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Flew, Marx and Gnosticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

R. T. Allen
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Extract

Professor Flew has recently sought to demolish the philosophical pretensions of Marx and the Marxists by the use of Hume's Fork and Popper's demand for falsifiable consequences. Marx tried to derive matters of ‘fact and existence’ from ‘relations of ideas’, which Hume's Fork states to be impossible. From this and not from empirical study, he derived predictions for the future course of history which neither he nor his followers have ever properly tested by empirical enquiries. Nor have they ever provided any clear, unambiguous and therefore testable formulations of those predictions. In particular, Flew claims, they have never given any concrete content to the central notion of ‘alienation’ such that an Index of Alienation could be drawn up and enquiries could be made as to whether, for example, the workers are more or less alienated under the private or public ownership of factories. Both faults stem from Marx's continuation of German, specifically Hegelian, philosophy.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 263 , January 1993 , pp. 94 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 Flew, A. G. N., ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism’, Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 257, 07 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 On the logical and historical connections between Gnosticism and Hegel and thence Marx, see Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)Google Scholar, and Science, Politics, Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery-Gateway, 1968)Google Scholar. For details of the ancient Gnostic systems, see Jonas, H., The Gnostic Religion (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2nd rev. ed. 1963)Google Scholar. For the later career of Gnosticism in Europe, see Runciman, S., The Mediaeval Manichee (Cambridge University Press, 1947).Google Scholar

3 Jonas, Quoted, p. 45.Google Scholar

4 Many other modern systems of thought encapsulate the basic Gnostic theme of man's alienation here on earth. See Jonas' Appendix on Gnostic elements in the nihilism of Nietzsche and the Existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre. Our contemporary Liberal philosophy of education, as will be shown by a glance at any issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education and the indexes of the various Introductions to the subject, transposes alienation into ‘indoctrination’ and seeks release from it. (The Gnostic element, among others, in philosophy of education from Rousseau onwards is traced in my The Education of Autonomous Man (Guildford: Ashgate Publishing, 1992).Google Scholar

5 ‘The German Ideology’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, McLellan, D., (ed.), (Oxford University Press, 1977), 169.Google Scholar