practice and some muddles about the methodology of historical materialism

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Practice and Some Muddles about the Methodology of Historical MaterialismAuthor(s): Frank CunninghamSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Dec., 1973), pp. 235-248Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40230439 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume III, Number 2, December 1973

Practice and Some Muddles about the Methodology of Historical

Materialism1

FRANK CUNNINGHAM, University of Toronto

Along with the rest of his Critique de la Raison Dialectique, which it introduces, the "Question de Methode" (widely read by English- speaking students of Marx as Search for a Method) takes an important place in the development of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical and

political thought. However, the Search is also a challenge to Marxists either to defend or abandon certain of their views, and as such I think it raises some crucial issues. It is the purpose of this essay not to produce a systematic critique of Sartre's influential work, but rather to explore and sharpen some principles of the methodology of historical materialism by critically examining a selection of interrelated misconcep- tions about Marxism2 exhibited in the Search and shared by many friends as well as foes of the historical materialist approach to the study of human society.

One instructive misconception is the following. Against what he sees as an overly economic interpretation of the individual by Marxists Sartre maintains that:

The unprejudiced examination of the historical object will be able by itself to de-

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1971 annual meeting of the Canadian

Philosophical Association, at St. John's, Newfoundland. I am grateful for helpful criticisms of that version, especially those of Leslie Mulholland (commentator on the

paper) and Dan Goldstick. 2 By "Marxism" I mean what is generally attacked as "orthodox Marxism", the core of

which is to be found in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Critics of orthodox Marxism very often misinterpret the content of this core, I believe, and one manifesta- tion of this misinterpretation is a wholly unwarranted, but wide-spread, theory that Marx's views were quite at variance with those of Engels and Lenin. Since I believe that the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of those who hold this theory (and has not yet been born by such as S. Avineri and N. Rotenstreich), I shall refer indifferently to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and also Mao, in the following. My own inclination, should

anyone prove them to be at variance on significant points, would be to exclude from "orthodox Marxism" just those views which are false, regardless of which of the classical Marxist advanced it.

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F. Cunningham Methodology of Historical Materialism

termine in each case whether the action or the work reflects the superstructural motives of groups or of individuals formed by basic conditionings, or whether one can explain them only by referring immediately to economic contradictions and to conflicts of material interests.3

This passage rests on a false dichotomy; since for the Marxist the etiologies of all "historical objects" include both economic and superstructural factors. Hence a satisfactory explanation of any one historical event would require reference to both sorts of facts. For example, a satisfactory account of the development of a school of art would have to include some reference to the class backgrounds of the members of the school, and satisfactory explanations of a technological change would have to include some reference to scientific, legal, etc. conditions.

On the other hand, it is a basic tenet of historical materialism that in order to explain the general direction of social movements in the long run, reference need only be to states and changes of productive forces and relations. Possibly Sartre has this view in mind in making his distinction, since it is a basic theme of the Search that while Marxism is best suited to explain long-range social changes and to exhibit the "material conditions" of action, economic categories, as used by Marxists, are ill-suited to the description or explanation of individuals or small groups.

Sartre's argument here is not untypical of many criticisms of Marxism. It hinges on confusing two central Marxist theses, onej having to do with the interaction of economic and superstructural factors in history, the other having to do with understanding the general direction of social change. For the Marxist who wants to pursue the task of defending and improving the methodology of historical materialism, the value of Sartre's negative arguments is that they raise questions about almost all the basic concepts of this methodology and raise them in a typically muddled way- muddled not only by Sartre but also by some Marxists. In saying the concepts are muddled it is meant that while each concept figures in a crucial Marxist thesis, and the theses are in part inter-defended, the lines of inter-defense are obscured by failing to see just what is at stake in each thesis. The result is that both attacks on and defenses of Marxism all too often become exercises in slogan exchange.

The concepts involved are: the Marxist approach to the individual; the ultimately decisive role of economic factors; determinism; and practice. What follows is a programmatic attempt to sort these concepts out, showing what role each plays in the methodology of historical materialism, how they are related to one another, and just how the Marxist position differs from that of critics like Sartre. Marxism and Holism

The first problem is to see just how Marxists are committed to the position called "holism". Work in the philosophies of history and social

3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 42, originally a preface to Critique de la Raison Dialectique Vol. I (Librairie Gallimard, 1960), all references will be to the English language publication.

