Sei sulla pagina 1di 6
MARXISM—IS IT RELIGION?* ROBERT C. TUCKER T 1s the paradoxical fate of Mary's thought to have exerted an influence upon the modern scene comparable to that of @ new faith. Paradoxical, because Marx set out with a repudiation of the religious consciousness as “the sigh of the oppressed creature.” Unlike such socialist predeces- sors as Saint-Simon, who coupled his doc~ trine with the call for a new Christianity, Marx proclaimed the criticism of religion as the first great step in a “merciless criti- cism of everything existing” which was supposed to disclose, indirectly, the princi- ples of a new world. The task, as he came to see it, was to be the first to transform socialism “from utopia into science.” Nev- ertheless, history will remember him not as the author of a scientific theory but as the apostle of a secular creed. Partly in response to this paradox, West- ern philosophical scholarship has lately en- tered upon a new phase in the assessment of Marx. It is increasingly realized that the critique of Marxism does not end with the demonstration that its economic doctrines are riddled with fallacies, that its central predictions about the trend of development of modern industrial society have been in- validated by real events, and that histori- cal materialism in general is scientifically insolvent. The final question is not that which forms the title of Max Eastman’s book, Marsism—Is It Science? That ques- tion having long ago been decided in the negative, a further one arises: “Marxism— Is It Religion?” Here a new critical ap- proach is called for—a search for the moral and philosophical meaning of Marx. The purpose of this essay is to outline very *A slightly shorter version of this paper was read at the History of Philosophy session of the American Philosophical Association, at Philadel- phia, in December, 1956, briefly certain elements of such an ap- proach. In one of his early works, Marx wrote of the Hegelian philosophy as follows: Hegel's interpretation of history presupposes an abstract or absolute spirit which evolves in such a way that mankind is only @ mass, con- sciously or unconsciously the bearer of this spirit, Within empirical, exoteric history he therefore assumes that there is in progress a speculative, esoteric history. ‘This passage is quite significant, and not only as an expression of Marx’s under- standing of Hegel. It also tells us some- thing very important about the system which was then taking shape in the mind of Marx. For his system too was to be con- structed arcund the idea that an “esoteric history” is in progress within “empirical, exoteric history.” This, along with the dia- lectical idea, belongs to the core of He- gelianism which lives on in Marx. Despite the fundamental elements of continuity, Marx’s system is his own and differs in more than one important respect from Hegel’s. The differences initially grew out of the fact that Marx exchanged He- gel’s concept of the absolute spirit for Feuerbach’s concept of man, Feuerbach had argued that not only the theological god but also its various philosophical sur- rogates, including the Hegelian absolute, were self-projections of man. This was Marx’s point of departure, but his direc- tion was back to Hegel. For Marx went on to reinstate a Hegelian interpretation of history within the framework of this reduc- tion of the absolute spirit to man. Only now it is man and not the absolute spirit which is conceived to have an “esoteric history” in and through the “empirical, exoteric history” of flesh and blood men, 125 126 the proletarians. “Philosophy,” as he puts it, “finds in the proletariat its material weapon.” For Marx, then, as for Hegel, the overt historical process has a philosophical sym- bolism, an inner scenario of which the mass of men are oblivious even though they play their various parts in it and contribute in this way to its enactment. Finally, the sys- tems of Hegel and Marx have a further vital clement in common. This is the idea that the esoteric history is a process of self-realization. Our central problem, therefore, is to analyze the idea of seli- realization in its Hegelian and Marxian forms. In Hegel’s interpretation, the scenario of history is the seli-realization of spirit— the Welfgeist. Spirit, he says, is activity or energy endowed with a drive toward seli- realization, which may be defined in the most general terms as “the development of itself explicitly to what it is inherently and implicitly.” Its characteristic mode of self- realizing activity is cognition, which is con- ceived by Hegel as an appropriation or active conquest of whatever appears exter- nal via the conscious recognition of it as belonging to the self, as subjective. Thus, Anowing is a peculiar subject-object rela- tionship in which the object is destrayed as, object by being recognized as pertaining to the subject, so that the progress of knowl- edge is at the same time the growth of the spirit’s self-consciousness: All knowledge, in other words, is ultimately self-knowl- edge. It is an “internalization” or “de- alienation” of what at first had seemed ex- ternal and alien (objective) to the know- ing subject. In the historical process of humanity, the spirit seeks and gains knowledge of it- self by becoming incarnate, “alienating” itself, in a succession of dominant national cultures, each of which is founded by a great man of action (e.g. a Caesar) and ultimately comprehended by a great philo- sophic mind (eg., a