无法逃离的“后黑格尔主义”辩证法
No Escape from the "Post-Hegelian" Dialectic
Author(s): Michael Williams
Source: Science & Society , Fall, 2000, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 357-365
通信
马克思、黑格尔与辩证法：研讨会
编者按：本节的三篇通信是由约翰·罗森塔尔的《逃离黑格尔》(S&S, Fall 1999)所发起的研讨会的第一部分。另外两篇评论，连同罗森塔尔对这五篇文章的回复，将发表在我们的2000-2001冬季刊上。
无法逃离的“后黑格尔主义”辩证法
一、罗森塔尔的观点
对于罗森塔尔来说，在黑格尔那里并不存在辩证方法，黑格尔将逻辑范畴无条理地映射到经验世界上。对于黑格尔来说，普遍是实在的，同时，特殊并非如此(1999, 5-6)。他的辩证法是“似是而非的”，应当只包含内部矛盾驱动的内在发展，而任何孤立的概念，在其有限性中，都会展现出这样的内部矛盾。因此，它的概念把握活动要求其过渡到另一个概念，在这个新概念中，矛盾得到了解决，以此类推，直到抵达无限性，而这一无限性的所有先前概念现在都被表明其是从属规定的环节(1999, 8-10)。
罗森塔尔主张，马克思[1973 (1857-8)]以“圣安东尼奥的姿态”克服了用黑格尔主义图式再次开始他的论证的吸引力，从而逃离了黑格尔的“倒错的神秘化”。这里的一个关键事例就是马克思尝试构建一个从作为价值的一般等价形式的货币到作为自我扩张的价值的辩证推导，但这一尝试并未成功。即使马克思完全恰当地运用了黑格尔的神秘主义——甚至是在《资本论》中也是如此——来详细阐述价值与货币的“现实范畴”的独特本体论，学者们也可能会因这一运用而误入歧途。但罗森塔尔主张，这些“黑格尔式的”（原文如此）公式并没有起到论证的作用。价值形式——以货币的形式独立地显现出来——只是恰巧表现出了与黑格尔形而上学的“客观性本身”（概念）(the Concept)的相似性，且这一相似性是误导性的。虽然货币作为交换价值的“实在的普遍”社会化身是看似合理的，但这样的实在的自然普遍，例如，在各种各样实际的具体动物之外的“动物”("Animal")并不存在。货币对于马克思来说并非“绝对的一般”("the absolute Universal")，而仅仅只是“所有作为交换价值的商品的类的”相对“普遍性”(Rosenthal, 1999, 3-5)。
罗森塔尔认为，黑格尔马克思主义尝试将唯物辩证法从黑格尔的唯心主义形而上学的修正中拯救出来，这实际上只是单纯地用“物质唯心主义”("idealism of matter")取代黑格尔的唯心主义(1998, Chapter 7)。在这一过程中，黑格尔所认为的“实在的矛盾”遭到了庸俗化，成为了有限者的不可避免的转瞬即逝的纯粹表达，体现为变化的必然性。实在的思想主体仍是意识与存在之间的消极中介，就像在黑格尔的一神论唯心主义中的一样——只是流动的方向在这里被颠倒了。这种“动态历史主义”，对于罗森塔尔来说，马克思的历史主义是本质的而非方法论的。
二、更深入地解读黑格尔
在把握概念与社会对象的连续性的方面上，“新”黑格尔马克思主义与查尔斯·泰勒(1)摆脱思想与对象之间详尽的、给定的和规定的中介形式——比如休谟或洛克的“感官印象/感官知觉/感性知觉”(“sense impressions”)、康德对奎因“命题”的形式超验范畴(formal transcendent categories)——的长期努力是一致的(Taylor, 1997)。如果意识与存在的二分法是无法维持的，那么任何实在的社会对象都会因其有限性而不完全符合其抽象概念这一点就不是什么可怕的“唯心主义”原罪，而是任何承认“近似”真理的认识论（任何非神论方法论都必须如此）的一种常见现象。黑格尔设法解决这些复杂性的尝试并不能被简单地还原为“绝对唯心主义”。与其说黑格尔主张“哲学创造了经验现实”(“philosophy creates empirical reality”)，不如解读为黑格尔仅仅主张哲学“创造了它自己的内容”(“creates its own content”)——“对思考的思考”(“thinking about thinking”)。因此，在逻辑学中，这个“绝对的形式在其自身就具有它的内容或实在性……内容无非是绝对形式的这样一些规定……” (Hegel, 1969, 592, 着重为罗森塔尔添加) (2)。
