{UAH} KARL MARX ON RELIGION: AFUWA and REHEMA
|
9:06 AM |
No comments |
Afuwa Kasule and Rehema,
From today, I will be posting to you weekly chapters of this
intellectual discourse on "Religion" from the point of view of
Marxists. They caused such a stir in 2011 when they first started
appearing in the London Guardian.. The articles will explain to you
why Iam anti-Islam, but pro-muslim and would quite happily give an arm
and a leg to end the suffering of the Muslim people all around the
world. You will discover I am engaged in a crusade against
exploitation, oppression and suffering everywhere in the world. I am
hoping you are capable of handling philosophical concepts.
Bobby
Karl Marx Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question
Peter Thompson
Marx thought that to understand religion correctly would allow one to
understand the whole of human history Karl Marx. Photograph:
Popperfoto Monday 4 April 2011 16.34 BST Last modified on Monday 4
April 2011 16.39 BST
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest
Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp
Marx famously said that all criticism begins with the criticism of
religion. This is often taken to be the starting point of a position
that ends with the slogan that "religion is the opium of the people".
However, as with most thinkers, this reduction to slogans does not do
the ideas behind them justice. The critique of religion as a social
phenomenon did not connote a dismissal of the issues behind it. Marx
precedes the famous line in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right with the contention that religion was the "sigh of the oppressed
creature in a hostile world, the heart of a heartless world and the
soul of soulless conditions" and that an understanding of religion has
to go hand in hand with an understanding of the social conditions that
gave rise to it.
The description of religion as the heart of a heartless world thus
becomes a critique not of religion per se but of the world as it
exists. What this shows is that his consideration of religion,
politics, economics and society as a whole was not merely a
philosophical exercise, but an active attempt to change the world, to
help it find a new heart. "The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it," he wrote in his
famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the phrase carved on his gravestone
in Highgate cemetery.
Even though understanding and action were tightly linked in Marx, we
can trace his understanding back separately, through two German
earlier philosophers, Hegel and Feuerbach.
In Hegel he finds the concept of the idealistic dialectic as a means
of understanding historical change but he uses Feuerbach's materialism
as a tool for understanding it correctly. That's why he called his
system dialectical materialism.
Hegel's dialectic is not at all materialistic. It is based on the
existence and importance of ideas, which are conceived of as almost
independent of the people who have them. We are merely their puppets.
It was essentially an attempt to explain change in history during the
period of revolutionary upheaval around the French revolution. Why do
revolutions happen, he asks, and what happens to them? Why do things
not stay the same and why is some world spirit (Weltgeist) constantly
changing its mind about the way it wants the world to be and
introducing a new "spirit of the age" (Zeitgeist)? Taking his cue from
Kant, adding in some Spinoza and a dash of neo-Platonism, Hegel
maintained that change happened in the world because it was immanent
in a growing development towards something as yet incomplete but which
had at its core the unfolding of the idea of human freedom. History
thus became simply a vessel for this unfolding, a totality which was
constantly changing and completing itself through a series of
constructive negations.
The dialectic is a theory of motion which posits that within every
given situation there exists its own negation. The tension and
interplay between the situation and its negation, produce constantly
new and emergent forms of social existence. Of course there are
difficulties in deciding what exactly is the negation of any
particular situation. I will deal with those later.
Marx took this Hegelian and idealistic dialectical approach and added
in a materialist grounding from Feuerbach who was in many ways a sort
of political Ditchkins of his day. For him religion "poisons, nay
destroys, the most divine feeling in man, the sense of truth". His
insight was that all forms of religious expression were merely the
abstracted vague longings of the human species translated into deities
and their hangers-on, or in other words a god delusion.
Marx's real synthesis of the debate between Hegel and Feuerbach is to
agree with both of them but to turn them both upside down (or back on
their feet as he would have it) and locate their ideas in concrete
historical situations. Hegel's idealism and Feuerbach's materialism
had one thing in common and that was their abstraction from real
concrete conditions. Hegel's dialectic was indeed a way of
understanding change in the world but it failed to recognise that
change emanated from prevailing material conditions rather than from
the workings of the Weltgeist. On the other hand Feuerbach's
materialism dealt only in abstract form with the way people perceived
religion and did not locate the form that abstraction took in the way
that people, above all classes, interacted with each other
historically.
By 1848 Marx was thus able to open the Communist Manifesto with the
contention that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles". This, for Marx, was the real motor of
history; real struggles between real classes which produced real
historical outcomes which in turn went on to become new struggles as
the process of the negation of the negation – "the old mole" as Marx
called it – carried on burrowing away, all the time throwing up new
ways of thinking which themselves went on to negate and change the
world.
What I shall do in coming weeks is to look at how all of this actually
works, how Marxists took up the baton and what the consequences of it
all were. I shall also ask whether Marxism still has any explanatory
power today, in a new age of revolutionary upheaval, or whether we
have, in Hegel's and Fukuyama's terms, reached The End of History.
