Gilson on Marx's materialism, part one

[Hugh Williams]

Gilson-Langan on Marx and Marxism (My gloss in two parts)

1)      Part One: Marx’s Materialism

Marx’s dialectical materialism derives thought from “being” understood as ‘the givenness of nature’. This was intended in the first instance to be different from the idealism of Hegel’s dialectic, the dominant intellectual movement of the day, where being somehow is to be derived from thought/idea.

With this materialism as a point of departure Marx believed he could cut through or avoid what he considered the equivocations, paradoxes, and confusions of Hegelian nature. This was intended to be an account that completely exorcised the notion that some force above and beyond nature – ‘God’ or ‘Absolute Idea’, is the source of our sense of nature.

The very movement of the dialectic itself is now conceived “realistically” as the clash or struggle of forces incarnated in what Marx posited with, an Aristotelian realism, as this extra-mental givenness of our objective social situation.

The question then becomes what are these real material forces? And why these relations and how are we to understand social change which was conceived to be dialectical. This study of what was understood at the time to be political-economy really was Marx’s most prolonged and important focus for his intellectual work.

And yet, as a student of Hegel, there was this complex underlying philosophical issue that Marx would have been very much aware of – what then is the underlying ontological-epistemological essence of this relationship between what Marx called the forces of production and the social or property relations of production, which under capitalism are in conflicting disproportion, and the superstructure of the ideological and juridical notions which rise up in the public consciousness of a society and appear to exercise this guiding influence on its development?

Gilson-Langan argue that Marx’s Hegelian influence should not be underestimated in tackling such a philosophical question, especially if we wish to avoid a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem Marx’s materialization of the ‘dialectic’ engendered? Gilson-Langan boil this problem down to one that should be familiar to many of us on this Lonergan-list-serve - as that of the problem of the relationship between thing and thought (idea) which is or has been renewed since Marx’s time through what Gilson-Langan call ‘the transcendental version of “intentionality”’.

Marx, given his political-economic preoccupations, commitments, and even obsessions for his time, does emphasize the objective aspects of the structures and forces he is trying to describe in his extensive analyses and yet he is clearly concerned with social-economic relations that involve human intentionality. The forces of production can be thought of as ‘things’, as factories and machines, but also, they involve thinking and thought, ideas of organizations and of technological implementation. These relations of production involve the ‘plans’, ‘intentions’, and ‘goals’ of owners and controllers of capital in conjunction with the servile acceptance by the workers of their subservient position under capitalist social relations of domination and control.

There also are the cumulative results of past decisions of the controllers of the system which once in play leave very little room for creative change while the capitalists are adhering to their vested interests.

Marx did see the culminating moment for historical social change in the revolutionary class consciousness which is not merely the ego’s or the individual’s grasp of his/her own understanding but involves its living, practical awareness of these material limits and real opposing and struggling forces both natural and voluntary-social. This then is a consciousness of the class struggle and the value of one’s own work as subject, and of the alienation of this value because of one’s acceptance of certain historically developed social relations.

The big difference from Hegel here, was that though Marx also realized that one needed to become consciously aware of these social relations, this was not enough to change them or to contribute to the making of history. This is because these relations are real and not ideal. It is only through a revolutionary praxis that the needed (or necessary) social change comes about. This will involve relations between knowing-willing subjects mediated through their common interest in the ‘objects’ transformed by their work consciously apprehended by their own appropriating action.

This Marxist analysis of systematic social-historical relations of real embodied existents whose intentions are through their bodily acts (work) manifest in ‘things’ (and their relations) is, according to Gilson-Langan, both a profound and original advancement in human intellectual achievement. It has greatly influenced, certainly within the history of philosophy, the whole field of phenomenological-existentialism in the likes of both Merleau Ponty and Charles Taylor. The latter, Charles Taylor, is someone I’ve studied very closely, though at the time, I must admit, perhaps because of my own ignorance and limitations, and perhaps, to some extent, because of the intellectual culture I was working in, these Marxist influences were too easily overlooked and even consciously or unconsciously repressed …

Hugh