I will dance colorfully on the page like a tropical bird if it brings your attention to Marx!

A response to Jay McDaniel’s response (here) to my recent article on Marx and Whitehead (here).

In a world where most Marxist philosophers are lucky if anyone outside of their insular academic or sectarian online community reads their work, I am deeply appreciative of Dr. Jay McDaniel for taking the time not only to read my article, but to then respond thoughtfully, critically, and dialogically, inviting further engagement from myself as well as his public readership. Jay’s response demonstrates a standard for the kind of humility, curiosity, and conviction we should all aspire to when we are engaging with the ideas of others on the internet.

It is with humility that I acknowledge that Jay McDaniel is an expert in Whitehead’s philosophy, while I am far from it. My article is written from the perspective of someone who has been studying Marxist philosophy for over a decade, but who has only relatively recently begun studying Whitehead. Steeped in the Marxist tradition, I approach all other philosophical schools with a Marxist critique and skepticism which is often received as polemical. This is because Marx’s philosophical materialism was already forged critically against the schools of naturalism, physicalism, economism, and philosophical idealism (Hegel and Kant) which preceded him (see The German Ideology); the ideas of which he found had all been developed through an ahistorical, and thus incomplete and undeniably faulty, epistemic base (which is what Marxists deride altogether as idealism).

McDaniel appreciates my critical and poetic sentiment, as a Marxist (which applies to all the philosophical schools which can be categorized as idealism regarding the causal directionality from which they both un-self-consciously arise, and to which they point for solutions) that Whitehead’s process philosophy, without Marx, will only be paddling upstream while the world burns. I followed this sentiment with the assertion that:

“An integration of Whiteheadian philosophy and Marxian philosophy may actually dam the river, and in the green stillness of the reservoir, we may finally see our true and sacred reflection.”

McDaniel writes that:

“The metaphor of paddling upstream, while the world burns, is striking, as is the image of damming the river. What is to be dammed, it seems, are the currents of self-destruction toward which humanity is now headed with global climate change, violence, political authoritarianism, and economic disparities. What is needed is another river in which we human beings swim, respective of, and sensitive to, our inseparable connections with one another and the more than human world: a river in which we can see their true and sacred reflections in one another and the more than human world.”

But McDaniel doesn’t accept my metaphor of “damning the river,” perhaps out of an ecologically-minded sensitivity towards any notion of a modern Prometheanism regarding our relationship to nature. That perspective, apparently driving his need to revise my metaphor; is completely understandable; as Adorno put it, “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” But in my metaphor, there is an implied difference between ‘ends’ and ‘means’, i.e. the means of damming the river justify the ends of undoing our extreme alienation from both ourselves and each other. In my metaphor, we are not damning the river simply because we can, or as a reckless means to some unvirtuous end, but because of our natural virtue, which, in an Aristotelian sense, is that we are reasoning creatures and thus we are capable of doing and thinking literally anything. The Marxist understanding is that what we do and think, first and foremost, is primarily determined by our objective, material (which are also our social) relations of production (which is the re-production of life, not just the production of ‘commodities’ for ‘consumption,’ be it necessary, or excessive). For Marx, we are alienated from our species-being, we do not know what it is that humans do “according to our kind” (ahem…Genesis 1).

McDaniel revises my metaphor, where for him, “what is to be dammed” are all of our current crises; appearing as a suggestion that we slow the collapse of civilization so that we may have time to correct its course. Keeping in mind that I am now speculatively arguing over poetic metaphors, what I suspect to be operating for McDaniel here is a qualification/limitation placed on the willingness to accept Marxism, which, to be fair, is a very common reception of Marxism. And so, McDaniel adds:

“What is needed is another river in which we human beings swim, respective of, and sensitive to, our inseparable connections with one another and the more than human world: a river in which we can see their true and sacred reflections in one another and the more than human world.”

