Their Materialism and Ours: Minds, Matter, and Marxism

This is a response to China Miéville’s essay from Salvage #15: Bewitched and Distorted, ‘Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism‘. A reply by China Miéville and Richard Seymour follows below.

Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.
–Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892 Introduction to the English Edition[i]

Do you have to be a materialist to be a Marxist? For most, this is hardly a question. “Dialectical Materialism” (diamat) was the state-sanctioned orthodoxy of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It was official doctrine that physical conditions, especially economic forces, are the primary drivers of reality. At the same time, it would be wrong to reduce dialectical materialism to some latter-day state cult. Instead, this theory of matter in motion was always the very lifeblood of scientific socialism. Indeed, this is what makes it “scientific” to begin with. From Marx’s dissertation on atomism, to Engels’ thesis that quality grows out of physical quantity, to Lenin’s defense of physical matter, to Trotsky’s insistence that minds emerge from brains, there is hardly any classical Marxist one could label an anti-materialist.

If anything, Stalin’s well-publicized drive to enforce “dialectical materialism” in school curricula and party manuals was also a considerable watering down of the idea. Having murdered many of the Old Bolsheviks and Hegelian Marxists, Stalin represented a decisively pragmatist (and unprincipled) version of the theory. Essentially, it all comes down to “the primacy of practice” rather than comprehending the whole of Reality. Philosophical thinking had to be limited, after all, to make room for the “collective will” of the Central Committee. Even comrade Hegel – that great thinker of nature and history – could be accused of harboring “Trotskyite” tendencies. Only philosophical degenerates, in Stalin’s words, “regard Hegel as an icon” in the Soviet Union.[ii]

Yet the assault on genuine materialism also came from outside the established orthodoxy, and manifested far earlier than one might imagine. Some of Marx and Engels’ own compatriots were anti-materialists. Many were interested in alternate philosophies like positivism, neo-Kantianism, and any number of theories which put humble experience before the comprehension of Nature writ large. Engels’ theory of a “dialectics of nature” was often mocked as an untimely holdover, a recrudescence of the old Romantic Naturphilosophie. Others like Kautsky, the so-called “pope” of German Marxism, did not believe that one required a philosophical foundation at all, and declared himself agnostic.[iii]

In Western Marxism, we see similar tendencies. Starting with Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, ontological materialism was rejected as pre-Marxist and “mechanistic.” Materialism was redefined (incorrectly) as dealing with social being only, and not with any underlying physical substrate. As Lukács put it, nature is a “social category.”[iv]The first generation of the Frankfurt School agreed, even if they rejected Lukács’ arguments about the need for a Leninist party. A Marxist, they held, could speak of dialectics in terms of historical consciousness alone.[v] They did not have to bother about the nature of reality itself.

Against “Folk Marxism”
This is all to say that China Miéville’s intervention in Salvage is not entirely novel, nor does he claim it to be. As Miéville himself notes, there are precedents for this kind of critique of “ontological materialism” – from Max Horkheimer to Leszek Kolakowski to Terry Eagleton. But, with Miéville, there’s an interesting twist: His main target is what he calls “folk Marxism.” This is the dogmatic belief that historical materialism needs to be “undergirded by a metaphysical materialism,” but that the latter is never fully argued for. At most, folk Marxism offers “vague, gestural” assurances that we live in a material world, without ever proving this to be the case. For the folk Marxist, in other words, materialism is presupposed as a matter of revolutionary faith, rather than well-founded reason.[vi]

As Miéville points out, the main challenge to any metaphysical materialism is what philosophers call “the hard problem” of consciousness: If we live in a world entirely composed of physical matter, then how can we possibly explain the existence of conscious minds? How, even in principle, can we derive something so irreducibly subjective (like the smell of freshly cut grass or the pangs of anxiety and guilt) from gray matter, molecules, and physics? If Engels insisted that quantity can transform into quality, Miéville’s response is, “not so fast.” Qualia are just so different from physical extension, that it remains a mystery how one can produce the other. There is nothing about an fMRI, or the anatomy of the amygdala, that immediately tells you what it’s like to experience “fear,” “love,” or “joy” firsthand.[vii]

Following the lead of David Chalmers and David Bentley Hart, Miéville is now open to idealist (or at least non-materialist) explanations for our experienced reality. This isn’t cast as some sentimental retreat from the rigors of philosophical Marxism. To the contrary, Miéville sees himself as a sober critic, exposing the unargued-for assumptions of “folk Marxism.”

In this, he is the latest representative of a long philosophical tradition. As early as the European Enlightenment, Gottfried Leibniz took issue with the materialism of his heretical contemporary, Baruch Spinoza. The latter argued that the mind must be the correlate of a physical body, and so, like the body, must itself be a complex of parts. The pious courtier Leibniz found this notion abhorrent. The mind is no natural structure, he insisted. Instead, the mind is simple. Minds are only moved from within, uncaused by their environment, and are above all, immaterial. That is to say, they are souls.[viii]

Leibniz complained that the materialist explanation of minds is akin to a big factory or mill. In this analogy, the physical brain is a complex of machinery, wheels, and gears, physically pushing on one another, and somehow producing non-physical thoughts. But if you could shrink down and enter this mechanistic brain, where would you find the actual thinking? Where would you find the conscious subject or mental states? Nowhere. Therefore, said Leibniz, this materialist picture is incoherent. Conscious souls must exist after all, quite apart from all this fine “machinery.” And these souls must, themselves, be the authors of our immaterial thoughts.

To the materialist, of course, this all begs the question. Where does the “soul” come from? Why posit such a ghostly thing at all? It appears to be applied deus ex machina. The idealist brings out the unitary, immaterial mind in order to explain the phenomenon of human thought. Yet this is an “explanation” that, itself, remains mysterious and unexplained.

A Genuine Problem
Certainly, it is hard to account for how the mind emerges from matter. That’s why philosophers call this “the hard problem.” But instead of trying to make those deductions carefully, the typical believer in souls only throws up their hands. They will concede that the brain is an important and complex organ; that we cannot think without it. (Both nature and nurture do matter, as science fully attests.) “But,” they continue, “there must be something else besides.” There must be some occult, non-material ingredient that allows us to go from dead, insentient matter to the vibrancy of conscious experience – a kind of “secret sauce” added to the mix. There must, indeed, be a soul.

If one is more consistent, brains should not count for anything at all. One should, along with Leibniz, admit that the soul – since immaterial – must also lack parts. And so, it cannot possibly be modified from without. Like all monads, the soul is “windowless,” and entirely moved from an internal logic alone. Accordingly, brain structure and function become superfluous. Once “souls” are introduced to the picture, and once these are affirmed as immaterial, uncaused by stimuli, and wholly simple, then there is no need for the apparatus of the brain whatsoever. Nor is there any need – or any possibility – of explaining how the body produces impressions on the mind, nor conversely, how the mind impels the body to move. All of this should be strictly impossible.

Leibniz’s “solution” – if it can be called that – was to ensoul, not just the human body, but the whole of nature as well. Absolutely everything is made of simple, soul-like monads. There is no extension whatsoever, nor mechanical cause-and-effect, but only a collection of these infinitesimally minute (and immaterial) substances. Each is sovereign, independent, and “windowless,” yet kept in perfect harmony by an all-knowing, all-good God. The only real cause is God’s divine Providence.

This immaterial picture, however, is a big problem for the Marxist. That’s because the Marxist is not only interested in correlating minds and brains, but also in fighting for revolution and social justice. Even minimal demands in this direction, such as for free school lunches, appear to grate against a consistent idealism. Supposing that minds can operate sovereignly of gray matter, then it is literally “immaterial” how healthy or well-nourished the brain is. What use are the physical calories derived from a physical school lunch, when thoughts operate on their own, idealistic accord.

Feuerbach claimed that food is the mediating term between matter and mind. “Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind-stuff.” The moral corollary of this is: If you want to improve people, then instead of “declamations against sin,” give them “better food.”[ix]

But then, Feuerbach was just a grubby materialist. The genuine idealist knows that minds are immaterial; And so how well we think, our moral character, even the source of our suffering, cannot be the result of material causes. These must instead be the work of Divine Providence, or perhaps, a culpable and free will. We can now see how idealism is the perfect metaphysic for austerity. It replaces the investigation of causes, and the criticism of unjust structures, with individual moral blame. This is a nagging problem for a sincere Marxist like Miéville. Certainly, he does not want to go down the neoliberal route of demanding people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yet the question remains as to whether he can avoid this logical implication.

No Easy Answers
Miéville is correct that most solutions to the mind-body problem are disappointing. In fact, they are hardly solutions at all. Dualism does not work, even if this was the preferred answer of both Descartes and most naive realists today. In positing that there are entirely physical bodies and entirely non-physical minds, one sets up an impossible problem with no conceivable solution. How can these opposite things ever interact, let alone produce one another? Simply put, they cannot. Miéville is right when, following Hart, he says that all dualisms implicitly call out for “some more basic ontological ground” or a “shared medium” that can reconcile wholly opposite terms. There has to be, in other words, one substance that contains both minds and bodies together. Thus all “final answers” to the mind-body problem “are in some way monistic, or they aren’t final.”[x]

Nor do inventive theories such as panpsychism or neutral monism do the trick. Most often these merely avoid the problem rather than answering it directly. If the task is to explain how mind and body interact, or how minds emerge from a material world, it is no good to merely stipulate that “all matter thinks” or that even “sand is sentient.” In other words, just saying that matter can think hardly explains anything – especially when there is no further demonstration as to how matter thinks, under what specific conditions, nor why we should believe such a thing in the first place.

Likewise, so-called “neutral monism” is another kind of philosophical punt. The theory here is that, underlying both mind and matter is some more basic, fundamental “stuff.” This primary substance is neither mind nor matter, yet neither is it entirely different from mind and matter – hence the claim to it being “neutral.” It is all too obvious that this is hardly a compelling solution to the hard problem. It is no more compelling than answering the age-old question, “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” with the nonchalant response, “chegg.”

What is revealing is that, alongside these non-answers to the hard problem, Miéville also lists “emergentism.” Basically, this is the notion that individual minds emerge from certain material conditions, namely, out of complex, organic life. Unlike panpsychism or neutral monism, emergentism does not immediately present itself as just an ad hoc answer to a difficult problem. It is not, in other words, a speculative solution or semantic maneuver for its own sake. Instead, emergentism coheres with a lot of what we know (or at least experience) about the world. Minds really do seem to emerge from complex physical structures, specifically, from brains. Modifying or destroying brains does really seem to modify and, in the worst cases, destroy minds. The whole sordid history of lobotomies attests to this fact, as does electroshock therapy and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) procedures, to say nothing of the infamous case of Phineas Gage. These are, at the very least, prima facie points in favor of the emergentist picture.

