On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part ten.
‘’Nature’ is what we see’
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–1886)
‘Nature’ is what we see —
The Hill — the Afternoon —
Squirrel — Eclipse — the Bumble bee —
Nay — Nature is Heaven —
Nature is what we hear —
The Bobolink — the Sea —
Thunder — the Cricket —
Nay — Nature is Harmony —
Nature is what we know —
Yet have no art to say —
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Nature’.
Karl Marx, (1818–1883), in his youth presented us with a critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’, (‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, 1841, for which he gained his PhD), not something that Marxist critics have given much attention to despite recognising the importance of Hegel for Marx. Alfred Schmidt, (1931–2012), author of ‘The Concept of Nature in Marx’, refers to the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ most often but plays down its significance in the formulation of Marx’s own materialist philosophy of nature and is not so far off replicating the very Hegelian views that Marx is critiquing and yet the critique of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ in Marx’s Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts foreshadows Marx’s later stated intention in ‘Capital’ to turn Hegel on his head and it affirms not only a theory of the ontological reality of the material world but a dialectics of nature whose importance for Marx extends from the Paris Manuscripts to ‘Capital’ and Marx’s Naturphilosophie criticizes Hegel’s replacement of natural history with a philosophy of nature derived from logical categories and affirms Friedrich Engels’, (1820–1895), later view that natural history should be restored by discovering dialectics in nature rather than imposing dialectics upon it.
Schmidt’s extensive reference to the Naturphilosophie is largely for the purpose of criticizing Engels and largely fails to address the concluding section of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that contains a specific critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and the Dissertation which Schmidt mentions merely once echoes the substance and very phraseology of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’, indeed the Thesis Notebooks contain three separate outlines of it so one wonders about the reticence concerning Marx’s direct confrontations with Hegel’s least discussed text for at least Marx almost alone among Hegel’s commentators took the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ seriously. Marx and Engels alongside most Hegel interpreters have been quite dismissive of the scientific importance of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and pay greater attention to the ‘Science of Logic’ and to the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ yet a reading of Marx’s Dissertation where we discover a virtually explicit critique of Hegelianism in the Appendix, indicates that Epicurus’ philosophy of nature is often albeit not always a stand-in for Hegel’s and that the conclusion of the Manuscripts really continues the idea of the Thesis of placing materialism on a more solid basis by way of a critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’, that all this allows Marx in the Manuscripts to criticize Hegel’s failure to realize the importance of natural history as the basis of any real history. The majority of commentators concur that Marx sides with Epicurus as a materialist opposed to Aristotle, the Hegel persona and correct as this is the critics have downplayed Marx’s critique of Epicurus’ residual idealism with respect to the essence of the atom and as such Marx’s critique of Epicurus serves as a critique of the left Hegelians.
Marx’s Dissertation praises Epicurus, as the 1844 Manuscripts praise Hegel, as a pioneer of enlightenment, but Marx also criticizes Epicurus, as he does Hegel, for deviating from enlightenment materialism in his view of free consciousness, Epicurus’ concept of the swerve op-poses the strict causality and necessitarian positive science of Democritus though the views of the two thinkers had long been held to be identical and while Epicurus’ materialistic atomism not shared by Hegel is lauded by Marx Epicurus swerves from his own materialism and ends up like Hegel as a proponent of an abstract individual freedom that rises above natural constraints and in so doing Epicurus finally and fearfully turns away from nature, fails to reconcile the abstract concepts of nature with their material qualities and consoles the thinker through what Marx calls abstract possibility.
‘Necessity appears in finite nature as relative necessity, as determinism. Relative necessity can only be deduced from real possibility, i.e., it is a network of conditions, reasons, causes, etc., by means of which this necessity reveals itself. Real possibility is [as it were] the explication of relative necessity. And we find it used by Democritus. We cite some passages from Simplicius’.
‘If somebody is thirsty and drinks and feels better, Democritus will not assign chance as the cause, but thirst. For, even though he seems to use chance in regard to the creation of the world, yet he maintains that chance is not the cause of any particular event, but on the contrary leads back to other causes. Thus, for example, digging is the cause of a treasure being found, or growing the cause of the olive tree’.
‘The enthusiasm and the seriousness with which Democritus introduces this manner of explanation into the observation of nature, the importance he attaches to the striving to ascertain causes, are naively expressed in his avowal: ‘I would rather discover a new aetiology than acquire the Persian crown’.’
‘Once again Epicurus stands directly opposed to Democritus. Chance, for him, is a reality which has only the value of possibility. Abstract possibility, however, is the direct antipode of real possibility. The latter is restricted within sharp boundaries, as is the intellect; the former is unbounded, as is the imagination. Real possibility seeks to explain the necessity and reality of its object; abstract possibility is not interested in the object which is explained, but in the subject which does the explaining. The object need only be possible, conceivable. That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived, constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block. Whether this possibility is also real is irrelevant, since here the interest does not extend to the object as object’.
‘Epicurus therefore proceeds with a boundless nonchalance in the explanation of separate physical phenomena’.
- ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’
In both works, Marx appears to anticipate his own later call to set Hegel right side up again:
‘The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigones who now talk large in cultured Germany to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a ‘dead dog’.’
‘I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’.
‘In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary’.
- 1873 afterword to an edition of ‘Capital’ volume 1
Here we find an expression of the classical inversion thesis of the orthodox tradition in which Marx’s thought is seen as a materialist version of Hegel’s dialectics, with its emphasis on inevitable laws of development including Engels’ dialectics of nature hence it reflects Engels’ view that the dialectic of concepts itself is merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world, including the world of pre-human nature. Against this view Schmidt tends to resist the materialist current in Marx and to relegate the more forthright materialism of the Marxist tradition to Engels. Schmidt’s point of view has been widely accepted and further he pays direct attention to Marx’s view of nature and to Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ more than any other writer together with a downplaying of Marxian texts.
Many of the well known commentators including Marxist ones that I have cited in my Hegel series, Jean Hyppolite, (1907–1968), Jürgen Habermas, (1929 -), albeit they may detect in various ways see a latent positivism in Marx, engage in very little if any discussion of the Naturphilosophie. Hippolyte refers to Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature once’. There are wide variations and disagreements among such commentators though the Naturphilosophie is not something they wish to take on. Schmidt seems to argue in support of Marx’s reversal of Hegel paying attention to Marx’s statements regarding the priority of external nature and its laws, while noting that for Hegel, the Idea, consciousness, is prior to nature. On the subject of meteors for instance Marx writes:
‘But the theory of the meteors is also specifically different in comparison both with the method of ethics and with other physical problems, for example, the existence of indivisible elements and the like, where only one explanation corresponds to the phenomena. For this is not the case with the meteors. Their origin has no simple cause, and they have more than one category of essence corresponding to the phenomena. For the study of nature cannot be pursued in accordance with empty axioms and laws. [Note: These at any rate admit of manifold causes for their occurrence and manifold accounts, none of them contradictory of sensation, of their nature. For in the study of nature [physiology] we must not conform to empty assumptions and arbitrary laws, but follow the promptings of the facts]. It is constantly repeated that the meteors are not to be explained haplos (simply, absolutely), but poilachos (in many ways). This also holds for the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the waxing and waning of the moon, the semblance of a face on the moon, the changes of duration of day and night, and other celestial phenomena. How then is it to be explained? Every explanation is sufficient. Only the myth must be removed. it will be removed when we observe the phenomena and draw conclusions from them concerning the invisible. We must hold fast to the appearance, the sensation. Hence analogy must be applied. In this way we can explain fear away and free ourselves from it, by showing the causes of meteors and other things that are always happening and causing the utmost alarm to other people’.
- ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’
Yet along with quite a number of other commentators Schmidt situates Marx in substantially the same position that he finds Hegel, for Schmidt the real prius, that which takes precedence, for Marx is as with Hegel the subject’s concept of nature, rather than nature itself. If nature must be conceived then for Schmidt Marx’s understanding of nature prior to human intervention, that is the traditional objects of materialist thought are thrust into the background insofar as they do not stress the practical and modificatory aspects of man’s relation to nature and so Schmidt concludes that Marx rejects the notion that nature exists in itself by attacking the very notion of a Marxist ontology of nature or indeed of an objective world prior to man’s intervention in it and in so doing Schmidt moves back towards the Hegelian notion of the Idea constituting nature.
In denying Marx’s acceptance of nature in itself Schmidt denies that for Marx nature can be dialectical in itself and in his endeavour to distance Marx from Engels’ dialectics of nature Marx is said to have believed that it is only the process of knowing nature which can be dialectical, not nature itself. Yet Schmidt rightly notes that Hegel also denied the intrinsic dialectics of Nature devoid of the Idea and through denying Marx a dialectical dynamic as a moving force in objective nature or his minimalization of pre-human history Schmidt minimizes the very natural history that Marx claimed as the basis of capital and in the process of contrasting Engels’ naturalization of history with the Marxian view Schmidt maintains that for Marx history is first, and immediately, practice and he thereby returns to Hegel’s view of nature as the history of consciousness (as conscious activity) expressing itself through nature rather than as an autonomous natural historical starting pointwhich Hegel also denies.
Given this account Schmidt and the many who share his views in stressing the primary importance of consciousness for Marx impose upon him the very philosophy of mind which he seems so intent to surpass and in interpreting Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie Schmidt parts company with the standard inversion thesis of Marx’s critique of Hegel yet upon close attention to the Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts we observe a Marx who is nearer to the standard viewpoint than Schmidt and many others would allow. Marx’s starting point is the antithesis if I may use that word of Hegel’s for while for both thinkers consciousness and nature mediate each other reciprocally and while Hegel affirms nature as necessary for mediating the progress of consciousness Marx says that nature must be prior to consciousness and Hegel by making consciousness the starting point sets out from the estrangement of a Nature that must finally be realized only through the progress of consciousness which is the Idea.
Hence Marx’s starting point presupposes the ontological reality of the objective natural universe and the primacy of matter without which pre-human nature is impossible and the concrete and plural character of the forms in which matter can first be found in nature is essential to Marx’s view of being. Humanity later becomes part of that plurality. So being then consists in the reciprocal relationships among plural entities which are both subjects and objects of one another and Marx understands this reciprocity as the dialectics of nature which is both prior to and inclusive of human relations and one that directly materializes some Hegelian categories. Both Hegel and Marx view history as being dialectical but by beginning dialectics with the Concept Hegel makes natural history absurd for Marx who not only directly reverses the Naturphilosophie’s denial of evolution but outlines the idea of a natural history of labour that is later affirmed in ‘Capital’. Humans certainly transform nature, something ignored by Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, (1804–1872), however for Marx nature still establishes necessary, residual and stabilizing boundaries which humanity cannot overstep.
The Methodological Starting Point. Schmidt cites Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ to the effect that while nature comes first in time the absolute prius is the Idea, this absolute Prius is the last thing, the true beginning, the Alpha is the Omega.
‘Nature is the negative because it negates the Idea. Jacob Boehme says that God’s first birth is Lucifer, this creature of light having centred his imagination upon himself and become evil; this is the moment of difference, of otherness held firm in opposition to the Son, who is otherness held in love. Representations such as this, which have a free rein in orientalized taste, have their ground and significance in the negative nature of nature. Immediacy is the other form of otherness, and consists of what is different subsisting abstractly by itself. This subsisting is only momentary however, it is not true subsistence; only the Idea, because it has returned into itself and is therefore being in and for self, subsists eternally. In time nature comes first, but the absolute prius is the Idea. This absolute prius is the finis, the true beginning, alpha is omega. Men often consider that which is immediate to be superior to that which is mediated, because the latter seems to imply dependence. The Notion has both aspects however, it is mediation through the sublation of mediation, and therefore immediacy. An immediate belief in God is often spoken of. This is the more degraded, and not the higher mode however, and the original or primitive nature-religions were an expression of it. Affirmation in nature is the shining through of the Notion, which soon displays its power through the mutability of this externality. All existences are in fact one body, in which the soul has its dwelling. Although the Notion displays itself in these gigantic members, it does so imperfectly, and it is only in spirit that it exists as it is’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Yet while conceding that Marx is critical of this beginning Schmidt is anxious to separate Engels’ view of an autonomous nature from Marx for whom material reality is from the beginning socially mediated but that mediation means that Nature is capable of apprehension only when mediated by labour which is to say that in the Marxist view all natural being has been worked on economically and hence conceived so for Schmidt Marx like Hegel begins with a conceptual view of the whole that only subsequently becomes enriched through material development rather than the other way round as standard Marxism would have it, yet by his own account Marx’s naturalistic beginning and end points are the opposite of Hegel’s for Marx had said that for him it is not the Concept but the material phenomenon alone that can serve as its starting point by which Marx means that the beginning of analysis for men is sensuous animal need which is of course determinateness by nature, subjectively and objectively, as Marx explains in the ‘Grundrisse’, and as he puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world’. The beginning and end points of analysis are nature and nature transformed. ‘Only when science proceeds from nature — is it true science’’ and ‘only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history’, a history that is a real part of natural history’, a history that concludes in ‘the social reality of nature’.
‘Cortona Via Crucis’, 1947, Gino Severini
On the other hand Marx’s Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts endeavour to demonstrate that Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ does not start with nature but begins first with the Idea in its logical form (or Concept), the absolute and fixed abstraction. And secondly it then ‘intuitively imposes these logical categories onto nature and thus merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous external form’, that is, it posits the actual, positive sensuous, real of the natural world. Thirdly it then annuls that positive stage and ‘resolves nature back into abstractions”; this restoration is the Idea in the form of ‘Spirit … thinking returned home to its point of origin’ (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). In sum Marx sees the natural historical equation starting from Nature then mediated by Ideas arising from natural needs and concluding in Nature transformed as fulfilled species needs and this is inverted by Hegel as the history of the Idea, from abstract Idea (Concept), to the Mediated Idea (Nature) and returning to the Idea triumphant as Spirit. Marx’s reading of Hegel is supported by Hegel’s own text which depicts a double movement as the result of the drive of the Idea towards being for itself, independent moments, such as the senses of the animal, come into objective existence like the sun, and the lunar and cometary bodies. But when matter negates itself as untrue existence a higher existence emerges, the earlier stage is sublated.
