Ana Bazac [a]
This year is the tercentennial of Immanuel Kant's birth (1724-1804). On the occasion of this significant anniversary, a longtime friend and comrade of RedMed from Romania, Ana Bazac, has written a wide-ranging study on the relevance of Kant's world-renowned ethical principle, the categorical imperative, for revolutionary politics. This study does not only leave no stone unturned with respect to Kant's maxim, but also delves practically into contemporary world politics, raising questions and providing answers on concrete events of our epoch such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza (the latter more and more becoming a war of the Middle East at large). As a matter of fact, Ana Bazac wrote an article in four instalments and submitted them for publication on RedMed, but in the end agreed to have these published in their integrity as a unified article with the title "Relevance of Kant's Categorical Imperative for Revolutionary Politics" in the theoretical journal Revolutionary Marxism 2025, published on behalf of the Revolutionary Workers Party (DIP) by an autonomous editorial board. The journal is supposed to bring out its annual edition before the year it bears in its title is out, but due to the hectic tempo of politics in Turkey these days, internationally immersed up to its neck in Syria and domestically rife with working class action developing spasmodically, dotted with police violence toward the workers, there will be an inescapable delay in its appearance (the stipulation now is publication in early to mid-January). Thus, the tercentennial of Kant will be left behind when the journal comes out. The author and the Editorial Board of Revolutionary Marxism have agreed to have the fourth and last part of the article on the relationship between Kant and Marx, to be published on RedMed before the year 2024 is out, together with the introduction to the article. We are sure that our readers who go on to read this piece of Bazac's article will pick up Revolutionary Marxism 2025 when it comes out in order to read, alongside other pieces, Bazac's article in its entirety. (Editor's note)
(1) Introduction
We are in a Kant philosophical year (Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804). In fact, philosophy is interested in and reflects on what ordinary people think and what interests them; and, irrespective of the historical frames and limits of the technical philosophical effort, philosophy as such is valuable and remains in the memory and patrimony of humanity only at the extent of real solutions for the real problem of the human history: the situation, reason-to-be and dignified life of every common human being on Earth.
From all the exploits of the world thinkers we retain only that which is significant/useful to us, now, in an always present-day reality. The professional philosophers and analysts of different kinds are, on the one hand, interested to better understand how and why did the forerunners think in a way or another; but on the other hand, they seem to shut themselves between the walls of an esoteric language and an illusion of elitism. Actually, the technical language can be understood without troubles if it is explained. And this explanation is not a reduction, a vulgar simplification, but just the absolutely necessary activity -- and somehow, the reason-to-be -- of bringing the professional research closer to the general public, to whom the research is actually intended, serves it.
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Kant is a giant in the patrimony of humanity: through his epistemological breakthrough of cognition as a multi-stage idea formation process, and through his ethical revolution of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is the moral law of -- keep attention -- all the rational beings: to never treat the others only as means but always also as ends -- as ends of both every individual and the human species, because every human being is a representative of humanity and humanity exists only if this moral law is fulfilled.
The professional philosophers -- as during the Kant celebration this year -- focus on the countless technical aspects of the epistemological theory, and sometimes on some of its applications: but almost never on the main application, the categorical imperative theory. Famous philosophers seem to have given to this condensed formula of the moral way of humans, bad marks: that it would be formal, abstract and emotionless, related to a non-earthly command of duty. However, just the categorical imperative means clear content of the duty and thus, not abstract calls for compassion, charity or reciprocity, but a concrete way to measure and control one's own limits and criteria.
Philosophers have always believed that they refer to every man, but the abstract reduction to the image of their historical and social condition never corresponded to every human being. Kant was the first who, through his demonstrated ethical application of the epistemological theory of what reason does mean, clearly highlighted that the human moral is not fulfilled by individuals isolated in their frame and struggling to "survive" on the expense of "others"/ "faraway", thus "exterior" to the frame from which one speaks about "moral". Kant was the first who advanced the quality of the human individual as a species being, representative of not only the human species but also of the category of "all rational beings" (in the universe).
IV Kant and Marx on the Road of Universalism
(15) Marx's attitude towards the Kantian moral metaphysics
Obviously, here only the moral and social aspects of the two are mentioned, and only indicating main elements of continuity and discontinuity.
