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Not Reflection Helena Sheehan on Christopher Caudwell An extract from Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History by Helena Sheehan Caudwell's epistemology was interactionist rather than reflectionist. In the conscious field, generated by the interaction of subject and object, neither subject nor object, neither mind nor matter, could ever be found completely 'pure'. As knowing was a mutually determining relation between subject and object, neither could ever be totally separated out and isolated from the other. Knowing was an active relation, a social product. It was the outcome of the labour process past and present. Truth was realised in action; it came, not so much as an end, but as the colour of an act. Feeling tone could never be completely separated from the object in experience. Both object and thought, both response and situation, were given in one conscious glow. Consciousness was not, however a mere iridescence, but real, determining, and determined. It was vital for marxists not to fall back into the subject-object dichotomy. The uniqueness of marxism was that it overcame this dichotomy, not be denying one or the other (as did idealism and mechanistic materialism) or both (as did positivism), but by embracing both. Both were real, however inseparable within the conscious field. Each was a constituent of the other. Always the subject was tied to the object as the object was to the subject. Knowledge bore always the impress of both. Arguing against epistemological objectivism, Caudwell stressed the role of active subjectivity and the importance of breaking with the illusion of the detached observer. It was impossible for the mind to stand outside the universe, to know it without disturbing it or being disturbed by it. Truth might seem to be in the environment, to be objective, independent of the subject, and yet all attempts to extract a completely non-subjective truth from experience produced only metrics. Objectivism could not be sustained and turned into its opposite; complete objectivity brought one back to complete subjectivity and vice versa. The act of knowing transformed what was known. It was never possible to detach the thing known from the knowing of it. Caudwell opposed all passivist imagery in describing knowledge. Knowledge was not a matter of copying, mirroring, photographing, reflecting. Although he never remarked on Lenin's use of such imagery in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he had read the book and his rejection of the reflectionist model was quite explicit and polemically expressed. In no uncertain terms, Caudwell made his point: The mirror reflects accurately: it does not know. Each particle in the universe reflects the rest of the universe, but knowledge is only given to human beings as a result of an active and social relation to the rest of reality. ~ * ~ In terms of the debate within Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, it was neither the position of Lenin nor that of Bogdanov. Nor was it the position of Lukacs or Korsch either. It was perhaps the position Gramsci was groping for, but never expressed with such confident clarity as Caudwell. When it came down to it, being preceded knowing, knowing flowed from being and evolved as an extension of being. Decidedly post-Cartesian, Caudwell asserted: I live therefore I think I am. In a concise statement of the fundamental contours of his theory of knowledge, he wrote: The question of which is first, mind or matter, is not therefore a question of which is first, subject or object ... Going back in the universe along the dialectic of qualities, we reach by inference a state where no human or animal bodies existed and therefore no minds. It is not strictly accurate to say that therefore the object is prior to the subject any more than it is correct to say the opposite. Object and subject as exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultaneously.... We can say that relations seen by us between qualities in our environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all the entities of physics) existed before the subject-object relationship implied in mind. We prove this by the transformations which take place independent of our desires. In this sense, nature is prior to mind and this is the vital sense for science. These qualities produced, as cause and around produce effect, the synthesis, or particular subject-object relationship which we call knowing. Nature therefore produced mind. But the nature which produced mind was not nature "as seen by us." . . . It is nature.... as having indirect not direct relations with us.... Such a view reconciles the endless dualism of mentalism and objectivism. It is the universe of dialectical materialism. Unlike previous philosophies, it includes all reality: it includes not only the world of physics, but it includes smells, tastes, colors, the touch of a loved hand, hopes, desires, beauties, death and life, truth and error. Only such an epistemology, which could hold together these different strands without giving way to either naive realism or total relativism, could encompass the whole. Caudwell held to it with utter consistency. It was essential to the underlying unity of his thought and it accounted for the distinctiveness of his position on various issues. It had implications, for example, for his position on the dialectics of nature. There is no evidence that he knew of the Comintern debate on dialectics of nature centering around Lukacs, but he was obviously acquainted with the standard communist formulations of this time to the effect that the subjective dialectics of the mind reflected the objective dialectics of nature. Although he did not specifically criticise any marxist authors holding this position, it was clear that he disagreed with it. For Caudwell, what was dialectical was neither subject nor object, neither man or nature, but the interaction between subject and object, the interaction between man and nature. He gave expression to his thinking on this in a way that again suggested the possibility of an underground polemic: The external world does not impose dialectic on thought, nor does thought impose it on the external world. The relation between subject and object, ego and universe, is itself dialectic. It was impossible, to Caudwell's way of thinking, to speak of an objective dialectic, to speak of nature as dialectical in itself. The dialectic emerged in the relation and not in the object or subject in itself. It was impossible to detach subject from object, or to know definitely what either would be in itself without the other. All that man could say about nature was generated by his interaction with it. He could not be the detached observer and know nature apart from his knowledge of it. Even in affirming the priority of nature to mind, he knew it was only possible to do so in and through nature as known by mind. Nature, as known, was a product of human society. Nowhere could the line between the two be precisely laid down. Knowledge of nature was mediated by the labour process. In its historical development, the labour process not only generated economic systems, but mathematics and the sciences. Emphasizing the full extent of the role played by social labour in the history of knowledge, Caudwell wrote: Once established, the labour process, extending as remotely as observation of the stars, as widely as organisation of all human relations, and as abstractly as the invention of numbers, gathers and accumulates truth. Faster and faster it proliferates and moves. The bare organism is today from birth faced with an enormous accumulation of social truth in the form of buildings, laws, books, machines, political forms, tools, engineering works, complete sciences. All these arise from co- operation; all are social and common. In this sense, all natural things were artificial. Nature could only be for man in and through his interaction with it. Emphasising the essential role of such interaction, Caudwell stated bluntly: The dynamic subject-object relation generates all social products - cities, ships, nations, religions, the cosmos, human values. 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