October 2008

Amazon review of Kant’s Politics, on the issue of ‘Freedom’s Causality

A post at Darwiniana, in relation to a Monthly Review book on intelligent design, What is materialism?

A new book on Intelligent Design, from Monthly Review

One of the enduring confusions of the left has been the relationship of Marx and Darwin. This is partly the result of Engels’ views which were not quite concordant with those of Marx. Engels’ somewhat eclectic writings proceed on the one hand toward a distinctly post-Hegelian version of materialism and dialectics, and yet on the other toward the scientism of the times, with a close embrace of the views of Darwinism. 
Of course, the general acceptance of Darwin’s theory makes this situation seem normal! Noone can get it straight, the more so as Marx was a closet Darwin heretic, too often taken in the way Engels is taken. In fact, in his remarkable passage from the generation of the Left Hegelians to the era of Comte and the positivistic scientism that became so dominant Marx remained in many ways within the mental universe of the Hegelian generation. Here again great confusion arises because of the problems with Hegelianism. In any case the issue of evolution as such was one thing, the theory of natural selection quite another. It was apparent to Marx almost at once that this was British ideology at work!  
Perhaps in the age of Postdarwinism it will be possible to do justice to this original insight of Marx. But everyone is so conditioned to Darwinian thinking that this is now counted against Marx, and not generally discussed by his followers! 
It is thus significant that Marx is on record as being skeptical of Darwin’s thinking. There is one telling episode. His enthusiastic interest in 1865 in a now forgotten book by Tremaux Origin and Transformations of Man and Organisms because of its critique of natural selection. Marx of course was clutching at straws, and was soon ‘corrected’ by Engels, but he was clearly ambivalent from the first about Darwin. He felt that Darwinism was a natural complement to his philosophy of history. And at the same time he perceived at once the ideological character of Darwin’s thinking. This acute insight quite naturally made him skeptical of the mechanism of evolution, the more so as the latent strain of Hegelian of his theories enabled him to straddle two domains of discourse. 
It is small wonder that Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist. He must have wondered what was becoming of his thinking as the German Socialist movement took hold, embracing the veiled ideology of Darwinism, after all the labors to expose the economic ideology with which he began. 
It is almost impossible to set the matter straight in the current environment of the Darwin paradigm, and confusion over Hegel. In all fairness to Engels, the Hegelian strain in Marx (and in Hegel!), although profound and elusive, is as open to challenge as the rest. The culprit is Hegel, but Hegel requires to be understood on his own terms, for he is not an easy thinker, and interpretation and critique is frequently vitiated by the wrong assumptions about evolution now current. 
What a muddle!
Engels has been criticized many times for the type of thinking that emerged later in Dialectics of Nature. He scores a plus for intuition, and a minus for bad theories that don’t do what they claim. The intuitions about dialectic, and ‘evolutionary leaps’ are as significant as they are flawed, and have resulted in a considerable amount of wrong thinking about the nature of revolution. 
The views of Darwin rapidly became an object of interest by many thinkers in the Second Internationale, and the myth of Marx’s wish to dedicate the second edition of Capital to Darwin was a staple until finally exposed.For the latter question, cf. Terence Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford, 1995), “Marx and Darwin, A Reconsideration”.
For the question of Marx and Tremaux, cf. Alan Megill, Karl Marx, The Burden of Reason (Rowman & Little field, 2002), p. 55.
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 199.
Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999).

This is a selection from an essay in The Hegel Myths And Legends, and gives some background on the ‘end of history’ mythology current in neo-liberal circles.  (scanned text, not always adequate: check out the text)

The End Of History And The Return Of History

Philip Grier

Through the summer and fall of 1989, Hegel scholars in America were treated to the unusual spectacle of a debate in the mass media over the meaning and truth of Hegel’s philosophy of history, a debate running through the pages of major daily newspapers, the weekly news magazines, and the journals of opinion. The occasion for this unaccustomed attention devoted to Hegel was the appearance of an article by Francis Fukuyama in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”

Caught up in the spirit of the event, Irving Kristol, the publisher of the National Interest, generously announced in his comment on the Fukuayama article, “I am delighted to welcome G.W.F. Hegel to Washington. He will certainly help raise the intellectual level of the place…Hegel is unquestionably a genius—along with Kant, the greatest philosopher of modernity”. The last sentence is, however, followed by this: “In a sense, all of us have to decide whether were pro Hegel or contra, even if we have never read him, as not many of us have.” Alas, most of the contributors to this episode would seem to be carrying out Kristal’s injunction quite ligerally; as a consequence the recent extended public debate over “Hegel’s theory of the end of history” has had almost nothing to do with Hegel.

