Misplaced Pages

#290709

263-430: Marxist theorist Louis Althusser , for example, defined the philosophy as " class struggle in theory", thus radically separating himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt a " God's eye view " as a purely neutral judge. The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in 1996 that "there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before." So even

526-533: A bourgeois ideology of "humanity". His essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis , in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci 's concept of cultural hegemony ). Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology . His best-known essay, " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation ", establishes

789-452: A hiatal hernia -removal surgery as he had difficulties breathing while eating. According to Althusser himself, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate; in particular, he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He would recall later: I wanted not only to destroy myself physically but to wipe out all trace of my time on earth: in particular, to destroy every last one of my books and all my notes, and burn

1052-480: A " young Marx " (in particular the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ) and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" ( Das Kapital , 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" ( The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ,

1315-494: A "bourgeois" philosophy. Starting from 1948, he studied history of philosophy and gave lectures on it; the first was about Plato in 1949. In 1949–1950, he gave a lecture about René Descartes , and wrote a thesis titled "Politics and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century" and a small study on Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's " Second Discourse ". He presented the thesis to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1950 but it

1578-484: A "critique of political economy ", and on its object. Althusser would later acknowledge that many of the innovations in this interpretation of Marx attempt to assimilate concepts derived from Baruch Spinoza into Marxism. The original English translation of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar , while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey and Roger Establet . A full translation

1841-470: A "return to Marx" and were attended by a new generation of students. For Marx (a collection of works published between 1961 and 1965) and Reading Capital (in collaboration with some of his students), both published in 1965, brought international fame to Althusser. Despite being criticized widely, these books made Althusser a sensation in French intellectual circles and one of the leading theoreticians of

2104-522: A "specter, a dead man walking". Althusser was forced to live in various public and private clinics until 1983, when he became a voluntary patient. He was able to start an untitled manuscript during this time, in 1982; it was later published as "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter" ("Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre"). From 1984 to 1986, he stayed at an apartment in

2367-487: A 'finite' theory" in which he stressed "something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis": the perception of Marxism as a theory that originally only reflected Marx's time and then needed to be completed by a state theory. The former was published as "Marxism Today" ("Marxismo oggi") in the 1978 Italian Enciclopedia Europea . The latter text was included in a book published in Italy, Discutere lo Stato , and he criticized

2630-426: A 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a communist policy , or not." ( Ecrits pour Althusser , 1991, p.98). However, "Althusser never ceased to put in question the images of communism that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself." Althusser thus criticized

2893-462: A 1955–1956 lecture on "Les problèmes de la philosophie de l'histoire". This course along with others on Machiavelli (1962), 17th- and 18th-century political philosophy (1965–1966), Locke (1971), and Hobbes (1971–1972) were later edited and released as a book by François Matheron in 2006. From 1953 to 1960, Althusser basically did not publish on Marxist themes, which in turn gave him time to focus on his teaching activities and establish himself as

SECTION 10

#1733107072291

3156-809: A 1964 letter. According to Elliott, the autobiography produces primarily an impression of "destructiveness and self-destructiveness". Althusser, most likely, postdated the beginning of his depression to a later period (post-war), having not mentioned earlier manifestations of the disease in school and in the concentration camp. According to Moulier-Boutang, Althusser had a close psychological connection with Georgette from an early age, and although he did not often mention it in his autobiography, her "nervous illness" may have tracked his own. His sister also had depression, and despite their living separately from each other for almost their entire adult lives, their depression often coincided in time. Also, Althusser focused on describing family circumstances, not considering, for example,

3419-521: A Catholic, he became more associated with left-wing groups, joining the " worker-priests " movement and embracing a synthesis of Christian and Marxist thought. This combination may have led him to adopt German Idealism and Hegelian thought, as did Martin's influence and a renewed interest in Hegel in the 1930s and 1940s in France. In consonance, Althusser's master thesis to obtain his diplôme d'études supèrieures

3682-502: A book about Machiavelli during a depressive exacerbation but was interrupted by a three-months stay in a clinic. The main psychoanalyst he attended was the anti-Lacanian René Diatkine, starting from 1964, after he had a dream about killing his own sister. The sessions became more frequent in January 1965, and the real work of exploring the unconscious was launched in June. Soon Althusser recognized

3945-522: A book titled Dialogue franco-soviétique, sur la psychanalyse . After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978 , Althusser's bouts of depression became more severe and frequent. In March 1980, Althusser interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris , and, "in the name of the analysts", called Lacan a "beautiful and pitiful harlequin." Later, he went through

4208-401: A careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading". Thus, Althusser's project is to help readers fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. Althusser holds that Marx has discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics or Galileo to physics , in that

4471-426: A certain manner by being wholeheartedly committed to this manner. Virtues contrast with vices , which are their harmful counterparts. Virtue theorists usually say that the mere possession of virtues by itself is not sufficient. Instead, people should manifest virtues in their actions. An important factor is the practical wisdom, also called phronesis , of knowing when, how, and which virtue to express. For example,

4734-428: A certain standpoint. Moral standpoints may differ between persons, cultures, and historical periods. For example, moral statements like "Slavery is wrong" or "Suicide is permissible" may be true in one culture and false in another. Some moral relativists say that moral systems are constructed to serve certain goals such as social coordination. According to this view, different societies and different social groups within

4997-399: A characterization of what is good and then define what is right in terms of what is good. For example, classical utilitarianism says that pleasure is good and that the action leading to the most overall pleasure is right. Consequentialism has been discussed indirectly since the formulation of classical utilitarianism in the late 18th century. A more explicit analysis of this view happened in

5260-486: A complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they "grate" on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to Lenin 's analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 . Lenin posited that despite widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early 20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution occurred because it contained all

5523-447: A contempt for the materialist theory when it suppressed a "scientific concept". This struggle ultimately resulted in the debacle of the fraction "Union of the Left" and an open letter written by Althusser and five other intellectuals in which they asked for "a real political discussion in the PCF". That same year, Althusser also published a series of articles in the newspaper Le Monde under

SECTION 20

#1733107072291

5786-458: A contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution. The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction. Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality. From this, Althusser concludes that Marx's concept of contradiction is inseparable from

6049-458: A critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn. Marx builds on four contributions Hegel makes to our philosophical understanding. They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, (2)

6312-410: A criticism of German Idealism and the more moderate Young Hegelians ) is still more or less the case in the 21st century, as many Marxists would claim, then Marxist theory is in fact the practical continuation of the philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy is still politically irrelevant. Many critics, both non-Marxist and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this is too quick a dismissal of

6575-502: A descent into theoreticism or the temptations of idealism . Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser : Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... Marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic") only insofar as it was the theory of the tendency towards communism, and in view of its realization. The criteria of acceptance or rejection of

6838-470: A diversity of viewpoints. A universal moral norm is seen as valid if all rational discourse participants do or would approve. This way, morality is not imposed by a single moral authority but arises from the moral discourse within society. This discourse should aim to establish an ideal speech situation to ensure fairness and inclusivity. In particular, this means that discourse participants are free to voice their different opinions without coercion but are at

7101-650: A draft, only published posthumously, based on a 1972 lecture, and also wrote for the National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled "Machiavelli's Solitude" ("Solitude de Machiavel", 1977). In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok to write for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi , he drafted a presentation titled "The Discovery of Dr. Freud" ("La découverte du docteur Freud"). After sending it to Chertok and some friends, he

7364-473: A general standpoint of what is objectively right and wrong. In a slightly different sense, the term ethics can also refer to individual ethical theories in the form of a rational system of moral principles, such as Aristotelian ethics , and to a moral code that certain societies, social groups, or professions follow, as in Protestant work ethic and medical ethics . The English word ethics has its roots in

7627-564: A generation of French philosophers and French philosophy in general —among his students were Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu , Michel Foucault , and Michel Serres . In total, Althusser spent 35 years in the ENS, working there until November 1980. Parallel to his academic life, Althusser joined the French Communist Party ( Parti communiste français , PCF) in October 1948. In the early postwar years,

7890-402: A higher level of human consciousness of freedom. Each stage also has its own principle or law according to which it develops and lives in accordance with this freedom. Yet the law is not free-standing. It is delivered by means of the actions of men which spring from their needs, passions, and interests. Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed to the efficient causation provided by passion; on

8153-508: A lack of practical wisdom may lead courageous people to perform morally wrong actions by taking unnecessary risks that should better be avoided. Different types of virtue ethics differ on how they understand virtues and their role in practical life. Eudaimonism is the original form of virtue theory developed in Ancient Greek philosophy and draws a close relation between virtuous behavior and happiness. It states that people flourish by living

Marxist philosophy - Misplaced Pages Continue

8416-539: A lack of unity amongst the ruling class; secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists . For Althusser, this example reinforces his claim that Marx's explanation of social change is more complex than the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that

8679-633: A lecture in Catalonia titled "Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international" ("Some Questions on the Crisis of Marxist Theory and the International Communist Movement") in which Althusser outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle. He also started a rereading of Machiavelli that would influence his later work; he worked between 1975 and 1976 on "Machiavel et nous" ("Machiavelli and Us"),

