Philosophy of Praxis (first instalment)

PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS – FIRST INSTALMENT

SPN 419-472

SUMMARY

This section is a critique of Nikolai Bukarin’s Historical Materialism, a book which Gramsci himself had used as a text for political education in the Italian Communist Party.

Gramsci’s main points:

1. Best to start with a critical analysis of and dialogue with “common sense”.

2. “The critique of systematic philosophies” should not however be neglected. But “it is necessary to engage battle with the most eminent of one’s adversaries”, their best expositions, and the strongest possible reading of their arguments.

3. Bukharin, by contrast, starts by attacking “bourgeois scholars” rather than dealing with common sense; but operates mainly by “picking off” minor ideologues and rubbishing this or that assertion by them, then concluding that all bourgeois thought is guilty of the error just derided. (Two of the first three sections of Bukharin’s introduction start by asserting:”Bourgeois scholars say…” and then scoffing at the views attributed to those scholars).

4. “Statistical laws can be employed in the science and art of politics only so long as the great masses of the population remain… essentially passive… [But] political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers… In reality one can ’scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle… One can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’…”

5. Bukharin, in contrast, proposes a “mechanical causalism” and “vulgar evolutionism”.

6. In “the philosophy of praxis”, understanding is thus integrated with activism, with politics, with making history. “Separated from the theory of history and politics philosophy cannot be other than metaphysics, whereas the great conquest in the history of modern thought, represented by the philosophy of praxis, is precisely the concrete historicisation of philosophy and its identification with history”.

7. Further, the philosophy of praxis goes beyond both materialism and idealism.

8. Bukharin counterposes a “materialism” composed of mechanical “causalism” and prediction, and of the assertion that all idealism is really just religion and denial of the existence of the material world. However, the Catholic Church emphatically asserts the existence of the material world!

EXCERPTS FROM BUKHARIN

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/index.htm

“It is evident from the above what relation exists between history and sociology. Since sociology explains the general laws of human evolution, it serves as a method for history. If, for example, sociology establishes the general doctrine that the forms of government depend on the forms of economy, the historian must seek and find, in any given epoch, precisely what are the relations, and must show what is their concrete, specific expression. History furnishes the material for drawing sociological conclusions and making sociological generalizations, for these conclusions are not made up of whole cloth, but are derived from the actual facts of history. Sociology in its turn formulates a definite point of view, a means of investigation, or, as we now say, a method for history.

The working class has its own proletarian sociology, known as historical materialism. In its main outlines this theory was elaborated by Marx and Engels. It is also called ‘the materialist method in history’, or simply ‘economic materialism’…”

“We may therefore answer the fundamental question as to whether the inherent law in the phenomena of nature and society, the uniformity which we observe in these fields, is teleological or causal: Both in nature and in society there exists objectively (i.e., regardless of whether we wish it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not) a law of nature that is causal in character.

What constitutes such a law of cause and effect? Such a law is a necessary, inevitable, invariable and universal relation between phenomena…”

“Prediction is possible in the domain of the social sciences as well as in that of the natural sciences… We know, for example, that astronomers are able to predict with the utmost precision the time of an eclipse of the sun or moon… Now, let us ask whether there is anything similar to this in the social sciences; the answer is in the affirmative…”

“In unorganized society we may set up the following laws

1. Social phenomena are the resultant of the conflict of individual wills, feelings, actions, etc.

2. Social phenomena determine at any given moment the will of the various individuals.

3. Social phenomena do not express the will of individual persons, but frequently are a direct contradiction of this will; they prevail over it by force, with the result that the individual often feels the pressure of social forces on his actions…”

“The individual case is of negligible importance. But just combine a great number of such ‘accidents’, and you will at once see that their ‘accidental nature’ begins to disappear. The function and significance of many actions, their combined action, is at once felt in the sequel. So the individual cases are by no means zero quantities, for zero, however frequently multiplied, will never give more than zero”.

“Idealism (the doctrine based on a fundamental idea underlying all things, a “spirit”), is simply a diluted form of the religious conception… The idealistic point of view, if pursued to its conclusion, leads to a number of absurdities, which are often defined with a serious face by the philosophers of the ruling classes. Particularly, we find associated with idealism such views as deny the external world, i.e., the existence of things objectively, independently of the human consciousness…

“This insane philosophy… is contradicted by human experience at every step. When we eat… none of us ever thinks of doubting the existence of the external world, i.e., the existence – let us say – of the food we eat… None the less, this fallacy is based on the fundamental position of idealism”.

CRITICAL COMMENTS ON GRAMSCI, AND DISCUSSION

1. Common sense

Martin thought that Gramsci’s concept of “common sense” is incoherent. It overestimates the formative influence on “common sense” of formal doctrine: the “principal elements [are] provided by religion”, writes Gramsci, but isn’t it rather the case that religion, preserving only some core ideas of its own (e.g., with Christianity, guilt), adapts itself very flexibly to varied “common senses”? It also overestimates the “realistic, materialistic elements”, claiming that they “predominate”; in fact naive “common sense” has a lot of “magical” rather than materialist thinking in it. (See Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”, chapter 4 and 5, for a good explanation of this).

