This is going to be a long mish mash post as I'm rushing through it to get to other things but did want to respond.
B0ycey wrote:Wasn't Marx against religion not God, calling it the 'Opium of the people"? Nonetheless the book of contradictions (ie The Bible) says that God would be against Capitalism in any case. Doesn't a camel have a better chance going through the eye of a needle than a rich man entering heaven for example?
Perhaps this is the crux. Religion is merely an explanation of the world 2000 years ago and used to control behaviour since then. And today we have another explanation due to our improved understanding. Are either right? Perhaps not. I have my doubts on the Standard Model. So in many ways Science is a religion as it relies on faith also. But there is a difference. Religion tries to enforce an objective morality to control behaviour -which is why Marx was against it I might add. And science is trying to explain things by creating models of known data and getting some perspective that way. And in terms of religion what better way to control behaviour than an all seeing God I might add?
I guess what I am saying is God as a being, human by design, doesn't explain what we can explain such as evolution today. Humans are not special on Earth and the planet wasn't made 6000 years ago. But God as a being is perhaps the best way for people to understand the world better as they can relate to that and understand that in terms of association to their reality. So God as a being is what was written and explained when we didn't know better. But in reality is that going to be God? I doubt it. So I tend to agree with @quetzalcoatl, that if you are going to entertain the existence of God at all, it is better to use God for understand creation than a morality found in religious text that isn't consistent in the behavior of life on Earth at all. Including, as you pointed out in our (humans) behaviour.
My own speculation would be that there is a lot that makes it difficult for me to reconcile a sense of Marx believing in God of any kind based on his humanist ethics (humans are the basis of all that is important, not God or abstract entities) and his non-metaphysical approach.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm The Marxian conception of nature, of man, and man’s relation to nature disposes of many traditional epistemological problems. Marx neither needs to prove existence of the external world, nor disprove its existence. From his point of view both these endeavours are prompted by false assumptions concerning the relation of man to nature, by considering man as a detached observer, setting him against the world or placing him, as it were, on a totally different level. For man, who is part of nature, to doubt the existence of the external world or to consider it as in need of proof is to doubt his own existence, and even Descartes and Berkeley refused to go to such a length.
This conclusion is of considerable significance for the interpretation of Marxian philosophy. As Marx refused to dissociate nature from man and man from nature and conceived man not only as part of nature but also nature in a certain sense as a product of man’s activity and, thus, part of man, Marx’s naturalism has no need of metaphysical foundation. Moreover, since man knows only socially mediated nature, ‘man’, and not natural reality, ‘is the immediate object of natural science’. To use Marx’s terminology, the natural science of man is logically prior to all other knowledge.[59]
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Why%20Marx%20was%20not%20an%20Atheist.pdfFinally, in everything I say about atheism, the God whose existence I am talking of being denied has nothing to do with infantile conceptions of an anthropomorphic God who watches our every move and does favours for the well-behaved. This kind of conception disappeared from serious theology, let alone philosophy, centuries ago, and for a long time has been maintained only for the comforting of the ignorant and the disciplining of children. An atheism which limited itself to the denial of this kind of God is unworthy of the name. The atheism which I am talking about is the atheism which denies the existence of a God of any kind, including a Deistic, non-interventionist prime mover or a Spinozist Pantheistic God. It was this kind of atheism which Marx denied. Need I repeat however, that this does not at all mean that Marx was a Deist or a Pantheist, but rather that he foreswore all kinds of Theism, Deism and Pantheism, including those that clothe themselves in Atheistic or philosophical garb.
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He opposed the influence of religion in the working class but only as one of any number of forms in which mysticism manifested itself, among which he numbered also the atheism of his day. He also foresaw a time in the future when God would have no place in human affairs, because that world whose spiritual aroma is religion would have been abolished.
(The above coincidentally makes a point against God as a person like being as childish as opposed to the absolute grounding to reality sense of God or any other concept which takes God's place for a person i.e. Matter or laws of history)
Of course there can be the take in which he opposed the reactionary manner in which religion was used as seen in his critique of how Christianity makes people docile to the status quo.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfThe social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces69. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor's compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, selfcontempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its selfconfidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity. (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, MECW 6:231)
But this criticism stems from his implicit humanist ethics in which the denial of the self for the abstract entity of God and life after death instead of a valorization and development of the human being.
