Friends will recall that the original aim of this Blog was to re-elaborate the categories of our interpretation of social reality - from philosophy through economics to sociology and politics - in light of Nietzsche's critique of Western metaphysics and above all of Marx's critique of capitalist society. This review of Habermas's own review of Marx's "critique of epistemology" in Knowledge and Human Interest
was one of the crucial steps toward our goal, - and we are pleased to re-publish it on the date of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday.
Jurgen Habermas's 'Meta-Critique' of Marxian Praxis
It would not
be too unkind to say of Jurgen Habermas, the talented epigone of the Frankfurt
School of Philosophy, that he devoted his lifetime to bridging the gap between
theory and practice…. in theory alone!
And it is not too unkind to say this when one considers that Habermas
fundamentally misconstrued the entire Marxian notion of “praxis” – intended in
the Gramscian sense of an intellectual activity that in its very theorization
of capitalist society contains its critique
in a manner that challenges directly and
practically the operation of the society of capital and that by that very
fact is the very first and necessary step toward its overthrow.
The task of critique is invariably that of
challenging the self-understanding of capitalist society so as to evince the
elements of antagonism that lie at
its very core, that indeed form its “essence”, and that occasion its crisis. And “crisis” is not a “thing”,
but rather a “moment”, a point in time – a co-incidence
on the occurrence of which we need to be pre-pared, organized to trans-form the present order of things. The task of
critique is therefore to outline the “fault-lines” in the antagonistic asset of
capitalist society and government so
as to prepare the organization for its eventual democratic overthrow.
Anyone who
reviews Habermas’s theoretical oeuvre will be immediately and starkly aware of
how far he was from this aspect of “critique”: at no stage did his enormous
theoretical output tackle the all-important question of exactly how his intellectual efforts could be applied to the overthrow of capitalist
society. For this is a task that must be most prominent and at the forefront of
all our intellectual efforts devoted to the examination of the manner in which
capitalism reproduces itself and tries to do so on an expanded scale.
It may well be
that the political problem of the
hypostatization of revolutionary practical analysis into abstract and harmless
“theory” begins really with Marx himself and his notion of “historical
materialism” that tries to convey at once two antithetical subjecta or subject-matters
in its interpretation of human affairs: history
on the one hand as the sphere of human political action, and nature on the other as the objective ground of all ontological
reality. The difficulty emerges from as early as the Theses on Feuerbach where the Eleventh Thesis reads: “Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the
world; the point now is to change it”.
Here Marx seems to imply that it is possible to interpret the world – surely
the task of “theory” – without actually changing it. Here is precisely that
“separation”, that Trennung, of
intellectual and manual labor, of “direction” or “order” and “execution”, of
“theory” and “practice”, of Politics and Economics, of Freedom and Necessity.
Indeed, here
is precisely that “separation” of Subject and Object that Kant will sanction
with the very first “Critique” – that of “Pure Reason” – that will seek to
delimit the theoretical limits of
human knowledge from a purely
theoretical viewpoint or “intuition” (An-schauung)
whereby it is Reason that provides the “guide”, the “direction” to the human senses (Sinne) so that the “mind” or “spirit” (Geist) ultimately controls the body as in the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans (the “thinking” and
“acting” [co-agitare] thing) and res extensa (the inert, “supine” thing)
– the perfect synecdoche for Capital as command over living labor and the
Worker as “labor power” to be commanded, “directed”. Recall Kant’s neat and
telling summation of his epistemology: “Intuition without concepts is blind [no “direction”, like manual
labor] and concepts without intuition are empty
[ideas cannot be put into practice, as with purely intellectual labor]”. It is thus that the “separation” of living labor
from the means of production, which enables its reduction to abstract labor under the command of
capital, turns into a corresponding “division of social labor”, between
intellectual labor that commands
so-called manual labor.
