Marx, with a literary vocation (and III)

Marx closes his youthful period with a letter written to his father from Berlin on November 10, 1837. In this valuable document, written at the age of 22, he justifies his lyrical vocation to his father as a necessary but outdated stage of life and casts a retrospective look at his literary output. He makes a highly self-critical assessment, especially of his poetry, which he considers excessively romantic and intellectualist. In the most heartbreaking part, he accuses himself of writing disordered and haphazardly constructed sentiments, of making "rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts," and of falling into an idealistic romanticism. He tells us that he had already attempted to remedy this by introducing satire and humor into some poems, and through the writing of the experimental novel. Scorpio and Felix and the drama Oulanem.

Reading the letter gives us some clues to understanding the place that literary experiments occupy within the set of young Marx's academic and life interests. It provides us with a detailed index of his literary, philosophical, and legal readings and allows us to reconstruct his intellectual development. His epistolary confessions serve to guide him on his next steps and inform his father of his decision to end his literary career and focus on his studies, aware of his enormous limitations and lack of talent.

At the beginning of the letter, Marx already hints that he is at a very transcendent, transitional moment in his life. He says so clearly with these words: "There are moments that are like milestones that mark an era already lived, and which, at the same time, seem to point decisively in a new direction."

The letter tells us the reasons that led him to abandon the Romantic vision and successively adopt the subjective idealism close to Fichte, the objective idealism of Hegel, which conceives life as the unfolding of the spirit; and a final moment represented by the conversion to left-wing Hegelianism, led by his friend Bruno Bauer.

Marx shared with his father the habit of making summaries of the books he read, with annotations and commentaries. Thus we know that he had read the essay on aesthetics Laocoont of the art theorist, writer and thinker, Lessing, Erwin or Four Conversations on Beauty and Art of the German philosopher Solger, the Art History Winckelmann's, and also the History of the German people by historian Heinrich Luden, and the criminal law theory of Ernst Ferdinand Klein, which has greatly influenced the discussion on guilt and imputation.

German legal tradition

He claims to have spent some time exploring the German legal tradition by reading two of the great classics, Heineccius and Thibaut, in order to construct a comprehensive treatise on the philosophy of law. He views it negatively because it is based on a false idealist distinction between "being" and "ought," which leads to a goal that distances him from real law. In other words, he produces an unscientific and dogmatic treatise as abstract as mathematics. Marx is acknowledging that he has fallen into a methodological error related to his understanding of Hegelian dialectics.

Within the field of law, he claims to have translated fragments of the law of Pandects into German. Digest, a compilation of Roman jurisprudence, promoted by Emperor Justinian I, fundamental in the development of European civil law. Marx acknowledges having delved into the studies of positive law and, more specifically, into civil law and the theory of possession of Savigny; but also into the criminal law of Feuerbach and Karl von Grolmann; and into Roman law through a compilation of legal definitions edited by Cramer. He was familiar with the updating of Roman law by Wening-Ingenheim and Mühlenbruch; in addition, he had read works on civil process by Lauterbach; and above all, texts on ecclesiastical law, such as the first part of the Concordia discoclantium canonum, by Gracià, and The Institutions, by Giovanni Paolo Lancelotti. Regarding philosophy, he remembers having read On the progress of science, of Francis Bacon, and in depth, Hegel and his disciples. We also know that he read a book on ethology and animal behavior entitled General reflections on animal instincts, especially artistic instincts, by Hermann Samuel Reimarus.

He realizes the importance of the connection between form and content when developing a philosophy of law, overcoming the error of having believed that the formal aspect of law could be separated and developed apart from the content. In his words: "form perhaps no more than the development of content."

In the letter he assures his father of his commitment to philosophy, and reassures him by telling him that he had burned his stories and poems, which is not true, because if it were they would not have reached us. He tells him that he has written a short dialogue in the Platonic style entitled Cleanthes or the starting point and necessary progress in philosophy, now lost, from the confluence of art and philosophy, and the idea of a divinity that manifested itself as power, religion, nature and history, which required a great effort to get up to date on natural sciences, history and Schelling's idealist philosophy.

At the end of 1839, he began to read, transcribe and translate selected passages from the book From Anima of Aristotle. He appears to have previously transcribed and translated fragments of the Rhetoric of the Stagirite philosopher, of whom there is no documentary trace. Between 1839 and 1841, Marx wrote preparatory texts for his doctoral thesis on the difference between the natural philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.

Poetry

His youthful poetic and literary passion did not disappear suddenly, and although it tempered over time, and his main interest shifted to the revolutionary struggle and the emancipation of the proletariat, he continued to read poetry and write very sporadically. In fact, Marx did not abandon his youthful project of exploring social and political conflicts through a variety of literary genres, as evidenced by the fact that, late in life, he still entertained the idea of writing a tragic drama about the Gracs, the name by which the brothers Tiberi and Gaius Grac were known. Marx wanted to make the Gracchi the protagonists of the work because they were historical figures representative of Roman republicanism concerned with justice and social reform. However, the humorous and satirical style, as well as the dialectical games adopted in his youthful literary productions, did not disappear and continued to be present in his later journalistic articles and political texts.

The writings of youth are available to readers, but only in Spanish. Thus, the drama Oulanem, the novel Scorpio and Felix, and the letter to the father, are part of a book entitled Literary experiments of youth (1837-1841) (Mnemosyne, 2024). This book fully reproduces the edition of the novel by Professor Joan González Guardiola, published in 2018 by Libros Singular. On the other hand, the love poetry is published under the title Poems (El Viejo Topo, 2000). And finally, the book Writings of youth (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), includes the interesting high school work entitled Reflections of a young man when choosing a profession.