“辩证矛盾”可以超越而不否定形式逻辑矛盾。这并非对无矛盾律的违背，因为它可以被一致地描述(Bhaskar, 1983)。这也并非对物理规律的违背，因为它试图把握住体系中而非位于该体系中的对象的任何孤立概念的结构性张力(structural tension)。黑格尔的辩证法在试图包含矛盾概念的同时，也试图包含它们的更具体的存在条件，在其中，抽象矛盾的两极被揭示为单个实在社会对象的对立必要谓词。因此，他从“矛盾”到“对立”的转变可以解读为系统辩证叙述的一部分，而非疏忽或故弄玄虚。他的“相当无趣的双关语”也许可以被重构为对从抽象到不那么抽象的转变的论证。
三、从黑格尔到马克思
罗森塔尔主张，黑格尔为马克思提供了“一套非常适合于理解货币作为价值的‘一般等价形式’的语言公式” (1999, 15)，这一主张无疑是方法论的。虽然《资本论》中的表述要好得多，但《政治经济学批判大纲》中从货币到资本的“推导”或许并不能成为似是而非的黑格尔主义死胡同的例证。价值与使用价值之间的抽象矛盾被具体化为它们作为商品的必要谓词的对立存在，意味着货币的出现。这并非对剩余价值的解释（当然，资本建立在剩余劳动之上），而是对个别资本的系统性强制动机的描述，作为对“资本”范畴的描述。货币在概念上的出现是为了超越理论上的分散化经济中商品交换的问题；但作为没有使用价值的纯粹的价值，赚取作为资本的货币的唯一合理的动机就是价值增殖（因为“货币唯一能够发生的变化就是数量上的变化”——Rosenthal, 1999, 20）。若是没有马克思从货币到资本的发展，沿着这一路径，积累的驱动力就只能表现为守财奴的非理性恋物癖。
不同于Rosenthal (1999, 18)的观点，从货币到资本的辩证发展，就像其他任何发展一样，需要的不仅仅是内部的驱动，也需要作为一定量货币的资本的显而易见的经验存在作为外部参照。同样的，从外部将“一般的经济事实——剩余价值的实现”(1999, 23)引入辩证叙述也是完全合理的，因为这一点将在随后由在劳动力发展为商品的过程中简单货币普遍商品交换与生产的复杂性来解释。然而，当马克思引入资本时，他并没有从概念发展的“外部”引入“直观可感知的”野兽(1999, 31)。相反，这一“一般的经济事实”由政治经济学家们的调查、资本主义经济个体的日常意识以及马克思他自己根据他对商品、价值和货币的论述而对以上这些的反思所中介。
罗森塔尔提出指控，将资本作为货币发展的最终形式的推导将“它所宣称的东西”神秘化(1999, 21-2)，这就引发了一个问题，它所宣称的东西到底是什么。对于罗森塔尔来说，它似乎就是货币本身。但更合理的说法是，它就是资本主义货币。他认为(1999, 4ff)，货币商品就是那种代表了所有具体种类商品的“共同‘本质’”的特殊，即交换价值。但货币特殊的本体论在于它的准自主的实在的存在本身，这一点甚至超越了黄金。对于罗森塔尔来说，从货币到资本的运动包含了现实历史的“具体的社会生产关系”，而不仅仅是单纯的货币流通中的社会生产关系（特别是劳动力作为商品的出现）。我认为这完全就是一种概念发展，旨在从（以罗森塔尔在其他地方极力推荐的方式提出的）现实范畴的角度来把握住已充分发展的资本主义中的社会关系。罗森塔尔在马克思对给定的相关现象的可能性条件的（合理）发展与黑格尔（似是而非的）概念推导(1999, 32 and 20n)之间划出一条清晰的分界线(open clear blue water)的尝试是没有说服力的。
四、后黑格尔主义辩证方法
在马克思成熟时期的政治经济学和他早期对黑格尔的批判中，我们都可以从中发现一种“体系”概念辩证法。对于黑格尔来说，现实就是合理的。马克思将资产阶级社会现实视作一个由有意识的个人所组成的在历史上和在地理上特定的动态的自我再生产的（尽管可能是转瞬即逝的）相互联系的自动体系(intransitive system)。这一体系只有通过从感性现实到“实践概念”——这些概念影响并构成了日常实践的必要条件——的“先验的”辩证抽象才能得到认知。
对这样一种体系的辩证叙述试图为不同层次上的社会范畴之间的复杂体系性的相互联系提供一种非随意性的解释，并希望最终能够将经验理解为具体。对出现的抽象矛盾的依次超越，通过实践抽象的结果的有效性的理论实践提供了一次系统性的检验。持续存在且未被否定(3)的矛盾被表明其是单个对象——这一对象就是循环再生产和潜在改造的根源——必然统一的环节之间的现实对立。未能得到体系性整合的元素（家务劳动者、国家工作者、封建残余、前喻形式(pre-figurative forms)(4)）将体系性地处于从属地位（家务劳动的商品化趋势与应对分散与异化的资产阶级主体的家庭部门的显然不可还原的核心）(Williams, 2001)。另一方面，在罗森塔尔的描述中(1999, 19)，划分不同个体、种和类的特征表现为一种通过归纳概括过程而实现的随意分类，而他自己已经在其他地方(1998, 49, 54, 57-60, 164)批判过，这只不过是单纯的“经验抽象”。
