Thursday, January 31, 2019

Interpretation, Change, Change For the Better

Previously discussed have been two problems with Marx's contrast of Philosophy that interprets the world vs. Philosophy that changes the world--that it does not distinguish between the natural world and the human world, and that interpretation is a kind of change.  A third problem is that he ignores two further fields of significant Philosophical work--interpreting human behavior and changing human behavior, aka Psychology and Ethics.  Perhaps he implicitly includes those in 'the world', not only as a convenient generalization, but because he conceives human behavior as a product of circumstances, and, hence, as sufficiently represented in the concept of 'world'.  However, that explanation hardly accounts for the human agency that is at the foundation of the Marxist analysis of the human world--Labor, or, indeed, the human agency that is the addressee of "change the world".  In any case, the Psychology-Ethics relation sharpens the distinction that he is trying to draw, systematizes it, and implies an application of it beyond the scope of Feuerbach's work.  In the context of the Psychology-Ethics relation, the Interpretation vs. Change contrast is more immediately formulated as that between Description and Prescription.  Thus, because an Ethical prescription entails an evaluation of an object of Psychological description, the two are systematically related. So, the insistence of Mill and others that their Philosophical work is Descriptive not Prescriptive, even Ethics, doctrines such as Utilitarianism present Marx with targets that are more significant than Feuerbach's work, because recognizable from his perspective as reactionary, even if associated with 'progressive' aims, e. g. Mill's elevation of the Common Good above mere reduction to the sum of Selfish satisfactions.  So, the Psychology-Ethics contrast illuminates a fourth problem with Marx's formulation: "change" would be more accurately expressed as "change for the better".

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