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.
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.
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 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.