> You're kidding about Marx, right? Marx has no
> systematic presentation of hsi total view. His magnum
> opus, Capital, was unfinished, and addresses only the
> critique of political erconomy.
I wrote that he *tried* to be systematic, not that he ever succeeded. I think he was under the spell of the Hegelian idea that true philosophers had to have ein System (the idea Kierkegaard violently rejected). "Capital" (at least Vol. I) looks to me as though he constructed it to look systematic, at least.
> As for being a
> philosopher, Marx early and decisively turned his back
> on philosophy. Instead he did sociology, economics,
> political science -- what he called in The German
> Ideology -- another unfinished and unpublished work
> -- "real positive science" as opposed to "ideology," a
> catefory in which he included "philosophy."
Depends on what you mean by "philosophy." Whether he wanted to call it philosophy or not, I think the best way of understanding his whole life's work is as philosophy -- an attempt to understand the "life-world," if you will, of the nascent capitalist society of his time, how it came into being, and what could be done to change it into a more humane world. Of course, as time went on, he became more involved in concrete political debates and struggles, so the ambition to create a new post-Hegelian system receded into the background. But one could argue that he might have been wanting, vaguely, to work up the notes he accumulated (e.g., those published as the Grundrisse) into a rather systematic form.
> Ideas of
> philosophical interest can be extracted from amrx;s
> work. But a philosophical system -- "dialecticala nd
> hsitocial materialis," or something like that? I am
> afraid that you confuse Marx with Plekhanov or
> Bukharin -- at best.
No, he certainly didn't want to create a "system" like theirs. That would have been much too oversimplified. But there are simpler systems and more complex systems.
> Actually, Nietzsche was in many ways a far more
> conventional philosopher than Marx. He expressly
> discissed ideas like free will and determinism,
> materialism and idealism. moral responsibility, the
> Meaning of Life, moral psychology, appearance and
> reality, truth and falsity, nominalism and realism.
> You will barely find Marx addressing these toipics.
True, but I wasn't discussing the question of who was the more "conventional" philosopher; I was just suggesting something about their writing styles. Trying to systematize Nietzsche was not just oversimplifying (as the "diamat" folks did with Marx) but disastrous (as his sister did in the "Will to Power.")
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax