The Darwin debate and the left
By nemo | November 15, 2008
The Darwin debate and the left
On Intelligent Design and the Left
Cats, Dogs and Creationism
By JEAN BRICMONT
“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.”
–Karl Marx (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).
Jean Bricmont reviews the MR book on ID. I have commented on the book several times here, before and after receiving a copy.
The left is stuck on nineteenth century materialism, and lives in a Darwinian limbo. I have no problem with attempted ‘material’ explanation, or rather, ‘naturalistic’ ones, but the theory of natural selection is a failure, so back to the drawing board. This book put out by Monthly Review fails to acknowledge a single critique of Darwin’s theory whatsoever and is therefore not a serious book, i.e. a piece of Darwin propaganda. John Bellamy Foster should know better as the co-author of Marx/s Ecology with its historical account of Marx’s early skepticism about natural selection.
Topics: Darwin, Marx, philosophy of history | No Comments »
Reverse gear dialectic
By nemo | November 8, 2008
From Darwiniana, Reverse gear dialectic….
In the middle of all the pundit comparisons to the era of FDR and the great depression, it is forgotten that that period had a behind the scenes driver in the surging left, the second to third Internationale, what to say of Boshevism soon to be Stalinism. The contemporary scene has nothing of the kind, except the echo of now failed leftist ideologies.
Public discussion of socialism ought to be a constant in liberal societies. Instead it has been so discredited by its Marxist hijackers that public discussion of issues suffers.
Lenin’s Tomb links to an historical materialism conference, with all the usual recombinations of jargon and refuted, or challenged theory.
These statements are not knee-jerk left bashing, merely the observation that there is no real left in our time-frame. The fall of communism should have led to a thorough critique of what went wrong, and yet still almost thirty years later Marxism chugs along, blocking a new left, and taking up the energy needed for a defining left.
Topics: Marx, socialism | No Comments »
The tragedy of the Marxist left
By nemo | November 2, 2008
One of the components of Marxism that led to much of its later confusion can be seen in Marx’s rejection of ethical idealism, a strain of Marx’s thinking that is too often disguised and unaddressed, and which invariably takes its idealistic fans by surprise, if it enters consciousness at all.
The grounds for all of this, beginning with Hegel, are complex, but finally stem from an inability to really grapple with the transcendental idealism of Kant.
From Sidney Hook’s From Hegel To Marx, Columbia, 1994, p.47
Rejection of Abstract Ethical Idealism
Opposition to the excesses of rabid individualism, however, comes not only from social realists but even more often from ethical idealists. Indeed it is in this latter form that it is most vocal and emphatic. What age has not heard a cry for justice in the name of Christ, Kant or some other ethical prophet? When has not someone’s conscience, someone’s devotion to things invisible led to conflict with the social order? And yet both Hegel and Marx regarded abstract ethical idealism, whether it have its roots in Christ, Rousseau or Kant, as Utopian and unreasonable-as even more dangerous than any philosophy of social atomism. It involved the same denial of the priority of the group over the individual; the same acceptance of the natural rights, or conscience, ethics which lies at the basis of philo¬sophical anarchism. Because it endangered the stability of the state, Hegel stamped it as a revolutionary doctrine; because it hampered militant class activity, Marx condemned it as Incipiently counter-revolutionary.
Topics: Hegel, Kant, Marx | No Comments »
Philosophies of history, theories of evolution
By nemo | October 31, 2008
Darwinism= Social Darwinism, Liberal Confusion Over Darwinism
Topics: evolution, philosophy of history | No Comments »
Review of Kant’s Politics
By nemo | October 29, 2008
Amazon review of Kant’s Politics, on the issue of ‘Freedom’s Causality
Topics: Kant, booknotes | No Comments »
What is materialism?
By nemo | October 19, 2008
A post at Darwiniana, in relation to a Monthly Review book on intelligent design, What is materialism?
