Materialism, Theory, Practice

Kant's discovery of Reason as primarily Practical signals not merely a re-interpretation of one and the same power, but a profound transition in its object as well--from Homo Sapiens to Homo Faber, i. e. from passive contemplator to self-determining maker. The maturation has been since reflected in not only the emergence of Pragmatism, but in the Epistemological theories of Bergson and Heidegger, for whom cognition is essentially purposeful, i. e. 'ready-to-hand', rather than observational, i. e. 'present-at-hand', in the terminology of Being and Time. Marx's thesis that humans are constantly remaking themselves as they remake the world, and the classification of Land as primarily a moment in the productive process, place him squarely in that tradition. Thus, his declared inversion of Hegel, from Dialectical Idealism to Dialectical Materialism, is, more profoundly, a maturation from Theoretical Dialectics to Practical Dialectics.