"The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." --Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1.
It is interesting to read Lenin on Hegel, followed by Lukacs, Korsch and then Althusser. Whereas Lenin said something like the way to understand Capital is to have read Hegel, Althusser says that the only way to understand Hegel's dialectic is to have read Capital. Lenin would appear to anticipate some of the post-modern concerns with how to treat psychological and social phenomena beyond crude physicalism without resorting to subjective idealism. Zizek seems to grasp the very crux of the matter when he writes: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the Philosophical Notebooks from 1915, in spite of Lenin's rediscovery of Hegel ? why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his "negative dialectics": how to combine Hegel's legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the "predominance of the objective" (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the "theory of reflection" according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).7 However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of objective reality OUTSIDE the thought's subjective mediation, but by insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive "objective reality," never being able to grasp it in it infinite complexity.8 The problem with Lenin's "theory of reflection" resides in its implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it "reflects." The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality (distortion) of the "subjective reflection" occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects ? only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see the whole of reality "the way it really is."9 -------------------------- CJ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