8942-465: A long relationship until he was forty-two. They broke up when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian bourgeois family from Romagna . Madonia was married to Mino, whose sister Giovanna was married to the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini. Every summer the two families gathered in a residence in the village of Bertinoro , and, according to Roudinesco, "It

9205-440: A long time. It still makes me tremble   ... We were living shut up in the cloister of our hell, both of us." I killed a woman who was everything to me during a crisis of mental confusion, she who loved me to the point of wanting only to die because she could not continue living. And no doubt in my confusion and unconsciousness I 'did her this service,' which she did not try to prevent, but from which she died. That, of course,

9468-439: A man, into my masculinity. She loved me as a woman loves a man!" Roudinesco argued that Rytmann represented for him "the sublimated figure of his own hated mother to whom he remained attached all his life". In his autobiography, he wrote: "If I was dazzled by Hélène's love and the miraculous privilege of knowing her and having her in my life, I tried to give that back to her in my own way, intensely and, if I may put it this way, as

9731-540: A means to promote their self-interest. Ethical egoism is often criticized as an immoral and contradictory position. Normative ethics has a central place in most religions . Key aspects of Jewish ethics are to follow the 613 commandments of God according to the Mitzvah duty found in the Torah and to take responsibility for societal welfare . Christian ethics puts less emphasis on following precise laws and teaches instead

9994-611: A more general principle. Many theories of normative ethics also aim to guide behavior by helping people make moral decisions . Theories in normative ethics state how people should act or what kind of behavior is correct. They do not aim to describe how people normally act, what moral beliefs ordinary people have, how these beliefs change over time, or what ethical codes are upheld in certain social groups. These topics belong to descriptive ethics and are studied in fields like anthropology , sociology , and history rather than normative ethics. Some systems of normative ethics arrive at

10257-472: A natural thing like a tree is a process that by and large points back toward itself: every step of the process takes place in order to reproduce the genus. In the historical process, however, what exists, what is actual, is imperfect. It is inimical to the potential. What is trying to come into existence - freedom - inherently negates everything preceding it and everything existing, since no actual existing human institution can possibly embody pure human freedom. So

10520-550: A person should tell the truth even in specific cases where lying would lead to better consequences. Another disagreement is between actual and expected consequentialism. According to the traditional view, only the actual consequences of an act affect its moral value. One difficulty of this view is that many consequences cannot be known in advance. This means that in some cases, even well-planned and intentioned acts are morally wrong if they inadvertently lead to negative outcomes. An alternative perspective states that what matters are not

10783-459: A place amongst the 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness . Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political . According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European colonialism ) and then through

Marxist philosophy - Misplaced Pages Continue

11046-401: A pleasurable experience has a high value if it has a high intensity and lasts for a long time. A common criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism argued that its focus on the intensity of pleasure promotes an immoral lifestyle centered around indulgence in sensory gratification. Mill responded to this criticism by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. He stated that higher pleasures, like

11309-575: A preface in July 1986 for the resulting book, Filosofía y marxismo , a collection of her interviews with Althusser that was released in Mexico in 1988. These interviews and correspondence were collected and published in France in 1994 as Sur la philosophie . In this period he formulated his "materialism of the encounter" or "aleatory materialism", talking to Breton and Navarro about it, that first appeared in Écrits philosophiques et politiques I (1994) and later in

11572-439: A process of production. Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes: economic practice, ideological practice, and politico-legal practice. Although each practice has a degree of relative autonomy, together they make up one complex, structured whole (social formation). In his view, all practices are dependent on each other. For example, among the relations of production of capitalist societies are

11835-402: A publisher and locked it in his desk drawer. The book was only published posthumously in 1992. Despite the critics, some of his friends, such as Guitton and Debray, defended Althusser, saying the murder was an act of love—as Althusser argued too. Rytmann had bouts of melancholy and self-medicated because of this. Guitton said, "I sincerely think that he killed his wife out of love of her. It

12098-420: A religious offering , as I had done for my mother." Although Althusser was really in love with Rytmann, he also had affairs with other women. Roudinesco commented that "unlike Hélène, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue". She gives as an example of the latter case a woman named Claire Z., with whom he had

12361-504: A representative of the law, and he was forbidden to sign any documents. In February 1981, the court ruled Althusser as having been mentally irresponsible when he committed the murder, therefore he could not be prosecuted and was not charged. Nonetheless, a warrant of confinement was subsequently issued by the Paris police prefecture ; the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from

12624-415: A reputable philosopher and researcher. Althusser resumed his Marxist-related publications in 1960 as he translated, edited, and published a collection directed by Hyppolite about Ludwig Feuerbach 's works. The objective of this endeavour was to identify Feuerbach's influence on Marx's early writings, contrasting it with the absence of his thought on Marx's mature works. This work spurred him to write "On

12887-428: A sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and effective transformation of the world through praxis , which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy ; Louis Althusser, founder of " Structural Marxism " in

13150-421: A short period. In 1948, he was approved to teach in secondary schools but instead made a tutor at the ENS to help students prepare for their own agrégation . His performance on the exam—he was the best ranked on the writing part and second on the oral module—guaranteed this change on his occupation. He was responsible for offering special courses and tutorials on particular topics and on particular figures from

13413-790: A single principle covering all possible cases. Others encompass a small set of basic rules that address all or at least the most important moral considerations. One difficulty for systems with several basic principles is that these principles may conflict with each other in some cases and lead to ethical dilemmas . Distinct theories in normative ethics suggest different principles as the foundation of morality. The three most influential schools of thought are consequentialism , deontology , and virtue ethics . These schools are usually presented as exclusive alternatives, but depending on how they are defined, they can overlap and do not necessarily exclude one another. In some cases, they differ in which acts they see as right or wrong. In other cases, they recommend

SECTION 50

#1733107072291

13676-464: A situation, regardless of their specific role or position. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is one of the most well-known deontologists. He states that reaching outcomes that people desire, such as being happy, is not the main purpose of moral actions. Instead, he argues that there are universal principles that apply to everyone independent of their desires. He uses the term categorical imperative for these principles, saying that they have their source in

13939-425: A society construct different moral systems based on their diverging purposes. Emotivism provides a different explanation, stating that morality arises from moral emotions, which are not the same for everyone. Moral nihilists deny the existence of moral facts. They reject the existence of both objective moral facts defended by moral realism and subjective moral facts defended by moral relativism. They believe that

14202-413: A strong need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems with orthodox Marxism . Such problems might include a too-simple economic determinism , an untenable theory of ideology as " false consciousness ," or a simplistic model of state power rather than hegemony . So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of

14465-466: A sudden and unprecedented departure. This break represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e., a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework. Althusser believes that Marx himself did not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, and was able to express it only obliquely and tentatively. The shift can be revealed only by

14728-428: A theory about society. Where classical political economy explains economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounts for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Consequently, Marx's Capital has greater explanatory power than does political economy because it provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of

14991-412: A thing is revealed in the entire, typical process of development of that thing. Looked at purely formally, human society has a natural line of development in accordance with its essence just like any other living thing. This process of development appears as a succession of stages of world history. (2) Stages of world history Human history passes through several stages, in each of which is materialized

15254-557: A virtuous life. Eudaimonist theories often hold that virtues are positive potentials residing in human nature and that actualizing these potentials results in leading a good and happy life. Agent-based theories, by contrast, see happiness only as a side effect and focus instead on the admirable traits and motivational characteristics expressed while acting. This is often combined with the idea that one can learn from exceptional individuals what those characteristics are. Feminist ethics of care are another form of virtue ethics. They emphasize

15517-436: A whole society. In Althusser's view, Marx does not merely argue that human needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandons the very idea that there can be a theory about what people are like that is prior to any theory about how they come to be that way. Although Althusser insists that there was an epistemological break, he later states that its occurrence around 1845

15780-449: A woman in France, but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him. Sarraute criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about them but that little is written about the victim. Althusser's friends persuaded him to speak in his defense, and the philosopher wrote an autobiography in 1985. He showed the result, L'avenir dure longtemps , to some of his friends and considered publishing it, but he never sent it to

16043-431: A world of reasoned action, ... a world of courage". According to him, they performed an indispensable maternal and paternal function for one another: "She loved me as a mother loves a child   ... and at the same time like a good father in that she introduced me ... to the real world, that vast arena I had never been able to enter. ... Through her desire for me she also initiated me ... into my role as

SECTION 60

#1733107072291

16306-496: Is "an inextricable tangle of 'facts' and 'phantasies'". His friend and biographer Yann Moulier-Boutang , after a careful analysis of the early period of Althusser's life, concluded that the autobiography was "a re-writing of a life through the prism of its wreckage". Moulier-Boutang believed that it was Rytmann who played a key role in creating a "fatalistic" account of the history of the Althusser family, largely shaping his vision in

