Historical materialism as mediation between the physical and the meaningful

I Historical materialism as a framework for a comprehensive understanding of reality

The German Ideology begins with Marx and Engels listing the ‘real premises’ of their historical materialist method. The first premise is neither tendentiously political nor metaphysical. It does not contrast ‘matter’ to ‘spirit’ but simply asserts that the existence ‘of real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity’ is the material presupposition of everyrthing else that human beings do (Marx and Engels 1978, 31). Note that they do not argue that the meaning of everything that human beings do can be explained by reference to the material conditions of production, only that those material conditions must be satisfied if there are to be human beings capable of anything else at all. A banal point, perhaps, but one with significant philosophical implications.

The first of those implications is that society is an emergent product of human labour exerting itself in and on nature. Without nature, there can be no human society. Even if some central aspects of human life are socially constructed, every construction presupposes materials, and nature furnishes the basic materials (including our bodies, which have evolved from non-living elements). Hence there is a common basis to even radically different forms of human social organization and belief: the need to maintain life-sustaining connection to the natural world. John McMurtry has called this connection the ‘life-ground of value’ to emphasize its absolutely foundational role in all human culture (McMurtry 1998, 23).

However, the existence of this life-ground at the root of all social systems does not mean that historical materialism contents itself with the abstraction ‘Human society depends on nature’ as the real truth of social systems. Human beings have a double relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, work in general maintains biological life and is therefore natural. On the other hand, we must work together to survive as individuals. Hence life-serving labour is equally a social relationship. The natural impulsion to stay alive leads us to work together to build societies in which we might not only live, but live well and freely. ‘The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a two-fold relation: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relation’ (Marx and Engels 1978, 43). Marx and Engels mean that to understand any actual social form, the historical materialist must focus on the real practices through which it is produced. Hence, as Henri Lefebvre argues, the distinctive feature of historical materialist thought is that it ‘maintains that contents have as much interest as forms’ (Lefebvre 2016[1976], 179). Hence the second implication of the first premise of historical materialism is that the nature of real societies cannot be deduced from abstract premises but must be empirically explored. Indeed, Marx would remind supporters later in life that historical materialism was not a philosophy of history but a mode of empirical inquiry (Marx 1979, 321–22).

All life depends upon subsistence and reproductive labour, but every dimensions of human life is not reducible to a struggle to survive. Instead, because we are thinking beings, our reproductive labour gives rise to techniques that allow our societies to increase in complexity and ranges of activity. ‘The satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, gives rise to new needs’ (Marx and Engels 1978, 42). These needs extend upwards from tools that directly mediate our connection to the earth towards forms of social relationship (like education) through which our cognitive and creative capacities are developed. ⁴ We never fully disconnect ourselves from the natural world (labour is always a twofold relationship), but nor are we confined to mere repetition of survival strategies. There is real social and cultural development on a permanent natural foundation.

Again, Marx and Engels do not insist that the content of particular practices can be accounted for in terms of some generic abstraction that reduces difference to sameness of meaning. On the contrary, they argue that the ‘nature’ of people in any given society is a function of their life-activity: the labour through which they produce and reproduce their lives:

This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life…As individuals express their life, so they are. (Marx and Engels 1978, 31)

The process of emergence of the specifically human out of the givenness of our organic nature occurs much earlier than the first cities or agriculture. Deep in our evolutionary past, our ancestors began to hunt for meat and establish permanent settlements. These permanent settlements required new forms of cooperation, and these new forms of cooperation, combined with new skills that hunting demanded, helped catalyse the growth in size of the human brain.

By no later than half a million years ago…groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire…Their brain size had increased to mid-size, between that of chimpanzees and modern humans. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously when the earlier prehumen ancestor turned increasingly to meat in its diet…When groups crowded together at a single campsite…social intelligence grew, along with the centres of memory and reasoning in the pre-frontal cortex. (Wilson 2014, 32)

David McNally, reflecting on the evolutionary evidence from an historical materialist perspective, sees the philosophical significance of these facts clearly.

