''Nature' is what we see'
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
'Nature' is what we see --
The Hill -- the Afternoon --
Squirrel -- Eclipse -- the Bumble bee --
Nay -- Nature is Heaven --
Nature is what we hear --
The Bobolink -- the Sea --
Thunder -- the Cricket --
Nay -- Nature is Harmony --
Nature is what we know --
Yet have no art to say --
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 - 1831). 'Philosophy of Nature'.
Karl Marx, (1818 – 1883), in his youth presented us with a critique of Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature', ('The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature', 1841, for which he gained his PhD), not something that Marxist critics have given much attention to despite recognising the importance of Hegel for Marx. Alfred Schmidt, (1931 – 2012), author of 'The Concept of Nature in Marx', refers to the 'Philosophy of Nature' most often but plays down its significance in the formulation of Marx’s own materialist philosophy of nature and is not so far off replicating the very Hegelian views that Marx is critiquing and yet the critique of the 'Philosophy of Nature' in Marx’s Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts foreshadows Marx’s later stated intention in 'Capital' to turn Hegel on his head and it affirms not only a theory of the ontological reality of the material world but a dialectics of nature whose importance for Marx extends from the Paris Manuscripts to 'Capital' and Marx’s Naturphilosophie criticizes Hegel’s replacement of natural history with a philosophy of nature derived from logical categories and affirms Friedrich Engels', (1820 – 1895), later view that natural history should be restored by discovering dialectics in nature rather than imposing dialectics upon it.
Schmidt's extensive reference to the Naturphilosophie is largely for the purpose of criticizing Engels and largely fails to address the concluding section of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that contains a specific critique of Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature' and the Dissertation which Schmidt mentions merely once echoes the substance and very phraseology of the 'Philosophy of Nature', indeed the Thesis Notebooks contain three separate outlines of it so one wonders about the reticence concerning Marx’s direct confrontations with Hegel’s least discussed text for at least Marx almost alone among Hegel’s commentators took the 'Philosophy of Nature' seriously. Marx and Engels alongside most Hegel interpreters have been quite dismissive of the scientific importance of Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature' and pay greater attention to the 'Science of Logic' and to the 'Phenomenology of Spirit' yet a reading of Marx’s Dissertation where we discover a virtually explicit critique of Hegelianism in the Appendix, indicates that Epicurus’ philosophy of nature is often albeit not always a stand-in for Hegel’s and that the conclusion of the Manuscripts really continues the idea of the Thesis of placing materialism on a more solid basis by way of a critique of Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature', that all this allows Marx in the Manuscripts to criticize Hegel’s failure to realize the importance of natural history as the basis of any real history. The majority of commentators concur that Marx sides with Epicurus as a materialist opposed to Aristotle, the Hegel persona and correct as this is the critics have downplayed Marx’s critique of Epicurus’ residual idealism with respect to the essence of the atom and as such Marx’s critique of Epicurus serves as a critique of the left Hegelians.
Marx’s Dissertation praises Epicurus, as the 1844 Manuscripts praise Hegel, as a pioneer of enlightenment, but Marx also criticizes Epicurus, as he does Hegel, for deviating from enlightenment materialism in his view of free consciousness, Epicurus’ concept of the swerve op-poses the strict causality and necessitarian positive science of Democritus though the views of the two thinkers had long been held to be identical and while Epicurus’ materialistic atomism not shared by Hegel is lauded by Marx Epicurus swerves from his own materialism and ends up like Hegel as a proponent of an abstract individual freedom that rises above natural constraints and in so doing Epicurus finally and fearfully turns away from nature, fails to reconcile the abstract concepts of nature with their material qualities and consoles the thinker through what Marx calls abstract possibility.
'Necessity appears in finite nature as relative necessity, as determinism. Relative necessity can only be deduced from real possibility, i.e., it is a network of conditions, reasons, causes, etc., by means of which this necessity reveals itself. Real possibility is [as it were] the explication of relative necessity. And we find it used by Democritus. We cite some passages from Simplicius'.
