Author: Govert Schuller

§1.0. General introduction.

A few years ago I happened to participate in a class on DeRose’s recent monograph The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context (vol. 1). We picked the text apart and read also papers by Moore, Unger, Lewis, Kaplan, Perry, Schiffer and a few more. In his monograph DeRose was mainly concerned to prove that knowledge claims, especially knowledge attributions, are context sensitive. The reason why that is the case he left open to be explored in volume 2 of his study. When in this current class I started playing with the insights which I obtained in studying epistemic contextualism (EC) and applied them to the Gettier cases I thought I could give it a try myself to explore the deeper reasons why EC, as my professor formulated it–”offers the promise of explaining the force of the skeptical arguments, while at the same time preserving the utility of the notion of knowledge”.

Then it struck me as very fruitful to also bring into play some of the insights obtained from a philosophy of science class in which we read Carl Craver’s monograph Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience. In this study the case is made that most of the successful advances in the biological sciences are due, explicitly or implicitly, to the use of explanations which include 1) a two-tier structure; 2) the notion of mechanism; 3) the idea that the elements of the mechanism in their interaction add up to an explanation; and 4) the concept of composition is central. The explanatory model is named ‘Inter-Level Mechanistic Explanation’ (ILME) and I think I can transpose this model to EC.

§1.1. Introduction

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the analysis of the standard definition of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ (JTB) in its relationship to the standard ‘skeptical argument’ (SA) that humans do not know much for sure, if anything at all—including the existence of the world–because knowledge is hardly ever sufficiently justified as both our senses and reason are both fallible and deceivable to the point that we do not even know for certain if the world of our experience really exists independent of us.

The specific route taken in this paper is to combine two complex sets of ideas developed independently from each other. In their combination they constitute a model with which certain skeptical cases can be analyzed in the specific manner such cases are generated. The result is that such cases can be, if not solved, at least be contained to the extent that scientific and quotidian notions of knowledge are preserved.

The two ideas are 1) from epistemology the idea of ‘epistemic contextualism’ (EC), especially the work by Keith DeRose; and 2) from the philosophy of science ‘Inter-Level Mechanistic Explanation’ (ILME) as developed by Carl Craver and Carl Gillett, but then transposed to the ‘mechanics’ of meaning generation.

The linchpin of the operation will be to show that there is enough congruence between 1) the structure of meaning generation, especially as developed in EC, and 2) the structure of natural processes and their successful explanation which the ILME model claims to have developed, such that the insights of ILME can be transposed to EC and tested.

The model will then be tested on some of the more prominent examples of skeptical arguments like the ‘Brain in a Vat’ argument which posits the possibility that all of our experience is generated by a scientist who knows how to manipulate our brain to have worldly experiences while actually our brain is in a vat, and the first of the Gettier cases in which someone by accident has a justified true believe but paradoxically has to be denied to have real knowledge.

This operation, because of its experimental character, is of course fallible, but my hunch is that it could succeed if it is executed in a flexible manner with a sensitivity to the nature of meaning.

This paper will first explain EC , intending to bring out certain of its features which are relevant to show the above mentioned structural congruency with ILME. Once these features are highlighted I will explain the work of ILME and highlight the features which will be relevant to make it ‘fit’ EC and be of service to the operation.

§2.1. Epistemic Contextualism

A recent development in philosophy is the notion of ‘epistemic contextualism’, which claims to get some grip on skepticism by making the point that when someone engages in the Skeptical Argument she is actually setting the epistemic standard so high that no proposition whatsoever about the world can be said to be true for certain. The usual context in which these claims are made is academia, especially in philosophy classes. Other contexts like court rooms, journalistic reporting and quotidian situations have, as is EC’s contention, their own appropriate epistemic standards.

The important strategy applied by EC is to make context and its accompanying epistemic standard an essential part of evaluating the strength of one’s knowledge claims. DeRose, who is today the most prolific defender of EC, constructed an illustrative example in which one person could justifiably attribute to a third person that she knows the truth of a certain proposition, while another person could paradoxically, but still justifiably, attribute to the same third person and at the same time the opposite, i.e. that he or she does not know the truth of the proposition in question. DeRose’s solution to the paradox is to highlight the difference in context and its different accompanying epistemic standard.

§2.2. The Office Case

One of the paradigmatic examples with which DeRose makes his case for EC is the Office Case. Thelma, Louise, Lena and John all work at the same office. John is often absent from the office. The three women are friends and on their day off, just before going to dinner, they pick up their pay-check at the office where they have some indication that John is present. They see his hat hanging on the coat rack and someone else makes an audible reference to him as if he were present. After dinner the women go their own way with Thelma going to a local tavern, Lena going home and Louise stopped by the police. Thelma at the tavern settles a bet with another friend about John’s showing up at work that day. Thelma, having bet John would be at work, tells her friend to pay up because John was at work. Her friend also had the same bet with Lena and asks Thelma if Lena also knows that John was at work. Thelma answers that “Lena knows that John was at the office”. Meanwhile Louise is stopped by the police who are conducting an investigation of John’s whereabouts in connection with a crime. Asked whether she knows if John was in the office she had to answer in the negative—she only saw his hat and heard a remark about him– and when asked if Lena knows she felt obliged to answer that “Lena does not know that John was at the office”.

The paradox is obviously in the fact that Thelma and Louise make opposite knowledge attributions to Lena at approximately the same time, but somehow both seem justified to do so. DeRose’s contextualist solution is to highlight the difference in circumstances in which Thelma and Louise found themselves and the different epistemic standards comprising the truth-conditions for making statements in the different contexts. Conversations at the tavern are governed by a low epistemic standard by which Thelma’s claim can be considered true, while Louise’s situation calls for a quite high standard by which her opposite statement can also be considered true. In other words, though both Thelma and Louise have epistemic positions of equal strength in regards to their knowledge about John’s presence at the office, Thelma’s position is strong enough to pass the low standard at the tavern while Louise’s position is not strong enough to pass the high standard operative in the police station.

§2.3. The Sufficiently Articulated Contextual Formula

In my effort to understand DeRose’s conceptualization of EC I constructed the following formula to incorporate some of the more relevant contextual elements which he discussed, which I baptized as the Sufficiently Articulated Contextual Formula (SACF):

(1) In the role of X, individual S knows p relative to epistemic standard N, which is prevalent in social context C.

If one plugs into the formula Thelma and Louise’s different epistemic contexts one would get the following propositions, which might look contradictory, but, because of the idea of context-sensitive epistemic standards, really are not.

(1a) Thelma can state that Lena, were she to join Thelma at the tavern, would say, as a betting person, that she (Lena) knows–relative to standard LOW reigning at a low-stakes, friendly bet–that John was in the office that afternoon.

(1b) Louise can state that Lena, were she to join Louise in the station, would say, as a police interviewee, that she (Lena) doesn’t know–relative to standard HIGH reigning at a criminal investigation–that John was in the office that afternoon.

Because of its relevance later in this paper, the origin of some of the elements comprising the formula will receive a more elaborate discussion. The majority of the formula’s elements came from a diverse set of thinkers discussed by DeRose and Rysiew who grappled throughout the years with context-sensitive terms like demonstratives, indexicals, gradable adjectives and the issue of context-sensitive epistemic standards.

