![]() The metaphysical model appropriate to it was not mechanism but a kind of naturalistic vitalism.Īt the same time there were several implications of materialism which were important for Marx. Marx’s materialism in no way displaced the Hegelian assumption of an underlying force which is the hidden reality behind a multiplicity of more or less ephemeral manifestations and appearances. It provided an a priori theory of progress which was at once a principle of explanation and an evaluation. What impressed Marx on a first reading of Darwin’s book was the crude English method of development and this was indeed a characteristic reaction for a Hegelian?įor Darwin’s theory of evolution was strictly an empirical generalization-a causal theory of change with no implication of progress-while the dialectic was for Marx as for Hegel a law of logic. ![]() At a later date, to be sure, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx sometimes claimed for his theory of social development an affinity with organic evolution, and there is in fact a superficial similarity between the class struggle and natural selection. Like Hegel, Marx also regarded mechanical explanation as belonging to a lower form of logic because it deals with a lower stage of reality. The dialectic he regarded as a logical method uniquely capable of dealing with a continuously developing subject matter and of revealing the “necessity” of its development. Like Hegel he regarded mechanical explanation as suitable to physics and chemistry because these sciences deal with subject matters which involve no problems of historical development Marx never believed their methods could be adopted by social studies. This conclusion was not at all shared by Marx, and in his Holy Family he distinguished his materialism sharply from the French materialism of the eighteenth century.įor Marx the qualification “dialectical” was the essence of the matter. ![]() Prerevolutionary French works like Holbach’s System of Nature had used “materialism” to mean a philosophy which purported to depend on physics and chemistry, and which held that the mechanical explanations given by these sciences could be extended to all subject matters, vital, mental, and social. It should be noted that Marx used the word “materialism” In a specialized sense that may be misleading, since the word already had, and after Marx retained, a meaning quite different from Marx’s. ![]() Marx’s first statements of dialectical materialism were made in a group of works written between 18 under the stimulus of feuerbach’s materialist interpretation of Hegel and as incidents in Marx’s career as a revolutionary socialist. ![]()
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