Hegel). In each such cycle of the growth of self-knowledge, the spirit first “relinquishes,” “alienates,” or ETHICS “externalizes” itself in the form of a par- ticular national culture, and then reappro- priates its alienated being by the act of bringing it to full and clear consciousness in a philosophical system. In short, the spitit’s self-realization is a cyclical two- phase process of disintegration and reinte- gration on a new and higher plane. This, according to Hegel, is the manner in which the spirit develops itself explicitly to what it is inherently and implicitly, namely, “self-contained existence” ot unity with self, which, is, he says, the essence of spirit and the meaning of freedom. ‘The classical Aristotelian conception views self-realization as a natural unfold- ing, an inwardly unimpeded process of ac- tualizing of the individual’s generic poten- tialities, the basic principle of the process being the same at all organic levels from plant life to man. It is crucial for the un- derstanding of Hegel to see that he has abandoned the classical ground. He is hi self quite explicit on this point. “The spir- itual,” writes Hegel in his Logic, is distinguished from the natural, and more es- pecially from the animal, life, in the circum- stance that it does not continue a mere stream. of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realiza- tion, But this position of severed life has in its turn to be suppressed, and the Spirit has by its ‘own act to win its way to concord again. This might be described as the Romantic view of self-realization. A postulated “division of the spirit against itself” creates a subjective impedi- ment to the spontaneous unfolding of its potentialities, to its actualization as spirit. ‘The toad of self-realization becomes, in Hegel’s expressive phrase, “a highway of despair,” strewn with boulders which the self places, so to speak, in its own way. As a consequence, “the spirit is at war with itself.” That is, the spirit’s drive toward self-realization works itself out in a succes- sion of inner conflicts expressing the stru gle of the divided self to overcome the di- vision and achieve a “second harmony.” Hegel here has given us, in cosmic projec- tion as it were, a profound picture of the DISCUSSION painful quest of an unhappy consciousness for peace within itself, for unity as a self. Briefly, the Weltgeist is a neurotic person- ality. Expositions of Hegel’s dialectic often proceed from his somewhat misleading at- tempts in various places to give it a purely logical formulation (‘‘the dialectical move- ment of the proposition,” etc.). But to dis- pel the aura of mystification surrounding this notion, it seems necessary to view it from the psychological standpoint. Accord- ing to Hegel, the message of dialectic is that “Contradiction is the very moving principle of the world.” The interpretation of this depends upon the meaning of ‘“con- tradiction.” ‘The foregoing analysis sug- gests that this term should not be con- strued here in the logical sense but, rather, as “inner conflict” of the peculiar neurotic kind in which Hegel has discerned the im- mediate motive force of the spirit’s self- development. ‘This emerges especially from his often repeated point that a dialectical contradic- tion is one which involves the “seli-sup- pression” of the subject in which it is pres- ent. Only in terms of the inner dynamic of Romantic self-realization as described above does this position become truly in- telligible. Thus, each resting place of the spirit along the road of self-realization rep- resents a new but still incomplete solution of the conflict between its “essence” and its “existence,” between the postulated tendency toward an all-embracing unity with itself and its factual present condition of disunity or self-alienation; that is, some- thing still appears obdurately external or “alien” to it, and must be internalized or brought within a new wider integration of self. Hence the given solution is inherently unstable: The spirit is impelled to suppress or “negate” itself as presently constituted. In this sense, “its own nature is the cause of its abrogation.” But inasmuch as the given solution came about as the negation of a previous solution, the fresh act of self- suppression (qua self-alienated) illustrates the fundamental dialectical idea of “nega- 127 tion of the negation.” On this view, we may say that dialectic is the formal pat- tern implicit in the process of self-realiza- tion as Hegel conceives it. It is a repre- sentation of neurotic inner conflict, trans- formed by the metaphysics of spirit into a universal regulative principle of change in nature and history. Hegel suggests that the pilgrimage of the spirit through history has a final destina- tion where it attains “the victory and rest of unity.” This vision of a terminal state of peace in the spirit’s hostilities with it- self discloses an important aspect of the relation of Hegel's thought to the religious experience. In his view, philosophy and re- ligion share an identical goal, the goal of salvation, although they approach it by different avenues. Of the two, philosophy is ranked the higher by virtue of the as- sumed superiority of speculative concep- tual knowledge over the “pictorial” expres- sions of the purely religious consciousness. Spirit, in the person of man, reaches full knowledge of itself, and therefore full har- mony with itself, in the form of an ulti- mate philosophical system which Hegel, it would appear, equated with his own, Thus, the esoteric history of the world, a history of the spirit’s self-realization, is conceived as culminating in a final form of philosoph- ical experience wherein all the internal an- tagonisms of the spirit are completely transcended and resolved. This is the stage of “absolute knowledge,” and Hegel de- scribes it as man’s redemption. Under the powerful influence of Feuer- bach, Marx experienced the break with Hegelianism as a kind of “break-through to real existence” or changing of worlds, as a transition from the spirit world of ideal- istic philosophy to the “real world” of practical human affairs, from the library to the market place. But he then proceeded to reconstruct the philosophy of spirit on a new “worldly” foundation; he created a Hegelianism of the market place. And the vital nucleus of this reconstructed Hegeli- anism was precisely the Romantic idea of self-tealization through the struggle of a 128 divided self to resolve its inner conflict and recover its lost unity. However, Marx’s shift to a worldly orientation brought about three important differences in the way in which this idea is worked out in his mind as compared with Hegel’s. First, the creature conceived to be divided and alien- ated from itself is man; the neurotic per- sonality, that is, migrates from the Welt- geist to the generalized human psyche. Marx consigns the absolute to the realm of the departed, but reincarnates its di- vided self in his conception of earthly man. Second, Marx recasts the notion of self- alienation in terms of what he calls its “economic expression.” Like Hegel, he starts by equating the self’s essence with its activity. The “species-essence” of man is equivalent for Marx to man’s “self-ac- tivity” or “life-activity” as a species. But if Hegel’s spirit is an activity of knowing, Marx’s man is an activity of making, a “material activity.” Man is komo faber. ‘The object which he makes, the product of his labor, is, then, “his objectified being.” Phrasing the distinction somewhat differ- ently, we may say that whereas the He- gelian spirit “produces” itself as a mental object, an object of cognition, Marxian man “produces” himself as a material ob- ject, an object of use (what Marx was later to call a “use value”). This is the essence of Marx’s “materialism.” In both instances, the producing process is an externalization of the producer's be- ing. However, in Marx’s case the external- ization of man’s being in the form of the product of his labor is not, per se, an alien- ation of self—and this is where the struc- tural analogy between the Hegelian and Marsian schemes breaks down. For Marx, the externalized being of man becomes an alienated being only under a certain postu- lated set of life circumstances, which he calls “the political-economic condition.” This is the system of private property re- lations, which results, he maintains, in the expropriation of the object from the pro- ducer. In this condition, the worker experi- ences his “objectified being” as something ETHICS which “exists outside him, independent, alien. to him, and . . . opposed to him as an alien power.” As Marx elsewhere expresses it, in this condition “the activity of the worker is not his self-activity. It belongs to another, it is the loss of himself.” In his concept of the proletariat, Marx represented this economic self-alienation of man as a real fact, indeed as ¢he real fact, of the contemporary world. The prole- tariat, as he conceives of it, is not simply a vast mass of utterly destitute people who toil for a bare subsistence and have noth- ing to lose but their chains; that is only the “exoteric” aspect. In Marx’s philosoph- ical concept, the proletariat is “the com- plete loss of Man” or “a dehumanization that is conscious of being dehumanized and therefore strives to overcome it.” The proletariat, in other words, is for Marx the supreme manijestation of seli-alienated man. And this suggests the meaning of the phrase quoted earlier, that “Philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weap- on.” For Marx attributes to this proletariat a dynamic tendency toward the recovery of its lost humanity, the reappropriation of its alienated being, the transcending of its divided state. He represents this tendency in terms of the Hegelian dialectical princi- ple of self-suppression. Just as the Hegeli- an spirit is impelled to “abrogate” itself qua self-alienated, so the Marxian prole- tariat endeavors to abolish itself qua pro- letariat. Since it is, by definition, the nega- tion of man, its act of self-abolition qua proletariat will be, then, the “negation of the negation.” But here the final act of ne- gation appears as the universal revolution. The third important difference is con- nected with this Marxian thesis that man’s self-alienation is caused and enforced by existing “circumstances.” The logic of the revolutionary idea is implicit in this prop- osition. For if man is divided against him- self solely because society as now consti- tuted compels him to be, then the quest for unity decrees the overthrow of “all exist- ing conditions,” making way for what Marx calls “conditions of unity.” In other DISCUSSION words, the reunification of self is visualized as a by-product of the revolutionary trans- formation of society. The upshot of this reasoning is that the basic conflict, which always remains an inner conflict in the con- text of Hegel's absolute spirit, in Marx takes on the aspect