Chapter 76 Chapter 27 Karl Marx

Karl Marx is usually thought of as the man who professed to have made socialism a scientific socialism; who did more than anyone else to create a powerful movement, Exclusion has dominated recent European history.It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss his economics, or to discuss his politics (except in some general respects); I intend to deal with him only as a philosopher and as someone who influenced the philosophy of others. Talk about him.At this point, he's hard to categorize.In one respect he is, like Hodgskin, a result of the philosophical Radicals, continuing their rationalism and their revolt against the Romantics.From another perspective, he is a person who revives materialism, adds a new interpretation to materialism, and makes it have a new connection with human history.Looking at it from another perspective, he is the last of the founders of the great system, he is the successor of Hegel, and like Hegel, he believes that there is a reasonable formula that summarizes human evolution.To emphasize any of these aspects while ignoring the others would give a distorted view of his philosophy.

The events of his life illustrate some of this complexity.He was born in 1818, in Trier, like St. Ambrose.Trier was deeply influenced by the French during the French Revolution and Napoleon's era. In terms of views, Trier is much more cosmopolitan than most parts of Germany.His grandparents were originally Jewish doctors of the law, but his parents became Christians when he was young.He married a non-Jewish aristocratic woman and loved her sincerely throughout his life.In college, he was influenced by Hegel's philosophy which was still popular at that time, and was also influenced by Feuerbach's rebellion against Hegel and his inclination towards materialism.

He tried journalism, but the "Rhein Zeitung" he edited was banned by the authorities because of his radical remarks.Then, in 1843, he went to France to study socialism. In France he met Engels, who was the manager of a factory in Manchester. Through Engels, he was able to understand the labor situation in Britain and British economics. He thus acquired an unusually international cultivation before the Revolution of 1848.As far as Western Europe is concerned, he makes no show of national deceit.The same cannot be said about Eastern Europe, because he has always despised the Slavs.

He participated in both the French Revolution and the German Revolution in 1848, but the reactionary forces forced him to take refuge in England in 1849.Except for a few brief periods, he spent the rest of his life in London, suffering from poverty, disease, and the loss of his children, but still writing and accumulating knowledge.What motivated him to do his work had always been the hope of a social revolution, if not in his lifetime, then in the not-too-distant future. Marx, like Bentham and James Mill, had nothing to do with romanticism; science was always his aim.His economics is a result of British classical economics, only the driving force has been changed.The classical economists, whether consciously or unconsciously, had their eyes on the welfare of the capitalist as opposed to both the landlord and the wage-earner; Marx, on the contrary, set out to represent the interests of the wage-earner. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 shows that in his youth he embraced the fervor of a new revolutionary movement as liberalism had in Milton's day.Yet he was always desperate for evidence, never relying on any super-scientific intuition.

Marx called himself a materialist, but not an eighteenth-century materialist.Under the influence of Hegel's philosophy, he called his kind of materialism "dialectical" materialism. This kind of materialism is very different from traditional materialism, but it is closer to what is called instrumentalism today.He said that the old materialism mistakenly regards the function of sensation as passive, and thus basically ascribes activity to the object.According to Marx, all sensation or perception is the interaction between the subject and the object; the naked object, separated from the activity of the perceiver, is just raw material, which changes in the process of being recognized.Passive contemplation of this old sense of cognition is an unrealistic abstract concept; the actual process is the process of dealing with things. "Whether human thinking has objective truth is not a theoretical question, but a practical question," he said. "People should prove the truth of their own thinking in practice, that is, the reality and power of their own thinking.... The debate on whether thinking without practice is realistic is a purely scholastic, academic, philosophical, and academic. The problem. . . . Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, and the problem is to change the world."

I think we can interpret Marx's assertion to mean that the process which philosophers have always called the pursuit of knowledge is not, as it was previously thought, one in which the object is constant and all adaptation lies in the knower. On the one hand the process.On the contrary, the subject and the object, the knower and the thing known are all in the process of constant mutual adaptation.Because this process is never fully completed, he calls it a "dialectical" process. Denying the reality of "sensation" as understood by the British empiricists is of the utmost importance to this theory.What actually happens, when it comes closest to what the British empiricists meant by "sensation," is better called "perception," for that implies agency.In fact—as Marx would have argued—we perceive things only as part of a process of action in relation to them, and any theory that does not take action into account is a misleading abstraction.