§2.4. Kaplan’s Machinery

The most important idea—of which the other ideas seem to be refinements—is Kaplan’s machinery by which mere utterances can become true or false propositions. Kaplan’s idea is to make a differentiation within the already established Fregean differentiation between the sense (Sinn) and the reference (Bedeutung) of a word or expression. The sense of an expression is its intelligible, mental structure which comes with the expression and the reference is the non-mental thing or state of affairs outside of itself it is referring to. Frege’s own exact formula is:

A proper name (word, sign, sign combination, expression) expresses its sense, stands for or designates its reference. By means of a sign we express its sense and designate its reference (Frege: 40; italics in original).

Kaplan makes the distinction within the Fregean concept of sense between the ordinary meaning of an utterance (its character) and its propositional aspect (the content). This distinction is helpful to deal with context-sensitive terms. For example, when one utters ‘he was there’, the expression only states the ordinary meaning, or character, that ‘some male was somewhere’. It has no clear sense, let alone reference yet. The utterance has to be paired with the context in which it was spoken to generate a testable proposition. To bring back Thelma and the Office Case, if she made that utterance in the tavern to her friend, her friend would have understood that Thelma actually expressed the proposition ‘John was at the office that afternoon’, which circumstance was relevant to the bet and could have been verified. Kaplan names this proposition generated by the pairing of the character of the expression with its context, the content of the utterance. The sequence of Kaplan’s machinery can be formalized as follows:

(2) Utterance + understanding → character; character + context → content;
content + circumstance → truth or falsity

Kaplan’s contribution is that he identifies a two-level structure in Frege’s concept of sense in which the character-meaning of an utterance has to be paired with the context of utterance to determine its underlying propositional content-meaning.

§2.5. Perry’s Unarticulated Constituents

Because utterances do not always express the full content of the underlying proposition it makes sense, as John Perry does, to further analyze the idea that the propositional content of an utterance often has “unarticulated constituents” (Perry: 138; italics in original). Perry’s example is his son telling him ‘It is raining’, which propositional content can be established per Kaplan by bringing in the context of the utterance, i.e. both are in Palo Alto, and therefore the proposition is ‘It is raining in Palo Alto’. In this example the place was the unarticulated constituent, which could only be derived from the context of utterance. Though this looks straightforward, Perry’s framework of analysis in the form of five initial assumptions makes the issue a bit more complex. Because of its importance for this paper, I will summarize this framework.

From the following set of assumptions Perry draws a principle, which later proves to be problematic: 1) statements express propositional content; 2) propositions have constituents; 3) statements have components; 4) a statement’s meaning is systematically tied to its components’ meanings; and 5) if the proposition expressed by the statement is true, then the statement is true. The principle derived from the above he called homomorphic representation and runs as follows:

Each constituent of the proposition expressed by a statement is designated by a component of the statement (Perry: 140).

This one-to-one relationship between constituents and components is absent when one compares the constituents in the proposition ‘It is raining in Palo Alto’ with the components in the utterance ‘It is raining’. Of this counterexample Perry states the obvious that “… the problem is that there is no component of the sentence that designates the unarticulated constituent …” (Perry: 141). The pressing question then becomes how we can determine these constituents for which there are no corresponding components. Perry’s proposed solution is that the unarticulated constituents are determined by the whole of the statement, which includes its context of use like background facts of time and place and the speaker’s intentions and beliefs.

In short, crucial components can be absent from statements though their presence is more or less clearly implied by the context of the statement. The absent components are the unarticulated constituents of the underlying proposition.

§2.7. Context-Sensitive Gradable Knowledge

The most important element of the formula is of course the idea that knowledge can be graded according to the context in which a knowledge claim is made. And it has to be noted that the formula is a compound proposition in which arguably a sufficient amount of determining contextual constituents are integrated, which mostly go silent. Just to repeat, the formula as it stands is:

(1) In the role of X, individual S knows p relative to epistemic standard N, which is prevalent in social context C.

But often this proposition is expressed by the statement:

(2) S knows p.

For the justification of the three constituents of the formula—situated role X, epistemic standard N and social context C—I present the following considerations. Though DeRose usually works with a binary epistemic standard of HIGH and LOW in his examples and more or less backs off in pursuing the idea that knowledge tracks the behavior of context-sensitive gradable adjectives very well, I think the comparison between the two is very fruitful. When two teachers discuss the height of their student John and conclude that ‘John is tall’, while the two basketball coaches at the same school conclude ‘John is not tall’, we have to solve this little paradox by bringing out the context-sensitive unarticulated constituent reigning gradable adjectives formalized as ‘for an X’. So, John is considered tall ‘for a student’, but is not tall ‘for a basketball player’.

Transposed to knowledge claims, and following David Annis’ example in this, one could say that in one context Jones, as a layperson, can be considered justified to know that ‘polio is caused by a virus’ (hereafter h), but that this statement is not justified to count as knowledge if Jones, as a medical student in an exam, would give this as an answer to the question ‘what causes polio?’. Jones knows h ‘for a layperson’, but does not know h ‘for a medical student’. As Annis states the point:

Thus relative to one issue-context a person may be justified in believing h but not justified relative to another context” (Annis in Rysiew: 5).

Therefore the social context and the different roles played in such contexts can be considered as the unarticulated constituents of knowledge claims in statements like ‘S knows h‘.

Though the three constituents of the formula seem to imply each other and all three could be considered as hanging and swaying together in their gradability, I thought it best to consider them as different constituents for clarity’s sake. The best defense for their differentiation is that in complex social situations the roles and standards of participants are very different. For example in a court case there is a whole roster of participants playing different roles, having different interests and applying different epistemic standards. One could say that most court cases are essentially a tug of war between the defense and the prosecutor regarding the epistemic standard by which the defendant might be considered innocent or guilty. The defense will try to set the standard high enough to plead not guilty while the prosecutor will try to lower the standard to get a guilty verdict.

Based on the above elaborated ideas that a) a difference has to be made between a statement and its underlying proposition; b) that not all constituents of propositions are expressed by components in the statement; c) that it is the context of the statement which will determine the content of the unarticulated constituents; d) that the context-sensitive constituents in knowledge claims are the situated role of the claimant—including its interests and beliefs–and the appropriate epistemic standard prevalent for that role and/or situation; one can construct a more elaborate epistemic contextual formula.

(3) ‘S knows p‘ is the simple statement which expresses the underlying compound proposition ‘In the role of X, individual S, with interests i₁-i_n and beliefs b₁-b_n, knows p relative to epistemic standard N, which is prevalent in social context C at place p and at time t.

This formulation I will baptize the Fully Articulated Epistemic Contextual Formula.

§3.1. Inter-Level Mechanistic Explanation

The idea occurred to me to bring into play the idea of ‘compositional explanation’ hired from recent developments in the philosophy of the biological sciences in order to understand better the two-tier structure of simple utterances and their underlying complex proposition(s). The idea is that a natural entity is mostly composed of a certain set of components with their own properties, powers and processes which together in their specific, mechanistic interactions can satisfactorily explain the properties, powers and processes of the composed entity. Because the entity’s behavior is on one level and the behavior of its components on one level deeper one could say of this explanatory model that it is an Inter-Level Mechanistic Explanation (ILME). The formula best capturing this idea is as follows:

(4) A whole composed individual s* has the powers and properties G₁-G_n , which can robustly be explained by the joint role-playing of its component entities s₁-s_n with their own qualitatively different powers and properties F₁-F_n , enabled by the background conditions $₁-$_n (Derived from Gillett, 2013).