‘ … from the standpoint of the Notion as it is grasped in its totality, [the divisions in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’] display the diremption of the Notion in its determinations. As it exhibits its determinations in this diremption and yet only allows them independence as moments, it realizes itself in this, and so posits itself as Idea. The Notion not only exhibits its moments and expresses itself in its differences however, but also leads these apparently independent stages back into their ideality and unity. By leading them back into itself, it in fact turns them for the first time into the concrete Notion, the Idea, and truth. There seem therefore to be two ways of formulating this division and so proceeding scientifically. The one begins with the concrete Notion, which in nature is life regarded for itself, and from this it is led to the expressions which the Notion throws out of itself as independent spheres of nature, and to which it relates itself as to another in the more abstract aspects of its existence, ending with the complete extinction of life. The other is the opposite one. It begins with the last self-externality of the merely immediate manner in which the Notion first exists, and ends with its true determinate being, the truth of its whole exposition. The first way may be compared to the progression in the conception of emanation, the second to the progression implied in the conception of evolution (§ 249 Addition). Each of these two forms taken by itself is one-sided, for they take place simultaneously, and the eternal divine process is a unified flow in two antithetical directions, which simply meet and completely permeate each other. The first, even when it is given the highest names and regarded as being concrete, is merely an immediacy. When matter negates itself as untrue existence for example, a higher existence emerges, and in one respect the earlier stage is sublated by means of an evolution; on the other hand however, it remains in the background, and is reproduced by emanation. Matter involves itself into life, and evolution is therefore also involution. As the result of the drive of the Idea towards being for itself, independent moments such as the senses of the animal, come into objective existence as the sun, and the lunar and cometary bodies. Despite some changes, these bodies retain their shape but lose their independence even in the physical sphere, where they are the elements. Projected outwards, subjective sight is the sun, taste is water, and smell is air. As it is necessary to posit determinations of the Notion here, we must begin with the most abstract, not with the most concrete sphere’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
While this statement would make it appear that Hegel denies the existence of Nature per se Marx does not adopt this view as for him the whole Hegelian process is here depicted as the result of a necessity where the abstract form in which the Idea expresses itself must arrive ‘at an entity which is its exact opposite, at Nature’ however ‘just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the ab-solute Idea, in the form of a thought-entity, so too it has re-emerged in that form’ and as Marx sums it in Hegel ‘subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute reversal’. Since this reversal begins and ends with the abstract Idea Marx makes the point that Nature, in Hegel’s hands, ‘sets out from the estrangement of substance’ and is thus alienated by its very existence and as the externality of abstract thinking it is the Idea’s ‘self loss’ and presented in this way Nature is ‘the Idea in the form of other being, since the Idea is, in this form, the negation of itself’ and nature is thus not just ‘relatively external vis-a-vis the Idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature’ hence in the Manuscripts Marx says that Hegelian ‘consciousness takes offense not at estranged activity, but at objectivity as such’ and, as the ultimate Prometheanism, becomes ‘nothing for man’. Hyppolite sees this as a critique of Hegel’s method of intuiting nature, while Schmidt and Paul Thomas who follows Schmidt see this as confirming that for Marx nature cannot be viewed apart from man.
As Hegel wrote:
‘If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing, how does He come to release Himself into something so clearly unequal to Him? The divine Idea is just this self-release, the expulsion of this other out of itself, and the acceptance of it again, in order to constitute subjectivity and spirit. The philosophy of nature itself belongs to this pathway of return, for it is the philosophy of nature which overcomes the division of nature and spirit, and renders to spirit the recognition of its essence in nature. This then is the position of nature within the whole; its determinateness lies in the self-determination of the Idea, by which it posits difference, another, within itself, whole maintaining infinite good in its indivisibility, and imparting its entire content in what it provides for this otherness. God disposes therefore, while remaining equal to Himself; each of these moments is itself the whole Idea, and must be posited as the divine totality. Distinctiveness can be grasped in three forms; the universal, the particular, and the singular; firstly it is preserved in the eternal unity of the Idea, i.e. the ******, the eternal son of God as it was to Philo. The other of this extreme is singularity, the form of finite spirit. Singularity, as return into self, is certainly spirit, but as otherness to the exclusion of everything else, it is finite or human spirit, for we are not concerned with finite spirits other than men. In so far as the individual man is at the same time received into the unity of the divine essence, he is the object of the Christian religion, which is the most tremendous demand that may be made upon him. Nature is the third form with which we are concerned here, and as the Idea in particularity, it stands between both extremes. This form is the most congenial to the understanding. Spirit is posited as contradiction existing for itself, for there is an objective contradiction between the Idea in its infinite freedom and in the form of singularity, which occurs in nature only as an implicit contradiction, or as a contradiction which has being for us in that otherness appears in the Idea as a stable form. In Christ the contradiction is posited and overcome as life, passion and resurrection. Nature is the Son of God, not as the Son however, but as abiding in otherness, in which the divine Idea is alienated from love and held fast for a moment. Nature is self-alienated spirit; spirit, a bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it; in nature, the unity of the Notion conceals itself’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Since nature in Hegel’s hands is alienated from thought this estranged thinking can only conceptualize natural phenomena or indeed the physical products of men and women as thought entities or as mental products, as entities that have become only abstractly possible and Nature becomes the philosophy of nature, ‘thinking which abstracts rom nature’, hence ‘an alienation of human thought’ according to Marx, and the appropriation of the alien natural objects is ‘only an appropriation occurring in consciousness’.
So the question arises as to how different from Hegel is Schmidt’s Marx for whom the sciences studying nature are not only ideologically motivated but are reduced to thought for Marx according to Schmidt depicts materialism as arising in the context of a defence of the bourgeois Enlightenment although Schmidt would have Marx transforming the ideological origins of materialism into an ideological critique of its scientific content by concluding that in Marx’s view the natural sciences, a main source of materialist assertions, provide no immediate consciousness of natural reality at all. The alienation of thought from nature is anticipated in the Dissertation where Marx had already noted that for Epicurus implicitly depicted as foreshadowing Hegel in this regard, the appearance of concrete things was alienation of the essence, hence alienation as such and thus intrinsically irreconcilable with concepts.
‘Composition is the merely passive form of concrete nature, time its active form. If I consider composition in terms of its being, then the atom exists beyond it, in the void, in the imagination. If I consider the atom in terms of its concept, then composition either does not exist at all or exists only in the subjective imagination. For composition is a relationship in which the atoms, independent, self-enclosed, as it were uninterested in one another, have likewise no relationship to one another. Time, in contrast, the change of the finite to the extent that change is posited as change, is just as much the real form which separates appearance from essence, and posits it as appearance, while leading it back into essence. Composition expresses merely the materiality of the atoms as well as of nature emerging from them. Time, in contrast, is in the world of appearance what the concept of the atom is in the world of essence, namely, the abstraction, destruction and reduction of all determined being into being-for-itself’.
‘The following consequences can be drawn from these observations. First, Epicurus makes the contradiction between matter and form the characteristic of the nature of appearance, which thus becomes the counter-image of the nature of essence, the atom. This is done by time being opposed to space, the active form of appearance to the passive form. Second, Epicurus was the first to grasp appearance as appearance, that is, as alienation of the essence, activating itself in its reality as such an alienation. On the other hand, for Democritus, who considers composition as the only form of the nature of appearance, appearance does not by itself show that it is appearance, something different from essence. Thus when appearance is considered in terms of its existence, essence becomes totally blended [konfundiert] with it; when considered in terms of its concept, essence is totally separated from existence, so that it descends to the level of subjective semblance. The composition behaves indifferently and materially towards its essential foundations. Time, on the other hand, is the fire of essence, eternally consuming appearance, and stamping it with dependence and non-essence. Finally, since according to Epicurus time is change as change, the reflection of appearance in itself, the nature of appearance is justly posited as objective, sensation is justly made the real criterion of concrete nature, although the atom, its foundation, is only perceived through reason’.
- ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’
Epicurus could not overcome the gulf between the two independent existences: the atoms as an abstract concept, atomoz archai whose very reduction into timeless essences means the death of nature, and the concrete atoma stoicheion which, endowed with qualities, is complete and alienated from its concept. Consequently Marx depicts Epicurus as one who ‘seeks to destroy the reality of nature which has become independent through an explanation according to abstract possibility’.