Or so at least
the capitalist would have us believe. Thinkers as diverse as Weber and Arendt
certainly fell into this prejudicial trap as the following quotations
illustrate. – Which is not to say that there are no “technical” reasons why
social labor should not be “divided”: but no amount of “technical rationality”
can impede the democratic supervision of the most technical tasks of social
labor!
Returning to
Marx, we have seen how he too believed that it was possible to separate
“reflection” or “consciousness” – that is, theory and interpretation – as an
entity distinct from “reality” or “the world”, such that “philosophers hitherto
have only interpreted the world”. Marx evidently neglects the fact that
“interpretations” and “theories” are themselves methods or modalities of human activity. Indeed, Marx himself observed
that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is just this ability
“to theorise or pro-ject” conceptually beforehand
the activities that they intend to
undertake. But this dichotomy and antithesis between “thought” as deliberation and “action” as execution is exactly what lies at the
source of the “division” of social labor and its “separation” from the means of
production in the society of capital.
This
“separation” (Trennung) and “division” (Krisis) needs to be understood and
examined with a view to its overthrow and supersession. The problem with the philosophical approaches of Kant first –
for he was the one who first conceptualized this Krisis – and then Hegel and Marx, who were more concerned with the Trennung – that is, with the
“separation” or “alienation” of living labor and its abstraction into “labor power” – is that they pre-suppose the
existence of a “reality”, of an objective substratum or “world”, that can be observed, theorized, and known “scientifically”.
Differently put, all these “theories” presuppose the epistemological “schism”
between knowing Subject and known Object – a schism that can be “bridged”
either irrationally or “schematically” or else “dialectically”, but in any case
only trans-scendentally, that is to
say, only by leaving intact the epistemological separation or break (coupure) between concept and reality.
And this has occurred because in the past we have oriented human action in a fashion polarized between “consciousness”, the for-itself or “action”, and
“reality”, the “in-itself” that is acted upon.
Had Marx been
aware of Nietzsche’s own critique of
Western, and most specifically of Kantian and Hegelian, metaphysics, he would
doubtless have transliterated his Eleventh Thesis as follows: “Philosophers and
scientists have hitherto claimed that
they were only ‘inter-preting’ the world, whereas in fact they were elaborating
strategies either to change or to
conserve it!” If we turn Marx’s dictum on its head like this, we soon realize
that in fact theory and practice were
never “separate” and that therefore philosophy and science are not “ideologies”
in the sense intended by Marcuse or Heidegger that they contain a pre-conceived
project or design of human action. The notion of “ideology” implies that there
are theoretical practices that are “non-ideological”. Instead, they should be
viewed as strategies that have
specific finalities or goals with which we may agree or disagree but that in
any case are never purely speculative or
contemplative because they remain
ineluctably forms of human activity.
The problem
revolves around the human temptation to separate conceptually the cosmos into subject and object, as if
the mere fact that there are “thoughts” proved incontrovertibly that there are
“thinkers” and, behind thinkers, “subjects” provided with a “consciousness”
capable of com-prehending life and the
world autonomously from these last,
that is to say, “freely” and “objectively”, from an Archimedian point. The
sooner we free our-selves from this pre-judice, the better.
Quite rightly, Marx chastises Hegel for making precisely this error – that of
mis-taking human objectification, the
necessary human immanent inter-action
with life and the world, with alien-ation,
the “false consciousness” arising from the extrinsication of the Idea in time
and in space to the apotheosis of ab-solute
knowledge, the ultimate stage of the Spirit or self-consciousness to the
point where it en-compasses all its predicates
and attributes whereby it is “ab-solved” from further clarification. Hegel
therefore mistakes life and the world, immanence, with the dialectical un-folding of the Idea: in short, Hegel mistakes Being
with Logic.
