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Christianity and Marxism
A Philosophical Contribution to their Reconciliation
Andrew Collier
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Christianity and Marxism
A Philosophical Contribution to their Reconciliation
Andrew Collier
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Andrew Collier analyses recent cooperation between Christianity and Marxism after earlier years of antagonism. He first discusses the nature of Christianity and Marxism and their place amongst contemporary world views, before looking at areas of apparent conflict and possible reconciliation. This groundbreaking work will be of interest to those involved in philosophy, theology, politics and Marxism.
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1 On philosophy and world views
The aim of this book is to make clear the philosophical relations between the Christian and Marxist world outlooks, with a view to showing to what extent they can be reconciled. At the present time, indeed, Marxism and Christianity do not look like the two leading contenders for dominant world view, at least in Europe and North America. The other two world views that I shall describe shortly - liberalism and neo-paganism - are both more fashionable. But fashion is no guide to truth, and anyway there are large parts of the Third World' where Christianity and Marxism are very much alive and kicking. And one thing both views have in common is the belief that having a large share of this world's goods is not conducive to insight into truth!
But here a question arises, with which the argument of this book begins: whatever points of contact and dialogue there may be between Christianity and Marxism, they are not usually on philosophical ground. And when they are, it is usually the wrong sort of Christianity which meets the wrong sort of Marxism on the ground of the wrong sort of philosophy. A Pelagian Christianity1 can meet a Feuerbachian Marxism on the ground of an anthropocentric philosophy, and confirm each other in their humanist errors. But I want to make Lenin and Althusser meet Augustine and Luther!
First, I shall say some general things about philosophy and world views, most of which will need filling out and justifying later in the book.
I
Marxist philosophy, or at least that tradition of it in which I have worked, denies that philosophy has any special method (though there may be styles of argument that are more often met with in philosophy than elsewhere), or that it has access to any special body of truths. This conception contrasts with that of modern (as opposed to ârecentâ) philosophy, i.e. with the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of those who have continued those traditions. Those philosophies are now commonly called âfoundationalistâ: they believe that knowledge has foundations, i.e. that certain parts of knowledge, acquired by specific methods, are indubitable, and form the basis of all knowledge. Cartesian rationalism with its attempt to deduce knowledge from indubitable axioms like geometry, empiricism with its âincorrigibleâ sense data, Kant's synthetic a priori, are all versions of this. But much recent philosophy is a mirror image of this foundationalism, and shares its failings: it does not claim to deal in indubitable truths, but it does claim to expose indubitable falsehoods, i.e. to show that much that others have thought true is not (or not just) false, but meaningless, nonsense. Philosophy ceases to be about truth and falsity and becomes about sense and nonsense. The contradictory to a piece of ânonsenseâ is treated as having the same certainty as Cartesian âclear and distinct ideasâ or phenomenalist sense datum statements were supposed to have.
Marxist philosophy at its best has resisted both foundationalism and ânegative foundationalismâ. It is not about sense and nonsense, nor yet about certainty and dubitability, but about truth and falsity. How then does it differ from non-philosophical areas of knowledge? Simply in that it has no special means of verifying or falsifying its ideas, such as experiments, or mathematical proofs. Its premisses are the results, explicit or implicit, of other practices. They are beliefs that we have good grounds for holding (grounds provided by other disciplines, or simply by everyday activities). But they give rise to philosophical problems because they contradict. If well-founded beliefs never contradicted each other, there would be no need for philosophy. Philosophy may reconcile apparent contradictions, or expose contradictions where there was apparent consistency. But either way, contradictions are its stock in trade. I don't mean âdialectical contradictionsâ in the technical sense that this concept has in Marxism (of which more later). I mean logical inconsistencies; pairs or groups of beliefs which cannot both or all be true. Philosophy in this sense can be called âdialecticâ in the older sense of the word.
Philosophy is a rational activity; its concern is for truth; that is why it seeks to expose contradictions if they were there but unrecognised, to reconcile them if they can be reconciled, to present them as stark âeither-orsâ if they cannot. For the objection (the only objection) to contradictory beliefs is that they cannot both be true. This is an entirely open conception of philosophy in that philosophy can take its premisses from anywhere, and is not tied to any particular method. It is not forbidden to talk about the vague or the dubious, the empirical or the non-empirical. But it is open, too, to the possibility that certain propositions may be discovered to be true or false.