不同于黑格尔的所谓主张，即辩证理性（内在性）存在一个单一的整体方法(Rosenthal, 1999, 9-10)，一种务实的后黑格尔马克思主义方法能够使多种论证形式共存于它的体系性叙述中(参见Rosen, 1984, ch.3)。黑格尔似乎在处理从矛盾到对立再到超越的运动中并没有提及抽象层次之间的跳跃，而体系辩证法则明确地关注着从最抽象到具体之间的运动。这样一个相互联系的有意识的社会存在所组成的自我再生产体系的概念使我们能够合理地将内在性与目的论合为一体：范畴的充分性将根据体系性自我再生产的必要性来判断。更重要的是，社会科学的必要性要求我们通过参照不容忽视的经验现实来评估我们的概念的充分性——在任何抽象层次上。它与形式逻辑贫困的本体论承诺——这个世界中的对象独立于思想且相互独立的对象——的充实化有关，以便能够处理体系性的社会关系。因此，无论是黑格尔所认为的神秘的自我运动的“理念”，还是由辩证唯物主义所颠倒的神秘的自我运动的客观性，都是无效的。思想和对象必然是统一的（当然是在政治经济学领域中）。客观东西（当我们能够处理它时）被确定为存在于那里的东西与我们将其概念化的体系性尝试的交集。社会客观性被主体的体系性行动所再生产和改造，它本身也受到了它所提供的约束和机会的主体间（日常中且或多或少“科学的”）概念化的影响。社会个体通过实践再生产和改造社会现实。这种不可避免的“存在于社会环境中的方式”（泰勒）意味着政治经济学是不可还原的反思性。社会客观性是由概念联系在一起的，这些概念在日常意识（时代精神）中的多种表现形式参与了社会现实（实践）的再生产和改造。
体系性叙述的起点并非什么绝对“理念”，而是从被把握的经验中抽象出来的结果，实际上，这就是从预先存在的“日常”或更间接的“概念化”（对于Reuten and Williams, 1989来说，这就是“价值形式”；对于Marx, 1974 [1887]来说，这就是商品形式）。概念图景永远是试探性的、临时的、可替代的、不全面的并且处在修正之中的。抽象与体系性叙述的过程永无止境地重复着，驱动这一过程的是对重要的、显然具有体系必要性的要素的研究，这些要素的存在条件似乎受到了威胁：它们实际上是必要的吗？如果是，这一体系是否在退化？还是在转变？(Reuten and Williams, 1989, Part 6)尽管第二卷和第三卷具有未完成的性质，而且在一些地方，不可避免地引诱读者猜测叙述的结果，但直到第三卷，这种将经验作为具体的理解才最终暂时确立。黑格尔的正面贡献是对感性经验的绝对给定性的质疑，其依据是概念必然先于感知。他从当时的科学和社会科学发现出发，开始了他自己的哲学(Smith, 1999; 1998; 参见Williams, 2001)，Smith引用的这段话清晰地证明了这一点：
“哲学的发展应归功于经验……经验科学并不停留在对于现象的个别性的知觉上，而是发现普遍的规定、种类和规律，从而以思维的方式给哲学加工了材料。这样，经验科学就准备了特殊东西的那种内容，以便这种内容能够被吸收到哲学中……经验科学也因此而包含着对思维的迫切要求，以便把自身发展为这种具体的规定。在经验内容中，思维扬弃那依然粘附的直接性与给予的材料，吸收这种内容同时也就是思维基于其自身的发展。因此，哲学的发展实归功于经验科学。” (Hegel, 1975 [1830], 112.)(5)
马克思也是同样，他并非是从未经中介的给定经验出发，而是从他对政治经济学的提炼（总结在《剩余价值理论》中）出发，开始了《资本论》的叙述。否则，他怎么能决定哪些“经济现象”是“商品流通领域中所特有的”(Rosenthal, 1999, 26)？在何种意义上，高度间接和复杂的概念“商品”是直接“给定的”？接着，马克思将通过政治经济学和日常意识所把握的经验体系化，以辩证叙述的方式在思想上将经验作为具体重构。
货币，“其所有者社会关系的具体化指标”(Rosenthal, 1998, 53)，不能通过归纳其众多表现形式得出，而只能通过在资本主义体系中体系性地定位其存在与职能得出。罗森塔尔本人简洁的叙述非常清晰地引出了马克思对货币、价值、商品和资本的体系性辩证解释(1998, Parts II, IV)。他强有力地主张，普遍商品交换必需一种感性具体的货币形式来代表了全体系范围中一般价值形式。虽然承认社会关系概念本身具有其内涵但无外延，没有独立的经验存在，但他拒绝接受它们的外延是由它们在自我再生产的资本主义体系中的范畴定位所提供的。
