Merleau-Ponty丨Marxism and philosophy

　　If we judge Marxism by the writings of certain contemporary Marxists, we will have a strange understanding of Marxism and its relationship to philosophy. Obviously, in the eyes of some Marxists, philosophy is nothing short of empty talk that has neither content nor meaning; Like Auguste Comte in the early days, they attempted to replace philosophy with science and to relegate man to the status of scientific objects. P. Neville wrote that political economy should adopt the methods of natural science, and should establish the laws of the "social world" in the same way that natural science formulates the laws of the material world. In a recent discussion with Sartre, Neville lashed out at humanism and courageously defended naturalism. R. Garrodi cleverly played tricks in the newspaper Le Le Réunción de France, praising Descartes at length, but not saying a word "I think, therefore I am". G. Corneo also praised Descartes at the University of Paris, and at the same time severely reprimanded those "sensational philosophers" for daring to treat people as the antithesis of things and say that they exist, but he forgot that these fallacies were first and foremost responsible for Descartes. One can believe this point by turning to Metaphysical Meditations. [Descartes said, "I am by no means a combination of the organs of the human body, by no means a transcendent and ubiquitous aura distributed among the organs, by no means wind, air, vapor, or everything I can imitate and imagine."] It is true that it is everyone's right to accept a certain philosophy according to his or her own preferences, for example, scientism and mechanism have long been the philosophical ideas of radical and socialist parties. However, it must be understood and pointed out that such ideologies have nothing in common with Marxism.

　　The Marxist view of human society, especially the economic and social view, does not allow society to obey fixed and unchanging laws such as the theorems of classical physics, because Marxism believes that society is moving towards a new order, in which the laws of classical economics will no longer apply. In Capital, Marx argued that these famous laws are often described as fixed and unchanging features of the "social world," when in fact they are merely attributes (and masks) of some "social structure"—capitalism that is itself dying. The structural concepts and general concepts that P. Neville trembled and did not dare to use are precisely the basic categories of Marxism. Marxist political economy speaks of laws only within structures of different qualities that should be described in historical language. Scientism has taken the form of conservative ideas from the beginning, because it wants us to treat the temporary as eternal. In the history of Marxism, scientific fetishism has always emerged at times of decline in revolutionary consciousness, such as Bernstein's plea for Marxists to return to the objective position of scientists. Lukács pointed out that scientism is a special phenomenon of alienation or objectification, which makes man lose his human reality and confuses him with things.

　　If the totality (cross-sectional and longitudinal) of human society is explained by fixed and unchanging "natural" laws, it is even more unfounded, because these laws cannot be explained in all of them even for the material world. Modern physics itself not only cannot cancel the structure, but can only understand the laws of structure within the scope of a certain historical state of the world. Since we have no basis to say that this historical state is the final state, these laws are affected by the empirical coefficient, which in turn is both related and cannot be inferred. Here, Neville would say, nature also has its dialectic, and in this sense, nature and society are consistent. Indeed, Engels accepted from Hegel a risky claim about the dialectic of nature. The dialectic of nature is the most unscrutinized part of Hegel's legacy, leaving it aside; Let me ask: How can the dialectic of nature avoid idealism? If nature is only nature, if it is an existence outside of ourselves, people will not find in nature the relations and qualities necessary to constitute dialectic. If nature is dialectical, it is because it is perceived by man and inseparable from human activity. Marx spoke of this latter nature in both the Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology. He said that this activity, this continuous emotional labor and creation, this production, "is the very deep foundation of the whole existing sensual world."

