{"id":2751,"date":"2018-07-01T00:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T05:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:56:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:56:44","slug":"ends-of-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2751","title":{"rendered":"Ends of philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/category\/platypus-review-authors\/chris-cutrone\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chris Cutrone<\/a><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><em><a href=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/category\/pr\/issue-108\/\">Platypus Review 108<\/a> | July-August 2018<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a name=\"return\"><\/a><em>Prepared opening remarks for an internal discussion by members of Platypus on \u201cMarxism and philosophy\u201d to be held on August 11, 2018.<a href=\"#introremarks\">*<\/a> An audio recording of the event can be found at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus<\/a>&gt;.<\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/embed\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus\" width=\"450\" height=\"40\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<em>Video recording at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/_lq3LOEI7R4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/_lq3LOEI7R4<\/a>&gt;.<\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_lq3LOEI7R4\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3>Misery<\/h3>\n<p>MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as \u201cbourgeois ideology.\u201d This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. There\u2019s little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine \u201cideology.\u201d It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)<\/p>\n<p>So what is meant by philosophy as \u201cideology\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>This goes to the issue of Marxist \u201cideology-critique.\u201d What did Marxism mean by ideology as \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d? \u201cFalse\u201d in what way? For if bourgeois ideology were considered the ideology of the sociological group of the bourgeoisie \u2014 capitalists \u2014 then there would be nothing \u201cfalse\u201d about it: it would be the consciousness adequate to the social being of the ruling class; it would be the true consciousness of the bourgeoisie. So it must be false not for the bourgeoisie but rather for others \u2014 for the \u201cproletariat.\u201d This kind of \u201cclass analysis\u201d of ideology would be concerned that the workers not fall for the ideology of the ruling class. It would be a warning against the workers adopting the idealism of the bourgeoisie that would blind them to their real social condition in capitalism. The idea here is that somehow the workers would remain ignorant of their exploitation by the capitalists if they remained mired in bourgeois ideology.<\/p>\n<p>Of course Marxism was originally no such \u201cmaterial analysis\u201d \u2014 debunking \u2014 of wrong thinking. No.<\/p>\n<p>Rather, the original Marxist ideology-critique \u2014 Marx and Engels\u2019s ideology-critique of bourgeois society \u2014 was the <a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/cutrone_beingbecomingimmanentcritique102217.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">immanent dialectical critique<\/a> of the way society in capitalism necessarily appears to its members, bourgeois and proletarian \u2014 capitalists and workers \u2014 alike. It was the critique of the true consciousness of the workers as well as of the capitalists.<\/p>\n<p>Now, that formulation just lost me 99% of ostensible \u201cMarxists\u201d as well as all of the rest of the \u201cLeft,\u201d whether socialist or liberal, who do indeed think that the poor benighted workers and other subaltern need us intellectuals to tell them what their true social interests are.<\/p>\n<p>This is not what Marxism \u2014 Marx and Engels \u2014 originally thought, however.<\/p>\n<p>Marxism began with the critique of socialism, specifically with the critique of the most prominent socialist thinker of Marx and Engels\u2019s formative moment in the 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon \u2014 who coined the term \u201canarchism\u201d \u2014 claimed that he respected only three authorities, intellectually, Adam Smith, Hegel and the Bible!<\/p>\n<p>Marxism is usually thought of as the synthesis of German Idealist philosophy, British political-economy, and French socialist politics. But what Marxism actually was was the immanent dialectical critique of these three phenomena, which Marx and Engels considered three different forms of appearance of the same thing: the most advanced bourgeois ideology of their time, of the early\u2013mid 19<sup>th<\/sup> century. They were all true expressions of their historical moment, of the Industrial Revolution. But as such, they were also all false.