Edgar Allan Poe wrote philosophical satires about Cant, Aries Tottle,
deduction, induction, and other topics. But seriously, folks, we need to
disaggregate a general discussion of the characteristics of materialism
from the specific case of Kant. I barely have time to read through fresh
batches of posts on marxism-thaxis comprised of all sorts of arguments
tangled up together.
Kant is one of the toughest nuts to crack in the history of
philosophy. Adorno has two volumes of lectures substantially analyzing the
socio-historical meaning of Kantian dualism. Had Engels' purpose in the
cited texts been to focus on Kant's philosophy in detail, he might have
been up to the task, but he is making a far more sweeping and hence
relatively superficial statement about the inhibitions of major portions
of modern western philosophy to go all the way with materialism. But the
reason for the existence of dualism and the manner of overcoming it are not
trivial matters. If you counterpose Spinoza to Descartes, or Hegel to Kant
(then 'inverted' by Feuerbach and Marx), you can get a better fix on the
deeper questions both the dualists and antidualists are struggling with in
their historical setting.
Descartes and Kant may be the essential founding philosophers of the modern
subject: they foreground the historically new concept of self-conscious
subjectivity, but also in the context of a new science founded on
mechanistic physics. There are religious and political reasons for the
separation of the spirit from the mechanical actions of nature, but there
is an objective problem as well, if one considers how the two would be
united in a single scientific world picture read off in materialist
terms. Spinoza's solution--whether one wants to dub him a materialist or
not as some Marxists do--is not obvious or transparent. Compare Spinoza to
La Mettrie, who took mechanical materialism to a logical conclusion that
was too heretical for Christian Europe to bear. But here too is a
problem. (Lenin, BTW, also criticized this sort of theory of
consciousness.) La Mettrie I presume is more transparent than Spinoza,
but nonetheless bumps up, as all philosophers must, against the limitations
of the development of science of the time, and the limitations of the
development of philosophy too, and the intrinsic paradoxicality of the
problem of consciousness.
As one of the erstwhile contributors on my marxistphilosophy list argued
some years back, Marx's innovative power may have stemmed from the
snowballing process of the inversion of idealism. This is a process
ignited by Feuerbach's materialist inversion of religion (and less
successfully, of Hegelian philosophy). I don't know if Greg said this, but
I'm saying it now. And I'll add that, curiously, there is something more
powerful about the inversion of idealism than about the positive assertion
of materialism. Perhaps one could apply this analogy to Spinoza; I can't
follow through. I would also say the process applies to the Frankfurt
School materialist inversion of the Kantian-Hegelian heritage in the
1930s. The negation of idealism attests not just to materialism but to the
power of idealist philosophies. If we are going to cite authorities,
something I don't like to do, Marx, Engels, and Lenin all recognized
this. But again, close textual analysis will help us to understand exactly
what arguments are being made, what not.
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