Allan thought that this criticism was fabricating a problem where none exists. Gramsci is quite right to stress addressing “common sense”: building on insights in it where we can, “therapeutically” dissecting it where necessary. As Robert pointed out, this is now standard pedagogic precept.

2. Philosophy “identified with history”

We all thought that Gramsci’s criticism of Bukharin as regards “mechanical causalism”, social prediction on the model of natural sciences, etc. is telling.

And if the nature of social life means that our understanding of it has to be tied up with our efforts to change it, then “philosophy” is tied up with the making of history.

But from that to the “identification with history” of philosophy is a big step. In fact, if philosophy is tied up with efforts to change the world whose success and outcome is uncertain – as it must be – then it inescapably comprises an element of initiative beyond what history has produced or may soon produce.

Even if one believes, like Hegel and radically unlike Gramsci, that “concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be [...] for such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late… When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering” – even if one believes that, the “painting grey on grey” is still a matter of individual initiative rather than mere generic “history”.

Moreover, Gramsci writes: “To think of a philosophical affirmation as true in a particular historical period… but as superseded and rendered ‘vain’ in a succeeding period, without however falling into scepticism and moral and ideological relativism, in other words to see philosophy as historicity, is quite an arduous and difficult mental operation”. Maybe not just arduous and difficult, but actually impossible. If it is true today that God does not exist, it was true 500 or 1000 years ago.

3. Materialism and idealism

Martin queried Gramsci’s apparent rejection of materialism. Gramsci seems to equate materialism with “mechanical causalism” of the early 19th century sort, but in fact it is much broader.

Allan pointed out that textually Gramsci explicitly rejects only “traditional materialism”.

None of us could make any sense of Gramsci’s proposition that the Marxist “theory of superstructures@ “poses in realistic and historical terms” what traditional idealism posed materially.

4. Dialectic

Gramsci complains that Bukharin does not discuss “the dialectic”.

In fact, there is in Bukharin’s book a chapter headed “Dialectical Materialism”, the only explanation I can see is this:

“Matter in motion: such is the stuff of this world. It is therefore necessary for the understanding of any phenomenon to study it in its process of origination (how, whence, why it came to be), its evolution, its destruction, in a word, its motion, and not its seeming state of rest. This dynamic point of view is also called the dialectic point of view… In the first place, the dialectic method of interpretation demands that all phenomena be considered in their indissoluble relations; in the second place, that they be considered in their state of motion.”

And this: “Hegel observed this characteristic of motion and expressed it in the following manner: he called the original condition of equilibrium the thesis, the disturbance of equilibrium the antithesis, the reestablishment of equilibrium on a new basis the synthesis (the unifying proposition reconciling the contradictions). The characteristic of motion present in all things, expressing itself in this tripartite formula (or triad) he called dialectic”. In fact, of course, Hegel did nothing of the sort; in any case, the presentation of dialectical processes as those of the constant re-establishment of equilibrium is odd.

Further, Bukharin not only subscribes to “the dialectics of nature”, but asserts that the real importance of dialectics is its basis in mechanics. “It is necessary to use the dialectic method, the dialectic mode of thought, because the dialectics of nature may thus be grasped. It is quite possible to transcribe the ‘mystical’ (as Marx put it) language of the Hegelian dialectics into the language of modern mechanics”.

(How? Bukharin’s explanation is puzzling. “We [now] know that the smallest particles of matter, the atoms, consist of still smaller particles, electrons, flying about and revolving within the atom, as the heavenly bodies of the solar system revolve around the sun. But the whole world consists of such particles, and how can anything be considered constant in a universe whose component parts gyrate with whirlwind speed?” The archetype of “mechanical thinking” was Laplace’s Mecanique Celeste: pre-atomic; dealing precisely with planets, stars, etc. moving with ‘worldwind speed’; having as one of its breakthrough propositions that an object moving with ‘worldwind speed’ continues to do so unless disturbed.)

Gramsci’s own terminology is also puzzling. He writes of “the dialectic”. Meaning what? And moreover of it as a “theory of knowledge”. Meaning what, again?

5. Language

Robert picked up on Gramsci’s discussion of language and metaphor. Gramsci argues that “language is always metaphorical”, and rebukes “an arbitrary trend towards neologism”, on the grounds that “language [can only be] transformed with the transformation of the whole of civilisation, through the acquisition of culture by new classes… and what it does is precisely to absorb in metaphorical form the words of previous civilisations and cultures”.

Robert raised the issue of language being used as an instrument of ruling-class hegemony, for example in the authoritative status given to Spanish as against indigenous languages in Latin American states.

We discussed that a bit. It’s true, but maybe not so simple. Gramsci would have grown up speaking Sardinian dialect, and only through schooling learned state-approved standard Italian. In a letter he would encourage his sister to let her son speak Sardinian dialect.

But he also insisted (p.325) that it is necessary for everyone to learn the standard national language, whatever the side-stories in terms of bureaucratic suppression of other popular idioms.

“Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is more or less limited and provincial…”

There’s a parallel here with Basil Bernstein’s writings in England in the 1970s. Bernstein studied “codes” of using a fairly standardised language (English in England) rather than dialects, but also came to the conclusion that a populist approach, endorsing local popular “codes” and rejecting the teaching of standard “codes” as ruling-class imposition, actually tends to solidify and double-lock class privilege.