This humanism in part seems to derive from his initial Feuerbachian approach.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htmMarx would not dissent from some of the beliefs of materialism, but it is doubtful whether he would attach as much importance to them as the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century did or as contemporary dialectical materialists do. For it is right to say, as Marx emphasized in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, that ‘consistent naturalism or humanism’ should be distinguished not only from idealism but also from materialism.[1] Marx’s basic philosophic attitude differed from absolute and reductive materialism, the only form of materialism known at the time, and could best be described as naturalism, a classificatory name which he chose himself. In this respect Marx was a Feuerbachian, for it was Feuerbach who declared his indifference to all previous philosophical schools and claimed that his own philosophy, being concerned with man, was neither materialist nor idealist.[2] Nature is a more comprehensive concept than matter. It includes matter and life, body and mind, the motions of inanimate objects and the flights of passion and imagination. ‘Nature’, wrote Santayana, ‘is material but not materialistic’,[3] a comment that might have come from Feuerbach or from Marx.
BUt he also famously criticized Feuerbach's humanism as he simply reversed the subject-predicate of Hegel to show that instead of the mystified form presented in Hegel, God was instead derive from man. But Feuerbach conceived of man in the abstract individual kind, where as Marx conceived of each person as a socialized individual who is accultured to sociocultural history of man based on the present day relations after seeing Stirner's criticism of Feuerbach's deification of man as still just as abstract and alienating as the concept of God.
Feuerbach considered human beings in terms of attributes which are common to all, where as Marx's examination of labor has him identify labor as the essence and precondition to all that is human, it is the singular thing which underpins everything else in both the origins and existence of human beings (man's physical body and ability is itself a product of labor and not solely that of nature).
There is only one person who I am vaguely aware also criticized Feuerbach's criticism of Christianity, with God as the creation of man.
[URL]https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/426foa/have_there_been_any_christian_responses_to//url]
There's also a rather explicit response to Feuerbach in the Russian theology I study, particularly in Vladimir Soloviev's notion of "Divine-Humanity." This is a response to Feuerbach's charge that belief in God amounts to the alienation of humanity from itself--that by projecting our best attributes onto the non-existent God, we separate ourselves from the best of what we can be, and consider ourselves nothing in the face of this God to whom we've ascribed all of our own perfections. Soloviev (and other Russians who follow him: Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, S. L. Frank, etc.) basically draws on the Orthodox notion of theosis, or deification, to develop a Christian alternative to Feuerbach (who was really popular in Russia at the turn of the 20th century).
Recall that Feuerbach differentiates between "God" and "divinity," where "God" refers to the being, and "divinity" refers to the attributes. His claim is that God doesn't exist, and was only made up to be the bearer of the divinity that we humans have alienated from ourselves. Divinity, in fact, belongs to humanity. This is why Dostoevsky referred to Feuerbach's theology (and it is theology, just of the atheist sort) as a dogma of chelovekobozhestvo, or "mangodhood," atheistic humanism. People like Soloviev drew on Orthodox theology to turn Feuerbach on his head, opposing his theology with the dogma of bogochelovechestvo, or "Godmanhood," "divine-humanity." The doctrines of Incarnation and deification overcome Feuerbach by affirming with him that divinity does belong to humanity--it is properly constitutive of humanity as such--yet divinity is something we possess through self-transcendence in relation to the absolute. Soloviev writes:
The beginning of truth is the conviction that the human person is not only negatively absolute, which is a fact. In other words, a person does not wish to be, and cannot be, satisfied with any conditional, limited content. A person is able to attain positive absoluteness as well, is able to possess the whole content, the fullness of being. Consequently, this absolute content, this fullness of being, is not a mere fantasy, a subjective phantom, but a genuine reality. Thus, belief in oneself, belief in the human person, is at the same time belief in God, for Divinity belongs to human beings and to God, but with one difference: God possesses Divinity in eternal actuality, whereas human beings can only attain it, can only have it granted to them, and in the present state, there is only possibility, only striving.