We must resist the modern tendencies to separate mind and hand, mental and material labour…one of the most distinctive human characteristics is the large part of the brain devoted to coordinating motor activity associated with the hands. Human practical activity…involves a unique relationship between conscious intelligence and bodily activity, a relationship whose central feature has to do with the way we direct our bodies according to planned activity. (McNally 2001, 93)

Human beings were brought together by purely natural forces (survival pressure and the fact that it takes two human beings to reproduce) but as soon as social life proper emerges, the relationships we establish are not just about survival. Human self-consciousness means that we are capable of distinguishing ourselves both from the natural world and from each other. Our conceptions of ourselves can be distinct from the conceptions others have of us, or of our objective place in the order of things. These gaps between self-conception, social standing and objective reality are the spaces needed for properly philosophical questioning of our place in the natural and social order of things. Alex Callinicos (commenting on Charles Taylor’s idea of humans as ‘strong evaluators’) understands this point clearly. ‘Seeing human agents as strong evaluators means treating their moral judgements as…capable of being true or false’ (Callinicos 1987, 118). At the same time, that which matters is not just life, but, as Taylor says, what ‘kind of life and what kind of subject’ we want to be (Callinicos 1987, 118). The problem of meaning has natural foundations (how we survive) and social structure (who am I amongst my fellows), but it grows beyond the conceptual limits of both evolutionary science. Alongside ‘fit and unfit’, the questions of good or bad force themselves into human reality.

Yet, even as we open up the field of inquiry into problems of evaluation, problems of good and bad in general, we have not left the field of historical materialism or physical nature. Margaret Archer, arguing from a critical realist perspective, understands this connection clearly.

We cannot tell ourselves an insider story about…the world…independent of how it is. If we did, we could not survive, much less thrive, and nor could any form of life, in all its meanings. (Archer 2000, 315)

Nevertheless, even the loftiest philosophical conceptions must remain anchored in material reality. They are the products of human brains, which depend upon regular inputs from the outside world. Hence, human consciousness, while not confined to thinking about survival alone, must understand the world upon which it depends. The understanding of the natural life-ground is the key to everything else human beings do. A coherent historical materialism must therefore be integrated with a scientific understanding of the physical universe. Since we depend upon nature, we must understand it, not only for the sake of sheer survival but also (as Archer noted) for the sake of creating good lives. Nevertheless, understanding nature is not itself a moral or political problem but the purview of natural science. At this point therefore we will turn to consider the sort of materialism that underlies natural science, both to understand its strengths (against new materialist criticism) but also to understand its proper limits.

II The strengths and limitations of naturalistic physicalism

Western Marxists as well as new materialist have tended to be suspicious of physicalism because some of its more dogmatic defenders operate with crude reductionist models that maintain that reality includes ‘nothing but matter and energy and their interactions’ (Haack 2017, 42). However, there are more sophisticated models of naturalistic understanding. The most complex that I have discovered is Andrew Melnyk’s ‘realization physicalism’. He avoids the absurdity of claiming that there is really nothing but particles, forces, fields and interactions and shows how a reductionist approach to physical phenomena is consistent with the existence of multiple sciences that explore the different dimensions of physical reality. His work is an important corrective to the new materialist reproach that ‘old’ scientific materialism are not adequate to the complexity of nature. At the same time, Melnyk’s position points to the need for models of socio-historical explanation that are independent of the natural sciences, even as they rely on them for an explanation of how human beings (and therefore human thought, society and culture) evolved.

Melnyck adopts an historical understanding of science. Reductionism is not a dogma but itself a product of the history of scientific development. In domain after domain of research, that which earlier ages thought to be irreducible to more basic physical forces have turned out to be explicable by more basic laws. Thus, the belief that ‘physics and the physical sciences [have] some sort of descriptive and explanatory primacy’ is not a zealous denial of complexity but empirically and historically warranted (Melnyck 2003, 2). Melnyk’s argument is interesting because he thinks through the complex ontological and epistemological problems implied by the ambiguous qualifier ‘some sort of’ primacy. ‘Some sort’ does not mean ‘absolute’.

