Abstract
Karl Marx’s story of emancipation is well known; it focuses on the emancipation of the working class, the proletarians finally throwing off their chains. Throughout this book, the Rortyan notion of “redemptive truth” plays a crucial role, that is, the idea of a single set of beliefs in combination with the attempt to fit everything into a single context. In the case of Marxism, this is of course the context of the class struggle. However, in this chapter Schulenberg tells the Marxian story of emancipation from a different perspective. Instead of concentrating on the class struggle, one could focus on Marx’s understanding of sensuous practical activity and creative praxis (or the subject’s process of aesthetic emancipation). Hence, Schulenberg compares Marx’s idea of “praktische, menschlich-sinnliche Tätigkeit” and creative praxis with that of John Dewey as he develops in Art as Experience (1934). For both philosophers, the human subject’s creative praxis is of the utmost importance. It is this parallel that adds to one’s understanding of the relation between Marxism and pragmatism.
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Notes
- 1.
For stimulating discussions of Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, see Peter Bürger, Das Denken des Herrn: Bataille zwischen Hegel und dem Surrealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), and the chapter “Hegels Philosophie des Todes” in Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2000), 13–25. In The Hegel Variations, Fredric Jameson writes about “the Slave’s truth”: “The Slave’s truth is thereby labor itself; his fearful preservation of the body and the physical has become a condemnation to perpetual labor on matter itself. At which point the Negative is itself clarified: and this determinate Negation of matter, which produces specific works and physical objects, is sharply distinguished from the absolute Negation which produces only death and destruction” (2010: 57).
- 2.
In this context, see Terrell Carver and James Farr, ed., The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge UP, 2015).
- 3.
It is noteworthy that Marx plays no role at all in Paul Fairfield, ed., John Dewey and Continental Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010).
- 4.
In this context, see Michael Quante’s helpful commentary in Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). In addition, see Michael Quante and David P. Schweikard, ed., Marx Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016). Regarding the historical context of the Manuscripts, see chapter 5, “The Alliance of Those Who Think and Those Who Suffer: Paris, 1844,” in Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 122–167.
- 5.
For a discussion of the relation between Marxist aesthetics and corporeality, see the chapter “The Marxist Sublime” in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 196–233.
- 6.
For an interesting analysis of Marx’s understanding of praxis, see “Part 1. Praxis: Marx and the Hegelian Background” in Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity, 11–83. In Representing Capital, Jameson writes that he sees “Marx as the climax of that great German philosophical tradition of the centrality of activity (Tätigkeit) as it reached its earlier climaxes in Goethe and Hegel” (2011: 108). See also Jameson, The Hegel Variations, 61.
- 7.
All this concerns the much-debated question of Marx’s understanding of human nature. As an answer to Althusser’s theoretical antihumanism, as he introduced it in “Marxism and Humanism” (in For Marx), see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refraction of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983). In addition, see Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016 [1961]).
- 8.
In this context, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke UP, 2001). Regarding Marx’s general approach to literature, S.S. Prawer correctly argues that “from the Paris Manuscripts onwards he sees all the arts as part of that universal creative activity through which man ‘transforms and creates the world and himself’” (2011: 123). In his conclusion, Prawer comments on Marx’s use of the words “Literatur” and “literarisch” as follows: “As we have seen, Marx does not use the words Literatur und literarisch with sole reference to imaginative compositions; he applies such terms readily to the whole body of written and printed material, whether artistic or not, or to the writings pertaining to a given field of investigation. This is merely one outward manifestation of his belief that imaginative literature and other kinds of writing are not wholly distinct and discrete, which is itself the corollary of his deepest conviction of all: that all the ways in which men express themselves, all the institutions they call into being, all the social relations they form, are intimately related, and that their study should form an integral whole, a ‘science of man’” (2011: 421–422).
- 9.
For discussions of Dewey’s aesthetics, see Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987); and Richard Eldridge, “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” The Cambridge Companion to John Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 242–264. See also the chapter “Aesthetics, Creation, Appreciation, and Consummatory Experience” in David Hildebrand, Dewey (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 146–182.
- 10.
In this context, one could think of one of Walt Whitman’s most Deweyan poems: “A Song for Occupations” (1881). See also the chapter “Making” in Raymond Boisvert, John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 117–138.
- 11.
As regards the compartmentalization of art, the arch-villain is of course Kant. Dewey comments on the crucial role of Kant’s Third Critique as follows: “Kant was a pastmaster in first drawing distinctions and then erecting them into compartmental divisions. The effect upon subsequent theory was to give the separation of the esthetic from other modes of experience an alleged scientific basis in the constitution of human nature. […] Having disposed of Truth and the Good, it remained to find a niche for Beauty, the remaining term in the classic trio. Pure Feeling remained, being ‘pure’ in the sense of being isolated and self-enclosed; feeling free from any taint of desire; feeling that strictly speaking is non-empirical. So he bethought himself of a faculty of Judgment which is not reflective but intuitive and yet not concerned with objects of Pure Reason. This faculty is exercised in Contemplation, and the distinctively esthetic element is the pleasure which attends such Contemplation. Thus the psychological road was opened leading to the ivory tower of ‘Beauty’ remote from all desire, action, and stir of emotion” (1980: 252–253).
- 12.
In Experience and Nature, Dewey expands on the dichotomy of art as a continuation of natural events versus “esoteric” art as follows: “There are substantially but two alternatives. Either art is a continuation, by means of intelligent selection and arrangement, of natural tendencies of natural events, or art is a peculiar addition to nature springing from something dwelling exclusively within the breast of man, whatever name be given the latter. In the former case, delightfully enhanced perception or esthetic appreciation is of the same nature as enjoyment of any object that is consummatory. It is the outcome of a skilled and intelligent art of dealing with natural things for the sake of intensifying, purifying, prolonging and deepening the satisfactions which they spontaneously afford. That, in this process, new meanings develop, and that these afford uniquely new traits and modes of enjoyment is but what happens everywhere in emergent growths. / But if fine art has nothing to do with other activities and products, then of course it has nothing inherently to do with the objects, physical and social, experienced in other situations. It has an occult source and an esoteric character” (1958: 389).
- 13.
In this context, see the new edition of Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017); and Bürger, Nach der Avantgarde (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2014).
- 14.
In Experience and Nature, Dewey also speaks of humans’ “narrowed, embittered, and crippled life, of congested, hurried, confused and extravagant life” (1958: 362). Crucially, in this passage Dewey’s critique of an alienated existence goes further than in his other texts. His critique not only refers to the worker’s alienation from the product he has produced, but it concerns all social classes. Existence is too much governed by “activities that have no immediate enjoyed intrinsic meaning,” that is, activities that are just “useful” (1958: 362). The vulgarity of this widespread notion of usefulness (and efficacy), according to Dewey, is diametrically opposed to processes of learning and acts of making that demonstrate the significance of creativity.
- 15.
A more detailed discussion of Dewey’s aesthetics would have to consider his understanding of mind. According to Dewey, mind must not be isolated from the world of praxis. This is central to his empirical naturalism or—and this is the term I would prefer—“naturalistic humanism” (Dewey 1958: 1). He underlines “that the idiomatic use of the word ‘mind’ gives a much more truly scientific, and philosophic, approach to the actual facts of the case than does the technical one. For in its nontechnical use, ‘mind’ denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons, and groups” (1980: 263). Mind, as he famously put it, “is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves” (1980: 263). The traditional conception that established a separation of mind from the practical world entailed an isolation of the aesthetic. Consequently, the live creature has to live in an artless world: “This conception of mind as an isolated being underlies the conception that esthetic experience is merely something ‘in mind,’ and strengthens the conception which isolates the esthetic from those modes of experience in which the body is actively engaged with the things of nature and life. It takes art out of the province of the live creature” (1980: 264).
- 16.
As we saw in Chap. 7, Jameson, in The Political Unconscious , still maintained that the class struggle was central to Marxist thought. In this context, it would be interesting to ask what happens to this Jamesonian notion of class struggle in, for instance, Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxism as they develop it in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). In the former text, they suggest that leftist politics in the time of Empire, the politics of the multitude, “is a matter of crossing and breaking down the limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command” (2000: 399). For a detailed discussion of Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxism, see the chapter “Empire, the End of the Outside, and the New Barbarians” in Ulf Schulenberg, Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 241–251.
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). Stories of Emancipation and the Idea of Creative Praxis: Karl Marx and John Dewey. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_9
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