In his essay Fukuyama aspires to identify “some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order” to our understanding of the events of history. He claims to have found such a “larger conceptual framework” (3) in Hegel‘s thesis of the end of history: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (4). This first statement by Fukuyama of what he means by “the end of history” appears to contain all the essential elements of his view. The story of human history is the story of our ideological evolution; that evolution culminates in liberal democracy (“the Western idea” [3]); history ceases because “the basic principles of the liberal democratic state [i.e., the ideals of the French and American Revolutions] cannot be improved upon” (5); there are no contradictions in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of the liberal democratic state (8); all important nations will either turn out to be liberal democracies, or, failing that, at least abandon their pretensions to represent any alternative or higher form of human society (13).

This theory supposedly reveals the larger significance of the ob­servation that Western liberal democracy has now prevailed over every ideological alternative to it; “the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war” (3), have all been defeated. The twentieth century has turned out to lead neither to the “end of ideology” nor to “a convergence between capitalism and socialism ... but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” (3).

This triumphant Western liberal democracy is distinctly consumerist in Fukuyama‘s conception of it, focused upon technical, economic prob­lem-solving-“the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (18). At the end of the article, apparently forgetting his own dictum that this liberal democracy represents above all the achievement of the human values of freedom, equality and reason that “cannot be improved upon,” Fukuyama falls into a bout of despair: ‘The end of history will be a very sad time” (18). Instead of the “struggle for recognition or the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal [sic],” life will consist of end­less “economic calculation”: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history” (1 . Even sympathetic commentators immediately noticed that Fukuyama’s coda had much in common with Nietzsche’s idea of the “last man,” and no discernible connection with Hege1.² In a sequel, “A Reply to My Critics,”3 Fukuyama tried to restate his attitude toward the posthistorical condition of existence in a less provocative way without retracting his original remarks, leaving a certain ambiguity about his position (28). No significant changes were introduced in the sequcl concerning his general conception of the end pf history, nor was its attribution to Hegel qualified in any way.

Mainly under the spell of Fukuyama‘s article, one supposes, most com­mentators have seemingly accepted that his quick sketch of the end-of ­history thesis is properly attributed to Hegel. Fukuyama himself betrays no doubt on this score; but his claim of attribution is at least indirect: It is Kojeve’s classic but highly eccentric Introduction to the Reading of Hegel which always figures as his explicitly cited authority for Hegel’s views.⁴ Fukuyama describes Kojeve as, in essence, the last true Hegelian. He writes that most of us know of Hegel “primarily as Marx’s precursor, and it is our misfortune that few of us are familiar with Hegel‘s work from direct study …. In France, however, there has been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist interpreters and to resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time” (4). He claims that it is Kojeve, attempting “to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806 [sic]” (4) who is most responsible for this effort.

Searching for a clue as to why Kojeve, and not, say, the far more obvious candidate Hyppolite, should be accorded this honor, it emerges that Kojeve is being contrasted primarily with Marcuse as a contemporary German interpreter of Hegel who “regarded Hegel ultimately as an historically bound and incomplete philosopher” (5, n. 2). In this company it becomes more understandable why Kojeve might acquire this status as the last true Hegelian. But at the same time Fukuyama gives no particular sign of recognizing Kojeve‘s own pronounced Marxist leanings, especially in his use of the master-slave dialectic as the prism through which the whole of Hegel’s thought is to be viewed.⁵ The more fundamental puzzle, though, would be to explain the source of Fukuyama’s extraordinary confidence that Kojeve’s very eccentric reading of Hegel, especially on the theme of the end of history, could be accepted as an authoritative interpretation.

