The Concept Of Nature In Marx

Human nature is dependent on physical objects external to it. Marx never tired of emphasizing that men must remain in a continuous process of exchange with nature in order to reproduce their life. Men change the ‘forms of the materials of nature’¹ in a manner which is the more appropriate to their needs, the better they know those forms. The process of knowledge is therefore not a purely theoretical, internal process. It stands in the service of life. Marx saw nothing but an expression of man’s self-alienation in the notion that knowledge has a self-sufficient existence, cut off from life, as presented by all contemplative philosophy. In Marx’s view, men must familiarize themselves, on pain of destruction, with the ‘forms’,² i.e. the laws, of the material on which they operate, and with the essential nature of the phenomena that surround them. All control over nature presupposes an understanding of natural connections and processes; this understanding grows out of the practical transformation of the world.³

The idea that men can only control nature by themselves submitting to nature’s laws is already characteristic of the scientific outlook of the early bourgeois epoch. As Francis Bacon wrote in his Novum Organon, ‘nature is only subdued by submission’,⁴ and theoretically recognized causes are converted into rules of practical behaviour.

At a more advanced stage of bourgeois society, Hegel⁵ identified homo sapiens with homo faber. Even in his pre-phenomenological phase he was concerned with the relation between the regularities inherent in material and human aims. Labour unites the two moments.

In his critique of Feuerbach, Marx described social production as ‘the basis of the whole sensuous world’.⁶ He insisted nevertheless that the social mediation of nature confirms its ‘priority’ rather than abolishes it.⁷ Matter exists independently of men. Men create the ‘productive capacity of matter only if matter is presupposed’.⁸ Lenin was therefore in line with Marx’s own thought when, in his pamphlet The Agrarian Question and the ‘Critics of Marx’, he attacked the notion held by the vulgar economists that human labour could replace the forces of nature:

Speaking generally, it is as impossible to replace the forces of nature by human labour as it is to substitute pounds for yards. Both in industry and in agriculture, man can only utilize the forces of nature, once he has understood their mode of operation, and he can facilitate their exploitation by means of machinery, tools, etc.⁹

The laws proper to the material of nature, laws which all human social endeavours must reckon with, are neither ignored nor fetishized by dialectical materialism.¹⁰

There is considerable confusion in existing interpretations of Marx on the question of the self-determination of nature within its mediation. Jean-Yves Calvez attached too much weight to certain statements made by Marx in the Paris Manuscripts, where he is concerned to emphasize the moment of social mediation, as against materialists who have ignored human practice.¹¹ Thus, like Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, he dissolves nature, both in form and in content, into the social forms of its appropriation. Without being completely aware of it, Calvez adopts a curious idealism of procreation cloaked in sociology, which appears particularly in this question of the laws of nature. He writes:

Nature without man has no sense, no movement. It is chaos, undifferentiated and indifferent matter, hence ultimately nothing.¹²

It is hard to reconcile such a formulation with Calvez’s statement, made in the same breath, and illustrated with certain passages from Capital, that human activity only takes place within the framework of laws inherent in the material of nature.¹³

The interpretation of the Marxist concept of nature given by Georges Cottier is similarly contradictory. On the one side, he correctly emphasizes the ‘internal autonomy’ of nature, the way in which it limits the possibilities for human action;¹⁴ on the other side, however, and without reconciling this with the first statement, he describes nature, in the language of Aristotle and the scholastics, as ‘materia prima’,¹⁵ i.e. as a shapeless substratum, lacking the ‘immanent form’¹⁶ ascribed to it by Marx. It is true that Marx also referred to nature’s ‘slumbering powers’.¹⁷ However, he did not have in mind an ontological substratum of mere possibilities, but rather the physical energies of man and the materials through which his purposes can be realized.

Let us return to the self-movement of matter, denied by Calvez, but unmistakably affirmed by Marx at many different points. The dialectical element of Marxist materialism does not consist in the denial that matter has its own laws and its own movement [or motion^17a], but in the understanding that matter’s laws of motion can only be recognized and appropriately applied by men through the agency of mediating practice. The dialectical movement between man and nature which takes place in production does not exclude the operation of the laws of nature (as it does in Hegel). In his sketch of Anglo-French materialism in the Holy Family, Marx characterized Bacon’s not altogether mechanical concept of matter in the following way, which is reminiscent of Schelling¹⁸ and on that account applicable to his own theory:

Motion is the first and most important inherent quality of matter, not only mechanical and mathematical motion, but still more, impulse, vital life-spirit, tension, or (to use Jakob Böhme’s expression) the throes (Qual) of matter. The primary forms of matter are the living, individualizing forces of being, inherent in it and producing the distinctions between the species.¹⁹

As far as the consequences of mechanical materialism in the broader sense are concerned, they were not simply rejected by Marx but reduced to a moment of a theory of nature, the theory we discussed in the context of his theory of society.²⁰ Marx’s thought is in fact as far away from bad idealism as from mechanical materialism. The recognition of the relative truth of the moment of naïve realism in nature does not therefore mean a regression to a purely mechanical materialism, as Calvez asserts.²¹