As he had earlier depicted Epicurus so in the Manuscripts Marx also depicts Hegel as relegating Nature to abstract possibility, as potential fulfillable only through the unfolding of consciousness, of the Idea and echoing the Dissertation’s critique of Epicurus who affirms the reality of nature but in the end seems to be at home in the abstract individual self-consciousness, the Manuscripts interpret Hegel’s nature as being translated into the philosophy of nature, human products into mental projects. In this case, ‘locked up in these fixed mental forms…. dwelling outside nature and thought’, the objective world, ‘nature has vanished’.
‘For us mind has nature as its presupposition, though mind is the truth of nature, and is thus absolutely first with respect to it. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has emerged as the Idea that has reached its being-for-self. The object of the Idea as well as the subject is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, since in nature the concept has its complete, external objectivity, but this externalization of the concept has been sublated and the concept has, in this externalization, become identical with itself. And so the concept is this identity only so far as it is at the same time a return out of nature’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Marx also criticizes Feuerbach’s failure to bridge this chasm. He ‘does not know sensuous activity as such’ but rather wants ‘sensuous objects really distinct from conceptual objects’. As Marx’s sees it two consequences follow from all this, first the thinking philosopher can only take his or her own estranged world as a criterion of that very estrangement, self-consciousness, which is ‘at home in its other being as such’ is a starting point that ‘becomes a confirmation of alienation’. Hegel, like Epicurus before him, ends with a circular argument in which what is to be proved is assumed and Hegel’s ‘intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature’ hence for Hegel the ‘entire transition from logic to natural philosophy is nothing else but the transition from abstracting to intuiting’. Second, because consciousness is self-confirming ‘anyone may think as he chooses to think’, as Marx said of Hegel in a youthful poem.
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‘On Hegel’
by Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883)
1
Since I have found the Highest of things and the Depths of them also,
Rude am I as a God, cloaked by the dark like a God.
Long have I searched and sailed on Thought’s deep billowing ocean ;
There I found me the Word: now I hold on to it fast.
2
Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle,
Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think;
Never, at least, is he hemmed in by strict limitations.
Bubbling out of the flood, plummeting down from the cliff,
So are his Beloved’s words and thoughts that the Poet devises;
He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels.
Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;
Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!
3
Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blue
Seeking for some distant land,
I but seek to grasp profound and true
That which — in the street I find.
4
Forgive us epigrammatists
For singing songs with nasty twists.
In Hegel we’re all so completely submerged,
But with his Aesthetics we’ve yet to be purged.
‘Hegel’ (Epigramme)
Weil ich das Höchste entdeckt und die Tiefe sinnend gefunden,
Bin ich grob, wie ein Gott, hüll’ mich in Dunkel, wie er.
Lange forscht’ ich und trieb auf dem wogenden Meer der Gedanken,
Und da fand ich das Wort, halt’ am Gefundenen fest.
Worte lehr’ ich, gemischt in dämonisch verwirrtem Getriebe,
Jeder denke sich dann, was ihm zu denken beliebt.
Wenigstens ist er nimmer geengt durch fesselnde Schranken,
Denn wie aus brausender Fluth, stürzend vom ragenden Fels,
Sich der Dichter ersinnt der Geliebten Wort und Gedanken,
Und was er sinnet, erkennt, und was er fühlet, ersinnt,
Kann ein jeder sich saugen der Weisheit labenden Nektar,
Alles sag’ ich euch ja, weil ich ein Nichts euch gesagt!
Kant und Fichte gern zum Aether schweifen,
Suchten dort ein fernes Land,
Doch ich such’ nur tüchtig zu begreifen,
Was ich — auf der Strasse fand!
Verzeiht uns Epigrammendingen
Wenn wir fatale Weisen singen
wir haben uns nach Hegel einstudiert
Auf sein’ Aesthetik noch nicht _________
abgeführt.
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We can thus manipulate the data of nature to conform to philosophy. So too had Epicurus formulated an arbitrary ‘method of imaginative consciousness’ in order to fulfil a philosophical purpose. In this method ‘only that which is really perceived or is comprehended through thinking is true’. It does not rely on the senses for our knowledge. All concrete determinations collapse in a ‘monotonous echo’, replaced by relations that are only imagined and in such a way that ‘the Concept has become identical with itself’.
‘Nature as such in its self-internalizing does not attain to this being-for-self, to the consciousness of itself; the animal, the most complete form of this internalization, exhibits only the spiritless dialectic of transition from one individual sensation filling up its whole soul to another individual sensation which equally exclusively dominates it; it is man who first raises himself above the individuality of sensation to the universality of thought, to awareness of himself, to the grasp of his subjectivity, of his I — in a word, it is only man who is thinking mind and by this, and by this alone, is essentially distinguished from nature. What belongs to nature as such lies behind the mind; it is true that mind has within itself the entire content of nature, but the determinations of nature are in the mind in a radically different way from that in which they are in external nature’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
In the Manuscripts Marx concludes his critique with a short demonstration of how Hegel performs this self-reflective manipulation, Hegel makes the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ have as its starting point a strained and fictional replication of the starting point of the ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’, Nature begins with Space which, as its most ‘completely abstract’ aspect, ‘remains the foundation of nature’, and which corresponds to the beginning point of the Logic, ‘absolute nothingness’.
‘The primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated indifference, i.e. space. It is on account of its being self-externality, that space constitutes collaterality of a completely ideal nature; as this extrinsicality is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Marx implicitly criticizes this portrayal of nature’s origin as a non-beginning and Hegel’s self-confirming circulation of thought returning to thought does not start with nature but with ‘a nothing proving itself to be nothing … an externality that has to be annulled’ indeed Hegel says that it is ‘inadmissible to speak of spatial points as if they constituted the positive element in space, because … space is merely the possibility of juxtaposition, not the positedness’ and precisely because it begins with only ‘abstract possibility’ the founding of nature on space was criticized in Marx’s ‘Dissertation’ as inadequate.
‘The nature of space has given rise to many theories. I shall only make mention of the Kantian determination of it as a form of sensuous intuition like time. It is now generally accepted that space must be regarded as a merely subjective element of the representative faculty. If we disregard the determinations of the Kantian Notion and subjective idealism in this theory, we are left with the correct determination of space as a simple form, i.e. an abstraction, the form of immediate externality. It is inadmissible to speak of spatial points as if they constituted the positive element in space, because on account of its lack of difference, space is merely the possibility, not the positedness of juxtaposition and what is negative, and is therefore simply continuous. The point, which is being-for-self, is therefore rather the negation of space, a negation which is posited within space. This also resolves the question of the infinitude of space. Space is, in general, pure quantity, no longer its merely logical determination, but as an immediate and external being. Consequently, nature begins with quantity and not with quality, because its determination is not a primary abstract and immediate state like logical Being. Essentially, it is already internally mediated externality and otherness’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Why should we begin with space when the eternity of matter is the necessary if not sufficient basis for overcoming this chasm as Marx implies in his notes and despite Epicurus’ failure like Hegel’s to bridge the gap between form and content for Epicurus this failure at least was treated in terms of atomic theory, the relation between the atomoi as concept and atoma as material reality. While Hegel specifically rejects the atomic theory:
‘The philosophy of Atomism forms an essential stage in the historical development of the Idea, and the overall principle of this philosophy is being-for-itself in the shape of what is many. Since Atomism is still held in high esteem nowadays among those natural scientists who do not want anything to do with metaphysics, it should be remembered in this connection that we do not escape metaphysics (or, more precisely, the tracing back of nature to thoughts) by throwing ourselves into the arms of Atomism, because, of course, the atom is itself a thought, and so the interpretation of matter as consisting of atoms is a metaphysical one. It is true that Newton expressly warned physics to beware of metaphysics; but, to his honour, let it be said that he did not conduct himself in accordance with this warning at all. Only the animals are true blue physicists by this standard, since they do not think; whereas humans, in contrast, are thinking beings, and born metaphysicians. All that matters here is whether the metaphysics that is employed is of the right kind; and specifically whether, instead of the concrete logical Idea, we hold on to one-sided thought-determinations fixed by the understanding, so that they form the basis both of our theoretical and of our practical action. This is the reproach that strikes down the philosophy of Atomism’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
… Epicurus in his better moments depicts it as real, ‘the immediate negation of abstract space, hence [as] a spatial point’. In this case, the point is not only determined only by space as it is for Hegel, but is also a material existence for if it were not, if it were pure abstraction or form determination, then it would be impossible for ‘any mode of being [to be] determined by another being’. It is Epicurus’ own failure to resolve the tension between abstract and concrete that Marx criticizes in his thesis.
