Thread by @Ne_pas_couvrir

Let's do a few long posts laying out Hess's influence on Marx. 🧵
So, Hegel absorbs Böhme's Ungrund-myth and the Lurianic cycle into philosophy, drawing from sources like Johann Jakob Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae, whose treatment of Kabbalah is largely Lurianic, as well as Swabian Pietists like Oetinger who reworked Lurianic ideas and synthesized them with Böhme. Hegel encountered Lurianic Kabbalah directly through Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, which he cited in his lectures, referencing Abraham Cohen Herrera's Porta coelorum (Magee). Pure Being contracts, like Ein Sof, in tzimtzum, yielding Difference and Nothing; this self-limitation explodes as Nature, a world of finite forms mirroring shevirat ha-kelim, where Spirit's light is refracted into opaque shards. History becomes the labor of Weltgeist, a collective agent gathering sparks through determinate negation (Aufhebung): each contradiction is preserved, lifted, and woven into fuller unity, a rational tikkun without human agency. The triad of Logic-Nature-Spirit thinly secularizes theosophy, with categories unfolding like the Sefirot in dialectical reconciliation, culminating in the ethical state where freedom realizes itself.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1979944825827778796

Hess inherits this Lurianic-infused Hegelian framework, blending it with Spinoza's monism from the Ethics, which treats thought and extension as modes of a single substance and informs Hess's vision of a reconciled community. While Kant's regulative teleology in the Critique of Judgment and his providential view of history in the 1784 "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim" provide a background for seeing progress as purposeful (albeit antagonistic), Hess anchors this teleology in human agency, secularizing it into praxis through his "philosophy of the deed" and making communal reconciliation the product of conscious action rather than inevitable unfolding (Hess, "Philosophie der Tat"; Avineri).

Hess then transposes the Lurianic-Hermetic grammar from Hegel and others into praxis. Drawing from Spinoza, Hegel, and his own Judeo-Christian synthesis, already framed by the eschatological horizon of The Holy History of Mankind (Avineri; Rosen), Hess secularizes the Lurianic motifs of withdrawal (tzimtzum) and repair (tikkun) into a philosophy of the deed (Philosophie der Tat), insisting in the early 1840s that abstract theory must unite with action to overcome social fragmentation (Avineri). Critiquing Hegel for allowing Geist to unfold somewhat independently through history, Hess argues that human deeds must consciously drive its realization, infusing a theurgic element in which collective praxis enacts a secular tikkun with human agency that repairs alienation by intentional action rather than divine intervention (Rosen). From Philosophie der Tat and the draft Entwurf in the Moses Hess Papers, IISH Amsterdam, Nachlass B 21, the guiding maxim is best treated as an inference: “we act, therefore we are,” paired with his demand for the “union of thought and deed” grounded in organic social life (Hess, “Philosophie der Tat”; Rosen. In this essay he privileges act over being, recasts the Cartesian cogito, and states that not being but the act is first and last (Hess, “Philosophie der Tat”). He popularizes this activist program in catechetical form, notably the 1846 “Communist Confession in Questions and Answers,” which presents communal ownership as the “Kingdom of God on earth,” and he reframes withdrawal and repair as alienation and communal restoration to be achieved through organized deeds rather than private edification; he also condemns private property as the “money-devil” that estranges humans from their species-essence, calling for ethical socialism to mend it (Hess, “Über das Geldwesen”; Avineri ). As Avineri and Rosen show, this catechism-style socialism supplied forms, slogans, and draft materials that circulated into the Communist Manifesto, even as Marx criticized its prophetic tone (Avineri; Rosen).Marx learns from Hess but later contests his esoteric language, superficially erecting a materialist scaffold over the esoteric structure to camouflage its magical appearances while retaining its core. Hess's influence on Marx and Engels in the early 1840s is hard to overstate. Hess was the man who convinced Friedrich Engels of communism: as Engels recalled, "Last year, when I was about to travel to Paris, he came through Cologne from Berlin; we spoke about contemporary issues, and he, a revolutionary of the Anno I [French Revolution], left me as the most fervent communist" (Rosen).

Hess's critique of contemplative materialism, which anticipates Feuerbach's limitations by stressing self-education and praxis in organic social life, directly shaped Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach." As Hess argues in his 1843–44 draft manuscript for Philosophie der Tat:
"The social life in the organic community is the social education of humankind. When history stands on the plane of organic life, the education of the human race coincides with humane education. Here education is no longer an education of men into children nor an education of children into men, but the self-education of free men, who have attained within themselves all the conditions for further development, who govern themselves, who determine themselves, who are active, who are active within those spheres of activity to which they belong entirely, with body and soul, with which they are grown together, as nourishment and life are grown together, as body and spirit are grown together. The human being has won his sphere of action, and an arbitrary separation of the living person in organic society from his sphere of action, or of the active person from his activity, is no more conceivable than a person’s leaping out of his own skin" (Rosen 136; from the Entwurf der Philosophie der Tat, Hess papers, IISH Amsterdam).

This formulation, emphasizing self-determination through collective praxis and rejecting external divisions in education or society, prefigures Marx's Third Thesis, written in spring 1845, which critiques Feuerbach's passive materialism for overlooking human agency in transformation and for implying a societal split between educators and educated, which Rosen highlights to show Hess's foundational influence on Marx's praxis-oriented turn (Marx Theses on Feuerbach; Rosen:
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence, this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice" (Marx).