The fundamental materialist tenet could be summed up as follows: the laws of nature exist independently of and outside the consciousness and will of men. Dialectical materialism also holds to this tenet, but with the following supplement: men can only become certain of the operation of the laws of nature through the forms provided by their labour-processes. The connection between the independence and the social determination of the laws of nature, understood in the above sense, is what Marx had in mind when he wrote, in a letter to Kugelmann:

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws express themselves.²²

Society is always faced with the same laws of nature. Its existing historical structure determines the form in which men are subjected to these laws, their mode of operation, their field of application, and the degree to which they can be understood and made socially useful. The power of nature cannot be broken entirely. Nature can only be ruled in accordance with its own laws. ‘Far from assuming fatalism, determinism in fact provides a basis for rational action.’²³ As was pointed out in another connection, Marx considered that ‘man can only proceed in his production in the same way as nature itself, i.e. he can only change the forms of the material’.²⁴ Engels, too, agreed closely with Hegel on the question of the laws of nature. As he wrote in Anti-Dühring:

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.²⁵

Following the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, and indeed Hegel too, Marx opposed any kind of naïvely teleological interpretation²⁶ of extra-human nature. He praised Darwin’s Origin of Species in a letter to Lassalle, on the ground that it ‘not only dealt the death-blow for the first time to “teleology” in the natural sciences, but also empirically explained its rational meaning …’.²⁷ Marx understood the ‘rational meaning’ of teleology to be that there exists something like a ‘natural technology’²⁸ in the plant and animal kingdoms. According to Marx’s interpretation of Darwin the organs of plants and animals are developed in the process of adaptation to and exchange with external conditions, to become ‘instruments of production’.²⁹ Primitive man did not pass beyond the ‘first, instinctive, animal forms’³⁰ of purposive behaviour towards nature. The pre-human history of nature was in Marx’s view the precondition for the struggle with nature consciously waged by socially organized men.

Although Hegel ridiculed the opinion which sees the hand of a purposeful Creator in all possible natural phenomena as ‘childish’,³¹ his own idealist philosophy did nevertheless contain the idea of a ‘final universal goal’.³² We have already stressed in the first chapter that it is precisely the denial of such a final goal, and such a previously given meaning of the world, which unites Marxism with the tradition of philosophical materialism and scepticism since classical times, and with all anti-metaphysical, anti-rationalist philosophy in the wider sense. For Marx, the ‘world’ was not a metaphysically conceived universe, but the ‘world of man’.³³ Purpose in the strict sense is therefore always a category of human practice, and here Marx limited himself, as a materialist, to what Hegel called the ‘finite-teleological standpoint’. Hegel put it this way:

In practice man relates to nature as to something immediate and external. He himself is in this relation an immediately external and hence sensuous individual, who has however the right to conduct himself towards natural objects as their purpose.³⁴

We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. 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 the labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement, that was therefore already ideally present. He not only effects a change of the form of the natural basis; in it, he also realizes his purpose, which he knows, which determines the mode of his activity, and to which he must subordinate his will.³⁶

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he presented the dialectic of consumption and production, Marx dealt with the anticipatory character of human intentions in a similar manner:

Consumption furnishes the impulse for production, as well as its object, which plays in production the part of its guiding aim. It is clear that while production furnishes the material object of consumption, consumption posits the object of production ideally, as its image, its impulse, and its purpose.³⁷

Labour’s purposes are subject to limitations, according to both Hegel and Marx. In the view of both thinkers, those purposes are limited objectively by the material at men’s disposal and by its laws, subjectively by the structure of men’s drives and needs. In relation to the subjective aspect, Marx went beyond Hegel by working out the socio-historical roots of human purposes, thus giving a concrete shape to his conception of it.

Man mentally anticipates the results of his activity. As Hegel said, this does not mean that man ‘wanders around in empty thoughts and purposes’,³⁸ but implies rather that he possesses a general knowledge of the structure of natural objects.³⁹ Anticipatory knowledge presupposes practical action which has already been completed and from which this knowledge proceeds, just as, inversely, it forms the precondition of any such activity.

Man acts; he exercises his powers on a material foreign to him; he separates his operations from their material infrastructure, and he has a clearly defined awareness of this; hence he can think out his operations and coordinate them with each other before performing them; he can assign to himself the most multifarious tasks and adapt to many different materials, and it is precisely this capacity of ordering his intentions or dividing his proposals into separate operations which he calls intelligence. He does not merge into the material of his undertaking, but proceeds from this material to his mental picture, from his mind to his model, and at each moment exchanges what he wants against what he can do, and what he can do against what he achieves.⁴⁰

When man emerges from his mythical subjection to nature, his labour casts off its ‘first, instinctual form’.⁴¹ In place of a naïve utilization of nature, solely through the medium of the organs of the body, there emerges conscious production directed to a purpose. This higher unity of man and nature, mediated through the tool, was what Marx understood by the word ‘industry’. He agreed with Hegel and the Enlightenment in their estimation of the anthropological role of the tool:

