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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Ludwig Feuerbach

Hegel after Hegel (I)

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, Communism, G.W.F. Hegel, identity, James Doull, Karl Marx, Ken Wilber, Ludwig Feuerbach, war

I’ve been spending some time lately with James Doull‘s last essay, “Hegel’s Phenomenology and post-modern thought”, and also with his closely related address on “Heidegger and the state”. (Both are in Philosophy and Freedom, the only published book of Doull’s writings.) Doull’s project in the Hegel essay is in a sense meta-Hegelian: to situate Hegel‘s thought in a philosophical history, as Hegel himself would do with the thinkers before him.

So the first parts of the essay tell the story of premodern and modern Western thought as it leads up to Hegel – a fine exegesis. But it’s the latter part of the essay that gets really interesting. For of course the history of philosophy went on after Hegel – and how should a Hegelian deal with that? Continue reading →

Marx on religion and suffering

10 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Flourishing, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Politics, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

20th century, Aśvaghoṣa, Christopher Hitchens, Communism, drugs, Friedrich Engels, Geoff Waite, Joseph Martin, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Mao Zedong, Pali suttas, religion, Richard Dawkins, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Terry Eagleton

Skholiast’s blog pointed me to an excellent review of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on “religion.” (The author goes by “pomonomo2003” in his review; his own very interesting website reveals his name to be Joseph Martin.) The topic is notable today, at a time when the militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grab the headlines – and those whom one might expect to be their staunchest allies, Marxists like Terry Eagleton, have instead been among their sharpest critics.

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite‘s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. Continue reading →

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