Revision of the concept of reason

In the third phase of his early work, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx sets out to unify theory and practice through revising the concept of reason as it is formulated both in the philosophical tradition and his own previous writings. To accomplish this, Marx returned to the study of need from a new angle. In the early essays, Marx found a form of rational interaction in the pursuit of happiness. But the content of the concept of need with which he worked remained unthematized and unanalyzed; it remained, in fact, immediate and hence irrational for Marx as it had for earlier political philosophy. This now becomes the decisive problem.

If there was a still dogmatic element in the earlier essays, it lay in Marx’s failure to derive rational social interaction, the “revolutionizing of the elements themselves,” from the needs it was to help satisfy. Instead, social revolution still appeared as a philosophical exigency from which the needy could incidentally benefit. The antinomy of reason and need is not abolished in the accidental convergence of philosophy and the proletariat, but rather reproduced in a new guise. The antinomies of philosophy and reality, theory and practice that appear in Marx’s discussion of historical agency are simply displacements of the original antinomy of political philosophy. To resolve these antinomies, Marx reverses the terms of the problem and attempts to found the demands of reason in the very nature of need. But this amounts to demonstrating that the content of the sphere of need is rational, is, in fact, the essential sphere of rationality for a metacritically reconstructed concept of reason.

How does Marx go about it? I will sketch the three dialectical “moments” of Marx’s metacritique and then elaborate each in some detail. Marx begins by showing that philosophical categories are displacements of social ones. For example, Marx is convinced that the problem of alienated labor is the real foundation of Hegel’s philosophy, but that Hegel does not pose it correctly.

Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He conceives labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence of man … [But] labour as Hegel understands and recognizes it is abstract mental labour. Thus, that which above all constitutes the essence of philosophy, the alienation of man knowing himself, or alienated science thinking itself, Hegel grasps as its essence.²⁸

The whole artificial, speculative, and ultimately theological structure of Hegel’s system results from his failure to thematize real labor as the ontological core of history.

Having relativized the philosophical categories with respect to social ones, Marx proceeds to the second “moment” of the metacritique: casting the social categories in the form of the philosophical ones. Reductionism is avoided by treating the now socially interpreted categories not as empirical facts but as moments in a philosophical dialectic. Thus Marx’s labor is not that of the economists but plays a properly philosophical role. Finally, in a third phase, the metacritique demonstrates the power of social action to resolve the contradictions of the philosophically recast social categories. In this phase Marx is able to show that the alienation of labor is a fundamental problem within philosophy, and not just a contingent social problem. This is impossible for Hegel who encounters the alienation of labor in history as no more than a passing concern.

In sum, Marx redefines the terms of Hegel’s philosophy, while retaining in part the relations Hegel establishes between these terms. Marx can then set the entire system in motion in history because of the social redefinition to which he has submitted it. It is clear that Marx’s new definitions do not correspond with Hegel’s and that he shifts back and forth in the Manuscripts between his own concepts and Hegel’s. But this is not just an ambiguous use of terms. Marx’s substantive thesis is that Hegel’s concepts are a misconstrual of a reality that Marx himself has described more accurately, that he is solving the very problems Hegel addressed in a mystified way.

The first phase of Marx’s metacritique is developed in the conclusion of the Manuscripts in the “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic.” There Marx argues that Hegel’s term “alienation” stands for the uncomprehended object of thought. To found reason, that is, to demonstrate the unity of subject and object, “It is necessary, therefore, to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an alienated human relationship which does not correspond with the essence of man, self-consciousness.”²⁹ The return of the alienated, the demonstration of its unity with the conscious subject, consists for Hegel only in surpassing the cognitive appearance of the object. Thus the appropriation of alienated reality is its comprehension. But, Marx argues, in its social application this method leaves the world exactly as it was before, tacking a certificate of rationality onto every form of oppression. Since alienation is, at least for Hegel, really overcome in philosophy, the need to change the world has vanished. Thought can congratulate itself on having produced the reality and thereby justifying it.

This is what Lukács means by philosophy remaining in the standpoint of immediacy. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels describe it as “the mystery of speculative construction.” They write:

Speculation on the one hand apparently freely creates its object a priori out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the object, falls into the most irrational and unnatural bondage to the object, whose most accidental and most individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general.³⁰

Hegel’s error results from describing real alienation as the appearance of the alienation of reason. For Hegel the alienation of the individual in the ancien régime did not consist in reduction to an “abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being,” but in the fact that the state did not correspond with its concept, that, in practice, it could not command the rational obedience of its subjects. Once the state has been reformed, then it can command rational obedience even from an “abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.” There is thus a merely contingent relation between philosophy and Marx’s “real” alienation, which consists in human misery and dependence. The philosopher becomes the “enemy” of the human community in demonstrating to it that it should accept its fate without protest. He withdraws the moral credit of the oppressed by rationalizing the established order.

Marx argues that Hegel falls into “uncritical positivism and uncritical idealism” because he begins by narrowing the subject to a mere function of thought.

