A Short History of German Philosophy by Hösle Vittorio; Rendall Steven;

Author:Hösle, Vittorio; Rendall, Steven;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Revolt against the Bourgeois World:

Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx

However, before that occurred, nineteenth-century philosophers had been concerned with freeing the world. It is beyond doubt that it was through the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883) that German philosophy became the most directly powerful in historical terms. Marx’s position in communist states far surpassed that of the Church Fathers in Catholicism, because he had to share his fame only with his loyal friend Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). The latter was clearly inferior to him intellectually, but Marx wrote several works together with him, and Engels completed Marxism’s worldview in his book Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, the so-called Anti-Dühring) of 1887, though it was obviously the work of a philosophical dilettante.

Since 1989, with the final collapse of the bloody social experiment that invoked Marx and Engels, it has been generally recognized that their influence was in fact very strong, but also much more short-lived than that of, say, Augustine, and that seeing in it the culmination of German, or indeed world philosophy, was a grotesque error not only of the moral sense, but also of the intellect. On epistemological and metaphysical questions, such as the mind-body problem that torments everyone with a philosophical bent, they not only had nothing original to say; they did not even understand them. Whereas Schopenhauer suffered from his atheism, Marx treated atheism as an intellectual matter of course, whose final achievement could only advance humanity. His sometimes apt critique of religion is based on a complete ignorance of philosophical religiousness in the manner of Leibniz or Kant and on a naïve ignorance of the potential danger of misusing an atheistic will to power. Even the true foundational problem of ethics remained foreign to him. He made a contribution to normative political theory only in his early work, while ignoring liberalism’s lasting insights on the necessity of the separation of powers, indeed sweeping them aside as ideological—and to that extent he at least favored, through an enormous sin of omission, the rise of totalitarianism.

And yet Marx is underestimated today. It is not simply that anyone who wants to understand the period between 1848 and 1989 has to study him, and that many of his absolutely original ideas have changed forever the shape not only of numerous academic disciplines, but also of literature (think only of Bertolt Brecht). His often journalistic style has captivated readers through its witty, pointed emphasis and polemics, and the range of his culture is striking in the age of specialists with one-track minds. His typical combination of cold, sometimes cynical description of the social world (including that of proletarians) with the hot flame of his moral outrage has kept generations spellbound. In addition to all that, today the emotion with which he assigns a historical task to philosophy has something moving, even downright melancholic about it, precisely because the threat connected with it has disappeared. The dogmatism with which Marx offered simple solutions to difficult problems

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