MARXISM AND ALTERNATIVES

Transcription

1 MARXISM AND ALTERNATIVES

2 SOVIETICA PUBLICATIONS AND MONOGRAPHS OF THE INSTITUTE OF EAST-EUROPEAN STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FRIBOURG/SWITZERLAND AND THE CENTER FOR EAST EUROPE, RUSSIA AND ASIA AT BOSTON COLLEGE AND THE SEMINAR FOR POLITICAL THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH Founded by J. M. BOCHENSKI (Fribourg) Edited by T. J. BLAKELEY (Boston), GUIDO KONG (Fribourg), and NIKOLAUS LOBKOWICZ(Munich) Editorial Board Karl G. Ballestrem (Munich) Bernard Jeu (Lille) HelmutDahm (Cologne) George L. Kline (Bryn Mawr) Richard T. DeGeorge (Kansas) James J. O'Rourke (Manchester, N.H.) Peter Ehlen (Munich) Friedrich Rapp (Berlin) Michael Gagern (Munich) Tom Rockmore (New Haven) Philip Grier (Carlisle, Pa.) Andries Sarlerirljn (Eindhoven) Felix P. Ingold (St. Gall) James Scanlan (Columbus) Edward Swiderski (Ox/orc!) VOLUME 45

3 TOM ROCKMORE Yale University JAMES G. COLBERT Boston State College WILLIAM J. GAVIN University of Southern Maine THOMASJ.BLAKELEY Boston College MARXISM AND ALTERNATIVES Towards the Conceptual Interaction Among Soviet Philosophy, Neo- Thomism, Pragmatism, and Phenomenology D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT: HOLLAND I BOSTON: U.S.A. LONDON: ENGLAND

4 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Marxism and alternatives. (Sovietica ; v. 45) Includes index. 1. Dialectical materialism. 2. Neo-Scholasticism. 3. Pragmatism. 4. Phenomenology. I. Rockmore, Tom, II. Series: Sovietica (Universite de Fribourg. Ost-Europa Institut) ; v.45. B809.8.M ' ISBN-l3: e-isbn-13: DOl: / Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Boston Inc., 190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322,3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. D. Reidel Publishing Company is a member of the Kluwer Group. All Rights Reserved Copyright 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st Edition 1981 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: THE IMMANENCE OF MARXISM-LENINISM 1. Emergence of the "New Soviet Man" 2. The Scientific-Technological Revolution 3. Dialectical Logic 4. The Dialectic of Nature 5. Meta-Marxism PART TWO: THE TRANSCENDENCE OF NEO-THOMISM 6. Natural Law and the Common Good 7. Nature and Knowledge 8. Logic and Knowledge 9. Immateriality 10. The ''Predicamental'' Perspective PART THREE: THE CONCRETENESS OF PRAGMATISM 11. Context 12. Science and Progress 13. Making Logic Practical 14. Nature and the.natural 15. "Context" as a Philosophical Concept PART FOUR: THE TRANSCENDENTALISM OF PHENOMENOLOGY 16. The Phenomenological Movement 17. An Approach to Social-Context 18. Phenomenological Methodology 19 _ An Ontological Phenomenology? 20. Meta-Phenomenology vii ix

6 vi T ABLE OF CONTENTS PART FIVE: CONCLUSION Notes Index of Names Index of Subjects

7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the following permissions to reprint parts of my essays: To Prof. Norris Clarke, S. J., Editor, International Philosophical Quarterly, Fordham University, New York, N.Y., for parts of 'William James on Language' (Vol. XVI No.1, March, 1976); to the D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, for permission to reprint some pages from Chapter VI, 'Underlying Themes and the Present Cultural Context'. This later appeared as part of the volume co-authored with Professor Blakeley, and entitled Russia and America: A Philosophical Comparison (Dordrecht, 1976); to the D. Reidel Publishing Company for permission to use parts of my article 'The Importance of Context: Reflections on Kuhn, Marx, and Dewey', which appeared in their journal Studies in Soviet Thought (Vol. 21 No.1, Feb. 1980); to Martinus NijhoffPublishers, The Hague, The Netherlands, for permission to use parts of my article entitled 'James' Metaphysics: Language as the House of "Pure Experience", which appeared in their journal Man and World, An International Philosophical Review (Vol. 12, No.2,1979). WILLIAM J. GAVIN Portland, Maine 1981 vii