At the same time, Miéville is correct that emergentism, on its own, does not solve the underlying philosophical problem. If minds seem to emerge from physical bodies, and if the manipulation of physical bodies can modify minds, then how is this possible? Even if we adopt a non-reductionist reading of emergence, whereby minds are greater than the sum of their gray matter substrate, we are still left with what looks like a mystery: How, in any case, can one sort of substance produce another? How can physical things produce non-physical mental states?

Miéville’s “Solution”
The solution that Miéville comes up with is, with respect, no solution at all. This is no polemical charge on our part, nor is it uncharitable. This is merely his own self-assessment of the situation. As he puts it:

“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.”

Miéville stays with the trouble by, first, recounting the absolute quagmire that folk Marxists have gotten themselves into, and second, by suggesting the “least unlikely” solution to this impasse. The quagmire consists of Marxists’ supposed failure to show how metaphysical materialism is true, and if true, how this can account for human consciousness. Nor has the folk Marxist convincingly shown, insists Miéville, why one needs to be a metaphysical materialist in order to be an historical materialist. In other words, one can do the revolutionary work of criticizing historical structures and human institutions, without the costly hypothesis of some underlying, unproven – and, to his mind, unprovable – ontology.

Miéville’s “least unlikely” solution to the mystery of consciousness is, by comparison, quite simple: God did it. “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 least unlikely.” The key move here is that theism is indeed a kind of idealism. In fact, it is the most consistent sort of idealism one can hope for, at least, if your aim is to avoid being a materialist.

In place of natural, “mechanical” cause and effect, what theism delivers is the notion of divine “fiat.” This is, to be sure, both a feature and a bug for Miéville. The downside of divine fiat is, as he points out, often moral in nature. How does one explain the presence of evil in the world, supposing there exists an all-good, all-powerful God who acts at a whim? What of childhood cancers and hurricanes? At the same time, this “least unlikely” solution also “solves an awful lot of problems.” These are, not least, philosophical problems. If mind and matter are so different from one another that they can scarcely interact on a natural basis, then perhaps the solution is a supernatural basis instead  – a divine mind. Leibniz may have been right the whole time. The world as we know it is not sustained by intelligible, natural laws, but instead, by the purposeful, “pre-established harmony” of God above.

And for those who remain unconvinced, that’s quite alright for Miéville. No need to declare a heresy or holy war, nor even to be intolerant of one’s atheist comrades. After all, metaphysical speculation is hardly “an obligatory field of interest” and so need not interrupt “the work of solidarity and activism, or intellectual or artistic pursuits.” As Miéville goes on to argue, comrades may disagree on fundamental questions of metaphysics and still work in complete solidarity when it comes to Palestine. At least at first blush, this seems plausible enough. Two activists may differ on the finer points of speculative philosophy and still stand on the same picket line together.

God Makes Things Worse
Unlike Miéville, however, we deny that the theist/idealist solution “works.” In fact, it makes everything much worse. This is true practically, at the level of organizing and activism. Yet it is first of all true philosophically, at the level of concepts. Idealism is affirmed, not out of sure reason or logical conviction, but rather we may say, out of desperation. Miéville indicates this with his telling phrase, “least unlikely.” One embraces idealism only after materialism, and the various dualist half-measures, have exhausted themselves and are deemed impossible. And only then does he take the second step of affirming theism as that “least unlikely” of all possible idealisms. Throughout, there is never any direct proof for any of it. There are no positive demonstrations offered for idealism, nor any natural theology demonstrating the existence (or nature) of God. Instead, there is only a progressive exhaustion – both of concepts and of knowers. It is a gradual concession to whatever’s left over, rather than a positive embrace of certain truth.

The problem is that the ultimate conclusion – God – nullifies this entire procedure. For a universe of Gods and miracles is incompatible with making predictions or calculating “likelihoods.” One can, of course, make educated guesses in a materialist world. A lawful universe of stable objects and causal relations is a predictable universe (even if our predictions are fallible, given our finite minds). Yet this is precisely what Miéville rejects. For such a fully objective nature, governed by unbreakable, universal laws, could not admit of God’s miracles which break those laws by definition. Nor could an objective, material world allow for the free creation ex nihilo that Miéville seems now to affirm, but only the natural emergence of things out of strict causal relations. Yet in Miéville’s supernatural universe, one has no right whatsoever to talk of cogent predictions or “least unlikely” options. This is because an all-powerful God, unbound by intelligible laws, can do anything at all, at any moment, for no reason whatsoever. This God is wholly unpredictable; and so our poor mortal intellects could hardly keep up, much less “play the odds” when it comes to guessing the shape of ultimate reality.

Likelihood itself, the process of making inductive judgments, cannot exist in a metaphysical vacuum (much as positivists and pragmatists would like). The great skeptic, David Hume, was at least right about this: that probable forecasts about the future are strictly meaningless unless one first accepts a whole set of rationalist principles. The first of these is the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). For any event, there must be some reason for that event to have occurred. Conversely, if there is no such reason, the event will not occur. In other words, the universe is governed by efficient causality, running from the past to the present to the future.

If we drop this rationalist principle, along with the necessary uniformity of nature (as any theist must), then the very act of prediction makes no sense. “Likelihood” becomes meaningless given the backdrop of divine whim. For what guarantee is there that mathematical, statistical, or even physical, laws will obtain? None whatsoever. After all, God (or the Gods) could change the rules at any moment. And if these laws are out the window, then the prediction of specific events is not just difficult, but entirely impossible.

Nor is the prediction of the correct worldview (materialism or idealism) any more possible. If an all-powerful God exists, then this deity can implant in our minds any sort of philosophy He pleases. Our thoughts may not mirror reality one bit; they may not even be our own. And so, none of these arguments about the “likeliest” or “least unlikely” worldview can hold any water. Once again, the supernatural conclusion nullifies the inductive premises. Irrational results, by definition, can only ever be the result of pure faith, never rational prediction.

This fatal defect is intimately connected to idealism’s practical downside. A purely subjective idealism, especially one based in God’s free will, can hardly ground our activism and our solidarity with others. Certainly, “consciousness” does matter, and Miéville skillfully draws on a current of Marxism which emphasizes feelings of class consciousness, righteous indignation, and revolutionary fervor, beyond logical, materialist analyses alone.[xi]

This, strictly speaking, is not wrong. Feelings do matter – not least in a revolutionary situation. At the same time, one must be able to discern between rational indignation and irrational hatred, between revolutionary ardor and mere resentment. In short, some feelings might be fascist. How can we tell the difference? If we suppose that sentiments and moods are mere qualia, wholly irreducible to intelligible concepts, then this discernment, too, becomes strictly impossible. Only if we conceive of humans as having an intelligible human nature, and this as part of a more universal Nature at large, can we begin to meaningfully start this work of discernment. Then, we can not only feel our feelings but also investigate them. Why am I crying? Just what am I upset about? Is there something to be done?

However, a universe governed at whim by a theistic Subject puts a final stop to all that questioning. It nullifies all objective nature, including that of human nature, and so makes a mockery of all investigations into this nature. Divine subjectivity – in making all things the creation of an omnipotent will – prevents us from ever knowing ourselves, and then discerning in others that which we hold in common. In the face of that omnipotent will, everything else becomes dust, and genuine solidarity becomes little more than a futile wish.

We may of course form bonds with others in the absence of strong, objective reasons. And, historically, of course, the bonds of faith have proven some of the strongest on offer. Yet these will always be agreements of passion and not intellect. As qualia, or moods, religious fervor can only encounter its comrades by accident – a mere coincidence of tastes and prejudices. By definition, there can be no guarantee that such alliances will be humane, progressive, or even durable.

The way out of this impasse is clear. And this is to refuse the false dichotomy of consciousness and matter. It is to refuse the artificial separation of physical nature, intelligibility, and subjective experience. For it is precisely this artificial separation that then demands some miracle, some inconceivable act of God, to put the world back together again. The genuinely rationalist position must be to account for how these various terms are, in the first place, always, already “one.” This would be a genuine monism, one that neither requires, nor admits, of anything the least super-natural.

No Materialism Without Matter
This process of reconciliation has to work from both sides, carefully redefining the terms “idealism” and “materialism” on a more adequate basis. For the rationalist, the word “materialism” (in the sense of metaphysical materialism) cannot denote simple, unintelligible “stuff.” If that were the case, as Miéville implies, it would indeed be impossible to reconcile mind with matter, and one would need something like a miracle to do the trick.

It would also be entirely impossible for the Marxist to carry out their practical work. That’s because one of the fundamental purposes of Marxism is to predict the future. Again, we don’t mean this infallibly, but, at any rate, scientifically. The Marxist is in the business of analyzing material patterns and trends – and tracing how historical circumstances have lawfully emerged from prior states. So armed with general principles of accumulation, labor, and exchange, one can then predict the next historical shift that may occur. This of course implies (as intimated above) that matter itself is intelligible and thus governable by such laws. It is not mere “stuff.”

Precisely because matter is intelligible, one can comprehend the evolution of material relations. Ancient slavery gives way to medieval feudalism, which in turn gives rise to capitalism. Marx describes his own work as a kind of “natural history” wherein he traces the birth pangs, growth, and decline of the capitalist system. And it is the specific, lawfulmanner of capitalism’s material decline that ultimately dictates its transformation into the next epoch, that is, into socialism.

In short, these transformations are not miracles. Neither are they largely the products of the “great men of history,” less so the inscrutable will of God. We are, instead, in the realm of efficient causation. One set of material relations, one set of social-economic laws, transforms into the next. This tendency is not “put into” the system by external, divine fiat. It is rather a native feature of the system itself, the immanent product of its various tensions and contradictions.

But if we understand that one epoch, one set of laws, transforms into the next in a predictable way, then this in turn implies an even more general set of principles that governs these epochal shifts as a whole. Matter as such must operate in definite and predictable ways. Barring this, the movement from one epoch to the next would not be an intelligible shift but rather a messianic (or apocalyptic) “event” or cosmic “rupture.” This would be irreducibly surprising, wholly inscrutable, and never subject to the predictions of scientific socialism. In other words, there must be a transhistorical Nature that undergirds the various expressions of human nature and of human modes of production. As Marx himself said, “Natural laws cannot be abolished at all.” For this reason, certain constants, such as the “necessity of the distribution of social labor” will remain even as the “specific form of social production” inevitably changes.[xii]

Miéville cannot be correct when he says that one can embrace “historical materialism” apart from the foundation of “metaphysical materialism.” For only an underlying, metaphysical materialism provides the basic rules of the universe (object permanence, efficient causation, uniformity of nature, and so on) that govern all historical events. One might attempt to take these for granted, because you are only interested in politics – but that lacks intellectual sincerity.