Marx constructed a scientific demonstration of the possibility/viability of a communist alternative to capitalism. And this was a theory, having different theoretical origins. In the ethical domain -- although Marx did not have ethical papers -- it is Kant [b].
To a thinker focused on the objective and subjective conditions of a proletarian revolution, the reduction of concrete freedom and rights to the political and juridical ones, as Kant did, is a proof of theoretical inconsistency of the author. However, even though Marx criticised Kant's metaphysical approach of the law and politics, he saw both the implicit critique of their real modern forms this metaphysics allows and also, and especially, the critical valences of the moral metaphysics. Very early, Marx characterised the Enlightenment's, thus Kant's, penchant to metaphysics as a display of scepticism "in regard to the rationality of what exists" [c], just opposed to the denial of rationality as such by the promoters of "think positive!" -- if this allusion to the present is allowed -- /by those who consider both that what is real is rational or that, although the real is irrational, it must still be taken for granted and as a basis of the legal forms. Thus, if these ones are "irrational" and "uncritical" and their point of view is assumed by the official modern state, Kant is rational and critical [d]. Just what was needed for a critical, thus fruitful analysis of the modern organisation of society. The uncritical "positive" obsequious approach -- where "the right of arbitrary power" [e] is principle -- emphasised the valences of the moral metaphysics, of the categorical imperative: it is the ought that must regulate the norms of power relations if we have moved away from outdated rules, as everyone considers modernity.
Kant showed how is to understand the levels of knowledge and that the level of concepts allows catching the real phenomena not as individual and particular occurrences, but as universal and necessary facts. In his turn, Marx -- who was interested only about the methodological aspect of epistemology, the succession of concepts (defined according to their contents) in the development of theory -- related the universal and necessary to the historical process and to the social relations. Kant's critical method concerned the theoretical and the metaphysical, the concepts with their meanings and function of form needed to be re-viewed; Marx's critical method concerned the development of real social relations, and only on this basis did he confront the concepts. No matter how mentally conceived, the universal and necessary ideas do not develop by themselves, but only in connection with the historical and social reality. For this reason, Marx's critical method concerned the whole, the complex interdependencies and feedbacks of ideas -- and different types of ideas -- and/with economy, politics, law, culture, consciousness. And the whole can be caught only if the forms are related to contents, given by experience.
Marx criticised Kant's moral "idealism" not from the standpoint of its practical conclusions: on the contrary, just this perspective of moral idealism showed to be and "must be rightly regarded as the German theory of the French revolution" [f], precisely opposed to those who mocked it from the point of view of closing the real within institutions that hinder its development.
Thus, for Marx the groundwork of the moral metaphysics was okay, even highly necessary; but not the "metaphysics of law" that rejected the social reality [g]. Exactly the legal norms -- and thus, the political institutions and relations -- must correspond to the social reality. If in moral, the common good happens when the humans are not treated only as means, but always also as ends, it can manifest realiter -- not only when the political and legal norms move away from what is and impose domination, structural asymmetry of freedom -- but, fundamentally, only in economic relations which annul the asymmetry of power to control the life resources, asymmetry that made the humans so helpless and ineffective.
(16) Kant's forms and Marx's contents
The metaphysical demonstration of Kant -- i.e., the quest for principles from deduction from concepts, they themselves defined in the frame of meanings given in abstracto -- is not a philosophical oddity we can well drop out. Its alternative is not the cynical "realism" that affirms the status quo as rational, thus "quite good." On the contrary, just Kant's insistence on the ought to be fuels the realism of the creation of the common good. This Kantian spirit was continued by Marx, both showing the necessity to re-examine the essential structures of the modern society. Both made a "transcendental critique" of society -- this adjective meaning here a highly theoretically proven analysis -- and moreover, Marx made a grassroots critique.
Kant presented the formation of ideas qua ideas, as forms. Marx pointed out the formation of ideas as contents and their dependence on both the concrete contents given by experience and, in this frame, on the way of thinking these contents: this was the reason of not only his explanation of ideology but also his focus on the methodology of thinking the contents.