Marx evidently wishes to overcome the adverse consequences of these Hegelian starting points, both to restore the sensuous animal laborens displaced by Hegel’s non-objective being as well as to restore nature to its proper stabilizing force in human understanding and what this means is that in order to overcome ‘the estrangement of substance’ or ‘the nullity of the object’ upon which Hegel’s method is based Marx has to affirm the ontological reality of substance, ‘the eternity of matter’, the sensuous world as such.
The Ontology of Objective Nature. Schmidt cites Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ to the effect that “since the internal essence of nature is nothing other than the general, when we have thoughts we are at home with ourselves in this internal essence of nature.
‘The philosophy of nature is in such a perilous condition however, that it has to demonstrate its existence, and in order to justify it, we shall have to trace it back to what is familiar. In the dissolution of the subject-object opposition a specific shape may be noticed, which has been made known partly by science, and partly by religion, in which it is however a past, and which readily overcomes the whole difficulty. The unification of both determinations is what is called the primal state of innocence, in which spirit is identical with nature, and the spiritual eye stands immediately in the centre of nature. The standpoint of the division of consciousness is the fall of man from the eternal and divine unity. This unity is represented as a primal intuition, a ratiocination, which is at the same time a vision, forming and so rationalizing sensuous shapes. This intuitive reason is the divine reason, for we may say that God is that in which spirit and nature are one, and in which intelligence at the same time has both being and shape. The eccentricities of the philosophy of nature have their basis partly in this idea, which implies that although people nowadays no longer find themselves in a state of paradise, there are still some on the sunny side of the hedge to whom God imparts the verities of cognition and science while they sleep, and that even if a man is not on that side of the hedge, he can transport himself thither merely by believing in the moments in which the secret of nature automatically becomes apparent to him, and allowing himself to have brainwaves, so that by giving rein to his imagination, he may give prophetic utterance to truth. Such a performance, which offers no further credentials, has been generally regarded as the consummation of scientific ability. What is more, it is also asserted that such a state of consummate science preceded the present history of the world, and that since our fall from this unity some remnants and distant glimmerings of that state of spiritual light have remained with us in myths, tradition, and other fragments, on to which the subsequent religious culture of the human race has fastened, and from which all scientific cognition has proceeded. If it were no more difficult than this for consciousness to know truth, but one only had to sit on a tripod and utter oracles, much of the labour of thought would certainly be spared’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
For Hegel ‘in nature concept speaks to concept, and the true concept which lies behind the fragmentation … will reveal itself in Nature’ says Schmidt here interpreting Hegel to mean that to comprehend nature rationally we must comprehend it as ‘reason submerged in materiality’ however, he moves towards this same position by saying that Marx did not understand nature ontologically in the sense of unmediated objectivism and for Marx ‘there is no fundamental matter, no fundamental ground of being’ thus it was not Marx’s intention simply to replace the ontology of Hegel’s World Spirit with a material World Substance, an equally metaphysical principle. Schmidt concedes Marx’s view of ‘the essentiality of man and nature’ including ‘man as a natural being’ and he concedes that Marx presupposed matter and he cites Engels as an authority for the view that there is no matter as such, only ‘definite existing pieces of matter’. Although Marx on occasion used the concept of matter alongside that of nature it was for practical reasons. Schmidt cites the ‘Second Thesis on Feuerbach’ to support the view that for Marx the reality of natural being as such is a purely scholastic question because it is isolated from praxis.
‘The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [Objekte], differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity. In The Essence of Christianity [Das Wesen des Christenthums]’, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice [Praxis] is conceived and defined only in [the] form of appearance [Erscheinungsform]. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity’.
- ‘Second Thesis on Feuerbach’
However, the Second Thesis addresses the reality of thinking not of material being, as Schmidt implies and all one can show is that Marx’s ontology had practical motives, indeed in his very definition of men and women’s practical labouring activities Marx affirms the ontological primacy of matter and this point is made clearly in the Holy Family. ‘Man has not created matter itself. And he cannot create any productive capacity if the matter does not exist beforehand’. Furthermore, man ‘can only work as nature does, by changing the form of matter’, and in any case Schmidt and those who share his views do not explain why the author of a dissertation criticizing Epicurus because he tends to negate all objective reality of nature should be so hostile to materialist ontology.
In his only reference to the Thesis Schmidt again brings Marx toward Hegelianism: ‘Human self-consciousness, [Marx] wrote in his dissertation, must be recognized as ‘the supreme divinity’’ and the context is an attack on Plutarch who would bring philosophy before the forum of religion rather than Marx who, siding with David Hume, would do the reverse. Marx is referring here to Prometheus as ‘the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar’. Yet as opposed to conscious creation of materiality, Marx emphasizes Prometheus’ tragic servitude to the material world as opposed to servitude to the gods: ‘Better the servant of this rock than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus’ (Aeschylus, ‘Prometheus Bound’).
Schmidt minimizes Marx’s inversion of Hegel while stressing the proximity of the two figures by insisting that Marx does not see Hegel as simply replacing Nature with Spirit or reducing Nature to pure Concept and Marx’s Hegel does not simply replace or idealize Nature, and according to Duquette Marx mistakenly interpreted Hegel as reducing nature to a mental product, that is Marx unknowingly agreed with Hegel in regard to the ontological reality of nature, on the need to start from abstractions, and on the priority of the mediation of nature by consciousness. In the hurriedly composed 1844 Manuscripts Marx does sometimes seem to see Hegel as the kind of idealist who denies the ontological reality of nature as when he refers to Hegel’s subject as ‘a pure incessant revolving within itself’, and sometimes Hegel himself invited this interpretation when he called nature ‘untrue existence’.
