SOURCE: “Can Phenomenology Accommodate Marxism?” in Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, No. 17, Fall, 1973, pp. 169-80.

[In the following essay, Shmuelli explores the degree to which Husserl's phenomenology and Marx's dialectical analysis are and are not compatible approaches to confronting alienation and establishing social change.]

In the last decades serious attempts have been made to bring together Edmund Husserl's phenomenology with Marxist dialectical materialism. Although the phenomenological strain of Marxism could already be found in the thirties, particularly in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, this trend has become more prevalent after World War II. In fact, the phenomenological approach became very strong in some communist countries, particularly in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Before the Russians occupied Prague, Karel Kosik's book, Die Dialektik des Konkreten (1967), exercised considerable influence.¹ These attempts to build a synthesis out of Husserl and Marx have broken down barriers between two major intellectual trends which were once considered irreconcilable. Husserl's description of the crisis of Western civilization, and his passionate appeal to transcendental reason, intersubjective and universal, in his posthumous work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, especially opened some possible interconnections. Thus a host of phenomenological Marxists or Marxist phenomenologists, like Enzo Paci and Pier Aldo Rovatti and their associates in Telos, try to discover Marxist problems, aims and methods in phenomenology, on the one hand, and a transcendental phenomenological grounding in the theory of Marx, on the other.

One can sympathize with Piccone's statement that, “no matter how much one tries to reformulate or strengthen Marxism, it appears today as a set of slogans which at best are presented with the pretenses of objective science. In fact, they turn out to be so many categories which occlude rather than clarify social reality.”² This proposition, almost a pronunciation on the bankruptcy of classical Marxian theory, seems to describe a state of both socio-political and theoretical affairs. Thus, neo-Marxism attempts to relive the Marxian heritage through phenomenology. However, great as the need of Marxism is for a phenomenological critique to make it relevant again, it is hard to prove Piccone's thesis that “today, when Marxism is deep in crisis, Husserl is to serious Marxists what Hegel was to Marx.”³ I see even more difficulties in the following comparison of the same writer: “To the extent that Husserl's Crisis can function as a starting-point for such a critique, it can be considered the most relevant Marxist text since Lukács' History and Class Consciousness and, as such, it must be carefully studied rather than summarily dismissed.”⁴

But Piccone himself is well aware of the difficulties involved in any serious effort to reconcile, or even accommodate, phenomenology with Marxism. For he admits that “the forced synthesis of the two mechanically juxtaposed frameworks (dialectic and phenomenology) is bound to fail from the very beginning, for either phenomenology ends up absorbed in the dialectic and ceases to be phenomenology, or the dialectic is frozen in the phenomenological foundation and ceases to be a dialectic.”⁵ Yet, he believes there is a viable, i.e., scholarly and well-founded, possibility of considering phenomenology as a “retrievable moment of Marxism” and thus achieving a double aim, a non-dogmatic Marxism and a socially relevant phenomenological theory.

It is the purpose of this paper to submit to a careful analysis one of the latest scholarly attempts in this direction, namely Enzo Paci's The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man,⁶ where he attempts to bring together phenomenology and Marxism in a sophisticated and original way. It is the most systematic attempt yet to build a synthesis between phenomenology and Marxism. Nevertheless, Paci himself characterizes his interpretation as a reconstruction and transformation of phenomenology.⁷

Paci's position can be stated as follows: Husserl's thought leads not only to the problem areas with which Marxism deals, but also to the same central ideas of human emancipation. Moreover, if one approaches Marxism from a phenomenological aspect, he may arrive at a critical Marxism. But generally Paci emphasizes that he is attempting to understand implications which were only hinted at by Husserl, “in a way not developed by Husserl himself.”⁸

As for Marx, Paci attempts to discover “a most profound and most authentic aspect of Marx's work,” namely, what Husserl calls the “transcendental foundation.”⁹ Marx's critique of political economy, Paci argues, has a paradigmatic character: it intends to reveal and demonstrate the root of objectification of all sciences and of the whole society. This is the historical, hermeneutical aspect of the problem.