体系辩证法是先验的，这既是本体论上的——寻求现实的但感性上无法接近的关系、相互联系、倾向和趋势——也是认识论上的——假设这些就是社会对象可知性的条件。正如罗森塔尔所说，《资本论》全部三卷都是从给定的现象出发，详尽阐述了自我再生产的资本主义体系的必要和充分条件，这完全是基于方法论预设的，即这种经济经验的条件包括“必须表现出某种系统性的内在联系与规律性”的“现象”的要求(Rosenthal, 1999, 29)。在这里，罗森塔尔(1999, 25ff)在马克思的方法中正确地发现了康德的影响，但这一点并不妨碍马克思的方法同时也是真正的“后黑格尔主义”。马克思对康德方法上的了解似乎主要来自于他对黑格尔的解读。奥托·鲍威尔很早之前就回答过了这一问题，“是什么把成熟的马克思与黑格尔联系在一起？”，并主张“对科学本质的认识论反映……不仅仅是对事件的反映，而且还是‘思维着的头脑的产物，这个头脑用它所专有的方式掌握世界’(Marx, 1973 [1857-8], Introduction)(6)，这是注入了黑格尔的康德片断——由马克思在不了解康德的情况下用黑格尔的语言发展而来，但摆脱了黑格尔对康德的本体论的再解读的影响”(1911, 189-190; 转引自Rosdolsky, 1977 [1968], xiii, n. 3)(7)。
五、回到罗森塔尔
罗森塔尔的论证在文献中的定位十分奇怪。尽管针对的是出现于二十世纪七十年代作为对“分析马克思主义”的回应的“新黑格尔马克思主义”(1999, 1)，但他的批判只成功地针对了“旧”辩证唯物主义（“动态历史主义”；Rosenthal, 1998, Chapter 3）。早在1942年，熊彼特就预见到了罗森塔尔对马克思与“马克思主义”唯物辩证法之间关系以及他的历史主义的实质而非方法论性质的描述，并写道：马克思“因他的论点和黑格尔的论证间可以找到的某些形式上的类似之处而感到愉快。他喜欢证明他的黑格尔主义，喜欢用黑格尔的术语。但也仅止于此。他没有在任何地方把实证科学出卖给形而上学……他的论证到处根据社会事实，他的一切命题的真正源泉，没有一个导源于哲学领域”(1970 [1942], 9-10)(8)。卢卡奇早在1922年就抱怨过像罗森塔尔这样的学者“将辩证法看作表面上的修饰装饰”，并误认为“马克思”只在几处“与黑格尔的概念‘调过情’”(1971)(9)。罗森塔尔(1998)奇怪地将卢卡奇，一个人道主义“西方马克思主义”的早期学者，描述为他所批判的那种历史主义马克思主义的典型。
1982年。Michael Rosen发表了一篇篇幅长达一本书的论证，认为由于“黑格尔辩证法的合理性……与黑格尔的绝对唯心主义紧密相关”，所以不存在可以提取的“可接受的、独立的‘内核’”(1984, ix)。他还对歧义的系统性滥用提出了与罗森塔尔相同的指控，“黑格尔在其哲学特有的含义上使用了许多非技术术语，同时保留了——且经常利用——它们的非技术联系”(1984, xi)。最近的一些与对马克思主义的“新”黑格尔主义解读相关的著作，包括我自己的以及与Geert Reuten合著的著作(Williams, 1988; Reuten and Williams, 1989)都遭到了完全的无视，或者仅仅在罗森塔尔(1998)著作的第十三章中被非常简短地提及。在《迷思》与《逃离》之间的这段时间里，又出现了三篇由“新”黑格尔马克思主义者发表的重要评论（即Arthur, 1999; Smith, 1999; Williams, 1999a）。其中的每一篇都提及了罗森塔尔对“辩证唯物主义”的人道马克思主义批判的简洁再现，以及他对“新”黑格尔马克思主义的几乎完全漠视。尽管《逃离》的视角从“旧”辩证唯物主义转向了“新”辩证法，但后者依然有待罗森塔尔的重视。
Michael Williams
社会科学经济学系
人文社会科学学院
德蒙福特大学
Milton Keynes MK7 6HP
England
michael_j_williams@iname.com
译者注：
(1) 查尔斯·泰勒是一位加拿大哲学家，其涉猎的范围相当广泛，是当代最有影响力的哲学家之一。
(2) 黑格尔，先刚译，《逻辑学》II，《黑格尔著作集》第6卷，人民出版社，第216页。
(3) 同样，在英语语境中，“否定”(sublate)一词时常是作为“扬弃”(Aufhebung)一词的同义词而使用的。另外请见《逃离黑格尔》一文中的译者注(18)。
(4) 前喻是一种文化传承方式，晚辈向前辈学习，前辈的过去就是晚辈的未来，文化变迁十分缓慢，大家庭为主要的家庭类型。这里明显是代指某种前资本主义社会形式。这一套术语与概念最早由美国人类学家玛格丽特·米德提出。
(5) 黑格尔，梁志学译，《逻辑学》，《哲学全书·第一部分》，人民出版社，第45-6页。
(6) 《马克思恩格斯全集》中文第二版第30卷第43页。
(7) 罗曼·罗斯多尔斯基，《马克思〈资本论〉的形成》，山东人民出版社，作者序第3页，译文有改动。
(8) 约瑟夫·熊彼特，《资本主义、社会主义与民主》，商务印书馆，1999年版，第16页。
(9) 卢卡奇，《历史与阶级意识》，商务印书馆，1999年版，第44页。
References
Arthur, Christopher J. 1999. “New Hegel, New Marx.” Radical Philosophy, 93 (January/February).
