Dialectics on To Be Decided

Who Thinks Abstractly?

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction. #

I have been on another journey lately. I have always balked at the philosophical traditions of Empiricism, and, its later cousin, Positivism.

It dawned on me, however, that the standard story that one is taught about Positivism by my greatest intellectual influence, Western Marxism, is more complicated than many are willing to admit.

It seems to me that one can just as easily be a Rationalist as a Materialist, as easily an Empiricist as, also, an Idealist. The way the philosophical divisions are usually drawn (according to the Young Lukacs, as well as by Sarte and the Frankfurt School) are that Rationalism begets Idealism, Empiricism begets Materialism.

This pattern of thought seemed to dislodge my previous philosophical worldview.

My PhD thesis was, in the end, an exercise in blending Idealism with Naturalism. I approved of both the ideas of Naturalism and Idealism. What made up the universe was to be consistent with the natural sciences, as well as informed and inspired by them. But, fundamentally, I argued that any attempt to reduce, eliminate, or make ‘supervene’ philosophical thought on top of the natural sciences was an activity of extreme unhappiness.

It seems to me that the fabric of the universe does accommodate objects and processes that allow humans to be right about moral judgements. If that makes me an Idealist, I admit it. It is true.

The lesson I received from my education is that Idealism of any form is to be abhorred and hurriedly disavowed. But is not, as Hegel says, every philosophy an Idealism? Take Deterministic Materialism–the Natural Scientist pictures in her mind the particles of the world like the mechanical elements of a clock. If only her capacity for prediction of the world’s mechanical iterms were more powerful! If she was successful in reproducing Hari Seldon’s imaginary Psycho-History, wouldn’t that make her God?

Impressions. #

I have had impressed onto me many times to sit at the feet of Locke, or Hume, and not protest. To me anyway the Lockeans have a more favourable impression. I think it sensible to say there are Primary and Secondary Qualities.

Interestingly my flag has never ever been tied to Descartes. It seems many of those interested in philosophy in Perth have. Perhaps this is indeed my Empirical Streak–having been forced through the British Empiricists over and over again, I know of nothing else.

Humdrum Hume. Over and over again. It was as if anything I wanted to say was mere daydreaming, to be promptly and ignorantly stamped out.

Bishop Berkeley. #

I spent some time meandering back through Bishop Berkeley again. To be honest, he seemed to me to be the most sensible of all of the Idealists. Why shouldn’t there be some active, perceptive essence to the universe? The problem, as I have had repeated to me many times, lay in thinking that was ‘one or the other’.

But frankly I do not care about ‘one or the other thinking’. Doesn’t rejecting Capitalism entail a selection and inhabitation within a particular side?

The Empiricial. #

There is a famous text by Hegel. It is called “Who Thinks Abstractly”. In it, Hegel is the famous rationalist. And I rather think he is right.

~~I have attached a copy of the little pamphlet for your convenience. It now seems very difficult to find…~~

He says: Why is not the supposed “concreteness” of empirical thought abstract? In its closeness to the senses, it is unprocessed thought. This is a lesson from Kant: up filters information about the world through the Faculty of Sensibility, into the Faculty of the Understanding, where categorical thinking is made possible. As the famous addage goes:

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

In order to have rational judgements make sense, therefore, we must submit judgements to what W. V. O. Quine called the ’tribunal of experience’. Sense data cannot simply ‘be’, it is always required to stand for assessment as to whether it is coherent, given the collection of other elements our worldview.

Conversely: Why isn’t the ‘Totality’ of our worldview considered what is actually Concrete? Kant with his Transcendental Idealism seems happy to limit and proscribe much of the operation of the Faculty of Reason within what he calls the limits of a ‘possible experience’. To go further would lead to strange and dangerous types of judgements.

The Return of Hume. #

efficient causation: a cliche.
we should always look deeper than the most famous aspects of a philosopher
bundle theory of consciousness: more important
john mcdowell refers to Hume as a ‘projectivist’ about normative relations.

APPENDIX #

CHAPTER IX;

“Who Thinks Abstractly?”

In the nineteenth-century edition of Hegel’s Werke, this article (Wer denkt abstrakt?) appears in volume XVII, 400-5. Rosen- kranz discusses it briefly (355 f.) and says that it shows “how much Hegel . . . entered into the Berlin manner.”

Glockner reprints it in his edition of the Werke in vol. XX (1930), which is entitled: Vermischte Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit.’ He includes it among “four feuilletons that Hegel wrote for local papers during the later years of his Berlin period.” But Glock- ner admits: “The exact place of publication is unfortunately un- known to me” (xix).

Hoffmeister, whose critical edition of Hegel’s Berliner Schriften: 1818-1831 (1956) is much more comprehensive than Glockner’s (800 pages versus 550), does not include this article. In a footnote he says that it belongs to Hegel’s “Jena period (1807/08)” (xiii). This is an uncharacteristic slip: at the beginning of 1807 Hegel went to Bamberg, in 1808 to Niirnberg; and in the first weeks of 1807, before he left Jena, he certainly lacked the time and peace of mind to write this article.

Of Glockner’s “four feuilletons” Hoffmeister retains only one, and that is really a letter to a newspaper, protesting their review of a new play. Hoffmeister gives no reasons for dating this article so much earlier than Rosenkranz and Glockner did. Possibly, the dis- paraging remark about Kotzebue (a German playwright, 1761- 1819) suggests a date before Kotzebue was stabbed to death by a German theology student. That the piece was written in Jena seems

1“Diverse Writings of the Berlin Period.”

Translation 461

most unlikely: it is so very different from the articles—and the Phenomenology—that Hegel wrote during his harassed and un- happy years in that city. But Hoffmeister could be right that it was written in 1807 or 1808.

WHO THINKS ABSTRACTLY?

TRANSLATION

Think? Abstractly?—Sauve qui peut! Let those who can save themselves! Even now I can hear a traitor, bought by the enemy, exclaim these words, denouncing this essay because it will plainly deal with metaphysics. For metaphysics is a word, no less than abstract, and almost thinking as well, from which everybody more or less runs away as from a man who has caught the plague.

But the intention here really is not so wicked, as if the meaning of thinking and of abstract were to be explained here. There is nothing the beautiful world finds as intolerable as explanations. I, too, find it terrible when somebody begins to explain, for when worst comes to worst I understand everything myself. Here the explana- tion of thinking and abstract would in any case be entirely super- fluous; for it is only because the beautiful world knows what it means to be abstract that it runs away. Just as one does not desire what one does not know, one also cannot hate it. Nor is it my intent to try craftily to reconcile the beautiful world with thinking or with the abstract as if, under the semblance of small talk, thinking and the abstract were to be put over till in the end they had found their way into society incognito, without having aroused any disgust; even as if they were to be adopted imperceptibly by society, or, as the Swabians say, hereingezdéunselt, before the author of this com- plication suddenly exposed this strange guest, namely the abstract, whom the whole party had long treated and recognized under a different title as if he were a good old acquaintance. Such scenes of recognition which are meant to instruct the world against its will have the inexcusable fault that they simultaneously humiliate, and the wirepuller tries with his artifice to gain a little fame; but this humiliation and this vanity destroy the effect, for they push away again an instruction gained at such a price.

462 “WHO THINKS ABSTRACTLY?”

In any case, such a plan would be ruined from the start, for it would require that the crucial word of the riddle is not spoken at the outset. But this has already happened in the title. If this essay toyed with such craftiness, these words should not have been allowed to enter right in the beginning; but like the cabinet member in a comedy, they should have been required to walk around during the entire play in their overcoat, unbuttoning it only in the last scene, disclosing the flashing star of wisdom. The unbuttoning of the meta- physical overcoat would be less effective, to be sure, than the un- buttoning of the minister’s: it would bring to light no more than a couple of words, and the best part of the joke ought to be that it is shown that society has long been in possession of the matter itself; so what they would gain in the end would be the mere name, while the minister’s star signifies something real—a bag of money.

That everybody present should know what thinking is and what is abstract is presupposed in good society, and we certainly are in good society. The question is merely who thinks abstractly. The intent, as already mentioned, is not to reconcile society with these things, to expect it to deal with something difficult, to appeal to its conscience not frivolously to neglect such a matter that befits the rank and status of beings gifted with reason. Rather it is my intent to reconcile the beautiful world with itself, although it does not seem to have a bad conscience about this neglect; still, at least deep down, it has a certain respect for abstract thinking as something exalted, and it looks the other way not because it seems too lowly but be- cause it appears too exalted, not because it seems too mean but rather too noble, or conversely because it seems an Espèce, some- thing special; it seems something that does not lend one distinction in general society, like new clothes, but rather something that—like wretched clothes, or rich ones if they are decorated with precious stones in ancient mounts or embroidery that, be it ever so rich, has long become quasi-Chinese—excludes one from society or makes one ridiculous in it.

Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status)—not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter.

The prejudice and respect for abstract thinking are so great that sensitive nostrils will begin to smell some satire or irony at this point;

Translation 463

but since they read the morning paper they know that there is a prize to be had for satires and that I should therefore sooner earn it by competing for it than give up here without further ado.

I have only to adduce examples for my proposition: everybody will grant that they confirm it. A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much bet- ter! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts.

One who knows men traces the development of the criminal’s mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relation- ship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became em- bittered against the social order—a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime.—There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this mur- derer! After all I remember how in my youth I heard a mayor lament that writers of books were going too far and sought to extir- pate Christianity and righteousness altogether; somebody had writ- ten a defense of suicide; terrible, really too terrible!—Further ques- tions revealed that The Sufferings of Werther [by Goethe, 1774] were meant.

This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.

It is quite different in refined, sentimental circles—in Leipzig. There they strewed and bound flowers on the wheel and on the criminal who was tied to it—But this again is the opposite abstrac- tion. The Christians may indeed trifle with Rosicrucianism, or rather cross-rosism, and wreathe roses around the cross. The cross is the gallows and wheel that have long been hallowed. It has lost its one-sided significance of being the instrument of dishonorable pun- ishment and, on the contrary, suggests the notion of the highest pain and the deepest rejection together with the most joyous rapture and divine honor. The wheel in Leipzig, on the other hand, wreathed

464 “WHO THINKS ABSTRACTLY?”

with violets and poppies, is a reconciliation 4 la Kotzebue, a kind of slovenly sociability between sentimentality and badness.

In quite a different manner I once heard a common old woman who worked in a hospital kill the abstraction of the murderer and bring him to life for honor. The severed head had been placed on the scaffold, and the sun was shining. How beautifully, she said, the sun of God’s grace shines on Binder’s head!—You are not worthy of having the sun shine on you, one says to a rascal with whom one is angry. This woman saw that the murderer’s head was struck by the sunshine and thus was still worthy of it. She raised it from the punishment of the scaffold into the sunny grace of God, and instead of accomplishing the reconciliation with violets and sentimental van- ity, saw him accepted in grace in the higher sun.

Old woman, your eggs are rotten! the maid says to the market woman. What? she replies, my eggs rotten? You may be rotten! You say that about my eggs? You? Did not lice eat your father on the highways? Didn’t your mother run away with the French, and didn’t your grandmother die in a public hospital? Let her get a whole shirt instead of that flimsy scarf; we know well where she got that scarf and her hats: if it were not for those officers, many wouldn’t be decked out like that these days, and if their ladyships paid more attention to their households, many would be in jail right now. Let her mend the holes in her stockings!—In brief, she does not leave one whole thread on her. She thinks abstractly and subsumes the other woman—-scarf, hat, shirt, etc., as well as her fingers and other parts of her, and her father and whole family, too—solely under the crime that she has found the eggs rotten. Everything about her is colored through and through by these rotten eggs, while those officers of which the market woman spoke—if, as one may seriously doubt, there is anything to that—may have got to see very different things.

To move from the maid to a servant, no servant is worse off than one who works for a man of low class and low income; and he is better off the nobler his master is. The common man again thinks more abstractly, he gives himself noble airs vis-à-vis the servant and relates himself to the other man merely as to a servant; he clings to this one predicate. The servant is best off among the French. The nobleman is familiar with his servant, the Frenchman is his friend. When they are alone, the servant does the talking: see Diderot’s Jacques et son maitre; the master does nothing but take snuff and

Translation 465

see what time it is and lets the servant take care of everything else. The nobleman knows that the servant is not merely a servant, but also knows the latest city news, the girls, and harbors good sug- gestions; he asks him about these matters, and the servant may say what he knows about these questions. With a French master, the servant may not only do this; he may also broach a subject, have his own opinions and insist on them; and when the master wants some- thing, it is not done with an order but he has to argue and convince the servant of his opinion and add a good word to make sure that this opinion retains the upper hand. ;

In the army we encounter the same difference. Among the Aus- trians a soldier may be beaten, he is canaille; for whatever has the passive right to be beaten is canaille. Thus the common soldier is for the officer this abstractum of a beatable subject with whom a gentleman who has a uniform and port d’epée must trouble him- self—and that could drive one to make a pact with the devil.

Evald V. Ilyenkov and A. N. Leontev on Language Acquisition

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 16:03:00 +0800

0.0 Introduction #

This paper will describe, and then compare and contrast, two very different ‘second-language’ acquisition activities. The underlying philosophical viewpoints that underpin each of the activities will also be drawn out and discussed. The advantages and short-comings of each of the approaches underlying the two activities considered in the paper will be elucidated. The two activities and respective language-acquisition approaches discussed in this paper are (a) a memorisation activity, and its corresponding behaviourist underpinning; and (b) a social peer-interview report exercise and its corresponding social constructivist underpinning. It will be argued that while memorisation activities such as the one discussed in the paper are almost universally incorporated as some component of ‘second-language’ acquisition, its philosophical underpinning is fundamentally flawed. Wrote-learning and memorisation are a function of the wide-spread social norm that classrooms are the best place to learn languages. Memorisation caters to the rationalisation of education as an ‘outcomes based’ practice, which reifies human existence. Against the behaviourist philosophical underpinning of memorisation activities and its attendant consequences for education, it will be argued that a social constructivist position should be taken towards language acquisition, such as that embodied in the chosen activity presented.

1.0.0 – Main Section #

1.1.0 – Description of Activities #

1.1.1 – Activity One #

The first activity considered in this paper is a very simple one, but it is more or less ubiquitous within language acquisition programs. It is actually two different activities, but since the theoretical assumptions underpinning those two activities are so similar, they will be considered together as one unit, to give a broader and fuller understanding of those theoretical assumptions.

The first part of activity one is the memorisation of common English phrases such as ‘good morning!’, ‘how are you?’, and ‘congratulations!’ The L1 associated with this part of the activity is French, although one could just as easily transfer the activity into any other L1. The substantial content of the activity consists in having the English phrases (L2) to be learned placed alongside their equivalent French counterparts (L1). The execution of the activity could be oral, aural, or written. It would involve memorising the form and content of the English (L2) phrases with regard to the original French (L1) form and content.

The second part of the activity is the memorisation of English homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, but have different meanings, and sometimes different spellings. Homophones are particularly difficult to learn because they seem at first quite arbitrary. This appearance of arbitrariness usually leads to activities such as this one, which are based on memorisation and wrote-learning. The purpose of this activity is to memorise the English (L2) words that are equivalent to the learner’s L1. Again, the execution of this activity could be oral, aural, written, or some combination of the three.

1.1.2 – Activity Two #

The second activity considered by this paper is called ‘conversation grid’. A grid of questions is drawn up, and learners must converse and interact with one-another using their L2 in order to record answers to the questions on the grid. The activity is first modelled by the teacher and another student, or by two students, and then learners go off by themselves and learn via their peers. A key facet of this activity is that it stresses minimal teacher authority. Learners are encouraged to try dialogue for themselves and ‘muddle through’. The activity can be as easy or as difficult as the level of command of English of the learners requires. Beginner learners would discuss and record information about other’s hobbies, likes and dislikes, or occupations. More advanced learners could discuss more abstract topics, and could be required to write more fuller and complex written answers to the prescribed questions. The purpose of activity two is to involve learners in social interaction, as opposed to the first activity. Activity two emphasises the communication of meaning, as opposed to the mastery of technical linguistic forms.

1.2.0 – Theoretical Underpinnings of Activities #

The two activities that were chosen to be considered in this paper are based on very different views about personhood, the mind, and learning. The two different views manifested in the above two activities will now be considered.

1.2.1 – Activity One #

The theoretical assumptions about the mind and the person that underpin the first activity can be collectively labelled ‘behaviourism’. Behaviourism, as its name suggests, asserts that the truth about someone’s learning is located in their behaviour, and not in their consciousness. It is argued that behaviourism is a persuasive way of viewing learning because of the claim that ‘behavioural change can be perceived objectively and can therefore be measured’ (Louw, 1993: 220). Behaviourism proceeds from the view that

what we have learned cannot be directly perceived; but the resulting change in behaviour or performance can be. On the basis of our performance, it can be deduced what and how much we have learned (Louw, 1993: 220).

Behaviourism proceeds from the vulgar materialist and empiricist view of the mind that asserts that because consciousness does not disclose itself as physical or material substance, it shouldn’t be considered as actually real. The resulting theoretical framework that results from this philosophical assumption resolves all human behaviour into ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’. The process by which a stimulus results in a response is called a ‘reflex’. Behaviourism treats learning as ‘conditioning’. Conditioning is the behaviourist concept for the process whereby a person’s the physical environment is altered in such a way that they develop new reflexes in order to deal with new stimuli.