For example the explanation of why a diamond can scratch glass–which is a process on one level containing two entities and their interaction–can be brought about by bringing in the properties and powers of the underlying components at the lower level, which are the carbon atoms composing the diamond and the molecules composing the glass. The explanation is that the carbon atoms are stronger bonded than the glass molecules and that when the right pressure is exerted and the right movement executed, the stronger bonded carbon atoms break up and displace the weaker bonded glass molecules creating the scratch (Fig. 1). Note that on the higher level one can say that it is the harder diamond which causes the scratch in the softer glass. This might suffice as an intra-level explanation. When the process is explained by bringing in the lower-level entities and their properties, i.e. carbons and molecules and the way they are bonded, the explanation is inter-level.

Fig. 1. Inter-Level Mechanistic Explanation of a diamond
causing a scratch in glass. From Gillett (2007).

Note here some important structural features of this example. We are dealing with a) two levels: one, the diamond and the glass, the other, the carbon atoms comprising the diamond and the molecules comprising the glass; b) there is a mechanism involved by which we can explain the phenomenon scratch; c) all the elements in the account add up to an explanation; and d) the concept of composition is central to the explanation.

§3.2. Some Key Features of the Concept of Composition

Based on careful descriptive work, especially in the biological sciences, Gillett was able to tease out a set of about a dozen key features of successful inter-level mechanistic explanations (Gillett, 2013: 317-8). Though most of them could be put into play in EC, I will just highlight three of them.

1. Qualitative distinct relata, which is the feature that the properties and powers of the entity are qualitatively different from the properties and powers of the components. One can easily observe that a diamond is hard and its carbons are strongly bonded, but not that the carbons are hard or the diamond is strongly bonded.

2. Natural necessitation, which feature is that under certain conditions the bonded carbons necessitate the hardness of the diamond and its ability to scratch glass.

3. Katanoesis, which is the feature of understanding why and how the carbons through its properties and powers ground the hardness of the diamond.

This topic of ILME is much richer and more complex than I can convey here and there might be overlooked aspects which might completely undermine the intention of this paper. Nevertheless I will proceed and present certain succinct formulations of ILME to serve my purpose, for example the following condensed formulation by Gillett of his concept of composition:

… composition involves teams of individuals bearing spatio-temporal, powerful and/or productive relations, where all the team members are spatially contained within the constituted individual, and such that the properties of the individuals in the team realize the properties of the constituted individual and the processes grounded by the individuals in the team implement the processes grounded by the constituted individual (Gillett, 2013: 318).

This brings the presentation of the two sets of ideas to an end. From here the work will be possibly easy because of the already suggested structural congruence between EC and ILME.

§4.1. Combining EC and ILME

It is my contention that both EC and ILME have certain features in common which make them, with some appropriate calibrations here and there, quite congruent, combinable and fruitful in their combination to tackle academic skepticism and some other vexing philosophical conundrums. Applied to the phenomenon of knowledge and meaning one could argue that the meaning and truth of an utterance can only be determined by the interaction between its relevant constituents, articulated or not, especially the context-sensitive ones like roles, social settings and epistemic standards.

The crux seems to lay in combining EC and ILME into a coherent formula or model. This could be done by calibrating the scientific composition formula (4) in terms of EC and replacing the idea of natural entities having causal ‘properties, powers and processes’ to linguistic entities having implied ‘sense, reference, character and content’.

(5) The simple statement ‘S knows p’ has the character-meaning M and property T v F, which can sufficiently be determined by the joint role-playing of its constituent propositional entities s₁-s_n with their own qualitatively different content-meanings F₁-F_n and properties T v F, enabled by the background conditions $₁-$_n.

In other words, the full meaning and truth of a knowledge claim can only be assessed if and only if a sufficient amount of contextual and non-contextual, lower-level ‘unarticulated constituents’ are brought out of hiding and are seen, in their meaningful interaction, as composing the meaning and truth of the higher level linguistic entity.

§4.2. Testing the Combination

To test this idea on a deeper level I propose to assess how this formula fares with some of the identified key features of scientific composition enumerated above.

1. Qualitative distinct relata, which is the feature that the meaning and truth of the entity are qualitatively different from the meanings and truths of the constituents. One can easily observe that the meaning of ‘Jones knows that polio is caused by a virus’ is different from the meanings of its constituents like ‘Jones is an educated layman’ or ‘Jones is with his friends at a bar’. Though it seems trivial, the point is that the relata are qualitatively different.

2. Natural necessitation, which feature is that under certain conditions the meaning and truth of the constituents of a compound proposition necessitate the meaning and truth of a simple statement. If all constituent elements of the proposition a) ‘As an informed layman, Jones knows that polio is caused by a virus, and knows so relative to an above average epistemic standard, which is operative when he has drinks with his educated friends’ are understood and are true then this necessitates the meaning and truth of the simple statement that b) ‘Jones knows that polio is caused by a virus’.

3. Katanoesis, which is the feature of understanding why and how the interaction of the meaning and truth of the constituent elements of the compound proposition ground the meaning and truth of the simple statement. The interaction of role, social context and prevalent epistemic standard is of course not causal, but is an inter-connection at the level of meaning at which they imply, hang and sway together along a wide spectrum of different social contexts from low epistemic taverns to mid epistemic editorial offices to high epistemic courts to ideally high epistemic philosophy classes. Instead of natural causality the operative term is social and linguistic appropriateness.

So far I think the formula is passing the test quite well. And even though the first feature looks trivial, the last two are from that.

§5.1. Generating and Solving Skeptical Arguments

Having formulated this multilevel mechanism of knowledge production I propose to further test it on a few prominent cases like the ‘Brain in a Vat’ argument (BIV) and the first of the Gettier problems.

Maybe the best manner to proceed with analyzing the BIV argument is by juxtaposing again two opposing statements, in this case the recurring skeptical issue whether I know or not if I have hands. The negation of the statement is the conclusion derived from what DeRose named the ‘Argument from Ignorance’ (AI) and the affirmation is supported by G.E. Moore by holding up his hands and asserting he has hands (DeRose 1999: 183 & Moore: 24). When plugging into the AI the hand issue together with the Brain in a Vat idea (BIV), the following argument can be constructed:

(6) I don’t know that I’m not a BIV.

If I don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then

I don’t know that I have hands.

Therefore, I don’t know that I have hands.

To fall back on formula (3) one can say that the seemingly absurd utterance ‘I don’t know that I have hands’, when made in a very specific context, accurately expresses the underlying compound proposition:

(7) As a student in a philosophy class, with the interest to discuss skepticism and the belief it will sharpen my philosophical skills, ‘I don’t know that I have hands’ because I do not know I’m not a Brain in a Vat relative to the very high epistemic standard reigning while discussing skepticism (which actually happened for a moment at DuSable 474 in the fall of 2012).

Though only for a moment and in the quite specific context of a philosophy class, the thought that ‘I don’t know I have hands’ was a true thought, because it expressed a specific underlying compound proposition, all of which constituents were (for a moment) true. And it was true only for a moment because applying the very high standard in an experientially lived manner–as opposed to merely entertain it in a verbal, hypothetical manner–is so counter-natural and counter-intuitive that a real effort has to be made to execute it and once it is executed one would quickly fall back into a more natural attitude reigned by more quotidian epistemic standards by which it is no problem whatsoever that one knows that one has hands. And this brings us to Moore.

