Karl Marx's Capital

Autorentext

Immanuel Kant ( 22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804) was an influential German philosopher[23] in the Age of Enlightenment. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time, and causation are mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature is unknowable.[24][25] In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience sharing certain structural features. In one of his major works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; second edition 1787),[26] he drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is therefore independent from objective reality.[b]
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists,[28] and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.[29]
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation. He believed that this would be the eventual outcome of universal history, although it is not rationally planned.[30] The nature of Kant's religious ideas continues to be the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological argument for God, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise",[31] and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood"[32] and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith

Klappentext

This small book is intended, as were the lectures in which it first took form, to be an introduction to the study of Marxs Capital. It is not meant to be a substitute for such study. It is the fate of all great books tp get bcdleA-down and served up cold in text-books, which purport to tell exactly what the great book comes to, as though a mans conclusions were worth very much apart from the way in which he arrived at them. We must all have had the experience, after reading even appreciative books about great authors, of going back to the authors themselves and finding how much more there is in them than their commentators lead us to expect. Marxs Capital is obviously a book of historical importance, and any one who reads it impartially will find it greater and far more illuminating than most critics of Marx would like us, or most Marxian writers allow us to believe. There are two ways in which it is indefensible to treat a great book, ways which seem nevertheless to characterize much of what is said of Marx in this country the way of uncritical condemnation and the way. of uncritical praise. There are some books on Marx in which are collected all his inconsistencies and nothing else, as though there was nothing in Marx but inconsistencies. Such books give the impression that Marx was one of the most muddle-headed, idiots that ever lived. On the other hand, some of his interpreters seem to have given up the belief in the verbal insgiratipn of scripture for the belief in the verbal inspiration of Capital and try to maintain that there are no inconsistencies in Marx at all. We might surely be prepared, without having read a word of Marx, to reject both these extreme views. Mere inconsistent thinking has never made history as Capital has made it. But no man who has brought about a great revolution in thought has ever been without inconsistencies. The original thinker is too much occupied in trying to express the creative thought which is welling up in him to trouble himself about getting it all straightened out. There are always parts of his work which he has taken over as they stood from other people...