Now let us consider the relation between philosophy and religious belief. Thomas Aquinas thought that a good many religious beliefs (e.g. the existence of God) could be proved philosophically. Others, though not contrary to reason, had to be accepted on authority (e.g. the Incarnation). Hence there was an overlap between philosophy and theology, ânatural theologyâ, alongside revealed truths. The tendency of his nominalist critics was to deny the existence of natural theology, which is so far quite correct, since no body of specifically philosophical truths exists, whether sacred or secular. But the tendency of nominalism was also to exclude reason from the domain of revealed theology. This was a disaster. All knowledge, ânaturalâ or ârevealedâ, is derived from a mixture of authority (i.e. reliable hearsay) and experience; and it is all open to criticism at the bar of reason. There is no epistemological ground whatsoever for any segregation of knowledge into a natural and a revealed sector. Scientific knowledge, religious knowledge, âgeneral knowledgeâ - they are all mostly hearsay, partly verified by experiences that are themselves conditioned by hearsay, which they presuppose. And in all cases it is possible to criticise received opinion rationally, raising the issues of the reliability of sources of the hearsay, its compatibility with other well-founded beliefs, and so on. This is what is called âthinkingâ, and the attempt to do it rigorously about things that matter is philosophy.
Does this mean that the distinction between philosophy and theology breaks down? It certainly means that the common habit of distinguishing âpurely philosophicalâ from âtheologicalâ arguments or grounds for beliefs is mistaken (as also are similar distinctions between other disciplines and philosophy). This habit of segregating the philosophical from the theological would only be justified given either a foundationalist conception of philosophy or an irrationalist conception of theology. The former relegates religious beliefs to theology if they cannot be deduced from supposedly certain premisses, derived from pure reason; the latter herds them into a reason-free reservation.
Historically, it can be said that if the Reformation and the Enlightenment had been combined in the right way, matters could have been set to rights: the reformers, especially Luther, recognised that the set of religious statements derivable without revelation was empty; the enlighteners refused to limit the scope of reason; both were right. But unfortunately the reformers sometimes took the non-ânaturalâ character of theology to be equivalent to its non-rational character; and the enlighteners tended to be foundationalists who regarded religious (like other) beliefs as only rational if they could be derived from the supposed foundations of knowledge. âReligion within the limits of pure reasonâ and religion off-limits to reason are the twin monsters resulting from these errors - both positions far inferior to scholasticism. Yet their roots are in scholasticism; to get back to a dialectical conception of Christian philosophy we would have to go as far back as Abelard (though Aquinas often practised dialectic admirably).
It is not my intention at this stage to examine the epistemological status of religious belief. My intention in this discussion is only to show what the business of philosophy is here: namely, I think that there are good reasons for holding many Christian beliefs and many Marxist beliefs; some of these seem to contradict each other; what are we to say about them?
II
At this point it may be useful to make a few comments on the sociological character of the main periods into which the history of European philosophy falls. Marxism has often studied the history of philosophy sociologically, and indeed is often accused, and occasionally guilty, of reducing philosophies to their class determinants. But the way philosophy is organised and its relation to the social structure of the time does profoundly affect the way in which philosophy is practised, and this in turn has effects on the content of its findings. European philosophy can be divided into four main epochs, âmodes of philosophical productionâ. From a Christian point of view, the chief outcome of their sociological characterisation is to show in each case the form in which the philosophers of an epoch are most vulnerable to the sin of pride.
In the first period, ancient Greek philosophy and its hellenistic successors, philosophers were for the most part organised in schools, in the double sense of institutions of learning and philosophical sects - the Academy, the Stoa and so on. Increasingly, these became educated substitutes for religious cults. Their characteristic form of pride (most notably among the Platonists) was the pride of the aristocrat in a slave society, pride in freedom from manual work, hence devotion to contemplation. This affected both their metaphysics (it underlies Platonic dualism, of which all succeeding dualisms were inheritors) and their ethics, with its preference for contemplation over action.
In the medieval period the monasteries or orders of friars were the loci of the most important philosophy. The ancient pride in contemplation was partly transformed into pride in the celibate religious life. Luther's strictures on the scholastic philosophers may have been unfair so far as their philosophical worth is concerned (they were certainly closer to the truth than their Renaissance or Cartesian successors), but he was not wrong about the temptations specific to monasticism, the proud belief in the superiority of those who rejected God's earthly gifts over those who received them gladly. And this did leave its mark on scholastic ethics. It is also worth mentioning that the extreme longwindedness of medieval philosophical writing, which perhaps more than anything else led to the later neglect of its study, was surely only possible for philosophers holding privileged positions in a celibate community.