The second aspect of the problem Paci's book poses is the systematic one, namely, the validity of arguments which claim to find in Marx's Capital the main thesis of transcendental phenomenology and in Husserl's Crisis a dominant direction towards the constitution of a new society and a new humanity as the telos of European civilization and its science. Distinct as these two aspects of the problem are, they cannot be isolated. Ultimately, it is the one decisive issue for determining whether an adequate understanding of Husserl and Marx can produce a valid phenomenological Marxism.

The concept of dialectic has a wide range of meanings and is, therefore, quite ambiguous. Nevertheless, at least two ideas are central:

1. Historically, dialectical method from Plotinus to Hegel and Marx held that every concept, category, or proposition implies its contradictory, contrary, or opposite. And even changes in the physical, social, or mental world are produced by contraries and oppositions and the struggle between them.

2. Therefore, dialectic ascribes a creative power to negation and the process of change becomes an advancement through rejections and conflicts towards a positive end which is the reconciliation of the struggling opposites.

However, these senses of dialectic are absent in phenomenology. For Husserl, as for Kant, the problem of the negative, e.g., the antinomies, contradictions, etc., is an embarassment of thought which has to be removed.¹⁰ Therefore, I agree with Piccone about the writers who, before Paci, worked on a synthesis between Marxism and phenomenology. Almost miraculously, however, Paci seems to transform Husserl into a “dialectician.”

How, then, does Paci conceive Husserl's “dialectic”? Since the term is used by Paci quite loosely, it means a wide range of operations and intentions. It is a critique of experience in the direction of mediations between abstract individuals and the abstract totality. The transcendental subjectivity of the ego, which is the source and origin of world constituting is an intersubjective ego in a living society, becomes conscious of his own meaning according to a common intentionality. “The dialectic does not objectively unfold in front of other subjects as a separate, preconstituted and mechanical reality. The dialectic is inconceivable without subjects, and vice versa.”¹¹ Dialectic, conceived as an objective process isolated from the subjects experiencing it, is a mythological construct, a mode of objectivism. Hegel's method, Paci believes, is criticized by Husserl and Marx alike as such an abstract construction.

For Husserl, Paci maintains, existence always surpasses itself in truth. Truth can never be possessed. It is a meaningful direction of being, the infinite intentionality for which the goal is always unreachable and it is in the world merely in the sense of a demand never fully realized. In this sense Husserl proclaims that “only spirit is immortal” because spirit is the movement by which the existence transcends itself towards the meaning of truth. The totalization of final truths is the infinite task of humanity.¹² Put differently: “Phenomenology aims at discovering and revealing all the ties connecting individual entities. This is what seeing the essence in the individual fact means.”¹³ Essence, in counter distinction to facts, is relational and not isolated, comprising the typicalities of all facts subsumed under it. The essence of the individual, for example, is his life as individuated in the progressive self-constitution, and the individual truly lives only in essential relations, that is, when the increasingly more rational social life of the community in its progressive self-constitution makes individuation possible. In this way, the essential and the factual, the general and the individual, are connected. Truths are connected to a system of universal relationships. “In this sense, Husserl denies the possibility of a science of separated individuals, the singular, or atomic, entities separate from relations.”¹⁴ Paci believes that this is the central sense of Husserl's dialectical method: the phenomenological concept of truth is essentially dialectical. So is reason in its quest for truth.

Furthermore, on the social level the world is given to every man (monad) in his modes of life, historical destiny, personal features, and finitude of all flesh. But in the human, finite vicissitudes of existence one finds a typicality, that is an eidos.¹⁵ “There is a direction toward an agreement of ideas and a harmonious society of subjects implicit in the idea that every monad has of the world.”¹⁶ Philosophy is the science of this universality constituted in the world, and as such it is engaged in dialectic, i.e., in interconnections. Ultimately, then, the dialectical process, according to Paci's interpretation of Husserl, is aiming at the highest possible encompassment on both the cognitive and the social level. Every perception as an intentional direction implies other perceptions. Although this all-encompassing interconnection is always made possible, it can never be fully exhausted.¹⁷ For social theory it means that “there must be a totality of meaning of the dialectic and a direction of truth of all groups and struggling communities. … There is no rationality coinciding with the reality of the world and history. In the dialectic, the classes and communities negated by other classes and communities tend to negate the negation. This means that subjects, groups, and communities are formed in a praxis and cannot oppose the positive meaning with their own self-destruction.”¹⁸ At the center of the dialectic is the active man who always remakes himself. Likewise, the world transforms itself in history.