Remember what the point of Feuerbach's critique is: to advance a humanism that would enable a socialism founded on humanity's best attributes (like love). Feuerbach believed that Christianity is antithetical to humanism because it alienates humanity from these attributes and treats humanity as nothing. The doctrine of Divine-Humanity responds precisely by showing how, in light the doctrine of deification, a Christian humanism not only is possible, but that is the only possible ground for an authentic humanism, because only Christianity allows people to actually attain their divinity. Divinity comes by the grace of the Incarnation, which is the incarnation of perfect personality into human history, so that, by the grace of the Spirit, those who become members of the Body of Christ also become partakers of Christ's perfect personality in the perfect community (sobornost', "conciliarity" or "all-togethernes") of Church (which is not, for Soloviev, coextensive with the Orthodox Church as an institution). This perfect-personality-in-perfect-communion becomes the basis on which socialism is to be constructed, as opposed to the atheistic humanism of Feuerbach, which (according to Soloviev's followers like Bulgakov and Berdiaev, and prophetically foreseen by Dostoevsky) reached its culmination in Bolshevik terror.
This is a sort of religious humanism that I could find some appeal in, although I don't know Soloviev of Russian Orthox Theology well enough to situate his criticism of Feuerbach in relation to Marx's humanism which eschews the metaphysical, methodologically at the very least.
BUt something which is compatible with religious ethics and Marx would be the emphasis on virtue which isn't something confined to Christianity but is derived from Ancient Greek ethics of virtue which emphasizes one's character over one's duty, its a question of who you should be instead of any math like solution to a specific problem. See this for brief summary of virtue ethics as over and above duty ethics: [urlhttps://epochemagazine.org/a-problem-based-reading-of-nussbaums-virtue-ethics-4cacfa3e74d6][/url]
And perhaps also note that the content of what constitutes a virtue changes historically with the community. Christian virtues are quite different from ancient Greece in which excellence in anything was virtuous while, according to Nietzsche, Christian values is based on making a virtue out of impotence and not doing what you wanted where as this wasn't so for the ancient Greeks.
[urlhttps://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm[/url]
Discussion of Marx’s moral views has hitherto been deficient because it has failed to recognise a common distinction between two different conceptions of morality. Because it seems apparent that he does not have a moral theory in one sense of the term ‘morality,’ it is concluded that he does not have a moral theory at all. But this does not follow if there is another sense of ‘morality.’ We must recognise, that is, that the notion of morality is not a simple and unambiguous notion. We must distinguish between an ethics of duty and an ethics of virtue. [26] On the one hand, morality has been viewed as centrally concerned with the duties and obligations one person owes to another. So viewed, morality is characterised by certain notions such as duty, obligation, guilt, justice, rights, etc. On this understanding of morality, to be moral is to act in accordance with certain moral laws and duties, or to be moved by a sense of moral obligation. It is the morality of ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not.’ Failure to act in these ways is met with condemnation for moral corruption, for being recreant to duty. In this sense, it has already been suggested, Marx does not have a moral theory. He rarely uses the notions and vocabulary which are identified with this view of morality, If one then assumes that this view is the only (proper) view of morality, one will quite naturally conclude that Marx must have been a scientist. Accordingly, one might further conclude that he condemned capitalism either simply because it was self-destructive, or because it violated various non-moral reasons or values. [27]
However, there is another understanding of morality which should not be forgotten. This is the sense of morality in which morality is linked with certain virtues, excellences, or flourishing ways of living. In this sense, morality is not primarily concerned with rules and principles, but with the cultivation of certain dispositions or traits of character. This view has been expressed in this way: ‘The moral law ... has to be expressed in the form, “be this”, not in the form, “do this” ... the true moral law says “hate not”, instead of “kill not”...... the only mode of stating the moral law must be a rule of character.’ [28] This, I believe, is quite close to Marx’s views.
So when Marx criticizes morality, it is of the individualist duty sort.
I agree that Marx was opposed to religion even of the atheistic sort which was one-sided (ideology) and was a mystification that controlled or misled people.
Although I think the appearance of objectivity of religious morality is no more objective than it ever was when we adopt the humanist position that doesn't appeal to metaphyiscal beings such as God as these have the appearance of objectivity in their universality as they aren't addressed to any particular.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/subject-position.htmIf an ethical claim is not to be either dogmatic or empty, it must be intelligible as uttered from a particular subject position, that is, in terms of who utters it, and some definite relationship of the speaker to the addressee, direct or indirect, upon whom it is to be binding, in some real, historical society. I take ‘subject position’ as inclusive of both the speaker and who the speaker addresses. A set of words taken in abstraction from who utters them to whom, is just that, a set of words, and nothing more, until “picked up” by some subject who meaningfully utters them. Discussions about ethical claims in abstraction from subject position have their place, but so long as they remain in abstracto they cannot constitute ethical claims. Only to the extent that words mediate a relation between living human beings, do they become practical. Leaving aside the question of blame, as well as calling upon a response from some subject, an ethical utterance must also respond to the suffering of some subject.
