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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ “From the Theses on Feuerbach to the Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Gramsci, Philosophy and Politics” Bernstein, Aaron Jacob Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 1 From the Theses on Feuerbach to the Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Gramsci, Philosophy and Politics Aaron Bernstein PhD European Studies 2 Abstract In recent years, there has been a growing literature on Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis, and specifically the centrality of Marx within it. However, this has not been accompanied by serious studies of the way in which Marx’s own approach to philosophy relates to Gramsci’s philosophical reconstruction of the former. This study explores both Gramsci’s philosophical reinterpretation of Marx, as well as Marx’s own understanding of philosophy. I argue that despite the presence of parallels between them, the two thinkers ultimately have divergent conceptions of philosophy. I conclude that Gramsci went beyond Marx both in the way he critically analyzed philosophy, as well as the way in which he grasped knowledge as politics. 3 Contents Introduction 6 Notes on the text 13 Chapter One Gramsci, Labriola, and a non-metaphysical concept of immanence 14 1.1 The pre-prison Gramsci 14 1.2 The “return” to Marx in the Prison Notebooks 16 1.3 Labriola 20 1.4 Prior concepts of immanence 22 1.5 Labriola’s immanence 26 1.6 Gramsci and Labriola 30 1.7 Gentile’s Marx 31 1.8 A philosophy of the act (praxis) in the profane sense 34 Chapter Two Truth, ideology, and the early emergence of the philosophy praxis 39 2.1 From Labriola to the primacy of politics 39 2.2 Politics as a gnoseological principle 40 2.3 Politics as an ontological principle 46 2.4 The beginnings of a fundamental redefinition of philosophy, and the early emergence of the 50 philosophy of praxis 2.5 Translatibility 54 Chapter Three Philosophy as hegemony, and the philosophy of praxis as an absolute immanence 60 3.1 The crystallization of a philosophical conception 60 3.2 Philosophy and common sense 61 3.3 The philosophy of praxis as a critique of common sense 65 3.3.1 The unity of theory and practice as a relation of translation 69 3.4 The critique of Croce 71 3.4.1 Croce’s historicism 72 3.4.2 Croce’s immanence 73 3.4.3 The speculative character of Croce’s thought 75 4 3.4.4 Translating Croce’s speculative thought into the terms of hegemony 77 3.5 Philosophy as hegemony (catharsis) 81 3.6 The philosophy of praxis as an absolute immanence, an absolute worldliness and earthliness of 85 thought 3.6.1 The philosophy of praxis as the immanent critique of common sense 87 3.6.2 The truth-power of the philosophy of praxis: coherence and the capacity to act 89 3.7 The nexus between philosophy and ideology: a clarification 93 3.8 The re-reading of Marx in Gramsci’s philosophical reflections 96 Chapter Four From philosophy as a transformative force to the discovery of the workers 99 4.1 From Gramsci to Marx 99 4.2 The young Marx’s intellectual context 100 4.3 The realization of philosophy in the world 103 4.3.1 The practice of philosophy as theoretical critique 103 4.3.2 The philosophical press and the universality of the state 105 4.3.3 The break with Hegel 106 4.3.4 The entry of philosophy into political struggle 109 4.3.5 The alliance of philosophy with the proletariat 110 4.4 The discovery of the working class movement and the turn towards a materialist philosophical 115 humanism 4.4.1 The workers as active agents 115 4.4.2 Speculative philosophical idealism as an alienated inversion 117 4.4.3 Materialist philosophical humanism 119 4.4.4 History as alienation and communism as the re-appropriation of the human essence 124 4.4.5 Materialist philosophical humanism as the framework for a proletarian-based communism 127 Chapter Five Praxis, ideology, and philosophy 133 5.1 From praxis to the rupture with all philosophy 133 5.2 The rupture with Feuerbach’s materialist philosophical humanism 135 5.2.1 Sensuous human practice: praxis as human labor 136 5.2.2 The ensemble of the social relations 141 5.2.3 Thought and knowledge as a social and practical relation 144 5 5.3 The double meaning of praxis 147 5.4 Revolutionäre praxis 148 5.5 Praxis: a theoretical breakthrough at both levels of the concept 151 5.6 History and ideology 154 5.7 The empirical scientific study of history versus the inverted ideological illusions of philosophy 155 5.8 Ideology as class domination 162 5.9 The practical power and efficacy of ideology beneath the rhetoric of illusion 173 5.10 A genuine displacement: philosophy as class power and domination 176 5.11 The eclipse of ideology 178 5.12 Revolutionary praxis as the site of truth and knowledge 182 5.13 Conclusions 185 Chapter Six Marx and Gramsci 192 6.1 Bringing the two together 192 6.2 Parallels and convergences 193 6.3 Reexamining Gramsci’s rereading 198 6.3.1 The dilated, gnoseological reformulation of ideology 200 6.3.2 Translatability: the critical dimension 205 6.3.3 Translatability: the positive dimension 215 6.4 From Marx’s diesseitigkeit to Gramsci’s terrestrità assoluta 217 Conclusion 229 References 233 6 Introduction The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, composed in a Fascist prison cell in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, have now come to enjoy an immense popularity and widespread diffusion on an international scale. As Joseph Buttigieg writes, ‘Few twentieth century works have elicited as much widespread interest or have had as great an impact on so many diverse field of study as the Quaderni del carcere’.1 In a similar vein, Fabio Frosini has spoken of a “worldwide Gramscian web”, in which the study of Gramsci’s thought is no longer simply an Italian or European phenomenon, but has become truly global.2 And yet, as others have noted,3 this widespread diffusion and popularity has not necessarily been accompanied by close, philologically precise analyses of the Notebooks. This is particularly the case in the English-speaking world due to the absence of a full English translation of Valentino Gerratana’s 1975 critical edition of Gramsci’s Notebooks, rightly described by Buttigieg as ‘the single most important event in the publication history of Gramsci’s works’,4 as it gave readers access, for the first time, to the Notebooks in the original form in which they were written.5 Consequently, despite the considerable portion of Gramsci’s writings translated into English, these have largely remained confined to thematic anthologies and selections re-organized by the editors and which therefore, do not reflect Gramsci’s original manuscripts, with the exception of Buttigieg’s far from complete project of producing a critical edition of the Notebooks in English.6 Nevertheless, the publication of Gerratana’s critical edition, which began to produce effects in Italy in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, has, especially in recent years, led to the emergence of a philologically intense “season” of Gramscian studies, now freed from the decades of politically 1 Buttigieg 1994, 99. 2 Frosini 2009b, 669. 3 Cf. Thomas 2010, xviii, and Buttigieg 1994, 99. 4 Preface to Gramsci 1992, xii. 5 The Prison Notebooks do not have the status of a “book”, in the sense of being a complete and definite work. Rather, Gramsci’s prison reflections remained incomplete, tentative, and exploratory. Gramsci indicated more than once, the provisional status of his fragmentary notes, Q 4, 16, 438, Q 8, 935, Q 11, 1365. On this point, cf. Frosini 2003, 74, Francioni 1984, 152, Buttigieg 1992, x, 6-7. Frosini delineates three phases in Gramsci’s prison work, characterized by a reorganization and restructuring of his research, Frosini 2003, 23-9. A philologically accurate reconstruction of the internal history of the composition of Gramsci’s Notebooks is therefore, a prerequisite for understanding them. 6 On the publication history of Gramsci’s writings into English, see Buttigieg’s Preface to Gramsci 1992, xii-xiv. Gramsci’s prison work comprises thirty-three notebooks, four of which are dedicated to translations of mostly German texts.