The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making animal.⁴²

Man has endeavoured in the course of history to increase his physical powers, taking as his starting-point the hand, ‘the tool of tools’,⁴³ as Hegel put it. In the case of the tool, ‘nature itself becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible’.⁴⁴ With the development of artificial instruments of production, man’s control of nature increases both extensively and intensively. It is ‘the work of history’, said Marx, ‘to discover the various uses of things’.⁴⁵ Primitive tools and machines⁴⁶ are copies of human bodily organs. They show the strength of man’s original orientation towards the model of his bodily form. Later tools depart from this model, develop their own forms, ‘de-organize themselves’⁴⁷ (to use Bloch’s fine expression), but remain bodily organs of man, even if artificial, as necessary to civilized life as hand and arm are to primitive life:

But just as man requires lungs to breathe with, so he requires something that is the product of man’s hand in order to consume nature’s forces productively.⁴⁸

The tool is a portion of nature which has already been incorporated by man. With its help progressively more objects are transformed into ‘results and receptacles of subjective activity’,⁴⁹ more and more areas of nature are opened up. Consequently, the tool undergoes considerable changes in the course of the history of technology:

From being a dwarf implement of the human organism, it expands and multiplies into the implement of a mechanism created by man.⁵⁰

There can be hardly any doubt that the most basic and abstract concepts have arisen in the context of labour-processes, i.e. in the context of tool-making.⁵¹ Hegel, as well as Marx, was aware of the historical interpenetration of intelligence, language and the tool. The tool connects man’s purposes with the object of his labour. It brings the conceptual element, logical unity, into the human mode of life. Hegel wrote in the Jenenser Realphilosophie:

The tool is the existent rational mean, the existent universality of the practical process; it appears on the side of the active against the passive, is itself passive in relation to the labourer, and active in relation to the object of labour.⁵²

The labourer is not in an immediate connection with the object of his labour, unappropriated nature, but with the instrument of labour, which was for Marx identical with the tool, and which he defined in the following way:

The instrument of labour is a thing, or complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the object of his labour, and which serves to conduct his activity onto it. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some things in order to set them to work on other things in accordance with his purposes.⁵⁴

Here Marx directly adopted the theory of the ‘cunning of reason’ developed in Hegel’s Logic. The passage he cited from Hegel runs as follows:

Reason is as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which by causing objects to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s own intentions.⁵⁵

If we keep to the above-mentioned Marxist definition of the tool as the mediator between labour with a definite aim and its object, we can distinguish three forms of tool, according to the role played by each of them in the labour-process. The tool can maintain itself in its identical form, it can enter materially into the produce of labour and, finally, it can be completely consumed, without becoming part of the product of labour.

Unlike Marx, Hegel portrayed the labour-process exclusively in its abstract moments, although, as Marx said of Adam Smith, ‘wearing from the start the character-masks of the period of capitalist production’.⁵⁶ In the Science of Logic, he wrote of the tool as a thing remaining external to the object to be worked on and having nothing to do with the product of labour itself. The tool maintains itself in ‘external alteration, and precisely through this externality’ with the result that ‘as an instrument’ it is ‘something higher than the finite purposes’ which serve ‘external expediency’:

The plough is more honourable than the consumption it makes possible, and which is its purpose. The tool lasts while the immediate satisfactions pass away and are forgotten. In his tools, man possesses power over external nature, although in respect of his purposes he is, on the contrary, subject to it.⁵⁷

Despite his awareness of the historical role of the tool, Marx had a far lower estimation of it than Hegel. He had no intention of deriving any arguments against the satisfactions of the senses from their transitory nature. He was wary of fetishizing the tool in relation to the immediate use-values created with its help, as Hegel had done. The latter’s formulation presupposed a situation in which men were turned more and more into appendages of their own uncontrolled productive forces. Nevertheless, it had an element of truth in it, in that most tools remain the same in use, and are foreign to their product. Marx made the following implicit reply to Hegel in Capital:

The instruments of labour properly so-called, the material vehicles of the fixed capital, are consumed only productively and cannot enter into individual consumption, because they do not enter into the product, or the use-value, which they helped to create, but retain their independent form with reference to it until they are completely worn out.⁵⁸

Since the tool is itself already a product, already in itself the ‘unity of subjective and objective’⁵⁹ which was to have been established by the product, and to which nature as a whole has not yet attained, it can also be consumed in the course of labour in such a way that it enters into the material of the product. Marx was thinking here above all of chemical manufacture, in which accessories are added to the raw material, ‘in order to produce some modification thereof, as chlorine is added to unbleached linen, coal to iron, and dyestuff to wool’.⁶⁰ Like tools in general, such materials mediate between human purposes and the material of labour, without ‘the reappearance of any of the raw materials used in the substance of the final product’.⁶¹ Instrument of labour and object of labour here merge into each other. Accessory materials in the narrower sense are those not directly applied to the material, which without having anything to do with the product, ‘are consumed by the instruments of labour, as coal under a boiler, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horses …’.⁶²

Lenin⁶³ stated correctly that Hegel was a precursor of historical materialism because he emphasized the role played by the tool both in the labour-process and in the process of cognition. Just as Hegel overcame the meta physical rigidity which dominated all pre-dialectical conceptions of the problem of freedom and necessity, so also he dissolved the reified opposition between teleology and natural causality. Marx took the view that the cunning of man consisted in his ‘use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some things in order to set them to work on other things in accordance with his purposes’.⁶⁴ This idea is itself based on Hegel’s examination, in the Science of Logic, of the categories Mechanism, Chemism, and Teleology. These categories are of the greatest importance for the understanding of the materialist dialectic.