'If somebody is thirsty and drinks and feels better, Democritus will not assign chance as the cause, but thirst. For, even though he seems to use chance in regard to the creation of the world, yet he maintains that chance is not the cause of any particular event, but on the contrary leads back to other causes. Thus, for example, digging is the cause of a treasure being found, or growing the cause of the olive tree'.
'The enthusiasm and the seriousness with which Democritus introduces this manner of explanation into the observation of nature, the importance he attaches to the striving to ascertain causes, are naively expressed in his avowal: 'I would rather discover a new aetiology than acquire the Persian crown'.'
'Once again Epicurus stands directly opposed to Democritus. Chance, for him, is a reality which has only the value of possibility. Abstract possibility, however, is the direct antipode of real possibility. The latter is restricted within sharp boundaries, as is the intellect; the former is unbounded, as is the imagination. Real possibility seeks to explain the necessity and reality of its object; abstract possibility is not interested in the object which is explained, but in the subject which does the explaining. The object need only be possible, conceivable. That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived, constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block. Whether this possibility is also real is irrelevant, since here the interest does not extend to the object as object'.
'Epicurus therefore proceeds with a boundless nonchalance in the explanation of separate physical phenomena'.
- 'The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature'
'The Haunting Dancer', 1911, Gino Severini
In both works, Marx appears to anticipate his own later call to set Hegel right side up again:
'The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigones who now talk large in cultured Germany to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a 'dead dog'.'
'I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell'.
'In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary'.
- 1873 afterword to an edition of 'Capital' volume 1
Here we find an expression of the classical inversion thesis of the orthodox tradition in which Marx’s thought is seen as a materialist version of Hegel’s dialectics, with its emphasis on inevitable laws of development including Engels’ dialectics of nature hence it reflects Engels’ view that the dialectic of concepts itself is merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world, including the world of pre-human nature. Against this view Schmidt tends to resist the materialist current in Marx and to relegate the more forthright materialism of the Marxist tradition to Engels. Schmidt’s point of view has been widely accepted and further he pays direct attention to Marx’s view of nature and to Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature' more than any other writer together with a downplaying of Marxian texts.
Many of the well known commentators including Marxist ones that I have cited in my Hegel series, Jean Hyppolite, (1907 – 1968), Jürgen Habermas, (1929 -), albeit they may detect in various ways see a latent positivism in Marx, engage in very little if any discussion of the Naturphilosophie. Hippolyte refers to Hegel's 'Philosophy of Nature once'. There are wide variations and disagreements among such commentators though the Naturphilosophie is not something they wish to take on. Schmidt seems to argue in support of Marx’s reversal of Hegel paying attention to Marx’s statements regarding the priority of external nature and its laws, while noting that for Hegel, the Idea, consciousness, is prior to nature. On the subject of meteors for instance Marx writes:
'But the theory of the meteors is also specifically different in comparison both with the method of ethics and with other physical problems, for example, the existence of indivisible elements and the like, where only one explanation corresponds to the phenomena. For this is not the case with the meteors. Their origin has no simple cause, and they have more than one category of essence corresponding to the phenomena. For the study of nature cannot be pursued in accordance with empty axioms and laws. [Note: These at any rate admit of manifold causes for their occurrence and manifold accounts, none of them contradictory of sensation, of their nature. For in the study of nature [physiology] we must not conform to empty assumptions and arbitrary laws, but follow the promptings of the facts]. It is constantly repeated that the meteors are not to be explained haplos (simply, absolutely), but poilachos (in many ways). This also holds for the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the waxing and waning of the moon, the semblance of a face on the moon, the changes of duration of day and night, and other celestial phenomena. How then is it to be explained? Every explanation is sufficient. Only the myth must be removed. it will be removed when we observe the phenomena and draw conclusions from them concerning the invisible. We must hold fast to the appearance, the sensation. Hence analogy must be applied. In this way we can explain fear away and free ourselves from it, by showing the causes of meteors and other things that are always happening and causing the utmost alarm to other people'.
