Abstract
This chapter focuses on the category of critique as this was taken over by Marx from his idealist philosophical predecessors. Adopting a genealogical perspective on critique inspired by Michel Foucault, the chapter argues that Marx attempted to repurpose a disposition and a practice from philosophy as weapons in the class struggle. Although Marx conceives this as a materialist move, Kirkpatrick argues that Marx’s critique retains strong connections with the philosophical tradition in which it was forged and, in particular, that it rests upon a form of subjectivity that was itself formed by the development of Christianity, with its emphasis on faithfulness to a revealed truth, bearing witness and the redemptive value of suffering.
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Notes
- 1.
Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1795).
- 2.
When he invokes the idea of true critique, Marx equates it with science (1992, p. 128) and opposes it to Hegelian “mysticism”. He says that Hegel identifies contradictions in social reality and understands them as “determinations of the concept of logic”, that is, as the unfolding of Spirit. In contrast, Marx agrees that reality contains contradictions but his theory explains them by “discovering… the particular logic of the particular object” (1992, p. 159).
- 3.
These negative sounding, perhaps slightly sardonic observations are all present in the footnotes of the 2015 Vrin edition of Foucault’s lecture, which are absent in the 1997 English translation (2007). By subtracting his expressed reservations about critique, the translation reinforces the impression, which is also there in the French text, that Foucault continues to think of himself as a critical thinker, when the reality is more nuanced.
- 4.
“As surely… as the self must acknowledge the boundary as boundary, so surely must it also overstep the boundary, and seek its ground in something that no longer falls within consciousness” (Schelling 1993 [1800], p. 101); “…the Kantian system may have need… to shut out the thing-in-itself; …we recognize it to be the uttermost perversion of reason and a concept perfectly absurd” (Fichte 1982 [1794/5], p. 45).
- 5.
Schelling describes the various stages in his argument as “the constant raising of the self to a higher power” (1993, p. 90), while for Fichte thinking critically involves our “elevation by freedom to an entirely different sphere, into mastery of which we are not thrust immediately by the mere fact of existence” (1982 [1794/5], p. 76).
- 6.
“…it is mind in its freedom, the culmination of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality and engenders itself as an existing world. The sole task of philosophic science is to bring into consciousness this proper work of the reason of the thing itself” (Hegel 1967, p. 35).
- 7.
As Charles Taylor puts it, “we are not dealing with a dialectic of illusion where we cut through false conceptions but rather with a dialectic of reality” (Taylor 1975, p. 230).
- 8.
“Hegel sees in Christian theology the whole truth of speculative philosophy laid out in images” (Taylor 1975, p. 211).
- 9.
Both Kant and Fichte had been accused of atheism when they published works that brought critique to bear upon religion in the 1790s (Rose 2009, p. 252).
- 10.
Hegel particularly praised Lutheranism as the highest stage of Christianity and of religion, a position that was broadly consistent with the prevailing conservatism.
- 11.
Fichte, for example, clarifies critical consciousness by contrasting it with more “basic reasoning, which proceeds mechanically” (1982, p. 20).
- 12.
Marx writes that “…revolutions need a passive element, a material basis. This is realized in a people only in so far as it is a realization of the peoples’ needs” (1992, p. 252).
- 13.
A suggestion recently re-vamped by in the (post-critical) work of Jacques Ranciere, who writes of nineteenth-century workers: “Emancipated workers fashioned in the here and now a different body and a different ‘soul’ for this body – the body and soul of those who are not adapted to any specific occupation, who employ capacities for feeling and speaking, thinking and acting, that do not belong to any particular class, but which belong to everyone and anyone” (2009, p. 43).
- 14.
In this, it constitutes a kind of regression behind Hegel, as observed by Gillian Rose, who pointed out that, like sociological thought more generally, Marx’s theory is located at a “Fichtean point” between Kant and Hegel, precisely because it lacks a theory of subjectivity (2009, pp. 227, 231).
- 15.
Phenomenology clarifies the relation of this kind of reading to embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty, “gesture, body and socius are the humus of an original semantic thickness” possessed by natural language (1964, p. 234).
- 16.
Both Schelling and Fichte discuss the self as reaching out towards infinity in an effort to attain full reality but finding it can only be by becoming finite. In Fichte, this “striving” for the infinite is pre-conscious and its reversal is initiated by reflection, which inaugurates conscious selfhood as finite. The pattern of striving and counter-striving is itself infinite (1982, pp. 231–237). Schelling argues that the empirical self can identify the infinite self through its ongoing work of synthesising the experiential universe (1993, pp. 118–119).
- 17.
The religious nature of this is clarified by Steiner’s hypothesis that, “any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence” (1989, p. 3).
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Kirkpatrick, G. (2022). Marx, Critique, Religion. In: Kirkpatrick, G., McMylor, P., Fadaee, S. (eds) Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91642-8_2
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