16569-443: Is a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx. Just as Althusser criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on a historical conception of human needs, so does he reject the idea that economic practice can be used in isolation to explain other aspects of society. Althusser believes that the base and the superstructure are interdependent, although he keeps to the classic Marxist materialist understanding of

16832-487: Is a moral obligation to refrain from lying. Because it relies on consent, contractualism is often understood as a patient-centered form of deontology. Famous social contract theorists include Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , and John Rawls . Discourse ethics also focuses on social agreement on moral norms but says that this agreement is based on communicative rationality . It aims to arrive at moral norms for pluralistic modern societies that encompass

17095-458: Is an oversimplification , it still has some measure of truth. On the other hand, Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus , 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty ; Jean-Jacques Rousseau , from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy ; Adam Smith , from whom came

17358-476: Is better than an unequal distribution even if the aggregate good is the same. There are disagreements about which consequences should be assessed. An important distinction is between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism. According to act consequentialism, the consequences of an act determine its moral value. This means that there is a direct relation between the consequences of an act and its moral value. Rule consequentialism, by contrast, holds that an act

17621-410: Is between naturalism and non-naturalism. Naturalism states that moral properties are natural properties accessible to empirical observation . They are similar to the natural properties investigated by the natural sciences , like color and shape. Some moral naturalists hold that moral properties are a unique and basic type of natural property. Another view states that moral properties are real but not

17884-404: Is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel

18147-456: Is embedded in and relative to social and cultural contexts. Pragmatists tend to give more importance to habits than to conscious deliberation and understand morality as a habit that should be shaped in the right way. Postmodern ethics agrees with pragmatist ethics about the cultural relativity of morality. It rejects the idea that there are objective moral principles that apply universally to all cultures and traditions. It asserts that there

18410-435: Is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life

18673-423: Is external to thought itself. By contrast, Althusser claims to find latent in Marx's work a view of knowledge as "theoretical practice". For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know. Knowledge is not discovered, but rather produced by way of three "Generalities": (I)

18936-532: Is found in Jainism , which has non-violence as its principal virtue. Duty is a central aspect of Hindu ethics and is about fulfilling social obligations, which may vary depending on a person's social class and stage of life . Confucianism places great emphasis on harmony in society and sees benevolence as a key virtue. Taoism extends the importance of living in harmony to the whole world and teaches that people should practice effortless action by following

19199-457: Is its "dialectical" character. The process of natural development occurs in a relatively straight line from the germ to the fully realized being and back to the germ again. Some accident from the outside might come along to interrupt this process of development, but if left to its own devices, it proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner. Society's historical development is internally more complex. The transaction from potentiality to actuality

19462-429: Is mediated by consciousness and will. The essence realized in the development of human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely that ability to negate the smooth line of development and go off in novel, hitherto unforeseen directions. As humankind's essence reveals itself, that revelation is at the same time the subversion of itself. Spirit is constantly at war with itself. This appears as the contradictions constituting

19725-466: Is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject , as did classic philosophy, including contractualism ( Hobbes , John Locke and Rousseau ) but also political economy , Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism

19988-736: Is no one coherent ethical code since morality itself is irrational and humans are morally ambivalent beings. Postmodern ethics instead focuses on how moral demands arise in specific situations as one encounters other people. Ethical egoism is the view that people should act in their self-interest or that an action is morally right if the person acts for their own benefit. It differs from psychological egoism , which states that people actually follow their self-interest without claiming that they should do so. Ethical egoists may act in agreement with commonly accepted moral expectations and benefit other people, for example, by keeping promises, helping friends, and cooperating with others. However, they do so only as

20251-521: Is not clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism, and Hegelianism are found in Capital . He claims that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and some marginal notes on a book by Adolph Wagner are fully free from humanist ideology. In line with this, Althusser replaces his earlier definition of Marx's philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice" with a new belief in "politics in

20514-439: Is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in

20777-651: Is not interested in which actions are right but in what it means for an action to be right and whether moral judgments are objective and can be true at all. It further examines the meaning of morality and other moral terms. Metaethics is a metatheory that operates on a higher level of abstraction than normative ethics by investigating its underlying assumptions. Metaethical theories typically do not directly judge which normative ethical theories are correct. However, metaethical theories can still influence normative theories by examining their foundational principles. Metaethics overlaps with various branches of philosophy. On

21040-446: Is one of the earliest forms of consequentialism. It arose in the 5th century BCE and argued that political action should promote justice as a means to increase the welfare of the people. The most well-known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism. In its classical form, it is an act consequentialism that sees happiness as the only source of intrinsic value. This means that an act is morally right if it produces "the greatest good for

21303-428: Is one of the main branches of philosophy and investigates the nature of morality and the principles that govern the moral evaluation of conduct , character traits , and institutions . It examines what obligations people have, what behavior is right and wrong, and how to lead a good life. Some of its key questions are "How should one live?" and "What gives meaning to life ?". In contemporary philosophy, ethics

21566-453: Is pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather "structure". As he sees it, Marx does not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons—their beliefs, desires, preferences, and judgements. Rather, Marx defines society as a set of fixed "practices". Individuals are not actors who make their own history, but are instead

21829-422: Is primarily concerned with normative statements about what ought to be the case, in contrast to descriptive statements , which are about what is the case. Duties and obligations express requirements of what people ought to do. Duties are sometimes defined as counterparts of the rights that always accompany them. According to this view, someone has a duty to benefit another person if this other person has

22092-438: Is right if it follows a certain set of rules. Rule consequentialism determines the best rules by considering their outcomes at a community level. People should follow the rules that lead to the best consequences when everyone in the community follows them. This implies that the relation between an act and its consequences is indirect. For example, if telling the truth is one of the best rules, then according to rule consequentialism,

22355-463: Is sought by the working class as an instrument to actualize socialism. He also viewed revolution to be deducible from the laws of the development and primarily the class struggle but this did not mean all means are permissible. There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between

22618-405: Is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production , produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with

22881-434: Is that codes of conduct in specific areas, such as business and environment, are usually termed ethics rather than morality, as in business ethics and environmental ethics . Normative ethics is the philosophical study of ethical conduct and investigates the fundamental principles of morality . It aims to discover and justify general answers to questions like "How should one live?" and "How should people act?", usually in

23144-519: Is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy , it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics , applied ethics , and metaethics . Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion , treatment of animals , and business practices . Metaethics explores

23407-422: Is the only thing with intrinsic value is called ethical or evaluative hedonism . Classical utilitarianism was initially formulated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century and further developed by John Stuart Mill . Bentham introduced the hedonic calculus to assess the value of consequences. Two key aspects of the hedonic calculus are the intensity and the duration of pleasure. According to this view,

23670-511: Is theft! ", in The Poverty of Philosophy (1845). Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, stood Hegel on his feet, in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx

23933-506: Is therefore not governed by interests of society, class, ideology, or politics, and is distinct from the superstructure . In addition to its unique epistemology, Marx's theory is built on concepts—such as forces and relations of production —that have no counterpart in classical political economy. Even when existing terms are adopted—for example, the theory of surplus value , which combines David Ricardo 's concepts of rent, profit, and interest—their meaning and relation to other concepts in

24196-437: Is to have a good will. A person has a good will if they respect the moral law and form their intentions and motives in agreement with it. Kant states that actions motivated in such a way are unconditionally good, meaning that they are good even in cases where they result in undesirable consequences. Divine command theory says that God is the source of morality. It states that moral laws are divine commands and that to act morally

24459-481: Is to obey and follow God's will . While all divine command theorists agree that morality depends on God, there are disagreements about the precise content of the divine commands, and theorists belonging to different religions tend to propose different moral laws. For example, Christian and Jewish divine command theorists may argue that the Ten Commandments express God's will while Muslims may reserve this role for

24722-446: Is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which

24985-411: Is usually divided into normative ethics , applied ethics , and metaethics . Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require. As a rational and systematic field of inquiry, ethics studies practical reasons why people should act one way rather than another. Most ethical theories seek universal principles that express

25248-433: Is what he said, but Rytmann's point of view is unknowable. Quebecois author Suzanne Léveillée has written that Rytmann wanted to leave him. Another Quebecois author, Francis Dupuis-Déri, also confirms that idea in an article about how the media dealt handled the murder, and later in a book titled Althusser Assassin . The crime seriously tarnished Althusser's reputation. As Roudinesco wrote, from 1980, he lived his life as

25511-421: Is wrong to break a promise even if no harm comes from it. Deontologists are interested in which actions are right and often allow that there is a gap between what is right and what is good. Many focus on prohibitions and describe which acts are forbidden under any circumstances. Agent-centered deontological theories focus on the person who acts and the duties they have. Agent-centered theories often focus on

25774-399: Is wrong. This observation is sometimes taken as an argument against moral realism since moral disagreement is widespread in most fields. Moral relativists reject the idea that morality is an objective feature of reality. They argue instead that moral principles are human inventions. This means that a behavior is not objectively right or wrong but only subjectively right or wrong relative to

