Marx and Laozi: A Dialectical Synthesis 3031409817, 9783031409813

Citation preview

Marx and Laozi A Dialectical Synthesis ja m e s c h a m be r s

Marx and Laozi

James Chambers

Marx and Laozi A Dialectical Synthesis

James Chambers Department of Philosophy Hebei University Baoding, Hebei, China

ISBN 978-3-031-40980-6    ISBN 978-3-031-40981-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Note on Citations of Hegel and Marx and Engels’s Primary Texts

 egel’s, primary texts are cited with abbreviated titles; Hegel quotes cite H the abbreviated title of the translation of the text followed by volume and page number in G. W. F. Hegel. Werke in 20 Bänden (W), ed. Moldenhauer and Michel, 20 vols and index (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71). Here is an example of a Hegel citation from this book: “It is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite” (SL.I:149/W5:165). In this citation “SL.I” refers to A. V. Miller’s translation of Hegel’s Science of Logic, “I” refers to volume one and “149” is the page number of the quote; “W5” refers to volume five of Hegel’s Werke in 20 Bänden and 165 is its page number. A list of abbreviations of the titles of the translations cited in each chapter is given in an endnote in each chapter. Details for translations of Hegel’s works are given in full in the chapter references. Marx and Engels quotes cite the English abbreviation of work title followed by volume number and page of Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) 50 vols (Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1975–2005) followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) 48 vols (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). An example of a Marx and Engels quote from this book is presented here: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (MCP-­ MECW6:482/MEW4:462). Here “MCP” refers to the Manifesto of the Communist Party,  “MECW6” refers to volume six of Marx and Engels Collected Works, and “482” refers to the page number of this quote; v

vi 

Note on Citations of Hegel and Marx and Engels’s Primary Texts

“MEW4” refers to volume four of Marx-Engels Werke and in this German version the quote appears on page “462”. A list of abbreviations of the translations with their full titles cited in each chapter is given in an endnote in each chapter. Doubt has been cast upon the authorship of much of the contents of books of Hegel’s Lectures, which this book cites extensively. The book tries to base its main theses about Hegel upon ideas found in Hegel’s major works. Generally citations of this book involving Hegel’s Lectures use sections which are not disputed; however, disputed sections are also cited, and the book does not contain specific references to highlight these distinctions. The book has been written with a broad respect for the hermeneutic tradition which has developed around Hegel’s Lectures whether or not the pen was wielded by Hegel’s own hand on every occasion. I do not subscribe to the view that Hegel should be read as if his words were exclusively written by his own pen. I think this is a comparably sympathetic way to treat a thinker whose idea of Spirit is both expressed through individuals and is bigger than any individual author. This reading enjoys degrees of latitude in assigning authenticity to Hegel’s writings; certain words in certain parts of certain works are more central than others. Recent research from the Marx-Engels-­Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project has cast the MECW and MEW titles of the Economic and Philosophic Notebooks of 1844/Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (EPM) and the German Ideology (GI) into doubt. These are now thought to be composites of disparate fragments pieced together long after Marx and Engels had died. Nevertheless, in this book I will continue to use the old names as this conforms to the titles used in the books I am citing. No doubt has been cast upon the authorship of the contents of these works and the content.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s editor Brendan George for his generosity and patience in guiding me through the publication process. I am very grateful to the editorial project manager Eliana Rangel who gave me a crucial extension to finish this book. Raghupathy Kalyanaraman, the project coordinator, has been very helpful in addressing my queries. The help of Nirmal Kumar and all the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan was invaluable in getting the citations and references into a readable condition. I would like to thank Zhang Yanjing (张燕京), the head of the Department of Philosophy at Hebei University, for giving me time off work to complete this book. I would like to thank Cheng Zhihua (程志华), the supervisor of my PhD, for his guidance during the composition of the earliest version of this book. I would like to thank my parents, brother, and sister for their encouragement throughout the writing process. I would like to thank my wife for everything and my children for making things interesting.

vii

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Reading  Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi  3 Hegel   4 Marx   5 Laozi  15 Contrary Reading Strategies of Marx and Laozi   18 References  22 2 Marx  and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments to Predicaments of Social Life 25 Revitalizing Laozi, Idealism and Materialism, Universalism   28 Dialectics and Synthesis   31 Synthesis of Science and Aesthetics   39 References  47 Part II Hegel’s Idealism  49 3 Hegel’s  Metaphilosophy of Idealism 51 Idealism and the Fear of Change   52 Hegel’s Definition of Idealism   58 ix

x Contents

Stern’s Conceptual Realism   58 The Definition’s Overlooked Metaphilosophical Insight   60 Stern Against the Mentalistic Interpretation   63 The Infinite Encompasses the Finite and the Ideal   69 Dialectical Definition of the Ideal   70 Metatheology of Idealism   71 Metatheology of the Ideal and Protestant Orthodoxy   74 Mind and World Identity   78 Absolute Idealism as Metaphilosophy   81 Conclusion  82 References  88 Part III Hegel’s Confrontation with Laozi  91 4 Hegel’s  Interpretation of Laozi 93 Hegel’s Idealist Criterion for Philosophy   94 A Brief History of Modern Interpretations of Laozi’s Dao   94 Hegel’s Eurocentric Bias  100 Hegel’s Laozi  103 Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi Was Mistaken  108 References 123 5 An  Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi127 Laozi’s Philosophy in Chapter 1  127 Lines 1, 2, 3 & 4: Non-conceptual Dao: Quasi-­Explanation of the Determinate  128 Lines 5 & 6: Background/Foreground, Indeterminate/ Determinate, and the Nameless/Named Opposition  130 Line 8: Laozi on Desire, Boundaries, and Concepts  140 Line 7: Knowing Without Desire as Absolute Mimesis  143 Lines 9&10: Unity in Opposition  157 Lines 11–13: Quasi-materialist Ontology of Mystery  157 Conclusion 165 References 177

 Contents 

xi

Part IV Wuwei and Praxis: Aesthetic Mimetic and Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 183 6 Wuzhi  and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment of Concepts185 Refuting Hegel’s Idealism  185 Laozi’s Aesthetics of the Finite: The Wuwei Epistemic Model  202 References 216 7 Praxis:  Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts219 Marx and Epicurus: Mereology of Materialism  219 Marx and Feuerbach  226 Marx’s Science of Concepts and Praxis  228 Praxis and the Materialist Theory of History  234 References 247 Part V Dialectics of Materialism and Wu 249 8 Social  Ontology of Materialism and Idealism251 Colletti Versus Smith  253 Hegel Cancelling Out the Independence of Matter  255 Smith’s List of Ways Hegel Did Not Cancel Out the Finite  258 Hegel’s Ontology of Method Versus Marx’s  260 The Principle of Identity and Noncontradiction in Hegel and Marx  267 Reification of Universals in Hegel  268 The Transition from Essence to Notion and the Idealism of Hegel’s Concrete Universal  270 Marx’s Aufhebung of the Idealism of Hegel’s Concrete Universal 276 References 285 9 M  aterialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu289 Marx’s Materialist Concrete Universal  289 The Problem of Idealist/Absolute Internal Relations  290

xii Contents

Brien’s List of Theses of Internal Relations  302 The Abstract Universal and the Concrete Universal  304 The Empirical Derivation of the Categories  306 The Conditional Nature of Tendencies  307 The Concrete Universal of Capitalism and the Concrete Universal of Communism  309 Wu Metaphysics and the Concrete Universal  311 References 318 Part VI Marx and Laozi: Ethics 321 10 Marx  and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms323 The Ergon Argument  324 Marx’s Ergon Argument  325 Capitalism as a Parasite  334 The Neglected Tendency of Naturalism and Laozi’s Anti-­ humanism 337 The Ethics of De: Anti-humanist Naturalism  340 The Aesthetic Politics of De  345 References 358 11 Marx  and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism361 The Rhetorical Tendency Against Ethics in Marx  361 Justice and Ethics  363 Two Tendencies of Thought on Morality in Marx and Laozi  366 Ideology and Laozi’s Criticism of Desire-Side Morality  369 References 389 12 Marx  and Laozi: Means and Ends391 Marx’s and Laozi’s Ecological Naturalism  391 Laozi’s Primitivism Versus Marx’s Futurism  397 Laozi and the Criticism of Capitalism  406

 Contents 

xiii

Marx’s Anti-utopianism and the Dichotomy of Consequentialist Politics Verses Free Labour: The Reunification of Means and Ends  408 References 419 Part VII Conclusion 421 13 C  onclusion423 Experiment and Memory  423 The Dialectical Synthesis  426 References 434 I ndex437

List of Figures

Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

White Dominant Yinyang Black Dominant Yinyang

424 430

xv

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Chapter 1 translation Table 4.2 1 Oppositions

109 109

xvii

Part I Introduction

1 Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Notre Jeunesse, 1910 Charles Péguy

Some readers may be surprised to learn that despite this book’s unusual title, its topic is not without precedent. Karl Marx and Laozi have been thought together for more than a century, most notably in China. There have been several noteworthy attempts to place Laozi firmly in the revolutionary materialist camp. Perhaps the most historically influential thinker to combine Marx and Laozi is Li Dazhao, cofounder of the Chinese communist party and mentor to the young Mao Zedong. Li was a committed Daoist before and after his conversion to Marxism and tried to practice the combination of the two doctrines in his political life (Li Dazhao 2002). Through his indelible influence on the ideological development of China, subtle Daoist undercurrents pervade much Chinese Marxist thought. Li Dazhao found numerous points of contact and compatibility between the two doctrines, some of which will be explored here. Yet Li did not expound upon theoretical links and divergences between Laozi and Marx directly or in detail. Scholars who did attempt this include Feng Youlan (2006) with his lifelong efforts to articulate Dao © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_1

3

4 

J. Chambers

in terms of Marxist categories, and Yang Xingxun (1950) with his materialist reading. Yet, on the whole, these studies have not strayed far beyond exegesis and into topics of more general philosophical concern. The two doctrines have not yet received explicit, systematic, book-length combination before this one. This is not a mere  work of exegesis. It is only about the history  of thought indirectly; it is not a history book. It is about ways of reading, but it is not a book about the method of hermeneutics. Rather, it is a book which employs distinct strategies in interpreting past philosophy in order to put forward a new position. Still, the book’s case stands or falls with its interpretations of Hegel, Marx and Laozi, so for clarity and fairness it is germane to begin with a brief introduction to the ways in which it interprets these three.

Hegel There are not two but three main characters of this book, one of whom is its antagonist who haunts it as both its master and pariah and who is not in the title; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. There can be no discussion of Marx without discussion of him. This book will introduce Laozi as mediating the emergence of scientific materialism, and Marx’s pivotal role in its development, against Hegel’s perfection of its rival, that glorious and monstrous school of thought—idealism. Like Karl  Marx and Friedrich Engels, I esteem this “mighty thinker” (C-MECW35:19/MEW23:27)1 and “titanic old fellow” (EL-­MECW42:177/MEW31:468). It is convenient that Hegel dealt with and criticized Laozi for this criticism, its flaws, serves as the entry point to a dialogue, or crucial lack thereof, between Marx and Laozi that this book will entertain. I read Marx as essentially meditating upon and applying Hegel’s insights in scientific socialism and as I am putting Laozi to work for Marx my reading of Laozi is also inevitably oriented around Hegel. Laozi and Marx will be read as dialectical thinkers and their dialectics will be derived from and counterpoised to Hegel’s. So, Hegel operates as a kind of black hole around which the book’s argument orbits. A traditionalist interpretation of Hegel will be argued for throughout. This is both the most useful interpretation for the traditionalist interpretation

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

5

of Marx that follows it and I believe the best way of interpreting Hegel as a philosopher in the way he understood philosophy. This is an objective idealist, realist understanding of Hegel. This reading has found a Hegel who has already waded through the morass of metaphilosophical Kantian doubt which mired the analytical school’s understanding of Hegel in the late twentieth century. The tide decisively turned against that reading at the turn of this century. I have found that, despite my expectations setting out, this book is more about Hegel than anyone else. I have come to agree with Foucault that this happens to everyone who does any research far enough, even though most do not notice it.

Marx All of Marx’s works must be read as addressing specific matters at hand in the particular historical struggles that he was engaged in when they were written. Marx was capable of the profoundest scientific thought because he was engaged in a political movement which ceaselessly brought new and complex challenges, bringing the best out of his intellect. Historicism (Vico’s naturalized historicism) is critical in interpreting Marx and Marx’s philosophy is itself a kind of historicism. Given that this whole book is an exploration of a materialist doctrine of Marx counterpoised to an idealist doctrine of Hegel, I cannot anticipate the results of what follow by giving definitions of materialism and idealism at this point. However, some account of the broad outlines of what follows is possible here. I warn the reader in advance that it involves introducing new terms which I cannot attempt any explanation of until later. I mean, roughly the same thing by “materialism” as Engels and Vladimir Lenin meant in their references to it. Lenin says “the fundamental premise of materialism is the recognition of the external world, of the existence of things outside and independent of our mind … for materialism, the object exists independently of the subject and is reflected more or less adequately in the subject’s mind …” (1962, 286). This characterization of materialism has been dismissed as trivial as it is too open-­ ended, for even Hegel’s idealism can be interpreted to agree with it (Žižek and Woodard 2011, 407). However, this dismissal of the Lenin’s meaning

6 

J. Chambers

grossly underestimates the significance of Lenin’s independence claim for matter. This can be brought out by reference to Engels’ preferred characterization of materialism in terms of primacy: “those who assert the primacy of spirit to nature … comprise the camp of idealism …. The others who regarded nature as primary belong to the various schools of materialism” (LF-MECW26:MEW21:259–307). Engels’ and Lenin’s formulations are roughly equivalent in the sense that in Engels’ usage of “primary” what is primary relative to another thing can exist without that other thing. However, there is more to it. The first chapter of this book will argue indirectly, through its explanation of Hegel’s idealism, that to assert the ontological independence of the object from the subject’s mind implicitly involves the assertion of the ontological primacy of the category of the finite over the infinite. For Hegel’s idealism’s claim of the primacy of spirit is derived from the claim of the primacy of the infinite over the finite. This latter claim is connected to the claim that the subject’s mind is part of the extended mind of universal Spirit. In this sense the object/matter in no sense can be said to enjoy independence from it. Elaborating the idealism/materialism controversy in this way will show materialism under Lenin’s characterization as a non-trivial exception to a pervasive idealist tendency in the history of philosophy, much of which has erroneously characterized itself as materialist, or at least not idealist in Hegel’s sense, insofar as it implicitly rests upon the primacy of the infinite claim. The materialism that emerges from the dialectical rejection of the primacy of the infinite claim of idealism is a realist process ontology in asserting reality exists independent of consciousness, that there is nothing in the world but matter in motion, there are real natures or essences inherent in things which make them nonreducable to “simples”, seeing consciousness as matter operating at its most complex level (Sayers 1985, xv). Nature has primacy over mind, and physics over biology, biology over social economic circumstances both in terms of chronology and in terms of the conditioning of human life. This materialism denies that experience is constructed by the subject or the subject-object nexus because of the fundamental element of passivity in experience: conditions imposed upon humans and not created by their mode of cognition (Timpanaro 1985, 34).

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

7

Despite its seeming naivety this doctrine is informed by Alfred Schmidt’s criticism of materialism’s ontological component (1971). Schmidt’s criticism of the ontological doctrine of materialism claims that Marx and Engels explicitly rejected the very idea of “matter as such” as an abstraction that falls outside of the practical contexts in which such words must fall if they can be said to have meaning. Humans, according to Marx deal with matter only in its determinate forms in the contexts of specific problems, that is, particular things; this hammer in carpentry, that equation in mathematics, those quarks in physics and so on. Yet, Marx’s stance on this issue does not imply an opposition to ontological materialism, a different issue. Schmidt fails to appreciate that the claim that there is no reality outside of sociolinguistic contexts is an ontological claim (idealism), the claim that there is such a reality that falls beyond the human realm of meanings is another ontological claim (materialism). These are exhaustive, alternative, ontological implications of Marx’s claim about praxis-oriented meaning that are unavoidable except by fiat—a stopgap to thought. With these two claims either sociolinguistic context is ultimately real or something else is. The only way in which Marx can be construed as claiming that matter as such is a meaningless abstraction is if he is construed as also making one of these ontological claims. In this book Marx is interpreted as making the latter claim. Schmidt attempts to sit on the fence in a Kantian fashion but without Kant’s justification (which Hegel refuted anyway), Marx’s or anyone else’s. That is, he has attempted the stopgap to thought by fiat. As for Schmidt’s further assertions that Engels breaks his own rule in trying to talk of nature in-itself apart from human praxis in The Dialectics of Nature I note that Schmidt has failed to appreciate Marx’s praxis-oriented theory of meaning in no way precludes discussion of reality in itself apart from social praxis and that to think it does is to commit to the antirealist doctrine Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism (2009, 36), which this book’s realist interpretation of materialism opposes. Correlationism asserts that the real is accessible only as a correlation to human thought. A practical context for discussing the nature of reality independent of human purposes already is a praxis-oriented field of enquiry. Praxis-oriented meaning is based upon the idea that only the concrete and finite are real and thus can carry meaning. This does not preclude talking in a general way about

8 

J. Chambers

matter, it just precludes talk of pure matter as such as an abstract universal. Paradoxically, saying that matter as such does not exist commits one to speaking about matter as such. To say that one cannot speak about matter as such is to contradict oneself in the same sentence. To assert that dialectics can only be present where there is consciousness is to mistakenly assert the necessity of consciousness for subjecthood, which is evidently not what Marx thinks because Feuerbach explains self-consciousness as a reflection of the conscious agent’s ability to treat the object as a subject with its own identity and perspective and Marx follows him in this (Wood 1981, 215). Further if Engels is to be charged with committing an error in talking of matter in this way by Schmidt then Schmidt must also concede that Marx makes exactly the same “error” in Capital when, for example, he explicitly applies dialectics to physical circumstances without reference to the narrow confines of Schmidt’s notion of praxis when discussing the dialectics of the elliptical motion of planets (C-MECW 35:113/MEW23:118–119). Most of this book deals with metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical issues on a very high level of abstraction. Every part of it invites further elucidation. There is a worthy case to be made that all of this book’s highly abstract explorations depart too far from Marx’s central concerns. Marx “is a somatic materialist whose starting point is active, sensuous, practical human life. He is not concerned with ontological materialism, in the sense of asking what the world is made of, and would doubtless have dismissed the issue as idly metaphysical. He had a brisk way with what he saw as fancy ideas. Like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Marx was a philosopher with a deep-seated scorn for philosophising” (Eagleton 2017, 61). I’m sorry to say that this book contains an array of “fancy ideas.” However, I believe Marx’s scorn for philosophizing had more to do with his political priorities, respect for the openness of speculation, and wish to disassociate himself from fields dominated in his day by idealists, than any denial of its meaning and necessity in system-building.2 Marx actually wrote Capital for literate workers unencumbered by metaphysical baggage, not navel gazing university professors. However, the book is a scientific treatise and as the critique of its methodology has extended through history,  questions of its theoretical merits have increasingly brought the “idly metaphysical” issue to the fore. If Marx has derived

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

9

features of his theories from Hegel and Aristotle there is, ultimately, no way of avoiding metaphysical issues; for Hegel and Aristotle forged all of their ideas in the furnace of metaphysical issues. Far from having a scorn for philosophizing, these two had an absolute mania for it! Perhaps Marx’s distaste for this speculation was, partially the result of a satisfaction with the handiwork of these master craftsmen. Marx believed that a practical application of Aristotelian and Hegelian ideas in theory on concrete social conditions would serve as a more effective demonstration of their strengths and weaknesses than critiquing these metaphysical ideas directly. In this he was correct; insofar as Marx’s methodology in his theory of history, of which Capital and its completion of the labour theory of value are the crowning achievements, rested upon the foundation of ontological materialism, the power of this theory of history legitimizes that ontological foundation. Marxism’s praxis-epistemology is not a foundationalist doctrine even if some components are more foundational than others. Yet even though Marx was correct about application of theory as the most effective demonstration of metaphysical/methodological foundations, this does not render a direct consideration of these issues redundant. This is what Engels must have felt when he developed “fancy ideas.” Besides, it is not as if Marx avoided directly confronting these issues in all his writings; Marx’s Doctoral Thesis, with its copious accompanying notebooks on the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, have Marx himself displaying the very opposite of “a brisk way” with ontological materialism. Later chapters of this book will show that ideas of an “idly metaphysical” nature worked out there underlie methodological features of Capital. Marx expressed the wish to write a book on dialectics on a couple of occasions (Kangal 2020, 108). Marx’s failure to produce this piece could not be accounted for simply by reference to a hostility to metaphysics as such a hostility would have prevented him from  entertaining the desire to write that work in the first place. This book accords similar Marxist authority to Engels’s words as it does to those of Marx. Of course, it is acknowledged that the two were different people with different ideas and that both made problematic and ill-­formed contributions to their own theory. It is equally one-sided to attribute utter perfection or wrongheadedness to either. The two had different foci; Marx worked on the materialist theory of history and

10 

J. Chambers

“Engels took greater account than Marx of the cosmic setting against which human history unfolds” (Timpanaro 1985, 69). The result is that Engels has more to say about strictly ontological matters than Marx and the book will have recourse to appeal to Engel’s authority where relevant. Attempts to separate Marx and Engels and denigrate Engels are a common trait of western philosophy. Tom Rockmore, a tenacious opponent of Engels admits his motivations in rescuing Marx—the thinker—from Marxism—the political movement inspired by Marx’s ideas (2000) as if somehow Marx’s works exist in two mutually independent spheres. This idea assaults perhaps the least controversial fact about Marx: that he was a social activist and that his writings were always oriented to his politics. This amounts to an attempted character assassination of both Engels and Marx. Rockmore is making an old move of many western Marxists, he is just more honest than most. Like all of them his attempt fails (or succeeds) because Rockmore’s safe Marx is either fundamentally mistaken or not saying anything interesting. A Marx defanged and safe for bourgeois academics to handle is a dead Marx. This book will try to keep the views of Marx and Engels as close together as they tried to keep their views in life. Marx was an irascible and independent-minded man but somehow his intellectual partnership with Engels survived and thrived through decades of bitter infighting in the German émigré community. Without even going into the complex intertwining of their interests and writings,3 this biographical fact about Marx and Engels alone proves an unusually profound agreement between the two men. There is, quite simply, no remotely equivalent political and intellectual partnership of such scope, depth, brilliance, and length of time in world history. The thesis that these two collaborated so well and yet fundamentally disagreed on key issues, must accompany the theses of either profound mutual misunderstanding or deception (arguably the greatest deception of all time). Deception is easily disproven by their private correspondence as it includes details of great intimacy, always with sentiments of deep friendship, in a mixture of European languages which only the two friends could read fluently. It is true that not every letter has been saved and some of the letters which have been lost may have contained conflicts and criticism, but such speculation has no bearing on the contents of the letters (the vast

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

11

majority) which have survived. In regards to Engels’ greater attentiveness to new developments in the natural sciences, culture and politics Marx commented: “1. I’m always late off the mark with everything, and 2. I invariably follow in your footsteps [ML-MECW41:546/MEW30:418].” Some have argued that Marx only said such things to flatter Engels, his chief financial backer (Carver 1989, 76). Yet if Marx is simply lying when he says this, why should we find it in complete accord with the intellectual development and theoretical output of the two? The partisans of the Marx against Engels reading are unperturbed by the lack of historical evidence of disagreement in their lifetimes. Instead, they focus upon how the words of Marx and Engels are interpreted, assuming that they are able to identify points of opposition between Marx and Engels that these collaborators themselves were unable or unwilling to identify. Yet again there is little need to go into the theory of the controversy to undermine this: biographical facts alone indicate the erroneousness of this position simply because it relies upon the plausibility of the thesis that someone who never even met either Marx or Engels is somehow better at reading these coauthors than they were themselves, even though, Marx says in print, they “work[ed] to a common plan and after prior agreement” (HV-MECW17:114 MEW14:472).4 This is a prima facie absurd thesis and nothing has ever been said to cast doubt on this absurdity. Everyone who bothers to entangle himself or herself into this controversy agrees that Marx and Engels were discerning men of scholarly bent. How could such men miss the glaring oppositions on key issues that the advocates for the split find? Once the asinine charge that Marx and Engels deceived each other is done away with and the critics are left with the charge that they were unable to understand each other, knowing what we know about the two, the rational response is not to promote an alternative reading, attributing greater discernment to ourselves than Marx and Engels, but to abandon reading Marx and Engels altogether. If Marx could not make himself understood to his closest collaborator there should be no hope for anyone else. If Marx was too obscure for Engels, he must be too obscure for all of us. Such a reading might make for an interesting deconstructionist case of a more general nature worthy of a separate debate but this is not the case that the advocates of the Marx/Engels split are making. It would be far too generous

12 

J. Chambers

to say for Marx that he succeeded in making himself completely understood to his intended readership, the literate working class, on all the key issues; but he should be credited with making himself intelligible on major issues to more people than himself and a coterie of post-WWII intellectuals. Amongst these “more people” Engels has better claims to membership than anyone else on purely biographical grounds. Sticking to biographical grounds also has the merit of forcing the revisionists to fight where their cherished employment of equivocation can be of no tactical advantage, more rapidly exposing their jaundiced infidelity to historical record and the agenda of purveying canard against Marx and Engels. Certainly, strong cases have been made that Engels did indeed misunderstand Marx on theoretical matters of more than trifling importance, but in these cases, Marx also bares his share of the blame.5 It is too much to expect them to be able to read each others’ minds. Given the closeness of the partnership these are cases when Engels should not merely be flagged for misunderstanding or forgetting Marx, but for misunderstanding or forgetting his own contributions to theory. Despite this criticism of an ugly trend of the western Marxist tradition the book does have recourse to respectfully consider elements of the humanist strain of western Marxism. Humanist interpretations of Marx are now popular in western Marxism. Humanist interpretations are very diverse but there are some common themes they share consistent with the interpretation of Marx in this book. Humanist Marxism makes the human being its central value, rejecting any abstract notion like God, Reason or History, sectional interests like race or gender. It holds that humans produce concepts rather than having them imposed upon them by heaven or laws of nature. It explains abstractions like “Laws of History” or “Morality” in terms of social relations, rather than the other way around. It opposes the structuralist thesis that the efficacy of individual human wills in society is a mere reflection of impersonal social forces. At the same time, it does not deny the historical efficacy of those structures and collective agents. Humanism is an ideal of Marxism. Marx characterizes it as one side of the harmonious resolution of the destructive conflicts of class society which communism establishes. The young Marx characterized himself as a humanist (EPM-MECW3:298/MEW40:536).

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

13

Humanist interpretations of Marx emphasize continuity in the thought of Marx from early to late, they recognize that there is no off-canon Marx, particularly in regards to the early idea of alienation and the later idea of exploitation, even if some unpublished texts require more caution and context than others. Humanist interpretations assert the Hegelian influence on Marx. Humanist interpretations stress the ethical component of Marx’s theory. Humanist interpretations of Marx are also not afraid of the metaphysical aspects of the theory. Humanist interpretations recognize Marx’s employment of essentialism whilst understanding his historical reticence to use that term. They oppose the extremist interpretation of economic determinism in Marx’s theory of history. They oppose Kantian and positivistic readings of Marx. The main points of contention with humanist interpretations in this book are often themes they share with western Marxism more generally, these include their blanket condemnation of Soviet “Dialectical-­ Materialism” (sometimes called “Eastern”), with little theoretical merit as the differences they think they can find are invariably differences of emphasis—as they pretend Soviet Dialectical-Materialism is a monolithic interpretation whereas it is as internally diverse as humanist Marxism; blaming alleged failures of the Soviet Union on a dogmatic misinterpretation of Marx, which is again to willfully ignore the varieties of interpretation of Marx in the Soviet Union, in the quixotic attempt to completely disown any connection between Marx and what happened in that and in other officially Marxist states they disapprove of; a concomitant aversion to political strategy of any kind, that explains their blanket condemnation of soviet scholarship and general whimsy; this whimsy includes a wooly minded obsession with moralism, voluntarism and “human rights,” uncritically regurgitated from bourgeois ideology, which lends itself to political impotence; an eagerness they share with all western Marxists to reinterpret Marx’s theory of history in a way which goes too far in its attempts to downplay the materialist interpretation of the mode of production in Marx’s theory of history to the extent that it undermines Marxism’s claims to science; and antipathy to Engels amongst some of them that is at best theoretically unnecessary and seems borne out of

14 

J. Chambers

jealousy against a man who actually worked with Marx and was better at writing than they. I list these things acknowledging that no western Marxist or humanist Marxist holds all of the theses listed above. Rather a family relationship of shared strengths and weaknesses exists between them. This interpretation of Marx’s theory of history steers a middle course between humanist Marxist excesses of voluntarism and Second International determinism. My employment of contributions to Marx’s thought beyond the writings of Marx and Engels might warrant the alternative title of Laozi and Marxism. This should give pause to remember Marx’s famous lament that at any rate he did not consider himself a Marxist (ML-­ MECW46:353/MEW35:107). It is in fact true. Marxism is bigger than Marx, and Marx was also somehow bigger than Marxism. Nevertheless, the citations of this book in its interpretation will mainly be oriented around Marx’s own words. Yet, Marx’s system has proven to be the most fertile ground in the humanities research of the last century and the current century. The ideas he initiated and inspired have been developed in myriad directions. I credit Marx as their shared progenitor no matter how degenerate or distorted I consider some of the variants to be. So, I will attribute some important ideas to Marx even though I only find them implicit in his own writings. Sometimes they are explicit in the words of Engels, sometimes they have been developed many years later by other Marxist researchers (usually Adorno), sometimes they are my own interpretation. When I believe I have found clear differences and conflicts between interpreters of Marx and Marx himself I will usually point this out, but I still recognize the ideas of those interpreters to be contributing to the rich school of thought of Marxism. The most important supplemental materialist philosopher to develop the theme of the irreducibility of being to concepts, which is central to this work, is undoubtedly Theodor W. Adorno. Although his philosophy is supplemental to this book’s main philosophical figures and is incompatible with its thesis in places, the thesis this book develops would have been quite impossible without an appreciation for the profound contribution to materialist philosophy made by Adorno. At its best, this book is following in Adorno’s footsteps.

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

15

Laozi This book attempts to produce an interesting, consistent Laozi that can help the Marxist project. Laozi’s 5000-character classic has gone under a few titles, the most common of which is some variant of the Daodejing. This roughly translates as the “classic of Dao and De”, two of the text’s central terms. Older translations of the book use the Wade-Giles spelling rules and call it Tao Te Ching, Tao-te Ching and so forth. I will use modern pinyin. For ease of reading, I will compress these words and assign it a oneword title: the Daodejing. There has been a recent trend in the west of no longer referring to Laozi’s classic as the Daodejing but instead calling it the Laozi. While I sympathize with the reasoning behind this, I have had recourse to personify Laozi and talk about what he says in his book and it is clumsy to talk about the book and the person with the same name. I take the broader hermeneutic view that the Daodejing is part of a Daoist framework in which Laozi has more things to say and do than are to be found in the Daodejing alone. Myths about Laozi are mentioned a few times in this book. I have recourse to expressions like “Laozi says….” And it is for convenience of expression that I have stuck with the best-known title. HansGeorg Moeller has argued that personifying Laozi is a mistake of reading an explicitly “antihumanist” text in a “humanist” way (Moeller 2006, 153). He thinks it is wrong to personify Laozi and give him authorial identity and purpose partly because the book itself eschews identifying its author and intention. There is an implied contradiction of this method when Moeller reads consistency into the book. In this way it retains a kind of authorial integrity Moeller does not seem to recognize. Moeller has missed the trick of the importance of exploiting the paradox of referring to Laozi as a person when he does not exist. Laozi personified is a model for the dissolution of subject that is Laozi’s epistemic and ethical point. He is someone who has done it. He is someone who thus does not exist and this, paradoxically, makes personification germane. Laozi’s text’s historical origins mimic the metaphysical/cosmological thesis that we live in a worldless world, in which structures openly interact with relative identities and without a global order. Laozi and his text come from nowhere as an orphan.6 All Laozi citations in this book will use the D.  C. Lau 1963 translation—Tao Te Ching (1963). This is not because I believe this to be the best

16 

J. Chambers

translation. I think that there are many that are better than it in different respects. One of its biggest drawbacks is its translation of Dao as way, but it is easy for readers to make the substitution of “Dao” for “way” in their heads. One of the theses of this book will be that Laozi’s meaning shines through multiple interpretations, with no pre-set hierarchy of meanings. I believe that a commensurate reading to my own should be available from consulting most translations of the Daodejing as well as, of course, the original ancient Chinese versions. Readers of Laozi are afforded a great freedom to develop their own Laozi’s within certain undefinable boundaries. The choice of translation is therefore pretty arbitrary. Nevertheless, Lau’s translation has a couple of advantages over others; it is old and easily accessible and it is translated into English by a native Chinese speaking sinologist with a profound knowledge of ancient Chinese literature and philosophy. Lau was conversant in English as well as modern and ancient Chinese. I think the fact that he is translating the work of one of his ancestors, with whom he has maintained a deep cultural affection, lends authenticity to his words. The method of interpreting Laozi should be radically different to that for Marx, in fact opposed. The Daodejing was a pedagogical tool for application to different situations not a treatise to argue a particular case. The result is that the Daodejing is written as an open, meaning-generating book. New readers can mine it for new meanings with every reading. This comparatively open purpose of the Daodejing will be exploited to situate its arguments into contemporary philosophical problems in novel ways. The Daodejing’s terse and metaphorical language seems clearly inspired by the structure the ancient Chinese divination text Zhouyi (周易), which with later commentaries is now referred to as the Yijing (Wade-Giles—I Ching—易经), or Book of Changes. The Yijing was read by individuals and their diviners who used the esoteric remarks of each hexagram as a dialogical prompt. Transposing that reading method to the Daodejing would conceive it as a collection of aphorisms awaiting further elaboration from readers in a public forum. Each passage would be read by experts, who would then orally develop the meaning through discourse with students. That Laozi can be read with different purposes is a hermeneutic demand of the text. Unlike the Daodejing it is quite impossible to read the Yijing’s cryptic pronouncements without reference to the way the book was used and commentaries upon it. Given that the readings of

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

17

the Yijing were meant to apply directly to the persons and situations involved in the questions asked of it, the idea of a definitive explanation of any hexagram is absurd. That a content can still be extracted from the Daodejing without repeating the old reading method has deceived readers into thinking that they can extract the definitive meaning of the text from it. This is a mistake. Yet it is important not to make the opposite mistake of relativism in interpretation. Roger Ames and David Hall point out that even with this relative freedom, there are limits to what Laozi can be interpreted as saying; many sections of the text are quite unambiguous in their meaning and sometimes historical research can remove ambiguities (2003, 164). They, apply a “responsive participation” hermeneutics in relating the text and the world, which they have defined as a creative mirroring of the unique object (21, 24). This reading of Laozi owes a lot to Umberto Eco’s idea of the open text (1989). Open texts get read as fields of meaning stimulating the generation of new meanings through interaction with readers. Closed texts get read as strings of meaning following one unequivocal line. I read the Daodejing as a superlative example of an open text because it embodies the truth of the open text in form and content. One of the key messages of the Daodejing is that the openness of the empty space (wu) is fertile in producing new contents (wanwu). The Daodejing both articulates this truth and embodies it in its form through being an open text. It is important to note that a reading of the Daodejing compatible with idealist or mystic theories is possible, and perhaps easier. Yet the appeal of yet another idealist or mystic interpretation is limited to the appeal of those already overrepresented, erroneous doctrines. I am making the case that a more interesting, useful, and profound interpretation is materialist. The use of commentaries on the classics as a means to establish a new system of philosophy is common in the Chinese tradition of philosophical interpretation. Liu Xiaogan notes that Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, Zhu Xi, and Wang Fuzhi from ancient times and Mou Zongsan from modern times all do this. He mentions that this is a peculiar characteristic of Chinese philosophy in general but he does not consider why. Firstly, I think that the hermeneutic tradition of reading ancient Chinese classics was in an open forum of creative re-readings as stated above. By using the classics to make their own philosophies I think the line of philosophers

18 

J. Chambers

Liu Xiaogan (2006) is mentioning are adhering to the hermeneutic tradition of ancient Chinese philosophy at its source. I think this is partly a result of the peculiarly open nature of ancient Chinese texts in general. Whereas the five classics certainly invite a broader further interpretation and elaboration I argue that the Daodejing demands creative rereading. I think this is partly what Laozi means when he lauds keeping the people foolish in chapter 65. The possibility for creative solutions is maintained by removing the burden of past traditions and their learning.7 The Daodejing is not merely intentionally vague, it makes the fundamental vagueness at the root of reality its object. Vagueness is its subject matter not merely its means of communication. Of course, this absolutely contrasts with Western philosophy where clarity has always been both means and ends of philosophy. My reading of Laozi is an instance of, what Liu Xiaogan calls, reverse analogical interpretation—fan xiang ge yi. As someone steeped in the western philosophical tradition this is unavoidable for me. Despite its alien intellectual framework, I do not believe my interpretation conflicts with Laozi’s original meaning because I believe it is a hermeneutic demand of the text itself for readers’ to create their own Laozis. As with all books, the only way to reproduce its meaning without modification is to slavishly copy it word for word without omission or addition. Any explanation in other words is pro tanto a modification or even violation of the original meaning. However, in the case of the Daodejing the scope for modification without violation is much larger than in other texts. This will be argued further in the second chapter of this book. However, I rest my case on the extent to which my employment of it has been a success and not according to any divagating metaphilosophical standards. I will not be making the mistake of Scholasticus who thought to speculate on whether or not he would be able to swim before he ventured into the water.

Contrary Reading Strategies of Marx and Laozi In the senses above the modes of interpreting Marx and Laozi are completely opposite to each other. Marx’s works are inherently historical, made about and for their time of writing to address specific historical

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

19

problems from which we can extract historical scientific truths relevant to us today. The Daodejing is a deliberately open book made to generate new responses to new circumstances. While Marx’s work is directed to changing historical circumstances how he found them in his times the Daodejing is made to be applicable to all historical problems by abstracting the individual from the social forces of history in such a way as to guide social conduct in new situations regardless of their historical context. This is a profound contrast in itself for Marx’s historicism would oppose Laozi’s transcendentalism as unscientific—and indeed it is. One of the purposes of this book is to argue that such opposition (and there are many instances of such oppositions) can complement each other when Marx and Laozi are interpreted as taking two roads which lead away from the western philosophical tradition. Marx takes the road of science and Laozi takes the road of personal cultivation through harmony with surroundings. The transhistorical way of reading Laozi employed here rescues him from Marx’s historicist arguments against abstracting the concrete. Rather than reading Laozi as making metaphysical claims with application to all times, insofar as Laozi appears to do this he will be read through Marx, who also made universal claims from abstractions—such as historicism itself—that were mutually interdependent. Laozi’s transhistorical-­looking claims will only be transhistorical in the sense that they have the power to take on different meanings in different times so that they are always relevant through always changing to be applicable to historical circumstances.8 This book’s attention to Marx is not focused solely on Marx and Engels but involves an extended treatment of the broader philosophical tradition of Marx and Hegel. I cite secondary sources from the broader Marxist philosophical tradition, especially Adorno. It might seem then that to compliment this broader reading around Marxism my reading of Laozi would similarly extend out into the broader philosophical tradition of Daoism, mentioning its second most celebrated thinker Zhuangzi in particular. However, I do not deal with Zhuangzi’s contribution to Daoism in detail and Zhuangzi is not a major focus of the work, nor indeed is the philosophical/religious tradition of Daoism in general. I confine my Laozi research to the detailed focus on certain passages from Laozi and other secondary sources on them. Zhuangzi is mentioned, but only

20 

J. Chambers

insofar as he is relevant to my attempt to develop the ideas of Laozi, which I have found to be interesting enough on their own to merit an even more extended work than I have undertaken here. As a matter of fact, my focus on Laozi is extremely selective. I only focus on elaborating ideas I find in a few key chapters of the Daodejing. Whilst my interpretation of Laozi is focused on the minutia of short lines of text, such a treatment of the prolific writings of Marx or Hegel is impossible. This contrast in reading strategies contains a danger possibly bigger than that of the possible arbitrariness of comparison. The problem is that I must read the two thinkers in vastly different ways. The problems arising from this cannot be wholly resolved or dismissed. Again, I insist that I have not merely been compelled to apply different reading strategies, but that my two reading strategies are dialectically opposed. I think that for the reader this can occasionally lead to some feelings of incongruity and disorientation. However, I also believe that these massive shifts of reading tempo can be exhilarating, especially on those occasions when I believe I have accomplished the production of a sort of harmony between the thinkers. The strange parallels I believe I sometimes create in the best parts of the book between these thinkers are quite uncanny, but without that accompanying feeling of incongruity in other places that uncanny feeling is impossible. This is a new reading experience opportunity that I hope readers will come to savor in some of the later chapters. It has its disadvantages, but I believe that the advantages outweigh them. This book employs novel interpretations of both Laozi and Marx. Laozi will be interpreted in a way which is radically opposed to any mystical interpretation (the most popular). More precisely, the book will attempt to remain within Adorno’s epistemic precept that all epistemic contact with the object is necessarily conceptually mediated, that we have no privileged access to the given through meditation, pure sensation or passivity. This is undoubtedly a controversial way of interpreting Laozi. However, an interpretation of Laozi will be put forward specifically constructed to be resistant to Hegel’s well known (and I believe sound) refutation of immediacy. Also, a qualified understanding of Laozi’s ontological priority of 无 will be presented so as to avoid the pitfalls of the erroneous

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

21

idea that Hegel calls Pure Nothing in his refutation of Eastern philosophy (that I also believe to be sound and applicable to Buddhism amongst other eastern philosophical ontologies). The version of Marx’s materialism that I articulate in the thesis is intended to be in line with the familiar definitions and descriptions in the works of Engels and Lenin on this matter. The book combines these well-known formulas with an idea of the irreducibility of being to thought that is not completely novel and it will be explicitly connected to the thought of Marx as an epistemic first step.

Notes 1. Marx quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: C—Capital; HV—Herr Vogt; EL—Engels’ Letters; EPM—Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; ML—Marx’s Letters; G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. LF—Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

2. Terry Eagleton does actually balance the one-sidedness of his quoted remarks here later in the same book (89–90). 3. See Richard Sperl (2004). 4. This point is made all the stronger by the fact that the very existence of the book in in which this remark appears is an expression of the peculiar ­sensitivity Marx exhibited in regards to his reputation and the high regard with which Marx and Engels held it. 5. See Blackledge (2020). 6. On the historical controversy surrounding the identity of Laozi see Wu and Defoort (2017).

22 

J. Chambers

7. Du Daojian (1237–1318) said, “Laozi that the Han people discussed was Laozi of the Han dynasty; Laozi that the Jin discussed was Laozi of the Jin dynasty; and Laozi that the Tang and Song people discussed was Laozi of the Tang and Song dynasties” (Du 1988, 773). 8. This seems to be an idea Marx is meditating upon in his famous incomplete discussion of ancient Greek art in the Grundrisse (G-MECW28:47/ MEW42:45).

References Ames, R., and D. Hall. 2003. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books. Blackledge, P. 2020. Engels vs. Marx? Two Hundred Years of Frederick Engels. Monthly Review-An Independent Socialist Magazine 72 (1): 21–39. Carver, T. 1989. Friedrich Engels: His life and thought. London: Springer. Du, Daojian. 1988. Xunjing yuanzhi fahui. In Daozang. Vol. 12: Du, Daojian 杜道坚. 1988. The Original Purpose of Xuan Jing 玄经原旨发挥. In Daozang. Vol. 12. Beijing 北京: Wenwu Chubanshe 文物出版社. Eagleton, T. 2017. Materialism. Yale University Press. Eco, U. 1989. The open work. Harvard University Press. Feng Youlan 冯友兰. 2006. Feng Youlan discusses Laozi 冯友兰论老子. In Ten Experts Discuss Laozi 十家论老, ed. Hu Daojing 胡道静. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Renmin 上海人民. Kangal, K. 2020. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lau, Din Cheuk 刘殿爵, trans. 1963. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Lenin, V.I. 1962. Collected Works: Volume 14, 1908. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Li Dazhao. 2002. Spring. In New Asian Marxisms, ed. T.E. Barlow. Durham: Duke University Press. Marx, K., and F.  Engels, Marx-Engels Werke (MEW) 1956-2017. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Marx, K., and F.  Engels. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2009. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. R. Brassier, 36–37. London: Continuum.

1  Reading Strategies for Hegel, Marx, and Laozi 

23

Moeller, H.G. 2006. The Philosophy of the Daodejing. New  York: Columbia University Press. Péguy, C. 1957. Notre Jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard. Rockmore, T. 2000. On Recovering Marx after Marxism. Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (4): 95–106. Sayers, S. 1985. Reality and Reason Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Schmidt, A. 1971. The Concept of Nature in Marx. Trans. B.  Fowkes. London: NLB. Sperl, R. 2004. “Edition auf hohem Niveau”: zu den Grundsätzen der Marx-­ Engels-­Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Argument-Verlag. Timpanaro, S. 1985. On Materialism. London: Verso. Wood, A. 1981. Karl Marx. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wu, X, and C.  Defoort. 2017. Laozi Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporary Chinese Thought 48 (3): 111–114. Xiaogan, L. 2006. “Fanxiang Geyi” yu Zhongguo Zhexue Yanjiu de Kunjing–yi Laozi Zhidao de Quanshi Weili. (“Reverse Analogical Interpretation” and the Difficulties of Research in Chinese Philosophy: Taking Interpretation of Lao Zi’s Dao as an Example), in Zhongguo zhexue yu wenhua (Chinese Philosophy and Culture). Journal of Nanjing University (Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences) (2): 76–90. Yang Xingxun 杨兴顺. 1950. Древнекитайский Философ Лао-Цзы И Его Учение. Moscow: Издательство Академии Наук CCCP. Žižek, Slavoj, and Ben Woodard. 2011. Interview. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 406–416. Melbourne: re.press.

2 Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments to Predicaments of Social Life

The fear before setting out on attempting a combination between Laozi and Marx is that it is destined to failure as these two thinkers diverge so completely. One reason perhaps why Li Dazhao and others have not seen conflict between them is that they are considered to be simply too unrelated to one another. This book recognizes and attempts to account for this dissonance dialectically. The case being made here is that Marx as the philosopher scientist is complemented by Laozi as the philosopher artist and that the doctrine called scientific socialism benefits from the aesthetic sensibilities of Laozi’s philosophy. The book will make the case that the ontology, metaphysics and epistemology (and with it the approach to ethics) of the dialectical metaphysics Laozi presents in the Daodejing, in fundamental respects complements the materialism of Marx. This is undoubtedly a very controversial case to make, but if this strange idea has been made on any humble level and in any respect palatable to the reader by the end of the book, then the idea that Marx’s and Laozi’s research projects so greatly diverge and yet are mutually complementary will also become more palatable to the reader and the divergence itself will be explained. This would be an important accomplishment because it makes it possible to see a way that Marxism and Laozi contain important truths

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_2

25

26 

J. Chambers

worthy of devotion even when these two doctrines are considered as constituting two divergent, and comprehensive theories. That is, in this book Marx’s philosophy and Laozi’s will be interpreted in their broadest senses, as life projects; problematics to orient a life around and ways of addressing the predicament of human life. To this end both doctrines necessarily contain accounts of the way the world is and our place in it and thus contain ontologies, metaphysics, epistemologies, approaches to science and ethics. Laozi and Marx are presented here as producing doctrines on the foundational philosophical questions that fundamentally diverge whilst being mutually supportive of one another. Naturally, presenting Marxist and Laozi’s accounts of such foundational philosophical issues within one book requires missing out many of the most important details but this is an experimental work only making a general case. The only way that the two doctrines can be both comprehensive and divergent yet also mutually complementary is if the union the book presents here is a dialectical one. Human social life is dialectical in the sense that it is both scientifically comprehensible in Marxism and aesthetically comprehensible in Laozi. Human life involves these two incommensurate yet united approaches to predicaments. There is both the discursive conceptual side, made into a science by Marx, and the mimetic nonconceptual side explored by Laozi. These two can operate through each other. Nevertheless, humans are historical animals and the Daodejing neither comprehends history nor directs historical activity (in the sense of class war) because it is an ahistorical work. This is a component of aesthetic thinking and also the most important reason why Marxism’s project enjoys primacy. Taking seriously the connotations for ideology contained in Marx’s bombastic announcement from the Manifesto of the Communist Party that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (MCP-MECW6:482/MEW4:462),1 implies that Laozi’s contribution to history is as a tool of the oppressor or tool of the oppressed. Capitalism, like all class-riven modes of production interpolates everything in terms of the logic of its primary contradiction. Capitalism’s contradiction is that between capital and labor, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx’s science is claimed, by those partisans of the expression,2 to comprehend this struggle and be the ideology of the workers. Laozi’s doctrine will be put to work for this kind of Marxism in this book.

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

27

In this book science is meant in the strict sense of a more profound because materialist rendering of Hegel’s term Wissenschaft. For Marx’s theory of history, praxis and capitalism will be read as embodying a materialist application of the concrete universal. When understood as a science of social life Marxism is complete in itself. As science it is not supplemented or enriched by additional methodologies. It does not need anything Laozi has to offer. However, Marxism is only a science. It is not an aesthetics, nor does it pretend to be, although it does, undoubtedly include a theoretical orientation to art. These two are not the same and it is crucial for the thesis of this book to stress this point: even though the two overlap, philosophy of art does not artistic philosophy make. Laozi’s system as an aesthetics can make a contribution to completing an outlook of social life. In this book Laozi is not supplementing or adding anything to Marx. He is just saying some different things, which might be of some use to Marxism. Sometimes, particularly in metaphysics and epistemology, Laozi will be read as saying the things foundational to and similar to Marxist materialism but in a radically different way which opens up new possibilities for dialectical thinking. Other times Laozi will be read as talking about the affectivity of socialist thinking that are not part of science. Throughout the thesis care is taken to ensure that Laozi does not molest Marxism. Laozi will not be brought in to correct what Marx has said. Rather, he will be employed to help look at some familiar and some different questions in different ways that are relevant to Marxism. There is an irony of making Laozi into a tool to achieve certain ends, Marxist ends, and later discussion will reveal in detail this irony should not perturb. The basic reason is that Laozi is here read as aesthetically solving the problem of the oppression of goal-oriented activity. Marxism, the way this book presents it, scientifically comprehends and proposes a solution to this same problem in social/political practice. Marxism and Laozi help each other to the ends of overcoming the means/ends dichotomy. Laozi is thus not being diverted from his own ends, the attempt to overcome their separation from means, but helped along his way.

28 

J. Chambers

 evitalizing Laozi, Idealism R and Materialism, Universalism There are three basic purposes that can be achieved through this book’s experiment. Achieving them amounts to a justification of the project. The first is to revive Laozi studies in the twenty-first century, help make Laozi relevant to contemporary philosophical problems and especially the problems of Marxism and materialism. Reviving Laozi studies in twenty-first century philosophical discourse is part of the grander project of the Chinese intellectual revival. Excavating cultural resources from China’s ancient past and infusing them with the life of Marxism enriches China’s cultural treasures to the benefit of scholars and activists. This is an important task because the abstractness and apparent mysticism of the Daodejing has been an obstacle for scholars to apply Laozi’s teachings in contemporary settings. Laozi studies are, for the most part, esoteric and have not been brought into the “Chinese Dream.” Confucius, by contrast has been enjoying a revival in intellectual currents in Southeast Asia for several decades. A number of works explore the points of contact to be found between Confucius and Marx on communitarianism, for example, and others have made the point that the Chinese version of dialectical thought has profoundly enriched Marxism. This work breaks new ground by exploring the metaphysical and epistemic connection between Laozi and Marx on the question of materialism. This involves a creative rereading, by no means obvious on the surface of the text. But owing to the fragmentary and highly abstract nature of the Daodejing, Laozi’s classic is open to a very wide range of interpretations. This book will try to interpret Laozi in a way which does not obviously contradict the text, preserves a metaphysical and epistemological core, is coherent, philosophically interesting and resistant to some modern criticisms most notably Hegel’s. By outlining a version of Laozi’s philosophy in this way surprising parallels will emerge between Laozi and Marx. It will interpret the two as engaging in radically different but mutually supporting research projects. It is hoped that by situating Laozi in debate with Hegel’s idealism and drawing Marx into that debate that the book can achieve its second purpose, clarifying the meaning of idealism and materialism and making

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

29

them relevant to modern philosophy. So much recent scholarship in the last century has distorted these critical conceptual schemas that these days they have degenerated into caricatures of themselves. They are seen as obsolete, barren and useless. There is a contemporary disparagement of terms like idealism and materialism. Scholars have despaired that they are too hard to define and have abandoned them. Some have argued that idealism and materialism are too vague to employ as global terms across the whole philosophical spectrum without being dogmatic. The startling case my book makes is that idealism is indeed such a global term to Hegel which to him at least was completely fundamental and unproblematic. So uncompromising was his definition of idealism, explored in this book, that old and young Hegelians alike more or less took the meaning of the whole idealism/materialism controversy for granted and did not study it in-depth. The absence of discourse is not the result of the obscurity of the ideas involved but precisely the opposite. Unfortunately, this absence allowed later generations, with different priorities, to muddy the waters to the extent that now these terms are no longer considered useful. This book articulates a straightforward and nonproblematic definition of Hegel’s idealism, and with it Marx’s materialism, which is incomprehensible except in terms of the refutation of idealism. Yet it does so in such a way as to recognize that these doctrines and their contention are still fertile enough to produce new possibilities of research.3 One major reason why confusion reigns in modern philosophy in general and on the subject of the approach to ontology of Marx and Engels in particular, is that of the abandonment of the terms idealism and materialism. In his investigation of Engel’s Dialectics of Nature Kaan Kangal concludes that “the dialectical and materialist rejection of metaphysics and idealism has not been finalized…I fail to make any sense as to why these terms in circulation are taken for granted, without further questioning as to whether, and on what grounds, we, including Engels and Marx, are justified in employing the terms in the ways that we do…Given the dogmatic tendencies in the past debates, including the Engels controversy, it is perhaps now time to explore the old battlefields in ways other than the ones through which our forefathers did” (2020, 205–6). I have resolved to explore the old battlefields in a way as drastically unlike our forefathers did as I can in appealing to a thinker about as remote from

30 

J. Chambers

their discourse as possible. I argue that using Laozi to bring clarity to the nature of dialectics and materialism can show how useful and important idealism and materialism remain. This should help in diagnosing the many confusing errors of recent philosophy as well as identifying a few obscure progressive steps that are buried under so much polemic and confusion. Realizing this second purpose takes the book a long way in achieving its final main purpose, to promote and defend the notion of universalism and eastern philosophy’s contribution to it against the trend of pluralism in comparative studies. Pluralism is an intellectual trend that has accompanied the rise of postmodernism. Pluralism starts with the basic and reasonable claim that all truths are relative to their contexts and goes on to make the incoherent, bizarre and dangerous claim that different languages, cultural outlooks, thoughts and opinions are fundamentally incommensurate such that, what is true for one culture or people cannot be true for another. Such a way of thinking, while pretending to be the voice of tolerance in international discourse in actual fact stands behind the harmful “Clash of Civilizations” approach that accompanies imperialism. Pluralism appeared attractive to those who sought to resist western claims to hegemony of global cultural truth. Yet the colonialist attitude it resisted has actually been strengthened by it. It is still alive and well and will continue to thrive in philosophy until eastern philosophy can leave the comfort zone it has been assigned in its marginalization in esoteric internal dialogues. Situating Laozi in a western philosophical debate, using him to combat western idealist philosophy, and showing that Marx also has things to say which are relevant to this debate is one important way to resist the threat of pluralism and western cultural hegemony. By fighting pluralism and western-centric hegemony in philosophy this book tries to fight imperialism in theory. Achieving the first and second purposes of the book in itself should demonstrate the superiority of universalism. This does not mean that the interpretations of eastern philosophical categories which assign them a uniqueness independent of western philosophy are to be denied. This is merely to assert that philosophy, is a single discipline which is enriched immeasurably by global integration. Certain important eastern philosophical categories are not relevant to western philosophy, to the detriment of western philosophy

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

31

and vise versa. The universalist tendency in philosophy resists only the attempt to fence off these categories from each other with designated spheres of influence. So, it may be that the Chinese philosophical categories cannot be neatly incorporated into the western philosophy idealism-­ materialism debate. The question then is that of whether an ontology can be constructed without reference to it. I do not believe such ontology can be constructed. Insofar as eastern philosophy has pretentions of the completion and rigor an ontology entails, it is to the detriment of eastern philosophy insofar as it evades this central question. This is not a marginal question for peculiar tastes, but a driving question of global class struggle. Certainly, much interesting and valuable ontology can be done without reference to idealism and materialism, but it will not be rigorous or complete. To those who would argue that there is no Chinese philosophy and that the writings which have been identified as philosophical were misidentified, then whatever these works may contain, if they appear to say things pertaining to philosophy, they have now become unreadable and not worthy of scholarly attention. For today we live in a global world. Even China’s most reactionary chauvinist elements have rejected it. The categories of a by-no-means solely western philosophy discourse have penetrated into every field of the humanities everywhere. Sinology, or whatever the purists would like to call it, is unsalvageable. We cannot return to a world in which “pure” Chinese thought had not been probed by “foreign” ideas (no such world ever existed). These people are essentially arguing for their own subject’s redundancy. You can either say something translatable to everyone or say nothing: there is no pure sinology just as there are no private languages.

Dialectics and Synthesis So, strange compatibilities between Marx and Laozi will be argued for, but in what sense and to what extent can it be said that these constitute a dialectical synthesis? Chapter one of this thesis will address what I take to be Hegel’s conception of a dialectical synthesis, the hallmark of speculative thought, in more detail but the reader deserves a preliminary account of the dialectical synthesis this book attempts before proceeding further.

32 

J. Chambers

Hegel insists “everything is inherently contradictory”4 [Hegel’s italics] (SLII:439/W6:74). The dialectical synthesis is the “unity of determinations within their opposition” (Enc.I§82:131/W8:176). Applying this realization is an act of speculative thought: “It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists” (SLI:56/W5:52). Hegel specifically speaks of general categories finite and infinite, identity and difference as exhibiting this kind of relationship. Hegel’s terminology displays a metatextual symmetry in a series of correspondences of opposed terms each of which appeal to a dialectical synthesis, all in an important logical sense orbiting the being-for-itself unity in opposition of the finite and infinite. On the finite side there are: individual, abstract, appearance, ideal, chance, representations, being, intuition/sensation, Understanding, nature (and more besides these). On the infinite side there are; universal, concrete, real, essence, necessity, concepts, thought, the Concept, Reason, spirit infinite (and more besides these). The dialectical synthesis here attempted is that between Marxism as science and Laozi as aesthetics. Both of these opposites exclude and require, complement and oppose each other to be themselves and they therefore exist in a unity of opposition reflecting two opposed modes of cognition and approaches to predicaments. This book concerns a dialectical synthesis. A popular objection to the whole schema of the dialectics of synthesis has been raised by Todd McGowan with his spirited panegyric on Hegel, in his Emancipation After Hegel (2019). It is a popular and influential contribution to an important recent trend in Hegel scholarship. In light of the challenge McGowan’s argument poses to this book’s central theme, a brief critique of McGowan can clarify and defend this book’s terminology. McGowan updates the opposition to the notion of “synthesis” in Hegel’s dialectics.5 First it should be noted that while Hegel is history’s most famous and important exponent of dialectics, he has no monopoly upon the contents of dialectics and his usage shall not dictate the use to which it will be put here. Synthesis plays an important role in dialectics as it will be employed in this book. Aside from this, McGowan’s rejection of synthesis fatally undermines his thesis, for in throwing out “synthesis” he throws out his cherished “contradiction” as well. If, as he argues Hegel’s dialectics sees

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

33

everything is contradictory then to understand any one thing involves identifying its contradiction. This is precisely what Hegel praises the Understanding for accomplishing when it identifies the different elements of a thing. Yet it is important to stress that contradictions are contained within one thing not between separate things. The Understanding tries to keep contradictory elements apart. It is very simple, in fact child’s play, to avoid the contradiction inherent in one thing by redefining it as two things, i.e., the acorn has no branches, the oak tree has branches; the acorn is one thing and the oak tree another. This is what the Understanding does. But this is the operation of analysis alone. With analysis alone we can avoid the conclusion that the acorn is the oak tree, these two are one, and thereby avoid the contradiction. Ad hoc distinctions between things can always be furnished to avoid acknowledging contradiction. In order to recognize contradiction, the two antithetical elements must be comprehended as composing one single thing; an operation, which I am following many others in calling synthesis, is necessary for this. Without synthesis in this sense contradiction is simply inconceivable. In denying synthesis, on the erroneous grounds that synthesis means doing away with contradiction, McGowan throws the baby out with the bathwater. “For Hegel, the proposition of reason is not merely A = −A as opposed to A = A. Reason’s claim is that “A = A and simultaneously −A.”” (Limnatis 2008, 316). In denying synthesis and not clarifying his position McGowan falls into the crude A ≠ A of pure contradiction and meaninglessness. Given this breakdown it might be in order to interpret McGowan’s opposition to “synthesis” in Hegel’s dialectic to be strictly limited to the role it plays in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad which Hegel explicitly criticized for being too abstract. The application of this triad can be problematic in Hegel (although McGowan strangely admits Hegel’s mania for triads, without attempting any explanation). Its application oversimplifies and can be easily overextended so McGowan’s opposition to “synthesis” is not uninformed. McGowan states that his opposition to “synthesis” is that it comes with the connotation that oppositions between the contradictory elements are resolved and harmoniously unified. McGowan believes synthesis implies that the contradiction in the synthetic entity disappears. He argues this is not Hegel’s idea. Hegel, was committed to the view that opposition in contradiction is never resolved and that the

34 

J. Chambers

contradictory elements remain antagonistic to the extent that nothing has a pure, noncontradictory identity. He follows Slavoj Žižek in reading Hegel as being Adorno before Adorno and proposes the notion of “reconciliation” between opposites as a better way of conceiving of the way Hegel unites opposites in his dialectics.6 Rather than overcoming contradictions “we must reconcile ourselves with them as absolute” (McGowan 2019, 82). McGowan contends that it is impossible to eradicate contradiction with synthesis. Insofar as synthesis is conceived of as somehow doing away with contradiction, it is problematic to dialectics. However, this is an additional connotation to synthesis. McGowan is disingenuous in his arguing that it is an essential component of the definition of synthesis. It is not a necessary condition of its definition. Despite McGowan’s groundless accusation that Marx proposes a kind of synthesis which is meant to resolve contradiction to make contradiction as such disappear,7 this is not a part of Marxist dialectics. Marxism does not propose a resolution to contradiction as such. Indeed, Engels is actually clearer on this point than Hegel. This does not imply Marxism (or Hegel) accepts that all contradictions are irresolvable and permanent. Orbital decay resolves the contradictory forces at play in the movement of planets. Evolution resolves contradictions between organisms and their environments. To take a more domestic example, the contradictions inherent in feudalism have been resolved by capitalism, by coopting some feudalist relations into the new mode of production and annihilating others. While McGowan dismisses nature altogether as undergoing contradiction as “external” (this is a senseless position regarding orbits, for example, which are unintelligible without reference to internal contradiction), McGowan maintains an awkward silence on history’s resolutions of contradictions, which are inconvenient for his case. A fatally paradoxical consequence of McGowan’s contradiction-­ absolutism arises on the abstract level of Hegel’s idealism.8 In Hegel’s case it refutes itself by being stated, for even on McGowan’s reading Hegel must believe in the resolution of at least one contradiction—and it is a big one. A contradiction exists between immature spirit and reality in spirit’s denial of the reality of contradiction. There is reality on the one side of this contradiction and immature spirit’s erroneous view9 about it on the other. Once spirit admits the ubiquity of intractable

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

35

contradiction, in the state McGowan considers to be Absolute Knowing, then spirit’s cognition of reality is now in accord with reality; in other words, this contradiction between spirit and reality has been resolved. There is no way for spirit to come to realize the ubiquity of irresolvable contradictions without resolving this contradiction, thereby denying the realization that it had just asserted. Now, to this it might be objected that such a paradox only follows if Hegel is construed as subscribing to a correspondence theory of truth rather than some species of constructivism, holism or coherentism. Without going into details however, I think that it takes no great reflection on alternative epistemic models to actually make the paradox even worse for the contradiction-absolutist interpretation of Hegel. For coherentism is based upon overcoming contradictions within spirit itself. One way out might be to assert that it is only an apparent and not a real contradiction, but I think making such distinctions between appearance and reality would constitute a slippery slope for this idealist project. Whether or not McGowan’s suspicions of the connotations of synthesis are legitimate and whether or not McGowan is right in thinking Hegel denies the possibility of the resolution of contradictions, this book will argue that Hegel’s philosophy does actually have the effect of cancelling out definitive contradictions. That is, even if McGowan’s interpretation of Hegel’s stated view of contradiction, namely its ultimate intractability as such, is correct, Hegel’s philosophy is forced to deny such a statement; in important cases it does this by privileging one of the opposed sides in the contradiction over the other side and assimilating the other to the privileged side.10 This cancellation comes by eliding the true content of the subordinated side. It accompanies Hegel’s denial of limits to conceptual knowledge. A no less problematic implication of McGowan’s peculiarly one-sided commitment to the permanence of contradiction is his rejection of any proposal of resolutions to contradictions. History has already furnished us with many resolutions to contradictions, which have been overcome through resistance. We are to pretend they never happened. To resist any contradiction necessarily involves believing in the possibility of a future world in which that contradiction has been dissolved, removed, or at least softened. There is no point in resisting a certain kind of contradiction

36 

J. Chambers

otherwise. Therefore, McGowan denies that struggles for equality between the sexes or ethnic groups involve a struggle against a contradiction but rather a struggle against a way of conceiving of a contradiction.11 Socialism proposes to resolve the antagonistic and destructive contradiction between labor and capital through the overthrow of the capitalist class and workers’ power, so McGowan thinks it must be wrong. McGowan’s version of emancipation after Hegel seems to advocate, in its stead, the endless struggle against everything to no purpose. We should deny the fundamental postulate of dialectics that all things are transitory and instead assert that contradictions are absolute. Teleological behavior is ruled out by the surrender to the permanence of contradiction. McGowan waxes lyrical about the pitfalls of Albert Camus’s abstract theory of the rebel, but given McGowan’s own position bars him from any political program, it is hard to see how McGowan can avoid falling into the same trap. He ties himself into knots each time he discusses a concrete historical struggle. So, for example in his discussion of the contradiction of black oppression in the USA he claims Unlike Washington, Du Bois doesn’t disdain the universal. He sees that the detour through universality is the only path to actual black singularity. The pure insistence on one’s own particularity leaves one stuck within an indeterminate diversity. Du Bois moves through universality and engages it in order to discover the singular as a form of what Hegel calls determinate universality. (88)

Booker T.  Washington and W.  E. B.  Du Bois proposed their separate solutions to the contradictory status of black Americans in society and McGowan prefers that of Du Bois for embracing the universality of the struggle. McGowan stresses that Du Bois’ position recognizes that black Americans will never be able to unburden themselves of their awareness of “alienation of particularity in the universal that produces singularity” (87), but he does at least believe that some kind of equality for black Americans is obtainable. What is this achievement of equality, on whatever qualified level, but the resolution of the contradiction? What is the point of it otherwise? Equality cannot be accomplished in the sense that Du Bois and McGowan approve of without the resolution of a

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

37

contradiction in society. McGowan cannot admit this because he is barred from advocating any concrete program.12 The figure that disrupts social harmony—say, the figure of the Jew or the immigrant13—becomes the figure of universality in the emancipatory project. This project doesn’t eliminate this figure or create a utopia in which such a figure loses its distinctiveness within universal belonging. Instead, it insists on the irreducibility of this figure of contradiction. (214)

The question society is facing is not the question McGowan is asking, namely: “How do we conceive of the contradiction of the Jews?” The question is simpler: “Do we exclude Jews or not?” The latter question cannot be reduced to the former. If society decides to stop excluding Jews and insists upon treating them as fellow humans of equal status, we have resolved a contradiction in society, a contradiction in the field of law and violence. There is no way around it. McGowan would insist that this new equality would not constitute the resolution of a contradiction but rather a transformation in the way it is conceived. That is, an author who insists on the ubiquity of contradiction, denies it was ever present in every clear-­ cut case where it might be resolved. This is casuistry. The contradiction relevant to exclusion is not that some people in society are thought of as different, everyone is already thought of as different; the contradiction is that some people are thought of as the enemies of the rest of society. Here the question of exclusion is not a question of terminology. And besides, just a little research reveals that history is replete with cases where ethnic and religious groups have been proven to not constitute permanent and irresolvable contradictions in society. At some point the Samaritans and the Philistines disappeared. It seems the former were fully absorbed into another society and the latter were exterminated.14 It is perfectly conceivable that the Jews and the entirety of the contradiction they might be thought to constitute to society could be fully removed. Nazis were capable of planning and undertaking this removal. They certainly would have succeeded had the left been rendered pococurante by sharing McGowan’s conviction that contradictions, such as the contradictions of fascism itself, were permanent. The complete ethnic cleansing of a society or even the world is well within the realms of conceivability. That is why fascism

38 

J. Chambers

is so dangerous. If the contradictions of global ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity really were somehow ontologically impervious to the resolutions offered by fascism then there would be no need to take the threat of fascism seriously. For the time being we are blighted with living in a society in which fascism is an ever-present threat, but it is not as McGowan would have us think, that somehow the danger is permanent. Fascism reared its ugly head during the peculiar circumstances of moribund capitalism and it can last no longer than capitalism itself, an inherently transitory mode of production. Capitalism might have pretentions to survive as long as society does, but it can only accomplish this by hastening the latter’s demise. McGowan thinks “emancipation involves making explicit and embracing contradiction” (214). So, suppose we see capitalism is contradictory and, in order to emancipate ourselves from it, we make the contradictions explicit and embrace them. Now what? We are stuck with it. Its contradictions cannot be resolved. Even though we know that contradictions within the mode of production have been resolved in the past, it is simply a step too far to strive for the resolution of the current contradictions; for these ones are ontologically permanent.15 The very fabric of reality dictates they shall not be overcome. Sorry physics, the heat death of the universe is rendered inconceivable by McGowan’s Hegelian decree! In McGowan’s defense it could be argued that the contradictions of feudalism are permanent and irresolvable in the sense that they have left an indelible mark on history and have shaped capitalism, and in this sense, they can be conceived of as transformed in capitalism rather than resolved. Yet Marxism cannot be accused of proposing to do away with contradictions of capitalism in this sense. Of course, the contradictions of capitalism are permanent in the sense that we are all historical agents. How could Marx or anyone with a dialectical conception of history deny that? McGowan is accusing Marx of more than this. A yet more desperate defense of McGowan would deny categories like feudalism altogether and attempt to translate everything into a one-sided interpretation of Hegel’s arcane lexicon of “freedom” in order to only articulate history in terms of the deepening awareness of the contradictions of freedom in society; that is, to deny all historical explanations that involve resolutions of contradictions by fiat. I don’t know if such a move is beneath McGowan. However, it is beneath serious

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

39

students of history. If we are to say, for example, that the contradictions inherent in the Greek Ethical Life have not been resolved but merely taken on a new shape, then all of history just becomes a series of appearances of these underlying contradictions; the crucifixion, the Reformation, the French revolution, all of these are just clothes for the chameleon contradictions with which to dress and undress themselves, and given the diversity of the clothing, the underlying contradictions themselves must be utterly formless. Yet given the implications for Hegel’s philosophy of history here, if all the contradictions are just complex reiterations of the first, then there is actually only one contradiction and all the rest is just appearance. The universe is not replete with contradictions, there is in fact just one and change itself is a fiction. Apparently, emancipation after Hegel is a very cloudy form of quietism. It is unjustifiable for a book which purports to be about Hegel with an emphasis on contradiction to have so little to say about determinate negation or aufhebung. Yet if the agenda of the author is a kind of quietism it does at least make a kind of rhetorical sense. In any case, whether or not overcoming contradictions involves the kind of additional connotation of synthesis as making it disappear is not relevant to the way the term synthesis will be employed in the title of this book. It is not a necessary component of the term synthesis, merely an additional connotation. Synthesis is not conceived of in this way in this book’s title. With synthesis we take two contradictory elements and conceive them as each containing and requiring their opposite partner, animating the development of a single thing. In this book a materialist science is combined with a materialist aesthetics to animate dialectical cognition and human action. This is both descriptive and prescriptive.

Synthesis of Science and Aesthetics While Hegel’s synthesis will be argued to be one-sided, the synthesis proposed here will take the form of the dialectical unity of opposites from the Chinese complementarian tradition of dialectics. In this tradition the contradiction persists but in a harmonious union through which the interplay of the opposites realizes the spirit of Hegel’s archetypal dialectical

40 

J. Chambers

synthesis of the opposed partners in Love. This formulation might seem one-sided as for Marx there is no obvious opposition between art and science. First it should be noted that this book is considering aesthetics in its broad sense, not in terms of the philosophy of art. This book will not philosophize upon what art and beauty are. This is an interesting question which overlaps issues of aesthetic philosophy but it is tangential to the aesthetic philosophy presented here. Aesthetics, is derived from the ancient Greek concept of aisthēsis (αἴσθησις), which goes beyond theorizing on beauty and encompasses perceptions and feelings in a broader sense, a field of nondiscursive experience that resists definition.16 In his classic book on Hegel, Charles Taylor places Hegel and Marx in “the expressivist tradition.” One of the main principles of expressivism is that “our life is a unity, it cannot be artificially divided into distinct levels: life as against thought, sentience as against rationality, knowledge as against will. Man is not an animal with reason added, but a totally new indivisible form” (Taylor 1975, 21). Hegel thought that historical development was the engine of a synthesis between these different aspects into a dialectical unity under rationality. He saw the aesthetic as merely a part of the broader philosophical spectrum over which reason, as in the working out of concepts, was master. Hegel incorporated the aesthetic into his system, arguing that it was defunct insofar as its truth has been surpassed by conceptual knowledge. “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place” (LA.I:1/W13:25). Marx rejected the Hegelian attempt to conquer the aesthetic with Reason. Marx insisted that the aesthetic is an intrinsic aspect of praxis (EPM-­MECW3:275–6/MEW40:515–6) which is nevertheless irreducible to conceptualization (EPM-MECW3:302/MEW40:542), limited, marginalized and degraded in class-society “All the physical and intellectual senses,” Marx comments, “have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature has been reduced to this absolute poverty” (EPM-MECW3:300/MEW40:540). Marx’s model for freedom is activity of artistic creation. For Marx “True human activity…is a question of praxis—of the free realisation of one’s sensory and spiritual powers

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

41

as enjoyable ends in themselves. Its model for Marx is the work of art, which, as for Aristotle, is an activity rather than a state of mind. The most authentic form of production or ‘life activity’ (notions which for Marx extend far beyond the factory floor) is one executed for its own sake, free from the goad of physical necessity; and this in his view is one vital distinction between human beings and their more utilitarian-­minded fellow animals” (Eagleton 2017, 76–77). In the context of the aesthetic Marx even goes so far as say that the “senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians” (EPM-­MECW3:300/MEW40:540). Of course, aesthetic theory has played an important role in the formation of Marxism and its development. Marxism has been employed as a politically prescriptive doctrine for art. Marxism… …definitely destroys the creative moods that are feudal, bourgeois, petty-­ bourgeois, liberalistic, individualist, nihilist, art-for-art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat … And while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed. (Mao 1965b, 94)

Such political prescriptions have invariably harbored a critical lacuna concerning the content of aesthetic experience itself, insofar as they have embodied theories of aesthetics rather than aesthetic theory. The Marxist Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno investigated enlightenment ideology’s appropriation of the aesthetic and the stultifying effects of late capitalism on aesthetic experience. Adorno attempted a more harmonious synthesis or “reconciliation” between the aesthetic and Reason than that of Hegel. Through a theory of human nature, greatly influenced by his special reading of Freud, Adorno strove to incorporate the aesthetic into reason without subordinating the former to the latter. Herbert Marcuse traced the repression of the sensuous nature of humanity by a one-sided rationality first expressed in elitist Greek philosophy and fully realized in the alienation of the sensuous in capitalism. He called for a new society in which “reason had become sensuous, and sensuousness had become reasonable” (quoted in Brien 2006, 126). So, philosophy about sensuous/aesthetic reason is by no means unfamiliar to Marxism. It could be called an ideal of western Marxist

42 

J. Chambers

developments of Marx’s thought. Yet this alone does not constitute the employment of sensuous/aesthetic reason. This is what this book is going to attempt to use Laozi to outline. Examples attempting such a reasoning in philosophy are rare, and have been dismissed as mere word play or mysticism. The Daodejing is a special case of such an attempt. This book reads the Daodejing as special in its employment and reflection upon a kind of sensuous/aesthetic reason. It is a poem, an aesthetic medium, which reflects upon itself so that its content and form express each other as a unified entity. Every poem embodies a philosophy and every philosophy, even Hegel’s most tortured prose, evinces a kind of poetry. Mixing philosophy and poetry has an illustrious history; Parmenides, Empedocles, Lucretius, and Boethius I might say are poetical philosophers; Dante, Goethe, Heine and Blake I might say are philosophical poets. Of the former, I believe that the philosophical content can be extracted from the poems without loss of meaning (although this involves imposing another kind of poetry upon it). This is what all secondary literature on them does. In the case of the latter the philosophical content is harder to extract but that content is also not the direct object of those works. They employ poetry as a means of disclosing a worldview/philosophy. They are not treatise to argue a case but explorations of ideas envisioned as descriptions of lived experience. They do not allow thought free reign as Hegel says of philosophy proper, but contain it within the contrivances of a sequence of imagery in the narrative form. The Daodejing will be read as special in the way it employs poetry as a methodology of constructing a theoretical system. This constitutes a different way of doing philosophy, which, challenges all the philosophy after the Platonic tradition. It is so unusual that classifying it as philosophy at all raises challenges of a metaphilosophical nature. I contend that the Daodejing is a special self-­ referential text in which the poetry is the argument, not merely its form. Chapter two’s argument is partially based upon the belief that Hegel’s conviction that the meaning of art can be fully extracted from its medium blinded him to this distinction of the Daodejing. Poetry, the aesthetic medium of language, is both its means and ends. This peculiarity of the Daodejing will be demonstrated in later chapters. If this book can establish that Laozi employs a kind of sensuous/aesthetic reason, then Marxism should be open to it. The book will argue further that this mode of reason

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

43

is not alien to the concept, although it does dialectically oppose it and that it employs a mimetic side of the concept novel to western philosophy. To attempt to combine this kind of novelty with Marxism would be to attempt more than demonstrating a compatibility. It would constitute a dialectical synthesis. For, above it was said that Marxism is interpreted as a comprehensive life project and that it is scientific in its employment of the concept. If, as I contend, the concept itself is scientifically and aesthetically split between opposite tendencies manifested in science and art, then to truly be comprehensive the scientific side of the concept and Marx’s employment of it ultimately depends upon the aesthetic side for its definition. The reverse is also the case. The Daodejing can only be said to demonstrate the dimmest awareness of the science of the concept. However, later chapters will argue that it contributes to the construction of a materialist foundation of the concept based upon its version of the concept of absence, which is aesthetically derived. Insofar as the “spiritual dimension” (Brien 2006, 224) Marxism appeals to can contribute to theory, I argue that the Daodejing offers requisite theoretical resources. This does not mean, however, that an account of aesthetic reason is wholly dependent upon Laozi, rather Laozi in this case has been the means of refining it. Insofar as Laozi is read as a representative of artistic philosophy he is read as a dialectical counterpart to Marx, but of course, there are many credible ways of reading Laozi in which no such connection arises. Further, in other philosophical poetry I believe such readings can also be partially found.

Notes 1. Marx quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: C.I—Capital I; EPM—Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; MCP—Manifesto of the Communist Party.

44 

J. Chambers

2. Of those who baulk at this expression many are averse to the term “Marxism” as well. Engels, not Marx, coined the expression “scientific socialism”. Yet in his magnum opus Capital Marx indicates that he regards that work, which is embedded in his broader theory of history and social ontology as a scientific treatise, comparing his task to that of the chemist and welcoming “scientific” criticism (C.I-MECW35:8/MEW23:12). 3. Hegel’s central term of Geist is a topic of controversy for English translators as it lacks a proper English synonym. The controversy surrounds the best two approximate fits: “spirit” or “mind”. These terms each have their merits in different contexts. Throughout this book I will refer to Hegel’s term Geist as Spirit or Mind. For what it’s worth I prefer Mind, as it is more consistent with my mentalist interpretation of Hegel’s idealism, but I will usually use spirit because it is the favored translation in much of the secondary literature to which the book refers. 4. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe (W) (1969-1971). The abbreviations used are: SL—Science of Logic; Enc.1—Encyclopedia Logic; LAI—Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, volume 1.

5. Walter Kaufmann (1966), famously makes the case against the application of the term “synthesis” to Hegel’s dialectic in the role it plays in the so-called thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad. It has been a popular target of criticism since. 6. During one of his bombastic diatribes Žižek spits a series of rhetorical questions at Theodor W. Adorno: “What if, however, the image of Hegel’s dialectic this critique presupposes is wrong? What if, in its innermost core, Hegel’s dialectic is not a machine for appropriating or mediating all otherness, for sublating all contingency into a subordinated ideal moment of the notional necessity? What if Hegelian ‘reconciliation’ already is the acceptance of an irreducible contingency at the very heart of notional necessity? What if it involves, as its culminating moment, the setting-free of objectivity in its otherness?” (Žižek 2012, 262). If Hegel had been Adorno before Adorno he would not have deni-

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

45

grated sensuous consciousness, he would not have insisted that the finite is ideal and not real, he would not have exercised skepticism of the finite, he would not have determined that the real is the necessity underlying the appearance of the contingent, he would not have called his Logic the Mind of God, he would not have enthusiasm in the ontological argument for God, he would not have denied any limits to the concept or Mind, he would not have insisted that the cunning of Reason directs history, back when he was an acolyte of the young Schelling he would not have argued the way he did against Herr Krug and his pen, nor Jacobi and later receive Schelling’s ridicule on the same grounds; he would not have deceived the world for nearly 200 years. Strange indeed it is that a writer, who makes such heavy weather of Hegel’s remark that philosophy is its times apprehended in thoughts, should find it to be so false as far as Hegel himself is concerned. Now, for the sake of argument we could entertain the idea that Žižek’s reading of Hegel reflects Hegel better than Theodor W. Adorno’s and that Hegel did not really mean all of those things he repeatedly said and that Hegel is a sloppy writer. What is accomplished by dressing Hegel up in Adorno’s clothes? The first accomplishment is to make two fools where there were none before; one who can’t write and one who can’t read. The second accomplishment it seems is, in a roundabout and fashionable way, to push Hegel’s idealism out of the back window, to make way for Lacan’s idealism through the front door. Žižek tries to accomplish the latter and he doesn’t mind paying the price of accomplishing the former to get it. 7. Marx and Engels explicitly denied contradiction could disappear, see Mao On Contradiction (1965a, 311–47) for a good summary on this topic. 8. It is a bit like Epimenides’ paradox. 9. The Understanding—Der Verstand. 10. The most famous proponent of this well-worn argument is Adorno. See Alison Stone, “Adorno, Hegel, and Dialectic” 2013, 1133. 11. He does not notice that struggling against a way of conceiving of a contradiction itself comprises a contradiction, which those struggling for the new conception would be struggling to overcome and cancel by replacing the old conception with the new one, or somehow assimilating it. He takes a fateful step on the appearance/reality distinction warned of above. This omitted detail does somewhat overthrow his entire case, in implying precisely what he introduced his cumbersome meta-­

46 

J. Chambers

commentary to evade; namely the overcoming of a contradiction. If, for example, the feminists are struggling for a new conception of the contradiction of femininity against the old patriarchal conception of this contradiction then they are struggling for a world in which the old patriarchal conception of the contradiction between the sexes has been overcome and somehow removed: the contradiction between these two competing conceptions has been ended in favor of the feminist conception. There is no point in this struggle without the promise of at least this kind of victory. So, a kinder interpretation of McGowan would suppose that some contradictions are more absolute than others, which are expendable. But given that McGowan admits that the patriarchal social construct of femininity and its “absolute” contradiction is a social construct, and therefore exists on conceptual ontological plain, it exists on the same ontological plain as the new feminist conceptualizations of that contradiction. Both the patriarchal conceptualization of femininity and its rival feminist concept of femininity are internally contradictory conceptions; they also contradict each other. But the latter contradiction is just as ontologically conceptual as the former. So, precisely how some contradiction could be more absolute than another seems to be an ontologically irresolvable matter. 12. Defending elements of Hegel’s political program leads McGowan into his book’s nadir. He ends up supporting Hegel’s advocacy of monarchy under the noxious pretext that monarchy can act as a check on fascism. Sadly, it does not seem to go without saying these days that, in addition to heinous abuses peculiar to itself, historically monarchy has never acted as a check on fascism and very often has facilitated its rise. McGowan owes the reader and explanation of his false statements in light of the fact that most of the Axis powers actually were monarchies (and that is not even counting quasi-member Spain). 13. Pretending here, that there was some harmony before and that this is some kind of black box you can stick any minority into precisely by abstracting from them the very thing which created the disruption in the first place; namely their particularity! 14. The lamentable observation that these days Philistines are all too common is not under dispute here, but this observation is based upon a more recent definition of ‘Philistine’ and not the scourge of the ancient Israelites with whom the reference above is concerned. 15. Apropos socialism, McGowan vacillates between decrying the resolution of contradictions it offers as impossible and denying the possibility of

2  Marx and Laozi: Scientific and Aesthetic Comportments… 

47

prediction, and without noticing it purpose as well, because of his contention that Hegel says philosophy cannot change the world. So, McGowan might not actually think the contradictions of capitalism are irresolvable, but merely that any attempt to resolve them would lead to disaster (permitting himself the ability to predict that which he forbade socialists in the same paragraph). Perhaps McGowan thinks they might just resolve themselves, somehow without it having anything to do with our teleological behavior, if we wait long enough. 16. Mario Wenning observes: “Rather than limiting non-instrumental action to the aesthetic realm as has been common in the European tradition from Schiller until Adorno or that of intersubjectivity as in the tradition from Kant to Habermas and Honneth, the domains in which actions can be practiced in a wu-wei-like manner is virtually unlimited” (2011, 65). Wenning is operating with a narrower conception of the aesthetic than I (or Schiller or Adorno, I suspect). In this book the scope of aesthetic actions are just as unlimited as the scope of wuwei actions.

References Brien, K. 2006. Marx, Reason and the Art of Freedom. New York: Prometheus Books. Eagleton, T. 2017. Materialism. Yale University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen and Unwin. ———. 1969-1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1988. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 1. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. Theodore F.  Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kangal, K. 2020. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaufmann, W.A. 1966. Hegel, a Reinterpretation. New York: Anchor Books. Limnatis, N.G. 2008. German Idealism and the Problem of Knowledge: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Vol. 8. London: Springer Science & Business Media. Mao, Zedong 毛泽东. 1965a. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Vol. 1. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

48 

J. Chambers

———. 1965b. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Vol. 3. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Marx. K., and F.  Engels, 1956–2017. Marx-Engels Werke (MEW), Berlin: Dietz Verlag. ———. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Taylor, C. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todd McGowan. 2019. Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Wenning, M. 2011. Daoism as Critical Theory. Comparative Philosophy 2 (2): 50–71. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

Part II Hegel’s Idealism

3 Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism

Marx’s scientific materialism is a negation of Hegel’s idealism and cannot be articulated without contrast to Hegel. A preliminary account of Hegel’s idealism is essential for this book as the controversy that will unfold between Hegel and Laozi in the next chapter will mainly concern idealism. This book will argue that significant points of contact exist between Laozi’s metaphysics and Marx’s materialism in regards to opposition to idealism. Without a clear idea of the version of idealism that this book will be debating it will not be possible to explain Laozi’s position or Marx’s. There are many ways into Hegel’s idealism and there are many aspects of it. There is enormous controversy surrounding this topic. A comprehensive account of Hegel’s idealism would require a book length study. This chapter only has space to explain the most fundamental and direct aspects of Hegel’s idealism, as this is really only a preliminary task to the book proper. It offers a traditional reading that is already complemented by other secondary literature on the topic. The book adopts the method of dealing with Hegel’s idealism most directly through an analysis of the way Hegel explicitly addresses the issue of idealism, through an analysis of the concept of the ideal and how it fits into Hegel’s system.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_3

51

52 

J. Chambers

Idealism and the Fear of Change Truth is transient. It seems a platitude in one sense, for who can deny that things change? Everything is changing all the time. Change is ubiquitous and unceasing. That seems to be a basic metaphysical fact. But it is a fact which has for a long time been the source of unease in the western philosophical tradition. At the very beginnings of the tradition Parmenides stands out for his radical attempt to overcome change. Later it will be mentioned how Hegel shows that this trend of western philosophy begins even earlier, at its earliest with Thales. In the west change has been regarded as somehow a corruption of the true reality which is suspected to underlie it. No doubt this was partly the result of an instinctive fear of death. In a quest for permanence, western philosophers, who could not deny that all things must pass in experience, insisted upon the existence of a supersensible1 reality which was eternal and unchanging. The ancient Greek philosophers were quick to realize that if there were a candidate for permanence then their best hope would be to seize upon ideas in this way. For, we can have the same idea twice without any change in the meaning. While the Parthenon was subject to decay with time, Euclid’s geometrical principles which it manifested never altered. So, the idea was established as man’s link to permanence and the ruling class, through their association with ideas reassured themselves that they could never be challenged because the ideas never changed. The material Parthenon would decay over time, but the rulers of society could protect the idea of the Parthenon forever by being the bastions of their society’s cultural heritage. The ideological props which supported the hostility to change are all too easy for moderns to expose. In an elitist and oppressive society, the ruling class, for whom intellectual activity was the exclusive preserve, naturally feared change as a threat to their privileges. As this fear (like all fear) lacks philosophical integrity it dressed itself up in the priestly garb of clericalism, a ceremonially elaborate but equally shallow expression of ruling class mentality whose poisonous contribution to human history (through the tentacles of religion and its offspring theology encompassing much of western thought today with its, largely unnoticed, underpinnings) can be summarized by its notorious refrain: “In the beginning was the word”!

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

53

This refrain is an intellectual extravagance that is at once perversely arrogant and grotesquely debased. It is arrogant because it posits that God in his infinite wisdom created reality from nothing but his own ideas, and that by also being capable of pure ideas we humans have privileged access to the divine, privileged access to the open sesame of all reality, divine knowledge (for all knowledge is divine) of the absolute nature of things which we completely lay hold of in words and give a name—God, an absolute explanation for everything (even though it is just an empty word). On the other hand, this intellectual extravagance is grotesquely debased because it is evident that divine creation is unlike any creation which humans could ever undertake. For it requires nothing. God didn’t make the world out of himself (that is the pantheism that the ruling classes despise). God is supposed to have made reality out of nothing but his own ideas. We humans, even at our best, always make things with matter— chairs from wood, equations from Mathematics lessons, music from instruments and so on. We cannot engage in pure creation from an idea with no precedent. God’s intellect must be radically unlike our own and yet—in its perverse arrogance the extravagance claims we are godlike in our intellects, that is, in the very same regard in which the grotesque debasement claims we are different from God in kind, not degree. The perverse arrogance and grotesque debasement are thus mutually contradictory and incompatible. To try and hold them both together is patently absurd. It can be done with that special kind of madness we call organized religion and this is then dressed up in bloviating idealism to bamboozle the inquisitive. This intellectual extravagance, as well as being absurd, is poisonous because it justifies a lopsided and oppressive division inside humans and between humans ultimately supporting a backward and exploitative mode of production. The world, as God’s creation, is conceived as radically other than God, a material manifestation of his divine idea, and we humans are always just a product of this eternal and transcendent thought. We are forever infused with that which is not divine, our debased (because just a corruption of the divine) bodies from which arises our sin and irredeemably contemptible natures. Humanity’s somatic life, can only be escaped upon death and arrival in heaven. It is dirty and thus prolonged endurance of its world through physical labor is thought to be degrading.

