REX VIVAT

Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formula from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should “recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present”; or, to put it in Marx’s terms: in reconciliation one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner “truth” of the miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel merely proposes a new interpretation of it, thus in a way misses the point—it is knocking on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it.