Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx

Robert C. Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351499804
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Karl Marx's early writing (first made available many years after his death) his economic interpretation of history and his concept of communism were set in a comprehensive philosophical framework. Marx's main preoccupation at this time was with man estranged from himself in an alienated world: a subjective, almost religious theme.Taking full account of these earlier writings, Robert Tucker critiques and reinterprets Marx's thought. He shows how its origins can be located in earlier German philosophers, in particular Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach. Reconstructing the genesis of Marxism in its founder's own mind, he clarifies Marx's mystifying contention that Marxism represented Hegelianism turned 'on its head'. He then presents a new interpretation, based on close textual analysis, of the relation between Marx's early philosophical system and the subsequent materialist conception of history as expounded in the later and best known writings of Marx and Engels. Against this background, Tucker presents Das Kapital as a work belonging to the post-Hegelian mythical development of Germany philosophy. Considering in turn the genesis of Marxism and the underlying continuity of his thought from the early writings to Das Kapital, Tucker shows the theme of alienation is central throughout.In the years since the book was first written, comments and criticism have encouraged Tucker to change his position somewhat. This is explained in a new introduction that goes beyond the interpretative enterprise of the rest of the book to assess Marx in relation to contemporary concerns: first it presents a critique of Marx's treatment of alienation and then it comments on the moot problem of the continuing relevance of his social and economic thought. On the latter point his views have matured and altered during the intervening years and he now finds the economic and social aspects of Marx's thought considerably more relevant than he did before.

PART I

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

I
The Self as God in German Philosophy

All of which is only another way of saying that . . . it is our affair to participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity {putting off the old Adam), and getting to know God as our true and essential self

HEGEL

The movement of thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man's self-realization as a godlike being or, alternatively, as God. A radical departure from Western tradition was implicit in this tendency. The centuries-old ruling conception of an unbridgeable chasm of kind between the human and the divine gave way to the conception of a surmountable difference of degree. It is hardly stirprising that out of such a revolution of religion there issued, among other things, a religion of revolution.

The image of man striving to realize himself as a godlike being found earlier literary expression in the figure of Goethe's Faust. The Faust of the first part of Goethe's poem is absorbed in 'dre;ams of godlike knowledge'. He aspires to 'this soaring life, this bliss of godlike birth', and would 'prove in man the stature of a god'. Having become in his imagination a godlike being, the possessor of absolute knowing powers, he feels driven to prove himself in action in this capacity. In order to confirm that he is the all-knowing self, he must acquire an infinity of knowledge. The goal is reflected in his complaint to Mephi-stopheles:

I have not raised myself one poor degree, Nor stand I nearer to infinity.

Faust feels revulsion towards his very learned but withal less than omniscient empirical self; it is alien in its finitude. He must either actualize the exalted image of himself as absolute knower, or else confess his 'kinship with the worm'.

The Faust-theme is pride in the sense of self-glorification and the resulting search for self-aggrandizement to infinity. This is the meaning that will be attached to the term 'pride' in the following pages. It does not refer to ordinary human self-esteem based on actual achievements or potentialities, but to self-deification. This special kind of pride, which may be called 'neurotic', is expressed in a person's creation of an idealized image of himself as a being of godlike perfection, in his presumption that this being represents his real self, and in his attempt to prove it in practice. The word 'godlike' connotes absoluteness, the transcendence of human limitations. The exalted self of the imagination is unlimited in its attributes and powers. It is a//-good, //-knowing, or a//-powerful, etc., and so may be described as an 'absolute self'.*

Pride may be viewed as a peculiar kind of religious phenomenon, for it involves a worship of the self as the supreme being. The godlike self displaces God. The religions of the Hebraic group (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have, on this account, condemned pride as the radically faulty tendency in human nature or root of sin. They posit the infinite transcendence or otherness of God as eternally complete and perfect being. Man, by contrast, is understood to be limited and imperfect by nature. Thus, the Bible's myth of the Fall of Man contains the idea that man errs in transgressing the limits of the creature and striving to be 'like God'. This condemnation of pride is a fundamental element in the Hebraic-Christian religious tradition. I take it that Kierkegaard expressed the true sense of this tradition when he wrote: 'God and man are two qualities between which there is an infinite qualitative difference. Every doctrine which overlooks this difference is, humanly speaking, crazy: understood in a godly sense, it is blasphemy.'²

In the movement of German thought from Kant to Hegel, the Faust-theme entered into philosophy. That is, it was generalized. The absolute self was made into an abstract norm of human nature, and man in general became a neurotic personality. Hegel in particular might be described as a Faust in philosophical prose, for 'absolute knowledge' is the goal of man in history as expounded in his Phenomenology of Mind, The source of his doctrine of the absolute self lay in the moral philosophy of Kant.

