Marx was initially exposed to the origins of the ontological idea that “Reason directs the World” in an ancient Hellenic traditionof philosophy that he studied in university. As Hegel claimed, it was Anaxagoras who “was the first to enunciate the doctrine that νοῦς…or Reason, governs the world.”95 For Heraclitus, another notable progenitor of this tradition, “all things come to pass in accordance with” the “logos.”96 According to Hegel, the ‘intelligent’ order of the cosmos is evident, for example, in the “movement of the solar system” which “takes place according to unchangeable laws” which are “Reason, implicit in the phenomena in question.”97 Thus Hegel proposed that the “sole business of science is to make conscious” the “work which is accomplished by the reason of the thing itself.”98 It is within this philosophic tradition that we should locate the ontological foundations of Marx’s assertion that “the ultimate aim” of Capital was “to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society,” one of “the natural laws of its
94 If this goes unrecognized we risk making the mistake of interpreting his ‘mature’ critique of capitalism primarily as an attempt to expose the transitory character of the capitalist mode of production. Allen Wood, for instance, claimed that the “ultimate aim of Marx’s theory, of course, is to reveal the tendencies to change inherent in bourgeois society” (Wood 2004, 226). This view is not entirely correct because Marx emphasized the transitory character of capitalism insofar as he claimed to see the immanent development of a “higher” social form from within the social life-process of capitalism. Cf. McCarney’s claim that “what underlies Marx’s conception of the practical significance of his social theory is his allegiance to an idea of method derived ultimately from Hegel,” i.e.,
“the phenomenological dialectic,” and that “the central substantive insight of dialectics is” the “idea that behind the phenomenal forms of existing society there is a more rational order struggling to be born” (McCarney 1990, 114, 193).
95 Hegel 1956, 11. Cf. Hegel 1969, 50 and Hegel 1968, 331-2, 339-40.
96 Heraclitus 2001, 2.
97 Hegel 1956, 11. “To consider something rationally,” Hegel claimed, “means not to bring reason to bear on the object from outside in order to work upon it, for the object is itself rational for itself; it is the spirit in its freedom, the highest apex of self-conscious reason, which here gives itself actuality and engenders itself as an existing world” (Hegel 1991, 60).
98 Hegel 1991, 60. For him, of course, this is ultimately the process of “Spirit” or “Mind” becoming conscious of itself: “the aim of all genuine science is just this, that mind shall recognize itself in everything” (Hegel 1971, 1).
movement.”99 On the one hand, the existence of social and political “science” of this sort entails that we can have real insight into our social life-process, enabling us to take conscious,
collective, and ultimately “free” control of it; on the other hand, it also entails that we cannot
“put forward fantastic solutions” to “social antagonisms” in the place of such knowledge.100 Hegel emphasized that “we must clearly distinguish” between Anaxagoras’ principle and
“intelligence as self-conscious Reason” and he claimed that it was Socrates who “adopted the doctrine of Anaxagoras” and radically transformed it, taking “the first step in comprehending the union of the Concrete with the Universal.”101 Socrates agreed with Anaxagoras that ‘Mind’ is a sovereign force in the world but he maintained that it was most truly active in the shared consciousness of human beings; hence the sentiment attributed to him by Plato that “I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that.”102 Marx thought that this tradition (and the philosophy of Hellenic antiquity in general) reached its zenith with Aristotle103 for whom the “function” of humanity “is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle,” i.e., “logos.”104 This tradition is thus
99 Marx 1976, 92.
100 Marx 2010c, 298.
101 Hegel 1956, 12-13. As A.E. Taylor put it, “Mind, said Anaxagoras, is the cause of all natural law and order, just as mind is the cause of the orderliness and coherence of human action. To Socrates this suggested that the universe at large is the embodiment, like a properly conducted human life, of coherent rational plan” (Taylor 1952, 64).
102 Plato 1997, 510. Cf. Marx’s claim that “Feuerbach’s aphorisms seem to me incorrect only in one respect, that he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. That, however, is the only alliance by which present-day philosophy can become truth” (Marx 1975d, 400).
103 Hegel maintained that “With Anaxagoras a light, if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognized as the principle. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras: ‘But he who said that reason (nous), in what lives as also in nature, is the origin of the world and of all order, is like a sober man as compared with those who came before and spoke at random’” (Hegel 1968, 319).
104 Aristotle 1998, 13.
foundational for Marx’s philosophical anthropology insofar as he conceived of the human
“species being” as “a universal and therefore a free being.”105
Aside from his direct study of ancient Hellenic philosophy, Marx was also exposed to this tradition in a renewed form through his studies of German philosophy, especially in the writings of Hegel. The idea of “Reason” underwent further development in Hegel’s philosophy and he articulated it as
“Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form,—that which sets this Material in motion. On the one hand, Reason is the substance of the
Universe; viz. that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand, it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe…. It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth. It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means from which it may obtain its support, and the objects of its activity. It supplies its own nourishment and is the object of its own operations. While it is exclusively its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energising power realising this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe—the History of the World. That this ‘Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the
105 Marx 1964, 112. Cf. Aristotle’s view that “reason more than anything else is [humanity]” and Hegel’s claim that
“the universal” which unites all of humanity, “man as man,” is “mind” (Aristotle 1998, 226; Hegel 1971, 1).
