In Between and Outside, Difference and Dialectics

[Some of the PhD programs I applied to wanted to know more about my person and how it has shaped the kind of work that I do. This is the statement of “personal history and philosophy” I wrote in addition to the “purpose of study.”]

I was born in cosmopolitan Manila, capital of the Philippines, between two so-called “ethnic communities.” I lived most of my life in that milieu referred to in official state records as “Filipino-Chinese,” lacking both the “nativeness” of the Filipino and the “elite” status of the Chinese. In grade school I remember being chosen as a speaker in an event celebrating Philippine independence and the revolutionary struggle against Spain. My history teacher had picked me to be the Filipino “representative” (to mirror the Filipino rebel leaders) because of my diligence and my brown skin. I will never forget, however, that I was not really what she was looking for. My small Chinese eyes, she remarked, betrayed me.

This uncanny position in between characterized many of my interactions in early life that I can only identify now. In college, for example, “native” “Filipinos” had the stereotype of the “Chinese” as good with numbers, obsessed with business, and dismissive (if not disdainful) of Filipino culture. My “native” classmates thought I was one of them. I could not speak Chinese, however, and I did better on minor classes in the humanities while struggling in business courses required by my major. At the same time, I could not understand some expressions my “Filipino” friends used and was not familiar with some typical activities. Interacting with both groups failed, as it were, to make me think of myself as belonging to either one—on the contrary only heightening the problems of identity I felt.

Ironically enough, this can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that there is virtually no identity politics in the Philippines. Even as it is a very diverse “nation-state,” for some reason, Filipinos don’t really talk about ethnic differences (at least not formally). When riding the jeep, for example, while it is commonplace to find two Filipinos who could not look any more different from each other, there is no way to talk about such things or to raise such issues (much less claim one as more “Filipino” than the other). People simply do not think about it, much less bother with it. After all, were differences to be pointed out, many fine grades of distinction would have to be considered: for example, between the Spanish-Filipinos (the mestizos), the Filipino-Americans (the Fil-Ams), and within the “truly” “native” “Filipinos” the many different tribes (originating from different regions) incorporated in that entity, not to mention the uncertain status of the Muslims (the Moros) in the south and the somewhat unassimilated but homegrown “Chinese” (and, mixed with the “native” Pinoys, the Chinoys). Not to be forgotten, of course, are the intermarriages and mixtures between these already mixed groups (like myself). Thus I grew up finding no sense (or use) in so-called “identity categories” at the same time that I felt sharply my own singular difference. This is partly to account for, I think, my aversion to large, fixed, exclusive categories and attraction to syncretic combinations, singular performances, and molecular differences.

The feeling I had of being in between—an outsider—did not merely have to do with ethnicity. I never did understand how my father, the son of Chinese immigrants and who could barely speak Tagalog (the dominant dialect that serves as the basis of the national language), was able to develop an “understanding” with my mother, a “Filipina” from the province of Pampanga for whom Tagalog was a second language and who could not speak Chinese. The moments I spent with my father were moments in which he was trying to learn Tagalog. He also passed away early in life and was not able to teach me Chinese. My mother, on the other hand, taught me my “first language,” Tagalog, although in conversations with family she herself used her own mother tongue, Kapampangan (from her province). In grade school, I encountered, of course, that other dominant language, English, an unofficial “official” language of the country in which I was for the most part educated (although not in the way that the rich were; hence my accent).

From very early on in life, then, I existed amidst many, shall we call, different “traditions.” Which one is my own?, I never really could tell. Other than identity, however, there were also issues of power, palpable to me from the very beginning. It struck me that, on the surface, one can be thought to be part of a dominant group (“He is part Chinese . . .”) yet, in reality, not have much power (my father did do a lot of business, as a traveling businessman of sorts). Similarly, one can indeed possess substantial power (“I speak fluent Tagalog, the major language of the country”), but, as I realized later, only within a certain context (“You’re abroad. What is your Tagalog worth now?”). In my experience, at least, I felt as though a shifter, occupying positions in the majority or the minority according to the time, place, and situation I was in.

Compounding this shifting position in power is the inability to fully identify with not only one’s “natural group,” as it were, based on one’s “inherent” characteristics, but also with the political ideologies or causes in which one believes. So-called “left-wing movements” in the Philippines, for example, demand of the state to curb economic inequality. This is partnered, however, with the conservative appeal to traditional “Filipino” values in response to the globalizing and modernizing pull of the West, which, due to some admiration I have for the West, prevents me from pledging full solidarity with the “national” leftist movement. The absence of men and the preponderance of women (my mom, aunts, sisters, cousins, nannies) in my life has also, despite my somewhat successful education in the performance of the “masculine” gender, affected my desires such that to an extent I feel the stirrings of feminine sexuality—which keeps me even more at odds with the movement I am supposed to belong. It seems as though there is always something that keeps me from identifying and belonging. Less a matter of choice than simply the way that my life has worked out, again and again I am relegated to the outside.

Studying the Cultural Libidinal-Political Economy

[A revised version of the “purpose of study” I sent out when applying for the PhD, written with the feedback of professors, friends, and family]

I have taken a long and unusual route to decide what kind of work to do for the PhD. Partly this is due to my Third World background. Focused on financial concerns and lacking predecessors in my family, I had only later in life considered a career in the humanities. More important, however, was my feeling that academic departments were artificially divided, which left me confused as to where to pursue the scholarship I was interested in. This is perhaps not unfortunate. In the process, I was trained in the intellectual frameworks used in economics and history (my major and minor in college) as well as in literature and continental philosophy (in which I will obtain my MAs).

The complex intermingling of these disciplines gave my research interest its present form, which attained coherence in graduate school. After a few years of serious study, the common thread that emerged in my work is the capitalist cultural, political, and economic social formation. The lasting influence appears to be Karl Marx, especially in his critique of the political economy of his day that, in my undergraduate years, were imbued in me as (neo)classical and (neo)liberal economics. I will never forget my first encounters with Marx in graduate school when the issues he raised clashed with the economic dogma I was educated in. At first economics and Marxist criticism seemed diametrically opposed, until I realized that Marx was only taking the work of political economy to its full conclusion by, ironically enough, looking at what it took for granted as “natural” and relegated to the outside.