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
A Critique of Intelligent Design, from Monthly Review
By nemo | October 9, 2008
A new book on Intelligent Design, from Monthly Review
Topics: Hegel, Marx, evolution | No Comments »
Marx and Darwin-Marx on natural selection
By nemo | October 9, 2008
One of the enduring confusions of the left has been the relationship of Marx and Darwin. This is partly the result of Engels’ views which were not quite concordant with those of Marx. Engels’ somewhat eclectic writings proceed on the one hand toward a distinctly post-Hegelian version of materialism and dialectics, and yet on the other toward the scientism of the times, with a close embrace of the views of Darwinism.
Of course, the general acceptance of Darwin’s theory makes this situation seem normal! Noone can get it straight, the more so as Marx was a closet Darwin heretic, too often taken in the way Engels is taken. In fact, in his remarkable passage from the generation of the Left Hegelians to the era of Comte and the positivistic scientism that became so dominant Marx remained in many ways within the mental universe of the Hegelian generation. Here again great confusion arises because of the problems with Hegelianism. In any case the issue of evolution as such was one thing, the theory of natural selection quite another. It was apparent to Marx almost at once that this was British ideology at work!
Perhaps in the age of Postdarwinism it will be possible to do justice to this original insight of Marx. But everyone is so conditioned to Darwinian thinking that this is now counted against Marx, and not generally discussed by his followers!
It is thus significant that Marx is on record as being skeptical of Darwin’s thinking. There is one telling episode. His enthusiastic interest in 1865 in a now forgotten book by Tremaux Origin and Transformations of Man and Organisms because of its critique of natural selection. Marx of course was clutching at straws, and was soon ‘corrected’ by Engels, but he was clearly ambivalent from the first about Darwin. He felt that Darwinism was a natural complement to his philosophy of history. And at the same time he perceived at once the ideological character of Darwin’s thinking. This acute insight quite naturally made him skeptical of the mechanism of evolution, the more so as the latent strain of Hegelian of his theories enabled him to straddle two domains of discourse.
It is small wonder that Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist. He must have wondered what was becoming of his thinking as the German Socialist movement took hold, embracing the veiled ideology of Darwinism, after all the labors to expose the economic ideology with which he began.
It is almost impossible to set the matter straight in the current environment of the Darwin paradigm, and confusion over Hegel. In all fairness to Engels, the Hegelian strain in Marx (and in Hegel!), although profound and elusive, is as open to challenge as the rest. The culprit is Hegel, but Hegel requires to be understood on his own terms, for he is not an easy thinker, and interpretation and critique is frequently vitiated by the wrong assumptions about evolution now current.
What a muddle!
Engels has been criticized many times for the type of thinking that emerged later in Dialectics of Nature. He scores a plus for intuition, and a minus for bad theories that don’t do what they claim. The intuitions about dialectic, and ‘evolutionary leaps’ are as significant as they are flawed, and have resulted in a considerable amount of wrong thinking about the nature of revolution.
The views of Darwin rapidly became an object of interest by many thinkers in the Second Internationale, and the myth of Marx’s wish to dedicate the second edition of Capital to Darwin was a staple until finally exposed.For the latter question, cf. Terence Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford, 1995), “Marx and Darwin, A Reconsideration”.
For the question of Marx and Tremaux, cf. Alan Megill, Karl Marx, The Burden of Reason (Rowman & Little field, 2002), p. 55.
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 199.
Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999).
Topics: Darwin, Hegel | No Comments »
The End Of History And The Return Of History
By nemo | October 5, 2008
This is a selection from an essay in The Hegel Myths And Legends, and gives some background on the ‘end of history’ mythology current in neo-liberal circles. (scanned text, not always adequate: check out the text)
The End Of History And The Return Of History
Philip Grier
Through the summer and fall of 1989, Hegel scholars in America were treated to the unusual spectacle of a debate in the mass media over the meaning and truth of Hegel’s philosophy of history, a debate running through the pages of major daily newspapers, the weekly news magazines, and the journals of opinion. The occasion for this unaccustomed attention devoted to Hegel was the appearance of an article by Francis Fukuyama in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”
Caught up in the spirit of the event, Irving Kristol, the publisher of the National Interest, generously announced in his comment on the Fukuayama article, “I am delighted to welcome G.W.F. Hegel to Washington. He will certainly help raise the intellectual level of the place…Hegel is unquestionably a genius—along with Kant, the greatest philosopher of modernity”. The last sentence is, however, followed by this: “In a sense, all of us have to decide whether were pro Hegel or contra, even if we have never read him, as not many of us have.” Alas, most of the contributors to this episode would seem to be carrying out Kristal’s injunction quite ligerally; as a consequence the recent extended public debate over “Hegel’s theory of the end of history” has had almost nothing to do with Hegel.
