Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism

‘Could we please hypothetically imagine that an actual paradigm shift takes place, and it becomes widely understood that materialism … cannot account for the existence of consciousness, and therefore must be rejected as false. … How would Marxist thought be affected if materialism was acknowledged to be
incoherent?’

– ‘Eunomiacus’, Reddit, r/Marxism, 2023

Consciousness – does this need to be said? – could hardly be more important for Marxists^[1]A short version of this essay was presented at the London Historical Materialism Conference in 2023. I am very grateful to all those respondents for their thoughts. Above all, I’m grateful to David … Continue reading. As radicals for whom theory and practice must be inextricable, it has been key to our investigations, for purposes of analysis and intervention. The Communist Manifesto sternly demands of its reader consciousness appropriate to the epochal task of rupture. DuBois, Luxemburg, Lenin, Gramsci in hand, we strive to outline consciousness in its popular forms, to make sense of its contradictions and aporia, to diagnose its ‘dual’ nature, to evaluate its manipulations by and recalcitrance against ruling-class ideologies. Aided by insights from psychoanalysis, we consider how consciousness might change, and/or be resistant to the change desperately warranted. As historical materialists, we investigate consciousness in its complex relations with – to use the hoary and frequently unhelpful shorthand – society’s underlying ‘economic base’. Debates follow, such as those between (to put it crudely) ‘spontaneists’ and ‘vanguardists’, over how consciousness moves, for example, or between Maoists and Deutscherites over limits to conscious, voluntarist will. Such disputes all bespeak a shared key aim: consciousness’s development, a striving to enrich its emancipatory content and form, to develop a class consciousness. The Left’s familiarity with such issues might manifest in a scholarly deep dive into the hermeneutics of social structure and political agency, and/or in sobbing with frustration because one’s uncle doggedly believes patently mendacious racist lies.

 

 

Of course, what social theorists mean by ‘consciousness’ is generally different from what psychoanalysts mean, which is not the same as the usage of neuroscientists, itself distinct from that of philosophers, and so on, even if there is overlap and/or descriptions of similar or inextricable phenomena from distinct vantage points. What’s notable is how little the underlying problem of consciousness tout court registers on the Left. That is, putting to one side its specifics and politics, why is there consciousness full stop? Why, and how, are any of us capable of self-reflective thought? Of experiencing emotion, ratiocination, preference, cold, whim, melancholy, joy? Anything at all? With important exceptions, for the most part the Left has remained untroubled by the voluminous and vexed ruminations on these issues. Untroubled and worse.

To be fair, the field is recondite and hard-going. Considering consciousness au fond necessarily tends to a level of abstraction that can feel far removed from urgent questions of political consciousness. And it’s perfectly possible to work with sophisticated models of consciousness and its contestation at such lived day-to-day levels, never detained by wonder that we are conscious beings at all. Or wondering if indeed we are.

Historical materialism holds that people’s material activities are at the source of their social existence. In what follows, Engels, who coined the term ‘historical materialism’, will come under critical scrutiny, so it’s worth approving his own definition here. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, he describes

the view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and into the struggles of these classes against one another.

Hence, especially given transformative aspirations, the crucial place of class consciousness. It need not be the duty of a socialist to be interested in more abstract, fundamental questions of consciousness. None of us can investigate everything. Asked why and how are we conscious at all, the theorist of political consciousness may simply shrug and proceed on the basis that this fact is a given. And, in everyday life, it may be.

But of course connections must exist between the mystery at its most abstract and those sharper, pressing issues of concrete consciousness. And what won’t wash is to suggest that the former question is irrelevant or unimportant, or to revert to a sneer. Let alone to simply assume or insist that the issue is solved because something something materialism. Strikingly, however, that is not only a typical response but, if anything, the default position. Far from agreeing to bracket the underlying question, for large swathes of the Marxist Left, especially the activist Left, some such answer is simply assumed. This is a tenet of what we might call ‘folk Marxism’.

As a matter of intellectual seriousness, this should not be allowed to stand. An investigation could be diagnostically useful, uncovering a reliance of much actually existing Marxism on presumptions and inherited myths. If folk Marxism is wrong or inadequate in this particular case, what other ‘obvious’ presuppositions stand in the way of critical thought, and thus practice? Further, though this piece will only touch on these in passing, it’s a contention here that there are in fact, inevitably, political and practical ramifications to such seemingly abstract philosophical questions. If nothing else, as Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss very shrewdly point out in ‘Reason is Red’ – from a philosophical position otherwise clearly at odds with what is advanced here – a Marxism that brackets metaphysics will always be ‘question-begging’, and ‘always searches for a borrowed normativity not derived from “what is” but only chosen according to one’s own whim’. Metaphysics is ultimately necessary fully to earn, rather than just ‘borrow’, our political ethics.

Folk Marxism misses what is at stake here. Which, beyond foundations of normativity, is what it is to be human, and the nature of reality itself.

 

 

For the later Engels, in 1886’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, philosophy is divided into ‘two great camps’: materialism and idealism. Marxism, of course, is firmly in the former. Engels approvingly cites Feuerbach:

[T]he material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality; and … our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter.

Terminology is a minefield in this area. To complicate matters, some in the Marxist tradition, following Engels, use the term ‘metaphysical materialism’ disparagingly in distinction from a putative post-Engels holism notionally opposed to reductive and simplistic materialist theories, often called dialectical materialism. Though he did not use that latter term, Engels inaugurated this usage of ‘metaphysical materialism’, which even Helena Sheehan, otherwise a subtle defender of Engels from many brickbats, calls ‘most unfortunate’, using ‘metaphysics’ ‘in a particularly eccentric way way that has been followed by subsequent generations of Marxists … bringing serious confusion into the development of the tradition through his fixation on the terminology of dialectics.’ Even more than Engels, Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, is the font of this confusing usage, as when he approvingly describes how Engels

refutes and ridicules the dogmatic, metaphysical materialist Dühring … To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, ie, truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth and it is this ‘one way or another’ which distinguishes the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialectical materialist Engels.

But, though with different dynamics than its imagined ‘metaphysical’ other, such ‘DiaMat’ is itself also predicated on a fundamental ontology of matter, as Lenin’s formulation makes clear. Such a grundnorm is, in usual contemporary philosophical parlance, a metaphysical materialism. This confusion is one route, within the shared sociolect of Marxism, by which vulgar and reductive materialism are often conflated with metaphysical materialism. In what follows, I use the term metaphysical materialism in its conventional philosophical sense.

 

 

In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Ralph Miliband calmly distinguishes different levels of ambitions for materialism.

In its broadest sense, materialism contends that whatever exists just is, or at least depends upon, matter. (In its more general form it claims that all reality is essentially material; in its more specific form, that human reality is). In the Marxist tradition, materialism has normally been of the weaker, non-reductive kind.

But Miliband allows that the concept has been deployed in ‘various ways’. Where ‘[f]or Marx’s practical materialism, which is restricted to the social sphere (including of course natural science) and where “matter” is to be understood in the sense of “social practice”, no particular difficulty arises’ with the definition of matter. ‘But from Engels on, Marxist materialism has more global pretensions’.

One doesn’t have to sign up in toto to (or even claim entirely to understand) Reiner Schürmann’s dense reading of Marx to share his frustration, in a lecture of 1977, not only over misreadings of Marx, in which ‘reality’ means ‘matter’, which ‘totally miss’ Marx’s operations, but ‘how frequent they are in Marxist literature!’ Such ‘pretensions’ are now, while not universal, a Marxist common sense. And as is usually the case for common sense, they are an enemy to thought and rigour.

Sometimes a philosophical co-constitution of Marxist and some such metaphysics is explicit. Sean Creaven, in his 1999 PhD thesis and the book later derived from it, is unusually clear and adamant both on the distinction and the necessary ‘exposition and defence of two kinds of materialism – ontological (or philosophical) and analytical-explanatory (i.e. anthropological and sociological)’ as ‘consistent with one another’. Indeed, more than consistent:

The fundamental point of contact between ontological materialism and explanatory … materialism is … in the simple fact that the laws or tendencies of humanity’s biological nature are basic to the laws of socio-cultural and socio-historical reality. There is, in short, a ‘chain of being’ extending from physico-chemical reality to biological reality and then to socio-cultural reality.

The connection, even when clearly made, is rarely so systematically argued. Alex Callinicos in Marxism and Philosophy, explicitly repudiating what he calls ‘physicalism’ – ‘the demand for a reduction of the human sciences to physics’ – describes an important sense not only in which ‘Marxism is a materialism’, but ‘is “ontological materialism”, or naturalism’, according to which ‘methodological principles relevant to the formulation and evaluation of theoretical discourses are the same in both the natural and the social sciences’. Sean Sayers, too, distinguishes ‘physicalism’ from ‘a non-mechanistic and non-physicalist form of materialism’, of which he sees Engels as a key developer. Further, he defends materialism, including Marxist materialism, as insisting that ‘[a]ll reality is material; there is nothing in the world but matter in motion’. Sebastiano Timpanaro, in ‘Considerations on Materialism’, combatively defends a totalising, bottom-up materialism, predicated ‘above all’ on the ‘acknowledgement of the priority of nature over “mind”, or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level’. Timpanaro praises Engels (and latterly Lenin), for extending the, as he sees it, incomplete paradigm of Marx from a merely human theory into an overarching ontology.

Marxism was born as an affirmation of the decisive primacy of the socio-economic level over juridical, political and cultural phenomena, and as an affirmation of the historicity of the economy … If a critique of anthropocentrism and an emphasis on the conditioning of man by nature are considered essential to materialism, it must be said that Marxism, especially in its first phase … is not materialism proper … Even more than by Marx – though evidently not in dissent from him – the need for the construction of a materialism which was not purely socio-economic but also ‘natural’ was felt by Engels, and this was a great merit of his.