<\/p>\n<p>Proudhon wrote of the \u201cphilosophy of misery,\u201d attacking the heirs of Adam Smith in Utilitarianism \u2014 James Mill and Jeremy Bentham \u2014 and other contemporary British political economists such as Malthus and David Ricardo and their French counterparts. Marx wrote his first major work on political economy and the class struggle in industrial capitalism as a critique of Proudhon, cleverly inverting its title, <em>The Poverty [Misery] of Philosophy<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I was deeply impressed by this work \u2014 and especially by its title \u2014 when I first read it as an aspiring young \u201cMarxist\u201d in college. It signified to me a basic truth, which is that the problem of capitalism and its potential overcoming in socialism was not a matter of \u201cphilosophy,\u201d not a problem of thinking. Reading further, in Marx\u2019s 1844 <em>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts<\/em>, I read and deeply internalized Marx\u2019s injunction that \u201ccommunism is a dogmatic abstraction\u201d which was \u201cone-sided,\u201d expressing the same thing as its opposite, private property, and, like bourgeois society itself, was internally divided, for instance, between collectivism and individualism, and so could not be considered a vision of an emancipated future society, but only a negation of the present. I had read in Marx and Engels\u2019s <em>Communist Manifesto<\/em> their critique of \u201creactionary socialism,\u201d and their observation that everything of which communism stood accused was actually the \u201cspecter\u201d of what capitalism itself was already doing \u2014 \u201cabolishing private property,\u201d among other things.<\/p>\n<p>This all told me that, for Marx and Engels at least, the problem of bourgeois ideology was not a matter that could be addressed let alone rectified by proper methodology \u2014 by a kind of right-thinking opposed to it.<\/p>\n<p>In short, I recognized early on that Marxism was not some better philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>Marxism was not a philosophical critique of philosophy, but rather something else entirely. For instance, Marx and Engels\u2019s critique of the Young Hegelians was not as philosophers, but in their philosophical claims for politics. This was also true of Lenin\u2019s critique of the Machians among the Bolsheviks (in <em>Materialism and Empirio-Criticism<\/em>, 1908). The critique was of the <em>relation<\/em> between philosophy and politics. It was thus also not a political critique of philosophy.<\/p>\n<h3>Ends<\/h3>\n<p>I have titled my talk here, \u201cEnds of philosophy,\u201d after the title for the week in our Platypus primary Marxist reading group syllabus when we read <a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/korsch_marxismandphilosophy.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Karl Korsch\u2019s 1923 essay on \u201cMarxism and philosophy,\u201d the recommended background reading for today\u2019s discussion<\/a>. In the syllabus week title as well as here, I intend to play on the multiple meanings of the word \u201cends.\u201d What are the ends of philosophy, according to Marxism, in terms of its telos, its goals, its purposes, and its satisfaction; what would it take to attain and thus overcome the aspirations of philosophy?<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, what would it take to satisfy bourgeois \u2014 that is to say, modern \u2014 philosophy? What would make philosophy superfluous?<\/p>\n<p>This is posed in the same way that Marxism sought to make labor as social value superfluous. How does labor seek to abolish itself in capitalism? The same could be said of philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>What would it take to bring philosophy to an end \u2014 to its own end? Not by denying the need for philosophy, but by satisfying it.<\/p>\n<p>But there have been other moments, before (and after) Marxism, which sought to overcome philosophy through its satisfaction, through satisfying the need for philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>The need for \u2014 the necessity of \u2014 philosophy in the modern world is different from its need previously \u2014 fundamentally different. The need to account for freedom in bourgeois emancipation was new and different; this did not motivate and inform traditional philosophy. But it fundamentally tasked modern philosophy \u2014 at least the philosophy that mattered most to Marxism, the Enlightenment and German Idealism at its culmination. But the need for philosophy in capitalism is also different from its need in the bourgeois revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Please allow me to address several different historical moments of the end of philosophy. I use this concept of moments of the \u201cend of philosophy\u201d instead of alternative approaches, such as varieties of \u201canti-philosophy,\u201d because I think that trying to address Marxism as an anti-philosophy is misleading. It is also misleading in addressing other such supposed \u201canti-philosophies,\u201d such as those of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Existentialism, Heidegger, etc., as well as other traditions entirely, such as the Enlightenment <em>philosophes<\/em> contra \u201cphilosophy,\u201d or Empiricism and Analytic Philosophy contra \u201cmetaphysics.