The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  2 For a valiant attempt to defend it, see G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). But for a convincing rebuttal of the defense, see Cohen’s numerous critics, including his later self. An insightful review of this debate can be found in J. Wolff, “Karl Marx,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).

  3 The term ideology also has a history before Marx, but since his use of the term constitutes a sort of watershed, representing a sharp break with that earlier history and the foundation for the term’s subsequent use, I shall set it aside here. For some helpful discussion of it, see M. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 169–73.

  4 Marx: Selections, ed. A. W. Wood (London and New York: Macmillan, 1988), 23. (Wherever possible, I cite this and other readily available collections of Marx’s writings in English in this chapter.)

  5 Marx: Selections, 66–7.

  6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), para. 207.

  7 Phenomenology of Spirit, paras. 208–9. Michael Rosen in On Voluntary Servitude is very interested in Hegel as a precursor to Marx in a general way, but, surprisingly, overlooks the central role that the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology played in the original development of Marx’s theory of ideology, as I am explaining it here.

  8 Marx: Selections, 67.

  9 Marx: Selections, 64.

  10 L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 14.

  11 The Essence of Christianity, 26.

  12 The Essence of Christianity, 27–8.

  13 The Essence of Christianity, 27.

  14 Marx: Selections, 24.

  15 Marx: Selections, 24. This famous metaphor had already been used before Marx by Bruno Bauer, and indeed has an even longer prehistory.

  16 In addition to his central diagnosis of illusion in this area, his reduction of God to the human being or human society, Feuerbach had also reduced the blood and body of the communion service to mere wine and bread, baptismal water to mere water, and so on.

  17 Marx: Selections, 81.

  18 Marx: Selections, 23–4.

  19 K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008), 83–4.

  20 For example, Michael Rosen in On Voluntary Servitude.

  21 Daniel Brudney in his generally very helpful book Karl Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) fails to give Bauer the credit he deserves for this key move because he mistakenly already attributes it to Feuerbach. Michael Rosen similarly overlooks Bauer’s key contribution here.

  22 B. Bauer, Die Judenfrage (Braunschweig: Friedrich Otto, 1843), 96 (emphasis added). Incidentally, Bauer also identifies an additional important way in which Christianity serves this function of reinforcement that tends to be overlooked, or at least neglected, by Marx. According to Bauer in Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842), the fact that Christianity posits God as an authority who dominates humankind lends an appearance of legitimacy to similar relations of socio-political domination that occur between human beings themselves, especially since God is also conceived as endorsing the latter. This suggestion is extremely plausible—think, for example, of the New Testament injunction to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) or of the nineteenth-century Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” where the traditional Christian conception of God residing in heaven behind the gates of St Peter to which human beings come begging is echoed in the stanza “The rich man in his castle,/The poor man at his gate,/God made them high and lowly,/And ordered their estate.”

  23 K. Marx, Early Writings, ed. L. Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 217.

  24 It is perhaps worth mentioning that this whole developing tradition of criticism of Christianity, which began with the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology, arguably ends up significantly closer to Hegel’s best views on the subject than might seem to be the case. For, although the idea of the illusory self-abasement of human beings is uppermost there and the idea of illusory compensations virtually neglected (hence, for example, the section’s very title), both ideas had been salient in the account of the origins of Christianity that Hegel had given earlier in The Positivity of the Christian Religion (1795, though the text was not published until the end of the nineteenth century), and moreover that earlier work had argued that it was the socio-economic oppression of large segments of ancient Roman society that had originally caused the adoption of these illusions (a position which is still implied, though much less clearly, by the Phenomenology, where “Lordship and Bondage” precedes and produces the Christian “Unhappy Consciousness”).

  25 As I mentioned in an earlier note, Bauer would add here, very plausibly: (c) The beliefs in question also sanctify the hierarchical domination of members of one social class by members of another by representing this as the nature of God’s relationship to human beings, and moreover as something that God endorses for the human case.

  26 Marx: Selections, 135–6.

  27 Michael Rosen, just as he overlooks the origins of Marx’s theory in Hegel’s account of the “Unhappy Consciousness” and its subsequent modifications by Feuerbach and Bauer, likewise overlooks the role played by this crucial generalizing move in the genesis of the theory (see e.g. On Voluntary Servitude, 175).

  28 This is the force of a famous analogy that Marx draws in The German Ideology (1845/6) between ideology and representation in a camera obscura (The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970], 47); like the representations of a camera obscura, which gives an inverted image of something real, ideology’s representations do reflect realities but they also distort them and are therefore false.

