A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition

by Unknown Author

  Marx was later to detach the theory of history from the philosophy of mind. It is nevertheless true that his attempt to give a material basis to the ‘dialectic’ of self-discovery retained, even in its later version, the marks of the ‘drama of subject and object’ which had been scripted by Fichte. And its moral significance resides in the concept which came to him from Fichte via Hegel—the concept of alienation. It is Marx’s treatment of ‘alienated labour’ that has been at the origin of much of the more recent philosophical interest in his writings.

  According to Marx there is some kind of ‘internal’ relation between alienation and the institution of private property. In order to illustrate Marx’s meaning, it is necessary to understand what ‘liberal’ economists had attempted. Such economists were less interested in the ‘natural’ right which, according to Locke, underlies the institution of property, than in the ‘contractual’ rights which stem from it. That is, they were interested in the movement of property under the laws of contract and exchange. Adam Smith, in his famous essay The Wealth of Nations (1776), had summed up a century of liberal and empiricist thought by attempting to demonstrate that the free exchange and accumulation of private property under the guidance of self-interest not only preserves justice, but also promotes the social well-being as a whole, satisfying existing needs and guaranteeing stability.

  In order to establish that conclusion, Smith considers human nature to be something settled. The homo economicus of liberal theory is not thought of as a historical being. However, he is motivated by desires and satisfactions which, while represented as permanent features of the human condition, may in fact be no more than peculiarities of the eighteenth-century market economy, which is in turn to be explained by something deeper than the operation of economic laws. If the nature of man is not fixed, we must see obedience to these economic laws as neither ineluctable nor necessarily advantageous. Marx wished to argue that the laws of liberal economics, while they may govern the movement of property, represent the institution of property as permanent. Hence they discourage an examination of other arrangements in which property, and the alienation that stems from it, might disappear. In these other circumstances the rewards and fulfilments of human nature will also change. And if alienation is overcome, they will change for the better. It could be said that there is something objectionable in this idea: namely, that it represents the nature of man as self-created, and yet also argues that there is a state of man ‘restored to himself’ which has some kind of supreme and distinctive value. In other words it seems both to reject and to accept the idea of a permanent human ‘essence’. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the charge levelled against liberal economic theory demands an answer. No theory of economic activity can make sense without a philosophy of human nature.

  Marx argues that the institution of private property only seems to create that freedom of movement and expression, that power over nature, which the liberal economists had ascribed to it. In fact it creates a deeper form of subjection. In his attachment to property man is ‘self-alienated’. The institution and the state of mind are related not as cause and effect, but inherently. What exists objectively as features of ownership, is felt subjectively as the alienation of the individual from himself and his species-life.

  What is meant, in this context, by self-alienation? Historically speaking the origin of the idea is not difficult to trace; similar observations can be found in Aristotle’s critique of the mercantile way of life, in Christian doctrines of the destructive nature of worldly attachments, and in the medieval attacks on usury. But for the purpose of philosophical evaluation it is necessary to detach Marx’s conception from all but two of its antecedents.

  The first is the concept of the ‘fetish’, introduced into Enlightenment thought by De Brosses (Du culte des dieux fétiches, 1760), and given philosophical content by Kant in his incidental discussions of the philosophy of religion. Kant argued that there is a distinction between genuine religious thought, which aims at the understanding of God, of the self and of the true relation between them, and spurious religious thought—or ‘fetishism’—which involves the outward projection onto the world of principles which represent only subjective characteristics of the idolator, and therefore serve to instil his world with mystery. Fetishism obscures the subject’s relation to the world, absorbing his human life into the vain worship of objects, and cutting him off from the true understanding of himself, as an autonomous being in intrinsic relation to others of his kind and to a transcendent God. Fetishism does not make the transcendent personhood of God immanent in the world. It endows the world with a false aura of immanence, painting phenomena in the subjective colours of a finite will. It therefore creates an impassable barrier between the self and God.

  The term ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung) became attached to that of fetishism, in something like the following way. Hegel argued that the religious spirit is a spirit which, because it sees itself detached from and in opposition to the sphere of perfection, is a spirit in self-alienation, essentially unhappy in the consciousness that it is not what it is naturally destined to be. (It is ‘fallen’, as the Christian doctrine puts it.) This applies not only to the Kantian fetishism but also to any religion, in so far as religion reflects man’s sense of his own imperfection, of his absolute solitude in the world of creation, and of his dependence on a being that lies beyond the sphere of objective knowledge. In a bold step that had an immediate succès de scandale, Feuerbach argued that this alienated character in religion is simply proof that all religion is nothing more than fetishism. Christianity itself is a species of self-projection. Men project out of themselves, and make into properties of a divine being, the perfections which are really theirs. These perfections have no objective reality outside man’s social life, but there they can have real existence. In removing his perfections from himself, and installing them in a transcendent world, man makes his own perfection seem unobtainable, since it now lies outside the sphere of his social action. Hence he becomes estranged from his own nature, and conscious of himself as an incomplete and limited being. Religion alienates man from the ‘species-life’ in which his perfection is possible, and hence from himself as constituted by that life.