Ontologically, Melnyk argues that everything in the universe is either a basic physical force or element or what he calls a ‘realization’ of basic physical forces or elements. ‘Realizations’ are like products or expressions of basic elements and forces. ‘Physical’ thus has two senses: a primary sense, in which case it refers to basic elements and forces, and a secondary sense, in which it refers to the realized products of those forces and elements. ‘Realization physicalism claims that everything (every actual token that is contingent or causal) is either physical…or else stands in a certain expressible relationship to what is physical in the first sense’ (Melnyck 2003, 20). As a simple analogy, consider printed words on a page. From the perspective of the eye, they are ink marks, and from the perspective of physics they are definite arrangements of atoms, which are in turn arrangements of subatomic particles, all of which are in motion and held in coherent structure by basic nuclear and electromagnetic forces. According to Melnyk, what the eye sees is a realization of the physical elements and forces. He does not deny the reality of letters but rather argues that the existence of the letters depends upon the properties of the more basic elements.

Thus, any complete explanation of the letters must involve an explanation of the basic forces and laws which make up ink. He is committed to this sort of reductionism, what he calls reductionism in ‘the received sense’ as first formulated by Ernst Nagel. Reductionism is true if there are certain ‘bridge laws’ which allow scientists to explain phenomena found at the level of the physical in the second sense back to phenomena at the level of the physical in the first sense. These bridge laws would thus explain why two different types of atoms bond together, and why, once they bond together, they always form the same compound. Hence physics can explain why two hydrogen atoms bond together with one oxygen atom to form the compound that we call water. Chemistry is reduced to physics once the bridge laws that explain the mechanics of the molecular bonding are understood. ‘Reductionism in the received sense’, Melnyk argues,

is the claim that T1 is reducible to some other theory, T2, [if]…the statements of T1 are deducible from the law statements of T2, by means of bridge principles taking the form of statements that assert the identity of every T1 type statement with some T2 type. (Melnyck 2003, 78)

If an entity is reducible in explanation, Melnyk argues, that very fact proves that the entity in question is real.

Reducibility is not eliminability, of course; if a fact is reducible its existence is undiminished; indeed, if reducibility is a (special kind of explainability), then, since explanation is necessarily of genuine facts, a fact acknowledged to be reducible cannot be coherently denied. (Melnyck 2003, 87)

The argument works well in terms of the complex relationships between the natural sciences. Melnyk gives the effective example of a reductionist explanation of the beating of the heart. It is true that the heart has an organic function: to pump the blood that carries oxygen and nutrients to our tissues. However, the heart does not beat for the sake of fulfilling this function (as the new materialists, with their penchant for distributing something like intentionality to unconscious physical systems might argue). Bennet, for example, argues that ‘it is possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such’ (Bennet 2010, 69). If she means only that some configurations of matter have internal powers to act, contra mechanistic materialists, who maintain that all motive force is external, then she is not saying anything a contemporary physicalist would deny, but only repeating a well-known problem with 18th-century mechanistic materialism. If she means to do more than reject mechanistic materialism, then she would need to provide empirical results of this experiment which are superior to reductionist models of physics. I know of no such results. The upshot is: when it comes to the behaviours and activity of physical systems, one need not post any questionable powers of agency or quasi intentionality to the system, but just understand how it works. The reason why the heart beats is determined by the physics of the atomic structure of cardiac cells and their special electrical properties. We do not need to posit any emergent properties, any special powers of the macrostructure, much less some quasi-intentionality, to explain its characteristic function. ⁵ The reductionist explanation does not leave anything out of account or unexplained, but nor does it ontologically eliminate the heart (Melnyck 2003, 274–77). The example is an excellent demonstration of how realization physicalism can reduce the explanation of macroscopic phenomena to microscopic elements and forces without absurdly denying the existence of the macroscopic phenomena.

