PHILOSOPHICAL (PRE)OCCUPATIONS and the PROBLEM of IDEALISM: from Ideology to Marx’S Critique of Mental Labor
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PHILOSOPHICAL (PRE)OCCUPATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDEALISM: From Ideology to Marx’s Critique of Mental Labor by Ariane Fischer Magister, 1999, Freie Universität Berlin M.A., 2001, The Ohio State University M.Phil., 2005, The George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 31, 2010 Dissertation directed by Andrew Zimmerman Associate Professor of History The Columbian College of The George Washington University certifies that Ariane Fischer has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 25, 2009. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. PHILOSOPHICAL (PRE)OCCUPATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDEALISM: From Ideology to Marx’s Critique of Mental Labor Ariane Fischer Dissertation Research Committee: Andrew Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History, Dissertation Director Peter Caws, University Professor of Philosophy, Committee Member Gail Weiss, Professor of Philosophy, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2010 by Ariane Fischer All rights reserved iii Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank her dissertation advisor Andrew Zimmerman, who has been a continuous source of support and encouragement. His enthusiastic yet demanding guidance has been invaluable. Both his superior knowledge of history and theory as well as his diligence in reviewing drafts have been crucial in the successful completion of the research and writing process. Further, many thanks are extended to Gail Weiss and Peter Caws for joining the dissertation committee, and to Dan Moschenberg and Paul Smith for agreeing to be readers. The author also thanks her friend Dorothy Geller for many challenging discussions, her brother Adrian Fischer for his critically insightful perspectives, and her husband James Pasternak for his love and great ideas. Andrew Zimmerman and James Pasternak have provided extensive commentary on my work and assisted greatly in the editing and proofreading of this manuscript. Finally, the author wishes to thank Ulrich and Christina Fischer for demonstrating unending confidence in their daughter, as well as Leopold and Ludwig Fischer Pasternak for their patience. iv Abstract of Dissertation PHILOSOPHICAL (PRE)OCCUPATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDEALISM: From Ideology to Marx’s Critique of Mental Labor My dissertation shows that the ideology concept developed by Karl Marx was first and foremost a critique of mental labor in bourgeois society, rather than a philosophy of consciousness, as is commonly assumed. Marx’s theory of ideology constituted a pivotal moment in the formation of his critique of political economy insofar as it offered a solution to the problem of idealist metaphysics, discussed among the Left Hegelian philosophers in the late 1830’s and early 1840’s, by explaining it in terms of its origin in the class structure of capitalist society. I interpret Marx’s texts using the approach of the “Cambridge School” of the history of political thought (Quentin Skinner), which has stressed the importance of examining classical texts in terms of their authors’ explicit objectives, the polemical function of philosophical language as individual speech acts, and the contextual nature of particular ideas and concepts. Based on a close study and analysis of one of Marx’s so-called “works of the break,” my investigation focuses on establishing the original meaning of “ideology”in relation to the Young Hegelian case for the “end of philosophy.” While it is generally recognized that The German Ideology, written in 1845/46 by Marx and Engels, is a key text in nineteenth century intellectual history, few attempts have been made to subject this complicated manuscript to a comprehensive analysis. Consequently, the connection between ideology and the capitalist division of labor has not been duly recognized. Most v broadly, then, the goal of this dissertation is to reconstruct Marx’s effort to fully secularize post-Enlightenment critical philosophy by applying the tools of political economy to the question that animated the intellectual debate at the time: the question of how to come to terms with, and overcome, Hegel’s metaphysical idealism. The significance of my dissertation lies in its contribution to nineteenth-century intellectual history, to the study of critical social theory, and to contemporary discussions of the Marxist tradition. Because exegetical projects have typically converged on just the first hundred pages, one quarter of the complete manuscripts, this section, titled “I. Feuerbach,” has gained misleading prominence in readings of The German Ideology. “I Feuerbach” resembles a discourse on method because of its general comments on “the correct manner of approach,” but its importance within the work as a whole is questionable due to its fragmented and unfinished state. In order to shift our understanding of The German Ideology toward a better appreciation of Marx’s concrete analysis of the typical (because characteristically bourgeois) yet peculiar (because uniquely passive) expressions of the German intelligentsia, I privilege instead the longest part of the manuscript, “III. Saint Max,” Marx and Engels’s exhaustive settling of accounts with Max Stirner’s 1844 book The Ego and Its Own. This book was then the most radical attempt to break with the Left Hegelian critique of religion and prompted Marx to subject his own Feuerbachian assumptions to thorough scrutiny. Revealing Stirner’s “Ego” – the singular, separate, fully sovereign individual – to be no alternative to Feuerbach’s “Man” but rather another humanist abstraction from the real relations that define people in their particular social situations, Marx took the decisive step to produce a materialist, i.e. economic, account of ideology. vi By focusing my inquiry on Marx’s response to Stirner, which remained unpublished until 1932, I reread The German Ideology in terms of its specific arguments against the Young Hegelian idealist distortion of particular historical events, social transformations, and contradictions. However, by situating the work squarely within the context of the early nineteenth-century debates over how to successfully “world” Hegel’s dialectic, I also recover Marx’s particular intervention in these debates. Marx, I show, was able to overcome the idealism of his former friends and allies by grounding the critique of philosophy in a theory of the intricate connection between labor, class, and practice. The most important conclusion of my work is that when Marx spoke of ideology he meant the idealist predilections built, as it were, into intellectual labor in a class society. Unlike many recent commentators who have maintained either that Marx, in his discussion of ideology, set out to produce a systematic exposition of the so-called “base- superstructure” doctrine or that Marx anticipated his theory of commodity fetishism in The German Ideology, I draw attention to something that has rarely been examined: the link between the ideology concept and the concept of the division between exclusively mental and exclusively manual labor in capitalism. I thereby challenge the notion that Marx’s theory of ideology was essentially a theory of systemic distortion, that is, a theory of materially conditioned, false ideas that obscure, in the minds of the oppressed, the truth of their oppression. This interpretation, I maintain, has misconstrued Marx’s role in post-Hegelian critical theory by projecting a concern proper to twentieth-century Western Marxism, onto Marx. vii In an attempt, then, at a historical hermeneutic, this dissertation demonstrates that The German Ideology must be read in the context of the secularization efforts in nineteenth-century German philosophy, specifically the Young Hegelian critique of philosophical idealism. Drawing on three disciplines – philosophy, intellectual history, and social/political theory – my dissertation establishes Marx’s intervention in post- Hegelian political philosophy as a continuation and eclipse of the struggle for what Ludwig Feuerbach called a materialist “philosophy of the future” that stretched back to the French Enlightenment and its critique of metaphysics. The contemporary theoretical relevance of my work lies in what I call the Marxian “class theory of consciousness.” By focusing on Marx and Engels’s understanding of the ramifications following from the division between manual and mental labor, this dissertation establishes that The German Ideology offers insightful ways of thinking about the historical and current intersections between modes of thinking and economic processes. viii Table of Contents Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iv Abstract of Dissertation.......................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................1 Ideology in General, The German Ideology in Particular................................................1 Ideology: The Study of an Idea....................................................................................3 Beyond the Theory of the Break................................................................................23 Marx’s Class Theory of Consciousness.....................................................................38