Well, revisited only briefly, but I will have to make a careful study of Karl Korsch’s 1923 book Marxism and Philosophy when I can squeeze it into my reading schedule. These issues are all old now, but they were new then, and they continue to resurface in our milieu. I’ve just read a few essays by Korsch on the Marxist Internet Archive and I just want to relate a few impressions.
I have mixed reactions. On the one hand, Korsch laudably attempts to relate philosophies as forms of consciousness to moments in social and political development, opposing the tendency, also purportedly rife within Marxism, as treating philosophies as detached abstractions at war with one another, such as the struggle between idealism and materialism. At the same time, Korsch seems to avoid politicizing philosophy in a way that would suppress its intellectual content in favor of purely pragmatic political exigencies. It seems that Korsch consciously opposes both tendencies in order to restore what he considers to be the original Marxian approach, which finds its precedent in Hegel. For example, in a section reproduced from Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch states: Hegel wrote that in the philosophic systems of this fundamentally revolutionary epoch, ‘revolution was lodged and expressed as if in the very form of their thought’. Hegel’s accompanying statements make it quite clear that he was not talking of what contemporary bourgeois historians of philosophy like to call a revolution in thought – a nice, quiet process that takes place in the pure realm of the study and far away from the crude realm of real struggles. The greatest thinker produced by bourgeois society in its revolutionary period regarded a ‘revolution in the form of thought’ as an objective component of the total social process of a real revolution. Only two peoples, the German and the French – despite or precisely because of their contrasts – took part in this great epoch of world history, whose deepest essence is grasped by the philosophy of history. ____________________________________________________________ Click to get free information on Pigeon Forge vacations. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/PnY6rw2hpWzMrlKb8K5omGKsWiVZm9KnB1Vg5U8Nq0xPJR1RjnbCB/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