Mechanism and Chemism are categories of objectivity, which Hegel regarded as subject to natural necessity⁶⁵ because both signify the submergence of the Concept in externality, as opposed to the third category, that of Teleology, or Purpose, in which the Concept has a ‘being of its own’.⁶⁶

The thesis of Mechanism consists in this, that the natural bodies, with all their differences, have one thing in common, namely that they are indifferent to each other and confront each other in an abstract, external manner. In Chemism, extended to cover a somewhat wider field than that of chemistry by Hegel, natural objects are only indifferent in their pure, bare, mere relationship, in their metamorphoses, in which of course they retain their immediate independence. Hegel described the process of Chemism in the following way:

The process consists in passing to and fro from one form to another, which forms continue to be external as before. The specific properties, which marked off the extremes against each other, are superseded in the neutral product.⁶⁷

Nature can only combine with itself after the emergence of organic life,⁷⁰ and specifically of man as a self-conscious active Subject because, as Marx said, it is in labour that nature sheds a part of itself and confronts itself through the division into ‘material of nature’ and the purposeful ‘force of nature’.⁷¹ Man’s existence for himself consists in his ability to exploit nature’s Mechanism and Chemism in order to realize his purposes. Hegel saw in the teleology of labour the higher unity and ‘truth’ of Mechanism and Chemism.⁷² The moments of the process of Chemism return again in labour at a higher level. The labourer and the subject of his labour are external to each other and yet related through the tool:

The teleological relation is a syllogism, in which the subjective purpose coalesces with the objectivity external to it, through a middle term which is the unity of both. This unity is on one hand purposive activity, on the other the means, i.e. the objectivity made directly subservient to purpose.⁷³

Man’s finite-teleological activity does not break out of the natural context; it does not need a transcendental principle to explain it, however much, because it is historical activity, it negates nature. Purposes at first foreign to nature do not simply make use of nature, but have themselves natural causes. Natural objects mediated with society are certainly ‘transnatural’ but not ‘supra-natural’, to use Merleau-Ponty’s expressions.⁷⁴

Hegel, like Marx, was aware of the bad infinity constituted by the compulsion of nature towards the reproduction of life. Hence the following passage from the Logic on the result of human labour:

Only an externally impressed form has arisen on the basis of the existing material, and it is also a contingent characteristic by reason of the limited content of the purpose. The goal attained is therefore only an Object, which again becomes the means or the material for other purposes, and so on until infinity.⁷⁵

The product of labour, the realized purpose, remains ‘internally flawed’.⁷⁶ The reconciliation of man and nature posited by it is not final. Most natural objects undergo a whole series of manipulations. From the point of view of the next higher phase of a labour-process, the formed material appears again to be unformed. Marx repeatedly emphasized this point:

When products enter as means of production into new labour-processes they lose their character of products. They continue to function merely as objective factors of living labour.⁷⁷

This is valid both for the stages of transformation of a natural object, viewed in isolation, and for the relation of man and nature in the history of society in general.

In this structure of the work-situation, with its interlocking moments of mutual indifference and relatedness, with the dependence of man on the objective world and its laws, and the nullity of this world in relation to man’s transforming practice, is reflected the contradictory unity of the moments of knowledge in Marx discussed below, where we shall try to show how – mediated through historical practice – both epistemological realism and socially applied subjectivism make themselves felt in his thought.

B. MARX’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

In discussing the concept of nature of a modern thinker in the strict sense, it is impossible to avoid dealing with his epistemological position. With the economic transition from medieval to bourgeois society, nature began to appear, epistemologically speaking, as ‘made’, rather than simply ‘given’. As man’s organized intervention into natural processes becomes more comprehensive, that conception knowledge which consists exclusively of the passive imitation of objective structures becomes more inadequate.

The abstract moments of any labour-process (‘purposive activity or labour itself, its object and its means’)⁸⁰ compose a unity in diversity which is formed anew in each historical epoch. In the same way sensuousness and understanding, intuition and concept come together in changing constellations. The moments of knowledge change as men enter into new productive relationships with each other and with physical nature. The ‘division of labour from the objective factors of its existence – the instrument of labour and the material to be worked’ on is ‘superseded’⁸¹ in the process of production, and in the same way the theoretical method cannot be separated from its subject.

