Karl Marx 200 Years

House of Marx's birth: The first house from the left 

(photo taken when I visited it many years ago)

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”, as Karl Marx’s 11th and last Thesis on Feuerbach reads. Has there been any philosopher in this world to whom these words apply better than to Marx himself?

This week, on 5 May, it is exactly 200 years ago that Karl Marx was born in the old town of Trier in Germany to a middle-class family. He would lead a life full of contradictions. Though being of bourgeois origin, he didn’t follow the interests of a man of bourgeois origin, despite his own theory. And though he was financially supported by his friend Friedrich Engels, who was a capitalist and who owned a large textile factory at Manchester, England, his aim was to bring down the class of the capitalists. Moreover, Marx did not change the world by leading the life of a political activist, but by leading the life of a full-blood philosopher and scholar: Just by interpreting the world he changed the world. However, others, like Lenin, Stalin, Ebert, Jaurès, MacDonald, Troelstra etc., would actively change the world based on Marx’s theory, although probably not always in the way Marx had imagined.

That’s what most people think of, when they think of Karl Marx: His political impact, and then his impact on communism in the first place, but also on social-democracy. However, his influence has been much wider. Marxist ideas have influenced feminism, economic theory, sociology and philosophy and who knows what more. Marx’s approach and method for studying society could (and can) be applied to many social fields. To restrict myself to my own fields of interest and to persons who had a direct impact on my ideas, in sociology many thinkers have been affected by Marx’s ideas without becoming Marxists, like Dahrendorf, C. Wright Mills and Giddens. In philosophy Marx’s ideas led to the critical theory of the Frankfurt philosophers like Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, which brought forth one of the most prominent thinkers of today: Jürgen Habermas. I want to mention also the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who is famous for developing Marx’s idea of class consciousness. It’s striking that thinkers and activists outside the political field have been influenced by the ideas of the”Young Marx” in particular.

But the interest in Marx gradually faded away, till we see a “Marx Revival” around 1968. It was just then that I went to the university and started to study sociology. Are you surprised that therefore I begun to read Marx’s works as well? I read Capital, of course, but in the end only a little part of it. However, I did entirely read most of his well-known smaller works, like the Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology and The Eighteenth Brumaire. I read works about Marx, and I read works influenced by Marx, like those by the sociologists and philosophers just mentioned. Especially I read the works by Habermas and there has been a time that I bought and read everything he published. Habermas (together with Apel and Popper) led me also away from Marxist philosophical ideas by showing me the importance of analytical philosophy. Actually a bit strange for there are hardly two other kinds of philosophy that are as different as Marxism and analytical philosophy. But they could be combined in the mind of Habermas, so why not in mine as well?

Since 1968 the critical social thinking of Marx but also the contents of his ideas have been on the background – and sometimes more on the foreground – of political life in this world, even though they have often been deformed or even violated. In the 1970s and 1980s revolutions were often fought in the name of Marxism, but when we look back today and see what has come of them (like in Angola and Nicaragua) must we say then that finally they had nothing to do with Marxism? Or are they just the ultimate consequence of Marxism?

Happily we still see also a positive inspiration by ideas that find their origins in Marxism, indirectly or directly: The discussion of the problems of globalization, the critique on the financial world and the banking system after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, the Occupy movement, or – more concrete – Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 200 years after his birth Karl Marx is still alive and with his ideas we can still interpret the world in order to change it for the better, if we desire.

Reading Spinoza

Spinoza is seen as a philosopher whose work is often obscure and difficult to understand, unlike, for example, Descartes whose texts are well written with clear and distinct concepts. Especially Spinoza’s Ethics is considered opaque, not only now but also by readers in his time. Nonetheless his ideas are still important today, which becomes apparent if one gives them a somewhat anachronistic interpretation that relates them to present discussions.