- 'The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature'
Yet along with quite a number of other commentators Schmidt situates Marx in substantially the same position that he finds Hegel, for Schmidt the real prius, that which takes precedence, for Marx is as with Hegel the subject’s concept of nature, rather than nature itself. If nature must be conceived then for Schmidt Marx’s understanding of nature prior to human intervention, that is the traditional objects of materialist thought are thrust into the background insofar as they do not stress the practical and modificatory aspects of man’s relation to nature and so Schmidt concludes that Marx rejects the notion that nature exists in itself by attacking the very notion of a Marxist ontology of nature or indeed of an objective world prior to man’s intervention in it and in so doing Schmidt moves back towards the Hegelian notion of the Idea constituting nature.
In denying Marx’s acceptance of nature in itself Schmidt denies that for Marx nature can be dialectical in itself and in his endeavour to distance Marx from Engels’ dialectics of nature Marx is said to have believed that it is only the process of knowing nature which can be dialectical, not nature itself. Yet Schmidt rightly notes that Hegel also denied the intrinsic dialectics of Nature devoid of the Idea and through denying Marx a dialectical dynamic as a moving force in objective nature or his minimalization of pre-human history Schmidt minimizes the very natural history that Marx claimed as the basis of capital and in the process of contrasting Engels’ naturalization of history with the Marxian view Schmidt maintains that for Marx history is first, and immediately, practice and he thereby returns to Hegel’s view of nature as the history of consciousness (as conscious activity) expressing itself through nature rather than as an autonomous natural historical starting pointwhich Hegel also denies.
'La Primavera', 1954/55, Gino Severini
Given this account Schmidt and the many who share his views in stressing the primary importance of consciousness for Marx impose upon him the very philosophy of mind which he seems so intent to surpass and in interpreting Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie Schmidt parts company with the standard inversion thesis of Marx’s critique of Hegel yet upon close attention to the Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts we observe a Marx who is nearer to the standard viewpoint than Schmidt and many others would allow. Marx’s starting point is the antithesis if I may use that word of Hegel’s for while for both thinkers consciousness and nature mediate each other reciprocally and while Hegel affirms nature as necessary for mediating the progress of consciousness Marx says that nature must be prior to consciousness and Hegel by making consciousness the starting point sets out from the estrangement of a Nature that must finally be realized only through the progress of consciousness which is the Idea.
Hence Marx’s starting point presupposes the ontological reality of the objective natural universe and the primacy of matter without which pre-human nature is impossible and the concrete and plural character of the forms in which matter can first be found in nature is essential to Marx’s view of being. Humanity later becomes part of that plurality. So being then consists in the reciprocal relationships among plural entities which are both subjects and objects of one another and Marx understands this reciprocity as the dialectics of nature which is both prior to and inclusive of human relations and one that directly materializes some Hegelian categories. Both Hegel and Marx view history as being dialectical but by beginning dialectics with the Concept Hegel makes natural history absurd for Marx who not only directly reverses the Naturphilosophie’s denial of evolution but outlines the idea of a natural history of labour that is later affirmed in 'Capital'. Humans certainly transform nature, something ignored by Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, (1804 – 1872), however for Marx nature still establishes necessary, residual and stabilizing boundaries which humanity cannot overstep.
The Methodological Starting Point. Schmidt cites Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature' to the effect that while nature comes first in time the absolute prius is the Idea, this absolute Prius is the last thing, the true beginning, the Alpha is the Omega.
