💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~vidak › metaphysics › marxian-naturalism.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:47:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Return to topic index.

Marx, Naturalism, and the Disenchantment of Nature

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.