New and revised edition david-hillel ruben
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Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life—he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities—as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants, That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need . . ,13 To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself. . .'u ‘The objects of his impulse exist outside him’, and ‘Hunger . . . needs a nature outside itself. Later we will see how the essential independence of nature is in no way compromised by the perfectly obvious point that natural objects can come to stand in contingent relations to the human, can become objects of man’s hunger, objects of his impulses. If man ceased to exist, the natural world would not necessarily follow suit, and that surely is part of what Marx has in mind when he talks about natural objects being ‘outside’ man. Indeed, Marx says: ... a being which does not have its nature outside itself is nota natural beingand does not share in the being of nature.15 Not only are natural objects independent of what is human, but in (3) Marx tells us, in Hegelian jargon, that it is necessarily the case that men are in nature. Any being whose nature or essence isn’t in things ‘outside’ itself couldn’t be; the human is essentially dependent on nature. fin criticism of Hegel's dialectic] On the one hand this act of superseding is a transcending of the thought entity , . . and because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality . . . this superceding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality to be seif-confirmation of itself . . ,14 In (4) Marx makes the same point by way of criticism of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel demotes the ‘other’ of thought into a moment of thought. In denying that reality is a ‘moment’ of thought I presume that Marx is saying that it is not in any essentia! way a thought-dependency. Whatever ‘thought’ may believe, it ‘leaves its object standing in the real world’. The real subject still remains outside the mind, leading an independent existence.17 Marx, in this well-known passage, is speaking of'the subject’in the sense of the subject of a scientific investigation. His point is that we should not confuse the reality of the subject with the methodological ‘appropriation’ of the subject which is accomplished by reproducing it conceptually from abstractions. The real subject leads an existence independently of the mind which appropriates it. Finally: The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geogeny—i. e. from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the coming-to-be of the earth, as a process, as self- generation. Generatio aequivoca is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.18 What this shows is, I think, that Marx took creation to be refuted by science. Whether this is right or not Marx took this to be the case. Marx in general makes no sharp distinction between philosophy (or theology) and science. The tone set by Marx’s insistence on the relevance of geology to the validity of the creation story would be difficult to reconcile with a denial of the independence of the natural world from the human. Marx understood that geogeny, as he called it, taught of a world which had long pre-existed the human, and since he considered the results of the sciences philosophically decisive (‘the only practical refutation’), he cannot have thought that any essential dependency existed between nature and man. This impression is, I think, confirmed by a remark in The German Ideology: Of course, in all of this the priority of external nature remains unassailed . . . For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists any where (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.15 Thus, there is a ‘nature that preceded human history’, and it then follows that, however much man may transform nature (‘it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere’), nature cannot be essentially dependent on the human. There is ho doubt that for Marx there is no philosophy which deals in only ‘conceptual truths’ and which is thereby isolated from factual inquiry. Thus, for Marx, science could be decisive in refuting such things as idealism or theism. For him, geology would simply have refuted any denial of the independence of nature, just as ‘geogeny’ refuted the myth of creation. In addition to the above quotation from The German Ideology there are at least three other places outside The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx makes the same point about the independence of nature. All three are concerned with the relationship between material nature and the work process: The material of nature alone, insofar as no Man has not created matter itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if the matter does not exist beforehand,21 In Capital Marx extends the remarks made in various writings, two of which I have just quoted, into the central feature of his analysis of value and the labour process. The function of human labour is to transform the form matter has, a matter which is itself not reducible to labour, praxis, human creation or transformation. There is both form and matter in any use- value, and the matter is a ‘given’: The use-values coat, linen, etc., in short the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, material and labour. If we subtract the total sum of useful labour embodied in the coat, linen, etc,, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished without the help of man.22 Both in The Manuscripts, and elsewhere, the theme of the essential independence of nature, or matter, is one that recurs often enough to be unmistakeable. In a moment, then, we will want to look at some misinterpretations of Marx which are mistaken on just this point, and try to see, if we can, where they have gone wrong. Before we go on to examine these misinterpretations I want to make three specific remarks about the essential independence of Nature from man, I will say more about this in Chapter IV, but I wish now to deal with three points which constantly surface in Marxist discussions of materialism. If natural things can exist independently of thought, or Nature independently of man, does that commit us (or Marx) to accepting that thought (or society) can also exist independently of nature? We are obviously not committed to this by the independence claim, although sometimes Marxists have wrongly rejected the essential independence of nature from thought on the presumed grounds thRt such a ‘dualism’ would commit them to the converse essential independence of thought from nature. One would be committed to this if the ‘dualism’ of thought and object took the classical form that it does, for example, in Descartes’ philosophy. Mind, whose essence is thought, and body, whose essence is extension, are essentially independent one from the other, according to the Cartesian philosophy. Thus it is perfectly possible for mind to exist without body, just as it is possible for body to exist without mind. Marx’s materialism does not commit us to anything like this Cartesian dualism. Acceptance of the essential independence of Nature from the human, or of natural things from thought, simply does not imply the acceptance of the converse essential independence of thought or society from Nature, or natural things. It is perfectly consistent to hold that nature can exist independently of thought, or Nature independently of all which is human, and to deny on the other hand that thought can exist independently of all objects, or the subject independently of Nature. In quote (3) above, taken from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, we saw how Marx claimed that a being had to have its nature (essence) in the natural world; that is, men had to be essentially dependent on nature. So clearly, for Marx, the essential independence runs in one direction only. It may well be that this position should be called something other than ‘dualist’, in order to distinguish it from a classical ontological dualism like that of Descartes. But, by whatever name, this is certainly Marx’s position; . . the young Hegelians consider conception, thoughts, ideas, in Tact all the products of consciousness to which they attribute an independent existence . . ,’;23 ‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence’;24 ‘The phantoms formed in the human brain are also necessarily sublimates of their material life-process . . . (Ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness) no longer retain the semblance of independence’;25 and finally, in Capital, Volume I, ‘For Hegel the process of thinking, which under the name of Idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, while the real world is only its external appearance. With me, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.’26 What we find then, in Marx, is a perfectly consistent assertion of the essential dependence of thought, the Subject, on Nature. In short, for Marx, as we all know, there can be a nature without consciousness but no consciousness without Nature. ‘Form’, says Marx, ‘has no validity except as the form of its content’. As there can be no form without content for it to be the form of, so there can be no thought in general without a material world in which it is embodied. The essential independence of nature from thought, the human, does not imply the converse essential independence of thought in general from nature. Finally, it is worthwhile noting, which is anyway obvious, that we must distinguish between the general fact that there is thought, or recognisable human activity of any sort, and particular thoughts. If we follow Marx and hold that thought in general is not essentially independent of nature, we still allow that any particular thought is essentially independent of that of which it is the thought. Between a particular thought and its object the essential independence is two way. There could be stones and stars with no sentient creatures to form the concepts ‘stone’ and ‘star’, and there can be concepts like ‘witch’and ‘unicorn’with no objects or instances. Indeed, this is obviously something any correspondence theory must hold, for correspondence is a contingent relation. If concepts and objects or statements and states of affairs match, if our beliefs do successfully reflect reality, this must be so contingently. It could have been otherwise. Marx’s position, then, is this; nature is essentially independent of thought, but thought is not essentially independent of nature. Particular thoughts are essentially independent of any paticular part of nature, and conversely. The second point I wish now to mention concerning the notion of essential independence is this. Sometimes, when one advances the idea that nature or natural things can exist independently of thought, or the human, the question israised whetherornotthought, orhumanpraxis,isn’t alsopart of nature. Do we deny that it is? And if thought isn’t part of nature, to what sort of supernatural existence do we wish to consign it? Of course, we are not denying that the human, that thought or praxis, are also part of the natural order. When Marx says that thought essentially depends on nature, he is asserting that thought is part of the overall system of nature. We might put our point this way. What materialism asserts is that there could be, indeed that there was in fact, a system of nature long before it came to have a particular feature or part, thought or human existence, a part which it does now in fact have. Karl Korsch seems, in his Marxism and Philosophy, to raise just this sort of accusation against what he calls 'vulgar socialism’, those who ‘separate’ thought and being. He criticises any form of Marxism which attempts to ‘draw a sharp line of division between consciousness and its object’and to ‘treat consciousness as something given, something fundamentally contrasted to Being and Nature’. Korsch says that such views contain ‘a primitive, predialectical and even pre-transcendental conception of the relation between consciousness and being’.27 But to what sort of‘sharp line of division’ or ‘fundamental contrast’ are we committed? We are certainly not, pace Korsch, committed to the thesis that thought and nature are somehow ontologically different, that the difference between them is one of a Cartesian-hke irreducible ontological difference. Ontologically, thought too is a part of nature, and this is why we said that thought too is part of the overall system of nature. All any reflection theory need assume, against which Korsch argues,28 is that the relation between particular thoughts and that which they are about is a contingent relation in both directions, but this certainly does not commit us to a ‘sharp line of division’ between thought and nature m some ontological sense. To think otherwise would be to conflate the epistemological requirement of two-way contingency between a particular thought and its object with an ontological distinction between thought (in general) and nature. Indeed, if one makes an ontological distinction between thought and being, then each of the pair would have to be essentially independent of the other, as Descartes for example would claim. The essence of thought and being would be different. But Marx argues for a contingent relation in one direction, between being and thought, but an essential relation in the other. Thus, although the ‘essence’ of being does not include thought, the essence of ‘thought’ includes being. The distinction between them cannot be ontological—they cannot constitute two separate kinds of things, since thought is not essentially independent of being. Because, in classical philosophy, the criterion for something’s being a thing is its logical independence of everything else, for us the essential dependence of mind or consciousness on nature prevents them from constituting an ontological duality. This is why the whole-part metaphor seems to us more accurate, in the sense that parts cannot be what they are apart from the totality in which they are situated. Our epistemological distinction between thought and reality does not commit us, then, to an ontological dualism. The third point I wish to raise concerns the meaning of ‘can exist independently of or ‘is in essential relation to’. I have said little about this except to say, in the chapter on Kant, that it is essential and not causal independence in which we are interested. There is obviously a causal relationship between nature and society, and the essential independence of nature claim never for a moment was intended to deny something so obvious as that. The independence of nature was, we said, its essential independence only, in the sense that it could exist even if society or thought or concept or knower or the human did not. Korsch speaks of *the coincidence of consciousness and reality’29 without giving any explanation of what he understands by that expression. If this means only that nature and thought, or reality and consciousness, mutually interact, effect one another, it is unobjectionable. If, on the other hand, it means that nature is not even essentially independent of consciousness, then we reject any such absurd conception. 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