Greek Art and Lit in Marx PDF

GREEK ART AND LITERATURE IN MARX'S AESTHETICS

Author(s): Heinrich von Staden

Source: Arethusa, Vol. 8, No. 1, MARXISM AND THE CLASSICS (Spring 1975), pp. 119-144
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26307444
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GREEK ART AND LITERATURE
IN MARX'S AESTHETICS*
Heinrich von Staden
11 he presence of the classical past was more pervasive in Karl

Marx's century than it is in our own, and it is not surprising that some
of Marx's works bear the imprint of a widespread preoccupation with
classical antiquity. The nineteenth century was, after all, the century
in which Hegel made Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Aristotle into
philosophical divinities, in which the young Hegelian Ludwig Feuer
bach wrote a new Theogony based mostly on Greek myth, in which
the older Goethe achieved a virtual symbiosis with classical culture,
and in which Friedrich Nietzsche responded to Greek antiquity with
tempestuous, brilliant intensity, not matched in the twentieth century.
It was a time when, characteristically, Marx launched his philosoph
cal career with a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, whil
Kierkegaard started his with a thesis largely devoted to Socrati
irony, and Henri Bergson his with a treatise on Aristotle's concept
of space. The theoretical articulation of philhellenism in the works
of the Schlegel brothers, of Schleiermacher, of Schiller, and of man
others had a profound impact upon the early part of the nineteenth
century, as did poetic expressions of grecophilia - it was the cen
tury that experienced the impact of Hölderlin's Hyperion, of Friedric
Schiller's Die Götter Griechenlands, of Shelley's Hellas, of Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn, and of Lord Byron's philhellenism in both it
ancient and its modern strains. So deeply entrenched was this r
mance of the past that only a few challenged seriously statements
such as that of the self-confessed Neoplatonist Coleridge who, whil
expressing his preference for romantic poetry, claimed that "th
Greeks...were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy,
dignity, majesty, of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely
conveyed by defined forms or thoughts." Perhaps less ambiguously
the prevailing attitude to Greek antiquity is suggested by Mr. Crot
chet of Thomas Love Peacock's Crotchet Castle: "Sir, ancient
sculpture is the true school of modesty. But where the Greeks had
modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where
they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have
nothing but cant, cant, cant..."
119
Arethusa Vol. 8 (1975) 1.
120 Heinrich von Staden
This pervasive presence of t

Marx untouched. Critics are, of
famous of his encounters with c
of 1841 - but there are also num
tion with Greece and Rome befor
his early childhood in Trier, whe
of the most impressive Roman rem
of his life his interest in antiq
early years when Johann Ludw
Prussian civil servant, who later
read Homer to Marx in Greek,2
Marx made Aristotle one of the v
repeatedly turned to classical an
main historical and philosophical
however, not only Greek history
Marx; in his discussions of the ae
literature also play a significant
II
In order to achieve an understanding of the role of Greek art and

Greek literature in Marx's view of Kunst — the comprehensive term
he uses to refer to verbal, visual, musical, dramatic, and choreographic
fictions — it will be useful first to examine briefly the locus that
Kunst occupies in the larger scheme of Marx's economic determinism.
One of the classic statements of the relation of the socio
economic 'basis' to works of art (which, along with philosophy, law,
religion, political structures, etc., of course belong to the 'super
structure' that arises out of the 'basis') occurs in The German
Ideology of 1846, an early work co-authored by Marx and Engels. (In
the passage quoted here they are attacking the views of a young
Hegelian, Max Stirner - mockingly called Sancho, after Sancho
Panza in Don Quixote - who had argued that the individual artistic
will is autonomous and unique, and that there is no economic or other
determining law outside the ego.5)
Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his pictures in

dependently of the division of labour that existed in
Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with
Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would know how greatly
Greek Art in Marx's Aesthetics 121
Raphael's works of art depended on t

Rome at that time, which occurred und
fluence, while the works of Leonardo d
state of things in Florence, and the wo
later period, depended on the totally di
ment of Venice. Raphael as much as any
determined by the technical advances in
him, by the organization of society and
labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of
labour in all the countries with which his locality had
intercourse. Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds
in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which
in turn depends on the division of labour and the condi
tions of human culture resulting from it.6
This is a clear, unequivocal statement of the dependence of

art on other factors - a clear denial of the unqualified autonomy of
the creative imagination. Yet it is important to note that the deter
minants of the work of art are not simply lumped together as 'economic
basis'; instead, Marx and Engels grant that multiple factors determine
the work of art. After first describing these determinants in terms as
vague as "the flourishing of Rome at that time," "the state of
things in Florence," and "the totally different development of
Venice," they try to be more specific by enumerating four determi
nants: (1) previous technical advances in art; (2) the organization of
society; (3) the division of labour in the artist's own locality; (4) the
division of labour in all countries with which his locality has inter
course. Popularizations of Marx's theory often discuss the 'basis' in
purely economic terms, but it is striking that the 'basis' here is
understood more broadly (as it also is in other parts of The German
Ideology, where it is, for example, called "the existence of men
[which] is their actual life-process," "real life-process," "real
existence" and simply "life"7). As though still not quite satisfied
with their explanation of the relation of art to its determinants, Marx
and Engels reformulate the relationship once more in the last sen
tence of the quotation: here an additional determinant is introduced -
demand - and it in tum is said to depend not only on the division of
labour, but also on "the conditions of human education and culture
resulting from it." What these cultural and educational conditions
(Bildungsverhältnisse) are,
an intermediary position in
division of labour and dema
Complicating even further
basis or substructure is the introduction of the notion of artistic
talent. Earlier this 'talent' was referred to as a 'potential' ("anyone
in whom there is a potential Raphael"8). What it is that determines
whether a person does or does not have "a potential Raphael" in
him/herself, is one of the unanswered questions raised by Marx's
theory.
Instead of a simple, unmediated, mechanistic cause-and-effect
explanation of the relation of the economic basis to the work of art,
a more dynamic construction therefore emerges. Instead of
Work of Art
Material
Productive Relations
we have a schema that looks more like this:
Work of Art
Development of Artist's
"potential" or "talent"
"Previous Technical "The Organization DEMAND Bildungsverhältnis se