By way of analogy, this would be like a scientist claiming to have a theory of Darwinian evolution, yet proudly rejecting all theories of physics. Certainly, in a local sense, such a naturalist could investigate the evolution of crabs on a beach, even if they are professionally uninterested in physical laws. But this is fundamentally a shallow endeavor. Such a naturalist is not operating without those underlying physical laws; they are merely assuming these, and then putting them out of mind. The claim to a “physics-agnosticism” is therefore made in bad faith.

If one really thought they could do evolutionary science without modern physics – without theories of efficient causation and matter in motion – then they should be open to all of the premodern notions that once infected natural investigations. They might embrace the divine origins of plant and animal life, or that instead of genetic mutation, drift, and adaptation, organisms are governed by a purposeful striving for godliness. They would have to be open to the notion that different species are created by God for some occult purpose unknown to us, and that each has a preordained place in the medieval Great Chain of Being (scala naturae). This is what happens when a scientist claims they can do their work without worrying about fundamental, underlying principles outside of their immediate discipline. But as with the natural sciences, so too go the social sciences. Historical materialism without metaphysical materialism is blind.

Their Idealism and Ours
Stepping back, some may complain that our definition of “materialism” is actually quite idealist.[xiii] It is the case that in place of mere insensible, unintelligible stuff, the sine qua non of our materialism is intelligibility and lawfulness. Matter is in motion, yes, but so too are the very laws of motion part-and-parcel of matter. This is true enough, and we do not deny the charge of idealism as such. Nonetheless, this comes with a very important caveat: Our idealism is of a very specific sort. It shares nothing in common with the subjective, and even theistic, sort of idealism that is the object of our present critique.

A subjective idealism is, as a matter of course, concerned with “moods,” “qualia,” “attitudes,” and “perceptions.” These are subjective states. They speak to a particular, concrete situatedness in the world. They describe sensations, which are always perspectival, rather than objective knowledge, which is universal.

This is a major reason why, for the subjective idealist, minds cannot emerge from entirely mechanistic stuff. For then how would they end up as particular and subjective? Anything produced by wholly mechanical means would itself have to be a kind of mechanism – conditioned by the very same, deterministic Nature that produced it. Subjective idealism, in this way, is a romantic protest against what it sees as the blandness of rationalism, and the tendency of rationalism to subsume everything under one, logical mechanism.

So the next step for the subjective idealist is this: There can be no purely objective world at all. The world itself must be composed, not of dull matter and blind laws, but freely created by a subjective mind. Only this kind of world, which is subjective all the way down, could in turn give rise to equally subjective minds such as our own.

Subjective idealism demands that some willful, creative agent – God, humanity, Dasein, Spirit, or whatever, voluntarily chooses to create the world. This subjective author freely composes the “laws” of nature too (which, of course, are not really lawful in any rigorous sense, since they can be abrogated with equal creativity). Subjective idealism necessarily breaks with necessity, avoids a mathematical universe of strict causation, and so provides ample space for miracles, “true events,” “ruptures,” and inspiring “acts of grace.” In a word, this is the return of contingency.

A theorist like David Bentley Hart (clearly an inspiration to Miéville) seems to sit on the fence about all this, especially when it comes to the question of subjective idealism. In his neo-Platonic manner, Hart affirms that the universe is part of the unfolding (or “expression”) of God. He even calls himself a monist, explicitly stating that “he [God] simply is reality as such.”[xiv] And finite things in the world are, for Hart, said to participate in God’s divine essence. Yet in making these moves, Hart explicitly rejects materialism. God is neither a mechanism nor a body; the physical universe is not identical to God. Instead, God creates the universe out of his “goodness” and generosity. True, for Hart, there is a zero-percent chance that God could have done otherwise. But this does not negate his overriding thesis that all mechanical causes, here in the world, are ultimately derived from one, generative act – the providence or “final cause” of God’s loving creation.[xv]

This is precisely what one would expect. For all of his supposed “monism,” Hart is nonetheless a traditional theist exactly where it counts: The universe is not one with God, nor is God identical to the universe. And while creation was not one choice out of many (for nothing is external to God, and so there are no external “options”), it was still something of a voluntary act. Creation is a momentous labor done out of Divine generosity and love.

The problem is that this element of contingency does not just flow down – from necessary God to non-necessary nature. It also backs up and infects God Himself. For if God can “freely” will the universe into existence, then perhaps God’s nature isn’t truly in the driver’s seat as Hart claims. The Divine Nature is not dictating terms entirely, but the final vote really does come down to God’s whim or caprice. Here, we have resurrected before us a very old, scholastic debate, namely, about whether God’s absolute freedom and God’s absolute nature conflict. But, for all the scholastic wrangling and hair-splitting, this is a debate that the theist cannot win. In their piety, they hope to preserve both God’s absolute nature and His absolutely free will (and maybe even make these identical). But conceptually, these are simply incompatible. A Divine Nature that does not have the last say (when it comes to creation, natural laws, etc.) has no business calling itself “absolute” to begin with. Similarly, a Divine Will that only follows around a Divine Nature has no business calling itself a free will at all.

While Hart attempts to straddle the theological fence, it is clear that he ultimately falls on the side of mystery, subjectivity, and will. The universe, for Hart, is intelligible – at least in a local and limited way. After all, it participates in God’s goodness and positive essence. But there is a hole in the middle of this (otherwise monistic and rationalist-sounding) doughnut. For God Himself cannot be known. Here, Hart is explicit: For all of his moral condemnation of Heidegger and his Nazism, Hart at least appreciates this Black Forest thinker for his latter-day apophatism and mysticism.

He [Heidegger] knew that being’s mystery, while it is the source of our humanity, never shows itself to us with the undeniable clarity of a distinct thing among other things, but reveals itself only as a kind of intangible shadow at the edges of the things that are.[xvi]

Whether we use the word God, or the generic term “Being,” the message remains consistent. The ultimate Being is a “being as such” and absolutely never merely “one being among many.” God, for Hart, is not a “thing” or a res. And precisely because God is not a thing (not even an infinite thing), then the category of causality does not apply to God.

This is Hart’s rejection of Early Modern rationalism, a rejection that Heidegger sums up in his attacks on “onto-theology,” and a rejection that Miéville appears to endorse today. God is not a thing, and so need not account for His existence or his nature. For the rationalist, God may be unique in being a self-causing thing (causa sui). Nonetheless, for the rationalist, God must be caused somehow in order to be intelligible. For Hart, and the entire anti-rationalist tradition, this is heresy. God is not intelligible in the manner of other beings, and to claim so is a kind of modernist egotism, a bad technology that seeks maniacal mastery, not only over the whole world, but also over the heavens above.[xvii]

Our absolute idealism is the precise opposite of this. Once more, it starts with the position that the universe is intelligible. Not only is the universe intelligible, but it is intelligible according to its own nature and immanent laws. This is the unrestricted idealism of Hegel, and his dictum that “The real is rational and the rational is real.”[xviii] We have here neither insensible matter, nor contingent free creation. There are only laws, and these laws (since part of Nature itself) are objective, universal, and wholly unbridgeable.

Unlike the occulted God of Hart, our version of “Divine” self-creation mandates that God and Nature are truly one. The most Hart can do on this topic is to equivocate. When charged with being a “pantheist” his characteristic response is to neither affirm nor deny. “You are not exactly misstating my position” he says, in response to one such critic; “I can neither reject nor accept” the label of pantheism “since it is meaningless.”[xix]

It is not meaningless for the genuine rationalist. For the rationalist, pantheism rejects all transcendence. Nothing is beyond the one, self-creating, and intelligible universe. Not so for Hart and his equivocations. Far from rejecting the transcendent and the supernatural, we have in this theistic thinker another conceptual punt: “I reject any discontinuity of nature and supernature.” The one merely shades off into the other, just as knowledge merely shades off into ignorance. So while Spinoza is clear that the ultimate object of knowledge is Deus sive Nature (God, or in other words, Nature), Hart and his tradition are content to speak of a God who is “neither” nature “nor” outside of nature. This is the difference between a logical pantheism, on the one hand, and a still-pious panentheism on the other.[xx]

Spinoza’s rationalist God is alien to personal confession or intercessory prayers. This is a heretic’s God that can be known, can perhaps even be “loved” in a purely intellectual sense, yet is no passional subject. This God neither hears prayers nor damns apostates, neither vanquishes enemies nor performs miracles, is neither merciful nor jealous. This God does not act in history, but rather is history – and pre-history, and post-history, besides. And this is a God entirely alien to creatio ex nihilo (the free creation of the world from nothing). A rigorous causa sui does not artificially limit itself for the sake of piety and traditional religious forms. Instead, this most consistent sort of God, this most absolute of all absolute idealisms, comes full circle. It reveals itself as identical to a stable and rigorous materialism.

Absolute Idealism = Materialism
How does absolute idealism transform itself into materialism? This is a task for careful deduction, not mere rhetoric. This is also a technical question that goes beyond a quasi-popular piece like this, which is meant to outline only the basic contours of our materialist worldview as against its critics. So while the specific deductions deserve their own full hearing, the essential moves are outlined below. We are well aware that this sort of presentation goes against the grain of contemporary academic politeness. Scholars today are trained to disdain making independent, original arguments about the nature of reality as such. Instead, the institutional expectation is that one’s output should be mostly exegetical, concerned with small questions, and involve a narrow focus on elucidating portions of the accepted canon (or equally vetted “anti-canon” in the case of postmodernist scholars). Nonetheless, we disdain to conceal our views, even when these are presented in nuce:

First, one must admit that we have some knowledge, or in Spinoza’s phrasing, that “we possess a true idea.”[xxi] For this most consistent of the Enlightenment rationalists, the proposition that we do have at least one piece of sure knowledge is beyond all doubt. The contrary supposition is immediately self-defeating, and those who claim that “they know that they know nothing” only reveal the bankruptcy of that very statement. Neither are the supposedly more sophisticated skeptics, who aren’t sure whether they know anything, on more stable ground. Spinoza characterizes these sophists, who are afraid to even confess their lack of knowledge, (less they accidentally admit to knowing something), as mindless “automata,” completely lacking a mind.[xxii] This is an Early Modern version of the charge: “barking like a dog.”

