In this sense, Marx was more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Etienne Balibar has called him ''perhaps . . . the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.''1
Antiphilosophers are those who are wary of philosophy—not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up with ideas that are suspicious of ideas; and though they are for the most part entirely rational, they tend not to believe that reason is what it all comes down to. Feuerbach, from whom Marx learned some of his materialism, wrote that any authentic philosophy has to begin with its opposite, nonphilosophy. The philosopher, he remarked, must accept ''what in man does not philosophise, what is rather opposed to philosophy and abstract thought.''2 He also commented that ''it is man who thinks, not the Ego or Reason.''3 As Alfred Schmidt observes, ''The understanding of man as a needy, sensuous, physiological being is therefore the precondition of any theory of subjectivity.''4 Human consciousness, in other words, is corporeal—which is not to say that it is nothing more than the body. It is rather a sign of the way in which the body is always in a sense unfinished, open-ended, always capable of more creative activity than what it may be manifesting right now.
We think as we do, then, because of the kind of animals we are. If our thought is strung out in time, it is because that is the way our bodies and sense-perceptions are too. Philosophers sometimes wonder whether a machine could think. Maybe it could, but it would be in a way very different from ourselves. This is because a machine's material makeup is so different from ours. It has no bodily needs, for example, and none of the emotional life which in the case of us humans is bound up with such needs. Our own kind of thinking is inseparable from this sensory, practical and emotional context. This is why, if a machine could think, we might not be able to understand what it was thinking.
The philosophy Marx broke with was for the most part a contemplative affair. Its typical scenario was that of a passive, isolated, disembodied human subject disinterestedly surveying an isolated object. Marx, as we have seen, rejected this kind of subject; but he also insisted that the object of our knowledge is not something eternally fixed and given. It is more likely to be the product of our own historical activity. Just as we have to rethink the subject as a form of practice, so we have to rethink the objective world as the result of human practice. And this means among other things that it can in principle be changed.
Starting with human beings as active and practical, and then situating their thought within that context, help us to cast new light on some of the problems which have plagued philosophers. People who work on the world are less likely to doubt that there is anything out there than those who contemplate it from a leisurely distance. In fact, sceptics can exist in the first place only because there is something out there. If there were not a material world to feed them they would die, and their doubts would perish along with them. If you believe that human beings are passive in the face of reality, this may also persuade you to query the existence of such a world. This is because we confirm the existence of things by experiencing their resistance to our demands. And we do this primarily through our practical activity.
Philosophers have sometimes raised the question of ''other minds.'' How do we know that the human bodies we encounter have minds like ours? A materialist would reply that if they did not, we would probably not be around to raise the question. There could be no material production to keep us alive without social cooperation, and the capacity to communicate with others is a large part of what we mean by having a mind. One might also point out that the word ''mind'' is a way of describing the behavior of a particular kind of body: a creative, meaningful, communicative one. We do not need to peer inside people's heads or wire them up to machines to see whether they possess this mysterious entity. We look at what they do. Consciousness is not some spectral phenomenon; it is something we can see, hear and handle. Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call ''mind.'' To call human beings rational is to say that their behavior reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx's materialism.
The materialist's response to the sceptic is not a knockdown argument. You might always claim that our experience of social cooperation, or of the world's resistance to our projects, is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of others. It may be that they see a gap between mind and world. This is ironic, since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat remote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages, artists, counsellors, Oxford dons and the like.
Plato thought that philosophy required a leisured aristocratic elite. You cannot have literary salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. (They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice that thought is independent of reality is itself shaped by social reality.
For Marx, our thought takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material necessity determined by our bodily needs. One might claim, then, that thinking itself is a material necessity. Thinking and our bodily drives are closely related, as they are for Nietzsche and Freud. Consciousness is the result of an interaction between ourselves and our material surroundings. It is itself a historical product. Humanity, Marx writes, is "established'' by the material world, since only by engaging with it can we exercise our powers and have their reality confirmed. It is the "otherness" of reality, its resistance to our designs on it, which first brings us to self-awareness. And this means above all the existence of others. It is through others that we become what we are. Personal identity is a social product. There could not just be one person, any more than there could just be one number.
