Las dimensiones del campo institución-educativa

The Epicurean notion of body (soma) includes both simple, indivisible bodies – the atoms – and the compound bodies that we can familiarize ourselves with through our senses. But there is a curious dualism or contradiction here, Marx remarks. As the world changes, and appearances are annihilated, the atom persists; it is the eternal foundation of the changing world, but as such it never appears; it becomes the essence underlying the world of pure appearances, which are closer to semblances than appearances in the Hegelian sense (which are the necessary expression of existing essence).⁹² While the meeting of atoms, which is paradoxical to Democritus, is made possible by the notion of their swerve, Epicurus', in Marx's reading, insists that the encounters do not abolish the swerve: the self-reliance of atoms asserts itself as repulsion in their encounters.⁹³ This tension between attraction and repulsion is central to Marx's reading of Epicurus' atomism; it means that the only possible combination of atoms into a body is based on their singular attractions rather than on external subsumption and that this attraction does not abolish the swerve. The atom is the movement of the swerve, and a simple affective binary: attraction and repulsion. In this sense the atom is no subject, because it has no object, only encounters and affects.

90 Ibid.

91 In a mythologising note, Marx posed the question of a re-construction from the rubble

(Democritus/Epicurus), after the fall of the system (Aristotle/Hegel). Whereas he likened the latter pair to Prometheus, he seems to see his own time as that of Deucalion. See appendix 1.3.-1.5. and 1.9.

92 'Essence therefore is not behind or beyond appearance, but since it is the essence that exists, existence is appearance', while semblance, on the contrary, is not 'independent and self-supporting' Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 199, §131.

93 Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 116.

Even if attraction creates compositions, it does not abolish the swerve. For this reason all conglomerate bodies have only a temporary and regional existence. The very principle of their combination is also the inner principle of the eventual separation of any one given body. The starting point – the separation of atoms – always reasserts itself. The composition of atoms does not abolish their exteriority, but only creates a semblance of interiority. The atoms do not involve themselves into life. So, when the atom 'proceeds to reality' (Wirklichkeit, actuality) and comes into appearance, it never exists as itself, but always as something else, as the bearer of forms indifferent and external to it.

On this basis, Epicurus cannot think actuality as actuality. He can only separate actuality into its component parts, not think its immanent organisation. Ultimately Epicurus can only dissolve any organisation; the fear that the thought of a whole might distrub ataraxy becomes an incapacity to think the self-organisation of matter. Marx's formulation of this problem is telling: Epicurus' incapacity to think organisation 'is a necessary consequence, since the atom, presupposed as abstractly individual and complete, cannot actualise itself as the idealising and pervading power of this manifold.'⁹⁴ Later Marx writes in a parenthesis, '[Epicurus] knows no other nature but the mechanical.'⁹⁵ The reference to these 'real idealising powers' and a nature beyond the mechanical would have been clear to many contemporary readers of Hegel:⁹⁶ in the Philosophy of Nature, the first such power – following the section on mechanism – is chemism, the combination of that abolishes their individuality in creating a new compound body.⁹⁷ After chemism, Hegel introduces organics, with the organism as a truly idealising power organising the multiplicity of its elements according to its own principle, its own idea. In Marx's own abbreviated summary of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, this is 'singular nature. The determination of subjectivity, in which the real distinctions of the form are likewise brought back to ideal unity, which is self-found and for itself — Organics.'⁹⁸ Idealisation is, as noted by Catherine Malabou, a process of simultaneous condensation and synthesis of what is different, both an abstraction and a contraction.⁹⁹ Thus, the reference of Marx's subdued critique of Epicurus is clearly the

94 Ibid., 130. My emphasis.

95 Ibid., 142.

96 Mechanical here does not mean deterministic, but refers to the play of forces, of matter, weight, motion, attraction and repulsion.

97 For an elaboration of the concepts of chemism and organism, see chapter 2, and appendix 1.12.

98 Marx, “Plan of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” 510.

99 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2004), 60.