The third period is the Enlightenment in the broad sense, from Bacon and Descartes down to Kant and Mill. The great philosophers of this period were for the most part not professional philosophers or members of any philosophical community, but loners, teaching through their writings and not in the classroom, and supporting themselves by other forms of work, whether as Lord Chancellor (Bacon) or lens-grinder (Spinoza), courtier (Leibniz) or East India Company employee (J.S. Mill). Correspondingly, their form of pride is a characteristically bourgeois belief in their autonomy, in the presuppositionless originality of their thought, owing nothing to authority. Like some ancient philosophers they tended to see their findings as in some sense essential to the salvation of humankind; the medieval philosophers of course had no such pretensions: salvation was the business of the church, philosophers were at best servants of the church, which could quite well save souls without them.
The fourth period, starting about the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany and towards the end of it in England, is the period of academic philosophy. Most philosophical writers in this period have held university posts and their form of pride has been a characteristically academic one, which is in turn an instance of craft pride: overvaluation of one's professional skills and contempt for those who do not possess them.
During this period, the special case of Marxist philosophy deserves separate mention. Until the second half of the twentieth century, Marxist philosophy was mostly practised outside the academy, and shared some of the features of each of the second and third periods: Marx and Engels themselves, Plekhanov, Gramsci, Cornforth were part âenlightenersâ working on their own, part servants of their parties. These features have been partly but not wholly lost since Marxist philosophy has become primarily an academic affair; the task of contributing to the conversion of the public at large, not just reproducing certain professional skills, has never been entirely abandoned.
It is perhaps a heritage of the third (Enlightenment) period in modern academic philosophy that both the Christian philosophy of the second period and Marxist philosophy are sometimes treated as not real philosophy; they are said to be âdogmaticâ rather than âcriticalâ. The truth behind this is that in the first place they do not expect salvation from philosophy as such; they only expect that philosophy can be of service to a way of salvation that it did not create. And correspondingly, at the epistemological level, they do not try to generate a body of knowledge out of philosophy's own resources, but rather apply rational criticism to ideas received from other sources. For this reason, Christian and Marxist philosophies alike have been less prone to foundationalism than other philosophies (though not exempt from it; we have seen that Thomas Aquinas's conception of philosophical knowledge is a foundationalist one, though his practice of philosophy - with its critical discussion of contending authorities - is less marked by foundationalism than is that of the Enlightenment). The standpoint from which these âcommittedâ philosophies appear âdogmaticâ is only the âEnlightenmentâ pride in the illusion of owing nothing to anyone for one's ideas. If dogmatism means the inability to understand objections to one's own point of view, or the refusal to give rational grounds for that point of view, then any unbiased reader would surely recognise a greater freedom from dogmatism in Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis, or in Engels and Althusser, than in Descartes or Kant, Locke or Wittgenstein. The claim to be âmen of reasonâ (or occasionally âwomen of reasonâ), owning no authority, and hence âsecularâ has been worn proudly by philosophers of the third, and to a degree of the first and fourth periods, as a badge signifying that the wearer is a critical thinker; but critical thought is proved by the way one reasons, not by the badges one wears.
III
In the remainder of this chapter I shall first of all set out the standpoints of Christianity, Marxism and two rival world views (which I call âliberalismâ and âneo-paganismâ) on several crucial issues, in order to highlight the degree of common ground which exists between Christianity and Marxism in relation to these alternatives. I shall then list four ways in which Christianity and Marxism seem to be diametrically opposed. In the remainder of the book I will be exploring these matters more thoroughly. I shall consider the four world views on the issues of our relation to nature and to each other, the place of reason in human life, and the account of the avoidable evil in the world.
In referring to world views, I am not talking about systems in the sense of unified theories of everything. It is the nature of human knowledge to be fragmented - because we are finite, because nature is split into distinct levels which require diverse kinds of study to uncover them, and (from a Christian point of view) because we are fallen creatures, whose fall has caused cognitive blind spots as well as other ills. This not only precludes âtotal systemsâ of the rationalist, idealist...