As far as I know, Marx was the first philosopher to criticize the concept of "truth" from this activism point of view.In his writings, this criticism is not emphasized very much, so I am not going to say more here, and I will examine this theory in a later chapter. Marx's philosophy of history is a mixture of Hegel's philosophy and British economics.Like Hegel, he believes that the world develops according to a dialectical formula, but he has completely different opinions from Hegel about the motive force of this development.Hegel believed that there was a mysterious entity called "spirit" that made human history develop according to the stages of dialectics in Hegel's "Logic".

Why the "spirit" had to go through these stages is unknown.One cannot help thinking that the "spirit" is trying to understand Hegel's work, hastily objectifying at every stage what it reads.Marx's dialectic has nothing of this quality except a certain necessity.According to Marx, the driving force is not spiritual but material.However, it is a substance of special significance mentioned above, not a completely dehumanized substance as mentioned by atomists.That is to say, in Marx's view, the driving force is actually the relationship between man and matter, the most important part of which is the mode of production of man.In this way, Marx's materialism actually becomes economics.

According to Marx, politics, religion, philosophy, and art in any era in human history are the result of the production mode of that era, or even the distribution mode in a step back.I don't think he would argue that this can be said about all the details of culture, but that it can only be said about the general outline of culture.This theory is called "historical materialism".This is a very important point; in particular, it is relevant to historians of philosophy.Personally I do not accept this thesis in its entirety, but I think it contains a very important element of truth, and I realize that it has had an impact on my own views on the development of philosophy as presented in this book.First, we discuss the history of philosophy in combination with Marx's theory.

Subjectively speaking, every philosopher thinks he is engaged in the pursuit of something that may be called "truth."Philosophers may have different opinions on the definition of "truth", but in any case truth is always an objective thing, something that everyone should admit in a certain sense.Whoever thinks that all philosophy is merely the expression of unreasonable prejudices does not pursue philosophy.Yet all philosophers will agree that there are not a few other philosophers who have been motivated by prejudice, and have extra-rational reasons for many of their opinions, of which they are not usually conscious.Marx, like everyone else, believed in the truth of his doctrine; he did not see it as nothing more than the expression of the peculiar mood of a rebellious German middle-class Jew in the middle of the nineteenth century.What can we say about this contradiction between the subjective and objective views of a philosophy?