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science has shown that this term is used to cover a variety of more or less independent views, and it will be instructive to see how 'classical' Marxism stands on each. In fact I believe there are no fewer than eight positions here, not clearly distinguished by those who criticize

opponents for being holistic.4 "Holism" is sometimes taken to mean (1) "anti-subjectivism". In this sense holism is opposed to the veiw, which Max Weber is most famous for advancing, that the social scientist

ought to limit himself to the task of delineating and correlating factors in the realm of the subjectively meaningful, i.e., individual persons' (usually conscious) values, interpretations, desires, beliefs, plans, etc. At other times holism is equated with (2) social determinism, specifically with the view that being in some social situation (e.g., a crowd) causes a person to act and think in certain ways. Holists themselves often charge their opponents with atomism, and hence holism might be taken to be anti-atomism, or what I shall prefer to call the position supporting (3) qualitative complexity. The holist in this sense maintains that even if some object of inquiry (e.g., a family or a social class) may be made up exclusively of individuals and their relations, this does not make that object somehow unworthy of study in its own

right; that is, he holds that families and social classes, for instance, are

qualitatively different from individual persons. Or holism might be

thought of as (4) anti-individualism, an extreme version of anti-sub-

jectivism, which maintains that the social scientist ought never to include treatments of individuals as important parts of his explanations.

Holism is frequently equated with social-scientific anti-reductionism. The word "reduction" often carries with it the connotation of "elimina-

tion"; it implies that if one thing is reduced to another, then the first is unreal or insignificant compared with the second. In this sense

advocating anti-reductionism would be advocating the position of qualitative complexity, and perhaps a different word should be coined.

However, there is a technical sense of "reduction" which refers to an

operation performed on two bodies of scientific theory and the linguistic formulae expressing them, e.g., of sociology and psychology or of

chemistry and physics; though reductionism in this sense itself needs to be analyzed into components. There is first of all what I chose to call "semantic reduction". In order to derive (in some sense of "derive") one set of laws from another, it is necessary for the descriptive terms used in expressing the first sort of laws to be defined, perhaps serially, by means of some descriptive terms used in expressing the second sort (present debates over the possibility of semantic reduction in the

philosophy of mind are found, for instance, in debates over the con-

tingent identity thesis). Having thus interdefined the appropriate terms, "ontic" and "nomological" reductions are possible (nomological reduction presupposing ontic, as ontic reduction presupposes semantic).

4 Some of these senses are sorted out by Ernest Gellner, "Holism Versus Individualism", and May Brodbeck, "Methodological Individualisms: Definition and Reduction", both in May Brodbeck, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York,

1968), pp. 254-268 and 280-303 respectively; although I think Gellner sometimes

equates what are listed below as senses 1 and 4.

237




The various pairs of interdefined terms are said to refer to the same

things, and the one set of laws is derived from the other. But even if reduction in these ways is seen to be possible, it may

not be desirable to attempt reduction. That is, there is a fourth kind of reductionism, "prescriptive reductionism", which hinges on a scientist's evaluation of the practical necessity or feasibility of trying to derive some or all of one sort of law from other sorts. Thus some psychologists hold that sociology can never produce scientifically worthwhile results until it is (at least in great part) reduced to psychology, and while at first debates about the possible reduction of biology to chemistry and physics centered on nomological reduction, today they seem to have shifted to ones over prescriptive reduction, it being argued that the task of successfully reducing sufficient laws would be unproductively difficult.

Holism might, then, also be (5) opposed to the possibility of semantic reduction; it might (6) challenge ontic reduction, or (7) hold that nomo-

logical reduction is impossible, or (8) prescribe against insisting on or

actually attempting reduction in some domain.

