Continental Philosophy by Andrew Cutrofello

Author:Andrew Cutrofello [Cutrofello, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy, History & Surveys, Movements, Phenomenology
ISBN: 0415242096
Amazon: B000OT7VL8
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-03-02T03:00:00+00:00

3.2 Marx’s prophecy of a proletarian revolution

What is here?

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?

No, gods, I am no idle votarist;

Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make Black white, foul fair, wrong right,

Base noble, old young, coward valiant.

(The Life ofTimon of Athens, IV, iii, 25-30)

Karl Marx (1818-1883) also thought that history was inexorably progressing toward the fulfillment of the highest ends of humanity, but he conceived of this telos not as a perpetual peace among federated states each of which would be governed by a republican constitution, but as the realization of communist society in which the abolition of private property would put an end to the class struggle. Marx also rejected any appeal to the providence of nature. The highest good for humanity could only be achieved by humanity itself.

Like other post-Hegelian German philosophers, the young Marx sought a more radical conception of the critical project, one that would show that the philosophy of Kant was the expression of a fundamentally bourgeois point of view. Feuerbach had taken an important step in this direction by denouncing the privilege that the German idealists accorded to the abstract life of the “spirit” over the actual existence of living human beings. After studying in Bonn and Berlin, Marx moved to Paris in 1843, where he wrote his posthumously published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844), noting in the preface that “It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins” (EAPM 64). Marx was drawn to Feuerbach’s idea that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our “species-being,” the fact that we are conscious of ourselves as individuals only insofar as we are conscious of the species as a whole (EAPM 113). Like Hegel, Feuerbach also thought that history is the movement by which humanity becomes alienated from itself and then overcomes its self-alienation. But Hegel had been unable to make this idea concrete because, like Kant, his thought was determined by the bourgeois society to which he belonged (EAPM 177).

As Marx conceives it, alienation is a function of private property, or rather, of any economic system in which the products of human labor are appropriated by a subset, or class, of society as a whole. In such a world, humanity becomes “estranged” from itself in several interrelated ways. The worker is estranged from the product that his or her labor produces, since this comes to exist as an “alien power” standing over against it: “the object which labor produces...confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (EAPM 108). As a consequence of estrangement from the thing, the worker also suffers from “self-estrangement. " Finally, through the division of humanity into laborers and owners, the species as a whole becomes estranged from itself: “In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself,...estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life” (EAPM 112; cf. 114).

In leaving

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