I.
Marx and Engels early wrote the famed 'Manifesto of the Communist Party.' This begun its main sections in a somewhat inaccessible, idiosyncratic manner by instead focussing on the development of capitalist society, and its nature, from a mostly positive point of view, before unveiling - the reader perhaps not drawn in at this point by the excitement of capitalism portrayed in its own terms - its difficulties, and finally a movement against it. This somewhat strange mode of beginning, which goes on for some time, is found again famously in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, incorporating the ideologies of 'the aesthetic,' or ordered fornication, and 'the ethical,' or reactive or reactionary marriage, which he associates with Hegelian Christians and Judaism, before undermining both critically from the perspective of faith, which they were merely attempting to reach while violating it inherently and standing against it. In this, he is still, like Hegel before him - and that his 'pseudonymous' form is merely a vulgarisation of Hegel's categories is fairly obvious despite his polemic, and he is generally as you might expect better off philosophically when writing down his own thoughts rather than someone else's while in the guise of another, which a less respectable person might call stealing - overly positive about what he criticises via a pseudo-personal identification, while obviously in his recollections of Regine Olsen she fails to take on any clear symbolic purpose other than that of a character, and likewise neither 'the aesthetic' or 'the ethical' come to mean anything, again hoping that Hegel's categories will somehow anchor this by giving it sense, but one quite different and more detached.
In all of this, he falls into the trap that we may call 'GWF' Hegel, the one and only, just as Hegel perhaps subscribed overtly to Hellenicism and so on. He is unable to escape the lure of the Hegelian categories, like that of Regine Olsen before or rather after them. We shall hold off comparing them, but the Hegelian categories seemingly would compare favourably, and clearly can have more lasting impact. His later work, in journals and articles, is generally more direct, but also more extreme, generally, in the questions with which Kierkegaard was concerned. It is also worth noting that Kierkegaard and Marx begin from similar stand-points of looking at concrete human activity and the human individual, which is perhaps a half-excuse for Marx in this form if not for Kierkegaard making up abstactions whose unique human activity could be summarised as other people's, except that Kierkegaard nonetheless focusses on the human individual at least in the religious realm, responding to issues apparently raised in Denmark at the time (after divorcing from an engagement, perhaps out of basic common sense or if for whatever reason necessary nationalism, with a nominal doppelganger for 'Ophelia'), while Marx effaces this, but through this can consider the hypothetical relation of the human individual to society, and hence discuss the faults of the social system at the time, which of course did not change until that was abolished. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's literature is as a result more living in itself, although this is confined by its focus on the religious to the poetic sphere mostly or to an inauthentic reproduction of philosophy, although some of his later polemic within a delimited region could be a highlight of the genre, and also, because of his regard for the circumstances and the opponent he was attacking, and his personal stand against this on behalf of Christianity but on their own, came across as significantly more necessary than many of Marx's attacks on other socialists, which tended to be quite minor and a implied no real nor living opposition, although there was some cynicism to this which was obscure, but promising and anticipative.
Marx and Engels early wrote the famed 'Manifesto of the Communist Party.' This begun its main sections in a somewhat inaccessible, idiosyncratic manner by instead focussing on the development of capitalist society, and its nature, from a mostly positive point of view, before unveiling - the reader perhaps not drawn in at this point by the excitement of capitalism portrayed in its own terms - its difficulties, and finally a movement against it. This somewhat strange mode of beginning, which goes on for some time, is found again famously in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, incorporating the ideologies of 'the aesthetic,' or ordered fornication, and 'the ethical,' or reactive or reactionary marriage, which he associates with Hegelian Christians and Judaism, before undermining both critically from the perspective of faith, which they were merely attempting to reach while violating it inherently and standing against it. In this, he is still, like Hegel before him - and that his 'pseudonymous' form is merely a vulgarisation of Hegel's categories is fairly obvious despite his polemic, and he is generally as you might expect better off philosophically when writing down his own thoughts rather than someone else's while in the guise of another, which a less respectable person might call stealing - overly positive about what he criticises via a pseudo-personal identification, while obviously in his recollections of Regine Olsen she fails to take on any clear symbolic purpose other than that of a character, and likewise neither 'the aesthetic' or 'the ethical' come to mean anything, again hoping that Hegel's categories will somehow anchor this by giving it sense, but one quite different and more detached.
In all of this, he falls into the trap that we may call 'GWF' Hegel, the one and only, just as Hegel perhaps subscribed overtly to Hellenicism and so on. He is unable to escape the lure of the Hegelian categories, like that of Regine Olsen before or rather after them. We shall hold off comparing them, but the Hegelian categories seemingly would compare favourably, and clearly can have more lasting impact. His later work, in journals and articles, is generally more direct, but also more extreme, generally, in the questions with which Kierkegaard was concerned. It is also worth noting that Kierkegaard and Marx begin from similar stand-points of looking at concrete human activity and the human individual, which is perhaps a half-excuse for Marx in this form if not for Kierkegaard making up abstactions whose unique human activity could be summarised as other people's, except that Kierkegaard nonetheless focusses on the human individual at least in the religious realm, responding to issues apparently raised in Denmark at the time (after divorcing from an engagement, perhaps out of basic common sense or if for whatever reason necessary nationalism, with a nominal doppelganger for 'Ophelia'), while Marx effaces this, but through this can consider the hypothetical relation of the human individual to society, and hence discuss the faults of the social system at the time, which of course did not change until that was abolished. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's literature is as a result more living in itself, although this is confined by its focus on the religious to the poetic sphere mostly or to an inauthentic reproduction of philosophy, although some of his later polemic within a delimited region could be a highlight of the genre, and also, because of his regard for the circumstances and the opponent he was attacking, and his personal stand against this on behalf of Christianity but on their own, came across as significantly more necessary than many of Marx's attacks on other socialists, which tended to be quite minor and a implied no real nor living opposition, although there was some cynicism to this which was obscure, but promising and anticipative.
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