Abstract
‘Whither Marxism?’ was the title of the first issue of Thesis Eleven in 1980. Among the contributors were Ágnes Heller and George Márkus, who had arrived in Australia with their respective partners Ferenc Fehér and Marysia Márkus in 1978. Together with the philosopher Mihaly Vajda and the sociologist Andras Hegedus, they made up the Budapest School around Lukács in the 1960s and ’70s. Thus from the beginning the Budapest connection played a vital role in the development of the journal, a connection which continues until today. In celebrating George Márkus at 80, the present issue honours his support and inspiration for Thesis Eleven and offers at the same time one answer to the question: whither Marxism? Or rather, a series of concentric answers that all derive from the crisis of Marxism. First, there is Márkus’s path from the conceptual elucidation of Marx, most notably in his classic study Marxism and Anthropology (Márkus, 1978), which goes back to the years he spent as a student in Moscow in the early 1950s, via the reconsideration with two of his students, Janos Kis and György Bence, of historical materialism in 1970 to the critique, undertaken in Australia with Heller and Fehér, of the Soviet system’s ‘dictatorship over needs’. The crisis of Marxism led Márkus to the more comprehensive challenge of developing a theory of modernity as culture, built around the guiding idea of high culture as the paradoxical unity of the arts and sciences. The focus on cultural modernity was carried in its turn by critical reflection on what Márkus terms the antinomies of modernity, most obviously evident in the two rival modern projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism, where the constant oscillation between the programmes of scientific disenchantment and aesthetic re-enchantment of the world functions as the mechanism, which reproduces modernity’s antinomic constitution at the same time as it manifests the paradoxical unity of culture.
But where does this leave the post-Marxist philosopher caught, as Márkus sees it, between the normative claims of the Enlightenment and the consciousness of the contradictions intrinsic to their realization? This is the question that Janos Kis (2015) poses in his reflections on the collection of Márkus’s most important essays on the idea of modern culture, Culture, Science, Society (Márkus, 2011). If the antinomies are built into the institutions that in enabling also threaten the Enlightenment ideal of a ‘moral community of free and equal persons, leading autonomous lives’, it is a dialectic that is written into the very nature of modern philosophy, called to rethink and reformulate the great questions inherited from the philosophical tradition. Faced by the competing programmes of Enlightenment and Romanticism, philosophy is compelled to become hermeneutic in orientation.
Jonathan Pickle complements Kis’s overview of the situation of philosophy in late modernity through his careful reconstruction of Márkus’s theoretical development from Marxism and Anthropology to the critique of really existing socialism. Pickle (2015a) shows how the recognition that the Marxian paradigm is open to differing interpretations lays the ground for Márkus’s turn to the theory of cultural modernity, highlighting, like Kis, the challenge to critical philosophy of the modern conflict of interpretations. In this situation the self-reflexive interpretation of culture becomes both the question and the answer to philosophy’s task, once philosophy renounces teleological perspectives and abandons the attempt to speculatively sublate the contradictions of the modern condition. Critical theory can no longer claim to be the theory of emancipation. On the contrary, the plurality of critical theories is the precondition of emancipation.
The survival of critical theory is tied in this perspective to the task of clarifying concepts, the subject of the three following papers, which examine conceptual analysis in Márkus in relation first to Marx’s understanding of alienation, second in relation to the paradoxes of freedom in modernity, and third in relation the interpretation of praxis in the political sphere.
How is the concept of species essence/species being (Gattungswesen) in Marx to be understood? Aaron Jaffe (2015) takes issue with the commentary by Hans Joas and Axel Honneth on Márkus’s Marxism and Anthropology. For Marx, the key to resolving the antinomies of modernity lay in overcoming the alienation that stood in the way of realizing man’s potentialities. Man’s, in principle, unlimited capacity to respond to the ever-changing challenges of the environment lies at the heart of Marx’s conception of species being. And this means, Márkus argues, that there is no human essence other than a universal social potentiality as it manifests itself in concrete social action. In this light the alienation that comes from social constraints constitutes one of the main driving forces of historical progress. Marx’s historical understanding of species being as opposed to a naturally given essence endows critical theory with an ongoing relevance, a relevance that is to some extent weakened, Jaffe contends, if the idea of species being is confine to the individual, as is the case in Marxism and Anthropology.
