Materialism

[Justin Schwartz <jschwart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 17 Feb 1996, J Laari wrote:

> Engels' wrote explicitly more (than Marx) about Sp.? Jokingly: there's
> more editors' than author's remarks on Spinoza - you remember all those
> "great Dutch 17th century materialist" and "great materialist
> philosopher" in Marx-Engels volumes? In a sense, as a rule of thumb, I'd
> say that Marx took materialism from Spinoza and dialectics from Hegel,
> and then fused them together. But that's oversimplification.
>

This attribution of Marx's materialism to Spinoza is certianly erroneous.
Marx's materialism comes from Feuerbach. He did read a bit of Spinoza in
his earlier years, but his allusions to S are always rather general.
Insofar as S is ant sort of real inflouence on M's thought, it must be
through S's influence on Hegel. In this regard S is to Marx the way
Rousseau (actually in my view a more important influence) is, something
gleaned through and filtered by Hegel.

--Justin




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