In his essay Fukuyama aspires to identify “some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order” to our understanding of the events of history. He claims to have found such a “larger conceptual framework” (3) in Hegel‘s thesis of the end of history: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (4). This first statement by Fukuyama of what he means by “the end of history” appears to contain all the essential elements of his view. The story of human history is the story of our ideological evolution; that evolution culminates in liberal democracy (”the Western idea” [3]); history ceases because “the basic principles of the liberal democratic state [i.e., the ideals of the French and American Revolutions] cannot be improved upon” (5); there are no contradictions in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of the liberal democratic state (8); all important nations will either turn out to be liberal democracies, or, failing that, at least abandon their pretensions to represent any alternative or higher form of human society (13).
This theory supposedly reveals the larger significance of the observation that Western liberal democracy has now prevailed over every ideological alternative to it; “the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war” (3), have all been defeated. The twentieth century has turned out to lead neither to the “end of ideology” nor to “a convergence between capitalism and socialism ... but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” (3).
This triumphant Western liberal democracy is distinctly consumerist in Fukuyama‘s conception of it, focused upon technical, economic problem-solving-“the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (18). At the end of the article, apparently forgetting his own dictum that this liberal democracy represents above all the achievement of the human values of freedom, equality and reason that “cannot be improved upon,” Fukuyama falls into a bout of despair: ‘The end of history will be a very sad time” (18). Instead of the “struggle for recognition or the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal [sic],” life will consist of endless “economic calculation”: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history” (1 
. Even sympathetic commentators immediately noticed that Fukuyama’s coda had much in common with Nietzsche’s idea of the “last man,” and no discernible connection with Hege1.2 In a sequel, “A Reply to My Critics,”3 Fukuyama tried to restate his attitude toward the posthistorical condition of existence in a less provocative way without retracting his original remarks, leaving a certain ambiguity about his position (28). No significant changes were introduced in the sequcl concerning his general conception of the end pf history, nor was its attribution to Hegel qualified in any way.
Mainly under the spell of Fukuyama‘s article, one supposes, most commentators have seemingly accepted that his quick sketch of the end-of history thesis is properly attributed to Hegel. Fukuyama himself betrays no doubt on this score; but his claim of attribution is at least indirect: It is Kojeve’s classic but highly eccentric Introduction to the Reading of Hegel which always figures as his explicitly cited authority for Hegel’s views.4 Fukuyama describes Kojeve as, in essence, the last true Hegelian. He writes that most of us know of Hegel “primarily as Marx’s precursor, and it is our misfortune that few of us are familiar with Hegel‘s work from direct study …. In France, however, there has been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist interpreters and to resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time” (4). He claims that it is Kojeve, attempting “to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806 [sic]” (4) who is most responsible for this effort.
Searching for a clue as to why Kojeve, and not, say, the far more obvious candidate Hyppolite, should be accorded this honor, it emerges that Kojeve is being contrasted primarily with Marcuse as a contemporary German interpreter of Hegel who “regarded Hegel ultimately as an historically bound and incomplete philosopher” (5, n. 2). In this company it becomes more understandable why Kojeve might acquire this status as the last true Hegelian. But at the same time Fukuyama gives no particular sign of recognizing Kojeve‘s own pronounced Marxist leanings, especially in his use of the master-slave dialectic as the prism through which the whole of Hegel’s thought is to be viewed.5 The more fundamental puzzle, though, would be to explain the source of Fukuyama’s extraordinary confidence that Kojeve’s very eccentric reading of Hegel, especially on the theme of the end of history, could be accepted as an authoritative interpretation.