No serious reader of Hegel could fail to recognize that Kojeve is as much creator as interpreter of the system he ascribes to Hegel. Kojeve’s entire reading of the Phenomenology revolves about the “master­slave” (Herr-schaft/Knechtschaft) episode, treating it as a passpartout for I he whole. Kojeve works it particularly hard in his exposition of the notion of history. He declares that “History began with the first Fight. that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave” (Bloom, 43). Kojeve insists that this fight is “a fight for pure prestige carried on for the sake of ‘recognition’ by the adversary” (Bloom, 11-12), that is, a fight not motivated by material or biological need, but a freely chosen one which puts everything at risk. The loss of the battle converts one of the combatants into a slave for the other, condemned to labor in confrontation with nature to satisfy the desire of the master. “History is the history of the working Slave” (Bloom, 20) articulated in a series of “slave ideologies” whereby the slaves seek to disguise their slavery from themselves. History comes to an end when the slaves eventually realize and assert their own intrinsically free being as citizens in a state in which all are equally free.

Kojeve’s end-of-history thesis has no obvious grounding in Hegel‘s texts, so the question must be asked: what led Kojeve to this extraordinary view? The answer is not far to seek. Kojeve himself declares (Bloom, 133­34; Queneau, 367) that “the source and basis of my interpretation of the Phenomenology” is to be found in an article which his fellow Russian emigre Alexandre Koyre wrote in the early 1930s on some of Hegel’s Jena period texts which had recently appeared. Kojeve gives no citation for the Koyre article, but there can be no doubt (on overwhelming internal as well as external evidence) that the article in question is “Hegel a lena,” published originally in 1934.⁶ It is evident that the source of Kojeve’s end-of-history thesis can be found in the final paragraph of Koyre’s article.

Koyre was examining Hegel’s treatment of time in the succession of manuscripts from the lectures at Jena in 1802, 1803-4, and 1805­-6 (Even though the 1802 date is no longer accepted as correct, the new dating does not materially affect Koyre‘s treatment of the texts.)8 Koyre treated those manuscripts (lecture notes) as the first glimpse into Hegel’s philosophical apprenticeship, our first opportunity to get behind the difficult and often obscure formulations of the mature system, to see the living process of its formation. At the same time he observed that there is a great risk in using these youthful works as an interpretive key to the mature system, namely the risk of “misunderstanding and misinterpreting” (150) the mature Hegel-and Koyre viewed the mature Hegel as above all the author of the Science of Logic, even more than of the Phenomenology (150, n. 4). On the other hand, Koyre was also inclined to treat the system of the Encyclopedia as problematic.⁹

The largest section of Koyre’s article was devoted to the translation and exposition of passages on time from the Naturphilosophie of the Je­nenserLogik, Metaphysik, und Naturphilosophie (i.e., sec. LA.A.; Lasson, 203­6). He focusses especially on remarks Hegel made there concerning the

relation of the finite to the infinite, time, and the relations of present, future, and past. 10 The present is described as an “empty limit” between the future and the past. ”The past is this time returned in itself which has sublated in itself the two first dimensions [present and future]. The limit, or the Now, is empty; for it is absolutely simple or the concept of time; it realizes itself in the future. The future is its reality” (169­70; Lasson, 204). Commenting on such passages Koyre remarks that it is not from the past that time comes to us, but from the future. “La duree does not extend itself from the past to the present” (176). “It is, on the contrary, from the future that it comes to itself in the present. The prevalent ‘dimension‘ of time is the future which is, in some way, anterior to the past” (177).1l

This treatment of past, present, and future was part of a larger argument by Hegel in the 1803 and 1804 versions of his Naturphilosophie dealing with the topic of motion in the solar system. Hegel treated the per­fect periodicity of movement in the solar system as an image of the “true infinite. “12 As Harris puts it, “Periodic motion is what Hegel characterizes as the temporalizing of space and the spatializing of time” (244). Hegel wished to exhibit the conceptual connection between the two, and his discussion of time is part of that endeavor. All of this belonged to Hegel’s attempt, presumably under the influence of Schelling, to treat nature as the realm of divine life. In this conception of nature, for example, Hegel depicted the aether as Absolute Spirit.^J3 Though this theme of nature as the divine life underwent a certain development (diminution) during this time, the 1803 and 1804 philosophies of nature “represent ,I continuous development of thought that broke off some time in the spring of 1805″ (Harris, 239). Harris also observes that the “system of 1805-6 proved to be the sunset of the Greek concept of nature as the divine life” (241).

