Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:27:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: HEGEL, ALTHUSSER, PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE


I bought two more books yesterday:

Althusser, Louis.  PHILOSOPHY AND THE SPONTANEOUS PHILOSOPHY OF
THE SCIENTISTS AND OTHER ESSAYS.  London: Verso, 1990  $5.98

Verene, Donald Phillip, ed.  HEGEL'S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT:
THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVE SPIRIT [Papers delivered at the 4th
biennial conference of the Hegel Society of America, Villanova
University, Nov. 11-13, 1976].  NJ: Humanities Press, 1980.  $12

There are many interesting papers in the Hegel volume.  The ones
that interest me the most are on the problem of the unity of
theory and practice in Hegel, and on the St. Louis Hegelians.  But
you will undoubtedly find other papers of interest on topics such
as economic and social integration, relation between politics and
economics, international relations, property and civil society,
marriage and family, Habermas and Hegel.

If one must suffer one book by Althusser in one's collection, this
is the one.  Remember the Australian Althusserian on the original
marxism list?  It was this book he used to back himself up with.
It's not hard to summarize all of Althusser while standing on one
foot, since he never productively developed his ideas beyond an
embryonic stage.  This is the place where he ties it all together,
and explains and justifies his various theoretical provocations.
Here both his cleverness and his weaknesses will be seen.

The essay in which he explains his philosophical career and ties
together his diverse concepts and theoretical shifts is "Is It
Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?"  Althusser is a very clever
man.  The hypocrisy of his claim to combat Stalinism from the left
should be transparent.  His war against theoretical humanism is
pretty lame.  His study of Feuerbach comes to the forefront.  His
explanation of how Marx transcended Feuerbach is not too
convincing  (p. 234-5).  He doesn't say it, but I would suppose
his study of Feuerbach must have inspired his notion of a new
practice of philosophy.  His use of Spinoza is very interesting
(p. 224).  His criticism of Hegel's expressive totality, to which
Althusser opposes structure-in-dominance (p. 219), is pretty
shrewd.  Reading this essay is quite stimulating as a springboard
for developing ones own thoughts, which necessitates spotting the
holes in his logic and going beyond him.

Perhaps the slipperiest of his ideas pertain to the practice of
philosophy and the relation of philosophy to science.  Here he is
at his cleverest, but he still is not entirely convincing.  The
notion of Marxist philosophy as class struggle in theory is a bit
too instrumentalist in its formulation.  Undoubtedly, the routing
out of ideology and idealism is part of or at least correlates
with class struggle, but I don't believe class struggle can
legitimately serve as a constitutive definition.  What is so
paradoxical is that Althusser simultaneously sought to defend the
autonomy of theoretical practice from empirical political
dictates.

Althusser is cleverest when relating philosophical practice to
science.  There is a grain of truth in many of his formulations:
that Marx left philosophy to do science, that the role of Marxist
philosophy is to draw the line between materialism and idealism,
that its role is not to construct a new "philosophy" (ontology) to
superimpose upon reality but to defend materialism and promote
scientific development.  Engels made statements of this sort, even
though others blame him for what the Russians did.  I would sum up
Althusser's strategy as making philosophy into a verb rather than
a noun.  Ingenious as this is, I don't think it can hold up.  In
this regard, one could compare Marxist philosophy to philosophy of
science as a discipline.  Even if philosophy is a handmaiden of
the sciences and cannot produce positive knowledge of the world in
itself, can one really say that philosophy abdicates its role of
producing, however provisionally, ontologies?  I don't believe a
realist philosophy can forswear ontology altogether, though it
might be limited to a metascientific enterprise.  Marxism in its
philosophical generality may be much more than "philosophy of
science", but inasmuch as it is committed to realism, how can it
abdicate ontology?  I am aware of course that Althusser was
combatting the old doctrinaire formulation of diamat, which in
Stalinist practice was stuck to empirical reality like superglue,
and which many others have complained about, including our beloved
Lisa.  However Marxism may be dedicated to science, or to the
conceptual reproduction of the concrete, it cannot dispense with
"philosophy" -- whatever you choose to call it! -- because the
evaluative, critical, metascientific functioning of theoretical
thought that we call philosophy necessitates freeing oneself from
immersion in particulars to extract the categories of thought and
self-consciously evaluate both them and the results of
thought-activity.  There is no way we can even have a discussion
about philosophy and science, the abstract and the concrete,
without discoursing in an abstract, general fashion.  Without
separating the tool from that which it is applied to, there can be
no self-conscious foundational understanding.  So why must
philosophizing be a noun and not just a verb?   Because I don't
think a realist can evade the task of forming general ontological
pictures of reality, not to arbitrarily superimpose upon empirical
reality, but to generalize from what we have learned about reality
and to develop a general, working picture of how the entities in
reality relate to one another.  In any case, since our knowledge
is finite, and science has not come to an end, the concrete cannot
be fully attained, and hence abstraction cannot be fully
overcome.

The new practice of philosophy has to be different than both
Feuerbach and Althusser envisioned it.  In Feuerbachian terms, if
we want to look at philosophy as alienated consciousness, we would
have to pinpoint what constitutes alienated consciousness in every
department of intellectual endeavor as a prerequisite to
overcoming it.  Pace Althusser, the new universal is not "class
struggle", but creative universality, as C.L.R. James insisted.


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