In order to quickly demonstrate the existence of an external world Moore stated while holding up his hands: “Here is one hand … and here is another” (Moore: 24), which obviously expressed the idea that he knows he has hands. Moore’s statement is also true because it expresses the proposition,

(8) As a public lecturer and philosopher, Moore, with the interest to challenge skepticism, knows he has hands relative to a more common sense epistemic standard prevalent in the context of a public lecture.

Therefore, and again, we have two opposing statements, both of which are true because of the differing contexts in which different epistemic standards are set by the interests of its participants. In the BIV argument it is an experimental exercise in stretching one’s epistemic standard to almost impossible heights, while Moore firmly keeps the epistemic standard at a more quotidian level.

In short, the generation of skeptical cases is done by setting the epistemic standard to the point of undermining the justification of a targeted knowledge claim, while its solution depends on bringing this crucial context-sensitive epistemic constituent out of hiding and showing how it operates.

§5.2. The First Gettier Case

To deal with the vexing challenge Edmund Gettier created with his two scenarios undermining the standard idea that knowledge is justified true belief, I will initially follow a recently proposed solution by Lukasz Lozanski and then deepen it with my proposed model. Lozanski thinks that the first Gettier example is a case of ‘reference-muddling’. I will try to show how exactly the ‘reference-muddling’ is executed.

Gettier’s very unlikely hypothetical ‘Case I’ concerns two acquaintances, Jones and Smith, who both have applied for the same job. Smith has reasons to believe the following things about Jones: 1) Jones will get the job; 2) Jones has ten coins in his pocket; 3) based on 1) and 2) one can validly infer that ‘the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket’. But, by a quirk of fate, what actually happens is that 4) Smith gets the job and 5) Smith has also ten coins in his pocket, which facts do not change the truth of 3), i.e. that ‘the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket’! Smith, assuming to have a justified, true belief that 3) is the case based on 1) and 2), is indeed right, but for the wrong reasons for 3) is now correct because of 4) and 5). In other words, this seems to be a case in which we have true premises and a true conclusion, but the reasoning is somehow invalid. What happened here?

My proposal is to treat 3) as a statement which underlying proposition is being messed with by Gettier. The statement 3) is ‘the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket’, which initial underlying compound proposition is:

(9) Jones is the man who applied for a specific job and he is the man who gets the job and he has ten coins in his pocket.

What Gettier then does is a multi-step operation on the proposition. First he silences some of the crucial constituents of the proposition, which could be rendered visually by putting the silenced parts between brackets:

(10) (Jones is the man who applied for a specific job and he his) the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket.

The next step is that he just cuts out the silenced, but still implied, parts, which we can visually render by crossing the relevant parts out:

(11) (Jones is the man who applied for a specific job and he his) the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Then, because by an improbable sequence of circumstances, Smith gets the job and he also happen to have ten coins in his pocket, which renders (11) true, though the underlying proposition now has become:

(12) Smith is the man who applied for a specific job and he his the man who gets the job and he has ten coins in his pocket.

The difference between (10) and (11) is that, even though both are the same utterance, the propositional meaning of (10) is still about Jones, though in an implicit manner, while (11) is about an unspecified ‘man’, which opens the way to apply it to Smith and generate (12), which miraculously happens to be the case even though Smith does not know it! In this way Gettier could construct the apparently knowledge-undermining scenario in which Smith has the seemingly justified true belief that ‘the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket’ but cannot be said to have real knowledge.

But, as Lozanski pointed out, and I will re-phrase in terms of Kaplan and Perry, it is not clear what exact proposition the statement (11) expresses. If it is (9) and the component ‘man’ stands for constituent Jones, then the statement is false, and if it is (12) and the component ‘man’ stands for constituent Smith, then Smith has no justification believing that, because he still believes (9). As Lozanski concludes:

The first possibility violates the truth requirement for justified true belief, while the second case violates the justification requirement. Gettier has tried to use semantic obscurity to trick the reader into believing that justified true belief is not enough for knowledge. However, it can be seen that in this case the ‘knowledge’ was either not justified or false, and thus never constituted knowledge in the first place (Lozanski; italics in original).

In other words, the ‘reference-muddling’ can be construed as a bait-and-switch strategy which was exposed by Lozanski and further clarified by an inter-level linguistic explanatory model as formulated in (5).

§6.1. Conclusion

The conclusion is that it is not only feasible to show that knowledge is context-sensitive and that academic skepticism is a special case depending on a specific context in which a very high epistemic standard rules the conversation, but also to show the underlying linguistic mechanism by which skeptical cases can be both generated and solved with the effect of safeguarding the notion of scientific and quotidian knowledge by respecting their appropriate levels of epistemic standards.

Origin

This paper was written for the class Philosophical Methods and Approaches (CSPH7048) conducted by Dr. Rebekah Humphreys in the Masters by Research in European Philosophy program at the University of Wales in the spring of 2015.

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Introduction.

This paper initially intended to address discussions regarding the importance and scope of an alleged break between the early, philosophical articles of the revolutionary theoretician Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his later, mature historical-materialist socioeconomic investigations. But, because Marx in his early years dealt predominantly with the grand and influential philosophy of the German idealist Georg Hegel (1770-1831) and with the ideas of the Left Hegelians, who developed the progressive and even revolutionary strands within Hegel, the conceptualization and investigation of this ‘break’ morphed into a search for the proper locus of an idealism-naturalism transition within the field of the larger and more complex subject matter, which in a memetic shell could be named the ‘Hegel-Marx transition’, though when unpacked and put to paper, as done by many later philosophers and social thinkers, might fill quite some library shelves.

Before outlining the thesis and structure of this paper I will present an introductory sketch of the two ideal poles between which one can position the assessments of the Hegel-Marx relationship by those who looked into it.

Among some scholars, especially Althusser and those who follow him, there reigns a long-standing and conventional idea that in order to properly understand Marx’s intellectual work it is not necessary to bring in Marx’s historical role as an early critic of Hegel’s philosophy, a philosophy which merely happened to be the dominant background of young Marx’s intellectual world when he was in the formative phase of his intellectual, revolutionary career in the 1840s. Hegel’s spiritual, transcendental, pan-logistic philosophy together with its political conservative and pro-Christian attributes is so fundamentally different from the atheist, revolutionary, social-economic investigations of Marx that studying Marx’s critiques of Hegel–let alone reading the very works by Hegel which were critiqued by Marx—would not contribute anything to a deeper understanding of Marx’s own work. As Marx engagement with Hegel was merely an accidental fact, a fluke of history to be left alone, it would not even make sense to look for a connection between the two thinkers.

On the other side there is the surprising and according to British Marxist philosopher Joseph McCarney (2000) “hyperbolic and notorious claim” by the Russian revolutionary Marxist Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) made after he had studied Hegel’s Logic during his WWI exile in Switzerland, that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx. (Quoted in McCarney, 62; italics in original)

Hyperbolic or not, Lenin indicated that Marx picked up important ideas from Hegel and developed them further such that Hegel becomes a necessary key—if read “materialistically” casting away “God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc.” (quoted in McCarney: 62)–to unlock not only the first part of Capital, but the whole of Marx thought. In terms of ‘transition’ one could argue that an essential component of Hegel’s’ work transferred into Marx’s work, in which it became an equally essential part, though this went according to Lenin unrecognized and therefore barely appreciated.

Structure and Outline

After reading a) most of the relevant early works by Marx in conjunction with b) those parts of Hegel’s philosophy he criticized; c) some of Marx’s later work; and d) also many, but certainly not all, of the knowledgeable commentators, my provisional strategy to tackle the problematic of a ‘break’ in Marx’s work or between Hegel and Marx, is to ‘complexify’ the field by posing several initial, probing questions and proposing a metaphor which seems to provide some space in which to answer them.