absolutely powerful essence…is the thesis which…has been proved in Philosophy.”106
Textual evidence indicates that Hegel’s idea of “reason” as “the substance of the Universe” had a profound influence on Marx in his formative years and that he “received the inner call to
comprehend,” as Hegel put it, whereby he came to “recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present” which enabled him “to delight” in it.107 His writings also indicate that this
philosophical orientation influenced his revolutionary disposition. In May 1843, he wrote to Arnold Ruge: “You will not say that I value the present time too highly. And if I do not despair, it is only the desperate situation of the present that fills me with hope.”108 Another letter to Ruge from September 1843 suggests that this disposition of Marx’s was directly associated with what Hegel termed the “rational insight” and “reconciliation with actuality” that “philosophy” granted Marx’s “inner” calling.109 Marx wrote that “Reason has always existed, but not always in rational form. The critic, therefore, can start with any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.”110 Capital indicates that he sublated this into his ‘mature’ theory and “scientific” critique of capitalism and political economy, in which he attempted to “make conscious” the “work” of
“reason” which is “implicit in the phenomena” of life in capitalist society. Hegel’s idea of
“reconciliation” was for Marx an inherently revolutionary one.
106 Hegel 1956, 9-10.
107 Hegel 1991, 22.
108 Marx 1967, 210.
109 Hegel 1991, 22.
110 Marx 1967, 213.
Sean Sayers associates the Young Hegelian “critical approach,” i.e., the “utopian and subjective wishful thinking” that abandoned the “scientific attitude of studying what is,” with Marx’s idea of the activity of the “critic” in 1843.111 While Sayers is justified in defining
“subjective wishful thinking” as utopian, it is mistaken to associate this with Marx’s position in 1843 because, based on the philosophical premises which are evident in his writing at the time, Marx thought “reason” is “what is.” Thus Marx’s position in 1843 does not entail that “the world is judged and criticised in light of how it ought to be,” as Sayers maintains.112 Insofar as Marx critically appropriated the Hegelian principle that “philosophy is exploration of the rational,” his revolutionary social theory is “for that very reason the comprehension of the present and actual, not the setting up of a world beyond which exists” only “in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination.”113 This idea is expressed in the manuscripts posthumously published as The German Ideology in which Marx and Engels wrote that “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”114 In this way, Marx took up what Hegel described as the “task of philosophy,” i.e., to “comprehend what is” because
“what is is reason.”115 This principle was vital for Marx’s idea of the relationship between theory
111 Sayers 1987, 153.
112 Ibid.
113 Hegel 1991, 20. McCarney claimed that Marx was concerned with “what Hegel calls ‘surrender to the life of the object’, and the thinking of that life in systematic, discursive form” (McCarney 2000, 67). In recent literature, Caligaris and Starosta maintain that what “is rational in Hegel’s dialectic” is “its method of immanent development of the life of the subject-matter” (Caligaris and Starosta 2014, 67). Cf. Starosta 2015, 62.
114 Marx and Engels 1998, 57.
115 Hegel 1991, 21. Hegel states further that if “theory does indeed transcend [its] own time, if it builds itself a world as it ought to be, then it certainly has an existence, but only within…opinions, a pliant medium in which the imagination can construct anything it pleases” (Ibid., 22). It follows that since every philosophy “is a philosophy of its time,” it “provides satisfaction only for those interests which are appropriate to their time” (Hegel 1968, 106).
“Socrates,” for example, “did not grow like a mushroom out of the earth, for he stands in continuity with his time”
(Hegel 1968, 384). It is evident that Marx also held a similar position. He maintained that “philosophers do not spring up like mushrooms out of the ground; they are products of their time, of their nation, whose most subtle, valuable and invisible juices flow in the ideas of philosophy” (Marx 1975d, 195).
and practice. For him, a genuinely “scientific” theory of “communism” depicts it as it “emerges”
from the “womb” of capitalist society, unlike the fanciful imagination of ‘utopian’ reformers who have not attained sufficient insight into their contemporary circumstances and instead make fantastic plans for the future.116
3. “Dialectic” as the Onto-Methodological “higher movement of reason”
One of Marx’s most well-known statements on the “dialectical method” can be found in the 1873 afterword to Capital where he wrote that it is a process of “inquiry” whereby we
“appropriate the material in detail,” “analyse its different forms of development” and “track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully…the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas.”117 The onto-methodological nature of “dialectic” is difficult to discern from only this passage, although it can be pieced together from this and other sources in the writing of Marx and clarified with the aid of Hegel’s work. It is important to stress the ontological aspect of Marx’s idea of “dialectic” because of the increasingly common tendency to treat it simply as if it were a mere theoretical tool.118 Bertell Ollman, for instance, has placed an excessive emphasis on the methodological aspect of “dialectic” in Marx’s thought; e.g.,
116 Marx 2010, 346. Contrary to Guido Starosta’s claim that “Marx’s materialist dialectical science entailed the transcendence of all philosophy,” Marx remained ‘philosophical’ in this sense (Starosta 2016, 52). Starosta argues that Marx abandoned “the abstract character of idealist philosophy as present in” Hegel because “the very essence of philosophy” is “to be indifferent to the real movement of human practice. Within the limits of philosophical thought, no real mediation is possible between theory and practice,” and “the relation between theory and practice cannot but become inverted” (Ibid., 14). However, the standpoint of philosophy according to Hegel as outlined above is not inconsistent with the fact that Marx turned “his attention on the way human life is materially produced” (Ibid., 15). It is rather a necessary ontological foundation for the kind of “science” characteristic of Marx’s ‘materialist’ “dialectical method.”