For Hegel, human life, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All alienation of human life is, therefore, nothing but alienation of self-consciousness. The alienation of self-consciousness is not regarded as the expression, reflected in knowledge and thought, of the real alienation of human life. Instead, actual alienation, that which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature (which philosophy first discloses) only the phenomenal being of the alienation of real human life, self-consciousness.³¹

Hence for Hegel, “It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but that he objectifies himself by distinction from and in opposition to abstract thought, which constitutes alienation as it exists and as it has to be transcended.”³²

In opposition to the formula he ascribes to Hegel, “man = self-consciousness,” Marx argues that man is sensuous natural existence, and that, therefore, the subject is a natural being.³³ Its essential mode of activity is also natural: labor, not thinking. Similarly, Marx proposes to redefine the concept of the object as an essential correlate of this subject, existing proximally for the human senses. Note that Marx does not return to Locke. He does not found knowledge on the senses in the empiricist manner, but redefines subject and object in their living connection. Thus Marx’s “sense object” is not a Lockean “idea” but the actual object itself, as it exists for the senses and especially as an object of need.

Writing still under the influence of Heidegger in his early review of the Manuscripts, Marcuse relates the Marxian concept of sensuousness to Kant’s claim that objects are necessarily given through sense perception. Sensuousness is thus a transcendental precondition of access to objectivity in general and not just a material relationship to particular objects. Feuerbach emphasized the passive nature of the sensuous subject and its quality of neediness and dependence on its objects. These ideas culminate in Marx for whom the “distress and neediness that appear in man’s sensuousness are no more purely matters of cognition than his distress and neediness, as expressed in estranged labor, are purely economic. Distress and neediness do not describe the individual modes of man’s behavior at all; they are features of his whole being.”³⁴ As such, Marcuse concludes, they are ontological conditions correlated with features of being itself. With the establishment of these new definitions of the philosophical subject and object, the first phase of Marx’s metacritique is completed.

The second phase of the metacritique then proceeds to reconstitute the formal structure of philosophy of identity with the help of these redefined terms. It is easy to overlook this moment of the metacritique since Marx insists that “real,” natural subjects must have “real,” natural objects. This seems to imply that objects and subjects are things standing in external relations. But the concept of “thinghood” is inadequate to grasp the essence of natural being.³⁵ Despite the mutual externality of real subjects and objects his remarks seem to imply, Marx goes on to reconstruct their relations in terms modeled on identity philosophy. Michel Henry notes, “the structure of the proletariat appears as the structure of consciousness itself such as this is understood in German metaphysics.”³⁶

In this second phase Marx revises the concepts of need and reason to overcome their antinomic formulation in political philosophy. This revision consists in transferring the formal attributes of reason to need. In Hegel, reason is self-reflective, it mediates itself in the course of its own self-development in history; again, for Hegel reason is also universal, both in the narrow sense that its ethical postulates apply equally to all, but also in the broader sense that its unconditioned categories apply to the whole of reality. The unity of subject and object is the foundation of this concept of rationality, the essential demand of reason that establishes reason’s imperium. Marx transfers these determinations of rationality wholesale onto “man.” And since “man” in Marx’s sense is a being of need, need no longer appears as the irrational content of a formalistic rationality, but is itself charged with the functions of rationality.

For Marx the philosophical subject is now a natural being, man. As such, this subject encounters its object, nature, in a natural way, through need. The ontologically primordial sphere is not that of natural science, in which external relations prevail, but the sphere of need in which subject and object are essentially related. Bertell Ollman suggests the concept of “internal relations” to describe this.³⁷ Marx writes, “As a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being [man] is a suffering, conditioned and limited human being, like animals and plants. The objects of his drives exist outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his faculties.”³⁸ Again: “the need of an object is the most evident and irrefutable proof that the object belongs to my nature and that the existence of the object for me and its property are the property appropriate to my being.”³⁹

Were this simply a statement about human physiology it would of course be completely banal. It is no news that hunger requires food. However, Marx is attempting to make a statement about being in general, about ontology, and not just about the empirical being of the human animal. He explicitly affirms that this is an ontological relation, and not merely a fact of physiology. He writes, “Man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are true ontological affirmations of being (nature).”⁴⁰ What is more, he proposes a theory of the historical evolution of human need that indicates that it is not only hunger that is objectified in food, but the higher needs of the social human being that find their essential object in the natural world. In this sense the interdependence of man and nature takes on a larger metaphysical significance that I will call their “participatory identity.” Hence Marx says that “Nature is the inorganic body of man,” to express the idea that man and nature, subject and object, are indissolubly joined.⁴¹

Now too the labor through which need is satisfied will also appear as an ontological category in the forms of philosophy of identity. Labor is in fact the actual process of unifying subject and object, man and nature. Here Marx passes from the abstract and immediate positing of the unity of subject and object in need, to a reflective, mediated unity through the production of the object of need by the subject in labor.

