10.29.05
Subject: Re: [kant] Historical materialism
From an exhange at the Kant at yahoo group on claims that Kant was a precursor to historical materialism (Allen Wood)
In a message dated 10/29/2005 7:16:51 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, merrillb@[xxx] writes:
Wood also discusses the issue [of historical materialism, and Kant as a precursor] at
>greater length in his (later) book on ethics.What is the title of this one?
Sorry, the book is Kant’s Ethical Thought, and the Hans Saner reference is Kant’s Political Thought. Saner produces a critical view of the usual thinking about Kant’s relation to Adam Smith, placing the source of his views in the pre-critical period, but there are a number of important books in the area, whose titles escape me. It would be good to have a decent bibliography here. We know Hegel’s reading of the English economists, Kant’s is less transparent, at least to me. But, as with Thomas Paine, and indeed Adam Smith himself, Kant’s classical liberalism came during that brief interval when this liberalism was still radical thinking, indeed revolutionary, witness their views on the French Revolution. It barely lasted a decade or so in that form, and soon Adam Smith is taken as a conservative liberal bastion during the Restoration as the left shifts into the proto-Marxist mode.
The question arises, what do we mean by historical materialism??? And what exactly is the nature of Wood’s leftist perspective? Some Marxists would tend to take Wood’s idea of Kant as a precursor of said ‘historical materialism’ to mean that somehow Marx superceded Kant! The relation of the two is complex. To me, despite his key insights, Marx never survived Hegel, and one could only wish that he had been more clearsighted on Kant.
Quite obviously the issue of ‘classical liberalism’ is a touchy one for leftists, to say the least. Wood is also placing Kant in the context of the development of modern biology. A book like Peter McLaughlin’s Kant’s Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation (Lewisten, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990) explores that post-Newtonian generation, and Kant’s attempt to handle the issues of teleology.
Kant produces a complete methodology to deal with teleology but has problems in actually using it on specific cases!!! His essay on history stumbles on the right approach, but his data is premature, and he muses about laws of history, then brilliantly catches himself with a ‘third antinomy’ reflection, ‘regular movement in the play of freedom’. The ‘causality of freedom’ is of course the hippopotamus with two heads, the inevitable no-no, that shortcircuits all theory. The later version of this is Popper’s critique of Marx in his Poverty of Historicism. But Kant’s fuller version is a tour de force because he invokes ‘Big History’ via the contradiction.
Kant’s essay on history suggests a form of ‘historical materialism’ that is not Marxist, and non-Hegelian both. This however could never be a reductionist perspective that eliminates ethics. So I am not sure where Wood is coming from.
However, a close reading of that essay shows that Kant is as much asking a question, as promoting a specific view. He knows that it is difficult to resolve the question of historical teleology, and yet knows that it is somehow there.
As you may know I claim to resolve this issue in my material on Kant’s Challenge, and in the process claim to resolve this issue of historical teleology in the one ingenious and simple resolution of the antinomies of teleological judgment, a drumbeat or ‘discrete-continuous model’. You have to get the knack of separating history into two levels without succumbing to metaphysics. This kind of model produces a ‘teleology tracker-approximator’, and that clarifies the issue, and exposes the teleological howlers that vitiate all systems here, including Marx’s.
This confirms Kant’s suspicion that the data required to solve the problem was still inadequate, with his resolve to throw the question into the future. Two centuries later we can see just how intuitively right that hesitation was. It needs a long study.
Hegel, for all his brilliance, still can’t quite get it straight and tries to make ‘dialectic’ the workhorse of evolution. It won’t work. Kant’s pre-Hegelian gesture is potentially the right one. And Marx’s metaphysics of revolution is simply ill-conceived,though not totally with insights (!!), and we see still to this day the hopeless confusion of justifying revolutionary futurism with teleological projections. Deadly. You must consider my Oedipus Effect issue, and its remedy.
Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ has perhaps confused the issue for many. The similar ‘asocial sociability’ in Kant coexists uncomfortably with Kant’s more cautious sense that a larger process must be at work. He is right! Thus his essay threatens to transcend itself on the spot, a point lost on many commentators.
The factor of ‘asocial sociability’ is insufficient to resolve the question of historical directionality. True, warfare might lead to the impulse of trans-statist federalism, but the real macroevolution of society requires a more explicit version of directionality. Kant sensed this, but was not equipped to produce the right answer to his own question. And he himself implies this.
What I do is simply explore the first paragraph of Kant’s essay which instinctively stumbles on the right answer. Then I go my own way, grateful for Kant’s methodology in a void which contains the right approach, although Kant didn’t use it!
Note its resemblance to a version of the Third Antinomy. But projecting that onto history requires caution.
I think my ‘eonic model’ hits the bullseye of finding the right approach, in the context of actual historical data, to the paradox of random ‘asocial sociability’ and some larger directional process fulfilling the ‘evolution of freedom’ concept latent in that paragraph.
We NEVER tackle teleology directly, only indirectly with a buffered medium of empirically demonstrable directionality. Never! Don’t fall for theologians lusting over teleology as Godism. It is as deadly as anything from Marxism.
Teleology will degenerate into propaganda and ideology almost at once. Teleological metaphysics, in history, is simple ideological football, and noone gets it right, as Kant quite senses. Popper and Isaiah Berlin bring this theme for our times, but Kant had a broader idea, and didn’t make the critique of historicism, in Popper’s sense, grounds for rejecting Big History.
So between Kant and Marx we have the most sublime (meaning, fearfully awesome) example of the antinomy of teleological judgment, with Hegel’s end of history the wild card in between. Between the two we can bring in a critical view of Hegel, rescuing some of his insights, but freeing ourselves from his mistakes.
The problem everyone has is distinguishing teleology from economic ‘historical materialism’ . The pseudo-teleology of economic systems wrecks every attempt at a system. Even Marx who attempts to cut the Gordian knot tends to flounder in the confusions of the economic interpretation of history. He is so allergic to idealism that he dumbs down his key insights via
Feuerbach, although a strong case could and has been made that he is a distorted ‘transcendental idealist’ (not an idealist!!! There could be a historical materialist transcendental idealist, ????) who fumbles the ball on that very question.
So one has to resolve also the problem of that economic thinking and separate it from any statement about Big History, which is what Kant is really asking for.
By the way, the material in my World History and The Eonic Effect, on all this is in the process of coming online and you will be able to explore the extensive treatment of just this question from my perspective. This book is designed modular style as several sub-books, one of them Descent of Man Revisited. This material goes into the whole question at length. Kant’s Challenge Resolved!!! I will post a link when this is ready.
All these questions are of moment for the current confusion of evolutionary theory, and the resemblance of natural selection to the conflict concepts in classical liberals and Hegel is no accident. More on that some other time.
A huge amount of material is about to come online at my website, on this issue. In the meantime see
http://www.history-and-evolution.com/kant/index.htm
I am reposting this at my blog: http://darwiniana.com
Comment there if you like.