Of course, and crucially, there is no sharp line between such explicit articulations and the mere en passant statements of an assumed case. And it’s precisely when argument is not deemed necessary that ideology is at its strongest. Justin Holt’s introductory text, The Social Thought of Karl Marx, for example, devotes a chapter to Marx’s materialism, merely glossing it briefly as a subset of ‘a theory that considers the entire existence of people and the universe as physical matter’. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes ‘the principles of historical materialism’ as being ‘laid out in Engels’s 1878 book … Anti-Dühring’, thus locating the locus classicus of the approach in a text that in fact, and far more problematically, revolves around a metaphysical materialism (if not by that name). The predication of Marxism on metaphysical materialism is often not even stated, simply given – if sometimes hazily, possibly unconsciously – by non-Marxists and, more importantly, by many Marxists.

Such folk Marxism has an enormous influence on the culture of the Left. Where the elision of historical and metaphysical materialism is challenged, or even simply raised, the folk Marxist must defend it. When the Reddit-user ‘Eunomiacus’ put the question which is the epigraph to this essay, one respondent thundered: ‘Without materialism, Marxism will lose its grounding and will become a swamp of reformism.’

 

 

The issue of consciousness tout court has always been central to the ontological questions here, precisely because it is so evasive, particularly to materialism. Sayers, in his spirited if ultimately unconvincing defence of Engels, describes this as the ‘old problems of the relation of the mental and physical’, the fact that the ‘“psychological” standpoint cannot be captured in purely physical terms’. Thus it’s on these grounds that the folk Marxist must engage.

There are very many examples out there of such folk Marxism, of which what follows are only a representative few. In 2021, the journal Marxist Student, an official outlet of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist International, pedagogically explained its position on ‘materialism’ thus:

The major cleavage in the field of philosophy is over the question of the relationship between mind and matter. Materialists, such as Hobbes, Diderot, and Marx, argue that matter (e.g. the material world) is primary: the world around us exists, and it can be known. Moreover, they argue that there is no real distinction between mind and matter – just that matter organised in a certain way results in mind and consciousness.

In ‘Marx and Historical Materialism’, written for the activist group RS21, Rob Hoveman put it that ‘Marx believed that human beings were part of nature, not beings placed on Earth by God’, that though distinct from other animals, ‘human beings as … part of the natural world [were] beings who were wholly physical in nature’. And in such wholly physical creatures, ‘quantitative change (such as the evolution of the brain) could turn into qualitative change (such as consciousness)’.

Tellingly, the title of Hoveman’s piece, republished in the US Socialist Worker, was tweaked to ‘Marxism and the Meaning of Materialism’ – the important adjective ‘historical’ now lost, the text’s elision between distinct kinds of materialisms was now negatively enshrined in the title. For Alan Woods and Ted Grant, in their 1995 Reason in Revolt,

the great strides forward made by science … provide striking confirmation of the materialist outlook. This is particularly the case in relation to the controversies over the brain and neurobiology. The last hiding place of idealism is under attack … What we call ‘mind’ is just the mode of existence of the brain.

The antique ‘mind-body problem’, then, while hardly easy for philosophers of any stamp, particularly vexes metaphysical materialism. Historical materialism, meanwhile, must deploy its intense and necessary focus on the problematic of consciousness, its content and social traction. To the extent that the latter materialism is, per Timpanaro, a derived function of the former, this raises a profound difficulty internal to Marxism.

In response we tend to see the insistence on the distinction between, on the one hand, ‘physicalism’, or ‘reductionism’, or ‘neopositivism’, as the remarkable Marxist philosopher Evald Ilyenkov called his own foil, or ‘mechanical’ or ‘mechanistic materialism,’ or ‘vulgar materialism’, or even, confusingly, that so-called ‘metaphysical materialism’, from succulent, nimble, ‘dialectical’, worthy Marxist materialism on the other. In whatever nuances the various former might differ, their main role in these models is as the obverse of the desired ‘non-mechanistic, non-reductive form of philosophical materialism’ that Sayers credits to Engels.

This is an attempted inoculation against the antique canard that, in the ignorant swaggering words of one critic, ‘[t]he realm of pure human thought and idea is relegated by the Marxist to a state of jejune non-effectuality’. Engels himself, in his commitment to materialism, long ago preemptively countered that, insisting that he wasn’t arguing that the ‘economic factor is the only determining one … systems of dogma also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular’. But what does – what can – this mean? In such a model, where does consciousness come from?

 

In a classic exposition of Marxist psychology, Alexsei Leontyev, in Problems of the Development of Mind describes ‘the transition to consciousness’ as

the beginning of a new, higher stage in the evolution of the psyche. In contrast to the psychic reflection peculiar to animals, conscious reflection is reflection of material reality in its separateness from the subject’s … attitudes to it … The cause underlying the humanising of man’s animal-like ancestors is the emergence of labour and the formation of human society on its basis … The origin and development of labour, this first and basic condition for the existence of man [sic], led to a change in his brain

In Activity and Consciousness, Leontyev sees ‘individual consciousness as a specifically human form of the subjective reflection of objective reality’ and that it

may be understood only as the product of those relations and mediacies that arise in the course of the establishment and development of society … the study of the phenomena of consciousness … allows us to understand them only on the condition that man’s activity itself is regarded as a process included in the system of relations, a process that realises his social being, which is the means of his existence also as a natural, corporeal creature.

Compare this to Callinicos arguing – on the offhand basis of ontological materialism – against the reduction of the human sciences to physics, because ‘what sets man [sic] off from the rest of the natural world is his ability to act upon and transform his natural environment’ (an inflated distinction in any case), and that

[o]n the basis of this metabolism … there arise structures which in their complexity and capacity for internally generated transformation are unique to human beings.

Thus we’re presented with consciousness as an evolved, intrinsically social phenomenon, and one that reacts back on the structures out of which it emerged. Now, this is not worthless. Particularly, this model can be foil to those – perfectly genuine – more mechanical traditions, Marxist or not, that implicitly or explicitly downplay (few would explicitly deny) interaction between ‘consciousness’ and the world, for a more simplistic unilinear theory, wherein consciousness ‘reflects’ material reality. One seminal such is Stalin’s balefully authoritative 1938 ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, a vulgarisation of Lenin’s already questionable approach to these matters. According to Stalin,

Marxist philosophical materialism holds that matter, nature, being, is an objective reality existing outside and independent of our consciousness; that matter is primary, since it is the source of sensations, ideas, consciousness, and that consciousness is secondary, derivative, since it is a reflection of matter, a reflection of being … Further, if nature, being, the material world, is primary, and consciousness, thought, is secondary, derivative; if the material world represents objective reality existing independently of the consciousness of men, while consciousness is a reflection of this objective reality, it follows that the material life of society, its being, is also primary, and its spiritual life secondary, derivative, and that the material life of society is an objective reality existing independently of the will of men.

The Leontyevian ruminations can be useful rebukes to such formulations. So far, so adequate. But however persuasive and useful they are, those ruminations are models, depictions of consciousness and/or its development in and as motion, of how it acts, is acted on and interacts, and by and with what. What they are not, however, are true theories of what consciousness is. To be fair, not for nothing is this known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.

 

 

The paths of this hard problem are very well-trodden to those au fait with philosophies of consciousness, yet likely to be abstruse to the newcomer. This essay is written particularly for the open-minded non-specialist Marxist, perhaps especially if they’re aware of having tamped down theoretical disquiet over some of these issues, for whom an introduction to the terrain and its stakes will be helpful. The text is dense with quotations, both to make the case that folk Marxism is a thing, and to underscore the scale of the issues it does not notice, or purports to have solved. I hammer in particular at that hard problem, to a degree perhaps obnoxious to those who know the debates. I do so hardly with any claim to solve it, but precisely because the key schism here is less between those with different suggested answers, than those who encounter it as the problem it emphatically and irreducibly is, and those who, for whatever reasons, shrug it away or make out no real there there. I hope those already familiar will be patient.

Though even for them it might be worth revisiting old ground. More so than with perhaps any other issue, it can take repeated encounters with the hard problem for it to even register as it should, as a fundamental epistemic issue – and thus a metaphysical one. And paradoxically, real advances in neuroscience may only increase that barrier. As one online commenter (‘rustgarden’) shrewdly puts it below a recent gloss on this issue by Bernardo Kastrup, ‘[t]he reality of the Hard Problem is going to become even more difficult to convey to people as technology finds more sophisticated correlations’ between brain states and experiences – to the point where they might allow, for example, reasonable guesstimates of experienced sound from brainwaves. ‘I expect that physicalists will soon point to examples like this to say that the hard problem has been solved, even though it still doesn’t explain anything of how we could get quality from quantity.’

It might be after many such shrugs and wonderings about what the big deal is that one abruptly experiences the kind of crisis that Tad DeLay sees as crucial to critical thought, inaugurating the appropriate inability to explain or wave the explanatory gap between matter and consciousness away. Not merely formally to be familiar with the question, but, to deploy Heinlein’s useful neologism for understanding powerfully, intuitively, and so deeply that the knowledge becomes part of you, to grok it, is to experience the debate as the existential question it is. When that explanatory gap is felt, the result can be wracking and exhilarating. (The philosophical thunderbolt that such a felt encounter with these issues occasioned in me has been reconfigurative.)

 

 

To quote David Chalmers, who formulated the term, the ‘hard problem’ is that of

how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world … When I see … photons hit my eyes – they send a signal that goes up the optic nerve … This is how science might describe me from the objective point of view. But there’s also a subjective point of view. There’s what it feels like for the agent who is seeing the scene. When I see you, I see colors, I see shapes, I have an experience from a first-person point of view. There’s something it’s like to be me.

Predictably, the riposte ‘What hard problem?’ is not uncommon. It is a category error, claims Massimo Pigliucci. ‘Why phenomenal consciousness exists is a typical question for evolutionary biology’, he writes. This leaves one with the ghastly sense that for him that is the only field for which it is appropriate, as when he question-beggingly insists that ‘[c]onsciousness is a biological phenomenon, so its appearance in a certain lineage of hominids seems to be squarely a matter for evolutionary biology’. And all that can be reasonably asked, he insists, is the nuts-and-bolts of how it works with regard to associated brain states.

[W]hat it is like [to be conscious] is like an experience … It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you. To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word ‘explanation’.