'Nature is the negative because it negates the Idea. Jacob Boehme says that God's first birth is Lucifer, this creature of light having centred his imagination upon himself and become evil; this is the moment of difference, of otherness held firm in opposition to the Son, who is otherness held in love. Representations such as this, which have a free rein in orientalized taste, have their ground and significance in the negative nature of nature. Immediacy is the other form of otherness, and consists of what is different subsisting abstractly by itself. This subsisting is only momentary however, it is not true subsistence; only the Idea, because it has returned into itself and is therefore being in and for self, subsists eternally. In time nature comes first, but the absolute prius is the Idea. This absolute prius is the finis, the true beginning, alpha is omega. Men often consider that which is immediate to be superior to that which is mediated, because the latter seems to imply dependence. The Notion has both aspects however, it is mediation through the sublation of mediation, and therefore immediacy. An immediate belief in God is often spoken of. This is the more degraded, and not the higher mode however, and the original or primitive nature-religions were an expression of it. Affirmation in nature is the shining through of the Notion, which soon displays its power through the mutability of this externality. All existences are in fact one body, in which the soul has its dwelling. Although the Notion displays itself in these gigantic members, it does so imperfectly, and it is only in spirit that it exists as it is'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
Yet while conceding that Marx is critical of this beginning Schmidt is anxious to separate Engels’ view of an autonomous nature from Marx for whom material reality is from the beginning socially mediated but that mediation means that Nature is capable of apprehension only when mediated by labour which is to say that in the Marxist view all natural being has been worked on economically and hence conceived so for Schmidt Marx like Hegel begins with a conceptual view of the whole that only subsequently becomes enriched through material development rather than the other way round as standard Marxism would have it, yet by his own account Marx’s naturalistic beginning and end points are the opposite of Hegel’s for Marx had said that for him it is not the Concept but the material phenomenon alone that can serve as its starting point by which Marx means that the beginning of analysis for men is sensuous animal need which is of course determinateness by nature, subjectively and objectively, as Marx explains in the 'Grundrisse', and as he puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, 'human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world'. The beginning and end points of analysis are nature and nature transformed. 'Only when science proceeds from nature — is it true science'' and 'only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history', a history that is a real part of natural history', a history that concludes in 'the social reality of nature'.
'Cortona Via Crucis', 1947, Gino Severini
On the other hand Marx’s Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts endeavour to demonstrate that Hegel’s 'Philosophy of Nature' does not start with nature but begins first with the Idea in its logical form (or Concept), the absolute and fixed abstraction. And secondly it then 'intuitively imposes these logical categories onto nature and thus merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous external form', that is, it posits the actual, positive sensuous, real of the natural world. Thirdly it then annuls that positive stage and 'resolves nature back into abstractions”; this restoration is the Idea in the form of 'Spirit ... thinking returned home to its point of origin' (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). In sum Marx sees the natural historical equation starting from Nature then mediated by Ideas arising from natural needs and concluding in Nature transformed as fulfilled species needs and this is inverted by Hegel as the history of the Idea, from abstract Idea (Concept), to the Mediated Idea (Nature) and returning to the Idea triumphant as Spirit. Marx’s reading of Hegel is supported by Hegel’s own text which depicts a double movement as the result of the drive of the Idea towards being for itself, independent moments, such as the senses of the animal, come into objective existence like the sun, and the lunar and cometary bodies. But when matter negates itself as untrue existence a higher existence emerges, the earlier stage is sublated.
' ... from the standpoint of the Notion as it is grasped in its totality, [the divisions in the 'Philosophy of Nature'] display the diremption of the Notion in its determinations. As it exhibits its determinations in this diremption and yet only allows them independence as moments, it realizes itself in this, and so posits itself as Idea. The Notion not only exhibits its moments and expresses itself in its differences however, but also leads these apparently independent stages back into their ideality and unity. By leading them back into itself, it in fact turns them for the first time into the concrete Notion, the Idea, and truth. There seem therefore to be two ways of formulating this division and so proceeding scientifically. The one begins with the concrete Notion, which in nature is life regarded for itself, and from this it is led to the expressions which the Notion throws out of itself as independent spheres of nature, and to which it relates itself as to another in the more abstract aspects of its existence, ending with the complete extinction of life. The other is the opposite one. It begins with the last self-externality of the merely immediate manner in which the Notion first exists, and ends with its true determinate being, the truth of its whole exposition. The first way may be compared to the progression in the conception of emanation, the second to