Márkus’s postulation of an antinomic modernity, riven by irreconcilable conflicts regarding values, places the very possibility of critical philosophy in question. Kis reminds us that the conflict of interpretations constantly threatens critical inquiry with incoherence. This is the danger that Márkus must negotiate in his analysis of the paradoxes of freedom. John Grumley (2015) sets out to show how Márkus’s reading of the modern concept of freedom grows organically out of his theory of cultural modernity and how it differs from Honneth’s recent work on freedom and democracy. For Márkus, the unity and indivisibility of freedom, as opposed to its pre-modern hierarchical limitations, goes together with an irreducible conceptual plurality that bears witness to the dilemmas inherent in the attempt to clearly separate freedom from power or to subordinate power to freedom in a principled fashion.
In a second contribution, Pickle (2015b) tackles the question of the political in relation to the sharply opposed methodological positions of Márkus and Arendt regarding the idea of praxis. Pickle demonstrates that Arendt’s categorical separation of cultural activities and political actions rests on assumptions that arbitrarily confine praxis to the public realm of the political. Such a concept of the political, Márkus charges, condemns itself to irrelevance. Márkus’s critique exemplifies his rejection of Arendt’s essentializing of praxis, which does not allow the recognition that meaningful human action supposes interpretative choices. Arendt’s rigid separation of praxis and poiesis denies, on the one hand, the disclosure of praxis in works of culture and, on the other hand, isolates political action from the conflictual space of decision-making.
Márkus’s major essay on Hegelian recognition in this issue (Márkus, 2015) is flanked by contributions from Ágnes Heller in her role both as philosophical colleague (Heller, 2015a) and in her role as life-long friend with her tribute ‘to my best friend’ on the occasion of his 80th birthday that speaks for itself and provides a fitting conclusion to the present issue (Heller, 2015b). In her critical appraisal of Márkus’s writings on modern culture, Heller distinguishes between museologists and philosophers. The museologist re-presents philosophical arguments and debates, the philosopher develops his own position. With Márkus this is the question of modern culture, and the way he answers it makes the studies in Culture, Science, Society more than an essay collection. Márkus does not offer a definition of culture, rather he traces the paths of its emergence in the modern period leading to the distinction between the general anthropological understanding of culture relevant for all societies and the historically specific concept of European high culture, composed of the arts and sciences. If Márkus’s concept of high culture corresponds essentially to Hegel’s absolute spirit, it excludes, as Pickle underlines more forcefully, religion. Nor does it endorse philosophy’s claim to absolute knowledge in relation to the natural sciences, even though the sciences cannot occupy the space vacated by religion and philosophy. While agreeing with Márkus’s view of science as a system of authorized beliefs bereft of normative power, Heller sees this lack as legitimizing philosophical intervention in the ethical and political questions raised by scientific discoveries and their application. As regards the scope of the concept of high culture, Heller is concerned whether it adequately embraces the art and philosophy of our time. Moreover, Márkus neglects the whole tradition of Romanticism in philosophy, despite the fundamental importance of his insight into the ongoing conflict between the two dominant cultural programmes in modernity. A neglect that is all the more striking in the face of the undeniable contemporary significance of the cultural conflicts between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of nature.
Márkus’s sense of the decline of high culture since the Second World War is reinforced by the historical failure of the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is the subject of Márkus’s final thoughts on Hegel, in which he sets out all that is at stake in Hegel’s concept of recognition. Márkus undertakes a close reading of the contradictions in the presentation of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit, which leads on to the question of the true subject of Hegel’s system. If the true subject is to be found in the historical unfolding of absolute spirit, where does this leave finite, accidental individuals? The struggle of individuals for recognition is only the first stage of the self-recognition through which individuals accede to the liberating recognition that their shared world is the world of their own making. This recognition of recognition in its truth – and hence participation in absolute spirit – signifies the realization of ‘conscious freedom’ as the telos of modernity that brings the unfreedom of history to an end. But it is precisely at this point that Hegel’s system fails.