26037-508: The École normale supérieure in Paris , where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party ( Parti communiste français , PCF). His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism . These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in

26300-645: The Ancient Greek word êthos ( ἦθος ), meaning ' character ' and ' personal disposition ' . This word gave rise to the Ancient Greek word ēthikós ( ἠθικός ), which was translated into Latin as ethica and entered the English language in the 15th century through the Old French term éthique . The term morality originates in the Latin word moralis , meaning ' manners ' and ' character ' . It

26563-522: The Cercle Politzer , a Marxist study group. Althusser also introduced colleagues and students to the party and worked closely with the communist cell of the ENS. But his professionalism made him avoid Marxism and Communism in his classes; instead, he helped students depending on the demands of their agrégation . In the early 1950s, Althusser distanced himself from his youthful political and philosophical ideals and from Hegel, whose teachings he considered

26826-511: The Chartist movement in the United Kingdom , he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, The Holy Family (1845), and The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner 's The Ego and Its Own (1844), considered one of

27089-523: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would later arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism , exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, and several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School , would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that

27352-462: The Marxist humanism —both popular at the time. At mid-decade, his popularity grew to the point that it was virtually impossible to have an intellectual debate about political or ideological theoretical questions without mentioning his name. Althusser's ideas were influential enough to arouse the creation of a young militants group to dispute the power within the PCF. Nevertheless, the official position of

27615-596: The Pope John Paul II through his former professor Jean Guitton. Most of the time, however, he and his wife spent locked in their ENS apartment. In the fall of 1980, Althusser's psychiatrist René Diatkine , who by now was also treating Althusser's wife Hélène Rytmann, recommended that Althusser be hospitalized, but the couple refused. Before me: Hélène lying on her back, also wearing a dressing gown. ... Kneeling beside her, leaning over her body, I am engaged in massaging her neck. ... I press my two thumbs into

27878-719: The University of Picardie Jules Verne and acquired the right to direct research on the basis of his previously published work. Some time after this recognition, Althusser married Hélène Rytmann. In 1976, he compiled several of his essays written between 1964 and 1975 to publish Positions . These years would be a period in which his work was very intermittent; he gave a conference titled "The Transformation of Philosophy" ("La transformation de la philosophie") in two Spanish cities, first Granada and then in Madrid , in March 1976. The same year he gave

28141-470: The evolutionist image which made of communism an ultimate stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic images which made it a "society of transparence", "without contradiction" nor ideology. Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser enjoined the most sober definition of communism, exposed by Marx in The German Ideology : Communism is "not a state of the future, but the real movement which destroys

28404-587: The globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the Industrial Revolution : thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities ,

28667-402: The medieval period , ethical thought was strongly influenced by religious teachings. In the modern period , this focus shifted to a more secular approach concerned with moral experience, reasons for acting , and the consequences of actions. An influential development in the 20th century was the emergence of metaethics. Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the study of moral phenomena. It

28930-411: The " epistemological break " between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society. In 1844–1845, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up

29193-427: The "raw material" of pre-scientific ideas, abstractions and facts; (II) a conceptual framework (or "problematic") brought to bear upon these; and (III) the finished product of a transformed theoretical entity, concrete knowledge. In this view, the validity of knowledge does not lie in its correspondence to something external to itself. Marx's historical materialism is a science with its own internal methods of proof. It

29456-475: The "science of history", historical materialism , Marx has constructed a revolutionary view of social change. Althusser believes these errors result from the notion that Marx's entire body of work can be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Marx's thought contains a radical "epistemological break". Although the works of the young Marx are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, The German Ideology (written in 1845) makes

29719-411: The "supports" ( Träger ) of these practices. Althusser uses this analysis to defend Marx's historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base (economic level) and superstructure (culture/politics) "rising upon it" and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the (economic) base (the well known architectural metaphor). For Althusser, it

29982-520: The "theoretical anti-humanism". The controversy was the pinnacle of a long conflict between the supporters of Althusser and Garaudy. In March, in Argenteuil , the theses of Garaudy and Althusser were formally confronted by the PCF Central Committee, chaired by Louis Aragon . The Party decided to keep Garaudy's position as the official one, and even Lucien Sève —who was a student of Althusser at

30245-511: The 1871 Civil War in France which concerned the Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first " dictatorship of the proletariat ", etc.) Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement , such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto , written with Engels (who

30508-499: The 1960s, would define it as " class struggle in theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the Revolutions of 1848 , Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto , which

30771-555: The 2006 Verso book Philosophy of the Encounter . In 1987, after Althusser underwent an emergency operation because of the obstruction of the esophagus , he developed a new clinical case of depression. First brought to the Soisy-sur-Seine clinic, he was transferred to the psychiatric institution MGEN in La Verrière . There, following a pneumonia contracted during the summer, he died of a heart attack on 22 October 1990. Althusser

31034-532: The 20th century, virtue ethics experienced a resurgence thanks to philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe , Philippa Foot , Alasdair MacIntyre , and Martha Nussbaum . There are many other schools of normative ethics in addition to the three main traditions. Pragmatist ethics focuses on the role of practice and holds that one of the key tasks of ethics is to solve practical problems in concrete situations. It has certain similarities to utilitarianism and its focus on consequences but concentrates more on how morality

31297-404: The 20th century, when the term was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe . Consequentialists usually understand the consequences of an action in a very wide sense that includes the totality of its effects. This is based on the idea that actions make a difference in the world by bringing about a causal chain of events that would not have existed otherwise. A core intuition behind consequentialism is that

31560-469: The Aristotlean position that law or principle is something implicit in a thing, a potentiality which is not actual but which is in the process of becoming actual. This means that if we want to know the principle governing something, we have to observe its typical life-process and figure out its characteristic behavior. Observing an acorn on its own, we can never deduce that it is an oak tree. To figure out what

31823-516: The ENS; and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment. In June, he was transferred to the L'Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine . The murder of Rytmann attracted much media attention, and there were several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal. The newspaper Minute , journalist Dominique Jamet and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused Althusser of having "privileges" because of

32086-515: The European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology . Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist , although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. He later described himself as a social anarchist . Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife,

32349-450: The European context it was possible to have a peaceful transition to socialism, which Althusser saw as "a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism". In a lecture given to the Union of Communist Students in the same year, he criticized above all the form in which this decision was taken. According to Althusser—echoing his notion of "French misery" exposed on For Marx —the party demonstrated

32612-628: The French city of Marseille as his father was to be the director of the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch in the city. Althusser spent the rest of his childhood there, excelling in his studies at the Lycée Saint-Charles  [ fr ] and joining a scout group . A second displacement occurred in 1936 when Althusser settled in Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc . Later he was accepted by

32875-619: The Germans. Seized in Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein , in Northern Germany, for the five remaining years of the war. In the camp, he was at first drafted to hard labour but ultimately reassigned to work in the infirmary after falling ill. This second occupation allowed him to read philosophy and literature. In his memoirs, Althusser described

33138-615: The Maoist journal La Cause du peuple called him a revisionist , and he was condemned by former students, mainly by Jacques Rancière . After it, Althusser went through a phase of "self-criticism" that resulted in the book Essays in Self-criticism ( Éléments d'autocritique , 1974) in which he revisited some of his old positions, including his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia . In 1969, Althusser started an unfinished work that

33401-543: The PCF was one of the most influential political forces and many French intellectuals joined it. Althusser himself declared, "Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance." Althusser was primarily active on the "Peace Movement" section and kept for a few years his Catholic beliefs; in 1949, he published in the L'Évangile captif (The captive gospel),

33664-435: The PCF. He supported a structuralist view of Marx's work, influenced by Cavaillès and Canguilhem, affirming that Marx laid the "cornerstones" of a new science, incomparable to all non-Marxist thought, of which, from 1960 to 1966, he espoused the fundamental principles. Critiques were done to Stalin's cult of personality and Althusser defended what he called "theoretical anti-humanism ", as an alternative to Stalinism and

33927-460: The Resistance while he was remote from the anti-Nazi combat; she was a Jew who carried the stamp of the Holocaust , whereas he, despite his conversion to Marxism, never escaped the formative effect of Catholicism; she suffered under Stalinism at the very moment when he was joining the party; and, in opposition to his petit-bourgeois background, her childhood was not prosperous—at the age of 13 she became

34190-528: The Sainte-Anne hospital and a psychiatric examination was conducted on him. Due to his mental state, Althusser was deemed to not understand the charges or the process to which he was to be submitted, so he remained at the hospital. The psychiatric assessment concluded he should not be criminally charged, based on article 64 of the French Penal Code , which stated that "there is neither crime nor delict where

34453-642: The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists ( Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants ). Another Althusser's significant work from this period was "Lenin and Philosophy", a lecture first presented in February 1968 at the French Society of Philosophy  [ fr ] . During May 68 , the tumultuous events of May 1968 in France, Althusser was hospitalized because of a depressive breakdown and

