There is, then, not only the reappearance of redemptive myth, but, this time, of a collective dream which is no longer the abstraction of comparative mythology but a truly international mythic drama―one that pits the “proletariat” or, more broadly construed, “alienated man” against “the sterility of the bourgeois world.” The existentialist hero of postwar Europe, and of France in particular, was a modern mythic embodiment―alienated man in an absurd world choosing freedom, a myth that embodied the modern Western sense of being the orphan of its own past, an orphanhood embraced as the condition of a conscious and concrete existence. But the existentialist hero left one abstraction intact―and that was freedom; the need to make it concrete transformed that hero into another man, one who found himself once again implicated in history. If the intellectual odyssey of Jean-Paul Sartre as a primary creator of the image of existential man may be taken as prototypal modern Western journey, it is possible to see his more recent Marxism as the exercise of an existential freedom that has chosen its content, a choice that transforms radical solitude into the possibility of radical solidarity and social renewal, and that leaves behind the Romantic individualism of existentialism which defined the isolated man as totally self-creating, as if neither history nor society existed. It is this Marxist myth, to which so many have committed their freedom, to which we now turn. The “redemptive vision” of Karl Marx cannot be questioned in terms of its theoretical power as an adequate description of historical or economic reality without considering it as a new mythic description of the world, whose worldwide communal response marks it as a legitimate “prophecy"―not a prediction in the sense of the physical sciences but a prophecy in the sense of articulating the discontent of an age and empowering a new vision of man and society.
To have said this is to raise the question of the adequacy of any social theory that does not begin with an imaginative response to a lived experience, that does not intend to close the gap in understanding which refuses to let people (in the words of Richard Wright) believe in what their life has made them feel. For if prophecies are to some extent “self-fulfilling,” that is, since men―unlike the phenomena of the physical sciences―live in a social world of their own creation, which they continually modify, then the way in which they conceive their situation is finally inseparable from the direction in which that situation may develop and change. Thus the response of a great mass of mankind to a new world view becomes one of the positive measures by which the descriptive power of that view may be authenticated. To insist on “neutrality” in the observation of the human world is to accept the given arrangements of a society as final, to see it as so many social “scientists” presently do, as a homeostatic mechanism requiring only
140
internal adjustments to keep it operational―a view which is finally far from neutral with its implicit allegiance to the status quo. Thus neutrality in human descriptive sciences is an illusion (or a symptom of a society which is bereft of human attachments); a valuation of human institutions is built into the observation of them. An ahistorical description of society, and its complement―an intrapersonal view of psychic disorder, is always in part an apology for the present system and a falsification of what is in fact an historical and interpersonal reality. An attempt at a truer description of society requires a consideration of the creative element in human affairs, which demands a philosophical decision about the values which impel change and the direction in which men seek to move the world in response to their evaluation of their present situation. The study of history, as Lucien Goldmann has said, is the search for human values; the imaginative response of men, particularly in moments of crisis which are pregnant with new arrangements, is an index to the kinds of values by which, however imperfectly, they modify and even radically restructure their reality. If, as Goldmann says, “philosophy really tells us something about the nature of man, then every attempt to destroy it necessarily obstructs the understanding of human reality. In this case, the human sciences will have to be philosophical in order to be scientific.” [9]
“An ideology,” writes Lewis Feuer in his introduction to a collection of Marxist writings, “is a myth written in the language of science.” [10] To which might be added that all myths are equally ideologies, and that while traditional myths were written in the language of religion, modern myths are written in the language of science, because they are more conscious and base themselves on an awareness that man and the natural world, our actual existence, are the source and ultimate measure of our ideas rather than some absolute or supernatural realm which has been recovered as our own projection, All ideologies, whether couched in the language of theology or science, are defined as myths because they are essentially a judgment of history and an embodiment of a set of ideal relations among men that is the measuring rod of that judgment; the ideology of Karl Marx can only be under stood and its influence explained if it is seen that his description of the economic and social relations of men―drawn from empiric al evidence (from “men, not in any fantastic isolation or abstract definition, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under
9. Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. Hayden V. White and Robert Anchor (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1973), p. 22.
10,
Lewis S, Feuer, Introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx
and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (London:
Collins, Fontana Library, 1969), p. 22.
141
definite conditions”[11]), derives both its method and its form from a humanistic premise, one that simultaneously restores to man his materiality, and to materiality its human meaning.