To be clear, and bracketing all of Pigliucci’s unwarranted assumptions, if this were to mean any such question is beyond what he calls the ‘principle of scientific naturalism’, by which he means metaphysical materialism (though the two are importantly not, in fact, necessarily coterminous), he might be making a plausible argument. But this is not his case, as his repeated analogies between the heart and, not the brain, but consciousness itself, show. ‘If you were asking how the heart works, you’d be turning to anatomy and molecular biology, and I see no reason things should be different in the case of consciousness.’

Of course the hard problem is the fact that conscious phenomenal experience is not biology – certainly not as it is traditionally understood and scientifically studied in terms of causalities of matter and energy – even if it is predicated on or inextricable from it. No recourse to Searle can help Pigliucci: if it is in fact true that ‘where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality’, this is precisely to restate the mystery, not to suggest that it can be tidied away as some ‘experience’ neither in biological science’s purview yet not bespeaking any limits thereto.

What subjectivity is it, after all, that is there to experience the experience?

 

 

Here, to sketch out the parameters of the field, a brief excursus on the controversial, criticised and much abused concept of the philosophical (or p-) zombie is necessary – and, at least for some of us, highly useful. This (admittedly, to the horror fan, poorly named) thought experiment is a creature physically, and in terms of all observable behaviour, identical to a human being, but without interiority and subjective experience – absent consciousness. A flawless biological automaton.

The p-zombie is a vexed creature. There are those (including me) for whom it is an invaluable heuristic, while for others it is a pointless and unhelpful chimera. To be clear, in brief defence of the concept, the claim is not, of course, that any such zombies exist (an oddly common misunderstanding), but that imagining them can help highlight what is at stake – which is precisely the subjectivity they do not have, and yet which no non-zombie interlocutor could know they lack. P-zombies illustrate that we can coherently imagine beings physically identical to humans and possessing and performing all the physical processes of human life, but lacking consciousness. Which at the very least implies that consciousness might involve non-physical properties or processes. In Michael Tye’s words, ‘[t]he point is that the idea of a zombie makes sense, and it makes sense because of how we think of phenomenal consciousness.’ Absent it, they would still interact with the world seemingly as we do, no less ‘efficiently’ and no less seemingly human.

Which is why, among the uses of this thought experiment is that it problematises the gestures at evolution or biology to deflate the hard problem. Contrary to Pigliucci’s claim that consciousness’s ‘raison d’etre can … be accounted for on evolutionary grounds’, the behaviour we associate with consciousness can be so accounted, and is highly adaptive. (We’ll bracket here the fact that ‘adaptation’ and the fact of the adapted/-ing subject raise major philosophical questions.) But consciousness itself, as Chalmers argues until he’s hoarse, is not presumed in such adaptive zombie behaviour, nor can it be derived from it. If, as Pigliucci clearly believes, consciousness in this case is definitionally inextricable from the behaviour, that is simply to restate the problem as its own solution. If adaptive behaviour of a certain complexity demands consciousness, as is implied in Pigliucci’s mention of a ‘raison d’etre’, two questions follow: why?; and much more tellingly, the hard problem itself – how does that ‘necessary’ consciousness arise from unconscious matter?

Meanwhile, Daniel Dennett’s claim that any ‘putative contrast between zombies and conscious beings is illusory’, presented as if it bracingly upends a pointless paradigm, attempts to solve the problem by universalising zombiehood, and – though he would contest this – eradicating consciousness. (His claim that those who think they can imagine such zombies in fact cannot and ‘invariably … end up imagining something that violates their own definition’ is related, but much more straightforwardly false.)

 

 

The hard problem is one of what are called qualia: subjective, conscious experiences. Why is any physical state one of not just behaviour, but consciousness? How does one derive not merely the objective motion in brains that accompanies but the subjective experience itself from matter in motion?

In urgently trying to communicate this, scientists and philosophers often wax poetic – how do we experience and what is our experience of the scent of this rare flower, the taste of that expensive wine, the subtle hues of the sunset-lit other? ‘There is a great deal to say for the view that accompanying every joy and, generally, every movement of consciousness, there is a closely connected but imperceptible movement of atoms in the cerebrum’, as Erich Becher wrote in 1925. ‘But joy is not this movement’.

It’s no surprise that the agitated consciousness-theorist gropes for rare and splendid sensory events in the attempt to invoke appropriate ‘thaumazein’, the wonder that Aristotle saw as the root of philosophy, at our subjectivity. No less philosophically extraordinary, of course, is our experience of pulling on our pants, the desire to blow one’s nose, the taste of cheap bread. We cannot but take ourselves for granted. But the fact of our experiences at all, our first-person subjectivity, if we are able to stop and consider them, are profoundly mysterious – particularly for the materialist.

Though Chalmers coined the term ‘hard problem’ in 1994, and has developed it and doggedly insisted on its centrality ever since, he was certainly not the first to note the issue. In 1714, Leibniz, in The Monadology, observed that ‘perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes’. He presented his now-notorious mill.

[S]upposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain perception.

In 1865, the philosopher and historian of materialism Friedrich Lange declared a refutation of materialism ‘to which there is no answer’: ‘Consciousness cannot be explained out of material movements.’ Max Horkheimer in his ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, underlines that ‘this argument has been tirelessly repeated ever since the debate on materialism in 1854’. This he illustrates with a remarkable cavalcade of quotations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those from Becher and Lange, above^[2]I’m grateful to Ray Brassier for bringing this to my attention. Small wonder that, for him, it is ‘somewhat galling that David Chalmers’s reputation as a significant philosopher rests on … Continue reading. The foundations for this insight can even be discerned more than two millennia ago, in Aristotle’s distinction in the Generation of Animals between all ‘those principles whose activity is bodily’ and which therefore ‘cannot exist without a body’ and cannot enter it from without, and ‘reason’ (or ‘thought’) ‘alone’, which is left ‘so to enter and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connexion with the activity of reason’. It is very old news, in the words of one of Horkheimer’s sources Harmann, that materialism

cannot only not prove, it cannot even suggest principles for understanding how a process in consciousness could derive from spatio-temporal processes in the nervous system, how even the simplest content of sensation really arises. Between the one and the other there is a gap which is completely impervious to reason, with no connecting link that we can discern.

This latter fact, as Pannekoek puts it in his perspicacious and exciting, though ultimately frustrating, 1942 piece ‘Materialism and Historical Materialism’, is that ‘ideas are different from bile … mind cannot simply be put into the same category with force or energy’. That this is a problem of kind is key.

 

 

The inextricability of this hard problem with questions of metaphysics opens out into a vast debate. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, whose tv series Closer to Truth is an invaluable repository of open-minded discussion on these issues, recently published a book-length overview of the field, ‘A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications’. Kuhn gathers nine broad explanatory paradigms – ‘Materialism’, ‘Non-Reductive Physicalism’, ‘Quantum’, ‘Integrated Information Theory’, ‘Panpsychisms’, ‘Monisms’, ‘Dualisms’, ‘Idealisms’, ‘Anomalous & Altered States’, and ‘Challenge’. The first of these, Materialism, reflecting its state as the single dominant philosophy on this, and indeed on all scientific questions, hardly just among Marxists, is further divided into 10 subsets. Within each set and subset Kuhn includes several theorists and/or approaches, ending up with brief but lucid glosses on no fewer than 225 theories of consciousness.

This obviously ranges far beyond our scope here. For all the gallons of ink spilt, for all the vital distinctions within each camp, for all the tempestuous debates over the esoterica, there are essentially two and a half broad underlying metaphysics by which one can approach this issue. (And yes, for all those positions that claim to bypass this fundamental distinction, too.)

The first is ontological, metaphysical materialism of the type discussed above. This, the same model underpinning folk Marxism, is by far the most common view for scientists studying consciousness. Though substantially less dominant, it is – just – the majority view, too, among professional philosophers: according to the 2020 PhilPapers Survey of Anglophone academic philosophers, 51.9 per cent of respondents accepted or leaned towards a ‘physicalist’ – materialist – philosophy of mind.

The second metaphysical grundnorm is some form of idealist explanation. Here what this means is, to quote Chalmers again, ‘the thesis that the universe is fundamentally mental, or perhaps that all concrete facts are grounded in mental facts’. A large number of the theories that Kuhn categorises using other terms – such as, for example, David Bentley Hart’s monism – are, whatever their other specificities, predicated on a fundamentally idealist metaphysics.

Of course, for a folk-Marxist audience, the very term ‘idealist’ is an immediate red flag, and, indeed, self-evidently wrong. Without making any positive claims for idealism here, it’s worth underlining the extent to which this nostrum is often predicated on ignorance and philosophical philistinism, and not only within Marxism. As Tom Rockmore puts it, many

observers are clear that idealism has been overcome but unclear about what idealists believe. Thus [G.E.] Moore famously thinks that all idealists share the disbelief in the reality of the external world. The charm of this unqualified claim is only slightly tarnished by the inability to name anyone in the history of the tradition who has ever held it.

The remainder – that is, the half of a metaphysics – comprises substance-dualist explanations, for which, crudely, in a material universe, mental phenomena are irreducibly non-physical, thus distinguishing the physical brain from the thinking, feeling mind. Such dualism certainly works as a vague holding theory and description, one that evades the impasse of materialism and the scandal of idealism, but it’s hard to conceive of a systematically dualist philosophy of mind, and thus of reality, in which one or other of the two poles does not ultimately assert ontological primacy. Whether or not it’s true that nature, as has been said, abhors a dualism, certainly, as Hart insists, reason does. The simple fact that the two, mind and brain, are related – indeed, that any two phenomena in the same universe are related – militates against any such foundational dualism.

This is what Hart, in All Things Are Full of Gods, calls

the fallacy of terminal dualism … the mistake of thinking any dualistic account of the relation of mind to matter could constitute an adequate explanation rather than a mere deferral of the problem to another level of mystery … in the end, a dualism can never be more than a provisional answer to any question; for two qualitatively different relata to be reconciled, there must be some broader, simpler, more encompassing unity in which they participate, some more basic ontological ground, a shared medium underlying both and repugnant to neither … some metaphysical or logical medium that comprises them both in itself and provides the basis of their congruity. Only at that level can one hope for any sort of answer to the ‘problem of mind.’ All final answers are in some way monistic, or they aren’t final.

