Philosophy and
Religion, Part 1a
Soul of
Soulless Conditions
37 years before Oscar Wilde wrote the “Soul of Man Under
Socialism”, Karl Marx wrote his “Introduction to a
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right”. Marx expressed similar
impatience with the Germans as Wilde did with the English, and with similar
stunning brilliance.
Even though he writes of the end of religion, yet Marx, with
words that have forever since been famous, expressed his tender understanding
of “the heart of a heartless world”. Those who only quote the part about the
“opium of the people” miss this point. One who called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature” could not
have had contempt for religion, or for religious people.
Marx was 25 years old. He was the former editor of a
distinguished (and then banned) magazine, and a Doctor of Philosophy. For
religion he had an appropriate, sympathetic and poetic respect. Marx did not
make war on religion, but he was certainly proposing to storm the heights of
philosophy. (For a version of the body of the work itself, as opposed to its
Introduction attached and linked below, see Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right on MIA).
The linked text is the confident Introduction to an
ambitious work that was never published in Marx’s lifetime. He was proposing to
issue a critique of the “Philosophy of Right”, the most accessible of Hegel’s
works. Hegel’s works still had prestige. The great philosopher had died
thirteen years previously.
Neither Marx nor Engels wrote very much at all about
religion in their subsequent four and five decades of life. This Introduction
is the most substantial of Marx’s writings on religion, insofar as it is about
religion. But it is also about philosophy, and about class politics. Marx’s
first sentence claims criticism of religion as the prerequisite of all other
criticism. But he seldom, if ever, leaned upon this point again in his later
works.
Marx is concerned to establish, not the condition of
religion, but the condition of life once the illusions of religion have left
the minds of the living. Towards the end of the Introduction comes this
question and answer:
“Where, then, is the positive possibility of a
German emancipation?
“Answer: In the formulation of a class with
radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society,
an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a
universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right
because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it;
which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in
any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the
premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself
without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby
emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete
loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of
man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.”
This 1843 (written) statement is categorical evidence of
Marx’s commitment already at that time to the historical role of the working
class. This was before Marx had teamed up with Engels. The team-up only happened
later in 1844 (September), in Paris, France, although they had met briefly in
Cologne, Germany, in November 1842.
What it also shows is Marx’s conception of the growth of the
working class as the determining event going into the future; and this has
implications, if true, for South Africa in 2012. The determining factor in
South Africa’s development will be the growth of the South African working
class, both objectively and in terms of its self-consciousness as a class.
Says Marx, nearly at the end of the Introduction:
“Philosophy cannot realize itself without the
transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself
without the realization of philosophy.”
In terms of its capacity to fulfil its historic role, or
not, philosophy will be the proletariat’s essential tool or weapon.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Intro, 1844, Marx.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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