Take for instance Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics. Spinoza had read the philosophical works by Descartes very well. He had even written a course on Descartes’s philosophy for his friends and followers. However, Spinoza did not agree with Descartes. Especially he rejected his dualistic world view. I think that many readers of this blog will know that according to Descartes the world is made up of two basic substances: matter and mind. Although these substances could interact with each other (in man this happened via the pineal gland in the brain), they were independent of each other. It was not what Spinoza thought. Let’s see what he writes in the beginning of his Ethics, where he expounds his world view. Spinoza has built up his Ethics as a mathematical theory. This involves that he starts from definitions and axioms and that with the help of them he proves his propositions. Since substances are what make up the world, he starts his works with discussing them and their characteristics. First he gives eight definitions. For us the most important are:

III. By ‘substance’ I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

IV. By ‘attribute’ I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.

Next Spinoza presents seven axioms. Then with the help of the definitions and axioms he develops his propositions. Until now I assumed that there are several substances, but in proposition V Spinoza clearly rejects Descartes’s dualism of matter and mind by concluding from his definitions and axioms:

There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute.

Or as the last sentence of the proof of this proposition reads:

[T]here cannot be granted several substances, but one substance only.

All this is rather vague. However, I think that Spinoza’s view becomes clear, if we see it as a first version of what nowadays is presented as the dual aspect theory of body and mind.

One of the main current ontological discussions is on the nature of the relation between mind and matter, and especially between mind and body, in case we study the problem how man is constituted. Are mind and body one? Are they separate? If the former, what then is mind exactly, if we assume as undisputed that man has a body anyway? If the latter, how do mind and body relate? Since Spinoza rejects the dualism of mind and body as two substances, we can ignore the latter question. But what is mind then given the presence of body (matter) anyway and Spinoza’s monist view that there is only one substance? A view accepted by many philosophers today is that man is a material being and that the mind is a kind of epiphenomenal effect emerging from the human matter. Others, like me, prefer a dual aspect view on man, which says that man can be considered and studied in two different ways: as a biological body or as a conscious and thinking mind, although in the end man is both together. In other words, man has two aspects: a bodily aspect and a mental aspect, which are two sides of the same coin, so to speak. This is now what Spinoza wants to say, too, I think. We have seen already that – against Descartes – Spinoza maintains that there is one substance, which we can interpret that way that there is only one “stuff” that makes up the world. But how must we conceive such a substance? That’s why Spinoza has introduced the concept of attribute. As defined by Spinoza it’s a difficult concept. However, following Lord in his Spinoza’s Ethics – which is an explanation of and introduction to the book – we can say that “attributes are the different ways in which a substance can be perceived. ... An attribute is the substance itself, as perceived in a certain way” (p. 21; italics Lord). According to Spinoza, two attributes are relevant for man: Extension and thinking. Also for Descartes extension and thinking are relevant for man. The difference between both philosophers is, however, that for Descartes extension and thinking are separate substances, but for Spinoza they are two different attributes of the one substance that exists in this world.

Once we know this I think that the analogy between Spinoza’s view on the world and the dual-aspect theory is clear, certainly if you know that the latter is also called dual-aspect monism. Spinoza’s attributes are nothing but what we now call “aspects” and his extension and thinking are what the dual-aspect theory calls “matter” and “mind”. Even more, also Spinoza speaks often of matter and mind in this way. Seen thus, Spinoza’s view is actually quite simple.

I want to add yet one remark. According to Spinoza, the one existing substance has an infinite number of attributes. So in fact, his theory is a multi-aspect theory. But because only two attributes are relevant to man, we can ignore it.

References

Spinoza, Benedict de, The Ethics, on http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/919/pg919-images.html)

Lord, Beth, Spinoza’s Ethics. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010. Also available online: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Phil_100/Spinoza_files/guide%20to%20spinozas-ethics.pdf

Why we act

One of the most lively discussions in philosophy is about how to understand or explain human actions. It’s a discussion that is almost as old as Western philosophy. The problem was discussed, then faded away, then flared up again, again it faded away, and so on. It was discussed by Aristotle (the first who did), by Hume and by Kant. It was a central theme in the methodological discussions at the end of the 19th century when Dilthey presented his view on Verstehen (understanding) as an alternative method for explaining human actions. It flared up again during the 1960s and thereafter, when Davidson, von Wright and Apel presented their views on action explanation as alternatives for Hempel’s positivism and Popper’s critical rationalism. These are a few highlights in the history of action philosophy, and actually since the 1960s the discussion didn’t die down. In 1996 I published my PhD thesis as my own contribution to the field – a book that, as so many books, has largely been ignored (but that’s reality).

