Utopia and Science

Philosophy and Religion, Part 2c

Utopia and Science

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In this, the last of this week’s part of the course on Philosophy and Religion, we link again to Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”. This is a short text extracted by Engels from his larger work, “Anti-Dühring”, and it helps 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”.

Download:

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880, Engels (16229 words)

Further (optional) reading:

Philosophers, 2004, Tweedie (2657 words)

Alberti and Spinoza compilation, Blunt, Spinoza (7150 words)

On Dialectics, 1878, Engels (3279 words)

  

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [435]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	4/6	27 June 2010
CU Africa [232]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	3/33	22 June 2010
CU [3011]	Philosophy and Religion	2/10	28 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

Renaissance and Enlightenment

Philosophy and Religion, Part 2b

Renaissance and Enlightenment

The longer part of today’s linked text, on Alberti and Spinoza, written by Anthony Blunt, describes the Italian Renaissance (= “rebirth”) through the life and work of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). The Renaissance is significant as an intermediate high point of humanism between the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the modern, Marxist world. The Renaissance thinkers drew upon Arab, Indian and Chinese culture as well as on that of the Ancients who had slept for a thousand years beneath their Italian feet. This piece of writing can help show how the unity of historical thought that Hegel later theorised had in practice been realised.

The Italian Renaissance, based on reason and the understanding that humans can themselves develop human culture that is not absolutely limited by the extent of the knowledge of the ancients, or by any other interior limitation, offers a pure and well-developed form of humanism.

The Italian Renaissance was later overcome by its own internal reactionary forces (e.g. see the last paragraph of Blunt’s account), but humanism did not then sleep as long as it had after the fall of the Roman Empire. It quickly rose again in Northern Europe, led in particular by the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677, pictured above) among others, in a movement known as The Enlightenment, which we may regard as going on up to the time of Hegel, and therefore to the dawn of Marxism. A short piece of Spinoza’s writing is given at the end of the Anthony Blunt document.

The following quotation is from a Spinoza page on MIA. It shows how Spinoza’s thought prepares the way for Engels’ thought:

“That thing is said to be FREE (libera) which exists by the mere necessity of its own nature and is determined to act by itself alone. That thing is said to be NECESSARY (necessaria), or rather COMPELLED (coacta), which is determined by something else to exist and act in a certain fixed and determinate way.”

These writings show the development of understanding of the dialectic of Freedom and Necessity, and the closely-related, parallel dialectic of Subject and Object, and can help one to understand the philosophical ground upon which Marx and Engels stood. For further reading on Spinoza, see the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s essay on Spinoza on MIA, where Ilyenkov remarks, and then quotes Hegel, as follows:

“…he was probably the only one of the great thinkers of the pre-Marxian era who knew how to unite brilliant models of acutely dialectical thought with a consistently held materialist principle (rigorously applied throughout his system) of understanding thought and its relations to the external world lying in the space outside the human head.

“The influence of Spinoza’s ideas on the subsequent development of dialectical thought can hardly be exaggerated. ‘It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.’ [Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel]

Download:

Alberti and Spinoza compilation, Blunt, Spinoza (7150 words)

Further (optional) reading:

Philosophers, 2004, Tweedie (2657 words)

On Dialectics, 1878, Engels (3279 words)

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880, Engels (16229 words)

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [435]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	4/6	27 June 2010
CU Africa [229]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	3/33	22 June 2010
CU [3146]	Philosophy and Religion	2/10	26 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

  

Philosophers

Philosophy and Religion, Part 2a

Philosophers

Johannesburg, 2010

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Johannesburg, 2004

The Communist University started in June, 2003, fully seven years ago. The main text linked below was prepared for the CU when it was six months old. It is an attempt to walk through the history of philosophy using the problematic of the individual versus society as the binding dialectical theme. As well as a chronicle of philosophical thought it includes a diagram that traces the present-day contending schools back to a split that took place around where Marx and Engels come into the picture. That great parting of the ways was marked by a specific set of circumstances, which is worth describing and referencing, so this is what I will try to do today, below.

