Philosophy and Religion, Part 2c
Utopia and Science
In this, the last of this
week’s part of the course on Philosophy and Religion, we link once again to
Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” (attached, in three parts). This is
a short text extracted by Engels from his larger work, “Anti-Dühring”, and it
helps us to place thought in a historical framework. For example, dealing with
the period subsequent to the Renaissance and prior to the French Revolution
that is often referred to as “The Enlightenment”, Engels writes:
“We know today
that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the
bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois
justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the
law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of
man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social [Social Contract] of Rousseau, came into
being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The
great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go
beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”
Here Engels describes the
limitation imposed upon the human Subject by the objective circumstances, and
also the possibility of transcending such limitations. This is humanism.
Humanism says that humans build humanity within the given material world and
history.
Nowhere does Engels say that
humanity is an accidental combination of atoms and molecules.
Yet, by sometimes chastising
the great Hegel with the same kind of roughness as he treated the nonentity
Dühring, Engels sowed the seeds of others’ subsequent and greater errors. Such
an error came about when the dichotomy of “idealism and materialism” was
elevated to a master-narrative of philosophy, which it is not. Humanity is not
reducible to matter.
As great as he was,
communists have in practice relied too heavily upon Engels to teach them
philosophy. As a result they have magnified Engels’ otherwise unremarkable
mistakes to monstrous proportions. The main one of these is the denigration of
“idealism” and the perverse worship of “materialism”. Whereas it is the
free-willing human Subject which was at the centre of Marx’s work, and which
must be at the centre of any communist’s work.
The image is of Charles
Fourier (1772-1837), maybe the greatest of the utopian socialists, and
also the inventor of the word “feminism”. The utopian socialists were prominent
after the Great French Revolution that started in 1789 with the storming of the
Bastille on the 14th of July of that year. Marx and Engels wrote of
them in the third part of Chapter 3 of the 1848 Communist Manifesto,
called “Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism”.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific, 1880, Engels, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