1.2.2 – Activity Two #

The learning theory called ‘social constructivism’ underpins the second activity. If behaviourism can be said to be the ‘most primitive’ form of descriptive and explanatory paradigm for learning, social constructivism could be said to be ‘two notches above it’.

The branch of social constructivism that will be accounted for here will be what has been termed ‘activity theory’. Activity theory developed out of Lev Vygotsky’s research on educational psychology. It is premised on dialectical materialism, a metaphysics that was developed in an attempt to resolve the ‘antimonies [contradictions] of bourgeois thought’ (Ilyenkov, 1977). Behaviourism is one side of the main contradiction within bourgeois thought. It asserts that truth is purely objective and measurable. The other side of the contradiction is idealism, which asserts that truth is more or less purely seated in the mind. (Whether or not cognitivism falls into this latter category is a matter of debate. Some argue cognitivism is merely an eclectic form of behaviourism.)

Dialectical materialism, in order to resolve this contradiction (what describes explains human being and thought? The environment or human mental states?), asserts that ‘it is not [a person’s] consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Lukacs, 1971: 18). Activity theory expands on this metaphysics by asserting that language is but one component of a body of objective, but immaterial, socially constructed thought-forms that mediate subjective human interaction with the objective environment (Leontev, 1977).

1.3.0 – Discussion #

The purpose of this section, the discussion section, is to compare and contrast the two lessons described above. The purpose of this is to explain how they are influenced by the above two different theories of language learning. From this explanation an argument will be built that asserts that social constructivism points to a deeper and fuller understanding of second-language acquisition. Very briefly, the behaviourist recipe for ‘learning’ an L2 (N.B. this method represents ‘classical conditioning’, as opposed to ‘operant conditioning’) is as follows:

Identify the learner’s L1. The learner’s L1 is, for the purposes of the L2 acquisition, an ‘unconditioned stimulus’ (UCS) which produces ‘unconditioned responses’ (UCR). The UCR in this case is the learner’s comprehension of linguistic meaning.
Pair the UCS with a neutral stimulus, the L2 sought to be ‘learned’. This is memorisation and wrote learning.
Remove the learner’s L1 from the learning environment. Apply to the learner the neutral stimulus, the L2, the ‘conditioned stimulus’ (CS), and this will elicit comprehension in the learner of the L2, a ‘conditioned response’ (CR) (Louw, 1993: 224).

Abstractly:

UCS -> UCR
UCS + CS -> UCR
CS -> CR

There are two observations that we can make about the first activity and its behaviourist theoretical underpinning, and they are all a function of its adherence to a strict notion of positivism. First, the acquisition of the L2 is treated as discrete ‘appropriation’. In other words, the L2 acquisition is conceptualised as a kind of mathematical function: L2 goes in, comprehension comes out. Acquisition happens on one plane of existence. Behaviourists might argue that memorisation leads to a process behaviourists label ‘generalisation’, which means that wrote-learned words should come to be associated with broader contexts of communication, but as Louw & Edwards (Louw, 1993: 231) mention, it is not clear whether generalisation is as regular and predictable as behaviourists claim.

Second, the substance of the L2 to be learned is treated in a formalist manner. It is treated as form without content. In other words, the L2 is treated in almost perfect abstraction, within any regard being paid to the kinds of contexts in which one would use the language. A possible example of this is the complete lack of ability of the memorisation activity to help the learner understand the pragmatics that may be involved in communicating meaning using the words.

The fundamental basis of both of these observed problems with the memorisation activity is that its positivistic, behaviourist underpinning posits a view of the human mind and its learning that is passive and ‘contemplative’. It is certainly possible for a behaviourist to maintain that language is a dynamic and evolving human construction, but the learning process that they advocate asserts that language is a monolithic, static body of data that is ready and able to be abstracted and appropriated formalistically.

In this connection we can recall part of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: The chief defect of all materialism up to now … is that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the subject or contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity, as practice, … (Ilyenkov, 1977: 224) (Ilyenkov’s emphasis).

What this meant was that

[people were] considered the passive side of the subject-object relation, as the determined member of this inter-relation. Furthermore, man was abstracted here from the combination of social relations and transformed into an isolated individual. The [human]-environment relations were therefore interpreted as individual to all the rest, to everything that lay outside the individual brain and existed independently of it (Ilyenkov, 1977: 225).

But, crucially,

outside the individual, and independently of his will and consciousness, there existed not only nature but also the social historical environment, the world of things created by [humanity’s] labour, and the system of relations between [person] and [person], developed in the labour process. In other words, not only did nature by itself (‘in itself’ [to use Kantian terminology]) lie outside the individual, but also humanised nature, altered by labour (Ilyenkov, 1977: 225).

The social constructivist underpinning behind the second activity seeks to capture and help learners engage with the social historical environment embodied within language, within the L2. Although the activity is limited to the classroom environment, which is artificial and abstract, it can be hoped that the practical execution of the ideas underpinning the activity will lead to the development of skills by the learners that will enable them to go out into the real world and use language the way it really works: as a cultural tool, an artefact that mediates personal access to objective reality.

The advantage of the second activity over the first is that it relies on the active participation and involvement of the learner. By conversing with peers and the teacher, the learner taps into language’s function as a human cultural artefact. Language is a practical, social activity that requires more than just individualised, abstract memorisation. It requires grounding in concrete reality in order to be truly meaningful. In a sense it is ‘situated’ in different cultural activities that require active participation, not passive memorisation (Brown, 1989).

3.0.0 – Conclusion #

In this paper, two different activities with very different approaches to language acquisition were compared and contrasted. The first activity, based in positivistic behaviourist theoretical assumptions about learning and the mind, treated language as an abstract, individualised experience. This position on language acquisition was argued to be philosophically wanting, lacking in substantiation in concrete evidence, and normatively unappealing. It was argued that the second activity rectified the shortcomings of the first. It viewed language as a body of human cultural signs and understandings that mediated subjective interaction with objective reality. Language in this sense was argued to be dynamic, and the underpinnings of the second activity’s approach was argued to be more powerful in both a descriptive and explanatory sense.

4.0.0 – References #

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18, 32-42.
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1977). Dialectical logic: essays on its history and theory. (H. C. Creighton, Trans.) Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/index.htm
Leontev, A. N. (1977). Activity and Consciousness. In Philosophy in the USSR: Problems of Dialectical Materialism (pp. 180-202). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved April 5, 2014, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1977/leon1977.htm
Louw, D., & Edwards, D. (Eds.). (1993). Psychology: an introduction for students in southern Africa. Johannesburg: Lexicon.
Lukacs, G. (1971). What is Orthodox Marxism? In G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (pp. 1-26). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Marx, Naturalism, and the Disenchantment of Nature

Tue, 01 May 2018 15:41:43 +1000

A key debate that is occurring in analytic philosophy at the moment is whether to agree to the popularly-accepted conception of naturalism. Naturalism, in its orthodox and popular version, forces us to accept an austere and disenchanted picture of the universe and the place of humans in it. Normativity, on this conception, is not a part of the universe at all. There are versions of austere naturalism (‘bald’ naturalism, as John McDowell puts it)[1] that admit of epistemic normativity—the position that if some epistemic fact is true, then we ought to believe it—but these are really no different in kind.

The real sufficient property of what distinguishes bald naturalism from other kinds is that bald naturalism doesn’t admit of moral entities in nature. There is an ongoing movement in analytic philosophy called Liberal Naturalism that seeks to exorcise some form of discourse about moral entities as real objects in nature. The way liberal naturalists see it, there is something fundamentally wrong about picturing the universe as devoid of moral meaning. Orthodox bald naturalism pictures nature as fully and exclusively explained by the hard sciences—physics, chemistry, and a reductive conception of biology—and supposedly this picture of the universe does not admit of moral entities.

I want to argue in this paper that this bald naturalist picture of the universe has entered political philosophy. This conception of nature creates terrible problems for political philosophy. It threatens to distort the meaning of historical texts through anachronistic interpretation. What I want to do in this paper is show that the contemporary orthodox position of bald naturalism is leading to a terrible distortion of Marxist political philosophy. In the first part of this paper I want to step through the first three chapters of a current book by Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis,[2] and show how Feenberg’s contemporary understanding of naturalism has caused him to pass over a proper analysis of Marx’s early philosophy.

I deem Marx’s dialectics of nature to be an interesting and exciting form of normativistic naturalism, which stands in juxtaposition to the orthodox bald naturalism in today’s analytic philosophy. Marx’s theory of revolution depends on unifying human forms of intelligibility with nature in order to bring about the end of what Marx calls ‘estrangement’—or ‘alienation’.