of a conflict between the inner and the outer, between the hu- man self and its social conditions of exist- ence. Thus does the quietistic Hegelian philosophy issue in the Marxian gospel of salvation by revolution. Exoterically, the anticipated universal revolution is an “ex- propriation of the expropriators.” But eso- terically, it is the doorway to the tran- scendence of human self-alienation and hence to what Hegel had called “the vie~ tory and rest of unity.” Therefore, Marx’s esoteric message to his devotees is this: “Tf you want to become one and whole, to be born again in harmony, you must first destroy the environment which makes you a divided being, alienated from yourself.” But Marx was too authoritarian in his fiber to let matters rest with a mere hypo- thetical imperative. He was not content to preach the gospel of salvation by revolu- tion in the hope that sufficient numbers of individual men might take heed and act ac- cordingly. He felt the need for a proof, for an irrefutable “scientific” demonstration that the cataclysmic event was bound to happen. This meant to him that he had to work out a scheme of history which would show the universal historical process to be driving relentlessly toward the revolution- ary denouement beyond which lay man’s unity. But how could he do this? Marx thought he had found the answer in the movement of “circumstances” themselves. In this present world of his self-alienation, the division of man was the consequence of a specific set of “circumstances,” the system of exploitation as embodied in pri- vate property relations. The secret of his- tory, then, would lie in its tendency to in- crease the degree of exploitation, so that ultimately the very set of circumstances which alienated man from himself would push him to the breaking point of physical 129 toleration and compel him to rebel against it. The outcome of' Marx’s decades of Her- culean mental effort to demonstrate the a priori historical inevitability of such a tendency was Copital, This discloses the nexus between the eatly philosophical Marx and the Marx who set out to trans- form socialism “from utopia into science.” Capital was nothing other than an en- deavor at all costs to compress the future into a preconceived mold, to project exo- teric history as a process which would nec- essarily realize Marx’s esoteric idea. It was written in a spirit quite alien to that of sci- ence as a free activity of cognitive discov- ery. Its fundamentally unscientific nature is ultimately an outgrowth of that fact. In The Varieties of the Religious Expe- rience, William James devotes a memora- ble chapter to “The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification.” He describes here the “twice-born” soul to whom the re- ligious experience comes as a “unifying of the inner self,” a deliverance from dis- cord. “But to find religion,” he adds, “is only one out of many ways of reaching unity.” On the basis of the foregoing in- terpretation, we may class esoteric Marx- ism as one of the secular approaches to unity which the modern age has brought forth in profusion. Tts predecessor, Hegeli- anism, is another. The Marxian teaching, irreligious and in fact anti-religious in its official character and attitude, is neverthe- less relevant to religion, to religions thought, in the nature of its underlying concem—a concern not for the condition of the economy but for the condition of the soul. Were this not so, incidentally, Marx- ism would have heen a dead issue and half forgotten long ago, an object of merely an- tiquarian interest on the part of historians of European economic thought. ‘The impulse that lurks at its core is the impulse to self-transformation, to be “born again” in harmony. Its explosive peculiarity is the message that the way for the self to be born again, to change, to achieve its sal- vation, is to revolutionize the existing struc- ture of society. It is, therefore, a kind of 130 religion of revolution, As Marx himself ex- pressed the crucial point, “in revolutionary activity, change of seif coincides with change of circumstances” (my italics). His argument, in other words, is that man can change himself from a divided and self- alienated being into an integrated person- ality by a political act, the act of revolu- tion, of destruction of the prevailing social order. Here is at once the appeal and the radical illusion of this doctrine. The appeal lies in the vision of a spiritual regeneration which will result automatically from a revo- lution of social circumstances. The illusion, of course, is that the regeneration, the “change of self,” is possible on those terms. Marxism was invalid as religion. Hegel set up philosophical activity, ETHICS meaning particularly his own philosophical activity, as the supreme avenue of salva- tion, relegating conventional religion, with its “pictorial” symbols as he called them, to a subordinate, sub-philosophical cate- gory. His disciple Marx, moving farther in this direction, found the avenue of sal- vation not in philosophical activity but rather in political activity of a revolution- aty kind—‘tevolutionary fraxis,” to use his formula, ‘The fulcrum of this movement from Hegel to Marx was, as mentioned earlier, Feuerbach, who wrote in 18 “We must become religious again. Politics must become our religion.” In our final critical reckoning, original Marxism will have to be seen in relation to this idea. Soctar Scrence Division, Rano Corrorarion

Potrebbero piacerti anche