--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
From today, I will be posting to you weekly chapters of this
intellectual discourse on "Religion" from the point of view of
Marxists. They caused such a stir in 2011 when they first started
appearing in the London Guardian.. The articles will explain to you
why Iam anti-Islam, but pro-muslim and would quite happily give an arm
and a leg to end the suffering of the Muslim people all around the
world. You will discover I am engaged in a crusade against
exploitation, oppression and suffering everywhere in the world. I am
hoping you are capable of handling philosophical concepts.
Bobby
Karl Marx Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question
Peter Thompson
Marx thought that to understand religion correctly would allow one to
understand the whole of human history Karl Marx. Photograph:
Popperfoto Monday 4 April 2011 16.34 BST Last modified on Monday 4
April 2011 16.39 BST
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest
Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp
Marx famously said that all criticism begins with the criticism of
religion. This is often taken to be the starting point of a position
that ends with the slogan that "religion is the opium of the people".
However, as with most thinkers, this reduction to slogans does not do
the ideas behind them justice. The critique of religion as a social
phenomenon did not connote a dismissal of the issues behind it. Marx
precedes the famous line in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right with the contention that religion was the "sigh of the oppressed
creature in a hostile world, the heart of a heartless world and the
soul of soulless conditions" and that an understanding of religion has
to go hand in hand with an understanding of the social conditions that
gave rise to it.
The description of religion as the heart of a heartless world thus
becomes a critique not of religion per se but of the world as it
exists. What this shows is that his consideration of religion,
politics, economics and society as a whole was not merely a
philosophical exercise, but an active attempt to change the world, to
help it find a new heart. "The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it," he wrote in his
famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the phrase carved on his gravestone
in Highgate cemetery.
Even though understanding and action were tightly linked in Marx, we
can trace his understanding back separately, through two German
earlier philosophers, Hegel and Feuerbach.
In Hegel he finds the concept of the idealistic dialectic as a means
of understanding historical change but he uses Feuerbach's materialism
as a tool for understanding it correctly. That's why he called his
system dialectical materialism.
Hegel's dialectic is not at all materialistic. It is based on the
existence and importance of ideas, which are conceived of as almost
independent of the people who have them. We are merely their puppets.
It was essentially an attempt to explain change in history during the
period of revolutionary upheaval around the French revolution. Why do
revolutions happen, he asks, and what happens to them? Why do things
not stay the same and why is some world spirit (Weltgeist) constantly
changing its mind about the way it wants the world to be and
introducing a new "spirit of the age" (Zeitgeist)? Taking his cue from
Kant, adding in some Spinoza and a dash of neo-Platonism, Hegel
maintained that change happened in the world because it was immanent
in a growing development towards something as yet incomplete but which
had at its core the unfolding of the idea of human freedom. History
thus became simply a vessel for this unfolding, a totality which was
constantly changing and completing itself through a series of
constructive negations.
The dialectic is a theory of motion which posits that within every
given situation there exists its own negation. The tension and
interplay between the situation and its negation, produce constantly
new and emergent forms of social existence. Of course there are
difficulties in deciding what exactly is the negation of any
particular situation. I will deal with those later.
Marx took this Hegelian and idealistic dialectical approach and added
in a materialist grounding from Feuerbach who was in many ways a sort
of political Ditchkins of his day. For him religion "poisons, nay
destroys, the most divine feeling in man, the sense of truth". His
insight was that all forms of religious expression were merely the
abstracted vague longings of the human species translated into deities
and their hangers-on, or in other words a god delusion.
Marx's real synthesis of the debate between Hegel and Feuerbach is to
agree with both of them but to turn them both upside down (or back on
their feet as he would have it) and locate their ideas in concrete
historical situations. Hegel's idealism and Feuerbach's materialism
had one thing in common and that was their abstraction from real
concrete conditions. Hegel's dialectic was indeed a way of
understanding change in the world but it failed to recognise that
change emanated from prevailing material conditions rather than from
the workings of the Weltgeist. On the other hand Feuerbach's
materialism dealt only in abstract form with the way people perceived
religion and did not locate the form that abstraction took in the way
that people, above all classes, interacted with each other
historically.
By 1848 Marx was thus able to open the Communist Manifesto with the
contention that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles". This, for Marx, was the real motor of
history; real struggles between real classes which produced real
historical outcomes which in turn went on to become new struggles as
the process of the negation of the negation – "the old mole" as Marx
called it – carried on burrowing away, all the time throwing up new
ways of thinking which themselves went on to negate and change the
world.
What I shall do in coming weeks is to look at how all of this actually
works, how Marxists took up the baton and what the consequences of it
all were. I shall also ask whether Marxism still has any explanatory
power today, in a new age of revolutionary upheaval, or whether we
have, in Hegel's and Fukuyama's terms, reached The End of History.
--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment