/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17954350]

Can anyone explain to me in moderate detail what relation Kant and Hegel’s works had on Marxism and laterNeo-Marxist scribblers like Marcuse and Gramsci?
They make is sound like Kant and Hegel’s writings are basically the origin of the Postmodern Neo-Marxist mind virus.
And before any of you say “hur dur you can’t be a postmodern Neo-Marxist”: yes, yes you can. It is a very real thing.

[Anonymous No.17954408]

>>17954350
>Marxism
Marx sometimes speaks as if we can't know anything about the material world that constitutes the base which in turn determines the superstructure which in turn includes our theories about said material world. If the idea is that our concepts are so contingent on base/superstructure that they can't be objectively right, then it becomes impossible to say anything about that Marxist underlying matter. This starts looking increasingly comparable to Kantian things in themselves. That comparison is not lost on people like Nick Land. Someone else who explicitly thinks along similar lines is Louis Althusser. Bear in mind he was not just a Marxist, but a structuralist: structuralism says we can't know the real world and our concepts are determined historically, culturally, whatever. So I'm sure he saw kinship there with Marx. But that view should be contrasted with the view of dialectical materialists such as Lenin and Engels himself. Lenin for example, insists that we CAN know the nature of that material world. This is scientific knowledge. And Engels says the same things. Lenin also wanted to say that Marx endorsed Engels' view because he read Engels' manuscript for Anti-Duhring and approved of it. Obviously the Land/Althusser "Kantian" Marx is inconsistent with this Engels/Lenin version of Marxism. But what they do is then positively characterize this matter as dialectical in the same sense that Hegel characterizes the Absolute and its moments as dialectical. Matter, rather than the Hegelian Absolute, is now this real thing where dialectic rules, literally not just figuratively, i.e. negation of the negation, etc. So that's a more Hegelian notion of Marx than Marx himself allowed. Marx did allow for such dialectical rules but he limited himself to historical progress following that dialectic. Engels extended that to the underlying nature of reality itself (physical matter, of the natural sciences). That was to over-Hegelify Marx. So there you have a Kantified Marx and a (more)Hegelified Marx.

[Anonymous No.17955145]

Kant's writings made a radical division between the subject and external objects. Because the subject constitutes its experience of reality, what we really know when we study our experiences are the subjective conditions of those experiences, not their objective character in the external world. "Objectivity" is a function of the subject imposing uniformity on its experiences and universality on its judgments. This saves the uniformity and universality of science, at the cost of saying that science is not a science "of" true reality but of our experience of it. All we know of the external world is that it's "out there." Nothing else about it, not even technically the fact that it causes effects (like sensations) in us, because cause and effect are themselves categories of our understanding.

Most people viewed this as a pyrrhic victory and as slightly bizarre. Nobody really wants the real world shrouded in permanent scepticism, with a permanent dualism between knowable "inside" and unknowable "outside."

Fichte controversially interpreted Kant to be trying to say that the external world, the noumenal outside of our phenomenal experience, is not an independent domain at all but is a logical function of our subjective need to posit objects for our subjectivity to react against. This is very complicated and weird, and basically wrong (Kant's transcendental object, or "X," was not a mere logical function -- sensations really do come from an external world for Kant), but the basic gist is that Fichte was a metaphysical and epistemological pragmatist who thought that what we normally think of as objective, external reality is actually the construction of subjectivity. Therefore subjectivity can unmake it and creatively remake it, with sufficient will understanding.

Whether this means of individual human subjects, or the collective of human subjects via culture, or a metaphysical quasi-Hegelian Absolute, is left kind of vague. But either way, Fichte was enormously influential on the romantics in Jena in the 1790s because he was arguing that the free, creative, self-expressive human spirit is capable of recognising its former creations as its own and re-absorbing them, reforming them, improving and re-making them, etc. The French Revolution was unfolding at this time and all the romantics were excited by it, by the prospect of human freedom and creativity re-making the world according to reason. For the romantics this meant something like that genius poet-superheroes were going to understand reality as a mirror of their own poetic souls and lead humanity into a golden age. Fichte got fired on suspicions of "spinozism" (atheistic pantheism) in 1799 and later wrote famous speeches that were precursors of organic nationalism.

