โ Scribed by Murray Greene
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
It was not the Priests that bore the Ark, but the Ark that bore its bearers.
(Midrash Rabbah, Exodus 3 6, 4)
Almost anyone having a nodding acquaintance with Marxism is able to quote Marx's mot about Hegel. The Hegelian dialectic, says Marx, is "standing on its head.": it must be "turned right side up" if the "rational kernel" is to be discovered in the "mystical shell." Marx purportedly accomplishes this feat by showing that the "ideal" world of Hegelian philosophy is "nothing but the material world translated and transposed in the human head. ''~ But why, one wonders, should Hegel have constructed a dialectic that stands on its head? And if by some whim or inadvertence he did so, by what blind chance could its kernel have been rational? One's puzzlement about the upside-down dialectic grows when one learns that upside-downness is an express moment within the dialectic itself. Hegel not only admits inversion, he insists on it, builds his position on it. In fact it was Hegel who defined a whole vast issue, or rather complex of issues, in terms of clas Verkehrte, and so lk,larx's mot about Hegel employs a weapon from Hegel's own arsenal.
Yet Hegel's notion of inversion is not widely understood, a and the purpose of the present paper is to elucidate as far as possible the Hegelian meaning. In the first place, we ask, what is the issue all about, that Hegel is dealing with in his notion of inversion? When and why does there emerge an "inverted world"? what purpose does it serve? Finally, what are the logical moments in inversion as a process? Hopefully our paper will contribute toward an understanding of the Hegelian "mystical shell" which was perhaps not so "mystical"--in Marx's sense -after all. : From the Preface to Capital, vol. I, 2d ed. (t873:'.. .2 Ibid. 3 Hegel's section on the "inverted world" of Understanding in the Phiinomenologie des Geistes is hardly mentioned by English-speaking commentators. Joseph C. Flay's "Hegel's 'Inverted world,'" Review ofilIetaphyficf, vol. xxiii, no. 4, June ~ 97o, pp-66o-678 , appeared after the present article was written. Dr. Flay's interpretation differs in certain respects fi'on: the present one.
8 p. 370. 9 p. 409. 10 pp. 542 ft. 1~ p. 769 passim.
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