In this sense at least Engels is clearly right about the two great camps. At a metaphysical level of high abstraction, it does, indeed, come down to idealism or materialism.

 

 

Of course, those attempts to bypass this Scylla and Charybdis are common enough. Thus claim some proponents of sensorimotor theory, neutral monism, Structural Qualia, Integrated Information Theory, some versions of panpsychism, according to which consciousness is a fundamental, pervasive feature of the universe, possessed at least in inchoate form by all things, including inanimate objects. Most of the particularities of such theories is beyond us, except to stress that the claims of any or all such to evade that dyad – let alone to solve the hard problem – are not convincing.

Panpsychism in particular, to engage in another brief excursus, can exercise a powerful pull on those justly troubled by the ‘hard question’, and it comes in both self-styled idealist and physicalist versions. Thus for example Michael Tye turned panpsychist in part because phenomenal consciousness is ‘apparently not admitting of borderline cases’. That is it either is or is not – drawing on the p-zombie, Tye is compelling against the counterargument that such consciousness might be ‘vague’. Which is to say that it cannot rigorously be described as having evolved (a position related to a critique of ‘emergence’ developed below). Thus Tye was led to panpsychism as ‘the best solution’, ‘to say that consciousness did not emerge and moreover consciousness is not reducible to anything physical … [but] is a fundamental intrinsic feature of basic micro-entities. It was there all along at the absolute bedrock of reality’.

Of course, this raises very many other questions about the nature of such phenomenal consciousness at various levels of complexity and/or fundamentality, as Tye is clear. And more to the point, such ‘materialist panpsychism’ is simply asserted, and in no way more logically compelling than idealism: as Hart asks, why is it ‘more coherent’ if one ‘phrases the matter in terms of mental “properties” inhering in matter’, rather than saying ‘that the “physical” or “material” subsists as a property of mind?’ As the stopgap for metaphysical materialism as which it functions, then, the materialism of such ‘materialist’ panpsychism is not logically derived, but merely a rearguard expression of preference. Further, Hart points out:

[I]f you’re willing to concede that matter is already in some sense mind at this point we’re discussing dispositions or potentials in matter so far outside the mechanistic paradigm [which is to say metaphysical materialism] that terms like … ‘naturalism’ have been rendered otiose, since apparently they exclude nothing – except, perhaps, some hazy pictures of an anthropomorphic God and an ectoplasmic soul inherited from the religion of the nursery or the philosophy of Descartes. It seems rather pointless so vigilantly to guard one’s metaphysics against incursions of supernaturalism in a world that can accommodate sentient sand. … [Because] for panpsychism to serve as a truly physicalist rather than classically idealist theory, it would have to posit the presence of real agency all the way down … [ and w]e’re merely deferring the question of mind to the subatomic level.

The fundamental – Engelsian – materialist/idealist schism thus remains. All of which is why it isn’t meant as a snide gotcha but with amused empathy to wonder if the title of Tye’s essay – ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Panpyschism’ protests too much. Smacking as it does of disavowed – and entirely appropriate – worry.

 

 

How, then, do materialist theories of consciousness attempt to answer the hard problem? How can one make sense of that joy, say, not just as an inferable, socially contextual state in others but as an experienced experience, from a brain-state, and ultimately from physical atoms?

Most commonly by far, attempts from within metaphysical materialism are made by reference to ‘emergence’.

Emergence is the model by which the properties of a complex entity are greater than, and distinct, from those of its parts and underlying strata. As the obverse of reductionism, it has been a useful resource to materialist theories of consciousness, among much else.

Helena Sheehan, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, describes ‘Engels put[ting] the weight of his effort into differentiating between his materialism and theirs [his intellectual opponents], contrasting the new organicist and emergentist form of materialism with the old mechanistic and reductionist form’. S. A. Grave, in ‘The Marxist Theory of Matter and Mind’, of 1953, argues that

[w]hat Marxist materialism does hold as a first principle is that mind is derived from matter. Matter is temporally and causally prior … Mind (i.e. God) did not make matter … Matter did make mind. The production of mind by matter is however ‘dialectical’ not ‘mechanical’ … the emergence of life and mind from inanimate matter in progressive evolution is the emergence of radically new qualities wholly irreducible in nature to what has gone before.

Gail Edwards, decades later, in ‘Putting Critical Realism to Work for Education and Revolution’, drawing on the theories of critical realism, for which emergence is central, argues in similar fashion.

Properties and powers can emerge from reality’s underlying strata but are not reducible to them. People’s liabilities and powers are not determined by their biology, for example. Human reasons, intentions and consciousness emerge from, but are not reducible to, neurophysiological matter.

Beyond Marxism, and with a rather deflationary sense of emergence, materialist and physicist Sean Carroll describes consciousness as ‘one of these emergent phenomena that we find is a useful way of packaging reality’. For Mario Bunge’s ‘emergent materialism’, ‘mental states form a subset (albeit a very distinguished one) of brain states (which in turn are a subset of the state space of the whole animal)’, emergent in that it is ‘a property possessed by a system but not by its components’.

Emergence as a heuristic may well work as a ‘thick description’ here, in the sense used by Ryle and, especially, Clifford Geertz. It may, through a particular species of rich and granular description, vividly depict and contextualise the phenomenon of human consciousness, its historical, social and individual development, rise, and workings. What emergence is not, however, is explanation. It cannot answer the hard question. Further, it can only overcome the problems of metaphysical materialism by relying on gestural proclamations, vagueness, and folk-Marxist common sense.

Key to understanding this is the established distinction between weak and strong emergence. In the former, a system-level trait may not be obviously the result of its more fundamental components, but in principle, can be explained as such. In the latter, ‘micro-level principles are quite simply inadequate to account for the system’s behaviour as a whole’, in Paul Davies’ words. The emphasis is added to show: this is not merely a question of being an inadequate description.

As an illustration of emergence, Davies explains that while ‘water may be described as wet … it would be meaningless to ask whether a molecule of H₂O is wet’. However, this is weak emergence: counterintuitive as it may be ‘that the properties of two common gases, hydrogen and oxygen, can combine to form a liquid that is wet and a solid that expands when cooled’, as Kuhn points out, ‘physics and physical chemistry can explain all of this, in terms of atomic structures and bonding angles’. As Hart tartly observes, ‘[p]hysical properties derived from other physical properties – no great problem there. So long as this is all that’s meant by “emergence,” then the concept is as inoffensive as it is obvious.’

The qualities of consciousness, of course, are utterly different. But too often materialist and Marxist theorists act as if this is not the case. They segue blithely from examples of weak emergence to those of life, its own mystery, let alone consciousness, as if the materialist story of the latter is thus proved. Thus, from the remarkable (erstwhile Christian minister) Marxist John Lewis:

Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas, but their combination in certain proportions is water. Organic substances have quite different properties from inorganic and yet may be synthesised from the inorganic. Protoplasm … builds organic substances first into proteins and then into protoplasm which then exhibits the characteristics of life … Life is simply the property of a particular pattern of non-living parts, but its reality and novelty are undeniable. … [I]n the case of man [sic] we have … foresight and self-awareness … Marxism does not deny the reality of either life or mind. It asserts, however, that they are functions of highly organised matter on the organic level.

Decades later Sean Sayers would offer a similar narrative.

[A]ll biological entities … are made up of chemical constituents in the forms of atoms and molecules, and these in turn are composed of more fundamental physical particles. Nevertheless the concepts describing biological entities … are distinct from, and irreducible to, the concepts and laws of physics. … A biological organism is not a mere collection of chemical or physical constituents. … Similarly the behaviour of an organism can be explained only in terms of laws governing the organism as a whole. … Human beings are … biological organisms. … Nevertheless, human thought … cannot be described or understood as such in purely biological, let alone chemical or physical terms … To understand the activity of the brain, as the organ of thought, it must also be seen in its social and psychological context, in which the concepts and principles of neurophysiology are blind.

This last point is absolutely true. But it leaves the hard problem untouched, despite the claim that humans ‘are made up entirely of physical, chemical, biological constituents’. The hard problem is a logical/philosophical problem. ‘Historical, social and psychological context’ is an invaluable thick description, but that logical gap it does not come close to filling.

Still less is the hard problem one of insufficient data. Because this is a problem of category, a ‘fundamental epistemic question’, in Kastrup’s words, ‘not merely an operational or contingent one’, no amount of knowledge of the behaviour of particles either singly or in their interactions – nor of historical, social and psychological context – can possibly ‘explain’ consciousness in materialist or physicalist terms. This is not circular logic: it is not that consciousness is here defined as something beyond the purview of metaphysical materialism. Rather, if we accept the existence of consciousness (not a given, as will become clear), then it is inexplicable precisely according to the logic and categories espoused by metaphysical materialism (certainly absent such esoteric qualifications to the notion of ‘matter’ that i) the status of the resulting theory as ‘materialist’ is ultimately questionable, and ii) a whole host of new theoretical problems necessarily arise – see for example the brief discussion of panpsychism above). Recalling Pannekoek’s bile, ‘[m]atter’, in Colin McGinn’s provocative formulation, ‘is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness’. That it does seem to give birth to it is precisely the difficulty. None of this is to deny the inextricability of brain and mind, nor to suggest that consciousness is free-floating from biology. Consciousness does in fact emerge, in one way, but this is clearly not ‘weak emergence’. And ‘strong emergence’ qua theory cannot and, despite some protestations to the contrary by metaphysical materialists, never will explain it.

Worse, in Bentley Hart’s words again, with my emphasis, this ‘is a perfect example of precisely the kind of problem that vague talk of “emergence” only allows us to evade’. ‘Emergence’ is perhaps the most common wand currently available to wave to achieve such a trick, though it is only one of the available strategies. Others, not mutually exclusive, include italicisation, emphatic deployments of ‘neither’, ‘nor’, ‘not only’ and ‘but both’ or similar, and/or the fairy-dust of too-easily-invoked ‘dialectics’.