Bauer, Otto. 1911. Der Kampf VI.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1983. “Dialectics.” Pp.122-9 in T. Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. Science of Logic. London: Allen & Unwin.
——. 1975 (1830). The Science of Logic. The first part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lukacs, Georgy. 1981. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin.
Marx, Karl. 1973 (1858-8). Grundrisse Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——. 1974 (1867). Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Reuten, Geert, and Michael Williams. 1989. Value-Farm and the State: The Tendencies of Accumulation and the Determination of Economic Policy in Capitalist Society. London/New York: Routledge.
Rosdolsky, Roman. 1977 (1968). The Making of Marx's ‘Capital’. London: Pluto Press.
Rosen, Michael. 1984. Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenthal, John. 1998. The Myth of Dialectics: Reinterpreting the Marx-Hegel Relation. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's.
——. 1999. “The Escape from Hegel.” Science & Society, 63:3, 32.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1970 (1942). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Unwin University Books.
Smith, Tony. 1998. "Value Theory and Dialectics." Science & Society, 62:3.
——. 1999. “The Relevance of Systematic Dialectics to Marxist Thought: A Reply to Rosenthal." Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 4 (Summer), 215-240.
Taylor, Charles. 1997. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harcard University Press.
Williams, Michael, ed. 1988. Value, Social Form and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
——. 2000. “Why Marx Neither Has nor Needs a Commodity Theory of Money.” Review of Political Economy, 12:4.
——. 2001. “Mysticism, Method and Money in the Marx-Hegel Dialectic.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
MARX. HEGEL AND DIALECTICS: A SYMPOSIUM
Editor's Note: The three communications in this section are the first install- ment of a symposium inspired by John Rosenthal's "The Escape from Hegel" (S&S, Fall 1999). Two more contributions, together with Rosenthal's reply to all five, will appear in our Winter 2000-2001 issue.
Science & Society, Vol. 64, No. 3, Fall 2000, 357-365
NO ESCAPE FROM THE "POST-HEGELIAN" DIALECTIC
Rosenthal's Position
For Rosenthal, there is no dialectical method in Hegel, who incoherently projects logical categories onto the empirical world. For Hegel, universals are real and, concomitantly, particulars are not (1999, 5-6). His dialectic is "wildly specious," being supposed to implicate only immanent development driven by the internal contradiction that any concept taken in isolation, in its finitude, reveals. Its comprehension thus requires transition into another concept in which the contradiction is resolved, and so on until an infinitude is reached of which all earlier concepts are now revealed as sub- ordinate determining moments (1999, 8-10).
Rosenthal argues that Marx [1973 (1857-8)], after "a St. Anthony-like struggle" against the temptation to re-cast his arguments in Hegelian schemata, almost escapes Hegel's "paralogical mystification." A key exemplar here is Marx's failed attempt to construct a dialectical derivation of capital as self-expanding value, from money as general equivalent form of value (Rosenthal, 1999, 15-17). Scholars may have been led astray by Marx’s entirely appropriate use, even in Capital, of Hegel’s mysticism to elaborate on the peculiar ontology of the "practical categories” of value and money. But Rosenthal claims, these "Hegeloid" (sic) formulae do no argumentative work. The value-form, manifest autonomously as money, just exhibits a misleading fortuitous similitude with Hegelian metaphysics’ objectivity as such (the Concept). While it is plausible that money exists as the “real universal” social incarnation of exchange values, there can be no such real natural universal as, for example, "Animal" existing alongside the plethora of actual specific animals. Money is not "the absolute Universal” for Marx, only the relative "universality of the class of all commodities as exchange-value” (Rosenthal, 1999, 3-5).
Hegelian Marxism, claims Rosenthal, tries unsuccessfully to extricate a materialist dialectical method from a rectification of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics that in fact just replaces Hegel’s idealism with an “idealism of matter” (1998, Chapter 7). In the process, Hegel’s putative “real contradiction” is banalized as a mere expression of the inevitable transience of the finite, manifest in the necessity of change. The real thinking subject remains a passive conduit between consciousness and being, as in Hegel’s theistic idealism – only the direction of flow is here reversed. Pace this “dynamic historicism,” for Rosenthal, Marx’s historicism is substantial not methodological.
Hegel Read More Empathetically
In grasping the continuity of concept and social object, “new” Hegelian Marxism is congruent with Charles Taylor’s long-term struggle to escape from exhaustive, given and prescriptive forms of mediation between thought and object, such as Hume’s or Locke’s “sense impressions,” Kant’s formal transcendent categories of Quine’s “propositions” (Taylor, 1997). If no dichotomy between consciousness and being can be sustained, then that the finiteness of any real social object makes it less than perfectly adequate to its abstract concept is not some terrible “idealist” sin, but rather a commonplace of any epistemology that admits of “approximate” truth (as any nontheistic methodology must). Hegel’s attempt to grapple with these complexities cannot simply be reduced to “absolute idealism.” Rather than saying that “philosophy creates empirical reality,” he can be read as claiming only that it “creates its own content” – “thinking about thinking.” Thus Logic, this “absolute form has in its own self its content or reality . . . the content is simply and solely these determinations of the absolute form and nothing else” (Hegel, 1969, 592, emphasis added to a citation by Rosenthal).
