Philosophy and Religion, Part 1a
Soul of Soulless Conditions
37 years before Oscar Wilde
wrote the “Soul of Man Under Socialism”, Karl Marx wrote his “Introduction to a
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right”. Marx expressed similar
impatience with the Germans as Wilde did with the English, and with similar
brilliance.
Even though he writes of the
end of religion, yet Marx, with words that have forever since that time been
famous, expressed his tender understanding of “the heart of a heartless world”.
Those who only quote the part about the “opium of the people” miss this point. One who called
religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature” could not have had contempt for
religion, or for religious people.
Marx was 25 years old. He was
the former editor of a distinguished (and then banned) magazine, and a Doctor
of Philosophy. For religion he had an appropriate, sympathetic and poetic
respect. Marx did not make war on religion, but he was certainly proposing to
storm the heights of philosophy. (For a version of the body of the work itself,
as opposed to its Introduction attached and linked below, see Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right on MIA).
The linked text is the
confident Introduction to an ambitious work that was never published in Marx’s
lifetime. He was proposing to issue a critique of the “Philosophy of Right”,
the most accessible of Hegel’s works; works which still had prestige. The great
philosopher had died thirteen years previously.
Neither Marx nor Engels wrote
very much at all about religion in their subsequent four and five decades of
life. This Introduction is the most substantial of Marx’s writings on religion,
insofar as it is about religion. But it is also about philosophy, and about
class politics. Marx’s first sentence claims criticism of religion as the
prerequisite of all other criticism. But he seldom, if ever, leaned upon this
point again in his later works.
Marx is concerned to
establish, not the condition of religion, but the condition of life once the
illusions of religion have left the minds of the living. Towards the end of the
Introduction comes this question and answer:
“Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German
emancipation?
“Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical
chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an
estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal
character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no
particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can
invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any
one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the
premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself
without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby
emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete
loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of
man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.”
This 1843 (written) statement
is categorical evidence of Marx’s commitment already at that time to the
historical role of the working class. This was before Marx had teamed up with
Engels. The team-up only happened later in 1844 (September), in Paris, France,
although they had met briefly in Cologne, Germany, in November 1842.
What it also shows is Marx’s
conception of the arrival of the working class as the determining event going
into the future; and this has implications, if true, for South Africa in 2013.
The determining factor in South Africa’s development will be the growth of the
South African working class, both objectively and in terms of its subjective self-consciousness
as a class.
Says Marx, nearly at the end
of the Introduction:
“Philosophy cannot realize itself without the
transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself
without the realization of philosophy.”
This is the theme of our
course. In terms of its capacity to fulfil its historic role, or not, philosophy
will be the proletariat’s essential tool or weapon.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Intro, 1844, Marx.