\u201d (For instance, Heidegger sought the potential end to \u201cthousands of years of Western metaphysics,\u201d going all the way back to Plato.) Yet all these various phenomena express to my mind a common issue, namely the problem of \u201cphilosophy\u201d <em>per se<\/em> in the modern era, both in the era of bourgeois emancipation and subsequently in capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>What is \u201cphilosophy,\u201d such that it can experience an end? It is not merely its etymological meaning, the love of knowledge, or wisdom, or the love of thinking. Philosophers are not merely smart or sage \u2014 not merely sophists, clever thinkers: philosophy cannot be considered merely the mastery of logic or of semantics. If that were true, then most lawyers would be better philosophers than most avowed \u201cphilosophers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The end of philosophy cannot be considered an end to sophistry, finally putting the clever fellows down. It cannot be considered an analogue to Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cFirst, we kill all the lawyers.\u201d It is not meant to be the triumph of Philistinism. Although you might think so from a lot of \u201cMarxist\u201d deprecation of philosophy, especially as \u201cbourgeois ideology.\u201d Such \u201cMarxists\u201d want to put a stop to all mystification by putting a stop to the mystifiers of bourgeois society, the lackeys \u2014 the paid liars \u2014 of the capitalist bourgeoisie. They want to stop the \u201cphilosophers\u201d from pulling the wool down over the eyes of the exploited and oppressed. This is not my meaning. \u2014 This was not even Socrates\u2019s (Plato\u2019s) meaning in taking down the Sophists.<\/p>\n<h3>Authoritarianism<\/h3>\n<p>Philosophy cannot be considered, either negatively or positively, as the arrogation of all thinking: it is not some Queen of the Sciences that is to make proper sense of and superintend any and all human thought in every domain. It is not the King of Reason; not the thought-police. Marxism did not seek to replace philosophy in such a role. No. Yet this seems to be precisely what everyone wants from philosophy \u2014 or from anti-philosophy. They want their thinking dictated to them.<\/p>\n<p>Korsch addresses this as \u201cBonapartism in philosophy:\u201d we seem to want to be told how and what to think by philosophers \u2014 or by anti-philosophers. It is an authoritarian impulse. But one that is an authentic expression of our time: capitalism brings forth its own Philosopher Kings.<\/p>\n<p>This is not at all what the immediate predecessors for Marxist thought in philosophy, Kant and Hegel, considered as their task: Kant, in \u201cbeginning\u201d philosophy (anew), and Hegel in \u201ccompleting\u201d this, did not seek to replace the thinking of others. No. Precisely the opposite: they sought to free philosophy, to make it \u201cworldly.\u201d They thought that they could do so precisely because they found that the world had already become \u201cphilosophical.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After them, they thought there would no longer be a need to further develop Philosophy as such, but only the need for philosophical reflection in the various different diverse domains of human activity. Our modern academic institutions reflect this: one receives the PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, in Chemistry, meaning one is qualified to \u201cdoctor,\u201d to minister and correct, to treat the methods and attendant thinking \u2014 the \u201cphilosophy\u201d \u2014 of the science of chemistry, without however necessarily becoming an expert specialist \u201cphilosopher of science,\u201d or studying the specialized discipline Philosophy of Science <em>per se<\/em>. According to Luk\u00e1cs, such specialized knowledge as found in academia as well as in the various technical vocations \u2014 such as law, journalism, art, etc. \u2014 exhibited \u201creification\u201d in capitalism, a disintegrated particularization of atomized consciousness, in which losing the forest for the trees was the very predicate of experience and knowledge. But this was the opposite of what Kant and Hegel had expected. They expected not disintegration but the organic, living and changing <em>relations<\/em> of diverse multiplicity.<\/p>\n<p>Marx found a very different world from Kant and Hegel\u2019s, after the Industrial Revolution. It was not a philosophical world in capitalism \u2014 not an \u201cenlightened\u201d realm of \u201csober senses,\u201d to which bourgeois philosophy had aspired, but something much darker. It was a \u201cphantasmagoria\u201d of \u201ccommodity fetishism,\u201d full of beguiling \u201cmetaphysical subtleties,\u201d for which one needed to refer to the \u201cmist-enveloped regions of religion\u201d for proper models. In capitalism, bourgeois society was sunk in a kind of animism: a world of objects exhibiting \u201ctheological niceties.