‘Thought, mind,’ John Lewis insists, ‘is not a substance added to matter, it is a function of a certain kind of matter.’ Lewis is not the only writer who seems to believe that restating a problem with a flourish solves it. To take a more recent example, from one perfectly clear that thought ‘cannot be explained in narrowly neurophysiological terms’, the capacity of humans to self-consciously reflect, offers Sayers in ‘Engels and Materialism’,

is only relatively autonomous from the natural conditions and social practices from which it develops and on which it is based. It is not a merely biological ability, but nor is it an ability that entirely separates us from the material world and transcends its processes. It is an ability which emerges and develops, gradually and by degrees, in the course of biological and historical evolution … [Engels’] aim in putting forward the idea of a dialectic in nature is not to idealise nature, but rather to naturalise the mental.

The most systematic – and sometimes rich – exposition of ‘emergentist Marxism’, Creaven’s, tells the same story with the same examples. Similarly inadequately to the hard problem. (It’s telling that Creaven is heavily and explicitly indebted to Dennett, whose thin emergentism, to the extent that it is there, is nowhere near as usefully developed as Creaven’s own, and whose theory of consciousness neither relies on nor validates such a model. And is, as we will see, for all its influence, hollow.)

Pannekoek saw the problem clearly from within Marxism, but ultimately failed to follow through on its ramifications. Instead, he ostentatiously wields dialectics in his own emergent story.

It is metaphysical and non-dialectical to identify thought because it is the product of brain processes with the products of other organs, or to assume that mind, because it is a quality of material substance, is a characteristic quality of all matter. It is also false to think that because mind is something other than matter, it must absolutely and totally differ from it, that there is no transition to and connection with both so that a dualism of mind and matter, reaching down to the atoms, remains sharp and unbridgeable. From the standpoint of dialectics, mind incorporates all those phenomena we call mental which, however, cannot be carried beyond their actual existence in the lowest living animals. There the term mind becomes questionable, because the spiritual phenomena disappear gradually into mere sense perception, into the simple forms of life. The characteristic quality ‘spirit’, which is or is not there, does not exist in nature; spirit is just a name we attach to a number of definite phenomena, some of which we understand clearly, others only partly. Here life itself offers a close analogy. Proceeding from the smallest microscopic organism to still smaller invisible bacteria, we finally come to very complicated albuminous molecules that fall within the sphere of chemistry. Where living matter ceases to exist and dead matter begins cannot be determined; phenomena change gradually, become simplified, are still analogous and are yet already different. This does not mean that we are unable to ascertain demarcation lines; it is simply a fact that nature knows no borders.

In his fascinating and conflicted 1945 essay ‘Le problème de la conscience dans la biologie contemporaine’ (‘The Problem of Consciousness in Contemporary Biology’), the extraordinary Marxist and surrealist Pierre Naville, as a deployer himself of dialectical techniques, was ruthless in diagnosing the anxiety of materialism that provokes such techniques, as well as their inadequacy.

How can you reduce the miracle of a plant’s growth, an animal’s adaptation or a child’s activity to the principles governing the clash of two balls? … So what a relief it was when Bergsonian sophisms, which were destined to end up in the most uncertain theology, came to the rescue of failing idealism! People enthusiastically ran after mechanism and materialism, and confused the problem to their heart’s content. But what is surprising, once again, is to see Marxists taking their place in the chorus, by the circuitous route of dialectics, which can do nothing about it!

Nor will the related process of focusing on praxis-as-materiality/materiality-as-praxis square this circle. To be emphatic: such an approach – as for example in Vygotsky’s insistence that ‘[w]e need to concentrate not on the product of development but on the very process by which the higher forms are established’ – can be invaluable. It enriches thick description against currents of Marxist (and other) reductionism, not least in seeing human consciousness as intrinsically historical and sociological. What it cannot do is unlock the hard problem. Tran Duc Thao’s claim, in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that ‘[t]he notion of production takes into full account the enigma of consciousness’ is an unconvincing claim in a mostly remarkable book, one clear about the scale of the problem.

In On Marx, Paula Allman suggests that Marx’s theory of consciousness ‘is actually a theory of praxis’, and ‘when people sensuously engage with the material world, their thoughts and feelings, their objectives and subjective responses, are produced simultaneously’. Presumably aware that the astonishing final three words in that passage somewhat apologetically wave away precisely the mystery, Allman allows that ‘thinking in terms of Marx’s theory of consciousness … can be difficult to express in human language’. That is undoubtedly true. But to the extent that it purports to be a theory (rather, again, than thick description), this too is word magic, of an apophatic kind.

Hart puts the problem trenchantly in The Experience of God (a book that, the allergic reaction its title might provoke in folk Marxism notwithstanding, should be required reading for anyone concerned with materialism and consciousness). With particular regard to emergence, ‘one is really just talking about some marvelously inexplicable transition from the undirected, mindless causality of mechanistic matter to the intentional unity of consciousness. Talk of emergence in purely physical terms, then, really does not seem conspicuously better than talk of magic.’

Particularly and particularly clearly with respect to consciousness, strong emergence tout court, Hart would later write, in All Things Are Full of Gods,

would be the appearance of entirely novel propensities that are wholly unrelated to the properties whose conjunction resulted in them – rather like the chanting of certain words, conjoined to certain herbs and eyes of newt and the light of a full moon, producing a magic castle. If we properly distinguish weak from strong emergence, what we’ll find is that instances of the former abound – … nature more or less consists in them – but that instances of the latter are absolutely nowhere to be found, and that what might occasionally look like a case of strong emergence is actually a case of formal causation.

Though this claim is routinely contested on the Left, as Naville has the clarity to point out, it is logically incontestable that there is simply no way, without some intervening mediation, ‘dialectics’ or what have you notwithstanding, that consciousness can ‘emerge’ from inert physical matter that possesses no such implicit properties. This ‘emergence’ is lux ex tenebris – a vulgar idealism at the heart of notionally sophisticated materialism. The folk Marxist, indeed the folk materialist, ‘answers’ to this do not explain anything: they merely evade the question.

 

 

With strong emergence banished, and if materialism, consciously or not, is predicated on metaphysical materialism – which it need not be – a current arises that Galen Strawson calls ‘the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought’. This is the turn to eliminative materialism.

In the words of Paul Churchland, one of its most esteemed representatives, alongside his wife Patricia Churchland, ‘[e]liminative materialism is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory … so fundamentally defective that both [its] principles and … ontology … will eventually be displaced … by completed neuroscience.’ This solves the problem by dispensing with emergence, by dispensing with consciousness. As Avrum Stroll puts it, ‘The correct view … according to eliminative materialism, is that there are no mental states in the folk-psychological sense.’ For eliminativists, too, there is no hard problem – because there is no consciousness at all (certainly in the sense with which that problem is concerned). At least they, unlike Pigliucci and other ‘what hard problem?’-ists keen to disassociate themselves from eliminativism, recognise that the subjective, interiority itself, cannot be compartmentalised off as irrelevant. It must be banished.

A few necessary caveats. There is, of course, no unanimity among the eliminativists on the exact parameters of their position(s). There’s disagreement about who is or is not, precisely speaking, an ‘eliminativist’. Is Dennett an ‘eliminativist’ or a closely related ‘illusionist’, and what, and how important and fundamental, are the distinctions? There are differences among these radicals over whether what are being ‘eliminated’ are ‘propositional states’ – the mental states expressed by verbs such as ‘believe x’, ‘fear y’, etcetera – and/or qualia. Dennett is particularly emphatic on that latter point: ‘contrary to what seems obvious at first blush’, he writes in ‘Quining Qualia’, ‘there simply are no qualia at all’.

For Paul Churchland, ‘[t]he concepts of folk psychology – belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy, and so on – await a similar fate’ to belief in witches – ‘elimination from our serious ontology’. Of course, such mental states comprise consciousness not merely as we understand but as we experience it. Still, some, such as Dennett, claim that they are not saying consciousness does not exist, but that they would undermine its fallacies of self, the ‘Cartesian theatre’, that it is ‘not what it seems’. The latter claim, however, is either thin to the point of vacuous and obviously true – who would deny that there are mysteries to consciousness? – or ‘strong’, and false, and ultimately about the non-existence of consciousness tout court. No wonder there are less shy eliminativists, like Michael Graziano, for whom ‘[c]onsciousness doesn’t happen’. On such a basis, Thomas Metzinger in Being No One encourages us to ‘give up the idea that we ever had anything like conscious minds in the first place’.

The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self … An essence. But … the brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain…You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate … and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there.

For Keith Frankish, ‘[p]henomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains’.

It is phenomenal consciousness that I believe is illusory. For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t coloured and they don’t compose a colourful inner image.

One reason for eliminativism’s vogue is doubtless because it is scandalous and exciting, pour épater le mainstream. As such, it might even operate in some version as a not-uninteresting philosophical provocation – Chalmer’s p-zombies are, effectively, the subjects of eliminativism with enough insightless insight not to be fooled by their own supposed selves. Perhaps the most satisfying presentation of eliminativism is as the reveal in Thomas Ligotti’s horror short story ‘The Shadow, the Darkness’, proving yet again that flawed or fallacious theories can be the bases of rich art. But beyond this bohemian disreputability, it is also true that part of the appeal of eliminativism, counterintuitive as it is, is that it is more rigorous qua materialist metaphysics than emergence or similar magic. Kastrup lays out Frankish’s position as follows (emphasis in the original).

1) Material things, in themselves, have no qualitative properties (like color, flavor, etc.), only our perceptions of them do;
2) The brain is a material thing;
From 1) and 2), the brain has no qualitative properties;
3) Experience is reducible to the brain;
From 3) and 4), experience cannot entail qualitative properties.
Ergo, phenomenal consciousness cannot exist; it must, instead, be an illusion.

This gloss of Frankish is highly critical, but it is not the logic of the argument that Kastrup contests, but its predicates. As Hart points out, ‘[e]liminativists grasp – as many materialists are unable or unwilling to do – that a truly consistent materialism must inevitably reach just such a logical terminus.’