8 INTRODUCTION Contemporary philosophy is by its nature pluralistic, to a perhaps greater extent than at any moment of the preceding tradition, in that there are multiple forms of thought competing for a position on the center of the philosophic stage. The reasons for this conceptual proliferation are numerous. But certainly one factor is the increasing development of contemporary means of publication and communication, which in turn make possible the rapid dissemination of ideas as well as an informed reaction to them. And this in turn has increased the possibility for serious philosophic exchange by enhancing the available opportunities for the interaction of competing forms of thought. But, although informed philosophic interaction has in principle become increasingly possible in recent years, the frequency, scope and quality of such discussion has often been less than satisfactory. Contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend not to interact in a Hegelian manner, as complementary aspects of a totally satisfactory and a-perspectival view, facets of a singly and all-embracing true position. Rather, contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend to portray themselves as mutually exclusive alternatives only occasionally willing to acknowledge the possible validity or even the intrinsic interest of other perspectives. Thus, although the multiplication of different forms of philosophy in principle means that there are greater possibilities for meaningful exchange between them, in practice the tendency of each of the various philosophic positions to raise claims to philosophic truth from its point of view alone has had the effect of impeding such interaction. This point can be illustrated through a brief glance at the generally hostile Marxist-Leninist reception of other philosophic tendencies. The touchstone of all forms of Marxism - as species of neo-hegelianism - is the dialectic. In the case of Marxist-Leninist philosophy this has taken the specific form of dialectical logic, where the "subjective dialectic" reflects the "objective dialectic"; and the proletariat creates its revolutionary method and historical world, subject only to the removal of man's alienation from nature and other men. All non-marxisms - as well as other Marxisms - are judged, assessed, and condemned on the basis of their incapacity for handling one aspect or the other of the dialectical-1ogical world view. ix

9 x INTRODUCTION From the Marxist-Leninist perspective, to take a series of examples, neo Thomism sins on the side of "objective idealism" through misplaced and non-dialectical concretion of fictitious entities; pragmatism fails correctly to identify the dialectical and historical character of human practice; and phenomenology robs the dialectic of any concrete (read "material") referent. Initially, Soviet preoccupation with neo-thomism came from the latter's connection both with certain political' movements in Eastern Europe and in Latin America, and its involvement with the Catholic religion, the most militant opponent of Communism throughout the world. These extra-philosophic linkages of neo-thomism not only discredit it in Soviet eyes (as well as in those of many pragmatists and phenomenologists) as reactionary but also are said to fmd expression in its philosophic ideas on concreation and "double truth". Through the neo-thomistic doctrine of double truth (viz. truths of reason cannot contradict truths of faith) man is robbed of his integrity and made to depend on figments of his imagination, namely God, saints, etc. In concreation, the human being who is said to collaborate with divine creativity loses his revolutionary vigor and practical autonomy; religious otherworldliness destroys man's efficacy in the real world. Even more destructive within neo-thomism, for the Marxist-Leninists, is its denigration of human nature through the doctrine of sin and its assignment of nature in general to the realm of the Devil. As there are two truths, there are two worlds, and man has no need to make revolutionary efforts in the here and now. He need only study theology and let the Church take care of the rest. The set of philosophic views that the Marxist-Leninists see as posing perhaps the greatest threat to a truly dialectical-logical worldview belongs to the heirs of the Vienna Circle - variously called ''neopositivists'' or "analytic philosophers". The verificationism, conventionalism and physicalism of Anglo-American philosophy are rejected as so many "subjectivisms", as so many attempts to reach some sort of certainty that reduces science to formallogical, Cartesian validity and, hence in principle, rejects the Marxist-Leninist dialectical model Even the assimilation of ideas from pragmatism does not help such neopositivism in its effort to link up with the real world. In fact, there is a tendency on the part of the Marxist-Leninist simply, but misleadingly, to identify neopositivism and pragmatism. Neopositivism on this interpretation fails because the ':praxis" of pragmatism is abstract - it is the merely rational practice of an ahistorical agent, instead of the world-historical practice of the proletariat.