[2]

Kant undertakes to expound ethics as a requirement of the practical reason. The ground of morality is not to be sought in the 'particular constitution of human nature', but rather in the formal nature of practical reason conceived in abstraction from any image of man as man. Nevertheless, behind this fagade of ethical formalism, we find in Kant a conception of morality as the expression of a compulsion in man to achieve absolute moral self-perfection.

This theme recurs constantly in his ethical writings. He suggests, for example, that if there were any principle of human nature which might serve as a respectable basis for moral theory, it would be the 'ontological conception of perfection' or, alternatively, 'absolute perfection'.³ In point of fact, the logical exposition of the categorical imperative coexists in Kantianism with a doctrine of moral perfectionism. According to Kant, morality has its theatre of manifestation in the relations between men. However, the real moral drama is conceived as going on behind the scenes of the theatre, in each man's relation with himself in the effort to be absolutely good. We shall be concerned here solely with this psychological side of Kant's moral philosophy.

He portrays man in a posture of anguished striving to actualize an image of himself as divinely virtuous. He writes that there would be no need for morality at all, no obligation or 'moral compulsion', if man were in actual fact a 'holy being'.* This is a manner of suggesting that morality is the compulsion to become such a holy being in actual fact. It is a compulsion to become godlike. For Kant holds that we derive our very conception of God from the idea of absolute moral perfection or holiness. Yet man, as a merely finite rational being, who is in part a fallible creature of the senses, cannot achieve holiness in this Life. Hence the moral situation of man assumes in Kant's philosophy the shape of a fundamental dilemma. Morality is man's compulsion to realize himself as a holy being. But his human nature stands in the way of success in this endeavour.

Kant's explanation is that man has a twofold nature, half godly and half human. He is a divided being, a dual personality: homo noumenon and homo phenomenon. The former is the godlike self of man; the latter, his merely human self. The terminology of this distinction is taken from Kant's epistemological dichotomy of noumenon and phenomenon as reality and appearance. The noumenon is the Ding-an-sich or thing as it is in itself. The phenomenon is the thing as it appears. Hence homo noumenon is man-in-himself, and homo phenomenon is man-as-he-appears. Further, man is conscious of himself in both capacities. He is aware of himself, on the one hand, as 'intelligence' and, on the other hand, as 'an object affected by the senses'. In the former or noumenal capacity, man is his 'real self, whereas, says Kant, 'as human he is only appearance of his self'.⁵

The noumenal 'real self is a being of godlike moral perfection. In one place Kant describes it as an image that man is forced to form of himself as an 'idealized person'.* He claims that this is a requirement of practical reason. Leaving that argument aside for the moment, we may note simply that man, according to Kant, creates an idealized image of himself as absolutely virtuous, and identifies this 'idealized person' as his 'real self. It becomes, then, the perspective from which he views himself, and the measuring rod by which he judges all his actions and inclinations. He discovers, when he does so, that his phenomenal or empirical self, i.e. the person that he observably is in much of everyday life, fails to conform to the godlike standards of virtue laid down by the noumenal self. He is conscious of himself as a dual self, as two different persons, the ideally perfect person on the one hand and the imperfect creature of the senses on the other. The latter appears as an alien being, a stranger, a 'me' who is not the real 'I'.