One is entitled to argue that Paci uses the concept of dialectic most loosely in describing Husserl's notion of the reciprocal interpenetration of body and mind, and of the external and internal. In general, however, the concept is used by Paci for the interrelation between the part and the whole, when the part is absorbed in the whole in which it is fully realized. Paci then concludes that phenomenological reason is dialectical since it is not fragmented into theoretical, practical and ethical reason. It is a whole. Truth is the whole, and therefore dialectical, as in the philosophy of Hegel.

An analysis of any text of Husserl can easily dispel the attribution of a dialectical method in his phenomenology. Thus, we find that the either/or prevails over the mediation, reconciliation or any sort of dialectical Aufhebung. For example, in his paper, “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” Husserl insists, “It must, therefore, be possible to choose, once and for all, between anthropologism and transcendentalism without reference to any historical form of philosophy and anthropology (or psychology).”¹⁹ By transcendentalism Husserl meant the cognitive process which aims at absolute, ultimately valid truths by grasping the changeless, essential forms of the world's intelligibility. Pure Ratio grounds cognition in order to be able to produce an explanation of fact. It is comparable to pure mathematics in its grasp of the a priori essences. Like pure mathematics which makes natural sciences possible, philosophy aims at the absolute truth, not at truth which is tied to specific historical situations, but at the ultimate truth which transcends all relativity.²⁰ True, the descriptive goals of phenomenology as a rigorous philosophy can only be approximated, and this only gradually. But this does not mean that they cannot be ultimately reached in apodictic insight by appealing to the eidos, i.e., to the pure a priori of any factual object or region of objects. How undialectically phenomenology discusses truth is obvious from the paper's insistence on the identification of truth with self-evidence and with intuition of absoluteness of transcendental subjectivity.

The reality of world objects cannot be naively presupposed as self-evidently existing. Therefore, Descartes grounded self-evidence in the subjectivity of consciousness. In this way, however, the foundation of all knowledge of world and of self in autonomous transcendental subjectivity became a problem in itself, in fact the central problem of phenomenology. Husserl emphasizes that transcendental subjectivity experiences “constant certitudes of existence”²¹ and ultimately asserts itself as the “apodictic ego,” prior to the existence of the world. Transcendental subjectivity is not the concrete, mundane ego. It is rather the ego that brackets the existence of the world and to which the world presents itself in its phenomenal validity. Only by this reflective activity of bracketing the world and grasping it as a flow of the activities of experiencing and theoretical judgment does the transcendental field open itself. But in this change of attitude by the “phenomenological reduction,” there comes to the forefront the fundamental contrast between the transcendental ego, with its apodictic absoluteness on the one hand, and the psychological ego with its historical relativity on the other hand. And Husserl assures the reader that only the consistent, although provisory, renunciation of the world through the phenomenological reduction opens the way to truly valid cognition, in the sense that transcendental subjectivity confers meaning and validity upon a world. Phenomenology is the science which elucidates the essential structures of consciousness, actual and potential, of meanings (noemata) which make the world objective, i.e., consolidate the varieties of temporal modes of consciousness in identical things. Husserl remind us that phenomenology interrogates consciousness in order to force it to betray its secrets, rather than interrogate nature as Bacon recommended.²² In this whole discussion of transcendental subjectivity versus the psychological or anthropological ego, there is no mention of any possibility of dialectical mediation, nor is there interconnection considered dialectical. Rather, the either/or is emphasized.