The knowing consciousness is a form of the social consciousness, and should not therefore be viewed in isolation from psychology and human history.⁸² Both the sensuous and rational theoretical functions are an aspect of the human essence which is unfolded in the course of history through labour. In the Paris Manuscripts, Marx remarked on this:

It can be seen that the history of industry, and the developed objective existence of industry, is the open book of the forces of the human essence, the human psychology which is present to our senses.… No psychology for which this book, i.e. the most tangible and accessible part of history, remains closed, can become a real science with a genuine content.⁸³

This corresponds exactly to what he said about sensuousness when distinguishing his views from those of Feuerbach:

The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history.⁸⁴

In our discussion of the role of the tool in the previous section, we have already emphasized that the capacity for rational knowledge, called by Marx ‘the transformation of perception and imagination into concepts’,⁸⁵ does not imply that consciousness is a fixed datum, but something springing from history subject to historical change. In the Dialectics of Nature Engels underlined the great significance of practical mastery over nature for the development of the capacity of thought:

Natural science and philosophy have up to now quite ignored the influence of man’s activity on his thought. They know only nature on the one side, ideas on the other. But it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not nature as such in isolation, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought. Man’s intelligence has increased proportionately as he has learned to transform nature.⁸⁶

In one of his last works, the Randglossen zu Adolph Wagners Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie (1879/80), Marx gave a kind of genealogy of conceptual thought. This has still not yet been properly appreciated despite its great relevance for the theory of knowledge. The whole remarkable passage deserves reproduction:

For the doctrinaire professor, man’s relation to nature is from the beginning not practical, i.e. based on action, but theoretical.… Man stands in a relation with the objects of the external world as the means to satisfy his needs. But men do not begin by standing ‘in this theoretical relation with the objects of the external world’. Like all animals they begin by eating, drinking, etc., i.e. they do not stand in any relation, but are engaged in activity, appropriate certain objects of the external world by means of their actions, and in this way satisfy their needs (i.e. they begin with production). As a result of the repetition of this process it is imprinted in their minds that objects are capable of ‘satisfying’ the ‘needs’ of men. Men and animals also learn to distinguish ‘theoretically’ the external objects which serve to satisfy their needs from all other objects. At a certain level of later development, with the growth and multiplication of men’s needs and the types of action required to satisfy these needs, they gave names to whole classes of these objects, already distinguished from other objects on the basis of experience. That was a necessary process, since in the process of production, i.e. the process of the appropriation of objects, men are in a continuous working relationship with each other and with individual objects, and also immediately become involved in conflict with other men over these objects. Yet this denomination is only the conceptual expression of something which repeated action has converted into experience, namely the fact that for men who already live in certain social bonds (this assumption follows necessarily from the existence of language), certain external objects serve to satisfy their needs.⁸⁷

Marx’s first point against Wagner here, in line with his philosophical development after the Theses on Feuerbach, was that man’s relation to nature cannot as such be fixed abstractly, that it is not initially theoretical and reflective but practical and transforming. Nowhere else in the whole of Marx’s work are the ideas which follow formulated so sharply. They also show that Marx was not, as is sometimes said, a wholly unpsychological thinker.

Production comes into existence as a result of sensuous needs. All those human functions which go beyond the immediacy of the given develop with production. Nature appears at first to be an undifferentiated, chaotic mass of external materials. From repeated intercourse with nature, which is common to men and animals alike, there emerges an initial crude classification of natural objects according to the yardstick of the pleasure or pain produced by them. The elementary theoretical achievement of this level of development is the establishing of distinctions, the isolation of the objects with pleasurable associations from the others. The nominalist classification⁸⁸ of natural objects, with the intention of exerting genuine control over them, corresponds to the economically more advanced and hence more organized human group and the contradictions emerging in it. The particular is subsumed under the abstract-general. In the view of Marx (as of Nietzsche) man’s ‘will to power’ over things and his fellows originally underlies his intellectual activity. The Spirit is originally empty. The concepts formed by it are the product of accumulated practical experience.⁸⁹ Its value is limited to the instrumental. Despite the materialism of this view, we must insist that Marx did not see in concepts naïvely realistic impressions of the objects themselves, but rather reflections of the historically mediated relations of men to those objects.

The epistemological side of Marx’s thought has formed the subject of much recent research in France. Pierre Naville for example, in his book Psychologie, marxisme, matérialisme, emphatically brings out the concrete historical position of the problem of knowledge in dialectical materialism:

The problem of knowledge – if this problem truly exists by itself – cannot be separated from a whole ensemble of more or less well-defined historical conditions. There is no ‘problem’ of knowledge until the concrete, practical functions of knowledge have been exercised; and this exercise does not occur by chance or ‘in itself’, but in the situations which give it its form.⁹¹

Lenin (who had already concerned himself with the problem of the philosophical content of Capital even before Lukács) similarly underlined what previous literature had insufficiently appreciated: the epistemological character of the dialectic in its Hegelian as in its Marxist version:

In Capital, Marx applied to a single science [political economy, A.S.] logic, dialectics, and the theory of knowledge of materialism (three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing). Materialism has appropriated everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further.

… Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism. This is the ‘aspect’ of the matter (it is not ‘an aspect’ but the essence of the matter) to which Plekhanov, not to speak of other Marxists, paid no attention.⁹²

In the next section, which deals with the content of the problem of knowledge in Marx, we shall show how the historical practice of man in its totality constitutes the logical unity, not only of the subjective human faculty of knowing, but also of the world of experience which corresponds to it.

C. HISTORICAL PRACTICE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE WORLD

Nothing distinguishes authentic from vulgar Marxism so much as its relation to the problems resulting from the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel. Marx was very deeply indebted to German Idealism for his whole approach, despite all his critical attacks on philosophy in general.

Thus, in the Theses on Feuerbach, he criticized all previous materialism for conceiving reality one-sidedly as an object given in intuition, ‘but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’.⁹³ Idealist philosophy, in its Kantian form, had shown that the intuitively given world of experience was not something ultimate, but rather the result of the shaping and unifying activities of the Subject. As a result, Marx was aware that a materialist critique must avoid falling back into a primitive objectivism. He therefore had to undertake a non-idealist reconstruction of the problem of the possible coexistence of an objective world of experience and a unified consciousness of it, instead of abstractly denying the idealist view as such.

For materialism, the ‘truth’ of the idealist concept of subjectivity is organized social labour, the ‘real Subject’,⁹⁴ the ‘general intellect’⁹⁵ taking shape in the life-process, the effect of ‘the labourer in general’⁹⁶ who is a composite of the action of individuals.

Idealism and materialism both lead to the disappearance of the real: the one because it suppresses the thing, the other because it suppresses subjectivity. In order to reveal reality, a man must fight against it; to put it succinctly, revolutionary realism equally requires the existence of the world and of subjectivity; better still, it requires a correlation between the one and the other such that one cannot conceive a subjectivity outside the world nor a world not illuminated by the effort of a subjectivity.⁹⁷

Even before his critical confrontation with Feuerbach, Marx objected to the rigid dualism of the epistemological positions which had dominated modern thought since Descartes, and which German philosophy had tried to overcome on a speculative basis. This is how he put it in the Paris Manuscripts:

It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man.⁹⁸

… We see … how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, and at the same time constitutes their unifying truth.⁹⁹

The basic positions of the modern theory of knowledge are reflected in this practical intertwining of objectivism and subjectivism, as it is seen in the dialectic of labour in Hegel and Marx. Inversely, it can be maintained that these basic positions reflect the practical stages of production and the historical transition from one to the other. This latter materialist conception is of course peculiar to Marx in this form.

The pre-Marxist materialists, according to whom nature as such, separated from its practical alteration by society, counted as the source of the various forms in which it was reflected in consciousness, failed to realize that even the most simple perceptions presuppose abstraction and contain conceptual elements.¹⁰⁵ All abstraction is based on perception, and perception itself, either of real things or of things subject to anticipatory modification in the mind, is based on conceptual operations. It is not possible to distinguish what originates from mere nature and what originates from human intervention in the content of our perceptions. Marx’s thesis is that psychology can only become a science with a real content if it is not separated from the history of industry. In connection with this, the psychologist S. L. Rubinstein has demonstrated the dependence of the world of perception and the modes of perception on the forms taken by man’s activities towards natural objects:

If we look especially at human perceptions and their historical development, we see … the dependence of the form of reception on the form of activity as a dependence of specifically human perception and its development upon the development of social practice: social practice transforms nature and creates the objective being of humanized nature. In this way practice partly calls forth new forms of specifically human perception and partly develops existing ones. The specifically human forms of perception are not only the precondition of specifically human activity but also its product.¹⁰⁶

The concrete is concrete, because it is the combination of many determinations, and therefore the unity of the manifold. It appears in thought therefore as a process of collection, as a result not a starting-point, although it is the real starting-point, and hence also the starting-point of perception and imagination.¹⁰⁹

The first immediacy, the ‘concrete’ in the positivist sense, the starting-point, is identical with the ‘concrete’ of a higher order in so far as it is proved to be concrete after undergoing theoretical analysis. It does not follow from this that ‘the comprehended world as such is the real’.¹¹⁰ The operation of the concrete concept does not create its object:

Hegel fell … into the illusion that the real was the result of thought, which combined itself with itself, immersed itself in itself, and moved itself outside itself, whereas the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete is only the manner in which thought appropriates the concrete for itself, and reproduces it in intellectual form. This process, however, does not lie at the origin of the concrete itself.¹¹¹

It was no accident that the beginnings of a genuine recognition of the laws of nature in the Renaissance coincided with the origins of the bourgeois world. The process of production became to an ever-increasing degree the planned application of the discoveries of natural science; finally it was itself transformed into ‘experimental science’,¹¹³ as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. Individual achievements have less and less significance with the development of this ‘experimental-scientific’ character of production:

The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism.¹¹⁴

History compels the reconciliation of ‘general social knowledge’¹¹⁵ with material production. It makes it more and more unavoidable that the human life-process should be brought under the effective ‘control of the general intellect’.¹¹⁶

Marx agreed with the bourgeois Enlightenment that thought which was not directed towards the accomplishment of practical tasks became merely whimsical. ‘Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.’¹¹⁷ Practice means not only the life-process of society as a whole and the revolutionary action which is to emerge out of its antagonisms, but also industry in the narrower sense and the experiments of natural science.