[Anonymous No.17955149]

>>17955145
Hegel was influenced by Fichte and by his friend Schelling (5 years younger than Hegel, a boy genius and close disciple of Fichte). Fichte was famously indifferent about nature, science, and history. He didn't care about the arbitrary external world since it could all be re-made by spirit (whatever that meant). Schelling was a lover of science and nature, and tried to take Fichte's subjective idealism (the world as the dream or dialectical unfolding of a super-subject) and explain how objective nature was the mirror of subjectivity. Nature's laws develop and unfold in parallel with the laws of subjectivity (mind or spirit, "Geist"). They are both modes (a la Spinoza) of the same ultimate being (pantheism).

Hegel took Fichte's vague subjective idealism, and Schelling's expansion of the narrative of the emanation of reality from an initial Absolute/Spirit, and built a very complex system. Depending on your perspective, either an ingenious logical system and philosophy of nature and history, or a bricolage of influences uneasily cemented together by Hegel's brilliant (and obscure) conceptual motifs (like the notorious "dialectics"). What exactly Hegel meant or thought about anything he said is controversial. It's often easier to describe "ways of thinking" associated with Hegel, like dialectical method, than it is to explain Hegel's "system."

In the so-called dialectical method, generally considered to be on display in the Phenomenology of Spirit (the one everyone pretends to read although it's also very difficult to pin down), when subjective (i.e. mental) consciousness tries to understand some objective (i.e. worldly, external) state of affairs, it will necessarily project its knowledge of the state of affairs as objective, as truly and finally adequate to its object. In doing so it will inevitably have remainders, aspects of the object and its functioning which are in fact not understood. Attempts to understand the object and conceptualise it thus reveal deficiencies in the present forms of conceptualisation, by raising the present concepts to their clearest expression, from unconscious or partly conscious assumptions and hunches to attempts at scientific cognition. By doing this, paradoxes inherent not in the object but in the initial way of conceiving the object will be revealed, leading to revolutions and resolutions of the existing paradoxes and a new, higher level of understanding. The new level of understanding will necessarily posit itself as finally complete, truly adequate understanding of its object, but it will fail again, and the process will continue.

[Anonymous No.17955154]

>>17955149
Eventually however Spirit will truly unite with its externalised object (recall the Fichtean externalised subjectivity-as-objectivity), and it will achieve Hegel's notorious "identity of identity and nonidentity," overcoming all interiority/exteriority, subject/object distictions, as Spirit is finally identical with itself in its conceptualisation of objects (since Concept and Object reveal themselves in the final dialectical moment as unity). At least, this is the case for speculative consciousness, supposedly the highest and final phase of human consciousness.

What the hell any of this means is anyone's guess. No one reads Hegel's nature philosophy for example even though he wrote plenty. Nobody knows whether he thought speculative consciousness had been reached or not, or whether history was at an end or had more steps to make.

Two things are really distinct about Hegel's supposed dialectical method, in terms of its influence on subsequent philosophy. The first is that (as Adorno says) Hegel deifies logic and places it at the core of Spirit's development. Spirit's development is orthogonal, it is in some sense inevitable, it is the fulfillment of its own initial, internal conditions through a process of self-externalisation (or self-alienation), then self-knowledge culminating in reunion with itself. The next phase at any given moment in the dialectical progression is a determinate product of the current phase, all the way back to the initial phase. And there is, by most accounts, an end to the process.

The second distinct aspect of Hegel's legacy is that the connection between the method, as vaguely and confusingly presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and nature/history/individual human psychology is extremely vague. Most people are familiar with a hodgepodge of Hegelian ideas about how each stage of history is part of a necessary moment in the dialectical development of Spirit, but again, whether these were inevitable or whether they follow in a tidy sequence is much more controversial (Hegel seems to say there can be backslide, but that's it).

Regardless, Hegel eclipsed Schelling (who went into relative obscurity) and dominated the fledgling German university system (the foundation of all modern universities) at Berlin. By the 1830s, most philosophical and cultural studies were overwhelmed by Hegelianism, to the extent that by mid century there was a strong reaction against Hegel, as a kind of failed overambitious and even harebrained project. (This partly sparked the "back to Kant!" movement popular with natural scientists like Helmholtz, Mach, etc.)

