Abstract
The introduction by Marxism of consciousness as the development of man’s relations with nature and society presented philosophy with a direct contrast to modern philosophy’s claim of understanding life by consciousness. Rather than the individual ego, the types of production and ownership were understood as the determinants of man’s social thought, and freedom, which had been conceived to be man’s essence (although qualified even here in space and time), was now to be seen in reference to the economic. This new view of freedom is most often seen as an attempt to surmount both Kant’s notion of freedom and Hegel’s metaphysics of freedom.1
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References
Irving Fetscher, “Marx’s Concretization of the Concept of Freedom,” Socialist Humanism, ed. Erich Fromm, Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1966, pp. 260–72; Herbert Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, pp. 48–155.
Robert Herzstein, “The Phenomenology of Freedom in the German Philosophical Tradition: Kantian Origins,” Journey of Value Inquiry, Vol. I, 1 (Spring, 1967 ), pp. 48–50.
Ibid., pp. 50–51.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper & Row, 1964, p. 61.
Robert Herzstein, op. cit., p. 53.
Ibid., pp. 53–54, 57.
F. J. Adelmann, “Freedom and Marxism,” Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. X, 1 (March, 1970 ), pp. 1–3.
Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, trans. Emile Burns, New York: International Publishers, 1968, pp. 125, 309–10.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. S. Ryazanskaya, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968, pp. 94–95, 487, 491, 493. See also George Kline, “Was Marx an Ethical Humanist?,” Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. IX, 2 (June, 1969 ), p. 95.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 38.
Ibid., pp. 37–38, 94–95, 487, 494.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., pp. 50, 54, 57, 487, 494.
Ibid., pp. 387, 491, 493.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, trans. unknown, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, Vol. I, p. 363.
I think here of such men as Berdiaeff, Bochenski, and Tran-Duc-Thao.
Marx and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, p. 363.
Ibid.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 148–52.
Tran-Duc-Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique, Paris, London, New York: Gordon & Breach, 1971, p. 9.
Ibid., pp. 8–9.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 108.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 446.
Ibid., p. 450.
On this question see Merleau-Ponty’s final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 434–456, and his long footnote on historical materialism, pp. 171–73. I have commented at some length in my articles, “Man and the Economic: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Historical Materialism,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. III, 1, pp. 121–127; and “Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of History,” in The Horizons of the Flesh: Critical Perspectives on the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Garth Gillan, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973, pp. 127–142.
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 134.
Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 55–59.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris: Gallimard, 1955, pp. 116–17. (English tr. Joseph J. Bien, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, in press.)
D. I. Chesnokov, Historical Materialism, trans. Clemens Dutt, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 273–81. Also of interest is Alexei M. Rumyantsev’s Categories and Laws of the Political Economy of Communism, trans. D. Danemanis, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, p. 83.
Ibid., p. 276.
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Bien, J.J. (1977). Meaning and Freedom in the Marxist Conception of the Economic. In: Ihde, D., Zaner, R.M. (eds) Interdisciplinary Phenomenology. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-6893-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-6893-7_9
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