Episode #078 ... Marx and Kierkegaard on Religion pt. 2

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  Hello,

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  support the show at patreon.com slash philosophize this.

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  Hope you love the show today.

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  So among historians of philosophy and people that just in general look at the thinking of Karl Marx,

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  there's not much of a consensus on how he felt when it comes to the subject of individual people and the relationship to the task of making moral progress.

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  It's too bad, really.

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  But the good news is for us as fans of philosophy, rather than, you know,

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  historians of philosophy or people that have to attach their identity to these people's thinking.

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  For us, the value of a philosophical concept really just lies in the idea itself, right?

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  What I mean is we don't need to necessarily understand the complex inner workings of Marx's brain as well

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  as he did to get value out of an interpretation of his work.

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  I mean,

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  as long as that interpretation produces some novel string of thought and gets us to think about possible assumptions we have in our thinking,

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  then it's really done its job for us.

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  So let's talk about a common reading of Marx.

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  What did he think about individual moral progress?

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  But we know a little bit about what he thinks based on what we already know about him,

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  you know, religion is the opiate of the masses.

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  But that statement in itself really doesn't tell us the whole story.

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