The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:

“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848).

In the History of Philosophy, the atomistic physics of Epicurus and of Democritus have been considered as very similar. Contrary to the more conventional view, Marx considers this similarity as only apparent. He indicates that as an analysis becomes more fundamental and specific, a basic difference becomes clearer. At the end of his analysis Marx indicates that there is an inner contradiction in each of those theories. Marx also intended to explain the reasons for this contradiction but, regrettably, his explanation has not been found among his writings. This paper must be considered as an attempt to reconstruct Marx's own philosophical presuppositions in his efforts to interpret ancient atomistic philosophy and to throw light on the beginnings of his critical method.

Literary criticism much too often ignores the contributions of the sociology of religions. And yet it would benefit from understanding that all culture has its source in a religious relationship to the world, even a negative one, and proceeds from a separation of the visible from the invisible. Such, in fact, is the principal characteristic of the religious element that Dilthey, for example, emphasizes. “Everywhere we encounter something that bears the name religion, its distinctive mark is its dealing with the visible”.

Every civilized society treasures through its folk tales and folk myths the elements of its native tribal life as points of cultural reference. The tribe not only acts as a foil to our culture, but also sustains its very being and gauges the degree of progress and change in the civilization that we uphold. This interdependence has a vital force: insofar as civilized societies define themselves by the distance they have built up between themselves and their respective primitive societies, a civilized culture without its indigenous tribal past risks the authenticity of its process of change to challenge and doubt. Hence, our adulation of distance in both time and space between ourselves and our tribal forefathers, and our eagerness to recognize, maintain, and even glorify our tribes—a necessary syllogism in our postulation of a self-preserving argument. In a peculiarly chiastic way, we thrive on our existential reliance on the very primitiveness that we seek to repudiate as characteristic of a world past. We celebrate our present by eulogizing our past, and to fit the tribes in the large scheme of our self-definition we iconize them. These idealized images hide a creative mask through which we embrace the romantic myths of our respective origins and progress; the parades we arrange for our tribal history—through performance on our streets, or through semantics in our literature—subtly embody this dependence.

In so far as the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu are life-philosophies, they are philosophies of solitude. My aim in the following pages is to explain and defend this claim, clarifying the distinctive kind of solitude that is taught by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

What we intend to do here is to present the obituary as a simple story in which an individual's life makes sense in terms of cultural assumptions on values, on meaningful relations, and achievements. The brevity of the story we consider is made so by the relative dearth of information which an obituary contains. But, in spite of the scarcity of information, the story still reveals a clear orientation: the obituary has meaning only in the context of socio-economic inequality and the exchange facilitated by that inequality. Our task in this paper is to attempt a description of this orientation to an “outsider”. The emphasis is not so much on the structure of the discourse but the cultural knowledge which guides the discourse.

Within the realm of structures of society, the caste system, a unique example among all the aspects of human adventure, represents at the level of social morphology, that is in the manner of grouping characteristic of a society, India's most original contribution to human history within all great civilizations, to the point that India's civilization is generally identified by the principal feature of its morphology.