34716-592: The Young Marx: Theoretical Questions" ("Sur le jeune Marx – Questions de théorie", 1961). Published in the journal La Pensée , it was the first in a series of articles about Marx that were later collected in his most famous book For Marx . He inflamed the French debate on Marx and Marxist philosophy, and gained a considerable number of supporters. Inspired by this recognition, he started to publish more articles on Marxist thought; in 1964, Althusser published an article titled "Freud and Lacan" in

34979-409: The acorn is - and also what the oak tree is - we have to observe the line of development from one to the other. (c) The phenomena of history arise from a whole with an essence which undergoes transformation of form and which has an end or telos. For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom, and the telos of that essence is the actualization of that freedom. Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence of

35242-430: The actual consequences but the expected consequences. This view takes into account that when deciding what to do, people have to rely on their limited knowledge of the total consequences of their actions. According to this view, a course of action has positive moral value despite leading to an overall negative outcome if it had the highest expected value , for example, because the negative outcome could not be anticipated or

35505-406: The actual is both itself and its opposite (as potential). And this potential (freedom) is never inert but constantly exerts an impulse toward change. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer , a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and

35768-529: The agent. It is controversial whether agent-relative moral theories, like ethical egoism , should be considered as types of consequentialism. There are many different types of consequentialism. They differ based on what type of entity they evaluate, what consequences they take into consideration, and how they determine the value of consequences. Most theories assess the moral value of acts. However, consequentialism can also be used to evaluate motives , character traits , rules, and policies . Many types assess

36031-416: The alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man ( menschliche Wesen , human nature). But the essence of man

36294-519: The autobiography). Althusser believed that he did not have a genuine "I", which was caused by the absence of real maternal love and the fact that his father was emotionally reserved and virtually absent for his son. Althusser deduced the family situation from the events before his birth, as told to him by his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was to marry his father's brother, Louis Althusser, who died in World War I near Verdun , while Charles, his father,

36557-570: The basic assumptions underlying moral claims are misguided. Some moral nihilists conclude from this that anything is allowed. A slightly different view emphasizes that moral nihilism is not itself a moral position about what is allowed and prohibited but the rejection of any moral position. Moral nihilism, like moral relativism, recognizes that people judge actions as right or wrong from different perspectives. However, it disagrees that this practice involves morality and sees it as just one type of human behavior. A central disagreement among moral realists

36820-404: The bed, it was new, exciting, exalting, and violent. When she (Hélène) had left, an abysm of anguish opened up in me, never again to close. His feelings toward her were contradictory from the very beginning; it is suggested that the strong emotional impact she caused in him led him to deep depression. Roudinesco wrote that, for Althusser, Rytmann represented the opposite of himself: she had been in

37083-456: The beginning of his teaching at the ENS—supported it, becoming the closest philosopher to the PCF leadership. General secretary of the party, Waldeck Rochet said that "Communism without humanism would not be Communism". Even if he was not publicly censured nor expelled from the PCF, as were 600 Maoist students, the support of Garaudy resulted in a further reduction of Althusser's influence in

37346-417: The best action for someone with a good salary would be to donate 70% of their income to charity, it would be morally wrong for them to only donate 65%. Satisficing consequentialism, by contrast, only requires that an act is "good enough" even if it is not the best possible alternative. According to this view, it is possible to do more than one is morally required to do. Mohism in ancient Chinese philosophy

37609-688: The book The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism of his former student, the Chilean Marxist sociologist Marta Harnecker . By this time, Althusser was very popular in Latin America: some leftist activists and intellectuals saw him almost as a new Marx, although his work has been the subject of heated debates and sharp criticism. As an example of this popularity, some of his works were first translated to Spanish than into English, and others were released in book format first in Spanish and then in French. At

37872-444: The buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers respectively. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers. Furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means. From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa. For him this

38135-411: The change mostly in mechanical terms using principles of genetics and natural selection. The historical process, however, never attempts to preserve an essence in the first place. Rather, it develops an essence through successive forms. This means that at any moment on the path of historical change, there is a contradiction between what exists and what is in the process of coming-to-be. The realization of

38398-404: The claim that humankind itself can adapt society to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves to it. Natural and historical change, according to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences. Organic natural entities develop through a straightforward process, relatively simple to comprehend at least in outline. Historical development, however, is a more complex process. Its specific difference

38661-420: The communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality (" collectivism "), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor,

38924-486: The concept of a complex structured social whole. To emphasize that changes in social structures relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as " overdetermined ", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud. This interpretation allows people to account for the way in which many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and how these circumstances may combine to produce unexpected social changes or "ruptures". Ethics Ethics

39187-413: The concept of ideology. Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud 's and Lacan's psychological concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of self. For Althusser, these structures are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology and avoid being subjected to it. On

39450-421: The consequences. A related approach is to characterize consequentialism not in terms of consequences but in terms of outcome, with the outcome being defined as the act together with its consequences. Most forms of consequentialism are agent-neutral. This means that the value of consequences is assessed from a neutral perspective, that is, acts should have consequences that are good in general and not just good for

39713-402: The contradictions possible within a single state at the time. In his words, it was the "weakest link in a chain of imperialist states". He explained the revolution in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc., a disparity between urban industrialization and medieval conditions in the countryside, and

39976-550: The contrary, the latter is the vehicle realizing the former. Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion than on the more historically specifiable interests of men. Marx will reverse this priority. (3) Difference between natural and historical change Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between the application of organic, essentialist categories to the realm of human history and the realm of organic nature. According to Hegel, human history strives toward perfectibility, but nature does not. Marx deepens and expands this idea into

40239-415: The critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the " Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation ), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and

40502-442: The cult of a criminal ideology into the heart of one of the best French institutions. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff went further on claiming Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution. Five years after the murder, a critique by Le Monde 's Claude Sarraute would have a great impact on Althusser. She compared his case to the situation of Issei Sagawa , who killed and cannibalized

40765-423: The deficient state of cowardice and the excessive state of recklessness . Aristotle held that virtuous action leads to happiness and makes people flourish in life. Stoicism emerged about 300 BCE and taught that, through virtue alone, people can achieve happiness characterized by a peaceful state of mind free from emotional disturbances. The Stoics advocated rationality and self-mastery to achieve this state. In

41028-476: The desire to deserve her love, in his memoirs, largely determined his adult life and career, including his admission to the ENS and his desire to become a "well-known intellectual". According to his autobiography, ENS was for Althusser a kind of refuge of intellectual "purity" from the big "dirty" world that his mother was so afraid of. The facts of his autobiography have been critically evaluated by researchers. According to its own editors, L'avenir dure longtemps

41291-438: The determination of the base "in the last instance" (albeit with some extension and revision). The advantage of practices over human individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of a number of different kinds of parts. Economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc., all united in

41554-456: The early 1950s, the Vatican prohibited Catholics from membership in the worker priests and left-wing movements—and it certainly affected Althusser since he firmly believed in this combination. Initially afraid of joining the party because of ENS's opposition to communists, Althusser did so when he was made a tutor—when membership became less likely to affect his employment—and he even created at ENA

41817-424: The emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marx's theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganization of the whole. To develop this idea, Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to

42080-405: The end of life. Psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco has argued that the absurd war experience was essential for Althusser's philosophical thought. Althusser resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare himself for the agrégation , an exam to teach philosophy in secondary schools. In 1946, Althusser met sociologist Hélène Rytmann , a Jewish former French Resistance member with whom he

42343-438: The essence of Spirit. (4) Contradiction In the development of a natural thing, there is by and large no contradiction between the process of development and the way that development must appear. So the transition from an acorn, to an oak, to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted flow of the acorn back to itself again. When change in the essence takes place, as it does in the process of evolution, we can understand

42606-429: The existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer depends on what is meant by "philosophy"). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of the final line of Karl Marx's 11 Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it". If this claim (which Marx originally intended as

42869-586: The existing state of being.". In 1938, Trotsky had written “Their Morals and Ours” which consisted of ethical polemics in response to criticisms around his actions concerning the Kronstadt rebellion and wider questions posed around the perceived, “amoral” methods of the Bolsheviks. Critics believed these methods seemed to emulate the Jesuit maxim that the “ ends justifies the means ”. Trotsky argued that Marxism situated

43132-421: The experiences of solidarity, political action, and community in the camp as the moment he first understood the idea of communism. Althusser recalled: "It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit—and that I actually met a communist". His experience in the camp also affected his lifelong bouts of mental instability, reflected in constant depression that lasted until

43395-418: The face of a strangled woman in my life. And yet I know that this is a strangled woman. What is happening? I stand up and scream: I've strangled Hélène! On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He himself reported the murder to the doctor in residence who contacted psychiatric institutions. Even before the police arrival, the doctor and the director of ENS decided to hospitalize him in

43658-517: The fact he was Communist. From this point of view, Roudinesco wrote, Althusser was three times a criminal. First, the philosopher had legitimated the current of thought judged responsible for the Gulag ; second, he praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism; and finally because he had, it was said, corrupted the elite of French youth by introducing

