Re: Marx and Marxist epistemology

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> amandatatts@xxxxxxxxxxx 04/05/01 02:04AM >>>
Hi,

I was wanting to take a look at the epistemological basis of marx and
marxism.  This is not for a philisophy course but a social/political theory
course that is investigating certainty and the basis of knowlege.  In my
class Marxism was categorised as part of rationalist epistemology in
contrast to empiricism.  Yet I consider Marxism separate from both domains
due to its MATERIALIST framework.  I was wondering if people know of
materials on the epistemological framework of historical materialism and or
Marx's epistemology?

Amanda

((((((((

Here are three fundamental statements on Marx's theory of knowledge.  Engels 
gives a basic Marxist formulation of the question of epistemology as "in what 
relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world 
itself? ".  In a way, Marx answers the question by saying "the thing is to 
change it ( the world)  " or the truth about a thing is your ability to change 
it.

For fuller discussion of fundamental epistemological issues see _ Anti-Duhring_ 
also by Engels, and _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ by V. I. Lenin.

Charles Brown

_________



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First two and last Theses on Feuerbach, by Karl Marx

I
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism - that of Feuerbach 
included - is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the 
form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, 
practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the 
active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not 
know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but 
he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in 
"Das Wesen des Christenthums", he regards the theoretical attitude as the only 
genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its 
dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of 
"revolutionary", of "practical-critical", activity.



II
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not 
a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth - 
i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The 
dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from 
practice is a purely scholastic question.

.....

XI
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is 
to change it.


_________
Excerpt from 1873
AFTERWARD TO THE
SECOND GERMAN EDITION, VOL. I OF CAPITAL


My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct 
opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of 
thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an 
independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is 
only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the 
ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and 
translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, 
at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first 
volume of "Das Kapital," it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, 
mediocre 'Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in 
same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, 
i.e., as a "dead dog." I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that 
mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, 
coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which 
dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the 
first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious 
manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up 
again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it 
seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its 
rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its 
doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and 
affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, 
the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; 
because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid 
movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than 
its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its 
essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress 
themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the 
periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is 
the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet 
but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the 
intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the 
mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.


Karl Marx


(((((((((


Frederick Engels'
LUDWIG FEUERBACH
AND THE END OF
CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY


part 2
"MATERIALISM"
The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent 
philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the 
very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their 
own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions [7] came to believe that 
their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a 
distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death -- from this time 
men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the 
outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there 
was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the 
idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as 
a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often 
enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from 
the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its!
 existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious 
desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal 
immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the 
personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of 
religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process 
of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the 
course of man's intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited 
and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one 
exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
 Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the 
spirit to nature -- the paramount question of the whole of philosophy -- has, 
no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant notions 
of savagery. But this question could for the first time be put forward in its 
whole acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in 
Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The 
question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a question which, by 
the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, 
the question: which is primary, spirit or nature -- that question, in relation 
to the church, was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the 
world been in existence eternally?

 The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two 
great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, 
in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other -- and among 
the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more 
intricate and impossible than in Christianity -- comprised the camp of 
idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various 
schools of materialism.

 These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing 
else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense. What 
confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them will be seen below.

 But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: 
in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this 
world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are 
we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct 
reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the 
question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of 
philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With Hegel, for 
example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world 
is precisely its thought-content -- that which makes the world a gradual 
realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere 
from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But it is 
manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from 
the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved !
here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no way prevents 
Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of 
thing and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is 
therefore the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being 
must prove its validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from 
theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian 
principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers.

 In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers -- those who 
question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive 
cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and 
Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What 
is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in 
so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic 
additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling 
refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice -- 
namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our 
conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being 
out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, 
then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself". The chemical 
substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained jus!
t such "things-in-themselves" until organic chemistry began to produce them one 
after another, whereupon the "thing-in-itself" became a thing for us -- as, for 
instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer 
trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply 
and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a 
hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always 
a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, 
not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also 
calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily 
occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 
1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, 
nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian 
conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where i!
n fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoret
a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously 
accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.

 But during this long period from Descarte to Hegel and from Hobbes to 
Feuerbach, these philosophers were by no means impelled, as they thought they 
were, solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really pushed 
them forward most was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushing progress of 
natural science and industry. Among the materialists this was plain on the 
surface, but the idealist systems also filled themselves more and more with a 
materialist content and attempted pantheistically to reconcile the antithesis 
between mind and matter. Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents 
merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content.