Publication Details

Abstract

By formulating the problem of freedom as a question of practice we present a conception of the aspect of the substance and the very principle of human freedom. In this sense freedom from the point of view of practice expresses the process of the humanizing, practical-creative command of the objective world in the sphere of the ontological unity of subject-object. In Marxist philosophy, in this connection freedom appears as the problem of human reality created in the process of human objectivization. Thus it can be asserted that freedom as an organic “component“ of the practical existence of subject exists in the form of an objective relation that is its expression and that fulfills the natural condition of activity and justification. Only in an objective relation (man — world) man confirms himself as a free (or nonfree) being. It is only through this relation that is (in substance) in sign of human reign over nature that the question of freedom — naturally from the aspect of practice as the highest grade of development of human activity — can be understood as a question of revolutionary practice. The starting point of this conception is Marx’s (and Engels's) conception of practice and human substance as practical existence, i. e. existence in the form of practice which is an expression of the revolutionary principle of practical fight for man’s liberation. But it is to be noted that Marx's notion of practice represents the basic ontological starting point of his “philosophy of human liberalization“ and that it is an expression of ontological reality of being, i. e. an expression of the real, changeable, in each historical period a different life process of men. Without practice — and its basic form of work — Marx’s conception of “anthropologization“ of nature would not be possible, the conception the substance of which lies in the dialectical negation of the natural by the human, i. e. in self-assertion of man as man — creator. In this sense freedom — from the aspect of this historical practice — is not only an expression ofthe recognized inevitability, as it is withHegel, or of the spontaneous activity of the pure I in the Fichtean sense of the word, but a practical creative surpassing of this recognized inevitability for the sake of human aims. This conception of freedom coheres, by Marx’s words, with the historical task of human society — of its revolutionary class —, „...to enthrown the reign of individuals over accidentality and things . . . This task, determined by the present state of things, coheres with the task to arrange the society in a communist way.“ Only under this precondition freedom — unlike with Hegel and Feuerbach — will cease to be an affair of consciousness er imaginations and will become an expression of real practical existence.