Or, let us turn to Husserl's discussion of the phenomenology of reason in Ideas (Chapter 12). Clear distinctions are made here between assertoric and apodictic forms of evidential vision, between pure insight and impure insight, and ultimately between adequate and inadequate self-evidence. For example, Husserl maintains that in principle a thing in the real world, within its finite limits, can appear only inadequately. Many things are related to one and the same determinable X and continuously advance towards a more detailed indication of the possibilities which they present. They are filled out by a variety of aspects, strengthened or weakened, complementing each other and conflicting with each other. This is the realm of factual things in their mode of existence. But to every category of such things corresponds an essence (as explained in Chapter 1 of Ideas), an eidos which as a datum of essential intuition is primordially self-evident.²³ In the same chapter truth is defined as a correlate of the perfect rational character of believing certainty, that is, of that which is eidetically self-evident to an actual consciousness. In the final account, truth is identified with the self-evident position as a correlate of man's self-evidencing judging from the standpoint of the subject, “but is also a name for every kind of self-evidencing judging itself, and, lastly, for every doxic act of reason.”²⁴ The point I wish to make clear is that Paci neglected the eidetic functions of transcendental subjectivity, which establish necessities and possibilities as an absolutely unassailable standard for the fact. The transcendental standpoint seeks out everywhere a systematic and “eidetic morphology,”²⁵ which cannot be found on a natural basis. It envelopes the whole natural world through the bestowal of meaning which conforms to essences. The phenomenological method consists ultimately in the elaboration of its central discovery of the importance of the intuition by which real existence can be conceived. Phenomenology aims to be the description of how essences, ideal constructs, make cognition possible, with absolute certainty. But the fact that apprehension of essences is a piece-meal operation, starting from singular essences and progressing to more comprehensive regional essences, does not make eidetic reduction dialectical.

It is clear that essence is not “individuation,” as described by Paci above. The phenomenological epoche, the access to all essences, does the opposite of all individuation. It suspends any positing of reality. The real world, as it exists naturally, is neither negated nor doubted but bracketed. This assumes that the existent world is not necessary for the foundation of knowledge. Hence, the entire phenomenological method, with its techniques of bracketing, refutes the idea that an external existence can provide an absolute foundation for our knowledge of the world. We know by now that the primary, radical, apodictically-established foundation can be transcendental consciousness alone.

On this analysis, phenomenology is a non-dialectical, if not anti-dialectical, method of apprehension. Its basic techniques, e.g., the epoche, variations of the imagination, the “free fancies,” eidetic and transcendental reductions show that none of this is dialectical in any accepted sense of the term. As a philosophy qua rigorous science, phenomenology aims at establishing a constancy of “universal humanity of reason as a binding necessity of the essence” (“Universale Vernunftmenschheit” als “verbindende Wesensnotwendigkeit”).²⁶ Hence, truth for Husserl is not the dialectical movement toward the all-encompassing whole. We do not have to wait for the self-differentiation of the infinite self-positing consciousness and its coming back to itself before we intuit truth in a self-evidential way.

However, the problems of phenomenology, I believe, are capable of dialectical development, and indeed need such development. In special need of such development are the relations between the transcendental and the psychological subject, between essences and facts, between noesis and noema, between transcendentalism and historicism, between the primary life-world and derivative historical culture. The relations between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity are loaded with dialectical tensions and mediations. If transcendental subjectivity is indeed the absolute, it is constantly in need of mediating steps of self-realization. Paci attempted to develop some dialectical motif of Husserl's system, but since he did not realize the full anti-dialectical impact of phenomenological transcendentalism, he could hardly recognize the difficulty of his task and look for dialectics where they perhaps could be found, despite Husserl's conscous eidetic transcendentalism.

What does praxis mean for Husserl, according to Paci's interpretation? Since the totality of world experience is never actually concluded as an established reality, but is rather an infinite and teleological process, depending upon man's accomplishments, one may maintain that the meaning of all reality is constituted in human praxis. The world is a unity of meaningfulness which has to be constituted. For an object to be given means that the complexity and multiplicity of its ways of appearing come to a definiteness and unity, in virtue of bestowing upon it a definite individual meaning. This constitution is called by Paci, if I understand his interpretation correctly, praxis. Thus, theory and praxis are not opposites. Phenomenological theory is man's becoming conscious in time and in the world. It has universal validity because it rediscovers in every part, according to the principle of universal correlation, the horizon toward which this part is directed (every monad is intending) as to its final goal. Telos and praxis are correlated. Praxis seems to be the term for intentionality, constitution, and self-reflection rather than merely for acts guided by these operations of the transcendental subject. Praxis, then, for Paci, is identical with the most theoretical acts of foundation itself. The struggle against occlusion and oblivion of the subjective root of all constitutional acts, the clarifying of this genesis, and the arriving at universally valid results is for him “scientific praxis.” Furthermore, phenomenology is described by Paci as the science of the life-world, as the act of becoming conscious, of man's historical situation.²⁷ Praxis, then, means both the theoretical foundation of phenomenological description of the world and the transformation of the world.