The second part of this paper I will show how Feenberg’s criticism of Marx’s naturalism depends upon a false premise—that nature must be devoid of meaning. In order to do this I will perform a brief comparison of Marx with a modern form of liberal naturalism. This naturalism is John McDowell’s Aristotelian brand of ‘relaxed’ naturalism, which can be found in his major works Mind and World and Two Sorts of Naturalism. I will show that McDowell’s anticipation at the end of Mind and World of a connection between his philosophy and Marx’s is absolutely correct. Marx’s concept of alienation, formulated in the 1844 Manuscripts, and carried through all of his work through to Capital, maps beautifully onto McDowell’s concept of first and second nature. Further, we can go deeper, and show that McDowell’s epistemological philosophical formulations in the beginning of Mind and World very closely resemble those of Marx’s in the 1844 Manuscripts. Through establishing a connection between McDowell and Marx I will be able to show how we do not have to accept Feenberg’s bifurcated and antimonial position on the relation of human meaning and the natural world. I argue that McDowell’s philosophy shows that Marx is entitled to unite human meaning and nature in the way he does.

Andrew Feenberg’s ‘The Philosophy of Praxis’ #

Feenberg’s 2014 book The Philosophy of Praxis is an analysis and an interpretation of Marx’s concept of naturalism. The book has three different parts. The first part performs an examination of the concept of naturalism in Marx. The second part performs an examination of the same concept as it appears in the work of Gyorgy Lukacs, one of the founders of Western Marxism. The first two parts of the book are fundamentally critical in nature, whereas the third is mostly constructive. Feenberg draws on Herbert Marcuse’s formulation of naturalism in Marxism, and concludes that this attempt at interpreting Marx’s understanding of the concept of naturalism is the most correct.

I will not be dealing with the second and third part of Feenberg’s book in this paper, because much of the discussion Feenberg undertakes in The Philosophy of Praxis is determined by his analysis of the classic texts of Marx. If we look carefully at the way Feenberg has discussed Marx and Engels’s early texts of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology, then the rest of the argument of Feenberg’s book can be understood. It is my position that Feenberg has not given Marx and Engels a proper treatment in the first part of his book, and because of this the conclusion of his book has missed the mark. This is not to say that Feenberg’s inspiration from Marcuse in the last part of The Philosophy of Praxis means Marcuse is wrong about Marx’s understanding of naturalism—it is that Feenberg even misinterprets Marcuse in the light of what Feenberg makes about Marx.

Naturalised normativism #

The conclusion of The Philosophy of Praxis is that human society and nature are ontologically separate, and that the meaning of Marx’s political philosophy is that social revolution that succeeds in establishing communism will not affect the natural universe, it will merely transform the way humans perceive and interact with nature. Communist revolution, properly understood, will be a cultural and social process, Feenberg says, and has no significance for the natural world.

The first three chapters of The Philosophy of Praxis establish the groundwork for reaching this conclusion. In the first part of Feenberg’s book, Feenberg discusses how Marx critiques Hegelianism and constructs his own system of Marxism. The discussion takes the reader right through Marx’s earliest engagements with philosophy in his doctoral thesis about Democritean and Epicurean materialism, right to the founding of historical materialism in The German Ideology.

Feenberg correctly explains that Marx’s chief manoeuver in escaping Hegelianism was by adopting the position that

philosophical categories are displacements of social ones. For example, Marx is convinced that the problem of alienated labour is the real foundation of Hegel’s philosophy, but that Hegel does not pose it correctly.[3]

This step in moving beyond Hegel is foundational for what Feenberg calls Marx’s ‘meta-critique’ of Hegel. Feenberg identifies three different phases in Marx’s early philosophy that take his ‘meta-critique’ of Hegel from start to finish. The first step Marx performs in constructing his new philosophy of Marxism is that he ‘redefines the terms of Hegel’s philosophy, while retaining in part the relations Hegel establishes between these terms’.[4] The transformation Marx effects in the first part of his development beyond Hegel is that he argues that

Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He conceived labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence of [humanity] … [But] labour as Hegel understands and recognises it is abstract and mental labour. Thus, that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy, the alienation of [humans] knowing [themselves], or alienated science thinking itself, Hegel grasps as its essence.[5]

So Marx does not disagree with Hegel that the essence, meaning and foundation of human civilisation is labouring, working, producing objects. Marx just revises Hegelianism by pointing out that Hegel only considered human labouring to be mental labouring, and that the objects that human labour produced were abstract, theoretical objects. Marx’s position is that it is concrete, physical and empirical labouring that is the kind of labouring which is the essence of humanity. The labouring that sharecroppers, factory workers, truck drivers etc., all perform is the real basis of the meaning of life for humanity.

The second phase of Marx establishing his system by transforming Hegelianism is to take the new content Marx has derived for his system and ‘reconstitute the formal structure of [Hegel’s philosophy]’ with the help of this redefined content.[6] In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and On The Jewish Question, Marx agrees with Hegel that political life, and therefore political philosophy, as up until now been riddled with antinomies. Therefore, the social life of human beings has been alienated, and has been damaging the flourishing and development of human beings.

Marx agrees with Hegel that the reason for the alienation of human civilisation is due to the bifurcation of human society into abstract state citizenship and civil society. Marx more or less follows Hegel’s constitution of the problem of alienation in The Philosophy of Right, Critique and On The Jewish Question. In their relationship to the modern Westphalian nation-state, humans are pure, moral agents. Humans have clear boundaries for their relationships with others, and there is more or less perfect procedural justice for every person with respect to the formal law of the state. Humans know exactly where they stand as citizens, and they have rights and duties with respect to one another that are explicit and logical. Citizens can appeal to the state to have their rights enforced. They can use the state to explicitly effect recognition between humans as they exist as perfect moral agents.

But humans live a split-life as social beings. Humans also inhabit the social space of civil society. This is a second ontological realm that overlaps over the ordinary everyday life of human beings. Civil society is the realm of pure economic relations and affective human behaviour. Humans are driven by their desires—base or intellectual—in civil society. Here, humans do not cooperate and respectfully recognise each other, as they do as citizens. Here humans compete for economic resources and attempt to cheat each other out of their lot. Civil society is the life Hobbes imagines all humans to be undertaking before they make a social contract in order to establish the Sovereign State—without the state, human life would be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. Humans are selfish and mutually hostile to one another in this ontological space.

Hegel and Marx go beyond liberalism when discussing this dichotomous human life by arguing that the antinomy of social and political society can be transcended—it can be ‘sublated’—aufgehoben. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that the antinomy of citizenship and civil society can be transcended through the power of reason, by constructing a special kind of state. The state Hegel envisions will embody the special logical structure of the Absolute Idea, and will therefore transpose the unity inside metaphysical thinking down into political and social behaviour. Hegel imagines that the perfect state will bring about the existence of the most perfect development of Spirit on earth. The cultural and social connection humans have with respect to one another—Sittlichkeit—will reach its furthest stage of maturation.

But Marx points out that the content of sittlichkeit and spirit on earth for Hegel is purely mental. Insofar as Hegel deems labour to be purely intellectual, then Marx denounces Hegelianism for being abstract. So Marx reconstitutes the formal structure of Hegel’s political and social philosophy by changing the term for mental labour with concrete, physical labour. As Feenberg says, the revision of the formal structure of Hegelianism

consists in transferring the formal attributes of reason to need. In Hegel, reason is self-reflective, it mediates itself in the course of its own self-development in history; again, for Hegel reason is also universal, both in the narrow sense that its ethical postulates apply equally to all, but also in the broader sense that its unconditioned categories apply to the whole of reality. The unity of subject and object is the foundation of this concept of rationality, the essential demand of reason that establishes reason’s imperium. Marx transfers these determinations of rationality wholesale onto “man”. And since “man” in Marx’s sense is a being of need, need no longer appears as the irrational content of a formalistic rationality, but is itself charged with the functions of rationality.

