As the condensation of Marx’s strong program into aphoristic form, the eleventh and last of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx 1972:109)—recapitulates, with radical additions, Aristotle’s claim, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that “we are not
conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, else there would be no advantage in studying it” (1962:II.2, 1103b26–28). As recapitulation, praxis, or ‘revolutionizing practice,’ referred to in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ like Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom—defined as“...a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man” (VI.4 1140b5–6)—is necessarily analytical and practical. Both Marx and Aristotle deny the desirability and even the coherence of a non-participatory analytical frame.
Epistemologically speaking, thesis eleven implies that adequate knowledge of truth comes only through active, transformative engagement in social and political life: “Man must prove the truth...in practice” (Marx 1972:108). If phronesis is the key to Aristotle’s moral philosophy, praxis forms the heart of Marx’s strong program in moral sociology.24
However, although both Aristotle and Marx described their respective
predecessors as ‘idealists’ in need of critical empirical correctives, Aristotle’s empirical critique appears to lack an historical-r/evolutionary element. As a result, Aristotle wonders how individuals can ‘become good’ rather than how the world itself can be
24 Aristotle also has a concept of praxis, but phronesis is generally considered to be the relevant comparative term (Lobkowicz 1967).
transformed in order to meet human needs (and even to generate and to fulfill new ones).
In his Politics, Aristotle criticizes Plato for outlining ideals that are appealing in their perfection (Aristotle 1941: II.6 1265a10–15) but unrealistic, whereas “We should
consider, not only what form of government is best, but also what is possible and what is easily attainable” (IV.1 1288b35). For Marx, this is an empiricism of adjustment, not revolution. He aimed at eliminating social evils, not at perfecting individual virtues.
Aristotle ties phronesis to an understanding of individual character formation as an accumulation process activated by natural aptitude, habituation, education, and experience. Through right action, teaching, and repeated exercise of practical judgement, inborn abilities develop into practical wisdom in human affairs. The principle that
phronesis is best exercised in situations of leadership has the important consequence that it tends to depend upon, reproduce, and to justify hierarchical and tutelary relations.
Aristotle’s theory of individual character is linear, but his theory of socio-political change is cyclical, based upon a formal typology of governments (i.e.,
Monarchy/Tyranny; Aristocracy/Oligarchy; Polity/Democracy), that periodically give way to each other in a kind of circuit. According to Marx, Aristotle could not conceive of revolutionary change or of history in the modern sense because he assumed human relations of domination and subordination to be permanent and natural, especially those between 1) free male citizens and women, slaves, and children (i.e., the political realm vs.
the household); 2) rich and poor; and 3) teacher and student. One finds little sensitivity in Aristotle for the subtle ways in which experiences of hierarchy and inequality might
deform the practical reason of both dominated and dominant groups. His biological metaphysics restricted his concept of phronesis, rendering revolution circular and repetitious, not linear and potentially novel. Chapter seven will address the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose critical and Marxian re-reading of Aristotle attempts to ditch Aristotle’s insistence on ‘natural slaves’ and to synthesize Aristotle’s focus on individual virtues with Marx’s insistence on revolutionary transformation in a renovated concept of
‘practice.’ Some followers of Alasdair MacIntyre now trumpet a program of Marx-inflected “Revolutionary Aristotelianism” (Blackledge and Knight, eds. 2011).
We conventionally distinguish Marx’s notion of praxis from phronesis in several important ways. First, praxis implies reality’s historical and dialectical ‘fluidity,’ and its potential for radical and novel change. One of the keys to this fluidity lies in the nature of praxis itself as an emergent form of activity that develops from a particular position within a social order, transforming that order. Thus bourgeois society emerged within feudal society as the revolutionizing practice of an emergent and competitive business class. Second, praxis develops through class formation rather than through individual development. In the case of proletarian praxis, it will do so in a manner that ultimately subverts hierarchical relations (and class) rather than stabilizing them. Above all, proletarian praxis, as a form of work, produces; rather than merely responding to the decision-demanding dilemmas of the human condition, as in Aristotle, it actively and directly creates that human condition itself. Revolutionary proletarian praxis, as opposed to practical wisdom, or phronesis, will emerge from a society organized around inequality
and exploitation, but it will burst these relations of domination and subordination. This implies some freedom with respect to character as something permanently stamped-on from the outside, as unfreedom. Alienated labourers are transformed and transform themselves into the gravediggers of capitalist society. They complete the process of organization begun by the capitalist mode of production. Revolutionizing praxis reclaims the sociality of character, embedding it in a dynamic dialectical process.
While Aristotle develops an individual, linear, and cumulative conception of character formation, Marx theorizes character formation—implicitly rather than explicitly
—historically and in terms of classes rather than individuals. What accumulates are not so much virtues as class characteristics (e.g., the bourgeoisie as vampiric) that emerge dialectically from forms and degrees of socially produced inequality and exploitation.