　　It is true that some of Marx's writings also smell of positivism, denouncing certain ideologies as absurd and seemingly trying to use the light of science to rid them of them. For example, in The German Ideology he says: "Usually these Germans are always only concerned with turning all the nonsense that has existed into some other nonsense, that is, they think that all these nonsense has some special meaning that needs to be revealed, but in fact the whole problem is to explain these theoretical phrases from the existing practical relations." One might argue that Marx refused to "understand" Zongtun, refused to acknowledge that religion had any meaning, and denied in principle the existence of religious phenomenology. This narrative compresses history into a wizened economic skeleton, which is only one step away from "shriveled Marxism." Others say that religion actually has no meaning, that it is a complete falsehood and a pretense of deception. However, the above view is not Marx's, but Voltaire's; Moreover, Marx once said the exact opposite: "Religion is the general theory of the world, its all-encompassing program, its popular logic, its spiritualist question of honor, its enthusiasm, its moral approval, its solemn supplement, its universal basis for comfort and justification." Religion turns the essence of man into an imaginary reality, because the essence of man has no real reality. ...... Religion...... It is the emotion of the ruthless world, just as it is the spirit of a system without spirit." Thus, the problem is not to deny religion any meaning, but to see it as a figurative representation of social reality and human reality. Communist ideology should be more imaginary than religion, not less, because religion, in the final analysis, reflects nothing more than concrete relations between people and between people and between people and the natural world. The problem is not to replace the church church with a scientific laboratory, not to tear down the Sacred Heart and build an observation tower, but to understand that religion is the fantasy of people in another world to meet other people; Therefore, we should replace this false interaction with real interaction in the real world. In Hegel's youth, he believed that human interaction was the basis of history, and he had not yet extracted the spirit of the world as the opposite of things; Reading the newspaper, he said, was "the morning prayer of reality." People are beginning to move from being dominated by nature to conquering nature, smashing the existing structure of society, making a transition through practice to the "kingdom of freedom" or, in Hegel's words, to "absolute history": this is the core of the religious man, the "metaphysical" content of Marxism, Heidegger. Religion is not exactly a thing that has nothing to offer, it is a phenomenon based on human relations. Religion disappears as a separate religion only after it enters into human relations. There is a kind of fake Marxism that holds that everything except the ultimate stage of history is false. This kind of thinking is completely in line with the "crude egalitarianism" that Marx fiercely criticized. True Marxism advocates the critical inheritance of all the achievements of the past, that is, it recognizes that in the general system of history, everything has its place of truth and everything has its meaning. This meaning from the perspective of overall history is not given to us by a physical or mathematical theorem, but by the central phenomenon of alienation. Man's worship of things alienates him and makes him lose his essence, but then he takes himself and the world back in the historical movement. In the animal world, there is no economic life, no commodities, commodity fetishism, and rebellion against fetishism. These phenomena are possible because man is not a thing, or even an animal in general, because only a person can turn to external objects, because man is not only an objective existence, but also a subjective existence.

　　The myth that Marxism equals positivism is believed is because Marx fought on two fronts. On the one hand, he opposed various forms of mechanistic thought. On the other hand, he fought a great war with idealism. Hegel's "world spirit," the genie that unwittingly directs man's actions and makes him realize his intentions, and the spontaneous logic of ideas, in Marx's view, are nothing more than "turning the essence of man into a fantasy reality." But this struggle against idealism has nothing to do with what positivism calls the objectification of man. Marx was even reluctant to speak of the individual as an instrument of collective consciousness, as Durkheim did. He argues that "first of all, it is necessary to avoid re-treating 'society' as an abstract thing and pitting it against the individual". The individual is a "social being", "self-being", "quasi-being". For individuals, society is not an accident encountered by man, but an organic part of man's existence. Man's existence in society is different from the existence of things in a box, and man bears society deep in his soul. So, one can say, "Man produces man – himself and others." "Just as society itself produces man as man, man produces society".

　　What if Marx believed that the bearer of history and the driving force of dialectics are neither an independent "social world" nor a "spirit of the world", nor a unique movement or collective consciousness of ideas? That is man, the person who participates in the conquest of nature in some way and interacts with others in a certain form in the process, the mutual subjectivity that concrete people maintain in their interactions, the continuous and synchronic community that is realizing its various existences according to a typical way (in this community, each being is both influenced by and transformed by the typical way, both created by other beings and created by other beings). People sometimes ask with some reason: How can there be dialectical materialism? Strictly speaking, how can matter include concepts such as "production" and "rebirth" implied by dialectical principles? This is because, in Marxism, neither "matter" nor "consciousness" is known separately, and "matter" is incorporated into the system of human coexistence, in which a common environment for all individuals at that time and throughout the ages is established, which guarantees the universality of individual plans and enables history to have a course of development and its own meaning. But the logic of the environment needs to rely on human production to function, move forward and be realized; Production without people cannot produce an economy, let alone an economic history, even if it is related to natural conditions. Marx said that domestic animals also participate in human life, but they are only products of human life, not an integral part of human life. On the contrary, people are always giving rise to new ways of working and lifestyles. Therefore, it does not make sense to explain man from the point of view of animals, let alone from the point of view of matter. Man has no origin, "because in the eyes of socialists, the whole so-called world history is nothing more than the process of man's birth through man's labor, the process of generation that nature says to man, so he has intuitive and irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, about his production process." The socialist man was able to foresee the coming of the "kingdom of freedom" and see the present era as a stage of capitalist alienation because he came to his conviction through his surroundings that man is a productive force, that man exists in relation to things other than himself, and that man is not an inert thing. Are we going to identify people as consciousness? No, it is still to turn the essence of man into a fantasy reality, because once man is identified as consciousness, he will leave everything, his body and real existence. Therefore, it must be established that man is a connection between tools and objects, a connection that is not part of ordinary thinking, and that makes the external aspect that man faces in the world both "objective" and "subjective" at the same time. For this reason, man should be considered to be a "passive" or "sensual" being, that is, a natural and social being, and at the same time an open, active, and independent being even in a subordinate position. "We see here that radical naturalism or humanism is both different from idealism and materialism, and at the same time the truth that combines the two." It must be understood here that the bond that binds man to the world is at the same time the means by which man is free. It is also necessary to understand how, through contact with nature, man, without destroying necessity but on the contrary, exploits it the tools for his own liberation, and how to build a cultural world in which "man's natural behavior ... became the act of man, or the essence of man... To man it became the essence of nature, the essence of his man... To him it became nature." This environment is not the natural world that precedes human history, but the natural world in which man lives, and man is changing his life every day in this environment, which is history. "History is the true natural history of man". Marxism is not the philosophy of the subject or the philosophy of the object, but the philosophy of history.

