On Instincts

During the 1960s, the question of philosophical anthropology was debated in Marxist circles with a passion and vehemence that seems remote today. Paralleling the French existentialist Marxists' struggles with communist orthodoxy in the name of Marxist humanism, the Praxis philosophers and other East-European thinkers such as Schaff discovered in the project of a Marxist philosophical anthropology a framework for both criticizing established theories and defending humanist reforms in existing socialist countries. This phase of Marxist debates came to an end with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Althusserian “scientific” Thermidor. Agnes Heller has not only remained faithful to the project of a Marxist philosophical anthropology.