The questions range from a) the starting question, Where can one locate a ‘break’ in Marx? b) If there is no ‘break’, where is the break to be located between Marx and Hegel? c) Is there a ‘break’ in Hegel with one part to be rejected and another part to be incorporated into Marxism? d) Do the later commentaries address the same break or not? e) Are there different breaks, possibly at different times? f) Did a break happen retro-activley after Marx’s death in the later work of Engels in which he arguably reconstructed the Hegel-Marx transition according to his own understanding, which was then received as the real Marxian position? g) And would it not be helpful to insert Feuerbach between Hegel and Marx as he arguably provided some of the keys to Marx to transform some of Hegel’s ideas to make them acceptable within an naturalist framework?

Maybe a helpful metaphor is to see the Hegel-(Feuerbach)-Marx-(Engels) sequence as a more or less continuous bundle of ideas, some of which strands, intentionally or not, get silently dropped or explicitly refuted, and others silently or explicitly appropriated or transformed. The preliminary hypothesis is that different commentators locate ‘breaches’ at different places in this uneven, bundled continuum of strands between Hegel and Marx in which there might be multiple breaks of different kinds and all evaluated differently in their importance.

The task of this paper then seems to come down, with the help of the commentators, to identify the most relevant of strands; differentiate and classify the different kinds of strands; locate possible breaks in these strands; and differentiate and classify the different kinds of breaks. It is my hope that by using this metaphor I can evaluate the ongoing debate about the question if there was a break in Marx’s work set within the wider context of Marx’s struggle with Hegel’s philosophy.

For a starting and entry point I will take the lead from the American continental philosopher James Luchte, who proposes to see a poetic break in Marx’s work (Luchte, 2015) in contradistinction to French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) who made the case for an epistemic break in Marx’s work (Althusser, 1968). Then I will go through different commentators in a chronological order starting with Marx’s and Engels’ own quite different perceptions of Hegel’s political thought with the help of Italian Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti (1975), then moving on to Herbert Marcuse (1941) Erich Fromm (1961), Louis Althusser (1968), and ending with Tony Burns and Ian Fraser (2000).

The above mentioned thinkers, who had access to and grappled with the relevance of Marx’s Early Works, are the experts from whom I will try to extract the relevant ideas on the relation between an early and later Marx while taking the very important Hegelian background into consideration, a background which is so important that it almost naturally becomes foreground.

James Luchte

My point of entry into the problematic is the short paper “Into the Breach – the Meaning of ‘Marx’” by James Luchte [1]. Though the paper is a very critical examination of Althusser’s interpretation of Marx, Luchte makes the case that he adheres to a ‘continuity theory’ regarding the relationship between the early and later Marx.

Luchte develops his position by questioning Althusser’s use of the classical, formal division of labor in academia between the different disciplines of poetry, philosophy and science. Althusser posits a sharp epistemological break between an early, idealist, pre-scientific, philosophical Marx and a later historical-scientific Marx. For Althusser pre-scientific philosophy is nothing more than an ideological veil or deluded interpretation of the world covering the reality which the later Marx scientifically investigated. According to Althusser the break started in The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach (both written in 1845), after which Marx’s work becomes thoroughly re-organized in harmony with scientific principles and should not be considered philosophical anymore. Althusser therefore is a “discontinuity theorist” (Luchte, 3). Even if a meaningful philosophy could be established, according to Althusser, it would be based on Marx’s matured science some-when still in the future.

Luchte criticizes Althusser’s adoption of this division of disciplines by reasoning that such a division itself is still beholden to a capitalist, alienated, ideological categorization (Luchte:9). He even depicts Althusser’s take on the later purported ‘scientific’ Marx as similar to Hegel’s Absolute Idea, because both Hegel and Althusser’s Marx claim a “monologicity of meaning” in their understanding of history, “free of interpretation”(Luchte, 12). He even muses whether Althusser’s thought becomes thereby “perhaps one of the vanguard of capitalist ideologies”(Luchte, 12), an accusation which seems to take a page out of the ongoing intra-Marxist debates in which contestants jockey for the most pure, revolutionary interpretation of Marx free of any capitalist ideological elements and often berate their opponents of having succumbed to such elements.

In contrast to Althusser, Luchte sees a “continuity and maturation of insights” running through the whole of Marx’s oeuvre which consisted not only of, as per Althusser, alleged early philosophical and later scientific studies, but also included “differing topographies of expression” (Luchte:12) like poetry, magazine articles, political pamphlets and political programs within which one can detect an ongoing ‘flow’ of “analyses, deconstructions and actions”, even to the extent that “all of Marx’s later insights were originally developed in his early works” (Luchte:2). He belongs therefore to the “continuity theorists” camp (Luchte:3).

Nevertheless, Luchte does see a relevant breach happening in Marx’s work, but it is not on the epistemic level, which he does not deny, but regards as quite overblown by Althusser. Luchte locates the ‘event’ of a breach in Marx’s poetry in which he found the “emergence of a profound questioning which took place amid his first readings of Hegel, Fichte and Schelling”. Luchte wrote,

That which erupts in Marx is a poetic space in which he began to explore the sense and contours of ‘love’ and commitment, of the sacred, a space, as with dasein in Heidegger or the ethical in Levinas, where an alterior sensibility is disclosed which is not articulated via the theoretical and practical ‘logics’ of rational organization (3).

This profound poetic questioning was obviously not conducted in a philosophical vacuum, but within the context of German Idealism, which importance is such that Luchte states the following:

… that which is most profound about Marx is precisely his relationship to and transformation of the philosophy of Hegel – and thus, of the relationship of Marx with the traditions of early German Romanticism and German Idealism. (Luchte, n.d.:13)

If I were to venture into characterizing Luchte’s position I would say that Marx attained something of a non-theoretical sensibility in his very early years while grappling with German Idealism, which gave him a quite unique attitudinal vantage point from which he could both appropriate and transform this tradition. Initially he expressed this perspective in his poetry, then in his early philosophical works, and was still guided by those early insights while developing later his more historical, economic, proto-sociological investigations, which, though quite technical, also retained many poetic and philosophical elements.

Marx’s and Engels’ take on Hegel per Colletti

From the fact that Marx never explicitly repudiated his early writings and that many of his later ideas had their origin in the early works, Luchte deduces the idea that Marx himself would not have perceived a ‘breach’ in his own work. If there is a break it would be with certain elements of Hegel’s philosophy, even while incorporating other strands of Hegel’s thought. In this section I will discuss Marx’s and Engels’ self-perception of the break between Hegel’s dialectical spiritualism and their own dialectical materialism.

