Reason and Natural Science: Making Philosophy Real
If reason is to prevail in the world, it must make philosophy real by transcending philosophy's own inclination to abstraction. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx began the transition from economic philosophy to economic science when he reappraised the significance of what Hegel had called the Understanding.
This involved moving beyond Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology - with its focus on the nature of man - to emphasise the historical-material achievements of natural science and their effect upon the practical activity of human labour.175In his Logic, Hegel had spoken of reason in terms of three dimensions: ‘(a) the Abstract side, or that of understanding; (b) the Dialectical, or that of negative reason; (c) the Speculative, or that of positive reason'.™ ‘Thought, as Understanding, sticks to the fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own'.i77 ‘In the Dialectical stage these finite characterizations or formulae supersede themselves, and pass into their opposites'.™ ‘The Speculative stage, or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms (propositions) in their opposition...W9 In other words, understanding sees the ‘parts'; dialectic sees the parts in relation one to the other; and positive reason comprehends the parts in the totality of the ‘whole’. ‘The truth is the whole... reaching its completeness through the process of its own development’.[265] [266] [267] [268] [269] In Hegel’s view, positive reason clearly ranked far higher than mere understanding, which is pre-dialectical. Philosophy is the highest of human activities, for it deals with universal truth. Empirical science, in contrast, moves within the limitations of experience; its facts ‘have the aspect of a vast conglomerate, one thing coming side by side with another... can never do more than separate the given concrete objects into their abstract elements, and then consider these elements in their isolation... Thus the chemist, e.g. places a piece of flesh in his retort, tortures it in many ways, and then informs us that it consists of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, etc. True, but these abstract matters have ceased to be flesh... The object which is subjected to analysis is treated as a sort of onion from which one coat is peeled off after another.^2 In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx had a far higher regard for natural science. If, as anthropology emphasised, man is inescapably a part of nature, and if he survives by working upon nature, then natural sciences are not simply ‘intellectual means’ but also, in practical terms, ‘a part of human life and activity’. Nature, from this perspective, is much more than ‘property’, or an embodiment of consciousness, as Hegel thought; it is the inorganic body of man ‘(1) as a direct means of life; and equally (2) as the material object and instrument of his life activity’.^3 To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die. The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.184 The anthropological point of view imparted an altogether new significance to tools and industry, for it is through them that man not only appropriates but also transforms the natural world to make it serve human ends. This meant that the natural sciences are not mere ‘theory’, as distinct from human practice; they are in fact a joining of theory and practice, or truly practical and transformative knowledge.[270] [271] [272] Whereas Hegel interpreted history as the emergence of Spirit in the world, already in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx saw that the real history of the human species is the history of industry. ‘Everyday material industry... shows us, in the form of sensuous useful objects, in an alienated form, the essential human faculties transformed into objects’.^6 The history of industry is therefore the history of man’s own self-creation, the creation of his own second nature, whereas Hegel’s philosophy relegated the whole of economic activity to civil society, in which ‘this great wealth of human activity’ is dismissively reduced to the satisfaction of ‘“need”, “common need”’.i87 The decisive turning point in Marx’s movement from philosophical critique towards a dialectical science of historical materialism came in the 1844 Manuscripts when he attributed the fundamental flaw of philosophy to its ignorance of, and indifference to, the natural sciences and their contribution to human industry. The natural sciences have developed a tremendous activity and have assembled an ever-growing mass of data. But philosophy has remained alien to these sciences just as they have remained alien to philosophy. Historiography itself only takes natural science into account incidentally, regarding it as a factor making for enlightenment, for practical utility and for particular great discoveries. But natural science has penetrated all the more practically into human life through industry. It has transformed human life and prepared the emancipation of humanity even though its immediate effect was to accentuate the dehumanization of man. Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural science, to man. If industry is conceived as the exoteric manifestation of the essential human faculties, the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man can also be understood. Natural science will then abandon its abstract materialist, or rather idealist, orientation, and will become the basis of a human science, just as it has already become - though in an alienated form - the basis of actual human life. One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood. If the highest expression of human activity is the practical-theoretical activity of labour, informed by the growth of science, then Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - the logic of the appearance of Spirit in the phenomenal world - must be reinterpreted as a logic (or, as Marx would say, as the real historical laws) of the appearance and development of human labour. The problem with Hegel's Phenomenology was that Hegel regarded the question of human freedom as ‘merely a theoretical one': he found only ‘an abstract, logical and speculative expression of the historical process, which is not yet the real history of man'. He treated wealth, state power, etc. as ‘phases of mind, entities of thought', and thus produced what Marx called the ‘the dialectic of pure thought'.^9 The philosophical dialectic of thought reflecting upon thought was a ‘pure, unceasing revolving within itself',i9° whose only possible outcome was that the ‘whole of nature. reiterates. the logical abstractions'.^ Despite all of Hegel's philosophical ‘abstractions', however, Marx never doubted that his dialectical method was essentially correct. The hidden subtext of Hegel's theory of the movement of history was actually the movement of man himself in making both nature and his own history. The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phenomenology - the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle - is, first, that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation, and that he therefore grasps the nature of labor, and conceives objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labor.w2 Since Hegel's method was essentially correct, and since ‘industry as it objectively exists is an open book of the human faculties’,[278] [279] [280] or the ‘comprehended and conscious process of [man's] becoming'^94 Marx's road ahead now became clear: the way beyond philosophy was to re-read the ‘open book' in order to determine the economic laws of history, which in turn would lead to a critical reassessment of the laws of political economy. The 1844 Manuscripts constituted Marx's philosophical critique of economic life, which in turn issued in the scientific critique of political economy in the Grundrisse and Capital.