In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition

Chapter Five: The Instinctive Dialectic

FIVE THE INSTINCTIVE DIALECTIC In his early work Marx speaks forthrightly of a “fully developed humanism,” which entails, he says, a “reintegration or return of man to himself” and a “complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.”1 Marx counsels here a certain redemptive or reconciliatory vision, one that emerges in his work alongside growing suspicions of disembodied rationalism and the Cartesian tradition, alongside growing concerns about alienation in the modern labor process, concerns about a liberal ideology that reduces society to “an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual.”2 In many ways, the normative core of Marx’s social criticism is borne along by an anthropological vision of a richer, more complete, fully embodied human existence in which “man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.”3 The thought seems to be that as human beings, full of creative potential, we ought to experience our lives, and our social and material world, as a positive expression of our creative talents and energies. If we cannot “reproduce” ourselves “actively, and in a real sense,” if we cannot “see” our “own reflection in a world which [we] have created,” then, well, we ought to be concerned, we ought to assume a critical posture, for our human situation is not what it ought to be. Marx’s critique of bourgeois society, his “protest” against what has become of the modern way of life, is rooted, Erich Fromm tells us, “in the humanist Western philosophical tradition, which reaches from Spinoza through the French and German enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century to Goethe and Hegel, and the very essence of which is concern for man and the realization of his potentialities.”4 On Fromm’s take, Marx’s philosophy emerges as the “upshot” of this broader humanist tradition, and it does so largely because of its debts to Hegel’s dialectical innovations. As Marx himself admits, in a passage that I noted in chapter 2 and that is worthy of slightly fuller consideration here, Hegel’s “outstanding ” contribution is precisely “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and 91 92 IN THE SPIRIT OF CRITIQUE generating principle.” The real contribution, Marx says, has to do with the fact that “Hegel conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as a loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labor.”5 As we have seen, both Hegel and Marx turn to dialectical thinking in order to account for self-creative human activity, and not merely in the Kantian, classically liberal sense of the individual pursuit of autonomy but in the broader sense of a species-wide pursuit of collective self-determination. For both Hegel and Marx, dialectical thinking helps to vivify a process by which we—individuals, communities, the human species as such—come to appreciate and take ownership over our ability consciously to create and recreate our world. In this final substantive chapter, and by way of a return to the framing theme of chapter 2, the theme of “staging,” I consider how humanist discourse in the dialectical tradition tends to get swept up in a naïve and perhaps dangerously hopeful reconciliatory narrative. Ultimately, I consider how we might embrace, in our own time, a dialectical way of thinking that appears to be grounded in a set of rather strong assumptions about the nature and trajectory of human “self-activity.” I consider how we might embrace a way of thinking that is borne along by a certain promise of, as Marx puts it, “reintegration or return,” a promise of atonement, or, as Fromm puts it, “the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process.”6 By invoking the language of humanism here I mean purposefully to raise a red flag. What we have been referring to as the dialectical tradition represents a significant chapter, perhaps the ultimate chapter, the “upshot,” of the broader humanist emphasis on “man” and on the presumed inauguration of a “human” world, an inauguration sold on the promise of liberation and emancipation yet burdened in time by rather pernicious consequences. Throughout the modern period, and perhaps as a constitutive component of Western...