In his exhaustive and helpful foreword to Marx’s Early Writings, which contains many of Marx’s articles critically examining Hegel’s philosophy, Colletti highlighted Marx’s own assessment of his difference with Hegel’s philosophy with the help of Marx’s pithy expression penned for the afterword of the second edition of Capital, that

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (Marx, 1873)

For Colletti it seems not so much that the oft-quoted spatial metaphor of turning Hegel ‘right side up’ was of crucial importance for understanding Marx’s difference from Hegel, but that instead he found it more useful to focus on Marx’s proposed correction of Hegel’s philosophy of discarding within Hegel’s dialectic method the ‘mystical shell’ in order to discover its ‘rational kernel’ (Colletti, 13). Note here that Colletti, and he is quite adamant about this point, refers to a problem Marx perceived within the dialectical method itself. According to Colletti Marx distinguished “two different and opposed aspects of the Hegelian dialectic itself—that is, two aspects of the ‘method’” (Colletti:13; italics in original). This makes Marx’s position quite different from Engels’ critique of Hegel, which was close to, if not identical with, the position of the Left Hegelians, i.e. Hegel’s dialectical method was basically correct and quite revolutionary in itself, but, because Hegel compromised with the Prussian State and produced incorrect conservative conclusions, Hegel’s inherently revolutionary principles would have to be worked out anew towards the more correct revolutionary conclusions (Colletti:11). In short, whereas Engels saw Hegel’s conservatism as extrinsic to Hegel’s dialectic method, Marx saw it as intrinsic.

The Core: Marx’s Sublation of Hegel

But what is Marx’s understanding of Hegel’s dialectic method in this respect? In this section I will first sketch Hegel’s system and then plunge into Marx’s 1844 unpublished article “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole”, which also addresses Feuerbach’s pivotal role in Marx’s grappling with the deficiencies of Hegel’s abstruse dialectics.

Hegel’s System

Hegel’s philosophy could be construed as a logicized narrative of alienation and redemption, which movement is fueled by an inner logic of Aufhebung (sublation, suspension) in which a particular idea or reality becomes first, and paradoxically all in one swoop, a) negated, b) lifted up and c) preserved, into its dialectical opposite, only to be sublated again—the negation of the negation—back into its starting point, though now thoroughly transformed by the whole process. It could be argued that on a grand, ontological level the process is a 1-2-3 motion (1. positing; 2. negation; 3. negation of the negation) and that in the human, historical realm this process of dialectical transformation is multiplied many times over in multi-periodic, multi-layered sequences. This dialectical movement is quite inevitable because every station on the way, every idea or reality, carries in itself the seeds of its own suspension, though for both Hegel and Marx there is a culmination happening, or to be expected, in the historical process of man’s development. For Hegel, the starting point is the Idea or Self-consciousness, which negates or externalizes itself into its opposite, i.e. material reality including humanity, which in turn is the entity in and through which the sublated Idea executes its double negation and becomes transformed into self-conscious Spirit, which realized itself on the world-historical stage in protestant Christianity in conjunction with the Prussian State of the 1820s, and especially in Hegel’s own and privileged philosophical awareness of that culmination.

Feuerbach’s Inversions of Hegel

Marx’s criticisms of Hegel’s system are initially based on the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), whom Marx credits with “genuine discoveries” in the field of Hegel’s dialectics and being the “true conqueror of the old philosophy” (Marx, 1988:144). Basically, according to Marx, Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel is that Hegel incorrectly starts–and therefore equally incorrectly finishes in the double negation–with a position which itself is already a negation (or estrangement) of something more primary and concrete. The Idea, or infinite absolute with its religious overtones, with which Hegel starts the dialectical process is nothing more than a logical abstraction of what is concrete and primary, which is for Marx the “actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular”(144), which for Hegel in turn is the negation of the Idea and therefore secondary and to be overcome. Because Feuerbach sees Hegel’s abstract starting point as theological and religious, and the first negation in material reality as the realm where philosophy and science hold sway, Hegel’s philosophy qua philosophy is therefore self-contradictory, because in the negation of the negation it negates itself as philosophy and re-instates theology and religion.

Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation … as a contradiction of philosophy with itself—the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself (Marx, 1988:144).

The implication of this false starting point for the correct understanding of man’s history is that it is locked in an abstract, empty logic. According to Marx, Hegel had “only found the abstract logical, speculative expression for the movement of history”(145), but not the real, concrete process of history anchored by man’s social relations and desires embedded in nature.

Besides criticizing Hegel for inverting the concrete and the abstract, Feuerbach also had a parallel criticism of Hegel’s inversion of the subject-predicate relation, which lead to the formulation of his influential “transformative method”.[2] For Hegel the concrete subject bearing the whole of history is the absolute, infinite Idea or God, which would make “real man and real nature”(162) into its mere abstract predicate. Feuerbach saw this tendency in Hegel to make out of the essential attributes of man, like thinking and self-consciousness, real living, concrete subjects, and therefore proposed to just reverse the relationship to get at the truth. In Marx’s appropriation of the “transformative method” the correction is formulated such that man is not the predicate of a hypothesized self-consciousness (with its theological implications), but that self-consciousness is a predicate or attribute of the real, sensuous man (with obvious naturalist implications). In Marx’s own statement, in which one has to juggle with the original Hegelian dialectical double negation together with Marx’s inversion of it (adding a third complexifying negation to the whole dialectical edifice), one could make sense of the following.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my own self, the self-consciousness that belongs to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through the negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject (Marx, 1988:158-9; italics in original).

Marx’s Assimilation of Hegel

Important to the overall argument of this paper is the fact that Marx in his inversion of Hegel’s dialectic did not enact a wholesale refutation of Hegel, but made a qualified appropriation of it, which–if one keeps in mind the paradoxical nature of sublation as both negation and preservation—was arguably itself a dialectical move in which Marx both criticized its incorrect aspects and preserved its positive elements. In the later part of his “Critque ..” he spells out two positive elements in the context of the foundational concept of estrangement (alienation). According to Marx the positive elements in Hegel’s dialectic were a) that Hegel saw the possibility of the annulment of estrangement (even though he incorrectly exchanged its abstract and concrete moments) and b) saw the estranged nature of the world and man’s “self-estrangement” (even though incorrectly in an abstract manner and not in a concrete manner) (161). To make some sense of the quite abstruse closing paragraphs (161-8) of the article, the following:

For Hegel this world is a defective world where we do not really belong. It is the negation of our spiritual origin and the way out, back into positivity, is by overcoming the initial negation by a second one, i.e. the annulment of the estrangement. Marx turns this logic around. He accedes that the world as experienced by man seems an alien world, that the objective world is in an ”estranged mode of being”(161), but then makes the case that the key in overcoming this estrangement is by appropriating the objective world by “annulling” its estranged character, and not by going beyond it by, and into, abstraction. Marx thus accedes Hegel’s possibility of “[a]nnulling as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self” but inverts the sequence of Idea-Nature-Idea to Nature-Idea-Nature. For Marx man is a this-worldly being fully embedded in nature as an integral, symbiotic part. Religion and Idealist philosophy did not realize that and made their own abstractions into living entities projected into a fictitious transcendent realm seen as both our place of origin and destiny. This redirected humanity’s attention away from each other and their social and practical world towards a fictitious beyond and therefore man felt home-less and estranged. Religion therefore was the real cause of alienation, which was later amplified by the capitalist system in which the institution of private ownership of the means of production and its correlate, commodified labor, alienated man from his own essence as a practical, creative, environment-shaping, sensuous being. To overcome this estrangement Marx proposes a one-two punch. First atheism would annul religion to establish “theoretic humanism”, then communism would annul private property and establish “practical humanism”(161).

In Marx’s explanation of Hegel’s second “positive achievement”(162) it could be argued that Marx was not just inverting Hegel’s logic, but was actually pushing it to its logical, dialectical conclusion, which would entangle the development of Marx’s thought even more intimately with Hegel’s. Though Marx mainly paraphrases and criticizes Hegel in these last pages of the article, it is not always entirely clear whether he also sometimes develops or inverts Hegel—something which apparently created belated discussions (See Stanley, 1997). Given that slight ambiguity and opening, I will venture into an interpretation which reads Marx as completing a dialectical sublation of Hegel. The key paragraph here is the following.