[Anonymous No.17955155]

>>17955145
>>17955149
Good effort post

[Anonymous No.17955158]

>>17955154
Hegelianism wasn't monolithic though. By the 1830s when Marx began writing and getting involved in politics, it had noticeably split into so-called Right Hegelianism and Left Hegelianism. Right Hegelianism is more similar to the actual philosophy of Hegel just described. It is more of a metaphysical doctrine of absolute idealism, supposedly reconciling human history and the progress of science and philosophy. It was often adapted (rarely well) to theological purposes. The British Idealists are examples of Right Hegelianism. It tends to be conservative.

Left Hegelianism emphasised the dialectical method, the emphasis on the subject's freedom, and the emphasis on the subject's necessary engagement with externalised objectivity, without necessarily giving a shit about Hegel's grand narrative, logic, or metaphysics. They were often iconoclastic, often free-thinking and atheistic, almost always liberal or socialist. (Pre-Marxist, "utopian socialist" ideas were in vogue.) You could call many left Hegelians "social" Hegelians, more concerned with what they could do with Hegel's historicised subject, always in dialectical interaction with externalised subjectivity-as-objectivity, than with ultimate metaphysical questions. Kolakowski describes this as a sort of "re-Fichteanised Hegel," which is a fair assessment. A famous example of a left Hegelian is Feuerbach. Feuerbach was hardly a great philosopher, but he had a vaguely Hegelian philosophy of mankind's development as the misguided externalisation and deification of human morality. Feuerbach's solution was to re-absorb these externalised, illusory objects and realise that they originally came from within us. Again, the "we needed to separate from and objectify our morality in order to re-unite with it at a higher level and eliminate the apparent subject/object split" thing is a Hegelian trope.

Marx wrote many things as a member of a movement called the Young Hegelians. Then he wrote Capital. Marx's basic argument was Hegelian: like the dialectical moments of Hegel's philosophy of history, the bourgeoisie was a "transitional class." In the very conditions of its transcendence of prior feudal social relations, it bore in itself the conditions of its own transcendence by the proletariat. (There is debate over a "break" with Hegelianism in Capital, but there wasn't one.) A major criticism Marx made of Hegel and of other Left Hegelians was that this transcendence could not be effected through understanding, through "speculative" knowledge. A famous idea of Marx's is that thought and action had to be united, that bourgeois consciousness and all its pathologies would be overcome, and thus capitalism too, when the labouring (acting=praxis) proletariat was united with self-consciousness (thought) of its own role and nature in the overcoming of capital. This unity of thought and being, consciousness and praxis, is again very Hegelian. What exactly it meant gets fuzzy and is a matter of dispute.

[Anonymous No.17955161]

>>17955158
Most Marxists in Marx's lifetime and immediately after he died however did not read the more Hegelian writings of his youth (most of which were not published until the 1920s-1930s), they read Capital, and assumed that Capital was a fairly straightforward "scientific" account of capitalism. No need for fancy Hegelian machinery, it's just a true account of capitalism. This form of Marxism didn't do too well, lapsing into the infamous "revisionism," trying to jettison Marx's highfalutin dialectical stuff and focus on the "a world revolution against the bourgeoisie is inevitable!" parts.

Worse, the socialist movement, which was really almost a breakaway society within the countries where it was active before WW1, largely decided to back its respective countries of origin in the war, which many saw as a betrayal of the workers' revolution. Even worse, after WW1 the socialist movement was increasingly integrated into institutional structures and no longer felt like a breakaway society. Radicals were becoming reformers, revolutionaries were becoming social democrats, and when the minority of radicals split to maintain their integrity, their party was usually politically insignificant. Socialism was no longer revolutionary, bourgeois society had absorbed it without being overcome dialectically as predicted. Thinkers like Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer began to consider why the revolution had failed if it was supposed to be a dialectical heightening of contradictions inherent in bourgeois consciousness.

You can imagine the weirdness of trying to take a dialectical method predicated on an internally necessary dynamic of "heightening until a break into a new level" and relativise it. What does this mean for the inevitability of the proletariat's struggle with the bourgeoisie? At this time all those earlier, more Hegelian writings of the "young Marx" became available and many people began studying, for example, Marx's concept of alienation: that Fichtean-Hegelian notion of apparent objectivities being the externalised products of subjectivity, whose roots in subjectivity have been forgotten so that they begin to rule over subjects who take them for granted. This allows for a greater articulation of Marx's notion of the forms of bourgeois society (for example the reduction of all human labour to quantifiable wages interchangeable with quantifiable abstract capital) being just the externalised and hardened-up notions of the bourgeois epoch, including all its internal contradictions.

