Show description

In his analysis of culture, Marx did not see the principle of its subservience to ideology, or of historicism as a rigid pattern to which reality must be made to conform. He said as much in his Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical 44 ANTON INA KLOSKOWSKA Economy, where he noted the unequal relaton of material production development to artistic development, and reminded himself not to approach the concept of progress merely in the abstract. It was thus an inadmissible abstraction for him to uphold the view of a permanent, clear-cut correspondence between the level of technological and cultural development, or even between the forms of organization of intellectual life, and the level of artistic or intellectual production.

Polish Essays in the Methodology of the Social Sciences, 2132. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979. 22 JULIAN HOCHFELD make an object of desire. In that current sense there are, accordingly, no interests without mental attitudes consisting in valuations, and without behaviour which indicates that the person involved strives for certain values which he appreciates. Historical analyses of relationships between structures of objective social positions and structures of attitudes and behaviour oflarge numbers of people, which occupy so much place in the works of Marx and Engels, stick, in fact, to such a psychological interpretation of class interest and conflicts of class interests.

Marx thought that the problem of consciousness should be studied against the background of these categories of activity, and added that consciousness is not empirically separated from real life practice. Actually, consciousness refers to all the above categories of human activity. It is man's singular feature that acting individuals are capable of reflection directed on the object of their action, or of self-reflection. This feature sets human activity apart from animal behaviour and social relations apart from interaction in animal herds.