This intellectual background developed in me a sharp eye insatiably curious about the workings of the capitalist social economy. Like Marx (with Nietzsche), I am interested in tracing the genealogy of political economies. This would help me, I think, shed light into the capitalism of our day, specifically to its deliberate construction and the symptoms that accompany it: e.g. consumerism, inequality, globalization, imperialism, and revolution. Especially interesting to me in this regard are the evolving dynamics of power and desire that maintain and change the way in which the social is organized. More than Marx, however, I would like to pay attention to components of the social formation other than the economic. This perhaps betrays the influence of literary theory (mainly structuralism and philosophies of language) and cultural Marxism (mostly the Frankfurt School). I believe that equally potent in the social economy are cultural artifacts/performances—“discursive” ones such as literature, popular culture, politics; “material” ones such as social institutions, family structure, city shapes, tools, and bodies—which sometimes lead to culture wars. These “cultural” matters, I believe, are pertinent objects of study, especially in how they reinforce and contradict the strictly “economic.”

My reading of Marx and approach to the social has tended to be influenced by “postmodern” thought. I find the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, for example, pertinent in stressing not only class divisions but also contentions in sexuality and race (and the subdivisions therein). Focusing on these molecular aspects not only bring in other traditions (e.g. psychoanalysis and bastard philosophies and anthropologies) into the inquiry but also allows a more comprehensive analysis by, among other things, raising issues not only of material things but also of the intellect and desire, providing a fuller picture of what is a libidinal-political cultural economy. Another influence is Michel Foucault with his dissociation of power from particular persons or orders. It is arguable whether these thinkers are in fact “postmodern,” but there is in them, I find, attempts to refuse definiteness or systematic accessibility in order to think flows in their complexity. This shadow of Nietzsche over Hegel in these thinkers, I feel, is a promising supplement to (or is perhaps a trace of) Marx’s own work. This is not to say that I have not been influenced by “modern” schools. In fact, if I had to list my theoretical/philosophical influences, they would include critical Marxism, deconstructed psycho/schizoanalysis, Nietzschean poststructuralism, and Heideggerian phenomenology—the “modern” and the “postmodern” in monstrous combinations.

Inquiry into the conflicts inherent in capitalism, however, would remain incomplete if it examined only the conflicts between how capitalism is thought about. That, one can argue (as Marx did with political economy), is still remaining within the established system. Responses not solely intellectual have been and are being mounted against the “system,” whether they be effective or counterproductive. Examples include past and ongoing political struggles and social movements, especially those that assert ethnic and state nationalisms and fascisms, religious belief, and lifestyle and gender identities. These things must also be thought, I think, especially when it comes to how sometimes they emulate the workings of power and desire in the very order that they seek to undermine. Like capitalism itself, I would like to submit its discontents to theoretical inquiry.

Spontaneous Generation and Capitalist Capture

I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction:

In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human worker, which as independent existences are then measured and valued numerically, is in fact a pervasive phenomenon in the capitalist political economy. Equally widespread is excess, which economics, the political economy’s official science, records as profit. Marx thinks the phenomenon differently as surplus value resulting from the processes of alienation and valorization. Surplus value, in turn, is connected by Marx to the further but no less marked phenomenon of recurrent crises, recognized by economics as a structural feature of the capitalist system.

There is, in a sense, a consensus between Marx’s thought and mainstream economics, originating as this latter does from the political economy of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, which is precisely the target of Marx’s critique. In both strands of thinking about the economy, there is the recognition, taken almost for granted, that there is excess: there is more in the end than was there in the beginning. It is assumed, in other words, that the product has more value than what was put in its production. The disagreement lies rather on how this excess originates (where it comes from). This is a question worth raising not only because it clarifies the nature of the excess and its production (which then may have significant consequences over its distribution), but, more importantly, because this excess itself is that upon which the social formation is founded and rests (and as such sheds light on its rules and relations).

This thesis sets against each other the economic and Marxist claims on excess. As its official science, economics takes the capitalist economy as a given (as the ‘natural’ state of the economy, as it were) and explains excess as savings on costs resulting from the strategic planning of capitalist agents, whose point of view, in studying economic phenomena, modern economics takes. Marx, in a historicist move, argues that capitalism is but one political economy among many, where the facts assumed by the likes of Ricardo, such as the savings supposedly reaped by capitalist planning, are, far from given, attributable to a particular systemic formation (a political event) of social relations and materials into an economy. This systemic social formation that comes to be called capitalism, Marx argues, involves at its core the exploitation of labor, in which capitalists expropriate the surplus value that laborers produce, appropriate it as their profits, which is then accumulated as additional capital.

Initially these ideological claims seem irreconcilable and mutually exclusive. While this thesis takes the view that something similar to what Marx refers to as exploitation in fact takes place in the capitalist social formation, a fundamental mechanism covered over by the naturalizing mystifications of political economy and revealed only through a historicist stance like that of Marx, I argue that the roles implied by that power mechanism are not mutually exclusive and, as such, the acts of ‘exploitation’ are not rigidly designatable to either only capital or labor, as Marx claims. I argue that a further standpoint beyond historicism is called for to account for the contribution, in addition to that of labor (whose point of view, directly opposed to economics’, Marx takes), of capital to the system, not to mention those by other elements, including non-human ones.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (sometimes with Félix Guattari), combined with insights from complexity and organization theory, provides this necessary standpoint. Refusing to take the capitalist ‘socius’ as natural, taking it, like Marx, as historical, Deleuze nonetheless provides some metaphysical grounding through the abstract process that he describes underlies all political economies, namely the assemblage of different elements into a unified, consistent, and productive whole that is the social formation. Thereby exploitation is revealed as a concrete actualization of the virtual process that Deleuze calls capture, an actualization specific to the historical socius that is capitalism.

More importantly, exploitation or capitalist capture is revealed to presuppose a spontaneous generation of excess. As such, exploitation does not exhaust all the productive capacities of the system and is but one potential source of further values among others. As Deleuze is quick to point out, however, all the (economic) potentials presupposed to be spontaneously generated are inseparable from the (political) process of capture that subordinates values to the dominant element in the system (e.g. to capital). Marx thus has some warrant to assert that exploitation is fundamental not only to the workings of the capitalist system but, more importantly, to the production of excess.

