Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

(^38) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents
the cry of Epicurus: 'Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods
of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of die crowd.'
Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus: 'In
one word - I hate all gods' is her own profession, her own slogan
against all gods of heaven and earth who do not recognise man's self-
consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside
it.^1 "
This 'self-consciousness' was the central concept of the philosophy that
the Young Hegelians, and Bruno Bauer in particular, were elaborating.
For them, man's self-consciousness developed continually and realised
that forces it had thought separate from itself - religion, for example -
were really its own creation. Thus the task of self-consciousness and its
principal weapon, philosophical criticism, was to expose all the forces and
ideas that stood opposed to the free development of this human self-
consciousness.^120
This enthusiasm for the philosophy of self-consciousness was reflected
in the body of the thesis where Marx criticised the mechanistic determin-
ism of Democritus by contrasting it with the Epicurean ethic of liberty.^121
A native of Abdera in Thrace, writing at the end of the fifth century B.C.,
Democritus summed up, in his theory of atoms and the void, the previous
two hundred years of Greek physical speculation. Epicurus taught more
than a century later in an Athens marked by the general social chaos of
the post-Alexandrine epoch and was concerned to supply principles for the
conduct of individuals.^122 Marx began his account of the relationship of
the two philosophers with a paradox: Epicurus held all appearances to be
objectively real but at the same time, since he wished to conserve freedom
of the will, denied that the world was governed by immutable laws and
thus in fact seemed to reject the objective reality of nature. Democritus,
on the other hand, was very sceptical about the reality of appearance, but
yet held the world to be governed by necessity. From this Marx concluded,
rightly, that Epicurus's physics was really only a part of his moral philo-
sophy. Epicurus did not merely copy Democritus's physics, as was com-
monly thought, but introduced the idea of spontaneity into the movement
of the atoms, and to Democritus's world of inanimate nature ruled by
mechanical laws he added a world of animate nature in which the human
will operated. Marx thus preferred the view of Epicurus for two reasons:
firstly, his emphasis on the absolute autonomy of the human spirit freed
men from all superstitions of transcendent objects; secondly, the emphasis
on 'free individual self-consciousness' showed one the way of going
beyond the system of a 'total philosophy'.
It was above all this liberating aspect of Epicurus that Marx admired.