This is, I think, a misinterpretation of Husserl's intention. The relation between theory and praxis in Husserl's thought seems to be quite different. In what follows, therefore, I will endeavor to show how my view of this relation differs from Paci's. But let me start by underscoring that Husserl's self-reflection in the Crisis has obviously “bracketed” the real conflicts of the European scene on a national and international level, and thus it became a very general, reflective analysis, without providing directives for the solution of the pressing problems of socio-political practice. The ultimate aim of his critical self-understanding was only in a vague way connected with “praxis” in a socio-political sense. His main purpose was to rescue man from dispersion in scientific materialism. In this sense, it was rather abstract and academic. I would agree, then, with Marvin Farber's statement that “A philosopher who refuses or neglects to take account of the pressing practical problems of his day (the well-known ones: capital and labor, imperialism and war, etc.) incurs the cardinal error of making his reflection ‘empty’ in a most important respect.”²⁸ Of course, Paci does not see Husserl's reflections this way. Paci makes the distinction “between mundane praxis and praxis free of the mundane.” The former is conditioned by the various interests of the subject in his life work, the latter is disinterested, free from fetishism, and takes place in the historical world of inter-monadic rationality. This latter praxis, disinterested in partial fetishized goals but rather directed toward the whole, is the proper return to subjectivity in action, oriented toward a universal telos.²⁹ “The praxis free from the mundane provides the opening to the world as a universal horizon.”³⁰ It reconstitutes the historical world as an intermonadic life with others. But this disinterested praxis was precisely called by Husserl theory, and in terms of the pressing world problems, this theory looks quite “empty,” in the above sense.

What did Husserl really mean by theory and praxis? Husserl defined philosophical theory as the “knowledge of the totality of what is,” in which no single truth may be absolutized and isolated. This function philosophy can fulfill only through phenomenology. Both the natural and the theoretical scientific attitude of modern naturalism which dominates Western civilization are naively one-sided “and constantly failed to be understood as such.”³¹ Both the natural attitude and scientific naturalism take it for granted that they can obtain truth in itself and do not notice that “they necessarily pre-suppose themselves in advance as communalized men and their surrounding world, in their historical time.”³²

In a passage of the Vienna lecture in which Husserl mentions praxis most emphatically, he stresses that his “new sort of praxis” is primarily a critique of the accepted life-goals as well as an intention to transform mankind into “a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights.”³³ This will be the highest synthesis of theory and practice. Essentially, Husserl maintains that there are two fundamentally different kinds of praxis, derived from a theoretical framework which prescribes norms and procedures. The first kind of praxis is a set of operations in accord with the theoretical totality of hypotheses and is destined to function normatively, like logical operations. All praxis of this kind, based on science, is related to a sphere of interest, and has the practical aim of satisfying the needs implied in these interests. This interested practical activity is based on a dogmatic theory. Any theory is dogmatic where transcendental reflection is absent.

The second kind of praxis is based on transcendental reflection and is very often identified with it. This reflection considers thematically those who make judgments, and how they make normative use of the so-called laws. It is thematically directed also towards possible errors, temptations, and failures. The first type of praxis implies a naive ontology, either as suggested by the prescientific knowledge of the surrounding life-world or by objective science which transposes this prescientific, imperfect knowledge in accord with ideally determined “truths-in-themselves.” The term transcendental (above) Husserl uses in the Kantian sense as “the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower's reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposefully, are stored up in acquisitions, and have become and continue to become freely available.”³⁴ The ultimate source in which all praxis and theory is grounded bears the title “I myself,” subjectivity. The praxis of this transcendental cognitive enterprise was described by Husserl as the most radical critique of accepted values, or the revolutionary elevation of mankind to a self-responsible humanity on the basis of absolute theoretical insights.

Logic too has to be founded transcendentally, if one wants to capture “the living intention of logicians.”³⁵ Since the sciences have forgotten their intentional meaning by underscoring their logical procedures, this meaning has to be rediscovered and connected to time, to the constitution of the entire world by transcendental subjectivity. The sciences of the factual have a strong tendency to conceal the original meaning realized by the living experience.