My inquiry into the nature of excess in capitalism is thus both historical and metaphysical. A historical standpoint towards the social formation is assumed to avoid taking the structural arrangements that lead to certain economic phenomena (such as savings), often reified by economics, as natural. At the same time, certain abstract processes, such as the formation of the assemblage (that generates excess), are recognized for their virtual reality in all social formations, although they appear in historically different forms (e.g. as surplus value or profit in capitalism) in which the potentials actualized are different.

The approach I take, then, reverses that of traditional political economy (which has evolved into modern economics). Rather than taking the capitalist political economy and its historical phenomena as natural, what I recognize is the metaphysical (and thus universal and ‘eternal’) status of the virtual assemblage that generates excess. Taking the assemblage as the abstract structure or framework (‘abstract machine’ or ‘Idea’ in Deleuze’s terms) that underlies all concrete and historically specific political economies, I draw from Deleuze’s philosophy to show that capitalism is an assemblage that generates excess. The metaphysical conclusions derived from this insight, the processes that will be shown are the true givens of any study of the political economy, will then inform the second look at phenomena at work in the capitalist political economy, especially the savings and profit (and sometimes loss) that economics takes as given, even ‘natural’ (or as resulting from the system that economics takes is the ‘natural’ configuration of the economy).

Strange Realities

I finished teaching Marx in class today. We had started out with his philosophy where I traced Marx’s intellectual development (in the context of Hegel and Feuerbach) and the historical materialist method that he developed (I offered a schematic and a narrative based on a Deleuzian flat ontology made possible by Heidegger’s notion of mode). We then made a detour into Althusser (to elaborate on the State and ideology) and, taking material from my thesis, finally discussed Marx’s critique of political economy (the forms of activity, material, and value in the capitalist political economy; labor and capital at the level of forces, classes, personifications, and persons; profit in exchange from the exploitation of labor; the need to realize surplus, crises of overproduction, and the changing form of capitalism). I ended the class with a brief and intentionally vague sketch of “species-being” and what Marx describes as the “free development of the human individual” in “communist society.”

There is a recent incident that illustrates what Marx critiques about the political economy that, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to raise in class (so I do it here). In late 2008, in lieu of the current economic crisis, former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan was called to testify in Congress. He had a revealing exchange with California congressman Henry Waxman:

Towards the end of his interrogation, Waxman asks Greenspan, “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wished you had not made?” Greenspan circles around the question, proffering his own definition of “ideology.” Greenspan who, consistently in the past, has uttered the term only with bitter contempt, identifying it with those who (like Naomi Klein)—unlike Greenspan and his experience (40 years in the Fed)—were somehow misinformed or misguided, perhaps even, for some tendentious reason, willfully misrepresenting reality. Those who—unlike Greenspan and the objective “science” he was a part of (along with University of Chicago guru Milton Friedman)—were delusionary, if not downright power-crazed totalitarian Commie. All the while as he enacted neoliberal policies (that monstrous combination of classical and Keynesian economics: deregulation, privatization, welfare cuts from the poor, wealth redistribution to the rich . . .) not only at home but abroad in a truly global economy.

In the debate with Naomi Klein (in late 2007), Greenspan retorts: “First of all, ideology is not what I hold. I try to learn what are the facts, and I let my opinions, judged on the facts, not by some preconception, which I regret is what ideology as a notion means.” In contrast, in front of Waxman: “Ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology.”

Waxman is not distracted by the evasions. When Greenspan says, “I found a flaw—” Waxman interrupts in disbelief, “A flaw in the reality . . .?” Greenspan responds with complex formulations. Mindful of the time, Waxman finally demands, “In other words, you found that [. . .] your ideology was . . . not right?” “I was shocked,” says Greenspan, and (finally!): “Precisely.” Yes, I was in ideology.

That is classic! The head of the financial system—dismissive of “ideology” (except for his)—faced with a crisis he is responsible for is forced to recount in public that, as he defined the financial landscape of the world of the past 40 years, he did it with—in—ideology . . . The man possessed of oh so much certainty, hubris, authority, and power, the chief captain of the “free market” who has always posed his stance as “natural,” objective, a “science”—now forced to admit that his view of the world was (like the rest of us) but an ideology. That has got to be one of the most dramatic moments in recent American history—and no one even had to write it!

Greenspan of course could only do all this afterwards, with some reflection, after he had stepped down from power—and when forced (by a crisis!). As Althusser says of ideology:

Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself.

Greenspan could never say, “I am in ideology,” (science itself, I believe, is ideological, and economics, moreover, is not a science!) because then, being inside, he would not see it. (When he says, “I was in ideology,” well, what good does that do?) What makes these free-marketeers even more exceptional (in their being ideological) is that they are particularly self-assured and forceful in insisting that No, they are not in ideology (They are just letting be, laissez-faire!)—and their words (like scientists) carry weight, not to mention that they are (frequently) in positions of power. It is of course not only their discourse that appears as natural, but the capitalist political economy itself of which their discourse is the official science, organized as it is according to neoliberal principles. (Hence the distinct character and potency of Marx’s critique.)

But at least Greenspan was forced to admit. At least (if we can believe him) now Greenspan knows and, more importantly, we (should) know—Which is less than we can say for Ben Bernanke, Greenspan protégé, the new Fed chairman; Henry Paulson, former investment banker, Treasury secretary to the end of the previous administration; Tim Geithner, new Treasury chief, another New York insider; Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, “Liberal” deregulators, Obama’s ear on their mouths. These people never did recant. They never were forced to swallow in public. And they continue to shape the financial and economic policy of this country.

But they did change ways. They did defy their so-called “principles.” Confronted by a meltdown (of their own doing!), free-marketeers (even if only secretly) must have swallowed—swallowed hard—enacting all those interventions in the economy.

The only thing is, their intervention only helped their former colleagues. They are in fact intervening in the economy—to help their own class!

And they are still in charge! And everyone’s shouting, “We have become Marxists!”

The world has become a circus—and the clowns are ruling, if not laughing. What to say, what to say? It is a crazy world we live in!