‘When matter negates itself as untrue existence for example, a higher existence emerges, and in one respect the earlier stage is sublated by means of an evolution; on the other hand however, it remains in the background, and is reproduced by emanation. Matter involves itself into life, and evolution is therefore also involution. As the result of the drive of the Idea towards being for itself, independent moments such as the senses of the animal, come into objective existence as the sun, and the lunar and cometary bodies. Despite some changes, these bodies retain their shape but lose their independence even in the physical sphere, where they are the elements. Projected outwards, subjective sight is the sun, taste is water, and smell is air. As it is necessary to posit determinations of the Notion here, we must begin with the most abstract, not with the most concrete sphere’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
However Marx’s point here is that Hegel’s mistaken concept of externality as a “loss of the object” nevertheless affirms the object’s existence, and relies on Hegel’s acceptance of nature as estranged externality. Rather than merely reducing matter to the Idea, ‘Hegel’s positive achievement’, in Marx’s view, was the realization that ‘the entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that only nature is something’, a necessary vehicle for the Idea’s realization. Thus Marx’s reversal of Hegel occurs in another way, it does not concern the issue of the ontological reality of nature per se, which is affirmed by both thinkers; the reversal concerns Marx’s stress on nature’s priority to consciousness. Marx’s starting point is an independent nature opposing the Hegelian view of nature’s dependence on thought. In minimizing this reversal, Schmidt suggests that Marx was not even concerned with discussing questions directed at pre-human nature, and cites the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘as soon as you ask questions, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man becomes meaningless’. From this statement which is really directed against the idea of God as creator Schmidt concludes that ‘questions directed to the pre-human and pre-social existence of nature should not be posed abstractly’, that is to say, posed without relating them to men’s practical existence, hence in Schmidt’s view, ‘Marx attacked the notion that nature exists ‘in itself’ prior to human mediation’ yet the Thesis criticizes Epicurus for pursuing tranquility at the expense of ‘knowledge of nature in and for itself’’ a knowledge that includes investigating the real causes of objects’. In Schmidt’s view, it would appear that the objectification of nature per se is alienated as it is for Hegel and for Marx’s Epicurus and he is not alone in this view for others too, say that nature for Marx ‘cannot be discussed as if it were severed from human action … reality is always human’ (Shlomo Avineri), that it does not exist ‘independently of the observer it confronts’ (Paul Thomas), that ‘there is no ready-made nature that we can contemplate or act upon’ (Leszek Kołakowski), or that ‘the idea (later espoused by Engels) that nature exists independently, and prior to, man’s efforts to transform it is utterly foreign to Marx’s humanism’ (Terrence Ball), and all of these writers have cited or listed Schmidt as an authority for their views.
And yet in regarding sensuous labour as the essence of man, as opposed to the abstractly mental labour of Hegel Marx is not arguing that a distinctly human in the sense of purposively rational labour is the basis of nature but only of a later human nature that constitutes a later development of natural history and in ‘Capital’ Marx distinguished two stages of the labouring process that situates man’s relations with nature, the first stage exists in the primitive extractive industries where the objects of labour (Arbeitsgegenstande) are ‘provided immediately by nature, such as hunting, fishing’, etc. in which ‘the soil (including water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with the necessities … exists without his agency [ohne sein Zutun]’, which is not to say that Marx does not regard human history as unique and he criticizes Feuerbach for his naturalism partly on these grounds but only at a second stage, ‘at a higher stage of develop-ment’, do the materials already filtered by human labour provide the predominant physical bounds of activity. Man is unique in that his history is a known history, but for Marx self-consciousness does not constitute nature or even human nature. ‘Self-consciousness’, he says, ‘is a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc. It is not human nature that is a quality of self-consciousness’ as it is for Hegel. Marx’s view of rationality as an attribute or quality of man’s nature is here listed along with his animal organs, his eye and ear, indeed, he characterizes Bauer’s transformation of self-consciousness from an attribute of man into a self-existing subject as a metaphysical-theological caricature of man in his severance from nature. Marx may not be merely replacing a materialist substratum for Hegel’s Absolute Spirit but he posits nature’s ontological priority as preceding consciousness which is to say conscious historical awareness is only apparent through historical development itself, and that historical development is itself a later chapter of natural history, its highest stage.
In stressing the importance of natural history Marx cannot help but insist that external objects the very conditions of externality, are indispensable to the essential powers of every being, not just humans. Since plurality is the very core of nature itself, Marx reverses Hegel’s concept of alienation: if every being is a material being and in this sense a natural being, then every being needs externality and is external to something else: ‘a being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature’. Marx could hardly e said to ignore ontology as Schmidt insists if he says that ‘a being that has no object outside itself is not an objective being’, and that “a non-objective being is a non-being’ which is not to say that man is only an object. If, as Marx says, man creates objects out of nature, ‘the activity of exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature … is the subjectivity of objective essential powers on the other hand man is certainly not always the subject. Since the material of labour includes nature as object both subject and object are the starting points of the enquiry. ‘Man is the immediate object of natural science. … But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man — man — is nature, sensuousness’. Even advanced man as subject is also an object, in his activities, he ‘unifies subject and object by exercising his objective essential powers’, and he creates or posits objects because he is posited by objects’. And since he is both a creator and result of objective forces, ‘at bottom he is nature. … his activity [is] the activity of an objective, natural being’, he is at the same time external to nature and internal to it. In brief while Marx’s emphasis on the prior importance of nature means that although man cannot initiate nature’s self-mediation, his very natural objectivity makes him part and parcel of it and this is the natural basis of Marx’s view of the dialectical unity of subject and object.
The Dialectics of the Other. Schmidt interprets the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ in respect to nature’s impotence which consists in its externality and its consequent unreconciled contradiction as showing that in Hegel the true dialectics starts only when the Idea infuses itself into nature and natural processes take place at an inferior level and thus ‘he did not allow them a constitutive role in the movement of the Concept’. Yet, as opposed to Engels who interpreted the results of modern natural science as lying already at hand in finished form, Marx ‘allowed the dialectically presented science to emerge first from the criticism of its present state’ and hence ‘at no point detached the materialist dialectic from the content of political economy’. For Marx, nature itself ‘is devoid of negativity. Negativity only emerges in nature with the working Subject’. This is the consensus among the anti-classical commentators, for Lucio Colletti, all contradictions, which he admits are crucial to Marx, are historically specific and avoid the Hegelian philosophy of identity, the unity of opposites. However, even in his Thesis Marx attributed a dialectical movement to the atom itself because the Epicurean notion of the free swerve only makes sense when seen as a specifically physical unity with the falling motion synthesized through a third motion of repulsion. If plurality as simultaneous objectivity and subjectivity exists in nature prior to human consciousness or alienation then what Marx called Hegel’s outstanding achievement, ‘the dialectic of negativity as a moving and generating principle’ would appear to exist for him in nature prior to conscious human intervention for Marx sees this plurality as a state in which ‘everything is itself something different from itself, that my activity is something else.
Even if everything is interpreted to exclude every activity that is not specifically human this dialectical activity is not depicted as being necessarily rational and in this context man is a creature of passion defined as ‘the essential power of man energetically bent on its object’ and here also Marx understands man’s active metabolic powers exerting their domination over nature, as a natural history that can be accompanied by a consciousness defined in terms of animal instinct rather than rationality. ‘[Man] is, on the one hand, endowed with natural powers, vital powers — he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities — as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him. …’ Yet these are objects that he needs. If passions and instincts are sufficient for the active subject to be cognizant of his need for external objects and to confirm a creature’s essential powers, then mere plurality itself or at least loss in the mere biological sense of hunger or organic metabolism, of processes of natural history prior to rational consciousness, entails dialectical relationships.
Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. Furthermore, for the starving man says Marx ‘it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals’ but Marx does more than apply dialectical relationships to animal needs he extends them to the botanical and cosmological worlds in which there is no mediation by any animal sensibility whatever: ‘The sun is the object of the plant — an indispensable object to it, confirming its life — just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. It might be argued that this relationship is not dialectical but a simple mechanistic or reciprocal model that in itself stands on the thresh-old of Hegel’s concept and is really pre-dialectical yet Schmidt makes precisely this accusation against Engels and cites Habermas to the effect that in Engels there is a ‘mechanical pseudo-dialectic of quantitative increase’ that is closer to Schelling than to Hegel. On the other hand Schmidt contends that many of the categories of Engels’ dialectics of nature such as quantitative increase, quality, measure, continuity, discreteness, and so on, are all taken from the first part of Hegel’s Logic and from this he concludes that if the dialectic owes its origins to the self-realizing concept without the human bearers of those concepts ‘there can be no question of a dialectic of external nature independent of men, because all the essential moments of a dialectic would in that case be absent’ As with Hegel Marx’s dialectics supposedly entails the consciousness which Engels’ version lacks yet in ‘Capital’ Marx also borrows Hegel’s logical categories and applies them to non-human Nature and there Marx discusses the transformation of the small handicraftsman into the capitalist: ‘Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel, in his Logic, that at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by inversion into qualitative changes. … The molecular theory of chemistry … rests on no other law’, a law attested in Marx’s view ‘by history and natural science alike’ and is treated with studied ambiguity and inadequacy by the handful of commentators who do not resolutely ignore it. These statements are not mentioned in Sartre, Colletti, Hyppolite, Habermas, Marcuse, et al, and Schmidt cites this passage only in a footnote and says that ‘it cannot be established how far Marx was conscious’ of his differences with Engels on his concept of nature. Jon Elster simply says it is hard to believe that Marx intended a dialectics of nature in the statement, Terrell Carver says that he is unsure whether these words are an endorsement of Engels or that Marx may not have had any clear cut views on the relationships between the sciences, but in the face of such ambiguity, one wonders how Schmidt can insist that Marx’s view of nature is ‘devoid of negativity’ or Carver affirm so resolutely that Engels’ ideas are ‘exactly the opposite’ of Marx’s.
