Philosophy
and Religion, Part 2c
Utopia and
Science
In this, the last of this week’s part of the course on
Philosophy and Religion, we link once again to Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific”. This is a short text extracted by Engels from his larger work,
“Anti-Dühring”, and it helps us to place thought in a historical framework. For
example, dealing with the period subsequent to the Renaissance and prior to the
French Revolution that is often referred to as “The Enlightenment”, Engels
writes:
“We know today that
this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the
bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois
justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the
law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of
man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social [Social Contract] of Rousseau, came into
being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The
great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go
beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”
Here Engels describes the limitation imposed upon the human
Subject by the objective circumstances, and also the possibility of
transcending such limitations. This is humanism. Humanism says that humans
build humanity within the given material world and history.
Nowhere does Engels say that humanity is an accidental
combination of atoms and molecules.
Yet, by sometimes chastising the great Hegel with the same
kind of roughness as he treated the nonentity Dühring, Engels sowed the seeds
of others’ subsequent and greater errors. Such an error came about when the
dichotomy of “idealism and materialism” was elevated to a master-narrative of
philosophy, which it is not. Humanity is not reducible to matter.
As great as he was, communists have in practice relied too
heavily upon Engels to teach them philosophy. As a result they have magnified
Engels’ otherwise unremarkable mistakes to monstrous proportions. The main one
of these is the denigration of “idealism” and the perverse worship of
“materialism”. Whereas it is the free-willing human Subject which was at the
centre of Marx’s work, and which must be at the centre of any communist’s work.
The image is of Charles
Fourier (1772-1837), maybe the greatest of the utopian socialists, and
also the inventor of the word “feminism”.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880, Engels, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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