Kant was not the first philosopher who made obvious how determinative is to have a clear conscience of the ideas we "naturally" arrive at. But he was the first who explained that this clear conscience of ideas is the awareness of ideas as forms, i.e., as our mental synthesis that, although starting from the information given by senses, slightly removes from it because the concepts ensue from processing the empirical notions and the ideas from the processing of concepts. Marx continued the focus on the clear conscience of ideas, because without this focus the cardinal role of ideas in the conscience and deeds of people is not understood.
And he proved that the clear conscience of ideas always involves their contents: which are not at all neutral copies of the state of facts but reflect just the experience of humans, their historical experience and, regarding the inherent social experience obviously in the frame of social relations, their position within the concrete social relations. And of course, the ideas circulate, are emitted, taught, learned, assumed, thus, regarding the ideas about their social experience, people take over, consciously or not, even ideas which do not correspond to their own social position. People interpret the facts -- letting here aside that even the information describing the facts reflect the power relations and are emitted according to the social position/interest of the rulers -- only in principle according to their own social position, in reality their ideas related to society are subordinated to the dominant social position. Therefore, a clear conscience of ideas involves the awareness of the "social positions" of ideas/of their ideological characteristic, because only this awareness helps the humans to understand the development of these ideas and their consequences: their telos/reason-to-be as ought to be and their deterring from it, but nevertheless their continuation, duration, by an inertia that makes people and the social reality they live within sick. The inertia of ideas leads to the inertia of the social reality.
Consequently, in order to shake it, the ideas themselves need to be shaken.
(17) Kant's publicity as main element constructing the subjective conditions of the communist transformation
Kant's deduction of publicity, thus of freedom of speech, from within his metaphysical construct, his enlightenment urges and commitment to contribute to the daring and knowledge of the common people were in line with Marx's lifelong goal to contribute to the subjective conditions of a proletarian revolution -- the proletarians being a world class within a capitalist world system --: the human reason [h] does not accept "cognitive Untermenschen", was both Kant's and Marx's warning.
(18) Kant's and Marx's paradigms
The breakthrough and demonstrated (philosophical) principles rarely appear; in general, the same ideas are discussed and explained according to the new experience.
The categorical imperative principle is, for ethics, as Darwin's theory is for biology. They are paradigms for the development of science and human cognition: and cognition never remains only thinking.
Marx, too, was a creator of paradigmatic principles:
- the outcome of the historicity of class struggle,
- the necessity of the "dictature of the proletariat" -- actually, the takeover of political power by the proletariat -- as the essential, absolutely necessary condition for
- the abolition of private property as structural social relation of the modern society (and that never must be confounded with the personal property).
Indeed, the social condition -- that which is the frame of the interhuman relations -- to treat the others not only as means but always as ends is just the abolition of the private property. These are the founding principles, but there are much more. And from this standpoint of paradigmatic principles in society, between humans, Kant and Marx completed each other.
The categorical imperative as ethical formula and the takeover of political power by the proletariat in order to abolish the private property are the most concrete, most functional, most clear and revealing, as ultimate conditions-criteria for the real worth of every human being and of all. But the achievement of the ethical imperative is conditioned by the achievement of Marxian principles. As we see nowadays, apart from these principles, all the slogans and "reforms" are impotent and, concretely, harmful; they waste the time and life of humans. We are justified to say that as the categorical imperative is a regulative idea of moral, so the communist idea -- as a synthesis of the above principles -- is a regulative idea for the practical life.
(19) The universalizable character of Kant and Marx
Kant brought about the requirement -- and principle, since it is a synonym of the categorical imperative -- of the universalizability, of the universalizable. In his turn, by emphasising the social classes, Marx did not support the division and discord of society: on the contrary, he demonstrated the proletarian status of the vast majority of the world population, irrespective of the popular "shares" held as crumbs dropped by the restrictive private control of resources and life. This proletarian status is the negative of the humans behaving according to the categorical imperative, it is the negative universal. "Through Kant", Marx promoted the concrete universalizability. "Through Marx", Kant signalled that the universalizability is not utopia.
Yes, we must not forget the Kantian meanings of rational beings as both persons with rights and beings without rights, or of states with civil society and without it (colonies); as well as we should consider the cosmopolitan federation of states with civil society only as a model for a world integration of all states; and if so, Kant himself deviated from his epistemological tenet to consider the principles only as forms containing universal and necessary prescriptions: would a federation aiming only to forbid a mutual attack of states be accordant with a categorical imperative?
