The Marxist Philosophical Problematic (and the possible Lonergan, McShane connection), part two
Hugh Williams
1) Part Two: The Marxist Philosophical Problematic (and the possible Lonergan/McShane connection)
Gilson-Langan observe that in their research of Soviet Marxist-Leninism, they found that there was this tendency and even resolve to try and take a solid position in explicating certain implications where Marx himself seemed to leave things as a only a matter of conjecture, opinion, or suggestion. Nevertheless, this effort at a type of systematization in Soviet Marxism is where Gilson-Langan’s research is directed in their efforts to understand just where the philosophical problems in Marxism and particularly its materialism may lie.
Gilson-Langan are quite clear that they will not become involved in the complex problem of Marxist exegesis as to what in these tendencies is faithful to Marx and what is not. But they will share, at least tentatively, the generalized Christian concern over what is understood to be this materialization of the dialectic, a concern which we find takes on highly sophisticated and updated proportions in Robert Doran’s “Lonergan and the Dialectic of History”.
Marxism and Marxist-Leninism especially is a materialism that rejects all idealism. In being a materialist philosophy, it is also dialectical which means the forces of movement are constituted by a contrasting and conflicting that leads to the development of higher forms which in turn will have their own contrasting/conflicting forces.
If we should focus on the highest level imaginable of this dialectic - that of human consciousness we find human thought requires the physical brain and yet conscious thought possesses no physical properties (thus, appearing as immaterial). This must be said and acknowledged even in Marxism, otherwise we would undermine the whole intentional order or what in Marx might be recognized as the relative independence of the superstructure which enables our awareness of idealism’s error, the much more complicated reversal of Hegel, the recognition that reality does not issue from some pre-existing idea but instead is grounded in the complex work of praxis where ultimately ideas must conform to reality’s development.
Philosophically, these premises inescapably lead to some more systematic consideration of this consciousness-reality relationship, consideration of its development out of sense knowledge into the higher forms of ideology, religion, and art. This leads to the consideration of how human consciousness has this power of symbolization and signification which are the basis for our understanding of this significant and evolutionary separation of the human from the animal. What is clear according to Gilson-Langan is that Marxist speculations on these developments returns us more generally to the centrality of this notion of praxis in Marx and Marxism.
Most generally in Marx there is this intimate dependence of the ideal superstructure on the material and practical contact with the world, so much so that superstructures cannot advance beyond it in any way when and if they become de-linked with their historical-material situation. And yet these ideal superstructures are not to be viewed as simply mirror reflections of the material conditions without some life of their own that bestows significance and meaning relevant for the progress of the material social-political-economic situation.
This human power of symbolization (and signification) is the height of the powers of abstraction and generalization of the whole complex relationship, from the limiting concrete material circumstances of their historical first occurrence, to being applied by the human subject to other situations dissimilar and yet similar by virtue of still being also an exercise in thought and thinking.
However, the development and enhancement of this human power increase the possibility and scope of error … this misapplication of ideas and thought to being.
Praxis then involves the concrete origins of the superstructure. It is also the end to which this must be destined, thus it provides the criteria of truth. (Is this not coming close to Segundo’s hermeneutical circle of liberation theology?)
As human thought (and ideas) more deeply penetrates into the nature of things and the realities of situations, we have in Marx this clear and firm view that ultimately the only criterion for thought’s validity is its successful application in real praxis – work, experimentation, and social change.
Freedom for Marx is not reducible to a state of mind, a kind of escape into the realm of spirit. There simply is no point in Marx for thinking beautiful thoughts (ideas) or even for practical efforts unless one is effectively engaged with one’s material situation so as to direct that material situation and the productive forces to which one has been subordinated.
There is this sense in Marx of coming to scientifically direct, or let’s say guide, the laws of one’s material situation and that it is this that is true freedom in Marx. Voluntarism, opportunism, and reformism can merely shift the suffering to others among the oppressed and exploited, thus obscuring to the benefit of the privileged the real underlying economic problems and the necessary social changes for taking control of the developmental forces of humankind.