Industry and experiment together form an essential moment of the process of cognition, by providing the necessary checks. ‘Hypotheses are not related to facts in the head of the academic but in industry.’¹¹⁸ The truth or falsity of a particular theory is established, not within conceptual thought, but only through experiment. Hence Lenin, in accord with Marx, made the following demand:

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge.… Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion too is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ not to allow human knowledge to become ‘absolute’, but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight against all varieties of idealism and agnosticism.¹¹⁹

In his later study of Hegel, Lenin investigated the epistemological aspect of Marx’s concept of practice more closely, and found that the seeds of this concept were already present in Hegel’s thought:

Theoretical cognition ought to give the Object in its necessity, in its all-sided relations, in its contradictory movement, in- and for-itself. But the human Concept ‘definitively’ catches this objective truth of cognition, seizes and masters it, only when the Concept becomes ‘being-for-itself’ in the sense of practice.¹²⁰

The turn of phrase which has crept into all textbooks of dialectical materialism since Lenin, according to which historical practice is the basis of knowledge and the criterion of truth, only retains its genuine meaning under certain conditions. On the one hand, misunderstandings of the pragmatic type must be avoided,¹²¹ while on the other hand it must not be forgotten that the epistemological role of practice is not exhausted by its retroactive determination of the agreement or disagreement of thought with the Object. In other words, practice must not become a kind of external appendage to theory. In fact, practice in general can only be the criterion of truth because – as a historical whole – it constitutes the objects of normal human experience, i.e. plays an essential part in their internal composition.

Of course, the sensible world is also a product of industry. From the simplest object of everyday use to the most complicated machine, it is, in the words of the Grundrisse, ‘natural material, transformed into organs for imposing man’s will or activity on nature’.¹²² A fixed, objective world, which makes itself independent of individual men, emerges from the relation of Subject and Object in labour. ‘That which in the labourer appeared as motion, now appears in the product as a fixed quality, as being.’¹²³ The ‘sensuous objects, really distinct from thought objects’,¹²⁴ referred to by Feuerbach and other physical materialists, only take on their character as objects in the strict sense when men, in the course of consuming them productively, rob them of their ‘natural’ independence.

Man can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.¹²⁸

This idea links Marx directly with Hegel, who, also in relation to labour, expressed himself as follows in the Philosophy of Right:

Yet matter is never without an essential form of its own, and only because it has one is it anything. The more I appropriate this form, the more do I enter into actual possession of the thing.¹²⁹

One can say in general of the historico-economic process of the transformation of Object into Subject and of Subject into Object, that under pre-industrial conditions the objective, natural moment is dominant, whilst in industrial society the moment of subjective intervention asserts itself in increasing measure over the material provided by nature.

The transition to industrial production means however not only a new attitude of the Subject to its material, but also an alteration of the extent and type of the material entering into the field of economic interest:

The external physical conditions fall into two great economic classes, natural wealth in the means of subsistence, i.e. a fruitful soil, waters teeming with fish, etc., and natural wealth in the instruments of labour, such as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, etc. At the dawn of civilization, it is the first class that turns the scale; at a higher stage of development, it is the second.¹³¹

In an agrarian economy, men take up a passively receptive attitude to nature, which appears directly as wealth in the means of subsistence:

Land is still regarded here as something which exists naturally and independently of man, and not yet as capital, i.e. as a factor of labour. On the contrary, labour appears to be a factor of nature.¹³²

With the ever-increasing reduction of nature in modern times to the level of a moment in social action, the determinations of objectivity entered progressively and increasingly into the Subject. This displacement of emphasis within the labour relationship towards the subjective side was conceptually expressed by the principle that only what was ‘made’ by the Subjects was in a strict sense knowable. This principle was at first understood in an abstractly logical manner, from Descartes up to the German Idealists, but was given a radically historical application by Vico and by Marx.¹³⁵

Men use largely the same ideas to realize their own capabilities by the practical construction of an objective world and to comprehend that world theoretically. From this starting-point we can understand Lenin’s methodological remark that, in the dialectic, the ‘complete “definition” of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as the criterion of truth and as the practical indicator of its connection with human wants’.¹³⁶

The question of the possibility of knowing the world only had meaning for Marx on the assumption that the world was a human ‘creation’. We only really know what a natural thing is when we are familiar with all the industrial and experimental-scientific arrangements which permit its creation.

