Philosophy and Religion, Part 2
One World, One History
This series on “Philosophy,
Religion, and Revolution” is intentionally Marxist. In that regard, like
everyone else, we must rely upon the works of the 1840s for philosophy, most
especially the 1844 “Introduction to
a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, the 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach”, and the 1845/46
“The German Ideology” -
although none of these were published in Marx’s lifetime.
The next group of original
Marxist works that explicitly address philosophical questions are from the pen
of Frederick Engels, during the time when he wrote and published the book known
as “Anti-Dühring”, which
came out in 1877. One of the spin-offs of “Anti-Dühring” is the main article, “On Dialectics”, linked below, written as
a preface. The publication of the book was followed by another spin-off, called
“Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific”. In the 1880s, Engels wrote about philosophy again, in his
book “Ludwig Feuerbach”.
Among other things, we are
going to be pursuing the idea that philosophy is indispensible to politics, as
well as to science, and that weakness in philosophy will have, and in the past
did have, disastrous effects upon political work.
Engels’ “Anti-Dühring” is the
work that contains the notorious “tools of analysis” that encourage the
illusion that people can have a simple set of keys to the kingdom of knowledge.
This course will leave those “tools” aside, deliberately; but we are obliged to
spend some time with the book in general, because it has been so influential.
The book is an argument
against a person who was otherwise of quite little consequence in political
history. Engels spends a tedious amount of time explaining Dühring’s errors
before he allows himself to express a fully-elaborated alternative world-outlook
as compared to Dühring’s. In this way, “Anti-Dühring” became a compendium of
alternative, Marxist, thought.
Thus, Engels spends the first
page of this preface with Dühring, before breaking away with the remark that
“theoretical thought is a historical product”. Then he begins to expound
dialectics, investigated, as he says, prior to his and Marx’s work, only by Hegel [Image, above]
and by the Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle.
Dialectics “alone offers the analogue
for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring
in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of
investigation to another,” says Engels.
Engels goes further, pointing
out that, then as now:
“All that was saved from the remnants of classical
philosophy was a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally
unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant that least merited
preservation. The final result was the incoherence and confusion of theoretical
thought now prevalent.
“One can scarcely pick up a theoretical book on natural
science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel
how much they are dominated by this incoherence and confusion, and that the
so-called philosophy now current offers them absolutely no way out. And here
there really is no other way out, no possibility of achieving clarity, than by
a return, in one form or another, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.”
The claim that Engels is
making for dialectics is that it, and only it, can embrace the entirety of
human thought through history, as well as the entirety of human understanding
in the present. Because of dialectics, because of Aristotle, Hegel, Marx and
Engels, all of this becomes possible and at the same time, therefore,
unavoidable.
“Classical” philosophy for
Engels mainly referred to the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and GWF
Hegel (1770-1831). Engels and Marx were Hegelians, but not “Old-Hegelians”.
This explains why Engels seems to reject Hegel, or to want to correct Hegel,
and stand Hegel on his feet where before he was standing on his head; and yet,
Engels praises dialectic above all, and the historic reintroduction of
dialectical thinking is owed entirely to Hegel, which Engels knows very well,
and acknowledges.
The Hegelian recognition of
unity in human history, experience, and understanding is simultaneously a great
breakthrough and pillar of our age, but is also a contested, and to some extent
unabsorbed idea. It would make racism impossible, for example; yet racism
survives. There remain opposing schools of philosophy, and the irrational,
anti-human and reactionary system called “post-modernism” has in recent decades
become the mental currency of Imperialism.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: On Dialectics, 1878, Engels.
