Philosophy and Religion, Part 0
Philosophy and Religion, Introduction
The series that will begin in
two weeks’ time on this YCLSA Discussion Forum attempts to show how it is
finally on the battlefield of Philosophy that the struggle for freedom is won
or lost.
It shows that this
battlefield is a Freirean battlefield. It is the crucial battle of the
free-willing human Subject, otherwise known as “The Subject of History”.
To see the full course posting schedule for 2015, please
click here.
Our course attempts to show
that some of the philosophical touchstones or “shibboleths” of the communist
movement have been terribly mistaken. It shows that the opposition of idealism
to materialism, where the latter is supposed to eliminate the former, is not
dialectical.
What is dialectical is the
counterposition of the human with the material world. These two can never be
collapsed into one, so long as human life continues. One does not eliminate the
other. Each is a condition of the other. Hence this is a true dialectic: a
unity and struggle of opposites.
In retrospect it seems clear that
at the time of the Great October Revolution in 1917 in Russia there was a
philosophical deficit among the revolutionaries; and that this philosophical
deficit got worse as time went on; and that this weakness eventually undermined
the revolution and caused it to topple, in the “collapse of the Soviet Union”
from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
We will succeed or fail in
the future, in proportion to our grasp of philosophy.
Philosophy is a beautiful
study, and nothing to fear.
Illustration: “Question
Everything!” – the sometime logo of the Communist University of London
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