[Anonymous No.17955171]

>>17955161
Around this time of course the Russian Revolution happened, and although often baffled by it taking place in backward Russia, many socialists were obviously enthusiastic, and thought the real deal worldwide workers' revolution was back on. Lenin was an extremely deep reader of Marx in a Hegelian light, and other important figures like Lukacs put the Hegel back in Marx by insisting on the distinct and necessary destiny of the proletariat in (essentially) completing the system of German idealism. These thinkers, possibly like Marx himself (it's hard to say honestly), saw the labouring worker as the practically eschatological completer of world history.

But after Lenin's death the revolution lapsed into Stalinism. Some intellectuals like Lukacs and initially Sartre and Merleau-Ponty continued to defend what was essentially a bourgeois totalitarian empire painted red, carrying all the contradictions of bourgeois consciousness (the administrative tyranny of apparatchiks or "managers" but on overdrive). As the USSR kept doing truly atrocious evil shit, more and more intellectuals begrudgingly abandoned it with broken hearts. Particularly after the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian revolution, but really it was an ongoing thing, since ugly shit like the Slansky trial had become commonplace and nobody really thought the USSR was a communist utopia anymore unless they were a real dunderhead.

Those other thinkers I mentioned, the ones who tried to figure out how to save dialectics and save the tradition of critique of contradictions in bourgeois consciousness despite the fact that the dialectic never really occurred, either acknowledged that the revolution was not inevitable and thus committed to a "war of position" against capitalism (Gramsci); or they tried to save the critical tradition as a kind of "neverending critique," a "negative" dialectic, i.e. continuously generating negations of contradictions in the present totality of culture/society/consciousness, but without the Hegelian prejudice that a positive "higher stage" is lying dormant in the negation, the so-called negation of the negation (Adorno); or they adopted other methods like psychoanalysis to explain why the alienated proletariat acted against its own interests, embraced its alienation rather than chafing against it and ultimately overthrowing it (Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man), and to explain why the bourgeois "superstructure" was so efficient at absorbing and redirecting critiques of itself while closing off all possibilities of overthrowing it (Adorno's culture industry).

[Anonymous No.17955181]

>>17955171
These thinkers, primarily in the German intellectual tradition, are postmodern in a general sense, but they are not quite the same as French postmodernism. French postmodernism also interacted with psychoanalysis and also considered itself a tradition of "critique," but it was not really focused on the workers as the true historical subject to be liberated, nor did it even have a Marxian concept like alienation. Although it carried out the same sorts of deconstructive critiques, negations of objectified forms of thought and such (through structuralist "archaeology" and later Nietzschean "genealogy" in Foucault's case), its praxis was much more general. A common criticism of this praxis was that it was essentially bohemian, it was "post-Marxian" in that it abandoned Marx but really pre-Marxian in that its ethos was fundamentally bourgeois (the vague "liberation" of subjects from "oppressive" institutions, which Marx would consider a dialectically superseded bourgeois convention that has long since become an ideological catchphrase for promoting gradualist reform WITHIN bourgeois-capitalist society rather than true revolutionary transformation of social structures).

Marcuse falls more into this latter camp, and there is even occasional talk that he was a subverter. (Actually there is a lot of talk about intelligence agencies promoting non-Marxist forms of critique in trendy Paris because they knew it was all bark and no bite, unlike renewed labour activism. They also liked that it had no connections with the USSR of course.) He and Adorno strongly disagreed on whether the bourgeois "New Left" of the 1960s, particularly the events of 1968, of the hippies and beats and New Agers and French poststructuralists, had any revolutionary potential. Adorno thought Marcuse was naturalising the Marxist critical tradition to a bourgeois worldview, which would just absorb it.

Which is exactly what happened. The modern status quo of wealthy elite university students pretending to be into "theory" is a legacy of the (probably deliberate) dilution of the critical tradition by the New Left. Socialism gets discredited by being associated with prissy dipshit rich kids who are so deeply embedded in their parents' bourgeois mentality and lifestyle that they could write fifty books on Marx and still never do a single thing for the working class. Which is exactly what elites want them to keep doing. Just like the Frankfurt School said, bourgeois society absorbs and even commodifies its own critiques, turning them into luxury items for wealthy reactionary elites as a final insult.

>>17955155
Thanks, sorry I have autism.