However, no matter how rich its explanatory models of physical phenomena become, realization physicalism reaches a limit when it comes to properly human reality. One can accept reductionist explanations of ink, but these cannot extend to the meaning of the paragraph that letters compose. The heart does not operate according to quasi-intentional reasons for the sake of keeping the body alive, but the metaphor of ‘having heart’ cannot be understood in terms of the polarity of heart cells. We cross a qualitative threshold when we move from physical elements to social, political and cultural reality, because, while the structures of power and meaning that organize societies are elements of the material universe, they are not themselves physical. David Harvey calls the forces that structure society and meaning ‘immaterial but objective’ (Harvey 2018, 5) to try to capture the way in which they have a causal influence on behaviour without being solid, physical, things. I intend by the idea of ‘meaning as mattering’ that which Harvey intends by ‘objective’. I think my expression is preferable, because it highlights the continuum between nature and society and society and symbolic meaning more clearly by eschewing the ontological contrast between material and immaterial. However, at the substantive level, I think Harvey’s explanatory intentions and my own coincide. I will explain why I approach the problem in this way through the capacities for human sentient experience and thought in the final section. To conclude this section, we need to examine why reductionism reaches its limits of explanation when it encounters meaning.

Melnyck’s reductionism, sophisticated as it is, cannot articulate the continuum between nature, society and symbolic meaning. Instead of seeing how meaning arises from the ground up and realizes natural powers in social self-conscious human powers of interpretation and creation, he tends, despite his better instincts, to eliminate meaning via reduction to brain states. Neither perceptual gestalts, nor the evolutionary connection of perceptual and cognitive systems to survival, nor social relationships play any key role. Of the entire class of meaningful, symbolic phenomena he says: ‘every kind of mental process or activity, now matter how apparently abstract or unworldly, seems to require brain activity of some sort in order to occur’ (Melnyck 2003, 186). The problem with this claim is that the brain is treated like a mental machine whose function can be understood in abstraction from nature, life and society. A sophisticated and growing body of pragmatist philosophy of mind and cognitive science has argued that it is impossible to understand sensation, feeling and thought as the product of abstract brain states.

A complete materialist explanation of meanings and values requires not just the explanation of the underlying neural processes but also an explanation of the social world within which those brains are situated, think and act. Attempting to explain meanings as nothing more than brain events leaves out the material world within which the brains of real people evolved and about which they think. This material world, I contend, is equally natural and social, and the social world is equally reproductive and productive labour and symbolic-interpretive activity that brings out and articulates what most matters to us within it. The brain researcher Jay Shulkin argues in this regard that ‘the design of minds like our is essentially interpretative, replete with a rich sense of experience’ (Schulkin 2000, 134). This conclusion means that ‘the cognitive and neural revolution needs to be anchored to a conception of experience that is active – a view of perception that is anchored in human action…and the search for coherence’ (Schulkin 2000, 134). It must move deeply into, not away from, socially organized and institutionally mediated human life.

Rather than mental products of brain states, meaningful ideas are better thought of as active interventions in the material world. The pragmatist tradition in philosophy has long championed this interpretation of ideas, although not perhaps in exactly those terms. The human world is not exclusively the physical world that underlies the socially meaningful. It is the totality of experience (including the subject of that experience) as a meaningful whole. W. Teed Rockwell’s critique of physicalism and eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind turns to the work of John Dewey to help make this point.

Dewey points out that…we experience a world full of objects that we care about, and those cares presuppose goods to be striven for…Those goods and purposes shape our experience by pointing beyond our bodies and brains. Our experiences would be incoherent without these references to the outside world. (Rockwell 2007, 86–87)

Hence, the pragmatic account of the experience of meaning must be grounded in the history of how human experience and thought has evolved to interpret a world we need to understand to survive. Marx anticipated this position in his pithy but undeveloped aphorism in the Second Thesis on Feurbach: ‘The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thought…is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power…of his thinking’ (Marx and Engels 1978, 3). ⁶ Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘embodied realism’ develops this insight, without, however, noting Marx’s anticipation of their position. Like the pragmatists, Lakoff and Johnson argue that meanings cannot be reduced to brain states because they only exist as whole gestalts. They are not of course sceptical that there is a physical reality upon which thought depends and towards which it is directed, but the world that we know is inseparable from how we perceive and conceptualize it, and how we perceive and conceptualize it is bound up with the practical necessity of understanding a world in which we must live. Theirs is an ‘evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of bodily capacities’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 17). To live, we must categorize: ‘Living systems must categorise. Since we are neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 19). The natural world exists independently of us in the sense that we our categories do not invent it, but as a known reality, the natural and the human interpenetrate.