“Dialectical contradiction” may transcend without negating formal logical contradiction. It is not in violation of the principle of non-contradiction since it can be consistently described (Bhaskar, 1983). It is not in violation of the laws of physics, since it attempts to grasp structural tension revealed in the system, not in any isolated conception of an object that is to be located in that system. Hegel’s dialectic seeks to encompass contradictory concepts and at the same time their more concrete conditions of existence, in which the poles of the abstract contradiction are revealed as the contrary necessary predicates of a single real social object. His move from “contradiction” to “opposition” may thus be read as part of a systematic dialectical presentation, rather than as negligence or obscurantism. His “pedestrian pun-making” can, perhaps, be reconstructed as argumentative moves from the abstract to the less abstract.
From Hegel to Marx
Rosenthal’s claim that Hegel provided Marx “with a set of linguistic formulae perfectly suited to grasping the nature of money as the ‘general equivalent form’ of value” (1999, 15) is indubitably methodological. While much better formulated in Capital, the “derivation” of capital from money in the Grundrisse may not exemplify a specious Hegelian dead-end. The abstract contradiction between value and use-value is concretized as their antagonistic existence as necessary predicates of commodity, implying the emergence of money. This is not an explanation of the existence of surplus-value (which, of course, Capital bases on surplus labor) but rather a description of the systemically imposed motivation of individual capitals, writ large as a description of the category “capital.” Money emerges conceptually to transcend the problems of notional decentralized economic commodity exchange; but as pure value-without-use-value, the only rational motivation for acquiring money as capital is valorization (since “the only sort of variation of which money allows is a quantitative one” – Rosenthal, 1999, 20). Without Marx’s development from money to capital, along these lines, the drive to accumulation appear as the irrational fetish of the miser.
Pace Rosenthal (1999, 18), the dialectical development from money to capital, like any other, need not be driven solely immanently, but also by external reference to the apparent empirical existence of capital as a sum of money. Similarly, the extrinsic introduction into the dialectical presentation of “the mundane economic datum of realized surplus-value” (1999, 23) is perfectly legitimate, as that which is to be explained subsequently by the sophistication of simple monetary generalized commodity exchange and production in the development of labor-power as a commodity. Nevertheless, by the time Marx introduces capital, it is no “immediately perceptible” brute given (1999, 31) introduced from “outside” the conceptual development. Rather it has been mediated by the investigations of the political economists, the everyday consciousness of the agents of capitalism and Marx’s own reflections upon them, in the light of his discourse on commodities, value and money.
Rosenthal’s charge that deriving capital as the completion of the development of money mystifies the “ostensible subject matter” (1999, 21-2) raises the question as to what exactly that subject matter is. For Rosenthal it would seem to be money as such. But more plausibly, it is capitalist money. He argues (1999, 4ff) that the money commodity is the particular representing the “generic ‘essence’” of all the specific sets of commodities, que exchange value. But the peculiar ontology of money lies in its quasi-autonomous real existence as such, transcending even gold. For Rosenthal the move from money to capital involves the real-historical “coalescence of specific social relations of production” beyond those of simple monetary circulation (in particular the emergence of labor as a commodity). I see it as entirely a conceptual development intended to grasp the social relations of fully developed capitalism in terms of the practical categories that they throw up (in a manner highly recommended by Rosenthal elsewhere). Rosenthal’s attempt to open clear blue water between Marx’s (legitimate) development of the conditions of possibility of given relevant phenomena and Hegel’s (specious) conceptual derivations (1999, 32 and 20n) is unpersuasive.
A Post-Hegelian Dialectical Method
A “systematic” conceptual dialectic is discernible in both Marx’s mature political economy and his earlier critique of Hegel. For Hegel the real is rational. Marx posits bourgeois social reality as a historically and geographically specific dynamic self-reproducing (though potentially transient) interconnected, intransitive system of conscious individuals. It is accessible to cognition only via “transcendental” dialectical abstraction from sensuous reality to the “practical concepts” that inform and constitute the necessary conditions of everyday praxis.
The dialectical presentation of such a system attempts to provide a non-arbitrary account of the complex systemic interconnections of social categories at different levels of abstraction that can ultimately hope to grasp the empirical as the concrete. The sequential transcendence of emergent abstract contradiction provides a synthetic test by theoretical praxis of the validity of the results of practical abstraction. Persistent unsublated contradiction is posed as the real antagonism between necessarily united moments of a single object that is the source of cyclical reproduction and latent transformation. Elements that escape systemic integration (domestic labor, state labor, feudal hangovers, pre-figurative forms) are to be located in their systemic subordination (the tendential commodification of domestic labor and the apparently irreducible core of the domestic sector that copes with the fragmented and alienated bourgeois subject) (Williams, 2001). In Rosenthal’s account (1999, 19), on the other hand, the features that differentiate individuals, species and genera appear as an arbitrary classification by a process of inductive generalization that he himself has elsewhere (1998, 49, 54, 57-60, 164) castigated as mere “empirical abstraction.”