Hess articulates the pedagogical and organizational side of praxis first, Marx then condenses the principle into a general rule of social transformation. This conceptual relay is what Rosen underscores where he shows Marx’s theses drawing on Hess’s program of practice-centered human development (Rosen).

Furthermore, Hess wrote a "Communist Credo" in question-and-answer form in 1846, and many of these ideas were later incorporated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, with Hess involved in the initial writing (Avineri). It is well known that the League of the Just (reorganized as the Communist League in 1847) entrusted Engels (and later Marx and Engels together) with drafting a "Communist Confession of Faith," an important preparatory document for the planned convening of a General Communist Congress in 1848.

Less well known, however, is that Moses Hess was initially supposed to draft this esoterically titled document, which aimed to outline the League's program in a catechism-style format reflecting its diverse socialist influences, including Hess's own Utopian and Fourierist leanings. Hess did, in fact, write a draft and submitted it to the committee in Paris. This version emphasized a vision of communism focused on organizing society to allow each member to "develop and utilize all his potentialities and powers in full freedom without jeopardizing the foundations of this society," advocating for the abolition of private property and its replacement by a "community of goods." It even touched on themes like marriage, influenced by Fourier's ideas, proposing that true freedom in social relationships would enable "real marriage" only under genuine liberty. However, Friedrich Engels sabotaged this effort in a manner that Engels himself described as cunning and underhanded. Upon returning to Paris in mid-October 1847, Engels critiqued Hess's draft point by point during a committee meeting, as he detailed in a private letter to Marx in Brussels:
"I played a hellish trick on Mosi [Hess], just between us. He had successfully pushed through a gloriously 'improved' Confession of Faith. Last Friday, I brought it before the circle, question by question, and I hadn't even gotten halfway through when the people declared themselves 'satisfaits' [satisfied]. Without any opposition, I was tasked with drafting a new one, which will now be discussed next Friday in the circle and sent to London behind the backs of the communities. But, of course, no one must find out about this, or we'll all be deposed, and there'll be a huge scandal" (Rosen).

The conflict stemmed from deep ideological rifts within the League, where members held a wide array of socialist beliefs, from Fourierism and Proudhonism to more materialist strains. Hess's draft, with its emphasis on ethical humanism, natural capacities, and themes like sexual relationships drawn from Fourier, clashed with Marx and Engels's emerging focus on historical materialism, class struggle, and the proletariat's revolutionary role. Engels's new draft, the "Basic Principles of Communism," shifted toward a materialist analysis, prioritizing "the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property." This recast Hess's ideas, such as ethical reconciliation of human essence and communal freedom, into a class-based framework, dropping utopian elements like Fourier-inspired marriage reforms. Shortly thereafter, Engels proposed dropping the catechism format altogether and renaming it the Communist Manifesto, further distancing the final product from Hess's contributions. Rosen documents that Hess first drafted the catechism-style “Confession of Faith,” which Engels then displaced with the “Basic Principles of Communism” (Rosen). This editorial coup also marks the narrowing from Hess’s ethical-pedagogical register to Marx and Engels’s materialist analysis.

From 1846 onward, Marx and Engels derided the German catechetical current as "True Socialism," criticizing its rhetoric of human essence and reconciliation for obscuring class antagonism. Yet, as Avineri highlights, they incorporated several of Hess's esoteric programmatic elements and proposals, including early visions of alienation's repair through praxis and history as a redemptive dialectic, recasting them in historical-materialist terms. Concepts like rupture and repair transform into determinate social relations and praxis, rather than motions in sacred time, while the catechism gives way to rigorous analysis, organization, and class struggle (Avineri; Rosen). This secularized repair shines through in Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where he portrays communism as "the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man," thereby mending the rifts between existence and essence, freedom and necessity, and individual and species. At the time of writing the Paris Manuscripts (1844), Marx still held Hess in high esteem; Rosen notes this admiration turned to distortion by 1846, as Marx caricatured Hess's ethical socialism to sharpen his own materialist edge (Rosen).

Hess's marginalization, and the concealment of the esoteric architecture in the Marxist canon can be attributed to this ideological purge: by labeling his ideas as "True Socialism" in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels positioned their materialist dialectics as the sole legitimate path, downplaying Hess's foundational role in introducing them to communism and praxis to claim greater originality. This erasure served to consolidate their authority within the movement, sidelining Hess's contributions, such as early formulations of alienation and ethical socialism.

Yet, despite this purge, Hess's esoteric motifs of rupture and repair, drawn from Kabbalistic sources via Idealism, endure in Marx's thought, recoded in materialist terms to drive emancipatory praxis. Magee's thesis that Hegel must be understood as a Hermetic thinker extends implicitly to Marx, whom he identifies as the "true modern disciple" of the Hermetic millenarian Joachim, emphasizing that these esoteric roots are indispensable for grasping Marxist concepts fully (Magee). Building on this historical lineage from Kabbalah through German Idealism to Hess's activist socialism and Marx's materialist recoding, the analysis that follows applies the dual hermeneutic in two registers that map onto one another. In the exoteric register: primitive accumulation, alienation, reification, praxis, where proletarian class consciousness, organization, and struggle do the work of repair. In the esoteric register: withdrawal, rupture, shells, repair (tzimtzum, shattering, kelipot, tikkun) where marginalized sparks and an elect of repair name the path back to wholeness. The images come through Hegel's Lurianic sources, the programmatic bridge comes through Hess's philosophy of the deed, and the materialist recoding comes through Marx's break with "True Socialism" and his insistence on historical mediation and collective action (Magee; Avineri; Rosen).