Advances in Art" of Society" (for art as
V. y commodity)
DIVISION OF LABOUR
"In (the artist's) "In all the countries

locality" with which (the artist's)
locality has intercourse."
Despite the multiplicity of factors granted a role in this descrip

there is, however, no question that it is an early formulatio
Marx's deterministic view of art and literature.
Thirteen years later, Marx offered another

pler - statement of this view:
The changes in the economic foundation le

later to the transformation of the whole imm
structure. In studying such transformations
necessary to distinguish between the mat
formation of the economic conditions of production,
which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or
philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of ... conflict and fight it out.®
By now the key concepts 'economic foundation' (Grundlage) or 'basis'

and 'superstructure' (Überbau, which includes all of what Marx here
identifies as 'ideological forms,' also the künstlerische, i.e. also art
and literature) have been adopted as umbrella notions for much of
what was still described discretely in The German Ideology. This
new formulation of the determination of the aesthetic sphere by the
economic conditions of production is simpler than the earlier state
ment examined above, and it therefore appears to be more radical.
There still are, however, qualifications that rescue it from being an
overly simplistic statement of measurable cause and measurable
effect. The last sentence in this quotation, for example, emphasizes
strongly ("it is always necessary to distinguish...") that the analysis
of the various spheres of the superstructure - law, government,
political theory, religion, literature and the arts, philosophy, and so
on - does not allow of the scientific precision attainable in the
analysis of the economic basis. But the central thrust of this ex
planation of the relation of Kunst to economic production remains
undeniably deterministic; the aesthetic sphere is again granted no
autonomy.
As Peter Demetz has pointed out in detail, some of Friedrich

Engels' later letters suggest that Engels, perhaps troubled by ques
tions that grow out of a rigid application of an undifferentiated,
mechanistic theory of economic determination to all works of fiction,
tried to loosen up Marx's paradigm of the dependence of Kunst upon
material conditions, by proposing a more reciprocal, dialectical
relationship between basis and superstructure.10 But there is evidence
that for Marx himself his deterministic formulations of the rela
tion of the basis to the aesthetic

to vexing questions beyond the on
described above.
III
The direct derivation of art and literature from the basis was
troubling to Marx, first, perhaps, because of his profound poetic
sensibility. He wrote a substantial number of poems in his student
days,11 translated Ovid's Tristia I," and knew by heart lengthy
scenes from Shakespeare's plays, from Goethe's Faust, and from the
Divine Comedy.13 It is also said that he continued reading Aeschylus
in Greek every year until his death," and that he regularly read the
Homeric poems, the Nibelungenlied, Don Quixote, and other literary
works to each of his daughters; according to one of his daughters,
Marx made Shakespeare the "Bible of our household."15 Walter Scott,
Fielding, and Balzac were also given places of honour in the Marx
home.1' Literature, especially poetry, had been a central experience
of his youth ("lyrical poetry inevitably had to be my first concern")17
and it remained central in his later life. It is perhaps not surprising
that a person so well versed in, and so intensely responsive to,
literature was troubled by questions such as the degree of 'symmetry'
between the socio-economic determinants and the works of fiction
that depend on them, or again by the endurance of a work of fiction
beyond the temporal and other boundaries of the culture in which it
is born.
It was, however, not only Marx's strong responsiveness to
works of fiction that seems to have given rise to critical questions
about the exact nature of economic determinism as applied to the
realm of fictions. Above all, it seems to have been a conviction,
harboured at least since his student days, that Greek art and literature
represent an aesthetic norm that was never attained again. If any
where in the corpus of Marx's writings there is a tension between
his economic determinism and his literary and artistic sensibility,
it is in his discussion of Greek art and literature. In a famous intro
duction which he drafted (but never published) in 1857 for his Con
tribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:15
As regards art, it is well known that some of its

peaks by no means correspond to the general develop
ment of society; nor do they ther

substructure, the skeleton as it we
For example the Greeks compared w
or else Shakespeare. It is even ackn
branches of art, e.g., the epos, can no longer be pro
duced in their epoch-making classic form after artistic
production as such has begun; in other words that certain
important creations within the compass of art are only
possible at an early stage in the development of art. If
this is the case with regard to different branches of art
within the sphere of art itself, it is not so remarkable
that this should also be the case with regard to the entire
sphere of art and its relation to the general development
of society. The difficulty lies only in the general formu
lation of these contradictions. As soon as they are re
duced to specific questions they are already explained.
Let us take, for example, the relation of Greek art,
and that of Shakespeare, to the present time. We know
that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art,
but also its basis. Is the conception of nature and of
social relations which underlies Greek imagination and
therefore Greek [art] possible when there are self-acting
mules, railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs?
What is a Vulcan compared with Roberts and Co., Jupiter
compared with the lightning conductor, and Hermes
compared with the Crédit mobilier? All mythology sub
dues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the
imagination and through imagination; it disappears there
fore when real control over these forces is established.
What becomes of Fama side by side with Printing House
Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, in other
words that natural and social phenomena are already as
similated in an unintentionally artistic manner by the
imagination of the people. This is the material of Greek
art, not just any mythology, i.e., not every unconsciously
artistic assimilation of nature (here the term comprises
all physical phenomena, including society); Egyptian
mythology could never become the basis of or give rise
to Greek art. But at any rate [it presupposes] a mythology;
on no account however a soci

cludes a mythological attitud
attitude to nature which might
therefore demanding from the
pendent of mythology.
Although the dependence of

material conditions is emphatic
relation of this Kunst to the bas
cause-and-effect terms; instead, Marx talks about "the unequal
development of material production and ... of art" and about "this
disproportion."15 This conclusion that a temporal and qualitative
gap can develop between 'progress' in the superstructure and 'prog
ress' in the substructure or basis seems to have been forced on Marx
above all by his view of Greek Kunst : between the aesthetic perfec
tion of Greek art and literature and the relatively primitive develop
ment of Greek material production with its economy based on slavery,
there is an 'unequal relation,' a 'disproportion.' Though ultimately
socio-economic ally determined, the aesthetic part of the superstructure
is now said to have, in some sense, its own law of development: a
consideration of Greek epic in its relation to subsequent genres of
Greek literature shows that "certain important creations within the
compass of art are only possible at an early stage in the development
of art . . . this is the case with regard to different branches of art
within the sphere of art itself ..." Instead of the refrain "depend
. . . depend . . . depend" which we encountered in the discussion of
Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian, we here have Greek art and literature
producing the stunning notion of "the unequal development" of
material production and of the aesthetic sphere. We have 'dispropor
tion'instead of deterministic symmetry; we have lack of correspondence
("some of its peaks by no means correspond to the material sub
structure") instead of correspondence and derivation.
We also see mythology so forcefully interposed between eco
nomic factors and art that mythology itself is described as the 'basis'
and 'material' of Greek Kunst. Again, what underlies the Greek
imagination and therefore the artistic products of ancient Greece is
here described, at least in the first instance, not as the economic
factors usually referred to by Marx, but as "a conception of nature
and of social relations." And these "natural and social phenomena"
are here not envisioned in Marx's cu