For Husserl, theory is the establishment and elucidation of immutable first principles, e.g., that which lies at the base of knowledge for Aristotle, or the “Transcendentals” for Medieval philosophers. These first principles are the ultimate basis upon which the structure of our concept is built, precisely what Kant called transcendental. Theory discovers, explicates, and justifies the principles which are implicitly functioning in all cognitions, omnipresent but unrecognized.

In spite of his criticism of the metaphysical presuppositions of the classic and the modern world views as objectivistic, Husserl's concept of theory had moral implications which are very close to the classic virtues. His theory, oriented towards essential necessities, believed that contemplation of these necessities is the highest achievement of reason both in the cognitive and in the moral dimension. It leads to a life of self-understanding, that is, to human autonomy and self-responsibility. Husserl's strong emphasis, then, is on pure theory, from which he believes an enlightened, rational “conduct of life” emerges, as in the Platonic tradition. He believed that modern science, particularly modern physics, has abandoned the ideal of true theory, thereby becoming “naive and objectivistic,” without insight into the connection between facts, laws, and theories of nature and the active pole of transcendental subjectivity which constitutes these facts, laws, and theories. The “inadequate” self-understanding of the natural sciences has had a devastating effect upon our whole Western civilization. The glory of modern sciences, namely their description of the world in its objective order, assisted by the mathematical model, is in fact the greatest impediment to the proper insight into the true structure of the world as regards both its subject pole and its object pole. This objectivism of the sciences neglects the transcendental basis of all possible objects of scientific analysis which are constituted in the self-evidence of a given life-world. The mathematical grasp of nature, as well as the technological control, must be retraced analytically back to transcendental subjectivity. If not, man is alienated from the sources of his selfhood. Husserl insists that this is precisely the difference between any scientific theory and his philosophical theory. Whereas all scientific theories originate out of the needs of human practice, particularly in order to secure what is given as existing, the phenomenological theory, although not losing any interests in the natural life-world, aims at clarifying the constitution of both the functioning practice and the scientific theory as well. Thus, theory, in Husserl, establishes the identification of being with intelligibility, in the sense that consciousness constitutes being, and only consciousness in its highest form as transcendental subjectivity is absolute being. It is the elucidation of the meaning of transcendental subjectivity as the absolute being and of its acts of constitution in their various modes, horizons, and regions. Such a theory is certainly not a retreat into an unworldly special field of study. On the contrary, Husserl believes that only phenomenological theory enables us to grasp in authentic knowledge both the world and human consciousness, and thus provides an all-embracing account of objectivity and subjectivity alike. But in opposition to Marx, Husserl insists that phenomenology does nothing but “interrogate just that world which is at all times the real world for us.”³⁶ It does not change it. Ultimately, it changes us. “Phenomenology subjects this world to intentional interrogation regarding its sources of meaning and validity.”³⁷ This is what theory discovered in Husserl's thorough interrogation of the world. Praxis, as mentioned above, leads into three directions, the third of which is identical with the totally disinterested steps of theoretical activity itself.