Marxism, I believe, is holistic in senses 1, 2, 3, and 8, but in no other senses. Marxists have often rejected the view that men are what they believe themselves to be in a way that makes it clear they are rejecting the view that the realm of the subjectively meaningful is the proper subject-matter of the social sciences.5 However, rejecting subjectivism must not be confused with abandoning all psychological reference to human attitudes. Indeed Marx employed psychological laws in his economic explanations and predictions; for instance, the law of industrial capitalism's tendency to lead to socialist revolution was derived by him from, inter alia, laws of the psychological effects on workers of large-scale collective labour. Similarly, some contemporary

5 V. I. Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" are and How they Fight the Social Democrats (Moscow, 1966), pp. 13-14. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow, 1964), pp. 3O3ff. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow, 1964), pp. 36-7, 63-4. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956), p. 53:

The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on the being, it will be compelled to do.

Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1968), pp. 622-3

In the history of society . . . the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working toward definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction between society and nature, important as it is for historical investiga- tion particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For here, also, on the whole, in

spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation or the means of

attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs

entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.

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commentators to the contrary, Marxists are committed to de- terminism6 (though, as will be noted, distinguishing this from fatalism). And holism in sense 3 is required for the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa to have the universal

application claimed for it by Marxists. Further, I believe that partly on the grounds of holding to holism in senses 1, 2, and 3, Marxists are justified in sometimes prescribing against reductionism (i.e., advocating holism in sense 8).

In the other senses, however, historical materialism does not seem to me at all holistic. That it is not anti-individualistic is exhibited by the existence of not a few 'orthodox' Marxist biographies, and most Marxist histories include discussions of the values and beliefs of individuals, much as Marx's 18th Brumaire, so highly praised by Sartre.

Also, I believe historical materialists must surely reject holism

regarding nomological and ontic reduction. For the materialist, if such

phenomena as social classes are not just the individual, material men, artifacts, natural objects and the relations among them, then what could they be- Klassengeister? And if Marxists are determinists, in the

only sense in which I think the position is coherent (namely that in

principle the report of any state or event whatever can be on the

explanandum side of a true statement of causal law), then laws

expressing regularities at some macro-level ought in principle to be derivable from more general laws expressing regularities at a cor-

responding micro-level. Otherwise Marxists would be committed to the

position that things in combination obey laws inexplicably unrelated to the laws of their behaviour when not in combination, and this

position would seem to contradict the essential dialectical view of Marxism that all things are causally interrelated (and explicable).7

6 Karl Marx, Capital, Preface to the first edition (Moscow, 1961), p. 8;

Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of

the social antagonisms that result from the natrual laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron

necessity toward inevitable results. See also Marx's praise of a deterministic account of his method in the Afterward to the

Second Edition, pp. 17-19. Marx & Engels, German Ideology, p. 41; and see the marginal note by Marx there:

Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must

produce it moreover in a certain way; this is determined by their physical organiza- tion; their consciousness is determined in just the same way.

See also, Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 172ff; And Engels, Anti-Duhring

(New York, 1966), pp. 125-6. 7 It is on these grounds that Engels often criticizes the fragmentation and mutual

isolation of the sciences by empiricists in his Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, 1966); e.g., In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by

every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things, (p. 178)

See also in the same work, pp. 42, 70, 249-250, and Lenin's "Philosophical Notebooks", Collected Works (Moscow, 1963), Vol., 38, pp. 148-164. (It is also for reasons advanced

above that I believe those Marxists are mistaken who, interpreting some inconclusive

passages in Engels and Lenin, hold to a form of epi-phenomenalism regarding the

mind- thus creating what are sometimes called "nomological danglers" in their theory.

239




The Ultimately Decisive Role of Economic Factors

As is well known Marx and Engels devised a sociological classification for the purpose of best understanding the direction of social change. They distinguished between the economic base, made up of productive forces (e.g., factories) and relations (e.g., the relation between proletarian and capitalist) and the superstructure, including legal institutions, moral codes, scientific theories, religious beliefs, etc. This classification originated, no doubt, in reflection on the fact "that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc."8, and its test is, as the test for any scientific classification, its productiveness in use. However, two problems, both of which seem to me to require work by Marxists, are raised.

One problem is seen in some alternate characterizations of the difference between base and superstructure from the point of view of individuals. In his earliest philosophical work Lenin made the distinction (not unlike Sartre I believe) in terms of consciousness. The superstructure is that of which an individual is conscious, while people are not generally conscious of the base.9 In one place Engels characterizes "political juridical and other ideological notions" as "formal", by which he means that though ultimately caused by economic conditions (the "content"), people who hold them are likely to believe that they are based, if on anything else at all, on other abstract notions, such as "justice" or "Cod".10 At other places Engels follows Marx in emphasizing the will. In a well-known passage Marx holds that superstructural phenomena are determined by economic forces and relations and maintains that this determination is a matter over which men have little choice.11 The view expressed by Lenin requires qualification, since ideological factors can have unconscious effects, and one can certainly be conscious of economic factors as causally important for one's own thought and action. The views of Marx and Engels cited require the qualification, made in other places by them, that determination by economic factors holds only ultimately or in the long run.

This brings us to the second, and major, problem. In an often-cited letter in which Engels distinguishes historical materialism from positions which advance what today are often termed "uni-causal"

For a Marxist critique of this epi-phenomenalism see D. Goldstick, "The Marxist

Concept of Matter", Horizons, No. 28 (Winter, 1969), 72-84.) It should also be noted that in adhering to "qualitative complexity" while also holding that reduction is possible, historical materialists are differentiated from mechanical materialists (of both the atomistic or psychologistic variety such as behaviourists and those such as Leslie White who believe in irreducible "emergent levels" in society) who typically assume that the possibility of "reducing" one subject matter to another, in one or more of the senses listed above, is incompatible with there being qualitative differences between them.

8 Engels, "Speech at the Graveside", Works, p. 435. 9 Lenin, Friends, pp. 14, 24.

10 Engels, "Letter to Mehring, July 14, 1893", Works, pp. 700-1. 11 Marx, "Preface to A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", Works, pp. 182-3.

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theories of history, he writes: "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted."12

Against what they call "economic determinism" Marxists say that while there are causal influences working from base to superstructure, there are also influences working the other way. For instance, scientific theories may prompt technological advances and hence changes in productive forces, or changes in political forms may inhibit organiza- tion of labour. Nonetheless, Engels' statement that economic causes are "ultimately" determining is essential, since otherwise historical materialism would merely be the view that society can be classified in the way sketched above, and there are causal relations among the phenomena classified. But this produces the methodological problem of giving some clear sense in which economic influences are "ultimate". I believe the best way of going at this problem is to hold that the economic base is ultimately decisive in that qualitative changes in it are causally necessary and sufficient (through time) for qualitative changes in the superstructure, whereas the reverse is not the case. For example, the Industrial Revolution is necessary and sufficient for socialism, (though not, of course, immediately), but, on the other hand, a state ideologically committed to socialism, without an industrialized economic base of any sort (or without industrialized allies), could not even hope to survive for any length of time, let alone to industrialize on its own. This raises a further problem about the nature of qualitative changes, but before addressing this problem, a return to Sartre's criticisms of Marxism will be in order.

Determinism

Sartre's treatment of Marxism as applicable to long-run social phenomena, but not to individuals, is supposed to open a gap which can be filled by existentialism, namely, the realm of the individual (and of the small group) insofar as individuals are engaged in "projects". "Project" is a technical term in Sartre's vocabulary which includes

activity which is purposive and subjectively meaningful and is best treated, according to Sartre, in superstructural, as opposed to economic, terms.13 However, it is not clear that from the point of view of the Marxist this gap exists (at least in principle). Rejecting holism in sense 4, Marxists can allow for and have produced works on individuals, but this work involves crucial reference to both economic and superstructural factors. Also the problem of giving sense to the doctrine about the ultimate determination of economic factors arises not because there are two independent realms, the economic and the superstructural, but because there are two realms which causally interpenetrate.