This role of Marx as moral diagnostician and social prophet is hardly surprising if we consider the impact of Marx’s thought over the last hundred years. No mere student of political economy, as Marx described himself, could have inspired such a movement were there not implicit in his doctrine a prescription for change and a telos: an ideal of a morally perfect world. [12]
But
the ability of a teleology to organize a system is common to all
theories that embrace such a notion and does not ensure their
adoption by society; what is socially significant in Marx’s
teleology is the convincing quality of its inevitability, precisely
because it is predicated on the actual material situation, a
situation described in a way which both diagnoses concretely the
contradictions and articulates the felt needs of his time while
promising that the present situation must necessarily be
overcome and produce the desired end. The power of Marx’s
synthesis, then, rests on its non-theistic and humanistic reworking
of the ultimately religious idea of the “unity of opposites” as
the fulfillment of human life. He believed that man had fallen into
division but would be whole again; he “established ‘Aufhebung’
(the transcendence of alienation) as a concept denoting ontological
necessity.” [13] But it is the extremely concrete way in which he
understands “alienation” and its “transcendence” that makes
his theory an effective instrument of genuine social change. The
coherence of Marx’s system, its ability to generate response by
enunciating a new world view along with the assurance of its
inevitable victory, turns on its reciprocal materialization of what
had been “purely” philosophical concepts and its humanization of
what had seemed “merely” material relations.
Perhaps
the best way to approach the Marxist synthesis is to follow its
growth in his own mind, for once constructed the system is so
coherent and its parts so mutually dependent that it nearly defeats
the mind’s attempt to find a starting point in regard to it. As
Marx built his system, he selected major elements from the
philosophic, political, and economic theories of his time, theories
which, taken fully and separately, appear irreconcilable, but which
Marx, drawing selectively from them all, fused into a new vision
which overcame their contradictions in a way that seemed
simultaneously to numberless people to
11. Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” Basic Writings, p. 289.
12. Jerome Balmuth, Introduction to Marxist Social Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. xxvii.
13.
Istvan Mészaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London:
Merlin Press, 1972), p. 113.
142
solve the contradictions of their own existence. In this fact lies the exoneration of Marx from the charge of grandiosity in claiming to have unified philosophy with the actual world, for the ability of his world view to find converts did not depend on philosophical sophistication, though without it the Marxist view would never have found its completed form.
The earliest and most decisive influences on Marx were double: the idealist philosophic-historical construction of Hegel’s system and the actual climate of revolutionary hopes in which he came of age. His formative years in the Germany of the late 1830's were spent among the “Young Hegelians,” “who saw themselves living in a general atmosphere of crisis and impending catastrophe,” [14] and who found the refutation of Hegel’s conservative quietism in his own description of history as a dialectical progression marked by revolutionary periods where the contradictions of a preceding age produced their own negation in a radically new synthesis. Thus they wished to use the critical weapons he had given them for what they called the “realization of philosophy,” the democratic reform of the still feudal and absolutist Germany which, as the young Marx said, had shared in all the restorations of Western Europe and none of its revolutions, and which was, of all these nations, the most philosophically advanced and the most politically backward. The subsequent suppression of the liberal press by the Prussian government drove many of the would-be reformers back to purely theoretical discussions, but drove others—Marx among them—into exile to continue the fight from abroad. As a matter of fact, the gathering of the forces of reaction could only encourage a man of Marx’s temperament, who felt revolution crackle in the air as it grew more oppressive: “Let the dead bury and mourn their dead. In contrast, it is enviable to be the first to go alive into the new life; and this shall be our lot.” In this same letter of 1843 he wrote of Germany: “It is only its own desperate situation that fills me with hope.” [15]
During
this same period Marx read and absorbed the insights of Feuerbach’s
Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy, which was to
give him his strategy for the demystification of Hegel by turning
Hegel’s own critical categories against him. Feuerbach, in an
earlier book on Christianity, had already given an account of
religion as the alienation of man’s own powers and capacities by
their projection onto a supernatural being; in his Theses he
extended this argument to Hegelian philosophy, asserting that Hegel’s
view was merely a rationalist’s religion that reversed the real
order of things with its identifi-
14. David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan & Company, 1973), p. 35.
15.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 63.
143
cation of an Absolute Spirit as the ultimate source of history and the material world. According to Hegel, history had been the evolution of this Spirit, or Idea, working unconsciously through man; in the final development of self-consciousness in his own philosophy, the Spirit becomes conscious of itself, and through cognition recovers the world as its own objectification, thereby closing the hostile gap between subject and object, negating the object whose very presence had set a limit to and thereby negated the infinite freedom of the subject. In this Absolute Knowledge, as Hegel called it (actually a rather mad solipsism), the spirit simultaneously knows itself as it knows the world to be its own materialization; the object world is dissolved in subjectivity in the identity of subject and object which is the Absolute Spirit in full possession of itself. This, for Hegel, was the transcendence of alienation―alienation being one of his key concepts which expressed the loss of self through its objectification, a loss which is only overcome in full consciousness of that objectification as such. But for Feuerbach, Hegel's philosophy is not the cure but rather a symptom of alienation, for like religion it projects an Infinite―which is really an abstraction from the collective life of finite human beings―and gives to its own creation an illegitimate ontological status, thereby alienating man from his own free being which seems merely the predicate of an Absolute Being. Hegel, according to Feuerbach, had simply reversed reality: thought arises from being and not the other way around. Thus philosophy must begin where all thought begins—with man’s actual, finite life, with his material and sensuous existence. The significant relation of man is to other men; Feuerbach ends with a humanism that asserts that man overcomes his alienation when he discovers his identity with other men in a loving I-Thou relationship.
