‘idealism’. Once again, we must ask why this should be.
The first reason is that the idealist interpretations of nature and history proposed by philosophers invoke principles like spirit, reason, consciousness, the idea etc … And, in practice, such principles always lead not to revolution, but to the education (if not, indeed, the edification) of the masses, which the philosophers themselves generously offer to take in hand. In Plato’s time they sought to counsel princes in the name of the ideal state. In our democratic era, they seek to educate the citizens (or ‘educate the educators’ of the citizens: the judges, doctors and teachers, by assuming their position, at least morally, at the very top of the academic edifice) in the name of reason and ethics.
This is not wrong, but behind this function of idealism there is a more formidable difficulty. In modern philosophy (the philosophy which finds its true language with Kant), whether one speaks of consciousness, spirit or reason, these categories which express the universal always have two sides to them, and Marx’s formulations in the Theses constantly allude to this. They intimately combine two ideas: representation and subjectivity. It is precisely the originality and strength of the great (German) idealist tradition that it thought this combination through systematically.
Clearly, the notion of ‘interpretation’ to which Marx refers is a variant of the idea of representation. For the idealism criticized here, the world is the object of a contemplation which seeks to perceive its coherence and its ‘meaning’ and thereby, willy-nilly, to impose an order on it. Marx very clearly discerned the interdependence between the fact of thinking an ‘order of the world’ (especially in the social and political register) and the fact of valorizing order in the world: both against ‘anarchy’ and also against ‘movement’ (‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes’, as Baudelaire was to write)* … He also saw very clearly that, from this point of view, the ‘old materialisms’ or philosophies of nature, which substitute matter for mind as the organizing principle, contain a strong element of idealism and are, in the end, merely disguised idealisms (whatever their very different political consequences). This enables us to understand why it is so easy for idealism to ‘comprehend’ materialism and therefore to refute it or integrate it (as we see in Hegel, who has no problem with materialisms, except perhaps with that of Spinoza, but Spinoza is a rather atypical materialist…). Lastly, he saw that the heart of modern, post-revolutionary idealism consists in referring the order of the world and of ‘representation’ back to the activity of a subject who creates or, as Kantian language has it, ‘constitutes’ them.
We then come to the other side of idealism, where it is not a philosophy of representation (or, if one prefers, a mere philosophy of the primacy of ‘ideas’), but a philosophy of subjectivity (which is clearly expressed in the decisive importance assumed by the notion of consciousness). Marx thought that the subjective activity of which idealism speaks is, at bottom, the trace, the denegation (the simultaneous recognition and misrecognition) of a more real activity, an activity that is more ‘effective’, if we may venture the expression: an activity which would be at one and the same time the constitution of the external world and the formation (Bildung) or transformation of self. Witness the insistent way in which the vocabulary of the act, of action and activity (Tat, Tätigkeit, Handlung) recurs in the writings of Kant and, even more markedly, of Fichte (this is, in reality, where the ‘philosophy of action’ extolled by the Young Hegelians comes from). Witness also the way Hegel describes the mode of being of consciousness as an active experience and the function of the concept as a labour (the ‘labour of the negative’). All in all, then, it is not difficult to derive the following hypothesis from Marx’s aphorisms: just as traditional materialism in reality conceals an idealist foundation (representation, contemplation), so modern idealism in reality conceals a materialist orientation in the function it attributes to the acting subject, at least if one accepts that there is a latent conflict between the idea of representation (interpretation, contemplation) and that of activity (labour, practice, transformation, change). And what he proposes is quite simply to explode the contradiction, to dissociate representation and subjectivity and allow the category of practical activity to emerge in its own right.
The subject is practice
Did he succeed in this undertaking? In a sense, completely, since it is perfectly possible to argue that the only true subject is the practical subject or the subject of practice or, better still, that the subject is nothing other than practice which has always already begun and continues indefinitely. But does this get us out of idealism? Nothing could be less certain, precisely because, historically speaking, ‘idealism’ covers both the point of view of representation and that of subjectivity. In reality, what we have here is a circle or a theoretical interchange which functions in both directions. It is possible to say that, by identifying the essence of subjectivity with practice, and the reality of practice with the revolutionary activity of the proletariat (which is one with its very existence), Marx transferred the category of subject from idealism to materialism. But it is equally possible to assert that, precisely by so doing, he set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’ in the idealist sense of the term (and hence, ultimately, as a representation or an abstraction by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’: is this not exactly what happened when, later, Marxist theorists, armed with the idea of class struggle, were to deduce from it a priori the ‘meaning of history’?).
There is nothing gratuitous about these dialectical games. They are closely linked to the history of the notion of revolution and, consequently, have a political aspect as well as a philosophical one. From the beginning of the modern period – that of the revolutions which are termed bourgeois, the Anglo-American and the French – the invention of the subject as the central category of philosophy, which relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the idea that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from the various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty etc.10 And the generic subject of this activity always has two sides to it: the one theoretical, the other concrete and practical. In Kant, that subject was humanity; in Fichte it became at a certain point the people, the nation; and in Hegel, lastly, it was the historical peoples as successive embodiments of the ‘world-spirit’, i.e. the progress of civilization.
The fact that Marx, in his turn, recognized the proletariat as the true practical subject (we have seen above that it is the ‘people of the people’, authentically human and communal) – the subject which ‘dissolves the existing order’ and thus changes itself (Selbsttätigkeit, Selbstveränderung), while at the same time changing the world – and that he used this recognition (in which the lesson of immediate experience and the most ancient speculative tradition are superimposed in a remarkable way) to assert, in his turn, that the subject is practice, does not, however, genuinely remove him from the history of idealism. Fichte had said precisely the same thing. Without playing with words, one might even go so far as to suggest that this is what makes of Marx and his ‘materialism of practice’ the most accomplished form of the idealist tradition, the form which enables us to understand more than any other the lasting vitality of idealism right up to the present, precisely because that transposition is closely linked to the attempt to prolong the revolutionary experience and embody it in modern society, with its classes and social conflicts.
To do so would be to prepare to understand that adopting the standpoint of the proletarians in a state of ‘permanent’ insurrection resulted not so much in putting an end to idealism, but in installing the materialism/idealism dilemma – the perennial question of their difference – at the very heart of the theory of the proletariat and its privileged historical role. But, with this dilemma, we may confidently expect that philosophy, having been chased out of the door, will come back in by the window …