The statement to be explained in two alternatives ways. First, if on the one hand by invoking the Logic here Marx is starting with conceptual analysis as Schmidt claims he is then that conceptual starting point would open Marx to the very thing of which he accuses Hegel and of which Schmidt seems most horrified, imposing dialectical categories from Logic onto nature thereby replicating Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’. Indeed it was only Engels despite his specific denial of its validity who nonetheless supposedly performed this imposition when he compared the development of the organism from the cell to the development of the Idea from the Hegelian thing in itself. Whether or not this was only a tentative and playful analogy drawn by Engels in a letter to Marx it is not repeated in ‘Anti-Duhring’ where he states: ‘To me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it’.
And the other and more plausible explanation for the statement from ‘Capital’ would seem to be that Marx is doing what Schmidt also blames Engels and only Engels for doing, namely converting the dialectic of Concepts into a reflection of the prior dialectical motion of the real world, a dialectics of nature that would, in Schmidt’s terms, remain external to its subject matter. As Marx himself says, Hegel’s Idea, ‘the demiurgos of the real world’, is to be transformed into ‘its exact opposite’ in which ‘the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind’. However, this second alternative is equally rejected by Schmidt who claims that the autonomous motion of a purely objective dialectic leads to an incompatibility between materialism and the dialectic. If matter is dialectically structured within itself it ceases to be matter in the sense required by the exact natural sciences, it is itself metaphysics an idealism unaware of its own nature, in Colletti’s expression, and leaving aside the positivism of these very arguments, Schmidt claims that while Hegel based his view of the impotence of nature on its externality, its unreconciled contradiction vis-a-vis the Concept, Engels no longer had this Hegelian retreat hence Engels was forced to present nature itself in the form of Darwinian covering laws concerning the material unity of the world but Engels is doing what Marx is doing, presenting nature on the basis of a dialectical natural history.
Natural History. When Marx depicts nature dialectically he depicts his natural starting point in the form of natural history and if Hegel says that everything begins with the Idea then by definition there can be no dialectics prior to the Idea, there can be no dialectics of nature per se hence no natural history and this position would be perfectly applicable to Marx as well as to Hegel if a distinctly human consciousness of the loss of externality were Marx’s starting point as it is for Hegel yet Hegel in linking history to Concep explicitly condemns the idea of evolutionary natural history as empty and inept indeed Schmidt’s most extensive citations of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ are from the latter’s condemnation of natural history:
‘Thinking consideration must reject such nebulous and basically sensuous conceptions as for example the so-called emergence of … the more highly developed animal organizations out of the lower. … Nature must be regarded as a system of stages, of which one necessarily proceeds from the other… not however in the sense that one is naturally created out of the other, but rather the internal idea, which constitutes the ground of nature. …. It was a crude notion of the older (and also more recent) philosophy of nature … that the transition from one natural form to a higher one … was seen as a case of external, real production, located in the darkness of the past.’
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Schmidt says that in this passage Hegel is ‘at variance with his own principles’ ut this is incorrect if Charles Taylor (1978) is right in saying that Hegel’s ‘essence of nature is its exteriority; otherwise Nature would have its own Spirit, its own Geist’. Conversely Schmidt notes that Marx treats human history as ‘a real part of natural history’ while for Hegel, strictly speaking, ‘there is no natural history’ and so one wonders how Schmidt can condemn Engels for his ‘naturalization of human history’ and Schmidt again returns to a viewpoint that is closer to Hegel than to Marx: ‘Nature only appears on the horizon of history, for history can emphatically only refer to men’ or in Hyppolite’s words for Marx ‘there does not exist a nature, without human significance, and then man’. However, natural history, for Marx, does begin in primeval geological formations whose development forms the basis in nature [ Naturbasis] for later human developments and for Marx labour begins as a strictly animal metabolism between man and nature. Man’s exclusively human labours are separated by ‘an immeasurable interval of time’ from ‘the savage in his cave — a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection — [who] feels himself no more a stranger, or rather feels as much at home as a fish in water’.
Hence for Marx everything including nature has a history because ‘everything natural has to come into being’ and this act of origin he calls history of which man’s known history, the true natural history of man, is ‘a real part of natural history — of nature developing into man’. Engells’ critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature is the same as Marx’s. As Engels puts it, partly by ascribing historical evolution only to the Spirit, Hegel’s philosophy ‘erred because it did not concede to nature any development in time, any ‘succession,’ but only ‘co-existence’.’ which is to say and as it would now be put Hegel’s philosophy of nature is synchronic rather than diachronic and in their ahistoricity ‘the natural philosophers stand in the same relation to consciously dialectical natural science as the utopians to modern communism’ says Engels.
In Marx’s view Hegel’s Naturphilosophie manifests what would now be labelled an anti-diachronic diachrony in his timeless view of time itself and for Marx Hegel’s view of time echoes that of Epicurus for whom time as time is reduced to a kind of Platonic ideality. That is, despite its greater ambiguity, Epicurus’ view of time resembles that of Hegel, for whom ‘the Concept of time is free from the power of time, but is neither within time, nor something temporal’.
‘Time does not resemble a container in which everything is as it were borne away and swallowed up in the flow of a stream. Time is merely this abstraction of destroying. Things are in time because they are finite; they do not pass away because they are in time, but are themselves that which is temporal. Temporality is their objective determination. It is therefore the process of actual things which constitutes time, and if it can be said that time is omnipotent, it must be added that it is completely impotent. The present makes a tremendous demand, yet as the individual present it is nothing, for even as I pronounce it, its all-excluding pretentiousness dwindles, dissolves, and falls into dust. It is the universality of these present moments which lasts, and the sublatedness of this process of things which does not. Even if things endure, time does not rest, but continues to pass, and it is because of this that it appears to be distinct and independent of things. If we say that time continues to pass even if things endure however, we are merely saying that although some things endure, change appears in other things, as for example the course of the sun; so that things still remain in time. The attribution of gradual change is employed as a last resort in order to endow things with stillness and permanence. If all stood still, even our thinking, we would be permanent, and there would be no time, but all finite things are temporal, as sooner or later they are all subject to change, and their permanence is therefore only relative’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
While Space for Hegel is self-externality referred to itself (corresponding to the absolute nothingness of the Logic), ‘time as the negative unity of self-externality is also purely abstract and of an ideal nature’, or ‘negativity relating itself to itself’ as Marx paraphrases it in the Manuscripts, and, as Marx specifically notes, such a concept is tailored to replicate the very next stage of the Logic becoming the unity of being and nothing. Marx’s paraphrase of Hegel is virtually identical to his earlier depiction of Epicurus’ view of time as the ‘the finite, negative unity with itself’ and like Hegel Epicurus’ inability to resolve the gap be-tween concept and concrete reality means that time on the one hand means the arising and passing away of sensuous things and on the other hand as an abstraction of externality, as Concept, the freely existing identity with itself, time is set apart from Nature. For both Hegel and Epicurus this contradiction is resolved in favour of the Concept and for Marx’s Epicurus time assumes an ideal conceptual form as ‘the absolute form of appearance’, the ‘abstract form of sensation’.