At the same time, however, this reality should be recognized as the work of our own hands. Not to see it as this—to regard it as something natural or inexplicable, independent of our own activity—is what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by an alien force. For
Marx, writes the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the objectivity of the world "is grounded . . . in the bodily organisation of human beings, which is oriented towards action."5
In a sense, then, consciousness is always in some sense "belated," as reason is belated in a child. Before we even come to reflect, we are always already situated in a material context; and our thought, however apparently abstract and theoretical, is shaped to the core by this fact. It is philosophical idealism which forgets that our ideas have a foundation in practice. By detaching them from this context, it can fall victim to the illusion that it is thought which creates reality.
So there is a close link for Marx between our reasoning and our bodily life. The human senses represent a kind of borderline between the two. For some idealist philosophers, by contrast, ''matter'' is one thing and ideas or "spirit" quite another. For Marx, the human body is itself a refutation of this split. More pre
cisely, it is the human body in action which refutes it. For that practice is clearly a material affair; but it is also, inseparably, a matter of meanings, values, purposes and intentions. If it is "subjective," it is also ''objective.'' Or perhaps it throws that whole distinction into question. Some previous thinkers had seen the mind as active and the senses as passive. Marx, however, sees the human senses as themselves forms of active engagement with reality. They are the result of a long history of interaction with the material world. ''The cultivation of the five senses,'' he writes in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "is the work of all previous history.''
A thinker like Locke or Hume starts with the senses; Marx, by contrast, asks where the senses themselves come from. And the answer goes something like this. Our biological needs are the foundation of history. We have a history because we are creatures of lack, and in that sense history is natural to us. Nature and history are in Marx's view sides of the same coin. As our needs get caught up in history, however, they undergo transformation. In satisfying certain needs, for example, we find ourselves creating new ones. And in this whole process, our sensory life is shaped and refined. All this comes about because the satisfaction of our needs also involves desire, but it was left to Freud to fill in this part of the picture.
In this way, we begin to tell a story. In fact, we begin to be a story. Animals that are not capable of desire, complex labour and elaborate forms of communication tend to repeat themselves. Their lives are determined by natural cycles. They do not shape a narrative for themselves, which is what Marx knows as freedom. The irony in his view is that though this self-determination is of the essence of humanity, the great majority of men and women throughout history have been unable to exercise it. They have not been permitted to be fully human. Instead, their lives have been for the most part determined by the dreary cycles of class-society. Why this has been so, and how it can be put right, is what Marx's work is all about. It is about how we might move from the kingdom of necessity to the realm of freedom. This means becoming rather less like badgers and rather more like ourselves. And having brought us to the threshold of that freedom, Marx leaves us there to fend for ourselves. How could it be freedom otherwise?
If you want to avoid the dualisms of the philosophers, then, just look at how human beings actually behave. A human body is in one sense a material object, part of Nature as well as part of history. Yet it is a peculiar kind of object, quite unlike cabbages and coal scuttles. For one thing, it has the capacity to change its situation. It can also turn Nature into a kind of extension of itself, which is not true of coal scuttles. Human labour works Nature up into that extension of our bodies which we know as civilisation. All human institutions, from art galleries and opium dens to casinos and the World Health Organisation, are extensions of the productive body.
They are also embodiments of human consciousness. ''Human industry,'' Marx writes, using the word ''industry'' in the broadest possible sense, ''is the open book of human consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms.''6 The body can do all this because it has the power to transcend itself—to transform itself and its situation, as well as to enter into complex relationships with other bodies of its kind, in that open-ended process we know as history. Human bodies which cannot do this are known as corpses.
Cabbages cannot do this either, but neither do they need to. They are purely natural entities, without the sorts of needs we find in humans. Humans can make history because of the kind of productive creatures they are; but they also need to do so, because in conditions of scarcity they have to keep producing and reproducing their material life. It is this which prods them into constant activity. They have a history out of necessity. In a situation of material abundance, we would still have a history, but in a different sense of the word from the one we have known so far. We can fulfill our natural needs only by social means—by collectively producing our means of production. And this then gives rise to other needs, which in turn gives rise to others. But at the root of all this, which we know as culture, history or civilisation, lies the needy human body and its material conditions. This is just another way of saying that the economic is the foundation of our life together. It is the vital link between the biological and the social.