Through periods of accumulation classes develop distinct characteristics based upon the division of labour and their material life conditions, but since their relationships with each other are conflictual rather than mutual, these periods systematically deform sociality, intensify contradictions between classes, and ultimately culminate in revolutionary moments of crisis that generate new social systems and social classes.
These revolutions are not mere repetitions of the past. They are transformations that produce novel social forms and new social characters. The bourgeoisie differ greatly. as a ruling class, from the landed aristocracy that they displaced.
On this view, history, while driven by class conflict, appears as a revolutionarily punctuated unrolling. In a way, Marx sublates the Aristotelian notion of human
flourishing, which Aristotle had confined to individual history, or at least to civilizational cycles. In Marx, human flourishing is both humanly created and determined
(denaturalized), and historically emergent. His theory of revolution emphasizes the productive and novel possibilities of socio-political crises. As a form of praxis develops it may break the bonds of the past, revolutionizing the forces and relations of production, and transvaluing previously dominant morality. In the proletarian revolution, rather than being bound to their class character as to an investment—as the bourgeoisie are bound to their bank accounts and to the logic of capital—the proletariat will produce a character reversal that releases humanity from the bonds of hitherto existing forms of character, character as a measure of personal qualities that is confined to systems of unequal social relations. Within class society, the dominant class accumulates the bulk of socially recognized and rewarded virtues and a near monopoly on (virtuous) character,25 just as they accumulate the bulk of the material wealth by controlling the means of production.
Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach makes the point:
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.
Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example).
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as
revolutionising practice. (Marx 1972:108)
The ‘doctrine’ Marx refers to here is not Aristotle’s (cf. Carrier 2006), and Owen’s
25 One’s reputation becomes a characteristically bourgeois obsession, as Weber noted well in his discussion (1958b) of Benjamin Franklin. Bourdieu’s influential work Distinction (1984) elaborates this logic in instructive ways, as will be discussed in chapter seven.
criteria for dividing society into two parts were not Aristotle’s, but Aristotle and Owen both accepted a division between active and passive classes and a relationship of necessary tutelage between them. Owen, the wealthy 19th century English industrialist, fancied himself capable of transforming social relations into cooperative ones by means of paternalistic social engineering. For both Aristotle and Owen, good governance comes from above. They also shared a view of human character conceived as the gradual
development of virtues (cf. Owen 1966:23–24). Since Marx has such a different notion of character, and little to say, directly, about the virtues other than to puncture bourgeois claims to them, it is only by means of an hermeneutic reconstruction that a Marxian conception of the virtues could be elaborated. Like Owen and Aristotle, Marx believed that only some people were in a position to develop particular abilities. However, in Marx’s view, the crucial individuals with regard to the changing of social circumstances were embedded in social circumstances rather than from a class somehow ‘superior to society.’ With regard to the proletarian revolution, the key actors were embedded in working-class struggle, in the direct enactment and production of revolutionizing praxis, through which society undergoes tutelage by the working-class itself.26
26 It is well-known that in the Manifesto Marx and Engels give a privileged position to two groups: 1) the
“small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class...a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” (1972:343); and 2) “The Communists...the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country...they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” (346). These two concessions, the first of which makes room for Marx and Engels themselves, and the second of which makes room for the Party, those dedicated entirely to labour organizing, do not, technically, describe groups that are ‘superior to society,’ but they were used as the ideological justification for the hierarchical Soviet party system. Marxist and Marx-inspired theories of education have been struggling with this dilemma for over a century (cf., Gramsci, Freire, and Rancière). Althusser’s solution, the overcoming of ‘class instinct’ by adopting a proletarian ‘class position,’ (1971:12–13) does not satisfy,
According to Marx, Aristotle took social divisions as natural and permanent divisions because of his social context. Marx called Aristotle, “the greatest thinker of antiquity” (Marx 1978:384), but saw him as incapable of comprehending the political-economic basis of his own society. Aristotle condemned market exchange (chrematistics), and Marx quoted him approvingly (1978:150–151n.2), but he did not understand its inseparability from oikonomia (household economics). Aristotle could not link his critique of exchange value to his appreciation of use value because he lived in a society based upon slave labour, which he accepted as natural:
The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. (Marx 1978:65–66)
Marx attributes Aristotle’s inability to understand the truth of social relationships—both the centrality of labour and the character of historical change—to his social context rather than to his lack of intelligence or virtue. The material basis of Athenian society was fundamentally obscure. In spite of the Greek philosophers’ tendency to use metaphors of light and sight to represent knowledge, Greek society lacked the transparency that would enable real insight into its social conditions. Thus, while Plato’s parable of the cave depicts the members of society as enslaved, emancipation takes place entirely in the mind, leaving real material slavery uncriticized, useful only as a metaphor, and the
and I express as much in scattered comments throughout the dissertation.
obscurity of the fundamental social relationships of Greek society undermines Aristotle’s attempted critique of abstract idealism. Marx argues that Hegel’s philosophy fails for the same kinds of reasons.