This study discusses the limits of Marx’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s conception of dialectics as a self-mediation of the fundamental by way of historical reality: we will show Marx’s disessentialisation of the (already quite monistic) Hegelian absolute spirit, and the consequences of Marx’s conception of consciousness as of a conscious being for the concept of culture, reduced that is to interest-conditioned, “ideological” praxis and its self-reflection. The study thus subjects to criticism the reduction of objectivi¬ty to totality in György Lukács, the founder of modern western Marxism; it points to the residuum (in no way objectively unlicensed) of self-positing subjecti¬vism in his “class-consciousness”; and it compares this immanentist conception with, on the one hand, the utopian conception of Ernst Bloch, foreshadowing Derrida’s stress on the auto criti¬cism of Marxism as a philosophy of the historicity of categories (as Lukács himself theo¬retically understood it!), and, on the other hand, with the dialectical non identity of the possible of Theodor W. Adorno. By reflecting on Marx’s concept of (historical) consciousness (of conscious Being) through critical insight into its most (in our view) signi¬ficant interpretations of the 20th century, the study attempts to capture the limi¬ts of the monistically-conceived dialectic for democratic social pra¬xis, preserving the “principle of hope” in the openness of the unsubsumable individual.
There is a plethora of naturalisms in contemporary philosophy. Instead of sorting out diverse past or present variants of this philosophical movement this article aims to define in three relatively simple points a version of naturalism that I consider as the most auspicious way for philosophy to remain a relevant and significant force in the domain of knowledge dominated by contemporary science. The tripartite definition of naturalism that is presented deliberately does not claim to be original, but seeks to capture in a concise and clear way the common core of the naturalistic mind frame. The point of the article is to point out the need to reduce internal metaphilosophical disputes within the naturalistic movement in favor of a greater emphasis on the concrete participation of philosophy in current scientific research. The claim is that the real (not only nominal) realization of the naturalistic turn in philosophy necessarily presupposes a change in the process of the education of future philosophers.