There is a war going on inside Kantian man. The moral life is a drama of ceaseless conflict within the dualized personality of the human being who is conscious of himself as half godly and half human. His duty, as he sees it, is to actualize the godlike noumenal self. This means that he must bend the phenomenal self to his moral will to be absolutely good. He must mould the phenomenal self into the being of absolute perfection. He attempts to do this by addressing himself in the stern language of the categorical imperative: Thou shalt be perfect. Morality is the system of commands of this order by which the godlike self in man attempts to compel the merely human self to be perfect. But the human self, homo phenomenon, resists the command. And so there arises in man, says Kant, a 'natural dialectic' in which the relentless compulsion to be perfect meets an 'urge to argue against the severe laws of duty and to question their validity'.' Sometimes he describes this as a war between duty and inclination. It is the inner conflict engendered by man's striving to actualize in conduct the absolute self. This situation of sharp and unending conflict inside moral man is reflected also in Kant's image of the phenomenon of conscience. He represents it as an internal 'tribunal' before which the idealized person arraigns the phenomenal self for harsh accusation and judgment as transgressor of the dictates of moral perfection.® The Kantian conception of the moral life is epitomized in this subjective courtroom scene. The implication is that man, having become in his imagination a being of complete perfection, turns against the imperfect empirical actuality of himself in a fury of self-accusation for violating the norm of holiness, for failure to be perfect.

Kant accepts the fact that there is no possibility of winning the war of the self this side of the grave. The phenomenal self regularly tends to violate the dictates of perfection, and so is always having to be arraigned before the internal tribunal. There is no prospect of completely eliminating the discrepancy between the noumenal and phenomenal selves. The only final victory conceivable is a posthumous victory in the event of personal immortality. Meanwhile, the only possible solution lies in the exertion of the moral will relentlessly toward a progress of self-perfection. If man cannot mould his phenomenal self into complete conformity with the idealized person, he can at any rate achieve a closer and closer approximation: 'For a rational but finite being, the only thing possible is an endless progress from the lower to the higher degree of moral perfection.'* Kant's solution of the dilemma of the dual self is, then, the idea of an endless progress toward a solution never to be reached. It is the idea of a process of infinite self-perfecting.

This doctrine yields the notion that freedom is inner bondage or successful self-coercion. Kant argues that man is unfree when subjected to coercion from without, or when he follows his spontaneous inclinations. He is free, on the other hand, when he acts under compulsion of the moral will to be perfect. Freedom means 'autonomy of the will', a condition in which man is subject to no outside commands but issues the moral law to himself. This is what Kant calls self-determination to action, which is his formula for freedom. The essential point is that self-determination means for Kant determination by the nou-menal self. And this, as we have seen, is compulsive; it is a question of self-coercion to be perfect. Kant therefore not only admits, but continually insists upon, the identity of freedom and internal compulsion. He writes, for example: 'The less a man can be physically forced, and the more he can be morally forced (by the mere idea of duty), so much the freer he is.' He speaks too of 'free self-constraint'.¹⁰

According to this view, a man is never so free as when he acts under the greatest sense of inner bondage, self-constraint, compulsion. It is only when he feels morally driven to do something, when he experiences it as compulsory and himself as a slave to the self-imposed command to do it, that he is free at all. The soul of moral man becomes, therefore, a kind of dictatorship of the moral 'ought'. Kant himself calls it an 'autocracy'.¹¹ Man is free, he contends, in so far as he identifies himself with the internal autocratic authority (i.e. the noumenal self) and compels himself to obey all its perfectionist dictates. He is free in so far as he submits willingly to the internal autocratic order, unfree in so far as he acts in accordance with mere impulses or desires. There is an interesting analogy between this position and that of the political dictator who claims that his authoritarianism is the 'highest form of freedom' and that there is no real freedom in a democracy, where everyone does as he pleases.

[3]

A critique of Kant's position might well start at this point. Something is radically wrong with a doctrine which tells us that the more compulsive a person's conduct is, the freer he is, that life in a subjective autocracy of the moral 'ought' is the true life of freedom. Such a doctrine does violence to our understanding of freedom by divorcing it from the experience of freedom. This is no less foreign to a subjective feeling of compulsiveness or involuntariness than it is to a sense of acting under compulsion of an external force or authority. Absence of compulsiveness is the basic mark of the experience of freedom. It is the experience of spontaneity in activity, of voluntariness, of not being coerced by anyone, including one's self.

