Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Communism and Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Illustrated) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Finance, Economics, Macroeconomics, Theory of Economics
ISBN: 1230001013467
Goodreads: 59885973
Publisher: www.WealthOfNation.com
Published: 2016-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Freedom and Necessity.

(The former part of this section is taken up with a criticism of Herr Duehring's knowledge of law of which he had boasted. It is a purely technical discussion and is of merely local interest. Having disposed of Duehring's juristic claims Engels proceeds to discuss "Freedom and Necessity" as follows.)

One cannot deal properly with the question of morals and law without a discussion of free will, human responsibility, and the limits of necessity and freedom. The realistic philosophy has not only one but two solutions of these questions.

"One must substitute for false theories of freedom the actual conditions in which reason on the one hand and instinct on the other unite upon a middle ground. The fundamental facts of this sort of dynamics are to be learned from observation and as regards the calculation in advance of phenomena which have not yet occurred, we must judge of them in general terms according to their special qualities. In this way the silly speculations with respect to the freedom of the will which have wasted thousands of years are not only entirely removed but are replaced by something positive, something useful for practical life." So freedom of the will consists in this that reason impels men to the right and irrationality to the left and according to this parallelogram of forces the true direction is that of the diagonal. Freedom would therefore be the average between insight and impulse, between understanding and lack of understanding, and its degree would to use an astronomical expression be empirically established by the "personal equation." But a few pages later we read "We establish moral responsibility upon freedom by which we only mean susceptibility to known motives according to the measure of natural and acquired reason. All such motives in spite of antagonism realise themselves in action with the inevitability of natural law, but we count upon this inevitable necessity when we deal with morals."

This second definition of freedom which is quite opposed to the first is nothing but a very weak paraphrase of Hegel's notions on the subject. Hegel was the first man to make a proper explanation of the relations of freedom and necessity. In his eyes freedom is the recognition of necessity. "Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood." Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence of natural laws but in a knowledge of these laws and in the possibility thence derived of applying them intelligently to given ends. This is true both as regards the laws of nature and of those which control the spiritual and physical existence of man himself,—two classes of laws which we can distinguish as an abstraction but not in reality. Freedom of the will consists in nothing but the ability to come to a decision when one is in possession of a knowledge of the facts. The freer the judgment of a man then in relation to a given subject of discussion so much the more necessity is there for his arrival at a positive decision.

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