On the other hand, it would be misleading to think that Sartre and Marxists are merely arguing at cross purposes here, since there is a

12 Engels, "Letter to Bloch, Sept. 21, 1890", Works, p. 692. 13 Sartre, pp. 91ff.

241




deep area of disagreement apparent in both the methodological problems so far discussed. Essential to approaching both sorts of problems was adherence to determinism, and if Sartre's philosophy admits of determinism at all, it certainly does not seem to admit it in a sense compatible with that required by historical materialism. Consider the following passages from the Search:™

How are we to understand that man makes History if at the same time it is History which makes him? Idealist Marxism seems to have chosen the easiest interpretation: entirely determined by prior circumstances - that is, in the final analysis, by economic conditions - man is a passive product, a sum of conditioned reflexes.

[quoting Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach] "The materialist doctrine according to which men are a product of circumstances and of education . . . does not take into account the fact that circumstances are modified precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated." Either [Sartre continues] this is a mere

tautology, and we are simply to understand that the educator himself is a product of circumstances and of education - which would render the sentence useless and absurd; or else it is the decisive affirmation of the irreducibility of human praxis. . . . men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions .... but it is the men who make it and not the prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehicles of inhuman forces which through them would govern the social world.

In these passages I believe that the position of anti-individualism and the one about the ultimate decisiveness of economic factors are falsely equated, as are the positions of determinism and fatalism.

It is true that in order to explain the overall direction of long-run social movements Marxists consider it necessary only to refer to facts about a society's forces and relations of production. But this does not mean that more detailed explanations do not require reference, not only to superstructural factors, but also to the beliefs, actions, etc. of specific individuals. Nor, for all but the fatalist, does it mean that the wants, beliefs, and actions of individuals make no difference to the course of

history. A similar point applies to Sartre's criticism of the Marxist view of

chance. Sartre criticizes Marxists for holding that "Napoleon as an individual was only an accident; what was necessary was the military dictatorship as the liquidating regime of the Revolution".15 But what is counted as chance is not just a function of ignorance; it can also be a function of interest. From the point of view of writing one sort of history, just who a state leader at a certain time was would be justifiably considered a matter of chance, but this does not mean that in another sort of study the personality and particular deeds of Napoleon, for instance, could not be the prime object of interest and an attempt made to understand just why he had a certain personality or performed certain deeds.

Engels' criticism of one sort of determinism is appropriate here. He

rejects the view that "only simple, direct necessity prevails in nature", which view would trace such facts as that "a particular pea-pod contains five peas" back to "the gaseous sphere from which the solar

14 Ibid., pp. 85, 86, 87, respectively. 15 Ibid., p. 83.

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system was derived". Engels maintains that far from being scientific, this determinism proceeds from a "theological conception of nature", since:

As long as we are not able to show on what the number of peas in the pod depends, it remains just a matter of chance, and the assertion that the case was foreseen

already in the primordial constitution of the solar system does not get us a step further. Still more. A science which was to set about the task of following back the casus of this individual pea-pod in its causal concatenation would be no longer science but pure trifling; for this same pea-pod alone has in addition innumerable other individual, accidentally appearing qualities: shade of colour, thickness and hardness of the pod, size of the peas, not to speak of the individual peculiarities revealed by the microscope.16

Engels, of course, maintained that nature is infinite, both in time and qualitatively, hence the position (typical of mechanical materialism) that there are first causes by reference to which everything can in principle be explained is abandoned. But in abandoning this, the Marxist also abandons the view that there is some ultimately correct or appropriate way of, so to speak, chopping up causal chains. Depending on his interests one may focus attention on mental states and events as important, often quite decisive, causes, while still recognizing that they themselves have causes, and that in another context it might be these causes which would be considered most important.

Practice

In his criticisms of Marxism, Sartre frequently invokes the notion of practice (or praxis). To Sartre the most important focus for a study of humans should be their projects, and projects are revealed in practice.17 The concept of practice is also a crucial one in Marxist philosophy; however, the nature of the concept differs. Sartre maintains:

When Marx writes: "Just as we do not judge an individual by his own idea of himself, so we cannot judge a ... period of revolutionary upheaval by its own self-

consciousness/' he is indicating the priority of action (work and social praxis) over

knowledge as well as their heterogeneity.18

The point of this famous passage from Marx is almost the opposite. He is arguing that social-scientific knowledge is necessary to evaluate a movement rather than just the opinions of those who happen to be active agents in it and who might be wrong about its significance. For Marx, as for Lenin, Mao, and all historical materialists, practice and knowledge are not opposed, but knowledge guides practice, and in practice our knowledge is formed and corrected.19

Practice for Sartre means the act of engaging oneself in a project, always against the "background" of historical and economic conditions (appropriately studied by the "regressive method") but essentially

16 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 219. 17 Sartre, pp. 91ff, 168ff. 18 Ibid., p. 14. 19 See Mao Tse-Tung's On Practice (Peking, 1968); the Marx passage is from his Preface

to A Contribution", op. cit.