producing a consciousness that corres
more passively "assimilated in an uni
by the imagination of the people."
It is the imagination that is active;
consciousness-producing praxis of man
the earlier discussion of Raphael, but th
imagination. Although the ultimate de
on social relations is retained, we are g
an active, creative imagination which can proceed at a different
speed than its ultimate determinants and which operates by its own
laws of generic development without at every stage being a simple
reflex or echo of the laws that prevail in its socio-economic sub
structure.
This vision, which seems to arise out of Marx's view of Greek

art and literature, does not recur in this form in Marx's works after
1857. But it is never explicitly jettisoned either, and at times it is
in fact referred to again. In a passage written a few years after this
draft (and quoted above, p. 123), this 'unequal relation' of which
Greek antiquity provides the main paradigm is once more alluded to
emphatically: "The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner
or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure."20
("With greater or less speed" would in fact be a more accurate
rendering than "sooner or later"; the original reads "langsamer
oder rascher.") It occurs in the main preview of Capital, and its
programmatic significance cannot therefore be overlooked — the
notion of the disproportionate relation, for which Marx's examination
of Greek culture was primarily responsible, turned out to be a re
curring theme.
The enormous significance of this conception of the unequal

relation and of its attempted substantiation by almost exclusive
reference to Greek art and literature (Shakespeare never gets his
promised day) becomes more clearly visible when Marx adds: "The
difficulty we are confronted with is not ... that of understanding how
Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social
development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic
pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and un
attainable ideal."21 In the original text it is even more evident that
Marx allies himself with the view that Greek art and Greek epic are
normative: "Die Schwierigkeit

und unerreichbare Muster g
cussed below, he reinforces an
paradigmatic quality by exten
ity," Marx says, "attained its
It is striking that Marx, a
explore the social conditions w
he regards as normative. Else
Greek superstructure and poi
level of alienation in archaic a
due to the more elementary f
in Greece. He also points to th
a dominant form of ownershi
erty was still at an inchoate s
expresses little interest in these substructural factors. Nor are the
details of the 'unequal relation' between that "most beautiful form"
of humanity, that "norm and unattainable ideal," and the relatively
crude productive relations of the Greek slave-based economy ex
plored.
Instead, what interests Marx here is a problem still vexing to
modern critics: the transhistorical aesthetic value of artistic products
which are themselves marked by a specifically bounded historicity.
Whence the timeless value of that which is also temporally deter
mined? And whence our capacity for aesthetic appreciation of the
products of different and earlier stages in the development of produc
tive relations? For our purposes, it is important to note that these
are questions suggested to Marx primarily by the normative value he
attaches to Greek art and literature.
IV
Marx never questions the normative quality ascribed to Greek

art and epic; it is treated as firm knowledge, secure against any
further testing, lying beyond verification or falsification. In this
uncritical assumption we have a remarkable - but by no means
unique - moment in the reception and perception of classical antiqu
ity. The view of Greek antiquity as aesthetically normative is, of
course, one that pervaded both neoclassical and romantic philhel
lenism, especially after it had been popularized through the sanction
of Winckelmann and Lessing.
From Winckelmann's claim (1755) that the Greeks should be

imitated because "good taste ... first formed itself under the Greek
sky," because one "finds in the masterpieces of the Greeks not only
the most beautiful nature but something more than nature, certain
ideal forms of the beauty of nature," and because Greek works of
art are "the purest fountains of art" which are marked by a "noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur,"23 an almost unbroken thread runs to
Marx's aesthetic conceptualization of antiquity. Thus even the in
sistently sceptical Lessing says in his Laokoon (1766): "What the
Greek artists did will teach me what artists always should do" ("...
was die Künstler überhaupt thun sollen").24 In an earlier outline of
Laokoon, Lessing asserts: "The Egyptians left off at the first
improvements on Daedalus; the Greeks further elevated these improve
ments to the level of perfection."25 And even Johann Gottfried Herder,
who criticized the notion that there is an innate, invariant faculty of
taste or a uniform, permanent standard of beauty, felt compelled to
affirm this normative Greek superiority: "The Greek language is the
most cultivated in the world, Greek mythology the richest and most
beautiful on earth, and, finally, Greek poetry perhaps the most per
fect of its kind..."26 So powerful was this vision of Greece that
Christoph Mylius warned Lessing in 1747 not to make fun of any
Greek authors, because "the greybeards are unforgiving, and who
ever as much as glances at the Greek authors askance fin their
opinion] deserves to be called a heretic."27
Almost every notable German Romantic joined in this aesthetic

idealization of Greek antiquity (although there were, of course, many
individual nuances and different emphases; philhellenism was far
from monolithic28). Marx's own teacher, August Wilhelm von Schlegel,
said in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809): "The art
and poetry of the Greeks was the expression of the perfect health of
their existence, of the consciousness of a harmony of all the powers
of Man caught within the limits of finitude"; and: "in the fine arts
the superiority of the Greeks is most uncontroversially recognized."29
What the ancients had in poetry, we yearn for; theirs was "the Sanctu
ary of the Beautiful."30 In an influential dialogue on aesthetics by
Friedrich Schiller's pupil Solger (Erwin, 1815 - a work which Marx
also read with care!), we are likewise told that "the harmony of es
sence and of real existence is as perfect in heroic Greece as in the
world of the gods," and that a p

fore to return to archaic Greek art.31
In spite of the fact that Hegel's relation with the modern world
was more comfortable than that of most German philhellenists, this
paradigmatic quality of Greek art is also emphasized by Hegel, to
whose philosophy the Sirens always lured Marx back, and there are
several echoes of this Hegelian view in Marx's dissertation (and, for
that matter, in the quotation above).32
It is, therefore, evident that Marx's assumption of the aesthetic
normativeness of Greek antiquity is another link in a continuous
grecophile chain that stretches back at least a century. It is the
radical thinker's uncritical reception of this romantic idealization
of Greece that gives rise not only to his notion of the 'unequal rela
tion' between basis and superstructure, but also to what he calls
'the difficulty' regarding the transhistorical aesthetic value and ap
preciation of that which is specifically determined by the 'real'
historical relations of a particular epoch.
The solution Marx suggests for this 'difficulty,' which must

be acknowledged as a perennial and authentic problem of the theory
of art and literature, is extraordinary. Again, he does not resort to a
close analysis of those social relations that condition aesthetic
receptivity and aesthetic productivity in the ancient and modern
epochs - although he reintroduces them briefly in the concluding
sentences - but, with a Viconian twist, he resorts to the image of
Greece as the childhood of mankind:
An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes

childish. But does the naïveté of the child not give him
pleasure, and does not he himself endeavour to reproduce
the child's veracity on a higher level? Does not the child
in every epoch represent the character of the period in
its natural veracity? Why should not the historical child
hood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful
form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that
will never recur? There are rude children and precocious
children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this
category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm
their art has for us does not conflict with the immature
stage of the society in which it o

trary, its charm is a consequence o
bly linked with the fact that the i
tions which gave rise, and which al
to this art cannot recur."
Through this image of Greece as the eternally charming childhood of

humanity, Marx tries both to solve the latent question of why this
normative art cannot recur ("still ... an unattainable ideal") and to
account for the aesthetic pleasure we - the weary, aged epoch of
humanity, as Rousseau and some German Romantics put it - can still
derive from the Greeks. Childhood can never return, but the exhausted,
alienated adults can still find a pleasing glimpse of their lost, true
essence in the unalienated, natural veracity (Naturwahrheit) of
children. Hence the "eternal charm" (ewiger Reiz) of the Greeks.
Some critics are tempted to brush aside this statement as a
freakish deviation on the part of Marx. This would be wrong. Not only
was it written in his mature period, a good thirteen years after the
1844 Manuscripts (which have played an influential role in the in
terpretation of Marx during the last two decades), but the image of
antiquity as the childhood of mankind recurs elsewhere in the
Grundrisse (which, after all, in current Marxist criticism seems to be
usurping both the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital as 'central to an
understanding of Marx' 'seminal,'etc.34). In "The Chapter on Capital"
in Grundrisse Marx comments, for example, that "the ancient con
ception in which man always appears ... as the aim of production,
seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which ...
wealth (is) the aim of production," and he then emphasizes in con
clusion: "Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients ap
pears to be superior, and this is so ...""
In Marx's use of the biological metaphor of childhood and
adulthood we have another remarkable moment in the reception of
classical antiquity. The most radical philosopher of the nineteenth
century — and one of the most outspoken critics of the Romantics —
is here resorting to one of the most traditional, most authentically
neoclassical and romantic36 explanations of the 'self-evident' superi
ority of Greek culture. The image of Greece as the beautiful childhood
or youth of mankind is, of course, one that pervaded especially that
branch of German Hellenism which, like Friedrich Schiller's later
philhellenism, emphasized the impossibility of a return to the idealized
past. The popularization of

Winckelmann and Lessing. I
read both of them with car
1837, Marx had written to h
habit of making excerpts from all the books I was reading, from
Lessing's Laokoon, Solger's Erwin, Winckelmann's History of Ancient
Art... While doing this I scribbled down some reflections
To illustrate this further link between Marx and the Neoclas
sicists and Romantics, I cite briefly only a few of many occurrences
within German Hellenism of this tenacious metaphor, without
attempting to differentiate between the divergent uses to which the
metaphor was put, and without any attempt at analyzing the related
notion of youth as the primal, poetic experience - these intriguing
topics would lead us too far astray.
In his criticism of Pope in Laokoon, Lessing asserts emphati
cally that painting was still in its childhood (Kindheit) in Homeric
times and that it did not progress much beyond childhood in the
subsequent centuries of Greek history. (Several years earlier [1747]
in a letter to Lessing, Christoph Mylius had already eulogized Homer
as "this old youth" — dieser alte Jüngling).3' Herder also repeatedly
returned to the image: in Greece youth is represented by Homer —
Marx too specifically associates Greek epic with the childhood of
mankind - whose 'youth' is the true age of poetry, whereas manhood
is analogous to prose, and old age, being the age of philosophy and
of conceptual abstraction, cares only about 'validity.' The constella
tion of circumstances that gave rise to Greek culture, says Herder,
will not recur - and "there is just as little chance that the human
race can return to its childhood (Kindheit) and bring back from the
dead an Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus, or a Homer and Hesiod, with
all that accompanied them..."35 Childhood and non-recurrence: the
same dual emphasis as in Marx!
One of the most poetic visions of this 'youthful epoch' occurs,
perhaps ironically, in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(one should not forget that it was Hegel's philosophy to which the
young Marx referred when he wrote his father that he had become ill
in part "from consuming vexation at having to make an idol of a view
I detest"40): "Greek life is a true act of youth. Achilles, the poetic
youth, initiated it, and Alexander the Great, the real youth, brought
it to an end.'"" It is Greece that provides us with "the bright, cheerful
sight of the youthful freshness of intel

youthful hero of world literature (Achille
are "in general the most beautiful,"43
In one of the more influential romant
tive characteristics of ancient and modern
On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795),
Greek poetry is the poetry "of a naïve an
(geistreiche Jugendwelt44 ). Furthermore,
Greek world, it is also an age of beautifu
an innocent veracity: "The feeling with
very akin to that which makes us mourn
gone forever, and for our childhood inn
hood is all that remains in humanity of u
the very Schiller whose "philistine enthusiasm" Friedrich Engels
would later censure,46 Marx shares the evaluation of Greek antiquity
as the period of childhood, of beautiful naiveté, of innocence, of the
natural, of the integral human being. The hateful idols had a great
capacity for survival.
In discussing normativeness (pp.128-30 above) and childhood and
naiveté (pp. 130-33) above) I have made two brief probes, both of which
show (1) that Marx's consideration of Greek art and literature opens
up dimensions of aesthetics that are not considered in his other dis
cussions of the aesthetic part of the superstructure, and (2) that it
is in particular a romantic conceptualization of Greek art and litera
ture that loosens up the basis-superstructure paradigm (which was
never totally rigid) to include these dimensions. In these concluding
pages I should like to draw attention, more telegraphically, to two
further aspects of Marx's view of Greek art and literature: (a) the op
position of Greek and Christian art, and (b) the relation of Greek man
of the past to Communist man of the future.
First, the published summaries of Marx's excerpts from works

on Greek religion and Greek art (made while he was editor of Die
rheinische Zeitung in Bonn, 1842), though frustratingly cryptic,
suggest that he was eager to work out some characteristic differences
between Greek and Christian art.47 While Christian art, according to
Marx, tends to be colossal and hypertrophic due to the weakness and
anxiety demanded of Christian man, who is taught to acknowledge
and even extol his own powerl