Addendum (Some background on the economic terms):

Responding to the laissez-faire tendencies of Smith and Ricardo’s classical economics (that argued that the economy is composed of free, equal, and rational individuals in a self-regulating market), Keynesian or Liberal economics was developed by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression to argue that, over and above the ‘free individuals’ of the classical model, the State has a role to play in the economy in speeding up the process by which it reaches equilibrium, its optimum level of activity (hence its interventionist implications). Neoclassical economics, in turn, was a response to Keynesian economics in the crises of the seventies and eighties when presidents like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher enacted policies that called for low taxes, ‘balanced’ budgets, the reversal of New Deal welfare policies, and the removal of government constraints on private business in general. The neo- in neoclassical signals that the new economics is no mere return to the past but is an advance. True enough, there was in neoclassical economics tacit acceptance that the State would (and should) intervene—if only to make sure it wouldn’t (and that businesses are duly represented). Neoliberal economics is, in many ways, the consummation of the neoclassical model as ‘liberal’ governments of the West (especially the United States) sought to transform developing economies (through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) according to its own model (systematized by the Chicago School of economists, foremost of which was Milton Freedman). In essentially enforcing policies of deregulation and privatization around the world, neoliberal economics is thus a monstrous combination of classical and Keynesian economics in that a ‘liberal’ State intervenes to enforce classical, orthodox economic principles around the world: a new liberalism, indeed. Despite the seeming variety, then, among the supposedly different strands, economics maintains the core assumption of equilibrium.

Marx’s Method: Narrative

After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way:

[Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory]

Model 2: “Narrative”

Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the first circumstance) (181). “Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other [material] things” (181). “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of [the means of production, i.e. a certain organization of the productive forces, which thereby produces] material life itself”—“an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life” (181). “Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick [for example, . . .] it presupposes the action of producing the stick” (181-2).

“The satisfaction of the first need [. . .] leads to new needs” (the second circumstance) (182). How to define need, then? How to delimit it? Not only does the (current state of the) (established order of the) social formation stimulate its own demand, stimulating further needs. What is being spoken of, after all, is not the dominant mode of production currently operative, but the first moments of history (or the first moments in all (periods) of history, in all series). Rather, “the production of new needs is the first historical fact,” like the production of the means of production itself (and thereby of material life) (182) (my emphasis). Needs generating further needs is not a phenomenon specific to the current form of the political economy. It is rather a problem of species, perhaps of “nature,” operative, as it were, in all of history, in all political economies.

“[Individuals], who daily remake their own life, begin to make other [individuals], to propagate their own kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family” (a third circumstance) (182). This reproduction, i.e. “the production of life, both of one’s own labour and of fresh life in procreation,” is both natural (an instinct) and social (taking place with other individuals) (182). Production thus entails (not only reliance on natural givens but also) the co-operation of several individuals, i.e. the engendering of social relations (the fourth circumstance), in which the (particular) mode of production corresponds with the (particular) mode of relations. The “mode of co-operation [moreover] is itself a ‘productive force,’” i.e. ‘engendering’ is itself ‘production’ in the context of generalized production (182).

“Increased needs create new social relations and the increased population [that results from that creates] new [and further] needs,” determining the status of the different social relationships created (e.g. whether the family is still primary in comparison to other social relationships created) (182). Throughout this, there is a “materialistic connection of [human individuals] with each other” (183). These four circumstances, moreover, are not “different stages [succeeding each other chronologically], but just [. . .] aspects or [. . .] moments, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today” (182). The model is thus a “narrative” only in a limited sense (in the same way that the “schematic” is representative in a limited way). There are indeed sequences traceable between the different ‘historical’ moments. No moment, however, has any necessary logical priority (in the same way that the “geographical” schematic divisions are not completely definitive).

Similarly, it would seem that “only [. . .] after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, [. . . is] man [. . . found to] possess[] ‘consciousness,’” and with it (implied) ideas and ideology in general (183) (my emphasis). “‘Spirit,’” however, is “from the start [. . .] afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter,” as exemplified (embodied?) by (i.e. which “makes its appearance in the form of”) language (183). Language, the social ‘thing’ that it is, which is “as old as consciousness, [. . . which, in fact,] is practical consciousness that exists also for other [individuals], and for that reason alone [does] it really exist[] for [one] personally as well,” reveals that consciousness and ideas in general—ideology—“only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse [i.e. relation] with other men” (183).

This still sounds (as in crude materialism) as though ideology (as embodied in language) is secondary to social relations (i.e. intercourse), but in fact “where there exists a relationship, [language, and thereby ideas, thereby ideology] exists for [an individual]” (183). As soon as there are social relations, language exists; in fact, social relations necessitate language: language co-exists with social relations. Since human intercourse or social relations (the ‘co-operation of individuals’ and their reproduction, i.e. the fourth and third moments of history) are co-existent with the previous moments of the production of needs and the means of production, it follows that consciousness, ideas, and ideology in general, which arise with social relations, also do not come after material conditions. Ideology coexists with materiality.

Marx’s Method: Schematic

Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) lays out his method of revolutionary critique in The German Ideology. Not a professional philosopher (like Kant and Hegel, or Feuerbach) and more like an intellectual journalist absorbed in political economy committed to the Revolution, Marx, drawing from the philosophical currents of his day (Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism), nonetheless achieved, through humanism, a brilliant methodological synthesis that would inform his quasi-philosophical inquiries. This method is none other than historical materialism. (Compare with the more concrete yet cruder delineation of the base and the superstructure, of which the models in this post and the following, like those by Gramsci and Althusser, are re-articulations.)

[Rembrandt's Philosopher in Meditation]

Model 1: “Schematic”

The starting point of the method is “real,” i.e. “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” (176). What is given/assumed are “men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (181). The first premise, in other words, are human beings, individuals that are materially organized and, consequently, related to nature (and each other) in structural arrangements that are modified (and have been put in place) “through the action of men” (176, 177). These individuals are set apart from other material bodies by the fact that they have consciousness and (as such?) they “produce their means of subsistence, [. . .] which is conditioned by their physical organization, [. . . in that process] indirectly producing their actual material life” (177). The starting point is thus a ‘dialectical’ relation: human beings are in concrete material conditions, which are (re-)created/organized by them.