[Anonymous No.17955193]

>>17955145
>>17955149
>>17955154
>>17955158
>>17955161
>>17955171
>>17955181
Some of the best shit I've seen on this site. Have you been to grad school?

[Anonymous No.17955196]

>>17955158
>>17955161
>>17955171
>>17955181
The thing about high effort, good quality posts like this is that if they make a good point I can't cite them in a paper/blog post.

[Anonymous No.17955208]

>>17955145
>>17955149
>>17955154
>>17955158
>>17955161
>>17955171
>>17955181
Absolutely splendid. Making my way through the Phenomenology now (and Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism) and this gives great context and a guide on what to watch out for. Thank you anon, really elevating the level of discourse around here.

[Anonymous No.17955253]

holy kino

[Anonymous No.17955810]

>>17955145 #
>>17955149 #
>>17955154 #
>>17955158 #
>>17955161 #
>>17955171 #
>>17955181 #
Absolute chad big brain post. This is better than anything I could have ever found anywhere else

[Anonymous No.17955820]

>>17954350
>Postmodern Neo-Marxist mind virus.
The OP was clearly dumb but the effortposter is great.

>>17955181
Something important to emphasize is that the french postmodernists are clearly post-Marxist as well, like Baudrillard and Derrida. This form of postmodernism is the one that is nonsensical to call neo-Marxist. Marxists (back when that word meant something) hated them and dismissed them as bourgeois etc...

[Anonymous No.17955977]

>>17955145
>>17955149
>>17955154
>>17955158
>>17955161
>>17955171
>>17955181
wonderful stuff anon, very well-informed and digestible
keep it up

[Anonymous No.17956030]

>>17955145
>Kant's writings made a radical division between the subject and external objects
That's just Cartesian dualism

[Anonymous No.17956034]

>>17954350
Can I? Yes. Will I? No, peasant.

[Anonymous No.17956068]

you guys ever thought about making a book about threads like these? It'd be pretty good, IMO

[Anonymous No.17956080]

it's always the german idealism threads that attract these effortposters. there's a low key cadre of big brain gigachads lurking these threads at all times

[Anonymous No.17956108]

>>17955181
Wow, I'm saving this

[Anonymous No.17956169]

>>17956030
they share some similarities but kant refuted descartes' claim on the permanence of the soul and the "i" as simple subject iirc

[Anonymous No.17956192]

>>17956169
also worth noting cartesian dualism is rooted in scepticism whereas transcendental idealism seeks to categorise and unify

[Anonymous No.17956319]

what secondary material would you recommend besides Beiser on German idealism?

[Anonymous No.17956366]

>>17954408
Bless you my sweet autist

[Anonymous No.17957587]

>>17956366
Where's this posted?

[Anonymous No.17957878]

>>17955171
>As the USSR kept doing truly atrocious evil shit,
Only cringe quote in what was otherwise a series of based posts.

[Anonymous No.17958365]

Yup, about 7 posts posts on 4chinz are all the proof you need that all leftists are just dogmatic protestants whose theology is masturbatory nonsense and their view of the world is childish and inane ;^)

[Anonymous No.17958410]

>>17955196
that's good though. you can just plagiarize them and no one will ever know. if anyone recognizes something from here, you can just claim that you were the guy posting it in the first place

[Anonymous No.17958578]

>>17954350
>postmodern neo-marxist
meaningless self-contradicting word salad, read a book. preferably not a self help book aimed at shut-in teenagers.
>>17955181
truly amazing post. the relentless astroturfing done by stormfags and tradcath larpers has almost driven me away from 4chan entirely, not sure if i should be mad at you or thank you for giving me a reason to stay a little longer.

sadly, the people spouting baseless bs about "postmodernism" or "cultural marxism" or whatever wont bother to read this.
>>17958365
t. didnt read or didnt comprehend what based autist said

[Anonymous No.17959058]

Could someone make a screen shot of the effort posts? I'm on my phone and I would like to save it

[Anonymous No.17959136]

>>17959058
https://imgur.com/a/XtGzolN

[Anonymous No.17959161]

>>17959136
Thank you

[Anonymous No.17959196]

>>17955154
Tell us more abour Schelling

[Anonymous No.17960551]

bump

[Anonymous No.17960572]

>>17954350
Basically, they were either Jewish or really Jewish.

[Anonymous No.17960579]

efforposters are too cool