43921-434: The field of history" and "class struggle in theory". Althusser considers the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event — the product of incessant struggle against ideology. Thus, the distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once and for all by the epistemological break. Because of Marx's belief that the individual is a product of society, Althusser holds that it

44184-712: The first time after receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia . He suffered from bipolar disorder , and because of it he had frequent bouts of depression that started in 1938 and became regular after his five-year stay in German captivity. From the 1950s onward, he was under constant medical supervision, often undergoing, in Lewis' words, "the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer", which included electroconvulsive therapy , narco-analysis , and psychoanalysis. Althusser did not limit himself to prescribed medications and practised self-medication. The disease affected his academic productivity; in 1962, he began to write

44447-416: The forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (this term

44710-413: The form of universal or domain-independent principles that determine whether an act is right or wrong. For example, given the particular impression that it is wrong to set a child on fire for fun, normative ethics aims to find more general principles that explain why this is the case, like the principle that one should not cause extreme suffering to the innocent , which may itself be explained in terms of

44973-519: The formation of character . Descriptive ethics describes the dominant moral codes and beliefs in different societies and considers their historical dimension. The history of ethics started in the ancient period with the development of ethical principles and theories in ancient Egypt , India , China , and Greece . This period saw the emergence of ethical teachings associated with Hinduism , Buddhism , Confucianism , Daoism , and contributions of philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle . During

45236-472: The foundation of morality as a product of society to serve social interests rather than “eternal moral truths” proclaimed by institutional religions. On the other hand, he regarded it as farcical to assert that an end could justify any criminal means and viewed this to be a distorted representation of the Jesuit maxim. Instead, Trotsky believed that the means and ends frequently “exchanged places” as when democracy

45499-580: The founding book of individualist anarchism . Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating , and that replacing God with Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation , or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon , who had become famous with his cry " Property

45762-405: The future should be shaped to achieve the best possible outcome. The act itself is usually not seen as part of the consequences. This means that if an act has intrinsic value or disvalue, it is not included as a factor. Some consequentialists see this as a flaw, saying that all value-relevant factors need to be considered. They try to avoid this complication by including the act itself as part of

46025-429: The greatest number" by increasing happiness and reducing suffering. Utilitarians do not deny that other things also have value, like health, friendship, and knowledge. However, they deny that these things have intrinsic value. Instead, they say that they have extrinsic value because they affect happiness and suffering. In this regard, they are desirable as a means but, unlike happiness, not as an end. The view that pleasure

46288-627: The highly regarded higher-education establishment ( grande école ) École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. At the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne , and wanted to be a Trappist . His interest in Catholicism coexisted with his communist ideology, and some critics argued that his early Catholic introduction affected

46551-404: The history of philosophy. In 1954, he became secrétaire de l'école litteraire (secretary of the literary school), assuming responsibilities for management and direction of the school. Althusser was deeply influential at the ENS because of the lectures and conferences he organized with participation of leading French philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan . He also influenced

46814-517: The hollow of flesh that borders the top of the sternum, and, applying force, I slowly reach, one thumb toward the right, one thumb toward the left at an angle, the firmer area below the ears. ... Hélène's face is immobile and serene, her open eyes are fixed on the ceiling. And suddenly I am struck with terror: her eyes are interminably fixed, and above all here is the tip of her tongue lying, unusually and peacefully, between her teeth and her lips. I had certainly seen corpses before, but I had never seen

47077-421: The human mind and culture rather than as subjective constructs or expressions of personal preferences and cultural norms . Moral realists accept the claim that there are objective moral facts. This view implies that moral values are mind-independent aspects of reality and that there is an absolute fact about whether a given action is right or wrong. A consequence of this view is that moral requirements have

47340-468: The idea that the grounds of property is labour ; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . "Vulgar Marxism" (or codified dialectical materialism ) was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism , with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure . Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of

47603-419: The idea that world history progresses through stages, (3) the difference between natural and historical (dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that dialectical change proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself. (1) Aristotelian organicism and essentialism (a) Hegel adopts the position that chance is not the basis of phenomena and that events are governed by laws. Some have falsely attributed to Hegel

47866-415: The importance of interpersonal relationships and say that benevolence by caring for the well-being of others is one of the key virtues. Influential schools of virtue ethics in ancient philosophy were Aristotelianism and Stoicism . According to Aristotle (384–322 BCE), each virtue is a golden mean between two types of vices: excess and deficiency. For example, courage is a virtue that lies between

48129-465: The individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus . Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique by Edmund Burke , who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment 's universalism and humanist project on behalf of

48392-513: The inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely

48655-436: The influence of ENS on his personality. Moulier-Boutang connected the depression not only with events in his personal life, but also with political disappointments. Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital (1965), which collects the work of Althusser and his students in an intensive philosophical rereading of Marx's Capital . The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as

48918-411: The intellectual satisfaction of reading a book, are more valuable than lower pleasures, like the sensory enjoyment of food and drink, even if their intensity and duration are the same. Since its original formulation, many variations of utilitarianism have developed, including the difference between act and rule utilitarianism and between maximizing and satisficing utilitarianism. Deontology assesses

49181-737: The journal La Nouvelle Critique , which greatly influenced the Freudo-Marxism thought. At the same time, he invited Lacan to a lecture on Baruch Spinoza and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. The impact of the articles led Althusser to change his teaching style at the ENS, and he started to minister a series of seminars on the following topics: "On the Young Marx" (1961–1962), "The Origins of Structuralism" (1962–1963; it versed on Foucault's History of Madness , which Althusser highly appreciated ), "Lacan and Psychoanalysis" (1963–1964), and Reading Capital (1964–1965). These seminars aimed for

49444-609: The level of ontology , it examines whether there are objective moral facts. Concerning semantics , it asks what the meaning of moral terms are and whether moral statements have a truth value . The epistemological side of metaethics discusses whether and how people can acquire moral knowledge. Metaethics overlaps with psychology because of its interest in how moral judgments motivate people to act. It also overlaps with anthropology since it aims to explain how cross-cultural differences affect moral assessments. Metaethics examines basic ethical concepts and their relations. Ethics

49707-572: The level of theory. Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Marxist and Marx-influenced 20th century theory, such as (to name a few random examples) the critical theory of the Frankfurt School , the political writing of Antonio Gramsci , and the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson , must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account, but many such thinkers also feel

49970-569: The moral rightness of actions based on a set of norms or principles. These norms describe the requirements that all actions need to follow. They may include principles like telling the truth, keeping promises , and not intentionally harming others. Unlike consequentialists, deontologists hold that the validity of general moral principles does not directly depend on their consequences. They state that these principles should be followed in every case since they express how actions are inherently right or wrong. According to moral philosopher David Ross , it

50233-477: The moral value of acts only depends on the pleasure and suffering they cause. An alternative approach says that there are many different sources of value, which all contribute to one overall value. Before the 20th century, consequentialists were only concerned with the total of value or the aggregate good. In the 20th century, alternative views were developed that additionally consider the distribution of value. One of them states that an equal distribution of goods

50496-431: The motives and intentions behind people's actions, highlighting the importance of acting for the right reasons. They tend to be agent-relative, meaning that the reasons for which people should act depend on personal circumstances. For example, a parent has a special obligation to their child, while a stranger does not have this kind of obligation toward a child they do not know. Patient-centered theories, by contrast, focus on

50759-463: The movement and he criticized the movement as an "ideological revolt of the mass", adopting the PCF official argument that an "infantile disorder" of anarchistic utopianism that had infiltrated the student movement. On the other hand, he called it "the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism" and wanted to reconcile the students and the PCF. Nevertheless,

51022-469: The natural flow of the universe . Indigenous belief systems, like Native American philosophy and the African Ubuntu philosophy , often emphasize the interconnectedness of all living beings and the environment while stressing the importance of living in harmony with nature. Metaethics is the branch of ethics that examines the nature, foundations, and scope of moral judgments , concepts, and values. It

51285-474: The non-bureaucratic, non-party, mass organizations in which, in his opinion, the "Marxist principles regarding the nature of the ideological' were fully applied. Key events in the theoretical struggle took place in 1966. In January, there was a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi ; Althusser was absent but Roger Garaudy , the official philosopher of the party, read an indictment that opposed

51548-531: The north of Paris, where he remained confined most of his time, but he also received visits from some friends, such as philosopher and theologian Stanislas Breton , who had also been a prisoner in the German stalags ; from Guitton, who converted him into a "mystic monk" in Roudinesco's words; and from Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro during six months, starting from the winter of 1984. Althusser and Navarro exchanged letters until February 1987, and he also wrote

51811-482: The notion of "government party" and defended the notion of a revolutionary party "out of state". During the 1970s, Althusser's institutional roles at the ENS increased but he still edited and published his and other works in the series Théorie , with François Maspero. Among the essays published, there was "Response to John Lewis", a 1973 reply of an English Communist's defence of Marxist Humanism. Two years later, he concluded his Doctorat d'État (State doctorate) in