No serious reader of Hegel could fail to recognize that Kojeve is as much creator as interpreter of the system he ascribes to Hegel. Kojeve’s entire reading of the Phenomenology revolves about the “masterslave” (Herr-schaft/Knechtschaft) episode, treating it as a passpartout for I he whole. Kojeve works it particularly hard in his exposition of the notion of history. He declares that “History began with the first Fight. that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave” (Bloom, 43). Kojeve insists that this fight is “a fight for pure prestige carried on for the sake of ‘recognition’ by the adversary” (Bloom, 11-12), that is, a fight not motivated by material or biological need, but a freely chosen one which puts everything at risk. The loss of the battle converts one of the combatants into a slave for the other, condemned to labor in confrontation with nature to satisfy the desire of the master. “History is the history of the working Slave” (Bloom, 20) articulated in a series of “slave ideologies” whereby the slaves seek to disguise their slavery from themselves. History comes to an end when the slaves eventually realize and assert their own intrinsically free being as citizens in a state in which all are equally free.
Kojeve’s end-of-history thesis has no obvious grounding in Hegel‘s texts, so the question must be asked: what led Kojeve to this extraordinary view? The answer is not far to seek. Kojeve himself declares (Bloom, 13334; Queneau, 367) that “the source and basis of my interpretation of the Phenomenology” is to be found in an article which his fellow Russian emigre Alexandre Koyre wrote in the early 1930s on some of Hegel’s Jena period texts which had recently appeared. Kojeve gives no citation for the Koyre article, but there can be no doubt (on overwhelming internal as well as external evidence) that the article in question is “Hegel a lena,” published originally in 1934.6 It is evident that the source of Kojeve’s end-of-history thesis can be found in the final paragraph of Koyre’s article.
Koyre was examining Hegel’s treatment of time in the succession of manuscripts from the lectures at Jena in 1802, 1803-4, and 1805-6 (Even though the 1802 date is no longer accepted as correct, the new dating does not materially affect Koyre‘s treatment of the texts.)8 Koyre treated those manuscripts (lecture notes) as the first glimpse into Hegel’s philosophical apprenticeship, our first opportunity to get behind the difficult and often obscure formulations of the mature system, to see the living process of its formation. At the same time he observed that there is a great risk in using these youthful works as an interpretive key to the mature system, namely the risk of “misunderstanding and misinterpreting” (150) the mature Hegel-and Koyre viewed the mature Hegel as above all the author of the Science of Logic, even more than of the Phenomenology (150, n. 4). On the other hand, Koyre was also inclined to treat the system of the Encyclopedia as problematic.9
The largest section of Koyre’s article was devoted to the translation and exposition of passages on time from the Naturphilosophie of the JenenserLogik, Metaphysik, und Naturphilosophie (i.e., sec. LA.A.; Lasson, 2036). He focusses especially on remarks Hegel made there concerning the
relation of the finite to the infinite, time, and the relations of present, future, and past. 10 The present is described as an “empty limit” between the future and the past. ”The past is this time returned in itself which has sublated in itself the two first dimensions [present and future]. The limit, or the Now, is empty; for it is absolutely simple or the concept of time; it realizes itself in the future. The future is its reality” (16970; Lasson, 204). Commenting on such passages Koyre remarks that it is not from the past that time comes to us, but from the future. “La duree does not extend itself from the past to the present” (176). “It is, on the contrary, from the future that it comes to itself in the present. The prevalent ‘dimension‘ of time is the future which is, in some way, anterior to the past” (177).1l
This treatment of past, present, and future was part of a larger argument by Hegel in the 1803 and 1804 versions of his Naturphilosophie dealing with the topic of motion in the solar system. Hegel treated the perfect periodicity of movement in the solar system as an image of the “true infinite. “12 As Harris puts it, “Periodic motion is what Hegel charac