Pace Hegel’s alleged claim that there is a single monolithic mode of dialectical reason (immanence) (Rosenthal, 1999, 9-10), a pragmatic post-Hegelian Marxist method can allow a multitude of forms of argument in its systematic presentation (cf. Rosen, 1984, ch.3). While Hegel appears to deal with the movement from contradiction, to contrariety to transcendence without reference to shifts between levels of abstraction, systematic dialectics is concerned explicitly with movement from the most abstract to the concrete. The notion of a self-reproducing system of interconnected conscious social beings allows us to legitimately conflate immanence and teleology: the adequacy of categories is to be judged in terms of the imperatives of systemic self-reproduction. What is more, the social scientific imperative invites us to assess the adequacy of our concepts - at any level of abstraction - by reference also to pressing empirical reality. It involves the enrichment of formal logics impoverished ontological commitment only to a world of discrete objects independent of thought, so that it can handle systemic social relations. Thus neither the mysterious self-moving “idea” attributed to Hegel, nor the mysterious self-moving objectivity embraced by dialectical materialisms inversion is valid. Thought and object are necessarily unified (certainly in the domain of political economy). The objective (as we can deal with it) is determined as the intersection of what there is and our systematic attempts to conceptualize it. Social objectivity is reproduced and transformed by subjects’ systematic action, itself informed by their intersubjective (everyday and more or less “scientific”) conceptualization of the constraints and opportunities it offers Social agents reproduce and transform social reality through praxis. This unavoidable “way of being in the social world”(Taylor) implies that political economy is irreducibly reflexive Social objectivity is linked by concepts , in their manifold manifestation in everyday consciousness (zeitgeist) that participate in the reproduction and transformation of that social reality (praxis).
The starting point of systematic presentation is not some absolute “Idea,” but rather the result of abstraction from the empirical grasped, de facto, to the extent possible with pre-existing “everyday” or more mediated conceptualization (For Reuten and Williams, 1989, the “value-form”; for Marx, 1974 [1887], the commodity-form). Conceptual spectacles are forever tentative, provisional, fungible, non-exhaustive and subject to revision. The process of abstraction and systematic presentation repeats endlessly, driven by the investigation of significant and apparently systemically necessary elements whose conditions of existence seem threatened: are they in fact necessary? If so, is the system degenerating? Or transforming? (Reuten and Williams, 1989, Part 6). This grasping of the empirical as concrete is not even provisionally established until Volume III, despite the unfinished nature of Volumes II and III and the unavoided temptation to anticipate the results of the presentation in several places. Hegel’s positive contribution is to question the absolute givenness of sensible experience, on the grounds that conception necessarily precedes perception. He started his own philosophy with the then extant findings of science and social science (Smith, 1999; 1998; cf. Williams, 2001), as evidenced with crystal clarity by this passage cited by Smith:
Experience is the real author of growth and advance in philosophy. . . . the empirical sciences do not stop short at the mere observation of the individual features of a phenomenon. By the aid of thought, they are able to meet philosophy with material prepared for it, in the shape of general uniformities, i.e. laws, and classifications of the phenomena. When this done, the particular facts which they contain are ready to be received into philosophy. This . . . implies a certain compulsion on thought itself to proceed to these concrete specific truths. The reception into philosophy of these scientific material, now that thought has removed their immediacy and made them cease to be mere data, forms at the same time a development of thought out of itself. Philosophy, then, owes its development to the empirical sciences. (Hegel, 1975 [1830], 112.)
Marx too starts Capital, not with unmediated empirical givens, but with his distillation of political economy (summarized in Theories of Surplus Value). How else could he have decided which “economic phenomena . . . are proper to the sphere of commodity circulation” (Rosenthal, 1999, 26)? In what sense is the highly mediated and complex concept “commodity” immediately “given”? Marx then proceeds to systematize the empirical, as grasped so far by political economy and everyday consciousness, in a dialectical presentation aiming to reconstruct in thought the empirical as the concrete.
Money, “the reified index of the social relatedness of its possessors” (Rosenthal, 1998, 53), cannot be derived by induction from its many forms of expression, but only by systematically locating its existence and functionality within the bourgeois system. Marx’s systematic dialectical account of money, value, commodity and capital is brought out very clearly by Rosenthal’s own elegant presentation of it (1998, Parts II, IV). He argues persuasively that generalized commodity exchange necessitates a sensate-concrete money-form representing the (system-wide) universal value-form. While Rosenthal recognizes that concepts of social relations have in themselves intension but no extension, no discrete empirical existence, he refuses to accept that their extension is provided by their categorical location within the self-reproducing capitalist system.