54 

J. Chambers

On the other hand, living in pure ideas (for the extravagance feigns unawareness of its absurdity and asserts this possibility) of worship but also all ideology through logos is seen as divine activity. Through this mentality we see a division in humans between the divine thinking side and the debased bodily side. And we see a division between humans in society, between those with the privilege of time for “pure” thought and participation in the Godhead, the priestly caste, and those cursed to toil in the filth of the “thoughtless” laboring life. This twofold division is pernicious because it imbues humans with supreme arrogance at the expense of the natural world which feeds them as just an unavoidable material excrescence and object of utility, and at the expense of the men and women who toil this natural world to satisfy the debased material needs of the master, necessary for his continued isolation from production. But it also imbues humans with extreme shame, for even the priestly caste cannot liberate its spirit from its dirty body. Humans are doomed to forever hate themselves and try and escape their bodies, to escape this life but with the hypocrisy that goes hand-in-hand with religion they lack the courage for suicide so try to live, half alive in spirit, half dead in body— the first true philosophical zombie. I readily admit that this is a rather crude caricature of an entire civilization’s ideological history. It’s also unfairly targeted at the history of thought in the west as the fear of change and the religious, idealist bifurcation of man is an ideological undercurrent that can also be easily found in ascetic religions in the east, including strains of Daoism. And it is prejudiced insofar as it presupposes a materialist explanation of ideology that has not been defended. It is also built on the out-of-date presumption that terms like idealism and materialism are straightforward, which doesn’t stand up to much after a century of distraction and obfuscation. It has been a political/historical polemic and not a philosophical argument. It is unfair to dismiss western philosophy in this way. Much has been learned. The process starting with Thales and ending with Marx has been one of development. But there is a serious point to this caricature. The social history of idealism, as a fundamentally reactionary poison to humanity is brought to light once the absurdity of its foundational clericalist refrain is made clear. All of the many deeply profound ideas that accompany the western philosophical tradition are trapped in the

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

55

straightjacket of clericalism and they can only be set free and put to good use when the idealist philosophy is exposed as resting on and hiding an absurdity clothing a fear. Despite his pronounced intention and the entire thrust of his whole work, no one has done more to free philosophy from the straightjacket of theology than Hegel. It is in this light that we turn to Hegel’s own take on the dichotomy of change and permanence. Hegel says, with Heraclitus—the west’s philosopher of change par excellence, that one thing at least did not and could not change—namely the principle that change is ubiquitous and unceasing. This, he proposed, was an unchanging fact of reality and it was bound together with all the universal laws of motion and the universal properties and kinds into which finite things were classed. These universal principles were the logos that governed and ordered change. It was a supersensible world of thought that governed our own, eternal and unchanging. This idea was identical to the Absolute Idea, which conquered change by grasping it with a concept. Hegel tries to prove this. It is his insistence that this can be proved and his attempt to prove it that, for Hegel is, among other things, a distinctive characteristic of philosophy. As Hegel says in the beginning of the introduction of his Science of Logic “It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind”2 (SL.I:50/W5:44). God’s essence and ideas are static and eternal but also dynamic in working themselves out in the world. In talking of the history of philosophy, in §13 of the Shorter Logic, Hegel says: For these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the work: and that Architect is the one living Mind whose nature is to think, to bring to self-consciousness what it is, and, with its being thus set as object before it, to be at the same time raised above it, and so to reach a higher stage of its own being. (Enc.I.§13:38/W8:58)

Hegel ingeniously accommodates time through the articulation of dynamic, supposedly self-moving concepts. For Hegel, “no thought can actually be thought which frees itself from time, from its own temporal core” (Adorno 2017, 34). Hegel’s attempt to unite dynamic and eternal universal essences and fluid transient appearances, is a failure because it

56 

J. Chambers

subordinates the latter to the former, because he insists that the contradictory union is formed in a conceptual comprehension. It is here that a sharp distinction between Laozi and Hegel becomes clear. For Laozi to hold together this contradictory union involves admitting a limit to conceptual comprehension. Laozi argues that the idea of the permanence of change does not conquer change. It is not a dialectical truth that puts the word at the beginning of all reality, rather says Laozi, the idea is paradoxical. In the beginning was not the word, there was no beginning. Concepts do not grasp and control reality. Reality escapes concepts. By insisting on complete, conceptual comprehension of the contradiction Hegel effectively subordinates one of the sides of it to the other and this act undermines the contradiction. To privilege concepts as comprehending and overcoming change is to subsume and ultimately negate the contradiction. It is to pretend that the contradiction that all things change, except the principle of change itself is a conceptualization and to conflate concepts and their referents. Laozi says that we must embrace the paradox, and not trick ourselves into thinking that conceptual resources can assimilate it. Laozi is here a master of negative dialectics when he says of the named and the nameless Dao in chapter one that: These two are the same But diverge in name as they issue forth. Being the same they are called mysteries, Mystery upon mystery— The gateway of the manifold secrets! (Lau 1963, 5)

Language does not “lay hold” of reality or dictate terms to it. Embracing the paradox involves the awareness that reality is independent of and ultimately escapes concepts because it is outside them. In more recent, but currently still old-fashioned language, it involves a kind of materialism. The way into scientific materialism is through Hegel’s idealism. This chapter will elaborate Hegel’s idealism as an introduction to a materialism which can find a place for Laozi. * * *

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

57

If, as Hegel claims, all philosophy is idealism, then defining his philosophy in these terms makes his idealism a metaphilosophy. This most obvious fact about his definition is the most overlooked. It is the key to a definitive, comprehensive and clear-cut interpretation of Hegel’s idealism. If Hegel defines all philosophy as idealism and thus his own idealism as a metaphilosophy, then his own idealism must be both the same as the old philosophies in this respect and also different in the sense that it embodies self-conscious awareness. Hegel divides philosophy into pre-­ reflective, pre-speculative, unconscious idealism and his own reflective, speculative, thus self-conscious, absolute idealism. Missing this obvious fact is the Achilles’ heel of Stern’s non-mentalistic interpretation in the only other in-depth study of this topic, the object of this chapter’s critique. If Hegel’s idealism is a metaphilosophy, then it is a radical mentalistic ontology of mind and its thought. Robert Stern’s conceptual realist interpretation of Hegel’s idealism played an important role in the major recent trend of the reestablishment of Hegel’s metaphysical credentials in the analytic tradition.3 This trend argued reality is structured by objectively existing universals or “concepts,” understood as natural kinds giving an objective ordering of reality (here “natural” is opposed to artificial orderings, not entities belonging to spirit). Stern’s interpretation was influential.4 Conceptual realism is a “soft-metaphysical” interpretation, steering a middle course between “hard-metaphysical” readings and non-metaphysical readings. The hard-­ metaphysical readings interpret Hegel’s idealism as a monism claiming reality is a manifestation of an ultimate metaphysical principle.5 The Kantian non-metaphysical readings interpret Hegel as articulating categories enabling the subject’s cognition of finite reality.6 The mentalism that this chapter advocates is a variant of the hard-metaphysical readings. Stern’s interpretation errs in incompleteness. Hegel defines his idealism in metaphilosophical terms. This shapes his dialectical understanding of the “ideal” and accompanies his metatheology. The metaphilosophical insight strengthens the case for the “mentalistic” interpretation Stern rejects.

58 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s Definition of Idealism Stern interprets Hegel’s most direct and concise explanation of idealism in philosophy: the second remark appended to the end of the second chapter—“Existence”—in The Science of Logic: The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being [wahrhaft Seiendes]. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism, or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognize finitude as a veritable being [ein wahrhaftes Sein], as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance. A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existences as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts [Gedanken], universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality—not even the water of Thales. For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also the in-­ itself or essence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-­ subsistent or grounded in themselves, but are posited by, are derived from, an other, from water, that is they are ideal entities. (SL.I:154–155/W5:172)

Stern’s Conceptual Realism “[T]he passage forms part of a sequel to Hegel’s discussion of the relation between the finite and the infinite” (Stern 2009, 62). This implies that when Hegel says the finite “lacks veritable being” he is opposing it to the infinite, which grounds it. The finite is individual things: “this table, this tree, and so on” (58). The infinite is universal properties and kinds like “red” and “humanity.”7 Hegel claims while the finite at first seems real— grounded in itself, in fact it is not, because it manifests a universal nature—the infinite. The infinite is supersensible in that knowledge of it is reached via abstraction from experience. We never experience the

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

59

(infinite) pure concept of “feline” when we look at (finite) cats. We see only cats exemplifying this infinite universal concept. Yet we can abstract the concept “feline” from cats in noting we can label numerous cats feline. The relationship between the finite and infinite is one of mutual sublation (aufgehoben). Each one is in the other, and each side is both cancelled and preserved. Pure finite does not exist, because all finite entities manifest a universal nature, which leads away from their Dasein— their “being there-ness.” Yet, pure infinite (like pure being) also does not exist, for the universal natures of things can be found only in finite things. Hegel calls these ideas of pure finite and pure infinite, isolated from each other, “being-in-itself.” Being-in-itself is an incomplete and, in that regard, erroneous conception of how things are. For they truly only have their identities when seen in their unity—“being-for-itself.”8 The finite and the infinite need each other. The truth of the finite/being-in-itself is its ideality/incompleteness. As the relationship between finite and infinite is one of mutual sublation, the implication is that as the finite is ideal because of its necessary relationship with its “other”—the infinite (Hegel explicitly says this), so the infinite is ideal because of its necessary relationship with its “other”— the finite (in the definition above, he refers to Thales’s idea of water as ideal, and this corresponds to the infinite, so it is implicit). Above Hegel has already mentioned “the ideality of both” (SL.I:151/W5:168). Stern’s interpretation is avowedly metaphysical, transgressing the epistemological boundaries Kant set for philosophically legitimate inquiry. This doctrine does not confine itself to inquiry of “the necessary structure of how things will appear to us in that experience, rather than about things beyond that experience or about being qua being” (Stern 2009, 7). Stern legitimises this interpretation with a detailed argument from a reading of Hegel’s critique of transcendental arguments that I will not repeat or  dispute. It dispels the Kantian doubts motivating the non-­ metaphysical readings of Hegel preceding Stern’s. Stern believes the dialectical union of finite and infinite precedes, ontologically and cosmologically, the synthetic a priori structuring of finite minds. Stern’s interpretation of Hegel stops with the idea that Hegel claims concepts are not merely ideas in finite minds but ontological constituents

60 

J. Chambers

of the structure of reality, making it knowable. Stern’s interpretation treats Conceptual realism and anti-nominalism as synonymous: [Hegel] is an idealist in his special sense, of holding that the “finite is ideal”, and (therefore) an idealist in the more classical (anti-nominalist) sense of holding that taken as mere finite individuals, things in the world cannot provide a satisfactory terminus for explanation, but only when they are seen to exemplify “universals, ideal entities” (in the manner of Thales’ water onwards) which are not given in immediate experience, but only in “[reflective] thinking upon phenomena”. Hegel’s idealism, in other words, amounts to a form of conceptual realism, understood as “the belief that concepts are part of the structure of reality”. However, none of this implies that Hegel is an idealist in the modern (subjectivist) sense of claiming that the world is mind-dependent, for individuals can be understood as instantiations of such “universals, ideal entities”, which then in turn explains how such individuals are accessible to minds, without the need for this subjectivist turn. (2009, 76)

The charge of incompleteness against Stern’s interpretation has teeth partly because of the importance the idea of logical and philosophical completion has for Hegel’s belief his system concludes the historical/ philosophical narrative.9 Also, Stern agrees Hegel’s definition has far-­ reaching implications: if Stern has omitted another implication, that is, mentalism, which Stern rejects, Stern is wrong. Mentalism is consistent with Stern’s conceptual realism; I argue below that mentalism completes conceptual realism, but Stern rejects it on independent textual grounds, which upon analysis turn out to be pretty flimsy.

 he Definition’s Overlooked Metaphilosophical T Insight In the passage above, Stern said Hegel is an idealist in “his special sense, of holding that the ‘finite is ideal.’” Yet from Hegel’s definition of idealism, nothing seems special about it; Hegel says, “Every philosophy is essentially an idealism” in this very sense. The conditions according to

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

61

which Stern says Hegel’s philosophy is special are those by which Hegel insists his philosophy is the same as any other. Stern does not dispel this implication of homogeneity. He shows this statement leads Hegel to set an idiosyncratic criterion for philosophy, excluding doctrines Hegel associates with empiricism, Locke, Hume, and Jacobi (2009, 67–68). Kant’s suspension of judgement on the question of the ontological ground of finite appearances puts him with this group.10 Nevertheless, on Stern’s reading Hegel’s idealism is just one variant of the non-empiricist philosophies. This construes Hegel’s idealism as merely an abstract universal; one property abstracted from all the old idealisms constitutes Hegel’s own. Hegel criticized classification via abstract universal, saying its “content has the form of indifference to its universality” (SL.II:609/W6:284). Classification via abstract universal goes against everything we should expect from the inventor of the concrete universal, who would rather seek a universal principle; the germ containing, underlying, and generating the individual instances (Ilyenkov 2009, 225–253). A classification of Hegel’s idealism as concrete universal is accomplished by recognizing the most obvious distinction of Hegel’s particular idealism present in his definition, namely, that his idealism is bound up with a metaphilosophical statement. Stern overlooks the distinctiveness Hegel’s idealism thus achieves. Only Hegel’s idealism notices and tries to prove the idealist definition of philosophy. This is in keeping with Hegel’s view that his idealism constituted the completion of philosophy through self-knowing (LHP.I:35/W19:54). Hegel names this stage of self-knowing the Absolute Idea, a self-thinking idea, which he insists has “soul” and “feelings” and does not merely know what the truth is but knows that it is “the self-­ knowing Truth” (SL.II:824/W6:849).11 To read Hegel’s definition of idealism metaphilosophically requires reading it as dialectical, embodying the Aufhebung of previous philosophy, both the same as it, in denying the veritable being of the finite, and different, in consciously making this claim and understanding its philosophical/historical significance/implications. Knowledge, that a universal essence grounds finite entities, is revealed by Hegel to be knowledge that this universal essence is the concrete universal of the self-thinking idea; “the knowledge that self-­ consciousness is absolute reality, or that absolute reality is self-consciousness” (LHP2:378/W19:408). It is not a loose collection of natural kinds but a

62 

J. Chambers

single ordered totality of the mind of God. Brady Bowman identifies Hegel as a proponent of “metaphysical idealism: the position that the whole sphere of categorically constituted, finite objectivity is both independent of finite cognizers and radically dependent on an infinite ground that does not itself in turn fall under the categories, but is the activity of which they are manifestations” (2013, 115). Mentalism, identifies this infinite as the absolute mind/spirit (absoluter Geist)—God.12 Reality consists of nothing more than absolute mind and its thoughts. Mentalism is implied by the role the distinctiveness of Hegel’s idealism achieves through metaphilosophical self-knowing. For Hegel claims the “absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth” (SL:824/W6:549), that is, the ontological basis of reality consists in a movement of self-knowing. The mentalistic reading of absolute idealism embodies expressivism, where “realization of a purpose” is the “realization of self ” in which “the subject can recognize it [life] as his own, as having unfolded from within him” (Taylor 1975, 15). Hegel’s ethical ideal is realized by his idealism’s contribution to philosophy (the highest level of spirit (SL.II:824/W6:549), for through it, spirit recognizes it constitutes the true object of its search for its ontological ground: “God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, his self-consciousness in man, and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God” (Enc.III§564:177/W10:374). This reading of Hegel’s idealism is antithetical to Stern’s attempt to separate the infinite from mind. On Stern’s abstract universal classification of Hegel’s idealism as conceptual realism/anti-nominalism, Hegel’s idealism is not integrated with Hegel’s claims for the role of his idealism in the history of philosophy. Although on Stern’s reading spirit can come to recognize the infinite ground of reality, spirit cannot recognize that infinite ground as its own self, for Stern supposes the ontological ground of the infinite is separate from the ontological ground of subjects. Hegel sees the concrete universal as an individual whose properties all exemplify their statuses as manifestations of the individual they belong to; they are united in that the individual is their universal through them. On the mentalistic interpretation God is the universal of universals, and so when universals are seen in their proper ontological place, God is knowing himself. Only if Absolute

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

63

Knowing is a state of God can universals reflect back upon themselves and be the turning point of self-consciousness. Only this individual unites them all as their universal. Stern interprets “absolute mind” as mind “at home in the world,” a purely epistemic relationship of an individual subject in a knowing relationship with its object; knowing itself, its object and the relationship between them (2009, 148). Stern’s interpretation has no place for God in absolute mind, and so no place for universals. Stern’s universals are purposeless. If the mentalistic interpretation is right, universals are a necessary moment in the self-conscious mind of God.13

Stern Against the Mentalistic Interpretation Stern promotes his epistemic interpretation of “absolute mind” to rival the mentalistic version. Even if textual evidence for Stern’s version exists, refuting the mentalistic version would require establishing that Hegel exclusively refers to absolute mind Stern’s way. Stern makes no attempt to establish this. There is significant textual evidence indicating this is a limited understanding of a broader concept.14 Stern quotes Hegel as seeming to rule out mentalistic idealism. Hegel mentions the view that “spirit is what is independent, true, that nature is only an appearance of spirit, not in and for itself, not truly real,” saying it is “utter foolishness to deny its [nature’s] reality [Stern’s translation]” (Hegel 1994, 17). Stern adds that nature coming before spirit in the Logic is problematic for interpretations giving spirit ontological primacy. Hegel means several things by spirit. I will address these textual arguments in turn. First, Hegel uses the word “spirit” (Geist) liberally. He writes about spirit as human consciousness and spirit as absolute mind—God. Hegel is often specific, speaking of spirit as a spatiotemporal human consciousness, as in ancient Greek ethical life or the French Revolution. Hegel once described Napoleon as “world spirit on horseback” (2003, 24). There is world spirit (Weltgeist), national spirit (Volksgeist), spirit of the age (Zeitgeist), subjective spirit, and objective spirit. Often, Hegel does not specify which. He would obviously be less likely to qualify his use of spirit in a lecture, as

64 

J. Chambers

where Stern found the quote in question, than in a written composition, as in this passage: “The concept of ideality expressly consists in its being the truth of reality, or in other words, reality posited as what it is in-itself proves itself to be ideality … we must trace nature back to ‘reality’ … and spirit to ‘ideality’. But nature is not just something fixed and complete on its own account, which could therefore subsist even without spirit; rather it is only in spirit that nature attains to its goal and its truth” (Enc.I§96:153/W8:204). Bearing this caveat in mind it is important to add that Stern’s “utter foolishness to deny its [nature’s] reality” citation has been ripped out of its context and mutilated. in the Introduction to the Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827–815 from which this citation is derived, Hegel does actually specify in general the kind of spirit he has in mind for the lecture course as the translator Robert R. Williams notes: while the title of the lectures may appear to promise an introduction to the entire philosophy of spirit as a whole, their focus is principally on subjective spirit as Hegel explains: “Here we consider only the finite spirit, but in it the essential substance is to be spirit. It has this in common with the infinite spirit, to be spirit” (2007, 57). This statement implies that when Hegel has not qualified the kind of spirit under discussion, subjective spirit should be the default interpretation. When Hegel asserts nature’s reality independent of spirit in Stern’s citation from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel is referring to spirit as in human consciousness, rejecting phenomenalism. This is consistent with the view that Hegel sees nature as ontologically dependent upon absolute mind. From the standpoint of absolute mind: There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no truth. (Enc.III§389:12/W10:43)

Mentalism’s reading of Hegel’s “utter foolishness to deny its [nature’s] reality” remark Stern mentioned sees nature as a category like spirit

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

65

involving finite and infinite. If Hegel regards nature as synonymous with the finite, he contradicts himself by asserting its reality at the same time as denying the finite’s reality in the definition of idealism. Spirit is thinking (finite and infinite). Nature is what is thought (finite and infinite). Thought is spirit, as in the thinking subject. Thought is nature as in the thought-determinations of Spirit. In this passage Stern put “nature” in square brackets to replace Hegel’s word “matter”. It is illegitimate to use these words as synonyms here because in the paragraph just preceding this use of the term, Hegel has explicitly distinguished nature and matter: “We have taken nature in the metaphysical, abstract sense as matter” (2007, 68). He thereby contrasts matter with nature when he introduces the speculative standpoint’s position on “nature, which stands in contrast and next to spirit. Here we place ourselves at a standpoint where we have to consider these two not as side by side, but rather as constitutive of the ideality of the external in its entire scope. This is the speculative standpoint, from which we likewise have to conceive spirit. Spirit is to be regarded as higher than nature. But the speculative standpoint requires that ideality be considered as the truth of nature itself.” However, when nature is taken in a metaphysical, abstract sense as matter by the understanding in its counterpoising matter and spirit, then Hegel says it is “folly to deny the reality of matter” because “one needs only to touch matter in order to experience resistance.” The pre-speculative, immature philosophical thought Hegel labels “the Understanding” (Verstand) regards this as a sufficient proof: “ordinary consciousness holds fast to the sensible, and rightly.” Yet Hegel immediately adds “However, its standpoint is not the absolute standpoint.” Insofar as nature is conceived of in the “metaphysical, abstract sense” it is conceived of one-sidedly and falsely in equal measure. Yet within this superficial sense it is folly to deny matter’s existence owing to the superficial proof of sensuous resistance, ordinary consciousness/the Understanding applies to it that is equal to it. Hegel notes that ordinary consciousness/the Understanding is right in this regard because nature is independent of subjective mind, as argued above.16 Yet it is not independent of infinite mind, a level of spirit which goes beyond the Understanding’s conception of spirit. This is the absolute standpoint which resolves the division between spirit and nature. To

66 

J. Chambers

say the least, the absolute standpoint takes a dim view of sensible consciousness: With regard to the equally immediate consciousness of the existence of external things, this is nothing else than sensible consciousness; that we have a consciousness of this kind is the least of all cognitions. All that is of interest here is to know that this immediate knowing of the being of external things is deception and error, and that there is no truth in the sensible as such, but that the being of these external things is rather something-­ contingent, something that passes away, or a semblance; they are essentially this: to have only an existence that is separable from their concept, or their essence. (Enc.I§76:122/W8:166)

Hegel frequently returns to the topic of the relationship between Spirit, Nature and matter in The Encyclopedia. In the following citation he is addressing not subjective but absolute spirit (the Idea) and he says: Considered according to this unity that it has with itself, the Idea that is for itself is intuiting and the intuiting Idea is Nature. But as intuiting, the Idea is posited in the one-sided determination of immediacy or negation, through external reflection. The absolute freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not merely pass over into life, nor that it lets life shine within itself as finite cognition, but that, in the absolute truth of itself, it resolves to release out of itself into freedom the moment of its particularity or of the initial determining and otherness, [i.e.,] the immediate Idea as its reflexion, or itself as Nature. (Enc.I§244:307/W:393)

As for Stern’s allegation of the problem of Nature chronologically preceding Spirit in Hegel’s system it should be noted that for Hegel there are important senses in which Nature can be said to be both before and after Spirit. Hegel clarifies this point in the philosophy of Nature: The goal of Nature is to destroy itself and to break through its husk of immediate, sensuous existence, to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit. Nature has become an other to itself in order to recognize itself again as Idea and to reconcile itself with itself. But it is one-sided to regard spirit in this way as having

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

67

only become an actual existence after being merely a potentiality. True, Nature is the immediate—but even so, as the other of spirit, its existence is a relativity: and so, as the negative, its being is only posited, derivative. It is the power of free spirit which sublates this negativity; spirit is no less before than after Nature, it is not merely the metaphysical Idea of it. Spirit, just because it is the goal of Nature, i.e., prior to it, Nature has proceeded from spirit: not empirically, however, but in such a manner that spirit is already from the very first implicitly present in Nature which is spirit’s own presupposition. (Enc.II§376:444/W9:536)

Hegel is saying here that while nature may be prior to spirit, spirit still precedes nature in the sense that spirit is the teleological ground and truth of nature. Spirit might come empirically after Nature but ontologically it is prior. Spirit as human consciousness undoubtedly follows on from nature in Hegel’s system, but spirit as absolute mind, God’s mind, it necessarily precedes nature. It is here apposite to repeat a citation from the Logic that it can “be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind” (SL.I:29/W5:44). Note Hegel’s use of the expression “finite mind” contrasts with God’s infinite mind. There can be no other reason for employing “finite” before “mind” here, referring to individual philosophy enquirers. If Hegel did not see God as infinite mind, he would have done well not to invite that inference by specifying the human mind as a “finite” mind, especially given Hegel’s predilection for talking of the finite as an essentially contrastive term. If spirit here is God, this remark obliterates the idea that nature precedes spirit. Hegel is saying the Logic, a book of concepts, is a description of God. This implies God is essentially mental. Hence Hegel’s assertion that the Logic is an exposition of God is immediately followed by support for Anaxagoras, who “is praised as the man who first declared that Nous, thought, is the principle of the world, that the essence of the world is to be defined as thought. In so doing he laid the foundation for an intellectual view of the universe, the pure form of which must be logic” (SL.I:50/W5:44). The Logic aims to show reality is dependent upon God’s mind/God because it consists in the logical laws that govern and manifest the world we experience. Hegel says philosophy “has no other object but God and so is essentially

68 

J. Chambers

rational theology” (LA.I:101/W13:139). If Hegel is to be taken at his word here, then those who dismiss Hegel’s talk of God as figurative are reading against him.17 Stern’s interpretation of Hegel’s idealism turns upon an analysis of Hegel’s conceptions of the finite and infinite. Hegel sees the finite and infinite as global terms. If this chapter can establish that both essentially depend upon absolute mind, then nature must also be ontologically dependent upon absolute mind.18 When Hegel characterizes Spirit as Nature’s goal it is also, in keeping with his objective idealist system’s general framework, prior to Nature as Nature has arisen from Spirit. Yet, this is not a claim of Spirit’s empirical precedence before Nature. The empirical is circumscribed by the limits of human observation, not God’s. God reveals Himself in two different ways: as Nature and as Spirit. Both manifestations are temples of God which He fills, and in which He is present. God, as an abstraction, is not the true God, but only as the living process of positing His Other, the world, which, comprehended in its divine form is His Son; and it is only in unity with His Other, in Spirit, that God is Subject. (Enc.III:13/W10:23)

Stern observes that an absolute mind grounding finite existence is not mentioned in the definition. He claims a mentalistic idealist reading of Hegel implies Hegel thought Thales, for example, grounded “empirical water” on the absolute mind, and this absolute mind similarly grounds finite existence in the metaphysics of all other philosophers. Hegel never made this patently false claim. Stern’s argument, imputes the abstract universal classification to mentalism. As I mentioned above, an abstract universal interpretation of Hegel’s idealism must be fundamentally wrongheaded. Of course, it is unreasonable to suppose Thales was aware his notion of “water” makes it an absolute mind’s concept. On the mentalistic reading this merely expresses the difference between Hegel’s metaphilosophy of idealism in history before Hegel (including the idealism of Thales) and Hegel’s own self-conscious idealism. Hegel’s self-conscious idealism expresses the metaphilosophical awareness that idealism in history before Hegel lacked.

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

69

 he Infinite Encompasses the Finite T and the Ideal In the being-for-itself relationship between infinite and finite, both sides exclude and require each other. Nevertheless, Hegel accords the infinite ontological primacy over the finite: “It is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite” (SL.I:149/W5:165).19 Hegel’s apparent inconsistency derives from his dialectical terminology. Three interlocking senses of ideal are discernible. First, the ideal is that which is ontologically dependent, not grounded in itself. In this sense the finite is ideal and the infinite real. In the second sense, the ideal is that which is just a moment of being-for-itself, being-in-itself. In this sense both the finite and the infinite are ideal when considered in isolation because neither is complete in itself. They need each other to be themselves. The third sense is closest to common use. It is a thought, an idea. In this sense the infinite is ideal because we know it through mental abstraction from experience, and the finite is ideal because although it may look like the antithesis of an idea it is both derived from and identical to the infinite idea. In typical Hegelian fashion the finite is dismissed as a candidate for reality because it is ideal (sense 1), and the infinite is proclaimed the real because it is ideal (sense 3)! The finite is ideal because derived from something else, but this something else is latent in the finite. The finite is an expression of the infinite. When Hegel says the finite is unreal because ideal, he also means the finite is real because it is a manifestation of the infinite. Thus, by the same token that it is unreal, it is real! The finite is ideal because partial (sense 2) and derived (sense 1) from something, which is itself ideal (sense 3): “being-for-itself has to be interpreted generally as ideality” (Enc.I§96:153 [Werke, 8:205]). But this ideal entity, the infinite, is itself self-grounded and veritable being, real. Just as the infinite is real because ideal, so the finite is real because derived from the infinite, something ideal. In other words, when the finite is put in its proper place and seen in its relationship with the infinite as an essential component of being-for-itself, it is real. It is real but has also lost its abstract independence, and can only be thought, as real, when the whole it is part of is thought. It is not seen as

70 

J. Chambers

a moment anymore, because the whole is seen instead. The being-for-­ itself relationship of the finite and infinite can be thought of in terms of the relationship of the finite parts with an infinite organic whole.

Dialectical Definition of the Ideal The three senses have been separated only for explanation. When each sense was separated, each was only being-in-itself—the reality of the concept “ideal” is each sense’s being-for-itself. “Ideal” is for Hegel, like any concept, a dialectical unity of opposites. When the three senses are separated through abstraction, they have reality only as ideas. We think we are dealing with an individual object with ontological status in itself, but this is an erroneous, because partial, thought. This power of abstraction of the thinking mind makes the finite thought. Because the finite exists only as derived, partial moment of being-for-itself, its being consists only in thought.20 It cannot exist separately from the thought of it, because reality is being-for-itself, not being-in-itself. If pure finite and pure infinite are only erroneous thoughts, the real consists in the negation of their purities and assertion of their union. This is a logical act of thought. Hegel denies that Logic is a merely formal science lacking content and insists it is a logic of matter as well as of concepts: “…the value of logic is only appreciated when it is preceded by experience of the sciences; it then displays itself to mind as the universal truth, not as a particular knowledge alongside other matters and realities, but as the essential being of all these latter” (SL.I:58/W5:55). He sees it as metaphysically structuring reality. It structures reality through the union of universal, particular and individual in the syllogism: “not only is the syllogism rational, but everything rational is a syllogism”21 (SL.II:664/W6:352). A tree, for example, is real when finite and infinite are united in it because they are the being-­ for-­itself of two partial ideas combining, forming a united idea. The finite and infinite are dialectically intertwined such that a tree can be real only when logically manifesting this dialectic. Logic for Hegel is the science of thought. In this sense the real tree is a product of logic, a moment of thought. This is one reason why Hegel posits the ontological primacy of the infinite. The universal “tree” is on the side of the laws of thought

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

71

enabling the finite/infinite union.22 Logic consists in general (infinite) rules governing the nature and interactions of different kinds (infinite) of things. The finite on the other hand is a bare logical (infinite) negation of the infinite. The only negation Hegel countenances is logical hence necessary negation. So, the finite depends upon the infinite in a way that the infinite does not depend upon the finite. Klaus Brinkmann explains being-for-itself in the negation of the negation as I have. “Hegel’s Aufhebung requires the asymmetrical unity of two essential but contrary determinations, in which one of the contraries (for instance, the finite and the infinite) is ‘stronger’ than the other and contains the other within itself ” (2010, 134). Hegel says the idea that the finite and the infinite form an equipollent unity is “misleading and false… [T]he genuine Infinite … preserves itself; the negation of the negation is not a neutralization; the Infinite is the affirmative, and it is only the finite which is sublated” (Enc.I§95:198/W8:202). “This asymmetrical situation,” writes Brinkmann, “in which the second moment [the infinite as the negation of the negation] is both moment and unity of itself and its other accounts for the dominance of the second moment, the fact that it is not equipollent but ‘stronger’ than the first” (2010, 135).23

Metatheology of Idealism “Everywhere in Hegel there is an aroma of religiosity” (Kimball 2000, 6) and in this respect Stern displays a peculiar anosmia. Hegel’s metatheology is in the definition. Stern elides it. Stern insists the universals/infinite that ontologically ground the finite exist independently of any mind to think them. This confronts the prima facie objection that if, as Hegel says in the definition, the infinite is thoughts (Gedanken), then early nineteenth-­ century (and contemporary) German (and English) parlance dictates they belong to a mind to think them. Stern shares McDowell’s and Brandom’s belief that “facts in general are essentially capable of being embraced in thought in exercises of spontaneity” (McDowell 1994, 28), as this thought is independent of minds. “Hegel insists that universals must be considered as subsisting outside the subject mind, as moments of unity located in things independently of the experiencing consciousness”

72 

J. Chambers

(Stern 1990, 114). Stern supports this view with a citation from Hegel’s Logic: “Thought is an expression which attributes the determinations contained therein primarily to consciousness. But inasmuch as it is said that understanding, reason, is in the objective world, that mind and nature have universal laws to which their life and changes conform, then it is conceded that the determinations of thought equally have objective value and existence” (SL.I:51/W5:45). We must put this citation into its context to see which “thought” Hegel is referring to here. The special kind of thought Hegel supposes exists independent of “the subject mind” is thought concerning “universal laws.” These universal laws are the logic that is the topic of the book in question. Two paragraphs above, Hegel states: “[L]ogic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought … God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.” Logic is God’s thoughts; God thinks them. Hegel returns to this topic of thought in the objective world in the Encyclopaedia Logic: “To say that there is understanding, or reason, in the world is exactly what is contained in the expression ‘objective thought.’ But this expression is inconvenient precisely because ‘thought’ is all too commonly used as if it belonged only to spirit, or consciousness, while ‘objective’ is used primarily just with reference to what is unspiritual” (Enc.I§24:56/W8:81). Hegel ascribes to inanimate objects “objective thought”/“thought-­ determinations” that are identical to the thought of human minds only when our thinking is “freed from all particularity of features, states, etc., and does only what is universal, in which it is identical with all individuals” (Enc.I§23:55/W8:80). Yet this kind of thought is not only identical with the thought-determinations of objects and other subjects. This talk about universal, philosophical thinking and its identity with thought-­ determinations develops out of the preceding section’s discussion of a religious idea: “Religion leads us to a universal, which embraces everything else within itself, to an Absolute by which everything else is brought forth, and this Absolute is not for the senses but only for the spirit and for thought” (Enc.I§21:54/W8:78). Religion’s Absolute is God. The thought-determinations are God’s. “It is only in thinking, and as thinking, that this content, God himself, is in its truth” (Enc.I§19:47/W8:70).

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

73

Hegel recognizes that thought-determinations exist independently of the individual subject’s finite mind—that is, he denies subjective idealism. Kaan Kangal summarises that Kant and Hegel “argue for the mind-­ dependency of the world, but it is Hegel who asserts that the metaphysical claims about the world are more than merely subjective thought determinations of it … The task of philosophy is to make the world intelligible by means of establishing a categorial framework within which the concept of the world is constructed. It is this conceptual form in which the world becomes a mind- dependent given” (2020, 156). Hegel puts it in these terms: “This universal aspect of things is not something subjective, something belonging to us: rather is it, in contrast to the transient phenomenon, the noumenon, the true, objective, actual nature of things themselves, like the Platonic Ideas, which are not somewhere afar off in the beyond, but exist in individual things as their substantial genera” (Enc.II§246:9/W9:15). Hegel does not recognize that thought-determinations exist independently of God’s mind. “Hegel did not maintain that reality was composed of mental objects as many philosophers assume by wrongly conflating his idealism with the phenomenalism of the empiricists. Objects, for Hegel, are creations of thought or Idea, and are, as the ‘other’ of thought, essentially dependent on it” (Ruben 1977, 22). Hegel’s use of the word “thought” actually conforms to contemporary parlance, unlike Stern’s, Brandom’s and McDowell’s; God’s infinite mind is the source of objectivity: But when we said that what is sensed receives from the intuiting mind the form of the spatial and temporal, this statement must not be understood to mean that space and time are only subjective forms. This is what Kant wanted to make them. But things are in truth themselves spatial and temporal; this double form of assunderness is not one-sidedly given them by our intuition, but has been originally imparted to them by the intrinsically infinite mind, by the creative eternal Idea. (Enc.III§448:198/W10:253)

The infinite of the subject’s thought exists essentially independent of the subject thinking it by no means undercuts mentalism, with the recognition that the infinite is still the thought of God, dependent upon him. The philosophizing subject participates in the Godhead. A realist about universals, like Stern, who does not realize they depend upon God’s

74 

J. Chambers

mind, is not aware of an essential connection between philosophy and religion. This renders Hegel’s pairing of them in his definition mysterious. No religion rests its case upon claims about the independence of universals from people to think them. Yet all religions (that Hegel counted as such), posit an essential dependence of things on God. The young Hegel also tried to say what idealism is: “That the world is a product of the freedom of intelligence is the determinate and express principle of idealism” (DBFSSP:130/1:65–66). On my reading, this statement is united with Hegel’s belief in God as creator and his belief that the finite lacks veritable being because God is the intelligence who creates the world, equaling the infinite that grounds the finite. On Stern’s reading, Hegel’s claim that a kind of intelligence produces the world is somehow unrelated to Hegel’s idealism, and thus the early and the late Hegel profoundly disagree with each other in a way Hegel somehow did not get around to explaining. “How does the universal determine itself? … A more concrete form of the question is: How had God come to create the world?” (Enc. II:13/W9:23). Hegel does not link universals/infinite to the thought of God on a whim. When Hegel claims “the finite has no veritable being,” Stern agrees he counterpoises it to the infinite. When Hegel denies “finitude as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal,” he implies these are the infinite’s qualities. Stern agrees these are all ways of talking about universals. Yet he does not note these are also all ways religions and Hegel talk of God. This is an instance of relevant characteristics of two entities (universals and God) being united, yet also an instance where Stern denies their identity or indeed any link between them.

 etatheology of the Ideal and Protestant M Orthodoxy Many emphasize Hegel’s heterodox theology. This might be used to argue that the comparison drawn here between orthodox religions’ views about God and Hegel’s view of the infinite are irrelevant, as Hegel’s theory of

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

75

the ideal is not intended to conform to conventional religion. That Hegel’s theological views strayed far from orthodox Christian theology cannot be contested. But it is one thing to admit the eccentricity of Hegel’s theology, and quite another to insist upon an outright incompatibility between Hegel’s theology and protestant Christianity. This objection can be refuted with on biographical grounds as follows: Hegel was a practicing Lutheran in a place and time of relative religious freedom. He did not have to untiringly profess allegiance to Lutheran Christianity. One can only assert that his religious views went against those of his church by imputing cynicism and hypocrisy to Hegel. He was not afraid to go against conventions for his beliefs, celebrating the anniversaries of the French Revolution in a time and place where doing so was taboo. Fear of social ostracism and careerism cannot explain Hegel’s religiousness. The following provides support for the mentalist interpretation’s commitment to the Protestant orthodoxy of Hegel’s idealism and its dialectical definition of the ideal. Evald Ilyenkov (2009) notes that Kant adopted the popular understanding of the term “ideal” as meaning no more than what is contained in subjective consciousness. He adapted it to refer to general and innate structural features present in all individual consciousnesses. So, when Kant’s transcendental ideality of space and time refers to the complete ontological dependence of the determinacy of things in space and time upon the conscious mind that experiences them, the things of experience possess no space-time determinacy in themselves. The ideal is thus the exclusive realm of consciousness. Kant counterpoises the “material” to the “ideal” in the sense that the material is known, through sensation, to exist outside consciousness. The existence of the material can be inferred from consciousness only because the characteristics of the objects of consciousness are all determined by the “laws of empiric advance” (Kant 2007, 512) of the ideal that consciousness imposes upon its objects in cognition. The characteristics of the material independent of consciousness are necessarily unknowable. Kant illustrates the difference between ideal existence and material existence with his famous example of the hundred thalers. Here Kant identifies the ontological difference between the material existence of a hundred thalers (or rather the material thing in itself those thalers ideally

76 

J. Chambers

refer to) in one’s pocket and the ideal existence of a hundred thalers merely in one’s consciousness through imagination—spendable/tangible thalers and unspendable/intangible thalers, respectively. We know of the reality of the material thalers in our pockets through sensation. Nothing relevant comes from sensation to correspond with the ideal thalers (except in cases of hallucination, which Kant has the methodological resources to explain away). Kant uses this in one of his arguments against the “ontological proof of the existence of God.” The existence of objects in consciousness can give no weight to claims of the existence of objects outside consciousness. The fact that God exists in people’s consciousness can give no indication of his existence outside consciousness, for lots of imaginary beings can exist in consciousness alone, like the imagined hundred thalers. Hegel complained that with his thalers Kant had been content with an abstract universal: “an empirical content … having no relationship with any other content and possessing no determinate character relatively to such” (SL.I:88/W5:90). Its materiality was mistaken for its reality, whereas in fact its reality is dependent upon the social nexus in which currency operates. The “reality” of a hundred thalers in one’s pocket is actually circumscribed by the contours of the state in which they are spendable. All the idols24 of society exist, independently of subjective consciousness, crystalized in the symbolic meanings that attach themselves to praxis through social/objective consciousness, which Hegel called spirit/God. Kant’s unduly narrow conception of the ideal meant he erroneously granted objects like money “material” reality, as their existence and characteristics (like their value) exist outside individual subjective consciousness. Kant’s notion of the ideal was too narrow in that it limited its application to subjective consciousness alone whereas in fact the ideal should also apply to the contents of social consciousness—a kind of consciousness Kant inadequately explored. Ilyenkov explains that Hegel saw Kant’s designation of money as “material” to be too Catholic, in the sense that it took the symbolism of money literally. Just as the Catholics failed to see in religious imagery a symbol of a general idea, Kant failed to see the ideal in the coins as a representation of something else, the idea of currency. The ability to

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

77

identify the ideal in the divine, the total abolition of idolatry is the Protestant insight of Hegel’s notion of the ideal. Through this insight Hegel famously rejected Kant’s refutation of the “ontological argument.” Insofar as God existed in social consciousness, he enjoyed the same ontological status as thalers. Hegel reconceived of the “thalers in his pocket” as embodiments of the universal principles of spirit, just as sensuously perceived religious paintings were reconceived as embodiments of spirit. “In their essence they were ideal, although in their existence they were substantial, material and were located, of course, outside the human head, outside the consciousness of the individual, outside individual mental activity with its transcendental mechanisms” (Ilyenkov 2009, 263). Spirit came to reflect the recognition that social consciousness is more than the sum of its parts (Kant saw social consciousness as no more than the sum of individual consciousnesses), a being with a history of its own, separate from individual subjective consciousnesses that included the state, morality and culture, science, language, and concepts themselves. Subjective consciousness comes into a preexisting world made by spirit. The social appropriation of objects precedes and determines individual appropriation. In learning anything about its objects the child learns society’s understanding of them. Through the awareness that spirit is a historical, geographically situated organism, its patterns and forms cannot be thought of as mere generalizations of innate tendencies of subjective consciousness, as Kant saw them, but must rather be thought of as ongoing processes relative to their time and place. Individual consciousnesses learn the culture of the societies they belong to, an overarching system imposed upon them from the outside, in which they live and toward which they make their contributions. In this way the contrast between the ideal and the material came to be thought of as a contrast between the infinite spirit and the finite, including subjective consciousness, which is contained in the infinite spirit. Because spirit exists through objectifying thought forms, the ideal, onto objects, the material is seen by Hegel to exist only insofar as it is appropriated by spirit, as this is the only way it can ever be encountered by subjects. Spirit’s universal forms mediate all of the subject’s interactions with finite objects. Individuals work only with objects as they are currently known and add to knowledge

78 

J. Chambers

using preexisting thought forms. These thought forms replace the material. “Hegel is really speaking not at all about nature as it is, but about nature as it is presented (described) in the system of a definite physical theory, in the system of its definitions established by its historically formed ‘language’” (Ilyenkov 2009, 270).

Mind and World Identity The identity argued for here between mind and world refers to the unity of identity in nonidentity as opposed to the abstract A = A identity that Hegel refutes. The unity of infinite and finite with infinite enjoying primacy coupled with Hegel’s consistent identification of the infinite with the mind of God/spirit means Hegel’s idealism asserts mind/world identity. This is mentalism. It is a radical thesis, intensely criticized after Hegel’s death.25 Nevertheless, it has been shown to follow from what Hegel has said throughout his work. The success of the criticism of Hegel’s identity thesis is arguably a major reason for the sudden disappearance of support for Hegel in his homeland after his death and for the sudden demise of the British Idealists.26 Hegel studies fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world after this. Hegel remained popular in continental philosophy but only in selective applications for ulterior purposes. No serious attempt was made to grapple with his ontology apart from a few studies from Warsaw Pact countries, most notably by Evald Ilyenkov. These studies generally upheld the mentalist interpretation but were not widely read. Nearing the end of the twentieth century aggressive attempts were made to throw this traditional thesis into controversy in Western scholarship. A notable example is William Maker (1998) who argues Hegel’s nature is necessarily independent of spirit. He fails to notice that the only way a non-identity between thought and nature can be asserted for Hegel is if concepts posit this distinction. The argument that only conceptual cognition or thinking can bridge the difference it caused stems from Hegel (Macdonald 2000, 132). Hegel uses an image from Greek mythology: trosas iasetai, the wounder will heal. Nature logically negates thought, and thus logic comprehends them both. Unless nature can be said to be in

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

79

some kind of logical relationship with thought, nothing can be said about it at all. Hegel claims: “If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature…” (SL.I:31–32/W5:20). But once an inherently logical relationship is conceded, logic reigns over both parties, and what appeared to be independent is consumed by the thought of God. Hegel stresses that nature is inherently logical and thus that thought is sovereign in the Encyclopaedia Logic: “Just as thinking constitutes the substance of external things, so it is also the universal substance of what is spiritual …. If we regard thinking as what is genuinely universal in everything natural and everything spiritual, too, then it overgrasps all of them and is the foundation of them all” (Enc.I§24:57/W8:82). Maker sees only one side of the division between thought and nature, failing to notice the relationship’s dialectics: …the object is regarded as something complete and finished on its own account, something which can entirely dispense with thought for its actuality, while thought on the other hand is regarded as defective because it has to complete itself with a material and moreover, as a pliable indeterminate form, has to adapt itself to its material. Truth is the agreement of thought with the object, and in order to bring about this agreement-for it does not exist on its own account-thinking is supposed to adapt and accommodate itself to the object…These views…are errors…. (SL.I:44–45/W5:37)

Unity of terms entails distinctness, division means indistinguishability. In a stimulating article Alison Stone (2000) parallels the genesis and development of nature in Hegel’s Dialectics of Nature with spirit in the Philosophy of Spirit. Stone sees the genesis of nature as parallel to the earliest stages of spirit. In the Philosophy of Spirit, spirit epistemically objectifies itself to recognize the externality of reality. In the same way, in the Dialectics of Nature the absolute idea metaphysically objectifies itself, becoming nature to enable it to overcome merely intellectual awareness. “The divine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit the Other outside itself and to take it back again into itself in order to be subjectivity and

80 

J. Chambers

Spirit” (Enc.II§247:14/W9:24). Mind is the active generative power in both of these paralleled accounts. Mind creates a putative non-mind to study itself. Stone sees the dialectical unity Maker misses.27 The “externalization” of “Idea” into “Nature” not only establishes a correspondence between logic and nature, it also argues for “Spirit” giving life to “Nature”. Hegel’s spirit “externalization” to nature thesis28 posits: A rational consideration of Nature must consider how Nature is in its own self this process of becoming Spirit, of sublating its otherness—and how the Idea is present in each grade or level of Nature itself: estranged from the Idea, Nature is only the corpse of the Understanding. Nature is, however, only implicitly the Idea, and Schelling therefore called her a petrified intelligence …; but God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit. (Enc.II§247:14–15/W9:25)

The most often repeated objection to interpreting Hegel as positing the identity thesis is that while affirming being’s a priori character, Hegel consistently asserts the existence of contingencies, with content known only a posteriori.29 Because these contingencies are a posteriori, it is alleged they cannot be reduced to thought. The idea of “the necessity of contingency” actually implies that if the contingent is necessarily irreducible to thought, then it necessarily must be reducible to thought for Hegel because the realm of the necessary is the realm of thought. Hegel claims: “The merely contingent things of the world are a very abstract determination” (Enc.I§50:98/W8:134). They have to be merely a logical negation of the necessary while having logical determination through negation. It is important to emphasize that the contingent has to be trivial in Hegel’s system because in this way it belongs to thought. With the unity of finite and infinite, finite under infinite, we have a unity of contingency and necessity, contingency under necessity. Hegel argues the finite is necessarily mediated by the infinite. Although the infinite is also mediated by the finite, mediation itself, as logical, is infinite. Hence Hegel feels entitled to reduce the finite to the infinite in explanation.30

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

81

Absolute Idealism as Metaphilosophy In the Thales example Hegel says the finite corresponds to the concrete determinate particular objects of our experience and the infinite corresponds to the universal concept of water, which, he says, ontologically grounds these finite things. For Hegel similar correspondences between finite and infinite can be found in all the ontological systems in the history of philosophy; for the atomists the finite entities are grounded by the infinite atoms, for Plato the finite entities are grounded by the infinite forms, for Aristotle the finite entities are grounded by the infinite substances (the species of living things and the four elements). Hegel’s metaphilosophy sees Thales’s philosophy, traditionally seen as a kind of materialism, as idealist. The ordinary things we experience (the finite), Hegel says, are ideal in Thales’s philosophy because Thales’s concept of water, which is ideal, metaphysically “grounds” them. The finite is ideal because it is grounded in the ideal. Hegel contends Thales’s water is an “ideal entity” because it is more than just what is present to the senses when seeing a cup of it. Its essence pervades all other things, things that do not look like water. Water is responsible for their existences and natures. This concept of water is ideal because it is known via an abstraction from experience and it is nothing beyond the idea we can have of it. Saying other things are, despite appearances, in fact water, also makes them ideal because their existence and essence are derived from this abstraction. Hegel also says seeing atoms or the idea of matter itself as an ontological ground for the finite is idealist.31 If Thales’s water does not perish when its finite instances do, exists in and through diverse finite entities, and is not limited by any of its particular manifestations, it must be infinite. It must be in itself intangible. If it is intangible, it must be an idea. Once we see that Thales’s water is a universal, we see it is a concept, a thought. Hegel’s metaphilosophy of idealism here delineates a historical continuum of thought from Thales through Plato up to Hegel himself. Plato was not the first to assert a supersensible world of the ideal grounding the material world of concrete determinate particulars. Such an idea is latent in the work of Thales, the father of Western philosophy. Hegel brings it out in the definition of

82 

J. Chambers

idealism. This is why Hegel says, “[T]he question then is how far this principle is actually carried out.” Thales carries this principle out partially; Hegel carries it out absolutely, hence absolute idealism. If any doctrine elevates mind’s thought to the level of the absolute, it is uncontroversial to apply the term “idealism” to that doctrine. The mentalistic metaphilosophy outlined above achieves this. Stern’s interpretation is an attempt to avoid this doctrine by jumping off a train of thought before it has reached its station.

Conclusion Hegel is arguably the strongest advocate for the importance of mind in the history of philosophy. However, recent Hegel scholarship in the Anglophone world in regards to ontology can be largely characterized as attempting to downplay the significance of mind. A historically important example of this tendency is Robert Stern. Offering an interpretation that went against the then-dominant trend of non-metaphysical readings of Hegel was commendable. However, it was metaphysically limited. Stern’s anti-nominalist interpretation of idealism, while according mind’s power of abstraction a privileged access to reality, rejects outright the traditional “mentalistic” interpretations of Hegel that accord mind ontological primacy. This chapter challenged Stern’s interpretation by reworking the “mentalistic” interpretation of Hegel’s idealism into Stern’s own in order to draw its full implications. Stern’s interpretation of Hegel is very appealing. Its great strength is that it directs its attention to an interpretation of one of the few extended passages in Hegel where he explicitly addresses the matter of the nature of idealism in general and its relationship to philosophy. He lets Hegel “speak for himself,” more than others have done. This chapter agreed with Stern’s anti-nominalism but argued he is led into difficulties by his failure to follow up its implications. Anti-nominalism without “mentalism” involves the assertion of a nebulous something “X” to ensure the ontological independence of the infinite from mind. Furthermore, in anti-nominalism without “mentalism” the ubiquitous religious undertones of Hegel’s writing’s as well as his specific reference to it in Stern’s

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

83

chosen passage are robbed of theoretical significance. This renders their constant presence mystifying and Hegel’s system as a whole incomplete. This chapter argued that restoring mind back to its proper place at the pinnacle of Hegel’s system solves these problems and so gives a superior interpretation to Stern’s. The non-mentalist conceptual realist interpretations of Hegel misrepresent him, and they misrepresent him in order to make him into a worse philosopher; a philosopher who is constantly refuting himself, a philosopher who does not understand the implications of his own thought. It is not a sufficient excuse to say that Hegel’s philosophy is very complicated and that he was not very good at expressing his views. That is as good as saying Hegel is unreadable and not worthy of the considerable effort the reading takes. It is an elitist slap in the face to all researchers. If a man says “yes” over and over again and we don’t like that answer, must we insist he means “no” only that he is not good at communicating or that his message is so very complicated? Is it not fairer to assume he means precisely what he does say and to just disagree? Dialectics, is not some kind of get out of jail free card for bad researchers, enabling them to take what they like out of any sentence and discard the rest. The revisionists’ Hegel is simply unreadable. Acknowledgments  I am grateful to the Armen T.  Marsoobian at the journal Metaphilosophy for allowing me to reproduce a modified version of my article “Hegel’s metaphilosophy of idealism” in this chapter. I am grateful to Ulrich Schlösser, Andy Blunden, and Cheng Zhihua for reading earlier versions of this article. Metaphilosophy’s anonymous reader’s insightful comments were indispensable.

Notes 1. I should clarify that the term “supersensible” as opposed to the word “transcendental” is used here under advisement. All transcendental entities are supersensible, but not all supersensible entities are transcendental. Kant’s notion of the real is transcendental for he says there is no way of knowing its nature. It is supersensible because it cannot be sensed but we can gain awareness of its existence through concepts in philosophy.

84 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s understanding of the infinite is supersensible, not transcendental. This is because for Hegel, the existence and nature of the infinite can be known through conceptual abstraction from experience but it is not sensed in the same way that we might see a finite object before us like an apple for example. But for Hegel conscious sensation involves concepts and intuitions indissolubly linked. Indeed, he sees them as identical and as such only separable through mental abstraction. In this case there is a real sense in which Hegel can say that we can sense the infinite. It is immanent in sensation, which is always conceptual as well as sensuous. But this is only a qualified way of thinking about the word “sensation”. The infinite is not a finite thing we can encounter like an apple, but it is immanent in the apple and knowledge of it can be reached through abstraction, the same abstraction that Hegel thinks is present and necessary when we experience the finite apple. This is part of what Hegel means by the term “mediated immediacy”. 2. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke—Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe (1969-1971) (W). The abbreviations used are: SL (1969)—Science of Logic; Enc (volume 1. 1991, volume 2.  2004, and 2012)—Encyclopedia; (1988; LHP (1995a, b)—Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

volume

3.

I feel I should apologise in advance for the frequent and lengthy Hegel citations in this chapter. The old complaint that Marx misunderstood Hegel arises from a lack of fidelity to Hegel’s own words. The authors of that thesis offer myriad theories as to what and how that misunderstanding occurred but a common theme is that there are swaths of “interpretation” and Hegel’s words are squeezed between the cracks. Their “true” Hegel is given scarcely any opportunities to speak for himself. My reply to those authors is the same: if Hegel meant to say that, why did he actually say this? They don’t discuss his words. They can take an isolated quote and spin out an elaborate series of propositions which completely refutes Hegel’s counter-statements, but they cannot explain why he made those counter-statements in the first place. Ambiguity of the word

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

85

“Aufheben” is just a dodge. Hegel is not saying that word in most of these citations. (Some, let's call them 'bare-bones' Hegel scholars doubt the authenticity of most of the contents of books of Hegel's lectures. Their thesis can be employed to dismiss many of the controversial quotes of this chapter. However, there are still enough left over  after any 'barebones' purge to support my thesis.) If Marx fundamentally misunderstood Hegel then, Hegel has said enough to demonstrate he has fundamentally misunderstood himself and this obviates the attempt to salvage the “true” Hegel. This interpretation is based upon what Hegel actually said, and the belief that he meant it. Maybe Hegel had a problematic system, but he still had a system, whence arises a fairly consistent repetition of a set of views. 3. Stern’s (1990) work accompanied the works of Willem DeVries (1991), Kenneth Westphal (1989), and James Kreines (2008). It is broadly in line with the work of the most notable pioneers in the analytic school’s appropriation of Hegel, Robert Brandom (1994) and John McDowell (1994). 4. Brady Bowman’s (2013) excellent book-length intervention on the topic draws upon Stern’s work. I would classify Brady Bowman a proponent of a hard-metaphysical reading who avoids the theological element and the charge of mentalism by omission. 5. See Taylor (1975); Inwood (1983); Horstmann (1990); Houlgate (1991); Foldes (2002); Stone (2000); and Sans (2004). 6. See Pinkard (1988) and Pippin (1989). 7. This is an oversimplification. These universals only apply to the infinite insofar as they contribute to the “Concept”; the Concept shares their nature and is disclosed through them. 8. Hegel also talks of it in this context as the True Infinite. This causes confusion when Hegel appears to be saying that the infinite is ideal and the infinite real. He means that the pure infinite (also translated as the Spurious Infinite) is ideal and that the True Infinite is real but the True Infinite is also ideal in the sense that all reality is ideal and the true infinite is the truth of the pure infinite. 9. See Ken Foldes (2002) 10. See Enc.I§37:76–77/W8:106–107 and Enc.I:§41:81–83/W8:113–116. 11. Hegel refers to the “intrinsically infinite mind” as synonymous with “the creative eternal Idea” (Enc.II§448:198/W10:253). 12. Some translate Geist as “mind/Mind,” others prefer “spirit/Spirit.” I use “spirit” for consistency with Stern. Incidentally, I suspect the only reason why Brady Bowman’s admirable study on Hegel does not go so far as to

86 

J. Chambers

attribute mentalistic idealism to Hegel is out of a distaste for the theological question. 13. Perhaps Stern might construe secular spirit, the self-conscious community, in this way (Hyppolite 1974, 29–31), but this spirit cannot play the ontological role of creator necessary for self-consciousness (where absolute knowing knows itself as absolute) to work, without deifying spirit. 14. Hegel talks of absolute spirit (der absolute Geist) as equivalent to God. All the connotations of Hegel’s discussions of God are linked to discussions of absolute spirit. Stern ignores this. 15. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828. 16. It is upon this same level that Hegel claims Hume is correct to note the non-existence of the necessity of causation, for all that is sensed is a succession of events; of course, Hegel and the absolute standpoint ultimately deny this. 17. Hegel can still be valuable for secular philosophy, of course, as interpreting Hegel and applying his ideas are not necessarily the same. 18. Stern proves Hegel had no reason to adopt mentalism because of certain Kantian doubts. 19. Again, this is the True Infinite. The pure/Spurious infinite is being-in-­ itself, like the finite/pure finite. 20. Imaginary things exist as ideas in minds only. We can imagine Escher’s Cube with Magic Ribbons existing in three-dimensional space, but it is only an idea. The pure finite is ideal, not real, in this sense. Of course, Hegel makes only qualified contrasts between the real and the ideal, as ultimately, he sees that reality is ideal. 21. See Stern (2009, 345–370). 22. It should be noted that this example is not meant to be an employment of Hegel’s terminology the way he would use it, but rather the way it would fit into common speech. Hegel himself exercised radical skepticism on the question of the reality of the finite, see Bowman (2013, 126). The finite is real in the qualified sense that an appearance can be  said to be real, but not real in the sense that judgements of finite experience of finite objects are apt for the criteria of truth. 23. See Karin de Boer (2010, 88–95) for another excellent recapitulation of the being-for-itself relation of finite and infinite along these same lines. 24. By “idols” I mean fictitious entities that have been in spirit’s lifeworld and have shaped history. Ideological entities like Gods, money, mythological creatures, Titles, icons, ghosts, laws, omens, and the like. A Marxist inspired by Alfred Sohn-Rethel might call these “real abstrac-

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

87

tions”. I think “idols” encapsulates those connotations best. For example, insofar as the Viking belief in Thor influenced their historical escapades like their invasions then this fictitious entity “Thor” obtained a reality in social praxis and in fact still does obtain a kind of reality in the myriad ways we are all living with the effects of the Vikings’ contribution to history. I don’t want to use the expression “fictitious entity” because I am not discussing the extraneous question of to what extent Hegel would grant one particular product of one finite mind’s imagination this status of thought-­determination-­level-universal reality. Insofar as a fictitious entity is embodied in the Volksgeist—that is, insofar as it is an Idol—I think it is uncontroversial to say the interpretation of Hegel I am proposing would grant that entity exists in the ideal. 25. Evading the difficulties of this criticism for Hegel probably underlies Stern’s wish to stop short of the mentalistic reading. I believe this criticism succeeded but do not thereby wish to denigrate Hegel’s idealism. Mentalistic idealism is the most accurate interpretation of Hegel’s writings, more respectable the other candidates. There is a substantial body of literature (see footnote 3 above) situating this idealism into the most respectable theaters of contemporary analytic philosophy (see Fritzman and Parvizian 2012). 26. Stern argued that the British idealists recognized problems with the identity thesis and addressed them. The arguments from the school he reconstructs are at best incomplete. Stern himself notes that several notable British idealists abandoned Hegel on these grounds (2009, 293–321). 27. See Wright (1983) on identity and non-identity. 28. Kangal (2020, 201). 29. Stern (2009) cites many examples. 30. In his brilliant exposition, Bowman goes so far as to characterize Hegel’s position as “an unmitigated skepticism toward the objects of finite cognition that is perhaps more radical than any variety of skepticism before it” (2013, 103). The contingency of the empirical finite is proof of its utter superficiality. The finite qua being-for-itself is ideal: the finite qua finite does not exist. 31. Theodor W. Adorno made a compelling case that as the completion of idealism Hegel’s thesis of the primacy of the concept goes unnoticed in discursive ontologies submerged in their foundations. According to Adorno, Hegel is far from being an isolated figure; he is in the company of mainstream philosophers and is praised for an awareness of the meaning of philosophy they lack (2004).

88 

J. Chambers

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B.  Ashton. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. An Introduction to Dialectics. Edited by Christoph Ziermann. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity. Bowman, Brady. 2013. Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brinkmann, Klaus. 2010. The Dialectic of the Inverted World and the Meaning of Aufhebung. In The Dimensions of Hegel’s Dialectic, ed. Nectarios Limnatis, 124–139. London: Continuum. de Boer, Karin. 2010. On Hegel the Sway of the Negative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DeVries, Willem. 1991. The Dialectic of Teleology. Philosophical Topics 19: 51–70. Foldes, K. 2002. Is Philosophy Over? A Reassessment of Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Aristoi 3 (2): 5–25. Fritzman, J.M., and Kristin Parvizian. 2012. The Extended Mind Rehabilitates the Metaphysical Hegel. Metaphilosophy 43 (5): 636–658. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen and Unwin. ———. 1969-1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1977. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. Trans. H.S.  Harris and Walter Cerf. New  York: State University of New York Press. ———. 1988. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 1. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. Theodore F.  Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1994. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828, Nachgescrieben von Johann Eduard Erdmann und Ferdinand Walter. Edited by Franz Hespe and Burkhard Tuschling. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1995a. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1. Trans. E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

3  Hegel’s Metaphilosophy of Idealism 

89

———. 1995b. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans. E.S. Haldan. 3 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2003. Hegel Handbuch, Leben  – Werk  – Wirken. Edited by Walter Jaeschke. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. ———. 2004. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827–8. Trans. Robert R. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Volume 3: Philosophy of Mind. Trans. William Wallace and A.V.  Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horstmann, Rolf P. 1990. Wahrheit aus dem Begriff: Eine Einführung in Hegel. Frankfurt am Main: Hain. Houlgate, Stephen. 1991. Thought and Being in Kant and Hegel. The Owl of Minerva 22 (2): 131–140. Hyppolite, J. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ilyenkov, Evald V. 2009. The Ideal in Human Activity: A Selection of Essays by Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov. Trans. H. Campbell Creighton. Ohio: Erythrós. Inwood, M.J. 1983. Hegel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kangal, K. 2020. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kant, I. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and edited by Paul Guyer and A.W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kimball, Rodger. 2000. The Difficulty with Hegel. The New Criterion 19 (1): 4–11. Kreines, James. 2008. Metaphysics Without Pre-Critical Monism: Hegel on Lower-Level Natural Kinds and the Structure of Reality. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57: 48–70. Lau, Din Cheuk 刘殿爵, trans. 1963. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Macdonald, Iain. 2000. The Wounder Will Heal: Cognition and Reconciliation in Hegel and Adorno. Philosophy Today 44: 132–139. Maker, William. 1998. The Very Idea of the Idea of Nature, or Why Hegel Is Not an Idealist. In Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, ed. Steven Houlgate, 1–27. New York: State University of New York Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

90 

J. Chambers

Pinkard, Terry. 1988. Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruben, D.H. 1977. Marxism and Materialism. Harvester and Humanities. Sans, Georg. 2004. Die Realisierung des Begriffs: Eine Untersuchung zu Hegels Schlusslehre. Berlin: Akademie. Stern, Robert. 1990. Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object. London: Routledge. ———. 2009. Hegelian Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, Alison. 2000. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Overcoming the Division Between Matter and Thought. Dialogue 39: 725–743. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Kenneth. 1989. Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Wright, Kathleen. 1983. Hegel: The Identity of Identity and Non-identity. Idealistic Studies 13: 11–32.

Part III Hegel’s Confrontation with Laozi

4 Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi

This chapter argues that despite the disappointment of some commentators that Hegel’s dismissive attitude towards Laozi forfeits the opportunity for genuine dialogue between the two, dialogue is circumscribed by Laozi’s rejection of Hegel’s idealist conception of philosophy. The chapter begins by going over some hermeneutic issues involved in Hegel’s own reading of Laozi, situating it in Hegel’s cultural/historical context and Hegel’s idealist/conceptualist understanding of the history of philosophy. Too often this condemnation has been used to excuse not probing the philosophical ideas that the differences between Hegel and Laozi can involve. For Hegel’s appropriation of Laozi does have philosophical integrity under its bigoted veneer. It explains that Hegel considered Laozi to posit Dao as a transcendent ground of reality resting upon the principle of absolute nothing, which makes him a mystic. This chapter explains how Hegel’s grand narrative of the history of philosophy accords Laozi the lowest status: a preliminary stage before the beginning of philosophy proper. Then it argues that Hegel has got Laozi wrong, introducing complexities to Laozi’s position which Hegel’s interpretation has overlooked.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_4

93

94 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s Idealist Criterion for Philosophy The previous chapter explained that, for Hegel, claiming the ontological primacy of the infinite, universal essences shared between and underlying particular phenomena, is idealism and is philosophy. The correlate of this claim is that a doctrine asserting the “veritable being” of the finite is not idealism, not philosophy. Hegel’s own idealism qualifies the infinite as in a for-itself relationship with the finite such that the two exist in an interdependent unity. Nevertheless, Hegel stresses, in this unity the infinite, which has enacted this union, enjoys primacy. Hegel says “It is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite” (SL.I:149/W5:165).1 Hegel’s grand narrative of the history of philosophy begins with the first attempt to promote a candidate for the infinite. Thales has historically enjoyed the status of the first philosopher in the West and with Hegel, Thales’ claim that reality is water, is read as promoting water as a candidate for the infinite. Hegel’s reading of Eastern philosophy identifies candidates for the infinite. Hegel’s criticism of Laozi is that his candidate for the infinite Nothing (wu无), is vacuous and so Laozi adopts a kind of mysticism to avoid explaining its relationship with concrete phenomena. This chapter argues Hegel is wrong in inferring Laozi promotes Nothing as candidate for the infinite, and rather uses this concept as a marker for the failure of the infinite to encompass the finite. Laozi asserts the veritable being of the finite and denies the ontological primacy of the infinite.

 Brief History of Modern Interpretations A of Laozi’s Dao The main area of dispute is on the central concept of the Daodejing— Dao—Laozi’s idea for ultimate ontological reality, which his system embodies. Modern interpretations of Dao begin with attempts of western missionaries. Their Christian theology heavily influenced their explanations. Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1823) tried to read certain key characters in the Daodejing as saying “Yahveh”. Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare continued these speculations, translating Dao as “logos” (de Prémare

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

95

1878). Another, Lionel Giles was crudest, translating it “God” (Giles 1905). With marked integrity in the face of the missionary bias of their employers, early Russian sinologists, such as N. Y. Bichurin, P. Tsvetkov and Georgievsky, perhaps due to their greater proximity to China and sensitivity to its distinct culture, bravely exhibited immunity from the urge to reduce Dao to alien theological categories or mix Laozi’s ideas up with the mysticism of the later Taoist sect (Yang Xingxun 1950: 100). Comparisons were made with Epicurus and Dao is figured as an antecedent and broader concept to that of God. It seems Leo Tolstoy did not share his compatriots’ immunity to spiritual mysticism in interpreting Dao, which he sees as an ethical ideal, but he did at least exhibit a profound sympathy and respect for Chinese thought that the other Christian mystics mostly lacked. Hegel referred to Dao as Reason derived from Pure Nothing and Kaltenmark followed Hegel in interpreting it as the transcendent origin of the universe (Kaltenmark 1969: 38). Schelling’s (1985) reading was arguably the most innovative and respectful interpretation of Laozi from a Western scholar since Western civilization’s first encounter with the Daodejing and is very important. It was exceptional in attempting to resist the tendency to reduce Dao to Western philosophical/theological categories (Wong 2017). He translated it as “portal” (1985, 576) an onto-ethical principle of non-being.2 His interpretation was never widely circulated and it seems it was forgotten by Western and Eastern scholars alike. Unfortunately, Hu Shi 胡適 (1919) and his fellow Chinese scholars did not follow Schelling’s promising line and were content to repeat the worn-out trend of the previous western-centric interpretations adding elements from the western philosophy that were fashionable at the time (i.e. Dewey’s pragmatism). This led down, what I regard to be, the semantic and trivial dead-end of the controversy of interpretation with the contrasting implications of Dao as either entity or principle. Zhang Dainian 张岱年, for example, saw it as a principle (Zhang 1982: 20). Lao Siguang’s 劳思光 theory of rules (Lao 1993: 252), Xu Fuguan’s 徐复观 theory of drive (Xu 1988: 329), and Gao Heng’s 高亨 theory (Gao 1988: 1–2) are on the same side in this controversy. On the other side, Xiong Shili 熊十力 (Xiong 2001: 203–204) interpreted Dao as an entity. Afterwards, Yang Rongguo 杨荣国 tried to make it a spiritual entity (Yang 1973: 38), and Ren Jiyu 任继愈

96 

J. Chambers

influenced by a materialist ontology tried to conceive of Dao as a kind of substantial entity (Ren 1963: 44–49). Zhan Jianfeng 詹剑峯 and Zhang Songru 张松如 tried to have Dao both ways and made it both principle and entity (Zhan 1982: 175; Zhang 1981: 8). In a project, ostensibly quite close to my own, Yang Xingxun emphasizes the revolutionary, atheistic, and materialist elements of Laozi’s Dao which he thought resembled Heraclitus’ concept of “Logos”, a principle governing changes in the universe yet somehow immanent in them and not dominating them with laws. Following A. A. Petrov’s promising line, he sees it as a self-referential unity-in-opposition of ground of being and architype of being – a category “encompassing both the peculiar material being that follows the nature of its development, and the law of the evolution of this being” (Yang Xingxun 105).3 There is sadly little elaboration of this idea in Yang’s work. These comparisons led to the development of new ideas but also overlooked subtleties in Laozi’s distinctly Chinese contribution to philosophy. Stanislas Julien differentiated Dao from actions, thought, judgment, and reason (Julien 1969). Ye Xiushan叶秀山 said “Logos” is a “measure,” but “Dao” was “immeasurable.” “Logos” is explicit, while “Dao” is implicit” (Ye 1992: 133). Wang Zhongjiang 王中江 had a stab at reasserting the cultural sovereignty of Chinese philosophy when he argued that, while the literal meaning of the character “Dao,” 道 “to speak,” conforms to the original meaning of “logos” in the West, this technical meaning is not consistent with its use in Laozi’s times (Wang 1995: 34–44). Helen Edith Legge urged that Dao cannot be translated, calling it “Tao” (Legge 1905). Arthur Waley (1934) was responsible for the translation of Dao as the “Way” becoming established in the West. Eventually Chinese scholars began to recognize the importance of reading Dao in its own terms, trying to situate it in a Chinese philosophical tradition which had its own categories Fang Dongmei 方东美 tried to separate different aspects of Dao such as its form, function, image, and characteristics (Fang 1979: 295–299), and Tang Junyi 唐君毅 and Chen Guying 陈鼓应 analysed different aspects (Tang 1986: 348–365; Chen 1985: 2). In Comparison, Yuan Baoxin 袁保新 had an ethical conception of Dao and tried to see it as a way of bridging the is/ought divide characteristic of much western philosophy (Yuan 1991, 102–103). Charles Wei-hsun Fu

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

97

(1973) and Liu Xiaogan 刘笑敢 offered influential interpretations, apparently inspired by Spinoza, that tried to equate Dao with nature (Liu 1997: 199–229). These interpretations inspired later work by Hans Georg Moeller (2006) and Steve Coutinho (2014). Indeed, there are many good reasons for using the term “nature”, or “natura naturans” as the best approximation for Dao in the Western Philosophical lexicon. It enjoys a similar pedigree in the history of the Western Philosophical tradition. However, I agree with Li Ruohui 李若晖 that this train of thought was fragmented and ambiguous (Li 2011: 3). Heidegger’s important interpretation took something from Schelling, seeing Dao as a “realm” (die Gegend) (Zhang 2008, 98–110). Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 had a Kantian interpretation of Dao. He saw it as the subjective realm that a subject had gained and demonstrated through his cultivation, and its objective form was no more than “postures” (Mou 1997: 120–125). These scholars used Dao as a means to develop their own thoughts. I believe, insofar as this was involved in the probing of Laozi’s ideas and not historical research of the text, this was an authentic way of reading Laozi. The problem is that all of them are mystical, idealist or empiricist in a way that Hegel refuted and condemned to pre-­ philosophy status. Furthermore, they create inconsistencies in Laozi’s words. As I mentioned in the introduction my reading of Laozi is an instance of, what Liu Xiaogan (2008) calls, reverse analogical interpretation, reading Chinese philosophy through western philosophical categories. Liu complains that putting the philosophy of one tradition into the categories of another leads to confusion. He cannot prove confusion is inevitable. Besides, philosophy should always prefer a profound confusion to a trivial clarity. Since the advent of World History the dream of isolating and purifying Chinese philosophy is impossible for the same historicist reasons it is promoted (our meanings cannot be theirs). It is chauvinistic (purist) in the same way that western-centric readings of Chinese philosophy were accused of being (this is our domain, you are excluded). It is stultifying because this historicism is a kind of relativism, which makes Chinese philosophy both irrelevant in a globalized world and makes unwarranted, defeatist concessions to western philosophy as if the latter alone has the right to set the agenda of globally pressing questions of

98 

J. Chambers

philosophy. It is self-defeating because it merely moves the topic of the debate for philosophy rather than closing it off (pretending that rather than debate Chinese philosophy we can debate whether or not we are allowed to debate it, forgetting that this involves reintroducing Chinese philosophy to explain). It is also false to the open-ended and meaning-­ generating spirit of Chinese philosophy according to which the classics demanded and enjoyed creative re-readings over successive generations. They did not insist upon geographical boundaries for the dissemination and development of thought and the contents of their work, particularly Laozi’s work (chap. 61) suggests an opposition to such sentiments. My reverse analogical interpretation of Laozi is peculiar in that it is based upon Hegel’s western universalist philosophical principles whilst counterpoising it to the tradition from which they sprang, convinced as I am that that tradition speaks to its own openness and has sublated4 itself. Thus despite its alien intellectual framework I do not believe my interpretation conflicts with Laozi’s original meaning. If I make use of this insight in my interpretation of the Daodejing I thereby obviate Liu’s general criticism of reverse analogical interpretation. Hoping to avoid the pitfalls of reverse analogical interpretation Li Ruohui sought an interpretation of Dao which used western philosophical concepts to augment the reconstruction of a philosophy of Dao with Chinese characteristics. He wanted western philosophy to act as midwife and not creator in the same way I do. However, Li Ruohui’s interpretation fatally underestimates the power of the Daodejing’s assault on Logos. His conviction that Dao can be assimilated to the western mode of philosophical discourse, logic and arguments, identifies Dao with what Laozi was striving against. Li accuses Laozi of employing spiritual language that does not qualify as philosophical and claims that consequently Laozi did not consider the philosophical foundations of his thought. He is beneath philosophy in the same way Hegel charged him to be. I counter that it was Aristotle no less who lauded the philosophical integrity of poetry. Laozi’s conception of Dao is philosophically rigorous because it is an anti-concept. Its ambiguity is its nature. By the same token it stands outside of philosophy when understood as an idealist project. Li himself appears to admit as much. Li fails to notice the philosophical argument in the Daodejing because Li has a limited, modern-quasi-western

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

99

understanding of philosophical discourse. The rhetorical strategy of the Daodejing is completely at odds with western Logos worship. Laozi performs a union of means and ends of mimetic rhetoric in the Daodejing. The Daodejing appeared during a time in China’s intellectual history in which the rectifying of names was regarded as the primary political task. The Logician Gongsun Long’s 公孙龙 famous proposition “A white horse is not a horse” (1983: 848) because the particular characteristics of the former distinguish it from the generality of the latter, was given a critical rejoinder with Laozi’s claim that an effable Dao is not the Dao. Li’s failure to appreciate the unique rhetorical strategy of the Daodejing goes a long way in explaining his failure to connect Laozi’s metaphysics with his epistemology. Li thinks Laozi claims Dao is immediately or spiritually known or known through abstraction (in effect) to Pure Nothing. The following chapter will try and explain Dao as a metaphysical, epistemic and ethical act united in one. Knowing it is doing it; a union of means and ends, Laozi’s ethical/political project. In order to make Laozi’s peculiar rhetorical strategy more Chinese, rather than dismiss it as “mystical language” and see it as a humongous weakness of the text, I make it a cornerstone of my interpretation. In making an interpretation of Laozi aimed towards this goal I am mindful of J. J. Clarke’s caution that treating Daoism as a “resource” that can be manipulated and reconstituted in accordance with our will, is mired in precisely those exploitative and masculinist attitudes for which Daoism has been billed as the cure” (2000: 88). Appropriating Laozi with some purpose is not mired in such attitudes in this case because the reading of Laozi presented is oriented around realizing his concern with overcoming the means/ends dichotomy as the last chapter of this book will explore. This interpretation shares some of Hegel’s key principles. Laozi will be interpreted in a way radically opposed to any mystical interpretation (the most popular). More precisely, the chapter shares Adorno’s commitment to seeing all epistemic contact with the object as necessarily conceptually mediated, denying any privileged access to the given through passivity either in meditation (mysticism) or pure sensation (empiricism). This is a controversial way of interpreting Laozi, but is a charitable reading with philosophical integrity, because it is specifically constructed to be

100 

J. Chambers

resistant to Hegel’s well-known (and I believe sound) refutation of immediacy. Also, a very qualified understanding of Laozi’s ontological priority of wu will be presented which does not make the mistake of the idea Hegel calls Pure Nothing in his refutation of Eastern philosophy.

Hegel’s Eurocentric Bias Hegel’s critique of Laozi must be seen as part of his overall project to produce a history of philosophy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy in which the critique occurs. Laozi was mentioned two years after the commencement of his lectures on China began in the last six years of his life. By this time Hegel had assumed the lofty mantle of the chair of philosophy in Berlin. To reach this position Hegel had built arguably the most comprehensive philosophical system since Aristotle. This system included a standard for demarcating the lines of all legitimate and progressive philosophical enquiries. He had built his philosophical system from within the western tradition of philosophy. It is thus not surprising that he did not find very much causing him to think anew from the foreign Indian and Chinese ideas pertaining to philosophy that he encountered in his final years.5 Hegel was trying to find a place in his system for Chinese thought. He designated it a low status in the prehistory of philosophy proper: “The history of the world travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning” (PH:121/W12:134). Hegel’s treatment of Chinese thought has been derided in comparative studies as Eurocentric bias preventing serious engagement. Eric S. Nelson (2011) argues Hegel denied Chinese culture was capable of philosophical thought due to linguistic deficiency. There is textual evidence that Hegel thought the inadequacy of the written form of Chinese was an obstacle to philosophical thought.6 There must be a widely held view that there is little substance to Hegel’s criticism of Eastern philosophy to explain the paucity of commentaries on it. This idea would have to be fueled by the thought that Hegel’s prejudice against the Chinese language made him dismiss Chinese philosophy tout court without bothering to consult the philosophy. This is not the manner of Hegel’s study. Hegel addressed

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

101

Chinese philosophical works that he found in translation, whilst undertaking miner excursions into the Chinese language. If this is the manner of Hegel’s approach we should rather suppose his disparaging remarks about the Chinese language were the result of his disappointment with the Chinese philosophy. Hegel was not impressed by the thoughts he found expressed in Chinese philosophy. He partly accounted for this by reference to the weaknesses in the language, which in form he actually found attractive.7 To some extent it is fair to characterize Hegel’s criticism of the Chinese language as simple bigotry. The Chinese past and present have proven capable of initiating widely influential philosophical ideas finding currency outside China in inconceivably complex ways. They have also, particularly in the twentieth century, proven quite adept at assimilating foreign philosophical ideas to their own, adapting and applying them to Chinese conditions and contributing to foreign philosophical debates. They have done this in Chinese, a language that has remained, in speaking and writing, strikingly similar to the earliest archaeological evidence we have of it. The Chinese language has constrained Chinese philosophy, but in equal measure it has enlivened it. Every language is like this. However, we should not let Hegel’s bigoted disdain for the Chinese language overshadow the real substance of his attacks on Chinese thought in general and Laozi in particular. There is an important sense in which Laozi is not doing philosophy of Hegel’s stripe even though Hegel himself seems to misidentify why and how. Hegel’s linguistic complaint was in part an expression of his own frustration in dealing with the ambiguities in the translations he had. Much of these ambiguities arose through punctuation issues that also cause modern readers of ancient Chinese classics headaches. The linguistic complaint is really a side issue to Hegel’s basic criticism and it is anachronistic (these days doubly anachronistic!) to let the modernist linguistic turn take centre stage in the controversy of Hegel’s criticism of Chinese thought. Worst of all, this kind of reading of Hegel’s criticism of Chinese thought quickly descends into name-calling and no hermeneutic progress can be made when the project of interpretation and commentary is reduced to the fatuous enterprise of identifying and condemning bigotry wherever it occurs in works of the distant past.8

102 

J. Chambers

Of course, it should also be admitted there is a certain arrogant audacity in presuming to be able to teach a course summarizing the whole gamut of Chinese (and Indian!) culture with special reference to its philosophy as Hegel did with such little prep time. He evidently did not expect much worthy of extensive research from the beginning of his task. When one reads Wong Kwok Kui 黄国巨 (2011) one gets the feeling that, had Hegel treated Chinese thought with more respect from the outset, had he read more about the historical and cultural context of texts like the Daodejing, he might have found in Laozi a worthy intellectual sparring partner whose ideas strikingly compared and contrasted with his own.9 Unfortunately Hegel had very little material to work with on Laozi, and what he had was distorted. Hegel’s access to Laozi seems restricted to just one extremely limited translation of only five chapters (1, 14, 25, 41, and 42) by the French Sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. Abel-­ Rémusat’s translation and commentary misrepresents the Daodejing as he only translated some of the most obscure chapters and expended an inordinate amount of commentary effort on pointless theosophical investigations into the fanciful conjecture that some connection exists between Laozi’s Dao and the God of the Hebrew Bible. Yet we should resist feelings of regret from reading Wong Kwok Kui because if Hegel had a deeper understanding of Chinese thought he would have found that Laozi stands outside his conception of philosophy. Hegel had a Eurocentric bias but thanks to his universalist philosophy he did not fall for a clash of civilizations West/East dichotomy. Hegel did not succumb to the prejudice that philosophy is the exclusive preserve of the West. Indeed, for all his disrespect, Hegel accords Asia a status in the history of the development of The Idea, at the very beginning. When Hegel read Laozi, he encountered an alternative approach to philosophical questions. Yet Hegel thought he had found a place for it in his system. However, in fact Laozi was incomprehensible to Hegel, not because Hegel was a bigot, but because there was no place in Hegel’s system for Laozi’s ideas. Bigotry was then employed as a means of explaining the immature philosophy Hegel thought he found. It is for this reason that we should resist philosophical regret at a lost opportunity. Laozi’s thought goes beyond Hegel’s conception of philosophy in an opposed, but complimentary way from that of Marx and Engels.

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

103

Hegel’s Laozi Hegel addresses the topic of Dao in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel identifies Dao as a Chinese attempt at “Reason” (Vernunft), akin to the ancient Greek logos, defining the way things proceed. Hegel even anticipates later translations of Dao with the word Weg (way). Hegel sees Dao as embodying a dialectic which anticipates his own conception of reason. He sees Dao as a self-moving spirit from which emanates the finite and which harmonizes contradiction, in a way which Mario Wenning observes “bears surprising parallels to Hegel’s conception of reconciliation (Versöhnung)” (2017: 166). In his analysis of chapter 42 of the Daodejing Hegel comments that Laozi’s philosophy anticipates Hegel’s own trinitarian dialectical theology (LPR:246/W16:328). However, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel argues that Laozi’s Dao rests upon the concept of absolute nothing as ontological ground and this leads it to a critical impasse. The rest of this chapter will be concerned with Hegel’s criticism of Laozi therein. Hegel’s criticism of Laozi is quite straightforward. Hegel lumps together Buddhism with Daoism, which he identifies with Laozi’s Daodejing. He believes the notion of nothing or nonbeing, Laozi’s “wu”, serves as the highest principle, the principle of the “Absolute” in the ontology of the Daodejing: [A]nd it is then said that in the Taoists, as with the Chinese Buddhists, the principle of the Absolute, the origin of all things, the last, the highest is nothing, that they deny the existence of the world. But that really only means that unity here is wholly the indeterminate, the being itself, which therefore appears in the form of nothingness. It is not in the sense, as is usually said, nothing, but as a distance of all representation, all objective, — precisely the simple, self-identical, the indeterminate, the abstract unity. So it is also affirmative; it is what we call essence. (1938: 285)

Hegel charges this notion is an empty abstraction. The outcome of this for philosophy is that this abstraction is detached from the job of explaining the determinate reality of concrete particulars in experience. There is

104 

J. Chambers

thus no way of either arguing for this abstraction dialectically or theoretically connecting it up with concrete reality. In metaphorical terms it falls into the same trap Hegel famously sees Schelling falling into in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the night where “all cows are black” (PS:9/W3:22). The principle is, because of its abstractness, indeterminate and because of its indeterminateness it cannot account for determinate reality. For Hegel it is because of this unfortunate choice of highest ontological principle that he charges Chinese philosophy with failing to develop, as it remains stuck in an overly abstract philosophical lack of discourse. Hegel also claims the detachment of the highest principle from concrete determinate particulars means Chinese metaphysics is cut off from and cannot provide a theoretical basis for moral or political philosophy which makes them “dry” (1938: 183), that is, without philosophical grounding and just commonsensical “moralizing sermons” (272). Hegel compares nonbeing with the Greek conception of God that performed a similar role with similar drawbacks in the proper beginning of philosophy in the Hellenic world. If the nothing is said, stopping at the negative determination, there is some meaning in it. The original is indeed nothing. However, it has no meaning, insofar as not all determinations in it are sublated [aufgehoben]. As when the Greeks say: The Absolute, God is the One, or as in more recent times it is said: God is the highest being, then all determinations are also erased. The highest being is the most abstract, the most indeterminate; there are no determinations in this. It is the same negation, only taking an affirmative form. Likewise, when one says: God is the One, nothing is said about the relationship of this One to the Many, about the many, differences as such. The affirmative form of this expression therefore has no other content than nothingness. If philosophizing does not go beyond such abstract beginnings, it is on the same level as that of the Chinese. (1938: 285)

He thinks he finds the textual evidence for an identity of Laozi’s thought with Chinese Buddhism here and draws a comparison with the Greeks in his comments on chapter one of the Daodejing: “This is nothing more instructive on the whole— something general, as we find it similarly in the beginning of philosophical progression in the West…” (1938: 282).

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

105

These two are both all-encompassing notions and so it is impossible to limit them with an opposite. An opposite notion/notion of opposition, would be needed for a development of philosophy because only through oppositions can there be determination (black needs white for its meaning, this table is not that chair etc.) and the real world we live in is one of determinate things negating each other. Laozi’s idea of nothingness is so indeterminate it swallows up all differences and in so doing swallows up any chance of explaining them. It is easy to see why this diagnosis of Chinese metaphysical thought was attractive to Hegel. It fits in with his Science of Logic, which articulates the dialectical progression of logical categories of thought forms from the lowest and most abstract level in the objective side (being in itself, the dead matter of the cosmos) to that of the highest determination and explanatory power in the subjective side (being for itself, living nature with humanity at its highest level of consciousness). It is Hegel’s contention that the logical categories found in the Science of Logic could be mapped onto real historical stages in the history of philosophy. The first stage in the Science of Logic is that of Pure Being, a metaphysical paradigm, which Hegel consciously parallels with the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides who he says “first enunciated the simple thought of pure being as the absolute and sole truth” (SL.I:83/W5:83). The absolute antithesis of Pure Being—Pure Nothing follows directly on from it in the second section of the first chapter. The historical parallel for this, Hegel says can be found “in the oriental systems, principally in Buddhism” (1938: 182). In Hegel’s grand narrative of the history of philosophy Pure Nothing (found in “oriental” thought) historically precedes the stage of Pure Being (found in the Eleatic philosophers later). This contradicts the order of presentation of the stages in the Science of Logic. How is this? According to Hegel, for the unfolding of the logic to be progressive Pure Being must precede Pure Nothing (Carlson 2007: 37). Although ultimately Pure Being and Pure Nothing are identical they are reached through different epistemic processes. Pure Being is reached by trying to absorb all distinctions into a One, by negating all distinctions to try and get them together as common. Pure Nothing is reached by trying to exclude all determinations. But by excluding everything we still use abstraction, we still deny

106 

J. Chambers

all distinctions, which involves everything. Pure nothing is reached by a denial of everything. Yet we cannot deny everything before it is asserted. As an epistemic act pure nothing actually posits something. So Pure Nothing cannot come before Pure Being for it already assumes it in the epistemic process required to reach it. Can we not also say Pure Being is also a denial of determinations and as such a denial of Pure Nothing and thus assumes it already? Pure Being does not deny determinations or Pure Nothing because these categories have not been brought to light yet. This is the case even though the true content of Pure Being and Pure Nothing is the same. Pure Nothing is distinct from Pure Being only in that Pure Nothing is an empty negation of Pure Being and vice versa. Both moments are empty, but the second moment must follow the first because the second exists only as a negation of the first. Once the recognition comes that the first must also be a negation of the second we are already on the way to the third stage of Becoming. Hegel thinks pure assertion can precede pure denial and that it does not include denial in itself from the beginning, or at least not consciously. This reinforces my interpretation that in Hegel’s Logic concepts presuppose consciousness; concepts are epistemic acts. Hegel believes that the difference between Pure Nothing and Pure Being appears in time: “being and nothing are held apart in time, are conceived as alternating in it, but are not thought in their abstraction and consequently, too, not so that they are in themselves absolutely the same.” (SL:84/W5:85). Time should be excluded from Hegel’s own conception of these two categories “in their abstraction”–purity. Being and Nothing are timeless logical concepts, but bringing in Becoming brings in time. He therefore asserts that the same truth underlies the identity between Buddhism’s ontological ground of nothing and the western ontological ground of being: the nothing, which the Buddhists make into the principle of everything (and into the ultimate end and goal of everything too), is this same abstraction. […] The same applies to the definition of God as mere being. Against it there stands, with equal justification, the definition of the Buddhists that God is nothing-from which it follows that man becomes God by annihilating himself. (Enc.I§87:139&141/W8:186&188)

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

107

This insight maps onto Hegel’s view that Chinese thought and society were stagnant. The “oriental systems”, like the Ancient Greeks began with an atemporal abstraction yet, because Pure Nothing already included Pure Being, the content and transition were overlooked by the Chinese. The selection of Pure Nothing as a primary ontological idea did not lead to the realization of any identity with Pure Being as it did the other way around for the Ancient Greeks. This also maps onto Hegel’s view of the genius of the Greeks. Because the Greeks had got off to the right start with Pure Being in Parmenides, they were able to skip the stage of Pure Nothing (Hegel identifies no analogue for Pure Nothing in the Greeks) with Heraclitus’s discovery of the stage of Becoming (the third stage) a constant back-and-forth movement between Pure Being and Pure Nothing. Pure Nothing has the additional weakness for Hegel in Eastern philosophy in that it does not, because it cannot, move beyond its mere assertion. As regards the proposition ex nihilo nihil fit Hegel notes “Christian, metaphysics whilst rejecting the proposition that out of nothing comes nothing, asserted a transition from nothing into being; although it understood this proposition synthetically or merely imaginatively” (SL.I:84/W5:85). I think in this context Hegel’s use of “synthetically” (synthetisch) here is in the sense of ‘artificially as opposed to organically’—a near-synonym of ‘synthetic’ in certain contexts in German (as well as English). I believe “merely imaginatively” (bloß vorstellend) roughly corresponds to the way in which this chapter refers to mystical insight. It seems Hegel would also characterize Laozi’s version of creatio ex nihilo as similarly lacking philosophical integrity. Despite its mysticism, Christianity had access to a transcendent agent—God—who performs the union between nothing and being. Hence Hegel notes Christianity, without really noticing it, contains the insight of the ultimate identity between nothing and being. This was a philosophical resource Hegel’s dialectical logic would later employ, through which he argues his philosophy has a place for a mysticism in which the mystery is preserved by being known philosophically. Hegel thinks Daoism lacks this access to a transcendent agent by starting with nothing, instead of being; trapped in the opposite (though the same) mysticism as Christianity yet without the resources to escape it.

108 

J. Chambers

Hegel believes the “oriental systems” are mysticism, whereas Parmenides’ ontology of Pure Being is based upon a linguistic argument regarding the impossibility of nonbeing begetting a dialectical approach to ontology (Chambers and Cheng 2019). It is for this reason that Hegel honors Parmenides with the title of the first proper philosopher. We should take Hegel’s criticism of Pure Nothing as a start-point for philosophy. I believe it has force against the notion of Nothing as origin and meaning of reality in certain Buddhist and Daoist schools of thought. Ren Jiyu 任继愈 notes that both idealist and materialist interpretations of Laozi’s concept of Nothingness are compatible with it (1963: 267). Hegel’s idealist assessment of pure nothing is reason enough to reject the mystical interpretation.

Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi Was Mistaken I have shown above that Hegel interpreted Laozi as an advocate of Pure Nothing from his reading of Chapter 1 of the Daodejing. It is also arguably the most important chapter and the key to reading the whole text. Much of the Daodejing is presented in an apparently random order. Yet the extremely dense and abstract nature of this chapter indicates that it has attained its place at the beginning of the classic (or at least one section of the classic (Ding 2016)) because of conscious selection. I read chapter 1 as a microcosm of the entire wisdom of the Daodejing (Fu 1973). Let us look at this chapter with the Wang Bi version of punctuation Hegel read: 道可道,非常道,名可名,非常名;无名,天地之始,有名,万物之母;故常 无欲,以观其妙,常有欲,以观其徼;此两者,同出而异名,同为之玄,玄 之又玄,众妙之门。 (Wang 1992, 1)

Professor Galia Patt-Shamir (2009: 411) has kindly given me permission to reproduce, a slightly amended, instructive translation of this chapter highlighting its oppositions10 (Table 4.1): The salient oppositions are schematically presented below (Table 4.2): Laozi’s oppositions are an attempt to identify Dao as the whole of two dialectically combined contraries. It is both one and two, it embodies a

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

109

Table 4.1  Chapter 1 translation 孴孬ಕՆಕˈ dao ke dao The dao that can be daoed

孫孵孬ඉ fei is not

孶孬໌Ն໌ɾ ming ke ming The name that can be named

孫孷孬ඉ fei is not

孹孬༙໌ᤊ෼೯฾ youming wanwu zhimu Named (it is) the mother of the myriad things

৙ಕ屆 chang dao the constant dao ৙໌屆 chang ming the constant name. 孫學孬ໃ໌ళஏ೯࢟ɾ wuming tiandi zhishi Nameless (it is) the beginning of heaven and earth

孫孺孬‫ބ‬ gu Therefore,

孻孬৙༙ཋҐ᧼ଘዂ屆 Chang you yu yi guan qi jiao Always have desires to observe its boundaries

৙ໃཋҐ᧼ଘຽDŽ Chang wu yu yi guan qi miao Always be without desire to observe its secrets

ಋ tong the same

孼孬ࠓၹंɾ ci liang zhe These two are

孴孳孬ड़ࣗҡ໌ɾ chu er yi ming But diverge in name as they issue forth

孫孴孴孬ಋ tong the same

Ҩ೯‫ݲ‬屆 Wei zhi xuan they are called mystery 孫孴孵孬‫ݲ‬೯຤‫ݲ‬孫孴孶孬䲀ຽ೯໵屆 Xuan zhiyouxuan zhongmiao zhimen Mystery upon mystery, the gateway of the manifold secrets.

Table 4.2  1 Oppositions 1) Expressible/Fleeting Dao 3) Namable names 6) Named is the mother of Myriad things 8) through desiring Manifestations/Boundaries learned 10) Diverge in name as they issue forth

2) Inexpressible/Constant Dao 4) Unnamable/Constant Name 5) Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth 7) through not desiring Perfection/Secrets learned 9) These two are the same

110 

J. Chambers

self-contradiction, or rather the principal self-contradiction. To his distinct credit Scott Austin offers an interpretation which challenges the uniform trait of its predecessors: all of which attempt to soften the apparent contradiction in the line. How can the way which is a way not be a real way? One may render it, “The way which can be travelled is not the ultimate way,” or “the reality that can be grasped is not the true reality,” but all such translations already presuppose a considerable process of interpretation. As the line stands, it is just the Tao which can be completed which is not a real Tao. (2011: 95)

A lot of pivoting has been performed in the hermeneutic history of the Daodejing to avoid acknowledging the contradiction here. Yet it is incongruous to expect the first chapter in a book of relatively self-standing chapters to rely upon such extensive qualifications. There is clearly a contradiction at play in this first line. The Dao we seek is not a Dao. Austin reads it thus: “The Tao which is a Tao is not a real Tao. Nature, then, contradicts its own ruling principles; or, perhaps, for us to attempt to understand those principles is for us to encounter a contradiction” (95). The first line says the constant Dao is not expressible/followed Daos and this contradicts the two occasions in the same chapter where Laozi says they are the same. This contradiction is dialectical. The constant Dao is both the same and different to the conceptual Daos we can have. While some might say I am trying to have my cake and eat it, I actually have sympathy for the interpretation of the first line outlined by Steve Coutinho. He argues the historical etymological provenance of reading the second Dao of the first line as meaning sayable/expressible is lacking. He promotes this interpretation of the first line: “Dao can be followed [the second Dao translated as followed] but it is not a regular Dao” (Coutinho 2014: 52). He does this mainly out of his concern to avoid the interpretation of Dao as unsayable because transcendent. I do not think the idea that Dao is unsayable necessarily leads to the idea that it is transcendent. It seems Coutinho does not either because he is happy with the idea that Dao is inherently obscure and subtle. It can transcend logos without transcending experience. Further, I believe a poetic parallel can be found with the second Dao and the second ming of the second line.

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

111

That is, I believe Laozi is talking about the incapacity of language to encompass Dao. I can interpret the first line in a way which is semantically identical to Coutinho but syntactically different to convey this meaning thus: “Daos can be followed [with concepts] but these are not the constant Dao.” We can use concepts, but concepts do not capture Dao. I am entitled to put “with concepts” in square brackets because of the link Laozi later draws between goals and concepts, discussed below at length. Following requires goals and goals require concepts so followed Daos are conceptual. On this interpretation we see the followed Daos as the goals we consciously set ourselves. (And, in an additional implied point, if we master non-action (无为- wúwèi) then we have to transcend goals and so following Dao cannot be one.) This way of interpreting the first line is not significantly dissimilar to the way Patt Shamir reads it, that is, as articulated Daos, so it remains unchanged in the section to which this note refers. I prefer my way of reading the chapter to Coutinho’s not because I think it is textually superior,11 (I follow Coutinho’s opinion that the Daodejing disallows a definitive interpretation and in addition I believe Laozi is playing with the ambiguous grammar to send several messages at once) but because it more strikingly exposes the dialectical character of Dao I wish to convey. Anyway, Coutinho’s interpretation robs the first line of its profundity, for all it implies is that here Laozi is saying the Dao that is the topic of his work is not like other Daos: “This Dao is special.” Yet if that is all Laozi is saying here the following chapters should make that so evident as to not warrant the introductory statement and not justify the fame it has earned. Laozi, famously parsimonious with words, would be wasting them here by stating the obvious—perhaps the book’s only such occasion. An interpretation of this chapter, making it a reference to others, is incongruous with them in style and content. Yet if my interpretation follows Austin’s in seeing a dialectical contradiction present in the first line is it not thereby condemned to follow Austin’s interpretation of Dao as transcendent? It is now important to clarify the sense in which this interpretation is and is not transcendent, a clarification Austin duly supplies: The first principle, in a view of reality which would purport to be ultimate, is (as the source of all reality) transcendent; it cannot be expressed using

112 

J. Chambers

language appropriate to the rest of the system. We approach it only through negations. But, as the first member of the system itself, it is also immanent, the principle of all principles, the archetype of the positive structures which engender the order of reality.

So, the “first principle” is transcendent of Logos/discursive thought (not cognition as such) because it grounds the order of nature. Yet it is also immanent in Logos/discursive thought because it is also one of the principles subject to nature. It is both transcendent and immanent, judge and judged. It is transcendent because it is immanent and it is immanent because it is transcendent. It is a principle transcending principles. It is an entity transcending entities. Austin’s account of knowledge of Dao is derived from a discursive investigation into the dichotomy of a ground of grounds.12 For Austin, we can discursively know that side of Dao. It is subject to the same principles it grounds. Chapter 25 mentions this dual role of Dao: Man models himself on earth, Earth on heaven, Heaven on the way, And the way on that which is naturally so. (Lau 1963: 30)

The interpretation offered here parts ways with Austin at the point he appeals to some kind of mystical or passive awareness of Dao. The next chapter of this book presents an account of the knowledge of the discursively transcendent side of Dao through the conscious reproduction of a peculiar kind of action all things perform, to be further elaborated in the analysis of lines 7 to 10 below. Chapter 25 has both metaphysical and epistemic content: The metaphysical content referred to is the constant Dao, which cannot be named and is the beginning of heaven and earth, immanent in things. When the constant Dao is named it is thus no longer constant. When seen as mother of all things, it is relegated to the level of an empty primordial ancestor (wu). These two ways of looking at Dao arise together and as such are both Dao. However, the epistemic content of the chapter states the unnamable constant Dao is knowable through not desiring and the

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

113

namable side is knowable through desiring. There are two sides to, two ways of knowing, one Dao (bearing in mind that one side of Dao cannot be properly so called as it escapes names). Hegel’s interpretation of this chapter does not make a connection between namable and unnamable sides of one Dao. Rather, Hegel infers from the fact that the unnamable precedes the namable that the unnamable generates the namable. He ignores the line saying these two emerge together. Hegel further infers the unnamable is actually referring to nonbeing. Hegel thinks that when Laozi uses the word 名 “míng” in “wú míng” Laozi is using it as a verb as in “wu names the beginning of heaven and earth”, and not wuming as in nameless.13 My own interpretation is consistent with both interpretations of this controversial couplet. That is, I think it reflects an ambiguity which is trying to put two different meanings, that complement each other, across at the same time. The wu side of Dao is also the nameless side.14 For the sake of the exposition here I am using the idea of nameless.15 This does not commit me to do so all the time. It depends upon what lessons we are trying to draw from the Daodejing. Given that Hegel is ready to lump Laozi together with Chinese Buddhists, it is not surprising he was drawn to the idea of wu instead of wuming. He is following Abel-Rémusat in this; and indeed, identifying Dao with nonbeing has a good pedigree in the Chinese hermeneutic tradition as it matches Wang Bi’s celebrated interpretation. Therefore, while I appreciate his panache, Yang Xingxun’s invective against Hegel-inspired interpretations, “such a fraudulent device can deceive only a simpleton in science and a blind admirer of Western bourgeois culture” (Yang 1950: 52), is to be deemed somewhat harsh! Hegel’s interpretation depends upon his understanding of Laozi’s use of the word “wu” in the first chapter. Hegel’s view is also bolstered by an apparent reiteration of this idea in chapter 40 when Laozi says the ten thousand things are the product of being and being the product of nonbeing. With Hegel’s interpretation Laozi is saying nonbeing generates being and the determinations (the wànwù) that follow from it, which Hegel disparages Laozi for not being able to prove.16 If we return to the idea that Laozi is talking about two sides of Dao and the respective ways of knowing them and recognize Laozi says these two sides emerge together we have reason to doubt Hegel’s criticism. I will try

114 

J. Chambers

to substantiate this claim and outline it more by presenting it as in fundamental opposition to Hegel’s idealist conception of philosophy. For the time being I concede that Laozi’s wu enjoys an ontological (and other kinds of ) primacy but insist the concept of wu and its relationship to you is not the same as Hegel’s Pure Nothing. This is because it is seen as one side of a two-sided concept, both two and one: Dao. Using Hegel’s finite/infinite terminology it is fairly easy to discern Hegel thinks Laozi’s Pure Nothing corresponds with his idea of infinity, and “the ten thousand things” Hegel thinks Laozi uses wu to explain corresponds with the finite. Hegel’s criticism was thus based around his view that Laozi was employing the notion of Pure Nothing as a candidate for infinity. Remember also how Hegel said Pure Nothing is a poor candidate for ultimate reality because its emptiness makes it incapable of explaining the diversity and change of the world we experience. Hegel is saying Laozi’s idea of the infinite is not logically capable of grounding the finite. Pure Nothing is forever a being-in-itself and cannot be logically related to its other, indeed, it is so abstract that it lacks an other. As such it fails to explain even in the basic way the lowest Greek philosophy succeeded in explaining. Nevertheless, it succeeds in being philosophy (that is, succeeds in being idealist), at least insofar as it posits a supersensible reality, corresponding to the infinite, and claims it explains the finite. It is thus the lowest sort of philosophy. Hegel’s definition of absolute nothing for Laozi’s conception of the wu of Dao is not consistent with its use in the Daodejing. While Chapter’s 1 and 40, employ wu as an abstract concept, Laozi uses wu in contexts of metaphors from daily life. In these metaphors wu is characterized as a relative absence serving as a container for specific events. In chapter 6 it appears as the hub of wheel spokes, and in chapter 11 it is the cut out spaces for doors and windows. It also appears in the indeterminacy of blandness, as found chapter 35 particularly and in the water metaphors in general, of the Daodejing as explored by François Jullien (2004). Wong Kwok Kui argues from this that “We may say that wu, as an abstract concept, is not logical nothingness, but a state of formlessness similar to apeiron, as much as you is a state of formed individual objects. Wu, we may conclude, is a state of nature being inactive in itself but can generate myriad things in the world without exhausting itself ” (Wong 2018: 582).

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

115

This inference contains an important aspect of Dao, but without further qualification it merely transforms Laozi’s Dao into the Ancient Greek conception of Being which Hegel has refuted above. I follow Steve Coutinho in seeing “Dao as Holistic and Imminent Source of Things” (2014: 23) and rejecting Dao’s alleged transcendence. Coutinho cautions against thinking Dao is a transcendent entity that stands outside of the empirical world, preceding and somehow creating it. Coutinho argues the notion of transcendence only arises in philosophical texts where naturalistic explanations of the origins of reality are explicitly ruled out. He points out that clear cases where the notion of a transcendent origin occurs in Western philosophical literature accompany extensive arguments against the possibility of naturalistic or holistic explanations. In the absence of any such arguments in the Daodejing Coutinho feels entitled to infer Laozi did not have the idea of transcendence in mind. In addition, Coutinho says the Daodejing is consistent with an interpretation of Dao as an imminent and holistic entity.17 Hegel sees the absence of argument for a transcendent Dao as Pure Nothing explaining the determinate and against other naturalistic first principles as reason to criticize Laozi. Coutinho, on the other hand sees the absence of such argument as reason to reject an interpretation of Laozi’s Dao in terms of Pure Nothing or other such transcendent notions. If Dao was seen as Pure Nothing the only way it could operate as an explanation of the determinate is if it was thought of as a transcendental entity. If it was a transcendental entity it could operate as a candidate for the infinite. This is why Hegel is drawn to this interpretation. It would have to be transcendental because, as Hegel says, there would be no way of articulating its link to the determinate, which would leave the connection obscure, hence Hegel’s criticism of Laozi. It would be an explanation of sorts, but an inadequate one. However, if it was conceived of as a naturalistic entity then it would be impossible for it to be any kind of Pure Nothing, for Pure Nothing is not evident in the determinate. So, either Dao must be thought of as transcendent or it cannot be thought of as Pure Nothing. While I think Coutinho’s understanding is more charitable than Hegel’s and more coherent with the text I do not agree with him that we should expect to find arguments for the transcendent in the Daodejing if

116 

J. Chambers

that is how Laozi thought of Dao. It is simply begging the question to assume that transcendent candidates for the explanation of the determinate need argument whereas naturalistic candidates somehow do not. Why should we assume the naturalistic explanation is more “natural”? Why should not a naturalist explanation not also include a refutation of transcendental candidates? Coutinho’s prejudice for the naturalism of modern philosophy is exposed by his use of the word “metaphysical”18 to describe only the transcendental candidates for explanation. Even naturalistic explanations are metaphysical and deserve just as much argument as any other (Lowe 2002). References to the history of Western philosophy are obviously out of place when dealing with a work from a completely different tradition like the Daodejing. I propose there is no argument against a transcendental candidate for explaining the determinate in the Daodejing not because Laozi somehow thinks a naturalistic explanation, unlike a transcendental one, does not require justification. And there is also no reason to assume such arguments did not occur to Laozi as if he never gave transcendental explanation thought. Rather, I say no such argument exists because of a fundamental aversion to the circle of logos in having the final say (no pun intended) on metaphysical truth in the Daodejing. And the only metaphysical explanation of the determinate that could be consistent with this aversion to logos is a naturalistic one, even if it is a kind of naturalistic explanation that must admit its ultimate inadequacy and paradox qua conceptual explanation. Words cannot do the job of explaining the link between Dao and the determinate. Laozi says this. On this we agree with Hegel. But this is not because Dao is thought of as absolutely transcendent. Rather it is precisely because Dao is immanent in the determinate. On this Laozi falls into the sharpest contrast with Hegel. For Hegel thinks that if the infinite is not transcendent then it is possible to articulate what links it to the finite. And this is why Dao cannot be seen as a candidate for the infinite. Partly the reason why Hegel made his erroneous interpretation is that the concept of Dao is notoriously difficult to pin down. Laozi says Dao is by its nature obscure (chapter 25). He goes on to say how any discussion of Dao leads to paradox (chapter 41) and any attempt to directly confront it leads to it retreating away (chapter 41). The meaning of Dao cannot be said but it can be shown.19

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

117

Laozi emphatically denies the possibility of defining Dao. Rather he repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly uses a cluster of concepts to indicate the relative presence or absence of Dao. One of these key concepts is vagueness. This has led Laozi to be vilified as an obscurantist or dismissed as a mystic. This is despite the fact that vagueness is a pervasive part of empirical phenomena. Laozi is a progenitor of the Metaphysical Indeterminacy thesis, which has recently become a hot topic in analytic philosophy circles in the work of Elizabeth Barnes (2011). Laozi’s concept of Dao is that of a quotidian and ubiquitous aspect of the world we experience. It is manifested in the finite, but it is not identical to it or itself the infinite. It does not require meditation, revelation or any transcendent kind of experience to reach awareness of it. Rather, it is found in the positive content or “life” of any experience. It is in that which is spontaneous and particular. It is the reality of experiences as opposed to the classification of experience in the scientific way of using concepts to comprehend it. Ge’s interpretation concedes that the immanence of Dao “has been universally acknowledged” (Ge 2018: 355) but adds that there is also a sense in which Dao can be said to be transcendent. Ge reasons that “if A depends on B for its existence or meaning while B does not depend on A, B can be said to be transcendent with respect to A. With this definition, we argued that the nameless Dao is transcendent, since the world depends on the Dao but not vice versa. The Dao’s asymmetrical relationship with the world undergirds its transcendence.” On this overly generous conception of transcendence parents transcend their children. Ge notes that, unlike on the Christian conception of transcendence, according to which God is ‘wholly other’ to his creation (hence creatio ex nihilo) Dao is conceived of as continuous with its creation: The Dao gave rise (birth) to the One; The One gave rise (birth) to Two; Two gave rise (birth) to Three; Three gave rise (birth) to Ten-thousand things. In this passage, the word for ‘to give rise to’ is sheng, which means ‘to give birth to’. In Chinese, when we say that A gives birth to B, we recognize that A and B are essentially continuous. For instance, the Chinese saying

118 

J. Chambers

“Dragons give birth to dragons; phoenixes give birth to phoenixes; the son of a mouse knows how to dig a hole” conveys the idea that natural traits and features are passed down from parents to children. (Ge 2018: 361)

Ge notes that this view of continuity between Dao and its creation is well established in Chinese secondary literature on the topic (361). Ge argues that this places Laozi’s Dao closer to Neoplatonism’s idea of creation as emanation (or Spinoza’s Acosmism). But this concedes too much to western categories. For a start it is doubtful that Dao can be conceived of as independent of the world. In its immanence Dao is the world. Insofar as Dao is conceived of as begetting the world it is also conceived of as being bound to its creation; if the world is the expression of Dao’s nature then its nature had to be expressed in the world. Dao could not be itself without its world, so Dao depends upon its world. Dao models itself on that which is “naturally so” (Lau 1963: 30), in the original Chinese Laozi says 自然 (zìrán), which directly translates as ‘self-so’. Ge’s claim for transcendence cannot apply to Dao. How has this breakdown occurred? Ge contrasts Daoism with Neoplatonism “While both systems contain dimensions of transcendence and immanence, it can be argued that immanence is more dominant in Daoism, whereas transcendence is more dominant in Neoplatonism.” Rather than searching for the thinking undergirding this preference in Laozi’s Dao, Ge errs in bringing Christianity into it: the “dialectic of transcendence and immanence, as imbedded in Greek metaphysics, has been overcome by Christian thinkers, such that God is understood to be simultaneously transcendent and immanent in relation to the world” (2018, 363). Christianity fails to accomplish any of this, by virtue of having a personalized and wholly other God, with much more ontological baggage besides. Ge’s conclusion that “Christianity may help supplement Daoism with an idea of transcendence that is absolute and external to the process of the world” (364) expresses a one-sided, idealist conception of transcendence. Ge has not heeded Adorno’s principle: “No absolute can be expressed otherwise than in topics and categories of immanence, although neither in its conditionality nor as its totality is immanence to be deified” (2018, 407). Ge has lost track of where Dao’s supposed transcendence is to be found, what kind of transcendence it is; it is transcending logos, the self-­transcendence

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

119

of all temporal, dynamic things. The finite has veritable being in this selftranscendence. The transcendence of Dao is to be found precisely in its immanence; in this sense these two opposites turn into each other. Favoring the independence of the transcendent amounts to abandoning this dialectic in the misguided attempt to “overcome” it. Dao is only transcendent insofar as the immanent is itself transcendent, it is not some kind of ‘wholly other’ external entity, and it is not epistemically transcendent in the sense that it is sensed and known discursively.

Notes 1. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke—Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe (1969–1971) (W). The abbreviations used are: PS—Phenomenology of Spirit SL—Science of Logic; Enc—Encyclopedia; LPR—Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion LHP—Lectures on the History of Philosophy PH—The Philosophy of History 2. Schelling’s interpretation is idealist in seeing Dao as a principle and cosmological in seeing it as describing wu’s temporal ontological precedence. 3. This anticipates Scott Austin’s comparative-philosophy approach to Dao, which has greatly influenced my own. 4. I am referring to the negation of the negation - it has become not itself. Incidentally Liu Xiaogan’s judgment that Western philosophy is not competent to interpret Chinese philosophy is based upon a one-sided and dichotomous understanding of the tradition that predates dialectics. When Liu insists, rightly in my view, that Dao transcends each of the categories of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics he is applying Western philosophical categories to Laozi and asserting Dao’s presence in all of these. “All human knowledge is confined to certain sorts of concrete things in the world of reality, and no concrete thing can

120 

J. Chambers

fully represent the basic existence that produced the myriad creatures of the universe and also encompasses human life and society. For example, explanations that are clear and concrete, such as defining the source of the myriad creatures as being earth, water, fire, and wind or air, or interpreting the nature of the world to be ether or atom, are not adequate to pass the tests presented by history and science while the symbolic meaning of the Way endures forever” (2008: 20). His complaint about explanations of concrete things seems to be that they are not abstract enough. Liu has unwittingly situated Dao in the so-called distinctly Western finite/infinite problematic that interested Hegel. Then he has given Laozi an idealist, mystical explanation, inferior to the kind Hegel refuted. Liu tries to make his Dao even more transcendent than Hegel’s Nothing, − he refers to it as “unknown thing”. However, as he arrives at it through exactly the same epistemic procedure as Hegel’s Nothing, he lacks awareness of his own Dao’s meaning. On Liu’s account Laozi’s Dao is not so foreign to Western categories as Liu seems to be aware, indeed it is all too familiar to Hegel. My interpretation is designed to reflect the distinctly Chinese origins of Laozi’s Dao, succeeding where Liu’s fails precisely because it recognizes the universal origins of the problematic central to Hegel’s idealism. Laozi’s Dao will be interpreted to not merely be a unifying principle but a unifying principle through being a principle of separation, the failure of unifying principles. 5. There is no single comprehensive English translation of all of the contents of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel’s most complete account of Chinese philosophy and Laozi was mainly published in Johannes Hoffmeister’s edition of the Vorlesungen in 1938. There is no publication of these sections in English. This author has supplied all the translations of quotes from this work. Where the quotes are taken from work that has been published in English the author used those translations. 6. Hegel complained of ambiguities arising from Chinese grammar, making a quote from Humboldt’s letter to Abel-Rémusat (1938: 281, 283). 7. He warns one must “not let the form beguile us into putting the Oriental elements on a par with our own, or even preferring them to our own” (LHP.I:107/W18:142). 8. Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra (2017) argue a similar case more extensively. 9. Wong’s interpretation of Dao classifies it as a principle of change (idealism) known through passivity (mysticism/empiricism), similar to Scott Austin’s.

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

121

10. Patt-Shamir uses Lau Din Cheuk’s 刘殿爵 (1963) translation, which follows the Mawangdui text. I use Lau’s translation throughout but I substitute ‘Dao’ for his word ‘way’. 11. Coutinho’s interpretation conflicts with archeological finds showing the early copies of the Daodejing to use the character “恒” heng instead of “ 常” chang - meaning ordinary in Coutinho’s sense. Heng can only be used interchangeably with chang in certain senses. The meaning of heng cannot be reduced to normality, regularity or ordinariness (Coutinho’s chang) as it refers to constancy in the sense of endless repeated action like the orbit of the moon around the earth (Li 2002). If Coutinho is denying the regularity of Dao in the sense of the regular cosmic cycles here (and not in the sense of regular ordinariness which is what chang means by regular) then he contradicts himself when he points out the cyclical character of Dao later. Coutinho’s reading might be historically problematic in another way for if we understand the provenance of the Daodejing as actually being a collection of disparate parts (this is the general consensus of historians today) a chapter talking about the contents of the rest of the book robs it of independence. While the chapters corroborate and reinforce each other it is problematic, from a historian’s perspective, to assume they might actually reference each other. This is what Coutinho’s interpretation does. I think Yoav Ariel and Gil Raz’s (2010) idea that chapter one refers to the book’s contents counts against the history of the text, compiled over many years by many hands and, anyway, makes that chapter less profound and there is no reason to do that in a text with chapters lacking narrative structure. This lack should be charitably read as holding a meaning. Without meaning in it, it is just sloppy writing so dire that to circumvent it, a cottage industry developed in China for reordering the text on the basis of returning to an order presumed, without evidence, to have existed in the mythical past (Ding 2016). It is better to marry the free form of the Daodejing with its contents and turn it into a rhetorical strength. This meaning gives the chapters relative autonomy in their contents, granting internal meanings. This is not saying the chapters cannot intersect, but they do this by internally embodying the same truths. This is a way in which the form of the Daodejing is read to embody its contents. I personally do not take this historical problem too seriously because of my method of interpretation, which is not dissimilar to Coutinho’s.

122 

J. Chambers

12. There will be a more detailed clarification of this in the analysis of lines 11, 12 and 13 below. 13. Research on the earliest versions of the text has found evidence indicating “nameless” is closest to the original meaning of “wuming” here. See Kim (2012: 160–161). 14. Other chapters contain reservations concerning naming Dao and naming in general. 15. It has been argued that the character for wu has connotations with the gods or spirits, who are said to act on the world despite being non-­ corporeal (Pang 1986). Such an understanding of wu would also be consistent with my reading but not Hegel’s. 16. The scope of this remark is unclear. It does not support Hegel’s interpretation so obviously. In chapter 40 neither being nor nonbeing are discussed in reference to Dao. 17. Coutinho’s interpretation is consistent with the anti-metaphysical interpretation of Chinese philosophy advocated by A. C. Graham’s analysis of ancient Chinese language and literary tradition (1959). This interpretation has been highly influential in western scholarship. It has not been so popular in the east. It has been debunked by Ge Yonghua (2018: 357–8) and others. 18. This is also Marx and Engels’s use of the word ‘metaphysical’, however since their times this interpretation of the world ‘metaphysical’ has been hijacked by the positivists and the phenomenologists and thus it is rhetorically disadvantageous to continue to use this interpretation of the term as it taints Marx and Engels by association. It is better to return to the original Aristotelian meaning of the term otherwise there is no clear term to describe Marx’s dialectics or what Engels was doing in works like The Dialectics of Nature, (particularly when contrasting it to modern anti-“metaphysical” fads) which they did not seem to mind but which makes difficulties for commentators. 19. The difference between saying and showing is, incidentally, the way I interpreted the difference between the fleeting names and the constant name dichotomy respectively. A similar explanation is found in the Huainanzi (Cao 2013: 76).

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

123

References Abel-Rémusat, Jean Pierre. 1823. Méoires sur La vie et Ouvrages de Lao-Tseu. Paris: Mélanges Asiatques. Ariel, Yoav, and Gil Raz. 2010. Anaphors or Cataphors? A Discussion of the Two Qi’s in the First Chapter of the Dao De Jing. Philosophy East & West 60 (3): 391–421. Austin, Scott. 2011. Tao and Trinity Notes on Self-Reference and the Unity of Opposites. Palgrave Macmillan. Barnes, Elizabeth, and J. R. G. Williams. 2011. A Theory of Metaphysical Indetermina- cy. In Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 6: 103−48. Oxford University Press. Cao, Feng 曹峰. 2013. A Review of the Issues Related to “Names” in Lao Zi’s First Stanza. Contemporary Chinese Thought 44(4): 72–91. Carlson, David Gray. 2007. A Commentary on Hegel’s Science of Logic. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Chambers, James, and Cheng Zhihua 程志华. 2019. Parmenides and The Negation in the Philosophy of Language 巴门尼德和语言哲学中的否定 范畴. Yangtze River Journal Series / General Issue 长江丛刊/2019.1/普 刊, 107–109. Chen, Guying 陈鼓应. 1985. Laozi Interpretation and Commentary 老子注译 及评介. Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中华书局. Clarke, J.J. 2000. The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought. London and New York: Routledge. Coutinho, Steve. 2014. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. New York: Columbia University Press. de Prémare, Joseph Henri Marie. 1878. Vestiges Choisis des Principaux Dogmes de la Religion Chrétienne, Extraits des Anciens Livres Chinois. Paris: Bureau des Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne. Ding, Sixin 丁四新. 2016. The Laozi’s Chapter Concepts Reviewed 老子的分 章观念及其检讨. Academic Monthly 学术月刊 9: 27–37. Fang, Dongmei 方东美. 1979. Philosophy of Original Confucianism and Taoism 原始儒家道家哲学. Taibei 台北: Liming Wenhua Chuban Shiye Gongsi 黎明文化事业公司. Fu, Charles Weihsun. 1973. Lao Tzu’s conception of Tao. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 16: 367–394. Gao, Heng 高亨. 1988. Exact Annotations of the Tao Te Ching老子正诂. Beijing 北京: Zhongguo Shudian 中国书店.

124 

J. Chambers

Ge, Yonghua 葛拥华. 2018. Creatio Ex Nihilo and Ancient Chinese Philosophy: A Revisiting of Robert Neville’s Thesis. Philosophy East and West 68(2): 352–370. Giles, Lionel. 1905. The Sayings of Lao Tzu. London: John Murray. Gongsun, Long 公孙龙. 1983. 公孙龙子Gongsun Longzi in Belvedere of Literary Profundity Complete Library in Four Sections 文渊阁四库. Vol. 848: 249c. Taibei 台湾: Taibei Commercial Press 台湾商务印书馆. Graham, A.C. 1959. ‘Being’ in Western Philosophy Compared with shih/fei and yu/wu in Chinese Philosophy. Asia Major 7 (2): 79–112. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1938. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie 1. Ed. J. Hoffmeister. Leipzig: Meiner ———. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin. ———. 1969–1971. Werke in 20 Bänden, ed. Moldenhauer and Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1988. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion One Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827. Trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart. University of California Press. ———. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Ontario: Batoche Books. ———. 2009. Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6: Introduction and Oriental Philosophy. Trans. Robert F. Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hu, Shi 胡适. 1919. Lecture Notes on the History of Chinese Philosophy 中国哲 学史大纲. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Commercial Press 上海商务印书馆. Julien, Stanislas. 1969. Tao-Te-King: Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits. Jullien, François. 2004. In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. Trans. Paula M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books Kaltenmark, Max. 1969. Lao Tzu and Taoism. Trans. Roger Greaves. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kim, Hongkyung. 2012. The Old Master: A Syncretic Reading of the Laozi from the Mawangdui Text a Onward. New York: State University of New York Press. Lao, Siguang 劳思光. 1993. The History of Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学史, Vol. 1. Taibei 臺北:Sanmin Shuju 三民書局. Lau, Din Cheuk 刘殿爵, trans. 1963. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Legge, Helen Edith. 1905. James Legge: Missionary and Scholar. London: The Religious Tract Society. Li, Ling 李零. 2002. Guodian Clear and Simple Reading Notes 郭店楚简校读 记. Beijing 北京: Beijing Daxue 北京大学.

4  Hegel’s Interpretation of Laozi 

125

Li, Ruohui 李若晖. 2011. On Laozi’s Dao: An Attempt to Make Philosophy Speak Chinese. Frontiers of Philosophy in China 6(1): 1–19. Liu, Xiaogan 刘笑敢. 1997. Laozi—A New Research on the Span of His Life and A New Interpretation of His Thoughts 老子—年代新考与思想新诠. Taipei 台北: Dongda Press 东大图书. ——— 刘笑敢. 2008. Can Modern Terms Accommodate Ancient Thought?: A Case Study from the Lao Zi, Contemporary Chinese Thought 40(2): 7–22. Lowe, E.J. 2002. A Survey of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2006. The Philosophy of the Daodejing. Columbia University Press. Mou, Zongsan 牟宗三. 1997. 19 Lectures on Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学十九 讲. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Ancient Press上海古籍出版社. Nelson, Eric S. 2011. The Yijing and Philosophy from Leibniz to Derrida. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (3): 377–396. Pang, Pu 庞朴. 1986. Chinese Culture and Chinese Philosophy 中国文化与中国 哲学. Shenzhen 深圳: Dunfang Press 敦方出版社. Patt-Shamir, Galia. 2009. To Live Riddle: The Transformative Aspect of the Laozi《 老子》. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (3): 408–423. Rathore, Aakash Singh, and Rimina Mohapatra, eds. 2017. Hegel’s India - A Reinterpretation, with Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ren, Jiyu 任继愈. 1963. The History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 1. 中国哲学史 Beijing 北京: 人民出版社. Schelling Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1985. “Philosophie der Mythologie”. In F. W. J. Schelling: Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 6 edited by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Tang, Junyi 唐君毅. 1986. Introduction, Comments on Chinese Philosophy 中国 哲学原论 ⋅ 导论篇. Taipei 台北: Student Bookstore 学生书局. Waley, Arthur. 1934. The Way and Its Power: A Study of Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. London: Allen & Unwin. Wang, Bi 王弼. 1992. Wang Bi Collected Writings 王弼集校釋, Vol. 1. Beijing 北京: Chinese Bookstore 中华书局. Wang, Zhongjiang 王中江. 1995. Breakthrough of the Dao 道的突破. In Research on Daoist Culture 道家文化研究, ed. Chen Guying, Vol. 8. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Ancient Chubanshe 上海古籍出版社 Wenning, M. 2017. Rational Mysticism: Hegel on Magic and China. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (3–4): 154–174. Wong, Kwok Kui 黄国巨. 2011. Hegel’s Criticism of Laozi and Its Implications. Philosophy East & West 61(1): 56–79.

126 

J. Chambers

———. 2017. Schelling’s Understanding of Laozi. Dao 16: 503–520. ———. 2018. Hegel, Schelling and Laozi on Nothingness. Frontiers of Philosophy in China 13 (4): 574–584. Xiong, Shili 熊十力. 2001. Selected Comments of Xiong Shili 十力语要. In The Complete Collection of Xiong Shili 熊十力全集, ed. XIAO Shefu, Vol. 4. Wuhan 武汉: Hubei Educational Press 湖北教育出版社. Xu, Fuguan 徐复观. 1988. The History of Research on Human Nature in China 中国人性論史. Taipei 台北: Taiwan Commercial Press 商务印书馆. Yang, Xingxun 杨兴顺. 1950. Древнекитайский Философ Лао-Цзы И Его Учение. Moscow: Издательство Академии Наук СCCP. Yang, Rongguo 杨荣国. 1973. A Brief History of Chinese Philosophy 简明中国 哲学史. Beijing 北京: Peoples’ Press 人民出版社. Ye, Xiushan 叶秀山. 1992. Some of My Sentiments in Reading the Comments on the Daodejing 我读《老子》书的一些感想. In Research on Daoist Culture 道家文化研究, ed. Chen Guying, Vol. 2. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Ancient Chubanshe 上海古籍出版社, pp.33–53. Yuan, Baoxin 袁保新. 1991. The Explanation and Reconstruction of Laozi’s Philosophy 老子哲学之诠释与重建. Taipei 臺北: 文津出版社 Zhan, Jianfeng 詹剑峯. 1982. Laozi as a Person, His Writings and His Remarks on the Dao 老子其人其书及其道论. Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe. Zhang, Songru 张松如. 1981. Laozi Scholarly Reading老子校读. Changchun 长春: Jilin Daxue Chubanshe 吉林大学出版社. Zhang, Dainian 张岱年. 1982. The Outline of Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学大 纲. Beijing: 北京 China Social Science Press 中国社会科学出版社. Zhang Xianglong (2008). “Haidegeer Lijie de Dao” 海德格尔理解的“道” (“The Dao in Heidegger’s Eyes”). In: Zhonghua Guxue yu Xianxiangxue 中华古学与现象学 (Ancient Chinese Learning and Phenomenology). Ji’nan: Shandong Youyi Chubanshe.

5 An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi

This chapter uses Hegel’s critical appropriation of Laozi as a means of constructing a novel interpretation of Laozi defensible against Hegelian assimilation. It is based upon the recognition that Hegel’s critical appropriation of Laozi (and much of Eastern philosophy) with the resources in his powerful philosophical arsenal captures and undermines probably most of the diverse Laozi interpretations that have emerged hitherto. This is despite the fact that comparative philosophy scholars have condemned Hegel’s Eurocentric bias against Laozi. The chapter attempts to construct an interesting Laozi interpretation, worthy of Hegel’s challenge. It reads Hegel according to a well-established, if not uncontroversial interpretation (no Hegel interpretation is uncontroversial), centered upon recognition of its extraordinary power to assimilate diverse philosophies, turning their categories into its own. Chapter one of the Daodejing will be shown to contain an immanent epistemology as well as ontology.

Laozi’s Philosophy in Chapter 1 I break down the first chapter into each of its dialectical contrasts:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_5

127

128 

J. Chambers

1. The Dao that can be daoed 2. Is not the constant Dao; 3. The name that can be named 4. Is not the constant name. 5. Nameless it is the beginning of heaven and earth 6. Named it is the mother of all things 7. Therefore, always be without desires to observe its secrets 8. Always have desires to observe its boundaries 9. These two are equal; 10. But diverge in name as they issue forth 11. Equal they are called mystery 12. Mystery upon mystery, 13. The gateway of the manifold secrets.(a modified version of the chapter as translated by D. C. Lau 1963, 5) There are a lot of ideas to unpack in these lines. A summary of the themes in categories of philosophy is provided below: 1–4 ontology 5&6 metaphysics 7&8 epistemology and ethics 9&10 logic 11–13 ontology

L ines 1, 2, 3 & 4: Non-conceptual Dao: Quasi-­Explanation of the Determinate As Dao is read as an ontological category in the contexts in which it is called obscure (in my view rightly) then the inference follows, in the minds of many including Hegel, that Dao is an absolutely transcendent entity (in my view wrongly). On the last line Laozi says the link between wu and you is mysterious. It would seem to Hegel that here Laozi is pointing out that Dao is transcendent and it is impossible to explain how it is linked to the determinate. On my interpretation Dao is actually impossible to articulate because it is immanent in the determinate.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

129

In the first and second line Laozi states the eternal Dao (the wu side of Dao) cannot be named. The second line implies Dao has a “constant” name and the third line implies that as this name is of the wu side of Dao it is of the unnamed side of Dao (Ren 1978; Cheng 1989). This means Dao cannot be a concept and cannot be reduced to such. Dao cannot be an idea and cannot be captured by concepts. As such it cannot be like the concept Pure Nothing. It cannot be a candidate for Hegel’s infinite and so Laozi cannot be a kind of idealist in Hegel’s sense. Although Laozi does not seem to be doing anything analogous to the ancient Greek metaphysical tradition when Thales, for example, tried to explain determinate reality through the concept of a kind of universal— water (that is, using Hegel’s terminology, explaining the finite through the infinite), Laozi is doing something analogous to the ancient Greek philosophers by trying to explain the determinate. Laozi promotes Dao as a kind of explanatory principle for reality. He is doing a kind of metaphysics but of an anti-conceptual kind. Laozi’s explanation is radically unlike the explanations found in the Greek philosophical tradition because rather than make an explanation of the concepts he uses he makes an explanation which can be seen in the language but not uttered through it. This, of course, is much harder to do in terms of presentation and interpretation, the key source of confusion surrounding Laozi’s account of Dao. This is one reason why the eternal/great Dao as a Way is a good name for Laozi’s conception of the ontological ultimate of reality. Paths are linier clearings made to facilitate movement from one location to a destination. Constructing a path involves removing or circumventing obstacles between locations. It thus involves relative absence (wu). Reaching a destination is a good analogy for all teleological behavior. The great way is a path that cannot be followed in that it is the clearing for all things to reach their destinations. It is the clearing itself, for its own sake insofar as it is indifferently for the sake of everything that is reached through it, for paths are indifferent to their users.

130 

J. Chambers

L ines 5 & 6: Background/Foreground, Indeterminate/Determinate, and the Nameless/Named Opposition Line 5 says the nameless side of Dao is the beginning of Heaven and Earth and line 6 says the named side is the mother of the myriad creatures. First it is important note adherence to the Eastern view that Dao is not said to be the beginning of Heaven and Earth in a cosmological sense (Fu 1973, 379). What do Heaven and Earth mean here? As with ancient Chinese metaphysics in general Laozi’s philosophy sees things primarily in terms of process. Heaven and Earth are not seen as separable from events or aggregates of the myriad creatures. Heaven and Earth are seen as the ways in which they interrelate and proceed (Ames and Hall 2003, 50). Heaven and Earth are the locus of events. It is not just the order of all the things that are happening, it is also where and when they are happening—but it is constituted by all the things that are happening. Armed with this idea of relativity Laozi’s characterization of the locus of events as on the wu side of Dao is highly appealing even though Laozi has a much broader idea of Heaven and Earth than merely time and space. Heaven and Earth can be seen as the context of events. As such Heaven and Earth is all the outside influences on that event that make it possible, that constrain and enable it and also the surrounding things that will in turn be influenced by that event. Yet isolating that event brings it to the foreground of awareness and thus ignores its context. As all events are embedded in a context and contexts themselves, which are just (always conceptually not necessarily in terms of size) bigger events, are necessarily also likewise embedded then Heaven and Earth seem outside of the range of attention. If we consider Heaven and Earth to be “the context of contexts” standing outside all the other events then it loses determinacy and becomes like Hegel’s ideas of Being/Nothing. It is also indeterminate for events themselves in their determinacy. It is in the background. As individual people have a unique perspective on their experiences, so do events. By being the locus of determinate responses to determinate stimuli events foreground themselves. By allowing the stimuli it sends to be so transformed, the context always by the same token retreats into the

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

131

background. As indeterminate, Laozi classifies it part of the unnamed, wu side of Dao, a bare negation to the events happening in it.1 Characterizing the unnamed side of Dao as the “beginning” of Heaven and Earth identifies it with the retreat of Heaven and Earth into the background to allow events to proceed within.2 To illustrate this idea think of threads and fabric. The fabric is no more than the arrangement of many individual threads but understanding the shape of the threads and the way that the individual threads move can only be done by reference to the fabric of which they are part. The fabric enables and constrains the shape and movement of the thread but it only does this in the precise manner in which it gets out of the thread’s way and allows it to do its own thing. The individual thread is where the fabric is not. In Hegelese the thread is a determinate negation of the fabric. But the fabric is an3 indeterminate negation of the thread, it is indeterminate because it forms the background of the thread that retreats in the same measure as the thread asserts itself. All the individual threads move in determinate ways, but qua fabric the movement is indeterminate because it is allowing the threads to do what they must do to react to their stimuli and it does this by backgrounding to the same extent that they are foregrounding.4 Background is still relative to foreground’s movement, but background just is the movement of events so it can never be observed directly in its stillness but must instead be inferred, as the negative shadow of that which is moving. Yet there must be background for only if there is an indeterminate space can a determinate entity fill it. That is, if there were no background and there was only foreground then everything would be only determinate. But if all was only determinate then there would be no metaphysical “room” for anything else determinate to emerge. Only if everything could simultaneously be its own foreground and a part of the background could novelty emerge.5 The indeterminate side is thus the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The epistemic and ethical implications of this realization are profound and guide Laozi’s thought. The background aspect of Dao is the beginning of Heaven and Earth in the sense that for anything new to emerge it must have spatiotemporal location. That is, one could say that as background is the locus of the emergence of foreground so is foreground, or the multiplicity of foregrounds, the condition for the existence of background. When events

132 

J. Chambers

foreground themselves they continually restart Heaven and Earth but only when unnamed. Only when unnamed do they act as the condition for something else. The explanans always lie outside of the explanandum. Laozi takes this insight further: the explanatory conditions for explanation itself lies outside of it.6 However, the earliest versions of the Daodejing do not make a distinction between Heaven and Earth on line 5 and the myriad creatures on line 6 but simply repeat myriad creatures. This reading reinforces the idea that heaven and earth and the myriad creatures are identical.7 Heaven and Earth is a way of referring to the myriad creatures from the perspective of background.8 The earliest versions of the Daodejing make the contrast in terms of the nameless being the “beginning” and the named being the “mother” of the myriad creatures. The contrast between background and foreground is not apparent in this case. Ames and Hall offer a translation of nameless and named into indeterminate and determinate respectively. The above discussed why I think this is a good translation but what has “beginning” got to do with “indeterminate” and “mother” got to do with “determinate”? Another way of seeing “beginning” as indeterminate is if we consider each moment to be pregnant with possibilities only some of which will ever be realized. When events are realized they are the wanwu but as all the wanwu at any moment are always pregnant with the possibilities of the next wanwu it seems that the present is always indeterminate. Looking back in time we can classify the events that made the present events to be their “mother”. But the necessity, the seeming inevitability of their motherhood is only apparent once their offspring is produced. “Mother” is arguably the paradigm of a post hoc name and this is one reason for Laozi’s repeated appeal to it as Dao insofar as it can be named. A pregnant woman might die before she comes to term and thus never become a mother. But if she survives we can say that as she was kept safe and healthy throughout pregnancy her becoming a mother was a necessary outcome of the process; so it is with all events. They can only be called the true cause after the fact. But this does nothing to negate their generative power while they are still pregnant with possibility (Chen and Bai 2001, 117). It just negates their determinacy in themselves and for the knowing subject at the moment of creation. On this way of reading the third and

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

133

fourth lines Laozi is highlighting the impotence of concepts in classifying the spontaneous generative power of any moment. Names are only effective at communicating post hoc. It is insofar as the mother cannot be named that it creates. The essence of the constantly creative moment is lost the moment the “mother” is identified.9 Time is the constant unfolding of the untold beginning becoming a mother while only the latter can be the referent of a name. One could say the difference between “beginning” and “mother” concerns time. The former is the present moment; the latter is the same event when looked at in the past. The generative power is the movement of Dao. Dao is the beginning of the wanwu because when unnamed it can be seen immanent as a tendency which conscious mind can nonconceptually know. Once named it is the mother, the creative wu of the things, that from which they come forth. I here make some relevant connections between the concepts of the feminine, the indeterminate and the infinite in Laozi and the feminine and nature in materialist philosophy. Line 6 is the first instance of a running theme in the Daodejing of representing Dao in feminine and more specifically maternal terms. Robert Henricks notes five chapters in the Daodejing explicitly referring to Dao as mother.10 He notes the frequency of womb and vagina parallels with Dao when Laozi discusses its role as an empty vessel (wu) in creation.11 He notes further the continuous, selfless, tender, maternal role of nourishment and protection Dao performs after the initial creation throughout the lifespans of the wanwu.12 The wu side of Dao is linked to the feminine.13 Indeterminacy is the infinity of nature. For François Jullien, the infinity of the indeterminate is expressed in Laozi’s praise of blandness: But the insipidity of traditional China, as represented by the limpidity of water (the basis for all flavors), is neither mere under- statement nor affected (or complicated) blandness. Rather, it con- stitutes a transformation — a conversion — the “beyond” of which is already contained within, leading consciousness to the root of the real, to the center from which the process of things flows. It is the way of deepening (toward the simple, the natural, the essen- tial), of detachment (from the particular, the individual, the con- tingent). This transcendence does not open onto another world,but is lived as immanence itself; viewed from this perspective, the two terms

134 

J. Chambers

finally cease being opposites. Blandness is this experience of transcendence reconciled with nature — and divested of faith. (2004, 143)

This book gives a detailed account of the role of the infinity of nature and its relationship to indeterminacy in Laozi’s metaphysics and Marx’s methodology in later chapters. Suffice it to say here that for Laozi indeterminacy of nature comes from infinity of nature.14 The infinity of Dao is a recurring theme in the Daodejing in which it is referred to as limitless, omnipresent and eternal, inexhaustible, deathless, exceeding time and space.15 In all these respects it corresponds most directly with the materialist idea of nature as it was “remarkably enough, discovered… independently” (LF-MECW26:383-384/MEW21:293) by Joseph Dietzgen. In a startlingly apposite parallel, the man Marx referred to affectionately as “our philosopher” (Eugene Dietzgen 1917, 14-15) said: The created mind is the definite child of the world. Good mother Nature gave to it something of her inexhaustibility. Mind is as limitless and inexhaustible in gaining knowledge as Nature is in her readiness to open her breast. The child is only limited by the limitless wealth of its mother’s love,—it cannot exhaust the inexhaustible. The created mind penetrates with its science into the innermost of Nature,—but it cannot penetrate beyond that, not because it is a narrowly limited mind, but because its mother is Infinite-Nature, a natural infinity having nothing besides it. (1906, 269)

In this passage it is almost as if Dietzgen is trying to explain Laozi’s idea of Dao named as mother in line 6. It can be objected at this point that Laozi is here talking about metaphysics and not ontology. Furthermore, from a Hegelian standpoint there is nothing here that cannot be accommodated, which raises the question of how this interpretation can be used to bolster the case this chapter makes of Laozi’s refutation of Hegel’s idealism. Only if this interpretation is read as not ontological can the Hegelian objection, that it does not touch Hegel’s ontology, have teeth.16 This topic exposes how deep the conflict between Hegel and Laozi goes. For Laozi, the metaphors indicating the presence of Dao are present across systems and fields of enquiry. Metaphysics and ontology can be

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

135

separated in principle for Hegel; for Laozi they cannot. This goes some way in explaining the methodological reasons behind Laozi’s failure to produce any proofs of his ontological insights. Dao is spoken of as the “root” of heaven and earth in chapter 6. The spirit of the valley never dies. This is called the mysterious female. The gateway of the mysterious female Is called the root of heaven and earth. Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there, Yet use will never drain it. (Lau 1963, 10)

A couple of other metaphors also appear here; “valley” and “mysterious female”. When Laozi appeals to the “spirit” of the valley Hans-Georg Moeller makes the useful observation that “spirit” here can be interpreted to refer to a master structure that is repeated in different images. Certain images share certain structures. The spirit of the valley appears in each of them in different ways. In chapter 15 Laozi links the image of the valley with the image of uncarved wood and muddy water. These images are all amorphous and indeterminate. The valley is a depression (relatively empty) of land in between two or more (relatively full) peaks. Its (relative) emptiness makes the valley fertile. It is a void at the center of fullness.17 Moeller identifies the same imagery when Laozi talks of Dao as like bellows (Moeller 2006, 25),18 empty space bounded by filled space which cannot be used up, just as the spirit of the valley “never dies.” He identifies it again when Laozi talks of Dao as like the hub of the wheel, the empty space in the pot or the empty space of the room. Empty spaces, yielding in the middle, that become the locus of continuous movement. In chapter 40 Laozi talks about how absence (wu) generates presence (you).19 Insofar as Laozi can be said to give any proof, it is in the identity of the metaphor of wu across these images. In every finite instance of its occurrence the whole you-wu schema is posited. So, when Laozi says that Dao is like the valley, he is urging us to see wu as such in the valley. Dao is that background. Upon each finite case does the whole cosmos rest.20 Cheng Chungying 成中英

136 

J. Chambers

explains that dao kedao implies you, and changdao is wu, in the sense that you and wu have the same origin, but have different names. Moreover, Cheng stresses also that wu and you mutually generate each other, and yet, the ten thousand things are produced from you which in turn is produced from wu. Cheng claims that this contradiction can be resolved when one realizes that wu has an epistemological and phenomenal sense as the opposite of you but also an ontogenetical and ontological sense as the source origin of you and all things, and thus beyond any distinction, including that between you and wu [Cheng 2004, 147]. Wu is not absolute nothingness, it is rather ‘standing against all things in language’ and thus beyond distinctions, while is also to be approached by observing boundaries. In this way the reality of things is not denied and yet there is a reality beyond the concrete. (Patt-Shamir 2009, 13)

The dual function of wu in the Daodejing, which has often been read as a fatal ambiguity in the text, should be read in this light. Laozi is making a point of blurring the line between metaphysics and ontology (even mechanics and ethics) with a term that paradoxically straddles both fields.21 Hegel was aware of the Chinese propensity for doing metaphysics in these terms. He notes that with the Yi Jing the Chinese were trying to discover the nature of reality as a whole but that its employment of symbols denoting, for example, mountain and rain, indicates the poverty of Chinese conceptual thought. Despite its apparent mathematical sophistication, the Yi Jing merely transposes images of natural phenomena onto binary divisions. Plato could conceive of a realm of pure ideas free from images. The iconography of Chinese metaphysics by contrast does not go beyond the ordinary objects of sense perception (1938: 274, 278). This poverty of abstraction meant Chinese philosophy could not conceive of the inner nature of reality and was only capable of dealing with its external forms. In this way, he argued, Chinese thought was trapped in the finite.22 However, Hegel seems to contradict this very point when he argues the elemental combinations of the Yijing, are often unnatural and bizarre.23 I concede perhaps more than I need to given Hegel’s own backhanded complement to Chinese philosophical abstraction, that Chinese

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

137

philosophy is confined to finite representations. Yet disagree with his idealist inference that this is a drawback of Chinese metaphysics.24 In this light it is important to defend Laozi against Ren Jiyu’s interesting criticism of Laozi as an anti-empiricist materialist. In his 1983 History of the Development of Chinese Philosophy (Pre-Qin) Ren writes that passages such as chapter 47; “Without leaving one’s door understand the world, without looking out of the window know Heaven’s Way, so that the farther one goes, the less one knows,” privilege the development of theory over direct scientific observation. He argues that here Laozi disagrees with Engels’ view, displayed throughout his works on Marx’s “scientific socialism.” Ren quotes “Notes to Anti-Duhring” of 1877–1878, published in English and in Chinese as part of “Dialectics of Nature”, where Engels stresses the importance of the empirical discovery: “Matter is nothing but the totality of material things from which this concept is abstracted, and motion as such nothing but the totality of all sensuously perceptible forms of motion….Hence matter and motion cannot be known in any other way than by investigation of the separate material things and forms of motion, and by knowing these, we also pro tanto know matter and motion as such” (AD-MECW25:515/MEW20:503).25 Yet Ren’s more primary concern here is to express conformity with chairman Mao Zedong. Mao directly criticizes the saying from chapter 47 in a notable section of On Practice: Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. In feudal society it was impossible to know the laws of capitalist society in advance because capitalism had not yet emerged, the relevant practice was lacking. Marxism could be the product only of capitalist society. Marx, in the era of laissez-faire capitalism, could not concretely know certain laws peculiar to the era of imperialism beforehand, because imperialism, the last stage of capitalism, had not yet emerged and the relevant practice was lacking; only Lenin and Stalin could undertake this task. Leaving aside their genius, the reason why Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin could work out their theories was mainly that they personally took part in the practice of the class struggle and the scientific experimentation of their time; lacking this condition, no genius could have succeeded. The saying, “without stepping outside his gate the scholar knows all the wide world’s affairs”, was

138 

J. Chambers

mere empty talk in past times when technology was undeveloped. Even though this saying can be valid in the present age of developed technology, the people with real personal knowledge are those engaged in practice the wide world over. And it is only when these people have come to “know” through their practice and when their knowledge has reached him through writing and technical media that the “scholar” can indirectly “know all the wide world’s affairs”. If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them. This is the path to knowledge which every man actually travels, though some people, deliberately distorting matters, argue to the contrary. The most ridiculous person in the world is the “know all” who picks up a smattering of hearsay knowledge and proclaims himself “the world’s Number One authority”; this merely shows that he has not taken a proper measure of himself. Knowledge is a matter of science, and no dishonesty or conceit whatsoever is permissible. What is required is definitely the reverse--honesty and modesty. If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. But one cannot have direct experience of everything; as a matter of fact, most of our knowledge comes from indirect experience, for example, all knowledge from past times and foreign lands. To our ancestors and to foreigners, such knowledge was--or is--a matter of direct experience, and this knowledge is reliable if in the course of their direct experience the requirement of “ scientific abstraction”, spoken of by Lenin, was--or is--fulfilled and objective reality scientifically reflected, otherwise it is not reliable. Hence a man’s knowledge consists only of two parts, that which comes from direct experience and that which comes from indirect experience. Moreover, what is indirect experience for me is direct e­ xperience for other people. Consequently, considered as a whole, knowledge of any kind is inseparable from direct experience. All knowledge originates in perception of the objective external world through man’s physical sense organs.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

139

Anyone who denies such perception, denies direct experience, or denies personal participation in the practice that changes reality, is not a materialist. That is why the “know-all” is ridiculous. There is an old Chinese saying, “How can you catch tiger cubs without entering the tiger’s lair?” This saying holds true for man’s practice and it also holds true for the theory of knowledge. There can be no knowledge apart from practice. (1965, 299–301)

Ren will have been keen to voice his disagreement with chapter 47 to show he has learned from Mao’s criticism above. Ren offers a historical explanation for Laozi’s mistake, that Laozi’s acquaintance with science was with astronomy, which in his day was often indirect and speculative. This led Laozi to value indirect observation as through the “mysterious mirror” of Chapter 10: “Can you polish your mysterious mirror / And leave no blemish?” Instead of relying on direct observation, there is a degree of speculation and mystical insight required, which is impeded by distracting empirical knowledge. He writes that Laozi’s mistake was to turn against the “investigation of the separate material things and forms of motion (i.e., energy)” and instead employ mystical insight to know “matter and motion as such”. I take issue with Ren’s seeing Laozi as an anti-empiricist because of a perceived mystical theory-burdened approach to scientific procedure. In chapter 47 Laozi does make the appeal to stay indoors and not get bogged down with inquiries into separate material things and forms of motion in order to know matter and motion as such as an abstraction from these inquiries. However, this is not derived from the idea that empirical observation does not yield scientific knowledge of matter and forms of motion as such and that scientific knowledge is better arrived at through mystical/theoretic insight of the kind Ren supposes drove ancient Chinese astronomy. The wu imagery in experience is as present in everyday experience as it is in scientific experience. Every localized wu image is a complete microcosm of Dao, as much present in natural phenomena and things in the home as things only observable in laboratory conditions. Laozi does not argue against scientific enquiries as such; he argues against the division of reality by separate fields of science and against a dualistic division of appearance and reality that science involves. Laozi is

140 

J. Chambers

not anti-empiricist in principle, merely non-empiricist in policy. In this sense I would like to see Laozi as not disagreeing with Engels about science and metaphysics in scientific principle but in ethical policy.26 Laozi is unimpressed with both the practical advantages of science and its effect upon the human metabolism with nature. Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus remarks: “the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained” (2021, 242). Laozi revels in this terminus in the mysterious movement of backgrounding. Philosophic and scientific explanations on their own do not remove this backgrounding from phenomena or even the ability of aesthetic return. The tendency to suppress conditions and reasons for the aesthetic experience of backgrounding is rather the effect of the way these explanations are made use of by the ideology of instrumental reason which accompanies science. Still, something is lost with the wealth of explanations, and it is, according to Laozi, a species of knowledge. Laozi, and the later Wittgenstein lament the concomitant stultification of cognition through the numbing effects of the ideology of instrumental reason’s appropriation of science; “[a]s though,” remarks the older Wittgenstein, “lightning were more commonplace or less astounding than 2000 years ago” (1998, 7). The criticism from Mao is different from Ren’s in that it combines Engels’ general dialectical epistemology with the Marxist orientation to class war. This substantial criticism expresses a fundamental ethical-­ praxiological principle of Marxism. It cannot be so easily accommodated by Laozi. The final chapter of this book will argue that, in light of this, Laozi’s non-empiricist and policy primitivism can and should change without going against Laozi’s principles.

L ine 8: Laozi on Desire, Boundaries, and Concepts At this point I reverse the order of presentation of the breakdown of the dialectical couplets of the first chapter. The chapter deals with line 8 before it goes on to deal with line 7.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

141

The following will make the case that in line 8 Laozi is talking about conceptual knowing as revealing the you side of Dao. There are four parts to this case. 1. It must be shown that Laozi talks of concepts in terms of boundary knowledge—徼 jiao. 2. It must be shown how concepts are a kind of knowing—identity knowledge. 3. It must be shown that conceptual knowing is in some sense linked to desire. 4. It must be shown that identity knowledge is linked to the you side of Dao. (1) Wong Kwok Kui (2011) has demonstrated that “jiao” in line 6 is best understood in terms of the ideas of manifestation, imperfection and boundaries. Textual evidence for Laozi understanding jiao as the identification power of concepts is to be found in the fact that above it was discussed how the first chapter is arranged as a series of dialectical couplets. In lines 5 and 6 the first line of the couplet is something about the wu side of Dao and the second is about the you side of Dao. This couplet is connected to the one following it by the character 故 gu meaning “therefore”. Because of this we should expect the first line of the 7/8 couplet to proceed from the first line of the 5/6 couplet. It shows that it does this by repeating wu and you in the same sequence. So a structural parallel exists between boundaries and the you side of Dao because they both occur on their second lines of their couplets. From line 6 we know the you side of Dao is the named side of Dao and the intimate link between concepts and names/words is well known. It is probable Laozi thinks of names and concepts as the same thing. ­Putting these ideas together indicates Laozi is saying names/concepts give knowledge of boundaries. In this it seems Laozi is in broad agreement with Western phenomenologists including Hegel. (2) The idea of boundaries is a good way of understanding the role of concepts in identification. Hegel introduces concepts in The Phenomenology of Spirit through their power of identification needed in the refutation of sense-certainty.27 Hegel does this by showing con-

142 

J. Chambers

cepts are necessary for introducing boundaries between things for consciousness, allowing it to identify one thing as not another. This idea of the identification power of concepts through exclusion is a common theme in epistemology and Laozi is in agreement with it.28 (3) It almost goes without saying that as concepts enable consciousness to identify its objects it is only through such identification that consciousness can have any objects to desire. This is the sense in which the knowledge of boundaries can generate desire. For example, Eve only wanted the fruit of the tree of knowledge after her attention had been drawn to it. Had she been unable to identify (in the rudimentary sense relevant) the tree of knowledge or its fruit she would never have developed the desire for one. Although in other places Laozi shows an interest in this kind of boundary-knowledge generation of desire,29 the order in which the two are referred to in line 8 suggests Laozi is more interested in the way desire generates concepts. Laozi is not interested (unlike Hegel is with his primary concern with desire in The Phenomenology) in the changing role desire plays in the development of self-consciousness. Laozi seems to have no interest in self-­ consciousness or its development per se. Rather Laozi seems interested in the constant generation of knowledge of boundaries through desire-driven concepts. Here again Laozi does not seem to be thinking anything particularly foreign to Western phenomenologists, who have also been wont to speak of intentionality in terms of desire. Let us take line 8 to be saying that desire generates conceptual boundary knowledge. When we desire something, it becomes a goal to be followed and as such it must be identifiable to be attained. The more clearly defined its boundaries become for the desiring subject the easier it will be for the subject to be sure when it is reached. Further, if the subject desires it as an end, the subject must also desire to know the means to attain that end. If there is any effort at all involved in attaining this goal it requires in addition the ability to discriminate between obstacles, tools and the irrelevant. This connection with goals makes Laozi’s idea of desire incompatible with Spinoza’s conatus. Broadly speaking, the more highly developed this ability is, the more effective it is in helping the subject achieve the subject’s goals, satisfying the desires.30 This ability to make distinc-

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

143

tions is, as we have already mentioned, the power of concepts to give us knowledge of boundaries. It does not take a lot of thought to show how this ability to make distinctions between objects presupposes the ability to make distinctions between individual objects and the world in general as well as the ability to make a distinction between the external world, individual objects and the subject’s inner self. In order for the Subject to perceive the existence of Objects in general, the Subject must also perceive that the Objects in general are distinct from the Subject. That is to say, the Subject can distinguish between that which is Subject and that which is not Subject, ie. Object. Our point is that, implied in the ability to discriminate between individual Objects in the external world is the ability to discriminate between the internal self and the external world. (Sherratt 2002, 103)

Desire-driven boundary knowledge presupposes self-consciousness. So the boundaries the subject draws are importantly driven by the interplay between the subject’s conceptual schema and the subject’s desires.31 In summary, Laozi associates desire with discursive thought and the subject/ object and means/ends dichotomies. (4) Concepts are very easily textually identified as on the you side of Dao because Laozi thinks of concepts as names and the named side of Dao is the you side of Dao.

L ine 7: Knowing Without Desire as Absolute Mimesis Mimesis is a term most familiar to the field of aesthetics. The history of Western literary theory exhibits an obsession with mimesis. Its philosophical pedigree is well established in Western thought going back at least as far as Plato, who is very hostile to it, alluding to its association with women, children and the insane and classifying it as three steps below truth. Despite its common recurrence in Western thought it has throughout been notoriously difficult to theorize. Scholars have gradually

144 

J. Chambers

converged around the view that mimesis concerns an inherently non-­ conceptual act (Huhn 2004, 11). This in itself should go some way in explaining the difficulty in articulating its meaning. Indeed there is a strain of thought in Western philosophy, originating in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, which makes mimesis the antithesis of concepts. This invites attractive parallels with Laozi, who is hostile to concepts. The following will argue that Laozi’s understanding of desireless knowledge shares some important links with Benjamin and Adorno’s ideas about mimesis. There are four tasks involved in making this case. 1. Mimesis must be shown to be in some sense nonconceptual. 2. It must be shown to be a way of knowing. 3. It must be shown to be in some sense linked to the lack of desire. 4. It must be shown to reveal something about the wu side of Dao. (1) According to Adorno mimesis is “the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other” (1997, 54). At its simplest, mimesis concerns the act of imitating, copying or mirroring something else. Adorno contends that mimesis is a primitive aspect of the human condition, going so far as to conjecture its origins to be in the realm of human biology (329). Indeed mimesis is a pervasive feature of all life. “Were Adorno not so adverse to metaphysics, not to mention sweeping philosophical formulations, we might even claim that all things come to be mimetically” (Huhn 2004, 9). It seems this is how Benjamin saw things but Adorno restricted himself to claims about mimesis in human life. (Laozi of course has no such fear of sweeping philosophical formulations!) Affinity is produced between the imitator and its object through “the assimilation of the self to its other” (1997, 329). Mimesis is nonconceptual because as discussed in line 8 concepts are responsible for boundary knowledge, which distinguishes objects from each other and subjects from objects. Insofar as the mimetic subject is capable of losing itself in its other it is by breaking down the boundaries of concepts. It does this by focusing on the conceptually irreducible aspects of its experience. Whereas concepts involve subsuming the object under definitions, that is

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

145

identifying the object as a possessor of qualities that it shares with other things, against which it can be contrasted to other things; mimesis involves likening oneself to an object how it is found. Whereas the concept ‘dog’ contains the constellation of concepts peculiar to that animal, four legs, wagging tail, panting and so on; imitating the dog’s bark and its motions merely evokes the idea of that dog. Benjamin’s theory of language contains the idea that all language involves a relatively dormant mimetic side. It is most obviously present in onomatopoeias because they are a peculiar union of sense and reference. It partly comes forth as the reference side of the split of the concept between sense and reference. The difference between mimetic and conceptual reference is that mimesis attempts a similitude between the referential act and the referent, which is where Benjamin disagrees most profoundly with the likes of Gottlob Frege and Ferdinand de Saussure who downplayed mimetic reference and only had a concept of logical reference—an arbitrary token, like a proper name. Mimetic reference is counterpoised to the theory of language which sees it as a systematic web of arbitrary signs differing only in terms of negating each other. The mimetic reference attempts to capture the sensuous ‘positive content’ of the individuality of its referents. If this idea of mimesis is put together with the claim of the introduction that the Daodejing embodies Dao in its structure then the Daodejing is a mimetic reference to Dao, embodying the knowledge of line 5. It is an act of mimesis. It is about mimesis. It describes and advocates mimesis. Adorno employs mimesis as a critique of the conceptual. Adorno critiques the concept through the realization that verbalization of concepts in labelling the particular is mimetic. According to Adorno mimesis involves the recognition, perhaps unconscious, that conceptual labels never completely capture their referents. If concepts were completely adequate then the mimetic impulse of art would be superfluous. Concepts promise identity with their referents. This claimed identity is not so much the absurd claim that the particular rose in front of me is no more than the word for it, but rather that all the universal properties of this dog, when completely articulated add up to the complete description of it, with no remainder, all captured and abbreviated by the catch-all concept ‘dog’. The dog is subsumed by its complete conceptual account. Adorno contends that the logic of concepts demands that such identity can exist

146 

J. Chambers

between concept and referent and yet this is forever impossible. Adorno believes that the individuality of things is brute. But he does not assert this as an external metaphysical presupposition to contradict the concept from outside the concept. That the particular is ultimately impenetrable to the concept is arrived at via immanent critique of the concept. Adorno argues the dynamic of concepts itself asserts the existence of an alien sensuous particularity for it to overcome through subsuming it in its own body. The universal concept posits the sensuous particular/nature in the act of overcoming it through ‘the word’, or rather in its claims to overcome it. The concept claims that sensuousness needs it in order to be complete, that its information is inadequate on its own. The concept must come into cognition from the outside of sensation to mediate sensation in cognition. An act of the concept, giving the mute particular voice through ‘the word’ is a kind of mimesis. Yet it is a mimesis of substitution: substituting the inherently universal concept for the individual particular through giving it a name. Thus, insofar as concepts succeed in referring they also fail because they admit they are nonidentical with their referents in asserting the incompleteness of the latter before conceptual substitution. Conceptual mimesis is tyrannical in the sense of admitting the independence of the particular but not respecting it. Mimesis is contained in the concept in an oppressive form and particularity is denied by the concept. Mimesis proper is a critical outgrowth of the concept’s own negativity for mimesis promises an affinity be found without replacing the sensuous form of the particular into an alien form. It does not suppose the sensuous particular/nature to be incomplete in itself. Adorno believes this affinity is possible through art because art can potentially reproduce the sensuous particular in its own form rather than substitute it with an alien form. Yet Adorno argues this potential of art is thwarted by our alienated mode of production. It should always be kept in mind that, like all Chinese philosophy of the period, the Daodejing is a practice-oriented manual, that is, it is a guide to action. The usual structure of chapters of the Daodejing consists in beginning with outlining some metaphysically or epistemologically relevant feature of Dao and then following that with some practical advice, which always consists in imitating said feature. It always consists

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

147

in presenting a mimesis with Dao as the solution of the chapter. “Therefore” (Gu故) is almost always followed by some instruction in the Daodejing to produce an affinity with Dao—a mimesis. To serve a practical purpose one should expect Laozi’s epistemic points made in lines 7 and 8 to be exhorting readers to act in a certain way, giving advice that we could choose not to follow. If lines 7 and 8 are merely describing fundamental epistemic features of the mind then they cannot be read as giving any advice from lessons learned in lines 5 and 6. A kind of mimesis that I call Absolute Mimesis is my interpretation of Laozi’s epistemic act, an act which can overcome the intentionality of desire. Absolute Mimesis is the grounding, self-conscious conceptualization of wuwei, a topic of later chapters. (2) Benjamin gives a few instructive examples of how mimesis is a way of learning about the world that children employ all the time in play when imitating things. But this rich mimetic world gradually is submerged in consciousness as they grow up. Benjamin finds a similar submergence of the mimetic faculty in human history: “the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the law of similarity was comprehensive; it ruled both microcosm and macrocosm” (1978, 333). He thinks of “magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples” (334). He points out that Astrology, which used to enjoy a religious and political supremacy in ancient societies mimetically links each life to the position of the stars. Benjamin does not mention this but the mimetic linking between cosmos and individuals is made infinitely richer and more complex in cleromancy which links the individual with his or her particular situation at any one time and its portents through divining its meaning in a conversational exchange with a structured random act. The Yijing, upon which the Daodejing is modelled, is based upon the principle of cleromancy. In his classic The Golden Bough James Frazer characterized ancient magic as based upon the principle that “things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy” (1922, 138). He argued that this principle is mere superstition, not a species of knowledge, and has been completely surpassed by modern science. However, if Benjamin is right, sympathy/mimesis is still alive in knowledge through juvenile learning and is embedded in language. The superstition of magic

148 

J. Chambers

and prophesy counted as a way of knowing the world in the sense that it gave people a way of ascribing a meaning to it and a way of navigating it. Even by forging (albeit fictitious) links the meaning in the ideal it obtained a social reality which was known. Benjamin calls children’s play, sympathetic magic and astrology cases of “nonsensuous similarity”. This is a term for similarities between things not materially resembling one another, between the animate and inanimate, the microcosm and the macrocosm. “The child’s imitation of a windmill is based on nonsensuous similarity, as is the tendency of ancient cultures to find clues to human character in the stars. Although we no longer encounter nonsensuous similarities in every corner of creation, Benjamin asserts that we still produce them, and thus continue to rely on the mimetic faculty, albeit one greatly trans-formed. The crucial means for the formation of nonsensuous similarities in modernity is language” (Potolsky 2006, 141). Benjamin explains how this mimetic side of language is what enables translation between languages. Translation relies upon the nonsensuous mimesis of different words with the same concept. Writing is “an archive of nonsensuous similarities of nonsensuous correspondences” (Potolsky 2006, 142) between voice and ink, sound and vision. In modern society the most pervasive and obvious manifestation of mimesis is found in artworks. It has already been said that Adorno talks of mimesis as “the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other” (1997, 54). This quote appears in an extensive study of aesthetics. This indicates that Adorno was thinking of mimesis here in terms of the conceptually irreducible experience of musical notes or the colors of a painting, or less obviously, of literary affection. They all evoke feelings, which only in its most developed artistic form does Adorno characterize as a knowledge, that cannot be contained by concepts. As mentioned in the point above even though mimesis acts against the concept Adorno sees mimesis as intertwined with it. Even when children use the mimetic faculty in play, pretending to run a shop for example, they use some infantile form of all the key concepts involved in that activity. That is, even though children lack concepts, they must employ their preconcepts (Blunden 2012, 245). The “groping for that concordance,” the affinity of knower and known, “survives” in the “ conception of

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

149

rational knowledge”. If this moment were “extinguished altogether,” says Adorno, then the possibility that the subject could know the object would be “incomprehensible” (2004, 45). For Adorno Artworks are capable of bringing the mimetic moment to the surface of experience.32 It is clear that if Laozi’s desireless knowledge can be characterized as a kind of mimesis then Laozi cannot be said to see his mimesis in the same way as Adorno does; as a drive which is contained in the concept yet yields knowledge that falls outside of the concept, or rather brings the knowledge that the concept is incomplete.33 Laozi’s mimesis must be somehow a separate species of knowledge even if he recognizes it is inherently intertwined with concepts and Laozi must see that it gives a different, even more important and independent kind of knowledge than Adorno allows. Laozi urges us to revel in this wu experience to aesthetically guide our lives. When Laozi says we can know the world without leaving our houses (in chapter 47) he is not saying we scientifically know the world this way, but aesthetically. Science does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Laozi rejects scientific inquiry not because it is false but because it is imperious and potentially alienating. This tendency unchecked can make it false. It can be and in fact is distracting from the aesthetic experience which must be at the heart of emotive and ethical life.34 Laozi sees scientific/conceptual experience as in an important sense derived from aesthetic experience just as he sees you as derived from wu, foreground from background, even if the two are mysteriously identical and necessarily intertwined. (3) In Chapter 37 Laozi appeals to the power of the nonconceptual as a way of naturally suppressing desire. It is thus in some way against desire. The way never acts, yet nothing is left undone. Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it, The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord. After they are transformed, should desire raise its head, I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block. The nameless uncarved block Is but freedom from desire, And if I cease to desire and remain still, The empire will be at peace of its own accord. (Lau 1963, 42)

150 

J. Chambers

Adorno characterizes the mimetic side of knowing as a kind of yielding of the subject to the object. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a social-­ historical psychological theory of the rise of capitalism. It gives an account from a philosophical perspective of the West’s gradual descent into the labor/domination complex with its accompanying repression of the body by a social production that conjures products standing over and against their makers in capitalism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer make the case that mimesis, once humanity’s dominant comportment to experiencing the world becomes gradually over time, and most dramatically in Western history with the Enlightenment, supplanted by conceptual “instrumental reason”. That mimesis ran counter to and was supplanted by a scientific outlook (which is conceptual) is shown by Adorno and Horkheimer in their linking of mimesis with magic, which was overthrown by science. The magical practices of the early shamans involved imitating the animals and natural phenomena of their environment in an attempt to commune with them and capture their power. Science was premised upon the isolation and separation of phenomena from the desiring subject. After it loses its place in the subject’s psychology mimesis is suppressed but continues to operate subversively. Enlightenment science’s conceptual instrumental reason reduces objects to the dynamic of means and ends which necessarily involves the compulsion to dominate nature. Adorno and Horkheimer make mimesis into the counterweight to this tendency. Where Enlightenment instrumental reason separates subject and object, means and ends, mimesis blurs these boundaries and is most present in the acts of “touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing” (2002, 149). Adorno counterpoises the sense of sight, the dominant sense of rational separation, with the sense of smell, the dominant sense of mimetic unity. If mimesis operates as a counterweight to the means/ends dynamic then by the same token it must run counter to the logic of desire.35 Adorno and Horkheimer talk of mimesis as that “tendency deeply inherent in living things, the overcoming of which is the mark of all development: the tendency to lose oneself in one’s surroundings instead of actively engaging with them, the inclination to let oneself go, to lapse into nature” (2002, 189). In presenting mimesis as an absolute kind of yielding, yielding to all of the environment, losing itself in it, sinking in it and being absorbed by it, Adorno is

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

151

drawn to seeing it in terms of death. Despite this apparent absolute passivity mimesis, even when Adorno discusses it here, is an act of imitation, contact and knowing—as such it is a kind of activity that negates desire.36 In his theorizing on the psychology of the comic Freud introduces the idea of “ideational mimetics” as the bodily copying of the other. The learner tries to reproduce the shape of a perception in his or her own body. In this way the learner embodies perceptions. This involves considerable thought about the object imitated and thus a mimesis of ideas. In the same way that speech gives external embodiment to thought, thought itself mimics all of one’s bodily motions. This isomorphism between thought and body (like all isomorphism) is an expression of a link mimesis has forged. But this makes mimesis involve concepts. This dialectical contradiction of mimesis and passivity/activity, mimesis and nonconcepts/concepts is nascent in prehistoric shamanic practices where the shaman’s rituals are carried out with some end, in addition to merely mirroring the object, in mind; healing, rain dancing, cursing, blessing and such.37 The shaman negates desire by renouncing his/her own self (and his/her desires), taking on the form of another object, usually an animal or natural phenomenon like the wind, and at the same time the shaman asserts desire by doing this with some purpose in mind, the purpose of achieving something for the tribe.38 The Adorno parallel with Laozi is complicated by the fact that for although in Adorno boundary knowledge (concepts) is driven by desire, mimesis is also driven by a different desire, the desire to take on another form. For a compulsion is also a form of desire, broadly understood. But even for Adorno this is a paradoxical desire as it involves the desire of negating the mimetic subject’s own self and thus itself as desire. It is a self-negating desire. So for Laozi mimesis is desireless in that it negates the means/ends dynamic of concepts and that it is the negation the subject’s desires insofar as the subject denies itself in taking on another form. (4) In the discussion of line 8 it has already been mentioned how lines 7 and 8 copy the order of you/wu lines of lines 5 and 6. On this reading of the first chapter Laozi changes the order of the dialectical couplets after line 4. Up to line 4 the first line of the couplet says something of the you side of Dao while the second line says something of the wu side of Dao. But line 5 changes the order of appearance of the lines in the couplets. Instead of

152 

J. Chambers

repeating the sequence by saying something of the you side of Dao it changes the sequence by saying something of the wu side. Lines 7 and 8 repeat this new sequence. The point I am making can be schematically presented thus: 1.  you 2.  wu 3.  you 4.  wu 5.  wu 6.  you 7.  wu 8.  you

This is a discrepancy in want of an explanation. One way I have considered is that the break in the sequence occurs deliberately to make the reference of the word “therefore” (gu) clearer. Laozi is saying that the epistemic point made in couplet 7/8 follows from the metaphysical point made in couplet 5/ 6 and not (or not especially) from the ontological/ logical points made in the couplets 1/2 or 3/4.39 Laozi is saying that because the nameless side of Dao is the beginning of heaven and earth and the named side of Dao is the mother of all things, dropping desires helps us learn secrets and keeping desire helps us learn boundaries. What the previous two lines indicate is that Laozi is implying something about the metaphysical link between foreground and background is replayed within consciousness when desire generates concepts and when the absence of desire subdues concepts. The boundaries of concepts within consciousness are the foreground of awareness, the stream of consciousness. But consciousness in total is much more than this stream of thought. Consciousness includes the background of memories, peripheral perceptions and feelings that make up the material from which the foreground of our thoughts emerge. The act of throwing thoughts up to the foreground of consciousness is in effect a reverse mimesis within consciousness itself. The backgrounding action of peripheral thought, yielding to dominant thought is an act of abandonment in it. In yielding to the environment the mimetic subject also yields to the background

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

153

thoughts of its own consciousness because desire, and thus conscious thought, is thwarted. It is turning mimesis the other way around. Laozi’s mimesis thus involves a kind of self-consciousness, awareness of self as the background thoughts. Laozi’s mimesis is a mimesis of self-negation as well as self-consciousness. The awareness that comes is not the mere awareness that consciousness is more than the train of thought at any one time, nor does it involve a total awareness of what all of the background thoughts contain; rather the awareness is of consciousness as a yielding.40 It is important to stress that absolute mimesis is not merely an imitation in the sense of copying things. In his commentary on the Zhuangzi (庄子) Guo Xiang (郭象c. 252–321 C.E.) gives several arguments against imitation and knowledge of Dao: it is useless because of the constant flux of events rendering situations ever new and imitation thereby obsolete. Imitation is fruitless given that it involves conscious effort which loses the very thing it tries to recreate, the naturalness of the thing imitated.41 It is harmful because it involves a constant striving to overcome natural limitations. Guo’s point can be conceded whilst still upholding the view that absolute mimesis is a kind of imitation, if it is more broadly understood, in the sense of reproducing a natural environment, a situation, and way of life. If desireless knowledge is a kind of mimesis then some kind of mimesis is linked to the wu side of Dao, Dao as background in line 5. Desireless knowledge is a link to the knowledge that line 5 brings. What could this link be? The inescapable answer must be that it is a mimetic link because mimesis is the forging of an ineffable link. But if the epistemic act of mimesis is mimetically linked to the metaphysical act of backgrounding (yielding) then Dao as background is mimesis as such. Backgrounding is a kind of mimesis because for everything to be determinate for themselves they must also be indeterminate for others, when objects move to the background they take on the form of the objects that move to the foreground just as a lump of wax takes the form of the objects pressed against it because foreground and background are simultaneous and ever present. This is because backgrounding is just the movement of all foreground objects into their environment, becoming their environment and thus becoming each other. So when the subject engages in a partial act of mimesis with an individual object the mimesis expresses itself in the

154 

J. Chambers

resulting similitude between object and imitator. When the subject engages in a mimesis with its background, or the fact of backgrounding in nature, that is with mimesis, all of its environment42 insofar as its environment yields to it, this subject, is engaging in absolute mimesis. This is the mimesis that interests Laozi. This is desireless knowing. This is a mimesis in which the subject attempts to sink into its background and background just is this act of yielding, sinking. Background is objects insofar as they do that.43 Insofar as all objects are compatible, inhabit the same environment, they all must be background and in this sense they all must harmonize. The secret, the perfection, the wu side of Dao is known through absolute mimesis—absolute in the sense that it is a mimesis of mimesis. It is a conscious mimesis of the mimesis of reality as background. Absolute mimesis is a mimesis of mimesis as such and in this way it is a mimesis of the wu side of Dao. According to Adorno mimesis is a compulsion, destructive in itself and insofar as it brings knowledge it is knowledge of the concept, namely its inadequacy. For Adorno mimesis is an act of the subject to try and find identity with its object via total sensuous immersion in the object’s form. It fails just as the concept fails because of the inherent nonidentity of individuals. It only succeeds in art by negating itself, moving from being a praxis into a poiesis and even then only in critical art. Laozi is quite different insofar as he identifies a special kind of mimesis, absolute mimesis, not limited to art, which links the subject to the act of mimesis as such— a metaphysical act, ubiquitous in all things. This act is a moment of autopoiesis44 of Dao in nature internalized in the individual. This epistemic awareness of this ubiquitous metaphysical fact through conscious yielding brings nonconceptual awareness of the ontological fact of Dao itself. The subject comes to know this by negating its subjective form—its concepts, and embracing the ontological act of yielding; the indeterminate wellspring of determinate reality. That is, the act of a certain kind of mimesis is mimetically linked to Dao as background. This returns to Adorno’s idea of the compulsion to mimesis being the compulsion to absorption in the environment, a mimetic consciousness is a backgrounding consciousness, a consciousness that absorbs its surroundings by stepping back into them.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

155

Laozi would say the fact that Adorno does not see any kind of ontological knowledge from the epistemic act of mimesis is due to the fact that Adorno has an incomplete concept of the environment, not modified by the idea of it as necessarily a yielding movement.45 It has already been mentioned that Adorno only looks at mimesis on the human level. This is a limit Adorno placed around his own research. This constrains a reflection on the broader implications of mimesis by fiat, which it seems Benjamin was happy to transgress.46 Adorno’s assertion of mimesis as somehow merely a biological compulsion involving the recognition within concepts of their inadequacy ignores the mimetic moment within objects themselves. It fails to recognize mimesis within the concrete universal but it is an essential part of it for only this way can its internal relations be explained.47 Adorno could object that absolute mimesis is impossible because mimesis requires a specific object, not a tendency of all things. It might be possible to see mimesis in artworks, or imitation of specific things but imitation of the imitation of nature as such is inconceivable. It is impossible to expunge concepts from experience. To really sink into the environment is not a conscious state; it is death. Laozi appears to be flirting with mysticism because he appears to claim that an act independent of concepts/reason can grant superior knowledge of things in themselves unmediated. Adorno was, rightly, keen to avoid doing this at the same time as asserting knowledge of the limit of the concept. He argues this knowledge can come from within the concept, which is why he terms his method a negative dialectic.48 Laozi has two responses to this. One is internal to the concept (negative) and the other is external to the concept (positive). The negative response partly addresses Adorno’s concern through his display of concepts corresponding to Dao when they are vague, vagueness is a concept of Dao, but vagueness is a negative concept because it eschews their boundaries. Coutinho gives a good summary of the appearance of Dao in vagueness throughout the Daodejing—calling it an “elegy to vagueness “(2002, 416). Coutinho lists the presence of Dao in all of the main cases for the employment of the concept of vagueness: Laozi talks of Dao as vagueness of the penumbral,49 Dao as present in the transformation of opposites into each other,50 Dao as present in the vagueness of growth

156 

J. Chambers

and decline,51 and in paradox and contradiction52 and boundarilessness and continuity.53 I do not have much to add to this here because this is an indirect, partial and so inadequate road to Dao. A condensed version of the positive response is as follows: It is an oversimplification to characterize absolute mimesis as an imitation of the imitation of nature as such, as was done above. In fact, the act performed is always localized to the environment of the imitator. The imitator imitates the mimesis of his/her environment, which is a complete54 microcosm of the movement of Dao. Laozi introduces the concept of德—de as referring to each kind of thing’s own peculiar manifestation of Dao as absolute mimesis.55 This means absolute mimesis cannot be a form of absolute passivity to all things, which is meaningless (Jiang 1937, 9), but rather for each thing to perform this act according to its own nature. In humans this has a conceptual side (as humans are inherently conceptual beings), the side which comes from ascribing a meaning to the act of nonaction—wuwei (which other things do not consciously perform) which the Daodejing goes some way in explaining. Wuwei is the De of humanity (the manifestation of Dao in humans), which involves a sympathetic way of interacting with the environment that is partially conceptual, appearing in the form of the concepts used rather than their content. It requires interpreting the image of the spirit of the valley to try and recreate it in different circumstances. It is known in its act. Wuwei is first and foremost a political act.56 This requires a lot of conceptual thought. So Laozi is not thereby asserting some kind of immediate knowledge to prompt Adorno’s censure. Everything performs the act of backgrounding. That is, everything has a wu side. That is, everything is mimetic. Animals can consciously perform absolute mimesis, although they are unaware of its cosmic significance. Humans can recognize this act in other creatures through their own mastery of it. Only humans can ascribe meaning to the act through their concepts. Laozi does this in the Daodejing although he does not find its meaning so important as the act itself. Indeed, for everyone apart from the sage understanding the ontological significance of the act itself is not important. In Laozi’s view the fact that humans are conceptual and less like the other animals in this regard is problematic for humans. It makes it so humans can go astray in ways that everything else cannot, which Laozi thinks has, unfortunately,

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

157

happened in civilization. In sum, for Laozi absolute mimesis is not an especially human act but insofar as it is, it is a species of knowledge, ethical and conceptual even though it is performed by leaning upon the nonconceptual within the conceptual. Laozi in this way does not break Adorno’s strictures against pure immediacy.

Lines 9&10: Unity in Opposition Lines 9 and 10 are partly concerned with making points that have been implied already. It has already been mentioned how the named and nameless Dao are two sides of the same thing and how background and foreground, determinate and indeterminate are the same with different names according to the different perspectives taken upon them and which they represent. It is instructive that line 10 points out that the divergence comes with the movement of going forward. It is by virtue of foreground, the you side of Dao, that distinctions can be made. Insofar as concepts make a division through names concepts are an episode in foregrounding. This simultaneously explains the apparent ease that Laozi has in employing concepts whilst decrying their dominance in cognition. This is what explains the identity and division referred to in lines 9 and 10. That is, foregrounding creates division and the concept is how it is known to consciousness, but this division only happens insofar as there is also unity, the nameless unity that comes when the wanwu57 make their simultaneous background movement. This touches upon the idea of the mediated immediacy for we see how the separation and unity and its knowledge is articulated but not comprehended in the concept.

L ines 11–13: Quasi-materialist Ontology of Mystery Line 12 says there is a mystery within mystery. This is typically thought of as just a way of emphasizing the mystery—saying it is very mysterious. The following will outline how Laozi really sees two mysteries; one

158 

J. Chambers

contained in the other. The first mystery concerns this simultaneous ubiquitous foregrounding/ backgrounding movement because it is itself a part of the background or wu side of Dao. Dao is two sided. The foregrounded side is the side related to concepts, allowing description. Insofar as things are foreground they are distinct and clear. Insofar as things are backgrounded they are united and amorphous. Background, when Dao is thought of metaphysically and not ontologically, just is the movement of unity; foreground, the movement of separation. As such the unity must be of the background side. This is the mystery of how foreground can be background. It is the mystery of how things can be separate and united, even separate through being united and vice versa. Within the circle of concepts this unity is dialectical and, after the maturation of dialectical logic, this can no longer be called a mystery when the logic of the unity of opposition as a category has been, thanks to Hegel, fully elucidated. If the unity/division of background/foreground is thought of with concepts, that is, through the power of foreground, then dialectics, the science of concepts, can comprehend the unity in opposition of things in the world and by extension these abstractions of background and foreground—but only by extension of a foreground view.58 The error of only seeing the foreground view comes with the recognition that it necessarily involves seeing the two united as one—this is after all what union means. But if Dao as background escapes concepts then so too does it escape the conceptual logic of numeration. The two are not joined into a one in Dao qua background. With dialectics we can know the union of identity and nonidentity but with Dao we have a referent for the element of absence of the union. The non-conceptual union breaks down that logic of numeration and the logic of union itself.59 “The One” of the background from which foreground emerged is actually a concept that accompanies the concept, as it counterpoises itself to that from which it has made itself the abstraction. The true union precedes “The One”.60 The foreground is background, that background is empty and yet foreground is continuously stepping out from it and back into it. This partly explains Laozi’s tendency to talk of Dao in terms of wu—absence. Background has its own view, which necessarily falls outside of concepts. This particular unity of opposition, unlike simply any unity in opposition (which is where the unity of opposition applies in scientific, applied

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

159

dialectical logic) remains mysterious because background qua background lies outside of logic. The wu side of Dao as background a placeholder for the claim that there are no non-circular grounds for existence of the world. This is the anti-conceptualist audacity of Laozi in contrast to Hegel. Hegel was fond of an image from Greek mythology: trosas iasetai, the wounder will heal in reference to concepts (Macdonald 2000: 132).61 The idea is that concepts essentially comprehend the division they have created and thus by self-consciously making a gap between subject and object, spirit and nature, concept and intuition, they also bridge it and take possession of the other side and this is what lends the concept ontological primacy. Hegel’s ontology is idealistic because nature is in a logical relationship of negation with spirit and thus Hegel sees it as logically derived. This means there is a unity in opposition with the infinite enjoying primacy. The finite is united with the infinite under the infinite, nature is united with spirit under spirit. Laozi makes his unity in opposition on the opposite side of the division. That is, the infinite is united with the finite under the finite, spirit is united with nature under nature. Doing this means the unity is not logical. We have a name which cannot be the constant name. For Laozi concepts can only comprehend the division they have made from their own perspective. The higher unity, while it can be described with paradox in concepts, is only known in itself through a mode of life which is necessarily inarticulate and thus mysterious. The higher unity is a radically non-conceptual act. For Hegel nature and spirit can only be said to have a logical relationship if they can be said to have any relationship at all. While Laozi does not see the existence of this opposition, it can be captured inside Laozi’s broader opposition between background and foreground in one sense, and when this is done the disagreement between Laozi and Hegel could not be sharper. When the spirit/nature dichotomy is abstracted out of the background-foreground/you-wu dichotomy Laozi can be taken to assert a nonlogical unity between them. This is analogous to recognizing a mediated immediacy in Adorno’s sense, although Adorno could never put it in those terms.62

160 

J. Chambers

Even though Adorno resists reducing immediacy to mediacy, he nevertheless remains Hegelian in the sense that appeals to pure immediacy are completely rejected… The philosophical attempts to break out of idealism through such appeals—by Bergson, Husserl, Kierkegaard—are rejected, as is positivism’s attempt to ground scientific knowledge in the immediate particular. Adorno responds to the accusation that he thereby sweeps up all immediacy (e.g. affect, experience, facts, etc) into the tide of mediation by arguing that: “By referring something back to the conditions that prove immediacy to have been conditioned, you do indeed strike a blow against immediacy, but that immediacy survives nevertheless. For we can speak of mediation only if immediate reality, only if primary experience survives. […] So the point about dialectics is not to negate the concept of fact in favour of mediation, or to exaggerate that of mediation; it is simply to say that immediacy is itself mediated but that the concept of the immediate must still be retained [Adorno 2006, 20–21] (Lumsden 2016: 96).”

