Ontology or history

With the possible exception of Marcuse, the Frankfurt School contests the interpretation of Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. Alfred Schmidt’s careful study of Marx’s concept of nature attempts to situate the Manuscripts at an equal distance from a materialist ontology and an absolute historicism. Jürgen Habermas also rejects the interpretation of Marx’s Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis. He argues that the early Marx distinguishes between nature as such, and nature as it enters the historical sphere through labor, and which therefore has a social character. Marx’s social theory would have implications only for society in the larger framework of a naturalistic ontology. Within this same tradition, however, it is customary to attack Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as idealistic. Thus the similarities I identify between the early Marx and Lukács are denied.

It is interesting to note that another influential school of Marxist thought, founded by Louis Althusser, makes no such distinction. Rejecting equally the early Marx and Lukács, the Althusserians see in both a romantic refusal of scientific objectivity and the independence of nature. There is thus a certain unwitting convergence of Frankfurt School and Althusserian interpretations in that both emphasize the autonomy of nature by contrast with philosophy of praxis and condemn as idealistic any doctrine that attempts to understand nature through history. I cannot consider these convergent critiques in detail. Here I would like to simply sketch the Frankfurt School’s attempt to “save” the early Marx from historicism.

In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas admits that Marx’s text is ambiguous. He claims that the ambiguities have given rise to a “phenomenological strain of Marxism” that overlooks Marx’s naturalism and for which “the category of labor then acquires unawares the meaning of world-constituting life activity in general.”⁹ Although Habermas includes Marcuse in this phenomenological strain, this would only be true of the very early and late work. Throughout much of his career, Marcuse’s position was close to Schmidt’s and Habermas’s in denying the ontological status of social categories. In Reason and Revolution, for example, Marcuse too notes the ambiguities of Marx’s text; he writes: “All this has an obvious resemblance to Hegel’s idea of reason. Marx even goes so far as to describe the self-realization of man in terms of the unity of thought and being.”¹⁰ But, in fact, “Marx … detached dialectic from this ontological base. In his work, the negativity of reality becomes a historical condition which cannot be hypostatized as a metaphysical state of affairs.”¹¹

Such an interpretation may explain Marx’s later Marxism but it does not account for the Manuscripts. It is particularly significant that in the formulations of Habermas and Marcuse, the antinomies Marx attempted to transcend reappear as alternatives between which he is supposed to have chosen: naturalism or humanism, history or ontology. But Marx himself writes:

Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism, and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.¹²

The early Marx would not have defined his own advance over Hegel as the demonstration that alienation is a historical category rather than an ontological one. He argued that all ontology is historical in essence and that the dichotomy between being and history is therefore false. This is the main claim of philosophy of praxis, the idea that history, properly understood, has ontological significance. As a philosopher of praxis Marx did not choose between an ontological and a historical interpretation of the social categories; he chose both. Hence his most striking utterances, such as the one just quoted, or the following: “Society is the accomplished union of man and nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.”¹³