Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy
Daniel Brudney
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0674551338
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Daniel Brudney traces the development of post-Hegelian thought from Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer to Karl Marx's work of 1844 and his Theses on Feuerbach, and concludes with an examination of The German Ideology. Brudney focuses on the transmutations of a set of ideas about human nature, the good life, and our relation to the world and to others; about how we end up with false beliefs about these matters; about whether one can, in a capitalist society, know the truth about these matters; and about the critique of capitalism which would flow from such knowledge.
Brudney shows how Marx, following Feuerbach, attempted to reveal humanity's nature and what would count as the good life, while eschewing and indeed polemicizing against "philosophy"--against any concern with metaphysics and epistemology. Marx attempted to avoid philosophy as early as 1844, and the central aims of his texts are the same right through The German Ideology. There is thus no break between an early and a late Marx; moreover, there is no "materialist" Marx, no Marx who subscribes to a metaphysical view, even in The German Ideology, the text canonically taken as the origin of Marxist materialism. Rather, in all the texts of this period Marx tries to mount a compelling critique of the present while altogether avoiding the dilemmas central to philosophy in the modern era.
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Existing beliefs about human nature undermines the claim that such conversions can provide an accurate grasp of human nature. Now, the 1844 Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach’s attack on philosophy, and he is as wedded as Feuerbach to avoiding abstract thought and to relying on what ordinary life tells us. The problem is that, unlike Feuerbach, he is pessimistic about what ordinary life cur- Introduction 19 rently tells us: he thinks that it is currently deeply misleading. I argue that the.
And living one when special effects, immediate appearances of God, miracles, are believed in. . . [When] the belief in miracles is no longer anything more than the belief in historical, past, miracles, so the 48 M a r x ’ s A t t e m p t t o L e av e P h i l o s o p h y existence of God is also only an historical, in itself atheistic conception” (WC 316/203; see also UW 302). In his insistence on the nonrational nature of faith, Feuerbach is best compared with two writers of the German.
Feuerbach assesses Jacobi differently at different times. In two pieces of the 1830s, he rejects Jacobi’s demand for immediate knowledge. In the first, however, what Feuerbach mocks is Jacobi’s claim to immediate knowledge specifically of God, of the “supersensible” (JacP 16). And in the second, Feuerbach does not reject immediate knowledge per se. In fact, he endorses it. He rejects only immediate knowledge in what he calls the “subjective sense of Jacobi” (KH 26/102). What seems to worry.
Self-consciousness really is, or at least can come to be, altogether free and self-creating. To help Bauer here, one could try to draw his metaphysical teeth. The many purplish passages on the power of Self-consciousness could be read as rhetorical exaggerations designed to make us recognize how much of the world human beings can in fact (jointly) change. For instance, one such passage is immediately followed by the sentence: “And so, philosophy becomes the critic of the established order” (Po.
Manner of life-activity,” Marx says, “is contained the whole character of a species, its species-character” (ÖpM 516/276). A human being’s life-activity, he says, is its work on the world (ÖpM 517/277), “the practical creation of an objective world, the working up of inorganic nature” (ÖpM 516/276). Such productive activity, Marx says, is the human being’s “active species-life” (ÖpM 517/277). In different places in the Manuscripts, Marx gives different accounts of which kind of productive.