Second, a certainly true idea, if truly known, must be clear and distinct. In other words, it must be simple. It cannot be a blur of complex, partially comprehended facets or impressions, but rather understood in its entirety. For what is certainty if the object of our knowledge is partly a mystery or hidden? And so, a true idea must, to again use Spinoza’s terminology, be of a substance – “that which is known entirely through itself alone.”[xxiii]

Third, that which is simple in itself cannot, by definition, rely on anything else for its existence. For if it did, then it would not be simple. If its very nature depended on another thing, then its definition would also include that second entity, and so therefore be complex. A simple thing must accordingly be self-caused (causa sui).[xxiv]

From there, the deductions are fairly straightforward. The fourth insight is that a thing entirely self-caused must at once be absolutely infinite. And so, a simple substance also reveals itself to be God, or in other words, Nature. For that which produces itself cannot be limited by any other thing. So we see that God being a caused “thing” is no liability. Instead, it is the very motor of these deductions which grant us an intelligible universe.

Here, though, we encounter a crucial inflection point. And it is the fifth insight that begins the transformation from an absolute idealism into a rigorous and stable materialism. “From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes…i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect.”[xxv] In other words, something infinite will have infinite effects. It is not enough for a substance to be self-causing, and absolutely infinite “as such.” An intelligible, self-causing being must also be fully determinate. “Bare substance” or “unformed existence” is incoherent. As Hegel might put it, “The essence must appear.”[xxvi] Here we have the notion of Erscheinung (manifestation), wherein God or Nature cannot remain as some occult, noumenal, abstract thing, but must also take concrete form. All of existence must be fully patterned.

This concrete form implies the bifurcation of Nature. Reality expresses itself both as universal, unbridgeable laws (Natura naturans); but also as the complex of discrete and finite entities (Natura naturata), subject to those laws. Nothing at all, of course, is outside of God or Nature. Yet neither is Nature capable of being “mute,” withdrawn, and remaining solely within itself, in all of its supposed purity and self-sufficiency. Existence cannot remain a pure “law” with nothing to condition or pattern. The pattern itself (or a self-patterning), which is to say a plenum, must obtain.

This, finally, is the key difference between a rationalist-pantheist like Spinoza, and an idealist-theist position. The shining forth of nature, the existence of modally distinct things, is never a choice or a brute, contingent fact, nor even a matter of inborn generosity or love, but rather follows from infinite Nature itself. And materialism just is this plenum – a separation of finite things, distinct in themselves and external to one another, yet all conditioned by the same intelligible laws.

The “Hard Problem” vs the “Fundamental Problem”
This rationalist picture drastically re-frames how one conceives of the so-called “hard problem” in philosophy. No longer is the problem rendered strictly impossible, a supreme mystery that demands some “least unlikely” solution, such as divine fiat. That’s because, from the beginning, we are no longer dealing with two, oppositely defined substances (insensible matter and ghostly subjectivity). Instead, matter is governed by rational laws, and rational Being must likewise express itself materially. As such, the rationalist’s task is far more banal: Explain how a material universe, which is always, already intelligible, gives rise to embodied intelligence. That is to say, how does matter become an individual mind?

The question, now properly stated, indicates how manifestly unmysterious the whole thing is. Certainly, it is still a “hard” problem, though not at all an insoluble one. As Marx might say, “Mankind…inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve.”[xxvii] Neurobiology remains today a relatively young science, and we have at best a very tentative understanding of how the various structures of the brain correlate to mental states. Nonetheless, this is a domain of investigation that admits of gradual progress. That is because we needn’t explain any great (or miraculous) leap from dead matter to vital subjectivity. Matter is already intelligible, and finite intelligence thus corresponds to matter folded onto itself – which is to say, minds correlate to certain (but not all) material structures – e.g., brains, but not golf balls. This is why, in the immortal words of Carl Sagan, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Intelligence is not added to the world, but is rather a ubiquitous, if latent, feature of matter. Or, in Marx’s own terms, “man’s physical and spiritual life is linked,” not only the one aspect to the other (mind and body), but both to nature as a whole. In this way, says Marx, “nature is linked to itself.”[xxviii] Hence, minds may be intricate and impressive things, but they are no mystery.

This is again different from the dubious solutions to the hard problem as discussed above. The rationalist worldview is not the same as, for example, panpsychism or vitalism. The latter imagine (wholly without evidence) that even sand is sentient, and that all material things actually have hidden conscious thoughts and experiences. Panpsychism is just another sort of “fiat” explanation; it is wishing something to be true just to solve a theoretical difficulty.

The rationalist does not beg the question in this way. They start with the evidence. In fact, better than empirical evidence, the rationalist starts with an apodictic fact – that we do possess some knowledge, some certainly true idea. In this way, the rationalist refuses to settle accounts with the “hard problem” before first tackling the “fundamental problem” of philosophy. This latter question is the true starting point of all subsequent queries: Is the real rational? Only once we answer this fundamental question, about the ultimate intelligibility of the world, do any of the narrower questions about minds, bodies, qualia, and moods become answerable (or even meaningful).

No doubt, this will be an unsatisfying response to those who persist in seeing a genuine mystery within the problem of consciousness. To them, mere “emergence” does no real work. One still has to explain how insensible “stuff” becomes a vivid, emotional experience. How does gray matter become the technicolor of a living world? For these critics, merely stating that matter is “always, already” intelligible is not sufficient. You also have to show the specific transformation from one to the other. This is true, but hardly a fatal criticism. The metaphysics of rationalism are not sufficient; though they are necessary to show why minds do emerge from physical nature. At the same time, it is no defect to clearly understand the limits of pure deductions alone.

An analogy: Someone unschooled in chemistry may wonder at how ice (which is eminently solid) could possibly transform into water (which is eminently liquid). Aren’t these diametrically opposed concepts? Surely a miracle is needed to affect such transubstantiation. But no such miracle is needed once one realizes that both solids and liquids fall under a more general category, namely that of matter. “Merely quantitative differences pass over by inversion into qualitative changes” “The molecular theory of chemistry…rests on no other law.”[xxix] And even if one lived in the premodern age, and had no inkling of atomic theory, the melting of ice would not necessitate an insoluble riddle – but could be progressively illuminated by more careful investigations, better empirical tools, cathode ray tubes, microscopes, and the like.

So it is with minds. That matter is irreducibly intelligible is a question settled by pure deduction and metaphysical certainty. It is, moreover, that necessary foundation that makes the specific emergence of consciousness from physical nature at all possible. Now, all one must do is fill in the empirical blank spaces within the metaphysical framework. The precise manner of emergence is always partly known through empirical means and so is never certain once and for all. This relative humility (a term overused in academia) is not the same thing as an insuperable “hard” problem that demands a miraculous solution. In other words, to once again draw on Marx, “We do not turn secular questions into theological ones.”[xxx]

Instead, one can move beyond the “hard problem” as such, and attend to secondary questions that have a more proximate bearing on real life, human psychology, and wellbeing. A clear example of such a secondary question are the passions. Where do these come from? How are they possible? For Miéville, and many others besides, the passions stand as a fatal objection to the materialist worldview. For there is nothing about gray matter which, however organized or intricate, can ever equate to passionate lust or righteous indignation. These feelings are qualia, entirely irreducible to the physical world. This phenomenological manner of thinking, in other words, starts with the evident fact, the explanandum, in this case, of passional human experience. It then goes about looking (mostly in vain) for some plausible explanans to account for it. But as we have seen, for the phenomenologist, there can be no such explanation.

The rationalist has no such difficulty. Instead of starting with the phenomenon of human passions, these are part of a much broader deduction. First, the universe is intelligible, the real is rational – and vice versa. Only then do we conclude that finite minds are the correlate of equally finite, material structures, which is to say, of bodies. The active mind is defined as one that operates, consciously, according to its own laws. In the phraseology of Spinoza, the mind mirrors and comprehends “the order and connections of things” in the world.[xxxi]

Yet precisely because the finite mind must be so embodied, it is also not infallible. The mind is no disembodied ghost or spirit, but is instead fundamentally enmeshed within the whole material world. Minds, therefore, will not always be active. They will sometimes (and perhaps very often) be subject to impulses and causes outside of their own conscious control or understanding. Precisely because minds are, in their own way, also bodily, they will sometimes, in other words, be passive. This, both in terms of etymology and concept, is the origin of what we may call the passions (passio). It is the state of “being moved” beyond one’s conscious agency.

This is just one example, of course. But it is an object lesson of how, in general, the rationalist method differs from all others. It does not start with some “given” phenomenon, and then wax poetic (or indignant) about how mysterious and befuddling is this experience. Instead, it starts with what it knows for sure – indeed, with knowledge itself. And then it draws its conclusions. In this way, the rationalist does not end up in the philosophical ditch of aporia or call for Divine intervention to help it out of that ditch. Instead, the rationalist deduces all that they can about human nature and Nature at large, and then sets the broad terms for all subsequent investigations – whether of psychology, physics, or politics.

No Gods, No Masters
If the real is rational and the rational is material, this provides the genuine basis for a Marxist politics. Only then can we investigate the world, its institutions, and its material structures (especially relations of production and consumption). In turn, these material structures are intimately tied to the moral goal of human liberation. The slogan that “freedom is insight into necessity” now has real content. However, without materialism, ethical norms become ethereal, floating above nature and human conditions. Politics fractures into facts and norms, with no necessary connection between them. Like all bad dualisms, this generates an interaction problem: the world of material facts can be observed and described, but it cannot tell us how one ought to live or organize – in a phrase, what must be done.

In Miéville, this diremption of reason from matter undermines the good work he intends to do in the cause of socialism. He wants both “bread” and “roses,” which is to say, material well-being and spiritual fulfillment. We agree. The problem is that Miéville’s worldview reintroduces a species of dualism despite himself. The normative, the realm of “roses,” becomes unmoored from the physical and material. The material is likewise debased as dead, dull, and gray. Any attempt to ground the former in the latter is inevitably cast as reductive, or even an act of violence. Either our qualia, our passions, and our cherished values are sui generis, or we are left with only a bleak, flattened world of brute matter and equally brute facts.

Miéville’s response to this kind of criticism strikes a judicious tone. In a previous essay, he tries to walk the via mediabetween “apophatic” mysticism and “cataphatic” knowledge – suggesting instead a “hyperphatic” solution that falls to neither extreme.[xxxii] Accordingly, for him, there is room for both Enlightenment reason, intelligible nature, and yes, even historical materialism, as well as irreducible subjective experiences, and even perhaps peak religious experiences too. And so, he perennially casts himself as an existentialist Hamlet to our rationalist Horatio — insisting that there are more things in heaven and earth than philosophy can ever encompass.