For Marx, the philosophical subject is now a natural being, man. As such, this subject encounters its object, nature, in a natural way, through need. The ontologically primordial sphere is not that of natural science, in which external relations prevail, but the sphere of need in which subject and object are essentially related.[7]

So instead of finding the unity of citizenship and civil society in the power of a mystical reason, Marx locates the beginning of the dissolution of human alienation in humanity conceived naturalistically. For Marx this is an ontological proposition, not a mere physiological one. Hegel would be able to affirm that humans physiologically exist in a relation of need—indeed any political philosophy could affirm this. But Marx is saying this need humans have towards nature is a special metaphysical relation. He explicitly affirms that ‘need’

Is an ontological relation, and not merely a fact of physiology. He writes “Man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are true ontological affirmations of being (nature)”.[8] What is more, he proposes a theory of the historical evolution of human need that indicates that it is not only hunger that is objectified in food, but the higher needs of the social human being that find their essential object in the natural world. In this sense the interdependence of human and nature takes on a larger metaphysical significance… . Hence Marx says that “Nature is the inorganic body of man”,[9] to express the idea that man and nature, subject and object, are indissolubly joined.[10]

The consequence of Marx’s revision of the formal structure of Hegelianism is that nature becomes intelligible to humans. It is pervaded with normative content with which humans can connect. Feenberg calls this ‘humanised nature’. Marx fully affirms a naturalised normativism in his system here. Humans are a part of a normativistic nature, and they are supposed to unfold their potentialities within it as they fight for communism, and perhaps progress into it. Marx says,

It is only when objective reality everywhere for [people] in society the reality of human faculties, human reality, and the reality of his own faculties, that all objects for [them] become the objectification of [themselves]. The objects then confirm and realise [their] individuality. They are [their] own objects, which is to say that [people themselves] become the object.[11]

[People] are not merely a natural being; [they] are a human natural being … Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly.[12]

As Feenberg explains, it is the revealing of meaning in nature that Marx deems as the essence of humanity—what we could say is the essence of the essence of human civilisation. The essence of human civilisation for Marx is of course concrete labour, but the essence of labouring for both Marx and Hegel is the revealing of meaning. The fundamental starting point of materialism for Marx then is that nature is permeated with meaning. As a result of this, the ‘objectification’ and alienation that humans experience is not a non-metaphysical, cultural, social relation that sequesters itself within the sphere of human sayings and doings, but is something that affects the natural world too. Feenberg writes,

It is in the recognition of meaning that subject and object are united. “Thus society is the accomplished union of [humans] with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realised naturalism of [humans] and the realised humanism of nature”.[13]

The third step of Marx’s critique of Hegel is drawing out the social and political consequences of his reconstruction of Hegelianism. Marx asks the question, “What is to be done to cause humans to stop being alienated?” The answer is that humans require economic democracy on top of political democracy. Only when workers can again possess and control the means of production can humans, and as a result nature, no longer undergo the process of alienation. This conclusion is fundamentally a practical one—it is not merely intellectual, as in Hegel. Real humans in the real, physical world must really and physically take back control of the means of production from the tiny minority of people who currently control them.

So alienation is not simply just a social category—a ‘construction’—it is a sickness in the fundamental structure of reality, of which both nature and humanity are a part. It is a distortion of the being of nature and humanity.

Feenberg balks #

Feenberg is right when he says that

Marx’s materialism is thus quite different from all previous materialisms since he believes that human consciousness is a moment in nature’s self-development and not an external spectator on the latter.[14]

And he seems to accept the interpretation he has given of the early Marx as the correct one when he quotes Alfred Schmidt in support in support of this thesis:

The hidden nature speculation in Marx [holds that] the different economic foundations of society which have succeeded each other have historically been so many modes of nature’s self-mediation. Sundered into two parts, [humans] and material to be worked on, nature is always present to itself in this division. Nature attains self-consciousness in [humans], and amalgamates with itself by virtue of their theoretical-practical activity. Human participation in something alien and external to them appears at first to be something equally alien and external to nature; but in fact it proves to be a “natural condition of human existence”, which is itself a part of nature, and it therefore constitutes nature’s self-movement. Only in this way can we speak meaningfully of a “dialectic of nature”.[15]

But despite the careful work Feenberg performs in the first two chapters of the first part of The Philosophy of Praxis, he denies the correctness of the system Marx constructed in his early years. He balks at the possibility of this philosophy being correct

Throughout the Manuscripts one senses that there is something wrong with his [system]. In claiming that “[humans] themselves become the object”, to cite but one example among many, he seems to hover between hyperbole and absurdity. Reading such passages, one wonders if [Marx] really means it.[16]

’Labour is just work’ #

Marx really means to identify the full development of humans into their most perfect form as affecting and also completing “objective reality everywhere”, but Feenberg dismisses this claim as impossible without much argumentation. The first criticism that Feenberg levels against Marx’s naturalised normativism is an old cliché that has been made against Marxism for centuries: ‘not all human activity is reducible to labour’

… equally questionable is the reduction of the fundamental human relation to nature to be labour. It is by no means self-evident that the transformative impulse is the primary one through which being is disclosed. In everyday coping, play, aesthetic appreciation, recognition, and contemplation humans relate to being perhaps just as fundamentally as they do in labour …[17]

Feenberg takes the Marxian concept of “labour” to mean “work” or “pure economic activity”, and rightly deems this ‘reduction’ of the human essence to be a false idea.[18] But Feenberg has constructed a straw man out of what Marx takes ‘human labour’ to be. For Marx, the category is an incredibly broad one. It unites all the faculties of human behaviour that Feenberg outlines in the above quotation into one category. The materialism of Marxism really meant to express that the essence of humanity, and therefore nature and reality, is how humans produce, reproduce, maintain, and care for themselves and others. Feenberg seems to understand that this kind of philosophy is supposed to help us escape the idealism of Schelling, Hegel, and Fichte, but Feenberg says that the

extension of the concept of an object of consciousness is in truth far greater than that of an object of labour. Thus if a Fichte or a Berkeley were to declare that the “consciousness itself becomes an object”, we might disagree with the philosophical premises that lead to such a conclusion, but at least the notion of consciousness refers potentially to every possible object. The idealistic conclusion need not be rejected out of hand because consciousness self-evidently requires an object to be reducible to it.[19]

But this argument relies on the false premise that “labour” is just “work”. Marx never asserted “labour” to mean just work. Marx takes “labour” to also include “play”, “aesthetic experience” and other ‘spiritual’ activities. Labour is the entire spectrum of metabolic exchange that humans make between nature and other humans—it is not just ‘work’, as Feenberg seems to imply.

‘Nature is by definition devoid of meaning’ #

The second argument that Feenberg makes against Marx’s normativistic naturalism is a much deeper and pernicious criticism. Feenberg correctly understands the position that Marx is advocating

For the early Marx, the senses are alienated in the alienation of labour. Only under communism can the senses achieve their highest pitch of perfection. When the revolution transforms the senses by abolishing alienation it attains the core of being itself, as required by the philosophy of praxis. “The suppression of private property is, therefore, the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses … The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and destined for him”.[20] Revolution unites subject and object in liberated sensation and thereby reveals the truth of nature.[21]

But Feenberg rejects that nature can possess meaning. Feenberg argues that human sense-perception, with its value-ladenness cannot detect meaning in nature. The immediate paragraph after the above reads

But can one really speak of “truth” in this context? Conceivably, the historically evolved sense of communist man are different from those of man in class society, but are the sense in any case straightforwardly related to the truth about nature? Is not natural science that discovers this truth, often by the most arduous effort to transcend the given social-sensory horizon toward deeper representations? In the Manuscripts, Marx explicitly rejects the epistemology implied by these questions, and with it, the existing natural sciences as well.[22]

Feenberg claims Marx’s position is contradictory, because it supposedly denies the reality of nature while simultaneously affirming the natural. Marx is supposedly saying nature is something humans create when they labour, but at the same time nature is a precondition for this labour. It seems Feenberg denies that humans can be actively engaged in going through metabolic exchange with nature. Apparently nature is something that cannot be changed by human activity, and will always transcend human understanding.

For Feenberg, it seems the natural world is the same as the bald naturalists. Nature, it seems here, is the realm of efficient causation, and not final-formal causation. Nature is value-free and alien to human ways of knowing and doing. At the same time, Feenberg holds that human social behaviour is permeated by meaning. Human cultural objects are produced by humans and are meaningful.

But this means Feenberg himself is actually holding to a contradictory position—if Feenberg maintains that nature is devoid of value, devoid of meaning, how is it possible for humans to escape alienation? If Marx is wrong about nature being normative, does that not mean that human experience with respect to the natural world with must always be reified, alienated? Further, how is human society related to nature? Feenberg rejects the Kantian theoretical construct of the ‘thing-in-itself’, and so rejects that human experience must necessarily be bifurcated, and that nature is an ‘ineffable lump’.

So if human society is meaningful, and nature is devoid of meaning, how are human society and nature related, and how can humans escape alienation? This is the way Feenberg poses the problem—that one sphere has to have priority over the other:

At issue in the ontological question of whether “external” nature has priority over social reality or vice versa is the methodological question of whether theory or practice has epistemological priority. In turn, on this depends whether or not subject and object can be united. In the customary representation of theory, subject and object are not identical, but distinctly separate. The ideal of truth as correspondence of thing and intellect presupposes the separation of the terms it brings into relation. The subject of theory occupies a position beyond all but cognitive connection with its objects, and unites with them not in reality but in knowledge, in a specular relation, i.e., speculatively.