tence, Greek art knows the val
in its excess and ostentatious pomp," while Greek art reveals a
profound sense of measure, proportion, and moderation.48
Add to this aesthetic antithesis the fact that Marx was employ
ing a similar political antithesis — pagan freedom in ancient Athens
versus Christian oppression in contemporary Prussia — in his articles
on press censorship in 1842-1843,49 and another striking continuation
of a German romantic theme emerges. Furthermore, according to Marx
the highest development of historical culture occurred in Greece
exactly when Greek philosophy became anthropocentric and, in con
trast to Christianity, turned away from an abject dependence on
omnipotent divinities: in Periclean and post-Alexandrian Athens.50
Greek art of these periods is the apotheosis of the creative powers
of man, who makes and fashions objects without becoming de
pendent on his own creations,51 while Christian art is an expression
of the resumption of pre-Greek barbarism, of the modern man's renewed
dependence upon overwhelming forces outside himself: God and King.
Freedom in Athens vs. censorship in Prussia, democracy vs.
monarchy, beautifully proportioned art vs. hypertrophy, freely creative
Greek man vs. dehumanized modern man,52 Prometheus vs. Christ,53
pagan vs. Christian: this aesthetic, religious, and political antithesis
culminates in a reaffirmation of the best implications of Aristotle's
definition of man as politikon zoon and in a condemnation of its
modern perversion ("Der Mensch ist ein geselliges, jedoch völlig
unpolitisches Tier"54) in the Christian state.
About the provenance of this triple antithesis there can be no
doubt: German philhellenism had a strong anti-Christian tendency
almost from the beginning, in spite of the fact that many German
Romantics were also enthusiastic about the beauty of Christian ritual
and about the Middle Ages.55 And from the beginning this anti-Chris
tian tendency also had political and, above all, aesthetic, overtones.
Zeitkritik was as endemic to the philhellenism of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as it was to Marx's visions of Greek antiquity.
It is not just a matter of contrasting the past in general with the
degenerate present and all its Kulturverderbnis, but the contrast is
very specifically that of Griechen and Gegenwart. It is from the dark
shades of the present that Marx, like the Romantics, views the
luminous beauties of the past, and of the Greek past in particular.
Already Winckelmann had stressed the political

Athenians as an important condition of their 'idea
and so did most later German philhellenists, th
varying nuances. (Friedrich Schlegel, for exam
include the paradigmatic moral freedom of the in
which he links to that "unlimited autonomy" to wh
entitled."56) Schiller's famous poem, Die Götter G
Hegel's reassertion of the Greek-Christian antit
more sanguine vision of the dialectical reunion of
in the Christian German state - are but two of man
of the same broad current to which Marx's use of
belongs.
A final observation about Marx's affinity with romantic philhel

lenism concerns not the idealization of the past, but his Utopian vision
of the future. Marx on occasion suggested that "the social revolution
of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but
only from the future,"57 but when one examines the very few glimpses
he gives us of man as he will emerge after the revolution, that is, of
disalienated man in mature communism, two striking things emerge.
First, the celebration of this future, disalienated man is usually
a celebration of aesthetic man. This homo aestheticus is, of course,
the result of new social relations, of the abolition of private property,
which will result in "true freedom" — a freedom described in Capital
HI as "that development of human energy (menschliche Kraftentwick
lung) which is an end in itself," a freedom whose realm "begins
only where labour ceases," which lies "beyond the realm of neces
sity, ... of actual material production."58 It is in this Utopian, self
legitimizing, sphere of freedom 'beyond' that the predominantly
aesthetic activity of unalienated man is located. In The German
Ideology, for example, Marx and Engels envision man in a non
alienated society as follows:
... with a communist organization of society, there dis

appears the subordination of the artist to local and
national narrowness, which arises entirely from division
of labour, and also the subordination of the artist to some
definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter,
sculptor, etc., the very name of his activity adequately
expressing the narrowness of his professional develop

ment and his dependence on division of labour. In a
communist society there are no painters but, at most,
people who engage in painting among other activities.59
A similar, more celebratory passage occurs in a slightly earlier

work,60 in which Marx seems to envision the liberation of reintegrated
man's senses and of his aesthetic capacity as the primary boon that
will result from disalienating him through revolutionary praxis. "The
forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the
world down to the present," and a result of the extreme alienation
characteristic of capitalism, with its acute division of labour, has
been that our sensory, aesthetic responsiveness has become restricted
to the extent that "man ... has no sense for the finest plays; the
dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty...
of the mineral."61 "Only through the objectively unfolded richness
of man's essential being" in a non-alienated society will "the rich
ness of subjective human sensibility — a musical ear, an eye for
beauty of form — ..." be cultivated or brought into being.62
This aesthetic emphasis is, of course, particularly striking in
view of the fact that the romantic vision of the future, for all its
political and humanistic overtones, was also overwhelmingly aesthetic.
Friedrich Schiller's Uber naive und sentimentalisehe Dichtung and
Uber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen are good examples.
Secondly, and more important for the purpose of this paper,
Marx's aesthetic vision of man in a non-alienated society also shows
remarkable similarities with his strongly romantic63 conceptualization
of ancient man. Just as ancient man, especially in the earlier stages
of his history, spontaneously developed many of his potentials while
remaining an integral unity not yet marred by that acute alienation
which accompanies modern fragmentation,64 so too future man will be
reintegrated — a painter today, a sculptor tomorrow, always an in
dividual and a communal being in one harmonious whole. No part of
his integrated self will allow itself to be alienated into an object on
which he would become dependent. Instead, the objects into which he
was once alienated and through which he dehumanized himself (in
production) will now become an objectification of his human essence,
affirming and expressing his true being.65
In this case Greek antiquity is not explicitly established as
the paradigm; instead, like some of the Romantics, Marx too em
phasizes that the historical emergence

self-consciousness, and so on, make the r
possible. But, again as in romanticism
retrospective and prospective visions are
slipping from audacity into rashness by s
of Communist man, especially of the fre
grated, communal man, is at least subc
view of the Greeks, it seems plausible th
infrequently interrelated in this manner.
Many other aspects of Marx's perception of Greek art and
literature could be shown in detail to have deep roots in romantic
philhellenism: the strong emphasis on mythology as the material of
Greek art and literature,66 the emphasis on the relation of religion
and art, the impact on Greek art ascribed to the ideology of 'limit'
and 'measure,'67 the notion that Greek art and literature are products
of a 'natural,' organic society, whereas modern art is a product of a
fragmented society, the tendency to lump together Homer and Shake
speare, and so on.
The few examples I have explored - the aesthetically normative
quality of Greek art and literature; Greece as the childhood of man
kind; the triple antithesis of Greek and Christian; the relation of the
view of Greek man to the aesthetic vision of Communist man - would,
however, seem sufficient to support the two basic contentions de
veloped in this essay. First, that Greek art and literature occupy a
pivotal position in Marx's view of the aesthetic part of the super
structure; second, that the paradigmatic role he ascribes to Greek
art and literature even in his mature period can be understood only
in terms of his affinity, in this particular area, with those strains of
romantic philhellenism which he started absorbing at least as early
as his student days, when he studied in Bonn with August Wilhelm
von Schlegel and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and when he became an
admirer of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Goethe.
The radical filters through which antiquity passes often obscure the
tenacity and durability of more traditional conceptualizations of
antiquity. In his analysis of Greek antiquity Marx used the radically
new matrix of economic determination with all its ramifications (di