On the one hand, I agree with McDaniel that we humans need to swim in “another” river; one where we can go with the flow, which, in the Daoist sense, is not simply to go with the current, but to fully comprehend (understand) our reality and then act accordingly. Keep in mind that beavers create dams, manipulating their natural environment to the primary benefit of themselves, while also accidentally/secondarily benefitting other living creatures. We may need to use our human ability to reason to (metaphorically) ‘dam the river’ as I have put it, but what I ultimately mean is the same as to completely reverse the flow of the river, effectively creating “a new river” in a sense compatible with Jay’s revision. If, for Jay, my notion of damming the river implies reform, then, for me, his revision of my metaphor (that we need a new river) implies revolution, and with that I could not agree more! Humans reversed the flow of the Chicago river in an exemplary show of the kind of Promethean modernity which Jay would be perfectly right to reject. But for humans to take up a new project of modernity, a new river if you will, as a modernity critical of modernity, is to apply the scientific/naturalist empirical method to the human as the final frontier. This is what Marx has already critically accomplished in terms of the natural law of the movement of human social organization and change, and his project resulted secondarily in a method for how we get free from the chains of capitalism. To be fair, the idea isn’t that we can ever completely undo our alienation, existing like a perfectly symbiotic algae in a stagnant/dammed pool of ‘still green water,’ but actually that our flowing with each other and all of nature would be the result of reducing /reversing our alienation.

McDaniel is concerned with what exactly I mean by Whitehead’s usefulness ‘for intervention on the ideological front,’ writing from his own experience of “teaching Whitehead in China where many people are most interested in Whitehead, not because he helps break free of the illusion of separateness, but because he leaves space for an appreciation of the intrinsic value of each and every human being.” His point is important; that the most compelling emphasis of Whiteheadian thought in China may be very different, even seemingly opposite, from that in the United States. Where Chinese people may be in need of philosophical tools for emphasizing the inherent value of the individual, Americans certainly need intervention in our hyper-individuality and illusion of separateness, which, however opposite our needs appear, ultimately leaves us in much the same spiritual crisis over meaning and purpose as experienced by our Chinese counterparts. I do feel the need to assert here that there is not something inherent to Marxism wherein the individual is destined to be lost: that is an exhausted Cold War anticommunist trope at this point. Instead, I purport that this is because we cannot isolate ‘the individual’ from their social organization, rather, the individual and the collective are always-already inextricably linked, in both communism or capitalism, or some admixture in between. In Marx’s theory of alienation, we humans are alienated from our species-being; our alienation from ourselves is identical to our alienation from each other, and it is only exacerbated under capitalism. Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

“Each of his human relations to the world — seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving — in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. — Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.”

And in the introduction to the Grundrisse:

“The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a ζῶον πολιτιχόν (a political animal) not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society — a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness — is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.”

Jay McDaniel rightly points out that my statement about Whitehead having ‘skipped over the specificities of human experience,’ is not entirely accurate. I should have worded this differently in order to properly convey what I meant, because Whitehead certainly did pay a great deal of attention to the human, as an exemplification of nature, while, much like Marx, he also asserted that human reason and rationality are not infallible. It is true that Whitehead did not skip over the specificity of the human — in general — as he did describe the general modal-processual experience of human sense-perception and thought. What I meant by the specificities of human experience are those historical conditions (material and social relations) shaping our epistemological channels of thought which produce epochal ideas in the forms of both the reproduction of extant ideas as well as those “novel” ideas which emerge against them (as so do not emerge not entirely out of nowhere).

To further my point on this distinction between Marx and Whitehead, I turn to Howard Parsons who, as a scholar of both Whitehead and Marx, wrote:

“Whitehead’s critique of experience and its ideas is a powerful tool of social criticism, but Whitehead did not fully use it as such because he diverted his energies into cosmology. This diversion was significant and fruitful. The result is that others must concretize and humanize this critique (Parsons 1967, 283).”

“A Marxist can say that Whitehead projects humanity into nature; a Whiteheadian, that Marx injects nature into history. But we all do both. The issue between Whitehead and Marx — the history of nature, the nature of history — is to this extent a human issue (289).”

As Parsons leaves us, history is a human issue, which Whitehead does not deal with…but Marx does. There is of course so much more I could say in my response to Mcdaniel at this time, but I would like to briefly address a couple of assumptions on McDaniel’s part before concluding my response to his response (for now). He writes:

“As I read Hummel’s essay, it seems to me that her answer to these questions is: The strategic intervention would focus primarily on the notion of inter-becoming, with its full-blown emphasis on relationality not isolation; its reference to God would be muted since, for many with whom she is in conversation, the word itself and its associations are problematic; and even with any inclusion of God, the emphasis would be on the call of the not-yet but not the tender care of an eternal companion.”