the progression implied in the conception of evolution (§ 249 Addition). Each of these two forms taken by itself is one-sided, for they take place simultaneously, and the eternal divine process is a unified flow in two antithetical directions, which simply meet and completely permeate each other. The first, even when it is given the highest names and regarded as being concrete, is merely an immediacy. When matter negates itself as untrue existence for example, a higher existence emerges, and in one respect the earlier stage is sublated by means of an evolution; on the other hand however, it remains in the background, and is reproduced by emanation. Matter involves itself into life, and evolution is therefore also involution. As the result of the drive of the Idea towards being for itself, independent moments such as the senses of the animal, come into objective existence as the sun, and the lunar and cometary bodies. Despite some changes, these bodies retain their shape but lose their independence even in the physical sphere, where they are the elements. Projected outwards, subjective sight is the sun, taste is water, and smell is air. As it is necessary to posit determinations of the Notion here, we must begin with the most abstract, not with the most concrete sphere'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
While this statement would make it appear that Hegel denies the existence of Nature per se Marx does not adopt this view as for him the whole Hegelian process is here depicted as the result of a necessity where the abstract form in which the Idea expresses itself must arrive 'at an entity which is its exact opposite, at Nature' however 'just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the ab-solute Idea, in the form of a thought-entity, so too it has re-emerged in that form' and as Marx sums it in Hegel 'subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute reversal'. Since this reversal begins and ends with the abstract Idea Marx makes the point that Nature, in Hegel’s hands, 'sets out from the estrangement of substance' and is thus alienated by its very existence and as the externality of abstract thinking it is the Idea’s 'self loss' and presented in this way Nature is 'the Idea in the form of other being, since the Idea is, in this form, the negation of itself' and nature is thus not just 'relatively external vis-a-vis the Idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature' hence in the Manuscripts Marx says that Hegelian 'consciousness takes offense not at estranged activity, but at objectivity as such' and, as the ultimate Prometheanism, becomes 'nothing for man'. Hyppolite sees this as a critique of Hegel’s method of intuiting nature, while Schmidt and Paul Thomas who follows Schmidt see this as confirming that for Marx nature cannot be viewed apart from man.
As Hegel wrote:
'If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing, how does He come to release Himself into something so clearly unequal to Him? The divine Idea is just this self-release, the expulsion of this other out of itself, and the acceptance of it again, in order to constitute subjectivity and spirit. The philosophy of nature itself belongs to this pathway of return, for it is the philosophy of nature which overcomes the division of nature and spirit, and renders to spirit the recognition of its essence in nature. This then is the position of nature within the whole; its determinateness lies in the self-determination of the Idea, by which it posits difference, another, within itself, whole maintaining infinite good in its indivisibility, and imparting its entire content in what it provides for this otherness. God disposes therefore, while remaining equal to Himself; each of these moments is itself the whole Idea, and must be posited as the divine totality. Distinctiveness can be grasped in three forms; the universal, the particular, and the singular; firstly it is preserved in the eternal unity of the Idea, i.e. the ******, the eternal son of God as it was to Philo. The other of this extreme is singularity, the form of finite spirit. Singularity, as return into self, is certainly spirit, but as otherness to the exclusion of everything else, it is finite or human spirit, for we are not concerned with finite spirits other than men. In so far as the individual man is at the same time received into the unity of the divine essence, he is the object of the Christian religion, which is the most tremendous demand that may be made upon him. Nature is the third form with which we are concerned here, and as the Idea in particularity, it stands between both extremes. This form is the most congenial to the understanding. Spirit is posited as contradiction existing for itself, for there is an objective contradiction between the Idea in its infinite freedom and in the form of singularity, which occurs in nature only as an implicit contradiction, or as a contradiction which has being for us in that otherness appears in the Idea as a stable form. In Christ the contradiction is posited and overcome as life, passion and resurrection. Nature is the Son of God, not as the Son however, but as abiding in otherness, in which the divine Idea is alienated from love and held fast for a moment. Nature is self-alienated spirit; spirit, a bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it; in nature, the unity of the Notion conceals itself'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
Since nature in Hegel’s hands is alienated from thought this estranged thinking can only conceptualize natural phenomena or indeed the physical products of men and women as thought entities or as mental products, as entities that have become only abstractly possible and Nature becomes the philosophy of nature, 'thinking which abstracts rom nature', hence 'an alienation of human thought' according to Marx, and the appropriation of the alien natural objects is 'only an appropriation occurring in consciousness'.
'Simultaneity of Centrifugal and Centripetal Groups (Woman at a Window)', 1914, Gino Severini
To be continued ...