More: the categorical imperative as universalizable is discordant with the Kantian rights of states, because these states, or nations, are groups. We cannot posit rights of no matter what kind of groups above the universalizable rights in their moral meaning. A proletarian taking over of power is not at all an instituting of the rights of a group over the rights of another one. Because the proletariat -- denoting the proletarian feature of all the working people of the world, their dependency on the private control of resources of the whole world -- is universal: not in the simple sense that it is a world class, but in the substantive sense that its purpose is universal, the abolition of the private property and the establishment of the public control of resources and social objectives worldwide.
In this respect, Marx's internationalism is pendant with the categorical imperative: it is the political imperative corresponding to the moral one. All the humans of the world are each other's ends if and only if they get rid of the internal and international structural relations which determine them to consider each other only as means. Differently put, if and only if they construct internal and international structural relations which allow their real social equality and fuel their active involvement in the control of resources and social goals. On this basis, the humans have the freedom to act according to their thoughts as aspirations to manifest the unique creative power of everyone. On this basis, all the interhuman relationships and feelings can evolve in their complexity marked by the good-evil couple of values which, however, are hindered by the profound restraint to not treat the others only as means. Anyway, universalism is learned, the closing in groups stops it.
The Marxist universals -- thus, not only the Marxian (that is, created by Marx and Engels) but those created in his/their wake -- do not annul the pluralism of cultures. Actually, just this pluralism and its necessity depend on these universals. Can we conceive the development of the specific culture of every people in the world, and of every human being, without the abolition of the private property, the emancipation of the peoples of colonies and semi-colonies, the rejection of the principle of "chosen" groups and their "historical" "justification", as well as "social" justification, and without expanding social rights on the basis of large social expenditures of the state? Can we consider historical facts and myths as more important than the categorical imperative?
(20) The practical relations of Kant and of Marx
Kant described the practical relations, morally regulated, as political and juridical relations.
Marx demonstrated that the practical relations are, first of all and obviously through the attitudes of people which are moral in their essence [i], economic. By analysing the modern market economy -- i.e.,
- economy based on private property and not on "possession of the rich" or of an abstract citizen preaching the private acquisition as a natural right;
- goal/law of maximisation of the private profit;
- competition between the private property holders and structures, and thus, competition between the wage earners also;
- domination and exploitation of the world by the states representing the most powerful and advanced private property structures, or modern colonialism (later on called imperialism, or Centre-Periphery domination) --
Marx did not consider it as a deviation from the "former" societies of "society's control of economy" [j]. And neither did he assess capitalism as a good social arrangement as such, better than the former systems, as Polanyi believed that Marx would have thought in this way, but he stressed the historical role of the modern system:
- to develop the productive forces at a level not only superior to the former productive relations but also and thus at a level no longer supporting the capitalist productive relations, or at a level when the productive relations hinder the development of the productive forces,
- to globalise economy and civilisation as such -- by generalising worldwide the market economy, science, technology, and mass culture -- and thus to create the objective basis for a communist society.
And because that globalisation is a capitalist one, subordinated to the capitalist pursuing of private profit, it’s obvious that it develops in a contradictory and self-destructive way for both economy and society.
(21) Judging the mature capitalism and the socialist transition through Marx’s lenses
Capitalism separated economy from social arrangements and considered economy the domain where the rule is exclusively the private profit and that is regulated exclusively by its own rules. Even the social expenditures of the state were only the result of the internal class struggle and the international socialist practice – as in USSR and later, in the East European and Asian socialist countries – which it was afraid of and hated them, implementing the social expenditures only depending on the interests of private profit, achieved through international extortion and domestic expansion of consumption. Thus, the idea of self-regulating economy became the tenet of capitalism, even though the capitalist economy itself needed and needs the state intervention into economy, and even though “self-regulation” determined the attack on the substantive economy, by draining the investments toward the financial “Ponzi system” (this is the so-called financialisation). Financialisation itself is a removal of finance from the logic of substantive economy, determining also high financial imbalances (raise of debts etc.). Thus, that draining determines the weakening of the former developed substantive economies and accentuates the substantive imbalances of colonies which, after the formal de-colonisation, became “developing countries”. If, with the raise of capitalism, “a social dislocation of stupendous proportions" from the rural to the urban working poor’s exploitation took place, the globalisation of the socially deregulated economy led and leads to another, not amazing but epical dislocation on global scale.