117 Marx 1976, 102.
118 Cf. Hegel 1969, 56. A typical example can be found in Arthur Schipper’s review of Dialectics in World Politics in which he describes “dialectics” as consisting of “a highly intuitive set of methodological tools,” a “sophisticated theoretical machinery,” and “a step-by-step method for applying this machinery” (Schipper 2016).
“dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world.”119 Ironically, this view omits the “full range” of Marx’s idea of
“dialectic” because it ignores its fundamental ontological dimension. As McCarney argued,
“questions of ontology” must be entertained as well because “no account of dialectic can be adequate without treating them.”120
The ontological meaning of “dialectic” is conveyed, though in an abstract and obscure way, when it is presented as the grand process of change in the cosmos or the transformative power at work in the flux of things. Hegel did in fact claim that it is “in general the principle of all motion, of all life, and of all activation in the actual world.”121 However, as the principle of
“all activation in the actual world,” “dialectic” does not simply denote ‘change’ per se, although this is certainly an essential aspect of it. On the contrary, as an onto-cosmological principle,
“dialectic” is a feature of the developmental movement of “reason” which takes place ‘within’
the ‘objective world’ and the activity of thought.122 We can observe this, for instance, in Hegel’s Science of Logic where he treats “dialectic” simultaneously as an ontology and as a mode of thought, even within a single sentence: “we call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which…seemingly utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously, through that which they are, a movement in which the presupposition sublates itself.”123
119 Ollman 2003, 12.
120 McCarney 1987, 181. Cf. his claim that in “the usual litanies...of what is living and what is dead in Hegel, it is his ontological vision that is most readily assigned to the philosophical graveyard” (Ibid., 162).
121 Hegel 1991b, 128-129. “Everything around us can be regarded as an example of dialectic. For we know that, instead of being fixed and ultimate, everything finite is alterable and perishable, and this is nothing but the dialectic of the finite, through which the latter, being implicitly the other of itself, is driven beyond what immediately is and overturns into its opposite” (Ibid., 130).
122 At this point it is perhaps helpful to recall Hegel’s idea that “reason” is both ‘substance’ and ‘subject’. According to him, “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject”
(Hegel 1977, 10). Cf. Whitehead’s claim that there “is Reason, asserting itself above the world, and there is Reason as one of many factors within the world” (Whitehead 1929, 10).
123 Hegel 1969, 105.
The unity of the ontological and methodological dimensions of “dialectic” is conspicuously presented in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic. In this text we read that the form of “the logical” has
“three sides”: “the side of abstraction or of the understanding,” “the dialectical or negatively rational side,” and “the speculative or positively rational one.”124 Thus the “dialectical” is necessarily present as a form of thought corresponding to the “negatively rational” side of the
“logical,” hence Hegel’s claim in the Science of Logic that “dialectic” is “a necessary function of reason.”125 The implications for methodology become clearer when we compare “dialectical”
thinking to the thought of what Hegel calls the “understanding,” i.e., thought which “stops short at the fixed determinacy and its distinctness vis-à-vis other determinacies” and “behaves toward its ob-jects in a way that separates and abstracts them.”126 The moment of the “understanding” is a necessary moment in the process of cognition, but to treat the finite abstractions of the
“understanding” as ‘concrete’ or true in-themselves is a distortion of reality.127 Thus the moment of the “understanding” is supplanted by the “dialectical moment” which “is the self-sublation of
124 Hegel 1991b, 125.
125 Hegel 1969, 56.
126 Hegel 1991b, 125-26. Engels described an analogous tendency in the thinking characteristic of the natural sciences: “The analysis of Nature into its individual parts” has “left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose; not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death” (Engels 1934, 27). Whitehead, too, emphasizes the fact that the ‘materialist’ ontology of the natural sciences results in a conception of a “lifeless” nature (Whitehead 1968, 127). Cf. the comedic novel Tristram Shandy (of which Marx was very fond): “There lies your mistake, my father would reply;—for, in Foro Scientiae there is no such thing as MURDER,—‘tis only DEATH, brother” (Sterne 2009, 56). In this context it is interesting to note Hegel’s claim that an abstraction “detached from what circumscribes it”—whereby it attains
“an existence of its own and a separate freedom”—is the result of “the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself” (Hegel 1997, 19).
127 To do so is to commit what Whitehead termed the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness” (Whitehead 1925, 58).