Abstract
Marx investigated the bourgeois mindset shared by modern philosophy and economics. From Hegel, Marx inherits the importance of action and critique of Verstand, the predominant modern thinking that traces back to Hellenism. Purism and bifurcation make up the bourgeois mindset. Purism pushes difference to disjunctions, such as form vs. content, mind vs. world, passive vs. active, immediate vs. mediated. These dualisms assume that what we distinguish in analysis can exist separately. Splitting apart what exists only together means thinking never recovers our existence as being-in-the world. Bourgeois philosophy lacks a grasp of human action or mediation. For the bourgeois mindset, activity is dismissed, diminished, or driven to subjectivism and skepticism. Bifurcations are fostered by capitalism. The actual duality between use-value and exchange-value that defines capitalist production encourages bourgeois ideology. An adequate phenomenology no longer asks what is objective or subjective; it asks what is true or false.
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Murray, P., Schuler, J. (2023). Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy. In: Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37545-3_5
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