Die Freien - Philosophy

Philosophy

The Young Hegelians, or the Left Hegelians, were a group of followers of Hegelian philosophy. They differed from the Old Hegelians, or the Right Hegelians, in that the latter were orthodox followers who strived to keep Hegel’s philosophy intact. The Young Hegelians, in contrast, while adopting the main elements of the philosophy, such as the dialectic approach, were highly critical of others. Marx for instance would not accept that the state was the seat of universality and rationality, i.e. that it was inherently rational, and made it his goal to prove that the difference between civil society, which Hegel held to be the sphere where individual interest is pursued in conflict with the interests of others, and the state, where such conflicts are transcended, was in fact misplaced, the goal of the proletariat being in fact to abolish such differences.

Other Young Hegelians had other qualms about Hegel’s Philosophy: David Strauss did not accept Hegel’s claims of Christian historicity renouncing any historical basis to Christianity in favour of its demythization, claiming that the stories found in the Bible should be understood as myths "constructed not by individuals but by the earliest Christian communities in response to the teaching of Christ and the Messianic tradition which they had inherited from the Old Testament.".