Darwin

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Aug 12 09:14:33 PDT 1999


Rakesh,

I am familiar with some of the interpretations you mention below. I would add especially Engels and Lenin. Lenin said because the Marxists of his day had not studied Hegel's _The Science of Logic_ , they didn't understand _Capital_.

Some other references: Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. It has a specific critique of Hegel. Also, Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Law) ". _The German Ideology_ by Marx and Engels is a critique of many Young Hegelians , and thereby defines some critique of Hegel indirectly. _Anti-Duhring_ by Engels. Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks , _The Teachings of Karl Marx_. and _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_

_Dialectical Contradictions:Contemporary Marxist Discussions_ edited by Erwin Marquit, et al. (Marxist Educational Press; Univ. of MInnesota). _The Open Philosophy and the Open Society _ by Maurice Cornforth. _Materialism and the Dialectical Method_ by Cornforth. _The Elementary Principles of Philosophy_ by Politzer. "Toward a Marxist Analysis of Subjectivity" by Tom Meisenhelder (in _Nature, Society and Thought_ Vol. 4, No. 1 ; 1991). _The Riddle of the Self_ by F.T. Mikhailov. _Dialectical Logic_ by F.V. Ilyenkov. There's a book on the history of philosophy by Teodor Oizerman the title of which I forget.

A lot of Marx and Engels' discussion of Darwin is in letters. Engels discusses Darwin in relation to Marxism in _The Dialectics of Nature_ and _Anti-Duhring_. J.B.S Haldane would probably be a good one on the relationship of Marxism and Darwinism.

Charles


>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> 08/12/99 10:30AM >>>
Charles,

I am still thinking about your reply. You have underlined the independence of Marx's philosophical influences from Darwinian influences. Which was the basis of Veblen's criticism of Marx: he built his system on Hegelian dialectics instead of Darwinian evolutionism (plus a bit of DeVries mutationism and Mendelian genetics--the Darwinism Veblen used was in a very confused state at that point).

Also to continue this debate, I will have to see where the Ernst Mayr-John Greene debate stands today over the philosophical implications implicit in Darwin's revolution of which he himself was of course often quite unaware.

There are many interpretations of Marx's relation to Hegel: Althusser/Colletti (Marx as critic of Hegelian hypostatization), John Rosenthal (who treats as a coincidence the applicability of Hegelian categories to the analysis of money), Patrick Murray (Marx's indebtedness to Hegel's logic for appreciation of the appearance-essence and form-content relation and the burdens of critique), Georg Lukcas, Guy Debord (see recent bio with intro by TJ Clark on Debord's use of the categories of Lukacs' Hegelian Marxism), Moishe Postone (critic of the totality implicit in that Marxism), Raya Dunayevskaya (don't understand her work on absolute), Tony Smith (Marx's use of Hegelian logic for the dialectical derivation of categories), Chris Arthur (the applicability of Hegelian logic to the perverse properties of capital), Michael Williams (similar to Arthur and Smith), John Rees (haven't read).

By the way, I meant to say effective dissolution of philosophy as the metaphysic of statis. I inverted my prepositions. Sorry.

yours, rakesh



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