The name Karl Marx conjures up a
philosophical medley of isms: socialism, capitalism, communism, Hegelianism,
materialism, idealism. All these isms
surround Marx with a multitude of preconceived notions, notions that can
sometimes get in the way of understanding what he meant to say. So in effort to sift through the various
conceptions and connotations attached to him, I read some
of his essays in The Marx-Engels Reader. Two particular passages from his essay “The German
Ideology: Part I” mobilized the metaphysical regions of my mind.
The first passage reads, “In direct contrast
to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from
earth to heaven.” With this, Marx says
that traditional German thinking takes its cue from lofty, overarching thought
processes and applies them to the experience on earth, whereas Marx looks
directly at the earth experience to derive lofty, overarching theories about
life. Marx breaks from the German
Hegelian philosophical tradition of using vague general theories to explain human
behavior. He believes that sociological
and philosophical truths are found by examining human behavior first and then
drawing conclusions about it.
The second passage reads, “The phantoms
formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material
life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.” Here, Marx claims that the thoughts and ideas
created by human imagination are subject to the interaction between how a
person produces their material livelihood and the cognitive processes resulting
from trying to make sense out of that livelihood. This, according to Marx, can be proved by
observing identifiable human action and then connecting it to human
thought. Together, these passages reject
Hegelianism and other Enlightenment philosophies which emphasize the importance
of rational thought as the foremost, supreme determining force of a person’s
being. He reverses the Descartes idea of
“I think therefore I am” to “I am
therefore I think.” Marx argues that the
totality of a person flows from their material production, i.e. a farmer is
formed by farming, not by a consciousness outside his existence.
Almost every, if not every, major
historical figure has a legacy strung together by truths and untruths and this
is no different for Karl Marx. Reverberating from his time to our time, his
words have been contemplated and understood by some, warped and skewed by
others. Studying a radical revolutionary
figure like Marx presents the challenge of having to disassociate from cultural
hearsays and historical assumptions.
Nonetheless, looking at his actual text helps to find that unfiltered
part of the mind where words are at least on some level allowed to speak for
themselves.
