Publication Details

Abstract

The problems of “abolition of philosophy” in Engels’ work represent a specific reflection of the original, on the one hand, and of the ideological application of the Marxist philosophy on the other hand -as a new philosophical view of the world consistently based upon the science. Philosophy is being abolished by means of being realized: theoretically and practically. Theoretically in the sense that the tradition of philosophical speculation is abolished by theorigin of a philosophy of a new type — of dialectical materialism. It is not immediately that philosophy is practically realized, but by means of transformation of socialism from a Utopia into a scientific ideology that serves as a direct starting point for a revolutionary change of society. Abolition of philosophy is therefore, in the contexts of Engels’ thinking, not a simple negation of philosophy as such — as it is sometimes being deduced from some of his formulations in his “The Development of Socialism from a Utopia to a Science” or in “Ludwig Feuerbach” by the bourgeois marxology, but it is its complicated theoretical-practical transformation, in the framework of which the practical involvement of philosophy in the change of practical world becomes a source of the motive stimuli of its intensive theoretical development. A distinct merit of Engels’ in the development of the given problems consisted in the analysis of “ideological powers” and of the function of ideology in the life of society leading into different definitions of ideological consciousness that is understood only as an “illusory consciousness” on the one hand, and as a spiritual moment of the super-structure in the broadest sense on the other hand. In the polemic with the efforts of disinterpretation of the given difference it is to be emphasized that the difference of both definitions is bound with, the difference of the subjective and objective approaches to social consciousness and with differentiating its changing function in the historic time, in which the adequateness of forms of social reflection increases gradually. In unity with science and with socialist ideology philosophy retains its full justification in Marxism as a general knowledge of reality and at the same time also both its functions conditioning its productive application in the life of society: the positive function and the negative one, the affirmative as well as the critical. Only in the case when ideology communicates the conscious projects of philosophy and science to the practice as its theoretical stimuli, but when at the same time it stimulates also their development by the requirements and experience of the practice, a "feed-back” between theory and practice is closed. The ideology becomes scientific in this case, without becoming extinct, while by means of it the leadership of philosophy and science is being realized in the full practical meaning of the word.