Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 23:30:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: National Socialism and Truth



Hey Ben, after spending the last few days opposing some neo-fascism in
Northern Virginia, I am back to your email . . . 

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Ben B. Day wrote:

> > What accounts for the primacy of economic relations, then?
> 
> Certainly not that they're more "matter" than "idea." I think Marx's
> position in this regard is flawed, so I'm probably not his best advocate,
> but you'd certainly be hard-pressed to find anything in his work
> suggesting that economic relations are more physicall real than those
> deemed superstructural.

I think the way I introduced the materialism/idealism opposition has
caused some confusion here.  I agree that economic relations as
"relations" are no more material than any other kind of relation.  All
"relations" are constituted in ideality.  If I add 2 + 2 real sheep
to get the number four, the mathematical relations thus involved are not
more real or "material" than they would be if I were adding imaginary
sheep. 

And yet--miscounting real sheep might have some consequences for me if I
make a living selling sheep. Miscounting imaginary sheep might also have
that consequence, given the right set of economic/social relations, but I
emphasize the material sheep for the moment because people can eat them
and make clothes out of their wool.

And people have to be able to eat, survive, and reproduce, if they are
going to form social relations which are not merely economic.  Somehow,
this seems to be true even if economic relations are not more material as 
"relations" than, say, social relations constituted when people teach and
write and read poetry.  

 There's certainly an ontological distinction made,
> as supserstructural social relations are treated as epiphenomenal, and
> economic relations "actual," but this is not the distinction between
> "idea" and "matter" 

I agree the base superstructure distinction is not one between matter and
ideas, but it is connected to the point made above about people needing to
eat in order to be able to do politics and law and superstructural stuff.

I don't agree that Marx treats the superstructure as epiphenomenal, though
the distinction raises difficulties.

(I hope we're using this term in the same way - as the
> object-range of the natural sciences).

I don't think we are using the terms in quite the same way, but we seem to
be employing overlapping usages.  
 
> Let me quote the following from Ricoeur's Lecturs on Ideology and Utopia.

> "... This still formal concept of ideology is completed by a specific
> description of some intellectual and spiritual activities which are
> described as inverted images of reality, as distortions through
> reversal... here Marx depends on a model put forth by Feuerbach, who had
> described and discussed religion precisely as an inverted reflection of
> reality. In Christianity, said Feuerbach, subject and predicate are
> reversed... Marx assumes that religion is the paradigm, the first example,
> the primitive example, of such an inverted reflection of reality which
> turns everything upside down. Feuerbach and Marx react in opposition to
> Hegel's model, which turns things upside down; their effort is to set them
> right side up, on their feet...

Their reactions to Hegel are not by any means identical though. Marx
recognizes how Feuerbach has oversimplified Hegel.  Otherwise, I think
this is not an inaccurate rendering of Feuerbach and Marx--except it
obscures the fact that in their reactions to Hegel they are also
preserving his dialectic, though in different ways.  Neither simply leaves
Hegel behind.

> "... When separated from the process of life, the process of common work,
> ideas tend to appear as an autonomous reality; this leads to IDEALism as
> IDEOLogy. A semantic continuity exists between the claim that ideas
> constitute a realm of their own autonomous reality and the claim that
> ideas provide guides or models or paradigms for construing experience.
> Therefore it is not only religion but philosophy as idealism that appears
> as the model of ideology.

Yes.

 (As a cautionary note, we should point out that
> the picture of German idealism presented here - that is, the claim that
> reality proceeds from thought - is mor eaccurate as a description of a
> popular understanding of idealism than of the supposed locus of this
> idealism, Hegelian philosophy itself. Hegelian philosophy emphasized that
> the rationality of the real is known through its appearance in history,
> and this is contrary to any Platonic construction of reality according to
> ideal models. Hegel's philosophy is much more neo-Aristotelian than
> neo-Platonic.) In any case, the popular interpretation prevailed in
> the culture of Marx's time, and as a result not only religion but idealism
> as a kind of religion for lay people, was elevated to the function of
> ideology." (pp. 4-5)

Here a point needs to be made. While Marx's work emerges from within the
left Hegelian debates of the '40s and takes as its earliest objects a form
of idealism specific to German philosophy during that period, that German
idealism is also seen to be the product of a Western
religious/philosophical tradition which has from its ineception tended to
explain material, social existence as a effect rather than a ground of
human thinking. The products of thinking whose form and content are
conditioned by the social/economic relations in which their producers find
themselves are taken to represent or express permanent ideals 
unconditioned by those social/economic relations.  This idealizing and
inverting gesture is  easily generalizable beyond philosophy and religion,
beyond Germany, and beyond the 19th century. 

