The Problem of Freedom and Universality: Marxian Philosophical Anthropology
| dc.contributor.advisor | Muraca, Barbara | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ralda, Oscar | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-03-25T17:40:42Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-03-25T17:40:42Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-03-25 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation has two principal aims. First, it provides a critical reconsideration of Marx’s philosophical anthropology as it bears on the essential continuity of his emancipatory critique of political economy. Second, it makes an argument for well-suitedness of Marxian philosophical anthropology in critically assessing the systematic irrationality of capitalist society, that is, its incorrigible failure to meet substantive human needs and its ecologically destructive accumulative imperatives. It is argued, then, that the normative underpinnings of Marx’s critique of capitalist society derive from his philosophical anthropology and that the latter therefore proves indissociable from the positive necessity of the socialist alternative.Traditionally conceived, philosophical anthropology involves a form of inquiry concerned with articulating the qualities distinctive of, and essential to, human beings. A Marxian philosophical anthropology, however, does not propose a rigid taxonomy of human qualities, but instead develops a critical dialectic capable of grasping the immanent, developmental character of the necessary material and ontological determinations constitutive of human sociality, paradigmatically expressed in the cooperative form of the labor process as the very locus of the process of conscious human self-mediation. Hence, the actualization of universal human freedom pertains to the conscious socialization––or the substantive humanization––of those determinations which form both the limits of social existence generally and which, in their distorted and antagonistically constituted form, become sources of a dysfunctional, irrational, and deficient form of human self-mediation; that is, they assume the form of alienated actualizations of our social nature or essence. In the case of Marxian critique, the necessarily social character of the labor process constitutes not only the primary object of critique in its antagonistically constituted and alienated form, but also constitutes the point of immanence needed for specifying the necessary transcendence of capitalist social relations and hence the destructive social metabolism sustained by capital and its alienated compulsions. In reconstructing Marx’s early work and its constitutive philosophical anthropological concepts, in returning to his metacritique of G. W. F. Hegel, and in tracing the ambivalent reception of the ‘essentialist’ and ‘naturalist premises’ of Marx’s claims within Marxist theory and critical theory more broadly, the dissertation makes the case that the historical materialist critique of capitalist society requires a positive notion of human self-mediation, and that such a notion is supplied by Marx’s philosophical anthropology. Essential to this philosophical anthropology is not only an account of self-mediation as the open-ended development of human needs and powers, but also as the very need for social relations in which social individuals, conscious of their universal interdependence, become for each other the positive condition of their reciprocal self-actualizing freedom, transcending thereby the antagonisms whereby sociality appears as an alienated, altogether external constraint. It is in this way that universal, substantive socialist freedom becomes intelligible––a human necessity. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29295 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Critical theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | Historical materialism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Karl Marx | en_US |
| dc.subject | Normativity | en_US |
| dc.subject | Philosophical anthropology | en_US |
| dc.title | The Problem of Freedom and Universality: Marxian Philosophical Anthropology | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Philosophy | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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