Yet the opposite is not the case for
Marx! If we consider
Marx’s work in its entirety, despite an undeniable scientistic streak in Capital,
there is no question of his having reduced “logic” to “being” for the simple
reason that this dichotomy does not occur in his oeuvre and certainly not in
the most mature exposition of his philosophical theorization of capitalist
society in the Grundrisse. Such a
theorization is essential, of course, because the overthrow of capitalism has
to be able to understand the needs that lead to it, has to be able to justify
itself. But this “self-understanding” must occur in a historical perspective
that is aimed not at a generic “philosophical totality”, at an all-encompassing
ontology. Rather, its principal aim and scope must be that of erecting a novel
political orientation of human social relations of production, a re-orientation
of social labor, to correct its ever-growing distortion on the part of capitalist
social relations of production.
Here is how
Habermas characterizes (one could be vicious and say “caricatures”) Marx’s Entwurf in the light of our formulation
of this problematic thus far:
Thus in
Marx's works a peculiar disproportion arises between the practice of inquiry [Forschungspraxis]
and the limited philosophical self-understanding of this inquiry [Forschung].
In his empirical analyses Marx comprehends the history of the species under
categories of material activity and the critical abolition of ideologies, of
instrumental action and revolutionary practice, of labor and reflection at
once. But Marx interprets what he does in the more restricted conception of the
species' self-reflection through labor [Arbeit] alone. The
materialist concept of synthesis is not conceived broadly enough in order to
explicate the way in which Marx contributes to realizing the intention of a
really radicalized critique of knowledge. In fact, it even prevented Marx from
understanding his own mode of procedure from this point of view. (K&HI,
p.42.)
Obvious here
is the intention on the part of
Habermas to distinguish “the practice
of inquiry” from “the philosophical
self-understanding of inquiry”. Marx called his theoretical activity
“critique” precisely for the reason that it was never intended as mere analysis or dia-gnosis of the workings and status of capitalism but rather as a
practical project, a dia-noia, whose very content, even the most “theoretical”
and “ana-lytical”, had to be designed
to put into political practice the overthrow of capitalist social relations of
production, namely, the command by dead labor over living labor. Though it is
possible, and we would argue even correct, to contend that Marx’s own account
of the social synthesis was defective, it certainly does not help matters if we
start splitting hairs in the manner Habermas suggests, by engaging in renewed
analyses not just of “the practice of inquiry” – which may be politically
justified because there is an immediate link with praxis – but also of “the
philosophical self-understanding” of this inquiry – because at that stage we
are already indulging in what threatens to become an endless chain of “meta-critiques of knowledge” that
rapidly spiral into complete irrelevance to anything “practical” in a Marxian
sense!
What troubles
Habermas is the alleged fact that “Marx interprets what he does in the more
restricted conception of the species' self-reflection through labor [Arbeit] alone”,
whereas in his “empirical analyses” Marx had more properly “comprehend[ed] the
history of the species under categories of material activity and the critical
abolition of ideologies, of instrumental action and revolutionary practice, of
labor and reflection at once”. In other words, the “disproportion”
[Missverhaltnis] or "incongruence" between the practice of inquiry and its philosophical
self-understanding occurs in Marx because he interprets the history of being
human “through labor alone”. And Habermas understands by “labor” exactly what he wishes to understand, that is,
“instrumental action” without
revolutionary practice, “material activity” bereft
of “reflection”. Already, therefore, Habermas’s entire “meta-critique” of Marx
is on shaky ground because he has excogitated
for himself, he has invented an obstacle, a problem or “disproportion” in Marx’s praxis that
Habermas (texts in hand) is about to overcome on his own “meta-critical” terms – that is, philosophisch! That is why we protest, despite our humble
admiration for him, that Habermas spent his lifetime bridging theory and
practice in theory alone!