  The Marxist theory of alienation can only be understood if we also add to it a second Kantian idea, one with which we are already familiar. According to one formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative, a rational being is constrained to treat all others of his kind as ends and never as means only. We have seen, in Hegel, the attempt to found this imperative in an analysis of lordship and bondage as necessary ‘moments’ in the self-consciousness of a rational being. To the extent that a man treats another as a means, so does he become a means to himself. In exploiting the other he exploits himself, losing his freedom in a form of subservience all the greater for his inability to recognise it as such. It is this theory that lends support to Marx’s contention that alienation, being a form of isolation from social life, is experienced as alienation from self.

  We might put the developed forms of the two original ideas thus:

  A man is an object for himself to the extent that he invests objects with human powers, and so ceases to see those powers as having their origin in himself.

  A man becomes an object for himself to the extent that others are objects for him (where X is an object for Y = X is only a means for Y).

  The combination of 1 and 2 is the state of self-alienation. The true realisation of oneself as subject requires and is required by two things: first, the recognition of others as ends, and secondly the rediscovery through social life of one’s actual human potential. But any lapse into self-alienation must also precipitate an alienation from species-life, and vice versa.

  The difficult philosophical claim, never properly established by Marx, and in itself contentious, is that this state of alienation is directly connected with the institution of property. Marx hoped to make the connection in the following way. Under the rule of private pro
perty, objects become the focus of individual rights, and thus take on the character of human life. There is a sense in which, through the institution of property, we endow objects with a soul. Since the only origin of this soul must be in us, it follows that there is an element of systematic ‘fetishism’ in the process. This fetishism develops as property develops from use-value (which is intelligibly related to human need) to exchange-value, in which the commodity begins to acquire life and autonomy of its own. With the arrival of pure exchange-value in the form of money, the transformation of objects into fetishes is complete; and with this transformation—effected only under the rule of the free market, which is itself the consummation of property relations—we have the establishment of capitalism. Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means. Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life remain will be dissipated, being projected outwards onto the world of commodities. To summarise all this in Marx’s colourful ‘Young Hegelian’ style:

  Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it ('On the Jewish Question').

  The later Marx

  We have already moved closer to the reformulation of Marx’s philosophical critique of the institutions of private property. This reformulation attempted to separate the theory of history from the theory of human nature and endow both with the scientific character suggested by their ‘materialist’ pretensions. The aim is to give substance to the claim, made in The German Ideology, that ‘consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness’. Hence Marx wishes to give a systematic theory which will both explain, and in explaining undermine, the illusions which uphold the moral and political order of capitalism.

  In his later writings Marx made little use of the concept of alienation, and, although the theory of fetishism was to survive in Capital (in the ideas of commodity and capital fetishism), the immediate connection with what one might call the ‘unhappy consciousness’ was broken. The term now becomes part of a scientific theory which ostensibly disdains all reference to the happiness or misery with which economic relations are experienced by those who participate in them. That experience is criticised not as happy or unhappy, but as true or false. The concept of alienation gives way to that of ‘false consciousness’, a false consciousness being one that makes, not particular errors of judgement, but universal errors in its perception of the social world. The burden of Marx’s critique of capitalism comes to rest on an ingenious and scientifically phrased theory of exploitation. This theory only tangentially makes contact with observations as to how the state of man under capitalism is experienced. False consciousness may not be a form of unhappiness: but its evil lies in the fact that it inevitably endorses exploitation, through its inability to perceive the exploitation that is there.