vision of labour, accumulation of private property, alienation, emer
gence of money, basis and superstructure), and thereby made a
fundamental and illuminating break with his neoclassical and romantic
predecessors. They had been more interested in such determinants of
art and literature as climate, environment, landscape, physical
training, genetic factors, light clothing, nudity, and health. For
Winckelmann, for example, the determinants of Greek art specifically
included the absence of venereal disease.68 Marx's sharp, compre
hensive, and thorough shift to economic determinism should not
obscure the fact, however, that the 'Greek antiquity' Marx perceives
and receives, especially in the aesthetic realm, remains the 'Greek
antiquity' of most Romantics. And it persists far beyond what David
McLellan (in Marx Before Marxism) and others have called Marx's
'early, romantic period.'
Marx's resistance to his predecessors is passionate, polemical,
and radical, but some of their perceptions survive his radical critique
with remarkable recalcitrance. Resistance and endurance, revision
and tradition, discontinuity and continuity: these central aspects of
intertextual, intercultural, and 'inter-epochal' relations, of the critical
operation of one sensibility upon another, surface in his view of
Greek art and literature with paradigmatic resonances.69 Perhaps
Nietzsche recognized the problem which Marx faced better than did
Marx himself, childhood metaphor in hand: "What then is truth? A
mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms ... Truths
are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors
now impotent to stir the senses..."
Yale University
Notes
* I am indebted to Bernard Knox for an opportunity to expose some of t

arguments developed in this paper to criticism in a lecture at The Cent
for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. This paper is part of a book in
preparation on Marx's 'reception' of Classical Antiquity.
1 The house in which Karl Marx lived from the age of 2 until he was 17 is
barely fifty yards from the massive Porta N

the second century A.D.), which still dominates the architectural land
scape in the center of Trier (Treves). The city was, of course, from time
to time a seat of the Roman Emperors, and close to the Gymnasium Marx
attended (1830-1835) are the substantial remains of Roman imperial baths
and of a large Roman amphitheatre. On the continuation of the street on
which he lived is also a beautifully preserved Roman bridge over the
Mosel river, still in use today. Very useful on Marx and Trier in general
is Heinz Monz, Karl Marx: Grundlagen der Entwicklung zu Leben und
Werk (Trier, 1973), a second enlarged edition of the same author's Karl
Marx und Trier (Trier, 1964).
See Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx zum Gedächtnis (Nürnberg, 1896), p. 2.
Cf. also Monz, op. cit., pp. 319-343, especially 342-343. An interesting
portrait of von Westphalen emerges in: Heinz Monz, Konrad von Krosigk,
and Georg Eckert, Zur Persönlichkeit von Marx' Schwiegervater Johann
Ludwig von Westphalen (Trier, 1973).
Cf., for example, Capital I (trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed.
F. Engels, New York, 1967): "(These) ... peculiarities of equivalent form
will become more intelligible if we go back to the great thinker who was
the first to analyze so many forms... I mean Aristotle" (p. 59). "The
brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered,
in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality"
(p. 60). See also p. 408 ("...Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity...")
and p. 82 ("a giant thinker").
1 Two good collections of Marx's statements about art and literature are:
Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Uber Kunst und Literatur (ed. Michail
Lifschitz, Berlin, 1949), and Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Uber Kunst und
Literatur (ed. Manfred Kliem, 2 vols. Berlin, 1967). The secondary litera
ture is enormous; I found particularly useful: Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels
and the Poets (trans. Jeffrey L. Sammons, Chicago, 1967); Georg Lukâcs,
Beiträge zur Ästhetik (Berlin, 1954), pp. 191-285; id., Karl Marx und
Friedrich Engels als Literaturhistoriker (Berlin, 1952); Henri Arvon,
Marx's Esthetics (Ithaca, 1970); Rolf Sannwald, Marx und die Antike
(Zurich, 1956), especially chapter 6; Stefan Morawski, "The Aesthetic
Views of Marx and Engels," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
28.3 (1970) 301-314. For further bibliography one can profitably con
sult Demetz, and Lee Baxandall's Marxism and Aesthetics: A Selective
Bibliography (New York, 1968).
5 'Max Stirner' was actually the pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt
(1806-1856), author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Leipzig, 1845) and
of an essay "Kunst und Religion" (Kleinere Schriften, Berlin, 1898), in
both of which he argued for these views. He and Marx were both members
of the Doktorklub led by Bruno Bauer in Berlin.
s The German Ideology (Selections, ed. C. J. Arthur, New York, 1970),
p. 108 (italics mine). For the original German text see Marx/Engels,
Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1958), pp. 377-378.
Ibid., p. 47.
Ibid., p. 108.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans, by S. W.
Ryazanskaya, ed. by Maurice Dobb (New York, 1970), p. 21 (italics
mine). The German original can be found in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 13
(1961), p. 9.
Cf. Demetz, op. cit., pp. 138-151.
A number of his poems and some fragments of his plays and novels are
extant; see Marx/Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband 1 (Berlin, 1973), pp.
602-615 and Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe 1.1.2 (Berlin, 1929), pp. 4-89.
Cf. also Robert Payne, The Unknown Marx (New York, 1971), pp. 55-94
(English translation of Oulanem, Marx's verse tragedy) [and Karl Marx/
Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. I (International Publishers,
New York, 1975), pp. 22ff., 517ff., 531 ff. Ed.]
Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe 1.1.2, pp. 17-25 (henceforth abbreviated
as MEGA).
Cf. the recollections of Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, in Lifschitz,
op. cit., p. 476, and those of Karl Liebknecht, ibid., p. 478.
Lafargue, ibid., p. 476.
Cf. the recollections of Eleanor Marx Aveling, ibid., p. 475. Eleanor Marx
continued the family tradition of a strong literary interest: her English
translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary was published (by Knopf), as
were her translations (in collaboration with R. Farquharson Sharp) of three
of Ibsen's plays (Everyman's Library) and an essay on Shelley, which
she co-authored.
Ibid., p. 476; cf. p. 479, Marx on his favourite poets: "Shakespeare,

Aeschylus, Goethe."
Letter to his father, 10 November 1837, Writings of the young Marx on
Philosophy and Society (ed. and trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H.
Guddat, Garden City, N. Y., 1967), p. 41.
Recently published as an Appendix in A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, pp. 215-216. This programmatic and, at times, tele
graphic draft of an introduction, which dealt mainly with the relations of
production to consumption, distribution, and exchange, and with the
method of political economy, was first published posthumously by Karl
Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit (1902-1903), pp. 710-718, 772-781. It is now
generally treated as a part of Grundrisse. This is the draft to which Marx
seems to refer in his preface to the Critique (p. 19): "A general introduc
tion, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on further consideration it
seems confusing to meto anticipate results which have to be substantiated,
and the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to
advance from the particular to the general." German original in Marx/
Engels, Werke, vol. 13, pp. 615-642.
Critique, p. 215 (italics mine).
Ibid., p. 21 (original in Werke, vol. 13, p. 9).
Ibid., p. 217.
Cf., e.g. The German Ideology, pp. 43-45, where th

tribal form of ownership to the feudal system of lan
(see also pp. 79-81). The most complete analysis of the 'basis' in ancient
Greek society is provided by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State, but this work deals more elaborately with the
prehistoric period than with classical Greece. Cf. also the sections from
Grundrisse in: Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (ed. Eric J.
Hobsbawm and trans. Jack Cohen, New York, 1965) or in Grundrisse
(trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 471-548.
Johann Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke (ed. Joseph Eiselein), vol. I (1825),
pp. 7, 8, 10. On the history of the notion of the 'ideal' in Greek art see
J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (New Haven, 1974, student
ed.), pp. 3-7. Wilhelm von Humboldt ("eine idealische Eigentümlichkeit
des Altertums," Werke, vol. VI.2, p. 148) and many other German phil
hellenists used this concept to characterize Greek art and literature.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Karl Lachmann,
3rd. ed. by Franz Muncker, vol. IX (1893), p. 156 (Laokoon I.xxvi). C£
also vol. IV, p. 31 (in a summary of Brumoi's work on comedy): "The
Greeks and Romans (are) our masters and models (Meister und Muster)
in all offspring of taste..."
Ibid., vol. XIV, p. 422 (Entwürfe 22).
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, vol. 2 (Berlin/
Weimar, 1965), pp. 103-104.
Lessing, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 3. Mylius was editor of Der Naturforscher,
to which Lessing was contributing mildly irreverent anacreontics.
On the divergences and tensions among the Grecophiles, see Henry Hat
field, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature from Winckelmann to the
death of Goethe (Cambridge, Mass. 1964); id., Winckelmann and his German
Critics, 1755-1781 (New York, 1943); E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece
over Germany (Cambridge, 1935); Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und
Kunsttheorie, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1924); Walter Rehm, Griechentum und
Goethezeit (Leipzig, 1936).
Sämtliche Werke (ed. Eduard Böcking), vol. 5 (1846), pp. 45-47; Marx
studied with Schlegel in Bonn, attending his courses on the Homeric
Question and on Propertius.
Ibid., pp. 16, 45.
Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Erwin. Vier Gespräche über das Schöne
und die Kunst (ed. Wolfgang Henckmann, Munich, 1971), pp. 236, 326.
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke
(Jubiläumsausgabe),vol. 11, p. 295. Cf. also his Vorlesungen über die
Ästhetik, ibid., vols. 12-14 (passim) and Sannwald, op. cit., chapter 2-6.
Critique of Political Economy, p. 217.
Cf. J. E. Seigel in The New York Review of Books, vol. 21, no. 17 (1974)
35-39.
Pre-C apitalist Economic Formations, pp. 84-85, or Grundrisse (trans.

Nicolaus), pp. 487-488.
I use 'Romantic' in the more traditional sense, not in the expanded sense
found, e.g., in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1973),
where 'romanticism' is enlarged to cover almost all poetry from Milton to
the present. A sampling of the modern usages of 'romantic' is provided in
Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (GardenCity, N. Y. 1961),
pp. 155-168. Cf. also the semantic range suggested for 'romantic' by W.
T. Jones, The Romantic Syndrome (The Hague, 1961), especially pp.
117-218, and Raymond Immerwahr, "The Word romantisch and its History,"
in The Romantic Period in Germany (ed. S. Prawer, New York, 1970),
pp. 34-63.
7 Writings of the young Marx, p. 45.
' Lessing, op. cit., vol. IX, pp. 118f., vol. IV, p. 3.
' Herder, ibid, (note 26), vol. 2, pp. 104-108. Cf. p. 110: "Die Kultur der
Griechen traf auf dies Zeitalter jugendlicher Fröhlichkeit."
' Writings of the young Marx, p. 48. Cf. pp. 46-47: "I had read fragments of
Hegel's philosophy and had found its grotesque craggy melody unpleas
ing— I wrote a dialogue ... entitled 'Cleanthes or the Starting Point and
the Necessary Progress of Philosophy' ... [but] my last sentence was the
beginning of the Hegelian system ... — this darling child of mine, nurtured
in moonlight, bears me like a false-hearted Siren into the clutches of the
enemy" (i.e., of Hegel).
1 Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11, p. 296.
! Ibid., vol. 11, p. 295; vol. 12, p. 320. Cf. vol. 13, pp. 409-410.
' Ibid., vol. 12, pp. 210-211. But see also vol. 14, p. 273, where Hegel
opposes "die gewöhnliche [Romantic?] Meinung, dass die Jugend in
ihrer Wärme und Glut das schönste Alter für die dichterische Produktion
sei..."
1 Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795 (ed. Johanne
Stuttgart, 1972), p. 29.
1 Ibid., p. 27.
Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie
(1886), in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 21 (1962), p. 281.
MEGA (see note 12) 1.1.2, pp. 114-118. The works he excerpted include:
C. Meiners, Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen, 2 vols.
(Hannover, 1806-1807); C. A. Böttiger, Ideen zur Kunst-Mythologie, 2
vols. (Dresden/Leipzig, 1826-1836); Johann Jakob Grund, Die Malerei der
Griechen, 2 vols. (Dresden, 1810-1811), from which the excerpts are most
complete; C. F. von Rumohr, Italienische Forschunger, 3 vols. (Berlin/
Stettin, 1827), in which Marx did not get much beyond vol. I.
MEGA 1.1.2, p. 117. On this aspect of Greek art, cf. note 67 infra.
Ibid., 1.1.1, pp. 179-250, esp. p. 184 ("wie das alte Athen") and pp.
236-238. (A few of these articles were published in English translation in
Writings of the young Marx, pp. 67-148).
Writings of the young Marx, pp. 114-118. There would seem to be an un
resolved discrepancy between this view and the subsequent elevation of
a pre-Periclean figure, Homer, to an ideal, normative status.
51 MEGA 1.1.2, pp. 117-118. Cf. von Rumohr, vol.

sense "that men had the power to create ... the co
lived" in the classical period, cf. J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in
Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972), p. 43 and Chapter 3 ("The World
under Control"). See below note 67.
52 Cf. "der entmenschte Mensch," ibid. 1.1.1, pp. 562-563.
53 From Marx's dissertation of 1841 (àTTÂcp Xoycp tous tocvtcxs e'xöaipco 9eou$
Aesch. PV 975), Prometheus recurs again and again as a rebellious,
creative symbol in Marx's works.
54 Ibid., p. 562.
55 Cf. Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism, pp. 166-193, for a provocative view
of the relation of the Christian "vision of truth" to the "beautiful
dream" of aesthetic paganism in German Romanticism.
56 Friedrich Schlegels Jugendschriften (ed. Jacob Minor, Vienna, 1882
vol. I, p. 13. For a positive reassessment of Friedrich Schlegel's posi
tion as a major figure in the history of criticism, see René Wellek, A
History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, vol. II (New Haven, 1955),
chapter 1.
57 Eighteenth Brumaire, in Selected Works, vol. I (Moscow, 1969), p. 400.
58 Capital, vol. 3 (ed. F. Engels, New York, 1967), p. 820.
s9 P. 109.
60 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (ed. Dirk J. Struik
and Martin Milligan, New York, 1964), pp. 140-142.
61 Ibid., p. 141.
62 Ibid. A good discussion of these passages is provided by Demetz, pp.
62-64.
63 Cf., for example, Schiller, op. cit., with the emphasis on the 'natural,'
'naive,' 'total' man of antiquity, and his famous assertion: "Since the
gods were still more human, human beings were more god-like." See also
Wilhelm von Humboldt. Werke (ed. Albert Leitzmann) vol. VI.2 (1907),
pp. 547-549, and Hölderlin's Hyperion, in Werke, (ed. M. Joachimi-Dege,
Leipzig, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 149. The Stückmensch here is the modern
German, as opposed to the Vollmensch or Totalmensch often said by the
Romantics to be typical of Classical Greece.
64 Cf. German Ideology, pp. 43-44; Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
p. 84 and passim.
65 1844 Manuscripts, pp. 132-146; cf. 106-119. See also Demetz, p. 63.
66 Welcker, Marx's teacher in Bonn, might have been especially influential
in this respect. He believed that the study of Greek poetry, Greek art,
and Greek mythology must always be combined - and it was from Welcker
that Marx took a course on Greek and Roman mythology for which he
received the grade "Excellent industry and attentiveness." Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, a very influential writer on aesthetics in the mid
nineteenth century, also emphasized the relation of art and mythology and
he might have reinforced Welcker's impact on Marx: in the course of
preparing an article for Charles Dana's New American Cyclopaedia,
Marx in the 1850's made many excerpts from Vischer's Ästhetik (6 vols.,
Reutlingen/Leipzig, 1846-1857).
Here, as in his emphasis on the 'Promethean,' anthropocentric aspect
of Periclean Greece (see also notes 50-53), Marx is touching on a central
aspect of Greek ethics and Greek art. Not only the ethical current that
runs from mêden agan and from the anti-hubris moral of the Croesus
Solon episode in Herodotus down to Aristotle's mësotes, but also the
emphasis on measure and proportion in Greek art would seem to lend
credence to Marx's emphasis on limit and measure (German: Mass).
Cf. J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience, pp. 40-41 (on measure and order in
the Blond Boy), 72ff. (on proportionality in the Parthenon), 106ff. (on
symmetria), etc.
Winckelmann, Sämtliche Werke, vol. I, pp. 10-14. (Montesquieu, whom
Winckelmann studied carefully, also had spoken of the influence of the
Greek climate). Herder, op. cit., vol. 2, p. Ill likewise emphasizes the
Greek climate, as does A. W. von Schlegel (who again adds the genetic
and health factors), op. cit., vol. 5, pp. 12-13.
For a provocative, psychogenetic view of the problems on which I only
touch here, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1973).

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GREEK ART AND LITERATURE IN MARX'S AESTHETICS

Author(s): Heinrich von Staden

Heinrich von Staden

11 he presence of the classical past was more pervasive in Karl

This pervasive presence of t

In order to achieve an understanding of the role of Greek art and

Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his pictures in

Raphael's works of art depended on t

This is a clear, unequivocal statement of the dependence of

we have a schema that looks more like this:

"Previous Technical "The Organization DEMAND Bildungsverhältnis se

"In (the artist's) "In all the countries

Despite the multiplicity of factors granted a role in this descrip

Thirteen years later, Marx offered another

The changes in the economic foundation le

By now the key concepts 'economic foundation' (Grundlage) or 'basis'

As Peter Demetz has pointed out in detail, some of Friedrich

tion of the basis to the aesthetic

As regards art, it is well known that some of its

ment of society; nor do they ther

on no account however a soci

Although the dependence of

are here not envisioned in Marx's cu

This vision, which seems to arise out of Marx's view of Greek

The enormous significance of this conception of the unequal

normative: "Die Schwierigkeit

Marx never questions the normative quality ascribed to Greek

From Winckelmann's claim (1755) that the Greeks should be

Almost every notable German Romantic joined in this aesthetic

world of the gods," and that a p

The solution Marx suggests for this 'difficulty,' which must

An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes

stage of the society in which it o

Through this image of Greece as the eternally charming childhood of

past. The popularization of

sight of the youthful freshness of intel

First, the published summaries of Marx's excerpts from works

and even extol his own powerl

Already Winckelmann had stressed the political

A final observation about Marx's affinity with romantic philhel

... with a communist organization of society, there dis

expressing the narrowness of his professional develop

A similar, more celebratory passage occurs in a slightly earlier

phasizes that the historical emergence

new matrix of economic determination with all its ramifications (di

* I am indebted to Bernard Knox for an opportunity to expose some of t

barely fifty yards from the massive Porta N

Ibid., p. 476; cf. p. 479, Marx on his favourite poets: "Shakespeare,

Cf., e.g. The German Ideology, pp. 43-45, where th

Pre-C apitalist Economic Formations, pp. 84-85, or Grundrisse (trans.

51 MEGA 1.1.2, pp. 117-118. Cf. von Rumohr, vol.

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