(2017. This is an earlier essay of mine from college. It’s not the best essay on this website by any means, so skip it if you’re just reading a few things, but I do find it vaguely relevant to the Great American Novel project for two reasons. One, it argues that the only way to create a new world is through immanent critique of the existing world, and two, I connect Marx in this essay to democracy and to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill.)
It is a common human trait to dislike criticism. We enjoy the feeling of validity, both in our actions and in our ideas about the world. When that validity is challenged, the first instinct is often to defend our status quo, and to feel threatened by the criticism. It can even have a negative emotional impact; it hurts to be criticized. And yet, it is more often than not a good thing to be criticized, since it offers a chance at improvement. For example, if it were not for the searing criticism of my tutors, my social studies essays would not have significantly improved over the course of the term, since I would not know where I needed to improve or how. John Stuart Mill says that although humans admit that they’re fallible, we tend to foolishly forgo taking precautions against our fallibility. Critique may cause pain on many levels, but it is pain that spurs growth. Over this term of social studies, we have encountered the abstract idea of “critique” in many manifestations, most memorably in the works of Karl Marx. Marx represents a peak in the application of critique (or kritik), and it is a central driver in his philosophical project which leads him to his groundbreaking critiques of capitalism. Early Marx called for a radical critique of everything existing and, through exploring the idea of critique in both a general sense and in the theories of Marx and others, I aim to explain my agreement with this idea. The concept of “critique” is an essential active mechanism necessary for the development of human progress and emancipation in both the material world and the world of ideas.
The idea of kritik has a rich history. Critique is used to broadly describe a philosophical process of examining a concept with an almost antagonistic scrutiny in order to discover the conditions, consequences, and limits of the idea in both theory and praxis. One of the most famous kritiks is by Marx’s German predecessor, Immanuel Kant. Kant used what is called “transcendental critique” most famously in his Critique of Pure Reason. Transcendental critique starts with some accepted aspect of existence or subjective experience and then uses deductive reasoning to decide what must be true about human minds or the spatiotemporal world in order for that accepted aspect to also be true. This made it particularly useful for Kant’s project, but it is not the only mode of critique. Marx uses “immanent critique” which differs from transcendental critique in that it critiques from within. Our existence takes place within many deterministic contours, and immanent critique allows one to criticize both the ideas and actuality of social conditions from within the historical context being criticized. Marx saw great potential for real social change in this form of critique since it necessarily came from the real world instead of just the world of thought, and changing the world was his main goal as a materialist and revolutionary. This form of critique combines analysis of the material and the Ideal, a “critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea” (Marx, To Make the World Philosophical 10) and finding contradictions in either of these realms can point the way towards emancipation from the construct being critiqued without requiring the construction of some new system like Kant. The keys to change already exist within the flawed systems, and through immanent critique the “inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards” (Marx, To Make the World Philosophical 10). Marx was one of the many German philosophers of the time who saw Hegel as their launching point, and Marx’s immanent criticism echoes the Hegelian dialectic. The existing concept and that concept’s material actuality in the real world (through which the concept can be critiqued) represents the positive start of the dialectic, and the critique is the negative element because it actively discovers the contradiction or negation inherent within the positive aspect. This negation results in the resolution of the dialectic, when the positive and negative aspects negate each other and sublate into the higher, stable third form. This sublation would resolve the inherent contradiction in the critiqued concept by fixing or clarifying whatever aspect was wrong or wrongly interpreted, thus bringing the Idea and the particular material reality into alignment. This, for Marx, is how real progress is made.
Marx’s work is based on the idea of immanent critique. Ironically, while immanent critique has a Hegelian nature, Marx’s entire philosophy is based on his critique of Hegel’s version of the dialectic. Hegel’s idealist dialectic starts from the abstract, produces its particular negation, and then sublates into the concrete final synthesis. Marx and Engels believed that Hegel’s version is “standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (Engels, Tucker xxi). Following the example of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx and Engels performed an inversion of immense consequence, flipping one of the most influential thinkers of the era on his head. The Marxist dialectic is grounded in material reality, reflecting how “[m]an was not the personification of spirit; rather, spirit was the thought-process taking place in man” (Tucker xxiii). This version, in which material reality begets its negation via interaction with the mind of man, then leads to eventual synthesis and real world change. Humans are the active component here, the agents of real change in the material world and the world of ideas. Critique thus fits into this process as the negation, since it is a mental reaction to a material reality which leads to a change in that reality. Marx’s dialectic seems more realistic, and it’s more appealing because it puts the power in our hands instead of in some disembodied idea.