Hegelian conception of organism. Contra Althusser, this does not mean that Marx's critique is idealistic in an anti-materialist sense. In fact the concept of 'idealising power' refers, in the case of organisms, to a materialist concept of organisation and natural teleology.¹⁰⁰ It simply means that organisms are self-generating and self-reproducing, and that their elements are determined and alive in relation to the whole. The organism has a temporal and local purpose and cause of itself in the sense that it is irreducible to external causations and organised according to its own principle. An organic whole is an Idea insofar as it is not localisable in any part or any limited set of relations between the parts. An organism is always in a relation to the outside, not merely consuming it, but idealising it. As Stephen Houlgate writes:

Life not only 'idealizes' matter into the organs of the body; it also 'idealizes' objects and materials outside the body by assimilating them into itself. “If life were a realist”, Hegel remarks, “it would have respect for the outer world: in fact, however, it always inhibits the reality of the other and transforms it into its own self.”¹⁰¹

Thus Marx judges Epicurus on a standard drawn from Hegel. It refers to a concept of the idea as something not abstractly universal and external to matter but immanent to the organisation of matter. Such organisation, considered as a process of idealisation, refers not just to the actual (Wirklichkeit), but to actualisation (Verwirklichung).¹⁰² Epicurus' atoms do not explain how a virtual multiplicity can actualise itself as or around an 'idealising and pervading power', how essence must come to exist, and how the existing essence must appear. Why is actualisation linked to idealisation, and what is meant by idea here? In a text written during the same year as Marx's Dissertation, Engels launched a critique of Schelling which draws on this Hegelian principle:

Being is thinkable for him only as matter, as hyle, as wild chaos. ... The chief meaning which Schelling attributes to it is ... that of possibility, and so we have a philosophy based on possibility. In this respect, Schelling rightly calls his science of reason the “none-exclusive” science, for in the end everything is

100 Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 105.

101 Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London:

Routledge, 1991), 163. 'Hegel refers to organic self-renewal as 'reproduction.' He understands reproduction, therefore, to be the process whereby an organism continuously produces and preserves itself as the singular organism it is - the process of 'self-producing.'

102 Wirklichkeit is a core Hegelian concept, which is translated as 'actuality', and sometimes as 'reality.' It relates to the verb wirken, to effect or to work (lit. an activity which changes a state of things). See appendix 1.6. for a note on Hegel's use of the concept of Wirklichkeit.

possible. What matters, however [contra Schelling], is that thought should prove its worth by its inner force to become real.¹⁰³

Potential in the sense spoken of here does not refer to logical possibility, but to a mode of being which is not actual. Thus, to understand actuality it is insufficient to proceed in an empiricist fashion from sensual impressions (such immediate proximate truth is mere semblance), or through abstract ontological speculation, say by positing a field of atoms (a multiplicity). The proper method for understanding actuality is to understand the path of actualisation, or idealisation.¹⁰⁴ This passage from possibility to actuality moves through contingency, it does not abolish chance but produces its own power and its own necessity of self-preservation. What is actual is necessary; not in an absolute sense, but in the sense that an organism's self-reproduction is necessary. Just as an organism can change, decay and die, possibility and contingency still form moments of finite necessity; they are part of any process of actualisation, as well as of actuality itself.¹⁰⁵ Here, Marx and Hegel's critique that Epicurean philosophy fails to account for itself (the pure immanence of the multiplicity of atoms is an abstraction which is only possible in thought, yet atomism does not provide a way to explain how this thought of the atom becomes possible) is redoubled when Marx enters into the content of Epicurus' theory.

In either case the problem is not the conceptual or 'real' abstractness of the atoms, but the lack of a passage from the abstract to concrete actuality. Thus Marx's reading of Epicurus does not, contra Althusser, entail a praise to teleology and necessity against the swerve. Rather, it criticises Epicurus for not theorising the passage from the atom to the actual, for one-sidedly insisting that the swerve is subversive of any whole, rather than potentially productive of compound bodies, and how encounters might lead to the generation of organised bodies. The freedom of the atom therefore appears as opposed to the necessity of composed bodies, just as possibility appears opposed to actuality.

Epicurus, in Marx's interpretation, cannot think the possibility of freedom in compound bodies. If freedom is the swerve of the singular absolute atom, the organisation of bodies can only be the repression of this freedom. This is not to say that it is abolished in compound bodies, but rather that it cannot be more than the principle of the contingency of abstract bodies. The atom's '[a]bstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being.'¹⁰⁶

103 Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Schelling: Schelling and Revelation,” in MECW, vol. 2, 1975, 207.

104 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 209–213 §140-141.

105 Ibid., 217 §145, see also §148.

106 Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 130–31. My emphasis.

But, in a world full of fear of authorities and gods, Marx can still take Epicurus' atomism as a model for philosophy despite its limitations. This is where Marx goes beyond Hegel's critique of Epicurus, towards an affirmation of the practical implications of Epicurean philosophy.