For what purpose can it serve to draw a
distinction as subtle as it is casuistic between the Marxian notion of “labor”
and “reflection”? As we saw with the Eleventh Thesis, it is true that Marx
leaned too heavily on the dichotomy between “the [real, natural] world” and its
– ideological, fetishistic – “interpretations”, and thence invited those
hideous “Hegelian-Marxist” (mostly Lukacsian) disquisitions on “authenticity
and false consciousness”. But it is or should be wholly evident that when Marx
spoke of “labor” he never intended by that term to mechanical pro-duction that the bourgeoisie intends by it in opposition to some other mystical artistic notion of “labor” such as that
contained in the classical distinction between poiesis and techne’. For
Marx to have done so would have amounted to succumbing to the most risible
nostalgia of late-romantic dreamers hankering (like Lukacs and Heidegger and
many after them) for the utopia of “totality”, of artistic and aesthetic
fulfillment and wholeness – for “Art”.
Habermas has
set up a straw man, and then proceeds to punch him out of shape! – Exactly in
the manner in which the philosophia
perennis since Plato and Aristotle has sought to present the cosmos as an “Other” to be subjugated
and dominated by “the Subject”, “Man” understood not immanently but rather trans-scendentally,
that is to say, by reference to an “ideal world” or a world of “Ideas” of which
this world, this life are only im-perfect copies – mere appearances (blosse Er-scheinungen), phenomena or “mere
representations” (blosse Vor-stellungen). If we define “labor” in terms of its mechanical a-spect and of its ideal or creative a-spect, then it is
obvious that the two are and will remain utterly anti-nomic and ir-reconcilable. It is obvious that we shall forever
sway between crude “materialism” and refined “idealism”. The unbridgeable hiatus – this perennial
conundrum of the philosophic mind – between “con-cept” and the “re-ality” that
it is supposed “to grasp” or “com-prehend” (as a “totality”) belongs to the
bourgeois fables that Nietzsche laughed off so “comprehensively” in Zarathustra and that indeed he
“hammered” to smithereens in the Twilight
(a book whose subtitle is “how to philosophise with a hammer”). (Simply bathetic is that highbrow bourgeois
interpretation, invented by Heidegger, of Nietzsche’s hammer referring to
“sounding” philosophical thoughts!)
To be sure, it
was Heidegger himself who, on the tracks of Lukacs’s trenchant critique of “The
Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” (in the Geschichte),
sought valiantly in his Kantbuch (which
he intended as volume two of Being and
Time) to correct Kant’s
misapprehensions regarding the nature of human intuition into which Kant fell in the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Heidegger
genially by-passes Lukacs’s entire Hegelian
problematic of “the dialectic of self-consciousness” which the Hungarian
philosopher had re-worked along Simmelian lines that led straight into the
formal Weberian notion of “rationalization” as “reification”, - which in turn
he adapted from Marx’s original discussion of “the fetishism of commodities” in
Capital. This dualism of the Arbeit
(labor) as the “totality” of human objectification that is parcelised and commodified
by the capitalist so that its qualitative
character as use value is then
reduced to its quantitative monetary form as “exchange value” until
a surplus value is produced over and
above the “socially necessary labor
time” needed for the reproduction of “society” – all this is a colossal fiction for which Marx himself was
principally responsible, but one that Lukacs ably worked up into an even
greater mythology, on the tracks of
Lenin’s fanciful Bolshevist vanguard or
“dictatorship” (avant-garde?) of the “proletariat” as being the Hegelian
“carrier” (Trager) of the dialectical
self-dissolution of capital (the working class
dressed up as the Kapital-Geist),
finally unveiled as “the individual subject-object of history” (a concept
Lukacs took from Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s formal distinction between noumenon and phenomenon).
All along this
line of reasoning or analysis, we find a laughable string of puerile
distinctions between a “real world” and an “apparent world” which serves to
obfuscate our immediate practical aim
– the overthrow of the society of capital (subjective genitive – the “society”
created by and for capital) and its final institutional form, the Keynesian State-Form now on its last
desperate death-throes.