  Marx consistently regards falsehood as a defining feature of ideology. For example, in another passage from The German Ideology he writes of “the illusion of ideologists in general” (The German Ideology, 67). Astonishingly, much of the recent secondary literature concerned with Marx’s theory of ideology fails to see this fundamental point. For example, Allen Wood implies that falsehood is for Marx an inessential feature of ideology, introducing into his exposition of Marx a concept of “functional ideology” that can be perfectly true and arguing only that for Marx falsehood is often a feature of ideology (Karl Marx, 118–24, 145–6). And Michael Rosen in On Voluntary Servitude likewise disregards the essential role that Marx assigns to falsehood in ideology. He does so in large part because he overlooks the source of Marx’s theory in the critique of religion that he took over from Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer and in the generalization of that critique to cover other areas of belief. He also argues against the idea that falsehood is an essential feature of ideology on philosophical grounds—in particular, the grounds that ideological beliefs might be unjustified but nonetheless just happen to be true and (more importantly) that certain non-cognitive aspects of culture, forms of selectivity, and forms of invalid reasoning should also be included as ideology. However, this is all really a revision of Marx’s theory.

  29 The German Ideology, 64.

  30 Marx: Selections, 126–9.

  31 See, for example, The German Ideology, 42, 46–7. Marx’s empiricism is the basis both of his identification of the ideological beliefs in question as false and of his claims that they serve, and exist because they serve, certain class interests in opposition to others.

  Marx’s empiricism is not naïve, though. For example, he recognizes that in order to generate an adequate theory, sensory experience needs to be processed, and in some cases corrected, by means of concepts, propositions, and inferences (cf. Wood, Karl Marx, 225–6). And he also realizes that sensory experience is historically changeable (see e.g. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Marx: Selection
s, 58–9).

  32 Contra Jon Elster, who writes: “Marx’s discussion of religion is arbitrary and largely incoherent” (Making Sense of Marx, 493–4, cf. 504–10).

  33 Marx: Selections, 64.

  34 Marx: Selections, 42–52, 68.

  35 Marx: Selections, 52–62.

  36 Marx: Selections, 75.

  37 Marx: Selections, 24.

  38 Marx: Selections, 67.

  39 Early Writings, 227–34.

  40 Marx: Selections, 126–9.

  41 The German Ideology, 81.

  42 The German Ideology, 81.

  43 The German Ideology, 81.

  44 The German Ideology, 47; Marx: Selections, 156–7.

  45 Allen Wood’s detailed and generally helpful account of Marx’s views on morality in Karl Marx, chs. 9–10 seems to me to go wrong on this issue, ascribing to Marx the view that moral judgments are often true (though relative to specific relations of production, and less important than judgments concerning non-moral values). This mistake is related to Wood’s failure to see that for Marx falsehood is an essential feature of ideology generally.

  46 Marx: Selections, 157.

  47 Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–90), 4:472.

  48 The German Ideology, esp. 97–100, 109–15.

  49 For a useful survey of Marx’s accounts of such theories as ideology, see Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 494–504.

  50 Marx: Selections, 50, 66.

  51 Early Writings, 239, 241.

  52 Marx: Selections, 220–1.

  53 Marx: Selections, 223–4.

  54 See also The German Ideology, 108–9; Grundrisse, in The Thought of Karl Marx, ed. D. McLellan (London: Macmillan, 1971), 143–5.

  55 The German Ideology, 58. Concerning the point I make here, cf. K. Renner, “The Economic and Social Functions of the Legal Institutions,” in Karl Marx, ed. T. Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), and Wood, Karl Marx, 63–5, 110.

  56 The German Ideology, 64. Marx sometimes also makes this point in an approximate way by classifying ideologists as members of the ruling class (e.g. The German Ideology, 65). When he does so, he presumably means that the distributors of an ideology belong to the ruling class rather than that its inventors do. For the latter claim would be too obviously open to counterexamples. For instance, whereas the Christian churches can somewhat plausibly be seen as part of the nobility under feudalism and then as part of the capitalist class under capitalism, Jesus and the other early inventors of Christianity cannot plausibly be seen as part of a ruling class.

  57 On Voluntary Servitude, 182–3.

  58 There is, of course, no contradiction between saying that groups often tend to believe falsely in ways that serve their own interests (dentists, for example) and saying that groups often believe falsely in ways that are contrary to their interests (smokers, for example).

  59 Jon Elster also expresses puzzlement concerning how on Marx’s theory ruling-class-friendly ideas are supposed to achieve broad acceptance by intellectuals (Making Sense of Marx, 473). But this seems to me even more of a pseudo-problem than Rosen’s. Think in this connection of the ways in which employees in a privately owned business will often tend to reflect the views of its owner, first, because they would probably not have been hired in the first place if they had not already done so, and second, because once they are hired a system of incentives and disincentives rewards such conformism and punishes deviations from it.

