Marx & Kierkegaard

“Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. It threatens our planet through excessive consumption, distracts us with irrelevant advertising, leaves people hungry and without healthcare, and fuels unnecessary wars. Yet we’re also often keen to dismiss the ideas of its most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn’t very surprising. In practice, his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Frankly, the remedies Marx proposed for the ills of the world now sound a bit demented. He thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. At certain moments one can sympathise. But it’s like wanting to ban gossip or forbid watching television. It’s going to war with human behaviour. And Marx believed the world would be put to rights by a dictatorship of the proletariat; which does not mean anything much today. Openly Marxist parties received a total of only 1,685 votes in the 2010 UK general election, out of the nearly 40 million ballots cast…” (continues) TheBookofLife.org

When Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward”, he was creating an interesting problem for his biographers. Our past may be the only thing about us that we can possibly understand, but the biographer, unlike her subject, knows at virtually every moment of her biography what happened next. For Clare Carlisle, in other words, it can look as though the life she is recounting has a coherence – that there was one thing after another for good reasons – that a life mostly doesn’t have when you live it... (Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle, continues)