New and revised edition david-hillel ruben
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Now, nothing could just exist indeterminately, with no specific properties or features whatever. Thus, what the essential independence of nature must claim is that the existence of nature and some of its properties are independent of praxis. I call such properties which, along with existence, are essentially independent of all that ishuman,naturalproperties. Many features in nature are introduced by men’s activity, which transforms changes, refashions nature. To use Hegelian jargon, nature is not ‘unmediated’. It comes to have cultivated cherry trees growing in places where they did not grow before, and that this is so is praxis-dependent. But nature also has natural properties which are praxis-independent. That water has a particular molecular structure, that an atom of gold has a certain subatomic structure, that there is a particular genetic code involved in biological reproduction, that light travels at particular speeds in certain particular circumstances, these are praxis-independent facts about water, gold, organisms and light, Even some natural properties can sometimes be changed by praxis, but whether they can or cannot be subsequently altered, there are at least initially some natural properties of things which are independent of what man does. Of course, he must usually do something in order to learn that such things do have the natural properties they in fact possess, but that they have such natural properties is entirely unrelated to his doings. Marx, in the Grundrisse, marks the distinction between natural and praxis-dependent properties by speaking of intrinsic and accidental form. He distinguishes wood having the form of a tree and having the form of a table in the following way: No immanent law of reproduction maintains this form in the way in which the tree, for example, maintains its form as a tree (wood maintains itself in the specific form of the tree because this form is the form of the wood; while the form of the table isaccidental for wood, and not the intrinsic form of its substance).30 Thus, some of nature’s properties, the non-natural ones, like that bit of wood having been worked up into a chair, are praxis-dependent, or ‘accidental* to the wood, as Marx says; others which Marx calls ‘intrinsic’ to the wood, will not be dependent on praxis. One cannot insist upon this too strongly, because Marxists have often assumed that if the essential independence of nature be admitted, one will encounter difficulty in explaining how human praxis can come to change nature. Just this appears to be Korsch’s mistaken worry, for he asserts that *those Marxist theoreticians for whom Marxism was no longer essentially a theory of social revolution could see no need for the dialectical conception of the coincidence of consciousness and reality’. For them, ‘a critique of political economy could never have become the major component of a theory of social revolution’.31 What Korsch apparently assumes is that the essential independence of nature and its natural properties from man leads to the incomprehension of change. But this is clearly an illusion. That some of the properties of things have not been introduced by human praxis does not imply that none have. Moreover, many of the natural properties of nature are themselves susceptible of being changed. Barren soil can become fruitful through irrigation, mountain roads can be built by cutting into the existing rock. So there really seems not the slightest difficulty whatever in giving the notion of change (and revolution) a place just because the ‘coincidence’ of nature and human activity is denied. . Indeed, to understand precisely why the essential independence (of nature from praxis) claim is compatible with the idea that many of the features of reality are dependent on the formative, shaping activities of man is precisely to understand Marx’s critique of Feuerbach. I do not propose to describe the shifts and changes in Marx’s materialism, and in his attitude to Feuerbach, which there undoubtedly were, or to explain why, from being a hostile critic of a doctrine that he calls ‘materialism’ (in The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) and an exponent of naturalism and humanism (in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of1844), Marx becomes an exponent of what he himself calls a materialist conception of history. But I do wish, however, to say something about the nature of Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach, especially in the famous eleven theses, the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which he wrote in 1845. The themes of activity and contemplation in one way or another run through all eleven theses. The first is perhaps the fullest expression of Marx’s point, and is worth reproducing in full: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, nor subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which of course, does not know real sensuous activity as such, Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective aciWwy. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christenthums, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty—judaical manifestation. Hence, he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, or ‘practical- critical’ activity. This thesis is compatible with my interpretation of Marx, and hence tends to confirm the ascription of materialism, the essential independence of nature from thought, to Marx, Marx says that hitherto reality was conceived by materialists only as the object, to be contemplated, Marx is critical of this not because it is untrue, but because it is only half of the truth. Indeed, it seems clear that in this thesis Marx sees himself as supplementing Feuerbach rather than emending or altering him, Marx says: \ . . Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought of objects . . There is no suggestion in this, or anywhere else in Marx’s writings that I know of, that Marx rejected Feuerbach’s idea of ‘sensuous objects really distinct from the thought of objects’. Indeed, notwithstanding the directly contrary interpretation which they have often been given, the Theses’ seem to me to provide further evidence of Marx’s adherence to a version of philosophical materialism. What is the other half of the truth which Marx’s materialism wants to preserve? That . , human activity itself as objective activity . , is activity which can transform, change the character of the natural realm. ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ A materialism which recognises that there is a natural realm, with a given structure, essentially independent of human thought, a given structure which circumscribes and places limits on the ways in which men can transform objects, can introduce new properties or forms, is a materialism that can embrace both the moments of object and objective activity. Marx’s stress on ’objective activity’ itself reinforces what I have been claiming. What is objective activity, if not a human praxis that recognises the nature and constraints of an objectively given natural order, which seeks to impress new forms on such a natural order? Labour is not only consumed but also at the same time fixed, converted from the form of activity into the form of the object; materialised; as a modification of the object, it modifies its own form and changes from activity to being. The end of the process is the product.31 This is only the materialism for which we have been arguing throughout. I think that Plekhanov was right to have suggested that ‘If Marx began to elaborate his materialist explanation of history, by criticising Hegel’s philosophy of Right, he could do so only because Feuerbach had completed his criticism of Hegel’s speculative philosophy.’33 That is, Marx took Feuerbach's rejection of Hegelian philosophical idealism as given, and was more concerned to build on what Feuerbach had already done, more concerned with doing what Feuerbach had not himself done—to add to Feuerbach’s materialism those insights about activity which all materialism previously to Marx had (as Marx claimed) omitted. But to do that was in no way to compromise those real insights of Feuerbach about the existence of nature independently of thought. Marx adds the insight that those natural objects, whose existence is not essentially related to what is human, become, or can become, mediated by human activity. In such cases the forms that such objects assume are related to what is human. To say, *the existence of natural objects essentially independent of praxis’ is not to imply that such objects must, somehow, always remain untouched by human minds and hands. Even when they are so touched their existence is still not essentially dependent on their being so touched. We do not bring the natural world into being, as if we were so many gods. It is in the spirit of this interpretation that we can understand many of Marx’s remarks. For example, Marx says in the Introduction to The Grundrisse, The concrete subject remains outside the intellect and independent of it, that is, so long as the intellect adopts a purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude.34 As long as man does nothing to the natural order it is only an order which stands in essential independence of him. None of its properties are yet praxis-dependent. When man adopts a practical attitude to the world, when he does something, the world comes to have shapes, forms which are not independent of ‘the intellect’, even if the natural world remains itself essentially independent of him. It is obvious, then, what I think we should say about the charge of incompatibility between historical and philosophical materialism. All turns on what one means by ‘philosophical materialism’. But if we do not mean any sort of reductive materialism, in which the whole of the social realm is reducible in principle to matter in motion, then I cannot see that any question of incompatibility could arise. Philosophical materialism asserts the real existence of nature essentially independent of human activity. It certainly need not deny that, in any social-historical accounts, ‘the premisses from which we begin are... the real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live ...’ We can refer to the ways in which the natural order constrains and limits men’s activity, and this is licensed by Marx’s inclusion of‘the material conditions under which they live’. But we would have to do far more than that to produce a ‘materialism’ incompatible with Marx’s historical method. If, in some reductive spirit, we were to replace ‘the real individuals’ and ‘their activity’ with other premisses concerning the physical composition of the matter which composes them, and then try to infer all of their individual and historical doings from those replacement premisses, much as Hobbes imagined we might be able to do, then that reductive materialism would be incompatible with Marx’s historical materialism, which insists that we begin with real individuals in any historical account. It is, however, no such reductive materialism which we are espousing and once this is understood, I think the charge of incompatibility between historical and philosophical materialism, as I understand that latter doctrine, will lose whatever plausibility it may once have had. Marx’s position seems so clearly enunciated, and so obviously true, the reader may wonder why I have taken so much care, and gone to such lengths, to set it out. What I have said so far may seem so evident as to be uncontroversial. Amazingly, this is not so. I will look at three of Marx’s interpreters, Georg Lukacs, Alfred Schmidt and Leszek Kolakowski, and show how they misinterpret Marx, or say things which suggest a misunderstanding of precisely this point. Many other interpretations could have been chosen, with equal justification, to make exactly the same point. I think the explanation for this is a failure on the part of these interpreters