Abstract
This chapter discusses a frequent criticism of materialism: that its conception of the world fails to provide a space for human subjectivity. With this in mind, texts by Marx are analyzed that provide elements—contrary to that criticism—for the approach of different subjective dimensions. At first, human labor is investigated as an intervention in the world that carries the marks of the subject who performs it. In the second part of the chapter, the subjective presence existing in the formation of human knowledge is examined. In both moments, Marx’s distance from a philosophical objectivism and from liberal subjectivism is unmistakable.
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Notes
- 1.
This is the retrospective evaluation of Murray Gell-Man—winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1969—on Bohr’s systematic disqualification of those interpretations of quantum physics that were different than his own. In his exacerbated subjectivism—a mark of our time—Bohr considered to be resolved substantive and philosophical questions that indeed are still open today. Murray Gell-Mann, ‘What Are the Building Blocks of Matter?’, in The Nature of the Physical Universe: 1976 Nobel Conference, ed. Douglas Huff and Omer Prewett (New York: Wiley, 1979), 29.
- 2.
Werner Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1958), 23–24.
- 3.
Abraham Pais, ‘Einstein and the Quantum Theory’, Reviews of Modern Physics 51 (1979): 863–914, 907. In addition to Einstein, the dissonant voice of Louis de Broglie toward the Copenhagen School’s subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics should be mentioned. A reconstitution of the debate, as well as a contemporary reevaluation of Einstein and Broglie’s positions can be found in Álvaro Balsas and A. Luciano L. Videira, ‘Truth by Fiat: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’, Revista Brasileira de História da Ciência 6, no. 2 (July–December 2013): 248–66.
- 4.
The film was directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente.
- 5.
Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 1.
- 6.
Ibid., 141, my emphasis.
- 7.
These affirmations do not mean that I endorse the tacit position that Marx’s thinking is immune to criticism, which would be a dogmatism to be avoided. However, in the case examined here, the criticism of an alleged Marxian objectivism appears to be misplaced for reasons that will be presented throughout the chapter.
- 8.
It is surprising that an author such as Jürgen Habermas (activating an only partially modified Kantian matrix) believed he could find in psychoanalytic texts a theorization about a supposed autonomy of the subject Cf.: Jürgen Habermas, ‘Desenvolvimento da Moral e Identidade do Eu’, in Para a Reconstrução do Materialismo Histórico (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983). In fact, what a Freudian work such as The Ego and the Id shows us is precisely the impossibility of assuming this autonomy; hence Freud’s famous reference to the self as “a poor creature owing service to three masters” (the external world, the super-ego and the id). However, if Habermas at least tries to remain on the grounds of real history, other defenders of an exacerbated subjectivism not only have difficulties recognizing the dependence of the self in relation to the real world, but choose to systematically attack the psychoanalytical contribution, fascinated as they are by the mirage of a nearly complete autonomy of the subject (which Freud himself never recognized).
- 9.
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in MECW, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 3.
- 10.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, in MECW, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 39.
- 11.
Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 109.
- 12.
Ibid., 108.
- 13.
Today, in the twenty-first century, we would say men and women.
- 14.
István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1986), 12–14. I analyze the Manuscripts of 1844 in greater detail in the following chapter of this book.
- 15.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1982), 759.
- 16.
Marx and Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, 39.
- 17.
Ibid., 40.
- 18.
Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’ (Grundrisse), in MECW, vol. 28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 413, my emphasis.
- 19.
Marx, Capital, 284.
- 20.
In the words of Edward O. Wilson, one of the founders of sociobiology: “A much more likely circumstance for any given aggressive species, and one that I suspect is true for man, is that the aggressive responses vary according to the situation in a genetically programmed manner.” Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 127, my emphasis.
- 21.
Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’, 17.
- 22.
Marx, Capital, 644.
- 23.
But care is needed: to say that the result of different human acts is unpredictable is not the same as supposing that it is random (or accidental). It only affirms that the particular rationality of the social being is constituted throughout history (which, by the way, disallows any type of futurology). Strictly speaking, this rationality can only be better known post festum, at the end of a process.
- 24.
Karl Marx, ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’, in MECW, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 173.
- 25.
Hans-Georg Flickinger, Marx e Hegel: O Porão de Uma Filosofia Social (Porto Alegre: L&PM/CNPq, 1986), 169–73.
- 26.
György Lukács, Para Uma Ontologia do Ser Social, vol. 2 (São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2013).
- 27.
Marx and Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, 31, 39.
- 28.
“There is an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work […].” Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005), 33.
- 29.
Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’, 38.
- 30.
Ibid., 38.
- 31.
Ibid., 37.
- 32.
Ibid., 38.
- 33.
Marx and Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, 54.
- 34.
Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858’, 18.
- 35.
Nicolas Tertulian, Lukács: La Rinascita dell’Ontologia (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1986), 62–63.
- 36.
Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, in MECW, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 178.
References
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Heisenberg, Werner. 1958. The Physicist’s Conception of Nature. London: Hutchinson & Co.
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Mészáros, István. 1986. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press.
Pais, Abraham. 1979. Einstein and the Quantum Theory. Reviews of Modern Physics 51: 863–914.
Tertulian, Nicolas. 1986. Lukács: La rinascita dell’ontologia. Roma: Editori Riuniti.
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Vieira Martins, M. (2022). Materialism and Subjectivity: Marx’s Position. In: Marx, Spinoza and Darwin. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13025-0_5
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