>Kant is Bentham's evil twin. Both theorized the moral principles of
>commodity exchange; they are each other's mirror image.
First, I think perhaps you underestimate the advance represented by commodity exchange.
Second, Kant is not Bentham, and by no means simply an apologist, but as Marx said of Ricardo, somebody whose clarity of purpose let him see far further than someone who was simply concerned to act as champion for capitalists (and see five).
Third, if you examine the passages on man's 'unsocial sociability' in 'Permanent Peace and Other Writings' you will see that Kant was so far from failing to understand the problematic character of capitalist social relations that he already anticipates Marx' writings on Commodity Fetishism.
Fourth, Marx, as we've already seen in relation to the free speech question, very far from that vulgar argument that sees questions of civil liberty as just a mask for oppression, but valuable in their own right.
Fifth, it was the clarity with which Kant expressed the problem of is and ought that provided the platform from which Hegel leaped to their dialectical resolution, which in turn is the basis of Marx's realisation of philosophy.
All in all, while it is important to criticise the shortcomings of the classical philosophers (as the classical economists) I see no honour in merely rubbishing them. Rather, it strikes me as oedipal, self- aggrandising. By contrast, the irrationalists as Lukacs called them, who came after the high point of bourgeois imagination well deserve a rubbishing.
n message <3.0.6.32.19991021103413.00a49770 at popserver.panix.com>, Thomas Waters <twaters at panix.com> writes
>According to one of the tours given at Monticello, it is true, but if I
>recall correctly, itis likely that all of those freed were Jefferson's own
>children.
We don't know about all, but I believe that DNA tests did indeed show that some of the black descendants of slaves on the estate share ancestors with the remaining Jefferson descendants - confirming the otherwise dire film.
In message <199910210434.AAA07801 at fn3.freenet.tlh.fl.us>, Michael Hoover
<hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> writes
>
>As for Kant, Marx & Engels consider him theorist of weak and miserable
>burghers and don't have much to say about him.
Engels on Kant:
'Kant's epoch-making work' p 25 'The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist, but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels ... Kant's discovery [historicality of the Earth] contained the point of departure of all further progress.' p26
The terrible two do write a more dismissive assault on Kant in the German Ideology - but that was a famously intemperate work and they had good reason to think that the critique of Kant was already completed in Hegel.
That said, I'm surprised that one enduring conceptual distinction of Kant's intrinsic to the Marxist tradition is not recognised: The difference between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself', as in 'class- in-itself' and class-for-itself'.
>Kant's liberalism was close to Humboldt's in that he was primarily
>interested in moral and philosophical argumentation concerning moral
>respect for individuals as ends-in-themselves. What this means in
>political practice is unclear so he becomes *everyman* for thinkers with
>individualist bent.
Don't you agree that individuals ought to be ends in themselves? I know I do. Isn't that the same idea as 'to each according to his needs'? What other end ought individuals exist for? -- Jim heartfield