On the whole, we can say that Greek philosophy up to Aristotle expresses the intellectual conditions peculiar to the city-state; Stoic philosophy is suitable for the world's despotism; Philosophy since then, or at least since Locke, has tended to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle classes; Marxism and Fascism are peculiar philosophies of the modern industrial countries.I think this is both true and important.However, I think Marx was wrong on two points.First, that the social conditions that have to be taken into account have an economic aspect as well as a political one; these conditions have to do with power, and wealth is only a form of power.Second, social causation largely ceases to apply as soon as a problem becomes detailed and technical.The first of these two objections has already been dealt with in my book Power, so I am not going to go into it.The second point is more closely related to the history of philosophy, and I intend to give some examples of its scope. Let’s take the issue of universality first.It was discussed first by Plato, then by Aristotle, then by the scholastics, by the English empiricists, and most recently by logicians.It is unjustifiable to deny that prejudice has had an effect on philosophers' views on the subject.Plato was influenced by Parmenides and Orphism; he wanted an eternal world and could not believe in the ultimate reality of the passage of time.Aristotle is more empiricist and has no aversion to the ordinary world of reality.The radical empiricists of modern times have a prejudice opposite to that of Plato: they find it unpleasant to think of a supersensible world, and are willing to do everything possible to avoid having to believe in such a world.But these kinds of prejudices that are opposed to each other have existed for a long time, and have only a relatively distant relationship with the social system.It has been said that the love of eternal things is the nature of the leisure class who live by the labor of others. I don't think this is necessarily correct.Neither Epictetus nor Spinoza was a gentleman of leisure.Conversely, it might be argued that the idea of ​​heaven as a place to do nothing is the idea of ​​weary laborers who seek nothing but rest.Such debates can go on indefinitely and lead to nothing. On the other hand, if one pays attention to the details of the dispute about universals, each side can make some arguments that the other side will admit as valid.Some of Aristotle's criticisms of Plato on this point are almost universally accepted.Recently, although no decision has been reached, a new technical expertise has been developed which has solved many side problems.It is not unreasonable to hope that it will not be too long before logicians can reach a clear consensus on this question. As a second example, let's look at the ontological argument.As already mentioned, this argument was invented by Anselm, denied by Thomas Aquinas, admitted by Descartes, refuted by Kant, and revived by Hegel.I think it is safe to say that modern logic has disproved this argument as a result of the analysis of the concept of "being".This is not a question of personal temperament or of social institutions; it is a question of pure technicality.The refutation of this argument is of course not a reason to conclude that its conclusion (that God exists) is wrong; if it were, we cannot imagine Thomas Aquinas denying the argument in the first place. Or, take the question of materialism. "Materialism" is a word that can have many meanings; we have said that Marx changed its meaning radically. The vehement debate about whether materialism is right or wrong has been sustained largely by avoiding definitions.As soon as this term is defined, we will know that according to some possible definitions, materialism can be proved wrong; according to some other definitions, it may be right, although there is no definite reason to think so; For other definitions, there are several reasons in favor of it, but these reasons are not conclusive.All this is determined by technical considerations and has nothing to do with the social system. The truth of the matter is actually quite simple.What we are accustomed to call "philosophy" is composed of two very different elements.On the one hand, there are questions of a scientific or logical nature; these questions can be dealt with by means of general consensus.On the other hand, there are questions which are of great interest to many, but which have no solid evidence in any respect.Some of the problems in the latter category are practical problems which cannot be treated with detachment.In times of war, I must support my country, or I must have painful disputes with friends and officials.There have been many times when there has been no middle ground between being for and against a recognized religion.For some reason we all feel that it is impossible to maintain skeptical detachment on many questions which pure reason does not ask.In the very common sense of the word philosophy, a set of "philosophy" is an organic totality of such decisions that go beyond reason.As far as "philosophy" is concerned in this sense, Marx's proposition is basically correct.But even in this sense a philosophy is determined not only by economic reasons but also by other social reasons.War, in particular, plays a role in historical causation; victory in war does not always go to the side with the greatest economic resources. Marx fit his philosophy of history into the mold suggested by Hegel's dialectics, but in fact there was only one triad that concerned him: feudalism, represented by the landowners; capitalism, represented by the industrial employers; socialism, represented by the industrial employers. Represented by wage laborers.Hegel sees the nation as the medium through which the dialectical movement is transmitted; Marx replaces the nation with a class.He consistently denied any moral or humanitarian justification for his choice of socialism or the position of the wage-earner; he asserted, not that the position of the wage-earner was morally better, but that it was a dialectical position taken in its radically deterministic campaign.He could have said that he did not advocate socialism, but only predicted it.However, this is not entirely correct.He