But what, then, is the Absolute Idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to traverse once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to acquiesce in being a totality of abstractions or in being the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself–abandon abstraction–and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary—at nature. Thus, the entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something (Marx, 1988:163; italics in original).

Marx seems to make the case that Hegel’s dialectical endpoint in absolute spirit is a “totality of abstractions” or a “self-comprehending abstraction”, which, because it knows itself to be empty, will have to abandon and annul itself and “so it arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary—at nature”(163; italics in original).

Abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning its truth, resolves … to abandon itself and to replace its selfabsorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth freely from itself: that is to say, abstraction resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of abstraction. (Marx, 1988:164; italics in original)

In other words, in my reading of these passages, it looks like that Marx was not merely paraphrasing Hegel’s defective dialectical move from Idea to Nature, but seems to suggest—as its sub-text–how to push and finish Hegel’s Idealist dialectics into a dialectical, naturalist humanism by a more radical overcoming of ‘abstraction’ [3]. The other way to read it, and admittedly the overall intention of the closing paragraphs goes in that direction, is that Marx is still, and only, criticizing Hegel’s dialectical move from Idea into Nature as infected with ‘abstraction’, that is, Hegel’s nature is still “abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity”, and that Hegel’s supposed “abandonment of thought” is still “revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought devoid of eyes, of teeth, of ears, of everything”(165).

The upshot here is that it could be argued that Marx either executed a corrective inversion of Hegel, which would create some critical distance between the two systems, or executed a dialectical completion, which would imply a systemic enmeshment of their thoughts, with Marx dialectically continuing where Hegel stopped short, and with the implication that in both cases Marx’s early struggle with Hegel was not only an integral part of the development of his own thought, but also a qualified continuation of Hegel’s system.

Herbert Marcuse

Another possibility is to interpret the Hegel-Marx transition along the lines of the German-American thinker Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Marcuse makes the case that the important discontinuity did not happen between Hegel and Marx, but already in Hegel’s thought itself. Hegel, according to Marcuse, already made important moves towards, or even into, a dialectical materialist interpretation of history, especially in his concrete social studies (Marcuse:60, 184). Hegel’s social thinking was already driven by a “conception of the world as a product of human activity and knowledge”(39), in which the concept of alienated labor is pivotal (78). Marcuse’s Hegel also sees that a social order based on “blind economic mechanisms” causes the “irreconcilable contradictions of modern society” and that such system will not be able to establish “a rational community”. Marcuse credits Hegel to be the first one to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in an individualistic market system, though Hegel wants a strong state to overcome its problematic nature (60-61). Reading these passage it is quite clear that Marcuse’s Hegel, except for minor issues, already thinks within a dialectical materialist framework centered around man as a world-transformative agent through his labor, and sees the necessity to overcome the contradictions of the market-based social order. Hegel in Marcuse’s depiction is therefore not necessarily exclusively an idealist and certainly not a conservative.

Later commentators of Marcuse’s engagement with Hegel observed a contradiction within Marcuse’s assessment of Hegel between the above mentioned dialectical materialist insights and Marcuse’s “official judgment” that Hegel was still beholden to his idealist metaphysics. In the end, and in harmony with Marx’s “canonical” self-perception of his break with Hegel, Marcuse goes with the general view that it was Marx who surpassed Hegel’s idealism, not Hegel himself as Marcuse’s own more detailed investigations seemed to suggest (McCarney:61-2; see also Burns and Fraser:12-3).

Erich Fromm

This section will get us back again into the question of continuity within Marx’s own thought with the help of German social thinker Erich Fromm (1900-1980), who, like Marcuse, had a background in the Frankfurter Schule and embraced a Marxist “existentialist humanism”. He published in 1961 large parts of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM here after) within a study titled Marx’s Concept of Man, in which he makes the case that the “central issue” of Marx’s philosophy is the “real individual man” and what he or she concretely is and does and changes through history (Fromm:v); that this humanist concept of “productive” man was best expressed in this early work (v); that this concept, from EPM to The German Ideology to Capital, never changed (74-75); and that Marx’s criticism of capitalism and promotion of socialism could not be adequately understood without this foundational concept of man as worked out in his early works (79). Fromm stresses Marx’s ongoing concern for man’s self-realization and freedom through overcoming the alienation of man from his labor and fellow men caused by the capitalist division of labor (43-58). Fromm developed this position also by contrasting it polemically with other western Marxists and Russian Communists, who all downplayed Marx’s early works with its humanist concept of man, in favor of more abstract sociological concepts like class and economic forces, thereby rationalizing their own theoretical and real disregard–even more than in the capitalist system–for the concrete individual (70-75).

Besides making the case for the ongoing importance of Marx’s humanist concept of man throughout his whole oeuvre, Fromm also makes the case that Marx actually picked up these ideas from an already established rich tradition with its roots in “Prophetic Messianism”, carried over by Spinoza, Goethe and Hegel with the latter giving it its “most systemic and profound expression”(29). In Fromm’s own words the central idea is of

… the productive man, of the individual who is he, inasmuch as he is not passive-receptive, but actively related to the world; who is an individual only in this process of grasping the world productively, and thus making it his own. For Hegel the development of all individual powers, capacities and potentialities is possible only by continuous action, never by sheer contemplation or receptivity. For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. (Fromm:29; italics in original)

Like with Marcuse, who is approvingly quoted by Fromm on Hegel’s technicalities, there is the idea that Hegel did some foundational work on the topics of man’s “self-activity”, labor, alienation, and its overcoming, such that Marx could appropriate this big chunk of Hegel’s thought and incorporate it by cutting it out of its idealist origin and setting it in a atheist, humanist framework. Actually, Fromm seems to interpret this move by Marx as a proper dialectical move operated upon Hegel’s idealism. Fromm takes serious and elaborates on a passage in Marx’s EPM in which Marx states that his “… naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both”(Marx, 1988:154). The materialism apparently sublated here is a positivist, mechanical, bourgeois, abstract materialism which excluded man’s self-activity set within the concrete historical process of “the real economic and social life of man and of the influence of man’s actual way of life on this thinking and feeling”(Fromm:9). The dialectical character of this move is that idealism and its negation in crude materialism is overcome by a synthesis in which both are negated, lifted up and preserved in a naturalist humanism. In this dialectical sequence Marx’s philosophy is not the refutation or negation of idealism, but the synthesis of idealism and its anti-thesis, crude materialism. In short, Marx’s early work on Hegel is both content-wise and methodologically a critical, dialectical continuation of Hegel.

Louis Althusser

Althusser’s concept of an epistemic break within Marx’s work was already discussed above in the context of Luchte’s ‘continuity theory’. The positive aspect of the break was the establishment of the wholly new science of history, a “scientific discovery without historical precedent, in its nature and effects”(Althusser, 1970:14), which slowly but steadily happened starting in 1845 and finding its fulfillment in about 1875. Its correlative negative aspect was Marx’s break with pre-scientific ideologies in general and Hegelianism in particular. In Althusser’s preface to the French translation of the first volume of Marx’s Capital he stated that, though the rupture with Hegel could be discerned in Marx’s 1845 Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, Marx was not necessarily fully aware of that and that he “needed a very long period of revolutionary work before he managed to register the rupture”(Althusser, 1971:93). Traces of Hegelianism remained throughout his mature writings and only were decisively overcome in his later work. In the metaphor of continental drift, which Althusser employed, the first crack between the newly to be formed continent and the landmass from which it broke away happened in 1845 and was barely perceivable. Then around 1875 the new continent was totally detached and irreversibly drifting away.

