From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sat Jul 23 2005 - 13:02:49 EDT
---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Marx: In Our Time From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@tiscali.nl> Date: Thu, July 21, 2005 4:18 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well comrades, don't get me wrong. I am personally not anti-philosophy, I am *pro-philosophy*; it gave me more intellectual freedom than I ever thought possible; consequently I believe in freedom for philosophy. Push come to shove, I might even argue that philosophical preoccupations are part of human nature, to the extent that *all* people ask "general questions about man and world" at some time or other. The more the working classes philosophize, the better it is really, in these days of professional cretinism, although if that is all they do, then we're not much further ahead either. Michael Lebowitz's reference to Marx/Dietzgen is apt. But I think I am correct in saying, as a generalization, that Marx himself believed the scope of philosophy was drastically reduced and supplanted by the modern sciences and empirical/practical investigation. This is proved incidentally by the 14 January, 1858 letter by Marx itself, I think it goes like this: "...I am getting some nice developments. For instance, I have thrown over the whole doctrine of profit as it has existed up to now. In the method of treatment, in fact by mere accident I have again glanced through Hegel's Logic has been of great service to me--Freiligrath found some volumes of Hegel which originally belonged to Bakunin and sent them to me as a present. If there should ever be time for such work again, I should greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer's sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism.... What do you say to friend Jones?"" In other words, there was a problem, and there was something rational in the mysticism, but it could be condensed in a few "sheets", and whether that was an instance of *philosophy* is a moot point. (As an aside, I recently visited Hegel Haus in Stuttgart; at ground level they had these sculptures of women clutching their heads and holding up shells to each other, with a curt inscription in German "this is how things were in Hegel's time" or some such thing :-)). Funny how the mighty thinker came from (what looked to me) a very humble home (nowadays tucked away amidst shopping plazas). I think Marx's original critique was primarily that philosophers of his age pretended to be able to acquire knowledge by (speculative) philosophical methods, which could not be *obtained* by those methods, resulting in "twaddle". Rather, the generalisations and inferences from those generalisations had to come from conscientiously working over the empirical material, i.e. they had to be generalizations *from something*, namely experience, observation and experiment, documented or otherwise. There was a difference between a "Veralgemeinung" and a "Gemeinplatz". A valuable generalisation was a *limited* generalisation derived from a disciplined study of a real object (the German word is "bestimmt" which could also be translated as "determinate"). I think Engels puts it quite well in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach: "The proof must be derived from history itself; and, in this regard, it may be permitted to say that is has been sufficiently furnished in other writings. This conception, however, puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectical conception of nature makes all natural philosophy both unnecessary and impossible. It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts. For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought, so far as it is left: the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics." Presumably if Marx had written a piece on "dialectics", as he said he intended but never did, it would probably have concerned this "thought process" in relation to practical existence. As a matter of fact, I personally believe Marx and Engels were wrong on this issue, just as Michael says I am wrong; a very important area of philosophical inquiry Marx and Engels did not investigate systematically was, for example, ethics. If they had done so, I'll wager it would have saved a lot of lives, and prevented a lot of misery. I think ethics is an enduring preoccupation in civil society, and that the moral dimension of human life merits attention in social science (as long as it does not degenerate in moralistic twaddle). That's my "Kantian" or "Spinozist" bias if you like. For the rest, I think Ian Hunt has pretty much got it sussed; and following pertinent Hunt's remark, Engels "expulsion" of philosophy was really belied by his own reflections on the "dialectics of nature". Having been bitten by the bug of philosophy, as it were, Marx and Engels never fully escaped from it... To change the point, we must interpret it, and that can get to be a big problem, I can testify to that! Jurriaan
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