Abstract
The Introduction lays out the book’s general plan: discuss Spinoza, Marx and Darwin’s contributions to a secular and immanent conception of the world, as well as the resistance these thinkers encountered in their own time. Concurrently, some of the other issues addressed in the book are presented. In summary, they concern: the productivity of a theory of emergence, showing that more complex levels of being emerge from a natural base, yet can no longer be directly derived from this base; the clarification that, for this reason, the concepts of biology should not be transposed to the understanding of prevailing social relations in complex societies (Darwin himself, by the way, warned of this); the existing space for human subjectivity in a materialist and immanent perspective of reality. Finally, having carried out this conceptual debate, the Introduction clarifies that the last two chapters of the book present a more empirical analysis of the contemporary world, presenting hypotheses that explain the current growth of religion in different regions of the planet.
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Notes
- 1.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 45 (translation revised according to the French original: “La part de l’immanence, ou la part du feu, c’est à cela qu’on reconnaît le philosophe”).
- 2.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 2.
- 3.
Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 24–47.
- 4.
I decided to maintain certain thematic recurrences throughout the book—and even explicit repetitions—in the hope that readers who decide to begin their reading with a more advanced chapter will still be able to extract sufficient meaning from the book. At times, I chose to use a more accessible language to broaden the reading public. This occurred more visibly—but not exclusively—in the chapters dedicated to Darwin, in view of a lesser familiarity with the naturalist’s work among readers in the human sciences.
- 5.
“To all intents and purposes, this philosophy [Marxism] subsumes the prophetism.” Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962), 56.
- 6.
Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 179.
- 7.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being’, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 75–76.
- 8.
Karl Marx, ‘Letter from Marx to his Father, in Trier, November 10, 1837’, in MECW, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 18.
- 9.
Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, in MECW, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 175.
- 10.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 354.
- 11.
Stephen Jay Gould warns of the flagrantly reductionist character of this project; Cf. Stephen Jay Gould, ‘“What Is Life?” as a Problem in History’, in What Is Life? The Next Fifty Years: Speculations on the Future of Biology, ed. Michael Murphy and Luke O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 12.
Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1992), 207. A reading of Edelman’s deservedly famous book shows that though the history of life is, in his words, a local saga (in contrast to the more general principles of physics), it still involves historical categories and regularities that can be known.
- 13.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 404. In the contemporary Darwinian debate, science historian Patrick Tort emphasizes with great insistence Darwin’s difference with the “the naive continuism of sociobiology.” Patrick Tort, Darwin e a Ciência da Evolução (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2004), 110.
- 14.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 200.
- 15.
Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’ (Grundrisse), in MECW, vol. 28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 29.
- 16.
Željko Loparić, Heidegger Réu – Um Ensaio Sobre a Periculosidade da Filosofia (Campinas: Papirus, 1990), 213.
- 17.
Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’, 413.
- 18.
Ibid., 190. On the topic of value as an automatic subject, see also: Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1982), 255.
- 19.
United Nations, ‘“Inequality Defines Our Time”: UN Chief Delivers Hard-Hitting Mandela Day Message’, 18 July 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/07/1068611.
- 20.
Oxfam, ‘Inequality Kills: The Unparalleled Action Needed to Combat Unprecedented Inequality in the Wake of COVID-19’, 17 January 2022, https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621341/bp-inequality-kills-170122-en.pdf;jsessionid=EB1ECD3096EEAB39B71BE9ACA05A6415?sequence=9.
- 21.
Cf. Ronald Numbers, ‘Creationism Goes Global’, in The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded edition (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006).
- 22.
Obviously, the crisis was not limited to the so-called real socialism. The intensity of the capitalist crisis is startling, even in developed nations. But the capitalist crisis is usually treated in mainstream media as a kind of force majeure (in sharp contrast to the strong criticism adopted when addressing the difficulties of the socialist bloc).
- 23.
Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 60–99.
- 24.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Letter 54, Spinoza to Boxel [September 1674]’, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 895–99.
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Vieira Martins, M. (2022). Introduction. In: Marx, Spinoza and Darwin. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13025-0_1
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