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involving a projection toward some future, in and by means of which the present is made sense of ("totalized"). The study of projects requires a method different from the regressive one employed by Marxists which Sartre calls the "progressive" method.20

Important for Sartre's account of practice is his distinction between the "objective" and the "subjective". One might interpret Sartre as dis-

tinguishing one's present desires, values, and beliefs as subjective and the past and future economic, etc. conditions as objective, and then

seeing these two as poles of the central philosophical dialectic.21 Thus

interpreted, a major philosophical difference between Sartre's approach to human practice and the Marxist one can be drawn, since for the Marxist all phenomena, both in the realm of what Sartre calls the subjective and in that of what he calls the objective, are studied dialectically (i.e., as exhibiting, each in its own way, general laws of dialectics; unity of opposites, negation of the negation, transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa). No special place is given to the particular process which Sartre calls a project. Sartre sees this difference, I believe, when he says that an alternative to his progressive-regressive method available for the Marxist is:

to make of dialectic a celestial law which imposes itself on the universe, a meta-

physical force which by itself engenders the historical process (and this is to fall back into Hegelian idealism) . . . .22

Marxists do see the laws of dialectics as universal, not in the sense of being metaphysical, but in the sense of being applicable to everything, human and non-human, in the universe; they are most general scientific laws.23

Sartre may think that on any view like this the distinctive characteristics of humans would be obliterated. But why should this be? Certain very basic laws of physics apply both to animals and to inert matter, but this does not prevent biologists and physiologists from seeing what is distinctive about animals. Similarly, the histories both of solar systems and of individual humans exhibit the unity of opposites, etc., but in such different ways that there is surely no danger for the dialectician of overlooking the difference between men and planets. In fact, I think an advantage to the general laws of dialectics is that, unlike metaphysical laws, they are such as to compel an inquirer quided by them to take particular circumstances into account, since

20 Sartre, pp. 91ff, 130 ff, 146ff. 21 Ibid., pp. 96ff. 22 Ibid., p. 99. 23 This position is most clearly stated by Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of

Nature. While it is popular now to claim that there is a basic difference between Marx and Engels on this point, it is clear to me that they held the same view. The notes that finally made up The Dialectics of Nature were developed by Engels in correspon- dence with Marx (as is evidence by Engels' first statement of the idea in a letter to Marx, May 30, 1873). Marx read and approved of the entire manuscript of Anti-Duhring (even contributing a chapter), and indeed, Engels' treatment of the transformation of quantity to quality in nature there (pp. 134ff) is offered in defense of a statement by Marx in Capital (Vol. I, p. 309, n.1).

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they make no specifications in advance of any particular inquiry as to, for instance, what the unified opposites are. The result is that the inquirer must examine the subject-matter of his inquiry to discover those opposites in it.

Possibly Sartre assumes that only metaphysical laws can consistently be thought to be universally true. But why must this be the case? To say that the laws of dialectics are universal and to deny that they are metaphysically final is to deny that they are unamenable to alteration in the light of new evidence or calculations but to hold that nonetheless they are now truer (i.e., more closely approximate statements of the actual nature of things) than are their present rivals (just as Newton's theory was truer than those of his rivals despite the alteration of the

scientifically theorized physical laws since his time). None of this is to say that major advances in the pursuit of (non-

physiological) psychology or small group sociology have been made by Marxists (at least in the English-speaking world). The machinery for such pursuit, however, seems to me already to exist within Marxism.