After this discussion of Husserl's concepts of theory and practice, let us return to Paci's interpretation. This interpretation was, from the beginning, oriented toward a reconciliation of Husserl's thought with Marxist concepts of theory and practice. A consideration of these concepts will contribute considerably toward an understanding of the scope and intention of the new phenomenological Marxism. What function does Marx attribute to theory, especially philosophical theory, and to praxis, and what are their meanings in his system? The intellectual endeavor actually to abandon philosophy by making it an effective power in the socio-political reality, in other words, to “negate” philosophy (that is, to dissolve it into its full realization and concretization), is a strong trend in dialectical materialism, deriving already from Hegel, but modified according to anti-idealistic premises. Dialectical materialism, in spite of its foundation in philosophical theory, neglected the elaboration of a theory of knowledge, of society, and of history grounded in a comprehensive ontology. It is not too difficult to find the reason for this neglect. It lies in the primacy which Marx bestowed upon praxis, which he defined as labor, the activity which produces the possible objects of experience; or, really, objectivity produced by man's activities. Labor is termed the “condition of human experience that is independent of all forms of society, the perpetual necessity of nature in order to mediate the material exchange between man and nature, in other words, human life.”³⁸ The surrounding nature is mediated by man's process of social labor, which creates the conditions of social life. Moreover, it creates the conditions which make the very objectivity of any natural or cultural objects possible. In this sense, social labor is more than an instrumental technical process. It bestows meaning, it conditions cognition, making it possible as an instrument for grasping the very reality produced by acts of labor. It is a kind of “transcendental” activity. Whereas praxis is active and future-oriented, theory (by which Marx meant mainly idealism) is contemplative and past-oriented, interpretative and not actively changing. Man, however, plans his future. Therefore, historical materialism must include “the energetic principle” (which Marx saw as missing in Democritus, and later in Feuerbach), in order to become an active power, and not merely a theoretical contemplation. This priority of praxis over theory does not mean that practical activity can be performed without theoretical insights. Revolutionary praxis certainly must be enlightened by the instructions of theory and follow true concepts. It is not sufficient to be practical in the sense of utilitarianism or vulgar pragmatism. Already in one of his earliest writings, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx assured his reader that “you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it,” and, moreover, that this realization “can only be achieved by the negation of the previous philosophy, that is, philosophy as philosophy.”³⁹ Against narrow-minded activists he defended philosophy, but against philosophers, that is, against contemplative quietism of theoretical abstractions and interpretations, he stressed his belief that philosophy cannot be realized without being abolished, that is, without change in form by a knowledge that leads to the realm of freedom. In this sense Ernst Bloch declares that Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”) is “the greatest triumph of philosophy.”⁴⁰

However, for Marx philosophical theory could well be limited to critique, but in a sense different from the one employed by Kant. No logic, whether formal or transcendental, is Marx's point of departure for his critique, but rather the material processes of production and appropriation of products. His critique is ultimately a critique of political economy and an evaluation of the evolution of the system of social labor with its socio-political and ideological results. Although Marx acknowledges the importance of the superstructures, it is labor which conditions the configurations of consciousness and all their symbolic interactions and creations. This reduction to the modes of human labor and its history alone, limits the possibilities of Marx's philosophical interpretation to the impact of various aspects and techniques of work upon the ideological superstructure. His philosophy thus became a critique of capitalist society. Since the fundamental structures of social labor, and nothing else, are reproduced in the self-reflection of consciousness, all philosophy which does not consider the nature of man as a tool-maker and homo faber, according to the system of productive forces and relations of production which he confronts as something given, is, for Marx, merely “ideology.”⁴¹ Thus, Marx would negate Husserl's concept of theory as contemplative, interpretative, and abstract. He would compare it to Fichte's theory of the abstract subjectivity, or to the “I-idealism” and its world-abandoning praxis.

Is Husserl's philosophy complementary to Marxism in the sense of adding a new dimension—namely the emphasis upon transcendental subjectivity—for a theory of knowledge and for a comprehensive ontology? It is difficult to acknowledge that such a theory can be related to Marxism, except by a misinterpretation of both systems. Paci, as we have seen above, underestimated the significance of theory in Husserl. His point is that theory is reason, explicating the concealed telos of European civilization. The crisis of Western civilization, he believes, is a special case of the capitalist crisis in a naturalistic, objectified, i.e., socio-political system. The specialized, scientific worker objectifies himself in the sciences, which in their turn confront him as alien entities, often as monstrosities. The alienated reality of objects determines human beings as objects. Science controls the scientist, objective reality, the living subjects. However, the interest of reason, of truth, is active in all scientific research, “just as the whole operates in each part.”⁴² The fetishized division of labor—field specializations which do not acknowledge the totality—is the crisis of the sciences; and phenomenology is that theory which describes this historical situation realistically and thus demonstrates its untruths.⁴³

To summarize Husserl's main points concerning theory and praxis, philosophy and the sciences: Husserl argued that modern science and technology, in capitalistic and communist systems alike, have overlooked, forgotten, and suppressed the consciousness of ordinary man in his life-world. Material and historical affairs of the surrounding world are suppressed by the very structures of these affairs, which are presented to consciousness as objective entities in themselves. Husserl saw the problem of alienation as a rising central problem of Western civilization in the post-Renaissance period when the sciences began, most likely unconsciously at first, but later intentionally, to neglect, to forget, and to suppress the ethical dimension of human existence. The history of the techno-scientific attitude over the natural and the transcendental attitude brought philosophy and science into disarray.