Marx,
while concurring in the humanistic reversal of Hegel’s categories,
departs somewhat from Feuerbach’s standpoint, for he feels that
Feuerbach remains too abstract in his discussion, rescuing an
abstract, generalized man from an abstract Absolute; if
thought is the predicate of being, then thinking must begin with
man’s particular being in the world―that
is, in his political, and ultimately his economic relations with
other men at any moment in time. Marx’s desire to politicize
Feuerbach’s reversal of Hegel’s idealism comes first; it was the
influence of the socialist and communist theories which he met in
full force in Paris, where he settled in the fall of 1843, together
with his reading there of English political economy and French
political history, that convinced him that economic relations lay at
the center of human history, and that in them Jay the key to man’s
alienation and to the way to transcendence of that alienation. If the
necessity to demystify Hegel seems a peculiar obsession in these
philosophers, it must be
144
remembered that his dialectic of history was a revolutionary view to which we have now become so accustomed that, like all thought paradigms which have been absorbed, its source has become shrouded and its conclusions have come to seem self-evident. Yet it was Hegel who first
conceived of history as it were in two dimensions: the horizontal, in which the phenomena of different spheres of activity, occurring among different peoples belonging to the same stage of development, are seen to be broadly interconnected in some unitary pattern, which gives each period its own individual “organic,” recognizably unique character; and the vertical dimension, in which the same cross-section of events is viewed as part of a temporal succession, as a necessary stage in a developing process, in some sense contained and generated by its predecessor in time, which is itself seen already to embody, although in a less developed state, those very tendencies and forces whose full emergence makes the later age that which it ultimately comes to be. [16]
This sense of history as a totality, interrelated in all its parts, tied to the notion of its evolution (which included the organic necessity of revolution in the process) as a purposive activity, made it possible to see all systems as historically contingent but without the loss of all values in an overriding relativism, for if a common purpose could be discerned behind all of history’s contingent manifestations, then human history became intelligible and meaningful at the same stroke. The flaw in Hegel’s system, however, was precisely that he attributed that purposive activity to an Absolute Spirit, historically manifest in the Spirit of various ages and nations, which he felt had come to its culmination in his time and in his system. When Marx rescued this historicism from the mystical, when he gave its purpose a human source, he destroyed it as a determinism and established it as a radical instrument of change, in which man is seen as both the creator and the end of his own history. It was Marx who came to see all aspects of human activity in an age as reciprocally determining each other, rather than as reciprocally determined and united by non-human Spirit; man’s purpose, which lay behind this history, could only be sought in the material existence through which he―by his very nature—must realize himself.
For
Marx, as for Hegel, history and consciousness were converging; for
Hegel, this convergence was the swallowing of objective history by
developed self-consciousness; for Marx, on the contrary,
consciousness would lose its separateness in material action with
which it was becom-
16.
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment,
3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 46-47.
145
ing coincident.
SOURCE:
Wilner, Eleanor. Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore; London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 140-146.
INTRODUCTION
1
1
THE COLLECTIVE EYE 4
Vision
as an Agent of Recurrent and Radical Change in Preliterate Societies
2
THE UNCOMMON EYE 47
Vision
in the Poetry of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats
3
THE STORM’S EYE 135
Karl
Marx and Vision in a Troubled World
BIBLIOGRAPHY
185
INDEX
193
Note: The author yields interesting characterizations in the chapter on Marx, not least about the social, political, and material context, influences, motivations, and early development of Marx himself. Note also the limitations of Sartre, the mention of Richard Wright (unification of the objective with lived experience), the strengths and limitations of Hegel and Feuerbach. Also note the juxtaposition of a materialist worked-out world view by Marx and its mass appeal as myth, as Wilner asserts.
Wilner goes on to discuss the 1944 Paris Manuscripts at length, addressing Marx’s critique of Hegel and focusing on the concept of alienation, and linking the overcoming of alienation according to Marx, with Blake (p. 151, with further Blake references on pages 157 and 160). WIlner largely does justice to Marx, even highlights Marx’s affirmation of individuality (p. 158).
Héros existentialistes dans l'oeuvre littéraire de J.-P. Sartre: texte bilingue
= Ekzistencialistaj herooj en la literatura verkaro de J.-P. Sartre
de Colette Llech-Walter
Ludwig Feuerbach: A Bibliography
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