The normative dimension

The interpretation of the Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis is also challenged from an ethical point of view. Marx’s claim that the “human essence” is “alienated” is frequently said to imply an ethical ideal. Marx is supposed to have rested his case for revolution on the injustice of capitalist alienation. Humanity’s true essence as “species being” imperatively requires the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of conditions in which social institutions are based on cooperation and creativity rather than competition. This formulation recapitulates the antinomy of value and fact, i.e., capitalist fact versus socialist value.

Not everyone agrees. Some see in the Manuscripts an attempt to transcend the opposition of value and fact presupposed by this interpretation. The debate over the Manuscripts is of course related to the larger debate over Marxism and ethics.¹⁴ Considered as a philosophy of praxis, Marx’s theory is unquestionably normative in some sense, but I argue that it is not based on an ethical conception.

What is at stake here is the dialectical character of Marx’s theory, hence also his relation to Hegel. Were Marx to accept the dichotomy of value and fact, ethics and social reality, he would regress behind Hegel to a utopian-moralistic position like that of Bruno Bauer and Moses Hess. In his essay on Hess, Lukács showed that these Left Hegelians attempted to recover revolutionary possibilities by positing ethical values as the basis for knowledge of the future. They thus rejected Hegel’s concrete analysis of and reconciliation with the present.

In his mature works Hegel found the “ought” realized in the “is” of his society. On Hegel’s terms, if Marx had posited the “human essence” as an ethical ideal, philosophy would already have transcended it theoretically through the demonstration of the relative rationality of what is. Alienation might, like the police courts Hegel deduces from the Idea, remain as an unpleasant fact of practical life. But then so are fleas and measles. The indifference of philosophical reason to such matters, essentially to human happiness, is not arbitrary but expresses the essence of social reality. The demand for the abstract ideal is a moment of negation necessarily frustrated by an objectivity that transcends it, that is to say, by reason itself. Hegelianism is not overcome by the renewed positing of the ideal, but rather anticipates it and refutes it in advance.

Hegel’s critique of Kant and of abstract ethical idealism influenced Marx to seek a basis for revolutionary theory in the tendencies of social reality, in a dialectic of ideal and real in history. Lukács argues that Hegel prepared the Marxian approach:

In contrast to Fichte with his revolutionary Utopia, Hegel developed very early on in his work the tendency to “understand what is,” a tendency which originally pointed energetically in the direction of the future. His concern to comprehend the present as at once become and becoming is … the germ of a true historical dialectics (the dialectics of history translated into thought). For it is precisely in the present that all forms of objectivity can be revealed quite concretely as processes, since it is the present which shows most clearly the unity of result and starting point of the process. Given that, the rejection of all “Oughts” and futuristic utopian thinking, the concentration of philosophy on knowledge of the present (grasped dialectically) emerges precisely as the only possible epistemological method of knowing what is really knowable about the future, the tendencies within the present which impel it really and concretely toward the future.¹⁵

This sounds more like Marx than Hegel, indeed, more like the mature Marx than the author of the Manuscripts. That work may be seen as transitional between an ethical and a socioeconomic approach to knowledge of the future. In the Manuscripts, Marx attempts to reconstruct the ideal concepts of political philosophy as potentialities awaiting realization. The contradictions between philosophy and reality are reformulated as immanent contradictions in reality itself. The new method is neither speculative nor empirical, but synthesizes these contrary approaches in a metacritique. This metacritique relativizes what is and what ought to be as contradictory tendencies actually inhabiting the real-in-process. It is through this conception that Marx relativizes ethical ideals as moments in the real process of becoming of what is, and so goes beyond utopian moralism.

For example, Marx does not set out from a philosophically elaborated concept of the state contrasted with the existing institutions he wishes to criticize. In fact, he dismisses this method contemptuously in a letter to Ruge: “Until now the philosophers had the solution to all riddles in their desks, and the stupid outside world simply had to open its mouth so that the roasted pigeons of absolute science might fly into it.”¹⁶ Instead, the philosophical deduction of what ought to be must proceed from actual struggles testifying to the living contradiction of ideal and real. The appropriate role for the new philosopher consists in “explaining to the world its own acts,” showing that actual struggles contain a transcending content that can be linked to the concept of a rational social life. “The critic,” Marx writes, “therefore can start with any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.”¹⁷

In these earliest “Marxist” writings, Marx can be seen struggling to release new grounds for revolution from Hegelian political philosophy. A generation later Engels summarized Marx’s conclusion with admirable simplicity. Where Hegel had claimed that “All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real,” for Marx:

The Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: all that is real in the sphere of human history becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality; and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.¹⁸

In sum, the only way beyond Hegel is through him. Marx makes this passage in the Manuscripts, where he is finally able to “develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal.” There Marx identifies reason (true actuality) with the socially mediated process of satisfying human needs and on that basis developing human individuality. Then the “existing actuality,” alienated capitalist society, is shown to be reason’s “unreasonable form,” which must be further mediated and overcome through revolution. The critique of political economy, which begins already in the Manuscripts, derives socialist potentialities from the contradictions of the given capitalist forms. The “ought-to-be and goal” emerges from the dialectic of existence and essence as a demand of reason, a methodological precondition of rationality, and not as an ethical ideal.

As a philosopher of praxis, Marx attempts to reconstruct the concept of reason so that capitalist alienation appears as reason’s essential problem, a problem to be resolved through historical action. Marx takes what for Hegel and earlier philosophy is a mere social contingency, human suffering, and dignifies it with ontological status, not in order to attribute it to the human condition, but rather the better to comprehend the presuppositions of its historical transcendence. These presuppositions are preserved ideally in philosophy in the concept of reason, and therefore Marx insists, against the reformers of the “practical political party,” that “you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it.”¹⁹

The concept of an “Aufhebung” of philosophy also has a methodological side, with which we will be focally concerned in this book. Once again, it is by reference to the Frankfurt School that I will attempt to clarify the project of the early Marx and Lukács.