One may argue that Husserl is attempting to uncover the lost unity of the human purpose of Western civilization and to rescue man and society from disintegration caused by the scientific image of the world which stepped out of pace with the personal, direct understanding of ourselves and the world. The telos of Western civilization, namely, the integrity of self and world, of the private and public realm, of science and philosophy, must be restored. This reintegration could certainly have immense political impacts. But these are not explicated by Husserl.

Phenomenological theory is considered by Husserl not merely to be a more rigorous science, but to be the only philosophy capable of saving mankind from the greatest and most recent danger which it has encountered, namely, of being lost in a scientific image of man and world, in a communal and cumulative enterprise in which every scientist is a mere replaceable agent of an anonymous process and every man is analyzed as an object and manipulated as such. Classical philosophy exhorted men to dedicate their energies to philosophy in order to preserve themselves from being lost in a chase after property, pleasure and power. For these were the seductions of the mind in times of scarcity. In the affluent society of today, phenomenology intends to provide grounds for self-understanding as a rescue from the heteronomy of science and from technological manipulation. In this way Husserl fights alienation by theory, or, as Robert Sokolowski correctly put it, “In Husserl the human problem, the problem of preserving the self against possible heteronomy and alienation, seems to be reduced to an academic, purely speculative matter.”⁴⁴

Notes

1. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1972), pp. 32 f.; see also Appendix, pp. 301, 317, and his Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt a.M., 1972). A more comprehensive review of this trend can be found in the introduction to Paci's volume, discussed below.

2. Paul Piccone, “Reading the Crisis,” Telos no. 8 (Summer 1971), p. 128.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Funzione delle scienze e significato dell'uomo, translated by Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen (Evanston, 1972), p. xxxii.

6. Parts of this book were previously published in Telos.

7. Op.cit., p. 446.

8. Ibid., pp. 269, 270.

9. Ibid., p. 413.

10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Muller (Garden City, 1966), p. 246. The famous beginning sentence of the introduction to Kant's “Transcendental Logic”: “We call Dialectic in general a logic of illusion,” p. 221, illustrates sufficiently his attitude.

11. Paci, op.cit., p. 281.

12. Ibid., p. 88.

13. Ibid., p. 120.

14. Ibid., p. 124.

15. Ibid., p. 218.

16. Ibid., p. 280.

17. Ibid., p. 271.

18. Ibid., p. 279.

19. Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, edited by Roderick M. Chisholm (New York, 1967), p. 130.

20. Ibid., pp. 131, 139, 141.

21. Ibid., p. 131: “Philosophy, genuine science, aims at absolute, ultimately valid truths which transcend all relativity. … Although philosophy, genuine science, can only be approximated gradually, it is reached by appealing to the eidos, the pure a priori, which anybody can grasp in apodictic insight.”

22. Ibid., p. 142.

23. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1967), p. 357.

24. Ibid., p. 359.

25. Ibid., p. 371.

26. Erste Philosophie, Erster Teil: Kristische Ideengeschichte (1923-24). Herausgegeben von Rudolf Boehm (Husserliana, Band VII, The Hague, 1956), p. 23.

27. Paci, op.cit., p. 282.

28. Marvin Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism (Albany, 1959), p. 294. On the great importance of this emphasis see below.

29. Paci, op.cit., p. 44.

30. Ibid., p. 45.

31. Ibid., p. 296.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., p. 283.

34. Ibid., pp. 97 f.

35. E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1969), p. 10.

36. E. Husserl, “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” op.cit., p. 140.

37. Ibid., p. 142.

38. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 27.

39. The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1972), p. 17.

40. Ernst Bloch, Marx und die Menschlichkeit (Rowohlt, 1969), p. 107.

41. Karl Marx, “German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, op.cit.

42. Paci, op.cit., p. 322.

43. Ibid., p. 323.

44. Robert Sokolowski, “Husserl's Protreptic,” in Life-World and Consciousness, Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, edited by Lester E. Embree (Evanston, 1972), p. 61.