Quote: A “Palatable” Karl Marx
I ran across this quote in Marx again today. It bears sharing. It comes from the early Marx, particularly, his dissertation. I’ve taken it out of context, but in such a way, I beleive, that on its own it still retains credibility – credibility for Marx and for us.
“What was inner light becomes consuming flame turning outwards.”
Marx, of course, was describing the movement of dialectics. He clearly remained under the spell of Hegel’s system, which absorbed the world into the philosophical, and made it spiritual, or ideal. It was Marx, however, who desired to turn such idealism and its philosophical-spiritual worldview on its head, retaining itself as philosophy, but united with a constellation of concreteness, truth and human praxis.
Definitions of “spiritual” notwithstanding, isn’t that something of the spirit of the Restoration?
Today is my birthday.
Like this:
~ by mattfrizzell on October 18, 2007.
Posted in Community of Christ, Critical Social Theory
happy belated birthday, Matt.
I’m glad you shared this quote because lately I’ve been doing a whole lot of cursing of Marx due to reading a lot of articles that use Marx to criticize, but then don’t offer many alternatives. Consuming flame is such a brilliant metaphor for my own spiritual/religious/devotional life path. Such passionate fire burns in me that sometimes it almost burns me up. Amazing.
Hey Shannon, thanks for the comment! And, thanks for the birthday wishes. I’m finally older than Jesus.
I’m not surprised you’ve got folk deploying Marx in the form of critique without suggesting alternatives. On the one hand, that’s frustratingly easy academia, right? – all critique, no constructive turn. Seems alot of that in our pomo environment. But, on the other hand, that kind of critique is not out of Spirit with the Marxist philosophical tradition. A reason is that relentless critique, understood this way, holds a space for the messianic. To say it simply, critique is conducted for the sake of remaining critically open. Behind this idea is the concept, traceable back to Marx, of reified consciousness – false consciousness that has congealed around dogma and apriori assumptions – like that of metaphysics, ontology, etc. Reified consciousness is a ubiquitous concept in concept thought – no one is exempt from it.