Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism

Chapter 2. The Dialectics of Process

C H A P T E R 2 THE DIALECTICS OF PROCESS Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow . . . Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow . . . For Thine is Life is . . . —T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men FROM INTERNAL RELATIONS TO DIALECTICS M arx and Whitehead share a common method, one that begins with human experience and analyzes the adequate explanatory grounds of that experience. The subject of our thinking is human experience but this is certainly not meant in any precritical empiricist sense as the examination of a distinct external, objective world by the subject. Such separation of the subject from object is entirely antithetical to both Marx’s and Whitehead’s descriptions of “reality” and inevitably result in an unacceptable dualism of the positivist or idealist forms.1 23 The difficulty for these dualisms always becomes one of access and this difficulty leads to the inadequacy of an objectivism that is unable to account for the activity of the subject in the process of knowing, or to a subjectivism that is unable to account for the shared objectivity of the world and hence falls prey to relativism. Notably, these positions are critiqued both by Whitehead, on the grounds that they are unable to account for the real transmission of data from one occasion of experience to another and simultaneously for the change that pervades the fabric of reality, and by Marx, as symptomatic philosophical ideologies emergent from capitalist social relations .2 These criticisms are, as will become evident later, facets of the selfsame position. Thus, instead of the precritical and dogmatic distinctive-dualism of subjectivism or objectivism, my references to the empirical world are intended to refer to a structure of experience much more similar to, if not identical with, Bologh’s dialectical phenomenology, which treats objects as objective conditions for the accomplishment of some activity. Conversely, it treats the activity as a condition for the knowledge of the object. For this type of analysis, no object exists as an abstraction, a meaning that is removed from all purposive activity, all history. Rather, every object is seen as grounded in its form of life. . . . This active unity of subject and object constitutes a purposive activity, a form of life.3 Instead of a duality, dialectical phenomenology posits a unity. However, this unity is not the result of reducing the objective to the subjective or the reverse. . . . Rather, both are united in a process, an active relation of subject to object.4 Thus, the empirical world as I refer to it is the active phenomenological encounter that is our being-(t)here, the intersection of relations (mit-sein) that constitute this particular material/historical/epochal form of life (dasein ). These descriptions are meant to highlight two features of this type of position: dialectic and process; the real unity of apparent opposites and this unity itself as generating change from the settled history of past fact. Such is the sense of the empirical and material used by Whitehead and Marx. INTERPRETING EXPERIENCE I am sitting in my garden on a beautiful summer day. As the morning sun gains in intensity my face begins to warm, small beads of sweat rise on my brow. A slight breeze is pushing the branches of the fig tree, moving its leaves in and out of the sunlight dappling through the elm tree above, allowing 24 MARX AND WHITEHEAD them to alternately receive and not receive the light for their photosynthetic processes. I notice an earthworm that has surfaced from last night’s rain and is burrowing again into the soil of the garden to receive nutrients. The tomatoes are further along than yesterday, some are just beginning to blush red; some of the grapes hanging beneath the shade of their arbor leaves are ripening translucent. The redwood stain applied last year on the garden fence is beginning to fade along the edges; it will need a new coat this fall. I am relaxed and pleased to be sitting in this lovely environment, yet I notice a slight tension in my neck and shoulders—the result of my concentration on this writing. These observations are so simple, so basic to our daily encounter with the world, yet they lead us to several more general determinations: a transmission of qualities from one...