This tenuous subject-object relation of theory is utterly unlike the practical relation the early Marx requires. He insists that subject-object identity be demonstrated by explaining the real process of production of the thought-objects of theory. This involves no merely reflective correspondence of thought and things, but an active creating. But can practice serve this ambitious philosophical purpose?[23]

So for Feenberg the problem of Marxism, communism, the philosophy of praxis—whatever you want to call it—is not about whether or not theory and practice can be united, it is what kinds of theory and practice are required in a bifurcated conception of reality.

McDowell’s ‘Relaxed Naturalism’ and Marx’s ‘Humanised Naturalism’: A connection #

Feenberg opts to consider nature as essentially reified—that is, it is devoid of meaning. This is the same conception of nature that bald naturalism adopts in analytic philosophy. In this part of the paper I will show why this position is a false one, and why Marx is entitled to adopt the position of a naturalised normativism—the position that nature is permeated with meaning.

I will do this by adopting the arguments John McDowell makes against bald naturalism in his book Mind and World[24] and his article “Two Sorts of Naturalism”.[25] McDowell shows that any conception of human behaviour or philosophy of mind that pictures the natural world as devoid of meaning runs into vicious antinomies. McDowell shows how picturing the natural world as devoid of meaning makes it impossible to show how humans are able to be in contact with the world at all It also makes it very difficult to show how humans can communicate with and recognise each other.

Conceiving of the natural world as essentially devoid of meaning creates an antinomy between human activity and the world—in other words, human behaviour cannot be full explained. The concept of intentionality is important in this connection. Intentionality is the concept for describing how an entity can be about something. Humans have intentionality, and the kinds of intentionality Feenberg and the bald naturalists consider humans to have is a very thin kind, and is insufficient for explaining the full richness of human activity.

In this part of the paper, we will first look at McDowell’s argument for a naturalised normativism from the perspective of the philosophy of mind. It will show why Feenberg is wrong about his interpretation of the early Marx, and why Marx is entitled to constructing the naturalism he does.

‘Mind and World’: The epistemological argument #

McDowell explains in the first part of Mind and World that conceiving of the natural world as devoid of meaning leads to an antinomy in the philosophy of mind. The antinomy that McDowell identifies in this first part of the book—his ‘epistemological argument’—is that between the Myth of the Given, and the myth of coherentism.

McDowell constructs his argument by taking some concepts from Kant’s philosophy of mind in the Critique of Pure Reason. McDowell pictures the human mind to be divided into two faculties—the faculty of receptivity, and the faculty of spontaneity. These faculties are roughly reminiscent of Kant’s own faculties of ‘receptivity’ and the ‘understanding’.

The function of these two faculties of the human mind in McDowell is roughly the same as in Kant: the faculty of receptivity is the faculty of sense perception, and the faculty of spontaneity is the faculty of concepts and reasoning. The faculty of spontaneity takes the information humans perceive about the world, and delivers it up to the faculty of spontaneity in order to process the information and turn the sense data into knowledge. The faculty of spontaneity connects the sense data content from the world together with concepts, and forms propositions and claims with it.

Now bald naturalists take the information that the faculty of receptivity collects from the outside world to be non-conceptual, and devoid of rational meaning. This conception of how the human mind relates itself to the world produces an oscillation between two sides of an antinomy—the Myth of the Given, and the myth of coherentism.

Advocates of the Myth of the Given hold that the content of the world received by the mind must be non-conceptual, but delivered in such a way to the faculty of spontaneity so as to constrain it, and determine its ability to form rational propositions about the world. This is because they hold that only the faculty of spontaneity can be the relation between mind and world that deals in the sphere of human meaning. If receptivity also handled information about the world that possessed meaning, that would prevent the faculty from being passive:

What generates the temptation to appeal to the Given is the thought that spontaneity characterises exercises of conceptual understanding in general, so that spontaneity extends all the way out to the conceptual contents that sit closest to the impacts of the world on our sensibility. [Defenders of the Myth argue that we] need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain of representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void.[26]

The above passage says defenders of the Myth of the Given pole of the antinomy of bald naturalism argue that human cognition must be constrained by something, and if the data the mind received about the world contained meaning, then the faculty of spontaneity would be able to reach out and change the content of the world—it would be able to imprint itself on objective reality. The consequence of this is that defenders of the Myth of the Given say we would never be able to collect impartial sense data about the world, because it would always be value-laden.

However the Myth of the Given fails as a positive account of the relation between mind and world because that would mean that receptivity delivers up excuses, exculpations, when delivering content about the world to the mind. Receptivity would be passive, yes, but there would be no warrants, justifications or reasons attendant with the worldly content that receptivity would allow the mind to receive. The content about the world the mind receives would be fundamentally non-normative. Receptivity could not be used to show why the world is the way it is, it would only be able to deliver up fait accomplis:

What happens there [at the outer boundary of the space of reasons] is the result of an alien force, the causal impact of the world, operating outside the control of our spontaneity. But it is one thing to be exempt from blame, on the ground that the position we find ourselves in can be traced ultimately to brute force; it is quite another thing to have a justification. In effect, the idea of the Given offers exculpations where we wanted justifications.[27]

The other pole of the antinomy is the myth of coherentism. It too adheres to bald naturalism by agreeing with the Myth of the Given that the sense data that humans collect about the world through the faculty of receptivity is devoid of meaning. But it is in an important way the obverse of the Myth of the Given. It holds that the faculty of spontaneity—what Kant called the Understanding, Verstand—does not need to be constrained by the sense data that human sense organs receive about the world. The myth of coherentism holds that the faculty of spontaneity—what it also agrees is the only part of human cognition that deals with anything meaningful—is perfectly free to assign any rational meaning to any component of sense data that is delivered up to it. Human cognition, or what Feenberg would deem human cultural entities, are in no way constrained by any of the empirical data humans have to deal with.

When Feenberg wrote in the quotation we provided above that “conceivably, the historically evolved sense of communist man are different from those of man in class society, but are the sense in any case straightforwardly related to the truth about nature?”, we can anticipate that he means to hold onto the coherentist pole of the antinomy of bald naturalism of the mind. He means to say that human meanings float free of any connection humans have with the natural world, and in a very strong sense human knowledge is not about the natural world at all.

Coherentism too fails as an account about how human activity can be about the world. Human meaning is sequestered away from the world’s content; nothing constrains the operations of the faculty of spontaneity. The operations of spontaneity are free to impute any kind of meaning or justification to the purely causal worldly content that the mind receives. McDowell deems this “frictionless spinning in a void”. The world can’t constrain judgement, so ultimately the world has no significance for the accountability that an agent has for the judgements it makes about the world.

McDowell shows that Feenberg’s bifurcated conception of the Marxian concepts of theory and practice are untenable as an interpretation of the Marxist ‘philosophy of praxis’. Feenberg sets up the antinomy between the Myth of the Given and the myth of coherentism by casting the problem of Marxist revolution as about the priority of types of theory and practice over each other. This is in effect saying we have to choose between a theory of the Myth of the Given or the myth of coherentism about Marxism.

A Myth of the Given type of Marxism would be a kind of historical determinist theory of revolution. It would be strictly economistic, and would not assign any conceptual importance to questions of agency of the revolutionary proletariat. History would be like a kind of clockwork that either proceeds forwards or is rewound in periods of reaction.

A coherentist Marxism would be like the uncharitable interpretations of the early philosophy of Gyorgy Lukacs that Althusserians like the early Poulantzas make—a Marxist form of Fichteanism. According to this theory, everything about reaching communism is about the forms of consciousness that the proletariat assumes through revolutionary struggle. This is a thoroughly anti-naturalist philosophy—it argues that nature is devoid of any significance for the struggle for communism, and that when humans interface with nature, there is a one-way, non-normative, efficient causal metabolic exchange. Communism will liberate society alone, not nature, and nature has, and always will exist as a kind of ineffable lump for communism.

Why Marx is entitled to his humanised naturalism #

Neither of these poles of the antinomy of bald naturalism about human cognition are acceptable. The whole of Feenberg’s book is determined by his acceptance of bald naturalism. The argument of his book oscillates from one side of the antinomy to the other, and eventually comes to rest in the myth of coherentism with his interpretation of Marcuse.

But McDowell shows us how to escape from the antinomy of the myth of coherentism and the Myth of the Given. McDowell’s move in all of this is to preserve the best parts of both sides of the antinomy, while transcending the consequences of both. This is in fact the same thing that Marx does in the 1844 Manuscripts. McDowell’s position is that we should

First, accept part of the story that coherentism tells. We should hold that the faculty of spontaneity is involved in actively producing meaning, and assigning that meaning to the sense data human cognition receives about the world. This allows us to escape the Myth of the Given. Now no part of experience is a fait accompli with respect to rational evaluation. No part of experience is now immune from evaluation and critical reflection. It is now considered fully normative, and we can subject it to reasoned assessment.