After establishing this reformed dialectic, itself the product of an immanent critique (of Hegel), Marx then uses it to produce more immanent critiques. In Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he critiques a few of Hegel’s assertions which, based on his inverted dialectic, Marx finds to be wrong, with existence and essence misaligned. Hegel’s top-down conception places the state as essential over the civil society and family; Marx asserts that rather “the state issues from the multitude in their existence as members of families and as members of civil society.” Furthermore, “[i]f Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a mythical fashion into a subject” (Marx 17-18). The state is simply an abstract, but people are concrete and therefore are the proper launching point in his materialistic dialectic. Furthermore, for Marx democracy is the essence of the state because it is a human manifestation instead of simply legal, and other forms of government are empty formal constructions without democracy as their full truth. He writes that “[i]n democracy the formal principle is at the same time the material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of the general and the particular” (Marx 21). This demonstrates an application of Marx’s inverted dialectic at its best. While Hegel’s dialectic creates hollow forms receiving content from without, forcing a sort of fake contrival of the content to align with the form, Marx’s dialectic starts with the content or the essence and then generates a perfect existential form for that content.
Marx’s development of critique all culminated in his grandest project: an immanent critique of capitalism and political economy writ large. Immanent critique is essential to this project, simply because Marx existed in a deeply entrenched set of historical, political and especially economic circumstances. There was no transcending the capitalist reality of the world around him. There was and still is no escape from the influence of capital; after all, how else could he eat? Furthermore, the years of scholarship before him also existed within a capitalist system. Because the system was so all-encompassing and all-penetrating, the only way to enact social change for Marx was through immanent critique of the capitalist system from within, which he pursued for most of his mature life, culminating in his seminal Capital. He explores both the material and philosophical realms of the issue, and takes these explorations as far as they can go. Over the course of this process, he reveals seemingly inherent contradictions in the system of capitalism. Building on the concept of man’s alienated productivity fueling the generation of capital on the back of survival wage labor, Marx attempts to show that the capitalist system will destroy itself in a dialectical negation. As capital grows larger, so too grows a dehumanized yet conscious proletariat. The inexorable forward impulse of capital requires it to either grow or to collapse to wage labor, and eventually the proletariat will grow so large that it will abolish itself while destroying capital. Thus the contradiction will be sublated into a synthesis of communism, and although Marx doesn’t know exactly what that would look like, he sees it as both positive and inevitable. Communism would be “the positive transcendence of private property… the complete return of man to himself as a social being… accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development… the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved” (Marx Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 85). This grand resolution at the end of the ultimate materialist dialectic only will come about as a result of kritik. Marx is conscious of both the way the material world can influence and generate our world of ideas and vice-versa; by the act of critiquing, Marx hopes to radically negate social reality, catalyzing the material forces (the proletariat) with his revolutionary theory. Thus, critique is essential for bringing about change, even on enormous scales such as that of political economy.
Clearly, Marx’s method of immanent critique has a lot of power to positively transform a previously accepted part of reality through a negation of contradictions. This makes his short essay For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing provocative, because it proposes exactly what it says in the title. Marx argues that philosophers like Hegel who “had the solution of all riddles lying open in their lectern” weren’t in line with reality, whereas “we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old.” This criticism “must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be” (Marx 13). In fact, it must embrace this conflict to generate authentic dialectical progress, without jumps or suppressions. He wants to release the complete truth from flawed old systems through “reform of consciousness, not through dogmas” by the negation of criticism; “[o]ut of this conflict… one can develop social truth” (Marx 14-15). In this way, the application of immanent critique can perform a dialectical movement towards truth in any existing system or concept, both in theory and in praxis. The underlying meaning here is that all existing systems and concepts ought to be immanently criticized in order to clarify our own consciousnesses, improve society, and approach “truth” in every idea.
This idea of ruthlessly critiquing everything existing resonates with On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill. In this essay, Mill argues that the pursuit of truth requires freedom of opinion and of communication. He gives four propositions to support this, and it is the second one that interests us here: even if “the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied” (Mill 52). In other words, no matter how correct one believes a currently held idea to be, it is necessary to smash that idea against others, to ruthlessly critique it, in order to get more of the truth. There is something inherent in the way ideas work that Mill and Marx both point to, which is that putting ideas through adversity strengthens them, although the remaining ideas may look quite different after the “inner light has become consuming flame” and a new, stronger truth is forged. This critique must be done to all previously held beliefs in order to approach truth and to emancipate ourselves from misunderstanding and false knowledge.I hope that I have demonstrated how the concept of immanent critique is essential to the Marxist project. Everything that exists can only be critiqued from within a world where that thing exists in our perception; thus, immanent critique is the only way to release truth from within systems and ideas that unfailingly include falsehood. This is the emancipatory essence of kritik, that it alone can free us from everything and anything that fetters us, until all is as free and true as can be. We should feel obligated to ruthlessly criticize everything existing if we truly desire truth and freedom; acceptance is ignorance and cowardice. The power of critique to push history forward in a dialectical series progression pops up so much now that I’ve become aware of it. For example, is Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women not a bold immanent critique from within societal gender constructions? Is Douglass’ Narrative not an immanent critique of American slavery and race constructions? Before these critiques, the ideas they critique were widely accepted, but that doesn’t make any idea right. If we want to progress, we need to critically look at what has brought us to the present, because according to Marx only from the old world can the new world be born. Thus, a critical (not to be confused with pessimistic) attitude must be taken towards all ideas fearlessly. Ironically, in order to pursue truth, one must forsake clinging to anything as truth.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 