However, if our arguments above hold, and genuine knowledge is not only possible, but a necessity, then we must side with the rationalist philosophers alone. We should dare, in other words, to pick sides. There is no “outside” to reason — nothing beyond the rational and the real, or beyond the domains of extension and intelligibility. The order and connection of reason and matter are one and the same. Against the Speculative Realists who invoke the “great outdoors” beyond all rationalist strictures, we instead invite everyone into the “great indoors” of what can actually be known with certainty.[xxxiii]

This “absolute” correlation of the rational and the real is what links “absolute” idealism with dialectical materialism. The Idea necessarily passes over into its apparent opposite — matter in motion. This is what ultimately emerges after the full labor of philosophical reflection is complete. As Marx says, “the entire logic [of Hegel] is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that only nature is something.”[xxxiv] Likewise, for Marx to declare in the Theses on Feuerbach that philosophers have only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to change it, an entire rationalist tradition must be presupposed. This is the tradition that runs, broadly, from Spinoza to Hegel. One cannot simply impose a revolutionary “ought” onto reality, in the mold of Bauerite self-consciousness. To paraphrase Hegel, it is easier to say what ought to be than to grasp what is.[xxxv]

Miéville’s “ought,” by contrast, knows few limits: He wants reason, Leftist politics, and historical materialism — bread and roses alike. But on what grounds are these desiderata justified? It is easy enough to want things; the harder question is what warrants what one wants? And can a theistic God (supposing He can be proven to exist) really secure these goods? If Miéville criticizes the “folk Marxist” for unargued materialist assumptions, his own “folk theism” only repeats and compounds the problem. Beneath such a leap of faith lie substantial philosophical commitments, and beneath this apophatic modesty lies a dogmatic insistence on how reason, consciousness, and matter must relate. All of this precludes rationalism and materialism from the outset.

Lenin exclaimed in his Philosophical Notebooks that one cannot truly understand Marx’s Capital without Hegel’s Logic. For the same reasons, he also insisted that an intelligent idealism is closer to an intelligent materialism than to any “stupid” materialism.[xxxvi] But we would go even further than our Marxist predecessors, and say that a consistently rigorous idealism necessarily transforms into dialectical materialism.

Lenin himself intuited this when he wrote that Hegel’s “Absolute Idea” is the most materialist section of the Logic. He also suggested that aspects of absolute idealism are compelled to convert into dialectical materialism[xxxvii] Yet this “compulsion” arises from the force of the concepts themselves. That Marx and Engels could “turn Hegel right side up” follows from the inner character of a philosophy that is (already) genuinely absolute and implicitly materialist. Hegel, Lenin noted, could criticize every form of materialism — save one. This is dialectical materialism.[xxxviii] But materialism must emerge from within the idealist tradition itself; it cannot be asserted independently of the dialectical demonstration. Hence our Marxism must at once be a “meta-Marxism,” a politics based upon a comprehension of the whole.

Miéville is right at the outset of his essay to insist that metaphysical questions are important. Yet it seems that halfway through his piece, he does not want to “stay” with the metaphysical “trouble” — to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. Instead, he stops short, and renounces metaphysics in favor of a leap of faith, or a kind of mysterianism. Matter becomes, for him, a blasted heath, and materialism a disenchanted science of dull realities. The turn to theism appears as the only probable escape from nihilism. But it is a false start, one that can only deepen the muddle, and — we should add with Marxist candor — risks reactionary conclusions.

In Prometheus and Gaia, we attempted to resolve what Miéville treats as insoluble. Above all, we wanted to bridge the divide between Reason and Nature, represented by the Promethean and Gaian archetypes. We tried to show that Prometheus and Gaia are united in the human subject, the highest expression of nature, and in revolt against Father Zeus, the theological personification of class society. Marxism, as Hal Draper wrote, is Prometheus plus Spartacus — but it is not a Prometheanism that elevates mind above nature. Rather, it understands human consciousness as a power of labor within nature itself, striving toward freedom. Better to ground consciousness in nature and society than to treat it as a gratuitous gift bestowed by a heavenly sovereign upon unworthy sinners. Or, as Prometheus himself declares: “Better the servant of this rock than to be a faithful boy to Father Zeus.”[xxxix]

[i] Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (International Publishers, 1935), 15.
[ii] Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Second Edition (Yale University Press, 2012), 280.
[iii] Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Verso, 2017), 80; Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024), 25–26.
[iv] “I argue in a number of places that nature is a societal category and the whole drift of the book tends to show that only a knowledge of society and the men who live in it is of relevance to philosophy.” “Preface to the New Edition of History and Class Consciousness,” Merlin Press, 1967, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs67.htm. “Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels – following Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature.” George Lukacs, “History and Class Consciousness: What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm.
[v] “Critical Theory is no ontology, no positive materialism…Against Marxism as metaphysics, Critical Theory takes dialectic incomparably more seriously than established Marxism.” Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism (Routledge, 2020), 153.
[vi] China Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism,” Salvage, October 6, 2025, https://salvage.zone/beyond-folk-marxism-mind-metaphysics-and-spooky-materialism/.
[vii] In Miéville’s words: “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?”
[viii] Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
[ix] Harald Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy: A Sketch of the History of Philosophy, Volume II, trans. B. E. Meyer (MacMillan and Co., 1924), 281.
[x] Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
[xi] “The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville,” Political Theology Network, March 27, 2023, https://politicaltheology.com/the-rupture-of-desire-an-interview-with-china-mieville-on-aesthetics-marxism-and-apophasis/.
[xii] Karl Marx, “Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 43 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 68.
[xiii] “On Spinozist ‘materialism’ | Richard Seymour,” Patreon, January 6, 2026, https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-spinozist-147550334.
[xiv] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 116.
[xv] David Bentley Hart, “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio Ex Nihilo,” Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 3, no. 1 (2015): 4–12.
[xvi] David Bentley Hart, “A Figure in the Twilight,” Substack newsletter, Leaves in the Wind, October 27, 2023, https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/a-figure-in-the-twilight.
[xvii] Hart, “A Figure in the Twilight.”
[xviii] “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Preface,” accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/preface.htm#xv.
[xix] David Bentley Hart, “Edward Feser’s Sub-Christian Dualism,” Substack newsletter, Leaves in the Wind, April 18, 2022, https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/edward-fesers-sub-christian-dualism.
[xx] Hart, “Edward Feser’s Sub-Christian Dualism.”
[xxi] Benedictus de Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton University Press, 1985), para. 33.
[xxii] Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” para. 48.
[xxiii] Landon Frim, “Sufficient Reason and the Causal Argument for Monism,” Society and Politics 5, no. 2 (2011): 137–58.
[xxiv] This is Spinoza’s conclusion in the first part of his Ethics. A substance, defined as simple (existing in itself alone), “cannot be produced by another substance.” It must therefore be self-causing. Benedictus de Spinoza, “Ethics,” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton University Press, 1985), E1P6.
[xxv] Spinoza, “Ethics,” E1P16.
[xxvi] G. W. F. Hegel, “The Doctrine of Essence (Appearance),” accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slappear.htm.
[xxvii] Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” 1859, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
[xxviii] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: Estranged Labour,” 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.
[xxix] Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume 1,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 313.
[xxx] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1977).
[xxxi] We are aware that not all of this follows a pristinely “orthodox” Spinozism. There is, even today, a live debate when it comes to the number of attributes of Substance within Spinoza’s system. Some take Spinoza literally when he states that, from an infinite substance, innumerable (“infinite”) attributes must follow. These, then, are literally uncountable. Others, hoping to moderate the Spinozist system, instead suggest that, of all the infinite possible attributes, there are in fact only two: thought and extension. In our opinion, while Spinoza represents the high water mark of Enlightenment rationalism and philosophy, his one major defect is the lack of a defensible deduction of the attributes as such. From our perspective, establishing such a deduction will finally secure the materialist bona fides of Spinozism (if not Spinoza himself) — namely, that an infinite and intelligible substance uniquely entails a materialist plenum. However, this is a project which goes far beyond this piece.
[xxxii] China Miéville, “Silence In Debris: Towards an Apophatic Marxism – China Miéville,” Salvage, April 2, 2019, https://salvage.zone/silence-in-debris-towards-an-apophatic-marxism/.
[xxxiii] Arun Saldanha, “Back to the Great Outdoors: Speculative Realism as Philosophy of Science,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 2 (2009): 304–21.
[xxxiv] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm.
[xxxv] As he puts it in the preface to the Philosophy of Right: “To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy, because what is is reason…If a theory transgresses its time, and builds up a world as it ought to be, it has an existence merely in the unstable element of opinion, which gives room to every wandering fancy.” “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Preface.”
[xxxvi] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38 – Philosophical Notebooks, trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow, n.d.), 180, 276.
[xxxvii] Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38 – Philosophical Notebooks, 234, 278.
[xxxviii] Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38 – Philosophical Notebooks, 277.
[xxxix] Karl Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation of Karl Marx — Foreword,” accessed April 24, 2026, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm; Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology, and Anti-Humanism (Anthem Press, 2022).

Materialism in Name Only

Response by China Miéville and Richard Seymour

We are deeply grateful to Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim for their thoughtful engagement, for the seriousness with which they take the metaphysical questions at stake, and for their, inter alia, achingly corybantic Spinozist hymn to the oneness of all being, to a divine and living nature, and to a truly transcendent ultimate reality beyond the mere empirical phenomena of experience. We could hardly be more pleased that, thinly shrouded in pious austere rationalism, itself wrongly labelled ‘materialism’, they evince such a deeply eroticised intellectual striving toward ultimate reality (‘amor Dei intellectualis’), and a besotted reverence for the infinity of being of which they and we are passing modes. They truly are, as Novalis said of Spinoza, God-intoxicated men.

As for ‘their materialism and ours’, there is no such thing. We are not materialists. Fluss and Frim are materialists in name only (henceforth MINO). For us to haggle over ‘materialism’ would be equivalent to the proverbial bald men fighting over a comb. Besides, we agree with them on more than one might assume. Precisely because they do not take their metaphysical and ontological stipulations for granted, nor assume the coincidence of historical and metaphysical materialism, nor hackishly forestall reckoning with these questions, nor peremptorily dismiss the ‘hard problem’, they are not the ‘folk Marxists’ of China Miéville’s critique in ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’. Even if we reach very different conclusions, we diverge on the basis of important shared ground.  

That said, much of what Fluss and Frim say by way of critique is simply, surprisingly misplaced. They engage with what the essay doesn’t say, are often wrong about what it does say, are guilty of some very obvious fallacies and, as we have said, their alternative ‘materialism’ is not materialism at all.