Second, identify both the mind and the world as fully permeated by meaning. Meaning and values fully extend down to receptivity, which means that the content of the world that the mind passively receives is normative. This second element of McDowell’s epistemological argument argues that we should accept part of the story of the Myth of the Given. This is that human cognition can be constrained by the world, and that the content of the world delivers up some sense data which the faculty of spontaneity cannot actively change. This allows us to escape the undesirable consequences of coherentism. There is a passive component to perceptual experience. In receptivity, we can’t help but have content about the world impressed upon our sensory equipment. We are constrained by the world with respect to its content.

This is exactly the same philosophy that Marx formulates in the 1844 Manuscripts, only he stipulates that it is the act of human labouring that forges the connection between the human mind and the world. Human labour takes up the content of the natural world through human sense organs, and connects with its conceptual content, and sometimes passively interprets it, and sometimes actively changes it. If humans were reified and alienated, so too would be their understanding of nature. If nature was changed to become alienated, so too would be its normative significance for human activity.

This is what Marx means when he writes

It is in the recognition of meaning that subject and object are united. “Thus society is the accomplished union of [humans] with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realised naturalism of [humans] and the realised humanism of nature”.[28]

Marx agrees with McDowell when McDowell says that the same kind of normativity and meaningfulness of the faculty of spontaneity must extend down into the faculty of receptivity, and therefore the natural world. Marx’s materialism is therefore unlike what we know materialism to be today. It is a normativistic materialism—it deems the matter of the natural world to be permeated with meaning.

References #

[1] I will adopt John McDowell’s terminology in this paper.

[2] Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School (Verso, 2014).

[3] Feenberg, above n 2, 43.

[4] Ibid 44.

[5] Marx, above n 3.

[6] Feenberg, above n 2, 46.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Marx, above n 3.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Feenberg, above n 2, 47.

[11] Marx, above n 3.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid; Feenberg, above n 2, 47.

[14] Feenberg, above n 2, 53.

[15] Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (New Left Books, 1971) 70.

[16] Feenberg, above n 2, 53–54.

[17] Ibid 54.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Marx, above n 3.

[21] Feenberg, above n 2, 55.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid 58.

[24] John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1996).

[25] John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998) 167.

[26] Ibid 11.

[27] Ibid 8.

[28] Ibid; Feenberg, above n 2, 47.

“Simple-Minded Bullshit”: How Texts Have Intrinsic Meaning

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 21:34:09 +0000

In this blog post, I want to argue that political texts have intrinsic meaning. By this I mean that we should be essentialists about the meaning of political texts (hereafter just “text”).

Being an essentialist about a text’s meaning means that one holds that a text possesses a finite set of attributes that are necessary for its identity and function as a meaningful piece of work. This should immediately appear controversial to some. It is a widely held view that the meaning of a text is to be understood in a fundamentally anti-essentialist manner. The meaning of a political text is in no way necessarily given, on an anti-essentialist account of meaning. On this view, the meaning of a text is contingent on a range of varying epiphenomenal factors (external, secondary factors). It is very popular to say, for instance, that the meaning of a text “changes” when it is interpreted in different contexts.

Anti-essentialism is a very popular view of textual interpretation, but I want to argue that it is wrong. The main argument I want to give for this is that if we deprive texts of intrinsic meaning, they cannot be shown to have any determinate rational content. It is impossible for a text to be “committed” to anything if it cannot have determinate rational content. Further, I want to argue that the only way for a text to be able to be assessed rationally is if it possesses intrinsic meaning. The only way for a text to have determinate rational content is if it possesses intrinsic meaning.

Dialectical Monism #

What I am putting forward is very radical. The picture of public rationality and political discussion that I am putting forward is radically monist. This means that I am asserting that the sphere of political discussion and action that humans inhabit is fundamentally unified. I assert that when it comes to political discussion and action, we inhabit one world, and one world only. There are not, as post-modernists assert, multiple different “realities” or social spheres. The political ontology that I am offering up here is one where all discussion and action occurs on the same level.

On this account, if the conditions were right, it is a very real possibility that every human should be able to make themselves intelligible to one another. The conditions that satisfy the mutual intelligibility of political agents would be the conditions of rationality. The universe of political discussion and action is therefore guided by one standard of rationality. This is a totalising philosophy. This is another feature that sets this system of textual interpretation apart from a post-modern one. Post-modern philosophy resists grand narratives and totalising structures. They do this for many reasons, a famous one being that totalising structures are necessarily oppressive, or lead to one being open to be tricked by illusions and contradictions. I’d like to resist that judgement about totalising philosophies. I argue that there is no way to escape subscribing to some or other assumptions about what the total world is like, in order to say something in particular. Hegel calls this “demanding the universal”. Hegel says that every particular argument you make is built into a complex background network of related judgements and assumptions. Having a rigorous account and analysis of these systems, building into a total system, ensures that what you are saying in particular is rational.

The standard of rationality I have in mind for ensuring that political agents can be made mutually intelligible to one another is lifted straight from Hegel. “Absolute negation” is the standard of rationality. Hegel says _negation _is some entity being related to something it is not. The concepts of otherness and negations are mutually supporting. When an entity is undergoing a moment of negativity, Hegel says it is undergoing change. _Absolute _negation is when an entity can determine itself through something which it is not, without being alien to that other entity (Ikaheimo, 2011: 160). Hegel also calls this freedom. Hegel argues that absolute negation is the standard of rationality for any kind of political discourse because it shows some entity or judgement can withstand contradiction without losing its identity. Something can withstand otherness without being destroyed. One can immediately appreciate how powerful this kind of standard of rationality is. As we shall see below, Hegel offers up the perfect metaphilosophy for understanding they key issue of our time: intersectionality.

It turns out that humans have the potential to be the perfect kind of entity in the universe, thanks to this standard of rationality. If humans are able to undergo absolute negation with one another, they are free. The more perfect the process of absolute negation, the more perfectly free humans are. The specific kind of process that humans go through in order to achieve absolute negation is called _self-consciousness _(Ikaheimo: ibid). Another name for Hegelian self-consciousness is _intersubjective recognition. _Humans have the ability to determine themselves through others by recognising others, that is, by relating themselves to others _intersubjectively. _Terry Pinkard puts a Kantian spin on this process, and says that this is a process of social legislation. I want to disagree with this characterisation. Self-consciousness is fundamentally anti-liberal and anti-pragmatic. The picture of meaning and human agency that Hegel is putting forward is fundamentally _ontological. _This means that Hegel is not merely trying to say something about what humans do, but what they and the universe are like. Hegel says that self-consciousness only manifests itself in social and cultural institutions, and is not a process of mere social legislation or mere “giving and asking for reasons”, as a follower of Wilfrid Sellars might put it. Hegel calls the social and cultural institutions that humans create in an attempt to govern the imperfect processes of absolute negation _Spirit. _When humans have social institutions which can facilitate self-consciousness perfectly, they have the perfect kind of society. Humans will be perfectly free.

This kind of system has strong links with Spinoza. Hegel argues that imperfect “forms of consciousness” (imperfect structures of intersubjective recognition) are real, but they are not true. This is what Hegel means when he says frequently that something is real, but at the same time false. He means that that entity does not accord properly with the demands of the Absolute Idea, the standard of rationality of absolute negation.

So embedded in this argument I am about to make about texts having intrinsic meaning is a political ontology which puts forward the very real possibility that humans can achieve a perfect society. I suggest this is the society Marx was imagining. Hegel’s metaphysics is completed by Marx. The society which will best facilitate self-consciousness is communism. The four kinds of “estranged labour” that Marx talked about in the 1844 Manuscripts are an articulation of Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness. So is the concept of commodity fetishism in Section 4 of Chapter 1 of Capital.

Deducing Intrinsic Meaning #

I do not mean to simply offer up this political ontology and argue that because this political ontology is attractive, I must therefore be right about texts having intrinsic meaning. I am certainly open to doing that, but I want to do more than just that. I want to _show _that this popular idea that texts do not have an essential meaning is false. Further, I want to show that if we examine the movement of the arguments for anti-essentialism, we can see that it is necessary that we conclude that texts have intrinsic meaning. By examining the structure of anti-essentialism, not only will we be able to show that it is false (in the sense of absolute negation), but that the logical conclusion of anti-essentialism is an essentialist theory of meaning of texts.

