Marx on Feeling and Philosophy

Karl Marx's PhD dissertation begins from a puzzle: Democritus and Epicurus seem to defend very similar philosophies of nature. Indeed, eminent figures in the history of philosophy from Cicero to the patristics to Leibniz have all argued that Epicurus is basically guilty of plagiarizing Democritus. Yet despite appearing to adhere to the same atomistic philosophy, the two philosophers could not have been more different:

However, a curious and insoluble riddle remains. Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but—how inconsistent!—they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general.

Marx outlines many of these oppositions. First, though both philosophers are materialists, Democritus is a skeptical materialist while Epicurus is a dogmatic materialist. On Marx's use of these categories, where Epicurus insisted that all we can know is that which we perceive, Democritus was torn between the apparent unreliability of our senses. As a matter of practice, Democritean materialism leads to an obsession with scientific exploration, while Epicurean materialism leads to a "contempt for positive science." Philosophy was never enough for Democritus. He traversed the entire world in search of better science. Epicurus, on the other hand, spent his life content in his garden, eating cheese and doing philosophy. 

Democritean materialism insisted that everything was pre-determined. With enough big data, we could predict every necessary chain of events. Epicurean materialism throws up its hands and bows before chance. Epicurus never had Democritus' obsession with the principle of sufficient reason. "There is no interest in investigating the real causes of events. All that matters is the tranquility of the explaining subject." 

This final difference--which Marx insists is tied directly to their philosophies, and not merely their personal dispositions--is most clearly seen in a comparison of their deaths: “while Democritus, despairing of acquiring knowledge, blinds himself, Epicurus, feeling the hour of death approaching, takes a warm bath, calls for pure wine, and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy.”

As Marx summarizes:

the two men are opposed to each other at every single step. The one is a sceptic, the other a dogmatist; the one considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance, the other as objective appearance. He who considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance applies himself to empirical natural science and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, learning everywhere, raging over the wide, wide world. The other, who considers the phenomenal world to be real, scorns empiricism; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio interno. But the contradiction goes still farther. The sceptic and empiricist, who holds sensuous nature to be subjective semblance, considers it from the point of view of necessity and endeavors to explain and to understand the real existence of things. The philosopher and dogmatist, on the other hand, who considers appearance to be real, sees everywhere only chance, and his method of explanation tends rather to negate all objective reality of nature.

From all this, we see something interesting about how Marx recommends we read philosophy. His dissertation is a reaction against the insistence in his own day to reconstruct the precise, metaphysical content of philosophic arguments. This is a demand very much alive in the contemporary academy. Analytic philosophy--about which I have mixed feelings, though I am certainly grateful for my analytic professors for forcing me to discipline my thinking--takes clarity as its highest virtue. "What, exactly, is the view here?!" In a world of academic bullshit, that constant demand is refreshing and helpful. It is good to be forced to clearly spell out what it is that you mean. Marx would probably have benefited from Shelly Kagan as an editor.

Yet for Marx, philosophy is only half about spelling out the view. Just as important is the general feeling of a philosophical doctrine. In his words: "it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favour of their metaphysical characteristics.” Rather than obsess over the metaphysical particulars of one argument or another, we would do well to reflect on the overall mold-of-mind that produced a particular philosophic work. To boil down Democritus and Epicurus to a set of propositions would be to ignore the profound gap between their two philosophical worldviews.

In this, we find an important clue for reading Marx himself, especially his famously complicated--some say contradictory--views about the connection between theory and praxis. As Marx learned from Hegel, feeling can be the most important part of an argument. (To paraphrase Hegel, to know what you truly believe, think about what you would die for). What matters most isn't necessarily the ideas we hold in our heads, but our deep feelings about the world. The task of philosophy, on Marx's view, is to give fuller expression of that which we feel. 

In this connection, think about Marx's notorious prediction that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. By "contradiction," Marx did not mean syllogistic error. He did not mean that the intellectual apologists of the market economy would eventually meet some argument they were unable to answer. Greg Mankiw will always formulate a response. He meant that eventually, the universal proletariat would begin to feel the paradoxical failures of capitalism. And it was that feeling which would produce revolution. 

The sentimental side of Marx's philosophy is neglected by the (still too common) reading of Marx as a vulgar economic determinist. A utopian who thinks a full, scientific understanding of the economic base is all we need to understand society. I think of this as the Ben Shapiro interpretation of Marx ("facts don't care about your feelings").