Examples of its use can be seen in at least some Marxist biographical work, e.g., the biographical sketches in some of Christopher Hill's historical analyses. There the pivot for understanding the thought and actions of an individual is finding the "contradictions" (in the technical Marxist sense, defined by the laws of dialectics) which motivate the

changes of his career, and one can also envisage this technique applied to the study of small groups like the family. However, while the contents of the descriptions and laws employed in fully developed individual studies would be peculiar to the subject-matters under examination the

general approach (focusing on contradiction-motivated change) would

be no different from the Marxist approach to history or natural science.

If, far from opposing knowledge and practice, Marxists use general laws of dialectics to gain knowledge of practice (or better of different

practices), then how does the concept of practice figure in Marxism?

One role that practice plays in Marxist philosophy is seen in Engels' and Lenin's polemics with empiricists. Both follow the same strategy.

They first show that their opponents' views lead to scepticism, then they

argue that scepticism is refuted in practice, that it is impossible for

anyone to live successfully as a sceptic in his daily life.24 This suggests

24 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Works, p. 385:

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the the information

imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he

proceeds to inform us that, whenever he speaks of objects or their qualities, he

does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which he cannot know any-

thing for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his

senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere

argumentation. But before there was argumentation there was action. Im Anfang war die Tat. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human

ingenuity invented it. See also, Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 55ff, 123ff. And The German

Ideology, p. 147.

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a way that the method followed by Sartre can be criticized from the point of view of practice.

One reason Sartre rejects a philosophical position which attempts to apply general scientific laws to various subject-matters is that in some sense such laws need to be "grounded". Taken one way, Marxists surely agree with this, and hold that their conclusions and the scientific methods employed to reach them are grounded. The conclusions are true, and the methods are useful for discovering truths and guiding actions and subject to all the self-corrective mechanisms that charac- terize scientific methods in general. However, though grounded, historical materialist principles are not, Marxists maintain, metaphysically final, since they may well have to be (objectively) altered in the light of scientific practice. Indeed, a charge of Marxists against relativists is that they fail to distinguish between grounded and metaphysically final principles, and, since there are no metaphysically final principles, are driven to scepticism.25

In the Search Sartre maintains that "anthropology" (including Marxism and existentialism as well as all the special social sciences) needs to be grounded, and he agrees with Marxists that metaphysical principles are not the grounds to be sought, but for quite different reasons. For Sartre there is no such thing as human nature, just ever changing human Praxis or projects, and the grounding of the human sciences requires "comprehension" (as opposed to "conceptual knowledge") of these projects. As soon as concepts are employed, one has lost the dynamism and uniqueness of man (his making of himself), and ceases to have a grounding for the social sciences.26

Possibly Sartre means by "conceptual knowledge" the use of "fixed" concepts, in the Marxist sense, in which case there is no disagreement between Sartre and Marxists here. A basic view of Marxism is that everything is always in process of change, and hence Marxists certainly do recommend against the use of "fixed" or "metaphysical" concepts, i.e., ones which do not do justice to the contradictory and hence changing nature of something.27 Or Sartre may

• classify as "fixed" any de-

terministic concepts in which case there is a disagreement, though a disagreement over determinism in general, not over the need for grounding beliefs about society.

If Sartre's view is to be taken as advising against the use of any sorts of concepts whatsoever at the level of grounding "anthropology", then I think he is subject to criticism by Marxists along lines similar to those by which they criticize relativists, since his view would then be practically sceptical in the social sciences at any rate. If at least expressing a belief involves employing concepts, then a major theme of Marxist philosophy has been to argue in favour of basing social practice on non-fixed concepts, i.e., on actions guided by beliefs which reflect the dialectical nature of society. Interpreted one way Sartre's view would

25 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 117ff. 26 Sartre, pp. 168ff. 27 See Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 202-5, Anti-Duhring, p. 93.

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seem to make the expression of any belief unjustified at the level of grounding anthropology, and given the scope of what Sartre seems to mean by "anthropology" (and the philosophical problems in holding that we can have beliefs which cannot in principle be expressed), this view surely flirts dangerously with a social-scientific scepticism that Sartre himself would want to avoid.