Mediation is necessary for cognition, nothing is wholly unmediated, but conceptual mediation of the object of cognition cannot go all the way down. There is something more to the mediation of metaphysical relations and cognition than conceptual mediation. This ‘something more’ is, conceptually, mysterious. The second mystery is critical for understanding the first, and the first is critical for understanding the second. Once it is clear that reality is contained in the metaphysical division of background and foreground and it is established this unity is contained in the necessarily non-logical side of the division it becomes clear that there can be no logical answer to a question of why this unity in division has come about. In logical terms it is arbitrary. The question, why is everything the way it is has no logical answer. This is the great mystery. A big question in philosophy is “why is everything the way it is”? In Western philosophy some have posed it in terms of “why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?”63 Laozi answers this question on line 12. It is a question which puts into question the logical schema of questions and answers. The fact that the question cannot be verbally answered is a negative proof of the first mystery. Yet there is a sense in which absence of desire (wuyu 无欲) does involve an answer to this unanswerable question. If, as Wang Youru argues, Dao is the absence of a signifier (2003), then it gets its significance from its apophatic contents, not from discursive thought; it

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

161

is lived and actualized in action as Laozi remarks in chapter 23 “To use words but rarely/Is to be natural…A man of the way conforms to the way” (1967, 28). Because wuyu gets a person in touch with the spontaneous, non-rational side of creation, living Dao involves embracing the non-reason for the whole dance of reality, through which successful practitioners escape the means/ends dichotomy. If life was meant to be taken seriously, it would make sense. Dao is antithetical to means-ends-dichotomy-oriented purposes, which is why chapter one states it cannot be followed. It is in this sense that Laozi is indeed proposing ‘nothing’ as a candidate for the absolute, although it is not the same ‘nothing’ which Hegel critiqued. That thing which posits itself, must actually be outside itself. The principle of sufficient reason ultimately fails as it succeeds. Spinoza, famously, put forward ‘being’ (as in ‘everything’) as a candidate for the self-positing absolute. This move implicitly relies upon positing ‘nothing’ as that which is outside and conditioning ‘being’, for this being is alleged to have no limit; nothing beyond it. To lack a limit is to lack nothing. There is no way of escaping absence here. If I say there is no reason or even that the question itself is wrong, I have actually given a reason: whereof one can say nothing, there one has actually said ‘nothing’. Note the role that nothing is playing here; it is the background conditioning and containing the foreground movement of being. For Hegel ultimate reality can be known through finding the for-itself relationship of the finite and the infinite such that everything is understood in the self-consciousness relationship.64 With knowledge of the universal the essence of things is known. It is known things are of the essence. While Hegel cannot explain Herr Krug’s pen he can dismiss this fact and facts like it as necessarily trivial and not as knowing in the philosophical sense. He explains the nature of reality by reference to the nature of Spirit to go through the dialectical process of knowing itself. Through knowledge of itself as embodying infinite Spirit finite spirit can grasp the meaning of reality with concepts. Everything remains within the self-­ justifying circle of concepts. For Laozi the most important thing lies outside concepts and while we therefore cannot grasp it, it can, if we have the right comportment to it, grasp us (chapter 38). It might be useful to compare Laozi’s identification of Dao as ultimate reality in the second mystery with Kant’s identification of the

162 

J. Chambers

transcendental real as the thing-in-itself. Kant’s understanding of the mystery of reality contrasts with Laozi’s. With Kant, the thing-in-itself is forever unknowable to us because of the veil of ignorance that necessarily accompanies the subject’s cognition of the object. The nature of the transcendental real is mysterious because of limitations of the subject within the boundaries of the empirical real. It is possible to suppose an entity with perfect knowledge outside of the empirical real of the thing-initself—God—Kant theorizes this entity. God is inconceivable in Laozi’s system. For Laozi the second mystery is known—as mystery. It is not because of a limit on the subject that reality is mysterious. This known mystery is partially captured in different ways with Li Dazhao’s identification of Dao with “endless Spring” (2002) and Paul Valery’s characterization of the sea as both eternal and fleeting in the exultation “forever new!” The eternity of novelty is a pre-philosophical, precondition of consciousness. The subject is not locked into the empirical real; rather reality is in and of itself mysterious because indeterminate. It cannot be known, in the sense of knowledge that interested the idealists,65 because ultimate reality is itself obscure, amorphous, penumbral, and indeterminate. Herr Krug’s pen is called upon to explain everything else through a mysterious action it performs. It is not that ultimate reality is hidden from the observer; it is hidden from itself. This is the ontological context which puts Laozi’s materialism in touch with that of the so-called new materialists for whom “ontology must itself always amount to a particular material practice of matter observing, excluding, and thus constituting itself anew” (Gamble et al. 2019, 127); for the absence of a substance for being as such expresses a pervasive absence supplying the discontinuities between matters. By harmonizing with this reality through an act commensurate with its creativity, Laozi maintains it can be mimetically known but there is no more to know of reality in an ultimate sense beyond this. Reality is radically incomplete. Another way of saying this is that the wealth of reality is open-ended and exceeds the concept. One must embrace the mystery to know it, not try to extirpate it with the concept. Line 13 says the movements of foregrounding and backgrounding are linked as through a door opening and closing, separating as it unites. It marks a boundary that is temporary and fluid through which things pass

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

163

and return. This is the first metaphor for Dao with a thing,66 but it is a special thing, in that it is overtly implicated in its act of opening and closing. Where there is opening and closing there is a door. Where boundaries appear and disappear there is Dao, an opening through which things pass. Dao can only be reified by reference to the union and division between two moments. It appears to be more than either side of the division but it has no existence beyond the relationship existing between the two sides. This is further reason for Laozi’s linking Dao with wu. It is only reified as a means of presenting the relationship between two things separated and then united, yet this relationship is not some ‘third’ thing but the two things separated and united in themselves. It can only be talked about as if it is something more, but it is not. This is a limitation of the concept. This is an expression of the passage between binary oppositions that is characteristic of the Daodejing. The open and close analogy is a key concept of the Yijing, a major influence on the Daodejing. Employing a metaphor with a tangible object, the door, to refer to Dao draws attention to the fact that all the lines of the first chapter are isomorphic and that metaphor has been employed between different realms of abstraction. So first Dao is ontologically characterized as nonconceptual, that which cannot be followed because unnamable, it is metaphysically linked with its wu side as background. These two are metaphorically linked in their different realms of abstraction, ontology and metaphysics. The epistemology is then linked metaphorically to this metaphysical characterization of Dao, via an act which appears to be an epistemic version of the ontological nonconceptual movement and the metaphysical movement of backgrounding. However, these metaphorical linkings through different realms of abstraction should not be taken to imply that there is a different Dao or even a different aspect of Dao described in each isomorphism. All these realms of abstraction are taken by Laozi to indicate the one Dao, to be different, inadequate perspectives on something known through its act, not its conceptualizations. (even though its significance—which is relatively unimportant to Laozi—is conceptually known). Isomorphism registers mimetic patterns and Dao is mimesis as such. In other words, chapter one is a De. Metaphor is the identification of similitudes between different things. Some, like Nietzsche, say this is all there is to language (and thus

164 

J. Chambers

concepts). There is another perhaps more obvious side to concepts—that of marking differences. It is clear from the above that Laozi thinks that concepts are best characterized in terms of this side. This is because this power of linking does not belong to concepts in Laozi’s view; rather this power belongs to something outside of concepts, the power of background (Similarly mimesis is oppressively employed in the concept according to Adorno whilst having a purity beyond this). As every concept must have some particular content, its foreground is, properly speaking, itself and its foreground is its divisiveness. Nevertheless, within concepts marking a division between things—desiring and discursive thought—always involves asserting a unity between things—desireless and mimetic thought. It is no coincidence that in unity vagueness and obscurity begin because unity is always an illusion insofar as it must ignore the complex internal divisions within any entity. But this illusion must be, in one sense, real because only by virtue of it playing the role of an indeterminate background can it bring forth determinate foregrounds (outcomes). This is further justification for Laozi’s use of wu to characterize Dao. Hegel uses this dualism within concepts to assert their omnipotence. Laozi reduces the dualism within concepts to the higher dualism of foreground and background in all things.67 The mimetic side of concepts actually points to a higher and purer act, absolute mimesis, but staying within the impure form of concepts Laozi has found a way of expressing by always emphasizing, as if to show the way, their mimetic side. All of the chapters of the Daodejing employ the mimetic side of concepts to advocate the pure mimetic act in which mimesis has thrown off its conceptual form. This model of moving between realms of inquiry and practice by repeating the same pattern of mimesis happens throughout the Daodejing, and indeed this encapsulates its primary ethical message. Taking these implicit linking steps seriously distances Laozi from Martin Heideggar and Jacques Lacan for whom the symbolic is, in a sense, arbitrary because dependent upon human contexts. For Laozi the reverse is the case, the omnipresent nonsymbolic ubiquitously informs and directs the symbolic through being reflected in foregrounds projecting from backgrounds of which humans and their petty praxiological problems are one case.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

165

Conclusion This brief excursion into Laozi’s ontology, metaphysics and epistemology pits him against Hegel. Hegel, in the reading of him of this chapter, championed the perfection of the concept as giving the knowledge of and being the fact of ultimate ontology. In giving a nonconceptual act both epistemic and ontological primacy Laozi is Hegel’s opposite. The next question is that of how to undertake the debate between them. Are the two positions simply incommensurate? It seems hard to argue for Laozi’s position when it advocates a kind of knowledge, which appears to be based upon the fundamental futility of logos in deciding the matter. In this case Aristotle’s famous dismissive, that arguing with such a person is like arguing with a plant, would appear to be Hegel’s best argument. Indeed, Hegel’s refutation of sense-certainty takes this form. Yet with the philosophical resources of his completion of idealism Hegel adopts a couple of strategies for critiquing rivals. Might Laozi be dispatched in the same way as these? Hegel can employ a metaphysical critique: demonstrating the inadequacies of other candidates for the absolute, as he did when he misconstrued Laozi’s philosophy as promoting the candidate of ‘nothing’ for the absolute and criticized it along the same lines as his critique the Eleatics and their abstract ontology of ‘being’. He can employ an empirical critique: identifying the philosophy as promoting immediacy which makes curious bedfellows out of empiricists and mystics,68 I have argued that this strategy also misidentified Laozi’s position. If Laozi does not find himself with Parmenides, as the champion of a nebulous candidate for the infinite, Hegel can try to deal with him like a mystic, Empiricists and Jacobi (the hybrid) with a nebulous exaltation of immediacy and the finite (Stern 2009). The problem facing this strategy is that Laozi’s peculiar employment of the mimetic side of concepts enables him to produce a kind of unifying explanation based upon the failure of unifying principles. Laozi bases his ontology upon the failure of unifying principles, united in a mystery. But this does not thereby make him a skeptic or mystic because his ontology appeals to a side of the concept, which indicates the polysemy of the finite and the failure of the infinite to contain it.69 The following chapters explain how Wu operates

166 

J. Chambers

in Laozi’s system as a unifying principle in a negative way. On this reading, neither rhetorical strategy is open to Hegel against Laozi. It has already been mentioned that Laozi employs a kind of negative argument for Dao through the use of paradox and vagueness. A negative dialectical logic, such as Laozi exhibits can show but not say the synthesis of finite and infinite. Laozi’s position could be argued for against Hegel if his anti-conceptualist system, with its concept of wu, could be employed in a refutation of the omnipotence/omnipresence of the infinite and for the ontological sovereignty of the finite. Laozi’s case against Hegel concerns the way in which the absolute is known. Laozi’s contribution to that critique falls beyond the remit of this chapter. It is addressed in the next chapter. However, this could only function as an indirect argument for Laozi’s position anyway. The positive argument is the successful application of absolute mimesis: the life project to realize its aesthetic, political and ethical system, overcoming the means/ends dichotomy.70

Notes 1. This is one way of interpreting Laozi’s use of wu when he talks about spokes on the wheel, hole in the cup and empty space in the room in chapter 11 as well as the metaphor of Dao as like an uncarved block of wood. 2. The Neo-Daoist philosopher Wang Chong 王充 (Shi 1996a, 266–94) employed the idea of the indeterminacy of Heaven and Earth in his theory of spontaneity according to which the wanwu were the offspring of the procreation of Heaven and Earth, a product of nature’s fecundity in uniting things which develop of their own natures by themselves— not ordered or designed by any “divine” hand. According to this theory heaven and earth lacked consciousness and constituted a higher order body enabling the free development of concrete entities within, rather than guiding and directing events. Interestingly Wang implies heaven and earth are to be more exalted for allowing this freedom of self-­ production than they would be if they micromanaged their offspring. Wang Chong was a free thinker and does not take pains to establish textual authority with direct quotes from the Daodejing. Nevertheless, in his essay on spontaneity he does credit Laozi with mastering this idea

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

167

(271). In his theory of spontaneity, he is inspired by the line we are discussing in chapter one and in other chapters, particularly chapter 5. 3. Of course, a methodological individualist (for threads) would deny the fabric any place in explaining the thread at all. He would only concede that the individual thread moves and takes the shape it does because of the other individual threads around it. But the poverty of this explanation is evident in that the individual thread is tied to its neighbors. And this tying amounts to, in (Aristotelian) explanatory terms, a qualitative leap. The fabric as tied threads is more than the sum of its parts. (And so is the society we are a part of in which real and not thread-based methodological individualists have not gone extinct yet). We should be reminded here of Marx’ fourth thesis on Feuerbach. At this point we should also add that not only is the fabric the background of the thread but so are the many tiny fibers that make up the thread and so on smaller ad infinitum. Whatever falls out of view; be it bigger or smaller, is the background and there’s no smallest point at which explanation should stop. Explanation can in principle continue indefinitely, as we gain greater macroscopic and microscopic knowledge of our world. (The following is extremely tangential to our case in this note but it might spare some confusion later if this point is made here: although a scientific explanation of a system or totality does have a conceptual point of departure where reduction must stop or rather begin, like Marx’ identification of simple commodity exchange as the ‘cell-form’ of bourgeois economy discussed in chapter 5, further reductions are always possible, within the limits of empirical constraints, just so long as we bear in mind that further reductions concern different systems/totalities.) Of course, the fabric is also contained in and related to a bigger whole which again acts as its background. The point is that the context can be both a bigger whole and also just the arbitrary circumstances of different wholes that may or may not form parts of a yet further bigger whole. I think ultimately Laozi does in fact see heaven and earth as a big whole of which all other things are parts and this is an essential component of his ethical outlook but nothing turns here on an agnosticism about this issue for reading the first chapter. Also Laozi has a unique understanding of ‘wholeness’ that comes from the ontologically negative role of Dao that means Laozi’s heaven and earth concept cannot be equated with more familiar holist or monist philosophies of the west. Laozi both agrees and disagrees with the notion that there is no ‘world’ in the ontological sense.

168 

J. Chambers

4. In many ways the indeterminateness of the idea of background here espoused corresponds well with Hegel’s concept of Being in the early narrative of the evolution of the Concept in the beginning of the Logic. But while Hegel concentrates on the way foreground emerges itself from the background with the stage of Essence and so on Laozi prefers to concentrate on that which is left behind by this development. Hegel sees the Concept (event/action/metaphysical “thing”) as pulling itself up “by its own bootstraps” so to speak. Laozi does not deny this but recognizing that there is no absolute vacuum (as Hegel does) for anything means that insofar as the event can pull itself up it must also be pushed by its circumstances and they push by being fertile (in Laozi’s sense) by being an indeterminate negation—a strange kind of conditioning by not conditioning. Think of travelling on a train and looking out of the window. Are you moving forward or is the world moving backward? It is relative. One can only happen to the extent that the other happens. Hegel prefers to see the transition from indeterminate to determinate in terms of foreground so that the background is incorporated into the foreground. Laozi wants to hold the duality of the transition apart so as to focus on its background wu side. Of course, Laozi is also concerned with the ubiquitous return to background (think of chapter 40) which Hegel thinks about in a completely different way. These two ways of looking at it do not disagree but they lead in different directions. 5. Hence what Laozi says in chapter 1 on lines 9 and 10 about both sides being the same but differing in name as they issue forth. Events are simultaneously foreground and background. 6. An interesting consequence of this is the rejection of a priori method in philosophy 7. This is confirmed in chapter 25 when Dao is referred to as the mother of Heaven and Earth. So it is the mother of the myriad creatures and Heaven and Earth. 8. Although these ideas of Background and Foreground seem not to be substantially different from Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas of Field and Focus I have deliberately used a different terminology, in contrast to Ames and Hall’s enthusiastic employment of it, because background and foreground better emphasize the dual nature of events as essentially, simultaneously and eternally both and that the way to see in that manner is to adopt a ‘view from nowhere’ which is Laozi’s main ethical point. Also Whitehead’s philosophy is unashamedly idealist in a way that I am interpreting Laozi to categorically reject. Finally there is no place in

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

169

Laozi’s ontology (or Marx’s!) for Whitehead’s actualism. Robert Henricks (2008) very profitably uses the analogy of a field, like a meadow to explain Dao. This shares some striking parallels with the conception of Dao as background in this chapter. Henricks’s analogy is limited in that it fails to account for the presence of Dao in foreground (the flowers in his meadow), the finite, and how this is related to nonconceptual experience. It does not link up Dao with De—德, knowledge of Dao with human action. The idea is contained in an aspect of Roy Bhaskar’s (2008) unhelpfully broad idea of real negation, specifically Non-being, but here again Bhaskar does not note the crucial link between the referent of this concept and the nonconceptual or its centrality. Perhaps the closest parallel is found in Charles Wei-hsun Fu’s (1973) interpretation of Laozi in which Dao is conceived of as the nonbeing of nature sub specie aeternitatis. However, this involves broadening the ontological referent of Dao (it is no longer situationally oriented) until it resembles the notion of Nothing (or Spinoza’s conception of Being) which Hegel refuted. Then it becomes separated from De and Laozi’s metaphor and his metaphysics (as opposed to his ontology) is reduced to a compromise with ‘figurative’ language, cut off from the nature it is supposed to exalt. Fu emphasizes Laozi’s nonconceptualism but it is an unreasoned version of Spinoza’s Being ontology burdened by a mystical renunciation of explanation. He discriminates against Laozi in the same way as Liu Xiaogan and Li Ruohui. 9. In Marx’s conditional science lower level determinacy can be offset by higher level indeterminacy. This is addressed in later chapters. 10. Chaps. 1, 25, 20, 52 and 59. 11. Chaps. 1, 4, 21 (as space containing seeds or essences) and most explicitly chapter 6. 12. Chaps. 34 and 51. 13. Henricks misses out a discussion of the epistemic side of the act to be like Dao in performing a feminine act coming forth in chapters like chapter 10 that includes the lines: “When the gates of heaven open and shut / Are you capable of keeping to the role of the female?” See the discussion of line 7 here. 14. The following extremely condensed formulation is the explanation given in more detail in chapter 4: the omnipresence of indeterminacy is that events are the intersection of an infinity of open systems with only relative scope, ensuring the polysemy and thus ontological sovereignty of the finite.

170 

J. Chambers

15. See especially Chaps. 1, 4, 5, 6, 25, 52 16. Actually, chapter four and five argue the infinity/indeterminacy relationship in Laozi/Marx is fundamentally at odds with Hegel’s ontology through its metaphysics. This is done by proving a fundamental and indispensable ontological thesis of Hegel’s idealism, which underlies and fatally undermines his avowal of the reality of the contingent. That chapter will argue that there is no place in Hegel’s system for the kind of absence Laozi is talking about. This interpretation of Hegel goes beyond the scope of this chapter. 17. The fertility of the valley’s emptiness is referred to in Chaps. 28, 39 and 41. 18. Chapter 11. 19. As you and wu are relative terms the images of emptiness and wholeness merely convey the ideas of background and foreground more dramatically. Foreground and background have a greater range of verbal application. The root, muddy water and the uncarved block can be thought of as empty, but the metaphor is strained. Background and foreground are more suitable in such cases. Nevertheless, my terminology of background and foreground is not intended to refer to a different idea to the you-wu (presence-absence) schema, it just emphasizes aspects of it which can otherwise go unnoticed. Moeller, for example does not note that the yielding movement of the wu side of Dao in these images involves mimesis and that the images are linked via isomorphism, which is why he cannot account for Laozi’s insistence that Dao is nameless. You and wu operate as expressions of the absolute contained in the relativity of their expressions in different situations. The yinyang schema has a similar range of application. They have no pure existence. I believe that despite his repeated protestations to the contrary Hegel’s infinite has pretentions of purity because it is conceived as a universal. 20. The fields of isomorphism of the first chapter (see the end of this chapter) allude to this same idea. 21. Feng Youlan’s冯友兰(2006: 70–71) and Chen Guying’s 陈鼓应 (1992, 2–15) influential interpretations both discuss Dao in terms of its multiple connotations between categories. My interpretation has it Dao inheres precisely in this family resemblance-type relationship. 22. This mode of reasoning is made most explicit in Wang Fuzhi’s (1619–1692) (Shi 1996b: 193–206) commentary on the Yijing “There is nothing exists under heaven except the concrete things. Tao is the Tao

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

171

of concrete things, and the concrete things may not be called the concrete things of the Tao” (193). Wang insists that his commitment to this view puts him at odds with Laozi: “Blind to what was mentioned above, Lao Tzu states that the Tao lies in the emptiness. The emptiness is, however, the emptiness of concrete things…. They keep on uttering the heterodox words, never escaped from concrete things, but the names which they give are described as separating from concrete things.” (199). However, I believe that Wang was wrong to see Laozi as his adversary in this for, as I argue at the end of this chapter and in the next, absence is Laozi’s category of finitude; the concrete. As Wang himself says it is “the emptiness of concrete things” by which I mean that for Laozi absence constitutes the concrete things or rather that it is that word he uses to refer to the means by which the concrete things are concrete. I suspect Wang’s true adversaries were the mystic adherents of Laozi rather than Laozi himself. As if replying to Wang Fuzhi on precisely this point, the contemporary Daoist philosopher Wang Chuanshan (1619–1693) says: “Under the sky (i.e., in the world) there are only things…The Dao is peculiar to things.”(Yang 1950, 10 (my translation)) 23. He notes fire, for example, simply does not go with water, disregarding China’s most celebrated invention—tea. 24. Interestingly, Hegel (1938: 273) notes in this place the inferiority of the symbolism of natural phenomena (Chinese metaphysics) to myth (the origins of Greek metaphysics) in representing reality. This is a typical preference of idealism and humanism in general. 25. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: LF — Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy AD — Anti-Dühring OFPPS —The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 26. Laozi is not a primitivist in principle. He is a policy-primitivist. He sees primitivism as a solution to alienation, the only solution of his ancient historical time. Chapter 5 of this book will attempt to marry Laozi’s primitivism with scientific socialism. A scientific Laozi sees scientific

172 

J. Chambers

inquiry as guided by an aesthetic/ethical appreciation of the facts. Laozi is ethically prescriptive about science, not scientifically prescriptive about science. 27. Actually to be more precise Hegel introduces universals in this way and not concepts however I have a conceptualist interpretation of this chapter, the dominant if not uncontested interpretation, such that Hegel thought of universals and concepts as synonymous in the relevant case. 28. Chapter 32 line 6 is another place where Laozi makes an explicit connection between division and names. 29. Most explicitly in chapter 8. 30. The pursuit of this goal is called a followed or named Dao, referred to in the first line. We see here how ideas within the first chapter feed back into each other. Also note how the named Dao is on the you side of Dao and how desire-driven-boundary-knowledge is also on the you side of Dao. 31. For the sake of precision of lexicon here I should clarify that from the above points about desire generating conceptual-boundary knowledge and vise versa, the two can only be said to generate each other in a ­qualified sense, not in absolute terms. It will be noted that above said Laozi was saying desire generates conceptual boundary knowledge, and this brief discussion of desire merely presupposes boundary knowledge. Desire in human consciousness itself in fact does not generate the capacity to use concepts to make distinctions; desire is actually not possible without this capacity. However, desire is a driving force in the subject, motivating the subject to hone and extend that capacity. Desire merely is the reason why this capacity does not sit idle in consciousness. Desire activates the capacity to use concepts to draw distinctions. The conceptual capacity belongs in the subject because desire can make a use of it. Desire is responsible for conceptual boundary knowledge in this sense. Desire can generate particular instances of conceptual boundary knowledge by motivating the subject to use its capacity to make them in satisfying desire. And, by the same token, conceptual boundary knowledge cannot be said to generate the capacity to desire, it can only trigger desires. Concepts are required for both means and ends to be identified by consciousness but desire is required for certain objects to be taken as ends and thus according certain others statuses within or without the domain of means. In an genealogical and metaphysical sense (the sense that interested Laozi) the two can be said to generate each other, insofar as they are modifications of a certain movement of life but in psychology this is not the case.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

173

32. This rather chopped-up and vague quote is repeatedly used by Roger Foster (2007) to make his case that Adorno thought of mimesis is contained in and parasitic upon the concept. I actually do not think it supports the case Foster wishes to make of it. I also do not think that Foster’s own case, that Adorno asserted the dependence of mimesis upon the concept in order to avoid claims for mimesis as a kind of guarantor of immediate knowledge, is much effected by this. As long as Adorno asserts that the two mediate each other there is no danger of immediacy whatever the source of mimesis. However, interpreting Adorno correctly on this matter is not my purpose in this study. I am frankly ambivalent about what Adorno said here on this question of immediacy and origins and Adorno’s tortured prose on the matter suggests ambivalence on his part also. 33. According to Foster Adorno is keen to limit the scope of mimesis as derived from and contained in the concept so as to avoid the charge that mimesis can attain some kind of immediate knowledge. Adorno characterized this claim of immediate knowledge as a kind of irrationalism that ensnared Heidegger among others. (In this controversy I side with Adorno.) Anyway, as mentioned in the note above, asserting the independence of mimesis as an act which engages the dominance of non-­ conceptual sensuous knowledge does not entail that mimesis can occur unmediated by concepts. Foster seems to want to deny sensation’s role in perception altogether. This is more than even Hegel did. That the two are independent yet mediate each other seems to be one appealing way of interpreting Laozi on lines 9–11. 34. Laozi’s emphasis on the power of the home as the ethical anchor on which the social world must turn gives the knowledge of the home an added importance. 35. There is here an attractive parallel between: Daoism’s historical role as a counterweight to Confucianism’s rationalistic, anthropocentric ethics; and Adorno’s counter-Enlightenment critique of the new superstitions and oppression of Enlightenment ideology (Gan 2012). 36. Adorno was heavily influenced by Freud’s idea of the death drive. This idea of mimesis and death makes for attractive parallels with Laozi’s characterization of the sage’s knowledge, knowledge of Dao, and death. In chapter 16 Laozi talks about knowledge of Dao in terms of watching the creatures go out in all their differences in life and then returning to the unity of Dao in death. The classical Buddhist obsession with desire as life and overcoming it as finally escaping the karmic circle of life to

174 

J. Chambers

enter the void of true death in nirvana was no doubt attracted to the parallels with overcoming desire, knowing, Dao and death here. This connection between Dao and the aesthetic embrace of death, with its implication of finitude is a major theme of Laozi’s epistemology in the next chapter in which it will be explained as an antidote to the dichotomy of metaphysics and phenomenology. 37. Advocating desireless knowledge as a means for some kind of return to an earlier, somehow superior age is a recurring theme of the Daodejing. (Chapters 10, 20, 28 and 55 are good examples). The link of shamanic mimesis with prehistory could be part of an explanation for this. 38. Now some very exciting parallels present themselves. First remember how Plato associates mimesis with women and children. His arguments for banishing mimesis from rational society allude to an emergent conflict between poetry and philosophy in early Greek civilization in his time of writing. The rhapsodic oral traditional culture of the prehistoric Greeks, which he sees as governed by emotions and female tendencies, was coming into conflict with the masculine ideals of the rational civilization he saw as emerging through logos in dialectic accompanying the increasing entrenchment of writing in Greek life (Potolsky 2006: 30). The shamanic connection with mimesis, it appears, traces the dominance of this tendency back to an age that possibly predates the oral epic poetic age in the west and the proverbial poetic age in China of which the Daodejing is a recording. We have here a parallel between mimesis and prehistory and a parallel between mimesis and the feminine. It is fascinating to put these two parallels together with Henrick’s observation that mother earth goddess worship is a cross-cultural phenomenon of prehistoric civilization (2008, 38). This in turn can be linked to Friedrich Engels’ far-sighted speculations of the origins of society in matriarchy (OFPPS-MECW26/MEW21). Armed with Engels’ insights and the fascinating parallels above, the anthropological thesis that Laozi looks back in time to the genius of a previous age not merely rhetorically but historically is very attractive. Laozi sees absolute mimesis as recreating a feminine action belonging to the childhood of civilization. While these parallels give indirect textual support for my interpretation, I sadly cannot pursue them further here. They invite further attention in a study on anthropology. 39. Anyhow, not much turns upon the soundness of this interpretation. I am interpreting 7/8 as coming from 5/6 whether or not Laozi changed the dialectical couplet sequence to make that point. The whole thing could

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

175

just as easily be explained by poetical demands or a corruption in the transcribing process. 40. I take it that this is the knowledge of yielding happening both outside and inside that Laozi wants us to pay attention to when he urges us to “block the openings” and “shut the doors” in chapter 52. This contrasts Laozi’s psychology with Friedrich Nietzsche’s (and Buddhist) in which there is only competition involved. The double movement of foregrounding and backgrounding in consciousness, which Nietzsche denies, is what enables consciousness to function as a more or less coherent whole. It is by virtue of this movement that contents of consciousness belong together. In terms of psychology this matter does not particularly interest Laozi, but in terms of identifying wholes it does. Laozi thus appears a typically Chinese advocate of the harmonious dialectics characteristic of the yin-­yang schema. 41. See Fung Yu-lan (1976, 226–227) 42. Hence the strong environmentalist undercurrents of Daoist thought (Chen 1985). 43. This is how I understand Laozi’s incredibly obscure exhortation to polish our mysterious mirrors without blemish in chapter 10 In this place Laozi is urging us to reflect everything insofar as it reflects us, to let nothing in in the sense of being open to everything. 44. Moeller insightfully talks of Dao in terms of autopoiesis—the production of something external to the task, for the sake of the whole system in its reproduction of itself. He does not discuss this as an epistemic act. 45. Note that this idea is conceptually derived. Laozi is not against concepts as such. He is against attributing them a monopoly of knowledge. 46. Adorno has important reasons for staying within the subjective which should be respected. Yet his contentment with the primitiveness of mimesis in the subject is part of his technique of submitting idealism to imminent critique through the subject-object division. This technique, whilst rigorous in its materialism, is not the exclusive resource of materialism. He supposes that unreasonably speculative risks are taken by not employing this division but he does not suppose that other abstractions and systems can be compatible with it. I disagree with him in this but I do not have the space to make that case here. I am, anyway concerned with interpreting Laozi for whom the subject-object division is contained in the background foreground division on a modified reading of the latter.

176 

J. Chambers

47. I address this issue in chapter 5. 48. Adorno refers to this in terms of the project “to break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity with the force of the subject” (2007: 10). 49. Chaps. 1, 9, 14, 15, 21, 25, 35, 36 50. Chaps. 2, 20, 22, 26, 29, 36, 41, 43, 45, 77, 78 51. Chaps. 1, 14, 16, 22, 25, 34, 39. 52. Chaps. 5, 10, 14, 20, 41, 45 (4, 14, 16) 53. Chaps. 1, 14, 16, 22, 25, 34, 39. 54. I should stress that it is a complete microcosm in the sense that the microcosm is itself open and incomplete, corresponding to the open cosmos itself 55. Although the ontological significance of this is not realized through his interpretation, Gu, Linyu’s 顾林玉 (1989) influential emphasis upon the effortless action (wuwei 无为) practitioner’s mastery of naturalness is derived from this. 56. The Daodejing is a political manual above all (Li 1986, 3). 57. It thereby continues the wu/you sequence initiated by the sequence switch in lines 5/6. 58. I call it the paradox of isomorphic identity, or the De paradox. 59. This is equivilant to saying the “Dao of Laozi does not mean that there is an independent thing transcendent to phenomena; rather, it suggests that phenomenal things are all the manifestation of the Dao” (Xiong 2001: 130). 60. Laozi makes explicit reference to the wu side of Dao as preceding and somehow undoing numeration in chapter 42. 61. This is how Hegel finds a place for contingency in his system. The contingent operates as a logical (and thus necessary) negation (for he can conceive of no other kind) of the necessary. 62. This is for reasons that would concern the legitimacy of the whole nature/ spirit dichotomy, which Laozi can only be reconstructed as recognizing in a very qualified sense anyway. 63. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Schelling and Martin Heidegger used this mode of expression. 64. Hegel’s version of the absolute, the Concept will be recapitulated in the following chapter. 65. Mou Zongsan famously characterized this mystery as nothing at all, in the sense that the subject sees that there can be no noumena behind the phenomena of its own conjuring (Mou 1991: 130.) That is, he denies

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

177

Laozi’s repeated appeal to mystery underlying phenomena, which is as much as to say he denies what Laozi asserts in the last line of the Daodejing’s most important chapter. He also makes subjective states the driving problematic of the work despite the facts that the subject-object dichotomy is anachronous to Laozi’s philosophical milieu and Laozi’s anti-­phenomenological bent cuts through this dichotomy; Laozi’s repeatedly applicaties Dao to the objective and denies subjectivity on ethical grounds. See Yuan Baoxin (1991) 74. 66. Elsewhere Dao is referred to as a valley, water, an uncarved wooden block, the female sexual organ, the feminine, darkness as such and the yin side of the yinyang opposition (Coutinho 2002: 52–53). The most direct references to Dao in the Daodejing all involve metaphors and metaphor is mimetic. 67. Moeller (2006: 41) cites chapters 39 and 54. In one sense this recurring model is Laozi’s adaptation of the yin/yang rubric. The yin/yang rubric is also considered to be a pervasive feature of all fields, having no pure form outside of the contexts of its appearances in the Yijing. 68. See Chap. 1 of this book and Stern 2009 for more. 69. See the next chapter for the polysemy of the finite. 70. Chen Chung-Hwan陈忠寰argues claiming Dao as axiomatic/ethical principle as well as ontic principle involves “no self-contradiction” (1964, 157). My interpretation has it that the conscious realization of the ontic principle is bound up with the project of realizing the ethical principle and that therefore Laozi’s epistemology, ontology, metaphysics and ethics are one indivisible act.

References Adorno, Theodor. W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. History and Freedom Lectures 1964-1965.Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity. Ames, R., and Hall, D. 2003. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books.

178 

J. Chambers

Benjamin, Walter. 1978. On the Mimetic Faculty. In E. Jephcott (Trans.), P. Demetz (Ed.), Reflections. New York: Schocken. Bhaskar, R. 2008. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Routledge. Blunden, Andy. 2012. Concepts: A Critical Approach. Leiden Boston: Brill. Chen, Chung-Hwan 陈忠寰. 1964. What Does Lao-Tzu Mean by the Term “Tao”? Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 4(2): 150–161. Chen, Guying 陈鼓应. 1985. Laozi Interpretation and Commentary 老子注译 及评介. Beijing北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中华书局. ———. 1992. A New Take on Lao-Zhuang老庄新论. Shanghai Ancient Chubanshe上海古籍出版社: Shanghai 上海. Chen, Guying, and Bai Xi. 2001. Comments on Laozi老子评传. Nanjing 南京: Nanjing Daxue Chubanshe 南京大学出版社. Cheng, Chung-ying. 1989. Chinese Metaphysics as Non-metaphysics: Confucian and Taoist Insights into the Nature of reality. In Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, ed. R.E. Allison. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. Dimensions of the Dao and Onto-Ethics in Light of the DDJ. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31 (2): 143–182. Coutinho, Steve. 2002. The Abduction of Vagueness interpreting the Laozi. Philosophy East & West 52 (4): 409–425. Dietzgen, Eugene. 1917. “Joseph Dietzgen:A Sketch of His Life” pp. 7-34 in Joseph Dietzgen, Philosophical Essays: On Socialism and Science, Religion, Ethics, Critique of Reason and the World at Large. Ed. E. Dietzgen &J. Dietzgen, Jr., tr. M. Beer & Th Rothstein, with a biographical sketch and some introductory remarks by Eugene Dietzgen. Chicago, Illinois: Charles H.Kerr Dietzgen, Joseph. 1906. Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology. Trans. Max Beer and Theodor Rothstein. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company Feng, Youlan 冯友兰. 2006. Feng Youlan discusses Laozi冯友兰论老子. In Ten Experts Discuss Laozi十家论老, ed. Hu Daojing 胡道静. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Renmin 上海人民. Foster, Rodger. 2007. Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. New York: State University of New York Press. Frazer, James. 1922. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan. Fu, Charles Wei hsun. 1973. Lao Tzu’s conception of Tao. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 16: 367–394. Fung, Yu-lan. 1976. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. In A Systematic Account of Chinese Thought from its Origins to the Present Day. New York: The Free Press.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

179

Gan, Yang 甘阳. 2012. 从西方迷信中解放出来 (Escaping WesternSuperstition) Speech given at the 2011 the National Museum of China and the Mercator Foundation’s joint organized exhibition “Die Kunst der Aufklärung” Gamble, C.N., J.S. Hanan, and T. Nail. 2019. What Is New Materialism? Angelaki 24 (6): 111–134. Gu, Linyu顾林玉. 1989. Laozi’s Value Approach to Honouring Ziran《老 子》崇尚自然的价值取向. Academic Monthly学术月刊7:1–5. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1938. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie 1, Ed. J. Hoffmeister. Leipzig: Meiner Henricks, Robert G. 2008. The Dao and The Field: Exploring an Analogy. In Teaching the Daode Jing, ed. Gary Delaney DeAngelis and Warren G. Frisina, 31–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Gunzelin Noeri and Ed. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Huhn, Tom. 2004. Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant. Pennsylvania State Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Jiang, Xichang 蒋锡昌. 1937. Laozi Assessment老子校估. Shanghai上海: Commercial Library 上海商务图书馆. Jullien, François, and F. Jullien. 2004. In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. Trans. Paula M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books Lau, Din Cheuk 刘殿爵, trans. 1963. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Li, Zehou 李泽厚. 1986. History of Ancient Chinese Thought古代思想史论 Beijing北京:Renmin Chubanshe人民出版社. Lumsden, John Michael. (2016). At the Limit of the Concept: Logic and History in Hegel, Schelling and Adorno, PhD diss. University of Essex. Macdonald, Lain. 2000. “The wounder will Heal”: Cognition and reconciliation in Hegel and Adorno. Philosophy Today, Spep (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) Supplement 2000 (Supplement): 132–139. Mao, Zedong 毛泽东. 1965. On Practice 实践论. In Selected Works of Mao Tse-­ Tung. Vol. 1, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1-48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. ———. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

180 

J. Chambers

Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2006. The Philosophy of the Daodejing. Columbia University Press. Mou, Zongsan 牟宗三. 1991. 19 Lectures on Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学十九 讲. Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Ancient Press上海古籍出版社. Patt-Shamir, Galia. 2009. To Live Riddle: The Transformative Aspect of the Laozi《 老子》. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (3): 408–423. Potolsky, Matthew. 2006. Mimesis. New York and London: Routledge Taylor and Francis. Ren, Jiyu 任继愈. 1978. A New Translation of Laozi老子新译Shanghai 上海: Shanghai Ancient Press上海古籍出版社. ———任继愈., ed. 1983. History of the Development of Chinese Philosophy (Pre-­ Qin)中国哲学发展史 (先秦). Beijing 北京: Peoples’ Press 人民出版社. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1985. Philosophie der Mythologie. In F. W. J. Schelling: Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sherratt, Yvonne. 2002. Adorno’s Positive Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, Robert. 2009. Hegel’s Idealism. In Hegelian Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–76. Coutinho, Steve. 2014. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. New York: Columbia University Press. Wang, Chong王充. 1996a. Balanced Inquiry (Selected) 论衡(节选). In SHI Jun ed. Selected Readings from Famous Chinese Philosophers: With Annotations and English Translation汉英对照中国哲学名著选读, Vol. 1. Beijing北 京:Renmin Chubanshe人民出版社. Wang, Fuzhi 王夫之. 1996b. An Outer Explanation of the Book of Changes (Selected) 周易外传 (节选). In Selected Readings from Famous Chinese Philosophers: With Annotations and English Translation汉英对照中国哲学名 著选读, ed. Shi Jun, Vol. 2. Beijing北京:Renmin Chubanshe人民出版社. Wang, Youru 王友如. 2003. Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. 1998. from MS 137 (1948) in Culture and Value [Vermischte Bemerkun- gen], trans. Peter Winch, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 2021. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. Luciano Bazzocchi. London: Anthem Press. Wong, Kwok Kui 黄国巨. 2011. Hegel’s Citicism of Laozi and its Implications. Philosophy East & West 61 (1): 56–79.

5  An Anti-conceptualist Reconstruction of Laozi  

181

Xiong, Shili 熊十力. 2001. Selected Comments of Xiong Shili 十力语要. In The Complete Collection of Xiong Shili 熊十力全集, ed. Xiao Shefu, Vol. 4. Wuhan 武汉: Hubei Educational Press 湖北教育出版社. Yang, Xingxun 杨兴顺. 1950. Древнекитайский Философ Лао-Цзы И Его Учение. Moscow: Издательство Академии Наук СCCP. Yuan, Baoxin 袁保新. 1991. The Explanation and Reconstruction of Laozi’s Philosophy老子哲学之诠释与重建. Taipei臺北: 文津出版社

Part IV Wuwei and Praxis: Aesthetic Mimetic and Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts

6 Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment of Concepts

This chapter begins with rehearsing some of the major arguments against Hegel’s idealism. These arguments are oriented around the same problematic; that despite Hegel’s protestations to the contrary, his idealism has over-extended the domain of the concept to subsume the nonconceptual. Hegel tries to prove that what appears to be outside the concept can be captured by it. Hegel tries to make the concept total. The refutation of Hegel’s idealism will close with an adaptation of Laozi’s aesthetic of wuwei to produce an epistemic counter to Hegel’s idealism, employing the ideas of the previous critique. Laozi’s aesthetics of wuwei will be used to make the materialist case that the finite is not subsumed by the universal spirit but rather becomes the infinite.

Refuting Hegel’s Idealism In Chap. 1 a soft-metaphysical version of Hegel’s idealism was argued to lead into a hard-metaphysical, mentalist version. The soft-metaphysical reading claimed only that Hegel’s idealism makes all significant, basic principles of being coincide with thought. It was argued that this collapsed into the hard-metaphysical version’s claim that Hegel reduces the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_6

185

186 

J. Chambers

particulars of the world to thought in the being-for-itself relation between infinite and finite, which was construed as the mind of God. The argument against Hegel’s idealism is that this is accomplished by employing the concept of the finite as a category and not as a reference to the particulars. The reductionism of Hegel’s idealism amounts to the attempt to conceptualize the nonconceptual. Hegel’s idealism elides the true content of the particulars by surreptitiously replacing them with a concept. Hegel’s erstwhile philosophical partner F. W. J. Schelling argued that Hegel “hypostatized the concept with the intent of providing the logical movement—which, however independent one takes it to be of everything subjective, can nonetheless always exist only in thought” (2007, 151). Hypostatization is an illicit move to give the concept an illusory existence or substantiality. Schelling referred to Hegel’s system as a ‘negative philosophy’. It was negative because it was trapped in the circle of concepts; starting with the recognition that what is senseless and illogical could not exist and making the erroneous inference from this that everything only exists via the logical. Schelling claimed that while Hegel gives the concept ontological primacy, the concept cannot fill this role because there is no logical way of explaining how thought can generate being.1 Schelling interpreted Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as a belated and unsatisfying attempt to address this problem and mocked Hegel’s outdated support of the ontological argument for God. Schelling’s argument is that the question of the reality of a thing cannot be decided by the concepts it involves. Schelling is against what he sees as Hegel’s confidence that the question ‘Why does anything exist at all? Why is there something and not nothing’ can be answered within the circle of concepts and the power of human reason. Simple recognition of the non-rationality, the contingency of being is sufficient proof, thinks Schelling, of the inadequacy of Hegel’s explanatory system. Defenders of Hegel’s idealism have denied that it has any pretentions to make a logical proof of existence. McTaggart accounts for the absence of any answer to the question ‘Why does anything exist at all?’ from Hegel with his argument that resources within Hegel’s system equip it with an explanation that reason rules being, that being is of the essence and that such a proof does not require any proof of being. According to McTaggart, in Hegel’s system supposing such a question as the proof of being must have an answer is to make a category mistake. The mistake

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

187

consists in failing to take account of the fact that explanations for anything in the universe refer to explanans external to the explanandum. Some things are explained in terms of other things. McTaggart’s defense here leads into Spinoza’s territory, for in the case of the universe entire nothing can be said to lie outside of this entity and therefore there is no available reference for external explanans. So, to try and answer a question about the nature of the universe in total is to cast about for an explanans that cannot be included in the scope of the concept of “everything”—obviously folly. Therefore, McTaggart argues the universe—as everything, must be regarded as without explanation but also not in want explanation (1901, 256–8). With Hegel’s holism, explanans for any particular explanandum would expand to encompass everything. As a defense of Hegel’s idealism this move has the advantage of evading Schelling’s charge of extravagance in attempting the logical proof of existence, whilst remaining consistent with idealism’s claim that the basic principles of being coincide with thought; rational explanations can (in principle) be supplied for each particular thing, just not everything. Reason is dominant in every link of the chain of expanding explanations. Yet this defense can be criticized for rendering all explanation of particular phenomena otiose. All lower-level explanations (the stick fell because I dropped it) must be inferior to and lead up to the ultimate explanation (the universe is just this way) and yet this ultimate explanation is vacuous. Ultimately all things of experience are as unintelligible and arbitrary as the universe itself. Charles Sanders Pierce’s reflections on “ultimate facts” (1992, 275), can be used to compound this problem for they identify the ways that individual phenomena can be said to stand alone in their contingency. For these contingencies no candidate explanans can be interposed between them and the vacuous ‘the universe is just this way’ explanation. Pierce considers indeterminacy and haecceity as cases of such ultimate facts. For indeterminacy Pierce gives a hypothetical example of a determinate a case deserving of special explanation; grains of sand on a certain beach are found to be only either cubically or spherically shaped. This, he supposes, warrants a special explanation because it is distinctive, unlike the sand grain shapes on other beaches. Yet the fact that grains of sand are generally of various shapes, he considers, is an indeterminate fact, not warranting any special explanation. Its explanation of which can only be

188 

J. Chambers

“referred to the general manifoldness of nature” (275). As a case of haecceity Pierce considers the question of how, for example, a particular grain of sand got here. An explanation can be adduced for its travels to this place but all that explanation could provide is a timeline of its past movements. The question why it came to have any definite place in the world at all remains unanswered and unanswerable. When one considers that any particular phenomenon apt for explanation is embedded in such indeterminacy and haecceity this appears to undermine the claim of Hegel’s idealism that reason rules all phenomena.2 Brady Bowman’s important contribution Hegel scholarship proposes a radical skepticism of the finite germane to the controversy so far. It can be employed to defend Hegel against Schelling’s charge of explanatory extravagance, by embracing the vacuity of empirical explanation. Bowman observes that hitherto “Hegel’s skepticism regarding the ultimate justifiability of empirically oriented, determinate judgments in any terms whatsoever has not been as clearly seen” (2013, 125). According to Hegel’s philosophy of science the ultimate vacuity of empirical explanation is hardly a problem peculiar to his idealism, but is rather the revelation of a pervasive truth underlying all empirical explanation, namely the indeterminacy of the finite. This defense of Hegel’s idealism can accuse the hypostatization charge of simply begging the question against Hegel from someone who believes that the finite really does exist and is therefore apt for explanation under a system with such totalizing ambitions as Hegel’s system of absolute knowledge. From Hegel’s perspective this charge is absurd for: if he believed in the independent existence of the finite, he would know that concepts could not possibly prove it; and if he did not believe in the independent existence of the finite, he would obviously have no intention of proving its existence. Rather than try to prove the existence of the finite Hegel’s idealism attempts to disprove it. Hegel’s dealings with the finite in-itself denigrate it. Notoriously, in the Phenomenology Hegel asserts that even dumb animals deny the sensuous truth of finite objects “despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall-to without ceremony and eat them up” (PS:65/W3:913). Its reality, according to his idealism, is only relative to its role in the being-for-itself relation with the infinite. Only if one is already convinced of the being-in-itself existence

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

189

of the finite would an absolute idealist philosophy be obliged to explain it, but the being-in-itself of the finite is precisely what Hegel’s idealism denies. “Hegel draws a distinct line between the correspondence between Concept and reality he calls truth, and the correspondence between representations more generally and experience which he refers to as mere correctness” (Bowman 2013, 126). Hegel restricts the conditions of truth to the correspondence of thought with itself. Concepts are opposed to the objects of sense insofar as the latter are finite and therefore the truth of empirical judgements and even most of formal logic and mathematics are dismissed as candidates for the truth. For Bowman, empirical claims clearly fall under the criteria for assessment in terms of correctness, not truth. On this defense Hegel does not try to conceptualize the nonconceptual, rather he discards the nonconceptual as meaningless. Despite his vast knowledge of it and interest in it, Hegel is unimpressed with empirical science, putting all of its weaknesses down to the poverty of the finite with which it is concerned. He cites, for example the so-called problem of induction, the historical transience and fluidity of taxonomies and explanatory schemas as well as the antinomic tendencies of phenomena outside of laboratory conditions. These latter are only able to demonstrate laws of nature by restricting the causal variables that render the particular events of lived experience subject to contingencies— that is, the conditions of the appearance of the indeterminacy of the finite. With the multiplying and differentiating of relevant factors for the operation of the law to remove its coincidental features the more precise formulation becomes more abstract and removed from concrete circumstances. The operations of laws cannot even account for particular phenomena in which they are all combined for, the complex of tendencies and countertendencies of different laws together do not always have mathematically calculable addition or subtracting effects and can lead to unforeseeable outcomes. Yet in order to be explanatory laws must describe what happens in the concrete cases where a complex of coinciding tendencies interact; that is, they must describe events which unfold in ways utterly distinct from the ways they unfold in the laboratory conditions which established the law (152). With these observations Bowman notes that Hegel anticipates the scientific realism of Nancy Cartwright, who denies anti-realist philosophies of science while insisting upon the

190 

J. Chambers

partiality and conditionality of laws of nature. On this textually well-­ supported and theoretically strong reading, Hegel’s skepticism of the finite extends the range of vacuous explanation well beyond Pierce’s cases of indeterminacy and haecceity. All empirical explanation must ultimately take the form: ‘because all of the things of this kind do this’, or an even more opaque rule ‘because most things of this kind do this except under X circumstances.’ Hegel seems to be ambivalent about the question of whether or not the objective world exhibits any mechanical or final causes, tacitly admitting that none have been definitively proven in his times (245). Bowman argues, convincingly, that Hegel was comfortable with the idea of the infinite incompleteness of the task of empirical science as arising from the incompleteness of nature itself qua finite.4 None of this empirical skepticism implies that Hegel denies the necessities, regularities, and classificatory distinctions of nature. Hegel believes empirical science plays an important role in the development of consciousness. Insofar as Hegel recognizes the successes of science in identifying regularities and law-like behaviours, tendencies, and natural kinds of nature he puts this down to the presence of the universal infinite. For, while the sensuous experience of empirical data is the realm of the finite, the finite does not exist alone, but only manifests itself through its entwinement with the infinite. This requires a slight qualification of Bowman’s mode of expression, for Bowman implies that the presence of the finite accounts for the indeterminacies and contingencies of experience, but if we are to accept Hegel’s thoroughgoing skepticism of the being-in-itself of the finite then the presence of the finite at all is only apparent. The finite should only be able to have effects in a figurative sense. The finite should be seen as merely sites of interactions of complexes of laws and tendencies of natural kinds, the appearance of contingency arising from the interactions of the universals, rather than as a being in its own right with its own effects. For if Hegel denies scientific laws beyond a heuristic because of the finite then it would appear that the finite is dominant in the empirical, which is the opposite of Hegel’s opinion. Perhaps the difference here is merely a difference in the mode of expression, but I feel that without this qualification Hegel surrenders all of the empirical to the finite and the operation of universal laws becomes occult, as if they are somehow undermined

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

191

by the finite, rather than producing the finite by their interactions. Hegel “espouses a metaphysics that is explicitly committed to the absolutely relational view of finite things” (Bowman 2013, 159). They therefore cannot stand alone in Pierce’s sense of ‘ultimate facts’. I think ultimately in the sense that matters Hegel does believe this bruteness can be contained in the concept. In registering their limits Hegel valorizes concepts’ ability to transcend them. He believes, as Henrich (1971) has argued, that the fact that there are brute facts can itself be proven to be a necessary fact, which thus contains the brute facts, catching them in the net of the necessary/ the universal/the concept. For Hegel bruteness is not the ultimate ontological fact Pierce takes it to be. The apparently loose and separate events of empirical science is taken by Hegel to be the wrong way of conceiving of natural phenomena; they are in fact governed by law and the appearance of contingency is false (Enc§38R:78–79/08:109–111). Finite phenomena rather arise like Aristotle’s accidents as the results of the interactions of necessary tendencies of universal natures. The contingency is the result of the infinity of these interacting universals. If Hegel really believed in the efficacy of the finite, he would not have taken such a dim view of Hume’s skeptical arguments against causation. He dismisses these arguments, even though he accepts that they are sound from within their scope, namely sensuous perception. It is precisely because they rely upon denying the role of the universal and conceptual in perception, privileging the finite aspect of experience, that Hegel thinks they do not follow. Hegel insists that the conceptual should be the final arbiter in deciding the apparent indeterminacies of nature, which are “one-sided, in­complete and only relationships in the sphere of Appearance” (SL.II:734/W6:437). The empirical findings of the senses are deficient: The question of whether a completed sensuousness or the Notion is the higher may … be easily decided. For the laws of the heavens are not immediately perceived, but merely the change in position on the part of the stars. It is only when this object of immediate perception is laid hold of and brought under universal thought determinations that experience arises therefrom, which has a claim to validity for all time. The category which brings the unity of thought into the content of feeling is thus the objective element in experience, which receives thereby universality and necessity,

192 

J. Chambers

while that which is perceived is rather the subjective and contingent. (LHP.III:440/W20:347)5

Once the findings of empirical science are ordered by the concept the universal is found to underlie all of the contingencies. This does not mean that there are no contingencies, merely that they operate in the realm of appearance. Hegel believes that through awareness of the poverty of indeterminate experiences “it is manifest that behind the so-called curtain that is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen” (PS:103/ W3:133). Nothing but the concept is seen behind that curtain. Having freed itself of the burden of the extravagance charge, Hegel’s idealism can now present itself as the ground of being as thought. In a review of Jacobi, Hegel explains both the incompleteness and superficiality of the finite and why the concept is able, despite being antithetical to the finite, to affect the dialectical union with the finite. [Since substance has been defined as the truth of the particular things that are sublated and extinguished in it, absolute negativity has effectively already been posited as its determination, and absolute negativity is itself the source of freedom. Everything depends here on a correct understanding of the status and significance of negativity. If it is taken only to be the determinateness of finite things (omnis determinatio est negation [all determination is negation]), then we are already thinking of it outside of absolute substance and have allowed finite things to fall outside of it; our imagination maintains them outside of absolute substance … Substance, namely, is supposed to be the sublation of the finite, and that is just to say that it is the negation of negation, since it is precisely negation which we took to be definitive of the finite. And as the negation of negation, substance is absolute affirmation, and just as immediately it is freedom and self-determination. Thus the difference between determining the absolute as substance and determining it as spirit boils down to the question whether thinking, having annihilated its finitudes and mediations, negated its negations and thus comprehended the one absolute, is conscious of what it has actually achieved in its cognition of absolute substance, or whether it lacks such consciousness. (In Bowman 2013, 57)

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

193

There are two ways of considering the negative. The finite is one way of considering the negative because of Hegel’s adherence to a principle, attributed to Spinoza,6 that the determinate is defined by reference to what it is not and therefore depends upon those external things for its being. So, for example the rose qua finite is not a cat or a galaxy or the feeling of ennui and its red is not green or blue or magenta. It requires a whole universe of things to negate, in order to be what it is. The second way of understanding negation is to see it as the denial of the first: substance must negate this being-in-itself finite because substance, unlike the negative and determinate finite, must be ontologically self-sufficient. Substance must have the veritable being which the finite lacks because, we know that something must perform this role or there would be no being, the denial of which is untenable even to the most extreme skeptic. We also know that concepts are able to negate the finite simply because, they are able to oppose themselves to the finite and say, regardless of what the content of a particular finite might be, that the concept is opposed to it—that is, in precisely the same way that Schelling insists being is other than thought. Delineating borders of differentiation is the concept’s most elementary yet also “most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power” (PS§32:18–9/W3:35–6). It is insofar as concepts notice the finite can escape their nets that concepts are able to register the finite as their other/their negation and it is this power which unites the finite under concepts. In negating that negation the concept can comprehend itself as this capacity, which means that it needs the finite to express itself and is thereby able to posit a union of identity and nonidentity with the finite. The determination of the finite in this union is posited by the infinite concept and cannot be accomplished by the finite. Here the fortitude of Hegel’s term aufheben is realized for with the negation of the negation the very failure of concepts to penetrate the finite is also their success in grasping the role the finite must play in its self-knowing. Combining work by Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Bowman clarifies this logical structure, the Concept, as a reflexive metaphysics which posits itself via the generative dynamic of absolute negation combining in one act the structure of being and the structure of thought.

194 

J. Chambers

Qua self-relating negation, autonomous negation immediately gives rise to a positive term (affirmation, being) to which it stands in an external relation, that is, a relation-to-other… . The decisive move, therefore, in reconstructing Hegel’s Grundoperation is to posit relation-to-other as a moment wholly internal to the relation-to-self: the relation-to-other that emerges as an analytic implication of autonomous negation has to be interpreted as, in truth, the relation of autonomous negation to itself. (Bowman 2013, 52)

If this self-positing of spirit is an act of knowing it requires consciousness, in its finite and infinite manifestations, to realise itself. Bowman is emphatic on this point: “all reality (“the true,” “the absolute”) depends on the emergence of a difference between formal and objective reality such that formal reality exists just to the extent that it is posited in and through its objective reality, in other words as an object of knowing” (218–19). This requirement underlies the existence and progress of Spirit through the history of civilization. It requires the finite to do this, and assigns the finite its role. This is the basis of Hegel’s idealism’s claim that “thought, qua objective, is the inwardness of the world …. The meaning of thinking and of its determinations is more precisely expressed by the ancients when they say that nous governs the world, or by our own saying that there is reason in the world” (Enc§24:56/W8:82). This section, in keeping with the general methodology of the Phenomenology, concerns the ‘immanent critique’ of a stage of consciousness. Immanent critique is the act of refuting a stage of consciousness by exposing internal contradictions which render it incoherent, thus prompting the adoption of a higher stage of consciousness. Sense-­ certainty is the primitive view of perception that claims it gains knowledge of the world by directly or intuitively experiencing it, without the mediation of concepts for fear that the inherent generalizations of concepts will distort knowledge. It supports ‘apprehension’ and denies ‘comprehension’. The ontological grounding for this view is that intuition alone gives knowledge of the object as an individual “the existence of external objects, which can be more concretely defined as actual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them absolutely unlike anything else” had “absolute certainty and truth” (PS:66/W3:91).

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

195

If, as Sense-certainty claims, reality is constituted by brute uniqueness, unqualified by universals sense-certainty must deny the universals of concepts any place in knowledge of reality. The ontology of sense-certainty takes the finite as absolute and has an epistemology to match. Hegel’s immanent critique consists in showing that sense-certainty’s idea of a ‘pure this’ to characterize individuals collapses into a general category in the sense that identifying every individual as a pure this makes it impossible to distinguish things from each other as everything is the same in exactly this regard. Sense-certainty claims “immediate or receptive” knowledge of sensory objects. Its intuitions have access to a given, a preconceptual site of truth. This claim fails because of the inability for immediate expression. In the attempt at describing its experienced objects as immediate, like in the cases of ‘this’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ sense-certainty finds that the supposedly immediate intuitions of the instances of experience, which it uses these indexicals to grasp, cannot be described without universal concepts of ‘this’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. Sense-certainty’s purported direct knowledge is demonstrated to be mediated. Sense-experience is thus not immediate, insofar as it involves the minimal ability to identify its objects; for that it needs concepts. The object’s immediate experience is thought of as true through its receptivity, and conceptual intervention is not needed. The empirical is not held to be the site of genuine knowledge counterpoised to discursivity. Yet it is also not claimed that sensory experience is purely conceptual or discursive. Sense-experience is argued to not be a passive capacity. It implicates basic judgmental discriminations going beyond passive receptivity. The non-conceptual’s significance is drawn from conceptual determinations. Through this failure Hegel says that sense-certainty “proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth”(PS:58/W3:82). We might wish to obviate the universal by using indexicals and proper names “[b]ut language, as we see, is the more truthful” (PS:62/W3:85) in introducing universals to even these most basic determinations; for any reference implies a multiplicity of potential referents. In his essay ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’ (1839), Ludwig Feuerbach attacks Hegel’s conceptual primacy thesis expressed in Hegel’s remark of language being the more truthful: “To sensuous consciousness it is precisely language that is unreal, nothing. How can it regard itself,

196 

J. Chambers

therefore, as refuted if it is pointed out that a particular entity cannot be expressed in language” (Feuerbach 2014, 66)? Feuerbach argues that Hegel does not show the truth of sense-certainty itself to be “the poorest and most abstract”. Rather Hegel shows that this poor and abstract truth is the best language can do, as it is inherently conceptual and universal, when it tries, unnecessarily, to express the unique of sensation. Language, not sense-certainty fails. “We have before us in the beginning of the Phenomenology nothing but the contradiction between the word, which is general, and the object, which is always particular. And the thought, which depends only on the word, will remain unable to overcome this contradiction. But being that is spoken or thought is just as far from being real being as the word is from being the object” (2014, 173). Feuerbach distinguishes between the “logical” meaning and the “legal” meaning of the “this”. The “logical” meaning is used to designate a multiple reference, it is the universal, while the “legal” meaning of the “this” must always designate a particular referent. Feuerbach claims that Hegel refutes sense-certainty by illicitly privileging the “logical this” over the “legal this”. The best-known defenses of Hegel against Feuerbach’s attack here center around the idea that Feuerbach has simply misunderstood Hegel’s objective in the immanent critique of sense-certainty. They argue that rather than trying to deny intuition any cognitive status, Hegel is merely arguing that intuition without the mediation of concepts is an inadequate source of knowledge as it fails to identify its objects in the minimum sense and that the union of intuition and concepts develops through a dialectically active system of comprehension. Hegel’s point about the failure of language to express sense-certainty thus agrees with Feuerbach that sense-certainty has an ineffable kind of knowledge but argues that this is useless, for worthwhile knowledge can identify its objects at minimum. Hegel’s argument is that the ‘legal this’ (indexicals and proper names) is only intelligible when ordered by a “conceptual inventory of language or consciousness” (“das begriffliche Inventar der Sprache oder des Bewußtseins” (Heidemann 2002, 62)).7 However, for Feuerbach this is an epistemic problem for consciousness, not a metaphysical problem for things themselves. Hegel is begging the question in running the epistemic question of consciousness’s means

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

197

of distinguishing things along with the question of the mode of being of things. Those arguments in defense of Hegel which try to separate these questions read against Hegel’s own insistence that the universal (not merely the universal instantiated in concepts) is the truth of sense-­ certainty. It is implicit in the refutation of sense-certainty that consciousness’ mode of comprehension is consciousness’ world. Feuerbach denies this model. Yet still, on Hegel’s behalf it could be argued that even the distinctiveness of finite things, which the metaphysics of sense-certainty assumed, are utterly unintelligible to any mode of cognition that is not tacitly employing concepts. If so then, Feuerbach’s argument on sense-­certainty’s behalf is dogmatic; it is dogmatic to argue that despite failure to identify its objects without concepts, that its objects nevertheless have discreet existences. This is as much as to say that it is dogmatic for consciousness to assume the independence of the external object of cognition. Feuerbach’s argument against this is that the power of distinctions in concepts actually reflects differences in the world. Feuerbach’s point here has a direct bearing on Hegel’s skepticism of the finite. Hegel has argued that the infinite has failed to fully penetrate the finite in empirical science and argued this means that the finite is unreal. Feuerbach’s argument comes to the point that, this is better evidence for the claim that the unreal element here is not in the being of the finite, but in the power of concepts. For, it is a fact that concepts can very easily be misapplied. This is a concern that motivates sense-certainty’s rejection of concepts in the first place. This indicates that both positions are begging the question. This is a bigger problem for Hegel than it is for Feuerbach because Hegel’s position is supposed to proceed via internal critique. Feuerbach suspects Hegel of underplaying the basis for conceptualization of the particular when the refutation of sense-certainty denies the worth of the contents of sensuous experience. The concept’s identification of the finite relies upon subjecting it to negation; the object is seen only as the opposite of the universal and this elides its positive content. Logically, the finite exists as a negative, in the sense of the determinate in Hegel’s idealism as outlined above, but Feuerbach insists that in reality the finite’s existence is irreducible to this negative role; the rose’s red is not the mere negation of blue or green, it has a positive content which cannot

198 

J. Chambers

be deduced from these negations. For Hegel’s defense it can be argued that the positive content of the rose’s red is not denied because the finite needs this element to be distinguished from the infinite and the infinite employs this element in the concept to make its distinctions. These concepts depend upon the positive contents of the variegated world of experience to make their distinctions. Hegel construes the concept’s need for the distinctions of the world as the dependency of the finite on the concept. Hegel’s idealism at bottom really does attempt an explanation of the finite; the finite is the Concept’s means of self-realization in the dialectical being-for-itself relationship with the infinite. Feuerbach construes the concept as dependent upon the distinctions of the world. The problem is that in trying to explain the bruteness of the finite in terms of its antithesis, (the infinite) the finite qua its referents is lost. Hegel argues that the finite is necessarily mediated by the infinite. Although the universal is also mediated by the finite, mediation itself, as logical, is universal/infinite. This is what makes Hegel feel entitled to reduce the finite to the infinite in explanation. But mediation cannot go all the way down. That is, if the finite were totally mediated by the infinite there would be no finite but only infinite. There must come a point at which mediation stops for the finite to retain any identity. It is precisely at this point of stoppage that the finite must exist in-itself. Of course, Hegel argues that the finite is actually an abstraction and being-in-itself is ideal, not truly real. In the Phenomenology Hegel characterizes magnetism as expressing the dialectical structure of infinity or of the Concept (PS:99/W3:130) with its contradiction of positive and negative poles. This relationship conceives of the contradiction negatively. Which side we call negative and which side we call positive is arbitrary in the sense that both get their identity purely from the negation of their opposite. The positive pole just is that pull against the negative pole. There is thus no sense in asking what is the positive pole irrespective of its relationship with the negative pole. But in the case of finite and infinite there is undeniably sense in talking of the two separately. The experience of the red rose in my garden cannot be reduced to being no more than the negation of the thought of the abstract universal ‘red’ my roses embody. Hegel uses the finite to refer to individual things; this table, that tree, but when he explains them via the infinite this table and that tree are only

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

199

referred to insofar as they exemplify that general category of being finite. Yet finite as general category is precisely the opposite of that to which it is used to refer. Hegel can explain the haecceity of red by saying that it is needed to be just thus and so to have a place within the network of negations that make up the Logical Idea but this is a general explanation. One can use exactly the same explanation with just the noun in question changed to explain this table or that chair and so on for all finite things; that is, insofar as they are infinite, the logical this—not finite, the legal this. The argument just outlined is an adaptation of Feuerbach’s point that the finite in question is the finite as the legal this, not the logical this. Hegel’s idealism hypostatizes the finite when it does this. Hegel’s idealism can be argued to have a place for the positive content of the finite in the concept’s determinate negation. In the “Doctrine of the Concept”. Hegel explains the forms of judgement and inference. The relationship is a key to Hegel’s account of how the infinite grasps the finite—the judgement as the form of reason. the infinitude of these objects is not the empty abstraction from the finite, not the universality that lacks content and determinateness, but the universality that is fulfilled or realized, the Notion [Concept] that is determinate and possesses its determinateness in this true way, namely, that it differentiates itself within itself and is the unity of these fixed and determinate differ ences. It is only thus that reason rises above the finite, conditioned, sensuous, call it what you will, and in this negativity is essentially pregnant with content, for it is the unity of determinate extremes; as such, however, the rational is nothing but the syllogism [Schluß]. (SL:665/W6:353)

The idea is that the negation of the negation brings content into abstraction.8 The determinate negation’s positive content only offers a formal identity, and not an identity in content. Yet the idea underwrites Hegel’s concept of the concrete universal, which is supposed to overcome the omissions of the distinctions between particulars of the abstract universal’s definitions. The concrete universal differentiates between the differences between particulars in terms of the different universals they embody. Universals exist through the different particulars instantiating them in their distinctive ways. So each particular’s instantiation of the universal

200 

J. Chambers

goes beyond the classification term it falls under. The universal enters a dialectic, it requires and generates its negation, the different determinations of the concrete, spread out amongst its unique particular embodiments becoming, not its negation, but its conditions of realization: ‘it follows … that the first negative, or the determination, is not a limitation for the universal which, on the contrary, maintains itself therein and is positively identical with itself ’ (SL:602/W6:276). The being of the universal is its multifarious manifestations, encapsulated in the category of individuality or singularity (Einzelheit). Unique combinations of universals make the individual hold the universal and particular together in one. While this shows employment of the positive content of the finite in particular judgement, it can only be relative and does not hold the absolute pretentions of the Concept; it only exhibits a formal correspondence in consciousness and not an identity with the finite. It therefore fails to shift ontological dependence from the finite onto the infinite. Hegel has an ace up his sleeve in the guise of God; God’s thought performs the logical act of the Concept in the reality of Absolute Spirit, beyond the mere correspondence of finite minds. Yet this move makes God a transcendent entity shut off from finite minds. Before subjective spirit was shut off from the finite, now it is shut off from absolute spirit. Theodor Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s concrete universal is based upon the charge of hypostatizing the particular with the categories of individuality and particularity in the same way as has been applied to the Concept. the particular human individual, as soon as one reflects upon it under the guise of the universality of its concept, which does not signify merely some particular being hic et nunc, is already transformed into a universal. (Adorno 2005, 245)

Adorno argues that the idealist belief that the cognition of the immediate necessarily involves mediation just because concepts necessarily employ mediation in cognition, it by no means follows that this mediation is essential to the immediate in the same way it is to the concept. The immediate is not mediated in the same way as the concept, rather the immediate is merely assimilated under one aspect in this way and there is more to the immediate than that (Adorno 2004, 171). It is important to

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

201

note that this argument against Hegel applies even to the so-called non-­ metaphysical, Kantian readings of Hegel’s idealism insofar as all adhere to the minimum idealist claim that being is truly captured by categories and therefore that being is rational (Lumsden 2016, 106). Hegel’s belief in the ontological primacy of the concept was what led him to suppose that the union of thought and being must be imposed by the concept through its power of explanation all the way down. Yet this power of explanation was shown to be dependent upon the irreducibly nonconceptual, unintelligible, aspect of reality, an aspect which was accorded merely derived and secondary existence. Perhaps this argument has put too much weight upon Hegel’s skepticism of the finite. Hegel could be defended on the grounds that the denial of the veritable being of the finite does not entail that the finite has no existence in excess of its for-itself-relationship with the infinite, but merely that its existence is dependent upon the infinite or rather its relationship with the infinite. The question to this would be, how does this excess of the finite beyond its relationship with the infinite not count as in-itself being? How is this not veritable being? The defense of Hegel urges that this excess somehow counts as a qualified being, a lesser or inferior being; this seems to be the import of Hegel’s finite skepticism. One reason why is that there is never an end to the infinite reduction, in the sense that all breaking down phenomena to their infinite (universal and necessary) aspects is an endless task. There is never an appearance of the finite that cannot be subjected to this kind of infinite analysis. On the other hand, thinks Hegel, the infinite can be separated from the finite and cognized alone. Yet with this, Hegel is tying being with the conveyance of meaning or conceptualization. This is begging the question. This is not consistent with the dependency of the system: Bowman writes, “the perennial recurrence of a self-external, finite content … cannot vanish lest the foundation crumble on which the higher-­ level self-relation of philosophical cognition is built” (189), but it does crumble in Hegel’s hands. Hegel admits that it is possible to isolate the finite in cognition, in the empirical. But he insists that this is not real being. Perhaps there is something wrong with the whole finite infinite dichotomy which produced this aporia, or perhaps it can be salvaged with a new model, which shifts ontological dependency from the infinite to the finite.

202 

J. Chambers

L aozi’s Aesthetics of the Finite: The Wuwei Epistemic Model Hegel’s refutation of sense-certainty has established the impossibility of immediate sensory access to anything: all perception is conceptually mediated. However, it has not abolished the passive element of perception; it has merely dismissed it as meaningless. For example, Hegel agrees with David Hume “that one [event] is the cause and the other the effect (the causal nexus between them) is not perceived; on the contrary, it is present merely for our thinking.” (Enc§42Z, 85–6/W8:118–19). In Hume’s case all that is perceived is a constant conjunction between two separate events. However, it is hard to see that Hegel could even admit that this much is perceived, insofar as he seems to be trying to distinguish perception and conception here. Something is perceived, and whatever it is, it is not informative. I suspect that Hegel is thinking of an oceanic, Spinozistic negativity (Bowman 2012, 91) but then it is a puzzle why Hegel should find anything about Hume’s causation skepticism agreeable as not even a constant conjunction is perceived in this oceanic experience. The previous chapter outlined Laozi’s concept of Dao in terms of a movement called backgrounding. Backgrounding is, in one sense, the assimilation of the finite to its environment, the negation of identity which enables it. Backgrounding is constitutive of reality, in the sense that it is the movement through which spontaneity, contingency and the unique arises. The passive element of perception yields information of an exchange of consciousness with an external world. Breathing and seeing are Feuerbach’s key examples of this kind of sensuous exchange. “Seeing is nothing but the sensation of being affected by light; the eye is the ‘light sense’. Seeing without light is as much as breathing without air; to see is to partake in light” (Feuerbach 2014, 118). If this is consciously performed, in an aesthetic act of immersing oneself in and harmonizing with the external situation, Laozi thinks, humans are able to gain awareness of it. Laozi believes that in perception this act is performed through an attentiveness to the positive contents of the contingent in experience. Bowman, articulating Hegel’s skepticism of the finite remarks: “the Hegelian absolute … is by definition the whole, while the various

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

203

individualities populating Hegelian science are moments that can claim neither determinateness nor existence outside that whole” (2013, 166–67). Yet, the positive contents of the finite cannot be reduced to their mutual negations. Laozi does not subjectivise experience as qualia but sees it as a reflection of the independence of reality from consciousness. As Laozi observes in Chap. 5 that “Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”, transient guests who are treasured while they are in use and then discarded after their time is up, not necessary constituents of their reality. The vastness of nature is independent of individual consciousness and contains it. One of the lessons gleaned from the act is that unceasing change is a movement between oppositions and that permanence is relative; absolute permanence is an illusion: Thus Something and Nothing produce each other; The difficult and the easy complement each other; The long and the short offset1each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Note and sound harmonize with each other; Before and after follow each other Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words. The myriad creatures rise from it yet it claims no authority; It gives them life yet claims no possession; It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude; It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit. It is because it lays claim to no merit That its merit never deserts it. (Lau 1963, ch2, 6)

The sage attempts to reproduce the action enabling the ephemerality of things rather than seeking out permanence to grasp at things which are passing away. This is a negative act which stimulates the wonder at haecceity. Possession is the attempt to conquer time, while concepts hold fast to the dead—the acorn will soon be a tree—so the sage eschews this. The true reward is in cultivating the natural movements of the elements of the environment to assist them in reaching their ends and to bind one’s actions to the oppositional flow of nature rather than to resist it.

204 

J. Chambers

What cannot be seen is called evanescent; What cannot be heard is called rarefied; What cannot be touched is called minute. These three cannot be fathomed And so they are confused and looked upon as one. Its upper part is not dazzling; Its lower part is not obscure. Dimly visible, it cannot be named And returns to that which is without substance. This is called the shape that has no shape. The image that is without substance. This is called indistinct and shadowy. Go up to it and you will not see its head; Follow behind it and you will not see its rear. Hold fast to the way of antiquity In order to keep in control the realm of today. The ability to know the beginning of antiquity Is called the thread running through the way. (Lau 1963, ch14, 18)

The Dao has no form, not because it is the infinite and dispersed between different particulars, but because it consists in the absence that conditions the spontaneity of the finite. When Pierce, appeals “the general manifoldness of nature” in regards to the indeterminacy and haecceity he knows this is looking in the wrong place because the general conditions of nature would refer him back to general principles, which are manifestly of no use in accounting for the phenomena which have here captured his interest. To overarch these particulars with a general category carries with it the risk of falling into the same trap of subsuming the finite into which Pierce believes Hegel fell. Pierce needs a negative concept, a category which classifies an illusive movement, rather than a generality, to stay out of that trap, a concept which registers limits. To apply a single concept to this multiplicity is to subsume it with the concept, so Laozi opts for an anti-concept; Dao registers the limits of conceptualization. Dao does more than Adorno’s nonconceptual because its referent is the absent source of finiteness; the thing that would be an explanation if an explanation were available, Dao as a principle. Dao transcends sensuous awareness in the sense that the multiplicity of diverse things in nature are intermingled and unfathomable in their bruteness, yet here also lies its

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

205

immanence. To “hold fast to the way of antiquity” is to return to things in their very beginnings which is when they are new and unknown. Hence, in chapter 16 Laozi says that “Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness” (1963, 20). It might be argued against this reading that Laozi does believe in a kind of permanence; the eternal Dao is present in the eternity of change. However, given that change is relative to the events which are changing, like the movement of opposition itself, the category of absolute permanence has no referent. Compare this with Hegel’s assertion of the epistemic primacy of universal laws: Nature offers us an infinite mass of singular shapes and appearances. We feel the need to bring unity to this manifold; therefore, we compare them and seek to [re]cognize what is universal in each of them. Individuals are born and pass away; in them their kind is what abides, what recurs in all of them; and it is only present for us when we think about them. This is where laws, e.g., the laws of the motion of the heavenly bodies, belong too. We see the stars in one place today and in another tomorrow; this disorder is for the spirit something incongruous, and not to be trusted, since the spirit believes in an order, a simple, constant, and universal determination [of things]. This is the faith in which the spirit has directed its [reflective] thinking upon phenomena, and has come to know their laws, establishing the motion of the heavenly bodies in a universal manner, so that every change of position can be determined and [re]cognised on the basis of this law … . From all these examples we may gather how, in thinking about things, we always seek what is fixed, persisting, and inwardly determined, and what governs the particular. This universal cannot be grasped by means of the senses, and it counts as what is essential and true. (Enc§21:53/W8:77–8)

For Hegel the true is the permanent natural underlying and governing the evanescence of the finite. Herein lies explanation and knowledge. Hegel wants to move beyond the transitoriness and chaos of unreflective experience—“this disorder is for the spirit something incongruous”— and into the universal and necessary which is said to underlie it. It would be wrong to accuse Hegel of bifurcating the world, in the manner of Plato, between reality and appearance. In Hegel’s philosophy the comprehension of the contingency of experience reveals that this is the way in

206 

J. Chambers

which the universal and necessary must manifest itself in the world the dialectical identity in difference of essence and appearance (SL.II:437/W6:147). Nevertheless, Hegel can be accused of, in this way, downplaying the ontological significance of the contingent. His case is that the true meaning of the chaos of pre-comprehended experience is found to be in it necessarily disclosing something else, pointing away from it. Laozi acknowledges ontological significance of universal necessities, as shown in his observation of the oppositional movement inherent in phenomena. However, Laozi sees things the other way around; rather than supposing that the true reality underlies and generates this chaotic buzz, he would rather think that the ontological order of reality corresponds to the order of experience, that there is something positive to be known from this chaos before the abstraction to universal necessity has been applied to it about the order of reality. Laozi thinks there is important wisdom in this wuzhi (无知，ignorant/without-knowing) state. Attendance to the contingence of experience in wuwei (无为9) yields an aesthetic appreciation of the eternal moment, revolutionizing the conception of time, place and the self. In chapter 27 Laozi lauds wuwei as conferring seemingly superhuman powers upon its practitioners: One who excels in travelling leaves no wheel tracks; One who excels in speech makes no slips; One who excels in reckoning uses no counting rods; One who excels in shutting uses no bolts yet what he has shut cannot be opened; One who excels in tying uses no cords yet what he has tied cannot be undone. Therefore the sage always excels in saving people, and so abandons no one; always excels in saving things, and so abandons nothing. This is called following one’s discernment. Hence the good man is the teacher the bad learns from; And the bad man is the material the good works on. Not to value the teacher Nor to love the material Though it seems clever, betrays great bewilderment. This is called the essential and the secret. (Lau 1963, 32)

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

207

The experiential focus upon the spontaneity of one’s immediate situation enables the subject’s absorption in their activities. The skills of traveling, calculation, speech, sealing doors and tying knots are mastered through the automatic flow of bodily movements, harmonizing with their environment to make their accomplishment an act which is thoughtless in its ease. Even fluent speech transcends discursive thought in the sense that the words are not consciously chosen through a reflective process but flow straight from their fluent thoughts. The good man prizes the teacher and material of the act whereas the person who tries to think through the steps of the activity to the underlying rules and principles, certainly gains something, but is also lost in the myriad details involved and unable to reach the heights of wuwei action. “When translating wu-­ wei as a form of “effortless non-calculative responsiveness” (rather than nonintentional action), what is meant is not the absence of objective effort, but a decreasing amount of subjectively experienced strenuousness.” (Wenning 2011, 63). Zhuangzi’s anecdote of cook Ding illustrates Laozi’s obscure presentation of ideas on wuwei in chapter 27. The cook has mastered the art of reading the anatomy of the oxen with his knife so as optimally cut it at the joints with the least strain, such that his knife never wears out. While each slab of meat presents unique challenges, he spontaneously tailors the employment of his skill to them without any preconceived, rule-governed plan (1968, 3). Chris Fraser employs John Searle’s idea of “the Background” to articulate the way wuwei engenders fluency of action. John Searle’s idea of “the Background” is similar to background as mentioned in the domain of epistemology in the previous chapter. It constitutes the toolbox of abilities and know-how that the agent brings to the scene of the action without consciously consulting them, principles and deliberative procedures: examples include driving and fluent language speaking.10 Wuwei appreciates that the consulting concepts are, at a certain level of proficiency, actually a hindrance to fluency, stifling spontaneity. Laozi believes that the superhuman success of the wuwei actor contains a metaphysical truth about the spontaneous and contingent flow of reality. Wuwei action dissolves the subject-object dichotomy in absorbing the agent the task; the tools and the product come to form a union in the

208 

J. Chambers

process. The wuwei actor is absorbed in the moment and this action. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has used Zhuangzi’s idea of the wuwei actors’ absorption in the task at hand to develop the psychological concept of “Flow” (2008, 255); the abandonment of burdens of the past and desires for the future in favor of living in the moment of doing something well. “By freeing the attention for the demands of the present moment from the weight of a recollected past and the demands of a not yet present future, it allows an action to be spontaneous rather than being guided by a fixed plan the goal of which is projected beyond the here and now.” (Wenning 2011, 65). Laozi thinks this enables a conquest over time because it elevates the conscious awareness of the moment to a cosmic perception of the constant flow of Dao, unconcerned with results because it contains them. This is the “eternal spring” of Dao ever new. The same people who use backgrounding to realize Dao in their actions obtain to a kind of eternity. They “have no realm for death” (57) through their fluency of movement. Laozi advocates the overthrow of conceptuality for the sake of the attainment of an aesthetic experience of time. Laozi’s use of timeless phraseology, rejection of the narrative form and refusal to employ a logical progression of arguments are all testament to the exhibition of wuwei in poetry. In Chapter 66 Laozi advocates the cultivation of a kind of ignorance—wuzhi—on this score. Of old those who excelled in the pursuit of the way did not use it to enlighten the people but to hoodwink them. The reason why the people are difficult to govern is that they are too clever, Hence to rule a state by cleverness Will be to the detriment of the state; Not to rule a state by cleverness Will be a boon to the state. These two are models.1 Always to know the models Is known as mysterious virtue. Mysterious virtue is profound and far-reaching. But when things turn back it turns back with them. Only then is complete conformity realized. (Lau 1963, 72)

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

209

Here Laozi’s idea is to look to the spontaneity of experience as harboring a potency of creative potential creative activity. Laozi terms this creativity wuzhi—not knowing. Chairman Mao celebrates this potential in the Chinese people of the revolution in “Introducing A Co-operative”: Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes, the desire for action, and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted. (2020, 76–77)

It is this aesthetic attendance to the eternal moment of the spontaneity of experience that provides the epistemic warrant for Mao’s confidence in the blank slates of a people casting off the shackles of tradition. “Maoist historiography contains contradictory elements: there is a master narrative based on a single chronological time, but we also find an open future that can overwhelm everything” (Pang 2016, 126). Whilst one side appeals to the authority of the materialist theory of history for its master narrative, the potency of the indeterminacy of the present is the product of an aesthetic engagement with political action. The thesis of the ineffability of the finite may appear unrelated to Laozi’s ideas of the ineffability of the wu side of Dao; the ten thousand things as processes that are ineffable insofar as they withdraw and become part of the background for each other. Hegel’s category of the finite encompasses the concept of haecceity, that which makes the object unique. As it seems mimesis is the act of denying one’s own identity and seeking the identity of another it would appear that backgrounding as a kind of mimesis negates finiteness. This naturally invites the inference that Laozi should think of the finite as foreground, which should mean that its ineffableness is on the you side of Dao. This contradicts what was said about the ineffable and the wu side of Dao. This inference comes from only looking at the finite in the manner of the you side of Dao. For as the finite is the result of the movement of retreat of background, foregrounding of a subject is as much the result of

210 

J. Chambers

backgrounding of the context. The red rose loses its luster against a red background. It is insofar as things retreat away from it, become indeterminate for it, that the rose has a unique identity. The finite rose also becomes the background for other foregrounds. I believe this sheds light on chapter 41, which can be read as Laozi’s view of the finite in these terms: The way that is bright seems dull; The way that leads forward seems to lead backward; The way that is even seems rough. The highest virtue is like the valley; The sheerest whiteness seems sullied; Ample virtue seems defective; Vigorous virtue seems indolent; Plain virtue seems soiled; The great square has no corners. The great vessel takes long to complete; The great note is rarefied in sound; The great image has no shape. The way conceals itself in being nameless. It is the way alone that excels in bestowing and in accomplishing. (Lau 1963, 48)

The key term is the character 大(da), meaning big or great. Da denotes the nature or manifestation of Dao as most explicitly mentioned in chapter 25 (Wong 2011: 64) Chapter 41 is commonly read as showing that meaning is dialectical, much like elements of Hegel’s discussion of the Inverted World in the Phenomenology of Spirit. So brightness needs to exclude dullness to have meaning, whiteness and sulliedness need each other and so on. This is certainly a useful way of reading this chapter and other oppositions in other chapters. But this reading is incomplete here as Laozi routinely says that it is Dao that appears such and such. It is not simply that brightness needs dullness for its meaning; Dao is present in the dullness that negates the brightness and furthermore, this dullness is what bright Dao looks like. Attention must be paid to the carefully selected oppositions of this chapter as always taking the form of background/foreground relations. I take it Laozi is here invoking negative opposites to show Dao as the background of objects that withdraws from

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

211

them to make them distinct. So, the square’s corners are visible against the contrast of the viewer’s borderless eye line. The bright light must be accompanied by an environment of relative darkness to shine, the even path can be traced along rough terrain and the virtuous are most real when all around them are depraved because only in those circumstances is virtue a test. The white shape will not be seen on a white background. Yet Laozi says the whitest Dao seems sullied. It seems sullied not merely because it negates its background.11 It seems sullied because it is that background. It is not at all a rehash of Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negation; it is a matter of dependence of foreground on background, and the latter being a movement of the former. Background is no more than a collection foregrounds ignored (epistemically and metaphysically by the subject and the object as well) from a certain perspective in a given spatiotemporal/abstract system location, hence Dao being more itself on its wu side. It is a negative act of the finite as foreground, retreating to that amorphous vagueness, becoming background. The pure positive content of the finite that escapes concepts is the shadow of the vanishing of the context, which is a nonconceptual act of mimesis. The finite is as much a movement forward as it is a movement back. Indeed, each instance of the finite is always moving backwards, and this is what makes other things finite. It is by virtue of this movement that we reach the second most important concept of the Daodejing, namely De (德). The De of an entity is that by virtue of which the entity is most distinct and the pursuit of which leads to its perfection. The concepts of De and the finite overlap insofar as finiteness can be perfected. Against this it could be argued the dependence here referred to is not one way. For it would seem the darkness also needs the bright light in its center to be itself through contrast. Yet for Laozi this is not relevant to the cases at hand. The brightness emerges from the darkness, the candle is lit in a dark room, the square is drawn on an amorphous surface and so on. These oppositions can be turned the other way around hypothetically. That is, we could suppose a corner of shade in a room of blinding light, a non- Euclidean shape drawn on a square background and so on but doing this merely reverses colors and shapes and so on, not the background foreground relation for which Laozi has chosen exemplars. Yin and Yang are relative. As the background always escapes conceptual view so it gives

212 

J. Chambers

the foreground its imminent ineffable luster. Vagueness is complete in itself and clarity depends upon it. This thesis of the primacy of the vague is a most important point of contrast with Hegel.12 In the identity in opposition of Hegel’s oeuvre identity requires boundaries and boundaries entail clarity.13 For Hegel (and Laozi too) black needs white for its identity because it gets its identity from contrast. Yet if the same model of identity through opposition is applied to the antithetical pair of clarity and vagueness paradox ensues. Vagueness appears to be made distinct by its opposition to clarity. Yet vagueness cannot be distinct. It is nondistinct by its nature. In chapter 41 Laozi uses this as a paradox of concepts that indicates the presence of Dao. Dao is present in the power of the finite to have veritable being in itself because background is just the movement of the sum of foregrounds. The other thing of note about this chapter’s account of Dao is its multidimensionality of isomorphism. The different cases of Dao, through time and space, color, sound, virtue and language present the same entity transgressing the boundaries of different dimensions of experience, different plateaus of reality. The same thing is recognizable throughout these different dimensions because of the isomorphic link of the background movement across them all. It is by virtue of this movement that the finite can be equally active across multiple dimensions, multiple systems. Bowman observes: “Finite cognition is a constitutive moment of the (infinite) cognition of the Idea, and reference to finite, self-external, non-­ absolute objects of knowledge is thus an ineliminable, albeit subordinate and by nature evanescent moment of the Idea’s self-cognition… . Its constitutive character is to be vanishing, not to be nothing” (2013, 189). For Hegel this vanishing as the way in which the finite is, upon inspection, made into a moment of the infinite in the comprehension of any system. The finite is the sites of collision for infinite necessary laws, akin to John Locke’s characterization of substance “Something, I know not what”. For Laozi, this vanishing is a transgressive movement between intersecting systems, playing different and incommensurate roles in each. This could be called the polysemy of the finite, which is especially applicable to the cases of novelty in which no hierarchical structure can be appealed in order to explain the event. It is by virtue of its polysemy that the finite enjoys ontological sovereignty. Awareness of the polysemy of the finite is

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

213

derived from a wuwei aesthetic comportment to experience. It is aesthetic because it is sensuous and other directed, or rather aimed at absorption into the other. When we experience wonder, often elicited by an artwork, we are experiencing that. This is because wonder arises with the question: how astonishing it is that we could live in a world that has that? (Tugendhat 2016, 131) Chapter 32 is one of many places that associate Dao with the ineffable. It is thus not known through its name but rather its experience: The way is for ever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small No one in the world dare claim its allegiance. Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it The myriad creatures will submit of their own accord, Heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will fall. And the people will be equitable, though no one so decrees. Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names One ought to know that it is time to stop. Knowing when to stop one can be free from danger. The way is to the world as the River and the Sea are to rivulets and streams. (Lau 1963, 37)

Line two characterizes Dao with the metaphor of unhewn wood. The amorphous uninterrupted unity of Dao is its power and to harness it Laozi urges sages to eliminate systems of categorization. This is what is meant when Laozi says that with the division of things comes labels and this signals “time to stop” because labels are a separation from Dao. Chapter 2 has already mentioned the link between mimesis and aesthetics. Aesthetics concerns the experience of the ineffable. Of particular relevance here is the idea that just as streams and rivers flow into the sea, the objects of perception return to primordial unity in Dao. By returning to unity before names one is being like the movement of things towards one another in backgrounding. This is the effect of the act of finding Dao in the amorphous background of the square, or the sullied background of the purest white in chapter 41. Laozi has made an

214 

J. Chambers

aesthetic use of concepts in chapter 32 because comprehension involves the act of being like the unnamed. The discursive use of concepts involves delineating the boundaries of things—a movement of separation of subjects and objects. The aesthetic use of concepts involves employing concepts to invoke a feeling in their users14—a movement of unity between subjects and objects. If chapter 32 is read as articulating a single concept then this concept is a movement embodying the aesthetic form, beginning as it does with separation in its form, concerning itself with the myriad creatures at the beginning and then moving towards a unity in the metaphor of the sea ending with the ‘polite’ name of Dao itself. Dao is invoked through a movement embodied in the structure of the chapter. Most of the chapters of the Daodejing take this aesthetic form. They exhort readers to make the movement of Dao in backgrounding, through performing that movement itself. If readers perform this act we have here a mimesis of mimesis. The recurrent water analogy with Dao is particularly salient because of its formless plasticity. It takes on the form of its environment, transparent and mirror-like. In calling upon water Laozi appeals to readers to be like a movement of being like; a feedback loop of mimesis. The French poet Paul Valery produced a definition of seeing as forgetting the name of the thing seen. This definition captures an aesthetic ideal of many artists, east and west. Valery’s definition is inspired by the artist’s insight that we are blinded to the contours of our world precisely because we are so good at conceptually navigating them. “Because we know what we are seeing we do not have to look at it, and hence, do not see it” (Good 2006, 146). This is a nice way of reading Laozi’s criticism of “the five colors”—classic Chinese division of colors—as blinding the eyes in chapter 12.

