A relatively brief biblical story, yet one which inspired philosophical examination, or better, elaboration, or even abstraction (what is philosophy but an elaborate abstraction from concrete phenomena?) for many thousands of years. Even in the 1800s, one of the foremost continental philosophers explored a number of theoretical categories using this ancient tale as a starting point - Soren Kierkegaard describes the paradoxical nature of Abraham's predicament in Fear and Trembling (2006: Cambridge University Press).
He starts from the common opposition between the particular (the needs of the individual) and the universal (the needs of society), and notes that taking a "moral" path usually involves supressing the particular in favour of the universal; for instance, I sacrifice my wish to gain a new car easily through theft and thereby help to uphold the (ethical rules of the) society in which I live. But Abraham's commitment presents a fundamental challenge to this dialectical opposition - he breaches the universal moral code through his willingness to kill his own son, but does not thereby assert the particular; he is prepared to lose his own heir, he does not fulfil his individual needs/wishes.
And so we have the paradox of faith - Abraham appeals beyond the universal for ethical approval, to the absolute, to God. "That is the paradox by which he remains at the apex and which he cannot make clear to anyone else [because to make it clear to anyone else he would have to re-enter the universal (i.e. a shared system of meaning)], for the paradox is that he as the single individual places himself in an absolute relation to the absolute (ibid, p. 54)".
Marx: humanist or not? Most people, especially his followers, would answer with the former - this great philosopher, especially towards the end of his life, fought for the reclaiming of man by man, of humanity by humanity, through socialism.
Yes indeed, the evidence is in his more political works, such as The Communist Manifesto, and his practical interventions, including his involvement with the First International.
But what about on a theoretical level? After all, Marx was primarily a philosopher - so was he theoretically humanist or anti-humanist? Did he, in the words of Althusser, (Philosophy and the Spontaneous philosophy of the Scientists, 1990: Verso) adopt "a concept of man as an originating subject, one in whom originate his needs...his thoughts...and his acts and struggles (p. 239)"? Or did he radically negate this concept?
In Capital (1976: Penguin), the most detailed, practical, applied, manifestation of Marx's philosophy, there is a sort of struggle between these opposing tendencies - surely appropriate for this dialectician, who believed that antagonism was at the heart of everything. Here, he presents a "science of society", the premise of which must be a negation of the idea of "(wo)man" in favour of a series of abstract categories. Althusser (ibid) puts it better: "Marx therefore starts out from the structural cause producing the bourgeois ideology which maintains the illusion that you should start with man: Marx starts from the given economic formation...and the relations which it determines in the last instance in the superstructure. And each time he shows that these relations determine and brand men... (p. 239)".
Let's jump to Marx's chapter on The Working Day to illustrate the Frenchman's point:
"What is a working day?... We have seen that capital's reply to these questions is this: the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing its services. Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital (p. 375)."He paints a bleak picture: "the worker is nothing other than labour-power" - that is, the human being is simply treated as an abstract category, a force which is ripe for exploitation, by capital. But is this the way it should be, according to Marx?
I give you an anecdote:
"In London three railwaymen - a guard, and engine-driver, and a signalman - are up before a coroner's jury. A tremendous railway accident has dispatched hundreds of passengers into the next world. The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune [note the sarcasm]. They declare with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before their labour lasted only 8 hours a day. During the last five or six years, they say, it has been screwed up to 14, 18 and 20 hours, and when the pressure of holiday travellers is especially severe, when excursion trains are put on, their labour often lasts for 40 or 50 hours without a break. They are ordinary men, not Cyclops (p. 363)."The last sentence of the passage reveals Marx's acute sympathy for the workers, for the individuals exploited by capital. This makes sense - the sympathy, the humanism, which drove him to political action could not help but seep through his theoretical writings.
But this is not one of many unsystematic "slips of the tongue", in which the stoic, scientific character of his work is revealed as a mere façade for the idealistic humanism within. He uses this particular case, and many others, as examples of the voracity of capital for labour-power, as examples of the tendency of capital towards an unlimited working day - that is, we must understand this anecdote within the context of the first passage quoted. So once Marx has established his (anti-humanist) theoretical principles, he allows himself to riff a little, to relax into sympathetic sentences about the exploitation of "ordinary men".
So then, do have an answer to our question: Marx, humanist or not?
At this point, we return to Kierkegaard - the work of Marx confronts us with a certain paradox of theory, which cannot be subsumed under the binary opposition of humanism/anti-humanism. Marx's fundamental theoretical practice, his theory itself, negates humanism on a higher plane than simple anti-humanism - it "places [itself] in an absolute relation to the absolute".
"But if the ethical is indeed teleologically suspended in this manner, how then does the single individual in whom it is suspended exist? He exists as the particular in contrast to the universal. Does he then sin? For this is the form of sin, viewed ideally...If one denies that this form can be repeated in such a way that it is not sin, then judgment has fallen upon Abraham. How then did Abraham exist? He believed."I hope I'm not completely dropping my materialist rigour when I employ the idea of "belief" - because it appears that Marx's theory exists in so far as it believes in the possibility of a truly humanist, post-capitalist, socialist society. This is the "absolute" which it appeals to, the absolute which allows it to avoid the sin of bourgeois humanism. It looks to a reality beyond the dehumanising reality of capitalism.
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