  60 See Elster, Making Sense of Marx, esp. 465–8.

  61 For Marx’s conception of his own position as “science,” see, for example, Capital, in Marx: Selections, 244ff.

  62 Marx: Selections, 156. Cf. The German Ideology, 47.

  63 The German Ideology, 63.

  64 Marx: Selections, 157.

  65 There is more to be said here, of course. In particular, someone might want to defend the argument I have just dismissed by responding that if one got beyond such everyday causal explanations as that in terms of rock-throwing to their deeper basis at the level of the explanations of physics (i.e. explanations in terms of initial conditions and laws articulated with mathematical precision in the technical language of physics), then my homely counterexample would fail. However, such a defense of the argument faces at least two problems. First, it arguably rests on an antiquated and mistaken conception of explanations in physics, since it now seems likely that even the most fundamental explanations that physics can provide will invoke laws that offer no more than statistical probability. Second, and more importantly, in response to such a defense one needs to ask the question: but to which of these two different levels of explanation do Marx’s explanations belong? For the answer is clearly: to the level of everyday causal explanations rather than to that of the explanations of physics. So unless one is prepared to dismiss the former sorts of explanations as simply spurious, the refutation of the argument offered here still holds.

  66 For this position, see, for example, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Marx: Selections, 58–9; cf. The German Ideology, 62.

  67 The German Ideology, 87–8: “Since [historical] evolution takes place naturally,…it proceeds from various localities, tribes, branches of labour, etc. each of which to start with develops independently of the others and only gradually enters into relation with others. Furthermore, it takes place only very slowly…It follows from this that within a nation itself the individuals…have quite different developments…This explains why, with reference to individual points…, consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical relationships, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities.”

  68 For a helpful discussion of the Frankfurt School’s version of this move, see R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 26–8. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude also discusses non-false forms of ideology in helpful ways (indeed to the point of misleadingly neglecting the false forms of it that were Marx’s normal concern).

  69 When Marx mentions art as an area of ideology, he normally seems to be thinking of high art (a rare exception is a reference in The German Ideology to “vaudevilles”). This is probably in part a result of his Hegelian legacy, for Hegel in his famous treatments of art had likewise focused on art’s more exalted forms. However, the ideological function of popular art and other forms of popular entertainment is surely at least as important, and probably more so (as Plato in a way already saw). In our own time, this would include such things as television, radio, films, popular music, magazines, advertising, and sport, for example. Developing the theory of ideology in this direction was one of Adorno’s most noteworthy achievements.

  70 See T. W. Adorno, The Culture Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). Adorno sometimes even implies that such ideology in the “form” of art is more important than ideology in its “content” (see e.g. T.W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970], 344–5, 377–9).

  71 For some incisive criticisms of Rawls’s theory, see B. Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice: A Critical Examination of the Principal Doctrines in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), and R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  72 Rawls himself seems to be blissfully unaware of the ideological character of his position. Whereas he did eventually begin to catch up with the eighteenth century’s recognition of the profound historical mutability of moral values in his late work Political Liberalism, he seems never to have begun to catch up with the nineteenth century’s recognition of the ideological character of much philosophy.

  73 Readers who know Chomsky’s work will understand why I here classify him as a philosopher rather than a linguist.

  74 For more detailed discussion of each of these cases, see my “On the Very Idea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schem
es,” Inquiry, 41/2 (1998) (concerning Davidson and Hardin); Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 5 (concerning Quine); “A Wittgensteinian Anti-Platonism,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 15 (2009) (concerning Searle); “Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, and the Birth of Linguistics,” in my German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (concerning Chomsky); and “Genealogy and Morality,” American Dialectic, 1/3 (2011) (concerning moral universalists).

  75 Notice that it would not be a good argument against this account that some of the philosophers mentioned here fail to subscribe to the sorts of nationalistic interests in question, or indeed even work from diametrically opposed political motives (as in the cases of Chomsky and Nussbaum, for instance). For, as I have mentioned, Marx’s theory of ideology makes no claims about the individual ideologist’s conscious intentions. To convey the point by way of an analogy: if Marx is right in thinking that the basic ideological function of Christianity in the modern world is to support the socio-economic interests of the capitalist class against those of the working class (as he probably is), then a sensible Marxist will of course nonetheless readily concede that Christianity has its sincere liberation theologians.

  76 For further discussion of this subject, see P. Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), esp. ch. 5.

  77 This extension of Marx’s model of ideology to competitive relations between groups other than socio-economic classes, such as nations and especially species, involves a certain change of emphasis in the conception of an ideology’s function; whereas, as we have seen, Marx himself was primarily concerned with ideology’s encouragement of the acquiescence of the oppressed in their own exploitation and only secondarily with its encouragement of the oppressors’ exploitation, here the situation is reversed (indeed, in the case of animals encouragement of the acquiescence of the oppressed plays no role at all). On the other hand, the change that is involved here is much less dramatic than it would appear to someone who interpreted Marx as only concerned with ideology’s encouragement of the acquiescence of the oppressed in their own exploitation, as Michael Rosen does, for example. This is one reason why I earlier made a point of noting against Rosen that Marx had both concerns. In other words, not only is that interpretation exegetically justified by Marx’s own discussions of such areas of ideology as religion, and moreover intrinsically plausible in those cases, but it also prepares a path for the sort of fruitful extension of his theory of ideology that I am advocating here.