Notes 1. See Stern (2009) for a more detailed reproduction of Schelling’s arguments. 2. Pierce refers to haecceity and indeterminateness as ‘firstness’ and ‘secondness’ respectively. I would reduce firstness to a special category of

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

215

secondness, but I admit I have not given the matter the thought it deserves. It seems that both of these categories appeal to the same kind of inexplicability. 3. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke—Werke in zwanzig Bänden (1969–1971) (W). The abbreviations used are:

PS Phenomenology of Spirit SL Science of Logic; Enc Encyclopedia Logic; LA Lectures on Aesthetics; LHP Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 4. The next Chapter of this book discusses how Marx’s methodology implies this also. 5. See also Hegel, Enc. I§21Z:53/W8:77–8. 6. See Bowman (39) for doubts about this attribution. 7. These include “concepts of space, spaces, time and times, where these can only be properly used by also using concepts of at least some of the designated item’s manifest characteristics (properties designated by predicates)” (Westphal, 2002, 11). 8. This seems to be what Judith Butler (1987) is getting at in her defense of Hegel against this kind of charge. Butler argues that when consciousness expands through the encounter with what is other to it, consciousness changes into something other than it was before. Yet Butler cannot be arguing that consciousness hereby negates itself and becomes the finite with this move; the finite corresponds to the condition of undeveloped spirit. 9. Ames and Hall translate wuwei as “non-coercive action” (2003, 44–45) and Eric Sean Nelson translates it as “effortless non-calculative responsiveness” (2009, 294–316). Wuwei is a broad concept with myriad intertwined connotations and applications. Here it is explored in terms of its epistemic and metaphysical content vis-à-vis Hegel; but this discussion inevitably strays into psychological and ethical territory as in Laozi there are no boundaries between these.

216 

J. Chambers

10. Wenning notes that Fraser’s criticism of wuwei as lacking evaluative import forgets that wuwei is applicable evaluative thought as well. It can be thoughtless in the sense of effortless background at the same time as being thoughtful in having thought as its subject matter. In my terminology wuwei is a moment of absolute mimesis/ backgrounding. The ontological content of wuwei is backgrounding since the practitioner takes on the form of the situation in its determinacy. 11. This point seems more explicit in chapter 18. 12. Indeed, it is in some important respects, the most important contrast between Chinese culture and Western culture generally. 13. For the form of indeterminacy is itself only one form contrasted with another, i.e. determinacy, and thus evinces itself as a one-sidedness and a determinacy. (LA.I:199/W13:261) 14. This is Wordsworth’s idea of poetry (1991).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Subject and Object. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford. New York: Collumbia University Press. Ames R., and David Hall Dao De Jing. 2003. A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine. Bowman, Brady. 2013. Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Spinozist Pantheism and the Truth of ‘Sense Certainty’: What the Eleusinian Mysteries Tell Us about Hegel’s Phenomenology. Journal of History of Philosophy 50(1): 85–110, 91. Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2008. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Feuerbach, L. 2014. The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. With an introduction by Z. Hanfi, New York: Doubleday. Fraser, Chris. 2008. Wu-Wei, the Background, and Intentionality. In Searle’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement, ed. Bo Mou, 63–92. Leiden: Brill.

6  Wuzhi and Wuwei: The Aesthetic Mimetic Employment… 

217

Good, J. 2006. Wittgenstein and the Theory of Perception. London: Continuum. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. V. Miller. London: George Allen and Unwin. ———. 1969–1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 1988. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 1. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. Theodore. F.  Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1995. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1. Trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2003. Hegel Handbuch, Leben – Werk – Wirken, ed. Walter Jaeschke. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Heidemann, Dietmar H. 2002. Kann man sagen, was man meint? Untersuchungen zu Hegels Sinnlicher Gewißheit. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 84(1): 46–63. Henrich, Dieter. 1971. Hegel Im Kontext. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Lau, Din Cheuk 刘殿爵, trans. 1963. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Lumsden, J.M. 2016. At the Limit of the Concept: Logic and History in Hegel, Schelling, and Adorno, Doctoral dissertation. University of Essex. Mao Zedong. 毛泽东. 2020. “Introducing a Cooperative”, pp. 76–77 in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 8. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. McTaggart, J.E. 1901. Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 256–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Eric Sean. 2009. Responding with dao : Early daoist ethics and the environment. Philosophy East and West 59(3): 294–316. Pang, Laikwan. 彭丽君. 2016. Mao’s dialectical materialism: Possibilities for the Future. Rethinking Marxism 28(1): 108–123. Pierce, C.S. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 2vols, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sayers, S. 1985. Reality and Reason Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Schelling Friedrich, W.J. 2007. The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures. Bruce Matthews trans, SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy, New York: State University of New York Press. Stern, Robert. 2009. Hegelian Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

218 

J. Chambers

Tugendhat, E. 2016. Egocentricity and Mysticism: An Anthropological Study. Columbia University Press. Wenning, M. 2011. Daoism as Critical Theory. Comparative Philosophy 2 (2): 50–71. Westphal K. R. 2002, ‘Sense Certainty,’ or Why Russell had no ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance’ Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain. Wong, Kwok Kui 黄国巨. 2011. Hegel’s Criticism of Laozi and its Implications. Philosophy East & West 61(1): 56–79. Wordsworth, W. 1991. Samuel T. Coleridge ‘Preface’ in Lyrical Ballads. London: Routledge. Zhuangzi. 1968. Trans. Burton Wason. New York: Columbia University Press.

7 Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts

This chapter begins with a discussion of Marx’s interpretation of Epicurus with a focus on how insights gleaned from that research fed into Marx’s science of praxis. Marx employs arguments, partly taken from Feuerbach, that Hegel has hypostatized the concept, to the critique of the idealist theory of history and its overthrow by the materialist theory of history.

Marx and Epicurus: Mereology of Materialism Marx’s first critical engagement with materialism comes in his Doctoral Dissertation on a formative thinker of materialism; Epicurus. In Marx’s times there was little contemporary literature on Epicurus as the latter was long considered a subversive. Marx’s militant atheist preface to the dissertation sets the tone for a self-consciously radical enterprise. This section draws out the materialist element of Marx’s study of Epicurus in order to develop a homology thesis between Marx’s reading Epicurus’ materialism and his critique of Hegel that followed. A shared model of active atoms/individuals/the finite producing and yet being dominated by a totality-universal laws/state-capital/the operates in Marx’s reading of Epicurus and his critique of Hegel. There have already been plenty of brilliant studies of Marx’s social ontology vis-á-vis Hegel’s,1 but a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_7

219

220 

J. Chambers

common shortcoming they suffer is that they underplay or omit the ontology of materialism underlying Marx’s social ontology. The origins of materialism are typically attributed to the pre-Socratic theory of atomism and its later adaptation by Epicurus. Leucippus and Democritus advocated an extreme form of eliminative materialism, claiming that all of reality is composed of eternal, tiny, and indivisible atoms that constantly move through the void. Therefore, everything, including the largest stars and the smallest creatures, humans and gods, can be reduced to the ongoing collisions and resulting compositions and decompositions of indestructible bits of flying matter that are too small to observe directly. The essential aspect of ancient atomism that modern materialists support is that it is ontological, not just epistemological. In other words, according to ancient atomism, humans are not limited to their sensory perceptions, cultural conventions, or language but can access real being: atoms and void. Democritus opposed the secondary knowledge of the senses to the ability of the mind to provide genuine and reliable truth. However, he also claimed that even the mind is made up entirely of material atoms. Therefore, ancient atomism avoids the concept of correlationism, which is the belief that the real can only be accessed as a correlation of human thought, and instead provides direct access to the real itself. On Democritus’ model matter is intrinsically passive. This passivity reveals a profound and unsatisfying irony at the core of atomist ontology: the atoms create nature through their collisions and resulting combinations based on their infinite number of pre-existing shapes and sizes. However, the atoms have no creative agency over their own productions since their dimensions are eternal and unchanging, and their immediate velocity is determined solely by their most recent collision. Therefore, how could entities that lack agency give rise to living, thinking creatures? Atomism can only attempt to answer this question through a determinism that deprives everything, including humans, of any agency. The atoms can only realize predetermined possibilities through their interactions. The atoms are not active, rather the rules governing their interactions are responsible for the variegated complexity of the macroscopic world.

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

221

Epicurus’s innovation was his introduction of the concept of independent swerve to the atoms. Through their innate ability to spontaneously swerve, Epicurus argued, the atoms have the agency to actively participate in the creation of the material world. Their internal drive to random movement can have cascade effects in which the atoms combine and separate in entirely novel ways. In this way Epicurus injected contingency into Democritus’ deterministic ontological model. The agency of atoms was then transposed onto an agency of their complexes in an ancient defense of the notion of free will. Marx noted that Epicurus also elevated the epistemic worth of the senses in his philosophy. Where Democritus reasoned a priori Epicurus felt the need to introduce contingency to the movements of the atoms out of an awareness of the contingency of real lived experience. Absolute determinism was deemed phenomenologically wrong. Epicurus tried to square atomism with the perception that human action seems to proceed from individual human will, not the external source of a collection of atoms being pulled around by necessity. He noticed both the determinism of causation and the indeterminism of novelty. Much of Marx’s dissertation is dedicated to defending Epicurus from the long history of criticisms of his innovations. Epicurus was charged with introducing contradiction into Democritus’ ontological model; he was trying to have his cake of determinism and eat it with indeterminism. Appealing to the warrant of sensation of free will was also classically dismissed as a vulgar misunderstanding of Democritus, for whom sensation was an inherently deceptive medium—atoms cannot be seen after all. Writing in the immediate aftermath of Hegel’s dialectical revolution in philosophy Marx seized upon, what he took to be an eminently dialectical attempt on Epicurus’ part to combine determinism and indeterminism, necessity and contingency (Bellamy Foster 2000, 64–65). Marx “criticised Democritus’s strict determinism and came out in favour of Epicurus’s position of freedom of man’s consciousness to change his surroundings” (McLellan 1972, 7). Marx calls Epicurus “the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment and he deserves the praise of Lucretius” (DBDE-MECW1:73/MEW40:305).2 Controversy reigns on the issue of why Marx is so supportive of Epicurus here. A common view is that Marx was still in the thrall of

222 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s philosophy at the time of writing his dissertation and so his enthusiasm for Epicurus’s innovations are a consequence of being intoxicated by deep quaffs from the Young Hegelians’ cup of free will. Hence passages where Marx claims that in Epicurus “abstract-individual self-­consciousness is posited as an absolute principle” (DBDE-­MECW1:72/MEW40:304). This utopian indeterminate world of absolute free will is thought to rule out the historical materialism that is famously attributed to Marx and so some sort of unwritten break is suspected to have taken place after the dissertation (See Burns 2000, 24). This theory is propounded despite Marx’s and Engels’s  continued interest in the dissertation on Epicurus even in old age (See Baronovitch 1984, 246, 261; McCarthy 1990, 53–4). In this light it is instructive to note Hegel’s reading of Epicurus does not deviate from the historically dominant dismissive assessment. Those who cite Marx’s adherence to an overtly Hegelian program in the dissertation owe us an explanation; why is it that, if Marx was so Hegelian in reading Epicurus, Hegel himself was not nearly so Hegelian? Hegel touches upon Epicurus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel exhibits no inconsiderable sympathy for some of Epicurus’s views and even comes to his defence on a few occasions, (occasions in which Marx is not so sympathetic). Yet Hegel also disparages  much of  Epicurus’s  philosophy. Epicurus’s materialist account of consciousness, for example, is dismissed as “a shallow, superficial view” (LHP:289/W19:322).3 The idealist interpretation of Marx’s dissertation urges that Marx eventually came to an unwritten agreement with the historically dominant derision of Epicurus as “indeed nothing more than a logically inconsistent mechanical materialist” (Burns 2000, 28). Insofar as Marx is read as supporting an idealist version of Epicurus his turn away from idealism afterwards must accompany a turn away from Epicurus. It does seem that Marx’s enthusiasm for Epicurus mellowed in later writings; in The Holy Family Marx lumped Epicurus together with Democritus as an antecedent to the mechanical materialists of the seventeenth century (THF-­ MECW4:126/MEW2:133). His turn to Aristotle as his Epicurus studies ended also indicates that Marx was seeking for a more adequate, non-­ reductive materialist solution to the mind-body problem than Epicurus’s (Burns 2000, 27). Obviously, Marx’s later dialectical conception of the practical, sensuous, corporeal subject derived from Feuerbach superseded any kind of atomistic ontology in Marx’s materialism. However, the

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

223

interpretations of Marx which allege an idealist reading of Epicurus and a later complete break with the idealism of that reading go too far in both directions. Marx’s early support of Epicurus was not uncritical and idealist and his later turn away from Epicurus was also not complete. The scorn heaped upon Epicurus over the centuries seems to emanate from the idealist lament that Epicurus has defiled Democritus’s beautiful, hermetically sealed thought temple. Introducing indeterminacy to this edifice has broken it open  to the  vulgar world of sensuous experience. Democritus’s system was closed, completely determined and consistent until Epicurus brought contradiction in from the outside. Yet such a criticism of Epicurus forgets that Democritus was trying to develop a theory to explain our world, the one in which we live. Any complete theory would have to include an explanation of the incongruity between the eternal and necessary atomic basis of reality and the world of illusions humans live in and Democritus does not attempt this. Indeed, in dismissing the senses Democritus pretty much rules out any such explanation, which cuts the ground from under his own theory. Insofar as Democritus’s ontology cannot account for our world, Epicurus was right to have challenged him. Further, Epicurus observed a world of determinate causes and effects as well as randomness and probability. The operation of two contradictory principles in lived experience is not open for a philosophical rebuttal of the kind Democritus attempted; sealing reality off from appearances. The reactionary philosophers of the past saw in Epicurus’s contradiction a mere incoherence. If lived experience exhibits a contradiction, these old philosophers thought, so much the worse for lived experience; consistency must be held onto in a theory at any cost. This is not the dialectical position. If the introduction of contingency introduces contradiction to the world then Marx sees a dialectician in Epicurus who appreciates a fundamental contradiction in reality itself. It is further, completely unwarranted for commentators like Tony Burns to high-handedly dismiss Epicurus’ contribution to the history of materialism given the pivotal role Epicurus has played in the history of philosophy and science. John Bellamy Foster’s work has demonstrated that that “the materialism of Bacon and Marx, and even that of Darwin (although less directly), could be traced back to a common point of origin: the ancient materialist philosophy of Epicurus” (Bellamy Foster 2000, viii).

224 

J. Chambers

Despite a Young Hegelian rhetoric of free will in Marx’s dissertation, Epicurus was still understood as an atomist who posited the ultimate constituents of the universe to be independent atoms which existed in themselves. Marx’s idiosyncratic reading of Epicurus does not deny this to assert an idealist program instead. Insofar as Marx attributes self-­consciousness onto the atoms he is limiting self-consciousness to the will to self-propulsion in the swerve; because the atoms are able to choose to move their own way Marx is saying they have self-consciousness. He is not taking the subjective idealist step of attributing self-consciousness to the atoms in the sense that they have thoughts. Epicurus naturalizes thought as a mode of organised matter not the other way around. The atoms are bare quanta of matter, they don’t think anything; some of their complexes have thoughts. Marx’s theory of history seeks an accommodation between free will and determinism and his solution is not very different from Epicurus’s. Similarly, Darwin was attempting to formulate a theory of open-ended transformations of species from a theoretical history of accumulated survivals of traits mutated by chance; a random and indeterminate process that bounded a necessary chain of developments up to self-conscious humans. Epicurus’s ontological mereology of materialism posits a host of random actors, who are nevertheless relatively uniform in their dimensions. On the microscale this ensures a chaos of wholly indeterminate motion, yet on the macroscale, like Boyle’s law, the forms assumed by the myriad atoms move with a predictable certainty. We have with Epicurus the first attempt at articulating an atomic emergentist ontology based upon the epistemic primacy of the senses. This emergentist materialism could then provide a model for social ontology in which individuals formed collectives and their conditioned choices could be both overdetermined by historical circumstances as well as being radically undetermined in the sense of individual action and the accidents of history. The fact that Marx couched his support of Epicurus in the young Hegelian vocabulary of free will has blinded commentators to the implicit critique of Hegel which is immanent in Epicurus’ mereology. For, analogous to Epicurus, Hegel sees the universal and necessary rules of the laws of nature and dialectical laws of Spirit as inhering in the individual instances of natural kinds and historical agents the infinite united with the finite in the being-for-itself relation. Yet more like Democritus, Hegel

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

225

does not see the movements of the individual agents of the natural kinds and historical agents as the active producers of Spirit. The individuals are subject to change through the unfolding of the Logical Idea of Spirit which works through them and makes them its vessels. Certainly Hegel, and particularly the Young Hegelians, lauded individual free will, but this attempted theory of free will was critically undermined by the elevation of a higher reality of universal necessity upon which the individual members were supposed to depend for their being. Epicurus saw the finite atoms underlying, preceding and postdating the rule-governed complexes they formed, whereas Hegel saw the formations and dissolutions of states and societies as the product of an immanent movement of an overarching Spirit. Marx was therefore equipped with materialist resources scavenged from Epicurus as well as Feuerbach in his criticism of Hegel’s social ontology. This homology of Epicurus’ mereology and the young Marx’s political critique of Hegel will be dealt with in greater detail in later sections of this chapter. In the dissertation Marx notes that Epicurus had considered the free atoms producing necessary complexes to be an absolute system. This meant that the freedom of the swerve had no conditioning whatsoever; the atoms were absolutely free. Marx thought this absolutist standpoint destroyed science: For “if abstract-individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle then, indeed, all true and real science is done away with” (DBDE-MECW1:72/MEW40:304). Marx would turn to Aristotle for a pedetic model (Gamble et  al. 2019, 125) of the self-­ movement of matter. Marx was critical of Epicurus’ exaggeration of chance and free volition, as opposed to real possibility which was more compatible with determinate negation and necessity. Paradoxically Epicurus is also criticized for a purely mechanical emergentist materialism (DBDE-MECW1:71/MEW40:303). Marx believes that in thinking through the contradiction “Epicurus has thus carried atomistics to its final conclusion, which is its dissolution and conscious opposition to the universal” (DBDE-MECW1:73/MEW40:305). Marx is celebrating Epicurus for destroying the dominance of the universal and at the same time his own atomistic system. Marx turned to Aristotle for a more nuanced view of the multilayered mereology of matter but retained the Epicurean insight of the self-movement of matter, its veritable being. He

226 

J. Chambers

denied Epicurus’ foundational conceit that that we can break reality down to certain irreducible components. Those who objected, as in the case of Cicero, that there was no cause given for such a swerve and hence demanded absolute determinism from atomism, Marx argued, were not thereby more logical since the atom itself had no cause. Further, to argue, as some did, that one needed merely to add some degree of spirituality to the argument referring to the “soul of the atom”-gained nothing from this but the addition of a word and the introduction of non-material principles. (Belamy Foster 2000, 54)

Marx was also supportive of Epicurus’ idea of the atom as representing the transience and mutability of matter, through their interactions all things change, and while the atom is permanent its permanence is the permanence of immortal death: (DBDE-MECW1:478/MEW40:181). Marx saw Epicurus was also distinctive in not granting humans an exceptional ontological status in knowing laws of nature, insofar as humans know nature, nature knows itself “In hearing nature hears itself, in smelling it smells itself, in seeing it sees itself.” (DBDE-MECW1:65/MEW40:297).

Marx and Feuerbach Marx’s turn to Aristotle coincided with his deeper reading of Feuerbach. From these two he appropriated the doctrine of the union, of thought and being in the dialectical subject-object relation (Burns 2000, 30). For Feuerbach was the first to criticize Hegel by resolving the metaphysical Absolute Spirit into “real man on the basis of nature” (THF-MECW4:139/MEW2:147). Feuerbach offered an alternative explanation of the union between thought and being. Proceeding from that quite correct understanding (in general and on the whole) of the root errors of Hegelian idealism (and thereby of idealism in general, since the Hegelian system was the most consistent expression of the idealist point of view), Feuerbach rethought the very posing of the

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

227

problem of the relation of thought to being. It was impossible, he showed, to ask how ‘thought in general’ was related to ‘Being in general’, since that already presupposed that thought (in its form alienated from man) was looked upon as something independent contrasted with being from outside. But being, however, understood not in Hegel’s way, i.e. not as an abstract, logical category, not as being in thought, but as the real, sensuously objective world of nature and man, already included thought. Being included not only stones, trees, and stars, but also the thinking body of man. (Ilyenkov 2009, 124)

It is historically important to trace the genealogy of this refutation of Hegel through Epicurus, Schelling and Feuerbach to demonstrate that it informed the scientific principles of the materialism of Marx and Engels. In Anti-Dühring Engels thought out the consequences of Feuerbach’s insight in regards to the question of the matter which materialists elevate to the highest ontological principle: Matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of account the qualitative differences of things in lumping them together as corporeally existing things under the concept matter. Hence matter as such, as distinct from definite existing kinds of matter, is not anything sensuously existing. When natural science directs its efforts to seeking out uniform matter as such, to reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences in combining identical smallest particles, it is doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples…(DN-MECW25:533/MEW20:519)

Here Engels illustrates the idea that “matter” does not operate as a candidate for the infinite in ontology the way Hegel thought all philosophy does. Rather, matter only has reality in its finite determinations. When dialectical materialism states that matter has ontological primacy this is a placeholder term for the finite, the real finite and not just its idea. In this same place Engels also demonstrates an awareness of the materialist rejection Epicurus, namely that that matter consists in certain absolutely irreducible components.

228 

J. Chambers

Marx’s Science of Concepts and Praxis There is a sense in which Marx’s entire work is oriented around his concept of praxis. Yet Marx only makes repeated reference to this concept in the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. This is because in all of Marx’s subsequent writings praxis is taken in its concrete forms. In Marx’s magnum opus praxis is addressed in the most concrete form of its existence namely the production of social life in political economy in human labor. Marx busies himself with the “rational solution [of problems] in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice” (TF-MECW5:8/MEW3:7). But praxis itself is a materialist, concrete, version of the research project around which Hegel’s work was oriented, namely the concept. Hegel reduced praxis to a moment of Spirit’s concept and Spirit itself was reduced to its concept in the logical order of nature and history. Against this Marx sees the concept as a moment of the historically conditioned and historical actions of individual humans. Human activity is not a moment of concepts; rather concepts are a moment of human activity. Praxis is Marx’s attempt to scientifically go forward with concepts on a materialist ontology with its premise that being cannot be reduced to thought. Concepts are scientifically employed by Marx to reflect upon the praxis-oriented function of concepts for humans. Properly understanding the status of concepts sheds light on the essence of humanity given in the theory of history. Marx focuses upon the scientific employment of concepts to define the predicament of the human race, around which history is to be scientifically understood, and articulates its solution. The human race is scientifically comprehended in the theory of history; the story of the emergence, domination and overthrow of the value form. The value form has no more content than practice in its most concrete form of labor (concrete useful labor and labor time). The terms, ‘practice’, ‘praxis’ and ‘activity’ are synonymous in Marx’s writings. There are however, differences in connotation when praxis became part of Marxist jargon. Practice is sometimes used to specify the non-theoretical side of activity with ‘Praxis’ thus expressing the idea of the unity of theory and practice (and this is my use). However, for Marx practice is always combined with theory in any activity and he felt no

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

229

need for a special term to designate this relationship. Praxis was not a technical term for Marx. With ‘praxis’, ‘activity’ or ‘practice’ Marx was concerned with consciously goal-driven acts. Marx makes direct appeals to Praxis only in the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. These were hurriedly written notes not intended for publication. They should be read provisionally, as Engels warns (TF-­ MECW:26/MEW21:264). The interpretation of the Theses offered below follows Andy Blunden’s commentary in An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity. Only the first thesis deals with the subject-object question directly but its main line is a thread that runs through all of the other theses: The chief defect of all previous materialism—that of Feuerbach included— is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was set forth by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christen- tums, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical, activity. The German Idealists studied experience insofar as it was thought of as the product of the subject’s own activity and denied the existence of a universe independent of human thought and activity. Feuerbach denies this. He took the standpoint of the natural sciences with its presumption that the object and its laws and nature existed independently of human activity, passively perceived through empirical sensation. (TF-MECW5:6/MEW3:6)

Marx agrees with Feuerbach’s estimation of the limitations of idealism. “… idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Marx rejects the German Idealists because of the materialist thesis that the object of experience is ontologically independent of the subject and there is a unity of thought and being. Yet Marx rejects Feuerbach’s passive perception thesis. Marx asserts the subject has a practical relationship with the object in which the subject learns about the object through changing it. By

230 

J. Chambers

putting these claims together, Marx creates a new position that refutes both the German Idealists and Feuerbach. Marx keeps Feuerbach’s idea of an ontologically independent object but also keeps the German idealists’ idea of the subject as practical. It comes out that both idealism and “hitherto-existing materialism” had a limited understanding of human activity, failing to see it as real, sensuous and itself objective. In other words, in activity human beings are enabled and constrained by the conditions of a material world existing independently of their consciousness. Human activity, which involves thought works on things existing independently of the individual actor, and in so doing is an objective, practical form of a thought. Marx highlights the strength of the German Idealists: “the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism,” but goes on to criticize this study of activity by idealism on the grounds that it was conducted “only abstractly since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Hegel’s study of activity was abstract because not rooted in concrete activities. It was thus not the activities of men but only activity of humans as such. Hegel tries to show that historic events are merely displaying the dialectical development of abstract ideas. Feuerbach has the limitation of not being able to study practice at all. “… Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-­critical’, activity.” Pure sensuous contemplation of the world, Feuerbach’s natural science ideal, is a fantasy; “sensuousness [is] practical, human-sensuous activity.” Our knowledge of the world comes from social activity. ‘Practical-critical’ is counterpoised to Feuerbach’s theoretical-­contemplative activity. Feuerbach “regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude”, and misses the epistemic significance of practical change in ‘practical-critical’ activity changing objects and understanding them are intertwined. In saying that “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question” (§2). Marx means that practice the subject-matter of enquiry and not is not merely making a pragmatist/empiricist point. Human sensuous activity is the object of Marxism. “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (§2). The second thesis has both epistemic and ontological content. In

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

231

the second thesis Marx’s dialectic of subject and object anticipates the relational principle of so-called New Materialism. For subject-object are thought of as co-constructing in cognition. Both are internally related in their mutual change as moments of matter knowing itself (Gamble et al. 2019, 127). The ‘scholastic’ question concerns the subject imagining itself as an external observer of the known object rather than actively participating in the change of the object in its knowing. Because matter exists relationally New materialism “does not aim to identify the absolute or immutable structure of being for ever and all time (being qua being). Rather, it seeks to identify, given a particular historical emergence of which we ourselves are an integral, fully-material part, the real conditions of that emergence” (Gamble et al. 2019, 127). “… The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” (§3) Marx points out that activity is more than a mere object of contemplation, and is also what goes to form the subject. His comment that “the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, … is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society”, indicates the politics of this kind of materialism, for which human beings are taken as fellow objects not an ontically distinct kind of subject. Human beings cannot be abstracted out of their social relations. These social relations are an activity forming part of larger social/historical processes. Activity dialectically straddles both the subjective and objective, mediating subject and object. Marx’s point is that the object is independent of the subject, the subject is also capable of creating objects and the inter-subjective way in which this is done is what we call society. Society can be studied as an object itself because human activity is objective. Because human society is an inter-subjective object it cannot be altered by changes in belief alone. So the basic falsehood of Christianity which Feuerbach exposes will continue to exert control over people because of the exploitative, alienating activity fundamental to capitalism, which makes religion an ideological tool of oppression and a psychological opiate for the masses. To defeat the oppression of religion it is necessary first to defeat the oppressive social relations that use it.

232 

J. Chambers

In overemphasizing the epistemological importance of intuition, the subject is seen as the passive side of the object-subject relation. This leads on to abstracting humans from social relations (§6). Feuerbach saw the subject’s environment given in intuition or passive contemplation as the starting point and this is why he saw intuition as the point of the immediate union of the subject with the environment. This led to him to ignore the social aspect of the environment (§9). Human life is so conditioned by the modifications of the natural environment by labor that the isolated subject is an inadequate epistemic model. Human nature is as much the product of human labor as the natural world and natural kind classifications like Feuerbach’s ‘species being’ are thus a step back from Hegel’s socialized, conceptual subject. Marx shared Feuerbach’s belief in the ontological primacy of the finite and the epistemological primacy of sensation. Yet Marx could also see the use of concepts in science. Taking the subject and object combined in praxis is a prius of activity theory, incorporating Hegel into historical materialism. From Feuerbach Marx learned that the primary condition of humans for scientific explanation is bodily suffering and need (GI-MECW5:37/MEW3:27). Feuerbach formulated this view from his grounding of the subject on its sensuous affectivity but he did not historically situate his new empirical subject because he ignored the active side and he elided concepts. Bodily need is the premise of history in that society is seen as an developing way of addressing that primary predicament. From Hegel Marx learned that the subject cannot be abstracted from its social environment, that this social environment has a logic of its own that must be brought to bear on the issue of the subject in praxis. In the Eleven Theses Marx shows his thought process in developing a dialectical materialist epistemology and theory of the essence of humanity. The idea of human nature as inherently historical emerges with the idea that humans change themselves through changing their objects in social production. When Marx identifies human nature as no more than the ‘ensemble of social relations’ human nature is understood as a process developing with history. Essentialism and historicism seamlessly combine in Marx’s theory of history. Human nature is the process of development in historical change, incomplete at any one of its stages.

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

233

Marx is the target of a portion of one of Slavoj Žižek’s harangues when he is accused of not learning a lesson he should have learned from Hegel (actually Lacan standing in for Hegel somehow) that the essentialism in his view of self-alienation misses “the way the subject emerges through the “self-alienation“ of the substance” (261). Žižek’s complaint seems to be that Marx is wrong for being an Aristotelian and not being an idealist. What compounds the oddity is that this has just come off the back of a denial that Hegel’s idealism swallows up the objective. All-too-briefly, Žižek’s theory is that subjectivity amounts to an ontological split in being, it comes second but retroactively posits its ground, which is less than nothing. Žižek is arguing that there could be no being apart from the human insofar as the subject posits the object as its object; the subject is second and its ground is third. Even though the subject comes second, humans still ontologically live in a world of their own making. A materialist must disagree: Žižek would do well to heed Adorno’s warning: The separation of subject and object is both real and semblance. True, because in the realm of cognition it lends expression to the real separation, the rivenness of the human condition, the result of a coercive historical process; untrue, because the historical separation must not be hypostatized, not magically transformed into an invariant. This contra- diction in the separation of subject and object is imparted to epistemology. Although as separated they cannot be thought away, the ψεύδος [pseudos—falsehood] of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated, object by subject, and even more and differently, subject by object. As soon as it is fixed without mediation, the separation becomes ideology, its normal form. Mind then arrogates to itself the status of being absolutely independent—which it is not: mind’s claim to independence announces its claim to domination. Once radically separated from the object, subject reduces the object to itself; subject swallows object, forgetting how much it is object itself. (Adorno 2005, 246)

Neither the subject nor the object are just whatever the subject makes them to be (knowingly or not). There is not that much freedom to be had, or rather, any freedom comes through these conditions. Why should Marx, a materialist, accept Žižek’s idealist thesis given that the “(in) famously stupid dialectical materialist substitution of “idea“ with

234 

J. Chambers

“matter“ as the absolute” (2012, 260) obviated the subject-object split that plagued post-Kantian philosophy and seems to be animating Žižek’s censure? Anyway, even if Žižek’s point follows it does not make biology disappear. It was Engels no less—he who is blamed for dialectical materialism—who put forward the scientific account of the evolution of human self-construction through labor. Given that Marx’s essentialism has this baked in, it is hard to see what principle of Žižek’s he is sinning against. Žižek has no time to explain where the problem lies however, he swiftly meanders away, as is his wont, to another ungrounded accusation, this time apparently dialectical materialism is not good for ecological thinking and so on…

Praxis and the Materialist Theory of History Marx’s Materialism is more than a negation of Hegel’s philosophy in that it is, to borrow Schelling’s phrase, a positive philosophy. It is positive in the sense that it imports a concrete real empirical ground for its theory and escapes the circle of empty abstractions of Hegel’s science of pure concepts. The brief excurses of Hegel’s concept-driven theory of history and Marx’s praxis-driven theory as its sublation below follows Scott Meikle’s presentation in Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. Hegel’s science of concepts is praxis oriented.4 Hegel is amongst the first thinkers to recognize that concepts reside in the social/historical nexus. Hegel defines the concept as neither a subjective entity living in human minds, nor an objective worldly entity independent of its thinkers, nor as a mere coupling of the two. “Spirit” is the concept Hegel uses with a subjective and objective side to signify the union of subjective and objective in which concepts reside. There is no contradiction between this content of Spirit and Marx’s idea of praxis. Hegel has a dynamic view of entities as developing over time. On this way of looking at it the development of concepts is a social product, like language, that belongs to the human race independently of its individual users in the social consciousness Spirit. Concepts are ideal in the sense that they belong to Spirit. Whenever an individual develops a new concept this is born out of a social context and develops according to its own

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

235

inner dialectical dynamic in dialectical concourse with other concepts and this logic grants it freedom from the individual concept users and innovators who operate as the vehicles for this development. This layer of Spirit is also compatible with praxis. However, the differences emerge with Hegel’s additional understanding of concepts (the idealist parts of which are expendable) as dialectically merging into one—the Absolute Idea. He contends that in the process of them moving from abstract to concrete all concepts gradually logically implicate each other. Concretization of concepts is a mutual process whereby concepts use each other to actualize their own potentials. This idea comes from an abstraction from the basic organic character of dialectics. The dialectical method is organic insofar as its object is considered to be a whole composed of hierarchically ordered, internally integrated parts, progressing from abstract to concrete. An organic whole is a universal, equally and completely present in all of its separable parts, even though and in fact because of, the fact that each of the parts oppose each other. This universal operates as the rationale of the parts and is thus more than the sum of them (Meaney 2002, 5). Each part embodies the whole to a certain, limited extent. The complete elaboration of the nuanced dynamics both internal to each part and between the parts amounts to an understanding of the nature of the whole. Now, the way it has been described such an organic methodological principle of dialectics does not differ from Aristotle’s essentialism. The novelty of the dialectical methodology is that it considers the internal dynamics and interrelations of change between parts as driven by contradiction such that the concrete totality is seen as developing through assimilating disparate external entities (Kosik 1976, 16). This organic methodology can be adapted to any system but Hegel adapted it to the system of concepts themselves. Hegel transposes this scientific methodological principle onto ontology through concepts. In Hegel’s ontology, reality consists of an order of entities from the simplest –abstract, to the most complex—concrete, the most complex of all is, of course, Spirit, which is even present in its abstract forms of base matter. So while it appears that thought consists of myriad concepts, for Hegel there is in fact only one concept—the Absolute, which operates as the universal principle of all the partial elaborations of its truth in the

236 

J. Chambers

concepts that are logically interrelated. The act of transposing the scientific method onto itself, in the form of self-conscious concepts is the act Hegel performs where materialist dialectics departs from idealist dialectics. It does not occur in materialist dialectics because of its primacy of the finite thesis. Hegel’s Science of Logic is a methodology that can be applied to any system, but the inner dialectic of a thing has its own content, which cannot be replaced by a metalogical system of systems. In materialism there is no system of systems and each system must be studied according to its own specific nature. While Hegel was not wrong to see in spirit/praxis as enjoying independence from individual humans in the ideal, Hegel gets caught in the web of his own abstractions when his grants total dominance to concepts (the domination is not total for often people accept a conundrum as is or fail to notice it or act against it without noticing) and are not created by historical change in social praxis but merely appear in their new guises on the stage of history in this. Hegel effectively reduced human activity to the concepts it involved, developing an idealist theory of history in which human action is seen as merely a stage upon which concepts logically displayed their changes through which the cunning of reason made individual historic characters its puppets. Human history was a means of the concept and human agency was curtailed. Yet it can be readily seen how Hegel was led to make these conclusions once he had noted the autonomy of the ideal and identified a hierarchy of concepts within idealist assumptions. Hegel’s Theory of History is a necessary outgrowth of making the science of concepts the ontological foundation of his philosophy. Hegel begins with essentialist categories. Hegel always grounded explanation upon the universal aspect of phenomena, for the realm of the universal is the realm of the necessary. Insofar as laws of history can be identified to explain historical events these events are being explained scientifically. Chance cannot be the basis for science (Meikle 1985, 25–29). Hegel follows this up with conceiving the form of law as the realization of potentialities embedded in the universal of the whole of society, or Spirit, which is driven by the logic of conceptual change. These potentials manifest themselves in tendencies to reach goals within the logic of the stage of Spirit in question. The ultimate goal to which all these developing stages

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

237

depend is “actualization of freedom”, which for Hegel was “the purpose of the world”. Hegel divided history into gradually ascending stages each with their own “principle” or law. The mechanism for the realization of the potentialities of historical change was the “actions of men, proceed from their needs, passions, and interests…” (PH:34/W12:34). While movements of the concept are the telos of historic change the, “passions” of men are relegated to the level of the mere means of the delivery of conceptual change: “first the Idea, the second the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras-web of Universal History” (PH:37/W12:37). History is unlike nature because whereas, for Hegel, nature merely replicates the same forms history is progressive. Spirit has a historical essence, which it makes itself. “ Universal History exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of Freedom” (PH:72/W12:77). In each historical stage Spirit is working out, solutions to logical problems innate the principle of that stage. The level of Spirit in a stage of history “has its determinate, peculiar principle … Its religion, its polity, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp” (PH:80/W12:87). But these are just the outer garments for their logical form which contains their meaning. Scott Meikle observes that this theory harbors the critical lacuna of the actual mechanics of the transitions from one stage to another (1985, 38–39). Human passions amount to an impoverished candidate for the mechanics of change because it is too vague to account for its timing and necessity. Hegel claims to know how to make a narrative of history before historical research because Universal history—as already demonstrated—shows the development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and of the consequent realization of that Freedom. This development implies a gradation—a series of increasingly adequate expressions or manifestations of Freedom, which result from its Idea. The logical, and—as still more prominent—the dialectical nature of the Idea in general, viz. that it is self- determined—that it assumes successive forms which it successively transcends; and by this very process of transcending its earlier stages gains an affirmative, and, in fact, a richer and more concrete shape;—this necessity of its nature, and

238 

J. Chambers

the necessary series of pure abstract forms which the Idea successively assumes—is exhibited in the department of Logic. Here we need adopt only one of its results, viz. that every step in the process, as differing from any other, has its determinate peculiar principle. (PH:79–80/W12:86–80)

But this narrative raises more questions than it answers. While it is true that people often get caught up in the logic of the conundrums they face through developments in the realm of the ideal, which take on a life of their own, these developments are spread along timespans which cannot be seen as coinciding with pure logical movements. Why were the enlightenment ideas of rational liberty realized in the French Revolution and not the revolution of somewhere else, some other time? Historical questions of this kind are not covered by Hegel’s theory, as if they are not important or are mere accidents. In this way actual history is reduced to the role of only exemplifying a prearranged narrative. Rather than the theory being built to explain the data, the data is only incorporated into the theory when it fits the theory’s narrative. Hegel “He only takes the one category, and contents himself with finding a corresponding existent for it” (CCHPL-MECW3:47/MEW1:250). Hegel did not do this because he had a poor grasp of theory or history; quite the reverse is the case. When Hegel elevated the concept to ontological primacy that meant that the concept, in its purity, was called forth to explain everything. The abstraction of necessity itself, Hegel was well aware, is empty because universals need particular and individual content to be real and meaningful. Yet Hegel could not add this content to the theory because then he would merely be describing history and the theory could not even pretend to explain. So historical events were conceptually refined until their contents were as barren as the logic. The Logical movement forms the premade template to be imposed upon historical facts chronicling Spirit’s historical development. The only way to explain how Hegel could have got this wrong is to recognize that he held the idealist ontology. In the Science of Logic Hegel distinguishes the ‘spurious’ infinite from the ‘true’ infinite. The spurious infinite is when the infinite is thought of as a being in itself. That is, when it is thought of in separation from the finite. An example of the spurious infinite is numeration; the list of numbers has no end. It is thus

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

239

indeterminate and spurious because not found in nature which is always bound by the finite. The true infinite is contained in the finite, like the circle which is bounded by space but has no beginning or end. When the infinite is called upon to verify the finite it escapes the bounds of the finite, as it is shown to do in Chap. 1, and becomes the spurious infinite. Hegel’s conception of the infinite is absolute rather than relative. This is why he collapses all concepts into one, said to apply everywhere. This same move forces Hegel to impose upon the historical categories the pure conceptual schema from his logic. This is what happens when a universal category is raised to cover all phenomena without reference to the peculiarities of any particular finite. It ends up not truly being contained by the finite, and rather overarches it. It becomes an empty universal like Hegel’s category of Being. And yet with his identification of the True infinite and the true—concrete—universal Hegel had all the resources necessary to get it right. History’s meaning was not to be found in the ‘accidents’ of the specific nature of their happenings but in the logical structure they could be said to exemplify. The transition is thus derived, not from the particular nature of the family, etc., and from the particular nature of the state, but from the general relationship of necessity to freedom. It is exactly the same transition as is effected in logic from the sphere of essence to the sphere of the concept. (CCHPL-MECW3:10/MEW1:208)

The criticism that Hegel forced history to fit into a prearranged panlogism, which makes this theory of history dogmatic, selective and uninformative, is at the root of all of Marx’s objections to Hegel’s theory of history. “The essence of the definitions of the state is not that they are definitions of the state, but that in their most abstract form they can be regarded as logical-metaphysical definitions” (CCHPL-­ MECW10:17/MEW1:216). In this place Marx is transposing Schelling’s metaphysical criticism of Hegel as hypostatizing the concept, onto the body politic, which Hegel regards as the political embodiment of Spirit. It is out of place for Dieter Henrich to criticize Marx as misunderstanding Hegel’s concept of the state in the Philosophy of Right. Henrich

240 

J. Chambers

argues that Marx’s criticism of the state as an overarching and oppressive tool of the ruling classes misses the way in which for Hegel the state is a social construct conforming to the freedom of self-consciousness “because it provides for the fulfillment of all the needs of the natural individual. Instead, the will accepts the state because only with reference to it can the self-reference of the will’s own structure be completed” (Henrich 2003, 327). For Hegel the state is the domain for the working out of free will socially, the irreplaceable arena for social discourse of freedom and values. The state is thus thought not to overarch its members but to be a social reflection of individual needs. Resistance against oppression, it seems, must be countered within the state i.e., improving the state. The idea is that if the state is a certain way, it must be because its people are a certain way. Yet this explanation assumes to be unproblematic precisely what Marx’s criticism problematizes, namely that the state is a transitory and one-sided entity; its authority is not the result some kind of spontaneous social response to individual needs but a sustained struggle between classes; the bourgeois state acts as an obstacle to their mutual development. The idea that change should exclusively come from within the state only works if that state is amenable to that kind of change, rather than being an obstacle to it. Marxian class analysis of the state demonstrates that the state is an inherently oppressive entity, essentially a tool for the suppression of classes, it begs the question against these findings to argue that the state is the only domain in which freedom can be meaningful. Marx is operating with a different conception of freedom. If the only kind of freedom you can conceive of requires an external organ with a monopoly on violence made for distraction, espionage, sabotage, stopgaps, and restrictions, all means of bullying and bribing people into acquiescing to their exploitation, then to claim that the state is the necessary domain of the expression of freedom it little more than a tautology, but if that is the only way you can conceive of freedom, Marx would say, your conception is not merely impoverished but perverse. Besides, as Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question makes explains, the state is incapable of moderating social power relations in capitalist society; legislation is forbidden to impinge upon the market and legislation cannot address socalled private interactions. The state is owned by monied interests who use it to promote bigotry and discrimination. The state is the result of a

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

241

series of violent ruptures in society and its maintenance requires the constant employment of force; it has risen and fallen and disappeared entirely for generations of people. Any materialist critique of the state prioritizes the transitoriness and fragility of the state, humans endured through the complete breakdown and collapse of the state and the dependence upon the state is not a transhistorical moment of their being or indeed a necessary reflection of their needs but an expression of class struggle at a given time. None of this is to deny the many benefits the state has brought, or the uses it has for socialism but these have all been brought at the expense of class rule. Marx does not discard Hegel’s logic. Manfred Frank has demonstrated that Marx and Engels were indifferent to the political persuasions of their intellectual forbears when scavenging scientific resources from them (1992). Marx and Engels were as eager to take from Hegel as they were Schelling and Feuerbach, if such things in them could be found that could be put to revolutionary use. Marx appealed to the methodological resources of Hegel’s dialectic in its entirety to realize his materialist theory of history because Hegel had identified the scientific way of employing concepts. Marx made ample use of Shelling’s refutation of Hegel, indeed not much of Marx’s criticism of Hegel is original, but Marx did not turn to Schelling’s alternative historiography because Schelling attempted to replace a science of history with a theodicy of history. If anything Marx extends and intensifies the scope and power of dialectics.5 Marx, even with his undeniable creativity and genius, in fact had relatively little to do himself in his theory of history that was methodologically new, dutifully following as he did the path of the science of concepts laid out for him by Hegel.6 Marx ‘setting Hegel on his feet’ can be summarized in a few words: “Real natures are made the starting point” (Meikle 1985, 40). This is an ontological move taking the form of the familiar Feuerbachian motif of reversing subjects and predicates. an explanation which does not provide the differentia specifica is no explanation. The sole interest is in rediscovering “the idea” pure and simple, the “logical idea”, in every element, whether of the state or of nature, and the actual subjects, in this case the “political constitution”, come to be nothing but their mere names, so that all that we have is the appearance of real understanding.

242 

J. Chambers

They are and remain uncomprehended, because they are not grasped in their specific character. (CCHPL-MECW10:12/MEW1:210–211)

Marx forms concepts from identifying the actually existing essence of the individual constituents of historical events. But it is precisely this organic unity which Hegel has failed to construct. The different authorities have different principles. They are, moreover, solid reality. To take refuge from their real conflict in an imaginary “organic unity”, instead of expounding them as elements of an organic unity, is therefore mere empty, mystical evasion. (CCHPL-MECW3:58–59/MEW1:261)

It’s important to note here that Marx expresses agreement with Hegel’s desire to identify the organic unity of society. What he is objecting to is the employment of an idea external to the phenomena in question. In the realm of the pure concept history can be explained with exactly the same locution as anything else. “But comprehending does not consist, as Hegel imagines, in recognising the features of the logical concept everywhere, but in grasping the specific logic of the specific subject.” (CCHPL-­ MECW3:91/MEW1:296). Patrick Murray explains how Marx mixed the critique of Hegel with the critique of political economy: “Hegel treats nature and humanity the way that capital does, reducing them to bad abstractions produced by abstract thought or abstract labor” (2020, 138). Marx will try and seek a concrete universal, a particular entity materially embedded in the system which has directly efficacious effects. Rather than letting abstract concepts like ‘freedom’ stand in for an explanation of movements of concrete historical categories like the people of the society, Marx investigates the phenomenon in question to identify and trace the real essence of the concrete entities in society that make history. Marx keeps hold of Hegel’s organic dialectics but instead of making the ‘whole’ explain its parts—an abstract universal—Marx makes it into a concrete universal which cannot be posited a priori but has to be discovered through investigation. Marx implies that this essence is characterized by internal, antagonistic contradiction that Hegel’s abstract and externally imposed version of ‘organic unity’ papers over. The real essence of historical events explains their every development as a real measurable

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

243

tendency with a direct, not mystical mechanism of bringing its effects about. Marx’s remedy is “to regard the universal as the real essence of the finite real, i.e. of what exists and is determined” (Meikle 1985, 43). Rather than starting with the pure infinite, Marx will start with the finite and then find the infinite/universal/necessary within that. Before Marx had completely figured out the class status of his own political orientation he seized upon the general population of society as the only content of history. “The state is an abstraction. The people alone is what is concrete” (CCHPL-MECW3:28/MEW1:229). The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour. (EPM-MECW3:332–333/MEW40:574)

Marx stays closer to the spirit of Hegel’s early insight when he sticks to the thesis that humans do not discover a premade essence through the twists and turns of a logic that stands over them; they create their essence through praxis. The narrative of this self-creation is history. This manner of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists. (GI-MECW5:31/MEW3:21)

In the Grundrisse Marx clarifies this position by pointing out that “Population is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed” (G-MECW28:37/MEW42:35). In this place Marx makes it clear that the people of society embody social relations. He is entitled to make this point because he has kept Hegel’s dialectical method

244 

J. Chambers

with its conception of an essence of history, passing through specific forms each with their own internal dynamics and laws of development. History can have no content beyond humans and their activities and through their activities they take on social roles. Following Feuerbach, Marx recognizes that the human being as “a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants” (EPM-MECW3:336/MEW40:578) dependent for its life on objects independent of it. Marx takes the idea that “the first premise of all human existence” is “that men must be in a position to live in order to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things” (GI-MECW5:41–42/MEW3:28). So instead of the essence being Spirit and its goal being the realization of the Idea, Marx studies the material character of the primary predicament of man, that of social production/ consumption, around which society is oriented with his awareness, that Feuerbach himself failed to bring to light, that absent any guiding abstract Spirit overarching society history must be understood in terms of the actions of the individuals who make up society. Society is conceived as an organic whole with an internally contradictory and developing way through which humans on aggregate address their developing primary material predicaments. Marx historicized production in his claim that “[t]his mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.” (GI-MECW5:31/MEW3:21)). Historical materialism recognizes the modes of production give social forms to production: “Marx’s case against idealist philosophy of law is that the goal of each particular way of life is realized through the process of satisfying needs; against economics, it is that satisfying needs is the means for realizing the goal of a particular way of life” (Campbell 1993, 146). For this reason Marx will class categories like production in general or labor in general as an illusion in the sense that they cannot exist outside of a specific historical mode of production. This illusion arises from “confusion and identification of the process of social production with the simple labour process” (C.III-MECW37:870/MEW25:890) This does not mean

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

245

that it is impossible to think of labour as such, abstracted from the mode of production, merely that it cannot exist this way. This is how Marx abstracted the so-called trinity formula from the labour process which stipulates that labor process for all epochs always comprises the unity of; the work, its object and its instruments (Murray 2020, 141). Marx had set himself the task of the scientific employment of concepts on the most fundamental issue for the material, practical predicament of the human race. In doing this Marx essentially set himself the task of the scientific employment of concepts for the question of the meaning of socialized humans as toolmakers, as material beings in a concrete situation with physical needs. That is, he set himself the ethically highest question of concepts for humans, the question of freedom. This is the most that could be done with concepts, discursively employed, on their highest level of abstraction for the highest ethical problem that was within their competence after the failure of the idealists’ absolute concepts; science at the limits of science; new limits that had been found after the failure of Kant’s overly strict outline of their confines and Hegel’s overly generous denial of any limitations. This necessarily brings concepts to bear on themselves. That is, they learn of their status as a moment of praxis. For Marx to scientifically go forward with concepts means finding the universal in the finite which eventually leads to identifying praxis and labour as the motor and telos of history. In this way Marx uses the scientific critique of concepts to outline the methodology of the science of history, the scientific self-consciousness of humanity. The difference between the material and the finite is that the material is the finite informed by concrete empirical content of the infinite independent of consciousness whereas the finite is a pure category of being. The finite is an abstraction and thus one can talk of the finite per se. The material does not exist in its purity but can only be found in its particular instances. Thus, the concept of the material implies that it is a placeholder for the concept of the finite with the recognition that it cannot be talked about per se without qualification.

246 

J. Chambers

Notes 1. A modern classic is Carol Gould’s Marx’s Social Ontology (1978). 2. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2005), followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: DBDE—Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature CCHPL—Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law EPM— Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 TF—Theses on Feuerbach GI—The German Ideology THF—The Holy Family G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy C.III—Capital III DN—Dialectics of Nature 3. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke—Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe (1969–1971) (W). The abbreviations used are: LHP —Lectures on the History of Philosophy. PH— Philosophy of History PR —Philosophy of Right. 4. Andy Blunden demonstrates the soundness of this interpretation (2010, 182–183) he includes the following marvelous quote from Hegel: The theoretical is essentially contained in the practical. Against the idea that the two are separate runs the fact that man has no Will without intelligence. The will holds within itself the theoretical, the will determines itself, and this determination is in the first instance internal. That which I will I place before my mind, and it is an object for me…. man cannot use his theoretic faculty or think without will, for

7  Praxis: Scientific Discursive Employment of Concepts 

247

in thinking we are active. The content of what is thought receives, indeed, the form of something existing, but this existence is occasioned by our activity and by it, established. These distinctions of theoretical and practical are inseparable; they are one and the same; and in every activity, whether of thought or will, both these elements are found. (PR-§4:29/W7:47) 5. “Marx parts company with Hegel precisely because Hegel makes the dialectical nature of thought the basis for the dialectical structure of reality, where Marx holds that just the reverse is the case.” (Meikle 1985, 35) 6. Lenin observes “it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx” (1961, 180)!!

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Subject and Object. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. Baronovitch, Laurence. 1984. German Idealism, Greek Materialism and the Young Karl Marx. International Philosophical Quarterly 24 (3): 245–266. Bellamy Foster, J. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. NYU Press. Blunden, A. 2010. An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity. Leiden: Brill. Burns, T. 2000. Materialism in Ancient Greek Philosophy and in the Writings of the Young Marx. Historical Materialism 7 (1): 3–39. Campbell, M. 1993. Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital. In Marx’s Method in “Capital”, ed. F. Moseley. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Frank, Manfred. 1992. Der unendliche Mangel am Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfange der Marxschen Dialektik. Munich: University of Munich Press. Gamble, C.  N., Hanan, J.  S., and Nail, T. 2019. What is new materialism? Angelaki 24(6): 111–134. Gould, C.C. 1978. Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1969–1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main.

248 

J. Chambers

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2011. Robert F.  Brown eds. Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825-6 Volume II, Greek Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree, Ontario: Batoche Books. Henrich, Dieter. 2003. David S. Pacini. In Between Kant and Hegel Lectures on German Idealism. Harvard University Press. Ilyenkov, Evald V. 2009. The Ideal in Human Activity: A Selection of Essays by Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov. Trans. H.  Campbell Creighton. Ohio: Erythrós Press and Media. Kosik, Karel. 1976. Dialectics of the Concrete. Translated by Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt, and edited by Robert S.  Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.  Lenin, V.I. 1961. Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works, vol. 38. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K., and F.  Engels 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW), vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. ———. 1975–2005. Collected Works (MECW), vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. McCarthy, George E. 1990. Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice and Nineteenth Century Political Economy. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. McLellan, David. 1972. The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction. London: Macmillan. Meaney, Mark E. 2002. Capital as Organic Unity: The Role of Hegel’ Science of Logic in Marx’s Grundrisse. Dordrecht: Springer Science Business Media. Meikle, Scott. 1985. Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. London:Duckworth. Murray, Patrick. 2020. Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions. In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, pp. 129–149. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

Part V Dialectics of Materialism and Wu

8 Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism

In previous chapters it has been argued that Hegel’s idealism is based upon the primacy of the infinite thesis. Its materialist refutation has employed imminent critique to Hegel’s promise of idealism to argue that its failure reaffirms the veritable being of the finite. Marx’s science has been reconstructed as employing the dialectical methodology of praxis containing concepts to the finite, to develop his concrete universal. Yet Marx’s relatively sparse and subtle engagement with ontology is commonly interpreted as rejecting it in some form. This has made fertile ground for expansive debate on the semantics of materialism. The result has been that while materialism used to be seen as a defining feature of Marx’s methodology, today it is common for Marx scholars to downplay its significance or even deny Marx was a materialist altogether. Controversy of interpretation has been greatly exacerbated by a resurgence of Kantian philosophy and disdain for metaphysics that were dominant themes of continental and analytical philosophy. This has muddied the waters of the old idealism/materialism controversy to the extent that these are no longer seen as useful terms. This article uses a disagreement in Hegel/ Marx interpretation between Tony Smith and Lucio Colletti to excavate the ontological dimension of the idealism/materialism controversy in Hegel and Marx’s political philosophies. Tony Smith’s non-ontological, methodological interpretation of Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism fit in well with the reappraisal of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_8

251

252 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s idealism that was happening in contemporary Anglophone philosophy when it appeared.1 This reappraisal rejected the traditional ontological interpretation of Hegel’s idealism with its view that Hegel thought reality is fundamentally mental in the sense that it consists in no more than mind and its thoughts. Engels was undeniably a supporter of the traditional interpretation and Smith does not deny Marx appears to share it. Smith claimed that as there is no substantive ontological dimension to the disagreement between Hegel and Marx, the two are far closer methodologically than Marx supposed. This interpretation also fit in well with the dominant Hegelian theme of Western Marxism. The result was a blend of themes of Western Marxism and Anglophone philosophy. Marx was Hegelian (Western Marxism) but Hegel was a realist (Anglophone philosophy). Lucio Colletti has most explicitly advanced the interpretation of Marx as proceeding from the primacy of the finite thesis critique of Hegel’s primacy of the infinite thesis. Colletti’s interpretation has it that this makes Marx a disciple of Kant as opposed to Hegel. Colletti’s interpretation is thus used in an anti-dialectical, revisionist enterprise. This is a regrettable misuse of the primacy of the finite thesis reading of Marx. Tony Smith has produced a strong rebuttal of Colletti. Tony Smith’s argument against Colletti reaffirms the undeniable Hegelian dialectical component of Marx’s thought, giving some important examples. This is laudable. However, Smith also makes some untenable arguments against the primacy of the infinite reading of Hegel’s idealism and against the primacy of the finite thesis reading of Marx’s materialism. This chapter’s first section will critically appraise Smith’s arguments. This chapter will argue that Smith’s refutation of Colletti’s interpretation elides the ontological difference between Hegel and Marx at the expense of comprehending the view he is arguing against. Smith’s criticism of Colletti fails not because Marx was a Kantian theorist but because Marx’s social theory was based upon a substantive ontological disagreement with Hegel. Smith himself admits that his arguments imply Marx had a fundamentally erroneous grasp of Hegel. It is an uncharitable reading of Marx, although it does not notice just how uncharitable it is. On Smith’s reading Hegel comes off worse than the primacy of the infinite thesis interpretation makes Hegel out to be. For in Smith’s favored interpretation

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

253

Hegel lacks an ontology, he is not a systematic thinker and his methodological preferences are arbitrary. Consequently, Marx’s materialism is also robbed of ontological integrity and his critique of Hegel neither introduces a distinctive outlook nor is it scientific. The simple principle of charity in interpretation, regardless of one’s ideological bent, dictates that no interpretation of philosophers should denigrate them against their own stated priorities when interpretations are available which identify profundity in their thought.

Colletti Versus Smith Before diving in it is important to preface the following arguments with the point that Smith insists that his arguments are in the domain of method whilst Colletti’s are in the domain of ontology. The purpose of the following argument is to illuminate the methodology/ontology debate and not to polemicize on Smith’s arguments in particular. The arguments might sometimes be accused of begging the question against Smith. However, given that Colletti’s own arguments are in the domain of ontology, I think Smith’s methodological criticisms are more apt for the accusation of begging the question than my own. On the occasions where it appears Smith and Colletti are talking past each other, Smith, who wants to shift the domain of the debate from ontology to methodology, should be blamed. In his opening statement Smith makes a claim that raises doubts about his competence in arguing on matters concerning Hegelian metaphysics and epistemology: Colletti often discussed Hegel’s alleged eradication of the material interchangeably with his alleged eradication of the finite. But the two points are distinct in principle. It is certainly possible to conceive of one without the other, say, a philosophical defense of idealism in which ideal but finite objects retained their independent existence. Accordingly each thesis will be discussed in turn. (1993, 68)

Nowhere does Smith discuss what kind of entity could be ideal but finite and retaining its independent existence. However, from the

254 

J. Chambers

preceding chapters of this book, it is hoped that the reader is appreciates that the ontological independent existence of the finite is precisely what Hegel is denying when he is insisting that it is ideal. Hegel believes that insofar as something is ideal it cannot retain any independent existence. When, in his definition of idealism discussed in Chap. 3, Hegel says “the finite is ideal” he is referring to the concept of pure finite which only exists as a general abstraction in thought. There are no purely finite things actually existing in this way. We can make a concept of it as a category but there are no pure instances of finite things in thought or anywhere else. As a category the fact that “the finite” is infinite is a dialectical truism. Hegel’s three-tiered definition of the ideal includes the claim that the finite (finite things) is identical with the infinite and dependent upon it. Smith implies another possibility, the material without the finite. Previous chapters of this book involve arguments to the effect that for Hegel such an entity is impossible. But it is worth adding to that the point that to Hegel the infinite implies the interconnection of things on the web of concepts. Leaving aside the question already answered of whether or not Hegel sees concepts as belonging to Mind, it is undeniable that independence of the infinite from consciousness for Hegel is impossible. If Thale’s water is a candidate for the in infinite in Hegel’s sense then all the things of the universe, including mind, are essentially water and there is thus no independence of anything from anything else, the same one essence pervading through them all. Indeed, the idea of separate things (separation as such - the pure finite) is ideal in the sense of a category on this ontology; water is a continuous substance. So it is for all candidates for the infinite. Any materialism to be attributed to Marx must be a materialism based upon a rejection of Hegel’s idealism in Hegel’s terms, for it emerged in Feuerbach’s critique. In assuming he can separate the material from the finite Smith is begging the question against Colletti. Smith does not discuss each thesis in turn because he does not discuss the distinction between the material and the finite or attempt definitions. This causes confusion.

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

255

 egel Cancelling Out the Independence H of Matter Smith starts with an appraisal of Colletti’s argument that Hegel eradicates the material when the material is conceived as reality independent of consciousness, although he does not state this. If he had stated this, he might have noticed that in Colletti’s argument the finite is also independent of consciousness, just not defined in those terms. This might in turn have caused him to notice that the distinction he draws between the material and the finite is not clear-cut enough to warrant the separate treatments he tries to give them. Colletti contends that Hegel claims natural processes are to be distinguished from logical processes. He argues Hegel then claims that the “logical processes” enjoy an ontological primacy, which “cancels out” the “natural process”. “Hegel’s solution was to downgrade the process of development ‘according to nature’ into an apparent process. The process of development ‘according to the notion,’ on the other hand, is upgraded into a real process. In other words, the process in reality or according to nature is reduced to an ‘appearance’ or manifestation of the logical process, the process according to the notion” (1974, 115–116). The first claim is not peculiar to Hegel. The second claim is an aspect of Hegel’s untenable idealism. Colletti then argues that Marx is distinguished from Hegel by his refusal to allow the logical process any primacy or cancelling out of the natural process. Colletti makes this case through outlining the ontological hypostatization of the concept argument discussed in the previous chapter. Smith argues that Hegel’s employment of logical processes is based upon the recognition of the independence of natural processes. Smith argues that for Hegel the latter cannot cancel the former out. He does this by begging the question of the boundaries of thought and natural processes that Colletti raises. First, Smith outlines a simple three-step model of Hegel and Marx’s general method: The first step consists of the rudimentary conceptualizations of empirical experience, the appearance of a random collection of more or less independent factors (what Karol Kosik calls the ‘pseudo-concrete’ (1976, 1)). The second step, as opposed to empiricism, consists in analyzing the rudimentary conceptions in higher

256 

J. Chambers

levels of abstraction to reach the logically elementary concepts. The third step involves the systematic restructuring of the elementary concepts, building them up to the most complex and concrete concepts so that one has reached a concrete conception of the whole as driven by an inner logic. Smith is right that this model broadly applies to both Hegel and Marx. There is a fundamental difference in the way in which the two appropriate the appearance of the first step; it is the difference of idealism and materialism. Smith’s three-step model does not contrast natural processes with logical processes; rather it contrasts appearances of natural processes with logical processes. Smith acknowledges that the first step consists of appearances. Obviously, Hegel recognizes the difference between these two. The appearance is the rudimentary conceptualizations of reality, the first step (1993, 73). This book adheres to the conceptualist interpretation of Hegel according to which there is no experience for consciousness unmediated by concepts, no matter how primitive in Hegel.2 Appearances by their nature are dependent upon the things that generate them in the perceiving subject and the perceived object (whether or not one thinks this object is ultimately mind-dependent). If appearances are taken to exist without underlying natural processes then we have subjective idealism. If appearances are said to exist without the subject to experience them then it is a misuse of the word appearance. An appearance must be an appearance of something to a perceiver to be worthy of the name. The natural processes are not the same as their appearances, whatever one thinks about Hegel’s idealism. Smith has just contrasted two species of thought; the subject’s experience of appearances in rudimentary concepts – a thought, and the subject’s logical reconstruction of those experiences – another thought. There is a question of whether or not Hegel recognizes the difference between appearance and essence/ natural processes. He obviously recognizes this difference but also thinks that this is a difference in which one species of thought is dependent upon the other. It is a unity in difference with the underlying essence enjoying primacy. Smith overlooks this unity. His implied identification of appearances and natural processes displays his awareness of it yet he does not observe that the difference between appearance and logical reconstruction exactly corresponds to the difference between finite and infinite discussed in Chap. 1. Hegel identifies appearance with the finite.3

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

257

Hegel’s Science of Logic counterpoises appearance to essence in a way that usefully displays this parallel.4 Hegel suggests the essence of an object appears to consciousness of necessity. “Essence must appear” (SL. II:418/W6:1235). Hegel sees essence is not something beyond or behind appearance but must shine (schein) forth in the way it is experienced. “There is no question here of an alien, external reflection to which essence would belong and which, by comparing this essence with concrete existence, would declare the latter to be appearance. On the contrary … this essentiality of concrete existence, that it is appearance, is concrete existence’s own truth” (SLII:437/W6:147). In Hegel’s epistemology truth (Wahrheit) is found in concepts’ logical organizations of disorganized forms of representation. The reason why natural processes are not the same as logical processes in Hegel is that in nature “contingency, caprice and lack of order … [account for consciousness’s] inability … to hold fast to the realisation of the concept” (Enc.II§250R:215–6/W9:35). That is, the accidents of the finite in representations are distracting appearances of the truth, which is said to underlie them in the “concept” but also shines through them. In this sense6 concepts correspond to essence and concepts enjoy the same relationship of unity of identity in difference with representations as essence enjoys with appearance. The finite necessarily fails to realize the concept as it operates as a logical negation of the infinite. Just as the difference between finite and infinite is ideal for Hegel—belonging to thought—so is the difference between appearance and logical processes. Smith’s failure to explore dialectical unity in difference foists upon Hegel the Lockean essence-­ appearance dichotomy that Hegel systematically strove against. On the ontological argument the parallel between finite and infinite, appearance and reality is highly relevant and overlooking it undermines the interpretation of Hegel. Difference belongs to the second analytical-regressive step, the step of the Understanding [der Verstand]. Unity belongs to the synthetic-progressive step, the step of Reason for Hegel. The differences are ideal (just as the difference between finite and infinite is ideal) and the unity is ideal/real (Chap. 2 third tier definition of ideal)—posed by thought recognizing its own power of division. Dialectics belongs to thought for Hegel in that two opposed thoughts, division and unity can be held together in one thought.

258 

J. Chambers

The question should be: do the logical reconstructions refer to a reality, which is external to them (materialism) or is there an identity between them (idealism)? In other words it is the question of whether or not Hegel recognizes the difference between the underlying essences of the appearance, i.e., the natural processes and the logical processes. Only an answer to this ontological question gets an answer to the question of whether or not Hegel’s idealism is an ontology in which the logical processes cancel out the natural processes. Smith cannot deny Colletti’s claims without entering the ontological domain.

 mith’s List of Ways Hegel Did Not Cancel Out S the Finite Smith lists four ways in which he thinks Hegel does not cancel out the finite. They all beg the question. First Smith notes Hegel’s undeniably profound interest in and knowledge of empirical research, which is grounded in his methodology. Smith cites Hegel: In order that this science [i.e., Hegel’s system] may come into existence, we must have the progression from the individual and particular to the universal—an activity which is a reaction on the given material of empiricism in order to bring about its reconstruction. The demand of a priori knowledge, which seems to imply that the idea should construct from itself, is thus a reconstruction only…. In consciousness it then adopts the attitude of having cut away the bridge from behind it; it appears to be free to launch forth in its ether only, and to develop without resistance to this medium; but it is another matter to attain to this ether and to development of it7 (LHP.III:176–177/W20:78–79). This raises an epistemic question. The issue of contention is to the referent of Hegel’s ‘idea’; is it self-reflexive or not? The issue is not whether or not or how it is related to empirical research. Hegel’s interest in the empirical is driven by the need to find the necessary underlying it, the logical truth, the truth which is a logic, can be found only by consulting its appearance in the empirical. Hegel also said: “Since man is a thinking

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

259

being, neither sound common sense nor philosophy will ever give up raising itself out of the empirical worldview to God” (Enc.I.§50A:95/ W8:130). If the reading presented here is correct Hegel’s interest in the empirical was tempered by the need to abstract self-reflecting concepts from it. This explains why Hegel could have made both of the statements cited above. If Smith’s reading is correct then when Hegel says “as thinking … God…is in its truth” (Enc.I§19A2:47/W8:70) this is somehow not to be taken seriously. Where are we to search for cues from Hegel that he is joking or serious? Marx took these statements seriously. Second Smith notes that for Hegel historical fact is irreducible to logical processes as implied by the fact that Hegel does not admit that the course of future events unfolds with logical necessity. I have shown, with a significant number of quotes from Hegel in the last chapter that he did in fact deduce historical progress from logical progress. I don’t have much to add to this. The textual evidence is simply overwhelmingly against Smith’s reading. For his case Smith only points out Hegel’s refusal to make predictions based upon his logical speculations. This refusal is bound up with his remark that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” (PR:20/W7:28). It is worth noting that the import of this statement actually goes far beyond prediction, it is a proclamation for all time. As said above for Hegel philosophy logically reconstructs appearances in the theatre of history, events happening in the unconsciousness of Spirit, yet to be synthesized when a finite consciousness (Hegel) brings its learning to infinite consciousness (Spirit). Furthermore, Hegel actually does make predictions based upon his logical reconstruction of history because, as Smith also acknowledges, Hegel was of the view that history had come to an end and was, logically completed. It could only perfect what had already been achieved (Bhaskar 2008, 22). This view is a prediction. Insofar as there was a future it contained no logical, and thus truthful meaning ahead. There is no reason why appearances should stop just because Spirit has reached maturity. Hegel flatly denies the possibility that reality be an open system, classing this a bad infinity (23). Third Smith notes Hegel repeatedly and consistently asserts the existence of contingencies, with content known only a posteriori. Because these contingencies are a posteriori it is alleged they cannot be reduced to

260 

J. Chambers

thought. I have dealt with this matter thoroughly in the beginning of this book. Suffice it to say that Smith has made the same mistake as Stern in this regard. Fourth Smith notes Hegel’s idea that philosophy is ‘its time apprehended in thoughts’(PR:19/W7:27). This is also irrelevant for reasons mentioned in reply to Smith’s second point. Finite mind does not have the genius to overstep the limits of the unconscious workings of infinite mind – Spirit. All of finite mind’s concepts appear through Spirit in the theatre of history. They are logically reconstructed afterwards. Spirit actively creates concepts because concepts are all socially mediated. Finite minds are their vehicles. The level of Spirit in a stage of history ‘has its determinate, peculiar principle … Its religion, its polity, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp’(TPH:80/W12:87). This section has argued that Smith’s arguments for a realist interpretation of Hegel repeat the confusion of epistemology with ontology. They also flatly contradict Hegel’s own definition of idealism’s claim the finite is ideal.

Hegel’s Ontology of Method Versus Marx’s Marx has an unambiguous answer to the real ontological question. Smith quotes Marx’s summary of the scientific employment of abstraction with regards to Hegel and quotes Marx’s criticism of Hegel along these lines in separate places taken out of their context. In fact they connect as one thought, which I separate in the same way as Smith to show how Smith’s split-up citations try to handle it. The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point, although it is the real starting point, and thus also the starting point of perception and conception. The first procedure attenuates the comprehensive visualization to abstract determinations, the second leads from abstract determinations by way of thinking to the reproduction of the concrete. (G-MECW28:38/MEW42:35)

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

261

To this Smith says, ‘This is precisely the architectonic of Hegel’s system as well’ (1993, 74). He agree with Marx’s criticism of Hegel for becoming enamored in this methodology, regarding it as self-reflexive. Hegel accordingly arrived at the illusion that the real was the result of thinking synthesizing itself within itself, delving ever deeper into itself and moving by its inner motivation; actually, the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a mental concrete. This is, however, by no means the process by which the concrete itself originates. (G-MECW28:38/MEW42:35) Smith comments: “Both Colletti and Marx are wrong here” (1993, 78). Smith’s interpretation misses the ontological insight contained in this criticism that separates the methodologies of Hegel and Marx. In this place Marx contrasts the process by which dialectical thought proceeds to know the object with the natural process involved in the emergence of the object outside the thought process. “The real subject remains outside the mind and independent of it—that is to say, so long as the mind adopts a purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude” (G-MECW28:38/MEW42:35). Hegel thought that knowledge consisted in the attainment of identity between the thought of the knowing subject and the object. When the subject performs the three-step process of knowing in a finite mind it replicates a movement of knowing, hitherto unconscious, in Spirit as infinite mind. But for identity this means that the three-step movement of knowledge is a movement of the object also and any deviation from this path is reduced to appearance (Meaney 2002, 4). “Hegel, for example, correctly takes possession, the simplest legal relation of the subject, as the point of departure of the philosophy of law. No possession exists, however, before the family or the relations of lord and servant are evolved, and these are much more concrete relations.” (G-MECW28:39/MEW42:36) For Hegel and Marx property is the cell form relation in explaining the origins and nature of the state. But Hegel turns this into a determining relation and the “concrete substratum underlying the relation of possession” (G-MECW28:39/MEW42:36), consisting of concrete historical categories like the family, is reduced to

262 

J. Chambers

one of its moments, modifying themselves to suit the needs of property’s development. Hegel contrasts the historical precedence of the family and the logical precedence of property in these terms: We desire only to observe how the conception determines itself, and compels us to keep at a distance everything of our own spinning and thinking. But what we get in this way is one series of thoughts and another series of realized forms. As to these two series, it may happen that the order of time of the actual manifestations is partly different from the order of the conception. Thus it cannot, e.g., be said that property existed before the family, and yet, in spite of that it is discussed before the family is discussed. (PR:49/W7:86)8 Hegel talks of the actual historical order of events, including precedence of the family as a “series of thoughts and another series of realized forms” (eine Reihe von Gedanken und eine andere Reihe daseiender Gestalten). This odd locution is selected instead of the simple expression ‘historical fact’ because Hegel wants to talk of it in the manner of how consciousness perceives. Historical events are talked of in terms of their status as an appearance of logical truths to the enquiring subject. Their status is like that of the herald (family) who orbits his king (property). The herald is seen first, but he only appears to indicate the immanent presence of the king. The movements of the king explain the movements of the herald even though the herald always arrives before the king. Indeed the herald is only a marker for the king. Of course, the herald exists, but in a derived and secondary way. Neither Marx nor Hegel think essence is real while appearance is unreal (Ruben 1977, 128). Property is a concept that plays a central role in the emergence of the concept of the state. In regards to explaining the state, Hegel’s method is profound but it is a distorted abstraction when it does not limit the scope of its observations to the concrete real of which the state is a hypostatized part. Hegel does not qualify his abstractions and sees the state as actualizing, upon completion, the concept of freedom, a concept ultimately identical with absolute knowledge—the truth. This self-reference of abstraction is the result of Hegel’s disregard of the material content of the real under observation tied up with his cancelling out the finite. This is the source of the indirect and abstract way Hegel thinks about people and praxis.

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

263

Materialism argues people are not mediums of the state trying to build a constitutional monarchy. They are individuals trying to satisfy socially modified survival needs, which strive against the state as much as they reinforce it. Elaborating upon Marx’s quote above Althusser says there are “two different concretes: the concrete in thought which is knowledge and the concrete-reality which is its object” (1970, 186). Marx thinks Hegel did not recognize this difference. Hegel distinguished appearance from the logical reconstruction of reality, which was reality itself. Nothing Smith finds indicates any more than this. Smith correctly notes that in Marx too the logical sequence of the categories diverges from their historical order of development (1993, 75). Yet this similarity in itself does not establish anything relevant to the question of the referent of the logical reconstruction. This is where the ontological question lies. Colletti restricts his claims of primacy to the ontological plain, which is the plain on which the logical processes cancel out the natural processes. This is the plain on which the debate between materialism and idealism as foundational doctrines belongs. But Smith talks about other kinds of primacy. Smith conflates claims of ontological primacy with specific instances of explanatory primacy. Smith’s question begging reaches its height when he comes to discuss Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s three-step model of abstraction: [I]t is a central thesis of Marx’s position that in capitalism the real process necessarily generates appearances that are illusionary. Those immersed within the real process inevitably consider “price” and “supply and demand” fundamental economic categories, see the wage contract as a free exchange of equivalents, see “capital” as a productive factor in its own right, and so on. Empirical sciences that do not call into question the priority of the real process make such appearances the first principles of their theories. The result is what Marx termed vulgar economics, not historical materialism. The intelligibility of the concrete and material can be grasped only through asserting the priority of the thought process over how the concrete and Material as given in appearances. For the concrete has a depth level of essence underlying its surface level of appearance. (Smith 1993, 78)

264 

J. Chambers

This argument cuts Colletti’s position deep because Colletti has a Kantian, positivist interpretation of Marx. Nevertheless, it is a minimal ontological claim of materialist interpretation to assert Marx based his research upon the assertion, which Hegel denied, of the ontological independence of the real given in empirical experience. This does not bind one to asserting Marx thus denied that the logical process of abstraction plays the key role in finding the underlying depth level of essence hidden and revealed by that appearance. The real point of disagreement is this: there is the ontological materialist interpretation that sees that for Marx, beyond the depth level of essence is the nonconceptual finite of the material, apparent in sensation. The scientific employment of abstraction requires the conscious identification of abstractions from the pseudo-­ concrete that are derived from those real, material, finite entities, not just any entities as Smith supposes. Marx did not employ Hegel’s three step model of abstraction to the mode of production of capitalism simply because Marx had a peculiar interest in economics that Hegel lacked. It is not that Hegel just happened to be interested in the state whereas Marx just happened to be interested in capitalism. The start-off point decides whether you are going to go down the road of abstraction, finding logos at the end the journey in a self-reflexive circle of concepts—Hegel; or whether logical abstractions identify an essence that builds up again to a comprehension of a finite, material, suffering, historical human being— Marx. It is a matter of abstractions seeing no reality beyond essence as conceptually elaborated (Hegel and Smith) or abstractions with a material referent beyond the elaboration (Marx). This does not mean Hegel did not notice the failings of the system. He did, for example, bitterly lament the poverty and suffering that he saw resulting from industrialisation. Nevertheless, he saw his task in the Philosophy of Right as to rationalise these instances as necessary compromises of a system that worked on the whole in the interests of everyone because their toils combined to realise the Idea. It is not merely that Marx exposes the apparent independence of categories like price and supply and demand to be an illusion generated by an underlying reality of capitalism. Capitalism is exposed to be a mode of production defined by the dominance of capital, a quantum of dead labour, reified with a life of its own. Its underlying reality, its referent, is the blood, sweat and tears of the wage slaves. Hegel is

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

265

interested in the state because he thinks: “Let man be aware of it or not, this essence realizes itself as an independent power, in which particular persons are only phases. The state is the march of God in the world; its ground or cause is the power of reason realizing itself as will.” (PR:197/ W7:403). He is an idealist. Marx is interested in human labour because he sees humans as historically defined by such. He is a materialist. It is not as arbitrary as Smith supposes. Capital logically reconstructs the development of a hypostatised abstraction from human praxis. This praxis is the concrete material and independent reality. The abstraction is capital, no more than a misappropriated form of dead labour. Marx is exposing the power of capital as an ideological and false appearance. Marx’s work on the labor theory of value is meant to explain the workers suffering to them as the result of their servitude, which the relations of production of capitalism conceal. Hegel logically reconstructs the development of a hypostatised abstraction from human praxis. But Hegel’s hypostatised object is the state, which he takes to be a self referentially real entity because it is a concept. He sees hypostatisation as a divine truth (Ilyenkov 2009, 263). He takes human praxis to be a product, and thus an appearance, which he reduces to the reified entity of the state. For Marx the start-off point for enquiry is the pre-theoretical economic categories: capital, exchange, rent etc. These are all cases of the rudimentary conceptualisations that form the ideology of a mode of production (pseudo-concepts forming the pseudo-concrete). Ideology is the realm of appearances. It both obscures and reveals the true logic of the labour theory of value under its surface. This truth is reached via a logical process, but the referent of the labour theory of value is the concrete praxis of social/historical human beings. They are finite, suffering beings. Through their collective toil they build an open system. For Hegel the opposite is the case. The pre-theoretical rudimentary conceptions in the realm of appearances are the social wholes like the family. The reality they conceal, revealed through logical processes, consists of conceptual abstractions like property and the state. Their referent is the Absolute Idea. Its perfection is communicated to the philosopher. If Hegel was not an idealist in an ontological sense he would have no business taking a hypostatised entity, the concept - the state, to be the truth won via a science of abstractions from appearances of categories like the

266 

J. Chambers

family on the grounds that this truth is reducible to the Absolute Idea. As far as Smith is concerned Hegel’s reification of the state does not happen because Hegel sees the truth as conceptual, even though Hegel is explicit that the state is a concept embodying the absolute idea upon completion. Smith supposes this happens by mistake. That is, as far as Smith is concerned Hegel has no ontological reasons for doing this. Indeed as Smith’s Hegel lacks ontology altogether it seems this mistake is inexplicable. Hegel derived his categories from each other a priori with empirical data supplementing this process. Smith admits this (1993, 90). Yet Smith also denies Hegel believed the logical movement from abstract to concrete in thought was identical with the truth underlying the appearances. The question then is what did Hegel think the truth was and why did he not write about that instead? Hegel is motiveless, save for a few methodological choices that lack reasoning, to be discussed below, and his explanations are meaningless. Marx’s derivation of the categories only appears to be a priori. At every level of abstraction (concentric nests of concrete universals) Marx is identifying tendencies within one level of abstraction that include empirical confirmation of tendencies posited in the previous, higher levels of abstraction and simultaneously posit tendencies within their own level of abstraction to be confirmed and enriched by the conceptual elaborations of evidence in the next lower level of abstraction and feeding back onto the latter. The increasingly concrete empirical data dialectically interpreted as indicating contradictions in the new categories in the lower levels of abstraction provides the justification for the logical derivation of this level of abstraction in the tendencies posited in the previous higher level of abstraction implying them (Brien 2006, 25–26). As the presentation moves from abstract to concrete it is successively enriched by increasingly concrete layers of empirical data (relative to their level of abstraction). That is, the empirical data is read as indicative of certain tendencies belonging to certain levels of abstraction. Hegel’s method is the reverse. In Hegel appearances post-dated, were reduced to, and were supplemental to the logical process. Because the derivation proceeds a priori it is circular and each element is identical in the absolute.9 Marx used logical derivation as a method of presenting real tendencies, limited to their level of abstraction, verified by empirical data. In Marx empirical data

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

267

precedes and verifies derivation. Colletti portrays this as a reliance of ideas from Kant but Marx still employs the methodology of the concrete based upon the ontological independence of the referent from the concepts. Smith has noted the Hegelian argument that Marx’s derivation of the categories in Capital is not strictly imminent to the concept. This is a Hegelian misinterpretation of Marx’s empirical dialectics.

 he Principle of Identity and Noncontradiction T in Hegel and Marx Colletti argues the principle of identity and noncontradiction is the logical principle of the finite. Colletti charges Hegel’s abandonment of the former committed him to abandoning the latter. He argues Marx upheld Kant’s idea of the concept of identity and noncontradiction thus upholding the finite against Hegel. Smith refutes Colletti’s understanding of the status of the principle of identity and noncontradiction in Hegel and completely textually unsupportable claims about Marx. However, the easy way in which Smith refutes Colletti misses the real way in which Hegel’s negation of the negation negates the finite. It thus misses the real ontological bone of contention between idealist Hegel and materialist Marx. Colletti’s argument proceeds from the idea that thinking the finite requires the recognition of the fact that each finite thing be kept distinct from the rest in thought. The principle of identity and noncontradiction does this job. Colletti claims dialectical logic throws out the finite when it throws out the principle of identity and noncontradiction. Smith shows Colletti’s argument misunderstands Hegel’s retention and use of the principle of identity and noncontradiction in the concept of sublation (Aufheben); the idea that the differences identified on the analytic step are preserved, on that step, whilst being abolished in a higher synthesis. Smith explains this idea by comparing a heap with an organism. In a heap there is no organising principle to unite the separate constituents. In an organism the contents are also recognised in their separation. Yet this is

268 

J. Chambers

now understood in terms of opposition of components united by their combined functions in interacting in a single system. The organism is the universal principle that runs through all of the organs. The finite organs compose the infinite organism. In doing this Hegel’s synthesis ‘goes beyond’ the principle of identity and noncontradiction. Yet the “same thing is not both affirmed and denied of the same object at the same time in the same respect. Dialectical logic does not make the heart into the liver” (1993, 82)! Smith is right that in this respect the organic model of dialectical logic does not violate the principle of identity and noncontradiction. However, for Hegel dialectics is a self-reflexive master key according to which concepts form an organism of themselves. This is how they escape reference to the finite and deny the finite’s efficacy, in effect denying its ontological status (Blunden 2012, 127). Smith actually admits Hegel’s system attempts to draw all explanation out of a circle of concepts (1993, 90). It is puzzling in this light that Smith does not share his thoughts on how this affects the status of the finite in Hegel’s explanations.