Human production “depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence [individuals] find in existence and have to reproduce” (177). The means of subsistence are the productive forces (the what, e.g. raw materials, derived from nature and man); their nature (and the nature of their reproduction) the mode of production (the how, e.g. the household, artisanal, or factory system, defined more or less by technology, broadly speaking). The mode of production is not simply the (re)production of physical existence but is a “definite form of activity [. . .], a definite form of expressing [. . .] life” that characterizes individuals in a particular social organization (177). The mode of production, in other words, is no mere reproduction of what is necessary for survival (i.e. the bare minimum), but in being a human ‘activity’ is the mode (as in Heidegger) itself in which individuals express themselves and how they live—a mode of living/expressing/manifesting life itself—which characterize the individuals in their existence. The mode of production thereby determines not only material conditions but, included in life, the state of ideas as well.

The development of the productive forces implies developments in the division of labor (“each new productive force [. . .] causes a further development of the division of labour”), which are but “different forms of ownership” in society, i.e. a power relation (177). The history of the division of labor can be traced from the latent division in the family, to the division between citizen and slave, to the division between (agricultural) country (with peasants) and (industrial and commercial) towns (with individual labor) (178-9). There is a basic similarity in these divisions—i.e. subjection—“but the [specific] form of association and the [particular] relation of direct producers were different [in each mode] because of the different conditions of production” (179). The particular form that the power relation (politics) takes is determined by the particular form of the conditions of production (economy, which from scarcity organizes things so as to achieve efficiency and effectiveness) (and vice versa?).

The mode of production in which the last division mentioned was operative (feudalism), although there was “little division” there (only between “princes, nobility, clergy, and peasants in the country; and masters, journeymen, apprentices, and [. . .] casual labourers in the towns”), is insightful to the current mode (capitalism), particularly in the emergence, in addition to land in the country, of capital in the town as the “chief form of property,” and of individual labor simultaneous with it (179). The simultaneous emergence of capital and labor is indicative of the fact that the division of labor really is but a particular organization of ownership in society, which is represented by capital (hence with change in one comes change in the other). Links from one mode (feudalism) to the other (capitalism) imply not only shifts in the forms of politics as economic conditions change, but continuities as well, continuities that lead to breaks.

“The existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour,” i.e. to ends, wealth, property, and the ability to further ends (177-8). The division of labor, in other words, entails a particular form of the relations of production. At an even more primary level, relations are necessarily entailed by production so long as it is social, whatever its form is, with or without division in labor. “The fact is [. . .] that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations,” of which the division of labor (and the interrelation, hierarchy, and subjection implied by it) is but the exemplification (180). As such, “the social structure and [implied with it] the State [i.e. legal and political entities organizing social relations, e.g. the Constitution, laws, government institutions; politics narrowly defined] are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals [. . .] as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will” (180) (my emphasis).

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” (180). The ideal (or ideology, or, together with the State, the ideological ‘superstructure’), in other words, is interwoven with (in contrast to being a “direct efflux” of (180)) material production (and its relations). Rather than determined by the material ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ (the economy, narrowly defined) (as “sublimate” “phantoms”), individuals (possessing an active mind, as in the idealist subject) produce “their conceptions, ideas, etc.,” i.e. their ideology (180). These individuals productive of ideology, however, existing in the social, are, it must be remembered, “real, active men [. . .] conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse [i.e. the relations] corresponding to these,” i.e. conditioned by material conditions (180). These material conditions have, of course, it must also be remembered, reached a concrete determination by a historical act of organization by a collective of individuals (using, among other things, the active mind). Hence production is not only material. In a ‘dialectical’ manner, there is both material and ideational production, and it is the economy of both productions—production in general—that takes on a form as the ‘mode of production,’ that thereby defines life.

When Bombs Fall

What must it feel, in remote corners of the earth when Western bombs fall on their lands? There you are, doing your chores, getting by on a quiet day, breathing in the breeze as you think about them, the people of your house, nurturing something that happened last time, that moment, resenting something else, many things—and then BOOM! BANG! Or Krrrr . . . Whatever the hell that sound was . . .? You worry about the fields, next season’s crops . . . You call out names, loudly you think, or perhaps just in your mind, your lips moving, the tongue uttering something. It’s like your heart, like something else, something much bigger, had a fall, making you shrink. You’re gonna fall, you feel it, your weak knees, but you walk fast, “Where are they?” you mean to say, “Come back here!” and you start to cry . . .

This night’s particularly gloomy. What are they gonna do to us? is what’s on everybody’s mind. Everyone that’s left. The ones not fighting. Those who never wanted to fight. So what’s gonna happen to the water supply? Are they also gonna tax us? Will it be on paper this time? Are there gonna be tall, white men in town? They gonna marry our daughters? Our wives? I never did like the old mayor, proud, corrupt, but, you know, he was one of us. This farm has been my father’s, and his father’s, and his father’s father . . . Where is my son? Still haven’t found him, that rascal. He’ll get a beating, he’ll see . . . Something’s in my head. Something must have gotten in my head. It hurts . . . I have to lie down.

It’s been a few days since they found us. They kept us in these run-down huts, guarded. I wonder what those guns would feel like in my hands, my finger on the trigger . . . I recognize this hut that I’m in. It’s the house of that strange man in town that nobody wanted to talk to, the miser. Neat house. Proper. So this is where he’s kept everything . . . He’s not here now. They beat us up. They found out that one of us, the kid, a scholar, could speak their language. There are twelve of us here, and less than half, including the kid, the scholar, mostly men, have been talking. “So when we get an agreement, we’ll set up at the old mayor’s house, do a census, find out who didn’t . . .” “Don’t worry about the mayor. He’s dead!” “They’re not gonna stay here that long. But while they’re here, we should make sure . . .” “Fuck those rebels! Resistance fighters got nothing to do with their lives. I wanna get back to my farm!” “You, since you can understand them, you talk to them. You’ll give them our terms . . .” “I’ll be in charge of the treasury.” “Soon enough we’ll manage things on our own. A white man wouldn’t stay in this heat-stricken godforsaken land. Why would he want to? They’ll leave eventually. Or they’ll burn. Burn in hell . . .” “Give them the girls they want. Maybe they’ll give us weapons . . .” “That’s right, I lost them all, my daughters! But if I didn’t . . .” “Don’t worry about the priest. He’ll shut up. Or get shot.” “What do we do with the lands of the dead?” “Distribute equally?” “Among us.” “Amen.”

