>>> "Peter K." <peterk at enteract.com> 03/25/00 12:28PM >>>
Carrol:
>Others can carry on the argument about Ehrenreich. I'm not concerned
>right now. I say *moralizing* is wrong. It's false. It reflects a failure
>to understand the world correctly. All moralist judgments reduce to
>Platonism and Platonism reduces to religion.
page 226 of Terry Eagleton's _The Ideology of the Aesthetic_:
"Unlike Nietzche and Heidegger after him, Marx does not press through this aestheticization to human cognition itself. This is not some anaemic rationalism: the goal of human life, for Marx as for Aristotle, in not truth, but happiness or well-being. His work is an extensive enquiry into what material conditions would be necessary for this goal to be realized as a general human condition, and thus belongs to the discourse of classical morality. * Marx is a moralist in the most traditional sense of the term, which is to say that he is concerned with the political determinations of the good life. His morality thus stands opposed to the withered modern sense of the 'moral,' impoverished to interpersonal relations and 'spiritual values' alone, for which the Marxist term is 'moralism.'"
* See Denys Turner, _Marxism and Christianity_ (Oxford, 1983), Part 1.
__________
CB: I agree with Eagleton. Lenin's _What Is To Be Done ?_ is a book of ethics.
Marxist's anti-moralism and shunning of moralistic terminology is to avoid association with the hypocrites, religious and bourgeois philosophers, who had taken over all the language of morality.
When Marx said the thing is to change the world, he was announcing an ethics at the heart of his theory. For him practical-critical activity is revolutionary activity.
CB