Reification of Universals in Hegel The idea mentioned in the end of the above section leads directly onto Colletti’s second argument of Hegel’s eradication of the finite. Colletti recapitulates Marx’s argument that Hegel’s reifies universals in such a way that the real finite subjects are reduced to the status of predicates of the reified universals. In this system individuals are robbed of agency and become bearers for the movement of the universals they belong to in the world. Smith attempts to dismiss this argument as a misunderstanding of Hegel’s take on the universals controversy between nominalists and realists. ‘This objection, although true to Marx, entirely misses the ontological status of universals in Hegel’s thought’(1993, 80). In Chap. 1 this was shown to be Stern’s favored interpretation of Hegel’s idealism as arguing for the finite ad infinite in a relationship of being-for-itself. Like Stern, Smith tries to construe this logical construct as equally acknowledging the ontologically mutually dependent status of finite and infinite. Smith also like Stern fails to see that as a logical construct this synthesis

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

269

self-consciously accords the infinite ontological primacy. Smith tries to demonstrate Hegel’s commitment to an ontological status for the infinite without reifying it and reducing the finite to the status of its predicate. He does this by reference to Hegel’s theory of the state. Smith argues that according to Hegel the state is “a principle and not a thing” (1993, 83). He quotes Hegel’s definition of the state: “The state…. is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality.” (PR§258:195/W7:399) [Smith’s italics]. This is again quite blatant question begging. The interpretation of Hegel’s idealism put forward by Colletti questions the very notion of what constitutes a ‘thing’ and qualifies it in terms of the unity of finite and infinite under infinite. If the state does not qualify as a thing because it is a concept (infinite ideal), then neither does the particular self-consciousness (finite ideal) who cannot exist without concepts and, Hegel argues, do not exist without participating in Spirit and its development of the state. The ontological inherence of a concept like the state in people who think it is a thesis of Colletti’s interpretation of idealism. This is not in dispute. The finite is logically posited by the infinite as a means for its realization. The infinite needs the finite. It will not do to say that the finite equally needs the infinite because the relation of necessity belongs to the infinite. Smith does not understand the thesis he is arguing against. Smith’s point is that as the state has actuality in the individual consciousness of individual citizens, the citizens cannot be reduced to a predicate of the state. This raises the question of how the state enters the substantial will of the collective consciousness of the individuals composing it. Smith himself explains Hegel’s interpretation of this development as arising from the circle of concepts themselves, that is, independently of individual wills (1993, 90). He appends a quaint footnote to his remarks “I would like to stress that I am defending the general ontological framework underlying Hegel’s theory of the state, not the specifics of that theory itself ” (1993, 152). From this we must infer that Smith thinks this mechanism is not a matter of ontology but ‘specifics’. This is an untenable claim, prima facie absurd. If the concept of the state imposes itself upon the individual consciousness then the former is the subject and the latter is its predicate, whatever terms Smith or Hegel might have preferred. In Smith’s eyes the idealism/materialism

270 

J. Chambers

controversy is not a controversy of general ontological frameworks but ‘specifics’ despite what Hegel and Marx say about it. Hegel would undoubtedly be horrified at the thought that the specifics of his theory of the state could be separated from the general ontological framework in any way. This foreign notion raises the question of what possible purpose a general ontological framework could have in Hegel and Marx’s research. It seems that Smith is arguing that there is no purpose insofar as one is enquiring about questions like “what is history?”

 he Transition from Essence to Notion T and the Idealism of Hegel’s Concrete Universal Smith notes that Colletti’s main source for Hegel quotes is the one-sided and transitional conclusions of the first two sections of Hegel’s Logic; Being and Essence. In the Logic Hegel first introduces the one-sided ontology of finite individuals (Being) then negates it with the equally one-­ sided ontology of individuals subsumed under universals (Essence) before negating this negation in an ontology with categories that mediate between the first two levels (Notion). Smith charges that the whole point of the Logic is to overcome the one-sided views Colletti attributes to Hegel. “On the level of Notion, the finite is not a mere appearance of Essence. That stage has been unequivocally left behind” (1993, 85). This is an unfair criticism of Colletti. Hegel’s definition of idealism is an important example from the Logic, which appears as a “remark” in the first section. The function of the “remarks” sections in the Logic is to provide explanatory, supplementary information that stands outside of the logical narrative. Remarks sections therefore should be read as containing Hegel’s considered opinions even if they are not fully disclosed. Whatever its contents, all agree that idealism was Hegel’s considered opinion. There is no other reason why Hegel should define idealism before the narrative is complete. Furthermore, nothing in the Logic is ever unequivocally left behind in the sense that, although Hegel’s final conclusions are only unveiled at the end of the last part on Notion in the section entitled ‘the Logic of the concept’; the structure of the entire

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

271

logical narrative embodies the principles it is meant to sum up (Baumann 2011, 79). The structure of the concrete universal underlies all the earlier conceptions. Nevertheless, Smith is right that the Logic (and philosophy of right) was an attempt to address the problem of how to unite many distinct entities without denying their difference. It is an attempted synthesis of universal/individual, infinite/finite. This is what Hegel’s concrete universal was about. The concrete universal is the crowning achievement of Hegel’s Logic.10 Here it only receives the briefest summary sufficient to explain how Hegel’s version of it is ultimately defeated by his idealism. The rest of this section will briefly explain how idealism turns Hegel’s concrete universal into its opposite through Adorno’s critique.11 It is striking that Smith regurgitates an uncritical version of Hegel’s Logic. He does not make any reference to Adorno’s well-known materialist criticism of the idealism of Hegel’s concrete universal. This is probably because Smith’s foil is Colletti and Colletti treats the Frankfurt school with undue scorn. Even a parody of Hegel would be sufficient to defeat Colletti’s Kantian materialism, a straw man of the materialism of the finite thesis. Where an abstract universal reduces particulars to no more than the universal’s instantiations, a concrete universal is a unity of distinct determinations’. The universal’s ‘determination is…the principle of its differences” (Baumann 2011, 78). That is, it only exists through the differences of two separate entities; it is the mediation of their difference. In the ‘Notion’ it is presented as subjectivity, where the emphasis lies with unity. Subjectivity is the making of the self-relation (Baumann 2011, 78) in positing self-differentiation. Self-consciousness is a model for this idea as in it the subject is making itself the object of its own thought, recognizing itself as this object. This realization develops through three steps: undifferentiated unity, simple identity with itself, the difference between itself as subject and itself as the object of knowledge, and last a conscious, differentiated unity with itself. This is a presentation of the three steps of the Logic through the subject. Subjectivity gets this designation from Hegel because it is the creation of its own internal difference. Because it is internal and self-reflexive this difference is contained in a unity. Things are distinct only insofar as they are distinguished from each other, the principle of determinate negation. In this way unity logically precedes and

272 

J. Chambers

generates difference. This model operates as the master key (cell-form/ concrete universal) for the differentiation of the determinate as such (in the absolute). Each entity is sorted into a place in an absolute logical hierarchy, enjoying a unique status through the medium of specific differences it has with everything else. Its specific place is its difference contained in the higher unity of the absolute logical hierarchy. Spirit has the form of subjectivity, which unfolds in the Logic. The Logic is an identity of thought and reality in the sense that it is the record of the self-­ consciousness of Spirit when humans recognize themselves in their construction of society and nature as the object of their collective thoughts. The concrete universal is thus no more than a principle of unity, (as Smith claims), of relations between particulars and at the same time the act of their differentiation. Broadly speaking every third step in the dialectical movement is equivalent to the Notion and the concrete universal. Through differentiation we have the determinate being which overcomes the collapse of Being and Nothing into each other. In this way the conclusion of the Notion is contained in the category of Becoming in the first part of the Logic—Being. This is why Hegel feels entitled to append a remark containing a definition of idealism here. Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s version of the concrete universal focuses upon the two idealist aspects of its character: its development through the negation of the negation; and its complete, single and bounded concept as a self-identical whole. The negation of the negation is the logical act of uniting different particulars in the concrete universal. Negation has to be determinate to be meaningful. Individuals enjoy determinacy through negating everything else. Things are unique 1 their specific combinations of universal properties, having properties others lack. This differentiation is the first negation, determinate negation. The second negation is the realization of the significance of the first negation: ‘What is therefore present is the same negation of negation in each. But this is in itself self-relation affirmation, but as return to itself, that is through the mediation which the negation of negation is. (SL:146/W5:160–161). To be unique each entity depends upon this relationship of mutual negation with other entities. This mediation of difference constitutes the finite as separate things within one unity. Separation is relative not absolute  – but relative to an absolute

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

273

system. Any two different things share one relationship as not-other. Thus the more determinate something is, the more it is related to its other in negations. The ‘turning point’ (Fulda 1978, 144) of Hegel’s dialectics is the point where the determination reaches such a high degree that precisely in their separations things must be considered to be parts of a unity. The way in which Alison Stone (mentioned in the chapter on Hegel’s Idealism) articulates the Spirit’s journey to self-knowledge through positing the Being of nature to enter a unity in difference is Hegel’s concrete universal as a process. As the absolute mediation of difference the concrete universal is a bounded, single whole, unrelated to anything outside itself. In the negation of the negation the meaning of the first negation is shown to be its one-sidedness. Difference is thus “in-itself ”. Hegel confirms the definition, stating it “is in its Notion.” (SL:121/W5:130) Chap. 1 has already discussed at length the ways in which the in-itself relation is characterized as ideal. Hegel confirms the definition there, stressing that it is ‘in its concept’ and only ‘pertains to our reflection’. It is no more than a logical construct in thought. All of this comes to a more complete way of saying, as has been argued throughout this book, that Hegel says the finite is ideal. Particular things end up negating themselves as separate. The completed concrete universal is one concept of simple self-­identity; unmediated, because it is mediation, by anything outside of itself: “the positive, the identical, the universal” (SL:836/W6:564). This contradicts the concrete universal’s definition as a differentiated unity. This contradiction that comes with completion is what drives a new three step round of negations. The concrete universal collapses into a new simple self-­ identity for its next negation. This is why the concrete universal describes the mechanism of dialectical progress. “We have shown that the determinateness which was a result is itself by value of the form of simplicity into which it has withdrawn, a fresh beginning” (SL:840/W6:569). The negation of the negation is the third step at the same time as being the formation of a new first step on a higher level. But the concrete universal is the name for the whole process, equally and completely present in all three steps. It is thus imminent and external to the process as its name. Despite the diversity it contains the concrete universal is one single self-identical concept. Through this it is a mediated immediate, so it is

274 

J. Chambers

the absolute. Marx calls a mediated immediate a fetish, something which appears to be independent and unconditioned but is in fact constituted by its relations with others. Hegel considers the absolute to be no more than the concrete totality of all earlier moments, but it is precisely the act of assigning this label that is supposed to unify them. It is defined abstractly. Adorno notes an inconsistency in this “subject-object dialectic, which involves no abstract higherlevel concept, itself constitutes the whole and yet is realized in turn as the life of absolute spirit.” A similar accusation has been made by Hegel scholar Günther Maluschke who argues that there is a separation between the supposedly internal dialectical dynamics of each concept moving itself to higher concepts whilst the whole process in the Logic is characterized as the movement of absolute spirit in general is taken to be the “self-moving soul” (SL:56/W5:52)—it is a contradiction between finite and infinite concepts where the infinite is imposed externally through the label of the absolute (1984, 204). If the concrete universal has no reality outside of the flow of the concrete entities in question, that is, if the totality is our external conception, then materialism says all of the dialectical content must be empirically given and this external conception belongs to thought independently of the object. Adorno lambasts the “perversion of universality which involves the idea of the whole as opposed to the particular, while simultaneously converting the whole into a particular” (2006, 45). Charlotte Baumann sums up: “Because the unity is one closed, ‘self-identical whole’, one specific, simple concept, this unity must necessarily be abstract against the particulars it is supposed to contain’ (2011, 85). “What tolerates nothing that is not like itself thwarts the reconcilement for which it mistakes itself. The violence of equality-mongering reproduces the contradiction it eliminates.” (2004, 143). Hegel’s concrete universal is based upon a disinterest in the “transitory and insignificant” (2004, 8) non-conceptual of the particular, the contingency of the finite is made to be necessarily trivial. Hegel does not deny its existence (appearances exist in some sense) but calls it “untrue” (PR §32:49/W7:87). Adorno’s criticism runs deeper. Hegel’s concrete universal is abstract in both its conception of the whole and the particular. While the whole is thought of as a self-identical mediated immediacy, Hegel’s refutation of

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

275

Being and Nothing proved that concepts require the negation of something outside themselves to have meaning. Hegel denies any particular concept can completely grasp its object because they all implicate each other whilst claiming the Logic is identical with the absolute idea, which is reality. Hegel’s defense is that the absolute idea contains the necessary divisions within itself, but it remains a particular idea. Adorno calls it the “attempt to make good this difference, to produce that identity between thought and thing, between subject and object, which is bankrupted by every individual concept, precisely through the totality of the developed system as a whole” (2019, 39). “Following Hegel’s own argument, such an entity which is not mediated by an other, another concept or object, is abstract: it is totally indeterminate and empty, something you can arbitrarily attribute properties to—and as such certainly different from the many particular determinations and specific entities it is supposed to contain” (Baumann 2011, 85). Smith’s objection to this criticism is implied in his remark that ‘on the ultimate level, that of the Notion, it is stressed that the universal, the whole, the essence, the infinite, cannot be thought coherently on its own apart from the particular, the part, the appearances, the finite any more than the reverse can be done’ (1993, 83). Smith here reduces the finite to what can be ‘thought coherently’. The assumption that what exists is limited to what can be thought coherently is the idealist thesis. A materialist recognizes the non-conceptual in the finite. The idealist only recognizes what can be grasped by concepts and dismisses everything else. Adorno agrees that “the particular itself is unthinkable without the moment of the universal which differentiates the particular…yet this does not submerge the moment of something particular, something opaque (2004, 328). The brief critique of the concrete universal above has argued the Notion is a mediated immediacy in which the parts are necessarily in-­ itself, ideal because partial thoughts. Subjectivity is one of the in-itself moments as well as containing the other moment in its concept. This containing actually excludes the other moment. Smith correctly notes Hegel was keen to evade the label of monism. Hegel’s writings are replete with denials of reducing the finite to moments of the infinite, subsuming the object in the concept. Indeed the concrete universal is intended to develop a conception of the whole/the infinite

276 

J. Chambers

which contains and constitutes particulars/the finite without cancelling them out. This does not mean Hegel’s concrete universal actually succeeds. It is important to distinguish the way in which Hegel liked to present his theory from its actual implications. Adorno’s materialist critique of Hegel’s idealist concrete universal is an instance of immanent critique. It is dialectical assertion of the ontological sovereignty of the finite. It is a materialist version of the ontological integrity of the finite thesis free from Colletti’s implausible Kantian inferences. If there is textual evidence supporting two possible readings of Hegel, the conclusion has to be that Hegel was muddled, not on this or that point, but systematically muddled. Marx himself saw this; and he expressed it by talking of a kernel and a shell. (Arthur 2003, 198)

Marx’s Aufhebung of the Idealism of Hegel’s Concrete Universal Smith says that “within Marx’s philosophical framework the individual has exactly the same ontological status as in Hegel” (1993, 84). He says this because he finds parallels between Hegel’s supposed concrete universal and Marx’s concrete universal in the circuit of capital. He also finds parallels between Hegel’s political ideal of the state and Marx’s communism. These parallels do exist. But Smith’s parallels miss the point of Marx’s employment of the concrete universal of capital, which is based upon the idea that the concrete universal has no absolute status and no reality outside of its application in particular objects. Marx’s study of capital is a refutation of the idealist reconciliation of the negation of negation. Capital is only relatively a concrete universal within a mode of production that is abstract, unnatural and false. This realization is arrived at via the negation of the negation of Hegel’s idealism. In Adorno’s criticism the metaphysical tyranny of the concept directly flows into Hegel’s hypostatization of the state. It is the system that forced Hegel, against certain libertarian inclinations, to exalt the state as an idea above and outside of the individual just as he did the movement of Spirit in his theory of history. Smith notes Hegel ‘granted an explanatory

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

277

primacy in history to systems of ideas’ (88). Yet Smith does not see any ontological reasons for this. This is the wrong way of looking at the issue. The onus is on Smith to explain how this practice could even be possible for an explanatory program that was not self-consciously an ontological idealist enterprise; and how this methodological bias could be denied without any ontological implications. Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s theory of the state is derived from Schelling’s earlier criticism that Hegel hypostatized the concept and Feuerbach’s adaption of that criticism to theology. Adorno directs these arguments to the concrete universal itself.12 In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx’s first extended engagement with Hegel, Marx arrived at his social ontology and took the first steps for his later idea of alienation and exploitation through subjecting Hegel’s procedure in the Theory of History to Immanent Critique. The immanent critique dialectically reverses Hegel’s hypostatization in a way that shows the truth of this hypostatization in society. Hegel’s social ontology has it that the people are an attribute of the abstraction of the state (interpreted as the Idea of reconciliation), which somehow preexists and overarches the people. Now, Hegel would not put it in these terms for, he insists that, as a concrete universal the state can exist only in and through its instantiation in the people. Nevertheless, while it is dependent upon all of its members, it is independent of any of them and it hierarchically orders them all. As it performs the role of the infinite in history it has primacy. Through this it exercises a disembodied power over them, as already referred to in the previous chapter and the earlier references to the state in the Philosophy of Right. Marx rejects this as embodying a double hypostatization. First the state is accorded independence over its people, then it is accorded dominance. Marx performs a negation of Hegel’s stance, the people are brought in to explain the abstraction of the state, the state is an attribute of the people and no more than the result of their actions. Then Marx performs a negation of this negation (sublation) by reconciling these two opposites and showing the truth of Hegel’s original position. This reconciliation does not take the form of harmonious symbiosis, as it does in Hegel, but antagonistic oppression. The truth of Hegel’s original position is that even though the state is derived from and abstracted from the people and does not enjoy any independent existence, in effect it does overarch the people through

278 

J. Chambers

the ideological role it plays as a mask of the contradictions inherent in society. The real content of society, people and their actions, is appropriated and subverted by the form of society, the state, for the state’s own purposes against the former. Andy Denis (2011) has used the biological phenomenon of parasitism as an analogy for the real-life hypostatization Marx is talking about that happens off the page of Hegel’s writings and in society at large. With parasitism the host organism’s acts are re/misdirected to achieve the opposed purposes of the parasite. The way in which the state perverts and exploits the actions of its citizens for its own ends is Marx’s take on ‘Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’. Hegel’s hypostatization of the state (as a placeholder for Spirit) is a reflection of a hypostatization that happens in society, in the ideal, of which Marx would later say: “With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”(C-MECW35:19/MEW23:27)13 Marx recognizes the existence of bourgeois justice but denies it validity because it is part of the superstructure of a parasite that pursues interests running against those of the human race. This same pattern of critique via double hypostatization, which Colletti’s interpretation explores, was later employed by Marx in his critique of capital.14 This is straightforward in the case of commodity fetishism where Marx directly compares the hypostatization of the commodity to the hypostatization of religion.15 The sum of the laborers’ work is the commodity, a concretization of labor. In the first hypostatization of fetishism it is separated from its creators and its process of creation. In the second, its realization is turned into the rationale of labor, the measurement of the value of the workers’ toil, which they must maximize. Religion involves imbuing imaginary entities with reality and dominance over worshippers but the commodity is a tangible object, which is accorded a separate measurable identity. “[T]he process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him” (C-MECW35:92/MEW23:95). The pattern of double hypostatization goes the level of capital itself, the core of the mode of production. Since ‘the labourers are isolated persons’, Marx writes cooperation between them…

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

279

begins only with the labour process, but they have then ceased to belong to themselves. On entering that process, they become incorporated with capital. As cooperators, as members of a working organism, they are but special modes of existence of capital. (C-MECW35:338/MEW23:352)

Capital/surplus value is a social meaning attached to surplus labor. It is an idealization of labour, something workers do. Yet the workers become appendages of capital and their survival and prosperity, insofar as any is accrued from the production process at all, must be siphoned off as the smallest and most expendable by-product of a process that has the accumulation of capital as its purpose. Rather than capital being conceived as a measurement of surplus labor, labour (in the sense of maintaining the labor power of the worker) is conceived of as a surplus of capital. Insofar as capital tyrannizes the workers by compelling them to pursue its accumulation at their expense it is a ‘live monster’ (C-MECW35:205/ MEW23:209), a parasite (Denis, 2011) that sucks up the spoils of labor.16 Capital is ontologically not a concrete universal in Hegel’s sense because it is open. It is in an important sense abstract. The laborers who reproduce it are only contained in it in their alienated economic lives but insofar as they are alienated they are excluded from the system and persist, suffering outside of it, in the sense that they cannot be themselves inside it, but rather must externalize themselves must make themselves into something they are not; robots. They work in order to live, in the hopes of some time outside of the production process. Capital operates as a concrete universal in effect through the perverse idealism of capitalist ideology. It is a concrete universal in ideology, therein lies its oppression. Smith is of course mindful of the fact that for Marx capital stands against the true subjects of history as reified and abstract (1993, 86). He does not see this as overturning Hegel’s system. Smith might argue that far from being an aufhebung Marx has merely returned to Hegel’s own criticism of tyranny as analogous to the stage of essence. But this objection misses the point that Marx actually explains capital and explains society with capital via the concrete universal and via treating capital itself as a reified concrete universal. It would have only one-sided explanatory power if it merely corresponded to Essence. Marx’s explanation of capital most

280 

J. Chambers

corresponds to the volume on essence in Hegel’s logic because the volume on essence concerns the movement from abstract to concrete, the means by which the categories are derived and thus the means of the progressive presentation of capital. Nevertheless, capital is still treated as Notion once the analysis is completed and it emerges as a self-causing entity. So, Marx has actually produced an aufhebung of Hegel’s Notion! It further misses the materialism implicit in the whole enterprise of studying capitalism through the concrete universal in the first place. Because of capital’s concrete universal status in the relations of production it is the basis of society and thus explains society in a materialist way. It serves as a ground for explaining modern history in the materialist theory of history (Meaney 2002, 173–4). The mode of production is not merely one system inside the absolute system but the essence of the species 17 in an open system. It employs the concrete universal to explain one particular system (the mode of production), which is bound up with explaining the human essence with materialism in a system, which is open at every level. This implicitly asserts this particular system is not identified with the absolute. Indeed, it denies the absolute. This is an ontological thesis. Obviously, Hegel could not acknowledge the significance of transposing his concrete universal onto the mode of production in this way. The way Marx explains communism, as an ontologically true concrete universal activated through the praxis of free labor, is the materialist contrast to Hegel’s contemplative reconciliation between the idea of the state and the exploited individual. Far from exactly corresponding to the structure of Hegel’s concrete universal Marx’s concrete universal corresponds to Adorno’s materialist critique of Hegel because it is self-consciously open. The realm of ideology, the pseudo-concrete, enjoys a qualified reality, it is not purely imaginary and ontological reality is refracted through it. Labor power is a measurable quantitative reflection of the productive capacity of society and its class struggle, it is thereby commensurate with the quantum of value and the self-valorization process of capital. Labor power, unlike concrete labor, is the indeterminate capacity for production of the value appropriated by capital. Capital mixes the infinity of value of the power of money with the infinite, because general, power of labor-power it realizes. Capital depends upon the labor-power it degrades but that labor-power is simultaneously reproduced in its commensurate form through the valorization

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

281

process (otherwise the workers could not be induced to participate in the first place) (G-MECW28:223/MEW42:218). This process is objectively real, not merely intersubjectively real, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s theory of real abstraction would have it. It is rather more like the real abstraction of the social form of Chris Arthur. The workers’ severance from their means of production is real and is what posits them as exchangeable with value and the infinite potential of valorization. So ideology is interpreted as a mask of a real system (the mode of production), and this mask is itself a system. Far from dispensing with Hegel’s dialectic Marx renders it more profound.

Notes 1. Smith’s plea for a nonontological reading of Marx’s materialism has much company. A noteworthy example comes from Charles Mills classic essay “Is it Immaterial that there’s a ‘material’ in historical materialism” (1989). Mills, like most, takes Marx’s materialism to concern a hypothesis in social theory (not ontology more broadly considered). Here, Smith’s arguments are taken as a good architype for a general trend; the debate he has with Colletti gets to the heart of the ontological thesis of the materialist reading of Marx this book is making. 2. In a stimulating article on the topic W. C. Wolf ’s observes important distinctions Hegel draws between representations and concepts such that consciousness is possible through representations without concepts. However, he overlooks the import of Hegel’s distinction between representations and concepts: “What are also called concepts, and, to be sure, determinate concepts, e.g. human being, house, animal, and so forth, are simple determinations and abstract representations [Vorstellungen], –abstractions that, taking only the moment of universality from the concept, … are thus not developed in themselves and accordingly abstract precisely from the concept” (EL: 314-15/242, § 164R). The difference between them is one of internal development from representations to concepts. Crucially this development, which representations lack and through which concepts come to be, is internal to the representations and is not brought about by anything from the outside. Wolf acknowledges this (2019, 407) but he does not see any exegetical or philosophi-

282 

J. Chambers

cal value in characterizing representations as essentially concepts on this basis. When Hegel observes that representations are “not developed in themselves and accordingly abstract precisely from the concept” Hegel is pointing out that the difference between representations and concepts is the difference between immaturity and maturity respectively. Representations can only be said to exist for Hegel in a derivative sense, derived from the complete concept. Representations contain the universal element of concepts but lack the scientific combination of concepts. Representations are rudimentary concepts. It is therefore only correct to say that a concept is not present when a representation alone is present with a significant caveat. Representations are inherently implicated in appearances and therefore there is another important sense in which Hegel can be said to deny the reality of representations. 3. Kant stopped halfway through in that he took appearance in a merely subjective sense, fixating abstract essence outside of it as a thing in itself, inaccessible to our cognition. to be only an appearance is the proper nature of the immediately objective world itself, and by knowing it to be such we also cognize its essence which does not lie behind or beyond appearance, but manifests itself as essence precisely by deflating it [the objective world] to mere appearance. (Enc.I§131A:200/W8:263) 4. Therefore, what something is, that it is entirely in its externality; its externality is its totality and equally so its unity reflected into itself. Its appearance is not only reflection-into-other but immanent reflection, and its externality is therefore the expression of what it is in itself; and since its content and its form are thus absolutely identical, it is, in and for itself, nothing but this: to express itself. It is the revealing of its essence, and this essence, accordingly, consists simply in being selfrevealing (SLII:464/WVI:185). 5. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page (and when appropriate volume and/or Zusätze) number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke—Werke in zwanzig Bänden(1969-1971) (W). The abbreviations used are:

SL Science of Logic; Enc Encyclopaedia; LHP Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

283

TPH The Philosophy of History Philosophy of Right. PR 6. Hegel’s use of the word “essence” in the Logic is idiosyncratic (see Blunden 2012, 124) but the difference is not relevant here. 7. Smith’s appreciation of Hegel’s empirical credentials is supposed to convey an incompatibility with ontological idealism. I think this derives from simply not taking the ontological interpretation of Hegel’s idealism seriously. It would be difficult to overestimate Hegel’s knowledge of the history of empirical science up to his times. Hegel’s own scientific speculation, at its best, anticipates current developments in empirical science. The ontological thesis was spearheaded by Frederick Engels, one of the few men of the nineteenth century to boast knowledge in the empirical sciences comparable to Hegel’s in breadth and depth. Engels is deeply interested in Hegel precisely for the contributions his philosophy made to scientific comprehension. So there must be something wrong with Smith’s implied view that identifying Hegel’s problems with scientific method as stemming from an ontological disagreement somehow underplays Hegel’s interest in science. The ontological reading by no means rules out a respect for empirical science; rather, its offers an account of some of the biases in Hegel’s explanations, rendered inexplicable by Smith’s reading. Hegel’s antipathy to nascent evolutionary thinking, for example, is well documented. On the ontological reading of Hegel’s idealism defended here this can be accounted for by reference to the fact that as an explanation evolutionary theory simply leaves too much to chance for the Hegelian system, in which the contingent is contained in the necessary. On Smith’s methodological reading, I fail to see why Hegel should be so vehement in his rejection of the very idea of the mutability of species. 8. Smith makes this same quote without mentioning it is a short section of a longer passage ending with the remark: “our process is this, that the abstract forms [appearances] reveal themselves not as self-subsistent but as untrue” (PR:49/W7:86). 9. “Abstract thinking therefore, is not to be regarded as a mere setting aside of the sensuous material, the reality of which is not thereby impaired; rather is it the sublating and reduction [Reduktion] of that material as mere phenomenal appearance to the essential, which is manifested only in the Notion” (PS:588/W6:259).

284 

J. Chambers

10. A beautiful formula: ‘Not merely an abstract universal, but a universal which comprises in itself the wealth of the particular, the individual, the single’ (all the wealth of the particular and single!)!! Très Bien!’, Lenin, 1961, 99. 11. This outline follows the presentation and translations of Adorno in C. Baumann’s Concrete Universal. 12. Fabian Arzuaga (‘Socially necessary superfluity: Adorno and Marx on the crises of labor and the individual’ 2018) produced an important piece building on Adorno’s work by means of a return to Marx’s critique. In it he constructs another dimension of the inversion thesis of universal social category of capital against the individual subjects of society in a way that also supports the ontological integrity of the finite thesis interpretation of materialism presented here.. 13. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2005), followed by volume number and page number of MarxEngels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations:

TF—Theses on Feuerbach G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy C—Capital Volume 1 14. Marx’s “discussion of subject-predicate inversion in Hegel’s logic, his analysis of estrangement and alienation, and (finally) his critique of commodities and capital can all be seen as the progressive unfolding, as the ever-deepening grasp of a single problematic” (Colletti 1975, 47). 15. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing simply because in it the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between them selves, but between the products of their labour … In order … to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life … So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (C-­MECW35:82-83/MEW23:86).

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

285

16. ‘[T]he fact that the surplus labour is posited as surplus value of capital means that the worker does not appropriate the product of his own labour; that it appears to him as alien property; inversely, that alien labour appears as the property of capital … labour is a totality – a combination of labourers – whose individual components are alien to one another … The combination of this labour appears just as subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence – having its animating unity elsewhere – as its material unity appears subordinate to the objective unity … of fixed capital, which, as animated monster … is in fact the coordinator, [and] does not relate in any way to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark, as its living isolated accessory … Capital … is the existence of social labour … but this existence as itself existing independently opposite its real moments  – hence itself a particular existence apart from them … [C]apital therefore appears as the predominant subject and owner of alien labour, and its relation is itself [a] … complete … contradiction’ (G-MECW:397-­399/MEW42:382-383). 17. ‘[T]he essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations’ (TF-MECW5:8/MEW3:7).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B.  Ashton. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. In History and Freedom Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2019. Ontology and Dialectics, 1960–61. Cambridge: Polity. Althusser, Louis. 1970. For Marx. Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Vintage Books. Arthur, Christopher J. 2003. Once More on the Homology Thesis: A Response to Smith’s Reply. Historical Materialism 11 (1): 195–198. Arzuaga, Fabian. 2018. Socially Necessary Superfluity: Adorno and Marx on the Crises of Labor and the Individual. Philosophy and Social Criticism 20 (10): 1–25. Baumann, Charlotte. 2011. Adorno, Hegel and the Concrete Universal. Philosophy Social Criticism 37 (1): 73–94.

286 

J. Chambers

Bhaskar, Roy. 2008. Dialectic  – The Pulse of Freedom. London/New York: Routledge. Blunden, Andy. 2012. Concepts a Critical Approach. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Brien, Kevin M. 2006. Marx, Reason and the Art of Freedom. New  York: Prometheus Books. Colletti, Lucio. 1974. A Political and Philosophical Interview. New Left Review 86 no. 1. Denis, Andy. 2011. Organicism in the Early Marx: Marx and Hegel on the State as an Organism. London: University of London. https://doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.2613494. Fulda, Hans Friedrich. 1978. Hegels Dialektik als Begriffsbewegung und Darstellungsweise. In Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.W.F. 1812–16. 2010. The Science of Logic. Ed. and Trans. G. di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1817. 1970. Philosophy of Nature. Vol. 1. Ed. and Trans. M. J. Petry. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. 1830. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, with the Zusätze. Ed. and Trans. T.  F. Geraets, W.  A. Suchting, and H.  S. Harris. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. ———. 1830. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J.  Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books. ———. 1970. Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe. Edited by Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1969–1971. Werke in 20 Bänden, ed. Moldenhauer and Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ———. 1955 Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3. trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. ———. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Trans. S. W. Dyde. Ontario: Batoshe Books. Ilyenkov, Evald V. 2009. The Ideal in Human Activity: A Selection of Essays by Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov. Trans. H.  Campbell Creighton. Ohio: Erythrós Press and Media. Kosik, Karel. 1976. Dialectics of the Concrete. Trans. K. Kovanda with J. Schmidt, and Ed. R.S. Cohen and M. Wartofsky. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1961 Philosophical Notebooks. In Collected Works. Vol. 38. Trans. C.  Dutt, and Ed. S.  Smith. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

8  Social Ontology of Materialism and Idealism 

287

Maluschke, Günther. 1984. Kritik und absolute Methode in Hegels Dialektik. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Marx, K., and F.  Engels. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1956–2017. Marx-Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Meaney, Mark E. 2002. Capital as Organic Unity: The Role of Hegel’ Science of Logic in Marx’s Grundrisse. Dordrecht:Springer Science Business Media. ———. 1955. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 3, 1840–1844. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.  Mills, C.W. 1989. Is it Immaterial that There’s a ‘Material’ in ‘Historical Materialism’? Inquiry 32 (3): 323–342. Ruben, David-Hillel. 1977. Marxism and Materialism. Sussex: Harvester Press. Smith, Tony. 1993. Hegelianism and Marx: A Reply to Lucio Colletti. In Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics, 67–91. New York: State University of New York Press. Wolf, W.C. 2019. The Myth of the Taken: Why Hegel Is Not a Conceptualist. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (3): 399–421. https://doi. org/10.1080/09672559.2019.161.

9 Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu

This chapter briefly sums up Marx’s materialist employment of the concrete universal in Capital to show that it demonstrates a materialist implication of Adorno’s refutation of Hegel’s concrete universal. It does so in a way that allows for elevating Laozi’s category of wu to ontological primacy.

Marx’s Materialist Concrete Universal The explanation here closely follows Kenneth Brien’s (2007) critical exploration of the concrete universal. It departs from Brien’s interpretation to attend to the relevant ontological implication. Brien’s interpretation of Marx’s dialectical-empirical method upholds the concrete universal and internal relations as fundamental canons of interpretation. Brien’s interpretation combines internal relations with the concept of structure. In Marxology these two are most strongly associated with Bertell Ollman and Louis Althusser respectively. There exists a tension between them which Brien does not discuss but which the following account will attempt to resolve. Brien’s combination does not address the extent to which the addition of structure modifies the ontology of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_9

289

290 

J. Chambers

internal relations. The relativity of structure in abstraction with internal relations is the materialist solution to the failure of idealist internal relations in Hegel’s concrete universal.

 he Problem of Idealist/Absolute T Internal Relations The philosophy of internal relations has been implicit throughout all of the discussion of the organic nature of dialectics in the concrete universal. The doctrine of internal relations posits an interdependence and interpenetration of all of the diverse elements to the extent that none of the elements have meaning or reality independent of each other in the whole. Despite the fact that Hegel’s concrete universal as a whole itself has pretentions to be no more than the unified organisation of the internal elements, it unites all of its individual elements logically and causally. On the interpretation of Hegel presented in this book these two are identical on the ontological level. In this way he reifies the whole as absolute. We can talk of the internal relations of a concrete universal of any organism, any whole/part ratio system as complete in itself. Yet because all of these concrete universals abide by a logical and ontological unity in one they are incomplete and logically collapse into the absolute; The concrete universal that contains all the others within itself. This is a beautiful trap. Hegel does talk of heaps and loose collections, of external as well as internal relations, but again these fall under the category of the finite which is contained in the infinite. Those apparently random elements belong to other wholes, which collapse into the absolute. Once logic rules there is no escape for matter. To simply transpose this model onto Marx as Ollman does is thus an ontological error.1 Ollman, produces an extremist version of internal relations. This is an erroneous but inevitable implication of internal relations taken too far. Ollman’s version of internal relations does not get to grips with Marx’s concrete universal because his one-sided version of the philosophy of internal relations is idealist. Brien’s account of the concrete universal implicitly refutes Ollman’s absolute internal relations. Ollman

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

291

has not engaged with the materialist refutation of Hegel’s concrete universal. Hegel’s concrete universal is open in the sense that within its logical movement each third step moves, spiral-like, to a higher version. However, his concrete universal is closed in the sense that Hegel abstracts a single concept from the recurring logical movement, which stands outside it, bounding a ‘bad infinite’ inside a ‘good infinite’. Individuation of the diverse elements contained in the unity is only possible through the mediation of the order of the reified unity. The materialist refutation of Hegel’s concrete universal targets its claim to absolute completion. Ollman seems to argue, then, that there are not really any asymmetric relations between things, but that we look at things ‘as if ’ there were such asymmetrics in order to aid our comprehension. But then we want to know if we could have just as well comprehended things from the contrary asymmetric perspective. Could we just as well have studied production so that it appeared ultimately determined by consumption and distribution? Is it just arbitrary that Marx considered the being-determining-thought relation torn loose from the general interconnection of things, so that he might just as well have chosen to consider the thought-determining-being relation as the ultimately decisive one? Of course these choices are not for Marx arbitrary. (Ruben 1977, 123)

Hegel’s internal relations do not fall into this trap of explanatory regress because Hegel appeals to the fact that he knows the whole, conditioning its internal movements and he knows wholes as microcosms of the absolute. This is not an option for materialists who cannot pretend to know the whole in an absolute sense. Ollman’s own solution to the problem of individuation is a kind of subjective idealism. He claims the whole is revealed in certain standard parts (in which some thinkers have sought to re-establish the relations of the whole), because these are the parts in which human beings through conceptualization have actually fragmented the whole. The theoretical problem of individuation is successfully resolved by people in their daily practice. The fact that they do not see what they are doing as individuating parts from an interconnected whole is, of course, another question …. (Ollman 1971, 40)

292 

J. Chambers

On this account reality does not individuate itself but rather this depends upon human activity. Humans have ‘fragmented the whole’. This is an incoherent ontology in that it depends upon a division, the division between humans and the monist whole they are cutting up first, for any division to be possible in the first place. The concrete real is one and then we come along from nowhere and cut it up. There are lots of popular variants of idealism that attempt to forestall this incoherence by way of the absurd denial of the idea of a pre-discursive reality, the void that never was.2 These idealisms make the world into a blank screen onto which we project our fancies that then get backdated to prehistory. Matter’s metaphysical role is reduced to its relative recalcitrance to the attempts to capture it in human discourse. Ollmen’s ontology does not get far enough to notice this incoherence and falls right into it without noticing its idealist connotations. Marx saw the perversity of the kind of truth of these illusions in the world of ideology. Marx denies it in his insistence in the Critique of the Gotha Program that labour is not the sole source of wealth but shares that title with nature (CGP-MECW24:84/MEW19:18).3 As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter the distortions of ideology presuppose the idea that appearance both conceals and reveals essence in Hegel and Marx. In a basic sense, the world appears a certain way because it is a certain way. Humans are able to individuate certain structures in their everyday lives because the world is structured and differentiated independently of humans, and structures humans themselves. Ideology is a distorted reflection but a reflection all the same. Marx’s employment of internal relations does not establish the all is one platitude of the concrete-real as an undifferentiated whole in which everything is identical with everything else. The internal relations of a certain domain of the world, capitalism, are instead shown to be very determinate. Capitalism is internally and externally differentiated. Chapter 3 has explained the materialist theory of history is the critique of the idealist dogma that the development of determinate phases of history is the mere result of the creative power of the concept. The materialist theory of history is the argument that determinate modes of production develop through the struggles of a suffering finite animal—humanity. Humanity is conditioned by natural, determinate, prediscursive, necessities

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

293

predating its control and cognition, still lived non-discursively. Earlier chapters have tried to show that humanity is still free to enjoy a profound non-discursive aspect of cognition in a materialist ontology. This chapter will close with a presentation of a non-discursive metaphysics in wu. In Marx individuation is necessary because of the relativity of structures/wholes, the relative openness of wholes, relatively asymmetric relations contained in an infinite open scale of abstract to concrete moving towards relatively increasing layers of contingency. This process never ends in the concrete real. This is reflected in the infinite process of approximation of the concrete-real in the concrete-in-thought (in dialectics). The implication is that the finite always escapes the infinite (parts are always more than wholes) and indeed this escape constitutes the finite.4 Laozi’s absence (“wu”) is pervasive at every level of abstraction and embracing the absolute as a failed whole. There both is and is not an “absolute”/world. It is a world of absence. The escape of the finite arising from the openness of the concrete real by no means compromises the identity of the whole in materialist dialectics. As Lenin observed with his glass tumbler, objects have basic, principled and determinate influences upon the external—their significance (1975, 100), which is commensurate with the vocabulary of essential properties. The difference between Hegel’s idealist concrete universal and Marx’s materialist one is manifest in their respective political economics. “For Hegel, economy is only one of the many manifestations of the ‘concrete spirit’, that is, an abstract manifestation of some higher nature of man” (Ilyenkov 2008, 153). Whereas for Marx openness characterizes political economy in its relative independence from other forms of social activity. “For Marx, the sphere of economic interaction of men is a fully concrete sphere of social life with its own specific immanent laws of motion. In other words, it appears to be relatively independent of all other forms of social activity of men and precisely for this reason constitutes the subject-­ matter of a special science” (Ilyenkov 2008, 155). Hegel’s idealist dialectics forces him to surrender the finite/quality of production to the infinite/ quantity of the commodity, whereas Marx’s dialectics recognizes the limits of the commodity in its materialist recognition of the ontological

294 

J. Chambers

sovereignty of the finite/quality, translated into his political economy as use-value. In Marx the finite cannot be completely absorbed by the infinite, but is rather held under the infinite in an antagonistic union. In the political economics of Marx and Hegel the finite corresponds to quality/use-value and the infinite to abstract utility/exchange-value. For Hegel, in the capitalist mode of production, the infinite—quantity/want—completely expresses the meaning the finite—quality/use value—For Marx in the capitalist mode of production the finite—quality/use value—cannot be completely absorbed by the infinite, but nor can it pretend to have an independent existence, it is rather held under the infinite—quantity/ exchange value—in an antagonistic union. Hegel’s one-sided resolution of the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value where the concrete use-values are reduced to abstract exchange-value directly corresponds to his idealism. Marx’s insistence on the antagonism of the union of quantity and quality where quality retains its identity whilst repressed corresponds to the materialist claim of the ontological integrity of the finite.5 Marx’s materialism enables him to identify the relationship between use-value and exchange-value as one of antagonistic sublation (aufheben). The equalization problem6 refers to the question: how can a commodity have an “equivalent form” according to which it can be “directly exchangeable with other commodities” (C1-MECW35:65/MEW23:70)? Every commodity is different, yet all have prices. How can such heterogeneous things as haircuts and hamburgers be made exchangeable with one another? This question asks how an individual entity/process, specific to itself and user, a finite thing’s quality, can be interpolated by a universal, infinite, quantitative market relationship. Any commodity can be made the equivalent of any other through trade; a relationship of infinite exchange inheres in a unique, finite entity. To cite the fact that one kind of object, say gold, acts as a universal equivalent i.e. currency, or to substitute other objects through reciting a catalogue of prices and exchange rates between them “already propounds the riddle of the equivalent form for our solution” (C1-MECW35: 68/MEW23:72). In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right pure “free will” (PR54/W7, 98)7 is negated by pure externality. The synthesis or the negation of negation/

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

295

sublation (aufheben) is property; free will externalized in the material world (PR57/W7, 106). Just as with Hegel’s negation of pure infinite and pure finite, purely subjective free will and pure externality are limited in themselves, attaining sufficiency in a higher generality (property) completely absorbing them. Through sublation they turn into mere moments of the universal. In Hegel the particular nature of the object and the particular human needs attendant to it are not relevant to the assignation of property or this dialectic’s significance for political economy. What is important is the role they play in the development of Spirit. Property is assigned by an individual claiming it alone. Yet its existence depends upon another free will’s recognition. Fortunately, the other has a corresponding need for property. So, each mutually ‘unown’ their properties, the negation. To ‘unown’ property one gives it up to gain ownership of another’s property (PR61/W7:114) (first negation). Reciprocal recognition of the will of the other in contracts of exchange realizes the free will of both parties (negation of the negation). Contracts express common will sublating the trade partners’ individual wills. In exchange concrete use of the commodity and abstract need for recognition are overcome in abstract utility. Hegel calls this “want”. ‘Want’ is an expression of subjectivity corresponding to the neoclassical economics idea of utility, more accurately termed abstract utility as it is not specific to each concrete commodity but the utility of homo economicus. Price ratios are determined by the ratio of abstract utilities derivable from consumption of commodities. The value is thus equated with abstract utility and amounts to one’s socially mediated subjective evaluation. “[Q]uality here becomes quantity … [want] in its progress starts from the special quality of an object, passes through indifference with regard to the quality, and finally reaches quantity” (PR70/W7:137). In this idealist synthesis there “is no residual of the specificity or concreteness of the commodity as quality (use-value to Marx) is totally subsumed in quantity (abstract utility)” (Basu 2018, 524).8 For Hegel this is a success, for truth is to be found in the human ability to use conceptual abstraction to identify the universal infinite underlying finite things. By seeing in every commodity an equivalent relationship with everything else, humans

296 

J. Chambers

mutually recognize each other as the bearers of universal rights in a shared community. Marx analyses the commodity as the conjunction of use-value and exchange-value. Use-value expresses the benefit derived from the particular use of the commodity. Use-value is “an absolutely specific relationship” (Pomeroy 2004, 95). conditioned by the commodity’s physical properties (C1-MECW35:46/MEW23:50) and the requirements of the person/s using it. Use-value corresponds to the finite. In all modes of production excluding capitalism products are distributed as use-values. Exchange-value expresses a ratio of equivalence, e.g. ‘one of these equals three of those’. It is unrelated to the commodity’s individual qualities. It just measures a catalogue of quantities of other commodities for which the commodity can be swapped. Marx indicates that exchange-value implies relations of production where commodities are systematically produced only to the end of being exchanged for other different commodities. These market-based relations require the labour power embodied in the commodities to also be exchangeable and thus also be seen as a fungible, infinite human capacity. “The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production” (C1-MECW35:93/MEW23:97). Quantitative equalization of different qualities is achieved through prices. Prices, however inadequately, express something else commodities all have in common. All commodities have use-values and all commodities are products of labour. Yet “As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value.” Prices are therefore derived from the labor expended in their production. In rejecting “the useful qualities of the products themselves”, use-value as a possible determinant of distribution, “we put out of sight9 both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract” (CI-MECW35:48/MEW23:52). In commodity exchange: “The twofold social character of the labour of the individual [qualitatively different as social labour and quantitatively the same as private labour] appears to

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

297

him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products” (CI-MECW35:84/MEW23:88). Marx’s value of commodities is determined by putting “out of sight … the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them” (CI-MECW35:48/MEW23:52) even after the qualitative and quantitative labor are put together in commodities. This opposes Hegel’s synthesis: “Value is the true essence or substance of the object, and the object by possessing value becomes an object for consciousness… Quality here becomes quantity” (PR70/W7:137). For Hegel Quality is completely subsumed by quantity—use-value by abstract utility. While for Marx capitalism’s solution of the equivalence problem is to set aside and ignore the unique characteristics and specific relations, the quality, a thing has to the person/s using it, for Hegel the solution is to make the (finite) quality turn into the (infinite) quantity through a universal convention’s agreed estimation of the entity’s social utility. Marx insists upon the opposite: The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniencies of human life.” (John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest”…) In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion”. (C1-MECW35:46/MEW23:50)

Use value is the “actual thing.” As with the materialist critique of idealism it is “truly an existent,” exchange value as an abstraction is its “reflexion”. Marx’s argument is not that the infinite ‘reflexion’ is a mere illusion, without some system of exchange there can be no economy. Exchange value and abstract labor are embodied in the social form: The fact that the particular kind of labour is irrelevant corresponds to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one kind of labour to another, the particular kind of labour being accidental to them and therefore indifferent. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become

298 

J. Chambers

here a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased as a determination to be tied with the individuals in any particularity. This state of affairs is most pronounced in the most modern form of bourgeois society, the United States. It is only there that the abstract category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern [political] economy, is first seen to be true in practice. (G-MECW28:41/MEW42:39)

Labour assumes the form of labour in general in capitalism but this is only its form in this specific mode of production, it is “not true in practice” in other modes of production. The critique of political economy is that in production the infinite— money—is in an oppressive relationship with the finite—wealth; that is, the roles have been reversed between the real matter of production and its expression in the social form; the producers are subject to the arbitrary whims of the market. Exchange value and abstract labor are in an oppressive relationship with their contraries; concrete labor and use value. Labor, in the guise of abstract labor is subject to exchange value. “The perverseness of measuring wealth by a standard that violates the very nature of wealth—usefulness—reveals the power of bad abstraction over the society that generates it” (Murray 2020, 146). The implication for socialism is that it amounts to the campaign to abolish production augmented by the real abstraction of value accrued from abstract labor, labor tradeable for exchange value. In a socialist society the roles have been reversed and the system of exchange is under collective rational control of the producers in the production process itself. This is not merely a question of socialized distribution but production between producers who interact with each other as humans rather than as sites of the circulation of commodities. Marx mentions the way production for exchange in capitalism is external to creation and only accomplished via the producer’s assumption of two contrary roles in “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” once intended to be part seven of the first volume of Capital: Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silk-

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

299

worm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. (RDPP-MECW34:447)

Marshall Grossman thinks the “metaphor of the silkworm implies that the poet’s creation of a poem is epiphenomenal to his production of himself as poet: the silk threads of the poem are merely the shell cast off by a caterpillar, following the predestined path of its own self-transformation” (1992, 78). I disagree with his view that Marx’s metaphor implies the poem itself is epiphenomenal to the artist’s self-production. Grossman has got the biology wrong. The silkworm’s silk is an essential part of it, which only becomes an external excrescence when the silkworm has developed into something else; a blind, flightless moth. Similarly, the poem only becomes an external excrescence for the poet when the poet develops into something else, namely a “dealer in a commodity”. The poem as an exchange-value is epiphenomenal to the poet’s self-­production, yet as a use-value the poem is the poet. The artwork as use-value is an expression of Milton as a poet whereas the commodity as an exchange-­ value is the expression Milton as an alien and opposed someone else, a merchant, and apparently a bad one. This is why it is important to resist Roberto Finelli’s analyses of the increasing penetration of exchange-value/abstract labor into use-value/ concrete labor in capitalism as not constituting an irresolvable contradiction but rather an “emptying-out of the concrete” (2007, 68), of the latter by the former. Despite the brilliance of his analysis of the superficiality of the postmodern condition, Finelli’s interpretation essentially abandons the site of the struggle for socialism to capitalism. If Capitalism really does completely empty out the concrete in the new social form of simulacrum-­effect of consumption following production in abstractness then there will simply be no concrete agents or experiences left to resist. The total abstraction of the social form must fail because of the ontological reality of the finite things, resisting this subsumption. The bland and

300 

J. Chambers

abstract experience of capitalist consumerism which Finelli identifies cannot exhaust experience; if it did then Finelli would be unable to diagnose it as degrading anything. It must be identified as the superficiality of something else, something which is mutilated on the procrustean bed of bourgeois experience and can assume a nonmutilated form in a different kind of society. The fact that production only exists through its social form does not mean that it is limited to its social form. Labour is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange between humanity and nature, quite independent of the form of society. On the other hand, the labour which posits exchange value is a specific social form of labour. (ACCPE-MECW29:278/MEW13:23). For capitalist value to subsume labour, value must attach itself to the most abstract feature of labour namely a ratio of physical exertion and time with indifference to its useful features. This indifference does not make those particular useful features disappear, it depends upon them; the contradiction of capitalism lies in this indifference. Commodity-producing labor is ‘practically abstract’ labor because it is socially validated as abstract, physiological labor, because it counts only as ‘mere congealed quantities of undifferentiated human labour’. Its specificity as useful labor is a matter of indifference, but indifference is ‘practically abstract’ labor’s social character, not the lack of one, just as being indifferent is a mood, not the absence of one. (Murray 2020, 146)

The subject which is totally emptied out by the exploitation process cannot be said to suffer exploitation. It will later be discussed how Marx’s insistence in Capital that the worker is exploited in capitalism despite the fact that, within the domain of capitalist abstract right, the worker is not harmed in the labor contract. This is because there is more to the worker than abstract right can assimilate. Value is a bad abstraction because abstract labour does not produce anything but abstract labor is the basis of the value abstraction. The following chapters argue that the means of resistance consists in reconnecting with the relations of production and the producers which capitalism has rendered abstract and indifferent. A being which is totally subsumed by the social form could not be imagined to be its victim, to resist it, or to outlast it.

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

301

Marx diagnoses Hegel’s idealist error in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “the rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity—an abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as an independent activity— as sheer activity [Tätigkeit schlechthin]” (EPM-MECW3:343/MEW40:585). This reduction of “concrete activity” to “sheer activity” is homologous to concrete labor being reduced to abstract labour in its crystallization in abstract labor as the substance of value. Hence Marx’s observation that “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man—as man’s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour.” (EPM-MECW3:333/MEW40:574). Marx’s developed economic theory will conceive of intrinsic value, the cause of commodity fetishism, to be an inevitable result of the social practices of real abstraction from the circuit of capital. Because it is a product of social practice, this is why it cannot be done away with simply through theoretical insight. Value is a bad abstraction in that it fails to reflect the features that make goods useful. It is not responsive to social needs. Marx’s critique of capital sees it hypostatized in a way homologous to Hegel’s hypostatization of the state. In this bad abstraction of social practice the concrete vanishes for value, but it does not vanish from the world. The movement of capital is “abstraction in actu”(C2-­MECW36:111/MEW24:109) through which “capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life process of its own” (C1-MECW35:165/MEW23:169). It dominates and orders the individuals of society, despite being a mere product of their collective activity. He explains that “individuals are now ruled by abstractions” (G-MECW28:101/MEW42:97). Value is a social feature of wealth that takes the form of a commodity resulting from the real abstractions of the capitalist mode of wealth production (Murray 2020, 136). It is an abstract form wealth can take but it is not wealth as such, wealth as such does not exist.

302 

J. Chambers

Brien’s List of Theses of Internal Relations Brien’s list of theses of internal relations is logically consistent with the materialist criticism of the pretensions of completion in Hegel’s concrete universal. I reproduce them here in full: 1. If the very being (i.e., the ontological structures) of two entities in the concrete-real is constituted to be what it is by the interconnections that the entities have with one another, we shall say the entities and internally related. 2. If the very being of two entities in the concrete-real is not constituted to be what it is by the interconnections that the entities might have with one another, we shall say that the entities are externally related. 3. Every concrete-real is constituted to be what it is through the internal relations it has with some other entities. 4. The nature of every concrete-real is constituted to be what it is not by some of its internal relations only, but in differing degrees by all of them. 5. Complete knowledge of any concrete-real would require an exhaustive comprehension of the relation of that concrete-real to everything else with which it is internally related directly and indirectly; and since this is not possible, complete knowledge of the concrete-real is not possible. 6. Even so, some knowledge of the structure of the concrete-real is possible to the extent that the infinitely complex internal relations that obtain among concrete-reals establish patterns of concrete differentiation-­in-integration whose broader structures can be grasped in thought (Brien 2007, 16–17). Brien notes his list is different from an idealist list in two main regards: first an idealist list implies that the absolute is intelligible through and through because of an ultimate logos-ontology identity: thesis 5 denies this. The other difference is the introduction of the concept of structure as enabling of the partial understanding of entities as concrete universals. Althusser talks of a “concrete totality” in Marx which involves “the ever pre-givenness of a structured complex unity” (1970, 202). He says that for Marx “the complex whole has the unity of a structure articulated in

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

303

dominance.” When applied to capitalism as a whole for example capital is both one member of the whole system as well as being the whole itself (dominant) in the sense that the whole is entirely geared towards the accumulation of this member. This avoids Ollman’s error of implying an absolute and indeterminate whole. Brien notes that internal relations is implicit in the concept of structure. The concept of dominance in structure recognizes the necessity of asymmetric relations of determination in Marx. This is the denial of the absolute scope of internal relations. The concept of structure relativizes internal relations, avoiding external relations ontology. Arguably Ruben makes this latter one-sided error. By overdetermining the entities within their domain, structures condition their internal relations. Brien notes that all of the structures are also internally related but this must be only relatively so or structures must collapse into each other and everything falls into the absolute—Hegel’s idealism. Some relations within a structure are obviously more internal than others outside of that structure (and belonging to other structures/levels of abstraction). Internal relations are a matter of degree. Structures make them relative. Structures mediate the relations within them and between each other. It is through identifying structures that Marx is able to individuate increasingly concrete levels of abstractions in the concrete-in-thought. The concrete-in-thought does not merely reflect the concrete-real but is constructed so as to reveal the concrete-real’s structure. Brien notes that Ollmen’s failure to recognize the importance of structure in Marx’s method blinds him to the crucial difference between the order of inquiry and the order of presentation, a topic of the Grundrisse. Given his, not entirely consistent, denial of asymmetric relations Ollmen thinks that Marx’s presentation of the logic of capital moving from the most abstract categories to the most concrete is in an important sense arbitrary. It is actually the most important characteristic of Marx’s employment of the concrete universal, an entity, which is itself a movement from abstract to concrete: But not only are there successive stages in the movement from abstract to concrete … it is also necessary to recognize that the conceptual elaboration of each more concrete stage is undertaken within the broader structural

304 

J. Chambers

framework of the more abstract stage. This must be clearly grasped if the full explanatory power of Marx’s method of analysis is to be understood. (Brien 2007, 21)

 he Abstract Universal T and the Concrete Universal The concrete universal arises in thought through the critique of the abstract universal. The abstract universal unites many particulars, but only by eliminating their differences and reducing them to a common denominator. It is a class of a set of objects with one or more attributes in common. These attributes are arbitrary in the sense that any can be added to make this abstract universal as long as they are not incompatible with each other. They do not constitute essential forms of the genus in question but merely ways of grouping things. The abstract universal cannot exist or even be imagined. The abstract universal “the horse” is a range of colors from black/white/brown/gold. There is no such horse. Horses have to be a particular color to exist. The concrete universal by contrast is part of an organic world in the sense that it embodies genealogy and internal relations. The concrete universal denies that a class like a horse, can be intelligible or exist (in Marx these two are separate, the former reflecting the latter in knowledge) without situating it in the habitat from which it emerged and lives and relating it to the myriad creatures with which it shares its world. The concrete universal is a germ of its species, containing particular variations within itself as alternate possibilities. It circumscribes a range of possible forms, some of which are incompatible with each other or even the form of the germ itself. But these forms can be shown to emerge from the development of the germ with dialectical contradictions imminent in it and its environment. So, the concrete universal is itself a movement from abstract to concrete and it always is. Every concrete universal in itself projects a more concrete universal within itself from the range of possibilities it circumscribes in the mechanism of the movement of its internal and external logic: “the “species in thought” is itself a schema which, in principle, can be indefinitely elaborated in more and more concrete ways so as to more and more fully grasp in thought

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

305

the detail of the “species in the concrete real.” However, “species in thought” is not able to specify that detail in an exhaustive way” (2007, 25). Brien does not explain why this is except to say that materialists cannot claim to know the absolute because it is infinitely complex. I argue that in a materialist cosmos the concrete is infinite in the sense that every detail contains more details, whence arises the contingent. If the layers of the concrete real are infinite then the concrete-real is in an important sense indeterminate. Chapter 5 used Laozi’s characterization of the indeterminate as background to be bound up with the primacy of the finite thesis of materialism. Note this as a fundamental materialist ontological characteristic of the concrete universal. For Hegel, the category of concreteness is fully applicable only then and there, when and where we deal with conscious will and its products, only in the sphere of the spirit and its products, its manifestations (Entäusserungen). In Marx’s view, this most important category of is fully applicable everywhere, in any sphere of natural and social being, independently of any spirit whatsoever, and on this basis, to the phenomena of life of the spirit itself, that is, to the development of any sphere of social consciousness, including reasoning, the sphere of logic. (Ilyenkov 2008, 156)

The following two subsections will show how Marx’s employment of the concrete universal in thought applies this ontological idea of the nature of the concrete-real. In the Preface to Capital, Marx writes: “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour—or the value-form of the commodity—is the economic cell form” (C1-MECW35:8/MEW23:12). The cell form—the germ: Here the commodity form operates as the highest level of abstraction, Marx’s start-off concrete universal, of the concrete real in thought for the presentation of that domain of the concrete real under analysis—capitalism.

306 

J. Chambers

The Empirical Derivation of the Categories Marx says: Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done success fully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction. (C1-MECW35:19/MEW23:27) (Emphasis added)

While each concrete universal circumscribes a range of more concrete universals within itself as possibilities it does not select one from them. As mentioned before, in Marx these latter forms are not merely logically derived although the presentation does make them appear that way; rather they are the structures containing the tendencies which empirical data can be interpreted to in fact manifest themselves on lower levels of abstraction. So the method of inquiry consists in identifying structures of internally related tendencies (abstractions) through matching them with raw empirical data. The empirical data is presented to indicate the operation of certain tendencies on certain levels of abstraction. The method of presentation consists in ordering these structures from abstract to concrete. This is done in such a way as to demonstrate how each concrete universal is contained in another higher-level concrete universal. Each concrete universal is logically/empirically nested in a higher concrete universal so they are all unified in one system. The system is open at each level of abstraction. As the presentation of the system becomes more determinate the more concrete universals verify the more abstract concrete universals through manifesting increasing layers of empirical data: “the more concrete elaboration provides the warrant for the more abstract elaboration” (Brien 2007, 26). Because this empirical data indicates the operation of this more concrete universal’s structural tendencies the data is shown in this sense to belong to that structure. Therefore the more abstract universal, which projected its more concrete elaboration as a possibility, is shown to hold with accumulating layers of empirical evidence.

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

307

The concrete universals in the concrete-real, which the concrete universals in the concrete-in-thought refer to, obviously are not verified by any empirical data; rather their operation creates the phenomena that the data records. Brien does not mention this but it follows from what he says that as the concrete universals become progressively more concrete so does the range of possible concrete universals they project become more narrow and precise. Just as in the case of the concrete-in-thought, the structures of the concrete universals on higher levels of abstraction do not select from one of their possible lower order structures in the concrete real either. The lower order structures are only internally derived from the higher order structures in a limited way. This separation between concrete in thought and concrete real does not exist in Hegel. In Marx the presentation shows the structures that are in fact manifested from capitalism’s determinate character. In Hegel categories emerge (or pretend to emerge) from an entirely immanent logic of the dialectical working out of the first abstraction. The implication is that while the presentation of Capital mirrors Hegel’s Logic, the Logic is a closed system and Capital (a concrete-in-thought reconstruction of ) capitalism (a domain of the concrete-real) is an open system. In materialist ontology capitalism is a representative structure in this sense because of the materialist refutation of the idealist error of the closed structure mediating everything. Marx’s critique of capitalism is an ontological criticism of the idealist pretentions of a closed totality. It is applied in the openness of his applications of the concrete universal. In this way he proves the case I argued above that capitalism is limited and open. The discussion will return to this point in the final two sections”.

The Conditional Nature of Tendencies Marx’s Capital demonstrates that capitalism is an open system through the introduction of countervailing tendencies/complicating factors in lower-level concrete universals. Tendencies in lower-level concrete universals complicate the effects of the tendencies projected by the

308 

J. Chambers

higher-­ level concrete universals and can even contradict them. The higher-level concrete universal laws are at first presented in isolation and then the lower-level concrete universal laws are introduced that can offset them. Marx notes in one place a general law which “is modified in its working by many circumstances” (C1-MECW35:638/MEW23:674). An example of such a case in Capital is where the chapter following the chapter on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is on “Counteracting Influences.” This adds in the most general counterbalancing forces to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Brien demonstrates this through analyzing Marx’s account of the conditional tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The initial conditions of the structures of capitalism Marx had been explaining up to that point posit this tendency. Brien distinguishes between vertical and lateral dialectical projections. We have been dealing with the vertical projections hitherto. They concern the projection of a more concrete universal within the more abstract concrete universal. The lateral projections concern certain long-­ term tendencies “laws” within one level of abstraction. Just as each concrete universal does not select the next lower-level concrete universal from within itself in the vertical projection, it does not dictate how the lower-level concrete universals will effect its lateral projections. With the vertical movement more complicating factors are introduced.10 Higher level tendencies can be offset by the lower order tendencies, which can effectively counteract and hide its operation in the empirical data. When complicating factors that counter act a given tendency are introduced into the dialectical movement at a given level of analysis, we would expect the lateral dialectical projection of the whole complex of factors distinguished at that level to be modified thereby. But the degree and kind of modification is methodologically in determinate. It is all contingent on the specific factors that might be involved—both those additional ­complicating factors introduced in the more concrete elaborations of the given tendency, and any counteracting factors that might be introduced. A clear implication of these considerations is that there is no methodological warrant for claims concerning the absolute inevitability of the outcome of a given tendency. (Brien 2007, 29)11

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

309

It is still rhetorically useful to talk of inevitable tendencies in capitalism, most importantly its inevitable demise from within Marxian science. In such cases “inevitable” should be qualified “inevitable as long as certain specified conditions hold and develop, and unless certain other possible conditions obtrude” (2007, 29). The openness of the system of Marx’s concrete universal implies a fundamental indeterminacy about the future. Certainly, overarching historical tendencies operate but they are at the same time mediated by contingencies springing from the actors of history and the conditions of the moment. It is thus impossible to read off the future from an understanding of historical laws, the study of which must be empirically grounded in a practical engagement with the immediate historic present. This is a recurring theme of Mao’s interpretation of historical materialism: “Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level” (Mao 1965, 308).

 he Concrete Universal of Capitalism T and the Concrete Universal of Communism Brien goes on to speculate upon the general contents of Marx’s originally projected seven-volume magnum opus of capital. This project proved to be wildly overambitious; Marx died before completing the first two volumes. It would progress to levels of the concrete eventually concentrating on such so-called superstructure features of ideology. This account would include the introduction of the complicating factors of “spiritual life”. These were possible conditions that obtruded the death of capitalism. The failure of the revolution in that life was a condition that obtruded the overthrow of capitalism. Nevertheless, because of its conditional nature, Marx’s projection of the death of capitalism and the development of communism remains sound. It remains true to the at-root indeterminate, limited and open nature of structures in general and capitalism in particular.

310 

J. Chambers

Marx’s criticism of capitalism is based upon the limited and oppressive way in which it appropriates its world and its members. Its world and its members both fall outside of it in important ways. Humans are alienated from capitalism because there is more to human life than capitalism can assimilate. Capitalism perpetuates itself by restricting and damaging the individuals it tyrannizes to pursuing only the limited and perverse needs that enables it to appropriate them and accumulate. His prediction of capitalism’s demise is based upon his estimation of the open way in which it fosters its own gravediggers, the workers and acts as an incubator for the fundamental relations of communism emerging from within it.12 Similarly capitalism expands through squandering natural resources. It cannot experience nature but only exploit it. Depleting natural resources and polluting its world is feeding an environmental cataclysm that will undo capitalism whether or not the workers respond to the call. Interestingly, capitalism is thus outside of itself just as the workers/nature are both inside and outside of it. Marx’s vision of communism is also limited and open. The workers are internal to capitalism in that they are its beating heart and living muscle. But they are external to capitalism in that their lives ultimately depend upon realizing the potential that capitalism has unleashed—killing capitalism and building something new. The following chapter discusses how the limits and openness of capitalism are antagonistic/parasitic. The limits and openness of communism are harmonious/symbiotic. Where in capitalism the limits of the system are alienating and the openness of the system constitute class struggle, in communism the system responds to its limits by expanding itself to embrace more of the lives of its people because it is open to the constant modification of its people. It is a true concrete universal. Smith appreciates the basic differences between Hegel’s concrete universal of the late Prussian state and Marx’s concrete universal of communism. But he does not see that Marx’s concrete universal turns Hegel’s concrete universal inside out. Marx’s materialist concrete universal is applied in Capital. Marx thus produces a materialist aufhebung of Hegel’s failed idealist concrete universal. It is a positive negation of the negation because it has material/empirical content. Its scientific soundness is a proof of the materialist concrete universal. As it is the scientific use of concepts in a materialist ontology it is the

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

311

best ontological proof of materialism. We see that this way of employing the concept fully unleashes its explanatory power; applying it to its domain of the concrete real with the greatest richness. What can be said about its world? To answer this question, I will turn to Laozi.

Wu Metaphysics and the Concrete Universal Chapter 40 of the Daodejing is concerned with the metaphysics of Wu. Turning back is how the way moves; Weakness is the means the Way employs. The myriad creatures in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing. (Lau 1963, 47)

The way I am reading the ontological/metaphysical idea wrapped up in this chapter is complicated. All of this discussion of Marx’s materialist concrete universal as a refutation of Hegel’s failed idealist concrete universal has been a way of introducing Laozi’s concept of Wu. In Chap. 2 I said that Dao is imminent in the finite but not identical with it, nonconceptual, a mediated immediacy and two mysteries. It is contained in the materialist concrete universal and is its wellspring. The remainder of this chapter presents a description of a materialist metaphysics through Laozi. It is dense but it has been alluded to in the discussion of Marx’s concrete universal. It is a kind of multiverse constituted by the lack of absolute order. Negation is ineliminable so this is logically equivalent to saying; as there is no absolute whole ordering its members the absolute is ordered by absence (line 4). Laozi talks of Dao as the ordering of absence, the worldless world (line 3&4). Structures enjoy a relative identity and autonomy without an absolute order.13 Members of structures (which are themselves structures) have their identities through their membership - that is, they are constituted by internal relations. Yet members of structures are always members of a multiplicity of structures, some of which intersect, and are infinite. “No property of any discernible thing, that is—whether its physical features, agency, or even its speech or thought—entirely precedes or

312 

J. Chambers

remains unchanged by its actions or encounters with other things.” (Gamble, Hanan & Nail) Novelty emerges from the interplay of the structures through members/particulars. Each is characterized by sets of contradictory tendencies including a driving contradiction to both assimilate the external and be assimilated by the external; identity is constituted and cancelled by this contradiction. Regularity is the result of the relative order imposed by the structures and the dominance of certain higher order structures (line 3). The parts are more than the wholes in this sense because no whole has absolute sovereignty over its parts. The finite has veritable being (line 4). It is through the absence of an absolute order that the particular escapes the universal. But then, this is the order. We can enter this order when we perform the act of backgrounding (line 1). Our act of backgrounding is always relative to the structures in which we are consciously effective (and as they accumulate the task becomes harder to synchronize in one act). We essentially extend ourselves into new domains without leaving the earlier domains.14 As structures only enjoy relative dominance over their members they are all open and events, while internal to the totality of structures, are in an important sense external to each structure. The infinity of the totality of structures means that it is open as well and wu stands outside of it. Insofar as a structure is open it yields to the other structures that play the decisive role in determining the foreground of the event (line 2). This yielding is internal to the structures and so is not logically equivalent to the concept of being overpowered. There is only struggle for dominance in effecting outcomes between certain intersecting structures, not all (line 2). This externality is the non-identity of background because it is not accounted for by any structure or number of structures, rather it is accounted for by an infinity of structures, compatible but incommensurate (line 1&4). They are together in the background. Incommensurate interaction is the wu relation. One might argue that in reifying absence, I am abusing semantics. I reply that by reifying absence in this way I can speak of the non-conceptual inside the conceptual. So it is a crucial move. Structures are all discursively mediated. So the lack of absolute order must be non-­discursive. The intersection of structures is incommensurate. Absence is here used to describe the disconnect between the structural vocabularies or lack

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

313

thereof (line 4). Absence does this work, not negation; negation is Hegel’s trick of expanding the empire of the concept in the absolute through determination. This comes to the fore with Hegel’s refutation of the concept of Nothing which assumes that finding the incoherence of the concept establishes the incoherence of its referent. Yet the incoherence of the concept of nothing is no obstacle to using it to refer as “nothing” is thought to go beyond concepts. Indeed the incoherence of its concept should be read as proof of nothing in itself. Indeed the aporia of concepts in dealing with nothing whilst simultaneously needing the concept is the greatest case that can be made for the importance of nothing that Laozi makes. The preceding has tried to develop a concept of nothing that does not fall into transcendentalism because of the imminence of nothing as the absence in all things. This is logic escaping logic, semantics escaping semantics. Materialist dialectical logic is both inside and outside of itself. To be fair to Marx, by no means does the ontological underpinnings of his employment of the concrete universal imply the metaphysics of wu, which I have just presented. It is rather the other way around. Strictly speaking his employment of the concrete universal as explanatorily open in Capital could be accounted for merely by limits of the concept in its scientific application to the concrete-real without the accompanying metaphysics of the concrete-real itself being infinite and open. That is, the concrete universal could merely be too complex, not infinitely so. His analysis of capitalism as one structure does not contain any incommensurate intersecting structures, rather the same structure is explained on different levels of abstraction, which only indirectly refer to incommensurate structures. Marx did not like metaphysics and the abstruse expressions I have just employed to give an account of Laozi’s arcane language is a partial demonstration of why that was. Nevertheless, Marx’s concrete universal is based upon the primacy of the finite thesis as well as the philosophy of internal relations. It does appear that these two theses are incompatible and so it takes a sophisticated metaphysical apparatus to dialectically combine them. The description of wu above has been an attempt to do this. I have just presented a metaphysics that combines the idea that entities are entirely constituted by their internal relations, structurally and conceptually mediated yet also irreducible to these. I have done it with the appeal to the wu side of Dao as background as ontological ground.

314 

J. Chambers

Hegel’s idealist concrete universal is the antithesis of his concept of the heap. The heap is a random conglomeration of externally related, mutually indifferent entities only ordered through their relative disorder in the heap. The heap is only defined via its negation in the particular entities that make it up. It is an abstraction. The concrete universal by contrast is an organism. It orders all of its members and in this way enables their identities. In opposition to Hegel’s hierarchical universalizing conception of “the whole”, subordination individuals to its categories Laozi’s ontology uses wu to enable a “contextual nexus and interdependent relationality of singulars” (Eric Sean Nelson 2009, 308). According to Karyn Lai’s interpretation, respecting Laozi’s concept of de (dealt with in later chapters) requires that the individual cannot be sacrificed to the whole (2003): 247–266). On the reading of Roger Ames and David Hall, the Daodejing’s holistic approach emphasizes contextual singularity or the dynamic interdependence of particulars (2003, 11). This enables them to develop a twofold definition of Laozi’s concept of ziran (nature) as both ordered spontaneity (the “field” of Dao) and the innate uniqueness or “self-so” through responsiveness (the “focus” of de) (68–70). This is consonant with other Daoist philosophy such as Brook Ziporyn’s reading of the Zhuangzi opposes a “unicentric holism” subordinating the particulars to the whole to an identifying it instead with an “omnicentric holism,” (2003, 34) a whole not ordered from a single center so that each particular member of the whole itself constitutes a center. For Laozi there can only be a family relationship/constellations of concepts of Dao. Dao plays a special role in the history of science of concepts for being the historically first concept defined in these terms. It also enjoys philosophical primacy as encapsulating the model for any structure as particular. Actually the constellations of concepts is the only way in which any concrete universal can be constructed for the conceptual comprehension of any object because of the way incommensurate structures intersect in the finite. Dao is the superlative case of this because it describes the master structureless-structure holding any object/structure/ process. Chapter 6 characterizes Dao as the spirit of the valley that never dies. The Dao structure is creatively indifferent to its internal relations yet constituted by these. The idea of the valley is that it is a relatively empty

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

315

space constituted by the myriad life forms that are contained within it without combining them in a whole. It is a concrete universal of the concept of the heap because, in addition to appearing to be a random conglomeration of externally related entities indifferent to it, it is also the creative principle of these operating as the indeterminate background space for their relatively free movement. Dao unites the entities ordered in the spirit of the valley by not ordering them. The valley is not an internally integrated whole organising its members, rather it is a field (metaphorically and literally) which its members, geological structures and organisms living on it, are relatively free to modify and collectively create. Its members only have their identities through the relative orders/structures they themselves impose between each other. Dao is a master structure, constituted by the lack of structure. Spontaneous order arises on this fertile plain. Something comes from nothing. (The empty cup and room exhibit this metaphysics through reducing wu to a physical image of our (we are a particular structure) utility—giving us freedom to move.) It is thus antecedent to the organic concrete universal of the kind employed by Marx in Capital. As an empty space, non-whole, Laozi’s concrete universal thus projects itself towards the internally related wholes of its relatively indifferent members in the concrete-in-thought. New domains are always already crowded out by the structures; none of them are empty spaces of free movement however, no domain is closed by its fullness. To be sure, Laozi thinks of this as a real movement in the concrete-real, but as Dao does not exist in an absolute sense the understanding of this movement must be qualified. Dao fails as a candidate for the absolute because it is by virtue of Dao’s emptiness that the finite account for themselves. In order to know a structure one cannot appeal to its place in an absolute metaphysical hierarchy of things because that ground is contested by the contingency of the interactions. Making this absolute impossible is work the concept of the wu side of Dao does. So it is a negative concept, reified as the negative shadow of the dictum; the real is the concrete.

316 

J. Chambers

Notes 1. Marx’s social ontology is a systematic refutation of pretenders to this kind of concrete universal: the state and capitalism. The wholes that interest Marx fail and communism only succeeds because it drops pretentions of completion. 2. Gamble, Hanan and Nail refer to these idealisms as “failed materialism” (2019, 116), but idealism is a better label insofar as it turns matter into an essentially passive entity; an echo chamber for the subject. The most fashionable these days is Slavoj Žižek’s version, which in a Hegelian way, employs the sophistical acrobatics of a subject that posits the division it creates retroactively, a reverse-time-travel model of cognition. 3. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2005), followed by volume number and page number of MarxEngels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: CGP— Critique of the Gotha Program

EPM—Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ACCPE—A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy RDPP—Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, Chapter Six. Results of the Direct Production Process C1/2—Capital 4. Adorno’s constellations of concepts are this mediated immediacy. 5. The ontological integrity of the finite thesis is the materialist assertion of the “veritable being” (SL154/W5, 172) of the finite Hegel denies. This is Lenin’s Materialism when he states: “Materialism is the recognition of “the fundamental premise of materialism is the recognition of the external world, of the existence of things outside and independent of our mind … for materialism, the object exists independently of the subject and is reflected more or less adequately in the subject’s mind …’ (1962, 286) 6. Hegel quotes use the translations listed in in the references section below. The page references state page and when appropriate volume number in the applicable translation followed by volume and page number in Hegel’s Werke in zwanzig Bänden (1969–1971) (W).

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

317

SL—Science of Logic volume I. PR—Philosophy of Right 7. The equalization problem is a term coined to present the political economics of Hegel and Marx in a way that surmounts the apparent lack of discourse between them. 8. This account of Hegel and Marx on the dialectics of the commodity follows Basu’s concise summary (derived from the late Pradip Bannerjee’s PhD thesis) of the “Enigma of the Commodity” (2018). Although the comparison of Hegel and Marx on the equalization problem here has more or less followed Basu’s summary the thesis of this book profoundly disagrees with Basu’s interpretation on substantial points. Basu supposes that abstract utility, as subjectively determined is incommunicable. Hegel only makes allowances for the ineffable in an extremely qualified sense (See Hahn, 1994). Hegel did not believe in the pure subjective just as he did not believe in the pure finite. Basu further supposes that identifying value with labour as Marx does is a polemical choice. The choice between idealism and materialism is not merely polemical. Abstract utility fails to explain value because it can only be quantified through social mediation, yet this mediation is founded upon abstract Labor, a quantity in essence. Basu, like Althusser, does not respect the dialectics of antagonistic synthesis and thinks that while Hegel’s synthesis swallows up opposites, Marx simply allows opposites to coexist exist side by side. In overlooking this significance of dialectics Althusser overlooks the concrete universal and gets “stuck on one level of abstraction” (Brien, 2006 23). 9. The original German says all the sensuous qualities of the thing are extinguished [ausgelöscht], the useful character of the work vanishes [verschwindet] along with the various concrete forms of the work and that they are reduced [reduziert] to abstract human labor. 10. See Capital, Vol. 3. The factors that Marx explores here are as follows: “Increasing Intensity of Exploitation,” “Depression of Wages Below the Value of Labour-Power,” “Relative Over-Population,” “Foreign Trade,” “The Increase of Stock Capital,” and “The Cheapening of Elements of Constant Capital.” It is important to note here that, as capitalism develops, additional factors that Marx does not point to may also come into play and serve to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, e.g., the “market replacing” functions of the state in the monopoly phase of capitalism (Brien 2007, 28).

318 

J. Chambers

11. Brien 2007, 29. 12. Ollmen (1977) makes a list of some of these, an update should include open-source software. 13. The worth of Althusser’s interpretation of the materialist concrete universal as a process without a subject is in this sense. 14. Laozi seems to suppose it becomes impossible, which is probably the main reason why he opposes technology. This is a problem for the next chapter.

References Althusser, Louis. 1970. For Marx. Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Vintage Books. Ames, R., and D. Hall. 2003. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books. Basu, Pranab Kanti. 2018. Financialization and Financial Crisis: Looking through the Lens of Commodity Fetishism. International Critical Thought 8 (4): 518–534. Brien, Kevin M. 2006. Marx, Reason and the Art of Freedom. New  York: Prometheus Books. ———. 2007. Marx’s Dialectical-Empirical Method of Explanation. Estudio 12 (39): 9–32. Finelli, R. 2007. Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s’ Capital. Historical Materialism 15 (2): 61–74. Gamble, Christopher N., Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail. 2019. What is New Materialism? Angelaki 24 (6): 111–134. Grossman, M. (1992). The Fruits of One’s Labor in Miltonic Practice and Marxian Theory. ELH 59 (1): 77–105. Hahn, Susan. 1994. Hegel on Saying and Showing. The Journal of Value Enquiry 28: 151–168. Hegel G.  W. F. 1969–1971. Werke in 20 Bänden (W), ed. Moldenhauer and Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). ———. 1812–16. 2010. The Science of Logic. Ed. and Trans. G. di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1821. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Trans. S.W.  Dyde. Kitchener: Batoche Books.

9  Materialist Dialectics in Capital and Wu 

319

Ilyenkov, E.V. 2008. The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital. Aakar Books. Lai, Karyn. 2003. Conceptual Foundations for Environmental Ethics: A Daoist Perspective. Environmental Ethics 25 (3): 247–266. Lenin, V.I. 1962. Collected Works. Vol. 14, 1908. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1975. Once Again On The Trade Unions. In Collected Works. Vol. 32. December 1920–August 1921. Trans. Clemens Dutt, and ed. Stewart Smith. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Mao, Zedong毛泽东. 1965. On Practice 实践论. In Selected Works of Mao Tse-­ Tung, vol. 1. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Marx, K., and F.  Engels. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Murray, P. 2020. Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions. In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 129–149. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, Eric Sean. 2009. Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics And The Environment. Philosophy East & West 59 (3): 294–316. Ollman, B. 1971. Alienation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ollman, B. 1977. Marx’s Vision of Communism a Reconstruction. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 8 (1): 4–41. Pomeroy, A.F. 2004. Dialectics and the Critique of Capitalism. State University of New York Press. Ruben, David-Hillel. 1977. Marxism and Materialism. Sussex: Harvester Press. Ziporyn, Brook. 2003. How Many Are the Ten Thousand Things and I? Relativism, Mysticism, and the Privileging of Oneness in the Inner Chapters. In Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi, ed. Scott Cook. Albany: SUNY Press.

Part VI Marx and Laozi: Ethics

10 Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms

This chapter will reconstruct the arguments of Marx’s scientific humanist ethical naturalism and Laozi’s aesthetic anti-humanist ethical naturalism with a view to a synthesis between them. The father of ethical naturalism in western philosophy is Aristotle. The structure of his ergon (functional) argument for a normative conception of human nature will be used as a model for the reconstruction of ergon arguments in Marx and Laozi. Aristotle presents a bioethics and a biopolitics, based upon his analysis of human biological capacities and needs. Marx, like Hegel was a great admirer of the philosophy of that “giant thinker”1 [Denkriese] (C1-MECW35:92/MEW23:96) Aristotle. Marx had been thinking a lot about Aristotle throughout the 1840s, having worked on translating Aristotle’s De Anima into German with extensive notes in 1842 (Meikle 1985, 58). It should therefore come as no surprise that there are strong Aristotelian undercurrents in Marx’s manuscripts of 1844 from which most of the material from this following reconstruction of his ergon argument is derived. Marx was not “secretly Aristotelian” (Žižek 2012, 261); it is common knowledge. All humanist interpretations of Marx make implicit references to Aristotle’s ergon argument. The most direct and accessible analysis of Marx’s employment of Aristotle’s ergon

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_10

323

324 

J. Chambers

argument is found in Alan G.  Nasser’s “Marx’s Ethical Anthropology” (1975). This chapter follows Nasser’s line of explanation. My novel contribution comes with the way I draw out its implications in a dialogue with Laozi. There are numerous ways of seeing Laozi as the very antithesis of Aristotle, both in terms of the hermeneutic traditions of these two thinkers and my favored interpretation of them.2 The project of reconstructing an ergon argument in Laozi appears ill-conceived for the most obvious reason that the teleological and species orientation of Aristotle’s ethics which the ergon argument employs involves values Laozi seems to deprecate above all else. Suffice it to say at this juncture that my mode of reasoning not only takes account of this obvious reason for doubt, but is based upon it.

The Ergon Argument Aristotle’s ergon argument appears in the Nicomachean Ethics. This argument forms the basis of ethical evaluation in Aristotle explicitly and in Marx implicitly. It is based upon Aristotle’s ontology, which claims that all substances have their own nature. He sees natures as functions (ergon), which are in an important sense responsible for their acts. Finding the ergon of anything requires identifying the characteristic activity that things of that kind, and only that kind, perform. This identification constitutes a ‘real definition’. Real definitions pick out intrinsic properties without which the thing in question would lose its identity, rather to than mere nominal definitions which only pick out observable features or subjective effects. Knowing what a thing’s ergon – function or goal is and how it goes about achieving it is knowing its essence. Knowing this essence enables the evaluation of things as successful or unsuccessful and what circumstances are beneficial or deleterious to the achievement of their goals. The unencumbered conduct of life activity constitutes the ‘good’ or the flourishing of the thing in question. Conditions which hinder that characteristic activity constitute a harm for the thing in question. When a thing is unable to perform its function, ergon-oriented evaluation can classify it as aberrant, impaired or damaged. With tools, for example, this kind of evaluation is easy and has no ethical import; a blunt

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

325

knife is not good but also not evil. Even in the case of animals it is a commonplace to say, for example, that regular exercise is good for a dog. Yet in other case with inorganic and organic beings this mode of evaluation is controversial, for it involves assigning the entities their own characteristic functions. Aristotle’s teleological evaluations are eternal, static and objective. They conflict with evolutionary theory’s random and transitory model of species development and the subjective conception of freedom according to which human fulfilment is thought of as a matter of individual choice. However, biologically transitory explanations of species and subjectivist conceptions of freedom can be accommodated by a modified version of Aristotelian teleology.3 Essences can be conceived of as relatively transitory and plastic without abandoning telos in the classification and evaluation of species. Within a developing organism Aristotle’s essentialism has always embraced change. The Hegelian appropriation of essentialism infuses essence with transitoriness. In book I, chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that humans have a nature that belongs to themselves, their own function (2012). Aristotelian ethics posits that the human function embodies a goal towards which humans should be seen as naturally directed and against which ethical evaluation can be made.

Marx’s Ergon Argument Nasser notes that the Ergon argument involves three fundamental claims all of which are apparent in Marx’s corpus: (1) Nature endows humans with a unique function, (2) finding the unique characteristic activity of humans is finding the function of humans, (3) This activity constitutes the ethical good for humans (Nasser 1975, 486). Alienation and exploitation are inherently normative terms which Marx spent his life’s work studying. If they are read without any implicit ergon argument, they are unintelligible. These phenomena will be read as constituting a harm to humans insofar as they undermine, impede and degrade their characteristic activity. “To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature … Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements,

326 

J. Chambers

relations, etc. … must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch…”(C1-­ MECW35:617/MEW23:637). In this quote from Capital Marx affirms all three ergon argument claims with his own historicized version of human nature implied in the remark “modified in each historical epoch”. It might be objected that the word “useful” is not obviously synonymous with the word “good” and certainly on nonconditional theories of morality there is no crossover between these words. However naturalistic ethical theory is conditional and Marx’s reference to “human nature in general” alludes to this. In the nonmoral sense of utility there is no obvious need for studying human nature in general to find out what is useful to humans, as this is always determined by particular interests which are entirely relative to the tasks in which humans are engaged. Sharp knives are indifferently useful for cooking and murdering. The only kind of usefulness that requires studying human nature in general to discern has ethical significance. The fact/value divide is a product of atomistic positivism. The methodological commitments of that school of thought have no place in any serious treatment of Marxism or the philosophical tradition from which it arose.4 Nasser considers Marx’s notion of alienation in terms of the ergon argument. Marx discusses characteristics of humans in terms of an innate potential for fulfilment through their free exercise and then discusses how exploitational modes of production including capitalism work against those characteristics. The ways in which capitalism harms those characteristics are different kinds of alienation. The main source of Marx’s ideas on human nature with its ethical implications is in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In a section entitled ‘Estranged Labour’ Marx reproduces an Aristotelian categorization of species: “The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life activity” and the human species in particular: “free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.” (EPM-MECW3:276/MEW40:516). If ‘life activity’ is akin to function here, then Marx is confirming point 1 and 2 in this sentence. Marx goes into some detail to demonstrate that he has identified the unique function of humans. “It is just in his work upon the objective world … that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

327

production is his active species life… In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being …” (EPM-MECW3:276/MEW40:516). This is Marx’s introduction to his conception of man as Homo faber, Humanity’s characteristic activity is productive labor. Marx is also aware that productive labor as such is not specific to humans: Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces onesidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature…man also produces in accordance with the laws beauty. (EPM-MECW3:276/MEW40:516)

Humans do not produce in the same way animals produce. Nasser notes the inextricable evaluative import of Marx’s words here (487). Animal production is blind/instinctive and only driven by the requirements of physical survival. Human production is conducted even after physical survival requirements have been satisfied and indeed being “free from physical need” is a necessary condition to be met before the human “truly produces”  – that is produces in a distinctly human way (EPM-­ MECW3:276/MEW40:516).5 It is on this kind of unencumbered production that humanity’s activity attains its own internal necessities, the symbolic world of social production in which the human “reproduces the whole of nature” in its own image (as mentioned in Chap. 3). For humans socially produce with others and this activity generates a world of meaning separate from biological survival to which all individuals adapt themselves in the socialization process, which even adapts and modifies basic human sensation in each epoch, the relations of production. Here Nasser’s account is incomplete insofar as it misses the concrete universal in Marx’s identification of social labor as constitutive of the essence of humanity. It is not merely that it is by virtue of this labor that humans are set apart from the animals; this kind of labor is also

328 

J. Chambers

biologically/historically responsible for the evolution of humans as a separate species, specifically the labor of humans in the production of tools (DN-­MECW25:452-465/MEW40:444-456). It is actually the mechanism of separation, not merely its mark. As Marx and Engels observe: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation” (GI-MECW5:31/MEW3:21). But this gap in Nasser’s account should by no means detract from the link with the ergon argument he has thus far identified. Aristotle’s method of identifying the characteristic activity of a species employs the abstract universal. Marx’s method employs the concrete universal, which is the scientifically complete method. With the abstract universal Aristotle failed to identify the true essence. Hegel’s idealism hindered him from making sufficient use of his methodological resources. Indeed, Marx notes that Hegel got very far on his own despite this burden. “The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie … is … that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process … he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour.” (EPM-­ MECW25:332-333/MEW40:574). Hegel’s philosophy had only a crude and indirect approach to anthropology and identified humanity with its participation in Spirit. Marx condemns capitalism because it restricts individuals from conducting this free production beyond the point where technological deficiencies used to mean that lives spent in mere toil for survival were unavoidable—precapitalist ages. Now we have reached a level of technological supremacy so high that the needs of human survival can be met with relatively little labor ensuring free time for free human labor if only the relations of production were organized to be conducive to it. Instead, the relations of production systematically undermine it. Having identified the essence of humanity in free labor Marx criticizes its fettering under capitalism. The ethical side of this is inescapable and is informed by the ergon argument. Another aspect the special character of labor in human nature is the universal way in which it enables them to interact with nature.

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

329

The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. (EPM-MECW3:275-6/MEW40:515-6)

This Aristotelian biologism of humanity and nature is not restricted to Marx’s early works. In Capital Marx refers to the interchange between humanity and nature in terms of the biological conception the ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechels, literally stuff-exchange).6 Marx refuses to take Hegel’s path and separate biology from history, nature and nurture. Rather, the human species is depicted as in a constant metabolic relationship with its natural environment. Of course, animals also engage with their natural environment with intimacy but they are not cursed/blessed by the human level of ability in manipulation of their metabolism. “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions [Stoffwechels] between himself and Nature” (C1-MECW35:187/MEW23:192). Humans can turn nature into one of their own limbs, in the sense that they can adapt it to their purposes and adapt themselves to its movements, and in so doing they turn nature into having changing meanings for them and changes themselves through history. “For labor is a moment in the metabolic process by which nature’s materials are humanized in the form of the product, the consumption of which in turn naturalizes man” (Nasser 1975, 489). “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (EPM-MECW3:276/MEW40:516). Yet when the capitalist appropriates the workers’ labor and the product thereof, the link between humanity and nature is severed. In capitalism the producers are separated from the means of production, the consumers are separated from producers, the product of labor is separated from

330 

J. Chambers

the producers. Labour should be the link to nature, not its separation. Therefore, in capitalism labor is put to work against itself. In tearing away from man the object of his production … estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. (EPM-MECW3:277/MEW40:517)

The advantage of humanity is its ability to rationally, socially produce for socially recognized ends. But the market only recognizes the private ends of the consumers who are disconnected from the workers. The laborers have no control over their own labur. They work under the blind dictates of the fickle avarice of the market, which make even less sense to the laborer than the instinctive labor of animals to them. Capitalism also works against the human propensity to work to achieve purposes that are their own, that they have rationally selected to achieve socially posited goals. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement” (C1-MECW35:188/MEW23:193). The capitalist withholds the means of production from the workers, treating workers as expendable appendages to those means of production. They work under the tyranny of corner-cutting and time management. In capitalism the means and object of work never belong to the workers themselves, the product is always the workers’ means to attain wages, a separate end of mere physical survival. The capitalist makes a use-value out of the workers’ production. The workers’ labor achieves the capitalists’ private purpose, which is no more than the accumulation of capital. The capitalist is just as much a slave to capital as the worker. There is an instrumental aspect to all work, for work is undertaken to create a product, to achieve an end. Where this end is internally connected to the work itself, the achievement of the end can be satisfying and self-realising. But in so far as work is done purely to earn a wage, work becomes a means

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

331

to an end that is external to it. The work activity itself – what it creates and for whom – is indifferent as far as the end of earning a wage is concerned. The worker works simply as a means to satisfy his own needs and interests. What he produces and how becomes arbitrary and irrelevant. (Sayers, 2011, 166)

Marx argues that the characteristic activity of humans, their function or purpose, includes the autonomy of selecting their own purposes of production and the will and ability to consciously select and carry out purposes are frustrated by capitalism. They are thwarted by capitalism and redirected to achieve separate, hostile ends; the ends of accumulating capital. Marx castigates capitalism for harming humans on these terms: “… in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-­ labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body.” (C1-MECW35: 270-271/MEW23:180). That capitalism imposes a working regime that violates moral norms as well as biological health demonstrates Marx’s own biologism in running the two together. It is comparable to the univocal way Aristotle equates health with ethical standards. The ergon argument embodies ethical essentialism. Chapter 3 has already discussed how Marx’s praxis-oriented theory of history is historicist insofar as it posits human nature is no more than the “the ensemble of social relations” at any one time. Marx’s historicism is a methodological departure from Aristotle’s ahistorical conception of the human essence. Marx’s theory of history is a seamless blend of essentialism and historicism.7 The blend is made possible by Marx’s theory of history seeing humanity/history as a concrete universal; the universal that is understood as a process whereby it moves from abstract to concrete through dialectical development. The motor of this process in Marx is, of course, labor and the class struggle oriented around the social form it takes in each mode of production. Each mode of production is the sum of: the forces of production; technology, resources and labor and the relations of production; the class dynamic which organizes labor in its employment of the forces of production and also the moral/cultural/legal superstructure. For each mode of production there is a corresponding modification of

332 

J. Chambers

human nature. Since a mode of production is “a definite form of expressing [men’s] life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production …” (GI-MECW5:31/MEW3:21). Human nature and its concept develop with the ascending modes of production of history. Marx considers the development of the human race and its concept as tending towards the goal of their realization in communism. Until that time the story of humanity can only be considered as incomplete. Marx’s evaluation of modes of production is tempered by a consideration of the limitations inherent in that stage of history. In precapitalist modes of production Marx decries the exploitation of the people as much as under capitalism but he recognizes that technological limitations of those epochs do not make the free realization of the ergon of humanity possible and so he accepts them as unavoidable.8 He does not demand of these stages equitable relations of production, “ethics cannot require them because history does not allow them. The ought of ethics is circumscribed by the can of history” (Nasser, 1975, 496). Marx’s outrage at the cruelties of capitalism is also tempered by his view that it is a stepping-stone towards communism. Marx’s ideas developed further when he began to believe that the ‘ought’ of ethics was not circumscribed by the can of history so tightly as to make all the horrors of capitalism a necessary prerequisite for the realization of the species everywhere. Perhaps the clearest example of this kind of reasoning in Marx is with his measured criticism of the British occupation of India as cruel but progressive in his earliest writing on the subject (TBRI-­ MECW12:132/MEW9:133) and then the development of a more nuanced view later. Marx developed a growing appreciation for the freedoms of precapitalist production in different regions of the world and eventually moderated his views. He became more supportive of the fight against British imperialism for India’s traditional way of life and supportive of advancing Russian communal farming as a possible means of bypassing the worst of capitalism there.9 Sadly, history has not been as kind as Marx had hoped. Marx’s more deterministic earlier line turned out to closer to how things would actually pan out as no corner of the earth has been able to bypass capitalism or its perfidious influence.

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

333

Insofar as capitalism is thought of as a stepping-stone to better things it equips workers with the ability and the will to free themselves from social and natural tyranny. Yet in the case of capitalism Marx’s criticism is ethical. On the one hand the technological advances ushered in by capitalism make the complete realization of the ergon of humanity possible, on the other hand the relations of production of capitalism bar the way to that free realization. Only under capitalism is communism made possible10 so only in capitalism is communism an ethical imperative. In The Holy Family Marx realizes that: …the abstraction of all of humanity, even the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. (THF-MECW4:36-37/MEW2:38)

Marx’s abstract concept of homo faber is only partially developed in precapitalist epochs. With the proletarian revolution humanity reaches enters a decisive new phase and history comes to end or new beginning depending upon one’s perspective. A major Aristotelian link to Marx employment of the ergon argument is that the historicized function Marx accords to humanity is like Aristotle’s ethical ideal of eudaimonia (flourishing). Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia is the idea of a life well lived and enjoyed. Eudaimonia consists in activating distinctly human capacities through the structures of the Greek polis which were contemplation and politics. Aristotelian virtues to attain eudaimonia combine the means and the substance of this end. The virtuous life reproduces the social conditions which enable it to be lived. Similarly, the unalienated social practice which Marx champions harnesses reasoning to the pursuit of aims which are constitutive of, rather than mere means to, an end; production which is free because it has been collectively chosen without the constraints of value. This is

334 

J. Chambers

Alasdair MacIntyre’s gloss on Marx’s suggestive expression ‘associated humanity’ (Gesellschaftliche Menschheit)11 in the 10th thesis on Feuerbach: “The standpoint of the old materialism is “civil” society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or associated humanity” (TF-MECW5:8/MEW3:7).