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There was a need for a new Enlightenment, a Second Enlightenment specific to the needs of the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century, that is, specific to the new needs of industrial capitalism, for which the prior thinking of bourgeois emancipation, even at its best, for instance by Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel, was not equipped to adequately address. It needed a new recognition of the relation between social being and consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>But for Marx and Engels, this new task of enlightenment was something that could not be accomplished philosophically \u2014 could not be brought to fruition in thinking \u2014 but only in actual political struggle and the transformation of society.<\/p>\n<h3>History<\/h3>\n<p>This was because, unlike the emancipation of bourgeois society, which took several centuries and came to consciousness of itself as such only late, no longer cloaking itself in the religious garb of Christianity \u2014 the Protestant Reformation as some return to true Christianity of the original Apostles, freed from the corruptions of the Church \u2014 and arrived at self-consciousness only at the end of its process of transformation, in the 18<sup>th<\/sup> century. As Hegel put it, \u201cThe Owl of Minerva [that is, knowledge] flies at dusk:\u201d proper consciousness comes only \u201cpost-festum,\u201d after the fact of change.<\/p>\n<p>But Marx and Engels found the task of socialism in capitalism to be motivated by a new need. The proletarianization of the bourgeois social relations of labor \u2014 the society of cooperative production in crisis with the Industrial Revolution \u2014 required a new consciousness of contradiction, a \u201cdialectical\u201d and \u201chistorical\u201d \u201cmaterialism,\u201d to properly recognize its tasks. As Marx put it, the social revolution of the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century \u2014 in contradistinction to the bourgeois revolution \u2014 could not take its poetry from the past, but needed to take its poetry from the future. This was quite a paradoxical formulation, especially since Marx and Engels explicitly abjured \u201cutopian socialism,\u201d finding it a realm of images of capitalism, and not of a world beyond it.<\/p>\n<p>This was because they found the workers\u2019 struggles against the capitalists to be motivated by bourgeois consciousness, the consciousness of the bourgeois revolution. Socialism was born in the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, for instance, in the former Jacobin Babeuf\u2019s Conspiracy of Equals, still motivated by the aspirations of \u201cliberty, equality and fraternity.\u201d Proudhon, for example, was motivated in his anarchist socialism, avowedly, by Adam Smith and Hegel (and the Bible) \u2014 animated, unabashedly, by bourgeois political economy and philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>Marx and Engels didn\u2019t think that this was wrong, but only inadequate. They didn\u2019t offer an alternative to Proudhon \u2014 to Smith and Hegel (or the Bible!) \u2014 but only a critique of how bourgeois thought mystified the crisis and task of capitalism. The world necessarily appeared in bourgeois terms \u2014 there were no other terms. There was no other form of consciousness. There was no other philosophy. Nor was there a need for a new philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>Bourgeois philosophy, for Marx and Engels, had successfully summed up and appropriated all prior philosophical enlightenment. They agreed with Kant and Hegel. Bourgeois social thought had successfully summed up and completed all prior thinking about society. Marx and Engels neither disputed nor sought to replace it. They were concerned only with its self-contradiction in capitalism. Not its hypocrisy, but its authentic antinomies, which both drove it on and left it stuck. The bourgeois \u201cend of history\u201d turned out to be the opposite of what it intended: not a final stage of freedom, but rather a final stage of unfreedom; the crossroads of \u201csocialism or barbarism.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Impossibility<\/h3>\n<p>This affected the status of philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy no longer described freedom but rather unfreedom. Or, more dialectically, it described both: the reproduction of unfreedom in the struggle for freedom. As a result, the task of freedom was no longer expressed by the need for all human activity to achieve an adequate \u2014 Hegelian \u2014 philosophically reflective self-consciousness, but rather to realize in practice and thus recognize in consciousness the limits of such self-consciousness, of such philosophical reflection. There was a crisis in radical bourgeois philosophy. The crisis and decay of Hegelianism was an authentic historical phenomenon, not a mistake.<\/p>\n<p>Like liberal democracy, philosophy in capitalism was no longer itself, and was no longer tasked with becoming itself, attaining its aspirations, but rather was tasked with overcoming itself, superseding its achievements. The achievements of bourgeois emancipation seemed ruined in the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, capitalism already accomplished such self-overcoming of bourgeois society, but perversely, negating itself without satisfying itself. In so doing, it constantly re-posed the task of achieving itself, as an impossible necessity. Bourgeois philosophy became the opposite of what it was, utopian. Not worldly philosophy, but an ideal, a mere notion, mocked by the real, ugly and anything-but-philosophical world.