52074-419: The one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake ". Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest Magna Charta of a day work limited by law": The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and

52337-744: The other hand, the collection of essays from which "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" is drawn contains other essays which confirm that Althusser's concept of ideology is broadly consistent with the classic Marxist theory of class struggle . Althusser's thought evolved during his lifetime. It has been the subject of argument and debate, especially within Marxism and specifically concerning his theory of knowledge (epistemology). Althusser argues that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemns various interpretations of Marx's works— historicism , idealism and economism —on grounds that they fail to realize that with

52600-484: The party accused of being a double agent for the Gestapo , for " Trotskyist deviation" and "crimes", which probably referred to the execution of former Nazi collaborators . Although high-ranking party officials instructed him to sever relations with Rytmann, Althusser tried to restore her reputation in the PCF for a long time by making inquiries into her wartime activities. Although he did not succeed in reinserting her into

52863-631: The party was still Stalinist Marxism, which was criticized both from Maoist and humanist groups. Althusser was initially careful not to identify with Maoism but progressively agreed with its critique of Stalinism. At the end of 1966, Althusser even published an unsigned article titled "On the Cultural Revolution", in which he considered the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "a historical fact without precedent" and of "enormous theoretical interest". Althusser mainly praised

53126-424: The party, his relationship with Rytmann nonetheless deepened during this period. Their relationship "was traumatic from the outset, so Althusser claims", wrote Elliott. Among the reasons were his almost total inexperience with women and the fact she was eight years older than him. I had never embraced a woman, and above all I had never been embraced by a woman (at age thirty!). Desire mounted in me, we made love on

53389-575: The party. Still in 1966, Althusser published in the Cahiers pour l'Analyse the article "On the 'Social Contract'" ("Sur le 'Contrat Social'"), a course about Rousseau he had given at the ENS, and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract" ("Cremonini, peintre de l'abstrait") about Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini . In the following year, he wrote a long article titled "The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy" ("La tâche historique de la philosophie marxiste") that

53652-488: The passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo! [How changed from what he/it was!]" But

53915-430: The people affected by actions and the rights they have. An example is the requirement to treat other people as ends and not merely as a means to an end. This requirement can be used to argue, for example, that it is wrong to kill a person against their will even if this act would save the lives of several others. Patient-centered deontological theories are usually agent-neutral, meaning that they apply equally to everyone in

54178-440: The person possesses and exercises certain capacities or some form of control . If a person is morally responsible then it is appropriate to respond to them in certain ways, for example, by praising or blaming them. A major debate in metaethics is about the ontological status of morality, questioning whether ethical values and principles are real. It examines whether moral properties exist as objective features independent of

54441-411: The person would want everyone to follow the same maxim as a universal law applicable to everyone. Another formulation states that one should treat other people always as ends in themselves and never as mere means to an end. This formulation focuses on respecting and valuing other people for their own sake rather than using them in the pursuit of personal goals. In either case, Kant says that what matters

54704-471: The position that phenomena are governed by transcendent, supersensible ideas that ground them. On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic unity between universal and particular. Particulars are not mere token types of universals; rather, they relate to each other as a part relates to a whole. This latter has import for Marx's own conception of law and necessity. (b) In rejecting the idea that laws merely describe or independently ground phenomena, Hegel revives

54967-563: The positive side of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; although sometimes tried to ridicule Diatkine giving him lessons in Lacanianism, by July 1966, he considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results". In 1976, Althusser estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics. Althusser analysed the prerequisites of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex relationships with his family (he devoted to this topic half of

55230-399: The post-Marxian philosophical tradition. Much sophisticated and important thought has taken place after the writing of Marx and Engels ; much or perhaps even all of it has been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism. Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry might condemn Marxism to a simplistic empiricism or economism , crippling it in practice and making it comically simplistic at

55493-471: The practice of selfless love , such as the Great Commandment to "Love your neighbor as yourself". The Five Pillars of Islam constitute a basic framework of Muslim ethics and focus on the practice of faith , prayer , charity , fasting during Ramadan , and pilgrimage to Mecca . Buddhists emphasize the importance of compassion and loving-kindness towards all sentient entities. A similar outlook

55756-528: The reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology (1846): In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That

56019-509: The rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the Prussian university and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism ( Kant , Fichte , Schelling and Hegel). Along with Engels, who observed

56282-460: The right of tradition , as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears both as the language in which exploitation masks itself and as

56545-468: The right to receive that benefit. Obligation and permission are contrasting terms that can be defined through each other: to be obligated to do something means that one is not permitted not to do it and to be permitted to do something means that one is not obligated not to do it. Some theorists define obligations in terms of values or what is good . When used in a general sense, good contrasts with bad . When describing people and their intentions,

56808-400: The rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham 's utilitarianism . Alongside Freud , Nietzsche , and Durkheim , Marx thus takes

57071-417: The same course of action but provide different justifications for why it is right. Consequentialism, also called teleological ethics, says that morality depends on consequences. According to the most common view, an act is right if it brings the best future. This means that there is no alternative course of action that has better consequences. A key aspect of consequentialist theories is that they provide

57334-401: The same ontological status as non-moral facts: it is an objective fact whether there is an obligation to keep a promise just as it is an objective fact whether a thing is rectangular. Moral realism is often associated with the claim that there are universal ethical principles that apply equally to everyone. It implies that if two people disagree about a moral evaluation then at least one of them

57597-423: The same time required to justify them using rational argumentation. The main concern of virtue ethics is how virtues are expressed in actions. As such, it is neither directly interested in the consequences of actions nor in universal moral duties. Virtues are positive character traits like honesty , courage , kindness , and compassion . They are usually understood as dispositions to feel, decide, and act in

57860-503: The sexual abuse victim of a family doctor who, in addition to the abuse, instructed her to give her terminally ill parents a dose of morphine . However, this story could have been invented by Althusser, who admitted to incorporating "imagined memories" into his "traumabiography." According to Roudinesco, she embodied for Althusser his "displaced conscience", "pitiless superego", "damned part", "black animality". Althusser considered that Rytmann gave him "a world of solidarity and struggle,

58123-462: The sociologist Hélène Rytmann , by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990. Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs , near Algiers , to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace , France. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser,

58386-409: The structure of practical reason and are true for all rational agents. According to Kant, to act morally is to act in agreement with reason as expressed by these principles while violating them is both immoral and irrational. Kant provided several formulations of the categorical imperative. One formulation says that a person should only follow maxims that can be universalized . This means that

58649-408: The structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors. Althusser believes that Marx's work is fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it is built on a groundbreaking epistemology (theory of knowledge) that rejects the distinction between subject and object . In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claims that Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism , counters

58912-456: The study of political economy . He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in

59175-428: The suspect was in a state of dementia at the time of the action". The report said Althusser killed Rytmann in the course of an acute crisis of melancholy, without even realizing it, and that the "wife-murder by manual strangulation was committed without any additional violence, in the course of [an] iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression." As a result, he lost his civil rights, entrusted to

59438-591: The teachings of the Quran . Contractualists reject the reference to God as the source of morality and argue instead that morality is based on an explicit or implicit social contract between humans. They state that actual or hypothetical consent to this contract is the source of moral norms and duties. To determine which duties people have, contractualists often rely on a thought experiment about what rational people under ideal circumstances would agree on. For example, if they would agree that people should not lie then there

59701-444: The tenth book of the Jeunesse de l'Église (the youth wing of Church), an article on the historic situation of Catholicism in response to the question: "Is the good news preached to the men today?" In it, he wrote about the relationship between the Catholic Church and the labour movement, advocating at the same time for social emancipation and the Church "religious reconquest". There was mutual hostility between these two organizations—in

59964-455: The term evil rather than bad is often employed. Obligations are used to assess the moral status of actions, motives , and character traits . An action is morally right if it is in tune with a person's obligations and morally wrong if it violates them. Supererogation is a special moral status that applies to cases in which the agent does more than is morally required of them. To be morally responsible for an action usually means that

60227-452: The theory is significantly different. However, more fundamental to Marx's "break" is a rejection of homo economicus , or the idea held by the classical economists that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or "given" independent of any economic organization. For the classical economists, individual needs can serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting point for

60490-428: The theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production. On the empiricist view, a knowing subject encounters a real object and uncovers its essence by means of abstraction. On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a "real" object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that

60753-417: The title of "What Must Change in the Party". Published between 25 and 28 April, they were expanded and reprinted in May 1978 by François Maspero as the book Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste . Between 1977 and 1978, Althusser mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF. "Marx in his Limits" ("Marx dans ses limits"), an abandoned manuscript written in 1978, argued that there

61016-450: The truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues , like courage and compassion , as the fundamental principle of morality. Ethics is closely connected to value theory , which studies the nature and types of value , like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value . Moral psychology is a related empirical field and investigates psychological processes involved in morality, such as reasoning and