Marx’s Critique of Feuerbach’s Materialism

[Paul Cézanne's Still Life with Basket of Apples]

Karl Marx explores his relationship with Ludwig Feuerbach in the list of theses that he wrote about the master (the “Theses on Feuerbach”). In From Hegel to Marx, Sidney Hook generously provides the context of these theses (reading them alongside The German Ideology). (The majority of the quotes in this post, including those by Marx, have been taken from Hook’s book—except, that is, for the theses themselves, in which case a T followed by the number of the thesis follows the quote and the translation comes from the McLellan anthology.) By deploying a pointed critique of the materialist tradition that Feuerbach comes out of and considering it alongside (Hegelian) idealism (seemingly its antithesis), Marx came up with a brilliant methodological synthesis that is his original conception of matter and the subject: historical materialism grounded in humanism.

The basis of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach is the objection that, although materialist, Feuerbach’s philosophical approach is (in overlooking man) neither historical nor concrete. In thesis I, Marx makes the bold assertion that all previous materialisms—including Feuerbach’s—had not been able to adequately account for the human subject. Starting from its earliest inception (perhaps with the ancient atomists) and stretching all the way to Hobbes and Locke (British empiricists), Marx claims that materialism had tried to explain (in Hook’s words) “not only the composition of man’s body but the contents of his mind as resultant effects of [material] elements [e.g. atoms] and energies [e.g. either forces of movement or passions/affections] streaming into him from without” in simple cause-and-effect dynamics (274, 275). (Even Feuerbach’s materialism, which provided some active role for thought, still had, in Marx’s view, the tendency (in starting from and relying primarily on experience and the senses) of making of thinking a mere reflective affair.) Thus, in materialism, Marx notes, “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation” (T1). This excluded the possibility, indeed the reality, of the “redirective activity of man,” an activity that, to Marx, is inherent in reality (275). Against this traditional materialist conception, Marx asserts that reality is “sensuous human activity, practice, [. . .] subjective”—a conception at the heart of any revolutionary philosophy (T1).

A way out of mechanical determinism, Marx recognizes, had been sketched by the idealists through their more sophisticated account of subjectivity. “Despite the fantastic and, literally construed, unintelligible constructions of the German idealists from Kant to Hegel,” Hook notes that “their great contribution was their insight into the essential activity of mind” (275). In contrast to the materialist account of thought as a mere effect of mechanical impulse, the idealists (esp. Kant) had asserted that even the simplest perception (at its very description as a mechanical effect) involved “some active subject who approaches it with this category rather than that, with a whole set of values, assumptions, memories and anticipations which, whatever their origin, now contribute to what is seen and thought” (275). Thus “in what-was-given-to-knowledge, something was involved about the subject-to-which-it-was-given,” a subject that was no mere passive receptor of mechanical signals but was rather a subject actively involved in the perception (and perhaps even the constitution) of the object being so perceived (275).

The trouble with the idealist approach, however, was that by virtue of its idealistic activity (which attributed to it a bigger role in perception), the mind was thought to constitute/create the things that it thought about. That is to say, the idealists took not only the character but the existence of the object being thought by mind as deduced/derived from it (275). Hegel did this in the teleological narrative he tells “in which objects and subjects [a]re reconstituted in an interacting process whose constituent elements [a]re materials, furnished by nature and previous history, and activities, resulting from the psycho-physical powers of [the mind of] man in some historical context” in a process that “was supposed to have transpired in a timeless divine Subject” (276) (my emphasis). Feuerbach had, of course, in a significant materialist move, critiqued this idealistic move. Arguing against Hegel, Feuerbach asserted that “the predicates of the divine Subject [that Hegel speaks about. . . a]re nothing more than representations of the powers of the human mind, expressed in the language of metaphor and hyperbole” (alienated from themselves and made transcendent) (276). Thus the activities that Hegel attributes to God, Feuerbach points out, are really but activities of the human mind—some of which (esp. the creation of things), as anyone in a materialist setting would recognize, the mind really cannot do.

While Marx was deeply impressed by Feuerbach’s move against Hegel (in fact he performed an analogous move), Marx finds Feuerbach’s approach itself to be unsatisfactory. This is because, as Marx points out, the man that Feuerbach talks about, whenever he uses the word, is really abstract man taken out of the social and historical contexts that conditioned, among other things, how this man’s mind works. Marx calls Feuerbach’s abstract man “essential man, not men as they existed here and now, in city and country, in high estate or low—but man as such, realiter, a kind of man in which ‘a pack of scrofulous, work-worn, starving men’ were equal to other men, a type of man in the light of whose meaning all historical differences between individuals, groups, and classes were superficial accidents” (277). Thus even while Marx credits Feuerbach for wanting to look at “sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects,” he points out that “he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity” (T1).

This abstraction, Marx notes, led Feuerbach to “a blank confrontation of nature and man [of things and consciousness, which . . .] ended in a blind alley [. . . where Feuerbach, like the earlier materialists,] could not get any process started between the two except by dissolving the latter into the former” (276). Worse, Feuerbach, Marx points out, actually relapsed into (contemplative) idealism. His abstract conception of man was that of an ideal man that “could have been at any time and any place,” which, since it is “not related to the concrete needs of men in the concrete social situations in which they find themselves, [. . .] provide[s] no leverage with which to change the existing state of affairs” (279).

Marx thus found both materialist and idealist approaches troublesome. In both, he saw the common (fallacious) move in which “a relatively fixed element—matter in the one case, the subject in the other—[. . . is taken] as a starting point for the development observable in nature, man and society” (276). Marx, for his part, does not deny that he himself starts with presuppositions. Unlike materialist or idealist presuppositions, however, Marx claims that his presuppositions are “real presuppositions from which we can abstract ourselves only in imagination” (277). This is because, as Marx describes them, they are “presuppositions observable in purely empirical fashion”—thereby “real”—namely the simple fact of “individuals as they actually are, their actions, and their material conditions of life” (277). From this description of the “active life process” of men, history, Marx claims, “cease[s] to be a collection of dead facts, as it still is among abstract empiricists, or an imaginary activity of imaginary subjects as among the idealists” (277).