 

 

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that in the work of some of the more ruthless Marxist materialists writing on consciousness, a certain proto-eliminativism can be discerned. For the leftist neuropsychiatrist Peter Stirling, according to a personal communication, ‘if you read about neuro-philosophy, one of the only people who makes sense and knows both fields and writes beautifully is Patricia Churchland’. Naville, eighty years ago, though he does not explicitly eliminate consciousness, is palpably theoretically uneasy about its existence. In a remarkable prefiguration of Churchlandian dismissal of ‘folk psychology’, he ruefully allows that ‘confining ourselves to using a given of acquired language’, ‘we will continue to use’ the word ‘consciousness’ ‘and we will wait until historical progress perhaps allows it to be replaced by notions more directly inspired by the realities in questions’. To avoid falling back into idealism, for Naville, ‘there is only one path left for objective psychology, the one opened up by behaviourism, which does not consider psychology as the study of “mental facts”, even if they are determined by being, but as the study of observable behaviour’ – stripped of any interiority. In this way, focusing on behaviour ‘[t]here is no problem of consciousness’.

‘We know that the metaphysicians,’ Naville writes, ‘inconsolable at having been forced to divorce themselves from psychology, did not give up so easily. Bergson, one of the great modern renovators of metaphysics, started from the pseudo-“immediate data of consciousness”.’ But the point is that whatever its manifold mysteries, in its very strangeness, notwithstanding that we can be wrong about our own thoughts, in the fact that even if it does in fact comprise illusions so too does it that subjectivity which can be fooled thereby, this is not only our only access to any data whatsoever, but is, in fact, immediate data, too.

‘[T]he existentialists and phenomenologists have quite simply resurrected the Cartesian Cogito, making it the starting point for a new ontology’, Naville complains. But one certainly doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, have a naïve pre-Freudian view, sans the unconscious, narrowly rationalist, etcetera, to acknowledge that consciousness is occurring. There is one thin sense in which we should, indeed, all be Cartesian: we might well quibble with the ‘therefore’ in Cogito Ergo Sum, but by virtue of quibbling with, or considering, anything at all, ever, the cogito stands. I – we – think. Neurological data are invaluable – indispensable – but they neither explain nor eliminate such qualia.

Where the eliminative considers a ‘thought’ or ‘emotion’ better expressed in terms of underlying processes, such qualia, whatever their associated brain states – and/or historical and social context – are phenomena, and irreducibly so. Consciousness. Which repudiates eliminative materialism. When Dennett describes the ‘illusion of consciousness’, this raises the question of what is being ‘fooled’ by that illusion, if not a consciousness?

In Consciousness Explained, he claims that

When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behaviour that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings into the world its own ‘good’. That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favourable, the unfavourable and the neutral. As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its events begin creating reasons for it, whether or not the creature can fully recognise them. The first reasons pre-existed their own recognition.

Curiously, here Dennett almost precisely replicates, from a materialist ontology, the trick diagnosed by Thao in Heidegger:

the actual problem posed by the structure of intentionality – to know that the world is ideally in my consciousness when I am really in it – finds its immediate solution … by a simple reordering of words, transforms the expression ‘the world in which I am’ into a moment of myself [though, as above, for Dennett an ‘illusory’ moment] inasmuch as I am precisely being-in-the-world.

If, as Thao puts it in his earlier work, this is ‘the magic of language’, Dennett’s is fairly crude prestidigitation. Of all the philosophical heavy lifting being asked of the words and formulations in Dennett’s position – poor bloated ‘good’, ‘favourable’, ‘interests’ and ‘reasons’ – perhaps the most remarkable is that blithe ‘creates a point of view’. Here, again, the problem is restated as if it were its own solution.

In such fashion, eliminativism thus throws up its own category errors and sleights whenever it must deal with the inescapable facts of thought, including about itself. (This is not quite the facile barb that if thought is an illusion so are the thoughts about eliminativism.)

Some of these, to be generous, might be explained away as ordinary-language shorthands, as when Patricia Churchland – by no means an unserious thinker – suggests in a 2018 interview that rather than ‘free will’ we should use the ‘fruitful and rewarding concept’ of ‘self-control’. This she suggests because there are ‘particular brain regions’ that ‘cooperate and interact in order to suppress certain impulses that would be unproductive, for example’. Such a model of course raises questions such as ‘Unproductive according to what ends?’ and ‘Ends reached by what agent?’, and indeed is predicated on a ‘self’ to exercise control. This may be merely a holding term, but that would be to attempt to suppress a subjectivity that can only always-already return. When Paul Churchland suggests that with the elimination of folk psychology ‘[o]ur private introspection will … be transformed, and may be profoundly enhanced by reason’, it’s notable that the privacy and introspection of that private introspection smuggles subjectivity back in.

Repeating the same manoeuvre, this time as ludicrous farce, is Brian Tomasik’s effort in ‘The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness’ – as part of his commitment to ‘effective altruism’, no less – to describe embodying an eliminativist epistemology, which he calls the physical stance.

Try adopting the physical stance as you go about your day. When you have a particular feeling or become aware of a particular object, think about what kinds of neural operations are occurring in your head … My experience with this exercise is that it soon becomes less weird … It feels more intuitive that, yes, I am an active, intelligent collection of cells whose sharing and processing of signals constitutes the inner life of my mind and allows for a vast repertoire of behaviors. Worries that I should be a zombie vanish, because I can feel what it’s like to be physics for what it is. In fact, being physics feels just like it always did when I thought consciousness was somehow special … Yes, the neurons in my brain are doing particular kinds of processing that other clumps of atoms in the world are not, and this explains why these thoughts show up in my head and not in the floor or a beetle outside. … We can import some phenomenal-stance intuitions when thinking about what parts of physics we want to think of as ‘suffering’, but we don’t trip ourselves up over trying to pigeonhole suffering as being something other than an attribution we make to whirlpools within the ocean of physics.

The risibly vulgar voluntarism here lies in thinking that despite the fact that, as Paul Churchland himself has it, ‘folk psychology has enjoyed no significant changes in well over 2,000 years’, you can think yourself out of this subjectivity, constitutive of human consciousness as we and the eliminativists know it, if you try real hard. Tomasik breezily disgraces the very philosophy he purports to practice in his own exposition thereof. He reduces eliminative materialism to ‘believing in physicalism’. He seems not to grasp that those very moments of reflection he describes as his success are their own inevitable failure. To think oneself ‘a chunk of physics’ is still to think, and to have a ‘oneself’ to do it with, with the interiority and subjectivity eliminativism eliminates. Tomasik’s banalised eliminativism slides into a distinct position: that ‘being physics feels just like it always did when I thought consciousness was something special.’ This is to return to a Pigliucci-ite ‘what hard problem?’ standpoint. Which, especially for a self-described eliminativist, immediately raises the question ‘Feels like to what?’

In Richard Seymour’s words, ‘Eliminative materialism presupposes the very subject that it tries to eliminate: for there to be a theatre of consciousness which beguiles us with impressions derived from physical impulses there has to be an observer to be beguiled’. To quote Hart, at his most waspish,

the arcane idea that somewhere out there, in principle at least, there exists an infinite narrative of physical particularities that could supplant all references to unified states of consciousness, without any empirical remainder – is not so much audacious as hallucinatory. At the apex of the mind, so to speak, there is the experience of consciousness as an absolutely singular and indivisible reality, which no inventory of material constituents and physical events will ever be able to eliminate. Here again, and as nowhere else, we are dealing with an irreducibly primordial datum.

 

 

This is the ‘qualiaphilia’ criticised by Dennett – who disputes that qualia exist – and (though not from within eliminativism) by Ray Brassier. For Brassier, whose critical engagement is forbidding, the

appeal to the self-evident transparency of appearance conveniently dispenses with the need for justification by insisting that we all already know ‘what it’s like’ for something to appear to us, or for something ‘to be like’ something for us … It is this seeming, and not its constitutive conditions, that has to be accounted for ‘in its own terms’ … But what are ‘their own terms’? Precisely the terms concomitant with the first-person phenomenological point of view. … But how exactly are we supposed to describe appearance strictly in its own terms, without smuggling in any extrinsic, objectifying factors?

I want to suggest that this is an implicit and, in this discussion, common elision of understanding with experience. We see it also when Metzinger decries a sense of

ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organised form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what ‘first-person perspective’ (or … ‘consciousness’) means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.

To argue that qualia and mental states, those definitional phenomena of internal subjectivity, are not merely sometimes mistaken in content or misleading in form but do not exist is to deny not the content but the fact of consciousness as it is experienced. To acknowledge this phenomenal experience is not of course to ludicrously suggest that all beliefs or feelings, including about oneself, are reasonable, or accurate, or adequate, or helpful. But some eliminationists, however, such as Michael Graziano, even more explicitly conflate that absurd conclusion with the critique of phenomenal consciousness itself – subjectivity. Consciousness is ‘a mistaken construct’. ‘He starts by talking about subjective experience – i.e. phenomenal consciousness, which is what science can’t explain’, Kastrup glosses, ‘just to end up explaining something else entirely: our ability to cognise ourselves as agents and metacognitively represent our own mental contents.’ Effectively this is to inflate the errancy or elusive nature of beliefs and feelings into the eliminationist conclusion that they are not ‘really’, in fact, beliefs or feelings. As Hart puts it with regard to Dennett, because no imagined subject

has any infallibly direct access to his private intuitions, hence … there are no qualia at all. But this is simply a non-sequitur. No one doubts that qualitative states of consciousness can be altered by changes both in the objects of perception or in one’s organs of perception, or that they may not be constant throughout one’s life; but that does not mean that such states do not exist.

Indeed, errancies, alterations and inadequacies are inextricable to phenomenal consciousness, and should be probed. This leaves space to make part of the exploration of actually-existing phenomenal consciousness ideology, the deep ‘real abstractions’ which structure the experiences of and consciousness in social life, and perhaps even also relationships between what Wilfred Sellars (an important figure to eliminativism) called the ‘scientific’ and the ‘manifest image’ of the world and humanity, including the latter’s inadequacies and folk psychological aspects.

But the fundamental point about qualia is not that we already know ‘what it’s like’ to experience them. Indeed, that is an extraordinary mystery. Rather, it is simply that it is like something at all. If that is true – and it is true – then eliminativism is false.