If an ethical claim which is not situated as the claim of a particular subject position is to have any practical validity at all, then the only logical possibilities are that it has universal validity, or it is an entirely individual claim. For a claim to have universal validity, independent of the social position of the speaker and addressee in some real historical society, it’s source would have to be extramundane: God, Nature, or pure reason, but in conditions of modernity, such extramundane sources are excluded.
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On the other hand, an ethical principle which is absolutely individual is of concern only for the given individual and has no force for anyone else. So a valid ethical claim must emanate from some particular subject position.
I worry that God has become just as abstract as any other deification when trying to make a universal appeal because its reality extends only as far as a real community of people exist, as opposed to mere beliefs of individuals considered independently of their social origins.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phiSittlichkeit is dierent from Moralität. Moralität begins with Socrates and reaches its high point in Kant. Moralität is individual, rational, and reective morality. It is based upon individual autonomy and personal conviction. One must rationally decide what is moral and do it because it is moral—because our rationality tells us that it is the right thing to do. This rational and reective component is relatively absent in traditional Sittlichkeit, which is best represented, for Hegel, in the Greek polis before the rise of Socratic Moralität. Sittlichkeit is ethical behavior grounded in custom and tradition and developed through habit and imitation in accordance with the laws and practices of the community. Personal reection and analysis have little to do with traditional Sittlichkeit. Sittlichkeit is ethical life built into one's character, attitudes, and feelings. Furthermore, Moralität involves an ought. It is morality that ought to be realized. This ought is also absent from Sittlichkeit. For it, morality is not something we merely ought to realize or ought to be. Morality exists—it is. It is already embedded in our customs, traditions, practices, character, attitudes, and feelings. The objective ethical order already exists in, is continuously practiced by, is actualized in, the citizen.
As this is the real basis of any morality as it is always based on the relations between people mediated by their shared projects, where there is no mediating project, it is equivalent to strangers in a state of nature
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Collaborative%20Ethics.pdfHuman freedom can only be attained through mediated self-determination, i.e., participation in projects. A stranger encountered in a public space is to be treated, Kant tells us, as an end in themself, that is, as a project. My relationship to a stranger then is that between two mutually independent ends, or projects. At the same time however, the other is a person, and not just any aggregate of actions, and persons are bearers of ineliminable rights. But the interaction between two individuals is never unmediated, except in the jungle perhaps, the question is always to discern which project defines the relationship relevant to a specific ethical problem. The foregoing review of efforts to devise an ethics appropriate to life in modern, secular nation states, needs to be taken together with my proposal that these efforts can only reach a successful outcome by taking a collaborative project as mediating the relationships between individuals. This leads us to a two-step approach to resolving ethical problems. First we must identify the relevant project and the position of the subjects within that project, or alternatively determine that the subjects must in the given instance be regarded as independent projects. Then we must identify the ethical norms indigenous to the given project(s), which we will do on the basis of a typology of projects and relations between projects. For each paradigm there are specific ethical norms. Every project has its own ethics, according to its self-concept; however, not in every case can such norms be endorsed as rational and reasonable,
The point about independent projects is very clear on what happens in Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/state-of-nature.pdfWhat confront each other in the master/slave dialectic are two corporate subjects (families, companies, clans, polois or nations) not two individuals. The master/slave dialectic demonstrates how modern, secular society emerged from traditional communities, not by means of a peaceful agreement but rather through conquest and subsumption of one by the other. When two sovereign subjects confront one another in the absence of effective overarching legal institutions, then conquest and the subsumption of one subject by the other is the only alternative to mutual destruction or withdrawal into mutual indifference. Even the establishment of trade relations presupposes certain mutual recognition, which historically follows from the failure of attempts at conquest or from the expectation of such failure.
Well God as some sort of absolute whether God is replaced by nature, reason, laws of history or what ever are mystifications and examples of man's alienation from himself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch05.htmAlienation (or "estrangement") means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him. They stand above and against him as objects, even though they may be objects of his own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object.
The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry.[59] The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialties, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. [60] The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a socalled religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act. Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.