More, capitalism subordinated society to this economy and transposed the capitalist market rules on the understanding and evaluation of intangible social values. In this society, the social rules are no longer regulative, thus neither for society nor for economy. So, condemning capitalism from an ethical standpoint – that of the precapitalist economies significantly based on reciprocity and symmetrical gains from exchange – is not efficient at all in order to explain why and how the capitalist rules have been generalised and are general. The fact that economy needs to be controlled by society is not spontaneously fulfilled by society. And the control by the state subordinated to the private profit does represent, although an alleviation of the condition of the many, only an instrument to help the development of capitalism as such.
For this reason, although the former USSR appeared in a backward country, and had to develop in the frame of a world capitalist market, in fact it and the other socialist countries were not “state capitalism”. Both USSR and the other socialist countries had to play internationally according to the capitalist market rules, while internally mixing this logic with the goal to develop an economy subordinated not only to the modernisation of economic structures – and this goal involved both market and non-market rules – but also to the implementation of socialist values, even in their communist meaning, and attitudes as mutual assessment of men according to their inherent human dignity and social equality: because “the condition of politics” assured this.
Because the legitimating values of the socialist system were not the sanctity of private property and the domination of the “fittest”, but just social justice and equality: this system was, indeed, the first phasis of the construction of the post-capitalist society, as Marx, from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to the Critique of the Gotha Program, showed. Simply, socialism. Not “state socialism”. Can we not see that the huge economic state interventionin the capitalist societies – including by sponsoring the culture and mass education – was and is not tantamount to “socialism”, just because of the values and ends of these different kinds of state interventionism? And can we not see that the capitalist state intervention did not solve the problem of meaningful lives of their population? Can a meaningful life be that of consumption and selfish “survival”?
The socialist values had both a socialist aspect – responding to the objective requirements of the construction of a new society within the old one – and a communist aspect: where equality meant – as in Kant – equality qua human being. Of course, we don’t have to and we don’t need to idealise the first socialist practical experience and, letting aside the concrete evolution of this experience, the mixing of values themselves in the real life. But just following the new legitimating values, the social justice was – and not as a desire or a prescription for the future – “an egalitarian politics in actu”. And the socialist politics was just this: with all its shortcomings. Therefore, the “condition” of a socialist politics reflected the Cartesian and Kantian equal endowment with reason of all the human beings.
In this, the socialist politics – substantiated by Marx – is both the surpassing of Kant’s image about the possibility of justice (as equal social rights) in a society based on capitalist political and juridical freedom of citizens, and the continuation of his moral requirements as the real foundation of politics and society. A very difficult continuation, because of the opposition of the capitalist forces worldwide through a model in which no one is responsible. And in which the “horror beyond description” (Mazin Qumsieh, http://www.defenddemocracy.press/please-end-extermination-campaign/) is covered by the consumption and spectacle annihilating the conscience of the real and fake privileged, and in which even Orwell’s “newspeak” is incredibly exceeded.
But Kant’s historical limits do not affect the value of the categorical imperative. On the contrary, they emphasise it.
(22) Kant’s categorical imperative as a call for Marx
However, this principle demands to be surpassed. In ethics, Kant made a revolution, but in morals Kant is only a call for Marx: for the real understanding of the value of every human being, an explicit theory of the concrete integral development of society is needed. Kant did not subordinate the multi dimensions of the humans to rationality (as his critics say), but he explained the cognitive basis of these dimensions and their moral basis. Marx is not superior to Kant because he considers all of these dimensions, but because he explains their interdependence and their dependence on the economic structural relations. And because his principles, conclusions of the fathoming of the real, highlight frames (“forms”) realised and fulfilled by all people and by all peoples. They give the contents of the regulative idea of communism, inventing also their forms. Essentially, these contents with forms cannot annul the Marxian paradigms because, indeed, “the content of every human act has to do, ultimately, with the production-reproduction of human life in community” [k].
