- J. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, tr. by Moore and Aveling (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), pp. 17–18.
- Ibid., p. 19.
- Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks in Selsam and Martel eds., Reader in Marxist Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 341.
- “Letter to Joseph Bloch,” in L. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 398–400.
- In L. Easton and K. Guddat, eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 402.
- Ibid., p. 415.
- In Law, Reason, and Justice: Essays in Legal Philosophy, ed. by G. Hughes (New York: New York University Press, 1969), pp. 137–167.
- Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Easton and Guddat eds., op. cit., pp. 408–409.
- Although my primary aim here has been to suggest a road to rapprochement between Marxism and phenomenology that owes little to other current writers on the subject, I think it appropriate for me to refer briefly to one major systematic effort at effecting such a rapprochement, Enzo Paci's The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, which is being so widely discussed at present because of the recent appearance of its English translation (by J. E. Hansen and P. Piccone—Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Paci particularly stresses the importance of Husserl's late work, The Crisis, because of its focus on the central Marxian problem of history. I am most sympathetic to two aspects of Paci's work: his emphasis on the concept of the Lebenswelt, and his development of commonalities between Husserl and Marx around the theme of the need for “disocclusion”, or demystification of our thought about the everyday world in which we live. But, in considering more closely this second point of Pad's, I already find certain basic difficulties with his approach. The goals of Marxian and Husserlian procedures of demystification—the “essence” of an historically transient mode of production, capitalism, in the one case, and eternal eidea in the other—do not seem to me to be of the same sort. Paci makes much of the notion of philosophia perennis; this notion strikes me as being assimilable to Marxist thought only with the greatest difficulty. He goes further: philosophy, he says “is transcendental because within me there is the cosmos (Weltall).” (p. 238) It seems clear to me that, if one accepts Marx's thesis that our world is still a world of class-conflict, then no single human being could possibly have the Weltall within himself or herself. In my opinion, Paci also errs when he speaks of the existence of a “secret religiosity” in Marxism (p. 345), and he worries too little about either the concept of fundamental (revolutionary) social change or the problem of the relationship between theory and practice in Marx. In short, I find that Paci works a bit too hard at “fixing up”, so to speak, both Husserl and Marx, so that their philosophies may together appear to constitute a nearly seamless web; this is neither necessary nor useful.
- But it would be wrong to discount the value of Paci's contribution to contemporary philosophy. This point is well made in an excellent article by Fred R. Dallmayr, “Phenomenology and Marxism: A Salute to Enzo Paci,” which appears in an anthology entitled Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications (ed. by G. Psathas; New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973, pp. 305–356). Dallmayr shares many of my misgivings about Paci's Husserlian Marxism, but remains convinced of the positive importance of his effort. The same cannot be said of Efraim Shmueli, who, in a recent article in this journal (“Pragmatic, Existentialist and Phenomenological Interpretations of Marxism”, JBSP 4, 2, May 1973, p. 139–152), refers briefly to Paci as one of those Italian phenomenologists, along with Pier A. Rovatti and Paci's Italo-American translator, Paul Piccone, who are attempting an impossible assimilation. (Shmueli's article was apparently written before the publication of the English translation of Paci's book and makes no direct reference to the Italian text.) My fundamental disagreement with Shmueli should by now have become clear, although along the way he provides many valuable cautionary considerations concerning the project of bringing Marxism and phenomenology into relationship with one another.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
Volume 6, 1975 - Issue 1