Probably I hadn’t written this blog, if the journal Philosophical Explorations hadn’t devoted its most recent number (Vol. 21, No. 1, March 2018) to a long period in this discussion: The philosophy of action from Suárez till Anscombe (roughly the period from 1570 till 1970). I’ll not discuss the articles here, but they made me think of two main approaches in action philosophy. These approaches may have become obsolete today (for superseded by recent views), but even so I think that its distinction gives a clear insight into relevant questions that must be answered if we want to understand or explain human actions: The distinction between the Humean approach of action explanation and the Kantian approach. Note, however, that “Humean” and “Kantian” are only labels. It is not so that these approaches as put forward by me can be literally ascribed to Hume and Kant.

If it weren’t already so before that date – since in 1963 Donald Davidson published his famous article “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”, which states that it is our beliefs and desires that determine how and why we act, and that there are actually no other factors that do, this typically Humean approach has been the mainstream in the philosophy of action for decades. Although now it has faded into the background in some sense, it still has a big influence on the thinking of many action philosophers, even if they are critical of it, like me. For basically it says that only factors internal to the mind determine our actions, and it leaves no room to what is external to the mind and happens around us. And just such factors are the fundamental and main action determining factors in what I called a Kantian approach. According to Kant it are our moral obligations and our maxims, so let’s say our guidelines, that make how and why we act, and it need not be so that these guidelines are internal. Most of the time they have been imposed upon us, if not enforced by the people around us, society and the world around us. This can go that far that some philosophers think that only such – what is usually called – external factors make us act, which have to be distinguished from the internal factors that make us act according to a Humean approach. Indeed, there is some reason to think so, when we consider the psychological view that says that is especially the situation we are in that makes how and why we act, and that it’s not our internal makeup and ideas that do. Maybe you remember my blogs on Philip Zimbardo, who stresses the influence of situational factors on our actions (if not, you can find these blogs via the search machine on this page). Also the philosopher Hannah Arendt actually says that it works that way, when she analyzes the Eichmann process and talks of the “banality of evil”. And there is much truth in it.

Nevertheless I think that it is a too polarized way of thinking to say that either a Humean approach of action is right or a Kantian approach is. Maybe in some cases a Humean approach is better and in other cases a Kantian approach is, but I don’t want to see them as mutually exclusive. Isn’t it so that often the best course is a middle course? I think that this “golden rule” applies here as well. Often, if not mostly, we act in a certain way because the situation we are in presses us to do so; because moral obligations do, etc. Briefly, external factors make us act as we act. However, this doesn’t mean that internal factors don’t play a part, for we’ll not act, if we don’t agree with the actions imposed upon us. Or rather then, what we’ll do can vary from acting unwillingly to resistance and refusal. Or we act because in advance we had already intentionally decided to do so, even in case we wouldn’t fully agree with what is asked from us. Or we act as we are asked or assumed to do since it fits our character or background ideas. In other words, internal factors are explicit or implicit filters that can control what externally is expected of us. And sometimes they can also play a part of their own, as Humeans assume. Actually we always do what we wanted to do, even if we are forced to do so. Of course, stated in this extreme way, it’s not true, but the statement can be used as a standard when we have to judge morally relevant actions.

The paradox of tolerance

Statue of Spinoza in Amsterdam

Sometimes it seems that every philosopher has his or her own paradox. Last week I discussed Condorcet’s paradox. In other blogs I have discussed paradoxes ascribed to the Greek philosophers Epimenides, Meno and Zeno. There is a Hume’s paradox; Wittgenstein discusses in his Philosophical Investigations the rule-following paradox; there is a Russell’s paradox and a Pascal’s paradox; Derek Parfit discusses a paradox; and so on. These are only a few examples, although not all paradoxes developed by philosophers or paradoxes bearing their name are philosophical paradoxes. Pascal’s paradox is one in the field of physics, for instance.

Many paradoxes are intriguing and involve brain teasing problems but are not really relevant for daily life. So, Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox says: “No course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” (PI 201) We could paraphrase it as “Does the rule determine the action or does the action determine the rule?”, which is nothing else but the well-known chicken and egg problem. However, we just act, also when we haven’t solved the paradox or haven’t thought about it, and we eat our eggs and continue breeding chicken as well.