　　Marx often referred to his materialism as "practical materialism." He wanted to show that matter plays a role in human life as a support point and form for practice. He is not referring here to the most ordinary substance that is external to man and by which human behavior can be explained. Marx's materialism holds that a society that is both synonymous or complementary to the ideologies of a certain type of practice, that is, synonymous or complementary to the various ways in which that society establishes a fundamental relationship with nature. It also argues that economics and ideology are intrinsically linked in the historical totality, just as the materials and forms of a work of art or perceived object are intrinsically combined. The meaning of a painting or a poem cannot be separated from the materiality of color and words; If we start from the concept, neither painting nor poetry can be created or understood. People can understand the perceived object only after seeing it, and no analysis and explanation can replace this observation. Similarly, the "spirit" of a society has long been embraced by the mode of production of that society, because the mode of production is a way for people to live together, and the various understandings of science, philosophy and religion are either simple developments of people's common lives or the development of this life in illusion. It can be understood that Marx took a reserved attitude towards the concept of human object, inherited and developed by phenomenology. Classical philosophers divided this concept; In their view, streets, workshops, and houses are complexes of colors that can be compared with natural objects in every way, but are given a layer of human meaning by secondary judgments. Marx also spoke of the concept of the object of man, but he meant to say that since the meaning of man is attached to the object, the object can appear in our experience. Marx radically concretized Hegel's idea that spirit is a phenomenon (an objective spirit mediated by the world and not drawn from it itself). The spirit of society is realized and passed on through the cultural objects that society gives to itself and lives in, and is perceived by people. As the practical scope of the social spirit accumulates, they in turn affect the way people exist and think. From this, one can understand that logic can be "spiritual currency" or "commodity fetishism" can lead to the emergence of a whole set of "objective" ways of thinking suitable for bourgeois civilization. As Raoul Lévy rightly pointed out, as long as ideology remains subjective, as long as economics is considered an objective process, and as long as people do not inculcate both into the overall historical existence and the objects of the people who reflect it, the connection between ideology and economics, although often celebrated, remains mysterious, illogical, and mysterious. J. Dumashi's inclusion of this phenomenology of the cultural world initiated by Hegel (Hegel considered the 18th century to be the golden age of the cultural world) on Marx's account, is perfectly justified. However, Neville argues here that, in Marx's view, "the manifestations and phenomenology of reality (especially the 'reality of ideas') are precisely for one to explain." Performance is just appearance, and real reality is the economy. In this way, it seems that phenomenology does not distinguish between "unfounded" phenomena and "grounded" phenomena, as if in Marxism the relationship between ideology and economics is the relationship between appearance and reality. The ideology of the bourgeoisie, which infects the entire bourgeois society, including the proletariat, like a plague, is not something that appears to be false: it blinds bourgeois society and appears to it as a solid world. It has the same "reality" as the economic structure of capitalism and forms a single system with these structures. These ideologies and this economy are certainly superficial in comparison with the socialist economic and social life they have all nurtured, but until the realization of socialism, the bourgeois mode of production and way of life have retained their importance, effectiveness and reality. Lenin clearly understood this when he said that the class struggle continued for many years after the revolution. If we want to come up with a strict definition of Marxist "materialism" and to repel the counterattack of mechanism, it must be considered that Marx expounded his theory of the practice of social existence as a concrete occasion of history, while keeping the same distance from idealism and mechanical materialism.

