These statements concerning ethics and socialist pedagogy having been explained, someone might yet ask:—But what was the philosophical opinion of Marx and Engels in regard to morality? Were they relativists, utilitarians, hedonists, or idealists, absolutists, or what else?
I may be allowed to point out that this question is of no great importance, and is even somewhat inopportune, since neither Marx nor Engels were philosophers of ethics, nor bestowed much of their vigorous ability on such questions. It is indeed of consequence to determine that their conclusions in regard to the function of morality in social movements and to the method for the education of the proletariat, contain no contradiction of general ethical principles, even if here and there they clash with the prejudices of current pseudo-morality. Their personal opinions upon the principles of ethics did not take an elaborate scientific form in their books; and some wit and some sarcasm are not adequate grounds upon which to base a discussion of the subject.
And I will say yet more; in ethical matters, I have not yet succeeded in freeing myself from the prison of the Kantian Critique, and do not yet see the position taken up by Kant surpassed; on the contrary, I see it strengthened by some of the most modern tendencies, and to me the way in which Engels attacks Dühring with regard to the principles of morality in his well-known book, does not in truth appear very exhaustive.[70] Here again the procedure is repeated which we have already criticised in connection with the discussions upon the general concept of value. Where Dühring, owing to the exigencies of scientific abstraction, takes for consideration the isolated individual and explicitly states that he is dealing with an abstract illustration (Denkschema), Engels remarks, wittily but erroneously—that the isolated man is nothing but a new edition of the first Adam in the Garden of Eden. It is true that in that criticism are contained many well-directed blows; and it might even be called just, if it refers only to ethical conceptions in the sense of assemblages of special rules and moral judgments, relative to definite social situations, which assemblages and constructions cannot claim absolute truth for all times, and all places, precisely because they are always made for particular times and particular places. But apart from these special constructions, analysis offers us the essential and ruling principles of morality, which give opportunity for questions which may, truly, be differently answered, but which most certainly are not taken into account by Marx and Engels. And, in truth, even if some may be able to write on the theory of knowledge according to Marx,[71] to write on the principles of ethics according to Marx seems to me a somewhat hopeless undertaking.
VI
CONCLUSION
Recapitulation: 1. Justification of Marxian economics as comparative sociological economics: 2. Historical materialism simply a canon of historical interpretation: 3. Marxian social programme not a pure science: 4. Marxism neither intrinsically moral nor antimoral.
The preceding remarks are partly attempts at interpretation, and partly critical emendations of some of the concepts and opinions expressed by Marx and in the Marxian literature. But how many other points deserve to undergo revision! Beginning with that concentration of private property in a few hands, which threatens to become something like the discredited iron law of wages, and ending with that strange statement in the history of philosophy that the labour movement is the heir of German classical philosophy. And attention could thus be given to another group of questions which we have not discussed (e.g. to the conception of future society) in regard to their detailed elucidation and their practical and historical applications.[72] If that decomposition of Marxism, which some have predicted,[73] meant a careful critical revision, it would indeed be welcome.
To sum up, in the meantime, the chief results which are suggested in the preceding remarks: they maintain.
1. In regard to economic science, the justification of Marxian economics, understood not as general economic science, but as comparative sociological economics, which is concerned with a problem of primary interest for historical and social life.
2. In regard to the philosophy of history, the purification of historical materialism from all traces of any a priori standpoint (whether inherited from Hegelianism or an infection from ordinary evolutionism) and the understanding of the theory as a simple, albeit a fruitful, canon of historical interpretation.