A misplaced critique
It is, in the first place, strange to find Fluss and Frim saying that Miéville’s solution to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – viz. how it, subjectivity, intentionality, qualia etc, could possibly emerge from insentient matter – is that ‘God did it’. As a matter of fact, that appears to be their position, even if, as good Spinozists, they would be forced to phrase it as ‘God or Nature did it’. By contrast, Miéville offers no such positive claim, and proposes no such solution. He proposes no solution at all. Fluss and Frim write:

One embraces idealism only after materialism, and the various dualist half-measures, have exhausted themselves and are deemed impossible. And only then does he [Miéville] take the second step of affirming theism as that ‘least unlikely’ of all possible idealisms. Throughout, there is never any direct proof for any of it. There are no positive demonstrations offered for idealism, nor any natural theology demonstrating the existence (or nature) of God. Instead, there is only a progressive exhaustion – both of concepts and of knowers. It is a gradual concession to whatever’s left over, rather than a positive embrace of certain truth.

They are half-right. The core arguments of ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ are all, explicitly, negative. To quote:

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.

The essay focuses, in Francis Bacon’s terms, on the pars destruens – the negative, the critique of other views – rather than laying out a pars construens, a positive statement of an alternative position.* Even if Miéville concludes his essay with the tantalising single-sentence suggestion, no more, that of all the unlikely solutions theism is not the most unlikely, he makes no positive case for adopting any particular position.†

Why is the argument so restlessly negative? Because the default position of much, even most, Marxism on this issue is incoherent in a consequential way, and ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ is explicitly an exercise in ground-clearing as a first step towards a research programme, which might indeed lead to some pars construens. Then, too, ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ abjures to state an alternative vision on the important practical ground that Miéville does not claim to be sure of any such. This is the point of the discussions of ‘staying with the trouble’ – not to suggest that it is a boon or benefit to refuse to come to a conclusion, but to be unembarrassed about uncertainties as long as they exist, and to hold that they do not in any way obviate any pars destruens. It is hardly uncommon to realise that what one has believed one believed cannot be right, and/but that one is not yet sure what one believes instead.

‘Beyond Folk Marxism’, then, takes metaphysical idealism seriously on the Sherlockian principle that ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be truth’. If metaphysical materialism is eliminated as impossible, and if, per Engels, philosophy is divided into the ‘two great camps’ of metaphysical materialism and metaphysical idealism, then it follows that metaphysical idealism must be taken seriously. Idealism, or some version thereof, must more accurately describe the universe. And, insisting on the Marxist rehabilitation of philosophical idealism, we must admit that theism might be one candidate, and not even the most unlikely. Perhaps, one might even allow, a startlingly seductive possibility which, as Miéville writes, solves many of the faults of other idealist traditions ‘almost definitionally by fiat’. We are both, indeed, startled, scandalised, fascinated with and newly open to the possibility of theism. But it is diagnostically intriguing that Fluss and Frim are much more disquieted by a positive claim that the essay does not make, than by its actual negative arguments. 

Telling too, perhaps, that their formulations misleadingly imply a coincidence of theism and idealism, as when they ‘deny that the theist/idealist solution “works”’. They, of course, disavow idealism and erroneously claim to be materialists – more on this shortly – but it is clearly the theist version of idealism that most disquiets them. We are not suggesting that Fluss and Frim, accurately discerning our susceptibility from a thimbleful of phrases, and rashly rushing in to extirpate the heresy, which evidently troubles them far more than the actual argument of ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’, must also plead guilty to the same fascination. But we’re certainly thinking it loudly.

What is still not debatable is that ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ deliberately and explicitly refuses to take a positive position on theism, or indeed on any specific idealist tradition. All idealisms, subjective, objective, transcendental, analytical, absolute and others are all, it insists, ‘worthy of respectful engagement’. So to the extent that Fluss and Frim’s critique rests narrowly on a critique of theism, it is simply not the takedown of the essay’s positive prescriptions that it takes itself to be – for there are none. 

Straw persons
Despite the above, we will here take a critical, leisurely shot at  some of the anti-theist arguments offered by Fluss and Frim. Not, to be clear, because we are making positive arguments for theism here. Rather, having foreclosed metaphysical materialism, and open-minded as to the specifics of idealism tout court, we hold that all such various traditions deserve steel-manning and serious critical engagement. This is what Fluss and Frim don’t provide.

The thrust of their argument against theism is that ‘a universe of Gods and miracles is incompatible with making predictions or calculating “likelihoods” that ‘God is wholly unpredictable’ that it governs the universe ‘at whim’; and that this collapses the principle of sufficient reason, a grundnorm of rationality tout court. Given God, we cannot know ourselves, nor the universe, nor historical laws or tendencies, nor anything, and this collapses any intellectual or political endeavour at all.

It’s worth pointing out that this, too, is a pars destruens: Fluss and Frim don’t avail themselves here of any of the numerous positive arguments for a Godless universe. They insist, rather, that given the epistemological catastrophe that must follow were theism true, in their model, it cannot be. Nor is this particularly even a logical pars destruens, but an ethical one. There is nothing in this argument to prove, logically, that we are not ‘as flies to wanton boys … to the gods’ – there is only a horror so great at the idea that they refuse to countenance it. But the prospect does not, as Fluss and Frim suppose, automatically follow from theism.

There are doubtless theists for whom the description might be accurate. But this is an antique debate within theology and philosophy, and there are a great number of sophisticated theological traditions and arguments for which this is a canard. At one extreme, for deism, God created the universe but absents itself entirely from its workings. In Robert John Russell’s theory of ‘non-interventionist objective divine action’, God’s acting objectively in nature affects the flow of natural processes precisely in ways consistent with the theories of natural science. For Aquinas, God is the primary transcendent cause, but – in distinction to the ‘occasionalism’ according to which God is the sole real cause of all events – God in its very quiddity is not outside nature but acts through the genuine and genuinely causal powers of the secondary, real, immanent causes it has created. 

Even an occasional ‘miracle’ (for those theists who believe in them, which is not all) is not contra naturam, because it operates above, rather than suspending, those secondary causes. For Wolfhart Pannenberg, following Augustine, a ‘miracle’ is – and contrary to Fluss and Frim’s claim that ‘by definition’ such a miracle must break natural laws – defined as an event that is unusual but explicitly not contrary to those laws, though it may shine a light on our lack of full knowledge of them. For David Bentley Hart among others, God is not a being among other beings but the grounds of all being, including natural laws. On which grounds the principle of sufficient reason presumes God, whereas Godless materialist naturalism leaves the totality of contingent being entirely unexplained, and its ‘rules’ ultimately untrustworthy. For both Leibniz and Alexander Pruss, too, the principle of sufficient reason presumes theism, absent which the operations of the principle itself necessarily terminate in precisely the kind of causeless ‘brute fact’ the existence of which that principle denies.

No, one does not have to be persuaded by any of these arguments, or others of like ilk, or of theism at all. We present them here merely to point out that the picture of theism provided by Fluss and Frim is a parody of various bodies of theory carefully and systematically developed over centuries. Fluss and Frim are clearly aware of these traditions – they refer to a ‘a very old, scholastic debate … about whether God’s absolute freedom and God’s absolute nature conflict’. They then, though, dismiss this as ‘scholastic wrangling and hair-splitting’, and instead invoke as the theist God a capricious and untrustworthy Zeus. This, God as demiurge, a very large and powerful being but still not the ground of being itself, is little more than the risible figure of fun that epigones of a bowdlerised enlightenment such as Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais delight in not believing in. For a rigorous takedown of so rich and, at its best, sophisticated a set of traditions as theism, let alone on exact grounds that have been a central concern of philosophical theologians for generations, this will not do.

Surprisingly for such sophisticated and well-read critics, similar and related straw-personning, and the as-if triumphant presentation of at-best inadequate ripostes thereto, recur throughout ‘Their Materialism and Ours’. As do certain inherent contradictions within their own model, which we see as concomitant on their attempts to square various unsquarable circles. To take just some examples, they write:

 ‘Once “souls” are introduced to the picture, and once these are affirmed as immaterial, uncaused by stimuli and wholly simple, then there is no need for the apparatus of the brain whatsoever. Nor is there any need – or any possibility – of explaining how the body produces impressions on the mind’. ‘What use are the physical calories derived from a physical school lunch, when thoughts operate on their own, idealistic [sic] accord.’ ‘If we suppose that sentiments and moods are mere qualia, wholly irreducible to intelligible contexts…’ 

But why should we suppose any such thing? Who said thoughts ‘operate on their own’? Whether one prefers the term qualia, ‘what-it’s-like-ness’, interiority, subjectivity, or whatever, there is absolutely no suggestion in any serious metaphysically idealist theory that such phenomena need, or could, be disembarrassed of the materiality through which they are made manifest – and which in any case, for a thoroughgoing idealism, is precisely not extricable from the mentality of which the universe is wrought. Here, Fluss and Frim revert behind their own backs to the dualism they otherwise (rightly) dismiss as impossible. 

There is more:

‘If an all-powerful God exists, then this deity can implant in our mind any sort of philosophy He pleases. Our thoughts may not mirror reality one bit’. 

This, again, is the God of Gervais, rather than of those many theorists for whom matters of human cognition and ratiocination are inextricable from humans as secondary causes in a theist universe. It’s also worth pointing out that, agree with it or not, the mirror argument can be and has been made, by Alvin Plantinga among various others, against naturalist metaphysical materialism, and remains a touchpoint for debates. That is, even agreeing to bracket the hard problem, if evolution within a physicalist universe has somehow given rise to our consciousness for adaptive reasons, that in no way necessarily correlates with consciousness leading to true belief or rigorous cognition, and therefore we have little reason to believe our beliefs. Fluss and Frim’s epistemological critique of theism can be marshalled against metaphysical materialism.

In similar and directly related mode, Fluss and Frim claim that ‘Miéville cannot be correct when he says that one can embrace “historical materialism” apart from the foundation of “metaphysical materialism.” For only an underlying, metaphysical materialism provides the basic rule of the universe (object permanence, efficient causation, uniformity of nature, and so on) that govern all historical events.’ It is hard to know exactly how to respond to this claim, given that it is flatly and straightforwardly false. It is a version of the old canard that conflates scientific realism – the commitment to the world’s reality independent of one’s senses and cognition, and the basic trustworthiness of our senses and cognitions about that world – with metaphysical materialism. It is also, to that extent, hopelessly confused. Metaphysical materialism provides no such foundation, since it cannot close the gap – which it introduces – between physical structure and the knowability of that structure. Object permanence, as is suggested by the phrase’s origin in Piagetian psychology, is a fact about cognition – or, in Kantian terms, a synthetic a priori structure – not something that could be given to consciousness by a purely physical world. Likewise, the ‘uniformity of nature’ and ‘efficient causation’. For the physical world to be truly knowable, for these mental facts to be true to nature, nature would have to be as mind-like and rational in structure as idealists say it is, not just physical: it would have to have a common platform with mind. Or, as Spinoza puts it: ‘If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other.’ Scientific realism is not only perfectly compatible with God, or indeed un-God-ed idealism, but arguably better grounded in such.