Take the example of causality which they explore at length in their book. There is no substance ‘out there’ called ‘causality’. Nature as such knows no ‘causes’ but only a history of events that happen. Causes are concepts that human beings deploy to make sense of and unify our experience. Causal claims can be true or false, but only within an overall human context that demands that we understand events in relation to our fundamental needs and interests. Still, we cannot arbitrarily make up causes just as we might prefer, because our purposes can be thwarted and our needs unsatisfied if our judgements are inadequate to the world upon which we depend. Thus, like Marx’s rejection of the ‘old materialism’, Lakoff and Johnson argue that rejecting a

simple-minded realism does not eliminate all forms of realism. What remains is an embodied realism that recognises that human language and thought are structured by, and bound to, embodied experience. In the case of physics, there is certainly a mind-independent world, but in order to comprehend and discuss it, we must use embodied human concepts and language. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 233)

III Meaning as mattering

I have argued that reductionist accounts of matter are sound as regards the physical substance of the universe, but fail as explanations of human society. Human society is consciously built through reproductive and productive labour and generates forms of conflict and struggle with no analogues in the physical world. A complete explanation of ‘matter’ must be both naturalistic-physicalist and historical. By the same argument, human society is shaped both by forms of struggle and conflict over resources and consciously articulated ethical ideas. These ethical ideas, in turn, concern not only the good life in the political sense but embrace the whole of what makes life (or would make life, in a better society) worth living. Ethics here should not be thought of as a mere set of rules to be uncritically followed but as the wider field of what McMurtry calls ‘life-values’. These embrace the whole of what makes life good: the objects and relationships we require to live and live well, and the capacities, including interpretive capacities, we can freely realize when the society in which we live ensures the comprehensive satisfaction of our needs (McMurtry 1998, 164–65). As society is to nature: the self-conscious production of human ways of living out of the givenness of the physical world, so too is symbolic expression to social forces and institutions: the self-conscious production of meaning within the institutional frameworks of social life.

The self-conscious production of meaning involves both interpretation and criticism, discovering meaning in existing states of affairs and demanding new states of affairs that would widen the circle of meaningful, worthwhile life to include those who are at present excluded from it because their lives are dominated by oppressive and alienating social forces. My aim here, however, is not to chart a direction towards a more inclusive, just and free society but to explain how the symbolic dimension of human life completes the material continuum of existence and life.

Although he was talking about artistic expression in the narrow sense of the term, Gustav Courbet captures very clearly the way in which the symbolic completes the material continuum when he said that the artist tries to ‘give the most complete expression of the thing’ (Berger 2017, xvi). ⁷ Let me try to cash the meaning of this claim out through the example of the poetry of Jorie Graham.

The poems in Jorie Graham’s collection Materialism all explore this fundamental connection between the aesthetic world of meaning and the wider material world of nature. Her poems exist in the space between, as Graham puts it in ‘Subjectivity’, ‘the world, and the world of the beholder’ (Graham 1993, 28). Critics have read in this line a sharp division between the two worlds. ‘As in most Western philosophy, there is a marked distance in Graham’s work between subjective experience and the objective world’ (Gardener 2005, 34). I think, rather, that the truth of these poems is the opposite: Graham does not insist upon a sharp line between the material and the subjective but instead reveals how meaning is a function of attending to that which matters in the objective world. The subjective is not an add-on to hard materiality; it is the completion of this hard materiality in so far as it enters into the human world, and the human world unites the physical, social and symbolic. Her poems, therefore, exemplify Courbet’s claim that symbolic interpretation and expression tries to give the most complete expression of things, and not an abstract overlay essentially distinct from things themselves. The thing, in other words, is the whole formed of its physical structure, social function and meaning (why it matters to people).