 

 

So what now?

Metaphysical idealism of course remains a bogeyman for folk Marxism. Anecdotally, this is evidenced in the repeated and scornful deployment in Marxist spaces (echoing Einstein’s uneasy response to quantum entanglement) of the adjective ‘spooky’ at the suggestion of any possible non-material elements to consciousness. A spectre is haunting materialism.

This is no surprise. And common sense, including Marxist common sense, will not help here. (When did it ever?) The thunderbolt of the hard problem is real, for all the various edgelord assertions that it is not a problem at all. But this is a negative satori for the materialist, and no particular positive paradigm leaps forward to solve the problem.

‘I do not claim that idealism is plausible’, Chalmers allows in his own long rumination ‘Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem’. But he goes on. ‘No position on the mind-body problem is plausible.’ That indeed is the rub.

Materialism: implausible. Dualism: implausible. Idealism: implausible …. None of the above: implausible. But the probabilities of all these views get a boost from the fact that one … must be true. Idealism is not significantly less plausible than its main competitors … there is a non-negligible probability that it is true.

There are, if you like, no good options, certainly for the folk Marxist. This is one of those times when the task must be, in the words of a fashionable left injunction regularly intoned but rarely observed, to stay with the trouble.

 

 

Of course one might argue that moving away from a metaphysically materialist theory of the mind needn’t make a great difference to life ‘as a Marxist’. As has already been argued, this is not an obligatory field of interest, and its absence as such need not cause any particular hiccups in the work of solidarity and activism, or intellectual or artistic pursuits. Three Marxists can act together in solidarity, can theorise and debate in comradely fashion on the Temporal Single Systems approach to the transformation problem, or the role of uneven and combined development to modern imperialism, or strategies for Palestine solidarity, while two fervently disagree on the metaphysics of consciousness, and the third doesn’t care. Certainly, however, accepting the inadequacy of metaphysical materialism should impact work closer to that wheelhouse. One might suggest, for example, and for all Naville’s concerns about this very move, that in placing centrally the conscious experience of the world, such a paradigm could usefully promote a revival of a Marxist phenomenology, say. A return, perhaps, to Michel Henry’s Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, or Tran Duc Thao, whose text’s dutiful stated commitments to metaphysical materialism are largely epiphenomenal to the succulence of the work therein. And the criticism of metaphysical materialist theories of consciousness here clearly has implications for knotted (and ill-named) questions of ‘free will’ and determinism and even ethics, among other areas, which are obviously relevant to Marxism.

Most directly of all, Richard Seymour, also quaking from his encounter with the Hart Event, has begun to produce remarkable pieces contesting any notion that such a philosophical turn is too abstract to much impact Marxism as theory or practice. In fact this essay is, to some extent, intended to serve as a post-factum philosophical ground-clearing for Seymour’s recent work on a Marxist approach adequate to such consciousness of consciousness, in ‘Marxism and Freedom’; ‘Freedom and Consciousness’; ‘Duel and Duality, or, Degrowth and Dialectics’; his extended series on ‘How to Survive a Mass Extinction’; and the remarkable short piece ‘Mailbag #2: Theological Remnant’, all on Patreon.

 

 

Of course the claims here should all stand or fall on their own merits. That said, Marxism – though, to be fair, hardly Marxism alone – is a field in which authority and permission have outsized weight. So the question of Marx’s own position is important, and vexed.

How right is Etienne Balibar to say, in The Philosophy of Marx, that ‘Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter’?

With close reading and insight, Sheehan contends at length ‘that Marx considered himself to be in accord with Engels in philosophical orientation and shared his explicit materialism and his conception of the dialectics of nature’. But this claim is ultimately unconvincing. Sheehans’ citations of Marx’s attention to technology and science are underwhelming on this point, unless metaphysical non-materialism and naturalism are automatically counterposed, which need not be the case. Her claim that ‘Marx repeatedly stated his explicit adherence to materialism’ is true, of course, but the question is precisely what materialism? She makes the important point that Marx did not disassociate himself from Engels’ Anti-Dühring, with its explicitly metaphysical materialism, and indeed he read and commented on the manuscript. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is evidence of his agreement therewith: George Kline has listed several other possible reasons for this absence of dispute, among them a disinclination to argue over abstruse matters; loyalty to a friend; and/or even a sense that Engels’ work on this was too weak to be worth debating.

That last claim in particular seems a stretch. As well as commenting on Engels’s work in these areas, he encouraged him towards the project that would ultimately become the Dialectics of Nature. And Marx himself certainly at times expressed views that seem to chime with Engels’s project to extend their historic system beyond that sphere, or understand it as derived from beyond it: ‘My standpoint’, he wrote in the 1867 preface to the German edition of Capital volume one, for example, is one ‘from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history’. But his own investment in these questions was never equal to Engels’, and what’s of even more importance is that whatever Marx thought of Engels’ system, or thought he thought, if anything, while it is not irrelevant, is by no means the close of the debate. Marx is hardly the only thinker sometimes wrong about aspects of their own thought, after all.

It might mollify heresy-hunters to go back to Miliband’s observations about the less ambitious materialisms in Marxism. We must remember that there have always been traditions and understandings of Marxism, including that of Marx, not, even explicitly not, predicated on metaphysical materialism, in sharp contradistinction to the more voluble and familiar folk Marxism. Leszek Kolakowski distinguishes Plekhanov from ‘most West European Marxists’ of his time, ‘who saw no logical connection between Marxism as a theory of social development and any particular view of epistemological or metaphysical questions’. Terry Eagleton, in his recent book on the subject, Materialism, puts the matter simply and unapologetically: ‘Historical materialism is not an ontological affair. It does not assert that everything is made out of matter’.

Max Horkheimer, in 1933, in ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, which does not focus exclusively on Marxist materialism but does encompass it, and draws explicitly and fruitfully on dialectical methods, criticises ‘most of the philosophical representatives of materialism’ for ‘starting with metaphysical questions and setting up their own theses in opposition to idealist positions’. By contrast, for Horkheimer, ‘any interpretation of the materialist orientation of thought which sees it primarily as an answer to metaphysical questions will be unable to grasp those characteristics of it which are the most important ones today’. This philosophical humility was spurred in Horkheimer precisely by the intractability for materialism of the hard problem, as his extensive quotations illustrate. His position, in Marlte Frøslee Ibsen’s words, is ‘the meta-philosophical insight that human thought is always conditioned by the social and historical context from which it emerges’ – a more humble historical materialism than metaphysical.

Such insights, of course, don’t necessarily presume any particular positive alternative theories, but their rejection of metaphysical materialism is hardly unimportant. Particularly when a similar move is detectable in Marx himself.

In his 2018 piece ‘Is Marx a Materialist’, the philosopher, including of Marxism, Tom Rockmore, in a close examination, finds that Marx ‘says little about materialism’, and ‘he does not use this term in standard fashion as an ontological designation for the building blocks of the universe’. He is clear that metaphysical materialism ‘is unimportant for Marx but central for Marxism’ – what I’ve called folk Marxism. It’s such an understanding that, in his introduction to Paul Reitter’s 2024 translation of Capital volume one, leads Paul North to discern in Marx the position that ‘materialism … should … mean neither the primacy of basic physical elements like atoms, nor the primacy of objects presented to human perception, but “sensuous practical activity by human beings”’.

Earlier substantial important work in the vein of Rockmore’s includes Frederick Bender’s 1983 ‘Marx, Materialism and the Limits of Philosophy’ and Alison Assiter’s 1979 ‘Philosophical Materialism or the Materialist Conception of History’. Marx’s historical materialism, Bender writes, ‘contains certain basic assumptions about man [sic], society, labor, production and nature’, but is predicated on a ‘social-historical, rather than philosophical, sense of the term “materialism”’. For Bender, indeed, Marx himself – if incompletely – in his system (which is to say, whatever he may have believed) repudiated ontological materialism and metaphysics tout court. For Assiter, similarly, Marx’s materialism ‘is not a philosophical materialism of any sort’, ‘is neither an ontological nor an epistemological theory, but is an empirical theory about human beings in history’, which ‘should be construed as a kind of “naturalism”’. Alfred Schmidt, in his brilliant and seminal The Concept of Nature in Marx, titles the trenchant opening chapter, and dedicates its textual and logical argument to presenting, ‘The Non-Ontological Character of Marxist Materialism’. For Marx’s model, he argues, it is ‘[n]ot the abstract nature of matter, but the concrete nature of social practice is the true subject and basis of materialist theory’.

Even Naville himself, countervailing his draw to a proto-eliminativism, at least glimpses an alternative, similarly anti-metaphysical, and thus as has been argued here more fruitful, way out of the impasse. His focus on ‘behaviour’ might diminish the importance of consciousness, but might also be, as he clearly hopes, a way to bypass the ontological questions it throws up: ‘[W]e consider it essential not to allow ourselves to be imposed upon by the great melodramas of metaphysics’.

The fact is that Marx, despite his background in philosophy, had no deep interest in metaphysics one way or another, particularly after the 1840s – again, whatever he may have thought he thought. His system was of a more limited kind. Kline, in his extremely important 1988 essay ‘The Myth of Marx’ Materialism’, assiduously taxonomises Marx’s uses of the term ‘material’, picking apart its various meanings, distinguishing Marx’s uses from Engels’, and persuasively denies that there ‘is evidence of, or support for, a materialist ontology provided by Marx’s colloquially “materialistic” turns of phrase’. Kline goes further, critically examining what he calls Engels’ ‘tendentious editing’ of Capital volume one in its English translation, comparing it to the first French translation, with which Marx was closely involved, to underline misleading ‘metaphysical’ implications that Engels brought into Marx’s text. Kline makes his conclusions as plain as he can:

I am denying that Marx, even the youngest Marx, was a philosophical materialist, i.e., a theorist who develops or defends a materialist ontology, asserting the ontological primacy of matter and explaining whatever appears to common sense to be non-material (e.g., thoughts, feelings, values, ideals, structures, laws) as manifestations, functions, or relational properties of ‘matter in motion’. Thus a less elliptical and more explicit, if also more unwieldy, formulation of my title would be ‘The Mythical Claim that Marx Developed or Defended a Materialist Ontology’.