Other ways that the concept of practice enters historical materialism

exemplify the inter-defenses of the various Marxist theses (some of which have already been mentioned). Obviously it is considerations of

practice that lead Marxists sometimes to prescribe against insistence

upon reduction in the social sciences. Social-scientific study reveals the

urgent need for action based on knowledge of the movement of

contemporary society; hence the luxury of piecing together the inde-

finitely large number and variety of laws necessary for reduction cannot be afforded. And again, practical considerations figure in determining what range of causes to take into account in explaining any sort of

effect, e.g., whether, given the practical effects sought by an inquirer, to look for non-mental causes behind any mental ones (or vice versa).

A less obvious example relates to the sense in which economic factors are ultimately decisive (and indirectly to the Marxist defense, not elaborated in this essay, of holism, sense 3 - qualitative complexity). It was suggested that this be interpreted in terms of qualitative changes, but what is a qualitative change? Presumably something has qualitatively changed when it starts to exhibit different characteristics or

qualities; e.g., ice is qualitatively different from water in that, among other things, it is brittle, and socialist economies do not share with

capitalist ones the quality of being directed toward reaping private profit. However, any two phenomena both share and do not share some

qualities. Ice and water are both subject to laws of gravity, and certain market laws are exhibited in both capitalist and socialist societies. Here

again, I believe considerations of practice enter. What marks off qualitative differences from non-qualitative ones is that the former have

important practical effects on people's lives, that is, on their survival and well-being, which latter is a matter of their human needs. Thus, while the differences between water and ice or socialist and capitalist economies may be negligible from some points of view (e.g., of the stellar astronomer or the linguist) they certainly are not negligible from the point of view of someone who wants to cross a lake or (socialists maintain) of someone who wants to earn a healthy, secure living.

It might be thought that there is an element of pragmatism here.

However, in the first place, what is being suggested is not that the differences are created by our interests and needs, but that the differences in qualitatively different phenomena exist (independently of what people believe or wish them to be), and it is our needs that cause us to mark off some of them as qualitative differences. Secondly, while it suffices to make the position of historical materialism coherent that some meaning to "ultimately decisive" and hence "qualitatively

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different" can be given, one of the conclusions of historical materialism is that people do in fact share certain practical needs in common.28

It should be noted that this does not mean that qualitative differences in human affairs are ones which affect only inherent (biologically given) needs. The Marxist can hold, for instance, that there might be religious needs such that different religious beliefs are qualitatively different in respect of their effects on these religious needs. Although for Marxism, the religious needs and beliefs people have will, ultimately, depend on extra-religious, economic factors.

This brings us back to a major bone of contention between Marxists and Sartre. For the latter an analysis (rather a "comprehension") of practice reveals the incompatibility of human action (or projects) with the sort of determinism required by historical materialism. This disagreement ought to be of little comfort to anyone who wants to unite existentialism and Marxism, but it surely also places the burden of proof on the historical materialist to defend his determinism. My own view is that Sartre is right when he criticizes Marxists for defending determinism by pointing to social and historical laws, while ignoring the subjective realm. However, it also seems to me that defense of determinism is possible here philosophically along lines familiar to students of action theory that reasons are causes, and empirically by the development and test of a specifically Marxist psychology.

Postscript on Theory and Practice

There is one view of practice which Sartre and Marxists share. A theme of the Search is that Marxists, being scientific in their theoretical attitude toward men, forget how to relate to individuals, and hence tend to lose their humanity. No doubt there is a psychological danger here. The guarantee the Marxist theorist has against this danger is to put his theories into practice. <3iven his theories this would require social action, and, given the truth of social "ontic reduction" this would require his acting in common along with other, individual humans- a practical way to avoid losing sight of individual humanity.

December 1971

28 Another way of putting this is that (for all but the Positivist) it is one thing to give meaning to the basic concepts of a theory and another to explain features of an actual subject-matter by means of the theory- a distinction which I believe Louis Althusser fails to make in his criticism of Engels' explications of what are here called holism sense 2, holism sense 3, and the ultimately decisive role of economic factors. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London, 1969), pp. 122-123.

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practice and some muddles about the methodology of historical materialism

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