Not all paradoxes are of this kind and some are really relevant for the way we live and how act. Take the paradox of intolerance, which Karl Popper discusses in a footnote in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (vol. One, Ch. 7, n. 4). In Popper’s words: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” It’s a question that presents itself again and again, like now in the days of the Islamic State: Should we tolerate who are intolerant towards us and want to put us in their straitjacket? Popper’s answer is “no”, and with right, I think. Nevertheless the problem is not as simple as it seems by this simple answer. For instance: What is intolerant? Which words and actions are intolerant? And then I don’t think of the extremes, which are usually clear, but of the limits between what can be tolerated and what cannot. Moreover, measures against the intolerant will backfire on the tolerant. If intolerant behaviour is a real problem, as it currently is, it need not only be suppressed but measures have to be taken in order to prevent it and to track it. In these days of the Internet and social media it involves secretly spying what everybody does there, since basically anybody can be intolerably intolerant and nobody’s face tells you whether s/he is. Briefly, in order to fight intolerance we need a Big Brother in order to help us, or at least a Little Brother (or so we think). But even if our Brother is only a Little Brother, little brothers grow up and will be big brothers in the end. It looks like that this is happening now. As is known, everybody who thinks that s/he is spied, will behave as if s/he is spied and will become his own Big Brother or her own Big Sister. Then we get the practical (or even maybe actual) consequence that Big Brother is not only intolerant against the intolerant but against the tolerant as well. Then it is no longer the rule to be tolerant that determines whether we do or don’t act in a tolerant way, but intolerance has become the standard. And then nobody wins and everybody loses. It’s the paradox of paradox.

Condorcet’s Paradox

When I made a walk through Paris, two weeks ago, with the intention to take pictures of statues of philosophers, Condorcet was not on my list. I passed his statue by chance, simply because I had turned into the wrong street. But once I saw the statue, of course, I knew that he was an important Enlightenment philosopher from the 18th century. His ideas were and are still modern. He stood for a liberal economy; he was an advocate of human rights, especially women’s rights and Black’s rights (he actively worked for the abolition of slavery); he opposed the death penalty; he stressed the importance of education and wished free public education for all citizens, including women; and he strived for a constitutional republican political system. When Condorcet criticized the new French constitution of 1793, he was considered a traitor and he had to flee. In 1794 he was caught and he died in mysterious circumstances in prison.

Marquis de Condorcet was not only an important and progressive political thinker, he was also a mathematician. Combining both interests, he developed a voting system, which came to be known as the Condorcet Method, but he also discovered that this method can sometimes lead to what is now known as Condorcet’s Paradox or the Paradox of Voting. Let me concentrate on the paradox.

In an electoral system based on the Condorcet Method the voters vote for candidates by arranging them in their order of preference. For keeping it simple, let me assume that there are three voters, namely X, Y and Z, and three candidates for a certain political function, namely A, B and C. Look how the voters vote:

X prefers    A to B and B to C

Y prefers    B to C and C to A

 Z prefers    C to A and A to B.

Let’s compare the candidates pairwise:

A > B (= A is preferred to B) by two voters, namely X and Z, against one (Y).

B > C (= B is preferred to C) by two voters, namely X and Y, against one (Z).

This would make that A > B > C, or A is preferred to B and B to C.

However, C has also received two votes, for

C > A (= C is preferred to A) by Y and Z, while only X prefers A to C.

This would make that A > B > C > A, which is not possible, of course, since nobody can be preferred to himself at the cost of himself (resp. herself). Voilà the paradox: Everybody becomes first but no one wins. Currently nowhere in the world a Condorcet Method of voting is used in government elections. However, some private organisations do. I suppose that usually these elections function well, but nevertheless the risk remains that everybody wins, although everybody is a loser.

Sources: Wikipedia and Mário Filipe Pinhal, “Condorcet’s Paradox”, on http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/ig/archive/presentations/2007/IG%202007%20-%20Mario%20Filipe%20Pinhal%20-%20Introductory%20-%20Condorcets%20Paradox.pdf