10 INTRODUCTION xi Were neopositivism-pragmatism able to identify a historical agent, it would not lose itself in interminable disputes on questions of method. Its method is abstract and subjective. It is grounded purely and simply in a Humean belief, lodged in a Berkeleyan mind, with no links to history or society. Because of this methodological commitment, neopositivism-pragmatism is incapable of giving any answer to the question "what do we know about what we know beyond what we know about it?". In other words, they cannot account for a reality beyond the immediate knower. Nor can neopositivism-pragmatism say anything about human misery or alienation, because it has no account of a nature beyond the knower, and reduces the human context to the biological constitution of the same knower. The Soviet critique of phenomenology and existentialism contains some of the same elements as their critique of pragmatism because both existentialism and pragmatism have roots in nineteenth-century Lebensphilosophie. Just as the Marxist-Leninists sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between neopositivism (which is basically a view of science and method) and pragmatism (which can be described as an account of man and his world), so they are often not too clear about the distinction between contemporary phenomenology (which stresses a method and view on science, originating with Husserl) and existentialism (concerned mainly with man and his hostile world). What is clear to the Marxist-Leninist who criticizes phenomenology and existentialism from a dialectical-logical perspective is that these latter join neopositivism-pragmatism in failing correctly to identify the human context. For this reason they cannot explain nature or man's relationship to it; which is why their extensive commentaries on the symptoms of man's alienation remain abstract and unconvincing. The failure of existentialism to explain man, nature, and history parallels and may be caused by the subjectivist methodology of the phenomenologist. According to Soviet accounts, the anti-psychologism, doctrine of the lifeworld and transcendental reduction of phenomenology remain on the level of pure description. Phenomenology is Cartesian in the worst sense; and neither Ingarden nor Sartre has been able to do anything to remedy this. It is the work of the later Sartre that the Marxist-Leninists see as demonstrating the final bankruptcy of phenomenology-existentialism. In effect, they argue, if Sartre's version of dialectical reason cannot justify the praxis of history, then it is clear that the "constitutivity" of the phenomenologists is historically meaningless. In sum, the Soviets see all non-marxist-leninist philosophies as falling

11 xii INTRODUCTION short on a number of counts, having to do with a non-dialectical-iogical view of nature, man, history, and society. All of them are "idealist": neo-thornism "objectively" and the other two "subjectively". Noone of them can account adequately for autonomous human activity. Two of them (existentialism and neo-thomism) try to account for human misery (alienation) but do so only at the price of dehumanizing man. Nature appears Significant to two of them (pragmatism and neo-thornism) but only as abstract; existentialism fails utterly to pay any attention to nature. Admittedly, the Marxist-Leninist reaction to other views is extreme, although it illustrates well the inherent difficulty of entering into dialogue with Marxism-Leninism from another angle of vision. An equally extreme position is taken by Husserlian phenomenology, in which the claim is made that all forms of "science" - i.e., systematic knowledge - in which the transcendental reduction is lacking, in practice all other viewpoints, must necessarily forfeit all claims to scientific status. But, these and other examples which could be cited should not be taken as an indication that interaction between competing tendencies is not possible. On the contrary, such exchange is both possible and necessary, if we are ever to transcend the parochialism inherent in the uncritical, or even in the critical, espousal of one philosophic viewpoint as opposed to other possible viewpoints. It seems clear from the examples cited that it is indeed difficult to confront competing philosophic tendencies, since all too often they harbor mechanisms for the exclusion of the possibility of meaningful discussion with their doctrinal rivals. The present volume should be seen as an endeavor to contribute to the development of an indirect dialogue through. the detailed exposition of responses to central philosophic concerns from four main perspectives: Marxism-Leninism, neo-thornism, pragmatism, and phenomenology. In each case, the treatment of the various philosophic tendencies will be developed in a series of stages, beginning with the respective views of essential questions of man, progressing to the related views of society, and then on to the underlying concepts of epistemology and ontology, before closing with an internal criticism of the fundamental presuppositions as such. The intention of the present discussion is basically two-fold. Every effort has been made to choose the series of concerns, preselected as the structure around which the discussion will take place, in such a manner as to avoid an intrinsic bias toward any single viewpoint, and so as to stress what is characteristic of the interests of contemporary thought, broadly conceived. To the extent that this attempt has been successful, the intended effect is to provide

