The Break With German Idealism
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The Young Marx is usually still considered part of humanist "bourgeois" philosophy, which Marx later criticized, along with German Idealism, on behalf of "social relations" which primed over individual consciousness, a product of ideology according to him. Marxist humanists stressed the humanistic philosophical foundations of Marx's thought by focusing on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1932, and largely suppressed in the Soviet Union until the post-Stalinist "Thaw"). Marx there expounds his theory of alienation, adapted from Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841).
Althusser opposed himself to this movement, arguing that the young Marx couldn't be read while presupposing "fully-developed Marxism". He thus posed the philosophical problem of Marx's evolution as the question of how may one conceive the transformation of Marx's thought without adopting an idealist perspective which would mark a return to Hegel's spiritualist dialectics and its teleological perspective (the hen is in the egg as mature Marx would be in the young Marx, the "contents" of his dialectical materialist philosophy expressed in his earlier works under the "words" of Feuerbach's idealism).
Read more about this topic: Young Marx
Famous quotes containing the words break, german and/or idealism:
“Well I guess you cant break out of prison and into society in the same week.”
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“The Germansonce they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual thingsDeutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
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“My formula for greatness in human beings is amor fati: that one wants to change nothing, neither forwards, nor backwards, nor in all eternity. Not merely to endure necessity, still less to hide itall idealism is mendacity in the face of necessitybut rather to love it.”
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