Berlin, 1841

Hegel died in November, 1831, when Karl Marx was 13 and Frederick Engels 11. Ten years later, Marx graduated from the University of Berlin and was awarded a doctorate of philosophy by the University of Jena shortly before his 24th birthday. Also in 1841, Engels was sent to Berlin to spend a year with the Artillery Guards. There is no record of Marx and Engels meeting in Berlin at this time. Their first recorded meeting was in Cologne, in November, 1842. Marx was editing a magazine called the Rheinische Zeitung (it was his first job) while Engels was on his way back to Manchester to recommence working in his father’s company. The two teamed up for good in Paris two years later, in 1844.

In the same year of 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach published his “Essence of Christianity” of which Engels later said: “…the spell was broken; the "system" was exploded and cast aside ... one must have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general.” We will look next week at the book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of German Classical Philosophy, which Engels wrote forty-five years later, in 1886, about the effect of Feuerbach’s intervention.

F W J Schelling had been a colleague and rival of Hegel’s, and had struggled in the great man’s shade. In 1841, at the age of 66, Schelling was made a Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, with the right to give lectures at the university, and an instruction to do so.

Hegel’s philosophy had long been the pride of the Prussian establishment, but it had turned out to be potential weapon in the hands of the proletarian class then growing with the spread of capitalism in Germany. In Berlin philosophical uproar had begun involving the “Young Hegelians”, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and others. The revolutions of 1848 were a few years away.

Schelling was given an instruction to debunk Hegel. His lectures attracted a sensationally distinguished audience, which included Engels, who said: "It will be our business to follow the course of his [Schelling's] thinking and to shield the great man's [Hegel's] grave from abuse. We are not afraid to fight.” Others present were the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, and the great Swiss humanist historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burkhardt.

A good account by Andy Blunden of this “world-historic” philosophical event can be found here on MIA.

In 1842, Engels published a work known as “Anti-Schelling”, which includes in its Chapter 5 the following classically dialectical line: “Only that freedom is genuine which contains necessity…”

Engels was 21 when he started writing “Anti-Schelling”. In contrast to Doctor Karl Marx, Engels was at that stage a military cadet who had never been to university (and never did go). Yet he was bold enough to challenge the official state philosopher, in print. The image above is of Engels in 1841, in his military uniform.

In terms of my rough chronology of philosophers in today’s text, this was the situation following Hume, Rousseau and Kant, and when Marx and Engels come in. Seven years prior to the revolutions of 1848, where the proletariat appears for the first time as a crucial revolutionary subject of history, this was the moment when philosophy split into its subsequent fragments, of which the contending philosophical schools of today are the direct successors.

Download:

Philosophers, 2004, Tweedie (2657 words)

Further (optional) reading

Alberti and Spinoza compilation, Blunt, Spinoza (7150 words)

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880, Engels (16229 words)

On Dialectics, 1878, Engels (3279 words)

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [435]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	3/6	18 June 2010
CU Africa [229]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	3/33	22 June 2010
CU [3146]	Philosophy and Religion	2/10	24 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

One World, One History

Philosophy and Religion, Part 2

One World, One History

This series on Philosophy and Religion (and Revolution) is intentionally Marxist. In this regard, like everyone else, we must rely upon the works of the 1940s, 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”. 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” encouraging 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 little consequence in political history. Engels spends a tedious amount of time explaining Dühring’s errors before allowing himself to express a fully-elaborated alternative world outlook. In this way, “Anti-Dühring” became a compendium of alternative, Marxist, thought, alongside of the disposable material about Herr Dühring.

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. And further, 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 dialectical philosophy 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, et cetera; and yet, Engels praises dialectical philosophy above all, and the historic reintroduction of dialectical thinking is owed entirely to Hegel, which Engels knows very well.

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.

Download:

On Dialectics, 1878, Engels (3279 words)

Further (optional) reading:

Philosophers, 2004, Tweedie (2657 words)

Alberti and Spinoza compilation, Blunt, Spinoza (7150 words)

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880, Engels (16229 words)

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [435]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	3/6	18 June 2010
CU Africa [229]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	3/33	22 June 2010
CU [3145]	Philosophy and Religion	1/10	22 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive