Farrago meaning3/28/2023 But it is commonly used to cover something else as well, a view about what science itself really is. Yes, I was using the word to cover just those two things, the rejection of metaphysics and the acceptance of science. When, therefore, at the beginning of our discussion you said that Marxists inconsistently combine positivism and Hegelianism, by “positivism” you meant the rejection of speculative philosophy, or of metaphysics, as it is generally called today, in favor of the methods of the sciences?Īuthor. ![]() Speculative philosophy, according to Marx, is an ideology, that is to say, a set of unfounded views of the world manufactured at the prompting of wish or interest. ![]() The whole theory of ideologies, therefore, is a development of Feuerbach’s theory of religion, and assumes, like that theory, that the way to know the real world is to look and see and manipulate and move around in it. Marx extended this idea so as to maintain that moral and political beliefs are disguises for economic interests. Feuerbach had thought he could show that religious beliefs were the illusory outcome of human failure, and that speculative philosophy was, so to say, the educated man’s substitute for religious belief. But must we suppose that this had any considerable effect on his later views?Īuthor. The quotations you gave from Marx’s early writings show that in the eighteen-forties he, like Feuerbach, was much occupied in refuting the claims of speculative philosophers and in showing that speculative philosophy was a sort of disguised theology or rationalized religion. I now see that your objection is more than a mere debating point, but I wonder whether you have not made too much of the Marxist opposition to speculative philosophy. This, indeed, is the feature of dialectical materialism that distinguishes it from mechanical materialism, and my argument is that, rightly or wrongly, it is established speculatively and not by the methods of the sciences or by observation. It is surely a most important thesis of the Marxist philosophy that matter develops into new forms by means of the contradictions in it. Isn’t this a minor slip rather than a fundamental error?Īuthor. To accept Zeno’s argument at its face value is to argue contradiction into the material world where certainly it is not perceived, and this is the very thing that speculative philosophers are criticized for doing. Marxists both claim to rest their views on what can be observed and handled, and maintain such theories as that the material world has contradictions in it because nothing can move without being and not being at the same place at the same time. Nevertheless I think the inconsistency is there. Marxists do claim to have transformed what they have borrowed from Hegel, and they don’t like being called positivists. I am not yet convinced, for might it not be argued that the Marxists have transformed what they have borrowed from Hegel so as to make it consistent with the positivistic part of their theory?Īuthor. It is not easy to do both of the things you ask, but what I mean is that on the one hand Marxists reject speculative philosophy in favor of the scientific methods, and on the other hand they import into their philosophy features from the philosophy of Hegel, a speculative philosopher who allowed only a limited value to the scientific methods. Can you explain this briefly and in less technical terms?Īuthor. Marxism, it seems to me, is a mixture of two philosophies which cannot consistently go along together, positivism on the one hand and Hegelianism on the other. ![]() There is, in my view, a pretty fundamental incoherence in it, but I should hesitate to say that it is the source of all the errors. So I should like to ask you whether you think there is any fundamental flaw in the Marxist philosophy that is the source of all the particular errors you claim to have noticed. You have joined issue with Marxism on so many different topics that I am in danger of losing sight of the main issues-if, that is to say, there are any. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).Ĭonclusion: A Dialog between the Author and a ReaderĪ Reader. Topic: Classical Liberal Critique of Sociialism.
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