 

 

Just as there is a cottage industry in Marxist attacks on Engels, so too is there in his defence, and, often concomitantly, in the minimisation of the distinctions between the two authors. No such police are needed here: Engels is indispensable to Marxism, often wildly ahead of his time, highly perspicacious. But his materialism was not identical to Marx’s. It went further – too far.

Engels’s apparently simple claim that ‘[m]atter is nothing but the totality of material things from which their concept is abstracted’ provokes Sheehan’s impressive exposition of a more nuanced Engels than is traditionally allowed, and chimes with a similar approach by Joseph Ferraro, in ‘Engels as an Ontological Materialist’, wherein he stresses elements of Engels’ materialism not as reductive but as ‘a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of matter and mind’ – at least potentially a less closed conception. Sheehan insists that for Engels, matter was not ‘a materia prima … a substratum’, but ‘an abstraction’ that ‘did not depend on a notion of prime matter’.

Still, and even where that might have led him in other directions, it is also the case that, in his own words, his materialism ‘means nothing more than the simple conception of nature just as it is, without alien addition’. Lying in bed he announced to himself that ‘the subject matter of natural science [is] matter in motion, bodies’. In his book on Feuerbach, Engels is clear that ‘our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain’.

Ferraro emphatically denies that Engels is an ontological materialist, and he and Sheehan certainly complicate the story. But the most generous statement we can make is that Engels can be ambiguous. It would be tendentious to deny, at minimum, a strong pull towards metaphysical materialism in Engels, even if it is also sometimes countervailed. That this has been a seminal reading of his texts is not mere misreading.

And in any case, however generous one is inclined to be to him, at issue here is less what he thought, than the elision of historical and metaphysical materialism overall. To the extent that Engels may have avoided this, he was right. To the extent that he succumbed, he was wrong. As, whatever his responsibility for it, is folk Marxism.

It’s no surprise that Engels, more than any other figure, haunts this problematic. The development of his metaphysical materialism was a multi-text project, of which the extraordinary, ambitious, insightful, tendentious and unfinished Dialectics of Nature remains a keystone. The sprawling debate around whether or not Engels’ application of dialectics to and discernment of dialectical motion in nature holds up and/or is dispensable to Marxism continues. The problem, for the metaphysically materialist Marxist, is that neither Yes nor No is an adequate answer. ‘On the one hand’, to quote Seymour (in a personal correspondence), ‘his extension of the dialectic to nature is “idealist”. On the other hand, his critics are “idealist” because … how can the dialectic apply only to human beings when humans are thoroughly material?’ Thus Gramsci, taking Lukacs to task for his criticism of the dialectics of nature: ‘[I]f human history should be conceived also as the history of nature, how can the dialectic be separated from nature?’ In fact, more than one solution to this conundrum is possible, from within historical materialism itself – but only at the expense of metaphysical materialism.

Some understanding of this, an obverse to folk Marxism, even survives in the swirl of what Brassier has called the ‘online orgy of stupidity’. In response to Eunomiacus’ question, certain Marxist interlocutors on Reddit were perfectly cheerful in proclaiming that ‘materialism isn’t necessarily an absolute metaphysical truth’’, or even that ‘[o]ntology doesn’t matter at all.’

 

 

Rather than anyone so admirably unflustered as these cheerful red Redditeers, who’d be justified in thinking this is an awful lot of sound and fury to argue for the obvious, these final remarks are addressed to my own past self and those in a similar place. Of whom I know there are many.

For a long time I proceeded according to folk Marxism, on the vague, gestural sense that historical materialism was undergirded by metaphysical materialism. This didn’t, I hope, and doesn’t, preclude having attempted worthwhile activism or writing. But it is not predicated on rigorous metaphysics. Which – as the anti-metaphysical historical materialists above might attest – is fine as far as it goes: but it is less so if it believes itself to be so predicated. And even in the best case, that can only go so far. Once you become interested in consciousness, then things tend to go bump in the night.

There is of course a rhetorical flex in claiming not to like the implications of your own analysis, but to push on regardless, because facts, famously, don’t care about your feelings. With apologies, therefore, for any such seeming pose, I’ll allow that when I first realised I’d argued my way out of a metaphysically materialist theory of mind, my resulting shakenness reminded me of CS Lewis describing himself at the arrival of his Christian faith as ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’. Because such a position leads, as Richard Seymour has put it, to ‘alarming things’.

But one can recover from shocks, and thrive in their aftermath. Now, when I shake at the implications it is with excitement.

 

 

To review, the key claims here are threefold, and negative: i) contrary to prevailing opinion, Marxist and not, metaphysical materialism cannot account for human consciousness: ii) contrary to a contrarian wing of radical materialist theory, consciousness exists; iii) contrary to folk Marxism, Marxist historical materialism need not be (and in Marx’s writings is not, and given i) and ii) cannot be) predicated on metaphysical materialism.

What, if anything, one does with these data is left entirely open.

It’s to be hoped that one result of the triple-claim above, for those Marxists who find themselves still worrying at these questions, is a diminution of a certain traditional philistinism with regard to and/or traducing of non-materialist metaphysics and theories. Idealism in particular – given the caveats about dualism noted above – is a vast and complex field, stretching back lifetimes and undergoing something of a renaissance. Fluss and Frimm are tenacious and thoughtful Marxist proponents of the importance of metaphysics, and my contestation of the materialist metaphysics they espouse is mostly from a position of comradely admiration. But their claim, defending Engels’ materialism, not only that ‘[s]ubjective thoughts and ideas do not freely produce themselves, but instead are produced by and reflect the material world around us’, but further that ‘[t]o say otherwise is to lapse into an irrationalist panpsychism, where a vitalistic spirit (not material cause and effect) is what animates reality’, is a swingeing parody of much, let alone the best, idealist thought. Metaphysical idealism need not be anti-realist, scientifically speaking. It cannot be assumed away, nor materialism assumed, according to a mistranslation of scientific methodology into ontology (a mistranslation of which, to be sure, much modern science is guilty). When Creaven says, ‘I take it that the lack of scientific support for any “mind-first” understanding of the universe is sufficient proof of the necessity of a materialist ontology of being’, the emphasis is his, and startlingly weak logic. Subjective, Objective, Transcendental, Analytical, Absolute Idealism, among many others, and their associated figures, whether disputed or not, are all worthy of respectful engagement, beyond any traditional leftist snickering about ghosts.

Even more ripe for dismissal is the rote, still common Marxist accusation that metaphysical non-materialism has an inexorable gravitational pull to both irrationalism and political reaction, by a baleful chain, expressed by Lewis with vividly paternalist racecraft.

The absence of materialism, let alone idealist metaphysics, opens the floodgates to every form of superstition … Instead of seeking out the scientific causes of disease the man [sic] who believes in the supernatural may attribute it to black magic, or devils. … Natives in Central Africa when they fail in their primitive methods of iron-smelting do not try to find out what technical error they have made, but attribute their failure to someone having bewitched them. … Eventually science is held to be something blasphemous. … If it should be contrary to the interests of any privileged section of the community to remove these evils, it will be seen how the superstition which paralyzes man’s efforts serves their ends. In this fact we have, perhaps, one of the reasons for the revival of idealism in an age in which many social evils exist and in which the remedies at hand conflict with vested interests…. In sociology … the interests of the privileged may be immediately threatened by sound social theory. In that case it will be desirable that knowledge should be clouded and human power to interfere enfeebled. This does not mean, of course, that every idealist is consciously defending his cash interests or the interests of a privileged class, but it does suggest that in a society ruled by and ideologically dominated by such interests there will be a certain pressure or drift away from scientific social thinking and towards idealism, superstition and supernaturalism, and that the greater the danger of social change, the more widespread will superstition tend to become.

If not expressed in like manner, such a hermeneutic of anti-idealist suspicion vividly colours many folk-Marxist attacks. Also comprising such attacks, to be fair, is a considerably more reasonable anti-clericalism, and agon against certain forms of conspiracism. Because certainly superstition and ‘irrationalism’ can be, and often are, powerful engines of reaction, but their elision with metaphysical idealism is not only philosophically incoherent, but a political insult to the countless revolutionaries and comrades simply agnostic on metaphysical claims, let alone to those politically motivated in part by religious faith.

In his book on materialism, Eagleton opens his discussion of ontology with a typical provocation, bringing in one of the most celebrated – holy – ghosts of all. ‘It is worth noting’, he writes, ‘that historical materialists need not be atheists, though many of them seem curiously ignorant of the fact.’

That ignorance is itself evidence of the tenacity of folk Marxism. Marx’s atheism is well attested, of course, but was inflected less by metaphysical materialism than by a Promethean and even ethical anthropocentrism, an analysis and criticism of alienation. As Vanessa Wills puts it, quoting Marx himself, it was

not primarily as an ontological stance on the existence or non-existence of God, but rather as part and parcel of a philosophical worldview radically committed to sweeping such questions aside, to … centering the human perspective, to overthrowing ‘all relations in which man [sic] is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’.

A splendid and inspiring radical humanist urge, but one without much to say about origins or ontology.

This opens onto potential programs for further research far beyond these concluding gestures here. And if the recovering erstwhile folk Marxism sets out, as appropriate, with docta ignorantia, a new learned ignorance, they do not of course have to become a theist. Even if persuaded of the aporia of metaphysical materialism, it is perfectly possible to formulate, to quote the title of one of Helen Yetter-Chappell’s essays, an ‘Idealism without God’.

But with that in mind, and remembering also Chalmers’ wry observations about the implausibility of all conceivable options to make sense of consciousness, one thing is undeniable. Once you’ve argued your way out of an ontologically materialist universe, of the many varieties of metaphysical idealism on offer, theism is probably not the most unlikely.

Of course, it also raises its own manifold problems, not least that of theodicy – evil. But of all Richard’s ‘alarming things’ perhaps the most so is that theism also, in fact, solves an awful lot of problems that most other varieties of idealism retain. And it does so almost definitionally by fiat.

China Miéville is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and a founding editor of Salvage. chinamieville.net