Graham notes the difference between the world and the world of the beholder, but her poems cancel the distance. Graham’s poetic self does not (as the same critic says) connect the ‘material and the spiritual’ (Gardener 2005, 36). I would argue, on the contrary, that the poems reveal the way in which the spiritual (the meaningful) is the expression of the poetic-interpretive attentiveness to the natural and social world. We cannot but attend to the world as meaningful, precisely because our lives matter to us, and the world in which we live pulls on our attention in a variety of way. Hence, we are always reading the world, not just to assess threats, but to discover beauty and value within it, revealing that the meaning resides in the human evaluation of basic physical forces and mundane events of this world. In my view, she called the collection Materialism to make that point clear (or as clear as poets make philosophical points).

Consider just one specific instance from the poem ‘The Dream of a Unified Field’. It starts out with a mother bringing her daughter a leotard that the girl has forgotten. She has to walk through an afternoon snowstorm to deliver it to the daughter’s friend’s house. The flakes are shaped and fall according to purely physical forces and are indifferent to the mother’s passage through them. ‘The snow started coming down harder./ I watched each gathering of leafy flakes/ melt round my footfall./I looked up into it – late afternoon but bright/Nothing true or false in itself/Just motion’ (Graham 1993, 80). Yet her footfalls – which are equally physical forces – that carry her to her daughter’s friends house cannot be fully understood by mechanics, because they are impelled by human emotion, and not ‘physics’ in the abstract. Graham marks the indifference of physical motion but then reveals how its instantiation in human life completes them as material practices. ‘I think of you/back of me now, in the house of your friend/twirling in the shiny leotard that you love./ I had looked – as I was leaving – through the window/to see you slick in all your magic’ (Graham 1993, 81–82). She is pulled or drawn to look one more time: the love she feels (and which the poem expresses) completes the expression of the mechanical force that turns her head. The feeling and the meaning of the human connection between eye and image does not leap across an ontological gulf between the natural and the social, the physical and the human, it is the unified expression of all those elements.

However, human life is not complete in any one instant, not only because there are (hopefully) future generations to be born, but also because, up to the present, no human society has comprehensively satisfied the needs or fully enabled the free realization of everyone’s creative capacities. Instead, social life has been marred by domination, exploitation and alienation. The complete expression of human things cannot be exhausted by even the richest artistic expressions because the complete expression of human things involves potentiality and the future. To think about human life in oppressive circumstances means that we must think of suppressed human potential. The complete expression of human potential would involve changing the circumstances in which it is currently suppressed, so that it might be more fully realized. Life matters not only in terms of day to day survival but also in terms of a future in which that which is denied to oppressed groups today will be freely available. Political argument is not motivated by facts and figures nor is it simply strategy and tactics. The most complete expression also requires a symbolic value dimension.

Take the example of inequality. On the one hand, inequality is just a fact of social life. As Marx himself says, inequality is really synonymous with difference, and difference is a fact: no two individuals are exactly the same, and inequality is a function of these differences (Marx 1978, 530). Inequality becomes a political problem only when a group makes it a problem by interpreting it according to some motivating ethical term: inequality as unfair, unjust or undemocratic, and these again to a vital unmet need of human beings. Ideological struggle is essential to the creation of political movements because until the field of social facts and forces is interpreted and made to matter, political struggles do not emerge. People do not mechanically respond to social conditions in predictable ways: politics must be motivated. Here too then, the symbolic completes the (social) material. People are motivated when otherwise meaningless facts are interpreted as just or unjust, right or wrong, good or bad, and our life becomes meaningful and potentially good, when we discover ways to institutionally embody these values, making them real parts of the experience and activity of our lives.

Historical materialism is thus best positioned to articulate material reality as a continuum stretching from the most fundamental forms of matter and energy to the highest expressions of human poetic and political consciousness. Its focus on human life-activity is the mediation necessary to coherently link energy fields from below to the fields of meaningful life above. Any version of materialism that sees the symbolic as explicable only when it has been reduced to a lower level of material organization is problematic, not because it ignores the independence of the symbolic (as an idealist might contend), but rather, as Raymond Williams argued, it would not be ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92). It would not be materialist enough because the human being is not in the centre of the material universe. Once the human is in the centre, it becomes clear that human life – the realization of evolutionary forces acting over billions of years – is social and social life – developing over tens of thousands of years – is fulfilled, made both meaningful and (potentially) better, through interpretation and creation.