Capitalism as a Parasite Andy Denis’ interpretation of Marx’s critique of capital makes the case for capital as a parasite. Denis’ analysis deepens the biologism which has thus far characterized Marx’s ethical naturalism. Although Marx does not say… this explicitly, what is at stake is an inversion of means and ends. The state, which should be a means to human ends, becomes an end in itself, and human existence, the end, becomes a means to the self-perpetuation of the state. We see this later with Marx’s theory of labour. The production of means to our ends, of things which we value, becomes the end, the accumulation of values, and the existence of the labourers a mere means to that end. This is the fundamental inversion, which has quite general application, and continually emerges in nature and society. (Denis 2011, 10)

While interesting this idea of parasitism requires clarification, for parasitism has many forms and indeed biologists cannot agree about the limits of the application of the term. Some parasites have negligible effects on the daily concerns of their hosts, while others have such subtle yet deep effects as to make it hard to judge whether they are disrupting the healthy, parasite-free, life of the host or enhancing and enriching the purposes and development their hosts; that is, there is no clear demarcation line to be drawn between symbiosis and parasitism – and symbiosis often becomes so intense that it leads to a melding of identities. Marx’s 6th thesis on Feuerbach points out humans cannot be separated from their modes of production (TF-MECW5:8/MEW3:7). A false inference that can be made from Denis’ incomplete account is that if in capitalism: “From the standpoint of the host [the people], the parasite [the s­tate/

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

335

capital] and host do not constitute an organic unity, but a temporary, provisional unity of two elements in struggle. However, from the standpoint of the parasite, there is an organic unity, as it can be no other way for the parasite” (2011, 9) The inference from this that without capitalism the host would be free to pursue its own ends, as is the case with biological parasitism traditionally conceived, is false. Further, without capitalism and with another mode of production the people would also not necessarily find themselves in social conditions conducive to their flourishing. Only if the alternative mode of production was communism would the host be free to pursue its own ends. In oppressive modes of production, we have a dialectical case of identity and antagonistic nonidentity, the human race is both identical to its mode of production and parasitized by it. It is a case of symbiosis/identity and parasitism/nonidentity. But not all modes of production are parasites and in communism we have a case of symbiosis tending towards identity. Capitalism sets goals for people. They have certain ahistorical desires but all of them are modified by capitalism. The incompleteness of both Nasser and Denis’ accounts is that they note that capitalism has its own purposes that go against the purposes of its people yet they also note that capitalism itself sets goals for its people and people are its willing accomplices. To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us (Fisher 2009, 19). Capitalism both structures the way people work to achieve their goals and is reproduced through this process. Capitalism is based upon an

336 

J. Chambers

antagonistic contradiction between the capitalists and the workers, the latter of whom are oppressed but eventually empowered by it and driven to overcome it. Capitalism, like all moribund modes of production, perpetuates itself by generating and intensifying purposes that its survival depends upon it frustrating. Capitalism is thus an aberrant sort of parasite because while it generates purposes for the hosts, which suit itself at the hosts’ expense, in so doing it also generates purposes for the hosts that go against its own purposes. It is a self-undermining parasite. Obviously, it is not uncommon for parasites to antagonize and destroy their hosts. Capitalism is an unusual parasite in that it equips its host with the means of its liquidation as well as opening vistas for progress through its demise. It is a disease that comes which its own antidote. In destroying people and destroying its environment, capitalism destroys the conditions for its own existence, but it also equips its victims with motives and means for its overthrow. After these qualifications, as an interpretation of Marx’s critique of capitalism, Denis’ analogy is strained. Yet, in Denis’ defense capitalism has demonstrated myriad powers of violence and ideology to warp its host and subdue those motives and means. A pessimistic Marxian critique of capitalism would find a closer link between capitalism and the architype of parasitism than an optimistic Marxian critique of capitalism. Marx himself was an optimist, but that is not necessarily where the truth lies, at time of writing, vis a vis the impending, undecided matter of the cataclysm of civilization. Marx himself did not use the parasite analogy to characterize capital. In Capital 1&3 Marx’s own use of the word ‘parasite’ and ‘parasitical’ is reserved for usurers and merchants. His reasoning seems to be that these middlemen leech value off workers and capitalists via occupying links of the distribution and exchange chains rather than involvement with production. It seems Marx wanted to restrict references to parasitism to exchange and distribution. This bears a closer correspondence to biological parasitism than Denis’s reading of capital insofar as biological parasites do not typically drive the host to produce anything, but rather redistribute the energy or things the host has already produced to themselves. One reason for this is that the parasite analogy, as already stated, implies the existence of two separate entities. Marx thought that no matter how

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

337

distorted the ideology of a mode of production, it was not composed of a purely ideational sphere resting on top of a purely physical sphere. He would not ascribe to the view that capitalism is just an idea which can be disproven and dismissed, but rather that it is inscribed in a social practice. Yet the parasite analogy retains use in that it helps identify a sense in which the mode of production can be conceived of as separate from and antagonistic to the people who make it and that its people might survive its demise.12 It makes sense of Marx’s proposed remedy: The exploited class must use the collective strength that has been instilled in it through the production process to wrest control of the means of production from the bourgeoisie, the personifications of capital, the parasite class, to develop a means of production that serves human purposes rather than humans serving alien purposes for the capitalists and their alienated greed. This importantly shows how a doctrine, which is thoroughly historicist in its conception of human nature, incorporates the evaluation of certain circumstances as unnatural. This is a useful entry point to Laozi’s own ethical naturalism.

 he Neglected Tendency of Naturalism T and Laozi’s Anti-humanism It is difficult to square Laozi’s nature worship with his aversion to the classification of natural phenomena. The following will attempt to do this. It was seen above how Aristotle’s naturalism is based upon the idea that natural kinds are distinguishable through their possession of unique functions, which also serve as the grounds for their evaluations. Evaluating humans through their function is ethics. Aristotle is aware of the fundamental dependency of natural kinds upon each other for the realizations of their individual purposes. The positions of the four elements, to take a basic example, are all relative to each other: earth to the center, water and air above and fire at the highest. The philosophy of internal relations was sufficiently apparent to Aristotle that he posited the unmoved mover as the only entity to escapes internal relations with other things and thus have a wholly independent nature explicable by reference to itself alone.

338 

J. Chambers

Despite the relative freedom and accompanying complexity involved in the human purpose, Aristotle recognizes that the achievement of the ergon of humanity is utterly dependent upon adapting to and harmonizing with the natural environment. Although humanity achieves its purposes through harmonizing with that which is not itself – nature – humanity’s purpose is precisely that which sets it apart from the rest of nature. There is thus a tension of thought in Aristotle; humanity is assimilating itself to nature, and assimilating nature to it. In Hegel’s terminology humanity is negating nature through production and but also humanity is being negated by nature through that same process.13 Humans adapt their environment to their own purposes, and in so doing humans adapt themselves to their environment. Humans humanize nature and in so doing nature naturalize humans. This is, of course, the great advance made possible by a dialectical conception of the metabolism between humanity and nature characteristic of historical materialism. All natural beings have their natures outside of themselves (MECW3:337/MEW40:578). In the materialist theory of history geographical features are called upon to explain the source of the means of production and the distribution of societies. In the early stages the influence of nature is more direct. As society develops it becomes progressively less overdetermined by nature but the dominance of nature in the early stages is at the root of the other changes that come later and more or less constant biological conditions place definite constraints on the social form. As society’s power relative to nature increases it becomes more and more important for individuals to adapt themselves to their social environment, and less and less important for them to adapt to their natural environment, which is socially managed.14 The downplaying of the agency of nature vis a vis society reaches its apogee in bourgeois political economics and the idealism of Hegel. Through the logic of the prevailing mode of production people find their class interests and the codes of other identity markers take precedence over their human interests, their selfish desires over their metabolism with nature. Yet this is a deception created by the complexity of relatively indifferent social relations in capitalism. The concourse with the natural environment never goes away, even if the relationship becomes increasingly mediated. The plethora of mediating links creates the illusion that there is nothing on the other end. This mistake is all the more stark for

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

339

the way it misconstrues the social subversion of nature: under feudalism Marx observes the land dominates the peasants as an extension of the landlord, upon which they must work (EPM-­MECW3:266/MEW40:505) and in capitalist conditions of exploitation nature in the form of dead labour congealed in capital, commodities and technology confronts the exploited as an alien power (EPM-­MECW3:267/MEW40:506). A dialectical conception of the metabolism does not lose sight of what is on the other end. The two tendencies of humanity both subsuming and being subsumed by nature are amenable to the terminology of Laozi in this book: the former is foreground and the latter is background. The former is a system contained in the latter system. Aristotle did not conceive of internal/external relations in terms of background/foreground so his conception of essence excludes the holistic/background tendency in all things to negate themselves through mimesis. For Aristotle the essence of something is what that thing is insofar as it separates itself from its environment so cannot be seen as what that thing is insofar as it retreats into its environment. The science of Aristotle and Marx neglects the mimetic tendency in things. When Aristotle turns to aesthetics he makes mimesis the focal point of his research.15 A scientific ethics can be built on an essentialism of foreground. This is a task which I believe Aristotle started, with an inadequate, because non-historical materialist, conception of human nature and which Marx completed. Aristotle and Marx’s essentialist ethics lacks an aesthetics.16 A complete ethics has an aesthetic side. I believe Marx’s awareness of this is another one of the reasons why he shunned ethics. Marx was a scientist and despite profound aesthetic sensibilities, which informed all of his thought,17 aesthetics played a subordinate role in his writings.18 The tendency of the working class’s interests to increasingly coincide with the interests of humanity as a whole and nature is a tendency that emerges from within the logic of its struggle with capital. The return of society to humanity and nature is as much invented as it is discovered. Within their distinctness do they create their unity.

340 

J. Chambers

The Ethics of De: Anti-humanist Naturalism In chapter 16 Laozi communicates the ubiquitous act of backgrounding I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. The teeming creatures All return to their separate roots. Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness. This is what is meant by returning to one’s destiny. Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment. Woe to him who wilfully innovates While ignorant of the constant, But should one act from knowledge of the constant One’s action will lead to impartiality, Impartiality to kingliness, Kingliness to heaven, Heaven’ to the way, The way to perpetuity, And to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger. (Lau 1963, 20)

In lines four and five Laozi comments how he can see both the foreground side and the background side of the wanwu. He watches them in their separateness and then sees them as they move back towards each other “home to their root”. Laozi goes on to say that when this act is knowingly performed it is “Kingly” which is heavenly. The kingly act is like the wanwu returning to the root. This creates a oneness and shared concern for all things, which overcomes the division between the self and others.19 The perspective beyond the boundaries of the ego self and its particular desires, to the bigger perspective of others is where ethics begins.20 This sympathetic feeling is reached through a non-conceptual act. It is a feeling we all have whether or not it is consciously performed. It is called sympathy. It is this feeling, which motivates ethical thought and theory. The ethics of Laozi’s knowledge through wuyu is novel in that it is anti-theory to the extent that it makes this animal feeling, promoted

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

341

in consciousness, into the ground of ethics; that upon which ethics is based rather than, as in traditional ethics theories, that which prompts justifications. This is what enables Laozi to produce an aesthetic of ethics. Laozi is just as concerned with human flourishing as Aristotle. Unlike Aristotle his approach appeals to, not what is unique about humans, that is what sets humans against everything else, that which connects humans to all things, that through which humans are not distinct, the act of backgrounding. However, Laozi comes closer to Aristotle when he recognizes that all creatures do this in their own separate ways, as indicated by the comparison and contrast in chapter sixteen between the wanwu (different things) and the king (a political designation for humans). This is what the concept of “de” concerns. Chapter 51 of the silk manuscript versions states: The way [Dao] gives them life; Virtue [De] rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way [Dao] and honour virtue [De]. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so. (Lau 1963, 58)

De is a vessel of Dao. “De” concerns identity through difference. It is about performing one act, the same act, backgrounding, through isomorphic difference. “De” is isomorphic identity created through sympathy. In this way most chapters of the Daodejing exhibit their own “de” through repeating concentric shells of isomorphic mimeses. The way in which chapter one performs this act from ontology through to metaphysics, epistemology and logic was already discussed in the chapter on wuwei. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is chapter 21 in which “de” is said to come from Dao alone, Dao is characterized as elusive in itself and the origin of all things. Laozi asks how he knows this and then answers himself “By means of this”. This expression “By means of this” applies to an act of “Great de” itself, the referent of this expression. Laozi does not say “through Great De”, because he wants to indicate, and prompt in the

342 

J. Chambers

reader, the real act of “Great de” rather than its concept – because it is not identical with its concept. “Great De” is a “manifestation” of Dao and Laozi knows of the ultimate ontological significance of Dao because the de of each thing has isomorphic identity. It is the same movement performed in different ways by different things. “Great de” is consciously realized in absolute mimesis. Absolute mimesis is relative in that it is localized and belongs to the systems/plateaus where it is performed. But by the same measure it is absolute because it tends towards a rippling effect beyond its locality, expanding its locality, mentioned in chapter 16. A good example of the ethical implications of this is chapter 54, which articulates humanity’s ethical task of realizing Dao in the world through cultivating De (isomorphic identity); from the level of the individual, through family, village, state and the world as a whole. The result is the identity of the act through the differences of the entities performing it (individual, family, village, state, world). This is so because the act in itself (Dao) does not exist. Armed with the idea of de as isomorphic identity, sympathy becomes the (aesthetic) mechanics of identity between different levels of society and world. The jolting locution “By means of this” appears three times in the Daodejing. Each time it appears Laozi is talking about de, as if to impress its act upon the reader. It appears in chapter 54 where Laozi explains Dao can be realized in the world through De of the individual’s wuwei rippling out through waves of sympathy because he can perform De. This non-conceptual knowledge is again implied to be self-evident. Note here that Laozi does not say that ethics ends at the level of humans but encompasses all of the environment. This is because of the anti-­ humanist implications of Laozi’s naturalism. Laozi sees in humanity a natural propensity to wuwei – backgrounding, to not be itself separate, and to be its environment; a propensity humanity shares with everything else. De is, in one sense, Laozi’s word for sympathy. In Chapter 25, Laozi says: Man models himself on earth. Earth on heaven. Heaven on the way. And the way on that which is naturally so. (Lau 1963, 30)

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

343

Dao follows its own spontaneity because Dao is things insofar as they exhibit their tendency to become their environment. This is the anti-­ teleological tendency of things, which accompanies every telos. There is a sense in which Marx’s humanism sees this for Marx sees humanity as a “part of nature” when humanity is alienated from nature, part of nature is alienated from itself. In solving its own problem through socialism Marx recognizes that humanity is also solving nature’s problem. “This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man” (EPM-MECW3:296/MEW40:536). Moral theory justifies the feeling of sympathy through logos. There are reasons why we feel thus and so and these reasons should control our actions. The idea is that will armed with reason to govern action, which requires that feeling be given a voice. Only then is it free. Laozi sees things the other way around. The feeling is called upon to justify his reasons: “By means of this”. Once voiced, the feeling is subsumed in identity thinking. Marx also grants feeling a historical efficacy that he denies reason. In the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach Marx argues that it is not possible to reason someone out of ideological deception but rather that social conditions generate the will to deceive oneself and those conditions must be struggled with before erroneous feelings can be uprooted. Ideology is inculcated into people through emotional experiences and not reasoned argument; it rarely encounters any rational scrutiny. Struggling against these conditions through which ideology is inculcated into people involves both reason and feeling. Marx is explicit that the sympathetic tendency in humans is suppressed by the ideological infiltration of language: The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, IIXXXIIII and therefore a humiliation, and consequently uttered with a feeling of shame, of degradation. By the other side it would be regarded as impudence or lunacy and rejected as such. We are to such an extent estranged from man’s

344 

J. Chambers

essential nature that the direct language of this essential nature seems to us a violation of human dignity, whereas the estranged language of material values seems to be the well-justified assertion of human dignity that is self-­ confident and conscious of itself. (CJM-MECW3:227/MEW40:460)

Here Marx talks about how cultural rules of communication constrain the expression of emotion to the extent that these emotions are deprived of a language. Ideology suppresses the linguistic expression of sympathy through supplanting it with “the language our possessions use together.” In the “estranged language of objective values” humans are constrained to communicate to themselves and their fellows in terms of their respective property ownerships. Here Marx contrasts a “human” and “direct” language with the estranged language of the ideology of private property. While he evidently laments its loss he recognizes that this language has, for the time being at least, been vanquished and he does not attempt to revive it. The reduction of people to property is a reduction of people as either means or obstacles to the attainment of property. Laozi sees language as having an inherent tendency to this kind of reduction as it is a manifestation of conceptual thought, which separates means and ends. This is why Laozi counterpoises feeling to language in itself. In a sense Marx would have to agree with Laozi in that the estrangement of language from itself is a natural part of language insofar as language is a mode of social praxis and exploitation was a natural and necessary expedient to overcome scarcity. And Laozi would also have to agree with Marx that there should be a suppressed language of sympathy under the surface, as Laozi seems to be trying to speak it. The language of sympathy, perhaps eliminated from common parlance, lives on in poetry, of which Laozi is a particularly prescient example as he makes his poetry about this feeling. Marx wants to rescue the language of sympathy by eliminating alienation. Laozi’s psychological addition to Marx’s social project could be to advocate reconditioning the psychology of humans in socialism to conquer desire, to revive a language of sympathy. Laozi self-consciously employs poetry as both means and ends of this liberation.

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

345

The Aesthetic Politics of De Laozi is like Aristotle, Hegel and Marx (with qualification) in seeing the field of human activity in which their distinctly human essence is to be found is the political arena.21 It is for this reason that the Daodejing is a political manual.22 It is political because politics is the arena for the realization of ethics and Laozi, like all the philosophers of his place and time, is essentially concerned with providing an ethical politics. So, in the political arena – the most distinctly human arena – humans, paradoxically must find the form of management that returns them to nature insofar as they are not unique but part of their environment. This is a political management in line with Dao, that is, Dao is conceived as a social act. De (wuwei/backgrounding), for humans, has a political dimension. Laozi’s De is surprisingly more direct than Aristotle’s eudaimonia insofar as it seeks to find flourishing in and through specific predicaments. Laozi gets an answer to the question of virtue that is at the same time more specific, and more general than Aristotle. On the one hand Laozi recognizes that activity must be radically different to be appropriate in different situations. Aristotle gets this far but his proposed solution, the golden mean, has been criticized, for being too general to be applicable. Laozi instead gives more direct instructions on the different comportments we should have to be in line with Dao in warfare, consumption and production, technology, leadership, travel and so on. Wuwei is very far from doing nothing. Indeed, while it stems from a natural tendency and when mastered is effortless, it is described as a skill to be mastered. But Laozi is also more general than Aristotle in explaining how for every predicament the very same act is performed. Isomorphic identity exists across situations. Actually, the same wuwei act is being performed across all situations, it just appears (zhirong) different in each situation.23 Process philosophy sees all entities as events. In Laozi’s metaphysics there are actually only two acts with isomorphic identity existing across plateaus. There are foregrounding, separating, self-asserting acts and there are backgrounding coming together, yielding acts. Everything displays a mixture of these two (This is the yinyang rubric). The difference between

346 

J. Chambers

“de” acts and other acts is that “de” acts display a relative purity of the wu side of Dao. They have an identity with the movement of identity itself. In chapter 8 Laozi mentions how the state attains order through imitating the nurturing, passive and fructifying power of water. “Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way. In government, the good lies in orderliness” (12). While still watering holes are sought out by animals, water is accessed inland through deep wells from underground streams where men dare not tread. In Chapter 17 the best political leaders are discreet, still waters running deep: “The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence” (21). He does not exhibit his talents in public. The people know that he exists but are not concerned with his acts. Water is indifferent as to what drinks it. Water is also tasteless and so is enjoyed by every living thing, providing sanctuary and nourishment. Water can be seen as like heaven and earth in its selflessness as Laozi says in chapter 7: “Heaven and earth are enduring. The reason why heaven and earth can be enduring is that they do not give them selves life. Hence they are able to be long-lived. Heaven is long lasting” (11). One of the implications of this idea is mentioned in chapter 59: “In ruling the people and in serving heaven it is best for a ruler to be sparing.” (66) Laozi advocates that the state should be as non-coercive as possible and minimize its rules, initiatives and punishments – it thus has no agenda, like water. Chapter 57 advertises the advantages of minimalist government: Hence the sage says, I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves; I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block. (Lau 1963, 64)

Steve Coutinho makes the conformist objection that Laozi’s denial of rules and regulations “is disturbingly overoptimistic. It is hard to see how abandoning laws and regulations can by itself change the hearts of people

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

347

determined to exploit others. Empirical experience strongly suggests that this is thoroughly mistaken” (2014, 202). This is a bourgeois objection and its class character is underlined by the footnote Coutinho appends to it in which he equates Laozi’s attack on social conventions with those of Laissez-faire free-market libertarians. He supposes Laozi is falling for the old bourgeois myth of the hidden-hand spontaneous generation of markets, at a time before the ideology of free markets. Given the array of doctrines that attack social conventions as oppressive from Nietzsche to Marx it is risibly bourgeois to think the most reasonable comparison with Laozi’s views is to be found in a faction of petty-bourgeois extremists.24 It is risible because these cranks merely follow the perverse logic of capitalist individualism to its logical extremes. They want to enforce a system of rules for maximizing capital free from legal constraints. What Laozi is advocating has to be more radical than such twaddle.25 It is important to note just how wrong it is to associate Laozi, or indeed any ancient Chinese philosopher, with anarchism or liberalism. These two are based upon the petty-bourgeois dogma of the independence of the individual. “Common to both individualist and social anarchists alike, however, is a perceived tension between individual liberty and the collective will. In Daoism and in Chinese political thought generally, this tension does not exist” (1983, 32). Ancient Chinese ethics conceives of individuals as nodes of intersecting social ties. “[n]otions of development, self-fulfillment, and meaningful action are embedded in the conceptual framework of interdependence” (Lai 2006, 47). Alex Feldt applies these observations to the question of anarchism: “The individual the anarchist defends from state interference is absent and thus the tension between ruling authority and the autonomy of the ruled either does not arise, or does so in a form unfamiliar and unanticipated by Western anarchism” (2010, 329). A more obvious parallel conception of the individual with the ancient Chinese one is with communitarianism. Of the communitarian conceptions of the individual Marxism is the most sophisticated and most intertwined with the idea of withering away of the state. Laozi was writing for states belonging to early stages of the Asiatic mode of production, a mode of production not merely protected and enforced by the state, but also directly administered by the state. The state was more directly implicated in exploitation than in most precapitalist

348 

J. Chambers

societies26. The state was not an arm of the ruling class, the state was the ruling class. The ruling class existed only as state functionaries. Laozi’s advocacy of a minimalist state in this context thus has even more radical implications than it does in capitalist societies where economic life is administered by the state to a lesser degree and the law’s function is to depoliticize the economy. Limiting the size of the state in the Asiatic mode of production directly corresponds to minimizing its exploitation in a way that it does not in other modes of production where ruling classes exploit as independent agents under the aegis of state power but without state centralized distribution of surplus. I contend that with the reduction of the state that Laozi advocates the results would be relatively autonomous smallholdings similar to those that inspired Marx in ancient Greece. The people will fail to exploit and manipulate each other without regulation if they are allowed to act naturally without the artificial mediation of the state because the state was the primary means of exploitation and manipulation in those times. Acting naturally consists in a sympathetic movement that class society represses. Reducing the state is part of Laozi’s advocated means to release this side of our natures. This was particularly so in Laozi’s mode of production of ancient China where the autonomous peasant communities were mainly occupied with their own self-sufficient toil. “Exploitation and manipulation” could only be an option for the leisured class Laozi wants to reduce to the point of not even being noticeable. This highlights the error of Alex Feldt who repeatedly notes Laozi’s, apparently deliberate, failure to advocate the abolition of the state.27 People always notice taxes and collecting them is the most visible expression of the state. In the Asiatic mode of production administering taxes is the defining activity of the state. This kind of state can only be reduced until it is invisible to the populace if it essentially ceases the activity that makes up its raison d’ être - ceases exploitation. The conventional ideology of class society is precisely what must be in contention here. Laozi does not want to set it free from the law. He wants to replace it with a new ideology, an anti-ideology. Presumably the empirical experience Coutinho has in mind is pre-regulated market capitalism (Rockefeller’s capitalism) and times of social unrest (times of lawlessness

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

349

with widespread looting etc.). Coutinho’s evidence tells him that “Complete absence of all regulation leaves room for exploitation and manipulation” (2014, 202). But these experiences belong to episodes of under-regulation and lawlessness in oppressive societies, in which the logic of exploitation persists but without the state to organize it. As such these experiences simply do not count. With the ideological conventions that come with exploitation, everyone regards society as a means of satisfying private desires. These systems of exploitation reproduce themselves in the, only relative never absolute, vacuums of state power, not because it is natural for people as such (there is no transhistorical person) but because it is natural for people in that historical stage, people who have already been corrupted by capitalist regulation. This is what accounts for the primitivist tendency in Laozi’s thought. Anyway, the weight of the materialist theory of history is on the side of the estimation of rules and regulations as systematically enabling, rather than preventing, exploitation and manipulation. Coutinho fails to take account of the fact that not only does Laozi rail against laws and regulations, he rails against moral and even aesthetic conventions of his time. Laozi’s program is radical enough to demand the reshaping of humans according to the requirements of an oppressed facet of their natures. This reading of Laozi can escape a reducio ad absurdum of his doctrine along Coutinho’s lines. Coutinho also appears to recognize the cogency of a historicist defense of Laozi (2014, 75) but is led to his interpretation of Laozi as some kind of utopian anarchist by his failure to identify any practical program for bringing about the change in the people that would be required to make them interact with wuwei.28 This failure is part of his failure to see Laozi’s proposed program for social change as bound up with the natural socialization of the wuwei life that forms his ethical ideal. This oversight, which is at the root of many misreadings of Laozi’s social program. The separation of means and ends is, for Laozi, a product of desire. In Laozi, this act of separation does violence to the ethical act. The only way to achieve a wuwei society must be through actions of wuwei themselves, which in some way are a germ of that society. This same error also neatly explains Edward Slingerland’s accusation of hypocrisy. “There are, when you look more closely, many other points in

350 

J. Chambers

the text where we appear to be presented with crude instrumental reasoning disguised as mystical wisdom, passages that seem primarily concerned with helping us get ahead in the world” (Slingerland 2014, 101). In chapter 66 Laozi talks about the de of the sage ruler. The reason why the River and the Sea are able to be king of the hundred valleys is that they excel in taking the lower position. Hence they are able to be king of the hundred valleys. Therefore, desiring to rule over the people, One must in one’s words humble oneself before them; And, desiring to lead the people, One must, in one’s person, follow behind them. Therefore the sage takes his place over the people yet is no burden; takes his place ahead of the people yet causes no obstruction. That is why the empire supports him joyfully and never tires of doing so. It is because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with him. (Lau 1963, 73)

This chapter out of context lends itself to an instrumental reading that conflicts with wuwei. Slingerland objects that this chapter is an example of “faking wuwei”. Slingerland himself admits “The instrumental reading of Laozian wu-wei is, arguably not in keeping with the original spirit of the text” (2014, 102). Yet this does not give him pause to read against his cynical impulse. Slingerland’s implication is that Laozi’s text is simply confused on the very issue that in Slingerland’s estimation forms the “premise” (101) of the text. This disastrous interpretation implies Laozi does not know what he is talking about.29 The obvious incongruity involved in appearing to give tips on achieving goals whilst renouncing them should be read as representing a rhetorical strategy of wuwei through reconceptualizing conventional meanings. I read chapter 66 as an invitation by Laozi to think anew about what it really means to “desire to be above the people”. Laozi is inviting readers to reconsider what people should take their goals to be. Chapter 66 does not talk about pretense, but it would have to imply this to justify the interpretation that Laozi is recommending wuwei as a strategic measure. Faking humbleness is a standard practice of politicians but this behavior is parasitical upon the

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

351

idea of the virtue of genuine humbleness. Genuine humbleness displays selflessness for the sake of the group, a team-worker’s virtue, which group members rightly prize. Chapter 66 does not have to be read with cynicism for this reason. Let’s take Laozi’s metaphor of the sea and valleys seriously and follow the reading technique explained in chapter 3. Laozi is describing a mimetically formed isomorphic identity between the rivers and oceans relationship with the valleys and the rulers’ relationship with the ruled. The rivers and oceans rule streams of the many valleys because they occupy the low ground. But the seas and rivers are just confluences of the waters of the valley.30 If the leader is to exhibit the de of identity with this natural dao then he/she must be a conduit of the many wills of the group, he/she must voice the unity of their strivings. Just as the waters of the valleys freely flow into the rivers and seas – they are not dragged by the oceans into themselves – the members defer happily to the leaders’ coordination and the leader is no more than the embodiment of the members’ own movement together. The leaders coordinate the followers’ willed movements; they don’t make the followers do anything. Laozi is saying that the best way to lead others is to put their interests above one’s own. If this is genuine, then none of the material advantages that leaders usually enjoy are sought by the wuwei leader, which is as much as to say that the leader’s interpretation of self-gain cannot be dominated by desire. In what sense does Laozi think this is the best way to lead? Slingerland supposes that Laozi thinks it is best in the sense of being the most effective means for the leader. But he misses the fact that measuring effective means for the leader is only possible in terms of the ends of the leader and in this sense, by the meaning of the words Laozi uses, Laozi can only mean that wuwei leadership is effective when the leader lacks his own ends apart from the group and so lacks a conception of effective means for him/herself apart from the group. This leader only considers ends of the group and with it the most effective means for the followers. What does the leader gain by always submitting his/her own interests to the group? With this conception of his/her own interests, the leaders gain leadership, but this can no longer be construed as being valued by the leaders for its own sake or any sake other than the interests of the group. Leaders and followers thus cannot see the arrangement as

352 

J. Chambers

involving subordination and servitude. There is a sense in which Laozi is saying that if one does not want to subordinate one’s conception of one’s own interests to one’s conception of the group one should not desire31 leadership. Chapter 66 is a radical critique of the class-based notion of leadership as including the hierarchical distribution of rewards.32 The leader is above the people because the leader sees, that the leader’s own needs are entirely subordinated to the success of the group. Chapter 7, 81 and others make this point more explicit. It almost goes without saying that such leadership is impossible to rationalize in any group dedicated to the private profit of certain members like a corporation for example. Interestingly this idea does not preclude reading all of the people as potentially leaders; they can all be above the members when they identify themselves with the group, which is more than the sum of its parts. Insofar as any hierarchy is indicated at all it is the hierarchy of the musical conductor who coordinates the team with their participation. Laozi’s thought about “de” overcoming distinctions is not compatible with artificially upholding them through leadership titles and offices. His insistence upon the equivalence of ruling a large state and cooking a small fish indicates that he does not valorize such distinctions; he would not glorify the one and denigrate the other. What has been said does not conflict with what Laozi says in chapter 5, namely that the sage is ruthless and treats the people as straw dogs. In ancient China straw dogs were used for ceremonial purposes, treated with the utmost care while in use and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose. This is read as a appreciation that all things pass, that death is unavoidable and to be embraced rather than mourned and that in conflicts the needs of the many outweigh those of the few. With a radicalized conception of political leadership, Laozi’s program for the realization of a wuwei society takes shape. Laozi can be read as providing both a blueprint of a classless society and a program for bringing it about through the acts that constitute it. It is limited and vague but this is a Laozi that Marx can use because it discloses an aesthetic of socialism, which anticipates the revolutionary model of class-consciousness and communist social consciousness. Both the case of the sage’s work in chapter 2 and the leader’s work in chapter 66 attempt to bridge the gap between means and ends that desire

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

353

has made between them. Wuwei is a Dao which cannot be daoed. It is nonconceptual in the sense that it eliminates distinctions, between means and ends. It is also nonconceptual in that achieving it requires tapping into a relatively dormant nonconceptual side of our natures, the side which subsumes the ego self in the environment, the task at hand and the group through an act of sympathy (absolute mimesis).

Notes 1. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), followed by volume number and page number of Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: CJM EPM TF GI THF TBRI C1 DN

Comments on James Mill Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Theses on Feuerbach The German Ideology The Holy Family The British Rule in India Capital Dialectics of Nature

2. I have already mentioned Aristotle’s view of the primacy of logos in contrast to Laozi. However, I believe that the points of contention between process philosophy and hylomorphism are not actually as many or as stark as most secondary literature on the subject makes them appear. Insofar as Aristotle sees life as a substance, he accepts process ontology, he sees the nature of a thing as responsible for its acts and appeals to natures essentially to explain change. His notion of form is also premised upon a doctrine of internal relations. Essentialism based upon natural kinds is accommodated by Laozi’s idea of foreground. Although it does not interest him as it is foreground, Laozi makes repeated reference to natural kinds - ‘wanwu’ - and does not deny them. 3. This has been accomplished by Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) and others.

354 

J. Chambers

4. A brief attempt was made to foist some of these principles onto Marxism in the late seventies/early eighties by the so-called analytical Marxists. Their reading has proven corrosive to the core tenets of Marxism. The combined efforts of this school amount to a monument to human folly in social theory and one of the best guides in how not to read Marx. 5. This does not mean that Marx does not see the possibility of free labor in the realm of necessity, that is labor carried out for physical survival that is also free (Sayers, 2011, 5). 6. A German cognate of the ancient Greek μεταβολή meaning ‘change’ and ‘throw’ from which the English ‘metabolism’ is derived, via French. Recent MEGA research has traced Marx’s use of the term to learning of the German agronomist Justus von Liebig’s (1803–1873) work in 1851. However, I suspect that Marx may have recognized the cognate Stoffwechsel from his efforts to translate Aristotle’s de Anima around the time of the completion of his doctoral thesis, as Liebig merely added a contemporary physiologist gloss on Aristotle’s earlier meaning. The bibliography of Marx’s doctoral thesis references a plethora of Aristotle’s classics, including works on biology. 7. I am here again drawing on Nasser’s account. This is also how I read Sean Sayers who does not find it helpful to apply these terms in this way to Marx, but this is a semantic difference of presentation because Sayers believes that Aristotelian essentialism is necessarily eternal. It seems this was also Marx’s view, which is presumably why he does not give Aristotle credit for his naturalistic humanism. Admittedly, Marx has developed these ideas via Hegel and Feuerbach, who also did not exhibit the virtues of tracing the sources of their ideas, naming influential thinkers. I would extend this observation to nineteenth century thinkers in general, for whom naming influences was not the convention. However, the Aristotelian inheritance operates on a very basic level of Marx’s analysis. David Depew has explained that a central concept of that work “species-­ being” rests on the idea that human consciousness is “the capacity, associated with Aristotle’s epistemology, to apprehend objects as instances of kinds or species, where a species mark is one or more distinctive dispositional capacities” (2002, 2). 8. Although even in these cases Marx only has theoretical justification for decrying the shortcomings of these epochs on the basis of the abstract

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

355

notion of the ergon of humanity which he could see in its incompleteness trans-historically. 9. See K. B. Anderson (2016). 10. Even in the case of supporting resistance struggles to bypass capitalism, Marx only saw this possibility because capitalism had already developed elsewhere, the depravities of which he hoped must necessarily inform any socialist movement in precapitalist societies. 11. MacIntyre’s translation calls this “social humanity” (1998). 12. The operations of direct behavior-altering parasite affecting the hosts’ central nervous system are analogous to the control of capitalist ideology. 13. The idealist Hegel often misses the power of nature to negate humanity. Mocking the ignorance of sense-certainty In the Phenomenology of Spirit he asserts that even dumb animals deny the sensuous truth of finite objects “despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall-to without ceremony and eat them up” (1969, 65/1969-1971 3, 91). The expression “you are what you eat”, made famous by its prominence in one of Feuerbach’s half-mocking materialist polemics, evidently means nothing to Hegel. But it should be employed in a materialist reading of Laozi. 14. It is interesting to note here that the negation of self through adapting to the environment, particularly in social ideology actually happens within the realm of desire; humans have their own purposes modified by natural/social constraints as well as finding that to achieve their own purposes they have to modify themselves to the dictates of natural/social environment. (Marxism like all scientific conceptions of humanity operates within the realm of desire.) Desire is and is not itself. Laozi is more interested in a side of wuyu that appears outside of the realm of desire; one could call it wuyu proper, which will be elucidated below. 15. However, it should be noted that even in this case Aristotle is concerned to produce a science of aesthetics, not an aesthetic of aesthetics. It is also important to note Aristotle’s remark that poetry is the highest form of philosophy. Aristotle evidently saw that aesthetic philosophy has primacy of insight over scientific philosophy. That we have no examples of Aristotle’s aesthetic philosophy is probably an accident of history. I read Laozi’s only work as a case of aesthetic philosophy par excellence. 16. I mean this in a qualified sense. 17. Marx’s encyclopedic knowledge of western art and literature is in evidence in all his writings.

356 

J. Chambers

18. Except in the case of his, now forgotten, early poetry and drama composition. 19. It is valuable to note that in this chapter, as in chapter 66 Laozi does not make any absolute ethical claims. His doctrine, like Aristotle’s, is not based upon what we should do regardless of how we are. It is not an unconditional ethics. It is based upon the view that with a clear understanding of the action towards which we are groping no further justification is required. We do in fact want to be kingly – in Laozi’s understanding of it. This is a fact about human nature not an imperative external to it that we need to rationalize. 20. Aristotle’s failure to perform this act in his theory can be explained by his conflating artificial and natural distinctions and is one way of explaining his aristocratic elitism, his racism and sexism in his ethics. Biographical details of Aristotle’s life indicate that, to his credit, in some respects, he failed to live up to the exclusiveness of his ethics. 21. Aristotle characterized humans as zoon politikon, which Marx copied. 22. It is generally regarded as giving advice on government to kings. But it seems that ancient intellectuals were aware of its subversive import Academic study of the Laozi has long been carried out in the shadow of a thriving industry of amateur translation and aficionado explanation. Since at least the Western Han dynasty, the Laozi has been seen as an object of popular interest that was, as a result, frowned upon by some classical scholars because it occupied a different set of social locations than other early texts. During the reign of Emperor Jing 景 (r. 157-141 BCE)，this tension was evident in the dismissive reply of Master YUAN Gu 轅固生，a court expert in the 詩經)，to Empress Dou’s S request that he teach her about the Laozi (Shiji 121.3123). Yuan considered the text nothing more than jiaren yan 家人言 “the words/theories of people in the household”一referring to servants or family members一signifying that it did not belong in the sphere of the court. The distinction between the status of the Classics and that of the teachings of Laozi and the Yellow Emperor (i.e., Huang-Lao 黃 老) has been read as having its origin in differences of region, class, political faction, and philosophy, but whatever the origins of the divide，serious scholars like Master Yuan Gu were not interested in crossing it. (Mark Csikszentmihalyi 2015, 47)

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

357

23. Process philosophy sees all entities as events. In Laozi’s metaphysics there are actually only two acts with isomorphic identity existing across plateaus. There are foregrounding, separating, self-asserting acts and there are backgrounding coming together, yielding acts. Everything displays a mixture of these two (This is the yinyang rubric). The difference between “de” acts and other acts is that “de” acts display a relative purity of the wu side of Dao. They have an identity with the movement of identity itself. 24. I can use this as a tu quoque argument that forestalls the argument that my attempt to read Laozi through Marx is anachronistic. Bourgeois scholars cannot escape reading Laozi through their own class paradigms either. This passage is just an example of a case when the assumptions of that paradigm come to the surface. 25. Libertarians are just anarchists who got rich. 26. Indeed, in all precapitalist societies exploitation has a more overtly political form as the business of the state in which surplus was primarily extracted through rent and taxes. See Claudio Katz, 1994 237–260. In the Asiatic mode of production this is true in the highest degree of all precapitalist societies. 27. In a desperate move, Feldt explicitly links Laozi to Robert Nozick! 28. He seems to think that the only indication of practical measures comes in the chapter 59 where Laozi talks about governing a country as like cooking a small fish, involving minimal effort to anticipate triggers to problems before they become unmanageable. Couthino laments that systems are too complex and long-term to always be successfully managed with minor, deft, improvised fixes at early stages. I don’t think this is actually what the analogy of cooking the fish is about but that is another matter. 29. Slingerland wants to find such incongruences because he wants to put Laozi into a grand narrative of Chinese philosophy that is oriented around the problem of the “paradox of wuwei” that of only attaining the advantages of acting without a goal when one sincerely does not have a goal, that is, when the advantages are not valued. Because Laozi does not appear at the end of Slingerland’s story he must read Laozi as giving an incomplete and inadequate answer to this paradox. One can certainly get this reading out of Chinese texts, if one refines the profundity out of them. But there is no good reason to want to read Laozi as posing a poor solution to a problem belonging to golfing self-help books. 30. Chapter 6 is similar.

358 

J. Chambers

31. Note Laozi’s paradoxical wuyu conception of desire here. 32. Certainly, this is not the most obvious reading of chapter 66, but it has the advantage of reading consistency into the text as well as making a Marxist reading of Laozi.

References Anderson, K.B. 2016. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-­ Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 2012. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, With an Interpretive Essay, Notes and Glossary. Trans. R.C.  Bartlett, and S.D.  Collins. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Coutinho, S. 2014. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. Columbia University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2015. Thematic Analysis of the Laozi. In Dao: Companion to Daoist Philosophy, ed. Xiaogan Liu. New York/London: Springer. Denis, A. 2011. Organicism in the Early Marx: Marx and Hegel on the state as an organism. Available at SSRN 2613494. Depew, D. 2002. Aristotle’s De Anima and Marx’s Theory of Man. In Marx, ed. S. Meikle, 195–249. Burlington: Ashgate. Feldt, A. 2010. Governing Through the Dao: A Non-Anarchistic Interpretation of the Laozi. Dao 9: 323–337. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969-1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. ed. Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer, vol. 20 vols. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen and Unwin. Katz, C. 1994. The socialist polis: antiquity and socialism in Marx’s thought. The Review of politics 56 (2): 237–260. Lai, K. 2006. Learning from Chinese Philosophies: Ethics of Interdependent and Contextualized Self. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Lau, D.C. 1963. Tao Te Ching. Trans. L. Tzu. London: Penguin MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

10  Marx and Laozi’s Ethical Naturalisms 

359

———. 1998. The Theses on Feuerbach: The Road Not Taken. In The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight, 223–234. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Marx, K., and F.  Engels. 1975-2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Meikle, Scott. 1985. Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. London: Duckworth. Nasser, A.G. 1975. Marx’s ethical anthropology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 35 (4): 484–500. Slingerland, E. 2014. Trying not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity. Canongate Books. Sayers, S. 2011. Marx and Alienation Essays on Hegelian Themes. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zizek, S. 2012. Less Than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

11 Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism

Marx and Laozi take a dim view of moral theory yet their writings are replete with evaluations relevant to moral. This chapter is dedicated to accounting for this apparent incongruity.

 he Rhetorical Tendency Against T Ethics in Marx Even in his private notes, Marx does not bother to make reference to ethical theory, most of what he has to say about it is hostile and dismissive. There are a number of reasons for this,1 one of the main ones being his view that ethics is not historically efficacious. Marx saw ethics in politics and politics in ethics. This insight undergirds his criticism of capitalism. The class struggle is a political struggle, and ethics is a part of that. “It is a question of what the proletarian is and what it consequently is historically compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is prescribed, irrevocably and obviously, in its own situation in life as in the entire organization of contemporary civil society” (THF-MECW4:36–37/MEW2:38).2 The workers are driven to socialism by the hopelessness of their situation in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_11

361

362 

J. Chambers

capitalism and a feeling of self-worth that cannot be found in any ethics book. If they are not human enough to be disgusted with their plight and develop feelings of mutual loyalty to their comrades, hope, courage and resolve to overcome their suffering then it is patronizing to suppose that the workers will have to consult ethical theory to find these things. Marx’s labor theory of value explains the workers’ suffering to them as the result of their servitude, which the relations of production of capitalism conceal. The theory of history explains to them the temporary and historically conditioned nature of the system that imposes their servitude and the historically conditioned necessity of its overthrow. The ethics of this is implicit, and potentially a distraction from a task, which begins with no more than collective courage. This is a problem of life, not a problem of theory.3 Morality is only efficacious in capitalist society when it serves as a sop to the masses. In capitalist society selfishness and cruelty are rewarded and kindness is punished. If this is the efficacy of morality, then so much the worse for morality. “Between equal rights,” Marx explains, “force decides,” (C1-MECW35:243/MEW23:249) (Since Marx’s times socialism is not merely an ethical imperative but a survival imperative. Biological necessity obviates the need for an ethical argument for socialism.) The downplaying of ethical theory was also implicit in Marx’s science because its overt discussion undermines scientific exposition of exploitation. Ethics remains important insofar as it satisfies the human need to find meaning in its history, meaning in life and meaning in socialism. When read as an ethical narrative the theory of history explains history as the drawn-out process through which humanity alienates itself from itself and nature through the modes of production it employs, to achieve its own ends but that ultimately thwart its ends, and then returns back to itself and nature through overcoming those alienating modes of production. Exploitation is employed to achieve natural human ends (which have been rehearsed above), the ends of civilization; physical survival and cultural development. Yet exploitation is perverse and poisons human relations with each other and nature so is evaluated as a necessary evil for civilization. Civilization itself is, paradoxically, a product of instinct and not itself apt for moral evaluation, another reason to disdain ethics. Once it is no longer necessary for the survival and development of society, with the concomitant technological advances of exploitation, it becomes a fetter which

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

363

alienates humans from their life activities, and which loses whatever justification it once enjoyed. It becomes a fetter at the point at which breaking it becomes in our power to choose. Once exploitation is overcome the way is made clear for the free labor that contains the realization of the essence of the species, always latent in humanity throughout the history of exploitation and resistance against it. The question of whether or not to resist exploitation is really the question of whether or not to have a society, to be human at all. Given this the ends and means reasoning of ethics plays just as little role in evaluating the revolution as it does in civilisation. 

Justice and Ethics Care must be taken to distinguish Marx’s ethical anthropology from his view of moral justice. For Marx, each mode of production contains an ideology its ruling class uses to justify its existence. This ideology has a moral component inscribed in law. For Marx there is a justice for each mode of production; one for slavery, feudalism, capitalism and so on. According to the capitalist system of justice capitalism is by definition just. It is in this sense that Marx says that capitalists’ purchase of the workers’ labor power is “without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury [Unrecht – wrong/injustice] to the seller” (C1-MECW35:204/MEW23:208). An interesting objection to this reading has been proposed by Alan Buchanan (1977) who argues that this remark should be read as a piece of sarcasm by Marx. He argues Marx actually believed that the purchase of workers’ labor power, rather than labor was even an injustice according to bourgeois morality. This is because bourgeois morality only cites contracts in which both parties enter freely as just and the choice of entering an employment contract is made under the workers’ duress; the bourgeoisie own the means of production so the proletariat’s only alternative to accepting their meagre pay is starvation. However, Buchanan continues, as Marx did not believe in bourgeois justice anyway, he was unconcerned by its own violation on this matter and made a joke of it. Buchanan’s argument is untenable because Marx underscores his insistence upon the fairness of the transaction in the Critique of the Gotha Program: “Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is “fair”? And is it not, in fact,

364 

J. Chambers

the only “fair” distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?” (CGP-MECW24:84/MEW19:18) The problem is not that bourgeois justice finds the transaction unfair, the problem is with the bourgeois system of justice itself. Buchanan erroneously assumes a consistency and integrity on the part of bourgeois morality to which it is not entitled. No moral system has ever survived scrutiny in its attempt at justifying the prevailing mode of production. Consistency and coherence are criteria too high for such systems. They are really just rhetorical tricks for browbeating opponents. Unhampered by the requirements of rigor or clarity bourgeois systems of morality can add any number of ad hoc clauses to justify the extraction of surplus-value by definition or simply appeal to a kind of relativism and insofar as our evaluation operates within the circle of their system of values they are entitled to do so. They have an army of apologists at their disposal whose job it is to accomplish this. It’s just a game. If one abstracts from the context of the workers’ duress from lack of alternative means of subsistence, as all bourgeois morality does, then the contract has been entered into freely and, given the alternative is pauperism and death, which, it supposes, the worker is also free to choose, the worker is not considered to be injured by working for his or her bread instead. This simple dodge is performed by assuming the ‘absolute sovereignty of human will’ or some other idealist humbuggery. Besides, there can be no contract agreed upon without an element of duress. If the labor seller’s duress is to be considered then so should be the buyer’s duress. If the capitalist does not hire enough workers the business will go bust. It is not the case that any capitalist can be held responsible for the unfreedom of any worker’s choice. Rather, the capitalist class as a whole deprives the worker of other means of subsistence. Even here the charge against the capitalist class is limited for, Marx insists, again in The Critique of the Gotha Program, that the Landowner class (which in Marx’s day had not yet been completely absorbed by the bourgeoisie) are also party to depriving the workers of any other means of subsistence (CGP-MECW24:83/MEW19:17). The capitalist who agrees to employ a worker cannot be blamed for the actions of class society in general. Buchanan’s reading has got bourgeois moral theory back to front. Bourgeois ideology is entirely reactionary; in moral theory, it concerns itself mainly with making excuses for its madness and cruelty. It first identifies a conventional practice of the ruling classes

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

365

and then declares that to be the eternal basis of morals. Marx dryly observes: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society…” (CGP-­MECW23:87/MEW19:21), and that is the beginning and end of moral theories which begin from the assumption that their current transitory context, is permanent and natural. The fact that their justifications all amount to a house of cards does not shut the apologists’ mouths. They still declare that any laborer is fairly treated, no matter how abject that laborer’s condition, and just go rooting for a new trick to drown out objections. Bourgeois moral theory is incoherent anyway (MacIntyre 1981, 116). Marx’s mode of evaluation is by no means imprisoned in the relative systems of moral justice (‘right’) of each epoch because they are merely the ideology of the dominant class in each epoch. Nothing is beneath the bourgeois theorist in the abstraction of economic relations. Marx opposes every aspect of capitalism, including its phony morality and legal superstructure because they go against the historical essence of humanity. Classes have their own antagonistic ideologies. Progressive classes enjoy ideologies, which tend towards the realization of the natural capacities of humanity. Marx lauded Spartacus’ doomed slave revolt for the progressive contribution it made to the ideology of proletarian class-­ consciousness. Marx supports the proletariat in the belief that this class has the power to free all of humanity. If the proletariat were offering a new mode of production which did not tend towards the abolition of exploitation and classes then it would not be worthy of support. Lenin declares: “We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle” (1966, 291). It does not enjoy the timeless legitimacy that is the pretension of all moral theories. There is a semantic case to be made that morality is essentially antagonistic as it is made for application to class societies which are based upon irreconcilable class conflict, where win-win solutions are impossible. In suggesting that there is a moral solution to the conflicts arising in class society without addressing their irreducible and irresolvable class character, morality serves only as an attempt to pacify the contending parties and hide a contradiction which can only be resolved through struggle. Once the antagonism inherent in class morality disappears it takes with it the major site of morality’s operations. Ideas of distributive justice play no part in Marx’s model of communism for he believes that principles of justice

366 

J. Chambers

arise to address conflicts that should be overcome. The rug will be pulled from under scarcity, want, fear, rapacity, conceitedness and the stress that comes with this and fosters abuse. There is sense in saying that morality itself is conditional upon the existence of class society and disappears with the disappearance of class society. I think it is helpful to understand why Laozi does not clarify the distinctions between two moralities present in the Daodejing in this light, for one system of evaluation, which he systematically uses, tends against antagonism, against classes and thus, in an important sense, against morality altogether.

 wo Tendencies of Thought on Morality T in Marx and Laozi The idea of bad abstraction being the ground of the parasitical ideology of capitalism that reifies things can be adapted to Laozi’s own thought to make a way for ethical interpretations of Laozi despite his criticism of morality.4 Eric Sean Nelson comments: “A work criticizing the exploitation and oppression of people by their rulers, the decay of ethical responsiveness into an adverse bureaucratic morality, and the unforgiving consequences of war and violence is not suitably described as unethical and nihilistic” (2009, 303).5 Both Marx and Laozi can be read as identifying two moralities; one is condemned (state ideology) and the other is employed (a natural ethics). Laozi’s idea of desire-driven concepts bringing a species of knowledge that is of manifestation, imperfection and boundaries has parallels with Marx’s idea of the state, commodity fetishism and capital itself arising from the hypostatization of the means-ends driven social world in the ideal. For Marx thinks that in exploiting/alienating society, in which all praxis is driven by a means-ends dichotomy (that is where the ends are external to the means, and no action has meaning in itself ), the ideology conflicts with the natural life activity of humans and their metabolic relationship with the natural world. Capitalism amounts to a pseudo-reality, an objective, socially real illusion of fetishism in the sense that the M-C-M circuit upon which it is based distracts

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

367

society with the pursuit of a mismeasure of wealth – capital, condemning its producers to lives of drudgery and poverty. Marx’s theory of surplus value exposes the illusory character of wage labour. Capitalist wage relations between worker and employer appear to be an equitable arrangement between two parties according to which each party satisfies personal needs (achieves personal ends) through means of the exchange with the other. This appearance conceals the capitalist exploitation of the worker. The theory of surplus value shows that a surplus of value the workers produce above the value of the labor-power the capitalist pays for to be surplus value underlying profits. So, despite appearances just like serfs in feudalism and slaves in slavery, wage workers in capitalism are exploited because they all coerced in to working beyond the maintenance of themselves and for the ruling class, the owners of the means of production. Because the first exchange between capitalists and wage workers (buying and selling of labor power) appears to be an exchange of equivalents, capitalism is distinctive in that this exploitation is not evident on the surface. Slaves and serfs knew their production of surplus was a form of service, an exploitation inscribed and enforced in custom and law, but the employment contract between the capitalist and wage workers does not admit to be in presenting terms of service according to which the worker pays a tribute to the capitalist, tribute for the use of the latter’s means of production, in the form of surplus labour, in order to receive with this labour something towards the means for the worker’s survival. The capitalist pays for an estimation of the labour-power of the worker and the worker produces values which are a surplus of the value of the payment. Exploitation is hidden by the separation of means and ends in exchange. In exchange for payment sufficient for survival, people in capitalism surrender their autonomy, time, strength and health to expanding the parasitic alien social power of capital. The actual use-value of the commodities in which the value of the labor is congealed is a matter of indifference or outright hostility to the producers themselves. They are not attempting to make products or services to be of any use, but to get some of the value of their own labor back in wages. They essentially give their labour to another in exchange for getting a fraction of it back. Even the capitalists’ private wealth is enjoyed only indirectly, by siphoning off a fraction of the capital accumulated, the

368 

J. Chambers

greater body of which returns to its C-M-C circuit or splits off into other circuits. The world of instrumental reason is an artificial world of beliefs; pitting people against each other and nature, subjugating people to the social relations of reified things. It is useful to read Laozi’s use of the word ‘manifestation’ – jiao – in this way because it explains the ambiguity of the term as referring to an inferior reality. Value has objective, social reality which constitutes a collective mismeasure of wealth (Murray 2016). The capitalist mode of production engenders the domination of desire in experience, and this domination expresses an alienated way of life: Selling is the practical aspect of alienation.... under the domination of egoistic need [man] can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity—money—on them. (JQ-MECW3:174/MEW1:377)

The social form of alienated things strives against human nature itself. Its ideological superstructure is the realm of legal justice, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ for Marx and Laozi. It has already been argued that Marx’s disparagement of this kind of morality whilst also systematically upholding strong judgments with evaluative import on ethical matters is a way of making sense of and overcoming an apparent internal tension in Marx’s thought on morality. Without this explanation Marx appears to oscillate between condemning morality and employing it.6 In effect Marx identifies two kinds of morality, the morality of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, which Marx denies; and Marx’s ethical anthropology,7 which grounds all of his evaluations. Interpreting desire-driven concept knowledge of chapter 1 in the Daodejing as involving the knowledge of state ideology and then identifying desireless mimetic knowledge with another kind which Laozi employs has the two advantages of reading coherence into the Daodejing as well as finding an affinity between Laozi and Marx. This way of reading also makes sense with the text because Laozi’s two kinds of knowledge correspond to two stances on desire and desire is inherently implicated in evaluative thought, which is the purview of morality.

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

369

Ideology and Laozi’s Criticism of Desire-Side Morality Once the two moralities have been identified in Laozi as one with desire and one without, Laozi’s criticism of one morality, foreground morality can be explained as the morality of the state, the morality of the dominant class. Marx’s criticism of capitalism will here be integrated into Laozi’s metaphysical categories. The materialist conception of the essence of man sees (in full agreement with the data of anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology) the universal form of human life in labour, in the direct transformation of nature (both external and his own) that social man brings about with the help of tools made by himself. That is why Marx felt such sympathy to Benjamin Franklin’s famous definition (quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson) of man as a tool-making animal: a tool-making animal and only therefore also a thinking animal, talking, composing music, obeying moral norms, and so on (Ilyenkov 2009, 208).

Laozi’s psychological criticism of the oppression of ideology as an outgrowth of desire armed with concepts can supplement Marx’s social/historical explanation. The social tool-making tendency can be seen in psychological terms as the cell form of the distinctly human modification of the biological phenomenon of desire; it activates the identification of subject as desiring agent, object as goal, and additional object as means, with modifications, of attaining the goal. This makes the satisfaction of desire into a three-step, socially planned process that, through becoming embedded in the life of the organism generates and develops those specially advanced human characteristics; concepts and speech. This is the beginnings of Adorno’s instrumental reason, which leads onto what Adorno called “Disenchantment”. Human history is built upon the edifice of this tendency. With the increasingly sophisticated ways in which humans satisfy their desires in collective tool making, the division of labor begins, and with this comes exploitation/class division and its concomitant ideology. This morality is oppressive in that it is enforced through the violence of class rule. It is oppressive by its nature insofar as

370 

J. Chambers

it is meant to confine activity within artificial bounds that enable exploitation against natural inclinations that resist it. It is oppressive insofar as it is used as the benchmark according to which state-sanctioned rewards and punishments can be allotted along with the unequal accordance of rights and responsibilities. It is also oppressive insofar as, like all aspects of ruling class ideology, it is a psychological tool of exploitation.8 This is the explanation and criticism that Marx gives of ideology,9 absent linking ideology with desire, as he didn’t produce a psychology of history.10 Desire-side morality fits the socialization of desire that becomes exploitation. In this paragraph I have put Laozi’s psychological explanation of the oppression of desire-side morality into Marx’s social historical explanation of the oppression of ideology. Of course, the Frankfurt school, notably Adorno, did a much more thorough job of supplementing Marx’s historical explanation with a psychological one. Adorno argues that the oppression of ideology arises from the monopoly of the instrumental use of concepts in human experience, which he implies is intimately bound with the means-ends interpretation of desire. I have noted that Laozi can be used to make a similar argument to point out a way of bringing Marx and Laozi together, not to advocate Laozi as a preferable partner to Marx in this particular area. The advantage of Laozi’s interpretation lies in the ontological context in which this belongs as representing one kind of a general movement of separation that the Critical Theory has neglected (because it is metaphysical) as well as the way out that absolute mimesis offers against Adorno’s pessimistic vision of disenchantment. Laozi’s foreground explanation of desire includes the ideas that it is both natural and unnatural, just like Marx’s criticism of alienation. Whereas for Adorno instrumental reason is both the negation of myth and a higher recurrence of the natural desire to dominate nature for survival. This is another critical advantage. Laozi’s ontological interpretation of desire as a type of foregrounding adds urgency to the criticism of capitalism. In Laozi’s ontology the process of completing the separation of one thing from its environment is the process of decay. When things foreground themselves, they become hard and brittle in the same measure. This process continues to the point of dissipation and return of the separate parts of the entity to the mother in regeneration, becoming something else. Capitalism is the perfection of

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

371

desire as an isolating foreground movement of individuals, the segmentation of their activities and experiences, the separation and alienation of individuals from themselves and society from nature. It is a kind of decay, not merely in the zombie-farm-way it engineers and thrives upon human suffering and death as Marx tells it, but in the way it sheds humans like leaves from the tree of life as Laozi tells it. This shedding can either end in the thaw of spring in socialism or kill off the tree entire. Capitalism will destroy everything, because this is its nature, or it will be purged enabling new life depending upon how historical actors interpret it. Laozi’s ontology of life foreground returning to background gives hope that the lifecycle of capitalism signals the death of a kind of movement that always turns into a rebirth one way or another.11 Of course, Critical Theory’s opposition to metaphysics would criticize this Laozi-inspired account precisely for introducing excess metaphysical baggage into the psychological history of exploitation. For it trades upon thinking of capitalism as somehow a natural extension of human cognition rather than a peculiar outgrowth of particular social circumstances which, in fact, had to be violently installed by the ruling classes through the brutal terrorism of primitive accumulation,12 and takes an increasingly large toll of violence to maintain.13 While the naturalness of capitalism should be contested by Marxists, a one-sided and problematic inference from it would be to abstract exploitation in capitalism from exploitation as such so that, rather than being one manifestation of exploitation in one particular historical phase, capitalist exploitation is construed as unique. It is important to historicize exploitation. Exploitation, like the category of class, does not exist in history as such but only exists through different forms in history; slavery, serfdom, wage-labor, etc. However, excessively historicizing exploitation loses sight of the continuity between forms of exploitation. Clarifying the points of continuity and difference between exploitation in capitalism and precapitalist modes of production can substantiate the interpretation of history inspired by Laozi’s metaphysics. This reading of Laozi sees in capitalist ideology the apex of a mode of social practice and thought which expresses the foregrounding movement of borders and appearance. Exploitation will first be explained as a separation of means and ends in the mode of production. Then capitalism will be

372 

J. Chambers

articulated as the penetration of this kind of exploitational activity and ideology into every facet of life. Marx accords a transhistorical sense to exploitation of which capitalist exploitation is just a special case. In the Grundrisse, exploitation is a parasitical relationship arising in the social form between the ruling classes and the ruled class. Here the ruling classes take advantage of a vulnerability of the laborer in order to force the laborer to yield a surplus beyond the production necessary for the latter’s maintenance. Exploitation, is an economic form of abuse. That is, the exploiting party makes use of the exploited party in order to gain a benefit recognized by the social form from the exploited party at the latter’s expense. The benefit is accrued from the exploited party in a way that harms the exploited party. Exploitation characterizes the relationship of the driving class dynamic between state aristocracy and peasant in the oriental mode of production, master and slave in the classical mode of production, lord and vassal in feudalism and capitalist and worker in the present mode of production. The effects of exploitation include elements of alienation already discussed. An interpretation of exploitation inspired by Laozi emphasizes its presupposition of the separation of means and ends. This exploitation is made possible by a cognitive act of separation of the laborer from the master and the task from the result. Marx observes “Every self-­ estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself.” (EPM-MECW3:279/MEW40:519) There is a clear link between the desire-side thought which Laozi opposes and the phenomenon of alienation, which Marx identifies: For the exploiting class the exploited class is a means to the attainment of the fruits of the production process without having to produce themselves; they are alienated from the producers and the production. For the exploited class the production process is labor for another; they are alienated from the production process, and the product. However, not all social relations are alienated in precapitalist modes of production. In prehistoric, pre-class times Marx and Engels believed that the mode of production called primitive communism prevailed. In these hunter-gatherer societies there was little or no surplus and so few opportunities for exploitation. Alienation was still present however, in the

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

373

vulnerability imposed by the lack of control on the environment of early humans. They were alienated from production in their dependence upon the natural fecundity of the earth operating entirely externally to their control. Claudio Katz has convincingly argued that particularly in the Grundrisse Marx’s ideas of freedom and thus unalienated social production took ideas from the “masterless” freedom of relatively autonomous communities of peasant smallholdings in ancient Greece (Katz 1994). Marx’s increasing support of precapitalist modes of production in his later years which has already been touched upon has a bearing to this. Social alienation creeps into history with classes in the attempts to circumvent the harsh natural necessities of scarcity which accompanied prehistoric societies’ low level of production. Generally, the predominance of use-value oriented production in precapitalist societies meant that the reproduction of, what Ruth Groff terms, “internal goods” (2012, 782), was not entirely precluded. In these conditions the producer relates to the natural conditions of production “as natural presuppositions of himself, which constitute, as it were, only an extension of his body” (OCPE-­ MECW28:415/MEW42:399). As property is here a social determination its nature is determined by social relations between humans as members of their communities. Capitalism is different; in Capitalism right to property is established through individuals, as the personifications of reified things – commodities. Here all social relations are exploitational: Holbach depicts the entire activity of individuals in their mutual intercourse, e. g., speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and utilisation... In this case, the utility relation has a quite definite meaning, namely, that I derive benefit for myself by doing harm to someone else (exploitation de l’homme par l’homme).... All this is actually the case with the bourgeois. For him only one relation is valid on its own account—the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation; and even where he encounters ­relations which cannot be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation, he subordinates them to it at least in his imagination. The material expression of this use is money which represents the value of all things, people and social relations. (GI-MECW5:409–410/MEW3:394–395).

374 

J. Chambers

Exploitation does not merely characterize the relationship between the capitalist and worker but also between capitalists themselves. Marx articulates the ideology of bourgeois political economics in its obsessive reimagining of the so-called ‘state of nature’. Individual producers are exchanging in the market: Each of us sees in his product only the objectification of his own selfish need, and therefore in the product of the other the objectification of a different selfish need, independent of him and alien to him. As a man you have, of course, a human relation to my product: you have need of my product. Hence it exists for you as an object of your desire and your will. But your need, your desire, your will, are powerless as regards my product…The social relation in which I stand to you, my labour for your need, is therefore also a mere semblance, and our complementing each other is likewise a mere semblance, the basis of which is mutual plundering. (CJM-­ MECW3:225–226/MEW40:459–460)

In the Manifesto Marx and Engels observe how in this ideology of exploitation the bourgeois patriarch “sees in his wife a mere instrument for production” (MCP-MECW6:502/MEW4:478). With the penetration of money into all social relations every facet of human life can be apportioned a price for the control of its exercise and exploited accordingly. The price form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that, al- though money is nothing but the value form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c, are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. (C1-MECW35:112/MEW23:117)

Exploitation in precapitalist society took the form of directly separating the producers from their product in order to extract the surplus. Capitalist society is different in that its exploitation is based upon the separation of use-value from the value in the commodity in the pursuit of the

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

375

accumulation of quantitative value. The logic of capitalism is an illusory system of appearances and borders, driven by infinite desire. Capitalist society reproduces commodity circulation as exchange-values, rather than as use-­values. The use-value of the commodity is qualitative; it concerns what that thing is intrinsically and what use it has. A chair, for example, is good for sitting on and other things besides. If that chair lost a leg, it would lose its sitting use-value. Exchange-value of the commodity, on the other hand, is purely quantitative; it concerns the measure of that commodity’s exchangeability in terms of a ratio of other commodities, e.g. this coat can exchange for ten yards of linen, or 10 lbs tea or 40 lbs coffee or 1 quarter corn or… While use-value concerns the commodity’s intrinsic nature, exchange value has a purely social objectivity (C1MECW35:57/MEW23:62), in which goods are ceaselessly produced with the sole purpose of being exchanged for others. Marx establishes that the shared substance of the value grounding this system of exchange is a quantum of abstract human labor. Labor is embodied in commodities by being treated as an abstract, quantifiable, fungible entity. In terms of exchange-value all commodities are qualitatively the same, they differ only quantitatively in the magnitude of abstract labor their production entails. The infinite index of exchange ratios between coat, linen, tea and so on is superseded by the universal equivalent of money, which brings out the purely quantitative relation between commodities as values. Economic activity is subordinated to the accumulation of this quantity in the capitalist General Formula of Capital, M–C–M1 (money-commodity-more money). Aristotle is critical of this ‘chrematistical’ circuit for: “There is no limit to the end it seeks; and the end it seeks is wealth of the sort we have mentioned and the mere acquisition of money” (1995, 27). Greed, or pleonexia, he claims, necessarily attends this form of circulation. In Laozi’s terms The General Formula of Capitalism is the limitless quantification of desire. The value arises from the exchange power of a commodity derived from the quantity of abstract labor spent upon its production, which makes capitalist profits. Labor power has a qualitative dimension in that the production process for each commodity is different, sewing, harvesting, and building for example are all different kinds of activities. Yet this qualitative difference is disregarded (C1-MECW35:48/MEW23:52) in

376 

J. Chambers

the assignment of exchange-value to labour power, just like all other commodities. Labour power retains only the distinction form other commodities that it is that which the ratios of exchange-values express, namely the ‘value’. In the form of value, labour is a homogeneous substance congealed in the commodity. Abstract labour is what becomes of the human productive capacity in capitalism. Marx observes that “it is a characteristic feature of labour which posits exchange-value that it causes the social relations of individuals to appear in the perverted form of a social relation between things” (CCPE-­ MECW29:275/MEW13:21). Money and commodities are not mere things, but relata underpinning a system of exchange. Yet they are misidentified as things, the purely social reality of the of the value commodity is mistaken for a natural property (commodity fetishism) and reified money displaces the social form of labor and wealth (money fetishism). The movement of commodities gains a social power which acts as a force of nature beyond the control of any of the people who reproduce this movement. In a society dominated by commodity exchange-value the surplus is transferred through the non-personal wage mechanism and not through legal and traditional ties. The ideology of this social form of reified things has some kind of universalism at its base, be it Kantian categorical imperatives or an abstract conception of utility, with their ethical values of formal equality and constitutionalism. “If Kantian pure practical reason expresses the abstraction of exchange-value, the instrumental reason of utilitarianism can be seen to express the fact that commodified goods are produced not for their own sake, but instead as means – means to an end unrelated to their use-values” (Groff 2012, 785). From this ethical standpoint arising from an interpretation of Laozi on Marx’s critique of capitalism, capitalism is not a natural extension of human cognition, not some kind of necessary ontological movement, as a modern Empedocles might put it, rather capitalism is a mode of praxis which fosters an infinite ontological movement of separation in the realm of ideology, an ideology of desire. Desire-side ideology uses money to mediate and thereby separate production and consumption, means and ends. Laozi’s ahistorical philosophy is amenable to the belief that this pervasive tendency is something happening in humans which they have

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

377

created by going against Dao and which can be reversed. A positive consequence of using Laozi to ontologize the system of severance in capitalism is that it provides a metaphysical, epistemic and ethical context for the malfunction of means/ends-dichotomous thought, rather than, as a common reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, turning history itself into a grand narrative of the emergence and dominance of this lopsided mode of thought. Obviously, no such explanation of morality as an ideological prop of class rule actually appears in the Daodejing. Yet this explanation of the origins of morality as part of an oppressive ideology does operate as a compelling way of reading elements of Laozi’s primitivism. In chapters like chapter 53 Laozi directly parallels the intensification of the expression of the class divide with social decay. The aristocrats’ displays of wealth impoverish the people. In Chapter 75 the tax collectors create banditry by taxing people to the point they feel their lives are not worth living. In chapter 38 Laozi parallels the emergence of moral strictures with the loss of Dao. Hence when the way was lost there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites. The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith And the beginning of disorder; Foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way And the beginning of folly. Hence the man of large mind abides in the thick not in the thin, in the fruit not in the flower. Therefore he discards the one and takes the other. (Lau 1963, 82)

If we put this idea together with chapters like chapter 53 the case can be made that Laozi sees the moralists (which must include the ruists who were Laozi’s ideological opponents) as an arm of an acquisitive empire-­ building state who voice the need for enforcing moral rules in response to the chaos that comes when unyielding desire is mixed up in a system of greed and exploitation, fueling competition and war.14 We can reason

378 

J. Chambers

backwards from the point Laozi makes in chapter 19 to see an argument in Laozi that the appearance of moralists in times of social strife is not a reaction against social strife but its ideological prop. “exterminate the sage, discard the wise, And the people will benefit a hundredfold; Exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude, and the people will again be filial.” (23)15 Mario Wenning observes: As a form of proto-ideology critique, Daoism thus reveals how moral systems of belief serve as justifications of the underlying pathological practices rather than adequately addressing and, wherever possible, transforming them. The point made by Daoists is that it is not helpful to change the moral convictions of the time as long as one does not also change the underlying practices (2011, 62).

If this contention is right, then Laozi is anticipating some of Marx’s observations in his Eleven Theses and On the Jewish Question. In addition to criticizing the morality of desire as an ideological a tool of the oppressor, Laozi criticizes desire-side morality as oppressive in itself. This takes the form of the ethical criticism of goal-driven concepts. Morality is itself oppressive insofar as the conceptual schema of moral evaluation is a restriction of natural inclination: The five colours make man’s eyes blind; The five notes make his ears deaf; The five tastes injure his palate; Riding and hunting Make his mind go wild with excitement; Goods hard to come by Serve to hinder his progress. Hence the sage is For the belly Not for the eye. Therefore he discards the one and takes the other. (Lau 1963, 16)

In chapter 12 Laozi attacks the artificial modification of natural pleasures as killing the senses. These human modifications take the form of conceptual boundaries. It is not the experience of music as such that Laozi

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

379

criticizes here as deafening the ears, but the five notes. The five notes refers to an artificially constructed division of musical tones for an aesthetic ideal of harmony belonging to musical thinking of Laozi’s day. Increasingly refined and over-analyzed pleasures lead to their depreciation, specialization and addiction. Desire itself is not oppressive, but when refined it severs the experience of pleasure from its act and replaces it with ‘critique’ and ‘assessment’ it socializes pleasure through the medium of domination. The comparison of the eye and the belly is a useful metaphor because of the ways they can modify pleasure. The belly is satisfied with any nutrition that fills it, whereas the roaming eye is what humans use to make distinctions, to measure preferences and to gloat and to covet. The eye is implicated in the means-ends dichotomy in a way that the belly is not (or at least not so directly). Refined pleasures are elitist. They create artificial rules designed to deprive the unrefined from shared pleasure. These rules reproduce a system of domination, which ‘Make his mind go wild with excitement’ because they detract from what pleasure is really about and replace it with a system of meeting artificial standards. The following will mix this aesthetic/psychological criticism of the oppression of desire’s concepts to make a tentative and experimental argument from Laozi, supporting Marx’s struggle against ideology. Marx makes a criticism of ideology as carving up language through the division of labor. In the German Ideology Marx imagines a prehistorical time when language was not alienating. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the ­language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people (GI-MECW5:36/MEW3:26).

This harmony of language and material activity is disrupted by the “division of material and mental labour” that comes with class society.

380 

J. Chambers

From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc. (GI-MECW5:45/MEW3:31)

Ideology is the ruling class’s alienation of language from material activity through cutting “‘pure’ theory” off from material activity. These purely mental languages then infect “the language of real life” until language no longer directly reflects ordinary experience but reflects the language of alienating ideology. This move of division obviously exploits the concept’s boundary naming power, which it was argued in chapter two, is triggered and directed by desire. Laozi’s account here differs from Adorno’s: The example of the ‘five notes’ in chapter 12 is a direct demonstration of the power of conceptualization power to alienate the senses. If the ruling classes employ desire-­ driven conceptual boundary power to produce the ideology which infected language then an aesthetic/psychological case can be made from Laozi that defeating this alienation can come through reviving the dormant desireless tendency in humanity. Mastering desire can be seen as getting to the psychological roots of the power of ideology. Laozi is an arguing from feeling. Laozi’s idea of the opposition of wuyu and youyu as ahistorical psychological16 drives in which wuyu can master youyu is not scientific. Such an argument would not to appeal to Marx, or Adorno. Adorno uses an imminent critique of the concept as he thinks mimesis has already been defeated. Mimesis is only used in an appeal to concepts to get themselves out of their own difficulty. Marx makes an imminent critique of bourgeois ideology and his explanation of the explanatorily prior role that a change in social circumstances drives changes in feelings. To some extent Laozi does realize that change in social circumstances drives psychological changes needed to defeat ideology but Laozi appeals to the transformative power of social feeling to achieve this. The value of Laozi’s contribution is a psychological interpretation of the struggle for socialism in which the victory over exploitation is a victory over the tyranny of the severance accompanying desire, the installation of a mode of

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

381

praxis that fosters an extreme of quantitative desire. Laozi is more useful than Adorno here because Laozi’s idea of overcoming desire is amenable to its adaptation for Marxism in an understanding of the aesthetic experience of class-consciousness. Adorno did not have the faith to experience class-consciousness as class-consciousness is an act of faith. Without the faith that revolution is inevitable, revolution is impossible. Collective action is frightening in its atavism and by no means is it revolutionary in itself. Indeed, it can be the greatest oppressive force. It is an inherently dangerous enterprise with no certain promise of progress. What is most frightening about it is that it temporarily induces a freedom from the self. Class-consciousness relies upon the scientific application of this primitive force and the art wuyu is its ability to break through the ideological constraints of class-society. For the sake of oneself one must renounce oneself in class-consciousness and embrace the death, of the unfathomable sea. This is the power of the shamans. This is the birth of tragedy. The masses in collective action contain a psychic power that can be harnessed to create a collective consciousness. The important element of the atavism of collective action, through which it rises above mass hysteria is to be painstakingly built in the awareness of the shared participants that it is their movement, and that each of them, both disappears into it, and commands. Wuyu is present in the practice and patience for this. The development of a higher level of collective consciousness has not been the open agenda of collective action in the past, yet it has always been the decisive moment of any revolution. The highest art awakens a similar atavism in that it accomplishes another kind of return to a shared experience across generations, to arrest a single feeling. It is revolutionary in breaking through the constraints of historical time.

Desire-Side Morality, Fan, and Wuwei Chapter 2 contains the notorious lines: “The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad.” (1963, 6).17 The naming of values is oppressive in that it dictates to humans what they should seek and what they should avoid. It dictates our feelings to us

382 

J. Chambers

rather than them arising on their own (fashion). When people act according to moral rules against their own inclinations they poison their actions,18 partly because there is an internal conflict between, what Hegel would call, will and desire. Actively seeking the good becomes not good because it constrains our ways of thinking of things. It makes us selective and this selectivity robs experience of its spontaneity, because we are attempting to fit experiences into a preconceived classification system, reacting how we think we should react (according to the social conventions that enforce moral evaluation) to this kind of thing19 rather than taking it on its own terms. Laozi would side with Aristotle and against Kant and insist that the virtuous action is felt, but he would go further than Aristotle and add that it must proceed through its feeling and that this feeling is suppressed in rule governed acts. It turns pleasure into an acquisitive enterprise. This leads to self-defeating attempts to prolong and intensify the desired. Acquisitive gain, driven as it is by desire, impedes the movement of “fan” in the world. It is sure to fail20 but it also lacks meaning in itself because it asserts the ego self of the possessor against the community and the environment. As the rest of chapter two spells out, through the process of fan – the movement of Dao – all extremes turn into one another Thus Something and Nothing produce each other; The difficult and the easy complement each other; The long and the short offset1 each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Note and sound harmonize with each other; Before and after follow each other (Lau 1963, 6).21

Mario Wenning claims “wu-wei, understood as pertaining to the form of an action performed in an effortless way, provides a radically different conception of optimal action from that of purposive, instrumental activity” (2011, 62). To favor one side of experience is to be oppressed by the illusion that there is an isolated value in one without the other. This is to be ruled by desire. The pleasure of the biting the juicy apple is not contained in this experience alone, but the entire cultivation process which made this apple.

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

383

Against this illusion Laozi advocates wuwei: Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words. The myriad creatures rise from it yet it claims no authority; It gives them life yet claims no possession; It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude; It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit. It is because it lays claim to no merit That its merit never deserts it (Lau 1963, 6).

The sages see things as processes, they do not linger after one side and revel in the temporal polarities through which they pass. By not seeking one side of the lifespan of the entities they work with, by not working for reward, the sages ensure that the goals of their labor are not external to the tasks themselves. Merit never deserts them because merit is in the activity itself, not merely in its results. The sages labour for its own sake. The implication of the way Laozi links this with the first lines indicates that Laozi thinks the sages have unearthed a natural mode of evaluation that escapes artificial desire-side morality. This must be so because Laozi’s criticism of desire-side morality is based upon the idea that it is oppressive in that it burdens its practitioners with labels that dull their senses, it damages them by forcing on them a selective attitude to life. People are oppressed by the ubiquity of the undesired and the elusiveness of the desired. People are oppressed by competition for the desired. Wuwei describes the sages’ way of collapsing the means/ends dichotomy that stems from desire. The sages are able to do this because they can overcome the ego self through the act of backgrounding. When the sages take on the form of their environment they see themselves as supporting the things in it. Yielding to the “ten thousand things” helps the 10,000 things assert themselves. The sage nurtures the things in his surroundings. He sees himself as assisting the movement of “fan” in the world. This activity does not separate means and ends because it sees each thing as part of a situation, the fertility of which is an end in itself through them and the act of harmonizing with them as satisfying and meaningful on its own. If the sage wants to take an apple down from the tree he does

384 

J. Chambers

not see the height of the tree as an obstacle and the ladder as a tool; rather he sees the tree as an essential part of the process of the life of the apple and sees himself as adjusting his own body to trace the shape of the ladder, which traces the tree. The taste of the sweet apple itself is not seen as a reward for the difficulty of cultivating the tree and climbing the ladder but rather as a part of the apple picking process that was part of the life processes of the tree and the apple picker. The sage gets something from the act of picking the apple, not merely its consumption. The ability to adapt to the environment as an end in itself is portrayed as granting almost magical powers upon its practitioners. In chapter 50 Laozi says: When going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades of life, three in ten will be comrades of death, and there are those who value life1and as a result move into the realm of death, and these also number three in ten. Why is this so? Because they set too much store by life. I have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding his own life does not meet with rhinoceros or tiger when travelling on land nor is he touched by weapons when charging into an army. There is nowhere for the rhinoceros to pitch its horn; there is nowhere for the tiger to place its claws; there is nowhere for the weapon to lodge its blade. Why is this so? Because for him there is no realm of death (Lau 1963, 57).

Passages like this have misled readers into thinking that Laozi is advertising wuwei as a means of achieving some goal, in the case above it would appear to be survival in the face of danger. This invites the interpretation of paradox because Laozi promotes wuwei as an act embodying a countertendency (wuyu) to the tendency of desire and its goals. Rather, Laozi is appealing to the tendency that wuwei embodies as life itself. Wuyu is a matter of biological necessity. All living creatures are essentially involved in assimilating nature to themselves and assimilating themselves to nature. The sage has mastered the art of assimilating himself to his situation; the tendency that creates situations as such. This confers upon him a figurative kind of immortality, a oneness with the spirit of the valley, but this immortality is not the goal of the act itself. The act itself is its own goal. The act concerns turning yourself into your world. The extra one that Laozi does not include as a disciple of life,

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

385

death, or creator of a place for death in their lives is the sage who is not worried about this problem. Laozi contrasts this extra one to those who obsess upon their mortality and the fearless. Assimilating nature to yourself would involve meeting the tiger with sword drawn. It can protect, but it contributes to the decay of its practitioners who must perceive the elements of nature as hostile, which accentuates fear and hate; the hard and sharp side of life that accompanies age and death. The sages survive because they do not desire to live at the expense of the features of the environment that appear to threaten their lives insofar as they too are natural beings. The sages attune themselves to their natural environment and in that way gain its power, such people have no realm for death. Laozi is not advertising the survival powers of the sage as if we should be attracted to the sage’s life through our desire for longevity. Laozi is valorizing the life of the sage as true life, which is long because it is authentically lived.

Notes 1. See George G. Brenkert, (2010). 2. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2005), followed by volume number and page number of MarxEngels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations: JQ—On the Jewish Question CJM—Comments on James Mill EPM—Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 GI—The German Ideology THF—The Holy Family MCP—Manifesto of the Communist Party OCPE—Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy CCPE—A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy C1—Capital 1 CGP—Critique of the Gotha Program

386 

J. Chambers

3. Or better yet, it is not a problem of interpreting the world but of changing it. 4. Laozi comes out against morality in a number of chapters (such as chapters 3, 18, 19, and 38). Yet Laozi obviously makes evaluations, which appear to be based upon some kind of system of ethics, in almost all of them. Unless Laozi is read as believing in more than one system of evaluation and being a partisan of one of them, the Daodejing is unreadable. 5. See chapters 78, 18–20; 30–31, and 72. 6. Lenin classifies Marxism’s morality as being the morality of the proletariat in the class struggle, this at a time when the working class was still a minority in the world’s class demographics, but he qualifies the proletariat’s morality as speaking for the human race in general. It is only by virtue of this that the proletariat speaks with moral authority. 7. A third category would include moral philosophies like Kantian deontology and utilitarianism or Christian morality or the individual moral codas according to which individuals lead their lives. Each of these systems of views are satellites orbiting the contending classes in the historical struggle according to which history unfolds. 8. Some say that these are essential features of morality. On this understanding of the meaning of the term “morality” I agree that Marx (and Laozi for similar reasons) is not only opposed to one kind of morality but morality as such. However, it is clear that Marx (and Laozi) makes systematic use of evaluative judgments on ethical matters. Because it is clear that some theory underlies these evaluations, I have had recourse to the word “ethics” to describe them. I believe that both Marx and Laozi are advocating the introduction of a social order in which humans are free of the artificial constraints that make theories of morality and, thus morality in the sense I am using the term, necessary and moral theory itself dies. To put it crudely, morality dies in circumstances where the relationships between humans and nature are no longer alienated. They are thus anti-morality in several senses. However, even if this is their position it is clear that this anti-theory ideal has a basis in theory and it is in this sense that I uphold the use of the term “morality” to describe certain evaluations in Marx and Laozi. It is obvious that neither Marx nor Laozi have any inclination to clarify these points themselves for different reasons. Some of Marx’s reasons have already been mentioned. In the case of Laozi his keen suspicion of getting caught up in semantics is mixed with stylistic requirements of the text.

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

387

9. Marx and Engels “go to great lengths throughout the German Ideology to point out how language is infiltrated by ideology” (Cook 1982, 546). 10. This is a way of putting Laozi’s psychological explanation of the oppression of ideology as arising from the monopoly of the instrumental use of concepts in human experience as a product of desire. 11. Engels’ speculations about the infinitely recurring cycle of expansion and contraction of the universe in the Dialectics of Nature makes contact with Laozi’s cyclical process philosophy. 12. “In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part [in the primitive accumulation of capital and wealth]” (C1-MECW35:705/MEW23:742). 13. The adventurism and spending of the US military speaks for itself. 14. Laozi talks about how acquisitive desire leads to greed in chapters 3, 9, 13 – Chapter 46. “The worst calamity is the desire to acquire”. 15. Edward Slingerland thinks that it is not fair of Laozi to blame the ideological movement of the times for this degeneration of social psychology on the grounds that “Constant turnover of preferences and feverish striving are not just products of evil marketing men or unrestrained capitalism; rather, they reflect a fundamental aspect of human psychology. Because of the way that we are built, perfect happiness or pleasure seems structurally impossible to attain, at least when pursued in the normal ways.” (As if Laozi is interested in Slingerland’s bourgeois conception of “normal ways”!) Slingerland attempts to back up this claim with references to psychology research data from nearly half a century ago and an explanation of brain function from evolutionary theory. I’m working within the historicist explanatory framework of human nature of Marxism so I feel in no way obliged to defend Laozi against people who just beg the question against historicism. Nevertheless, it is amusing to expose the blinkered prejudices of Anglo-American popcorn philosophy (Or is it psychology? Slingerland’s interpretation of Chinese philosophy seems to reduce its central concern to dichotomies of game theory) to imminent critique. If humans can modify their own natures, and if they have entered a perverse historical stage then “classic work in the 1970s”, a few surveys of miserable lottery winners (this is Slingerland’s normal ways!), could not tell us how humans are essentially, transhistorically, incapable of satisfaction but rather how they find themselves in times of alienation. References to how these peoples’ brains work abstracted out into evolutionary psychology goes no further in explaining dissatisfaction as biologically innate. Of course, as an adaptation to scarcity and

388 

J. Chambers

alienation certain brain functions develop. But this very explanation assumes its, historicist, antithesis; that human brain functions are plastic and transitory. 16. Yet Laozi ultimately sees them in metaphysical terms as expressions of foreground and background in thought – see chapter 2. 17. It is interesting to note that Laozi explicitly links desire-side aesthetic evaluation with desire-side moral evaluation. The same criticism applies to each. It is also interesting to note here that the paradox of things turning into their opposites through naming is carefully constructed to imply the survival of aesthetic/ethical evaluation after the criticism of naming has occurred. I take Laozi to be saying that the good really is bad when named, it becomes bad through its name. The implication of this cannot be, as some have inferred, that evaluation is itself an error, that nothing can correspond to evaluative terms. The reverse is the case; there are such things as beautiful and ugly (chapter 2 goes on to say that the sages revel in the “fan” movement of one from another) but the desire-side naming corrupts them. It is not that there is no good or bad, it is that these labels warp our orientation to things. Note also that Laozi does not imply that names have the power to turn things into their opposites in general – they can’t turn the long into the short for example. Laozi does not say that what we call the ugly we somehow make beautiful. Laozi is saying that the labels corrupt things. 18. On this interpretation the virtue ethics criticism of Kant’s conception of moral duty would be shared by Laozi. 19. This, in turn, increasingly embeds the view that phenomena are essentially fungible in consciousness, which Adorno sees as the way the dominance of exchange value accompanies the dominance of “rationality” in consciousness leading to the “disenchantment” of our times. In this sense Laozi advocacy of the “in the moment” acts of the sage, deflects the implication of the purely for-itself relationship between opposites and rather advocates the nonconceptual union with the finite as that which undergoes change. 20. Chapter 9 “There may be gold and jade to fill a hall / But there is none who can keep them” (19). 21. This is a process variable of Heraclitus’ dialectical observation: “Disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest” (1957, 189, Fragment #204).

11  Marx and Laozi’s Moral Skepticism 

389

References Aristotle. 1995. Politics. Trans. E. Barker, and revised R.F. Stalley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brenkert, G.G. 2010. Marx’s Ethics of Freedom. London: Routledge. Cook, D.J. 1982. Marx’s Critique of Philosophical Language. International Phenomenological Society 42 (4): 530–554. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Groff, R. 2012. Aristotelian Marxism/Marxist Aristotelianism: MacIntyre, Marx and the Analysis of Abstraction. Philosophy & Social Criticism 38 (8): 775–792. Heraclitus. 1957. In The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ilyenkov, E. V. 2009. The Ideal in Human Activity: A Selection of Essays by EvaldVasilyevich Ilyenkov. Translated by H. Campbell Creighton. Ohio: Erythrós. Katz, C. 1994. The Socialist Polis: Antiquity and Socialism in Marx’s Thought. The Review of Politics 56 (2): 237–260. Lau, D.C. 1963. Trans. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin. Lenin, V.I. 1966. The Tasks of the Youth Leagues. Collected Works. Vol. 31. London: Lawrence and Wishart. April-December 1920. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. ———. 1975–2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Murray, P. 2016. The Mismeasure of Wealth. Leiden: Brill. Nelson, Eric Sean. 2009. Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics and The Environment. Philosophy East & West 59 (3): 294–316. Wenning, M. 2011. Daoism as Critical Theory. Comparative Philosophy 2 (2): 50–71.

12 Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends

The chapter begins with an overview of Marx’s ecological criticism of capitalism. It is shown to agree with Laozi’s view of the orientation of humanity to nature, insofar as both condemn modes of practice with pretensions to exercise dominance over nature, reducing it to articles of human use and refuse. Then the chapter addresses the question of technology which Laozi generally opposes and which Marx supports. It argues that Laozi’s opposition to technology is based upon associations with unbridled desire and the severance of means and ends, humans and nature. The chapter argues that these associations are not necessary and that, when technology is emancipated from its role in exploitation it can contribute to enhancing the harmonious union of means and ends, humans and nature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of socialism and class-struggle as overcoming the means-ends dichotomy in modern society in a way which updates Laozi’s advocacy of wuwei.

Marx’s and Laozi’s Ecological Naturalism Marx upheld a “materialist viewpoint that is also dialectical in nature (that is, a non-mechanistic materialism) sees this as a process of transmutation of forms in a context of interrelatedness that excludes all absolute © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_12

391

392 

J. Chambers

distinctions” (Foster 2000, 16). So, in theorizing Marx’s understanding of the human relationship of Nature, it is always to be remembered that Marx saw humanity as a part of Nature, and Nature as a self-consciously fuzzy word to refer to the environment of inorganic and organic matter as opposed to humans, but also humans themselves. Marx defines labour as “in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions [metabolism] between himself and Nature..” (C1-­ MECW35:187/MEW23:192)1 This definition has internal evaluative import for labour: if labour improves the metabolism between the species and nature, by increasing their mutual flourishing, then this is healthy labour, labour functioning well; if the metabolism between nature and humanity is mismanaged it constitutes a failure of labour. As labour is the defining feature of the species then the evaluative import has ethical content. Marx believes the metabolism between human beings and nature has its own logic which conditions the mode of production. Marx’s critique of capitalism characterizes it as necessarily destructive to the environment, disrupting the metabolism in a way which endangers human life on the planet.2 It thereby constitutes a failure of labour, a violation of its very basis. Even insofar as internalizing the evaluation of the metabolism to the standards of the mode of production in general is concerned capitalism fails by its own standards, because it destroys the two ahistorical sources of wealth, labour and nature. In subordinating the natural sources of wealth to the valorization process, capital diverts the metabolic function of labour. In so doing it depletes and wastes it; it also actively destroys humanity’s natural ecosystem with its clearing of natural environments to make way for its unsustainable commercial enterprises and its pollution. The damage done to the natural environment by capitalism’s unsustainable development are too well-documented to recount here. Capitalism plays out the ‘poverty of the commons scenario’ on the world stage. When it comes to the question of sustainable development, capitalism finds itself in the same quandary that drives the industrial cycle: Capital, which has such “good reasons” for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

393

into the sun. In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. (C1-MECW35:275/MEW23:285)

Recessions happen when the pursuit of higher profits fuels innovation and technology which expand higher capital accumulation and the increased movement of capital. The drive for capital accumulation then tries to step over the bounds of the material limits of the labour power of the population, causing wage increases, which are not translated into a limitless increase in consumption. There is a natural global demographic limit to market expansion and the increasing use of technologies reduces the rates of profit in the long run. Now, capitalism is facing a literal deluge of its own making, but no capitalist has either the power or the motive to address this issue within the logic of the valorization process because environmental damage costs money to clean up, and involves an opportunity cost of alternative quick profits. Capitalist government policies to address unsustainable development are routinely sabotaged by the commercial interests which own them and only offer palliatives at best. Capital exploits the nation state to create an environment of competition which undermines all global efforts to confront global problems by freely flowing between them, whilst creating artificial barriers between them. Capitalism is contradictory in the way it destroys both the natural environment and the humans that reproduce its value. Marx refers to a mode of production as the ‘social metabolism’ a system comprising a social division of labour in which products are distributed or exchanged between people. A mode of production is the human appropriation of nature. Because of capitalism’s relative social mastery of the environment, humans have found themselves more constrained to assimilate themselves to capitalism’s standards than natural standards. People find they can make more money as lawyers or bureaucrats than farmers. This leads them to lose sight of their continued dependence upon the natural environment. The result is the dangerous cultural malaise that attends the survival

394 

J. Chambers

imperatives to harmonize with natural laws, such as those concerning the conditions necessary for the replenishment of water sources, trees or soil nutrients. As a consequence, capitalism imperils not merely human survival but the survival of most of the macroscopic life on earth. Capitalism reduces the question of the metabolism to a technical question of the exploitation of natural resources and the production of commodified technology. But the meaning of labour comprises improving the metabolism, not capitalist valorization. The capitalist valorization process has hijacked labour, and perverted its ends. The logic of capitalism, a social form, is in conflict with the logic of nature. The conflict has arisen through capitalism’s one-sided appropriation of nature. “Productive power is certainly not synonymous with production technology, since no matter how far production technology might develop, if it ends up disturbing the metabolism between human beings and nature, it cannot be considered the “development” of productive power.” (Sasaki 2021, 179). But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. (C1-MECW35:507/MEW23:530)

In Laozi’s terms, capitalism presents a conflict arising from a foreground system trying to overrule the conditions of a background system, which contains it. When this happens, it is bad news for the foreground system. No matter how capitalism tries to break through the limits of natural conditions, be they the limits of the biological necessities of human labour power, or the limits of soil yields, those natural conditions will reassert themselves in the form of crises of capitalism; pestilence, war, famine and death. Capitalism’s relationship with the natural world takes the form of turning natural wealth into commodities or destroying it. Capitalism subordinates the natural world to its own purposes at the expense of the latter. This is a one-sided appropriation of nature because it attends to the metabolism insofar as labour can be directed to the assimilating nature to the social form, and not assimilating the social form to nature. This activity does not recognize the

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

395

autonomous development of things in nature and their independent purposes, which run counter to their disposal by capital. This is not how Laozi characterizes the action of Dao, in enabling de according to which each thing is allowed to develop in its own way “This self-generative power, as de, should not be conflated with power as domination or external imposition, given that dao engenders without appropriation and molds without mastery” (Nelson 2009, 300). In 25 Laozi asserts that the sympathetic unity between foreground and background means that the former needs to adapt itself to the logical functioning of the latter: Man models himself on earth, Earth on heaven, Heaven on the way, And the way on that which is naturally so (Lau 1963, 30).

