05.02.07
Kant and historical materialism
An email to the Kant at yahoogroups listserve on a discussion of Kant, Marx, ideology, historical/economic theories…directly relevant to questions of evolution
The discussion of Kant and historical materialism never reached closure here, perhaps in part because of the ambiguous overtones of the term, and the distractions of old disputes (some with me), harking all the way back to Kant-L.
Allen Wood in various books, e.g. his recent book, Kant, pursues the idea of Kant’s views on history as a sort of proto-’historical materialism’, Kant as some precursor of Marx (?). I am not quite clear as to Wood’s ideological orientations, but the implication of his analysis seems to indicate that he accepts some sort of ‘economic interpretation of history’, as with Marx. And this somehow gets connected with the treatment of ‘unsocial sociability’ in Kant’s essay on history, as if this could be seen as an intuition on the way to Marx. This then gets connected with a kind of teleological mystique, in the context of Kant’s otherwise extremely careful and austere discourse on teleological judgments: the driving force of this ‘historical materialism’ is the process of social antagonism, or whatever. Is Wood confused? He has historical materialism mixed up with the very ideology Marx wished to expose.
The whole discussion, to me, is hopelessly confused, and puts a wrong focus on ‘unsocial sociability’, leaving Kant stranded in vulgar Adam Smith land, where the deeper meaning of his essay has been lost. After all the care and meticulous attention to critique, the net result of Kant’s views on history are thus taken to be at the lowest common denominator of social conflict, ‘unsocial sociability’, the fumbled football passing from Adam Smith, to Darwin, in the confusions of economic ideology and evolutionary theory.
Kant deserves something better than that.
Allen Wood seems to forget that if Kant is such an economic theorist, he hardly anticipates Marx, who was a critic of the ideology of the Adam Smith heritage. Marxists, after all, would consider Kant a bourgeois ideologist, and given his remarks on ‘unsocial sociability’ (or at least the fetishistic way Kant studies take that idea) it would be hard to clear Kant of the charge.
Thus the attempt to look at Kant in terms of ‘historical materialism’ doesn’t really go anywhere, the more so since ‘unsocial sociability’ is not up to the job of macro-historical explanation. Kant might well be taken as an historical naturalist, speaking, after all, of ‘nature’s secret plan’.
In my own work, I have always claimed to have solved this question by going in a different direction, the eonic effect, a non-random pattern that fits Kant’s rubric question. If you read Kant’s essay on history you detect an important ambiguity, in the form of an implicit question Kant is asking, in between his ruminations on ‘unsocial sociability’. I have many webpages on this, Kant’s challenge, Kant’s question, and much else. We can do better justice to Kant by examing the facts of history in order to answer the question that he is asking, and which he cast into the future, it being still impossible to answer in the context of Kant’s historical period.
This beautiful resolution of the problem demands relief from the ‘unsocial sociability’ remarks, and that’s all they are, remarks, in the middle of the real solution which Kant intuits in the first paragraph of his essay.
Since this material deviates from the reign of Kant dogma and the academic necessity of defending Kant to the last detail, it has never really had a hearing in Kant circles, which is unfortunate since the ‘eonic model’ is in many ways more Kantian than Kant, and shows a way to fulfill what I consider Kant’s real intent and meaning.
In a word, why not be done with this nonsense erected around ‘unsocial sociability’. It reduces Kant to another ‘base and vulgar authors’ denounced by Marx as those who perfume the scorpion.
Another barrier in the way here is the way the question of evolution is brought in, controversially, too controversial for academic Kant circles, where the pretense of Kant as some proto-Darwinist is seriously maintained by some. Or denied by others in private.
It is hard to see how anyone could take Kant as a precursor of Darwin.
The point that I was making here is that we can’t separate history from earlier evolution (of man) and that it is precisely in the ‘macro’ history seen in the eonic historical analysis of the ‘eonic effect’ that we find the resolution of Kant’s challenge, and a clue to the hidden dynamic of human evolution.
Because of all these surrounding controversies an elegant solution to the issues of Kant on history has been lost in the woodwork, in the hopeless endeavors of so-called philosophy.
http://history-and-evolution.com/2nd/chapthree3_1.htm
http://history-and-evolution.com/2nd/chapthree3_1_1.htm
After that, try reading
http://history-and-evolution.com/2nd/intro1_2_3.htm
(Botched Theories and The Coefficient of Murder)
John Landon