The Romantic Genius: The Beautiful Soul #

“Reason” is the third chapter of Hegel’s _Phenomenology of Spirit _(1807). We can reconstruct Hegel’s general argument in this chapter in order to show that texts have intrinsic meaning. The chapter “Reason” deals with the change in structure of self-consciousness that went on during the Enlightenment, right up until Hegel’s day. But in this chapter Hegel only deals with the effects of the Enlightenment at the level of individual consciousness. So if one reads the Phenomenology and stops at the end of “Reason”, they will only have an abstract understanding of absolute negation. You will not know the full story. Hegel is famous for this sort of philosophical exposition. He ascends from the most particular to the most general, incorporating more and more parts of his total system until he reaches the top. We would normally take the most general and sweeping pronouncements of a theory as an abstract summary of its overall upshot, but for a Hegelian or a Spinozist this is the theory at its most concrete. Hegelian systems are organic systems. This means that all the previous levels of the system are still preserved at the top, they’ve just reached their most perfect deduction at their highest level of generality. The lower levels have shown that the top is true. This is a fundamentally Aristotelian idea, and although Spinoza is not a fan of organicisim, Spinozist philosophy holds onto the same kind of theoretical exposition.

The second and third parts of “Reason” deal with morality. The first part of “Reason” dealt with natural science. If you follow the development of the first part of “Reason”, and you agree with Hegel’s argument, you will agree with Hegel that the disenchanted picture of the universe that natural science puts forward doesn’t offer us a complete picture of the universe. That’s beside the point right now.

The final moments of “Reason” offer us the answer to how it is possible for texts to have intrinsic meaning, and how this picture of meaning emerges out of anti-essentialism. Hegel discusses the dialectic of the “beautiful soul” in the final moments of Reason. In this part of the Phenomenology, Hegel is concerned to demonstrate how it is possible for there to be any kind of determinate ethical content in an individualistic human society. How is it possible for society to exist as a collection of atomised individuals, and yet have stable and coherent systems of morality?

Hegel examines the dialectic of an extreme form of individualism not unlike the individualism of today’s neoliberalism: the picture of the “genius” put forward by Romantic philosophers. Hegel calls the Romantic genius the “beautiful soul”. The label is clearly meant as a criticism. The beautiful soul will at once be recognisable to to the seasoned internet user. The beautiful soul is a contradictory form of self-consciousness. The beautiful soul holds that there is only one stable form of moral law, or moral duty, and that is the beautiful soul’s own conscience. We can immediately see how this relates to a discussion about the intrinsic meaning of texts. The content of the moral duty to which the beautiful soul holds themselves, therefore, is not found in the moral law to which they are committed, but in their own conscience, their own opinion.

Any kind of moral law or duty is therefore not essential to the rationality of morality. It is not an external thing outside the interpretation of the Romantic genius. In what will seem like no surprise at all, Hegel says this kind of understanding of the meaning of morality leads to a contradiction: the beautiful soul is either a moralist or an ironist, according to Terry Pinkard (1996: 214).

Ironist #

Pinkard explains that

Nothing can count for such a “beautiful soul” unless they let it count for them, and this election of what counts for them is something entirely personal, something that they must decide on their own to do in term of their own basic convictions. This formation of the romantic authentic individual is thus logically led to taking an ironic attitude toward everything, including themselves. Nothing can count as absolute, nothing as definitive unless they, as an individual, elects to count it as such; but the romantic, authentic individual knows that in principle this cannot be a sufficient ground for convincing others of the meritoriousness of what they have elected to count as worthy of belief or action because the others must elect to count it for themselves on the basis of their own convictions. … Thus the romantic agent knows nothing can be final and definitive in a communal sense, and knowing that, they also know that nothing can be final and definitive for themselves, since whatever bonds they put on their thoughts and actions can also be loosened and thrown of by them. The only appropriate attitude therefore is irony, the belief that whatever one believes and takes seriously cannot be final and definitive even for oneself (Pinkard, 1996: 214-215).

Moralist #

The other side of this contradiction is for the beautiful soul to become a moralist:

The other possibility for the beautiful soul is to preserve their moral purity and stick to their convinctions, demanding that the world take the on their own terms or not at all. This beautiful soul cannot be ironic, for that would mean for them that they should abandon their own deepest beliefs. However, a community of such beautiful souls would be unlikely to be able to sustain itself since it would quickly deteriorate into pure confrontation among uncompromising “men and women of conscience” (Pinkard, 1996: 215).

The one stable locus of meaning for any kind of moral duty for the Romantic genius depends on the perspective of the person being asked to reflect on their conscience. Hegel rightly concludes that this leads to a completely contradictory account of morality. One can immediately see Hegel anticipating Nietzsche at this point. There is no stable or coherent conception of the moral law if all we depend on is the context of someone’s conscience.

Hegel, however, says that we can derive a stable conception of morality if we sublate (forgive me, Richard) the dialectic of the Romantic genius. If we transcend, but preserve these two unstable and contradictory polar opposite accounts of morality, we can achieve a satisfying account of ethical meaning.

The answer that Hegel gives to the dialectic of the Romantic genius is summarised in the last section of “Reason”:

SECTION 437: The distinction, then, of self-consciousness from the essential nature (Wesen) is completely transparent. Because of this the distinctions found within that nature itself are not accidental characteristics. On the contrary, because of the unity of the essence with self-consciousness (from which alone discordance, incongruity, might have come), they are articulated groups (Massen) of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits transparent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential nature.

Self-consciousness, again, stands likewise in a simple and clear relation to those different laws. They are, and nothing more — this is what constitutes the consciousness of its relation to them. Thus, Antigone takes them for the unwritten and unerring laws of the god —

“Not now, indeed, nor yesterday, but for aye
It lives, and no man knows what time it came.”

They are. If I ask for their origin, and confine them to the point whence they arose, that puts me beyond them, for it is I who am now the universal, while they are the conditioned and limited. If they are to get the sanction of my insight, I have already shaken their immovable nature, their inherent constancy, and regard them as something which is perhaps true, but possibly may also be not true, so far as I am concerned. True ethical sentiment consists just in holding fast and unshaken by what is right, and abstaining altogether from what would move or shake it or derive it.

The ethical reality or ethical substance of the community in which the Romantic genius finds themselves is the intrinsic meaning of their ethical context. Whether or not they agree with the prevailing social rules of their community, they nevertheless acknowledge that those are the rules of their context. Despite their truth_, _the prevailing ethical social order for the beautiful soul is their ethical reality.

This provides the answer for the intrinsic meaning for political texts. A political text’s intrinsic meaning is the crystalisation of the social context in which it was written. Whether or not we agree with the prevailing attitudes of the society from when a political text issued, the debates and the issues at stake at that time are the intrinsic meaning of a political text. The political landscape of the time that a text was written is the organic unity of meaning within a text.

This helps us “commit” a political text to something, it helps us rationally assess a political text without having to commit it to a static and singular meaning. The meaning within a political text that we are consulting is the ethical substance of its time. This allows us to give it friction against our own ethical reality, the meaning of our own social context.

Yes, the idea that a text as an intrinsic meaning is “simple minded bs” indeed.

References #

Hegel, G. W. F. _Phenomenology of Spirit, _translated by J. B. Baillie (1910) (__Forgive me for using this version, I wanted to copy and paste the text hahahah).

Ikaheimo, Heikki (2011) “Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel’s Social Ontology” in Recognition and Social Ontology.

Pinkard, Terry (1996) Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason.

Dialectics on To Be Decided

Who Thinks Abstractly?

Introduction. #

Impressions. #

Bishop Berkeley. #

The Empiricial. #

The Return of Hume. #

APPENDIX #

Evald V. Ilyenkov and A. N. Leontev on Language Acquisition

0.0 Introduction #

1.0.0 – Main Section #

1.1.0 – Description of Activities #

1.1.1 – Activity One #

1.1.2 – Activity Two #

1.2.0 – Theoretical Underpinnings of Activities #

1.2.1 – Activity One #

1.2.2 – Activity Two #

1.3.0 – Discussion #

3.0.0 – Conclusion #

4.0.0 – References #

Marx, Naturalism, and the Disenchantment of Nature

Andrew Feenberg’s ‘The Philosophy of Praxis’ #

Naturalised normativism #

Feenberg balks #

’Labour is just work’ #

‘Nature is by definition devoid of meaning’ #

McDowell’s ‘Relaxed Naturalism’ and Marx’s ‘Humanised Naturalism’: A connection #

‘Mind and World’: The epistemological argument #

Why Marx is entitled to his humanised naturalism #

References #

“Simple-Minded Bullshit”: How Texts Have Intrinsic Meaning

Dialectical Monism #

Deducing Intrinsic Meaning #

The Romantic Genius: The Beautiful Soul #

Ironist #

Moralist #

Social Crystalisations #

References #