Marxist Views of The Human Mind
Marx and Engels are claimed to have possessed a very mechanistic view of the way the human mind works. After the brain receives impressions from the outside world, they are claimed to have said, it automatically moves the individual to take action (see Activist Theory). They asked this: "Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means." According to this view, the thing which we call 'free will' is nothing other than an awareness of the impelling forces which move an individual to action; in taking action, he is not free to change the course his very nature dictates."
Read more about this topic: Economic Determinism
Famous quotes containing the words marxist, views, human and/or mind:
“One good reason for the popularity of reductionism among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism.... In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is.”
—Claud Cockburn (19041981)
“It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.”
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“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a language acquisition device, an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thoughtwith these I deal.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)