But concretely, the real conditions determine the problems, their understanding and thus, the rhythms, the priorities, the scales, the phases, the means, the correlations between tactical movements and strategical tendencies, in a word, the methodology. For instance, according to the Marxian original theoretical demonstration, where the contradictions are sharper, there they are more acutely felt and thus, the revolution occurs. However, as it was shown by history, not this was the case, because the West is not only the “fatherland” of modernity and its development as the master of the world capitalism, but also its show-window, the welfare and the dominant ideology paid by the Western capitalism stopping the process of social awareness.
Therefore, not the sharper structural contradictions between the productive relations which are private, restrictive – requiring the socialisation of the means of production which are significantly socialised and global – and the productive forces, including science and technology, which are highly socialised and global, led to revolution, but on the contrary, the sharper principal contradictions between the colonised and semi-colonised peoples and the Western colonisers evolved in semi-peripheries and peripheries. But all of these contradictions intermingle. The more so because the Western capitalism is the mirror of the structural contradictions and their results: the level of scientific and technological discovery is huge and, at the same time, its application is perverted, the Western decision-makers generating war, famine and malnourishment, destruction, complex ecological crisis even to the point of no return, increase of irrational and absurd beliefs, ignorance, fear and reduction to “the struggle for survival”. Today, the world is confronted with the globalised capitalism in its neo-liberal and system crisis stage. It’s obvious that the difficulties are much bigger than a century ago. First of all, its hegemonic role on the conscience of the world proletarians is what must be defied. And in this process, Kant’s categorical imperative is a beacon.
(23) Kant and Marx confronting the necessity
Both Kant and Marx signalled the future, a society à venir, if we use Derrida’s expression for democracy. Both were moderately optimistic. But while Kant’s moral metaphysics can be seen by a common non-philosopher as an abstract desire, Marx’s theory is, indeed, the key for his active propensity: more than a hope, a practical method. That is only a sketch, continuously evolved in reality by all the humansà venir.
Kant’s moral categorical imperative signalled a new moment of the concept of necessity: to treat all the humans as ends, and not only as means is the sine qua non condition of the persistence of humanity. Marx’s principle of political revolution in order to destroy the cause of considering the humans as means and not as ends, was and is the sine qua non condition of the fulfilment of moral necessity. Kant gave the frame of necessity. Marx’s principle showed the possibility of the frame.
If so, “Marx” means not only the Marxian theoretical breakthrough but also and essentially the Marxist thinkers who pursued it: and first of all, Lenin, because he first put the principle of the communist revolution into practice, showing that it’s possible. The practical process emphasises another relation between the philosophical concepts of possibility and necessity: revealing that necessity requires a deviation from it, just in order to fulfil it. Necessity is strict, possibility is open, because otherwise the necessary frame cannot be accomplished. This is the originality of the creation of possibility: the Leninist and Stalinist “socialism in a country”, the Cuban “unique experiment in Latin America”, the Chinese, North Korean and North Vietnam “people’s republics”, the present “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, are the original creation of possibility. The realisation and sustainability of communism requires and implies the awareness of its necessity by the proletarians of the whole world. Possibility is positive [l], it shows how necessity is accomplished, despite all the obstacles, while the world proletarians are only in the negative phase where they do not yet criticise the dominant “use of reason” and accord with this use, seeing only that which is not but it is presented to them as knowledge: so, where they only learn to distinguish these.
This de-phasing/disjunction of phases between the negative that deprives possibility and the original struggle for necessity is the mark of our epoch. Theoretically, necessity makes, ultimately, the world. Practically, its process is open: even to its destruction, because of the destructions of so many lives. Theoretically, the human life is sacred, and this assumed principle by all is and leads to the moral principle of universalizability. This means, according to Kant, that not reason is specific to the human beings – there are other beings on the Earth also thinking – but the moral reason. And the moral reason is that which gives the unique specificity to all rational beings in the universe [m]. But in the practical surrounding us, we see that the human life is not sacred.
[a] Professor, Division of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Romanian Committee of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Romanian Academy.