Kant's perversion of the idea of freedom is a logical consequence of his identification of homo noumenon as the real self of man. We may agree with him that self-determination to action is the correct general formula for freedom, but there is a hidden corollary: the determining self must be a possible self. It must represent, in other words, a set of authentic potentialities of the individual, and thus be a self whose realization lies within the realm of genuine possibility. Only if this essential condition is met can man know the experience of freedom as spontaneous self-expression in activity. The experience of voluntariness in action is given only to the person who is giving expression to himself.

When, on the other hand, the self with which a man identifies himself is a godlike being of perfection, the experience of freedom evaporates and his actions are performed under an inner compulsion. For such a self is not a possible self. As Kant himself admits, it is not a self lhat any mere human being could ever really be or become. A man cannot become an impossible superhuman absolute self, but he can force himself to try and coerce himself endlessly in the attempt. This is what Kant pictures him as doing, and the logical but fallacious conclusion is that freedom means successful self-coercion. Kantian man cannot spontaneously (freely) determine himself to action in the capacity of homo noumenon; he can only strive to compel himself to action in this capacity. All his actions become compulsive.

The subjective system of bondage which may arise in man as a consequence is sharply etched in Kant's picture of the autocracy of the moral will to perfection. Although it is not his conscious intention to do so, he shows that self-glorification leads to the formation in man of a pride system that becomes autonomous and exerts, through its coercive imperatives, a tyrannical power over the individual. An internal 'autocracy' emerges. The individual becomes a subject of the godlike nou-menal self in him which imperiously orders: Thou shalt comply with my standards of absolute perfection or else suffer torments of self-accusation for violating them. All his energies are canalized into the ceaseless effort to comply with the dictates of the internal autocracy. This is a system of slavery far more complete and severe than any external political autocracy. The human being becomes the slave of the force of pride that has arisen and grown autonomous within him. Kant's representation of this subjective system of bondage is drawn with great psychological accuracy. His error is a philosophical one. It expresses itself in the fact that he calls this bondage 'freedom'.

The error in his conception of freedom is only a manifestation of the deeper error in his conception of man. He maintains that practical reason compels man to form a picture of himself as a being of godlike perfection and to regard this 'idealized person' as his 'real self. It seems, on the contrary, that reason cautions against this, and that pride is the force that leads man to reach out for the infinite and absolute, to confuse humanity in his own person with divinity. This hubris is the pathology of human selfhood. Man falsifies his identity as finite man when he arrogates to himself absolute attributes and powers. The absolute self that he becomes in his imagination is necessarily a pseudo-self, i.e. a self impossible of realization. In the attempt to realize the unrealizable, he necessarily becomes divided against himself. His soul becomes the arena of a war between homo noumenon and homo phenomenon. Pride dualizes man, and initiates a destructive conflict within him. Kant's image of self-divided man is a vivid if unwitting illustration of this fact.

Kant's philosophy transformed what had always been regarded as the radical fault in man, the pathology of selfhood, into a universal norm. It identified the neurotic personality as the normal man, and pride as the requirement of'reason'. The consequences of this momentous step were reflected in the further development of German philosophy in the systems of Kant's immediate successors, Fichte and Hegel in particular. Here we encounter an exuberant affirmation of pride. The apotheosis of the human self that Kant had adumbrated was taken as the revelation of a great truth. The noumenal self was accepted as the authentic essence of man, and the urge to demonstrate its actualization became a driving force of philosophical thought. The field of its actualization was extended from the life-history of the self-deifying individual to the life-history of the human race. Man's self-realization as a godlike being became the theme of a philosophy of history. Hegelianism was the high point of this development.

[4]

In a letter to Schelling in 1795, the twenty-five-year old theology student Hegel declared that a great new creative movement was to grow out of the Kantian philosophy, and that the central idea in the movement would be the doctrine of the absolute and infinite self. In a series of unpublished writings of these early years, * Hegel groped toward the formula that would serve as the lever of this creative transformation of Kantianism. He found it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Philosophy & Myth in Karl Marx
• copy
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction: Marx in Changing Perspective
• Part I. The Philosophical Background
• Part II. From Hegel to Marx
• Part III. Original Marxism
• Part IV. Mature Marxism
• References
• List of Books Cited
• Index