undoubtedly believed that all dialectical movements were progress in some impersonal sense, and he must have thought that socialism, once established, would bring more happiness to mankind than feudalism or capitalism had ever done.These beliefs must have governed his life, but so far as his writings are concerned they are largely hidden.At times, however, he set aside cool-headed predictions to actively inspire rebellion, and the emotional basis of his quasi-scientific predictions was implicit in everything he wrote. Viewing Marx purely as a philosopher has serious shortcomings.He was too practical, too preoccupied with the problems of his time.His vision is limited to our planet, and within the limits of this planet, it is limited to human beings.It has been evident since Copernicus that man does not have the cosmic importance that man once claimed.No one who has not thoroughly grasped this fact is entitled to call his philosophy a philosophy of science. Concomitant with this confinement to earthly affairs is the willingness to believe in progress as a general law.This attitude was characteristic of the nineteenth century, and it existed on Marx as well as on others of his time.It was only because of the belief in the inevitability of progress that Marx thought it possible to dispense with moral considerations.If socialism is to come, it must be an improvement.He will admit without hesitation that socialism does not look like an improvement to the landowners or capitalists, but that is nothing more than a sign that the dialectical movements of their contemporaries are out of tune.Marx claimed to be an atheist, but maintained a kind of cosmic optimism that can only be found in theism. In a nutshell, all the elements in Marx's philosophy derived from Hegel are unscientific, which means that there is no reason to think that these elements are correct. The philosophical veneer that Marx put on his socialism may not really have much to do with the basis of his views.It is also easy to paraphrase the most important parts of his argument without mentioning dialectics at all.He was deeply impressed by Engels and the reports of the Royal Commission, who thoroughly understood the appalling cruelty of the industrial system that existed in England a hundred years ago.He saw that this system is likely to develop from free competition to monopoly, and its unfairness will inevitably lead to the resistance movement of the proletariat.He believes that in a thoroughly industrialized society, if one does not take the road of private capitalism, the only way is to take the road of state ownership of land and capital.These claims are not the business of philosophy, so I am not going to discuss either or not.The problem is that these assertions, if true, would suffice to substantiate points of practical importance in his system.Therefore, it is good to throw away the trappings of Hegelian philosophy. The history of Marx's reputation has always been special.In his own country, his teachings gave rise to the program of the Social Democratic Party, which grew steadily until it won a third of the total vote in the 1912 general election.Shortly after the First World War, the Social Democrats were in power for a time, and Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, was a member of the party; but by this time the Social Democrats were no longer firmly committed to Marxist orthodoxy.Meanwhile, in Russia, fanatical followers of Marx took over.In the West, none of the large working-class movements has ever been fully Marxist; the British Labor Party has sometimes seemed to move in this direction in the past, but has remained steadfast in its adherence to an empirical type of socialism.However, in Britain and the United States, a large number of intellectuals were deeply influenced by Marx.In Germany, all advocacy of his doctrine was forcibly banned, but it is expected to be revived after the overthrow of the Nazis. Modern Europe and America were thus divided politically and ideologically into three camps.There are liberals who, to the extent possible, still believe in Locke or Bentham, but adapt to varying degrees the needs of industrial organization.There are Marxists, who hold the government in Russia and are probably growing in power in some other countries.The two schools of opinion are not too far apart philosophically, both are rationalistic, and both are scientific and empirical in intent.But from a practical political point of view, the two factions are clearly divided.In the letter of James Muller quoted in the previous chapter, which said that "their view of property looks really ugly", this boundary is already expressed. However, it must also be admitted that Marx's rationalism is limited at certain points.Although he believed that his interpretation of the direction of development was correct and would be borne out by events, he believed that such arguments would only appeal to those (with very few exceptions) those whose class interests coincided with it.He has little hope of persuasion, but of class struggle.Thus, in practice, he fell into power politics, into a dominant class theory, although not a dominant nation theory.Of course, as a result of the social revolution, class divisions are expected to disappear eventually, giving way to complete political and economic harmony.Yet this, like the second coming, is a distant ideal; the period leading up to this ideal is strife, dictatorship, and ideological orthodoxy. A third school of modern opinion, represented politically by the Nazis and the Fascists, differs philosophically from the other two schools much more deeply than they do from each other.This school is anti-rational and anti-science.Its philosophical ancestors are Rousseau, Fichte and Nietzsche.This school emphasizes will, especially the will to power; it believes that the will to power is mainly concentrated on certain nations and individuals, and those nations and individuals therefore have the right to rule. Until the time of Rousseau, there was a certain unity in the world of philosophy.That unity is gone for a while, but perhaps not for long.A rationalistic re-conquest of the human heart would restore this unity, but it would be useless in any other way, since the claim to dominion only breeds strife.