　　So, what is the status of philosophy according to the Marxist view? Philosophy is an ideology, in other words, an abstract aspect of life as a whole; Since it seeks to become an "independent system", it is also a "realization of the fantasy man" and plays its part in the deception of the bourgeois world. But "the farther away from the economic realm we study, the closer it is to the realm of purely abstract ideas, the more contingencies we see in its development, and the more twists and turns its curve becomes." It is not enough to explain philosophy in terms of economic conditions in any case, but it is also necessary to understand the content of philosophy and to explore its substance. "It's not just the economic situation that is the cause, it's the positive, and everything else is just a negative result." It must be noted that causal thinking alone is not enough, because it is an abstract understanding to generally regard cause and effect as polar opposites. Philosophy, like art and poetry, is a reflection of the times, but this does not prevent philosophy from grasping some truths of permanent value through this era, just as Greek art found the secret of "permanent charm" (Marx). The economy of each age has led to the emergence of an ideology because it is the environment that people have personally experienced in the process on which they seek to achieve themselves; In one sense, this economy limits people's horizons, but in another sense, it is people's contact with beings, people's experiences. It is possible, like Marx, to be limited not only by circumstances, but to understand it and to go further beyond it in life. Philosophy is false philosophy only when it remains abstract, confined to concepts, understood only by people of insight and conceals real impersonal relationships. Even in this case, philosophy, while masking reality, reflects reality; Marxism does not leave philosophy, but to uncover its mysteries, to explain philosophy and to realize philosophy in reality. "The German pragmatists demanded that the denial of philosophy was justified. The mistake of the faction... It lies in limiting itself to making this request, not seriously fulfilling it, and it is impossible to achieve it. The school thought that as long as he turned his head, turned his back to it, and muttered a few trite words, the negation of philosophy would be fulfilled ... In a word, you cannot eliminate philosophy without realizing it in reality. "I think, therefore I am" is not a false proposition unless it is divided and thus undermines our indivisibility from the world. It can only be eliminated if this proposition is realized in reality, that is, only by pointing out that it is completely contained in human relations. Hegel's thought is also not wrong, it is correct from beginning to end, but it is nothing more than an abstraction of the mythical battle between self-consciousness and self-consciousness that he describes, suffice it to give them historical names. As has been pointed out, Hegel's logic is "revolutionary algebra." Commodity fetishism is the historical realization of alienation depicted by Hegel in riddle form, and Capital is a concrete "phenomenology of spirit". As a philosopher, Hegel is to blame in his later years for thinking that he could single-handedly rely on thought to obtain all the truths of all other existences, to generalize them, to discard them, and to use his wisdom to reveal the secret meaning of history at the disposal of others. Philosophical thinking is a way of being, so as Marx said, one cannot be complacent in circles between "the existence of pure philosophy," "the existence of philosophy of religion," "the existence of political philosophy," "the existence of philosophy of law," "the existence of philosophy of art," or "the existence of real man," but if the philosopher understands this truth, if he sets himself the task of not living in place of others, but in the experience of others and the internal logic of existence. If he discards the illusion of observing the completed totality of history and sees himself as part of the totality of history, as everyone else, and that a future awaits him, then philosophy realizes its existence in reality while being eliminated as an isolated philosophy. Marx called this specific idea criticism to distinguish it from speculative philosophy; Others suggested giving it the name "philosophy of being."

　　As its name indicates, the "philosophy of being" deals not only with knowledge or consciousness (i.e., the activity that independently confirms the intrinsic and malleable nature of an object), but also existence, that is, activity that arises in a natural and historical environment and which can neither be separated from nor subordinated to it. Cognition has since returned to the totality of human practice and is constantly supplemented by practice. The "subject" is no longer the subject of knowledge, but also the subject of man; Under the influence of a continuous dialectical movement, it thinks according to its own environment, formulates categories through its own experience, and transforms the environment and experience with the meaning it finds in its environment and experience. In particular, this subject is no longer isolated, no longer general consciousness or purely self-acting; It is in other consciousnesses (each of which also has a specific environment); As something for itself, this subject is objectified and becomes a quasi-subject. For the first time in history, Hegel pointed out that the task of the philosophy of warfare is not to think about subjectivite, but about intersubjectivite. Husserl said that a priori the subject standard is the intersubjective standard. Man no longer appears as a product of the environment or as an absolute legislator, but as both producer and producer, as a place where he must slide into concrete freedom.

