegel’s philosophy, man brings forth his essence through his ever-changing concepts and the representational activity guided by them. Hegel’s concise short version is: What man does, that he is,²⁹ or man is what he does.

In reality, the human being is the ensemble of self-created social conditions: Marx, in his 6th Thesis on Feuerbach in 1845, answered the question of the essence of man as follows: But human essence is not an abstraction inherent in the single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.³⁰ Marx conceives the essence of man as the ensemble, as an accumulation of social relations, which man himself has created. The essence of man is established in a process in which this essence can always be determined only temporarily in reflection on the self-created relations. The essence of man, then, is what men do and have done and through what they have produced themselves and their relations. In this answer of Marx to Kant’s fourth question, in a certain way, the heritage of classical German philosophy is already summarized in Marx’s philosophy. This connection, in which the Kant-Hegel-Marx philosophical line is expressed in a first approximation, will be shown in the following. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci was not only concerned with the reconstruction of this line, but he sketched the first outlines of a philosophy that explicitly conceives of the active individual as a process of self-creation and as the linking center of his relations, and consequently elevates a non-abstract, non-arbitrary will to the basis of philosophy.³¹ The position formulated by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Gramsci is contrasted with those religions, which determine the nature of man as a non-changeable creature of God, as well as those philosophies, which divide humankind into different groups of natural beings, which compete with each other and ultimately remain subject to a struggle for survival.

On the meaning of the 4 questions as self-reflection on oneself and society: The various answers given to Kant’s four questions are examined in the following along the historical and philosophical development. With the help of this ordering in time, not only the development of classical German philosophy towards Marx can be worked out. Early bourgeois philosophies, such as that of Spinoza from the 17th century, philosophies that emerged in the 19th century under the influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, or the philosophy of the Soviet Union in the 20th century become comprehensible in their central content and their answers can be compared with each other. The systematic connection between the 4 questions, which has just been hinted at, will become increasingly apparent in the course of the investigation. This is especially true for epistemology as a basic discipline, because the Marx that Gramsci makes visible cannot be understood without Kant’s constructive philosophical contribution to epistemology. The 4 questions have a very special meaning in epistemological terms, because the object under investigation is man himself and this object is at the same time subject. The philosophically thinking human being is urged to recognize himself as part of the object and in it at the same time as an acting subject. The subject is to become clear about his/her possibilities of gaining knowledge; he/she is to examine whether the imperatives presented have validity, he/she is to place him/herself in the movement of humanity in the past and present and to reflect on what concrete possibilities of