  Part of the reason for this shift of emphasis was the important insight that Marx was able to obtain into the theory of history, once he had replaced the Hegelian representation of its movement by a theory that was more scientifically inspired. This new theory of history, in a version due partly to Friedrich Engels, has been called ‘dialectical materialism’ (by G. V.Plekhanov (1856-1918), one of the founding fathers of Russian Marxism). It is unclear whether the word ‘dialectical’ is correctly used to describe it: for this seems to imply that Marx, like Hegel, believed that history proceeds by the successive resolution of ‘contradictions’. What is undisputed, however, is that the theory is a form of ‘materialism’. Hegel had seen history as the development of consciousness. Marx argued that the fundamental things that develop, and so bring about the movement of history, are not features of consciousness at all, but ‘material’ forces. The development of consciousness is to be explained in terms of the material reality, and does not explain it. Thus, in the famous phrase of Engels (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy) quoted above, Marx’s theory of history ‘sets Hegel on his feet’. Moreover, the theory was held to validate, as a prediction, the original view that capitalism would be superseded by a more humane social arrangement. Having faith in this prediction, it seemed less important to Marx to provide a description of man’s unhappiness. For it is redundant to give reasons for bringing about what is inevitable.

  The theory of history begins from the distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Marxist philosophers who have wished to hold on to the Hegelian antecedents of the theory (for example, George Lukacs and certain philosophers of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’) have criticised or underplayed this distinction, believing that a truly philosophical Marxism must found itself, like the theory of alienation, in an understanding of human consciousness. The purpose of Marx’s distinction, on the other hand, was to show human consciousness as an offshoot of a deeper social and economic reality. Consciousness is something to be explained, in terms that may not be recognisable to the conscious being himself. One may say that, in moving to the scientific theory of history, Marx also takes a step from the first-person to the third-person point of view, a step which inevitably takes him away from the standpoint of the agent, towards that of the observer.

  The base of all human institutions is that upon which the forms of consciousness are built, and in terms of which institutions (and the consciousness which derives from them) are to be explained. This base consists, for Marx, in two parts: first, a system of economic relations, secondly, certain active ‘productive forces’. The existence of any particular system of economic relations is explained in terms of the level of development of the productive forces. These forces consist of labour power, and accumulated knowledge. As man’s mastery over nature increases, the productive forces will inevitably develop. At each level of development a particular system of economic relations will be most suited to contain and facilitate their operation. Hence we can explain, rather in the manner of Darwin (with whose theory of evolution early Marxists compared the theory of Marx), the existence of any given economic system in terms of its suitability to the productive forces which, were they at a different stage of development, would either not require, or else actively destroy it.

  Upon the system of economic relations rises the superstructure of legal and political institutions. These serve to consolidate and protect the economic base, and are therefore similarly explicable in terms of their sustaining and protective function. Finally, the political institutions generate their own peculiar ‘ideology’. This is the system of beliefs, perceptions, values and prejudices, which together consolidate the entire structure, and serve both to conceal the changeability, and to dignify the actuality, of each particular arrangement.

  There are roughly five economic arrangements: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism. The last is distinguished by the fact that the necessity for a legal, political and ideological superstructure now vanishes, and the state, together with all its apparatus and the ‘false consciousness’ which surrounds it, finally withers away. Under communism, men live in a state of unmediated fellowship, on equal terms, neither exploited nor exploiting in a world where each gives according to his ability and each takes according to his need. This state of communism Marx saw as inevitable, simply because productive forces were bound to develop beyond the point where capitalism could contain them. Having developed to that point, the ‘fetter’ of capitalism is broken asunder, and communism, which is the only economic arrangement suitable to the enormous level of development which will by then have been achieved, must necessarily come in place of it. This transition, however, will be impossible without a violent revolution, such as had supposedly attended the transition from feudalism to bourgeois mercan
tilism in eighteenth-century France.

  In the course of developing this theory, Marx provided various elaborate descriptions of the capitalist and feudal arrangements. He tried to show the essential differences between them, and the precise way in which they generate contrasting systems of law. His investigations led him towards the vexed problems of political economy, in particular the problems of value (or price). Nothing can have value except in relation to human activity. Use-values can be explained simply as the relations which hold between objects and the needs which they satisfy. But what about exchange-value? What accounts for the fact that a particular commodity exchanges at the particular price that it commands? Secondly, how does surplus-value arise, in other words, how is it that a particular person (the capitalist) is able to accumulate exchange-value through the operation of the market?

  In order to explain the two features of exchange- and surplus-value (which he believed to be mutually dependent, and together definitive of capitalism) Marx took over from the political economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) the so-called ‘labour theory of value’. This explains the exchange-value of a commodity in terms of the socially necessary hours of labour required to produce or reproduce it. The accumulation of surplus is then explained in terms of the extortion of labour from the labourer, by exchanging his means of subsistence (which serves to reproduce his labour power and is therefore the true ‘price’ of labour) for hours of labour in excess of those needed to produce those means. Marx was thus led to a theory of exploitation. It seems that the production of surplus-value must necessarily proceed through the extraction of hours of unpaid labour. Hence capitalistic relations are necessarily exploitative.