Although Koyre, writing in 1934, did not have available the nu­merous scholarly investigations of the Jena period writings to which we now have access, and was not in possession of an entirely accurate chronology, nevertheless he correctly grasped the fact that the line of argument concerning time which so interested him disappears in the further development of Hegel’s thought. First, the 1803-4 notes lack t he corresponding section.¹⁴ In the 1805-6 version of the Realphilosophie there is a discussion of time, but the nature of the text, as well ,IS the argument, is quite changed. Space is no longer derived from time, but space is treated first, and time discussed afterward. The text is now divided into paragraphs, like those of the later Encyclo‘pedia, and t he style of writing is more public than private. Finally, in the. corre­sponding Encyclopedia passages, these rich speculations concernl11g the rity of the future over the present and past have entirely disappeared (Koyre, 187).

Notwithstanding the evidence that he himself has assembled of Hegel having essentially discarded the argument on time from the “1802” notes, Koyre goes on to declare that, “It is this insistence on the future, the primacy accorded to the future over the past, which constitutes in our opinion, the greatest originality of Hegel” (177). In his concluding remarks Koyre curiously seems to speak as though Hegel had not dis­carded his doctrine of the primacy of the future, and treats that doctrine as ultimately leading to the failure of the system. “It is thus, in the Hegelian conception, that the dialectical nature of the instant secures the contact and the co-penetration of time and eternity. But it is also this which explains, in the final analysis, the failure of the Hegelian system. For if time is dialectical and is constructed commencing with the future, it is­whatever Hegel may say about it-eternally unfinished” (188-89). Since this is true, according to Koyre, the Hegelian system can be constructed only if history has been terminated, if there will no longer be a future, if time itself has stopped.

In his concluding paragraph Koyre observes almost casually:

It is possible that Hegel believed in it [the end of history]. It is possible even that he believed not only that it was the essential condition

for the system-it is only at night that the owls of Minerva begin their flight-but also that this essential condition had already been realized, that history had effectively ended, and that it was precisely because of that that he could-had been able to-complete it [his system]. (p. 189)

Since Koyre is obviously convinced on various grounds that the (Ency­clopedia) system is a failure, and has just argued that the future cannot be foreseen, he has little interest in exploring the question of whether Hegel really believed that history had ended. (We must remember, of course, that the end of history is a precondition for the system only given Koyre’s reading of the discarded “1802″ passages on time as if they were a crucial element of Hegel’s mature thought.) This possibility, which Koyre mentions just in an off-hand fashion, seems to have struck Kojeve with the force ofa revelation; it became the cornerstone for his interpretation of the Phenomenology.

Kojeve reveals only a fleeting awareness of anything odd about his procedure for interpreting the Phenomenology, namely, taking an obscure set of passages on time from a very early version of He gel’s Naturphilosophie which Hegel certainly rejected prior to writing the Phenomenology, and

treating them as the basis for an interpretation not only of that work Ilut of the whole of Hegel’s philosophical position.1⁶ Kojeve (and to some extent, it should be said, Koyre himself) seems to have entirely disregarded Koyre’s warnings about the danger of applying these early and in some cases abortive writings of Hegel to the interpretation of the mature works.

Kojeve goes on to develop Koyre’s suggestions into an elaborate doctrine of the finite, empirical existence of time, history, and “man” (l‘homme). He quotes Hegel as saying that ‘Time is the Concept itself which exists empirically” (Bloom, 136),17 and argues that the empirical existence of time (history) entails that it must come to an end. IdentifYing the concept with work, Kojeve argues that “the existence of Work in the World is the existence in this World of Time” (Bloom, 145). He further concludes on the same page that “if Man is the Concept, and if the Concept is Work, Man and the Concept are also Time.” The empirical existence of time (history) thus also entails the empirical existence of work, and hence of man. Being empirical, each of these is also finite, hence corning to an end. ‘Therefore History itself must be essentially finite; collective Man (h umanity) must die just as the human individual dies; universal History must have a definitive end” (Bloom, 148). This end of history, according to Kojeve, constitutes the coming of the wise man (wisdom, Absolute Knowing). And this state of wisdom is eternal, posthistorical.

The article continues…

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160 By Barbara Ehrenreich

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,” for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.