The implication here is that, because Marx’s break with Idealism only started to happen in 1845, that his pre-1845 writings like EMP were still within the ban of Idealism, and, even though they were critical of Hegel, were still ideological and pre-scientific. The decisive break is in Marx’s own work and the early Marx consists of variations of German Idealism. Althusser’s more detailed assessment of the relationship of Marx early writings with Hegel can be found in Althusser’s For Marx, in which he made the case that “the Young Marx was never strictly speaking a Hegelian”, except in one singular, unique text , EPM, which was “the most extreme test of the ‘inversion’ of Hegel ever attempted”(Althusser, 1970:35; italics in original), though this text was not the locus of Marx’s break-through and transformation as many perceive it to be.

[Marx] had always kept his distance from Hegel, and to grasp the movement whereby he passed from his Hegelian university studies to a Kantian-Fichtean problematic and thence to a Feuerbachian problematic, we must realize that, far from being close to Hegel, Marx moved further and further away from him (Althusser, 1970:35; italics in original).

Fraser & Burns

The last commentators for whom there is room in this paper are the British Hegel and Marx scholars Ian Fraser and Tony Burns who compiled the very helpful The Hegel Marx Connection. They open their insightful introductory essay with an apt quote from erstwhile Marxist and later anti-communist Sidney Hook, which truth I am now quite aware of, that to “conjoin . . . the names Hegel and Marx . . . is not so much to express a relationship as to raise a problem – one of the most challenging problems in the history of thought” (Fraser & Burns:1). To make sense of the diverse positions trying to understand this problematic and complex relationship they propose to initially categorize them in two camps: those who appropriate Hegel into Marx and those who expunge Hegel from Marx. The first see the importance of Hegel’s principles of dialectics, but then recast in a humanist frame, while the second group would reject any use of Hegel’s dialectics because it is still problematically enmeshed with idealist metaphysics.

Though there are many variations within the two categories, Burns and Fraser see a recent emergence of a third alternative, which seems to me a variation of the appropriation agenda. This alternative would reject the assumption shared by the first two groups of the idea that “Marx is a materialist, [and] Hegel is an idealist” and would interpret Hegel’s economic, social and political writings as already materialist. Burns and Fraser think this position of Hegelian materialism was initially ‘hinted’ (20) at in the thoughts of Lenin, Lukács and Marcuse, and then developed by more contemporary thinkers, but my reading above suggests that at least Marcuse was explicitly taking that position already. He might not have fully develop it, at least he made some big strides in that direction.

As we saw in the case of Marcuse and Fromm, who would belong to the first (or third) group, it looks strongly that the Hegel-Marx ‘appropriationists’ would also adhere to a ‘continuity theory’ in Marx’s own work by the logic that the young Marx picked up useful elements in Hegel’s thought, which subsequently continued to be integral to Marx development. The mirror image is to be found in Althusser, who seems to be both the ‘expunger’ and ‘discontinuity theorist’ par excellence.

Conclusion

Given the obvious complexity of the subject matter, it will maybe be forgiven that a neat conclusion of this topic is well nigh impossible. Sticking to my initial metaphor to see the continuities and discontinuities within Marx work and within the inevitably closely connected Hegel-Marx transition as a bundle of ideas of which some go through fundamental changes (or not) at different moments, and are evaluated differently depending on who is looking, I will venture into the proposal that there are three major strands, each with a multiple amount of threads themselves. I will try to organize and name the threads while also naming those who could be associated with them.

The major strands are A) ontology, B) methodology, and C) content.

The two major components of the ontological strand are A.1) Idealism and its opposite A.2) Materialism. Most commentators seem to incorporate this simple dichotomy as a basic assumption, though Marx, and Fromm following him, would make a tripartite differentiation of A.1) idealism, A.2′) its antithesis, crude materialism and their synthesis in A.3) naturalist humanism, which overcomes the subject-object dualism in a concept in which man and his social and natural environment continually co-create and transform each other.

The two major components of the methodological strand are B.1) dialectics and B.2) science, with many variations in between (see below), and a minor third methodology of accessing the whole subject matter, and that is through B.3) a non-theoretical, poetic sensibility (Luchte).

Content-wise one could create a quite long list, but the major contenders would be C.1) productive, self-active man, C.2) a. alienated labor and b. freedom, C.3) man’s a. social, b. economic and c. political life, C.4) a. thought and b. consciousness, C.5) a. biological and b. physical nature.

Though I think that Fromm is right to perceive the central issue in both Hegel and Marx to be man’s self-realization and freedom, the deeper methodological issue by which much is decided is that of the dialectical method. It seems to be this specific topic on which all thinkers have widely different ideas and even adhere to different versions within their own thought.

The first simple differentiation is between B.1.a) Hegelian Idealist dialectics and B.1.b) Marxist, naturalist dialectics.

The second differentiation concerns the where of the idealism-naturalism transition with the possibilities of placing it in B.1.x) Hegel (Marcuse), B.1.y) in Feuerbach (Marx), or B.1.z) in Marx (Althusser).

The third differentiation concerns the how of the transition with the possibilities of B.1.k) partial assimilation/appropriation (Marx, Engels), B.1.l) dialectical continuation/radicalization (early Marx, Fromm), B.1.m) inversion (Marx, Feuerbach), and rejection (Althusser).

Then, within the dialectical radicalization thread one can see this happening either in B.1.l.a) a one stroke radicalized sublation of Hegel’s abstract system into naturalism as I suggest to read EPM, or B.1.l.b) a two stroke dialectical sequence from Hegelian Idealism to crude materialism to naturalist humanism (Marx, Fromm).

Also, within the appropriation thread there is the difference between B.1.k.a) assimilating the revolutionary, dialectical method wholesale but shedding the conservative conclusions (Engels), and B.1.k.b) assimilating only the rational core of the method but shedding its mystical shell (Marx).

And, as a hopefully last differentiation, one can see both the difference and similarity within the inversion thread between B.1.m.a) the abstract-concrete inversion (Marx, Feuerbach), and B.1.m.b) the subject-predicate inversion (Marx, Feuerbach).

Is there a simple summation possible of these concluding observations such that the whole topic can be nicely wrapped up in a meme? I don’ think so, though my preference goes towards Marcuse’s Hegelian materialism and its dialectical radicalization in Marx.

Endnotes

[1]. This short paper made its way in a slightly extended form as chapter one into a longer piece titled “Marx and the Revolution of the Sacred”. I copied, pasted, double-lined and paginated the chapter to keep this paper somewhat organized and referable.

[2]. It is an open question for me if the tensions and possible inversions in the pairings of Idea-Reality, Subject-Predicate, Essential-Contingent, and Concrete-Abstract, are variations of an underlying logic of the relation between Transcendence and Immanence.

[3]. There is another passage in which Marx seems to indicate that his naturalist humanism is based on a dialectical overcoming of the dualism between idealism and materialism. “… naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both”(154). Fromm took this quote serious. See below.

Origin

This graduate essay was written for the class “Nineteenth Century European Philosophy” (CSPH7046) under Dr. Adrian Davis at the University of Wales in the fall of 2015.

Sources quoted and consulted

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