Naturalism Most Marxian\'s, in Addition

Naturalism

Most Marxian's, in addition to seeing Marxianism as an emancipator social theory, have also seen it as a worldview. Moreover, they have attached considerable importance to it being a coherent and rationally sustainable worldview. As Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty took philosophers to be doing, and legitimately so, Marxians as well want to see how things hang together in the broadest and most inclusive sense of that term. They want to establish, in doing this, that talk of a Spiritual or Supernatural World is nonsense, or at least a mistake, and, as Marx put it grandly, to establish "the truth of this world" (Rorty, 1976). Some of them were what we now call historicists (Gramsci most clearly), but none of them, not even Otto Neurath, were relativists, skeptics, or what some now call postmodernists, who think that there is no truth of this world, or of any world, to be established. They might, if they could have studied Quine and Davidson, and could have read their Putnam and Rorty, have come to be convinced that there is and can be no one uniquely true description of the world.

But that would not lead them to relativism or skepticism or to a Mannheimanish sociology of knowledge-orientation anymore than Quine, Davidson, Putnam, and Rorty are so inclined or so entrapped (so conceptually imprisoned). It is one thing to say that there is no uniquely true description of the world and it is another thing again to say that there are no true accounts of what goes on in the world that can be warranted. Science, including social science, and careful commonsense description-aware of ideological snares -- will give us knowledge, much of which is cumulative, and an increasingly more adequate grip on the world (including the social world) (Nielsen, 1971). While remaining, as were Marx and Engels, resolutely anti-metaphysical, Marxians thought, and contemporary ones continue to think, that we can gain an increasingly more adequate thoroughly naturalistic world outlook (Sellars, 1967). But this excluded religion as a source of truth and required us (a) to regard it as a cluster of human projections and (b) to treat it as a mystifying ideology, though some thought, in certain circumstances, as with Munzer, as, all the same, and (a) and (b) notwithstanding, a useful instrument (mythical as it is) to use in achieving emancipation. but, more typically, as we have seen, it functions as an instrument for conservatism: an instrument for sustaining the hegemony of the ruling classes, impeding the coming into existence of a genuinely democratic society, where we would live in a world of equals.

However, could we not reject the Marxian naturalistic worldview while still accepting what I have called the canonical parts of Marxianism, i.e., the emancipator social science or critical theory perspective that arguably really turns the machinery, if anything does, on the theoretical side of the struggle for socialism and a classless exploitation-free society? 19 the answer is yes: a Christian or a Jew or a Moslem could consistently reject such a naturalistic worldview while wholeheartedly accepting the canonical parts of Marxianism. Would it not, however, be a reasonable thing -- or perhaps even the most reasonable thing -- to stick with the naturalism and the canonical parts of Marxianism? That, I believe, depends on your estimate of the intellectual strength of naturalism. if, on the one hand, you think, as Marx and Engels evidently do, that a materialistic or naturalistic anti-metaphysics on the Holbach-Hobbes Hume-Bayle continuum has plainly and unassailably, or even with just a considerable degree of plausibility, established a naturalistic view of the world, then you will conclude that building anything on the mere fact that canonical Marxianism and some forms of Christianity are not logically incompatible is not a reasonable thing to do (Allen, 1993). if, on the other hand, you think that naturalism is a mistaken, problematic, or at least a rationally unmotivated, worldview, indeed perhaps even itself an unwitting metaphysics, revealing more about our Weltgeist than anything else, then you will not, or at least should not, think that that is so. You may be more hospitable to a Christian-Marxian possibility.

The reason that this is the way that things stand in Marxian discussions of such issues, and that there is little argument for naturalism in Marxianism, is that Marxians, like George Santayana, who, politically speaking, was very conservative, just take it as obvious that physicalism and atheism are true (Nielsen, 1971). I think this is so too, but I realize that a good number of knowledgeable people do not, so I have in my writing about religion, my Marxianism notwithstanding, argued for naturalism. If one does not, one just side-steps argument and discussion with theists or Wittgensteinian fideists. That, for good or for ill, is where it is at in "the philosophy of religion game." I wish the philosophy of religion game would wither away (Allen, 1993). It seems to me to pose no intellectually challenging problems, but that notwithstanding, I like Gramsci and Durkheim, I think religion is a very important cultural phenomena indeed. Religion is not just superstition or just a bunch of intellectual blunders or cognitive mistakes. I agree with Marx Wartofsky's remarks, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that an adequate materialist conception of religion could not so treat religion. but, as Wartofsky does too, I wish we would come to look at religion in good Durkheimian fashion as just an important cultural phenomena and orient ourselves, and orient our understanding of the world and our struggles in the world, in accordance with that perception. but, alas, we cannot just start there, if we wish to engage in the deliberations about religion going on in our society.