This historical limitation in human thought is the fundamental evidence against idealism (perhaps here I might say something in reference to Lonergan’s own idealism or idealist tendencies relative to this Marxist materialism). However, philosophically, according to Gilson-Langan, one has to give not only an account of the generation of thought in and from our bodily sense experience of the world but, in addition, what it means in thought to consciously affirm the objectivity of social relations, to affirm that the product of human work is alienated in nature, and to affirm these things somehow should be brought under our voluntary social control.
Philosophically, this, says Gilson-Langan, becomes one central problem – how is it intentional acts are incarnated or embodied in nature and the material world? How is it that intentionality can penetrate our language, our institutions, and the products of our work? In a sense it returns us philosophically to the problem of idealism versus realism, or in perhaps a more updated manner – to the problem of intentionality analysis and causality.
It is Gilson-Langan’s claim that Marx with his intellectual effort to reorient Hegelian philosophy materialistically, develops a highly complex social theory that ultimately is based on a social ontology that remains largely implicit and even incomplete in its ontological-epistemological account.
Soviet Marxism with its official handbooks (much like the Thomistic manuals’ efforts to work out the question of Christianity) tried to work this out much more explicitly with very mixed results at best. This inadequacy or incompleteness can be explained and perhaps understood in two basic ways. 1) This question and problem of social ontology – i.e., our being in the world among others simply does not lend itself to any ‘once and for all’ solution. And so, any serious effort to come to grips with the historical materialism of political-economy and its ideology simply is bound to fall short (at least in the work of any one thinker) in providing a full and satisfactory account of this complexity. 2) This seemingly inescapable limitation is not intended to shortchange serious efforts to address this philosophical problem of knowing and the known, truth and being, in our human experience. It is only to say that this remains philosophically incomplete in Marxism.
The Gilson-Langan treatment of Marxism in the context of this history of philosophy focuses on the ontological-epistemological question that, again philosophically, is said to ground Marx’s historical-materialism and dialectical-materialism. (The former being in my view more of a methodology whereas the latter becomes at least in Soviet Marxism it seems, a metaphysics.) This means taking seriously historical-materialism’s intentional origins in human thought, and perhaps better understanding and appreciating the efforts of many later Marxists to give some more plausible ontological-epistemological account that avoids the risk of determinism that can come with materialism’s concerted efforts to avoid idealism.
According to Gilson-Langan, there is this sense in thinkers who have taken Marx seriously and have been greatly influenced by his social theory, thinkers such as Max Scheler and perhaps Max Weber, that our thinking in history and its fundamental importance can only be understood, as Marx rightly claimed, in terms of the whole social, political, economic situation in which we are materially embodied. However, this material relationship can exist and be important without a reductionism. This is to say that our thinking and knowing of real material structures are involved in the historical movement and dialectic and are so in a way that defies a simplistic reduction to these material structures themselves. (We should not presume this means that Marxists will be prepared to abandon their materialism. This is because, as in Ernst Bloch, we have this insistence that in the material structures of the world there is this hidden dynamism that is the reason for the emergence of thinking and knowing in human beings despite that fact that no satisfactory philosophical account has yet to be given.) A good deal of modern and contemporary philosophy (such as in Lonergan and Doran) tries to give evidence and provide arguments supporting what at a minimum can be agreed to with many if not most Marxists as this non-reductionism.
Gilson-Langan suggest that Max Scheler has posed the philosophical challenge that goes to the heart of all reductionist tendencies. He asserts that no theoretical system of political-economy and society even in its assertion of materialist scientific laws can be regarded as totally independent of thought and value. (Rahner in SiW in his section on foundations, it seems to me, came to a similar discovery in his attempts to articulate some fundamental grounding first principle of being.)
Marx and Engels may have said something somewhere at some time that economic relations are ultimately the decisive factor in history. Nevertheless, given their genuine mistrust of any simplistic reductionism this claim must be contextualized metaphysically and philosophically while yet respecting their project’s firm methodological commitment to historical-materialism so as to counteract the widely acknowledged disorienting excesses of Hegelian idealism.
Hugh