For Epicurus as for Hegel time itself as opposed to what is natural, is in a manner of speaking timeless and becomes in Marx’s terms ‘a counterimage of the nature of essence’ the ‘real form’ of appearance hence time takes on the qualities of an immutable Concept in reverse, ‘eternally consuming appearance and stamping it with non-essence’. For Marx on the other hand material beings ‘are generating time out of themselves’ and ‘time by itself does not exist’, and is inseparable from things and from sensuous perception. For Hegel, and to some extent for Epicurus, time is the becoming of the Idea, a Geist which conceives nature rather than conceiving of nature and the idea of a pre-human natural history does not sit well with this kind of thinking but it is well-suited to Hegel’s opposition to the idea of evolution, that is of real natural history and both Hegel in his day and Epicurus in his were uneasy with nature as such and wish to escape from it by stamping subjectivity onto it.
This is not to say that Marx relies upon some absolute Feuerbachian nature nor that he does not argue that men and women change nature and themselves for indeed the literature of classical Marxism had as its focus the idea of praxis whereby theory was validated by revolutionary action and most assuredly Marx excoriated the false naturalism of the classical economists who failed to realize the historicity of their theory and yet false in what manner? Not much remains in Marx without an appeal to a more genuine naturalism that the concept of alienation from species essence entails and this naturalism gives stabilizing force to our praxis, our interference with nature hence Marx’s view that the catastrophic effects of deforestation are unavoidable unless natural growth is conscientiously managed in particular the exploitation of labouring man and woman in his or her metabolism with the world which meets with ‘natural obstacles that cannot be overstepped.
What is false about the naturalism of both the political economists and Hegel is that while the political economists’ pseudo-naturalism, the view that a benign hand governs the world, ends in the fetishism of commodities, for economists the fetishism of the market itself, and Hegel’s alleged pseudo-naturalism the view that an unseen Geist governs the world, leads to the fetishism of the earth as the centre of the universe in the form of the Idea of Earth, the place where consciousness reigns. Earth as the final stage of the Hegelian Mechanics is outlined by Marx in both the Dissertation and in the Manuscripts and in the latter work Marx refers to Hegel’s ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ where the antithesis between positive and negative stages in logic is resolved in Ground. Marx notes that the logic closely determines the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ where ‘the Earth is the natural form of the logical Ground…. the negative unity of the antithesis’.
‘The opposition which has returned into itself is the Earth, or the planet in general. This is the body of individual totality, in which rigidity is opened up into the separateness of real differences, and this dissolution is held together by the self-like point of unity. Remark. The axial rotation of the planets, combined with their moving around the central body, is the expression of animation, and is the most concrete form of motion. Similarly, the luminous nature of the central body is abstract identity, the truth of which, like the truth of thought, is the concrete Idea of individuality. Astronomy has not yet discovered the actual law governing the planetary series, i.e. the primary determinateness of the distances between these bodies. The attempts made in natural philosophy to demonstrate the rationality of the series from its physical constitution, and by analogies with a series of metals, have been equally fruitless, and can hardly be regarded as providing a satisfactory basis for research. It is however irrational to regard contingency as the basic factor here, as Laplace does when he treats Kepler’s attempts at grasping the order of the solar system according to the laws of musical harmony, as the mere aberration of a bemused imagination, and so fails to appreciate the deep faith which Kepler had in the inherent rationality of this system; a faith which was the sole foundation of the brilliant discoveries made by this extraordinary man. Newton’s application of numerical tonal relations to colours, which is utterly inept, and which, with regard to the data, is completely erroneous, has on the other hand won fame and approval’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel’s own presentation of an ideal nature ends with an Earth-centered universe, planets are now the subject for whom ‘the bodies of the solar system are no longer independent but are predicates’ and ‘the planet is the veritable prius, the subjectivity in which these differences are merely moments of an ideal nature, and in which life first has its determinate being. The Sun is subservient to the planets, just as the Sun, Moon, comets, and stars in general, are merely aspects of the Earth’. Here Hegel draws a direct analogy between the human subject and the planet: ‘Just as the ego, although it is not yet spirit, finds its truth within spirit, so light finds its truth in the concrete being of the planet’. If nature is ideal then the place where conscious life is located can only mean that ‘if there is any pride of place, it must be this our Earth which we regard as supreme’.
In the thesis Marx criticized Hegel via his critique of Epicurus, both philosophers regard the solar system as alienated by virtue of its very permanence and its immunity from conscious interference: ‘When [Epicurus] comes upon the reality of his nature … when he comes upon independent, indestructible matter in the heavenly bodies whose eternity and unchangeability were proved . . . then his one and only desire is to pull it down into earthly transience. . . . This is his most glaring contradiction’. Just as Marx criticizes Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ for its positing of a German-centeed universe so he implicitly criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of nature for its ideal of an earth-centred universe and by minimizing the latter critique, Schmidt and others replace what some might see as Hegel’s fetishism of the Germanic with the more abstract fetishism of politics through which in pulling nature down to earthly transience the conscious agent becomes the centre of the universe. As a matter of fact Marx does not define freedom simply as the freely acting consciousness of the subject either in the form of what Hegel is doing to nature in the philosophical realm, of what capitalists think they are doing in their Promethean domination of the material world, or of what Schmidt thinks he is doing for the conscious social actor and rightly or wrongly Marx is demonstrated in both the 1844 Manuscripts and in the Dissertation as defining freedom as Engels does, that is to say, freedom is knowledge of necessity and both the necessity of the pre-human natural world and the necessity of the artificial world that is still rooted in man and woman’s metabolism with nature.
Dedicated as always my lovely one, let us end here with some Marxism in song my love: ❤️
[Zeppo]
Everyone says I love you
The cop on the corner and the burglar too,
The preacher in the pulpit and the man in the pew says I love you.
Everyone, no matter who,
The folks over 80 and the kid of 2,
The captain and the sailor and the rest of the crew
Says I love you.
There are only 8 little letters in this phrase, you’ll find.
But they mean lot more than all the other words, combined.
Everywhere, the whole world through,
The king in the palace, and the peasant too,
The tiger in the jungle and the monk in the zoo,
Says I love you.
[Chico]
Everyone Says I Love You
The great big mosquito when he stings you
The fly when he gets stuck on the fly paper too says
I Love You
Every time the cow says moo
She makes the bull-a very happy too
The rooster when he hollers cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo
says I Love You
Christopher Columbus he write
the Queen of Spain a very nice little note
He write ‘I Love You, baby’
and then he gets himself a great big boat
He’s a wise guy.
What do you think Columbus do
When he come here in 1492
He said to Pocahontas ‘Acki Vachi Vachi Voo,
‘That means ‘You little son of a gun, I Love You’.
[Groucho]
Everyone says I love you
But just what they say it for I never knew
It’s just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who
says I love you.
Take a pair of rabbits who
Get stuck on each other and begin to woo
And pretty soon you’ll find a million more rabbits who
Say I love you
When the lion gets feeling frisky
And begins to roar
There’s another lion who knows just what he’s roaring for
Everything that ever grew
The goose and the gander and the gosling too
The duck upon the water when he feels that way too
says [Quack Quack Quack]
Coming up next:
The logic of Nature.
To be continued. ….