Habermas’s proton pseudon (principal [first and
foremost] mistake) he himself articulates in only his second paragraph (!) from
the start of his “meta-critique” of Marx. Having quoted from a passage of the Paris Manuscripts in which Marx decries
Hegel’s confusion of human objectification with “alienation”, Habermas sums up:
This seal
placed on absolute knowledge by the philosophy of identity is broken if the
externality
of nature, both objective environmental and subjective bodily nature, not only
seems
external to a consciousness that finds itself within nature but refers instead
to the
immediacy
of a substratum on which the mind contingently depends. Here the mind
presupposes
nature, but in the sense of a natural process that, from within itself, gives
rise
likewise
to the natural being man and the nature that surrounds him --and not in the
idealist
sense of a mind that, as Idea existing for itself, posits a natural world as
its own
self-created
presupposition.4
There are
therefore, argues Habermas, both Kantian and non-Kantian components to Marx’s
philosophical framework. The Kantian elements are already made explicit in the
“terminology” adopted which, unlike Hegel’s absolute idealism, still posits the
“external” character of “nature” to “mind”: “Here the mind presupposes nature”.
But Habermas’s adoption of terms – “signifiers”, “symbols” – as charged and redolent with the
problematic of the prima philosophia,
such as “mind” and “nature” means that he has already saddled Marx’s Entwurf
with all the worthless paralyzing, mortifying ballast and baggage carried by
Western meta-physics – what Nietzsche so valiantly de-structed, or demolished critically and then threw overboard!
Just listen to these pearls from the supreme academic brain of the Teutonic establishment – something to make
you bristle with rage:
Marx is assuming something like a
nature in itself.
It is prior to the world of mankind. It
is at the
root of laboring subjects as natural beings and also enters into their labor
processes.
But as the subjective nature of man and the objective nature of their
environment,
it is already part of a system of social labor that is divided up into two
aspects
of the same "process of material exchange." While epistemologically
we must
presuppose
nature as existing in itself, we ourselves have access to nature only within
the
historical
dimension disclosed by labor processes. Here nature in human form mediates
itself
with objective nature, the ground and environment of the human world.
"Nature in
itself"
is therefore an abstraction, which is a requisite of our thought: but we always
encounter
nature within the horizon of the world-historical self-formative process of
mankind. Kant's "thing-in-itself"
reappears under the name of a nature preceding human
history. (ch.2, p.34)
This is patent
and despicable nonsense! Had Marx had
the misfortune of catching a glimpse of this kind of utter bastardry from
academic poltroons such as Habermas no-one
could vouchsafe for the physical integrity
of the Frankfurt professor! Nothing but nothing could be further
from Marx’s entire worldview, perspective, philosophy – call it what you like!
– than the garbage about “Dinge an sich” (things in themselves, that velame oscuro or “obscure veil” – one
could call it letame oscuro, obscure
filth!) that Kant unloads by the cart-load in the First Kritik! The plain and overwhelming fact of the matter is that Marx
was attempting by all means available to him to overcome (Nietzsche’s Uberwindung) precisely the kind of meta-physical conundrums in which
precious bourgeois “minds” such as Kant’s took such obvious delight. That Marx
was unable to achieve such a feat –
we will have to wait until Nietzsche for a far more sophisticated and
penetrating effort – does not mean that he shared the trans-scendental idealist claptrap of Kant and his German Idealist
epigones!
Quite
obviously, having set up a phantasmagoric Kantian anti-thesis in Marx’s “revolutionary practice” between “mind” and
“nature”, and therefore between
“labor” and “reflection” or “interaction”, it is evident that Habermas then
needs… a syn-thesis (!) – an equally
phantomatic effort by Marx “to bridge” this Fichtean hiatus irrationalis from within the Kantian philosophical,
speculative strait-jacket in which Habermas has entangled Marx’s praxis. Once more, Habermas sees a
“distortion” arising between Marx’s “practice of inquiry” and his
“philosophical self-understanding of this inquiry” – but this “distortion”
exists only because Habermas has fundamentally “pre-distorted” Marx’s praxis
by re-defining its central – revolutionary – problematic! Here is how Habermas
summarises his conclusions:
The
materialist concept of synthesis thus retains from Kant the fixed framework
within
which the
subject forms a substance that it encounters. This framework is established
once and
for all through the equipment of transcendental consciousness or of the human
species
as a species of tool-making animals. On the other hand, in distinction from
Kant,
Marx
assumes empirically mediated rules of synthesis that are objectified as
productive
forces
and historically transform the subjects' relation to their natural
environment.29
What is
Kantian about Marx's conception of knowledge is the invariant relation of the
species to its natural environment, which is established by the behavioral
system of instrumental action -- for labor processes are the "perpetual
natural necessity of human life."