[b] For the relations between Kant and Marx, see: Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism, Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1988, Butler University Books. 17; Howard Williams, “Karl Vorlaender’s Kantian Synthesis of Marx and Kant”, Kant Yearbook, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2021, pp. 129-152; discussing Hermann Cohen in the neo-Kantian Marburg School, Elisabeth Widmer, “‘Left-Kantianism’ and the ‘Scientific Dispute’ between Rudolf Stammler and Hermann Cohen”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, October 18, 2023.
[c] Karl Marx, “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” (1842), Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, Lawrence & Wishart, (1975), 2010 Electric Book, pp. 203-210 (here, p. 205, I underlined). (Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, I, pt. 1, 251-259).
[d] Ibidem (2010), p. 204.
[e] Ibidem (2010), p. 210.
[f] Ibidem, p. 206.
[g] See the analysis of the very young Marx’s analysis of jurisprudence, his starting point, Donald R. Kelley, “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 350-367.
[h] And the feelings – as suffering, first of all – also. Kant showed that, ultimately, the feelings have a basis and justification in thinking, in reason, and his goal was to formalise this rational basis. This basis was obvious for Marx, too. But his scope was to change the social settlements which generate cruelty and suffering. The feelings are individual and random. Can they justify our knowledge that involves and searches for the universal and the necessary? No, in order to arrive to the universal and the necessary, the conditions of feelings must be taken into account by cognition. Only analysing these conditions can we arrive to what is universal and necessary, thus objective knowledge. Just because the feelings reveal the mediated character of objectivity, Marx focused on the scientific decomposition of the social relations in their development.
[i] The attitudes are moral because they involve the consideration of both the subjects who think and act and the ones who are in any type of relations with the former, and the thoughts and actions as such, according to meanings beyond the strict and direct causality and efficiency, thus according to the telos asking what for those thoughts, actions, attitudes and relations. Thus, the moral characteristic doubles the practical character that consists just in the deployment of causal and efficiency evaluation of thoughts, actions, attitudes, relations, institutions, values. The moral evaluation according to the what for is practical, too, because it is the reason’s level of content, but it is special in that it is the background of human attitudes; however, its own deployment in the human mind takes place consciously and thus, it is not superposing exactly on the practical. The moral evaluation asks, imposes, requires, but if the social organisation imposes practical priorities which are not suitable with the “moral voice” of the conscience, it is silenced (postponed, perverted etc.). This splitting between moral and practice is a question of contents of the social ends, means, values, forms, and was emphasized by Marx.
The humans acquired the capabilities of moral evaluation as restraints. The restraints themselves have an instinctual basis of interdependence between humans and thus the restraint to kill other humans, etc. See Konrad, Lorenz, On Aggression (1963), Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.
[j] As Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, Beacon Press, 1944, considered. And as he thought that Marx would have thought this way.
[k] Enrique Dussel, “El reto actual de la ética: detener el proceso destructivo de la vida”, pp. 143-152, in Heinz Dieterich, Enrique Dussel, Raimundo Franco, Arno Peters, Carsten Stahmer, Hugo Zemelmann, Fin del Capitalismo Global. El Nuevo Proyecto Histόrico, Mexico, Txalaparta, 1999, p. 143.
[l] Kant pointed out positive means to apply knowledge into practice, “to extend the boundaries of sensibility… beyond everything, and so even to dislodge the use of pure (practical) reason”, while negative is to remain only within the boundaries of theoretical knowledge, or of sensibility, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the second edition, Bxxiv, p. 114.
[m] For this reason, the contemporary dominant ideology spreading fear of “aliens invading the Earth” is ridiculous: can we imagine extraterrestrial civilisations able to undertake trips inter galaxies but devoid of “the moral law within” every individual being constituting these civilisations? Since the moral law raises just “the worth as an intelligence” made by everyone’s pursuit of the reason-to-be of intelligence as such, thus by everyone’s pursuit of the common good of all moral beings in the universe, can we imagine the extraterrestrial civilisations as alike the capitalist logic of survival of the “fittest”, meaning strongest? Do we not rather understand that the fear of aliens is the transfer from the homo homini lupus relations in order to divert the general attention just from these relations? The quotes from Kant are from Critique of Practical Reason (AA 5: 162), p. 129.
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