"The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact. This distinctions has a different significance at different times – e.g. the estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less too. It is not a destination that we have to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life."
I do not understand how the term accidental is being used and how "material collision" is being used in this passage.
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Marx and Engels have a materialist metaphysics. What that means is that anything mental, emotional, ideological, spiritual, is the product of the material circumstances that people are in, at any given time in history. Further in the paragraph, they write: "The fundamental form of this activity is, of course, material, from which depend all other forms—mental, political, religious, etc." So whatever the ideology is of a person in any given period of history it will always be the product of the material circumstances of that period.
ReplyDeleteFor example, a person born into a capitalist society will likely develop a competitive ideology; their "competitive spirit" is the product of the "material collisions in life," which are, in this case, the collisions between the need to eat and have comfortable shelter which collide with other people who are after the same things. And since their is a lack of these things, people compete with one another for them. These are all material circumstances (elements) that produce a competitive ideology (spirit). That means that the theory has been produced by the material elements at odds with one another in a given historical time. Marx and Engles are arguing against the idea that people subscribe to an ideology, a theory, first, and act on it second. For them it is the reverse.
When they distinguish a person from what is accidental to him or her, they are referring to anything that people are born into (like estates that are inherited). Paris Hilton is not separate from the things and power that she has, which have been given to her accidentally, by luck; simply by virtue of being born a Hilton. She, as an individual, cannot be separated (conceptually categorized) from her estate, celebrity and anything else that has accidentally been granted to her.