this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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No, I mean rigour in the sense of being free from given assumptions, allowing reason to be fully self-grounding; this is the only possibility for philosophical science, as soon as you proclaim that reason is unavoidably conditioned by some given (as Marx does in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital), you rule out the possibility of philosophical science and condemn philosophy to opinion. [explained further in lecture 1 here]
You can’t do philosophy in this way for the reason above and because you cannot derive from “material experience” that reason is conditioned by material experience, this is why empiricism isn’t philosophy.
The notion of a philosophy of praxis violates what (scientific) philosophy (described above) is, Hegel goes over this in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Maker also does so in ch. 8 of Philosophy Without Foundations but you have to take that with a grain of salt due to the non-metaphysical reading (and also some "doctrine of 'whatever'"-ism (Yibing, Back to Marx, p. xxi), but that doesn't matter for the argument).
Because the objective historical inversion where dead labor rules over the living is the process by which the proletariat (a class of propertyless laborers) comes into being and becomes the absolute majority (“For [alienation] to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless’, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture” (The German Ideology)). The degree to which alienation is felt/is is the degree to which a greater and greater amt of the population is rendered propertyless “cogs” in service of capital.
For Marx, it’s the feeling which drives the proletariat to action, but it’s a feeling of “the objective conditions,” which also provide the proletariat with “revolutionary potential” in terms of making communism objectively possible (“material basis”).
I think it's important to emphasize the feelings side because, despite some things Marx and Engels have said (see "Four Letters by Engels on Historical Materialism"), within Marxism communism is not an inevitability mechanically resulting from the economic conditions of developed capitalism, the proletariat still must actualize their revolutionary potential to take hold of the immanent negativity within capitalism (i.e. there is a "subjective dimension").
I also think you perfectly highlighted, in your two quotes, the difference that I've been arguing exists. The quote from Capital is much less 'philosophical' but more scientific than that from TGI.
I agree that there is some subjective feeling needed to set people into action, you will never see me arguing against that. It's about the scientificity of that claim when argued in TGU vs later in e.g. Capital
Ah you're a philosopher. I've studied Hegel too, I disagree entirely about the basis of what a science is. Chemistry is based on assumptions about the material world but is much more rigorous in scientific terms than Hegels science of logic, in the view I'm speaking of. And to be clear, I am a Hegel enthusiast, I find his works admirable and with kernels of amazing conclusions growing everywhere and explicated everywhere, too. But I think it's a doomed effort to created assumptionless science. It's fun to think about, but I'm talking about how to change the world
Agree to disagree, I already said what I had to say on this.