It is quite
mesmerizing to witness the effusive impetus with which Habermas with nonchalant
hermeneutic fury completely misrepresents Marx’s most express theoretical
intentions. Doubtless, Marx believed in a “subject” as well as in “nature”. But
why and how are these necessarily “retained from Kant’s fixed framework”? And
where oh where is that “transcendental consciousness” that Habermas claims to
detect in Marx? Nothing is
transcendental in Marx! Marx is inveterate, stubborn immanence! Nor can the human species for Marx be described
“barrenly” as “a species of tool-making animals” – because, as Habermas remarks
in the very next sentence,
“in
distinction from Kant, Marx assumes empirically mediated rules of synthesis
that are objectified as productive forces and historically transform the
subjects' relation to their natural environment”.
But again, why, in light of this “historical trans-formation” – surely a
“meta-morphosis”, a Goethian “trans-crescence”, and if not, why not? -, why
does this entitle Habermas to conclude in the same breath that “[w]hat is
Kantian about Marx's conception of knowledge is the invariant relation of the species to its natural environment”? How on earth can this relation be “invariant” when
Habermas has just acknowledged that it is liable to “historical
transformation”? And how can this “invariance” be “established by the
behavioral system of instrumental action -- for labor processes are the ‘perpetual
natural necessity of human life’? Why does the Marxian “perpetual natural
necessity of human life” – the evident ec-sistence of being human as living activity, hence even as Arbeit – suddenly become a “behavioral
system of instrumental action”?
The
conditions of instrumental action arose contingently in the natural evolution
of the human species. At the same time, however, with transcendental necessity,
they bind our
knowledge
of nature to the interest of possible technical control over natural processes.
The
objectivity of the possible objects of experience is constituted within a
conceptual perceptual scheme rooted in deep-seated structures of human action;
this scheme is equally binding on all subjects that keep alive through labor.
At this point
one would have to state bluntly, at the risk of sounding vulgar, that Habermas
is making things up “on the run” – such is the obtuseness of his fantastic
“variations” on Marx’s theme! Where in God’s name does “transcendental
necessity” come into Marx’s immanent
naturalism – something worthy of Nietzsche’s “genealogy of morals”?
The
objectivity of the
-- 36 --
possible
objects of experience is thus grounded in the identity of a natural substratum,
namely
that of the bodily organization of man, which is oriented toward action, and
not in
an
original unity of apperception, which, according to Kant, guarantees with
transcendental
necessity the identity of an a-historical consciousness in general. The
identity
of societal subjects, in contrast, alters with the scope of their power of
technical
control.
This point of view is fundamentally un-Kantian. The knowledge generated
within
the framework of instrumental action takes on external existence as a
productive
force.
Consequently both nature, which has been reshaped and civilized in labor
processes,
and the laboring subjects themselves alter in relation to the development of
the
productive
forces.
Finally!
Finally Habermas snaps out of his neo-Kantian trance! But remember, this is
only partly so – only to the extent,
that is, that this “un-Kantian point of view” merely counterbalances the other
“Kantian” elements of Marx’s theory that Habermas seemingly detects. But
Habermas remains locked within his
own formulation of the Marxian
problematic which, far from falling back on Kantian formalism, was always
(remember!?) implanted on Hegel’s dialectic
for a start! Now, if we accept Habermas’s one-sided Kantian formulation of
Marx’s problematic, then we necessarily
end up with his “disproportion” because, from the quotation just above, if
[t]he
knowledge generated within the framework of instrumental action takes on
external existence as a productive force,
then it follows necessarily that for such a “framework of instrumental action” to be trans-muted
into an “external existence as a productive force” involves a “reshaping and
civilizing” of “nature” as well as an “alteration of both nature and the laboring
subjects themselves” that is quite inevitably anti-thetical – that is, it gives rise to Habermas’s lamented
“distortion” in Marx – for the simple reason that “nature” understood as the
antithesis of “the subject” can never be “transformed” or “civilized” or
“altered” by….”instrumental action”!