This, Fluss and Frim tacitly acknowledge in their Spinozist account of reason and the passions. There is, they write ‘nothing beyond the rational and the real, or beyond the domains of extension and intelligibility. The order and connection of reason and matter are one and the same.’ The ‘irrational’, they explain as a privation of a fundamentally rational order, in which ‘minds’ are sometimes ‘subject to impulses and causes outside of their own conscious control or understanding, which is ‘the origin of what we may call the passions’. The causes themselves are not irrational but are imperfectly conceived (inadequate ideas) by a finite mind. We might fault their account for too strongly counterposing the passions to reason. After all, their distinction ‘between rational indignation and irrational hatred, between revolutionary ardor and mere resentment’ implicitly draws on Spinoza’s distinction between the ‘sad’ and the ‘joyful’ passions: that is, even according to their own preferred metaphysics, there are passions which are rational and, to that extent, expand our power to act. However, the basic argument that the material order is at one and the same time a rational order is in no way a metaphysical materialism. They go on, in the same vein, ventriloquising the idealism they criticise:

[O]ur moral character, even the source of our suffering, cannot be the result of material causes. These must instead be the work of Divine Providence, or perhaps, a culpable and free will. We can now see how idealism is the perfect metaphysic for austerity. It replaces the investigation of causes, and the criticism of unjust structures, with individual moral blame.’ 

Here, Fluss and Frim combine a swingeing and philistine parody of the varied and heterogeneous traditions of idealism with a common, but unhelpful, Marxist tendency to derive politically reactionary positions far too neatly from theoretical positions – including those not overtly political – of which one is critical. Notably, in separating  ‘moral character’ and ‘material causes’, they once more allow dualism to creep in behind their backs. Likewise, the implication that idealism forecloses the ‘investigation of causes’ not only contains a tacit dualism of mind and matter, but ignores rich bodies of idealist theory that are perfectly consonant with scientific realism and the investigation of ‘material conditions’. 

It is without question true that certain political positions, including reactionary and baleful ones, have various elective affinities with, cleave with, and even in some cases may to various degrees logically derive from certain philosophies. And the uncoverings of such tendencies and resonances are politically and theoretically crucial acts. But Marxists, in part out of a healthy heuristic of suspicion, have tended to be considerably too quick off the mark, and too reductive and ‘monocausal’, with such readings. The innumerable layers of mediation between certain theoretical grundnorms and various political positions, and the actions thereupon of contingencies – the ‘swerves’, clinamen – are far too often written out of the model of totality. As Serge famously said, ‘[i]t is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs’. Thus too with idealism – and with metaphysical materialism, and much else. It is not that they do not contain seeds which might lead one to support austerity: it is that they contain many seeds, not all of which do. 

On the one hand, Fluss and Frim ignore the tendential logics by which for, say, a theist idealist of radical stamp, such as a liberation theologian, idealism would be the perfect metaphysic for collective action and a thunderous rebuke to austerity. Conversely, for an enormous number of ‘austerians’, the ‘perfect metaphysic’ and ideological cover is, far from being idealism, a crudely materialist darwinism, a metaphysics by which physical and material might makes right, winners in material struggle deserve to win, and losers to lose. The point here is not to deny that certain idealist theories might justify political reaction: only to say that there is nothing inevitable about this, nor that metaphysical materialism is necessarily a bulwark against that.

In a partial defence of ‘emergence’ as a heuristic for the occurrence of consciousness, against the criticisms in ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’, Fluss and Frim analogise between the ‘emergence’ of consciousness in the physical matter of the brain and the phase transition between water and ice. But this latter is precisely the sort of ‘weak’ emergence that the essay allows. The former, by contrast, is the ‘strong’ emergence that the essay argues is impossible. That is to say, understanding of the molecular bonds of H20 explain the counterintuitive shift from liquid to solid in reduced temperature, whereas no degree of understanding of the molecules in the brain can ever explain the fact of interiority, of consciousness. And in fact, ‘strong’ emergence provides no explanatory mechanism by which the transition from molecules to mind could ever occur; it is merely asserted as something that must have happened. While they agree that we do not yet understand ‘the specific emergence of consciousness from physical nature’, Fluss and Frim insist that ‘all one must do is fill in the empirical blank spaces’ because ‘[t]he precise manner of emergence is always partly known through empirical means and so is never certain once and for all’. But – as ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ insists at obnoxious length – the ‘hard problem’ is a metaphysical, not an empirical problem. There is, simply, no amount of empirical data at all about the physical behaviour of the brain at any level of magnification that can bring us one iota closer to answering the philosophical question of how, from such matter, the fact of interiority can arise. Because we are talking about two fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. At least according to metaphysical materialism – of which more below.

In Fluss and Frim’s view, while it is true that ‘emergentism, on its own, does not solve the underlying philosophical problem’, it is adequate if it is applied on the basis of the correct materialist metaphysics. The bulk of the pars construens of their essay is dedicated to outlining such a theory. It’s to this that we now turn.

MINO
The most interesting questions arise where Fluss and Frim present their own metaphysics. An examination of which shows, intriguingly, that in certain respects we disagree with them far less than they seem to believe, while in others we disagree with them even more.

Allowing that their exposition is careful and complex, we’ll start by briefly laying out their claims. ‘For the rationalist, the word “materialism” (in the sense of metaphysical materialism) cannot denote simple, unintelligible “stuff”.’ They are saying that ‘matter’, for the rationalist, cannot be the mindless stuff of physicalism: that is, they agree with ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ that ‘it would indeed be impossible to reconcile mind with matter’, if matter were so conceived, and thus agree with us in opposing the crudest forms of physicalism. Where things get interesting is how they tweak and nuance the concept of matter.

They are not, of course, alone in doing so. Even plenty of scientists who would define themselves as physicalists, in the sense of seeing the universe and all it contains, consciousness included, ultimately in terms of fundamental physics, and who would not hold with Fluss and Frim on their model of materiality, stress that the old-fashioned notion of matter as inert ‘stuff’ has been known to be a fairytale since, at least, the birth of quantum theory. The astounding and counterintuitive behaviours and indeed quiddity of the building blocks of the universe that we tend, misleadingly, to gloss as ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ outlines an incomparably less ‘inert’ or indeed straightforwardly ‘physical’ vision of the universe than the crudest common sense allows. 

Physicalism in such more sophisticated versions, with its recourse to cutting-edge science rather than common sense, is the scientifically dominant heir of the pre-quantum models of metaphysical materialism (and indeed for some essentially coterminous, the same philosophy in new times). As Jessica Wilson puts it in ‘On Characterising the Physical’, ‘[t]he appeal to physics reflects … the circumstances motivating materialism’s evolution into physicalism. … [C]ontemporary physics has reported that the relatively fundamental entities [of materialism] have few, if any, of the characteristics of the material; and thus materialism has been rendered a has-been. Its foundational spirit has survived in physicalism, however … [T]he foundational entities – now, the physical entities – are to be characterized by physics, the science treating of relatively fundamental entities, rather than by definition alone.’ 

There exists, even among some Marxists (and others), a bad extrapolation from this in an attempt to explain consciousness, interiority, qualia. While it may be true that the ‘stuff’ of an older metaphysical materialism couldn’t give rise to consciousness, goes the argument, thinking in terms of quantum fields and superposition and such, all these weird phenomena that are far less ‘inert’, surely leaves open the possibility that, even if we don’t understand it now, future investigations into the sub-atomic realm of the mind might ‘solve’ the hard problem. There are two main problems with this. The first is that it is, overwhelmingly, utterly gestural, of the ‘because something something quantum physics something’ variety. Not only is this no solution, it is not even a roadmap to a solution, but a gestural statement of faith that one day a solution will, must, arise. (From within physics itself, one could say something similar of Roger Penrose’s nervous promissory note about quantum processes and microtubules.) Much more damagingly, however, though this approach formally notes the sheer oddness of physics, philosophically it remains a category error of exactly the sort that we – along with Fluss and Frim – see in the reconciling of mind with matter. The bizarre behaviours of subatomic particles are no more categorically apt to generate consciousness than the dead rock of pre-Copenhagen common sense (unless one posits something fundamentally consciousnesslike therein, as do some panpsychists).

To their credit, this is not Fluss and Frim’s approach. Rather, their conceptual reconfiguring of matter does not base itself on arcane physics, but is, quite properly, philosophical.We urge readers to refer to ‘Their Materialism and Ours’ for a more careful exposition of what we summarise here. For Fluss and Frim, the philosophical argument unfolds as follows. i) Given that rationalism works at all, the matter of the universe is fundamentally ‘intelligible and thus governable by … laws’. ii) There is a sense in which Fluss and Frim proclaim themselves to be idealists – specifically absolute idealists, in a broadly Hegelian sense. By this they mean that ‘the universe is intelligible … according to its own nature and immanent laws’, and that, per Hegel, the ‘real is [therefore] rational and the rational is real’. ‘We have here neither insensible matter, nor contingent free creation.’ The key point here is that for Fluss and Frim, this is ‘universal’ ‘objective knowledge’, rather than the ‘particular and subjective’ consciousness they see (questionably) as intrinsic to all theism, and to what they call ‘subjective idealism’. iii) This ‘absolute idealism’ Fluss and Frim then reframe as materialism. Their argument here is dense and complex, but essentially revolve around the fact that knowledge and understanding of the universe is possible, and that, drawing (heavily) on Spinoza, any such true idea thrown up must be ‘that which is known entirely through itself alone’, that it is ‘self-caused’, and (quoting Hegel), that ‘[t]he essence must appear’ – which is to say, it must take concrete form, and thus be material. Ultimately, then, ‘'[t]he shining forth of nature, the existence of modally distinct things, is never a choice or a brute, contingent fact, nor even a matter of inborn generosity or love, but rather follows from infinite Nature itself. And materialism just is this plenum – a separation of finite things, distinct in themselves and external to one another, yet all conditioned by the same intelligible laws.’ 

Notice, already, the sleight of hand. They have established that existence, in this metaphysics, is fully expressed and fully determined. They have not deduced, so much as asserted by terminological fiat, that this fully determinate plenum, infinite substance expressed in infinitely many attributes, all equally co-original with ‘God or Nature’, is material. The Hegelian move, showing how infinite substance manifests as a world of finite things, makes this philosophical relabelling even more implausible: matter for Hegel cannot be the ground, cannot be self-sufficient, can only be the self-externalisation of Spirit as a condition of its return to itself.