<\/p>\n<p>Because of this \u2014 precisely because of this \u2014 bourgeois philosophy did not end but constantly reinvented itself, however on an increasingly impoverished basis. It radically revolutionized itself, but also, in so doing, radically undermined itself.<\/p>\n<p>Philosophy remained necessary but proved impossible. It disintegrated, into epistemology, ontology and ethics. They went their separate ways. But they also drove themselves into blind alleys \u2014 dead-ends. This actually indicates the task of philosophy to overcome itself, however in perverted form.<\/p>\n<h3>Metaphysics<\/h3>\n<p>So, what is philosophy? One straightforward way of answering this is, simply, metaphysics. Kant, following Rousseau, had overcome the division and opposition between Rationalism and Empiricism by finding a new foundation for metaphysics. This was the Kantian \u201cCopernican Turn\u201d and \u201crevolution\u201d in philosophy. But it was not simply a new metaphysics, but rather a new account of metaphysics \u2014 of philosophy \u2014 itself. Moreover, it was revolutionary in an additional sense: it was not only a revolution, but also accounted for itself as revolutionary. This is because it was a metaphysics of change, and not merely change but radical qualitative transformation: it was a revolutionary account of the fundamental transformability of the substance of philosophy itself. In short, it was a philosophy of freedom. It was the self-reflection of practical freedom in society \u2014 that society made human life\u2019s transcendence of nature possible, at all, but in so doing created new problems to be worked through and overcome.<\/p>\n<p>It is precisely this metaphysics of freedom, however, that has gone into crisis and disintegrated in capitalism. This has been the expression of the crisis and disintegration \u2014 the decay \u2014 of bourgeois society.<\/p>\n<p>The goal of philosophy in overcoming itself is to free thinking from an overarching and underlying metaphysics at all. Kant and Hegel thought that they had done so already, but capitalism \u2014 in its crisis of the metaphysics of bourgeois society \u2014 revealed that there was indeed an underlying and overarching metaphysics still to be overcome, that of social practice \u2014 society \u2014 itself. The self-production and self-overcoming of the subject in its socially and practically objective activity \u2014 labor \u2014 needed to be overcome.<\/p>\n<p>The end of philosophy \u2014 the end of a singular metaphysics, or of metaphysics <em>per se<\/em> \u2014 aims at the freeing of both action and thinking from any unitary framework. It is the freeing of an ever-expanding and limitless \u2014 without end \u2014 diverse multiplicity of new and different forms of acting, being and knowing.<\/p>\n<p>Postmodernism was, as Moishe Postone put it, \u201cpremature post-capitalism.\u201d It aimed at the freeing of the \u201csmall-s subjects from the big-S Subject.\u201d It also aimed at freedom from capital-H History. It meant overcoming Hegel\u2019s philosophy of history.<\/p>\n<p>We already live in such freedom in bourgeois society, however perverted by capitalism. Diverse activities already inhabit different realms of being and call forth different kinds of ethical judgments. Doctors and lawyers practice activities that define being \u2014 define the \u201crights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness\u201d \u2014 in different ways, and are hence ethically bound in different ways. Doctors discipline themselves ethically differently from scientists. Among scientists, Biology has a different epistemology from Physics: there are different methods because there are different objects. There is no \u201cphilosophy\u201d in the sense of a metaphysical logic that encompasses them all. Lawyers, for example, practice differential ethics: prosecutors and defense attorneys in criminal law are bound by different rules of behavior; the practice of civil law is ethically distinct from criminal law; the rules of evidence are different. We do not seek to bind society to one form of knowledge, one code of conduct, or one way of life. There is no \u201cphilosophy\u201d that could or should encompass them all. It would be arrogant to claim that there is one singular logic that can be mastered by anyone for governing everything.<\/p>\n<p>Bourgeois society has already established well the reasonable limits to philosophy and its competence.<\/p>\n<p>In Ancient civilization there were differentiated realms of being, knowing and acting. There was a caste system, in which there were different laws for peasants; for merchants; for artisans (and for different kinds of artisans, for different arts and different sciences); and for the nobility; and for the clergy. But they were unified in a Divine Order of the Great Chain of Being. There was heterogeneity, but all with a single origin in God: all of God\u2019s creatures in all of God\u2019s Creation. That mystery was to remain unknown to Man \u2014 known only to God. There was a reason for everything, but only God could know it. There was not philosophy but theology, and theology was not to arrogate to itself the place of the Mind of God, but only ponder Man\u2019s place in and relationship to it. Theology established the limits to man\u2019s knowledge of God: we knew only what God had revealed to us, through his Covenant. We all heard the Word of God; but God told His different creatures different things. In overcoming theology, philosophy did not seek to replace it. It sought to explore the mind of man, not to relate to and limit itself with respect to the Mind of God. It was not concerned with Divine or Natural limits, but with freedom.