Thus, Habermas in-vents (in the
double sense of “confabulates” and in-venire,
“runs up against”) the “disproportion” in Marx’s praxis that he laments! First,
Habermas “invents” in the sense that he “makes the problem up all by himself”; and then, he in-vents this problem in
the sense that he claims “to have run up against it” as a “disproportion” in
Marx!
The materialist concept
of synthesis through social labor marks the systematic position occupied by
Marx's conception of [42] the history of mankind in the intellectual current
that begins with Kant. In a turn of thought peculiarly determined by Fichte, Marx
adopts the intention of Hegel's objection to the Kantian approach to the
critique of knowledge. In so doing he is impervious to the philosophy of
identity, which precludes epistemology as such. Notwithstanding, the
philosophical foundation of this materialism proves itself insufficient to
establish an unconditional phenomenological self-reflection of knowledge and
thus prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology. Considered immanently, I
see the reason for this in the reduction of the self- generative act of the
human species to labor. (p.42)
So herein lies the problem
with Habermas’s wholly unwarranted interpretation of Marx’s “epistemology”: in
the fact, that is, that Habermas entirely overlooks Marx’s adoption of Hegel’s
critique of Kant – from positions that will be shared in part even by the
negatives Denken from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and that indeed
had germinated as early as Schelling (see Lowith, Vom Hegel zu Nietzsche) – and this not merely in terms of method, given Marx’s self-avowed
indebtedness (cf. Preface to Capital)
to Hegelian dialectic, but also and
above all in the fact that the Hegelian dialectic constitutes a critique of
Kantian transcendental idealism both as epistemology – and above all as ontology! Kant is almost exclusively concerned
(despite the helpful objections Heidegger raises in the Kantbuch) with epistemology, whereas Hegel is concerned essentially
with ontology – with the nature of Being – despite the fact (and here is the
pretext for Marx’s critique of Hegel,
and then of Political Economy, of Ricardo) that he assimilates ontology to “logic”, and thence to epistemology.
Nevertheless, the Hegelian dialectic of
self-consciousness is much more than a critique of Kantian epistemology! It is above all else an
attempt to move beyond Kant’s epistemological formalism which inevitably
shatters against the rock of its ontological “antinomies”!
It is absurd, in light of all
this – and we need not even consider Hegel here, for one could as well invoke Schopenhauer’s own critique of Kant (!) –
to insist that Marx’s own critique of Hegel would – after all was said and done
– revert to Kantian positions that Marx himself would have considered well and
truly dead and buried after Hegel’s
philosophical advances! The weakness,
the weak link, “if you please” (as Marx would say), in Habermas’s review of
Marxian praxis ( of inquiry as political and theoretical practice) lies perhaps most centrally
and essentially in his misconception
of the Marxian notion of “labor”, of the Arbeit,
which Habermas understands as “instrumental action”, as mere operari – precisely because he theorises the entire complex ontology of the
Arbeit from a pre-Nietzschean viewpoint! Marx, on the contrary, whilst he
lacked the philosophical lexicon
developed later by Nietzsche, and more intensely by Heidegger, had already
moved to a philosophical dimension
that Kant did not even imagine – and here
the pun is intended because, as Heidegger showed, it is exactly the defective Kantian notion of the “imagination”
as the “syn-thesis” between human “intuition” (Sinn) and “the understanding”
(Verstand) that made his critical idealism vulnerable to the Nietzschean
assault….