Here is a more modern example of how this idealism emerges in
intellectual work, from someone who is not a German philosopher and, if
asked, would say he was a materialist.  I think he will stand by these
views despite my critique, and so won't feel picked on if I borrow them
for this demonstration and talk about him in the 3rd person (unavoidably). 

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000 zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:

      I could honestly care less about anything Faulkner may have done or
      written outside of his novels. They are much more complex than anything 
      else we coud talk about, and reflect much more interesting issues in
      much more interesting ways. As a novelist, Faulkner was certainly a
      far better person than he was in person. That is not
      uncommon. Instead of marches and what not, Fualkner was addressing
      these problems existentially, and thus, much more interestingly. People 
      will be talking about Fualkner for centuries after Martin Luther
      King's marches have become little more than footnotes to
      history - as important as they certainly were.

The "existential" address of problems is, of course,  more
interesting than "marches and what not" only after one has access to equal
education and economic opportunities and a full belly.  But
here the idealized fictional struggles of Faulkner's novels
are presented as in themselves interesting and destined to permanence, 
while  struggles for equality "outside" the novel, so to speak, are
destined to become "footnotes" of history.  This is the gesture which Marx
criticizes not only in the left Hegelians, but also in such contemporaries
as Guizot.

In Troy's forumlation, ideal literary production transcends 
material history in a manner quite consistent with the idealist aesthetics
which emerged with the secularization of literary study in the 18th-19th
centuries, but which remains nevertheless geneologically and structurally
connected to the religious/philosophical inversion Feuerbach and the early
Marx criticized.  

My point with respect to Ricouer, then, is that the idealism/inversion
which Marx discerns in the German Ideology is not a limited case. That
ideology-critique grows out of critique of religion is a clue to
understanding how ideology continues to operate today, now, in the U.S.
and other Western countries, in the construction of
"metanarratives" through which people make sense of the world and adapt to
it and are adapted to it.  This is as much the case in academia, and
certainly English depts, as anywhere else. 

>From a left-Hegelian perspective, one might insist that these
metanarratives continue to involve the projection, objectification and
misrecognition Hegel discerned in the progress of "Spirit," and so one is
doing critical work by recognizing the misrecognition.  Marx's
critique of commodity fetishism extends the critique of religion
to the critique of seemingly secular science of classical economics
precisely because the latter, like religion, still involve the projection
of idealized value on material things which, in an alienated and
objectified form, is then misrecognized as inhering within them.  Unlike
the left-Hegelians, however, Marx recognized that just pointing this out
would not change things, because the distribution of wealth and power also
depends on the continuance of the misrecognition.  In U.S. universities,
we may discern the exploitive operations of capitalism all we want in
novels destined to become permanent, so long as we do not start organzing
adjuncts and TAs  into strikes that may well be footnotes to some future
history but are darned irksome right now to those who benefit from the
present economic arrangements.
I may be getting off subject here so I will let that go for now.  

  Marx's materialism is
> not primarily a statement on the essence of what exists (whether all
> thoughts are actually material states, e.g. the firing of neurons), but
> rather a privileging of a certain type of social relationship.

I agree that his materialism is not some sort of primitive positvism
linking "thought" to firing neurons, but it does presume that there is
such a thing as matter, a material world in which people must have
material as well as ideal nourishment in order to live. The point of
recognizing this is not so that we can isolate a mass of matter in which
thoughts or ideas can be thought to inhere, but to understand how the
requirements of material existence condition the non-material requirements
of existence. 
 
>  My argument was simply that, when the term "historical materialist"
> is used to describe Marx (a term coming from Plekhanov), it indicates the
> latter definition you mention here, and not the former. Indeed, I don't
> think that Marx subscribes to the former (that physical forces drive the
> economy. Perhaps this wasn't what you were saying, but your original
> comment seemed to imply that Marx's materialism actually has something to
> do with "matter" (unless this term was also being used to describe
> something other than "physical stuff").

I am sorry if that definition was misleading.  It was meant to be a
general definition of materialism which only specified what various
materialisms tend to have in common, namely the tendency accord the
material world a priority over ideas and concepts in some way. I did not 
mean to suggest that a materialist who, say, studied literature, would set
about chemical analysis of a book or something.  I definitely agree with
the below statement.

My central point was that he wasn't
> pulling a Locke, who urged that we would use social analysis only until
> the natural sciences had progressed far enough to account for social
> phenomena physically (i.e. not a "materialist" in the strict sense).

hh
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