Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 22:08:24 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: MT: PATRICK MURRAY'S MARX [PART 2]


Murray goes on to show why Marx views Hegel as a crude empiricist as well as
a metaphysician.  Hegel takes certain atomistic facts as givens, without
subjecting them to proper scrutiny before putting them into the employ of
system-building.  

"Marx sees Hegel's science of society as dangerously misleading precisely
because Hegel had not worked through the relationship of his logic to the
empirical 'facts.'  Hegel's empiricist seizure of the given led him to a
headlong collecting of 'facts' under his own logical structure.  Marx
believes Hegel did not sufficiently examine the data in order to rethink the
nexus of logic and 'facts'; consequently, his logical reconstruction of the
'facts' of modern European societies remains arbitrary."  (p. 40)

Murray elaborates Marx's view of how science ought to work, in
contradistinction to the errors Hegel makes in THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT.  Not
much is said about the latter, except for the general relation of civil
society to the state, which Marx believes to have been undertheorized.
Hegel's "accommodation" to existing society is seen to be a question of
method, not of personal compromise.

In chapter 3 Murray goes on to discuss Marx's critique of the Hegelian
dialectic in the PARIS MANUSCRIPTS, and Murray reads backwards from Marx's
CAPITAL into these manuscripts as well.  Marx makes a link between
alienated, abstract labor, abstract thinking, and Hegel's logic, which
contradict humanity's sensuous relationships with its world.  "Logic is the
money of spirit" aptly sums up this argument.

Chapter 4 concerns the critique of the Young Hegelians in THE HOLY FAMILY
and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, particularly the speculative method which proceeds
by inversions.  

Again, Murray makes some noteworthy remarks about theory and practice:

"The criticisms of Stirner should have a sobering effect on talk about 'the
unity of theory and practice' in Marx.  Marx explicitly disavows, as a
'religious' illusion of absolute idealism, the human possibility of an
_immediate_ connection between theory and practice.  Such an immediate
linking would be possibly only for an immediate intuition, in which concept
and object directly coincide.  Marx thus confirms the Kantian split between
concept and object or theory and practice that he had suggested in his
dissertation work."  (p. 62)

Murray also places Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in the context of
what Marx's complaint about "interpretation" of the world, citing a passage
in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY against the propensity of the Young Hegelians to
demand a change in consciousness as a result of interpreting the world
differently. (p. 63)  Murray drives home his point thus:

"If this is the context in which we must understand Marx's use of
'interpret' in the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach, Marx does not intend a
simpleminded juxtaposition of action vs. thought.  The full significance of
this cryptic thesis emerges when we comprehend the scope of Marx's critique
of the Young Hegelians as we have discussed it: it encompasses a critique of
the _scientific_ inadequacy which complements their _practical_ barrenness."
(p. 64)

Chapter 5 carries on into the development of historical materialism as the
alternative to speculative historiography.  Although Marx sometimes seems to
make consciousness an epiphenomenon of social being in his zeal to refute
the idealist inversion of consciousness as determining being, Murray
believes that his aim is not to replicate the abstract materialism and
dualism of the Enlightenment by a simple reversal, but to transcend this
dualism (p. 69).  Consciousness is conscious being; consciousness is the
consciousness of real active beings.

Murray sees historical materialism as a materialist version of Phenomenology
(p. 72).  The various stages in the development of philosophy and political
economy represent stages not just in consciousness but in social
development.  Utility theory especially fits the logic of the Enlightenment
and is related to commerce (p. 73).  (Marx's criticism here of the principle
of "utility" is directly relevant to my remarks elsewhere on the character
of utilitarianism.)  Murray also suggests that Marx has a qualified sympathy
for utility theory (p. 74), at least as pertains to the rising period of the
bourgeoisie.

The most unusual section of this chapter will interest those of us on this
and related lists who have been involved in debates on Marx's relationship
to the natural sciences (p. 75-77).  Here is a summary of what Murray has to
say: Marx eschews a categorical distinction between nature and culture,
hence between natural and social sciences.  This dualism, reflected in the
extremes of materialism and idealism, lacks a concept of mediation.  Natural
science is not intuitively obvious either; it is a product of historical,
actual activity, especially of trade and industry.  Marx's comments on Bacon
and Hobbes are adduced.  As the scientific concept of matter evolves, its
sensuous characteristics are supplanted by abstract, mathematical forms.
The sensuous world is now the product of an abstract, mathematical world of
essences, at least according to French and British philosophers.  

Finally, Murray compares this views of science to the philosophy of
pragmatism (p. 78), finding similarities in Marx and Pierce.  Murray does
emphasize that for Marx the practical does not merely mean the instrumental.  

Presumably Murray will amplify these ideas in the next chapter, for the way
Murray expresses them certainly makes me uneasy.  Murray also leaves
incomplete his account of Marx's view not only of the materialist
philosophers of science, but of the nature of natural science itself.
Without the supplanting of sensuousness as direct experience, modern science
as we know it would be impossible.  Does Marx regard this as a desirable,
undesirable, or dual development?  In what other way could science possibly
develop, and if this represents a form of alienated consciousness, what on
earth could possibly be the cure for it?  Can one square this
characterization of science with Marx's later introduction to the
Grundrisse, in which the process of scientific idealization, whose ultimate
goal is the conceptual reconstruction of the concrete world, departs from
sensuous immediacy for the decisive abstract general relations governing
empirical phenomena?  Is it possible that the much-maligned Engels provides
the answer to this problem?  For Engels on the one hand shows the
ever-progressing unification in physical theory of what were previously
thought to be disparate forms of energy, but at the same time emphasizes the
qualitative distinctions which pertain in the material world as an antidote
to a mechanical materialism that obliterates them.