The Youngest Marx

[Zanthorus]

Recently I've been interested in some of Marx's earliest philosophical works, the notebooks on Epicurean philosophy and his doctorate on the difference between the Epicurean and Democritean philosophies of nature, and how they relate to his later work. The most obvious connection is Democritus and Epicurus' materialism, however the connection seems to go a little deeper than that.

The most ineresting thing I've found so far is this (http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/6/2/9/0/pages362900/p362900-1.php) paper which suggests that Marx saw the situtation in Greek philosophy after Epicurus in the same way as German philosophy after Hegel. After a "philosophy total in itself" confronted the world there were two roots - Plutarch's root of descending into religious mysticism or the root identified with Lucretius of making practical demands on the world. The Doctoral thesis is said to be Marx's attempt to mark out his own relation to Hegel through the relation of Lucretius to Epicurus. I do find it kind of strange how the authors consider the former analogous to the Old Hegelians and the latter analogous to the Young Hegelians since Marx reproached even the "true conqueror of the old philosophy", Feuerbach, for having no concept of "human sensous activity, practice".

Does anyone have any good insights on the above thesis or Marx's earliest works in general?

[BAM]

John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature goes into this in some depth. I read it ages ago when I was a student. I do still have a copy somehwere.

Marx said Epicurus was the greatest of all the ancient thinkers and he praised him for his non-deterministic materialism (that would foreshadow Marx's "new materialism" of the Theses on Feuerbach) and for his concept of man as being situated within nature - apart from, but a part of, the natural world.

In this way, Epicurus stood as a materialist in opposition to the prevailing philosophy of his age, in the figure of Aristotle's total system, much like Marx's relation to Hegel, and also because Hegel hadn't been appreciative of Epicurus at all. Epircurus's philosophy of nature provided him with his concept of freedom and spontaneity, something lacking in the rigid determinism of Democritus. His ethics came from his physics. That's how Marx saw it. I think the analogy works, even if Marx went on later to reject the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach. And Marx criticises Epicurus in a similar way that he criticises "contemplative" materialism.

(I couldn't get that link to work, BTW)

EDIT: I did get it to work after a couple of tries, but the formatting is awful. Will try and read over the weekend

[Zanthorus]

Did you scroll down? At the top it has the text of each page in quite terrible formatting but lower down it has the text in a much easier to read format.