<\/p>\n<p>There is no possible one single or once-and-for-all account of freedom, for then freedom would not be free. There is no possible account of \u201cbeing\u201d free, but only of <em>becoming<\/em> free. And there is only one such account, that of bourgeois emancipation from traditional civilization. It was to set free all the diverse and multiple activities of mankind, in relation to other humans, to Nature, and to ourselves.<\/p>\n<h3>Overcoming<\/h3>\n<p>Marx was both a Hegelian and departed from Hegel, with a historical and not a philosophical difference. As Marx put it, for Hegel himself the Hegelian system was not ready-made and finished as it was for those who came after. As Marx observed, Hegelianism went into crisis for real historical reasons, not due to misunderstanding by his followers; but rather the crisis came from Hegelian philosophy\u2019s actual contact with the world, and that world had become as internally contradictory in capitalism as Hegelianism became in contact with it. The Hegelian dialectic is both appropriate and inappropriate to the problem of capitalism. The crisis and disintegration of Hegelianism was a crisis of metaphysics \u2014 of philosophy \u2014 at a higher and deeper and not a lower or more superficial level from Hegelianism. Hegelianism was falsified not in itself but by history. But Hegelianism was also borne out by history as the last word in philosophy \u2014 in metaphysics. Marxism cannot be purged of its Hegelianism without becoming incoherent; Marxism remains Hegelian, albeit with what <a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/lukacs_methodsystemmarxhegel081018.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Luk\u00e1cs called an \u201cadditional twist\u201d in the \u201cpure historicization of the dialectic.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>If society in capitalism remains bourgeois in its ideals, with the goal of providing opportunities for social labor, materially, it has become its opposite: as capitalist, it prioritizes not labor but capital, and at the expense of labor. This means society is tasked with the material challenge of overcoming its ideals. But, as Marx recognized, this can only be done on the basis of this society\u2019s own ideals, in and through their self-contradiction. In philosophy, this means the task expressed by the self-contradiction of Hegelianism.<\/p>\n<p>Capitalism is the model of the Marxist-Hegelian procedure of <a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/cutrone_beingbecomingimmanentcritique102217.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">immanent dialectical critique<\/a>: this is how capitalism itself moves, how it reproduces itself through self-contradiction. Capitalism is its own practical critique, reproducing itself by constantly overcoming itself. As Marx put it, the only limit to capital is capital itself; but capital is the transgression of any and all limits. It is the way capitalism overcomes itself, its dynamic process of change, which is its unfreedom, its self-limitation. The Marxian horizon of freedom beyond capitalism is freedom beyond the Hegelian dialectic, beyond the bourgeois dialectic of transformation \u2014 beyond labor as a process of self-overcoming through production.<\/p>\n<p>There thus remains a unitary metaphysics binding all social practices, dominating, constraining and distorting their further development in freedom under capitalism: the bourgeois right of labor. The form of total freedom in bourgeois emancipation \u2014 self-production in society \u2014 has become in capitalism the form of total unfreedom. The social condition for labor has become that of the self-destruction of labor in capital. The goal of labor in capital is to abolish itself; but it can do so only by realizing itself \u2014 as self-contradiction. Hegel\u2019s \u201cnegative labor of the concept\u201d must be completed; short of that, it dominates us.