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Anonymous Fri Jun 3 18:17:02 2022 No.20467991 [Reply] [Original]

I was educated in the history of philosophy, broadly speaking classical Western—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Searle, Rawls, Nagel, Russell, Nozick, Parfit, with some detours into Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.
We never studied Marx, however, and my understanding of political philosophy came from the metaphysical-distributive mode.
I’ve recently been getting into Marx, and what is shocking to me is that I can’t seem to reconcile just what he is. Sometimes I feel like an entire world was ignored by Philosophy, and that to understand Marx means basically throwing out large swaths of the history of philosophy—that Marx basically operates in a way similar to Kant in that he shows how experience is mediated; unlike Kant, he thinks it’s mediated by the capitalist system, which creates a worldview. It’s here where I get troubled, because it implies that idealist philosophy generally—from Kant to Rawls and on—is starting from the flawed premise, perhaps akin to the Heidegger idea of being “thrown” into an already existing state of affairs.
I guess what it’s showing in a sense is not just that two economic systems are opposed—socialist and capitalist—and also not just that one favors individuals and one favors groups, but that one actually engineers the way thought is generated. To be blunt, it makes me wonder if all that philosophy I studied was actually fruit from a poison tree.
This is such a large question—it’s hard to wrap your mind around it, because it entails the very possibility of objectivity (can you abstract your subjectivity with some tool to arrive at an objective understanding), but on the one hand it seems very simplistic—how can Marx be correct when he’s not really dealing with things like moral luck, is/ought, personal identity, justified true belief—he seems almost basic; but on the other hand, when Marxism makes sense, it suggests that a lot of that philosophy is just a mistake. I haven’t felt quite this shaken since I really “got” Aristotle once or twice, or when I “understood” Pragmatism (including its contradictions).
I’m kind of at sea a bit here—I’m immersing myself in Marx and Chomsky and Bakunin and Murray Bookchin to help understand where I am exactly—but has anyone else had this sort of experience? Is this a common step? I always used to feel like Rawls was the be-all of political philosophy, and that his communitarian critics were just goodie goodies, but now I’m almost feeling like all of that work was elaborate justifications of the “thrownness,” and that Marx has made it all seem almost trivial.

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