　　F. Alguier reproached Heidegger on this issue, saying that his ideas were vague, and that the analytical method adopted by Alguier took apart precisely what Heidegger wanted to unite; on the one hand, the raw material of knowledge, and on the other, spirit. After his analysis, Heidegger seems to have become an irrationalist. Finally, he expressed surprise that Heidegger wanted to combine the values of reflection, science, and truth. This is because Heidegger wanted to think about questions that had never been considered, because he consciously wanted to study the mundane thing whose existence had always been reflected on and supposed, because he, like Hegel, he proposed spirit as a problem to be solved in the future, in short, because he wanted to see spirit emerge from experience, rather than be content with assuming its existence. Similarly, G. Munan said of Sartre that he found in Sartre's philosophy a "shy materialism" and "shy idealism." This is tantamount to saying that Sartre's philosophy is a philosophy of both idealism and materialism. Whether or not this statement is justified, one can say that dialectical materialism is a kind of "shy materialism" and "shy dialectic." Any dialectical philosophy is always hesitant to say its name. According to Plato, dialectics does not sacrifice either aspect, it always requires "two aspects." As a result, philosophical efforts to overcome abstraction always stall halfway, either because of a bias towards the material or because of a bias towards the spirit, each clinging to its own preconceptions.

　　P. Elway also wanted to get involved in this controversy, but he remembered only Husserl's earliest formula: the philosophy of essence, philosophy as a strict science, consciousness as a priori activity. Indeed, Husserl adhered to these formulas until his later years. But he or his collaborator E. Fink also proposed a number of other formulas: the starting point as a "dialectical environment" and philosophy as "infinite contemplation or dialogue." The whole point of his career is that he no longer doubts the demand for absolute reason, the possibility of the thesis of "phenomenological reduction" that made him famous. He saw more and more that any philosophy of reflection has a tail left behind, because our existence precedes reflection, which is a fundamental fact. Thus, in order to fully understand our environment, he finally determined that the phenomenologist first task was to depict the empirical world in which Descartes' distinction between matter and spirit was not yet complete. It was precisely because he had wanted to get the problem clear from the beginning that he finally decided that the task of philosophy was to depict subjects devoted to the natural world and the historical world, which was the field of study of all his thought. Starting from the "phenomenology of stagnation", he reached the "phenomenology of growth", reached the "history of intention", that is, the logic of history. He depicts consciousness embodied in the object environment of man and in linguistic traditions, and he has contributed more than anyone else in this regard. Thus, in his early career, he may have "resisted Hegel's rebirth," but he now promotes Hegel's rebirth. Philosophers are time-consuming in their work, and they cannot be blamed for this. Let's look at how Marx treated young people who were eager to "surpass Hegel." To ask a philosopher to draw his research conclusions immediately under the pretext of urgency of the task is, as Marx said, to forget that the curve of ideology is much more complex than the curve of political history. This is sacrificing rigor and grandstanding under the banner of political romanticism, which is exactly what Marx took care to avoid. However, one might argue that existentialism is not only a philosophy, but also a fashion. Even so, it is not difficult for us to answer. In fact, although phenomenology and existentialism initially followed opposite paths, they did not allow students to lie back and sleep peacefully in a priori consciousness, but awakened their interest in historical issues. It is said that Husserl wanted to lecture in Belgrade in his later years (he was forbidden to lecture in Germany), and the Gestapo reviewed his manuscript before he left. Should we also observe philosophy through the eyes of a police officer? Philosopher Husserl, we declare you a suspect of anti-Hegelianism. For this, we put you under control... Both P. Neville and P. Elvé were too busy to read Husserl's original work, which had not yet been translated into French. If that's the case, why should they talk about Husserl?

　　Fortunately, with or without Husserl, those who love philosophy will always understand. Phenomenology aside, when Elway articulated his own position, he spoke of less scientism than a phenomenological point of view. rehabilitating the sensual world or the perceived world; Truth is to be perceived or known by us; Cognition is not the formal processing of "feelings" by "I", but the form contained in matter and matter contained in form; Put the "abstract world of science" and the "destiny of absolute logic" back into "human activity", so that "human activity" can know itself in the reality found in the course of its own activity, and cannot believe in "the rope stretched out to it by the Creator to prevent human activity from falling into possible depravity", and of course, there is also the refutation of all "storage of consciousness" theory, which is either manifested as a vulgar form of "physiological secretion" or in the elaborate form of "logical and social components". The above argument was achieved by Elvé from the path of Hegel and Marx, while others were reached by the phenomenological approach. In the first issue of the Playbook, G. Munan called for a re-examination of the relationship between consciousness and the mind, asserting that consciousness "reflects the world." He thought it hit the nail on existentialism. In fact, he rejected Marxism along with the philosophical tradition.