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 (1904–1981)
“Your views are now my own.”
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist.
In conversation, after having taken a strong position in an argument and heard a complete refutation of his position.
“... till women are more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)