61279-460: The turn from the 1960s to the 1970s, Althusser's major works were translated into English— For Marx , in 1969, and Reading Capital in 1970—disseminating his ideas among the English-speaking Marxists. In the early 1970s, the PCF was, as most of European Communist parties, in a period of internal conflicts on strategic orientation that occurred against the backdrop of the emergence of Eurocommunism . In this context, Althusserian structuralist Marxism

61542-444: The underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism , deontology , and virtue ethics . According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties , like telling

61805-399: The value of consequences based on whether they promote happiness or suffering. But there are also alternative evaluative principles, such as desire satisfaction, autonomy , freedom , knowledge , friendship , beauty , and self-perfection. Some forms of consequentialism hold that there is only a single source of value . The most prominent among them is utilitarianism , which states that

62068-411: The way he interpreted Karl Marx . After a two-year period of preparation ( Khâgne ) under Jean Guitton at the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was admitted into the ENS in July 1939. But his attendance was deferred by many years because he was drafted into the French Army in September of that year in the run-up to World War II and, like most French soldiers following the Fall of France , was captured by

62331-423: The working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it

62594-435: The École Normale, and also, "if possible," suppress Hélène herself while I still could. After the surgery, in May, he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic. His condition did not improve, but in early October he was sent home. Upon returning, he wanted to get away from ENS and even proposed to buy Roudinesco's house. He and Rytmann were also convinced about the "human decline", and so he tried to talk to

62857-408: Was "On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel" ("Du contenu dans la pensée de G. W. F. Hegel", 1947). Based on The Phenomenology of Spirit , and under Gaston Bachelard 's supervision, Althusser wrote a dissertation on how Marx's philosophy refused to withdraw from the Hegelian master–slave dialectic . According to the researcher Gregory Elliott, Althusser was a Hegelian at that time but only for

63120-577: Was a crime of mystical love". Debray compared it to an altruistic suicide : "He suffocated her under a pillow to save her from the anguish that was suffocating him. A beautiful proof of love ... that one can save one's skin while sacrificing oneself for the other, only to take upon oneself all the pain of living". In his autobiography, written to be the public explanation he could not provide in court, Althusser stated that "she matter-of-factly asked me to kill her myself, and this word, unthinkable and intolerable in its horror, caused my whole body to tremble for

63383-403: Was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk, while his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Catholic , worked as a schoolteacher. According to his own memoirs, his Algerian childhood was prosperous; historian Martin Jay said that Althusser, along with Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida , was "a product of the French colonial culture in Northern Africa." In 1930, his family moved to

63646-400: Was absent from the Latin Quarter . Many of his students participated in the events, and Régis Debray in particular became an international celebrity revolutionary. Althusser's initial silence was met with criticism by the protesters, who wrote on walls: "Of what use is Althusser?" ("A quoi sert Althusser?"). Later, Althusser was ambivalent about it; on the one hand, he was not supportive of

63909-643: Was also when he "truly discovered" Machiavelli. Between 1961 and 1965, they exchanged letters and telephone calls, and they also went on trips together, in which they talked about the current events, politics, and theory, as well as made confidences on the happiness and unhappiness of daily life. However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings. They nevertheless continued to exchange letters until 1973; these were published in 1998 into an 800-page book Lettres à Franca . Althusser underwent psychiatric hospitalisations throughout his life,

64172-431: Was coined by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov ), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy : Louis Althusser Louis Pierre Althusser ( UK : / ˌ æ l t ʊ ˈ s ɛər / , US : / ˌ ɑː l t uː ˈ s ɛər / ; French: [altysɛʁ] ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at

64435-429: Was engaged with Lucienne's sister, Juliette. Both families followed the old custom of the levirate , which obliged an older, still unmarried, brother to wed the widow of a deceased younger brother. Lucienne then married Charles, and the son was named after the deceased Louis. In Althusser's memoirs, this marriage was "madness", not so much because of the tradition itself, but because of the excessive submission, as Charles

64698-537: Was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation , developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the " human nature "). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that

64961-437: Was in a relationship until he killed her by strangulation in 1980. That same year, he started a close friendly relationship with Jacques Martin, a translator of G. W. F. Hegel and Herman Hesse . Martin, to whom Althusser dedicated his first book, would later commit suicide. Martin was influential on Althusser's interest on reading the bibliography of Jean Cavaillès , Georges Canguilhem and Hegel. Although Althusser remained

65224-568: Was in this magical setting ... that Louis Althusser fell in love with Franca, discovering through her everything he had missed in his own childhood and that he lacked in Paris: a real family, an art of living, a new manner of thinking, speaking, desiring". She influenced him to appreciate modern theatre ( Luigi Pirandello , Bertolt Brecht , Samuel Beckett ), and, Roudinesco wrote, also on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts ( For Marx especially) but also his most important concepts". In her company in Italy in 1961, as Elliott affirmed,

65487-433: Was introduced into the English language during the Middle English period through the Old French term moralité . The terms ethics and morality are usually used interchangeably but some philosophers distinguish between the two. According to one view, morality focuses on what moral obligations people have while ethics is broader and includes ideas about what is good and how to lead a meaningful life. Another difference

65750-412: Was no Marxist theory of the state; it was only published in 1994 in the Écrits philosophiques et politiques I . The Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto allowed Althusser to develop new ideas on a conference held in Venice about "Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies" in 1977. His speeches resulted into the articles "The Crisis of Marxism " ("La crisi del marxismo") and "Marxism as

66013-578: Was not forced to marry Lucienne since his younger brother had not yet married her. As a result, Althusser concluded, his mother did not love him, but loved the long-dead Louis. The philosopher described his mother as a " castrating mother " (a term from psychoanalysis), who, under the influence of her phobias, established a strict regime of social and sexual "hygiene" for Althusser and his sister Georgette. His "feeling of fathomless solitude" could only be mitigated by communicating with his mother's parents who lived in Morvan . His relationship with his mother and

66276-500: Was observing the Chartist movement ) a year before the Revolutions of 1848 . Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself. Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy , French republicanism and radicalism , and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model

66539-456: Was one of the more or less defined strategic lines. Althusser participated in various public events of the PCF, most notably the public debate "Communists, Intellectuals and Culture" ("Les communistes, les intellectuels et la culture") in 1973. He and his supporters contested the party's leadership over its decision to abandon the notion of the " dictatorship of the proletariat " during its twenty-second congress in 1976. The PCF considered that in

66802-411: Was only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction ("On the Reproduction"). However, from these early manuscripts, he developed " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses ", which was published in the journal La Pensée in 1970, and became very influential on ideology discussions. In the same year, Althusser wrote "Marxism and Class Struggle" ("Marxisme et lutte de classe") that would be the foreword to

67065-411: Was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: " Proletarians of all countries, unite! ". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte 's December 2, 1851 coup , which put an end to the French Second Republic and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War . Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in

67328-569: Was published in 2016. Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained influential in Marxist philosophy . His essay "On the Materialist Dialectic" proposes a great " epistemological break " between Marx's early writings (1840–44) and his later, properly Marxist texts, borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard . His essay "Marxism and Humanism" is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and " species-being ", which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of

67591-536: Was rejected. These studies were nonetheless valuable because Althusser later used them to write his book about Montesquieu 's philosophy and an essay on Rousseau's The Social Contract . Indeed, his first and the only book-length study published during his lifetime was Montesquieu, la politique et l'histoire ("Montesquieu: Politics and History") in 1959. He also lectured on Rousseau from 1950 to 1955, and changed his focus to philosophy of history, also studying Voltaire , Condorcet , and Helvétius , which resulted in

67854-411: Was submitted to the Soviet journal Voprossi Filosofii ; it was not accepted but was published a year later in a Hungarian journal. In 1967–1968, Althusser and his students organized an ENS course titled "Philosophy Course for Scientists" ("Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques") that would be interrupted by May 1968 events . Some of the material of the course was reused in his 1974 book Philosophy and

68117-407: Was such a homebody that biographer William S. Lewis affirmed, "Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp" by the time he met his future wife. In contrast, when he first met Rytmann in 1946, she was a former member of the French resistance and a Communist activist. After fighting along with Jean Beaufret in the group "Service Périclès", she joined the PCF. However, she was expelled from

68380-437: Was the moment of reproduction and constituted the important role of the superstructure. An analysis understood in terms of interdependent practices helps people to conceive of how society is organized, but also permits them to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely,

68643-414: Was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will . In the same way, following Babeuf , considered one of the founders of communism during the French Revolution , he criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of

68906-475: Was unlikely. A further difference is between maximizing and satisficing consequentialism. According to maximizing consequentialism, only the best possible act is morally permitted. This means that acts with positive consequences are wrong if there are alternatives with even better consequences. One criticism of maximizing consequentialism is that it demands too much by requiring that people do significantly more than they are socially expected to. For example, if

69169-401: Was unsettled by the requested criticism he received by Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, and then, by December, he wrote a new essay, "On Marx and Freud". He could not attend the event in 1979 and asked Chertok to replace the texts, but Chertok published the first without his consent. This would become a public "affair" in 1984 when Althusser finally noticed it by the time Chertok republished it in

#290709