First, while McDaniel is correct that I do not personally find the image of God as a ‘companion’ (in our suffering) to be very helpful, he presumes that my audience finds any discussion of God to be entirely anathema. While this is certainly true of secular liberals, it is not necessarily true of my Marxist friends and acquaintances who are finding themselves more and more interested in coming back to some version of God after a long venture in the cold wilderness of atheism. It turns out that Marxism and religion are not antithetical, it is just that religion in modernity has been a powerful ideological tool against communism (i.e. the 1950’s spacerace and ‘Leave it to Beaver’ sentimentality in which America stands for God and freedom and everything ‘good,’ while the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba supposedly stand for the opposite of that). That said, what I do personally find helpful is the image of a God who patiently, unconditionally, and without intervention waits to know us in his image, and I believe that that God knows us as such when we locate true identity between the subjective and the objective (i.e. the incarnation), which I also believe is the project of Marxism.

McDaniel leaves me with a suggestion:

“It was this beauty that I heard in the final phrase of Hummel’s essay: “in the green stillness of the reservoir, we may finally see our true and sacred reflection.” The promise of her ongoing work, I suggest, lie in incorporating this sense of Beauty, be it Whiteheadian or Marxian or both, into her analysis. She might build upon whatever intuitions gave rise to the beauty of her final sentence. Yes, we need to dam the currents of self-destruction, but we also need to peer into “the green stillness of the reservoir, where we may see our true and sacred reflection.””

I am happy to hear that the beauty of my words has struck a chord. If this line is the reason my article was published, or read, or responded to, then so be it; consider me encouraged to use more beautiful metaphors. I view all linguistic expression, even the most quotidian, as metaphor because it serves a convincing/compelling purpose in our practical act of relating socially. But I will dance colorfully on the page like a tropical bird if it brings your attention to Marx! McDaniel presses upon “whatever intuition gave rise to the beauty of her final sentence,”…and I must respond, quite simply, that love was the intuition. Love as justice (an eternal object) in the first instance, and love as attention (God as an actuality) in the second.

Finally, in partial agreement with McDaniel, Whitehead indeed invites us to see “our true and sacred reflection,” but Marx provided us with a transhistorical map to the reflection pool. Whitehead, all by himself, won’t lead us much of anywhere regarding liberation from extreme inequality, poverty, environmental destruction, and war, all of which are closely tied to (resulting from) the capitalist mode of production. It is this same capitalist mode of production which, as the base of everything, philosophical idealists want to preserve in some ideal/utopian vision of a mythical “market socialism.” But ‘market socialism’ is just as mythical as ‘free market capitalism,’ and even China is on the road to completely eliminating capitalism once their people are fully raised out of poverty and their productive forces are fully developed in place.

My question for McDaniel and others, especially readers of Clayton’s Organic Marxism: is your proclivity for ‘market socialism’ or the ‘progressive reform’ of liberalism, in combination with your placing of blame on individual behavior (i.e. ordinary ‘conspicuous consumers’ and ‘greedy, power-hungry’ capitalists), really in line with a Whiteheadian process-philosophical understanding of this reality? Or, could it be that it is still heavily informed by the idealism of classical liberalism both against ‘neoliberalism’ and in combination with twentieth-century anticommunism? There is socialism or there is capitalism: there is no third-way, at least not indefinitely, and definitely not in a way which could solve the problems created by capitalism in the first place.

The Awakening, by Karl Marx

When your beaming eye breaks
Enraptured and trembling,
Like straying string music
That brooded, that slumbered,
Bound to the lyre,
Up through the veil
Of holiest night,
Then from above glitter
Eternal stars
Lovingly inwards.

Trembling, you sink
With heaving breast,
You see unending
Eternal worlds
Above you, below you,
Unattainable, endless,
Floating in dance-trains
Of restless eternity;
An atom, you fall
Through the Universe.

Your awakening
Is an endless rising,
Your rising
An endless falling.

When the rippling flame
Of your soul strikes
In its own depths,
Back into the breast,
There emerges unbounded,
Uplifted by spirits,
Borne by sweet-swelling
Magical tones,
The secret of soul
Rising out of the soul’s
Daemonic abyss.

Your sinking down
Is an endless rising,
Your endless rising
Is with trembling lips-
The Aether-reddened,
Flaming, eternal
Lovekiss of the Godhead.