12 INTRODUCTION xiii an occasion for a somewhat novel parallel exposition of the various tendencies, which is indeed indicative of their respective intellectual resources. Further, despite the independent character of the exposition, its parallel form, reinforced where possible by cross-references to the other sections, provides material for the kind of indirect comparison that is difficult and perhaps impossible, as has been indicated through illustration above, to carry out from a position within any single viewpoint. As seems likely, this kind of discussion brings out not only some expected differences, but also unsuspected analogies between the various positions. To avoid possible misunderstanding, two caveats should immediately be entered. In the first place, the claim is not made here that the philosophic tendencies to be considered comprise an exhaustive list of contemporary viewpoints. It should not be difficult for anyone familiar with the current philosophic scene to cite other positions which have, in fact, been omitted here. Nevertheless, it does appear that if judged in terms of such criteria as intellectual influence, breadth of interest, and explanatory power, these are among the most significant philosophic movements of the day. It should be further noted that the exposition in any case is less than exhaustive. Stress has in each instance been placed less on the complete development of the response to one or another concern from a given point of view than on the expository statement of how one or more of the major representatives of such a perspective can or in fact does react to the problem at hand. But, although the discussion is thus admittedly restricted in scope and depth, it is hoped that to the extent that it, in fact, reflects the current state of philosophy it can at least contribute to opening or to reopening the debate. But, the inherent limitations, which are freely acknowledged, need not be considered a fatal defect since, as has been remarked, although comprehensiveness may be desirable, the important thing is progress. What is more, in what follows we look at the capacity of the other schools to deal with some of the same problems that Marxism-Leninism considers its private preserve. The fact that the non-marxist-leninists deal with these problems in a non-class-bound way is in itself a response to Marxism-Leninism with its dogmatic positions on partijnost' and revolutionary spirit in philosophy. In other words, as we watch each philosophic approach proceed from normative perspectives to speculative issues and then to epistemologicallogical considerations, we see a need for communication which no one of them can avoid and which transcends the explicit or public interchange which is often the work of well-meaning but marginal representatives of these philosophic approaches. F~r example, there is a sense in which some "progressive"

13 xiv INTRODUCTION neo-thomist advocates of dialogue with Marxism are as "Marxist" as their Marxist-Leninist interlocutors. Philosophic debate is not political rhetoric. To the extent that what follows succeeds, it establishes the contours of a theoretical landscape, over which all of our protagonists can travel. It is our contention that these travellers - despite their varied historical situations - cannot avoid meeting, at least relative to the basic q]lestions we evoke below. Only the reader will be able to say whether we have provided merely further evidence as to the incompatibility of various philosophic views or a useful map of the paths across the contemporary theoretical landscape. Although this book is the result of close collaboration, primary responsibility for the several parts was, in fact, assumed as follows: Thomas J. Blakeley - Soviet Marxism: James G. Colbert - neo-thomism; William J. Gavin - pragmatism; Tom Rockmore - phenomenology. We join together in thanking George L. Kline (Bryn Mawr), James J. O'Rourke (Manchester NH) and Edward M. Swiderski (Oxford) for their careful reading of the manuscript and for the many constructively critical remarks.