<\/p>\n<p>Overcoming this will mean overcoming metaphysics \u2014 overcoming philosophy. At least overcoming philosophy in any way known \u2014 or knowable \u2014 hitherto. | <strong>P<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Further reading<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Cutrone <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Chris Cutrone, \u201cBook review: Karl Korsch, <em>Marxism and Philosophy<\/em> (2008),\u201d <em>Platypus Review<\/em> 15 (September 2009), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/09\/03\/book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/09\/03\/book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cRejoinder on Korsch,\u201d <em>PR<\/em> 20 (February 2010), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/02\/26\/rejoinder-to-david-black-on-karl-korschs-marxism-and-philosophy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/02\/26\/rejoinder-to-david-black-on-karl-korschs-marxism-and-philosophy\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cBook review: Gillian Rose, <em>Hegel Contra Sociology<\/em> (1981, 1995 and 2009): Gillian Rose\u2019s \u2018Hegelian\u2019 critique of Marxism,\u201d <em>PR<\/em> 21 (March 2010), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/03\/15\/gillian-roses-hegelian-critique-of-marxism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2010\/03\/15\/gillian-roses-hegelian-critique-of-marxism\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cRevolution without Marx? Rousseau, Kant and Hegel,\u201d <em>PR<\/em> 61 (November 2013), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2013\/11\/01\/rousseau-kant-hegel\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2013\/11\/01\/rousseau-kant-hegel\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cWhy still read Luk\u00e1cs? The place of \u2018philosophical\u2019 questions in Marxism,\u201d <em>PR<\/em> 63 (February 2014), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2014\/02\/01\/why-still-read-lukacs-the-place-of-philosophical-questions-in-marxism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2014\/02\/01\/why-still-read-lukacs-the-place-of-philosophical-questions-in-marxism\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cBook review: Andrew Feenberg, <em>The Philosophy of Praxis<\/em> (2014),\u201d <em>Marxism &amp; Philosophy Review of Books<\/em> (February 14, 2015), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/marxandphilosophy.org.uk\/reviews\/7988_the-philosophy-of-praxis-review-by-chris-cutrone\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/marxandphilosophy.org.uk\/reviews\/7988_the-philosophy-of-praxis-review-by-chris-cutrone\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Cutrone, \u201cBack to Herbert Spencer! Industrial vs. militant society.\u201d <em>PR<\/em> 82 (December 2015 \u2013 January 2016), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2016\/01\/12\/back-to-herbert-spencer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2016\/01\/12\/back-to-herbert-spencer\/<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Korsch <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Karl Korsch, \u201cMarxism and philosophy\u201d (1923), in <em>Marxism and Philosophy<\/em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1923\/marxism-philosophy.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1923\/marxism-philosophy.htm<\/a>&gt; [<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/korsch_marxismandphilosophy.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PDF<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>Korsch, \u201cThe Marxist dialectic\u201d (1923), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1923\/marxist-dialectic.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1923\/marxist-dialectic.htm<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>Korsch, \u201cOn materialist dialectic\u201d (1924), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1924\/materialist-dialectic.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/korsch\/1924\/materialist-dialectic.htm<\/a>&gt;.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><a name=\"introremarks\"><\/a>Introductory remarks on the topic of &#8220;Marxism and philosophy&#8221;<a href=\"#return\">*<\/a><\/h3>\n<h3>Chris Cutrone<\/h3>\n<p align=\"right\"><em>August 11, 2018<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>An audio recording of the internal discussion by members of Platypus on \u201cMarxism and philosophy\u201d can be found at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus<\/a>&gt;.<\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/embed\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus\" width=\"450\" height=\"40\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<em>Video recording at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/_lq3LOEI7R4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/_lq3LOEI7R4<\/a>&gt;.<\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_lq3LOEI7R4\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this summer, I visited Athens and made a pilgrimage to Aristotle\u2019s Lyceum. I was struck by the idea that perhaps what I am doing in Platypus is essentially the same as what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were doing back in Ancient Greece. Spencer and I were recently discussing the recurrent trope of Aristotle and Marx, apropos of today\u2019s discussion of Marxism and philosophy, and he recalled his feeling nauseous when reading Castoriadis\u2019s famous essay on Aristotle and Marx, published in the same issue of the journal <em>Social Research<\/em> alongside Moishe Postone\u2019s seminal essay, \u201cNecessity, Labor and Time.\u201d Spencer said he had felt sick at the thought that nothing had changed since Aristotle\u2019s time.