to free their thought entirely from idealist modes of thinking. However much they would reject the ascription, all I think remain to some degree trapped within an idealist framework, either in the actual content of their ideas, or in the terminology they use, into the straightjacket of which their ideas are then pushed. It is especially worth noting Lukacs’ evasions on the problem of Marx’s materialism, for he was certainly one of the ablest and most sensitive interpreters of Marx’s thought. Critical discussions of Lukacs have often alluded to idealist tendencies within his History and Class Consciousness, and such discussion has dealt with Lukacs’ conception of praxis in particular in some detail. Lukacs himself says in the 1967 Preface to the English edition, ‘that History and Class Consciousness was based on mistaken assumptions’.35 We can see, I think, that these mistaken assumptions are more basic than his conception of praxis; indeed, these mistaken assumptions are concerned with the very nature of Marx’s ontology and epistemology, Lukacs, as is well known, set out to discuss the various forms that reification assumes in a society whose dominant mode of production is commodity production. Thefirstpart ofReificationandthe Consciousness Of the Proletariat’ discusses the philosophical history of the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Lukacs’ discussion centres around the same group of problems that we have been discussing—how to reconcile thought and object, form and content, system and fact—for these are, for him, the antinomies of bourgeois thought, intellectual expressions of reification. For Lukacs the inability of classical philosophy to accomplish this reconciliation is to be traced to its uncomprisingly theoretical, contemplative stance toward such problems. ‘Classical philosophy did, it is true, take all the antinomies of its life—basis to the furthest extreme it was capable of in thought [my emphasis]; it conferred on them the highest possible intellectual expression. But even for this philosophy they remained unsolved and insoluble’.36 Lukacs characterises the central antinomy of bourgeois thought in several ways: thought and object, subject and object, form and content or matter, system and fact, For Lukacs, these antinomies are the by-product of a contemplative, wholly theoretical attitude, and it is for that reason that they remained unsoluble for classical philosophy. It was left for Marx, and the ‘philosophy’ of praxis that is itself a praxis, to transcend these dualities, these antinomies: ‘. . . it is not enough that the attempt should be made to transcend the contemplative attutide. When the question is formulated more concretely it turns out that the essence of praxis consists in annulling that indifference ofform towards content that we found in the problem of the thing-in-itself,’37 ‘. . . we can now understand the connection between the two attitudes and see how, with the aid of the principle of praxis the attempt could be made to resolve the antinomies of contemplation.’38 Much of what Lukacs says in the essay seems eminently right. But agreement with some of the things Lukacs says about some of the antinomies certainly need not commit us to agreeing with what he says about all the antinomies. Lukacs’ stress on totality, as against the atomicity or facticity of an empiricist approach, his description of reality as process and tendency rather than a world of rigid and frozen objects (although why a reflection theory should find the view of reality as process uncongenialis never explained: ‘But if there are no things, what is “reflected”in thought?’ (p. 200) The right answer to this rhetorical question should be: process and tendency!), all of this is certainly to be welcomed by any Marxist. Similarly valuable is much of what Lukacs says about the subject-object antinomy. Lukacs often makes clear that he is restricting his discussion to the social world and that, therefore, the objects he is discussing are social objects, or cultural objects as we have called them. ‘Thus man has become the measure of all (societal) things.'39 In the social world, Lukacs is certainly right, there is no rigid separation of subject and object. The social world is, by definition, the world of social objects or cultural objects, as I have earlier called them. If we limit, for whatever reasons, our philosophical ken to them, then it follows immediately that the antinomy of subject and object has been overcome, for cultural objects are just those objects which, as the result of human labour, or of praxis, bear the indelhble stamp of subject. Without the subject there could be no cultural or social objects, no social world whatever. All of this is an important legacy of Marx about which Lukacs reminded Marxists following the intellectually (and politically) dark night of the Second International. But it is also clear from the structure of the article itself that in ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Prolitariat’, Lukacs takes himself to be answering, or dissolving, the same problem with which classical German philosophy had struggled, the relationship between thought and object, where ‘object’ is not necessarily confined to social objects, human creations. In the concluding pages of the essay, Lukacs returns then to the antinomy as expressed not between subject and social object but as expressed between thought and object, as it was in classical philosophy, ‘Hence only by overcoming the-theoretical-duality of philosophy and special discipline, of methodology and factual knowledge can the way be found by which to annul the duality of thought and existence’.40 Or again, ‘Thus thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they “correspond” to each other, or “reflect” each other . . . (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process.’41 Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 3.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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