Systematic dialectics is transcendental, both ontologically – in seeking real but sensuously inaccessible relations, interconnections, dispositions and tendencies – and epistemologically – in postulating these as a condition of the knowableness of social objects. As Rosenthal argues, from given phenomena the three volumes of Capital elaborate the conditions necessary and sufficient for a self-reproducing capitalist system, on the entirely methodological presupposition that such conditions of economic experience include the requirement that “phenomena . . . must exhibit a certain systematic interconnection and regularity” (Rosenthal, 1999, 29). The Kantian influence that Rosenthal (1999, 25ff), rightly, here finds in the Marxian method does not preclude it being also genuinely “post-Hegelian.” Marx’s knowledge of Kant’s ideas on method appears to derive largely from his reading of Hegel. Bauer long ago answered the question, “What connects the mature Marx with Hegel?,” with the claim that “the epistemological reflection on the essence of science . . . is not a mere reflection of events, but rather ‘a product of the thinking head which appropriates the world in the only way it can’ (Marx, 1973 [1857-8], Introduction), that is a piece of Kant, implanted in Hegel – developed by Marx without Kant’s knowledge, in Hegel’s language, but free from the ontological re-interpretation of Kant by Hegel” (1911, 189-190; cited in Rosdolosky, 1977 [1968], xiii, n. 3).
Back to Rosenthal
The location of Rosenthal’s arguments in the literature is distinctly odd. Despite targeting the “new Hegelian Marxism” that emerged in the 1970s as a response to “Analytical Marxism” (1999, 1), his criticism impacts successfully only on “old” dialectical materialism (“dynamic historicism”; Rosenthal, 1998, Chapter 3). Schumpeter anticipated Rosenthal’s account of Marx’s relation to the “Marxist” materialist dialectic and of the substantial rather than methodological nature of his historicism as long ago as 1942, writing: Marx “enjoyed certain formal analogies which may be found between his and Hegel’s argument. He liked to testify to his Hegelianism and to use Hegelian phraseology. But this is all. Nowhere did he betray positive science to metaphysics. . . . his argument . . . everywhere rests upon social fact, and the true sources of his propositions none of which lies in the domain of philosophy” (1970 [1942], 9-10). Lukacs complained as early as 1922 about Rosenthal-style scholars “regarding the dialectic as a superficial stylistic ornament” and believing “that Marx had ‘flirted’ with Hegelian concepts” in only a few places (1971). Rosenthal (1998) oddly characterizes Lukacs, surely a germinal scholar of humanist “Western Marxism,” as an exemplar of the historicist Marxism that he criticizes.
In 1982. Michael Rosen published a book-length argument that no “acceptable, independent ‘kernel’” could be extracted since “the rationality of Hegel’s dialectics is . . . inextricably linked to Hegel’s Absolute Idealism” (1984, ix). He also makes the same charge of systematic abuse of ambiguity as Rosenthal, “that Hegel uses many non-technical terms in a sense specific to his philosophy, while retaining – and often playing on – their non-technical associations” (1984, xi). More recently, the work of “new” Hegelian interpretations of Marxism, including my own work with Geert Reuten (Williams, 1988; Reuten and Williams, 1989) are completely ignored, or are given but the briefest mention in Chapter 13 of Rosenthal (1998). In the period intervening between that book and the present paper, three significant reviews have appeared by “new” Hegelian Marxists (viz. Arthur, 1999; Smith, 1999; Williams, 1999a). Each mentions Rosenthal’s elegant reprise of the humanist Marxist critique of “dialectical materialism” and his almost complete lack of engagement with “new” Hegelian Marxism. Notwithstanding the shift in aim in the present paper from the “old” dialectical materialism, the “new” dialectics still awaits Rosenthal’s serious attention.
Michael Williams
Department of Economics and Social Science
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
De Montfort University
Milton Keynes MK7 6HP
England
michael_j_williams@iname.com
References
Arthur, Christopher J. 1999. “New Hegel, New Marx.” Radical Philosophy, 93 (January/February).
Bauer, Otto. 1911. Der Kampf VI.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1983. “Dialectics.” Pp.122-9 in T. Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. Science of Logic. London: Allen & Unwin.
——. 1975 (1830). The Science of Logic. The first part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lukacs, Georgy. 1981. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin.
Marx, Karl. 1973 (1858-8). Grundrisse Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——. 1974 (1867). Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Reuten, Geert, and Michael Williams. 1989. Value-Farm and the State: The Tendencies of Accumulation and the Determination of Economic Policy in Capitalist Society. London/New York: Routledge.
Rosdolsky, Roman. 1977 (1968). The Making of Marx's ‘Capital’. London: Pluto Press.
Rosen, Michael. 1984. Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenthal, John. 1998. The Myth of Dialectics: Reinterpreting the Marx-Hegel Relation. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's.
——. 1999. “The Escape from Hegel.” Science & Society, 63:3, 32.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1970 (1942). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Unwin University Books.
Smith, Tony. 1998. "Value Theory and Dialectics." Science & Society, 62:3.
——. 1999. “The Relevance of Systematic Dialectics to Marxist Thought: A Reply to Rosenthal." Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 4 (Summer), 215-240.
Taylor, Charles. 1997. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harcard University Press.
Williams, Michael, ed. 1988. Value, Social Form and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
——. 2000. “Why Marx Neither Has nor Needs a Commodity Theory of Money.” Review of Political Economy, 12:4.
——. 2001. “Mysticism, Method and Money in the Marx-Hegel Dialectic.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