<\/p>\n<p>I recalled how Frantz Fanon wrote, in <em>Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, that he would be happy to learn that an African philosopher had corresponded with Plato, but this wouldn\u2019t make a difference for 8 year-olds in Haiti and the Dominican Republic forced to cut sugar cane for a living. This compares well to the former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who, writing from her exile in Cuba on Black Lives Matter, referred to black Americans as \u201cAfricans lost in America.\u201d But are blacks any less lost in Africa today? Am I an Italian or Irish lost in America, too? I often feel that way, that my peasant ancestors were dragged into bourgeois society to ill effect, to my present misery. What would it mean not to be lost? Was I returning home, in a sense, when, as an intellectual, I returned to Aristotle\u2019s school in Athens? Was I any less lost in Athens?<\/p>\n<p>Adorno wrote, in his inaugural lecture on \u201cThe idea of natural history,\u201d that \u201cI submit myself, so to speak, to the materialist dialectic.\u201d What he meant of course was that he could only speak misleadingly of submitting himself to the materialist dialectic, as if he would not already be dominated by it, whether he was conscious of his submission or not. This reminds us of Trotsky\u2019s statement to his recalcitrant followers who rejected Hegelianism that, \u201cYou may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Why should we be interested in \u201cphilosophy,\u201d then? Adorno did not mean that he was submitting himself to Marxism as the \u201cmaterialist dialectic\u201d in the sense of submitting to Marx\u2019s thought. No. He meant, as we must mean in Platypus, that he accepted the challenge of Marx\u2019s thought as thinking which registered a greater reality, as a challenge and call to task for Adorno\u2019s own thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Foucault wrote about his chagrin that just when one thinks one has overcome Hegel, Hegel is still there smiling back at you. This rather paranoid claim by Foucault as a mental phenomenon has a real meaning, however, which is that Hegel still speaks in some unavoidable way to our real condition. What is meant by \u201cHegel\u201d here, of course, is the entirety of the alleged \u201cMaster Narrative\u201d of the Western philosophical tradition culminating in bourgeois modernity.<\/p>\n<p>Engaging philosophy then, is not being told how to think, but allowing one\u2019s thinking to be challenged and tasked in a specific way. It is a microcosm of how society challenges and tasks our thinking, whether we are inclined to it or not.<\/p>\n<p>Historical philosophers are not some \u201cdead white males\u201d the authority of whose thinking threatens to dominate our own; we do not, or at least ought not, to read philosophy in order to be told how to think. No. The philosophy that comes down to us from history is not the dead weight of the past, but it is part of that past. And the past is not dead or even really past, since past actions still act upon us in the present, whether we like it or not. Marx reminds us that, \u201cMan makes history, but not according to conditions of his own choosing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We cannot avoid the past, but we are concerned with the symptomatic attempts to free ourselves from the past by trying to avoid it. Especially on the \u201cLeft,\u201d and especially by ostensible \u201cMarxists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As Korsch reminds us, among other ways, this can take the form of trying to avoid the \u201cphilosophical\u201d aspects of Marxism.<\/p>\n<p>We might recall that Korsch\u2019s essay on \u201cMarxism and philosophy,\u201d the background reading for today, was the very first text we read in the Platypus reading group. This was before it was called Platypus, of course, but it was still our first collective discussion of a reading as a group. Our reading was predicated on opening up, not philosophy, but rather the <em>political<\/em> foundations for Adorno\u2019s thinking. It was meant to help lead my academic students of Adorno, not from Marxism to philosophy, but rather from philosophy to Marxism.<\/p>\n<p>This is the intention of today\u2019s event as well: we come full circle. Perhaps indeed nothing has changed. | <b>P<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 108 | July-August 2018 Prepared opening remarks for an internal discussion by members of Platypus on \u201cMarxism and philosophy\u201d to be held on August 11, 2018.* An audio recording of the event can be found at: &lt;https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/180812PhilosophyAndMarxismAndPlatypus&gt;. Video recording at: &lt;https:\/\/youtu.be\/_lq3LOEI7R4&gt;. Misery MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as \u201cbourgeois ideology.\u201d This meant, first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,18,7,35,19,16,21,6],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-42","tag-adorno","tag-lectures","tag-lenin","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism","tag-postmodernism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2823,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions\/2823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}