The ideology of subduing or conquering nature is wrongheaded insofar as it confuses conditions with consequences. When individual lives are spent assimilating to the logic of the social form against the logic of the natural form, the individual’s relationship with the natural world is severed. Chapter 46 is concerns Laozi’s views on the metabolism. When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-­ horses breed on the border. There is no crime greater than having too many desires; There is no disaster greater than not being content; There is no misfortune greater than being covetous. Hence in being content, one will always have enough. (Lau 1963, 53)

Here Laozi criticizes rearing warhorses as opposed to farm horses. The reason why is not as simple as Laozi’s opposition to war. The warhorse eats grass and grain from the earth, but does not return to the earth by ploughing the fields. It has been severed from a metabolic relationship with its environment in the covetous pursuit of empire building. When the ends of animal husbandry are separate from the metabolic function of

396 

J. Chambers

labour on the land, Laozi complains they are unnatural. Laozi employs to metaphor to articulate the sympathetic response of the earth to the severance of artificial, destructive activity: Where troops have encamped There will brambles grow; In the wake of a mighty army Bad harvests follow without fail. (chap 30, (Lau 1963, 35))

From an agronomist’s perspective this claim can be contested, but Laozi’s appeal to the barren fields is a poetic attempt to express the unnaturalness of war, as if the human revulsion to the corpse-strewn battlefield receives a mimetic response from the land. Laozi’s point is not the same as that in Ralph Waldo  Emerson’s “nature always wears the colors of the spirit”: Laozi’s idea is that, the human productive exchange with nature is a kind of two-way communication, in which nature is able to speak back. Humans are not the stewards of nature, but a part of it. This, of course, is a premise of the Yijing, a foundational Chinese text and indirect inspiration for the Daodejing. Laozi’s superstitious expression of the metabolism between humans and nature falls short of anthropomorphizing nature and instead attempts to naturalize humans, in trying to read the sympathetic response from the fields. The failure of the harvest is a message from nature of the failure of war. This two-way communication on the basis of natural sympathy indicates that “Daoism does not call us to worship nature as a Divine Other, a blind irrational power, or pantheistically as our own self ” (Nelson 2009, 303). Of course, with modern science humans have a much deeper grasp of their effects upon nature, but it has come at the expense of objectifying natural phenomena and emotional detachment which enables the current social indifference to environmental destruction. The social organization is desire-driven in this way it acts in terms of foreground, which is an attempt at severance, the attempt to break free from natural conditions; it is destructive activity, detrimental to humans and their environment. Laozi opposes the unnaturalness of war as consisting in its artificiality. Simply put, capitalism does not model itself on nature but opposes it; in Laozi’s terms, herein lies its perversion.

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

397

Laozi’s Primitivism Versus Marx’s Futurism Laozi and Marx fall into opposition on the question of technology which Laozi opposes and which Marx supports. This section will argue that Laozi is opposed to technology in policy and not in principle and that in principle Laozi is in agreement with Marx. Laozi generally opposes technology, wishing to take humanity back to a previous age of communal production before exploitation. Marx is an enthusiastic supporter of technological development, which he sees as the only way to lead humanity to the freedom beyond animal necessity as well as the freedom beyond exploitation. Laozi opposes technology because he sees it as an extension of desire ruling human experience. Laozi advocates controlling desire, which means controlling technology. Controlled desire obviates the need for technology. However, Laozi does not see desire as itself wrong, merely its domination of experience. Desire for Laozi is good when it is constantly satisfied in the act of yielding to the environment. Marx advocates the accentuation of desire in every facet of life. Marx sees that by harnessing technology, desires can be satisfied. But that involves controlling the artificial creation of scarcity and eliminating exploitation. Laozi does not see this because he is writing in an earlier age where it is inconceivable that exploitation can be eliminated rather than advanced by the increase of technology. However, Laozi still does Marxism a service in clarifying an underlying point of Marx’s understanding of socialism, and, anyway, the Daodejing is best read ahistorically as applying to different epochs. Although Laozi is opposed to desire-side ideology of accumulation and consumption – that is, being ruled by desire – this does not mean that Laozi is advocating asceticism. Laozi wants people to “savour that which has no flavour” (70). We must activate our senses to enjoy unrefined experiences. Laozi says that by giving we gain the world. Clearly gaining the world here is desirable. Mastering desire involves changing the meaning of the ideas of things we originally desired. Gaining the world here is understood in a different sense to power and glory. Laozi wants the sage to fill the people’s bellies and strengthen their bones (7). sating hunger and promoting health are here considered to be good things to do. Laozi does not think that there is something wrong with enjoying the bodily

398 

J. Chambers

pleasures of life.3 Laozi objects to desire ruling life’s experience. This does not mean that Laozi thinks we should seek out misery or some kind of masochistic satisfaction (the secret pleasure of monasticism) in self-­ deprivation. Rather, Laozi objects to desire ruling life because this deprives life of its greatest joy, the joy of yielding, the joy of harmonious relations with the natural and social environment. This joy is prevented by desire fueling conceptual thought that separates ends from means and identifies pleasure only with ends and turns pleasure into a thing only experienced subjectively and thus divisible in private consumption. This reasoning motivates exploitation and technology. In chapter 80 Laozi describes a society that has realized Dao as an unsophisticated and bucolic network of disconnected settlements, which makes little use of technology (87). Laozi’s opposition to technology is part of his opposition to desire-side ideology. If the leisured class is reduced with the state then so too is the need for the production of surplus through technology. It is against the movement of “fan” to try to accumulate surpluses.4 If technology is employed because it is labour saving then it conceives of labour as a chore, an undesired means to achieve a goal – consumerism. This attempts to isolate result from the process in experience. To Laozi the ideology of technology is inconsistent with finding meaning in harmonious labour. As an artificial extension of human desires, it is oppressive in that humans are forced to assimilate their actions to their machines to satisfy their desires against nature. Technology’s argument is that it helps increase the power of production; it increases production and reduces labour. Yet, the inconveniences or low levels of production are only inadequacies to be improved upon if they are conceived of as undesirable in themselves. Technology is touted as solving elementary problems of scarcity and survival. These are so important as to justify painful processes yet only if technology does indeed solve these problems. In capitalism its development seems to exacerbate them and make technology’s further development seem both essential and hopeless. Mario Wenning observes: “by way of trying to master the present for the sake of a future project, the openness of the present is closed and the present shrinks. Constant innovation becomes a means in order to desperately try to gather more experiences and rush after fugitive goals in every shorter time spans” (2011, 62). There are two

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

399

ways to address problems of shortages and undesirable labour: one is some kind of technology or technique, the other is to adjust oneself to the situation. Another way of looking at it is that one way of experiencing the situation is as a problem to be solved by adapting the conditions to human desires, seeing the conditions as objects for our manipulation; and the other way of experiencing the situation as a predicament to harmonize with, one to which we must adapt ourselves, seeing the conditions as filled with subjects with their own purposes, and adapting ourselves to them. The distinctly human response is the former. Laozi is arguing that these two responses are not mutually exclusive and that a one-sided focus on the former response reduces our ability to perform the latter response. We will simply never be content if we lose the latter ability because the technical solution can only solve a technical problem, which is not the actual drive of invention.5 The drive of invention is desire. Hence the inadequacy of technology, it addresses the symptoms and not the disease. The technical solution of any one problem necessarily leads to the creation of new ones. Class society is locked in an endless losing battle with the hydra of desire, experiencing each new challenge as a new kind of pain, instead of as exciting new challenges. Particularly in capitalism, which reduces all labour to the most odious toil, the advantages promised by technology is its promise to reduce the inconvenient work in the process of production and increase consumption. This promise of technology is never fulfilled because the valorization process is the mechanism of an infinite desire. Once labour is made easier it is immediately set upon exhausting repetitive tasks with the new machinery or dispensed with altogether. Technology, in the modes of production it fosters, is thus not a solution, but a problem for labour. It perverts experience by destroying the link between production and consumption and destroying the links between producers and consumers. In mediating the human relationship with nature through desire, technology is real but false because one-sided. Technology objectifies nature and turns it into a thing for humanity’s private consumption. It is antagonistic to nature. Developing the means of production has its own purpose but it only belongs to itself. It is foreground that does not return to the background in nature. This leads to it to creating its own empty background from the symbolic, which is what commodity fetishism is and the

400 

J. Chambers

obsession with accumulation generally for its own sake. Mastering desire is mastering the impulse that drives technology and exploitation. Marx and Engels are the most powerful critics of the horrors that accompanied the industrial revolution, the period of history in which constantly revolutionizing technology became a necessary compulsion of economic existence. Marx and Engels were also keen to stress the liberating potential of technology as empowering the workers and the immediate gains that came from technology’s ability to broaden the horizons of human experience.6 Marx is thus an uncompromising supporter of further technological development. These views put Marx into conflict with Laozi. Insofar as Laozi is read as anti-technology in principle he has committed the genetic fallacy. Certainly, technology has its origins in desire and conceptualization but desire is also human. Laozi does not believe in the Buddhist fantasy of life beyond desire, he believes desire should be experienced in its operation through acts which are meaningful in themselves. But technology is the human way of controlling desire. As Hegel explained “in natural want and its direct satisfaction the spiritual is submerged by mere nature. Hence, a state of nature is a state of savagery and slavery.” (PR-162/W7:350). Desire is maddeningly oppressive in the hand to mouth existence of a non-technological life. Technology overcomes this inhuman condition and in so doing develops the powers and desires of humanity. Powers and desires are one. Controlling desire does not require eliminating technology; technology is an indispensable part of human existence and there is no pre-technological humanity, nor can it require curbing its development; there is no natural place for technology to stop. Each piece of technology is historical in representing a temporary and improvable solution to a problem or an advance beyond a problem to the entertainment of a new one. They have an inbuilt past of previous development and a future of progress. To resist the progress of technology is to deny the historicity of their being, the historicity of human nature. Humans are technological beings so resisting technological development actually goes against the De of humanity, which it was already shown, is a conceptual matter involving bringing the organization of humans in line with Dao in a human way.7 If De has a political dimension it has a historical dimension. If De is historical so must be wuwei.

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

401

Technology develops the senses and enriches experience. It is instructive to compare Marx’s remarks about music with Laozi’s The most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear…because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers…. for this reason the senses of social man differ from those of non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form—in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being…. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present (EPM-MECW3:302/MEW40:541).

Here Marx makes reference to the idea that the human senses progressively develop through history. The sense of musical beauty enriches human experience. Laozi’s remark in chapter 12 that “The five tones deafen men’s ears” cannot be read as a call to cultivate unmusical ears because as historical beings this is impossible for us. We live in musical times. Chapter three has already discussed how wuyu is an aesthetic experience. As an aesthetic medium, music is a historically developing way of experiencing Dao. Laozi’s injunction against the five notes thus should not be read as a reactionary argument against culture. Rather wuwei in music must take aesthetic experience as it finds it, historically, and move against the restrictions of musical conventions that deafen the ears to the music of everything outside of them.8 This revolutionizes music by challenging the conventions of the music of the times. A Marxian reading of Laozi should historicize Laozi’s primitivism: “All previous forms of society [V-28] were destroyed by the development of wealth—or, which is the same thing, by the development of the social productive forces. Among the ancients, who were conscious of this fact, wealth was therefore directly denounced as bringing about the dissolution of the community.” (G-MECW28:464/MEW42:445–446). Today however, the progressive development of wealth is necessary for survival and social stasis is stagnation. Marx sees that modern life revolutionizes the very concept of wealth. Marx readily admits that the ancient ideal of production constrained to meet existing needs as an end in itself does

402 

J. Chambers

appear ‘loftier’ than the concept of production as a means to achieve the goal of limitless accumulation of material wealth in capitalism. Yet he refutes this appearance: if the narrow bourgeois form is peeled off, what is wealth if not the universality of the individual’s needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc…. the full development of human control over the forces of nature— over the forces of so-called Nature, as well as those of his own nature? What is wealth if not the absolute unfolding of man’s creative abilities, without any precondition other than the preceding historical development, which makes the totality of this development i.e. the development of all human powers as such, not measured by any previously given yardstick (G-MECW28: 411–412/MEW42:395–396)?

There is an important sense in which it can be said Marx is a primitivist. Laozi advocates the restriction of technology in order to return to a primordial oneness with nature that he is right to judge we have lost through history (and technology). Marx advocates the advance of technology in order to return to a oneness with nature, but on a higher level. This idea is derived from Hegel who used a biblical narrative of history that Marx secularized. In the bible story of Adam and Eve the two enjoy a simpler and more natural life in the Garden of Eden, a land God made to harmoniously accord with them. Everything in the Garden of Eden is theirs to enjoy except for the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil whose fruit God orders them not to eat. When they break this rule, God banishes them from the Garden and so begins the Fall, a time of disharmony and disunity with nature and self, a time we find ourselves in. An obvious inference from the story of the fall appears to be that we are better off in a state of ignorance, uncorrupted by the knowledge that separates us from our world. But Hegel rejects this inference: …the schism in which we find everything human involved can certainly not be the last word; but, on the other hand, it is not correct to regard the immediate, natural unity as the right state either … Childlike innocence does certainly have something attractive and touching about it, but only insofar as it reminds us of what must be brought forth by the spirit. The harmonious union that we see in children as something natural is to be the

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

403

result of the labour and culture of the spirit. Christ says, “Except ye become as little children,” etc. [Matt. 18:3]; but that does not say that we must remain children9 (Enc1:62/W8:89).

Even though work is alienating activity Hegel sees that through work we earn a higher unity with nature. This unity is higher because it involves a self-consciousness about the meaning of our work and our place in nature. Hegel and Marx both assign labour the role of alienating and overcoming alienation through history. But Hegel gives this insight an idealist twist by ultimately according the concept, activated through labour, the right to produce union by fiat. Marx does not move beyond embodied physical labour as the wounder and the healer. Collective control over production overcomes the alienation of exploitation. Work for its own sake overcomes work for reward or a master. The semi-­mythological times of ‘primitive communism’ a mode of production predating private property, occupies the place of the Garden of Eden in the materialist theory of history. But they were times oppressed by scarcity and natural necessity, times of superstition when people were absorbed in overcoming obstacles that no longer exist as such for moderns, times so hard that exploitation was, for many the only way out. Controlling desire would only make the drive for technology unnecessary if the ideology of technology necessarily separated means from ends and made labour into a chore. Marx knows this is not a necessary premise of technology. Certainly, in capitalism it is, but in revolutionizing the concept of wealth capitalism points beyond itself to a future in which actions can once more be performed as ends in themselves through technology. Advancing the way in which we pick apples improves us as apple pickers and improves our relationship with nature; it improves the apple. Technology aids the sage’s task of supporting the 10,000 things. Just as through technology historical experience has developed musical sensibilities technology develops all of the senses as ends in themselves. That it also thwarts humans’ need to commune with nature is a historical and transitory fact that developing technology helps to resolve. Criticizing Laozi for not seeing the revolutionary potential of the continued and deepening pursuit of wealth through technology is anachronistic.10 It is based upon the hindsight of the potential for technology

404 

J. Chambers

that Laozi could not have had. For Laozi’s doctrine to be applicable to different ages it must be able to take up the problems of humans as it finds them in different epochs. Wuwei is ahistorical, in the sense that we are free to employ it for ourselves regardless of our level of alienation. Indeed, Laozi advertises wuwei as an overcoming of a kind of alienation. In this sense Laozi’s appeal to limit technology functions as an act of wuwei in those times. Those times have passed. Here it might seem that the contrast between Marx and Laozi is even stronger, for Marx sees that continuing along the path of the separation of means and ends and realizing a new concept of wealth that has emerged within capitalism’s realm of desire, that is following the desire-side logic of capitalism itself, is the only way to overcome its alienation. The non-historical reading of Laozi appears to make Laozi promise a freedom from alienation in any times through a rejection of the desire-side logic of modes of production. This is an impossible promise for humans are social beings and the oppression of one oppresses them all. However, there are different kinds of freedom and it makes sense to see in Laozi a certain kind of liberation that Marxism can also embrace during times of oppression. The ability to identify and resist alienation amounts to a kind of freedom from it that Marx believed the working class could partake in even as the most oppressed class. Indeed, that certain kinds of freedom can preexist and lead to the development of communism is a central tenet of Marxism (Sayers 2011, 60). Laozi’s tonic amounts to this ability to identify and resist effectively through resisting affectively. Mario Wenning argues against the primitivist reading of chapter 80 altogether. His alternative reading is more in line with the ahistorical nature of Laozi’s argument presented here as well as the Marxist socialist model inspired by the independent smallholdings of ancient Greece: in chapter 80 of the Dao-De-Jing, what is depicted is not a historical past of perfected human beings who live in harmony with nature. Rather, the images serve as mythic or utopian evocations of a mode of being and power-execution which is significantly different and more sophisticated than that found in societies which use up all resources in acts of instrumental activism. In the case of the utopian village, what is depicted is not a primitive community before the fall. The city possesses tools such as ships

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

405

and carts, armor and weapons, but they—have no reason to deploy them. This city consists a group of people, which is technologically highly advanced while preserving the freedom to not use the technology at its disposal, to live a decelerated life in the present while leaving the technological choices at their disposal unused whenever their application is not absolutely necessary. They live in relatively small communities in order not to be governed by a distant government they do not have an obvious connection to. The imagination is used here as a laboratory to provide impulses in order to enrich conceptions of chosen, communal and sophisticated passivity in the present rather than primitive innocence or unreflective activism directed at the future (2011, 53).

Previous chapters mentioned how Dao unites the myriad worlds in a world-less world. An important reason why Laozi was opposed to technology was in the tendency Marx mentions of advancing the senses. Through technology humans enter into relations with new entities, previously indifferent and get themselves into new worlds. This makes it increasingly difficult to perform the act of backgrounding between them all. Laozi’s business arises from this concern. There is the possibility that one act might be backgrounding in one world but not in another. Laozi admires the more limited creatures of the natural world because they perfect the act of backgrounding where they are. It is easier for them to do. But this opposition to technology is one-sided. Certainly, the task of backgrounding becomes harder the more entangled with our world we become but it also becomes richer and more powerful. Philip Kain has argued that Marx did not believe that any higher return to the unalienated labour of the self-sufficient ancient smallholdings was possible (1982). The rational ordering of production Marx calls for would still involve an estrangement of labour in that a division of labour and impersonal distribution of products as found in capitalism would still take place in communism, unlike the attic farmer’s production for and by himself. However, the aspiration of the humanization of the real would prevail. Furthermore, taking seriously Marx’s call for an altruistic revolution of the self, as J. L. Jenkins urges, requires the revision of class society’s definition of estrangement (1995).

406 

J. Chambers

Laozi and the Criticism of Capitalism When Laozi’s union of means and ends in the life of the sage and the De polity are put together with Marx’s revolutionary socialism and anti-­ utopianism a middle way can be found between the erroneous extremes of reformism and consequentialism in the workers’ struggle. The working class defeat the means-ends dichotomy in activated class-consciousness because capitalism is a means-ends ideology and class-consciousness is the social side of the act of absolute mimesis, which both liberates in itself and tends towards the actualization of freedom in society through its tendency to produce communism. Returning to the root through social unity is the eradication of the capitalist class and their means-ends ideology, is the construction of socialism present as a germ in sagely leadership/class consciousness. Laozi’s naturalism of humanity, as part of a bigger whole which it must harmonize with is enlivened when placed into the problem humanity faces in the dying stages of capitalism. The sage’s wuwei consists in carefully yielding to the environment to support the things in it. There is no sense in interpreting the sages as submitting to whatever force is imposed upon them. There is no justification for such an interpretation as the Daodejing is, among other things, a treatise on war.11 In this sense there is no contradiction in expressing Laozi’s belief in the necessity for yielding to struggle. The Daodejing seems to have been involved in some cross-­ pollination with Sunzi’s Art of War.12 When in Chapter 78 Laozi argues that “the weak overcomes the strong” he is attempting a revision of the traditional conception of struggle, which has inspired Chinese martial arts. “In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it” (1963, 85). The flow of water moves freely through the cracks and modes of least resistance, eventually wearing away the stone. This is Laozi’s preferred model for resistance according to which the victor saps the opponent’s energy through a kind of evasion and uses the opponent’s strength against itself. The sage can never be forced to submit to slavery because the master depends upon the psychology of desire to force the slave. The slave submits because he is scared of death and values his life above his

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

407

ability to live it for himself. The master is also a victim of the psychology of desire insofar as he sees in the slave only means for the attainment of pleasure in consumption. The slave’s life is not in his work but in his rest and the master’s life is not in his work but in his consumption of the fruits of the slave’s labour. Laozi’s opposition to the logic of servitude is what drives opposition to state power and slavery and his endorsement of war to defend his proto-communitarian ideal. Capitalism is like all modes of production in it interpolating all individuals into its categories. In capitalism one is either a capitalist, worker or a satellite of one of them. There is no third position between them insofar as the system makes individuals historically meaningful in their contributions to the struggle of one or the other side. It is true that the progressive fragmentation of identity has led to the people identifying more strongly with certain crisscrossing subgroups and markers of identity that have arisen through the growing complexities and alienations of social life, but these identifications have not in any way altered the driving contradiction of capitalism between bourgeois and proletariat. These artificial markers of identification are the highest stage of foreground movement severance of late capitalism, for they fragment self-identity, social identity. Both the liberal and communitarian models of individuality have been superseded by a schizoid cacophony of competing voices in the individual. People deceive themselves into thinking these social constructs of individuality express them; they merely express the social decay of society, mainly in imperialist countries. All are drawn into one of the two sides of the class struggle irrespective of these personal quandaries. The antidote to this rot is to return to the driving contradiction, of which this is a symptom in the social world and to return to the biological connection with nature. The sage is no exception to capitalism’s class divide. It is not merely that hermits do not exist for capitalism; rather capitalism reduces the hermit to an agent of one of the sides. Laozi has historical significance in the defining struggle of our times insofar as his teachings can be made the tool of the oppressor or the oppressed. The sympathetic unity of “De” politics between individuals in Laozi makes him an opponent of the upholders of systems of exploitation. Capitalism’s peculiar tendency to destroy social bonds and atomize individuals is an anathema to Laozi’s model of concentric shells of sympathy.13 Laozi’s criticism of

408 

J. Chambers

capitalism is that capitalism is not just a parasite in misdirecting the goaloriented acts of its hosts to further its own ends at their expense; capitalism is a parasite in severing means and ends, which makes misdirection inevitable. Means and ends are necessarily united in natural activity. Rejecting the division between means and ends is rejecting capitalism. The sage cannot but be the enemy of capitalism because capitalism is the enemy of humanity and nature.

 arx’s Anti-utopianism and the Dichotomy M of Consequentialist Politics Verses Free Labour: The Reunification of Means and Ends Marx’s anti-utopianism is principled but qualified. It forbids speculative idealizations of future society that are not based upon comprehensive tendencies present in current society. So, Marx’s opposition to the utopian socialists was not a blanket condemnation of their daring to dream and using the vision of that dream as a political motivating force. Marx himself sporadically engaged in general speculation on the nature of the potential future socialist society in political discourse. Marx’s opposition to the utopian socialists is concerned with their failure to ground their speculations on a comprehensive understanding of the economic structure and the scientific understanding of value as the quantity of embodied labour-time. A classless society could not be established in a mode of production where commodities were exchanged for certificates of exact ratios of the earned labour-time they cost. This utopian socialist proposal would reproduce capitalist relations of production because the commodity form would still dominate the labour process and the market would prevail. Classless society must instead be based upon the principle of social utility determining the labour time spent in production. The commodity form and law of value must be cut out at their root in the exchange of labour power itself. This can only be accomplished by the workers’ collective control of the means of production. The utopian socialists neglected the historical tendency of the emergence of the working class as a political force that must be mobilized to take control of the means of

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

409

production and instead pleaded with the moribund capitalist class to paternalistically surrender its power. Collective control of the means of production by politically conscious workers is the meaning of socialism and necessarily a democratic process. It is elitist to speculate upon how the workers should do this, anticipating and dictating decisions to the workers that they must make themselves. It is also beyond the human powers of prediction to forecast in detail. There are simply too many variables. Nevertheless, workers’ collective control of the means of production entails a revolutionary transformation of every aspect of society, which can be explored in general. Marx limited his speculations to this.14 In regards to Laozi, Marx’s most important revolutionary insight of communism is that in communism work will be the chief need of humans because this principle encapsulates the democratization of the unification of means and ends, which in Laozi is a peculiarity of the sage and the solution/meaning of life. This labour liberates consciousness from the tyranny of the concept wedded to desire. The view that economically necessary work is an inherently unpleasant compromise people make in order to afford themselves or others the leisure time and comforts that of consuming its fruits is a traditional economic assumption of western philosophers. This is still a staple of bourgeois ideology. Plato and Aristotle claim the fullest human life happens in the freedom of rational contemplation, without labour, which they think is inferior activity for satisfying baser needs. Kant also thought of humans as rational beings in essence whose somatic life was the animal aspect. This idea is prevalent in the main schools of thought in Christianity. They think of work as a ‘curse’, that comes as punishment for humanity’s ‘fallen’ nature. This kind of thinking feeds into utilitarianism of the nineteenth century, which influenced the view in classical economics that work lacks value in itself and is valued only in terms of the consumption of its product. In classical economics humans are seen as essentially living in and for their own consumption. They are burdened by the necessity of paying the price of not fully living when toiling. A life without production and only consumption is seen as the ideal that only the blessed rich enjoy. In the eighteenth century the increasing specialization of the division of labour, particularly in manufacturing, saw the rise of repetitive

410 

J. Chambers

and monotonous work. Adam Smith recognized this kind of work damaged its workers. Yet Adam Smith supported the expansion of this labour because it came with a rise in national consumption – labour’s purpose. The increasing supply of ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’ (Smith 1900, 104) was all that mattered to Smith. Karl Marx criticized Smith: In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labour! was Jehovah’s curse on Adam. And this is labour for Smith, a curse. ‘Tranquillity’ appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’. It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual, ‘in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility’, also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity—and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits— hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. (G-MECW28: 529–530/MEW42: 512).

Marx sees Smith as an advocate of alienated labour. The most interesting sense in which it can be said to be alienated for this chapter is in the sense that the consumption is external to the labour. The products of manufacturing labour are generally not consumed by its workers; they are exchanged for cash with customers. With this, capitalists pay workers the approximate cost of their labour power – that is, the minimum consumption of necessities. Smith proposed a remedy for the compromise of degrading labour for increased consumption with passing remarks on ‘education’ undefined. Marx mocked Smith for offering this in “homeopathic doses” (C1-MECW35:368/MEW23:384). Marx, sees in some kinds of labour an internal meaning. He denied labour had to be alienating. He thought of people investing their life and love into their labour, not seeing consumption as an external reward. “Economic work has a degree of freedom in comparison with this [alienated labour undertaken solely satisfy immediate desire]. Human beings are for-themselves, they

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

411

can stand back from desire and the activity to gratify it and subject this to rational control” (Sayers 2011, 67). Marx thinks of this a freedom within the realm of necessity. Aesthetic labour is confined to this kind. Both Hegel and Marx prize art as an expression of freedom. Marx says that the “laws of beauty” belong to it.15 In communist society this form of labour dominates everyone’s working day. In this sense the “laws of beauty” color all of life. In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx envisages a future of communism where labour constitutes ‘life’s prime want’16. Labour to earn a living involves: 1) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the subject who labours; 2) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the object of labour; 3) that the worker’s role is determined by social needs which, however, are alien to him and a compulsion to which he submits out of egoistic need and necessity, and which have for him only the significance of a means of satisfying his dire need, just as for them he exists only as a slave of their needs; 4) that to the worker the maintenance of his individual existence appears to be the purpose of his activity and what he actually does is regarded by him only as a means; that he carries on his life’s activity in order to earn means of subsistence. (CJM-MECW3:220/MEW40:454)

Labor in communism involves the negation of these elements of alienation: (1) because the labourer is an essential part of the collective decision-­making process that defines the social utility of production he/ she is entirely conscious of the meaning of his/her labour17; (2) the market does not mediate exchange and instead the producer is directly connected to the distribution and consumption of the product and thus sees in the object of production the satisfaction of social needs; (3) his/her self-consciousness has advanced to the point that he/she has no egoistic (selfish) conception of wellbeing (private consumption is eliminated) and is collectively satisfied, satisfied in satisfying needs for the collective; (4) the product is no longer a by-product of a task solely carried out for wages exchanged for private consumption but instead becomes the consumption itself, the externality of ends from means of labour is eliminated and the ends of labour become internal to the means because in production/consumption of all of the product, individually and as part of

412 

J. Chambers

a collective the worker is essentially engaged with enhancing human integration with nature. Communism is a synthesis of means and ends of labour. It is the reconnection of the means and ends of activity that exploitation has severed. A metaphysical question emerges here, which Marx did not explicitly address because he was not interested in the explicit ethical/logical question of means and ends as such. This metaphysical question is bound up with the practical question of how communism will be achieved and anti-utopianism. In capitalism activity exhibits a schizoid division of means and ends. Activity in communism exhibits a synthesis of means and ends. In this respect they are opposites which raises a question of how one thing (capitalism) can turn into its opposite (communism) in respect to means and ends. This question is encompassed in Engels’ second law of dialectics (the interpenetration of opposites). It is answered through the operation of his first law of dialectics (quantity changing into quality).18 The means/ends dichotomy is collapsed through the development of the class-consciousness of the proletariat and its emergence as the collective subject and dominant class. Aspects of communism that Marx predicted exist as a germ in capitalist society, much of it in class society in general, including free labour. The mode of production where means and ends are united is built via extending and intensifying a political activity that itself is a union of means and ends. Building class-consciousness tends towards communism and is an end in itself. Marx recounts his observations of contemporary French ouvriers as inspiration for: the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, ­drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies (EPM-MECW3:313/40:553–554).

Marx sees these admirable qualities, through their need for society, as a herald of communal life. It expresses both the means for its attainment,

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

413

for only with people who are already inclined towards mutual trust, cooperation and sharing can their joint consciousness of themselves as members of the class with the historic mission be fostered and their necessary union in struggle be possible; and it expresses the end itself to be attained, for only collective consciousness allows for communal production which liberates humanity from the shackles of natural necessity and exploitation. The same means-ends unity of Laozi’s wuwei society and political program is found in Marx’s definition of the class struggle for communism as the concrete universal of its social psychology. Sometimes individuals identify themselves with group projects such that they cannot think of themselves as separate from their group and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their group. In such cases Marx says the group is attaining self-consciousness (Blunden 2014). Marx believes that capitalism fosters this group self-consciousness amongst its workers by thrusting them into disciplined mass collectives and imposing upon them intimate daily cooperation and sharing in their working lives. The workers define themselves through their opposition to the capitalists. When they complete their historic mission, they abolish classes and unite the subjectivity of all individuals on earth in the collective entity of humans in communism. Class-consciousness is a historically conditioned modification of human nature. But it is the realization of a transhistorical social tendency that the interpretation of Laozi’s chapter 66. sees him as anticipating in the group psychology of the leader. The waters of the valley become one through their confluence in the rivers and seas. The leaders imitate the rivers and seas by embodying the collective will of their followers. The leaders’ subjective wills have been absorbed into the general will of the group. The leaders’ De is a social/political equivalent of the movement of absolute mimesis between self and environment that yields knowledge of Dao, as the movement of Dao. This is an important insight because it combines Marx’s ergon argument from separation, the uniqueness of humanity, with Laozi’s ergon argument from the absorption of humanity in nature. Marx’s socially conditioned emergence of class-consciousness assumes the mechanics of the psychology of yielding through sympathy that is the “De” of Laozi’s ethics.

414 

J. Chambers

Insofar as class-consciousness emerges from the antagonistic for-itself relationship between the workers and capitalists in the logic of the capitalist system it is comprehended by dialectics. However, insofar as the working class fosters its own identity beyond its mere conflict with the capitalists and beyond the antagonistic system of capitalism itself towards a new system the workers must comprehend their unity sympathetically and nondiscursively, that is, without desire. The primacy of the finite as argued for in chapter three is realized on the social level in the movement of sympathy as the yielding background movement that creates a political movement. In the previous mention of chapter 66 it was said that in principle Laozi’s ideal of leadership was not necessarily limited and that all members could potentially be leaders. However, in Laozi’s historical context there were certain limits to the potential for broad leadership imposed by the mode of production of his time. I have mentioned that the masterless freedom to direct their own economic activities and not have to work for someone else that Marx identified as coming into existence with the ancient Greek polis is Laozi’s model of ideal society. I would make the further historical conjecture that this polity was sporadically achieved to different degrees in other regions around the world including Laozi’s place and time.19 The autonomy and relative self-sufficiency of the peasant household afforded it a certain masterless freedom but also isolated it from the rest of the community. Community-wide projects were often limited to festivals, which owing to the division of labour they involved created small social circles within the big event. Because of these limitations Laozi accorded the privileged access to the spirit of the whole community and its myriad activities on aggregate to the sage who coordinates them and transcends the spectrum of praise and blame that belongs to each of the circle’s specific tasks (lines 1–3). Laozi highlights the ironic alienation from the community in its divisions that this holistic viewpoint from sympathy affords in his famous lament of chapter 20. Exterminate learning and there will no longer be Worries. Between yea and nay How much difference is there?

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

415

Between good and evil How great is the distance? What others fear One must also fear. And wax without having reached the limit. The multitude are joyous As if partaking of the t’ai lao [elaborate feast] offering Or going up to a terrace in spring. I alone am inactive and reveal no signs, Like a baby that has not yet learned to smile, Listless as though with no home to go back to. The multitude all have more than enough. I alone seem to be in want. My mind is that of a fool – how blank! Vulgar people are clear. I alone am drowsy. Vulgar people are alert. (Lau 1963, 24)

Just as with Dao itself, by being so intimately involved with all of the particular movements of the separate actors without specializing in any the sage is made aloof from them.20 Group consciousness is made an exclusive privilege of the sage because of the division of labour that community projects inevitably involved. This was a limitation that Marx could already see industrialized economies had the technology to overcome. With the accumulation of coordination responsibilities for group members in the class struggle Marx forecasts the democratization of the holistic wuyu knowledge Laozi exclusively grants the sage. The triumph of the proletariat is the reunification of means and ends. In its separation from capitalism, in a foregrounding activity through which each of the members of the class perform the background act of becoming each other in collective action, a new world is created. It is a world where humanity and nature seamlessly blend into each other. Humanity returns to the mother and nature returns to the humanity. Laozi’s ideal is realized through Marx’s. The human of today is a desire machine. This is the full blossoming of the real problem of ethics, which Laozi addressed while it was still a bud. It is part of a psychological explanation of civilization, which has turned

416 

J. Chambers

into a social hydra of desire. Exploitation appears with the separation of means and ends, the exploiters separate the consumption from the production. This is kind of what the story of Adam and Eve is about. The resolution of the ends/means dichotomy can only come through the deflagration of the social hydra. The struggle for socialism is the conquest of desire. However, it cannot be a struggle for its suppression in the individual, this is the struggle of Buddhism, noble but ill-conceived, partly from method and partly from principle. The struggle for socialism is even less a struggle for the suppression of self-consciousness because it arises from the struggle for the satisfaction of needs which capitalism creates and frustrates; it is rather the extension of this self-consciousness. The problem is that instrumental reason of capitalism separates means from ends. This separation creates the hydra of desire which is fed by technology. The struggle is the reunion of means and ends. The reunion is brought about by a scientific comprehension of the crisis in the production-­consumption nexus, its transitoriness, and the practice of class-consciousness. Class-consciousness returns the cluttered self to the root in the engagement with the production process; fueling and fueled by a courage to experience the hell that fills the Wunderkammers-of-life with just enough distractions from it to perpetuate its ruin. Class-­ consciousness is at once a struggle against one-sided desire and its social hydra and the triumph over it: it embodies the deflagration of the social hydra through a dual movement, political strategy and higher consciousness. Laozi has more to teach about the latter than the former, the movement of Marxism has more to teach about the former than the latter.

Notes 1. Marx and Engels quotations cite the English abbreviation of the work’s title, followed by volume number and page number from Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2005), followed by volume number and page number of MarxEngels-Werke (MEW) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–2017). Abbreviations:

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

417

CJM—Comments on James Mill EPM—Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 GI—The German Ideology G—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy C1/3—Capital 1 and 3 2. Capitalist production collects the population together in great centers, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.... Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.... Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker. (C1-MECW35:507/MEW23:529). 3. Sexual pleasure is implied in several chapters. 4. In Chapter 9, for example Laozi cautions “There may be gold and jade to fill a hall/But there is none who can keep them” (Lau 1963, 13). 5. At least it is not the drive once the problem of immediate survival has been solved. 6. See Sayers 1998, 79–93. 7. Laozi recognizes that sometimes this even means war, both perverse and natural. 8. These conventions are behind the perverse tendencies of both elitist snobbery and popular decadence in music. 9. For Hegel quotes, cited translations are followed by volume and page (and where applicable, Zusätze [§]) number in G. W. F. Hegel Werke in 20 Bänden (W), eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969–1971). Abbreviations: Enc—Encyclopaedia, PR—Philosophy of Right,

418 

J. Chambers

10. It is also unfair insofar as the revolutionary potential of technology is only a potential. The socialist revolution is an open matter, by no means certain. Should it irrevocably fail then in the only sense that matters, Laozi will have been proven right; we would have been better off in a state of innocence than in the state which generates the socialist experiment and the hell to come with its failure. 11. Žižek criticizes the quietism of the modern “recourse to Taoism or Buddhism” as a kind of coping mechanism through which practitioners “drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-­ substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.” (2001) This criticism does hit the targets of modern popular variants of Daoism and Buddhism. I do not believe it could hit Laozi. 12. See Kim (2012) 125. 13. (1963, chapter 54, 61). 14. See Bertell Ollman, (1977). 4–41. 15. It implies that even the realm of necessity becomes aesthetic, that art becomes ubiquitous as all human labour turns into art. When humans live aesthetically even industrial production is artistic. When art is no longer a commodity it will lose its ‘purely’ aesthetic pretensions and no longer be a frivolous extra of society. People will experience everything in their world aesthetically. The idea of art as a subject separate from other activities will disappear and become once again a ubiquitous aspect of the world we experience, as it used to be in primitive communism and to some extent still was in precapitalist societies, but on an infinitely higher level. With the abolition of the division of labour everyone will do art. “The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in some individuals and its suppression in the grand mass which springs from this, is a consequence of the division of labour... In a communist society, there are no painters, but men who among other things do painting.” (GI-MECW5: 394/MEW3:379). 16. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’, in R.C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx and Engels reader Engels Reader, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton), 1978, 525–41.

12  Marx and Laozi: Means and Ends 

419

17. Marx claims that in production, “labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community” (C1-MECW35:89/MEW23:92). 18. Chairman Mao’s reported view that Engels’ first law of dialectics can be reduced to a special case of the second does not affect this. The change described above is a case of quantity into quality whether or not this change deserves to be described as a law. 19. Marx notes this was only enshrined in law long-term for the attic peasant, (C.3-MECW37:793/MEW25:815). However, I conjecture that it fitfully appeared particularly during the power vacuums of the spring and autumn period and warring states period in China. The Mohists were a political movement that struggled for this kind of arrangement. I would further conjecture that most of the (political) chapters of the Daodejing are written proverbs of the elders of some of these communities or people inspired by them. 20. I believe this aloofness is some of what Laozi means when he says that the sage is not benevolent (chapter 5, (Lau 1963, 9)) as well as when the Laozi says the sage treats all people, good and bad, well (chapter 23 (Lau 1963, 53)).

References Blunden, A. 2014. Forms of Radical Subjectivity. International Critical Thought 4: 418–432. Foster, J.B. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: NYU press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969-71. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Karl Markus Michel and Eva Moldenhauer, vol. 20. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. ———. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Trans. S. W. Dyde. Ontario: Batoche Books. Jenkins, J.L. 1995. The Possibility of Communist Altruism. History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1): 95–109. Kain, P.J. 1982. Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Kim, H. 2012. The Old Master. A Syncretic Reading of the Laozi from Mawangdui Text A Onward. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lau, D.C. 1963. Trans. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin.

420 

J. Chambers

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1956–2017. Marx Engels Werke (MEW). Vol. 1–48. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. ———. 1975–2005. Collected Works (MECW). Vol. 1–50. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Nelson, E.S. 2009. Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics and the Environment. Philosophy East & West 59 (3): 294–316. Ollman, B. 1977. Marx’s Vision of Communism a Reconstruction. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 8 (1): 4–41. Sasaki, R. 2021. A New Introduction to Karl Marx New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism. London: Springer International Publishing. Sayers, S. 1998. Marxism and Human Nature. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Marx and Alienation Essays on Hegelian Themes. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, A. 1900. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Routledge. Wenning, M. 2011. Daoism as Critical Theory. Comparative Philosophy 2 (2): 50–71. Žižek, S. 2001. Self-Deceptions. On Being Tolerant—and Smug. In Die Gazette, August 27.

Part VII Conclusion

13 Conclusion

Experiment and Memory Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. – Rainer Maria Rilke (1984, 92).

Grigori Zinoviev, President of the Communist International, was alarmed by the writings of Karl Korsch and warned delegates to the 1924 World Congress: “if we get a few more of these professors spinning out their theories we shall be lost.” (Korsch 2008). We did have a few more of these professors spinning out their theories and we were lost, or at least, suffered a crippling strategic setback, depending on what happens next. Zinoviev’s warning carries less weight in our times when so much is lost already and there is less and less worth winning. Throughout the world class-consciousness is low and ebbing away. The only reason why socialism still exists at all after the catastrophic defeats of the last century is because of capitalism’s continued creativity and consistency in the manufacture of its most abundant product: human suffering. The working class have been bullied and bribed into acquiescence and connivance with their exploitation and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3_13

423

424 

J. Chambers

destruction, but this acquiescence has made the way for a transformation yet more insidious and disgusting: the workers are turned into the kind of creatures that cling to their system of exploitation, and desire its perpetuation in the face of the threat of annihilation this promises them. While they cravenly refuse to see it for what it is, they yet crave the suffering that capital brings them; in their daily activities they as good as beg for more, and fight any challenges to the power of capital tooth and nail for fear of losing that suffering. Socialism’s message is only heard by that dwindling better part of a human that naturally abhors unnecessary suffering. It is a tiny relic in human psychology upon which all of capitalism, and its resistance, depends because capitalism is a kind of exploitation and is therefore bound up with suffering itself. Certainly, this grotesque development was already well on its way in Zinoviev’s times but it has greatly, perhaps decisively, advanced with the defeats of the last century. Zinoviev’s warning therefore comes late. The present work is a drop in the ocean of discourse on Marxism. If, as I hope and believe, the present work has deepens theoretical understanding of Marxism and enhances Marxist theory in some small way, then it might be of some use. If, on the other hand, I am wrong and it merely adds to the obfuscation of Marxism I can console myself with the acknowledgement that most of the damage that can be done in that regard has already been done. It is hard to imagine how it is even possible for the waters to be any muddier concerning Marxism, thanks to more than a century of bourgeois sophistry. A drop in the ocean of confusion does not make it any more of an ocean. And of course, theorists are only partly to blame when they are not understood. Capitalism cannot go on much longer before it devours humanity along with most of the earth’s macroscopic life once and for all. Marx was overly optimistic when he predicted the alternative of socialism to be universal barbarism. It was a prediction for more innocent times, times before the advent of the technologies of mass death and oppression which capitalism has only just begun to wield against us recently. Armed with these powerful new weapons, capitalism projects a dystopian nightmare more probable and more bleak than universal barbarism, a future that would make the, also likely, prospects of total annihilation into a relief. Universal barbarism is noble indeed, in comparison with a “civilization” in which the remotest possibility of the overthrow of capitalism no longer exists and all resistance must fail. Without the concerted, organized and global effort of the exploited and excluded to put social production under

13 Conclusion 

425

collective control, universal barbarism would be a distant hope and Laozi’s primitivism will have been proven right against Marx’s optimism. “Marx’s ideas remain our greatest theoretical weapon today for transforming the society in which we live” (Sasaki 2021, 16). Yet Marxism itself must continually transform in line with the new challenges posed by the ceaseless mutations of its enemy. This book advocates the transformation in favor of remembering lost knowledge of the ancients. Perhaps we have reached a time when we can learn from them. Marxism must get a lot stronger to rise to the challenge of capitalism as it enters this most moribund and hideous phase. Something radical must be accomplished because of the new time constraints. It is worth the risk in making a bold, experimental contribution to the revitalization of Marxism. Marxism might get a little weaker from failure. Marxism might get a lot stronger from success. The most likely outcome is that this book’s contribution to theory makes little difference either way. Cataclysm awaits. In any event, to take a longer-­term view, civilization is very young and much has been accomplished in a very short time. It is almost inevitable that some humans will survive as long as the earth harbors a biosphere, long enough, I estimate, to make some kind of socialism a probability sooner or later. With a cosmically long-term view all these worries disappear into nothingness. I therefore, have little to fear from Zinoviev’s warning. It will not be said that no one searched for a way out, even if no one took it. Perhaps this book’s most radical thesis is that we don’t need to find a new way to get out of this mess. We just need to begin to take the oldest ones seriously. We have all the intellectual tools available to save ourselves from ourselves already. Yet we live in a world in which it is easier to imagine the macro-scale implementation of fusion technology, than the macro-scale implementation of sympathetic social interactions. A social order based upon kindness instead of antagonism seems more remote than ever. Yet we already found the way out; we just ran from it, like running from our own reflections in the mirror. “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself” (CCHPL-MECW3:182/MEW1:385). Legend has it that that Laozi wrote the Daodejing in lieu of money to pay a toll at the Han pass on the road west. The legend contains a rejection of the logic of exchange value and the means/ends dichotomy with which it is bound up. The sage does not deal in money and exchanges his priceless wisdom instead. The book is written on the spot, spontaneously

426 

J. Chambers

and effortlessly. Laozi has no thought for future accumulative gain or fame and treats the work as an entertainment. Commenting on the scene Walter Benjamin asks: “and what use would his wisdom be if he who forgot the valley (which he had just looked on with pleasure again) when he rounded the next corner did not also forget his anxieties about the future almost as soon as he felt them” (2003, 248)? Laozi lives in the moment and does not allow his ends to escape his means. Hopefully, attentive readers have read this book in the same spirit.

The Dialectical Synthesis In this book Marx and Laozi have been put together in a few rudimentary ways. The resulting synthesis has been dialectical in a peculiar way. Earlier in this book G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of idealism has been described in some detail: the for-itself relationship of the finite and the infinite. It has been explained how in this for-itself relationship the synthesized entity must be thought of as the union of two moments each of which have their identity solely in and through their opposition to the other. Reality is the union of the infinite and the finite insofar as the finite is only defined as not the infinite and contrariwise. There is a sense in which this synthesis can be employed in one possible interpretation of the yinyang image below (Fig. 13.1): On this way of looking at the yinyang image the black just is the negation of the white and contrariwise and no more than this. Insofar as

Fig. 13.1  White Dominant Yinyang

13 Conclusion 

427

either of the two moments (glyphs) have any identity in-themselves this is an inadequate way of saying that it appears that way through determinate negations of other things that are not part of the image (the surrounding blackness of the square above). This is really just a problem of the incompleteness of images, which are always particular, one reason why Hegel downplays the philosophical value of the aesthetic. Hegel’s synthesis happens under the concept of infinite and finite, spirit and nature; it is absolute. It should also be added that for Hegel as the dialectical synthesis involves one moment whose inner logic creates and comprehends the opposition, this one side also creates the unity; it is the side of spirit, the side of the infinite—the side of the subject in the subject-­ object dialectic. In Hegel’s model of the absolute, reality is completely structured by thought-forms; One side enjoys primacy. The white side takes the place of spirit on this image as it contains the black side. Theodor W. Adorno subjected this for-itself synthesis to materialist criticism, arguing that Hegel abused the dialectic through making the opposition and unity belong to spirit. Sublating opposition essentially denies it. Negation is ultimately dissolved in Hegel’s system because resolution is its ultimate meaning. For Adorno, objects are only amenable to partial structuring from the subject, and their intelligible side does not exhaust them. Negative dialectics recognizes the reality of the division between subject and object (Adorno usually puts this in terms of subject and object but he also emphasizes the “particular” in the object as opposed to the universal). However, Adorno was aware that even recognition of separation amounts to a kind of unity because of the logic of concepts, which has this oppressive tendency to unite (under itself ) where it separates. This is why Adorno projected a future utopia in which the recognition of the particularity – the separation – of subjects and objects was a real-life activity, not merely a theoretical postulate, that contained the inherent and, in this case, unwanted contradiction of the concept. Only when we had been liberated from a certain oppressive tendency of the concept could real-life aesthetic experience do the materialist work of recognizing the reality of the dialectical union between subject and object. Nevertheless, a contradiction persists insofar as synthesis is involved in the interaction between finite and infinite, subject and object, unifying reality. A material relationship exists between subject and object

428 

J. Chambers

and in this case a new interpretation of the yinyang image can be offered in which the black glyph, the object, truly does the work of union precisely because the white glyph, the concept, recognizes its limits in the real act of recognition. This is what Adorno calls ‘reconciliation’. “the idea of reconcilement bars its affirmation in a concept” (2004, 160). With Adorno’s conception of reconciliation “it would be impossible to conceive that state as either the undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis: rather it would be the communication of what is differentiated” (2005, 247). Adorno’s description of reconciliation above is a direct parallel of Hegel’s typical definition of the concrete universal as unity in difference in the way Adorno opposes reconciliation to undifferentiated unity and absolute difference. Yet Adorno’s articulation of reconciliation is problematic in positing a model of the subject-­ object relation based upon a mere “communication of the different”. In characterizing the bringing together of subject and object as not forming a unitary whole this model can be criticized for foreclosing the dialectical moment; it loses comprehension of the contradictory union of identity and non-identity. The lack of synthesis amounts to a step back from Hegel’s dialectical model of absolute idealism, mind and nature. Deleuze’s difference wins. Yet this would be a hasty inference; Adorno, as a materialist, asserts that a thinking subject is a particular object but not all objects are thinking subjects ‘concepts ... are moments of the reality that requires their formation’ (2004, 11). This view is tempered by the denial of nominalism in the object: “Object, though attenuated, also is not without subject. If object itself lacked subject as a moment, then its objectivity would become nonsense” (2005, 257). These two oppose and need each other. It can be argued that this kind of materialist reconciliation turns into its opposite if this model is interpreted as offering an ontology composed of mutually dependent opposites. The fear of this implication probably motivated Adorno to limit its scope to the epistemic. To describe the absolute with these antithetical categories, (subject-object, consciousness-­nature) means a return to a dialectical unifying model. As this union is comprehended by the subject or (let’s not beat about the bush here) Spirit, reconciliation applied to an absolute model of ontology actually ushers in the return of absolute idealism. As an ontological model, reconciliation is overruled by Adorno’s dialectics in favor of

13 Conclusion 

429

idealism. Yet this turnaround only follows with the acceptance of two conceptually intertwined principles: (1) this subject-object dialectic is absolute, (2) the subject equals consciousness. Materialism rejects them both. The materialist dialectic of subject and object denies the absolute and posits in its stead a relative dialectic between subject and object on their levels of interaction. In positing the object’s ‘primacy’ (2004, 192) over thinking the subject is downgraded from the level of an absolute ontological category. Mind and nature depend on one another but this mutual dependence is asymmetrical in that nature and its material objectivity have primacy. Such a dialectic is implicit in Adorno’s epistemic scope of his subject-object dialectic. His claim that “objectivity would become nonsense” in the absence of the subject does not deny the material existence of the object without the subject; merely its sense. The subject is itself an object and in this sense the object does not ontologically depend upon the subject. Thinking subjects are completely dependent upon the object insofar as consciousness is necessarily intentional and human subjects are biological. For Adorno the only freedom from nature subjects can aspire to is arrived at through admitting this dependency; he asserts its denial in the idealist reversal of dependency actually arises from a natural drive to dominate implicit in the instinctive fear of something external to consciousness, the fear of rupture and change, betokening the fear of death: Still transparent, however, is the reason for the illusion that is transcendental far beyond Kant: why our thinking in the intentio obliqua will inescapably keep coming back to its own primacy, to the hypostasis of the subject. For while in the history of nominalism ever since Aristotle’s critique of Plato the subject has been rebuked for its mistake of reifying abstraction, abstraction itself is the principle whereby the subject comes to be a subject at all. Abstraction is the subject’s essence. This is why going back to what it is not must impress the subject as external and violent. To the subject, what convicts it of its own arbitrariness—and convicts its prius of aposteriority—will sound like a transcendent dogma (2004, 181).

The goal of negative dialectics is to posit unity in recognizing and respecting nonidentity. This model keeps negation intact rather than falling into

430 

J. Chambers

dualism. ‘Through the decision in which spirit acknowledges itself to be domination and retreats into nature, it abandons the claim to domination which directly enslaves it to nature’ (Horkheimer & Adorno 1997, 39–40). For conscious humans to make the “decision” (Bescheidung) to “retreat into nature”, is for them to acknowledge the dependence of their thought upon natural impulses driving them. Adorno refers to this as the “remembrance of nature in the subject” (40). With this remembrance of its controlling influences having their source in nature, consciousness could “acknowledge itself to be domination”, arising from a natural survival drive. Thereby, we conscious subjects, would be able to live in awareness of those natural impulses acting on and inside of us by acknowledging the dependence of our thought and behavior patterns on them. Some kind of unity is asserted but it is mysterious for the concept because not contained in the concept – contained in the non-conceptual side of the act of recognition or rather it is contained in the conceptual side of the act of recognition insofar as the conceptual side recognizes that it does not belong to the conceptual side. This is one way of reading Adorno’s famous refrain that his task is that of “breaking through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity with the power of the subject” (2004, 2). An implication of the asymmetrical dialectic between subject and object is the denial that the conscious subject introduces a rupture into being. Being must itself be conceived of as discontinuous to enable subjectivity and its meaning to arise from it. Yet this also implies that Adorno’s qualification of the objectivity as “nonsense” without the subject only has a purely epistemic and trivial value, in the sense that it takes place in the subject; objectivity only arises for materiality vis-á-vis the conscious subject, the absence of which is paradoxically hypothesized by Adorno here. Assuming humanity is the lone form of sentient life then if there were no people, obviously there would be no conscious subject’s meaning ascribed to objectivity; this is a platitude. Yet if the discontinuousness of matter precedes the conscious subject then, while it may be that its “nonsense” exceeds the conscious subject, ontological sense is also not to be conceived as limited to consciousness; the object-subject dialectic must exceed consciousness. This seems to be what is animating Adorno’s distinctions between objectivity-object and subjectivity-subject in the

13 Conclusion 

431

following: “Potentially, though not actually, objectivity can be conceived without a subject; but not likewise object without subjectivity” (2005, 249). Vicki Kirby has illustrated that materialists must be committed to the view that logic is not the exclusive preserve of the conscious subject (2017, 1–6). “If humans are fully material beings who do mathematics, then matter does mathematics. And indeed, how else could nature have produced human mathematicians if it were not already mathematical? How else could it have generated the very principles that mathematicians claim to discover? And why else, finally, do those principles, despite their undeniable success, never quite manage to fully quantify or predict matter – unless matter is also inherently performative and improvisational” (Gamble et al. 2019, 123)? Adorno qua materialist should seek to evade the idealist model of the free conscious subject creating meaning and imposing it upon its more or less recalcitrant object. Therefore, the dialectical unity in opposition between subject and object can obtain an ontological scope when subjectivity is no longer made the exclusive preserve of consciousness, in the sense of the infinite immanent in the finite. Consciousness is reconceived as a higher tier mode of the subjectivity of matter. However, once consciousness is detached from subjectivity as merely a sufficient not necessary condition, the subject-object dialectic gives way to a dialectic of deeper categories derived from Laozi; the dialectic of background and foreground, which can be conceived in its different aspects as the dialectics of passive and active, presence and absence. This dialectic cuts through Adorno’s subject-object dialectic. This deeper dialectic encompasses the form of Adorno’s concession of the free subject, which is free through its conscious choice to “retreat into nature”. When this movement is understood as Laozi’s backgrounding movement, it provides an explanation for why freedom as self-consciousness must take this form. An additional consequence of this deeper dialectic is that the dialectic is made relative to the interactive processes of the discontinuous matter. This relativity is the opening of contingency, the open system of reality pervaded by Laozi’s concept wu – absence. This dialectic can be presented pictorially (Fig. 13.2): It thus appears like the traditional yinyang image in which the concept (the white glyph) recognizes the sovereignty of non-identity, which is hinted at by the nonconceptual (the black glyph) and conceptually

432 

J. Chambers

Fig. 13.2  Black Dominant Yinyang

expressed in the failure of the absolute pretensions of the concept. One could say the failure of Hegel’s logic is this conceptual proof. This is a better model for the dialectical synthesis that has been drawn out between Marx and Laozi in this thesis. Marx begins with the nonconceptual finite; the suffering, tool-making animal, and unfolds its dialectical, conceptual outer casing. He can thus be seen as the white, universal, glyph carrying its finite. Laozi is represented by the black glyph; the aesthetic, finite comportment holding the conceptual side of experience. As materialist ontology begins with the non-conceptual, the black side forms the unity of the image. The world is contained in mystery, hence the beautiful. A more elaborate representation of the image would display the white glyph as 3-D and emerging out of the black space; thus depicting the foreground-background dialectic, which is the archetype of dialectical contradiction as espoused by Laozi. Yet this image too is inaccurate when read one-sidedly. Earlier it has been explained that the wu side of Dao through the idea that the conceptual/foreground does not emerge out of the background in an absolute sense; rather it is the product of the infinity of processes mediating each other in any particular process. It applies in any process, not every process in the sense of the absolute. As the universe is an open totality of processes one can only say “every process” in a qualified sense. There is only contradiction for materialists. To suppose that there is any absolute simple-self-identity, (outside of a thought experiment) really preceding any determinate negations is idealism. Only determinate negations exist. That is, only the concrete is the real and the

13 Conclusion 

433

abstract is relative not absolute. Mao was right that contradiction has metaphysical primacy and the negation of the negation only has a derivative status.1 The wu side of Dao is the negative shadow of this concrete-­ in-­thought. This negative is contained in the concept through its own internal logic of determination through negation, the for-itself relation. Yet the idea of wu refers to a reality not contained in the concept and thus it must be a concept that escapes itself in the concrete-real if it is to refer at all. It is at this point—at the end of Western philosophy—that Lao-Tzu again asserts himself. For he saw long ago that the search for a verbal or conceptual foundation for a ground to appearance is perhaps not the most important thing, that a noetic ground, if allowed to occupy the forefront of philosophical experience, will stultify the search for wisdom, ironically ending the very philosophizing that it had begun. He would, I think, capsize Parmenides and Plato and return to Heraclitus, a Heraclitus without the Logos, a Heraclitus in whom the transcendent inhabits the immanent instead of rejecting it or being divorced from it (Austin 2014, 94).

Richard Rorty, repeating a view he attributes to Michel Foucault, famously mused that philosophers “may be doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel” (1991, 96).2 I have come to believe that this encounter happens sooner or later to any researcher who does not give up too early, although they usually do not recognize whom they are meeting. I’ll add to this that while we are usually too distracted by the scenery to notice, our journeys always ending with that same encounter; they always begin with the same encounter also. When, particularly western, researchers set out on their journeys they almost never notice the old Chinese man travelling the other way. This is unpardonable inattentiveness really because he stands out well enough—sitting on a bull. We’re always in too much of a rush to heed him it seems. Those who are fortunate observe that he has already been down that road and he is returning. All our travels start from the same root. But for most of us our lives are our travels unto death. We can only stay at the root by continuously returning, relatively speaking, and that is why the old Chinese man on the bull looks as if he is going the other way,

434 

J. Chambers

when it is really just the effect of us passing him. The faster we travel, the faster he travels in the opposite direction. Whether we notice or not, it is an unavoidable encounter because all our travels begin and end in silence.

Notes 1. Whether or not this means that the negation of the negation does not qualify as a rule of dialectics is a different question upon which I think actually Mao was more ambivalent than most commentators suppose. See Pang 2016, 111–112. 2. I believe the words Rorty has in mind are the following: “Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us” (1970).

References Adorno, T.W. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge. Adorno, T. W. 2005. Subject and Object. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. H. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. Austin, S. 2014. Tao and Trinity: Notes on Self-Reference and the Unity of Opposites in Philosophy. New York: Springer. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Commentary on Poems by Brecht. In Selected Writings, vol. 4, 215–250. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gamble, C.N., J.S. Hanan, and T. Nail. 2019. What is New Materialism? Angelaki 24 (6): 111–134. Horkheimer, M., and T. Adorno. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cumming. London: Verso. Kirby, V. 2017. Matter Out of Place: “New Materialism” in Review. In What If Culture Was Nature All Along, 1–25. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Korsch, K. 2008. Marxism and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

13 Conclusion 

435

Pang, L. 2016. Mao’s Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future. Rethinking Marxism 28 (1): 108–123. Rilke, R.M. 1984. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. S. Mitchell. New York: Random House. Rorty, R. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others (Philosophical Papers). Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sasaki, R. 2021. A New Introduction to Karl Marx. London: Springer International Publishing.

Index1

A

Absence, 29, 43, 114, 115, 117, 129, 135, 152, 158, 160–162, 170n16, 171n22, 186, 204, 207, 293, 300, 311–313, 349, 429–431 Absolute, 9, 34, 36, 40, 46n11, 53, 58, 61–68, 72, 74, 79, 82, 86n13, 86n14, 86n16, 93, 103–105, 114, 118, 136, 150, 151, 153–157, 161, 164–166, 168n4, 170n19, 172n31, 174n38, 176n64, 188, 189, 192–195, 200, 202, 203, 205, 216n10, 221, 222, 225, 226, 231, 234, 235, 239, 245, 262,

266, 272–276, 280, 290–303, 305, 308, 311–313, 315, 342, 349, 353, 356n19, 364, 370, 391, 402, 406, 413, 427–429, 432, 433 Absolute idealism, 57, 62, 81–82, 428 Abstraction, 7, 8, 12, 19, 58, 68–70, 81, 82, 84n1, 87n24, 99, 103–107, 136, 138, 139, 158, 163, 175n46, 198, 199, 206, 227, 234–236, 238, 242, 243, 245, 254, 256, 260, 262–266, 277, 281, 281n2, 285n17, 290, 293, 295, 297–301, 303, 305–308, 313, 314, 317n8, 333, 365, 366, 376, 429

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Chambers, Marx and Laozi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40981-3

437

438 Index

Abstract universal, 8, 61, 62, 68, 76, 198, 199, 242, 271, 284n10, 304–306, 328 Adorno, Theodor, W., 14, 19, 20, 34, 41, 44–45n6, 45n10, 47n16, 87n31, 99, 118, 144–146, 148–151, 154–157, 159, 160, 164, 173n32, 173n33, 173n35, 173n36, 175n46, 176n48, 200, 204, 233, 271, 272, 274–277, 280, 284n11, 284n12, 289, 316n4, 369, 370, 380, 381, 388n19, 427–431 Aesthetics/aesthetic, 25–43, 140, 143, 148, 149, 166, 172n26, 174n36, 185–214, 323, 339, 341, 342, 345–353, 355n15, 379–381, 388n17, 401, 411, 418n15, 427, 432 Alienation, 13, 36, 41, 171n26, 243, 277, 284n14, 301, 325, 326, 344, 368, 370–373, 380, 387–388n15, 403, 404, 407, 411, 414 Althusser, Louis, 263, 289, 302, 317n8, 318n13 Anarchism, 347 Anti-conceptualism, 98, 129, 204 Anti-humanism, 337–339 Aristocracy, 372 Aristotle, 9, 41, 81, 98, 100, 165, 191, 222, 225, 226, 235, 323–325, 328, 331, 333, 337–339, 341, 345, 353n2, 354n6, 354n7, 355n15, 356n19, 356n20, 356n21, 375, 382, 409, 429

Atomism, 9, 220, 221, 226 Austin, Scott, 110–112, 119n3, 120n9, 433 B

Backgrounding/background, 130–140, 149, 152–154, 156–164, 167n3, 168n4, 168n5, 168–169n8, 170n19, 175n40, 175n46, 202, 207–214, 216n10, 305, 312, 313, 315, 339–342, 345, 357n23, 371, 383, 388n16, 394, 395, 399, 405, 414, 415, 431, 432 Baumann, Charlotte, 271, 274, 275, 284n11 Beauty, 40, 327, 401, 411, 423 Being, 12, 14, 17, 21, 25–27, 29, 32–34, 38, 41, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69–71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 87n31, 94, 96, 97, 103–107, 113, 114, 118, 120n4, 121n11, 122n15, 122n16, 130, 132, 134, 150, 154, 156, 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168n4, 168n5, 169n8, 175n43, 185–187, 190, 192–202, 208, 211, 213, 214, 216n10, 219–222, 224–233, 236, 238–241, 244, 245, 251, 259, 264, 265, 267, 270, 272, 273, 275, 278, 279, 281n2, 282n4, 284n15, 291, 296, 297, 300–303, 305, 312–314, 316n5, 325–327, 335, 338, 339, 343–345, 348,

 Index 

351, 361, 366, 368, 371, 374, 375, 385, 386n4, 386n6, 392, 394, 395, 397, 400, 401, 404, 409, 410, 415, 418n11, 430, 431, 433 Being-for-itself, 32, 59, 69–71, 86n23, 87n30, 105, 186, 188, 198, 224, 268 Being-in-itself, 59, 69, 70, 86n19, 105, 114, 188–190, 193, 198, 212, 238 Benjamin, Walter, 144, 145, 147, 148, 155, 426 Biology, 6, 144, 234, 299, 329, 354n6 Blake, William, 42 Blunden, Andy, 148, 229, 246n4, 268, 413 Boundary, 16, 59, 98, 128, 136, 140–144, 150–152, 155, 162, 163, 212, 214, 215n9, 255, 340, 366, 378, 380 Bowman, Brady, 62, 85n4, 85n12, 87n30, 188–194, 201, 202, 212 Brien, Kevin, 41, 43, 266, 289, 290, 293, 302–303, 306–309, 317n8, 317n10 Brinkman, Klaus, 71 C

Capital, 8, 9, 44n2, 265, 289–315, 326, 329 Capitalism, 26, 27, 34, 38, 41, 47n15, 137, 150, 231, 263–265, 280, 292, 296–300, 303, 305, 307–311, 313,

439

316n1, 317n10, 326, 328–338, 348, 355n10, 361–363, 365–371, 373, 375–377, 387n15, 391–394, 396, 398, 399, 402–408, 412–416, 423–425 Cause, 85n8, 101, 132, 190, 202, 223, 226, 254, 265, 301, 350, 417n2 Chance, 32, 105, 224, 225, 236 Change, 39, 47n15, 52–57, 72, 96, 114, 138–140, 151, 152, 191, 203, 205, 209, 215n8, 221, 225, 226, 230–232, 235–237, 240, 325, 329, 338, 346, 349, 353n2, 354n6, 378, 380, 388n19, 419n18, 429 China, 3, 28, 31, 95, 99–101, 121n11, 133, 171n23, 174n38, 209, 348, 352, 419n19 Clericalism, 52, 55 Colletti, Lucio, 251–255, 258, 261, 263, 264, 267–271, 276, 278, 281n1, 284n14 Communism, 12, 276, 280, 309–311, 316n1, 332, 333, 335, 343, 365, 372, 403–406, 409, 411–413, 418n15 Concept/concepts, 12, 14, 32, 40, 43, 45n6, 46n11, 51, 55–57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66–68, 70, 73, 77, 78, 81, 83–84n1, 85n7, 87n31, 94–96, 98, 103, 106, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117, 129, 133, 137, 140–146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154–166, 167n3, 168n4, 169n8, 172n27,

440 Index

172n31, 173n32, 173n33, 175n45, 176n64, 185–214, 219–245, 251, 254–257, 259, 260, 262, 264–270, 272–277, 281–282n2, 289, 291, 292, 302, 303, 310–315, 316n4, 332, 333, 341, 342, 354n7, 366, 368–370, 378–380, 387n10, 401–404, 409, 427, 428, 430–433 Concrete universal, 27, 61, 62, 155, 199, 200, 239, 242, 251, 266, 270–281, 289–291, 293, 302–315, 316n1, 317n8, 318n13, 327, 328, 331, 413, 428 Consciousness/conscious, 6, 8, 45n6, 63–67, 71, 72, 75–77, 84n1, 105, 106, 108, 112, 133, 142, 147, 152–155, 157, 162, 166n2, 172n31, 175n40, 177n70, 190, 192, 194–197, 200, 202, 203, 208, 215n8, 221, 225, 245, 254–260, 262, 264, 269, 271, 281n2, 297, 305, 326–328, 333, 341, 344, 352, 354n7, 379–381, 388n19, 401, 409, 411, 413, 415, 416, 429–431 Contingent/contingency, 44–45n6, 80, 87n30, 170n16, 176n61, 186, 187, 189–192, 202, 205–207, 221, 223, 257, 259, 274, 293, 305, 308, 309, 315, 431 Contradiction/contradict, 8, 15, 26, 28, 32–39, 45n7, 45–46n11, 46–47n15, 56, 65, 103, 105,

110, 111, 121n11, 136, 146, 151, 156, 194, 196, 198, 209, 221, 223, 225, 234, 235, 242, 260, 266, 273, 274, 278, 285n16, 294, 299, 300, 304, 308, 312, 336, 365, 406, 407, 427, 432, 433 Coutinho, Steve, 97, 110, 111, 115, 116, 121n11, 122n17, 155, 177n66, 346–349 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 246n2 Critique of the Gotha Program (CGP), viii, 292, 363, 364, 385n2, 411 D

Dante, Alighieri, 42 Dao/Daoism, 3, 15, 16, 19, 54, 56, 93–100, 102, 103, 107, 108, 110–119, 119n2, 119n3, 119–120n4, 120n9, 121n10, 121n11, 122n14, 122n16, 128–135, 139, 141, 143–147, 151–164, 166, 166n1, 167n3, 168n7, 169n8, 169n13, 170n19, 170n21, 171n22, 172n30, 173n35, 173–174n36, 175n44, 176n59, 176n60, 177n65, 177n66, 177n70, 202, 204, 205, 208–214, 311, 313–315, 341–343, 345–347, 351, 353, 357n23, 377, 378, 382, 395, 396, 398, 400, 401, 405, 413, 415, 418n11, 432, 433

 Index 

Daodejing, 15–20, 25, 26, 28, 42, 43, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102–104, 108, 110, 111, 113–116, 121n11, 127, 132–134, 136, 145–147, 155, 156, 163, 164, 166n2, 174n37, 174n38, 176n56, 177n65, 177n66, 211, 311, 314, 341, 342, 345, 366, 368, 377, 386n4, 396, 397, 404, 406, 419n19, 425 Darwin, Charles, 223, 224 de, 15, 156, 163, 169n8, 176n58, 211, 314, 340–353, 357n23, 395, 400, 406, 407, 413 Death, 38, 52, 53, 78, 151, 155, 173–174n36, 208, 226, 309, 352, 364, 371, 381, 384, 385, 394, 406, 424, 429, 433 Desire, 9, 128, 140–157, 160, 172n30, 172n31, 173–174n36, 208, 209, 242, 262, 335, 338, 340, 344, 346, 349–352, 355n14, 358n31, 368–371, 374–385, 387n10, 387n14, 391, 397–400, 403, 404, 406, 407, 409–411, 414–416, 424 Determinism, 13, 14, 220, 221, 224, 226 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 150, 377 Dialectics of Nature (DN), 7, 29, 79, 122n18, 137, 246n2, 353n1, 387n11 Dialectics/dialectic, 4, 8, 9, 30–39, 44n5, 44n6, 56, 70, 79, 83, 103, 118, 119, 119n4, 122n18, 155, 158, 160, 174n38, 175n40, 200, 231,

441

235, 236, 241–243, 257, 267, 268, 273, 274, 281, 289–315, 412, 414, 419n18, 427–432, 434n1 Dietzgen, Joseph, 134 E

Eagleton, Terry, 8, 21n2, 41 Eastern philosophy, 21, 30, 31, 94, 100, 107, 127 Eco, Umberto, 17 Ecology, 391–396 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, viii, 12, 21n1, 40, 41, 43n1, 243, 244, 246n2, 301, 316n3, 326–330, 339, 343, 353n1, 372, 385n2, 401, 412, 417n1 Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, 228, 229, 343 Emergence/emergent, 4, 131, 174n38, 194, 228, 231, 261, 262, 377, 408, 412, 413 Empirical, 58, 68, 76, 87n30, 115, 117, 137, 139, 162, 165, 167n3, 188–192, 195, 197, 201, 229, 232, 234, 245, 255, 258, 259, 263, 264, 266, 267, 306–308, 310, 347, 348 Encyclopedia (Enc), 66, 84n2, 119n1, 215n3 Ends/means-ends dichotomy, 27, 99, 143, 161, 166, 366, 379, 383, 391, 406, 412, 416, 425 Engels, Friedrich, vii, viii, 4–14, 19, 21, 21n4, 29, 34, 44n2, 45n7, 102, 122n18, 134, 137, 140,

442 Index

171n25, 174n38, 222, 227, 229, 234, 241, 246n2, 252, 284n13, 328, 353n1, 372, 374, 385n2, 387n9, 387n11, 400, 412, 416n1, 419n18 Environment, 34, 137, 150, 152–156, 202, 203, 207, 211, 214, 232, 304, 329, 336, 338, 339, 342, 343, 345, 353, 355n14, 370, 373, 382–385, 392, 393, 395–398, 406, 413 Epicurus, 9, 95, 219–227 Epistemology/epistemic, 8, 15, 20, 21, 25–28, 35, 63, 99, 105, 106, 112, 119–120n4, 127, 128, 131, 140, 142, 147, 152–155, 163, 165, 169n13, 174n36, 175n44, 177n70, 185, 195, 196, 202–214, 215n9, 221, 224, 230, 232, 233, 253, 257, 258, 260, 341, 354n7, 377, 428–430 Essence/essentialism, 6, 13, 32, 55, 58, 61, 66, 67, 72, 77, 81, 94, 103, 133, 138, 161, 168n4, 169n11, 186, 206, 228, 232–235, 237, 239, 242–244, 254, 256–258, 262–265, 270–276, 279, 280, 282n3, 282n4, 283n6, 285n17, 292, 297, 301, 317n8, 324, 325, 327, 328, 331, 339, 345, 353n2, 354n7, 363, 365, 369, 409, 423, 429 Ethics, 25, 26, 119n4, 128, 136, 173n35, 177n70, 237, 260, 324, 325, 332, 337, 339–345, 347, 356n19, 356n20, 361–366, 386n4, 386n8, 388n18, 413, 415

Exploitation, 13, 240, 277, 300, 325, 332, 339, 344, 347–349, 357n26, 362, 363, 365–367, 369–374, 377, 380, 391, 394, 397, 398, 400, 403, 407, 412, 413, 416, 423, 424 F

Feeling, 20, 40, 61, 102, 148, 152, 191, 193, 214, 340, 343, 344, 362, 380–382 Feudalism, 34, 38, 339, 363, 367, 372 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 8, 167n3, 195–199, 202, 219, 222, 225–227, 229–232, 241, 244, 254, 277, 334, 354n7, 355n13 Finite, 6, 7, 32, 55, 69–70, 94, 129, 135, 185, 186, 188, 202–214, 219, 224, 225, 251, 252, 258–260, 290, 355n13, 388n19, 426 Foregrounding/foreground, 130–140, 149, 152, 153, 157–162, 164, 168n4, 168n5, 168–169n8, 170n19, 175n40, 175n46, 209–212, 312, 339, 340, 345, 353n2, 357n23, 369–371, 388n16, 394–396, 399, 407, 415, 431, 432 Foster, John B., 392 Foucault, Michel, 5, 433 Frankfurt School, 41, 271, 370 Freedom, 16, 17, 38, 40, 64, 66, 74, 75, 149, 166n2, 192, 221, 225, 233, 235, 237, 239, 240, 242, 245, 262, 315, 325, 327, 332, 338, 373, 381, 397, 404–406, 409–411, 414, 429, 431

 Index 

Free Will, 221, 222, 224, 225, 240, 294, 295 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 151, 174n36 Futurism, 397–405 G

Gamble, C. N., 162, 225, 231, 312, 431 The German Ideology (GI), viii, 379, 387n9 God, 12, 45n6, 53, 55, 62, 63, 67, 68, 72–74, 76–80, 86n14, 86n24, 95, 102, 104, 106, 107, 117, 118, 122n15, 162, 186, 200, 220, 259, 265, 402 The Grundrisse, 22n8, 243, 303, 372, 373 H

Hanan, J. S., &, 312, 316n2 Hegel, G. W. F., vii, 3–21, 27–29, 31–36, 38–42, 51–83, 93–119, 127–166, 185–202, 204–206, 209, 210, 212, 215n3, 215n8, 215n9, 219, 221, 222, 251, 255–281, 289, 290, 323, 382, 400, 426 Hegelianism/Hegelian, 9, 13, 29, 38, 40, 44n6, 69, 127, 134, 160, 202, 203, 222, 226, 252, 253, 267, 316n2, 325, 434n2 Hein, Heinrich, 42 Henrich, Dieter, 191, 193, 239, 240 Heraclitus, 55, 96, 107, 388n21, 433 Historical Materialism, 222, 232, 244, 263, 281n1, 309, 338

443

History, 4, 6, 8–10, 12–14, 19, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37–39, 42, 44n2, 45n6, 52, 54, 55, 62, 68, 77, 81, 82, 86–87n24, 93–100, 102, 105, 110, 116, 120n4, 121n11, 143, 147, 150, 194, 209, 219, 221, 223, 224, 228, 232, 234, 236–239, 241–245, 259, 260, 270, 276, 277, 279, 280, 292, 309, 314, 329, 331–333, 338, 349, 355n15, 362, 363, 369–371, 373, 377, 386n7, 387n12, 400–403, 429 Humanism, 12, 171n24, 343, 354n7 Humanity, 14, 31, 41, 53, 54, 58, 105, 150, 156, 228, 232, 242, 245, 292, 293, 300, 327–334, 338, 339, 342, 343, 355n8, 355n11, 355n13, 355n14, 362, 363, 365, 380, 391, 392, 397, 399, 400, 406, 408, 409, 413, 415, 424, 430 Hume, David, 61, 86n16, 191, 202 Hypostatization/hypostatize, 186, 188, 255, 276–278, 301, 366 I

Ideal, 12, 32, 41, 44–45n6, 51, 57–60, 62, 69–71, 74–78, 81, 85n8, 86n20, 87n24, 87n30, 95, 148, 174n38, 198, 214, 230, 234, 236, 238, 253, 254, 257, 260, 269, 273, 275, 276, 278, 333, 349, 366, 379, 386n8, 401, 407, 409, 414, 415

444 Index

Idealism/idealist, 4–8, 17, 28–31, 34, 35, 44n3, 45n6, 51–83, 87n26, 93, 94, 97, 98, 108, 114, 118, 119n2, 120n4, 120n9, 129, 134, 137, 160, 162, 165, 168n8, 170n16, 171n24, 175n46, 185–201, 219, 222–224, 226, 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 238, 243–245, 251–281, 290–303, 307, 310, 311, 314, 316n2, 317n8, 328, 338, 355n13, 364, 403, 426, 428, 429, 431, 432 Identity/non-identity, 8, 15, 21n6, 32, 34, 59, 72, 74, 78–80, 87n26, 87n27, 104, 106, 107, 135, 141, 145, 154, 157, 158, 193, 198–200, 202, 206, 209, 210, 212, 257, 258, 261, 267–268, 312, 428, 431 Ideology, 271, 272, 275, 278, 293, 294, 302, 311, 312, 314, 315, 324, 334, 335, 338, 341–343, 345, 346, 351, 357n23, 407, 414, 426, 428 Illusion, 164, 203, 223, 244, 261, 264, 292, 297, 338, 366, 382, 383, 429 Ilyenkov, Evald, 61, 75–78, 265, 293, 305, 369 Immediacy, 20, 66, 84n1, 100, 157, 159, 160, 165, 173n32, 274, 275, 311, 316n4 Infinite/infinity, 6, 32, 53, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 67–71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80–82, 84n1, 85n7, 85n8, 85n11, 86n19, 86n23, 94, 114–117, 120n4, 129, 133, 134, 147, 159, 161, 165,

166, 169n14, 170n16, 170n19, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197–201, 204, 205, 212, 220, 224, 227, 238, 239, 243, 245, 251, 252, 254, 257, 259–261, 268, 269, 271, 274, 275, 277, 280, 281, 290, 291, 293–298, 305, 311–313, 375, 376, 399, 426, 427, 431, 432 Instrumental reason, 140, 150, 350, 368–370, 376, 416 Isomorphic identity, 176n58, 341, 342, 345, 351, 357n23 J

Justice, 278, 363–366 K

Kant, Immanuel, 7, 47n16, 59, 61, 73, 75–77, 83n1, 161, 162, 245, 252, 267, 282n3, 382, 388n18, 409, 429 L

Lacan, Jacques, 45n6, 164, 233 Laozi, 25–43, 51, 56, 93–119, 127–166, 185, 202–214, 215n9, 289, 293, 305, 311, 313–315, 318n14, 323–353, 361–385, 391–416, 425, 426, 431, 432 Lau, D. C., 15, 16, 56, 118, 121n10 Lenin, Vladimir, Ilyich, 5, 6, 21, 137, 138, 247n6, 284n10, 293, 316n5, 365, 386n6 Libertarianism, 276, 347, 357n25

 Index  M

Manifesto of the Communist Party (MCP), 26, 374, 385n2 Mao, Zedong, 3, 41, 137, 139, 140, 209, 309, 419n18, 433, 434n1 Marcuse, Herbert, 41 Marx, Karl, 3–21, 25–43, 51, 54, 84–85n2, 102, 122n18, 134, 137, 167n3, 169n8, 169n9, 170n16, 215n4, 219–234, 246n1, 246n2, 247n5, 247n6, 251–256, 259–268, 270, 274, 276, 281n1, 284n12, 284n13, 284n14, 289–311, 313, 315, 316n1, 317n7, 317n8, 317n10, 323–353, 361–385, 391–416, 424–426, 432 Marxism, 3, 9, 10, 12–14, 19, 25–28, 32, 34, 38, 41–43, 44n2, 137, 140, 230, 326, 347, 354n4, 355n14, 381, 386n6, 387n15, 397, 404, 416, 424, 425 Materialism/materialist, 3–9, 13, 14, 17, 21, 27–31, 39, 43, 51, 54, 56, 81, 96, 108, 133, 134, 137, 139, 162, 175n46, 209, 219–234, 236, 241, 244, 251–281, 289–315, 334, 338, 339, 349, 355n13, 369, 391, 403, 427–429, 431, 432 Matter, 5–8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 20, 21, 46n11, 53, 58, 64–66, 70, 81, 82, 137–139, 162, 165, 173n32, 175n40, 191, 211, 215n2, 216n10, 220, 224–227, 231, 234, 235, 253, 255–258, 260, 264, 269, 290, 292, 298, 300, 303, 316n2,

445

325, 336, 357n28, 363, 365, 367, 368, 384, 386n8, 392, 394, 400, 418n10, 425, 430, 431 McGowan, Todd, 32–38, 46n11, 46n12, 46–47n15 McTaggart J., E., 186, 187 Meaning, 5, 7, 8, 16–19, 28, 29, 42, 52, 75, 76, 87n31, 96–98, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111, 113, 116, 117, 120n4, 121n11, 122n13, 122n18, 141, 144, 147, 148, 156, 161, 194, 196, 201, 206, 210, 237, 239, 245, 259, 273, 275, 279, 290, 294, 327, 329, 350, 351, 354n6, 362, 366, 373, 382, 386n8, 394, 397, 398, 403, 409–411, 427, 430, 431 Mediation, 80, 160, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 233, 271–273, 291, 317n8, 348 Meikle, Scott, 234, 236, 237, 241, 243, 247n5, 323 Metabolism, 140, 329, 338, 339, 354n6, 392–396 Metaphysics, 9, 25–27, 29, 51, 68, 99, 104, 107, 118, 119n4, 128–130, 134, 136, 137, 140, 144, 163, 165, 169n8, 170n16, 171n24, 174n36, 177n70, 191, 193, 197, 253, 293, 311–315, 341, 345, 357n23, 371, 379 Method, 4, 15–17, 51, 121n11, 138, 155, 168n6, 236, 253, 255, 260–267, 289, 303, 304, 306, 328, 416 Milton, John, 298, 299

446 Index

Mimesis, 143–157, 163, 164, 166, 170n19, 173n32, 173n33, 173n36, 174n37, 174n38, 175n46, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216n10, 339, 341, 342, 353, 370, 380, 406, 413 Moeller, Hans-Georg, 15, 97, 135, 170n19, 175n44, 177n67 Morality, 12, 77, 326, 362–385, 386n4, 386n6, 386n7, 386n8 Murray, Patrick, 242, 245, 298, 300, 301, 368 Mystery, 56, 107, 128, 157–164, 176–177n65, 311, 432 Mysticism, 28, 42, 94, 95, 99, 107, 108, 120n9, 155 N

Nail, T., 312, 316n2 Naturalism, 116, 323, 334, 337–344, 391–396, 406 Nature, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 18, 28, 30, 32, 34, 40–42, 53, 55, 58, 59, 63–68, 71–73, 78–82, 83–84n1, 85n7, 96–98, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120n4, 133, 134, 136, 140, 146, 150, 154–156, 159, 161, 162, 166n2, 168–169n8, 176n62, 187–191, 203–205, 210, 212, 224, 226–229, 232, 235–237, 239, 241, 242, 247n5, 255–257, 261, 272, 273, 282n3, 290, 292, 293, 295, 298–300, 302, 305, 307–310, 314, 323–332, 334, 337–339, 343–345, 348, 349,

353, 353n2, 355n13, 356n19, 362, 368–376, 384, 385, 386n8, 387n15, 391–396, 398–400, 402–404, 407–409, 412, 413, 415, 427–430 Necessity, 8, 32, 40, 41, 44–45n6, 80, 86n16, 132, 190, 191, 206, 221, 225, 237–239, 257, 259, 269, 292, 297, 303, 327, 333, 354n5, 362, 373, 384, 394, 397, 403, 406, 409–411, 413, 418n15 Negative dialectics, 56, 155, 427, 429 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 163, 175n40, 347 Nothing, 6, 11, 31, 34, 53, 58, 60, 62, 66, 76, 79, 81, 93, 94, 103, 104, 106–108, 114, 132, 134, 137, 149, 160, 161, 165, 167n3, 169n8, 170n22, 175n43, 176n65, 186, 187, 192, 195, 196, 199, 202, 212, 222, 226, 233, 241, 263, 270, 274, 278, 282n4, 296, 311, 313, 315, 335, 338, 345, 355n13, 356n22, 365, 374, 388n17, 406 O

Ollman, Bertel, 289–291, 303 Ontology/ontological, 6–10, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 31, 44n2, 45n6, 46n11, 57, 59, 61–63, 69, 70, 75–78, 81, 82, 86n13, 87n31, 94, 96, 100, 103, 104, 106–108, 114, 118, 119n2, 119n4, 127–129, 134–136,

 Index 

152, 154–166, 167n3, 169n8, 169n14, 170n16, 176n55, 177n70, 186, 191, 194, 195, 200, 201, 206, 212, 216n10, 219–228, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 241, 251–255, 257, 258, 260–270, 276, 277, 280, 281n1, 284n12, 289, 290, 292–294, 299, 302, 303, 305, 307, 310, 311, 313, 314, 316n1, 316n5, 324, 341, 342, 353n2, 370, 371, 376, 428–430, 432 Opposition/oppose/opposite, 7, 9, 11–13, 17–19, 29, 32–34, 39, 40, 43, 51, 58, 70, 98, 105, 107–109, 114, 119, 130–140, 155, 157–159, 163, 165, 177n66, 190, 193, 197–199, 203, 205, 210–212, 225, 235, 265, 268, 271, 277, 285n16, 297, 314, 317n8, 318n14, 365, 371, 372, 380, 388n17, 388n19, 391, 395–398, 405, 407, 408, 412, 413, 426–428, 431, 434 P

Parmenides, 42, 52, 105, 107, 108, 165, 433 Pierce, Charles, S., 187, 188, 190, 191, 204, 214n2 Plato, 81, 136, 143, 174n38, 205, 409, 429, 433 Poetic, 110, 174n38, 396 Political economy, 228, 242, 293–295, 298, 299, 301, 317n7

447

Poverty, 40, 136, 167n3, 189, 192, 209, 264, 367, 392 Praxis/practice, 3, 7, 8, 27, 40, 41, 76, 87n24, 137–139, 150, 151, 154, 162, 164, 219–245, 251, 262, 265, 277, 280, 291, 297, 298, 301, 309, 329, 333, 337, 344, 350, 364, 366, 368, 371, 376, 378, 380, 381, 391, 416 Presence, 83, 117, 119n4, 134, 135, 155, 169n8, 190, 212, 262, 346, 431 Q

Quantity/quality, 74, 145, 293–297, 300, 317n8, 317n9, 375, 408, 412, 419n18 R

Ruben, David, Hillel, 73, 262, 291, 303 S

Sasaki, Ryuji, 425 Schelling F. W. J., 45n6, 80, 95, 97, 104, 119n2, 176n63, 186–188, 193, 227, 234, 239, 241, 277 Science, 11, 13, 19, 26, 27, 32, 39–43, 70, 77, 113, 120n4, 134, 138–140, 147, 149, 150, 158, 169n9, 172n26, 188–192, 197, 203, 219, 223, 225, 227–245, 251, 258, 260, 263, 265, 293, 309, 314, 339, 355n15, 362, 396

448 Index

Science of Logic (SL), 44n4, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 67, 69, 70, 72, 76, 79, 84n2, 94, 105–107, 119n1, 191, 199, 200, 215n3, 236, 238, 257, 272–274, 282n5 Self-consciousness, 8, 55, 61–63, 86n13, 142, 143, 153, 161, 222, 224, 225, 240, 245, 269, 271, 272, 403, 413, 416, 431 Skepticism, 361–388 Smith, Tony, 251–261, 263–272, 275–277, 279, 281n1, 283n8, 310 Socialism, 4, 25, 36, 44n2, 46n15, 137, 171n26, 241, 298, 299, 343, 344, 352, 361, 362, 371, 380, 391, 397, 406, 409, 416, 423–425 Society, 12, 26, 36–38, 41, 52, 54, 76, 77, 107, 120n4, 137, 147, 148, 167n3, 174n38, 225, 231, 232, 236, 240–244, 272, 277–280, 284n12, 297, 298, 300, 301, 305, 333, 334, 338, 339, 342, 348, 349, 352, 355n10, 357n26, 361, 362, 364–367, 371–376, 379, 381, 391, 393, 398, 399, 401, 404–406, 408, 409, 411–414, 417n2, 418n15, 425 Spinoza, Baruch, 97, 118, 142, 161, 169n8, 187, 193, 211 Stern, Robert, 57–68, 71–74, 82, 83, 85n3, 85n4, 85n12, 86n13, 86n14, 86n18, 87n25, 87n26, 87n29, 165, 260, 268 Sublation/aufheben/aufhebung, 39, 59, 61, 71, 85n2, 192, 193,

234, 267, 276, 277, 279, 280, 294–295, 310 Sympathy, 95, 110, 147, 340–344, 353, 369, 396, 407, 413, 414 T

Thought, 3–5, 7, 13, 14, 18, 21, 28, 30–32, 37, 40, 42, 45n6, 52–55, 57, 58, 62, 65, 67–74, 77–83, 95–98, 100–102, 104–108, 112, 115, 116, 131, 136, 143, 144, 151–153, 156–158, 160, 164, 170n19, 172n27, 173n32, 175n42, 185–187, 189, 191–196, 198, 200, 201, 207, 215n2, 216n10, 220, 222–233, 235, 238, 240, 242, 247n4, 247n5, 252–257, 260–263, 266–268, 270–275, 278, 291, 293, 302–305, 307, 311, 313, 315, 325, 326, 333, 336, 338–340, 344, 347, 349, 352, 366–368, 371, 372, 377, 388n16, 398, 409, 410, 426, 427, 430, 432, 433 Transcendence/transcendent, 53, 93, 95, 107, 110–112, 115–119, 120n4, 128, 133, 134, 176n59, 200, 243, 429, 433 U

Union of identity and non-identity, 158, 193, 428 Universal, 6, 8, 19, 27, 32, 36, 37, 55, 57–68, 70–74, 77, 79, 81, 85n7, 94, 120n4, 129, 145, 146, 155, 161, 170n19,

 Index 

172n27, 185, 190–192, 195–201, 205, 206, 219, 224, 225, 235–239, 242, 243, 251, 258, 266, 268–281, 282n2, 284n10, 284n12, 289–291, 293–297, 302–315, 316n1, 317n8, 318n13, 327, 328, 331, 369, 375, 413, 424, 425, 427, 428, 432 V

Value/Use-value/Exchange-value, 9, 12, 70, 72, 76, 139, 228, 240, 265, 273, 278–281, 282n2, 285n16, 294–301, 305, 317n8, 324, 326, 330, 333, 334, 336, 344, 362, 364, 367, 368, 373–376, 380–382, 384, 388n19, 393, 406, 408, 409, 425, 427, 430

449

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 140 Wong Kwok Kui, 102, 114, 141 Wu, 17, 94, 100, 103, 112–114, 119n2, 122n15, 128–131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 141, 144, 149, 151–154, 156, 158, 159, 163–166, 166n1, 168n4, 170n19, 176n57, 176n60, 209, 211, 289–315, 346, 357n23, 432, 433 Wuwei, 47n16, 111, 147, 156, 176n55, 185–214, 215n9, 216n10, 341, 342, 345, 349–353, 357n29, 381–385, 391, 400, 401, 404, 406, 413 Wuzhi, 185–214 Y

Yan Xingxun, 4, 95, 96, 113, 171n22

W

Wenning, Mario, 47n16, 103, 207, 208, 216n10, 378, 382, 398, 404

Z

Žizek, Slavoj, 5, 34, 44–45n6, 233, 234, 316n2, 323, 418n11