In his approach, Marx claims, the grand oppositional question between nature and man/mind disappears. This is because the focus is shifted towards concrete, historical needs, which, Marx claims, traverse both the material and the ideal. Hook explains:

The possibility of having needs and satisfying them, that which makes men need-ful creatures, has its explanation in the physical environment of man and the biological structure of his body. The specific forms through which these needs, both of the senses and the mind are gratified, as well as the development of these needs, are attributable to man’s social organi[z]ation. The interaction between physical conditions and social organi[z]ation is history. [. . .] Conditioned as they are by their environment, human beings can change that environment or preserve it because their activity, including thought, is an objective activity having objective effects. (278)

In other words, in shifting the question toward human needs, Marx is able to displace the dichotomy between matter and consciousness. At the same time, by paying attention to concrete needs—which can be both needs of the body and needs of the mind, which are based on both individual biology and social material conditions but, with the help of thought, depending on material conditions, are changeable by man—Marx is able to take account of both.

Feuerbach’s Materialism

[Jan van Kessel's Still Life]

In tracing the intellectual development of Karl Marx, Sidney Hook discusses, in addition to G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, foremost critic of Hegel from the left, whose materialism deeply impressed the young Marx. Analogous to Marx’s own critique, Feuerbach complains of Hegel’s idealism that its “method of deducing existence from essence, the ideal from the real, established nothing which it did not already assume at the outset” (226). “Hegel [moreover] could only sustain the appearance of observing this method by systematically distorting the character of sense perception, by hustling it, so to speak, out of the world of space and time and material organisms into a timeless realm of meaning” (226).

In order to substantiate these claims, Feuerbach deploys a pointed critique of Hegel’s systematic philosophy. Hegel’s Absolute Idea, “a meaningful organic totality perpetually renewing itself outside of time,” is, Feuerbach argues, not the conclusion drawn from the supposedly objective, universal, culturally presuppositionless philosophy that Hegel develops, but is rather the “real beginning, [the] real presupposition” with which Hegel starts (227-8). Granted, systematic thought in which the universe is taken as an organic totality—where everything is related to everything, the end is already contained in the beginning and the end necessarily leads back to the beginning—indeed permits the move by which Hegel posits the Absolute Idea in the beginning to find it again in the end (228). Feuerbach contends, however, that this organic systematicity—on which Hegel’s whole philosophy hangs—is neither tentatively adopted nor definitely proven but is instead “an assumption dogmatically begged to begin with [by Hegel] and not submitted to controls of experience” (228).

There are two opposed emphases here: idea and the system for Hegel; experience and sense perception for Feuerbach. As former follower-turned-foremost critic of Hegel, Feuerbach sought to overturn Hegel by standing him up on his feet, asserting the primacy of sense perception. The abstract ideas with which Hegel, standing on his head, begins has, Feuerbach argues, led Hegel to construct a system in which all things (matter) are made to be fitted (thereby distorting their nature or ignoring certain parts) to the developments of an Absolute Idea, which, as Pure Being, has no determination—and thereby no apparent/provable connection to the material world in which, Feuerbach stresses, we live. In order to devise this connection (uniting pure, absolute Idea to the many different things in the world), Feuerbach argues that Hegel distorts the workings of sense perception.

Hegel does this when, through a discussion of the demonstratives this, here, and now (which show that all words connote meanings inexhaustible by the particular context in which they are applied), he rejects particulars (claiming that they are in fact universals) and concludes that “the universal is the truth of sense-certainty and since speech can only express this truth, then in so far as we desire to refer to a sensory fact, it is impossible to say what we mean” (229-30). What Hegel implies by this is that “sense-perception [. . . is really but] a meaningless shadow irrelevant to knowledge, an obscuring veil through which reason must penetrate to discover the truth” (230). Against this, Hegel suggests that “[material] things [. . . are] congeries of universal completely knowable and completely logical,” thereby accessible by/through the pure, absolute Idea, traced through systematic philosophy.

Against Hegel, Feuerbach asserts that sense perception is “the primary medium through which the intractabilities of nature manifested themselves” (226). Thus for Feuerbach philosophy has to start “with life, in all its concrete wants and needs,” with sensory experience as the primary access to it (paving the way to knowledge), without which “there could be no recognition of the differences between things” which is what characterizes them in their materiality (which is the mode in which they begin, where the this and that that Hegel has refuted are, Feuerbach points out, really but logical categories, objects of pure thought whose unreality does not cancel the reality of the objects of the senses that they refer to) (229, 230). Systematic knowledge is of course not possible with sense perception alone. Feuerbach points out, however, that this does not mitigate the fact that sense perception is where the inquiry must begin (as happens in science, in touch as it is with ordinary experience, in contrast to philosophy that seems unable to “derive its problems from practical life,” thereby causing it to regard sense perception “as an obscuring element hostile to thought”) (231).

Schelling had likewise leveled a critique against Hegel, but, unlike Feuerbach, from a religious and reactionary perspective. Departing from the idealistic tendency to conceive of nature as a construction of the self, Schelling had asserted that nature is “independent of, [. . .] yet related to, the self” (a position he later reversed as he identified thought and being and asserted that the world was a product of divine imagining), an other self that is “only the visible organism of [human] understanding,” which is to say, of imaginative perception (233, 234). Both Schelling and Feuerbach thus stress “feeling or affective experience as a necessary element in the knowledge process” (236). Unlike Schelling, however, Feuerbach “does not contrast feeling with reason, nor hold it up as a superior organ of intellectual vision capable of giving true conclusions about the world not vouchsafed by science” (236). For Feuerbach, “whatever unity exists in the world must be discovered by the methods of science, not by intuition, imaginative synthesis, or any other surrogate for analysis and experiment” (236). Thus when Feuerbach refers to feeling, he is not using the word as “a mode of knowledge of the One, God, Universe,” but “as a concept of empirical psychology” (i.e. as synonymous with sensation?) (236).