This idea played a considerable part in the critique of Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ repeatedly undertaken by Engels. He commented as follows in the Dialectics of Nature on the statement that the thing-in-itself is unknowable:

It does … not add a word to our scientific knowledge, for if we cannot occupy ourselves with things, they do not exist for us.¹³⁷

For the materialist theory, as for Hegel, the boundary between the in-itself and for-itself of things, and between the socially appropriated and the as-yet-unappropriated region of nature is relative and historical, rather than absolute. When men register the phenomena of nature, they always also register its essence. In his pamphlet on Feuerbach, Engels made this reply to the agnosticism of Hume and Kant:

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable ‘thing-in-itself’. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained such ‘things-in-themselves’ until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the ‘thing-in-itself’ became a thing for us, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.¹³⁸

D. THE CATEGORIES OF THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC

The question of the relation of the successive historical categories in which nature is represented to its objective structure is part also of the wider problem of the epistemological role of practice. First of all we must distinguish Marx’s economic categories in the narrower sense, such as ‘Capital’, ‘Commodity’, ‘Value’, from his logico-epistemological categories such as ‘quality-quantity-measure’, ‘essence-appearance-phenomenon’, which are utilized in the economic analysis and stem from Hegel’s Science of Logic. Marx wrote of the categories of bourgeois economics:

They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities.¹³⁹

Whereas the economic categories lose their validity with the decline of the historical relations they express,¹⁴⁰ the logical categories, despite their empirical, human presuppositions, have a more general and comprehensive validity. They are historical sediments – that ‘ideal’ described, rather unhappily, in the Afterword to the second edition of Capital, as ‘nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought’.¹⁴¹ The categories are mental stages and nodal points of the theoretical appropriation of nature which grow out of living practice.¹⁴² They are always simultaneously the expression both of the structures of material reality and the stages of its practical-intellectual appropriation.

Historical materialism differs from sociologism in its analysis of substantial attitudes of thought, artistic movements, moral conceptions, and so on, in that Marx insisted that the social genesis and the title to truth of an intellectual creation cannot be identified with each other. This point is of still greater significance in connection with the social understanding of the most abstract categorical conditions of thought.

Arnold Hauser is right in saying that the essence of the materialist philosophy of history consists in the thesis that spiritual attitudes are anchored in conditions of production, and move within the range of interests, aims, and prospects characteristic of these; not that they are subsequently, externally, and deliberately adjusted to economic and social conditions.¹⁴³ This certainly does not mean, however, that for example all statements about nature only succeed in revealing something about the particular social order in which the statement was made, rather than something about the objective natural context itself. This was how Ernst Bloch represented it in Erbschaft dieser Zeit:

The concept of nature certainly expresses in the first place the society in which it appears; its order or disorder, the changing forms of its dependence. These forms return superstructurally in the concept of nature too: thus the primitive, the magical, the qualitatively ranked, and finally the mechanical concepts of nature, are to be understood in large part as ideology. Mechanical natural science was indeed to an especially great degree the ideology of the bourgeois society of its time, ultimately the ideology of the circulation of commodities.¹⁴⁴

There are occasional remarks in Capital about the relation between the mechanistic mode of thought and the period of manufacture:

Descartes, in defining animals as mere machines, saw with eyes of the manufacturing period, while to eyes of the middle ages, animals were assistants to man, as they were later to Von Haller in his Restauration der Staatsmssenschaften.¹⁴⁶

It is true that in the same context Marx made the critical comment that ‘Descartes, like Bacon, anticipated an alteration in the form of production, and the practical subjugation of nature by man, as a result of the altered methods of thought’,¹⁴⁷ that in other words the philosophers remained unconscious of their own social basis. However this is not to say that the modern mode of thought was purely an ideology, without being simultaneously a reflection of real nature.¹⁴⁸

In the Dialectics of Nature, Engels dealt with the most important category for the explanation of nature, the category of causality. The conception that two events follow each other with necessity according to a rule is not a mere projection borrowed from the human sphere. Nor is it possible simply to extract the causal law from nature in a naïvely realistic way. The circumstance that men are in a position in their production to establish causal connections, including those that do not otherwise exist in nature, fully confirms the objectivity of causality, according to Engels, rather than makes the category a relative one:

But not only do we find that a particular motion is followed by another, we find also that we can evoke a particular motion by setting up the conditions in which it takes place in nature, indeed that we can produce motions which do not occur at all in nature (industry), at least not in this way, and that we can give these motions a predetermined direction and extent. In this way, by the activity of human beings, the idea of causality becomes established, the idea that one motion is the cause of another. True, the regular sequence of certain natural phenomena can by itself give rise to the idea of causality: the heat and light that come with the sun; but this affords no proof, and to that extent Hume’s scepticism was correct in saying that a regular post hoc can never establish a propter hoc.… If I am able to make the post hoc, it becomes identical with the propter hoc.¹⁴⁹

Men grasp the objectively existing laws of nature through, and by means of, the historical forms of their practice.

Chapter Three

Society and Nature, and the Process of Knowledge

A. THE LAWS OF NATURE AND TELEOLOGY

B. MARX’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

C. HISTORICAL PRACTICE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE WORLD

D. THE CATEGORIES OF THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC

Chapter ThreeSociety and Nature, and the Process of Knowledge

A. THE LAWS OF NATURE AND TELEOLOGY

B. MARX’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

C. HISTORICAL PRACTICE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE WORLD

D. THE CATEGORIES OF THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC

Chapter Three

Society and Nature, and the Process of Knowledge