Publication Details

Abstract

Our approach to the positive Marxist-Leninist account of the problem of man is not an accidental one; that is to say what was one of the causes why there were considerable theoretical-methodological deformations was a clear lack of positive development of the elementary methodological starting points in Marx’s theory of man. And thus it happened that criticizing the drawbacks of dogmatism and of the cult „the improvers” of Marxism in their effort to approach the „authentic“ Marx by means of the so called „radical criticism” deformed then the very principles of Marx’s philosophical legacy. The idea of antihistořicism became the theoretical-methodological basis in this „criticism“. And thus instead of the dialectical-materialistic approach we can meet, in the various „philosophical-anthropological“ conceptions of „authentic“ Marxism, the absolutizing effort to consider e. g. the early stage of Marxism (the period of Marx’s Feuerbachian-humanistic orientation) as the highest stage of its development. On the basis of this the philosophical revisionism does not take for necessary to start in the analysis of man from the complex whole of Marx’s philosophical texts, which — on the terminal consequences — means intentional ignoring of the idea of continuity in the thinking of the founder of scientific communism. Similar theoretical-methodological inconsequences can be met among our theoreticians who in their attempt at an „authentic“ explanation of the problems stated an artificial contradiction between „the young Marx“ and „the old Marx”, resp. between Marx and Engels or Lenin. Bearing in mind these drawbacks and in connection with their running criticism we have conceived also this paper, the central question of which is an analysis of the theoretical-methodological elements in Marx’s theory of man.