Such philosophically reconceptualized labor Marx calls “objectification,” the natural activity of the naturalized subject, man. When human beings transform their environment through labor, they “objectify” their needs and faculties. This they must do, for as a natural being man must “express and authenticate himself in being as well as in thought,”⁴² The result is a “humanized” nature within which human beings can fulfill themselves and unfold their potentialities in a continuous process of self- and world-creation. Human existence is confirmed and universalized in the transformed objects of labor and, by extension, in all of being. Marx writes,

It is only when objective reality everywhere becomes for man in society the reality of human faculties, human reality, and the reality of his own faculties, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself. The objects then confirm and realize his individuality. They are his own objects, which is to say that man himself becomes the object.⁴³

Marx uses the word “human” here in an emphatic sense: “Man is not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being … Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly.”⁴⁴ To be human in this sense is to be social. Thus the humanization of nature reveals social dimensions of objects hidden to alienated man. The full reality of nature is known to an attuned observer, not to “crude” perception. The “non-musical ear” knows less than the musical ear.⁴⁵ It misses the truth of what it hears. Marx thus distinguishes between a merely animal relation to the world and the revealing of a meaning. It is in the recognition of meaning that subject and object are united. “Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.”⁴⁶

Finally, the third phase of the metacritique derives philosophical and political consequences from these formulations, consequences that appear once the philosophical terms have been reconstituted in history where they can be set in motion through social practice. At stake here is the meaning of the concept of “alienation” which, Marx argues, stands in contradiction to the “human essence.” Hegel’s concept of alienation is now revised to mean a specific, degraded type of objectification in which the transformed world turns around and dominates its creators instead of serving them. The individuals cannot recognize or develop themselves through alienated objects, but are crushed and oppressed by them. Because alienation, as “loss of the object,” is not just a social category but also a determination of being, it recapitulates the antinomy of subject and object. In alienation, subject and object stand in conflict, as opposed principles requiring mediation.

Identity philosophy demands that the object appear to speculation as a product of the subject, but for Marx this production process is now a real one, occurring in history and not in the head of a philosopher. Alienation is a problem for philosophy, splitting subject from object, but not a problem that could be solved in pure thought through a speculative construction. Marx notes that “the medium through which alienation occurs is itself a practical one.”⁴⁷ Its transcendence will also have to be practical, requiring a reversal in the relations between human beings and the products of their labor. This then is the “real” alienation that must be overcome and that Hegel confounds with objectivity itself.

Philosophy now appears not as a means through which a subject–object unity is achieved, but rather as the reflection in thought of their unification through labor. If this unity is obstructed by alienation, philosophy too will fail. Thus where Hegel saw actual alienation, alienation in Marx’s sense of the term, as the phenomenal form of the alienation of self-consciousness, Marx reverses the terms and defines the alienation of self-consciousness as the phenomenal form of actual alienation.

This alienation of self-consciousness consists in religion and idealistic philosophy. Human beings create a world through labor that dominates and dispossesses them; in thought too the products of the mind become dominating powers. The spiritual and intellectual struggle to understand alienation gives rise to myths and speculative constructions. The individuals rationalize their powerlessness and learn to accept its inevitability as a positive good, “the rose in the cross of the present.”⁴⁸ In Hegel this form of artificial reconciliation with alienation nevertheless points toward the solution by mythologizing the actual unity of subject and object in labor.

Such alienated thought, Marx believes, cannot resolve its own antinomies. The concept of reason cannot be founded so long as alienation is immediately accepted in reality. It is the fact that philosophy remains in immediacy, that its transcendence of alienation takes place merely in thought and not in real life, that is responsible for the turn toward a supra-sensible reality. But if the overcoming of alienation in practice is essential to the liberation of reason from theological myths, then revolution itself is a methodological necessity for philosophy.

A characteristic theory–practice relation now emerges, similar to that which Lukács establishes in his early Marxist work. If theory attempts to overcome alienation in pure thought, it will fall into various secularized forms of religion. Yet alienation is the obstacle that must be overcome in order to found reason, for to accept it means to fail to unite subject and object, to demonstrate the production of the latter by the former. Thus theory can found itself only by passing into practice to destroy alienation in reality. Marx writes:

It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely philosophical problem.⁴⁹

The purpose of theory is to provide the proletariat with the “intellectual arms” it needs to solve not only its own problems but those of philosophy as well. No longer does theory appear as the real subject of this process, representing rational form to the proletariat, which latter, as mere need or factical content, is a “passive,” “material” base. Rather, the proletariat’s needs are rational in the sense that they reveal the truth of nature. The contradictions the proletariat experiences in its existence are not accidentally related to the contradictions of philosophy, but are one and the same. Theory and practice have been united.

In reaching this conclusion Marx finally derives a wholly new ground for revolution: the ultimate demand of reason is rationality; revolution alone can satisfy this demand by resolving the antinomies of philosophy. If this is true, then reason itself requires revolution, and every rational individual should lend a hand.