Haddock/Collier
Being and Worth Andrew Collier London: Routledge, 1999
Reviewed by Adrian Haddock
The blurb on the back cover of Being and Worth reads as follows:
Do things have value only because we value them? Is reason purely self-centred? In Being and Worth Andrew Collier argues that beings in both the natural and human worlds have worth in themselves, whether we recognise it or not. He builds on recent work in critical realism to provide a re- assessment of Spinoza's philosophy of mind and ethics.
What conceivable relevance could such a book have for Marxists? Observant readers will have noticed the reference to 'critical realism', the 'movement in philosophy and the human sciences' associated with academics of Marxist and Marx-ish bent. But this is a book which aims to establish the intrinsic worth of all being, human and non-human, by reference to such figures as Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, The Reverend John Macmurray and Baruch Spinoza. What relevance could such abstract meta-ethical issues have for the readers of this journal; a journal whose avowed intention is to revitalise and extend 'classical Marxism as a political project and theoretical tradition?' There are two answers to this question. The first, and most obvious, is that Andrew Collier is one of the most interesting and unusual Marxist philosophers of recent years. Originally an Althusserian, Collier spent much of his early writing developing a particularly Marxist perspective on the philosophy of psychology. However, his encounter with the work of Roy Bhaskar in the mid- 1970s led him towards an outspoken defence of scientific realism in general and its relevance to Marxism in particular. His third book, Socialist Reasoning, attempted to extend Bhaskar's 'critical realism' to the realm of ethics. Whilst mainly a critique of liberal political philosophy, Socialist Reasoning contains a number of fascinating 'asides' that offer a glimpse into Collier's political development. In one notable 'aside', he describes how he came to reject the belief that Russia was a form of 'state capitalism', and offers a spirited (though not uncritical) defence of the USSR as an 'actually existing' socialist state. Recently, Collier has devoted much of his efforts to introducing Bhaskar's philosophy to a non-philosophical audience. This work is notable for its ongoing interest in establishing affinities between Bhaskar's writings and those of the seventeeth century
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Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. Being and Worth (whose title recalls Heidegger's Sein und Zeit) is perhaps Collier's most ambitious attempt yet to synthesise his major themes: critical realism, realism in ethics, and the ideas of Spinoza. To find the other answer to the question with which I began, cast your mind back to when debates about Marxism and morality were all the rage in philosophical circles. Indeed, undergraduate students introduced to Marxism via the partial gaze of the academy could easily have thought that the only thing modern-day Marxist philosophers were interested in was whether Marx believed in social justice or not. Thankfully, the articles published in Historical Materialism to date have been of sufficient range to counter this view. Nonetheless, academics such as G.A. Cohen and Norman Geras have spilt much ink trying to resolve the apparent dilemma of why Karl Marx, a writer whose life and work appears to have been motivated by profound ethical concerns, dismissed moral discourse altogether as 'obsolete vulgar rubbish' and 'trash' that must be rigorously eschewed by the communist movement. Cohen and Geras' considered view is that Marx was simply confused on the issue. Cohen's rather convoluted opinion is that 'Marx mistakenly thought that Marx did not believe that capitalism was unjust, because he was confused about justice: Geras, on the other hand, attempts to convince us that Marx really believed in the conventional, liberal- democratic idea that social justice means the equitable distribution of wealth.1 Collier's work has a prima facie superiority to both these approaches. For it attempts, not to read Marx through the prism of a modern-day understanding of morality, but to tease out the moral practice that is implicit in Marx's own writings.
Spinoza and ethical naturalism
Collier's project owes much to the work of Roy Bhaskar. Considering that Bhaskar is the acknowledged founder of the critical realist 'movement' and Collier his most famous populariser, it is no surprise that Being and Worth advertises itself as 'an essay in critical realist ethics' (p. vii). It is the stated aim of critical realism to establish a new philosophy both of Marxism and Jor Marxism. It is for Marxism in the sense that it aims to help Marxists rid themselves of any lingering positivist prejudices and postmodernist dalliances they may be afflicted by. And it is of Marxism in that it attempts to render explicit what has up till now been merely implicit in Marx's
1 Cohen 1983, p. 444. Geras 1989, pp. 210-267.
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