Marxism and Science: An addendum to. News.

An even more notable goal to note is the crotchet you implicitly put speed that every historical-philosophical discussion is compelled to defend the Enlightenment against the attacks of postmodernists. I certainly conform that Marxists should support the Enlightenment against its irrationalist detractors. But don't you reflect Marxists also have an constraint to defend dialectics against some of the scions of the Enlightenment, the atomists and empiricists? Why does one straits to undermine the other? Remember that when you venture that the Enlightenment is the historical harbinger of socialism and Marxism that it is just as true to bring up that it is also the precursor of liberalism and the bourgeoisie.

The inheritance of the Enlightenment is not an all or nothing proposition. Marxism comes into its own by point of a critique of the Enlightenment. Just pirate a seem at the Theses on Feuerbach! Practically each one of the theses is directed at some proposition or other of the Enlightenment. But "critique" does not wonderful "rejection.

" Marxism represents a true Hegelian aufheben of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is at once preserved and overcome. The Theses on Feuerbach consists of 11 statements; all of them on philosophy.

They are not "directed at some thesis or other of the Enlightenment." They are directed very specifically at Feuerbach's proposal of materialism, which is a machine-made one. Engels extracted them from the then-unpublished German Ideology that he and Marx had written in 1845-46. The Theses on Feuerbach were a vital separate way of the system by which Marx developed recorded materialism, not a critique of a disarray of Enlightenment ideas. There are no references to liberalism or the bourgeoisie.

They are, as Engels says, "the renowned bug of the revitalized circle outlook." With his insistence that Marxism emerged from the Enlightenment by a ready of "sublation" or "aufheben," Steiner is suggesting that Marx and Engels rejected the understanding of sameness that had been developed in the practice of the Enlightenment, advanced in the English Revolution and made a fundamental of the philistine change in America and France. He follows a method well trodden by militant and Stalinist opponents of Marxism in doing so.

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