Red Antigone, the first biography of Helen Macfarlane, published by BPC Books, March 2024, is now availalable from Amazon. Ten years ago, I wrote an essay with Ben Watson, editor of Unkant Books, to explain why we were publishing a complete edition of her forgotten works for the Chartist press.
'Helen Macfarlane: Independent object'
David Black and Ben Watson
Radical Philosophy 187, Sept/Oct 2014
Talking of the destructive nature of egoistic desire, its satisfaction that the other is nothing, Hegel made room for further development, an empirical moment which might surprise those who think German Idealism only ever allowed for abstraction: ‘In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it [the simple ‘I’] aware that the object has its own independence.’ History is such an independent object, and provided it is researched by genuine desire, it can jolt self-satisfaction out of its destructive circuits. Since Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fumbling initiation, German philosophy has provided the anglophone world with ample opportunity for both desirous egoisim and destructive self-satisfaction, but historical research has recently unearthed an independent object to reshape our ideas, not just of the reception of Hegel in English but of what we actually think about Everything.
This ‘independent object’ is the Chartist journalism of Helen Macfarlane (1818–1860) in 1850, admired by Karl Marx as the work of a ‘rara avis’ with truly ‘original ideas’, but forgotten by everyone since, including all the official ‘Marxists’.* We are convinced enough of the power of her words – and their timeliness today – that we shall rely on extensive quotation from her articles in the Democratic Review, Red Republican and Friend of the People. In Radical Philosophy 186, David Charlston used graphs of statistical density to demonstrate how the ‘objective’ treatment of Hegel by translators like Terry Pinkard has served to ‘secularize and depoliticize Hegel’. We found Charlston’s coupling an encouragement, since it implies a radical break with today’s consensus that rational politics can only start once religious passions have been replaced by secular logic.
Macfarlane was addressing working-class radicals whose thinking was made possible by religious categories; her ‘Hegelianism’ meant that she had no time for the Benthamite programme of First Rationalism, then Improvement; she interpreted Hegel as an application of the revolutionary humanism preached by Jesus and betrayed by the established Church. This may be why, outflanking ‘radical poets’ like Shelley and Byron, Macfarlane’s polemics have the orotund, unanswerable ring of Shakespeare, Milton and Blake. These texts were written to be read aloud, in taverns where illiterate politicos would seize a newspaper and cry, ‘Who’s here can read? I want to know what Feargus O’Connor is saying about Julian Harney; has the man gone mad?’ The Macfarlane revival – she was not only the first translator of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (thirty-eight years before Samuel Moore’s standard one), but the first translator of Hegel’s philosophical writings into English – is not simply an independent object to dent the armour of know-it-all Hegelians; it also breaks into the realm of English Literature and its pecking orders.[T]he golden age, sung by the poets and prophets of all times and nations, from Hesiod and Isaiah, to Cervantes and Shelley; the Paradise … was never lost, for it lives … this spirit, I say, has descended now upon the multitudes, and has consecrated them to the service of the new – and yet old – religion of Socialist Democracy.
Marian Evans, another nineteenth-century woman who adopted a male soubriquet (George Eliot) in print (Macfarlane’s was ‘Howard Morton’), is revered as a novelist, but if you explore her critical relationship to Christianity (translator of David Strauss’s scandalous The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) parallels with Macfarlane foam forth. Macfarlane’s commitment to the Chartist cause has a clarity, a conviction and historical grasp which can make a bid for George Eliot’s place at the moral centre of Victorian letters. As the novel form is laid waste by the Booker Prize contingent, reduced to a tawdry opportunity for middle-class confession, moralism and limp satire, Helen Macfarlane’s example steps forward; she was already there.
So much for the why and who. But philosophy?
Macfarlane’s Hegel has none of the anxious complexitudes of Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures – unfortunate template for the French (and now anglophone) reception of Hegel – which resemble nothing so much as someone tensely and lengthily defusing a bomb (Dialektik sprayed on the side in Gothic script). For Macfarlane, Hegel is quite simply a translation of Jesus’s revolutionary, egalitarian humanism into a world without mystery or gods.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (1827) sees the religious ‘form of representation’ as having been a historical necessity for making Christian doctrine universally accessible to the masses through the medium of the Church. But since the domain of this representation is the world of the past, its spiritual being is only implicit; it lacks the ‘absolute singularity of presence to self’. In Hegel’s view, biblical and church history must not be allowed to rule over the present or determine the future. It is this revolutionary idea – not the gigantic books, not the jargon, not the late reconciliation with the ‘reality’ of the Prussian state – that Macfarlane takes from Hegel. These were the questions posed by the young Left Hegelian David Strauss, who sought to answer them by taking Hegel’s insights further. Just as for Hegel the given immediacy grasped through sense-certainty was only the first moment of dialectical philosophy, so for Strauss (as for Reimarus and Lessing before him), the immediacy of religious consciousness through dogma or sacred history had to undergo the negative mediation of free historical criticism.
For Strauss, the Christian absolute of the incarnation was contradictory because, restricted as it was to one individual (Jesus), it lacked the inclusivity of a real absolute. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835–36) argues: ‘It is humanity that dies, rises and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life. The legacy of the Christian mythos of resurrection is that: from the kindling within him of the idea of humanity the individual man participates in the divine life of the species’. For Strauss, the rational subject and historical substance are united in the cause of progress.
Helen Macfarlane’s writings of 1850 show a debt to David Strauss. For her, such unity means recognizing that ‘the days of orthodox Protestantism are numbered’. These are arguments which a Benthamite, rationalist, Stalinized Left never learned – a truly historical materialist understanding of the splits in Christianity – which is why their words about ‘class struggle’ as a solution to the Catholic–Protestant division in Northern Ireland (and Glasgow, Liverpool) never connected to anyone involved in the conflicts. Unlike those adopting the Whig view of history (Protestantism as ‘progress’ beyond Catholicism), Macfarlane was decisive and illuminating.
Socialism without pantheism is a dead letter, just another string in the bow of the capitalist reordering. Ten years earlier, in 1839, the young Friedrich Engels (still not yet a socialist or atheist) had, in breaking with Protestantism, declared his conversion to Strauss’s Hegelian pantheism:
‘Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism. Of course, I shall not become such an inveterate Hegelian, but I must nevertheless absorb important things from this colossal system. The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the ‘modern pantheists’ knowing well that even the word pantheism arouses such colossal revulsion on the part of pastors who don’t think. Modern pantheism, i.e., Hegel, apart from the fact that it is already found among the Chinese and Parsees, is perfectly expressed in the sect of the Libertines, which was attacked by Calvin. This discovery is really rather too original. But still more original is its development.’
Strauss follows Hegel in showing that, implicitly, the thought content of religion had an objective, theoretical drive. The difference is that for Hegel the importance of the gospels was their symbolic content rather than their historicity, whereas for Strauss the gospel narratives were myths, which had preserved and translated the messianic desires of the early Christian communities.
Helen Macfarlane did not approach working-class radicalism through what Friedrich Engels called ‘the weird and dismal hell’ of Feuerbachian atheism; rather, she got there by radicalizing Strauss’s critical Hegelianism. When Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined was translated into English in 1846 by Marian Evans, it was described as ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell’ by Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading Anglican Evangelical whose speeches in the House of Lords were much ridiculed by Macfarlane. Like many others of the Hegelian Left, Strauss did not embrace socialism. But for Macfarlane, what Strauss called the ‘divine life of the species’ could hardly be anything else.
(The full article can be read HERE )