Marx’s Difference from Hegel

[Peter-Paul Rubens' The Prophet Elijah Receiving Bread and Water from an Angel]

In From Hegel to Marx, Sidney Hook traces the intellectual development of Karl Marx within the context of the dominant Hegelian philosophy of his day. While Karl Marx was indeed highly influenced by the systematic, totalizing, and absolute philosophy of Hegel, in the first part of Hook’s book (contrary to the author’s own intention) it is illustrated how it is in his critiques of and deviations from Hegel where Marx demonstrates his genius, paving the way for the potent materialistic, truly historical, and revolutionary philosophy that has come to be known as Marxism.

The first point of difference between Hegel and Marx is both thinkers’ conception of philosophy. For Hegel, philosophy is an activity of thought, a self-enclosed and self-sufficient Nachdenken (German for reflection, literally thinking-after) whose purpose is the clarification of what has happened (22-3).  “To clarify an event is [for Hegel none other than] to explain it in terms of logical necessity [. . . in which the event is] fitted into some developing whole [i.e. the system],” in that process revealing its meaning, which can be no other than what it is (i.e. what has happened) (23). “The task of the philosopher is [thus] to discover that meaning [which is none other than God, or Spirit, or Mind: Geist], progressively correcting his conceptions after more and more of the web of cosmic structure [as Geist, through man, comes to know itself] has been disclosed to him” (23). Thus philosophy’s only goal is (self-)understanding, in which “the world comes to self-consciousness and man rests in God” (23).

Marx retorts that this kind of philosophy is really a retrospective rationalization of the actual, existing state of things that, contrary to how Hegel portrays it, was really conditioned by the social, which is material. In other words, Hegel’s philosophy is a teleological metaphysics that makes explanation justification and all history a theodicy (in which evil is the “counterpoint in a metaphysical harmony”) (23). Against this, Marx proposes theory as the guide to practice in which practice is the life of theory (in which, as Lukács reads it, theory is grounded in and adjusts to reality just as reality adjusts to theory as reality becomes conscious of its inherent revolutionary potentials) (24). For Marx, then, philosophy is this “unity” (this dialectical materialist relationship, Lukács would say) between theory and practice—praxis—in which philosophy is immediately (in) reality (i.e. there is no remove between virtual philosophy and actual materiality, Deleuze would say), in which philosophy, in a very real sense, is real.

Thus for Marx what the philosopher does is not contemplative evaluation (as Hegel would have it) but involved social activity contemporary with the material state of things. In fact, ironically enough, Hegel’s contemplative philosophy itself (like all contemplative philosophies), Marx points out, is not “removed from life” (25). Making current society the object of philosophy (esp. a teleological one that claims that the said state is the highest so far, necessary towards final perfection) with which philosophy does nothing but reflect about (esp. as some form of prototype or paradigmatic model, which philosophies tend to do to their objects) (esp. a philosophy that identifies “reason” with “reality” (20)) is to accept that actually existing state of things—as the State of things, the way that things absolutely are; and as something acceptable, the way that things should be—in the process (doubly) legitimizing that current state.

In contrast, for Marx, “the purpose of [. . .] social theor[y is] to provide that knowledge of social tendencies which would most effectively liberate revolutionary action” (25). Thus “philosophy is not retrospective insight into the past [but] prospective anticipation of the future [in which theory] explains why the present is what it is in order [in practice] to make it different”: i.e. (echoing Ludwig Feuerbach) not only to interpret the world (no matter how differently), but to change it—to pave the way (not just for Hegel’s freedom but) for social liberation (25).

While Hegel and Marx, then, put process at the center of their conceptions of philosophy, Marx’s conception of it was not “cramped by his system” as Hegel’s was (where change was chained to its conception as “the form in which an unchanging absolute exhibited itself” that was already arrested in the Prussian state, portrayed by Hegel as “the closest embodiment of the absolute”) since for Marx, the process was “an activity of matter, not of spirit”; hence human agents may bring it towards further development in actually existing material conditions (55). That is to say, for Marx, “the process of social development has no ends to reali[z]e which are not the ends willed by men” (58). One’s willing alone does not suffice to bring a material condition about, however. “What is willed must be continuous with a discovered situation which is not willed but accepted. When it is willed must be determined by objective possibilities in the situation” (58).

This difference in conception of philosophy roots from a difference in political orientation. Although in identifying reason (Vernunft) with reality (Wirklichkeit) Hegel did in a later work distinguish reality from the existent (i.e. that which is in existence: the actual, to use Deleuzian terminology) and clarified that “not all existence was real” (since the “truly real [is] the perfectly ideal, the logically complete, the norm”), this was self-defeating since the implication that “the existing state was reasonable only in so far as it was real [and not all that was existing was]” was tainted by the fact of Hegel working as the official state philosopher of Prussia, which in other places he had lauded as the next, more perfect stage (even the epitome) of human history, revealing what particular state he thought of  as “real” (as opposed to merely existent) and the criteria of reason (which, contrary to his pronouncements, here proves not universal) to which he subscribed (i.e. Prussian reasoning that “reasonably” legitimized the Prussian state) (20).

On top of this, there are of course Hegel’s pronouncements on sovereignty as (in Marx’s paraphrase) the “absolute self-determination of the will”—hence, sovereignty’s exaltation as the highest value—specifically, sovereignty that “must be individuali[z]ed” wherein “only a subject, i.e. what has mind, can be a true individual”—in which Hegel argues that “in this world that which is both a subject and an individual must be a ‘person,’ [. . . which, Hegel continues, is none other than] der Monarch”—specifically, the enlightened Prussian monarch (21). It is not only, as Marx points out, that “with the will of the monarch lies the final decision” (21). Rather, for Hegel, “the final decision of will is—the monarch” (21). This is really but an expression of Hegel’s conception of individuality as “an articulation of both the logic and the ethics of the whole,” in which “the higher the system [is,] the truer the individual” (hence “the family is more of an individual than its members, the community more of an individual than the family, etc.” and hence “the only completely ‘real’ individuality is the Absolute”) (42). In the process, Hegel is able to portray as the highest expression of freedom (so far), thereby legitimizing, the state in which he happened to be the official philosopher.