David-Hillel Ruben

TL;DR: Action and its Explanation by David-Hillel Ruben as mentioned in this paper is a good introduction to the work of action and its explanation, and it is based on a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalisations.

Abstract: idea of the organism; but in appearance and in his own opinion he has developed the determinate reality out of the Universal Idea. He has made the subject of the idea into a product and predicate of the Idea. He does not develop his thought out of what is objective, but what is objective in accordance with a ready-made thought which has its origin in the abstract sphere of logic (p. 14).sphere of logic (p. 14). In these passages, which are representative of the tone and theme of his Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Marx denies the Hegelian creation claim. Objects are not ‘result’ or ‘product’ or ‘issues’ of Idea; nor is Idea a ‘subject’ with creative powers, the powers of praxis. Indeed just the opposite is the case, and that is the core of the transformative method’s message. The materialist theme is taken up again and repeated in The Holy Family in an amusing passage which occurs in the section entitled ‘Das Geheimnis der spekulativen Konstruktion’ and which parodies the Hegelian philosophy: If from real apples, pears, strawberries, almonds I form the general notion fruit, and if I go further and imagine that my abstract notion, the fruit . . . exists as an independent essence of the pear, the apple etc., I declare therewith—speculatively expressed—the fruit to be the ‘substance’ of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc . . . I then, pronounce the apple, pear and almond to be merely existing modes of the fruit . . . The speculation which out of different real fruits has produced as the fruit of its abstraction the fruit, must consequently . . . attempt to get back again . . . to the actual multiform, profane fruit, the pear, apple, almond, etc . . . It arises, answers the speculative philosopher, because the fruit is not dead, undifferentiated, static essence but a living, self-differentiating dynamic essence . . . the different profane fruits are different life-forms of one fruit: they are crystallisations which the fruit itself builds. For example in the apple, the fruit give itself an ‘appley’, in the pear, a ‘peary’ existence . . . The fruit posits itself as apple, posits itself as pear, posits itself as almond . . . The ordinary man feels that he is saying nothing extraordinary when he says that apples and pears exist. But the philosopher, when he expressed this existence in speculative fashion, feels that he has said something extraordinary. He has accomplished a miracle, he has produced from the unreal conceptual notion, the fruit, real, natural entities, apples, pears, etc . . . he has created these fruits out of his own abstract understanding . . . In recognising any existent thing, he imagines that he is completing a creative act.11 These passages show what never has, to the best of my knowledge, been disputed in any case, viz., that Marx denied the Hegelian doctrine which involved ascribing to thought the ability to create all of nature, every object, or even any object, out of itself. But what of the weaker, dependence claim? These passages do not seem to show that Marx rejected the essential dependency of nature on what is human. For that we must look elsewhere. In particular, the examples Marx uses in his denial of creation will not support a denial of dependence. This is because some of the examples 70 M A R X I S M A N D M A T E R I A L I S M are of ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ objects—the state, family, and private property. Even if thought does not create the state, or the family, it is clear that they, for their existence, are essentially dependent on human, purposeful activity. The state is not independent of the activity of real men. So Marx’s examples, from The Critique, may deny the creation claim but do not themselves support the essential independence claim for natural objects. Many, although not by any means all, of Marx’s denials of the essential dependence of Nature on what is human, can be found in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This may be thought surprising since the Manuscripts have been used for ‘proving’ precisely the opposite point, as we shall see later in the chapter when we come to discuss Kolakowski. The lesson in this is, I think, that it is particularly important to interpret Marx’s often aphoristic way of saying something by looking at the overall purpose of the passage from which the aphorism is taken. This is true of Feuerbach as well. We noted before how Feuerbach spoke of the identity of subject and object, which appears to contradict our interpretation of Feuerbach as a realist about objects, but remarked how this seemed to mean for him only ‘the sensory contemplation of man by man’, an innocuous claim for our interpretation. One can see the same retention of Hegelian jargon, but given new meaning, at work in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It is important not to be taken in by it, and above all else, not to base one’s interpretation on the occurrence of the Hegelian jargon alone. For example, in The Manuscripts Marx says: ‘Thinking and being are thus no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other’.12 What does this do to our claim that Marx denied the dependence of natural being on thought? Absolutely nothing, as one can see when one looks carefully at the whole passage and sees that all Marx means by this bit of misleading Hegelian jargon is that through his self-consciousness man is aware of himself as social (hence, the ‘being’ side of the dichotomy) as well as individual (the ‘thinking’ aspect of the distinction). The Hegelianesque aphorism seems to serve only a rather strange summary for the preceding paragraph: ‘Man, much as he may therefore by a particular individual . . . is just as much the totality . . . the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself . . .’ The sort of point I am making here is, I believe, a general point which it is important to bear in mind in dealing with The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. We shall return to more of these sorts of passages when we come to discuss some of the influential misinterpretations of Marx later in this chapter. The denial of the essential dependence of natural objects on thought occurs scattered throughout The Manuscripts and occasionally elsewhere, but primarily in the third ‘manuscript’, in the section which deals with Hegel’s philosophy. The denials of dependence come either by way of explicit assertion of the essential independence of nature, or more often, by way of criticism of the Hegelian view of the essential dependence of nature on thought. I wish to quote and to remark on ten such passages. My own M A R X A N D M A T E R I A L I S M 71 feeling is that a careful reading of The Manuscripts could not leave the reader in any doubt that Marx believed, at least very much more often than not, that nature existed essentially independently of all that is human. What is more likely is that the reader of The Manuscripts may feel that these passages contradict other things which Marx also occasionally says there which suggest essential dependence between Nature and society, or the human. My task will be now only to cite those passages which show Marx holding an independence claim, as he must do if he is to be counted a materialist. I reserve for my later discussion of Kolakowski the task of showing Marx’s basic consistency, of showing how passages in Marx appear to argue for a dependency of nature on the human only when taken out of context. In context these passages in no way contradict an independence claim in the way they are often thought to do. Let us first, then, look at ten passages in which Marx says or implies that natural objects are essentially independent of the human: (1) Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life—he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities—as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need . . .’13 (2) To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself . . .’14 ‘The objects of his impulse exist outside him’, and ‘Hunger . . . needs a nature outside itself ’. Later we will see how the essential independence of nature is in no way compromised by the perfectly obvious point that natural objects can come to stand in contingent relations to the human, can become objects of man’s hunger, objects of his impulses. If man ceased to exist, the natural world would not necessarily follow suit, and that surely is part of what Marx has in mind when he talks about natural objects being ‘outside’ man. Indeed, Marx says: (3) . . . a being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and does not share in the being of nature.15 Not only are natural objects independent of what is human, but in (3) Marx tells us, in Hegelian jargon, that it is necessarily the case that men are in nature. Any being whose nature or essence isn’t in things ‘outside’ itself couldn’t be; the human is essentially dependent on nature. (4) [In criticism of Hegel’s dialectic] On the one hand this act of superseding is a transcending of the thought entity . . . and because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality . . . this superceding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality to be self-confirmatio