This, then, is how we come to have history; but it is also what we mean by spirit. Spiritual matters are not disembodied, otherworldly affairs. It is the prosperous bourgeois who tends to see spiritual questions as a realm loftily remote from everyday life, since he needs a hiding place from his own crass materialism. It comes as no surprise that material girls like Madonna should be so fascinated by Kabbala. For
Marx, by contrast, ''spirit'' is a question of art, friendship, fun, compassion, laughter, sexual love, rebellion, creativity, sensuous delight, righteous anger and abundance of life. (He did, however, sometimes take the fun a bit too far: he once went on a pub crawl from Oxford Street to Hampstead Road with a couple of friends, stopping at every pub en route, and was chased by the police for throwing paving stones at street lamps.7 His theory of the repressive nature of the state, so it would seem, was no mere abstract speculation). In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he discusses politics in terms of social interests, as one might expect; but he also writes eloquently of politics as expressing ''old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles.'' And all this from the bloodlessly clinical thinker of anti-Marxist fantasy.
All of the spiritual activities I have just listed are bound up with the body, since that is the kind of beings we are. Anything which doesn't involve my body doesn't involve me. When I speak to you on the phone I am present to you bodily, though not physically. If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the ''spiritual'' is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.
There is one activity of the body in which ''spirit'' is made particularly manifest, and that is language. Like the body as a whole, language is the material embodiment of spirit or human consciousness. ''Language,'' Marx writes in The German Ideology, "is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.''8 Consciousness is social and practical through and through, which is why language is the supreme sign of it. I can be said to have a mind only because I am born into a shared heritage of meaning. Marx also speaks of language as ''the communal being speaking for itself.'' The language of philosophy, he remarks, is a distorted version of the language of the actual world. Thought and language, far from existing in a sphere of their own, are manifestations of actual life. Even the most rarefied concepts can be traced back eventually to our common existence.
Human consciousness, then, requires a great deal of material stage-setting. And to start from human consciousness, as so much philosophy does, is generally to ignore this fact. It is to beg too many questions.9 Conventional philosophy does not start far back enough. It overlooks the social conditions which put ideas in place, the passions with which they are involved, the power struggles with which they are entangled, the material needs they serve. It does not typically ask ''Where did this human subject come from?,'' or ''How did the object come to be produced?'' Before we can think, we have to eat; and the word ''eat'' opens up the question of a whole mode of social production. We also have to be born; and the word ''born'' opens up the whole domain of kinship, sexuality, patriarchy, sexual reproduction and so on. Before we come to reflect on reality, we are already bound up with it practically and emotionally,
and our thinking always goes on within this context. As the philosopher John Macmurray comments, ''Our knowledge of the world is primarily an aspect of our action in the world.''10 ''Men,'' Marx writes in Heideggerian vein in his Comments on Wagner, "do not in any way begin by finding themselves in a theoretical relationship to the things of the external world.''11 A lot has to be in place before we can start to reason.
Our thought is bound up with the world in another sense, too. It is not just a ''reflection'' of reality, but a material force in its own right. Marxist theory itself is not just a commentary on the world, but an instrument for changing it. Marx himself occasionally talks as though thought were a mere ''reflex'' of material situations, but this fails to do justice to his own more subtle insights. Certain kinds of theory— emancipatory theories, as they are generally known—can act as a political force within the world, not just as a way of interpreting it. And this lends them a peculiar sort of feature. It means that they form a link between how things are and how they might be. They provide descriptions of how the world is; but in doing so they can help change the way men and women understand it, which in turn can play a part in changing reality. A slave knows he is a slave, but knowing why he is a slave is the first step towards not being one. So in portraying things as they are, such theories also offer a way of moving beyond them to a more desirable state of affairs. They step from how it is with them to how it ought to be. Theories of this kind allow men and women to describe themselves and their situations in ways that put them into question, and therefore eventually allow them to redescribe themselves. In this sense, there is a close relationship between reason, knowledge and freedom. Certain kinds of knowledge are vital for human freedom and happiness. And as people act on such knowledge, they come to grasp it more deeply, which then allows them to act on it more effectively. The more we can understand, the more we can do; but in Marx's view the kind of understanding that really matters can come about only through practical struggle. Just as playing the tuba is a form of practical knowledge, so is political emancipation.
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