The Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Natural Philosophy

This edition includes a new introduction by the translator and reference materials including a Glossary of Philosophic and Economic Marxist Terminology, an Index of Personalities Associated with Marx and a Timeline of Marx’s Life and Works.

This is Volume I in The Complete Works of Karl Marx by NL Press.

This manuscript is Marx's Doctorate university Thesis. It is one of the most critical texts to understand the foundation of Marx's political theories. Here he elaborates his initial, basic dialectical understanding of perception through a de-mysticized Epicurean Naturalism. This is an anachronistic re-interpretation of Epicurean cosmology through the lens of Hegelianism. He creates a dichotomy between Epicurus and Democritus, although he admits that "Epicurus borrowed his physics from Democritus." The "rationality" Marx advocates for is inherently an amoral and misanthropic form of anti-logos reason, or in Hegelian terms, it is missing the Geist, the Super-rational "glue" that enables human reasoning in the first place. This work, as with all of Marx's writings, it deeply anti-socratic and thus anti-existentialist in his denial of Self-Consciousness (mimicking Schopenhauer & Nietzsche): "If self-consciousness, which knows itself only under the form of abstract generality, is elevated to the status of absolute principle, then the door is opened to superstitious and unfree mysticism".