Nonetheless, for Fluss and Frim, this series of manoeuvres having been essayed, the hard problem, while it remains hard, ceases to be a categoric, mysterious or ‘insoluble’ problem. Because when one conceives of matter as ‘always, already intelligible’, its ‘emergence’ (which, as mentioned, they do revert to) into ‘an individual mind’, while still highly complex, is no longer a categoric impossibility. Importantly, taking this ingenious argument on one level, we straightforwardly agree. Recall that, contrary to what Fluss and Frim claim, the claim of ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ is not for theism, but that metaphysical materialism cannot be true, and that thus some form of metaphysical idealism must be. Here, indeed, Fluss and Frim explicitly and enthusiastically adopt idealism, of the absolute variety.

Here, however, problems arise. One is that – contra Engels, with whom, on this point, we are in accord – Fluss and Frim claim not to have to choose, ultimately, metaphysically, between materialism and idealism. For them, to quote, ‘absolute idealism = materialism’. But the thing is, as they have it in Texas, you can put your boots in the oven but that doesn’t make them biscuits. We are not the cops: Fluss and Frim can call any of their categories anything they want, according to whatever whims move them. But in a debate like this, defining terms is important. And the simple fact is that, according not only to all conventional but all systematic and meaningful philosophical usage, absolute idealism of Fluss and Frim’s model is not any kind of metaphysical materialism.

A few examples: for George Stack, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Materialism is a set of related theories which hold that all entities and processes are composed of – or are reducible to – matter, material forces or physical processes. All events and facts are explainable, actually or in principle, in terms of body, material objects or dynamic material changes or movements. In general, the metaphysical theory of materialism entails the denial of the reality of spiritual beings, consciousness and mental or psychic states or processes, as ontologically distinct from, or independent of, material changes or processes.’ For Howard Robinson in the same book, ‘[m]aterialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material’. For Daniel Stoljar, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, metaphysical materialism is essentially interchangeable with physicalism, and ‘'[t]he general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical.’ In David Lewis’s influential formulation, ‘Materialism is the thesis that physics – something not too different from present-day physics, though presumably somewhat improved – is a comprehensive theory of the world, complete as well as correct. The world is as physics says it is, and there’s no more to say.’ For John Carswell Smart, ‘materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them’. For Jessica Wilson, physicalists, precisely as the most sophisticated modern metaphysical materialists, ‘have good reason to impose the NFM (no fundamental mentality) constraint on their operative account.’

And then there is this, which might be relevant for our Spinozist interlocutors, from Ernest McMullin in The Concept of Matter in Modern Philosophy:

‘If the universe were best described in terms of Spinoza’s categories, then “immaterialism” would be the correct label, since the emphasis is upon those features (logical necessity, unity, creativity…) that have traditionally characterised the ‘spiritual’ counterparts of matter…’

The point is not only that Fluss and Frim are not using the term as philosophers do, but that though they call their model ‘materialist’, it contains, of necessity and as a foundational grundnorm, rather than as a derived characteristic, a mind-like quality – which is, precisely, metaphysically idealist, and precisely the quality that disqualifies a theory from being metaphysically materialist in philosophical parlance. Now, we agree with Fluss and Frim that this is a necessary move. But we believe it is vital to be clear that this is to move away from metaphysical materialism, towards the proletarian idealism on which historical materialism can, and must, be based.

This means by which Fluss and Frim perform this sleight of hand – and to be clear, we don’t question their good faith, only the degree to which they have clocked the ramifications of their own position – is by the category of ‘intelligibility’. This recurs repeatedly throughout their model. Explicitly defending metaphysical materialism, they stress (correctly) that the universe cannot be ‘simple, “unintelligible” stuff’. ‘[M]atter itself is intelligible’. ‘[T]he sine qua non of our materialism is intelligibility and lawfulness’. And because this intelligibility is distinguished, in Fluss and Frim’s model, from any subjectivity, they distinguish it from theism – and from ‘idealism’, to the (contradictory) extent to which they conflate the two. And, as we have shown, because the universe is ‘always, already intelligible’ (to itself), the hard problem may remain hard, but it ceases to be impossibly so. To sum up, quoting Carl Sagan that ‘We are a way for the universe to know itself’, Fluss and Frim triumphantly declare that ‘[i]ntelligence is not added to the world, but is rather a ubiquitous, if latent, feature of matter.’

To stress, precisely because of the intractability of the hard problem, we agree with these diagnoses of the universe, and of ‘matter’ – stuff. Their last formulation in particular is admirably clear. Not least because the ‘intelligibility’ of matter, in their model, is not contingent. It is not intelligible in that by some cosmic accident or brute fact, the physicality of the universe happens to be comprehensible to the creatures called humans that belatedly evolve in it. Intelligence does not ‘supervene’ on, or ‘emerge’ from matter, but is in a classically panpsychist manner constitutive of it. Intelligence here is ubiquitous, not added – there from the start, from the birth of the universe. Nature is constituted by rational relations, all the way down.

But, rational to what, according to what? Again, here is the ‘mind’ in everything, always. This is not metaphysical materialism. For something in and of its nature, as opposed to contingently, to be ‘intelligible’, there must exist a standpoint from which it can be understood.

By the slightly nervous qualification ‘latent’, Fluss and Frim appear to want to solve that problem – but they do not. First, what can it possibly mean for ‘’intelligence’ to be ‘latent’ in unliving matter for billions of years? We have already seen that to have philosophical traction, the ‘intelligibility’, and thus the ‘intelligence’ that finds the intelligible intelligible, cannot contingently happen to arise, but must exist coterminously with the intelligible. Were it the case that the universe becomes fathomable to itself only with the arrival of humanity, quite apart from the fact that that is not what ‘latent’ means, and not what Fluss and Frim claim, we would be right back to the absolute insolubility of the hard problem – where previously ‘unintelligent’ matter now throws up ‘intelligence’ and consciousness.

And if, instead, ‘latent’ here means ‘present always’, then Fluss and Frim’s continued insistence that they do not mean a so-called ‘subjective’ intelligence are beside the point. Of course, their extreme allergy to and anxiety about anthropomorphism with regard to the universe is laudable. But whether or not we even agree that it is possible to imagine an intelligence worthy of the name that is able to find the intelligible intelligible that yet contains no trace of what could call ‘subjectivity’ – a debate we bracket here, not least because terminology is a minefield – it should be clear that their model necessarily embeds that intelligence, that mindlikeness, in the very foundational ontology of the universe. This is the opposite of metaphysical materialism.

Now, it is possible that we might dispute with Fluss and Frim the parameters of a plausible idealism. They are Spinozist mystics (the noun is not, for us, a dis, though we suspect it is for them), for whom Nature and God are infinite and one, for whom intelligence and intelligibility are fundamentally constitutive of Nature and God, but for whom the same reality also includes infinities and super-infinities of super-sensible attributes, exceeding anything accessible to human sense or reason. We might stress-test that model compared to any of the variety of the monist theisms in which we find rich resources – or indeed, as ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ proposed, against Helen Yetter-Chappell’s ‘idealism without God’, or against Bernardo Kastrup’s strange vibrating overmind of ‘analytical idealism’. Or whatever. But these are intra-idealist debates that Fluss and Frim are engaged in, though they seem to be in denial about the fact.

A lacuna in ‘Beyond Folk Marxism’ is precisely an engagement with such denial purveyed by some Marxist interlocutors. To the great credit of Fluss and Frim, and to their fellow deployers of such a technique, it almost always derives from a clear-headed acknowledgement of the scale of the hard problem for metaphysical materialism.

The usual move is to finesse a model of the universe, nature, matter, according to which the hard problem is at least in principle soluble. Such a model will be, of necessity, idealist, in some form. However – and this is where a good deal of confusion creeps in, as what may appear to be arguments about philosophical substance are in fact questions of terminology – presumably out of fidelity to the supposed norms of Marxism, and/or anxious about heresies, and/or in deference to the Marxist tradition’s culture of theoretical authority, having established this more fecund metaphysically idealist grundnorm, such thinkers then proceed simply to call their models materialist.

Such theories and theorists as these, we call MINO – Materialist In Name Only.

Fluss and Frim are by no means the first to pursue this MINO move. Perhaps the most celebrated MINO writer in the Marxist canon is Ernst Bloch, as outlined in Cat Moir’s excellent recent book Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism. Especially in her chapter on ‘The Materialism Problem’ in this important work, Moir outlines in some detail how explicitly much of Bloch’s work was motivated by engagement with the hard problem (though it was not yet known by that name). And though she does not explicitly make this point herself, it is clear from her work that what Bloch described as his ‘speculative materialism’ was another form of (not wholly un-Spinozist) idealism. In acknowledging the possibility of consciousness as constitutive of matter in its essence prior to any human consciousness, he rendered consciousness ‘the substrate’ of this ‘objectively real possibility’ – which is not wrong, but begs the same question about the mindlike and creative point of view from which that potentiality is objectively real, from the earliest existence of matter. Bloch dresses this up with many winning formulations, such as that of ‘the Not with which everything starts up and begins’, and by his deployment of Schelling’s description of  ‘unconscious intelligence’ within Nature.

Moir describes Bloch as ‘playing rather fast and loose with the systematic relationship between spirit and substance in Hegel’s thought’, in his reconstitution of Hegel as a materialist, and indeed in his own self-designation thereas. This is inarguable: in his Aristotelian, hylomorphic model of matter, in which all matter insofar as it exists is already governed by rational relations, in which it is also teleologically oriented toward the continuous actualisation of its inherent possibilities and in which, crucially and centrally, consciousness is always-already implicit, in his model of matter which, for Moir, is ‘the dialectical process of self-realisation and inhibition, he posits a much more persuasive grundnorm than metaphysical materialism, though certainly one not without lacunae or problems or with which one cannot argue.

The problem for later Marxist theorists of metaphysics is that he then calls that ‘materialism’ – if ‘speculative’. In such fashion, and from similar though not identical predicates, Fluss and Frim, too, have offered at minimum an intriguing idealist metaphysics from which one might approach the hard problem, as well as analysing the world from a historical materialist perspective.

That they, retreating from the radical implications of their own metaphysic, however, that they succumb to MINO-ism – that they call this philosophy ‘materialist’ – is wholly unpersuasive.

*We are grateful to Matteo Mandarini for these formulations.
†The original mistaken formulation in the essay, getting lost in double negatives, was ‘not the least unlikely’, but this has been corrected.