KANT:
Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace I see before me beautiful. I might reply that I am not fond of things of that sort, made merely to be gaped at. Or I might reply like that Iroquois sachem who said that he liked nothing better in Paris than the eating-houses. I might even go on, as Rousseau would, to rebuke the vanity of the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I might, finally, quite easily convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited island with no hope of ever again coming among people, and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a mere wish, I would not even take that much trouble for it, if I already had a sufficiently comfortable hut. The questioner may grant all this and approve of it; but it is not to the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking, no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of this presentation. We can easily see that, in order for me say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the respect in which I depend on the object’s existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.
MARX:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production. Then begins the epoch of social revolution.
In considering such transformations a distinction should be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the productive social forces and the relations of production.
Man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.
There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities.
The capitalistic mode of production ( essentially the production of surplus-value) produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labor-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labor-power itself.
Kant is all reflection and Marx is all fight, but both exhibit the modern tendency to split the world into two forever divided camps; Kant, its use and its beauty, Marx, its use and its use-value—the latter of which Marx maintains, is experienced by mankind religiously and aesthetically; so finally Kant and Marx are very much the same, ushering in fantastically devised estrangement.
Though Kant might be considered ‘conservative’ and Marx, ‘radical,’ the lynx-eye of true philosophy notes the profound similarity between these two philosophers, both, in many respects, brilliant but deranged producers of woe.
It is difficult to pick a winner between these two deep and similar types of conflict.
WINNER: MARX
