Outside Reading- Catherine Buttner

“Religion Is an Opiate” by Karl Marx

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question…The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating” (Karl Marx).

In the above quote, Marx points out a weakness of the materialist doctrine, which holds that people are products of the circumstances that surround them.  This means that people who change do so because their circumstances have changed.  Marx points out that people who agree with this view have forgotten that people often produce changes within circumstances.  This means that people are capable of producing changes for themselves and they are not simply helpless victims of their circumstances.  Marx uses the example of “the educator himself needs educating” (494) to illustrate how circumstances are dependent on the influence of people.  To become an educator, one would have to have been influenced by his or her own educators in the past.  This is what determines the type of educator a person becomes, so that he or she can influence a new generation of students.  The educator could be seen as a circumstance that influences people, but it is important to remember that the educator has been influenced by his or her own educators in the past.  Influence is a cyclical thing- it is not as if immutable circumstances appear out of nowhere, against which people are powerless (as materialism might make it seem).