This is where I have a vague speculation on the social cultural basis and development of consciousness and how it corresponds to the development of conceptions of God. As there is a shift in the ideality of God in material form.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIt is quite true that the “real talers” are in no way different from the gods of the primitive religions, from the crude fetishes of the savage who worships (precisely as his “god”!) an absolutely real and actual piece of stone, a bronze idol or any other similar “external object”. The savage does not by any means regard the object of his worship as a symbol of “God”; for him this object in all its crude sensuously perceptible corporeality is God, God himself, and no mere “representation” of him.
The very essence of fetishism is that it attributes to the object in its immediately perceptible form properties that in fact do not belong to it and have nothing in common with its sensuously perceptible external appearance.
When such an object (stone or bronze idol, etc.) ceases to be regarded as “God himself” and acquires the meaning of an “external symbol” of this God, when it is perceived not as the immediate subject of the action ascribed to it, but merely as a “symbol” of something else outwardly in no way resembling the symbol, then man’s consciousness takes a step forward on the path to understanding the essence of things.
But God or Gods of old clearly had a reality to them just as real as money has value today and is objective in it's value and not dependent on any individual's consciousness as it's basis is outside of man. In fact, Marx used Feuerbach's insight on subject-predicate reversal between God and Man to apply the same notion in his particular way to the ideality of money and value.
But to get to your point about science today I think it doesn't essentially solve the problem of alienation and if anything has exacerbated it within conditions of the capitalist production which has pursued science as a means to revolutionizing the industry and production.
Scientism and faith in science although not exactly the same as religion, has become so complex that it requires faith in the experts and institutions that produce the facts that we learn to be facts in the same way we might take the facts spoken by the priest about God and religion to be true not knowing any better because we haven't the time to really explore the matter ourselves.
We are to subject ourselves just as much as the religious person to science and the instrumental rationality of our bureaucratized world.
In fact, the epistemological views associated with the objectivity of science tend to deny the place of human beings as knowing subjects, this is how it maintains its appeal to objectivity which is somewhat functionally true but misunderstands the real basis of how we come to know things.
But knowledge is of course not something developed strictly of the individual to nature or what ever, but is always within projects, Einstein wasn't an independent thinker but one who had the established knowledge of physics and communities of scientists working on problems.
So I wish to emphasize the subject-object relation of Humanity against the one sidedness of science as it is typically understood in it's aversion to subjectivity yet often doesn't always understand logical necessity of thought.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259742845_Reality_of_the_Ideal"To know an object – and be unable to correlate this knowledge (knowledge of the object!) with the object?! In actual fact, this paradoxical situation arises where a person does not really know an object, but knows something else. What? Phrases about the object. Words, terms, formulas, signs, symbols, and stable combinations thereof deposited in science, mastered (memorized) in place of knowledge of the object – as a special object that exists above and outside reality, as a special world of ideal, abstract, phantom ‘objects’. It is here that an illusion of knowledge arises, followed by the insoluble task of relating this illusory knowledge to reality, to life."
Ilyenkov most probably bears in mind here the ‘third world’ by Popper, populated by ‘linguistic entities’.
The problem of the correlation of knowledge with a thing arises only if they are treated as two primordially different ‘worlds’. Reality (‘world’ number one) seems to be transcendent or ‘the beyond’ with respect to knowledge (‘world’ number three), while the individual consciousness (‘world’ number two) is allotted a part of a medium, correlating ideas with things. All the while truth is being sheltered between the ‘worlds’ like Epicurean gods. Little wonder, then, that Popper considered truth to be a purely relative concept and altogether rejected the existence of absolute truths. However, as Ilyenkov’s disciple S.N. Mareyev noticed, relative truth without the absolute truth is as the North Pole without the South – namely nonsense.
The very concept of truth is different in dialectics and formal logic. The latter demands to eliminate subjectivity – this ideal is clearly pronounced in the title of the report by Popper: ‘Epistemology without a knowing subject’. By contrast, in dialectics truth is understood as a process of transformation of the subjective into the objective, and vice versa. And the ideal is an objective form of a subject’s activity.
And that concludes my many threaded ramble. Take from it what you will as I'm trying to pursue too many different ideas here.
But in looking through it I've stumbled upon some clarification for myself in regards to religion and conception of God and I don't imagine I'll go the route of Soloviev though I'd like to learn more about his position. I suspect Ill forever remain a humanist
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics