How Philosophy Lost Its Nerve And How Marx Put It Back To Work with Christoph Schuringa

A century ago, philosophy split its seams. Cambridge’s revolt against British Hegelianism promised “clarity,” Vienna’s scientific modernism tried to rebuild from scratch, and postwar America professionalized it all while quietly erasing the politics that once burned at the core. We invited Christoph Schuringa, editor of Hegel Bulletin and author of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy and Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, to map the break—and to argue why Marx didn’t abandon philosophy so much as put it back to work.

We start with Russell and Moore’s rebellion and the Bloomsbury circle that treated linguistic precision as a moral breakthrough. Then we step into Red Vienna, where the Unity of Science lived alongside adult education, social housing, and austro‑Marxist reform. Wittgenstein links both worlds: sanctified by the Vienna Circle, wary of their empiricism, mystical yet method-obsessed, and ultimately a catalyst for the linguistic turn that reshaped Anglo‑American departments. The Cold War’s shadow looms large here; McCarthyism and professional incentives sanded down the political edge of philosophy of science, leaving behind procedures without projects.

From there, we pivot to Marx. Schuringa makes a provocative case: Capital is philosophical not because it states doctrines, but because it enacts dialectical thinking adequate to its object. Rather than a self‑contained logic applied to reality, Marx tracks how concrete oppositions ripen into contradictions—how specialization collides with labor mobility, how accumulation breeds crisis. Ethics reenters the frame too. Instead of rulebooks, we get the hard work of situated judgment and character, closer to Aristotle than to textbook deontology. Species‑being names our capacity for freedom and mutual recognition within social life; its glimpses are already here in imperfect forms, like care untethered from payment.

If you’ve ever wondered why analytic philosophy persists, why Wittgenstein feels both central and strange, or how Marx can guide action without sanctifying dogma, this conversation connects the dots. Join us for a tour from Cambridge to Vienna to London and back to the workshop of history—and stay for a clear, practical case for philosophy that helps us think and act together. If this resonates, share it with a friend, leave a review, and tell us: what should philosophy dare to do next?

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Setting The Stakes: Analytic Vs. Idealism

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmblog. And today I'm with Christoph Sharinga, who is a I I believe you're an associate professor at uh uh Northeastern University in London.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

That's absolutely right. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:04

Okay. And you are the editor of the Hagel Bulletin, which is gonna be relevant for the day. I know you from work you published in the New Left Review and Jacobin and Daniel Tet's podcast. And also I've first started reading you because of your critique of analytic philosophy, critique that made friend of the show and my personal friend, but not really political ally, Ben Burgess, very angry. Um I've been looking forward to this because you've done extensive work on German idealism and analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy, as well as Marx's relationship to it. And I have noticed the subtle return of analytic Marxism, largely due to this dominance at the editorial panel of Catalyst, the theoretical journal attached to Jacobin magazine, which I'm not going to alienate any of my colleagues by talking too much shit about, but I think it's led to some confused theory as of late. And also, interestingly, a lot of the current crop of analytic Marxists seem very disconnected from the larger analytic Marxist project, except for a love of GA Cohen. So they don't seem to cite Preswowski or Roomer or any of that. But that's not exactly what we're talking about today. We're gonna start off with a discussion of your book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, and we're gonna tie it into the a book that came out also very recently, Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy. And I see these two books as a bound pair kind of that they both explain different responses to the crisis of German idealism that happened you know 150 some odd years ago, roughly. But since they're published by different presses, they're not marketed that way. So I wanted to talk about them both and then tie them together. So I guess for some context, what did you see as the crisis in German idealism that led to this rebellion against idealism and philosophy? Because it it you know it does seem like starting with Kant and definitely with Hegel, there's an attempt to change where European philosophy is entirely going. And this particularly dominates the Anglo universities. Why did that happen?

Russell, Moore, And The Cambridge Break

SPEAKER_00 4:04

It's a very good question. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you put it in terms of a crisis of German idealism, which is of course exactly right. I'm and I'm very pleased that you see the two books as being connected because that's not so obvious, maybe, to everyone. It is to me like what I'm trying to do with Marx is the sort of positive face and the more sort of affirmative face, pr presenting a view of philosophy uh that I want to advance, with the critique of analytic philosophy being a more the kind of critical but very closely related critical side of that project. And it's curious, of course, that you know the birth of analytic philosophy itself, which is placed by different people at different junctures, but I think actually the scholars, the historians of analytic philosophy, I think all pretty much agree that it's much more plausible to place the beginning with Burton Russell and G.E. Moore in Cambridge, England in 1898, when they carry out what Russell later in his numerous autobiographical writings where he repeats the same story, calls the rebellion against idealism. I think I think that's the most obvious uh place to put it. The other obvious place is earlier in Germany with uh Gottlob Frege in 1879. But given that Russell himself presents the rebellion as directly against Hegelianism, Hegelian idealism, it seems at least on the surface like it is actually quite straightforwardly the rejection of the idealist heritage itself. But of course, it's much when you look at what can actually be meant by that by looking at the social conditions and the uh sort of intellectual matrix of Cambridge at the time, sort of peculiarities immediately come to the surface because it's not the case. So, I mean, Hegel died in 1831, sort of at the height of his powers during the cholera epidemic that swept at that time. And Hegel's star in Germany, I mean, starts to go down very, very, very quickly in the decade after his death. You get the the young Hegelians take Hegelianism in a particular direction. This is quite a radical different direction. In Germany itself, there's an enormous backlash against idealism. So you get in the mid-century the rise of materialist philosophy, which entirely displaces the Hegelian tradition, and you get a kind of science-worshipping kind of anti-philosophy attitude becomes very widespread. So what Russell and Moore are thinking of and what they're reacting against is this very specific late 19th century British phenomenon, this very isolated phenomenon, and associated with people like F. H. Bradley in Oxford and in Cambridge, with a man who was actually only a few years older than each of them was as undergraduates, this very young man called J.M.E. McTaggart, who was a particular Hegelian of his own sort of kind. Very interesting Hegelian, who in his writings on Hegel actually sort of directly argues against certain Hegelian arguments, and he really kind of engages Hegel in very serious argumentation. So what Russell and Moore are essentially doing is they are rejecting a view that they had themselves adopted, you know, three or four years earlier, under the influence of McTaggart, and they have this conception of Hegelianism as this very grand metaphysical system, characterized principally by the idea of dialectic. So it's it's an odd, it's an odd sort of maneuver, also because they actually, in some ways, they're building on some of the critiques in the work of Bradley of the empiricist tradition. So they're building on critiques of you know traditional British philosophy, Locke and Hume and so on, and then radicalizing it further to arrive at the view that's the that's the kind of you know analytic philosophy 1.0. So so it's a yeah, it's a complex not it's it's not a sort of straightforward rejection of a what we would understand by German idealism, and it's not a straightforward rejection as, and it's certainly not a reversion to empiricism.

C. Derick Varn 8:37

I was uh thinking about this in my own studies in America, that this actually has a parallel process and like Charles Sanders purse in the United States who starts off as a Hegelian and maintains some core of Hegelianism and when he starts inventing pragmaticism. I'm gonna make sure that we are clear about that. It's not pragmatism, that's later. But he's responding to kind of the the the kind of very crude folk Hegelianism of the transcendentalist. And I I the process is interesting to me because it just suggests that there's a like a set of convergences coming out of this philosophical problem to Hegel, because it happens in three different kind of in three different places, you see, in Germany, in England, and the United States.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

And of course, the United States is like the least sophisticated version of it, but yeah, you also have Henry, sorry, William James, who's a very interesting figure, right? Because he's sort of so markedly anti-Hegelian, but he comes from the sort of milieu exactly, which Hegelianism was being pursued in all these different ways in America. Absolutely.

C. Derick Varn 9:44

I guess so. I I I wanted to ask you a little bit about the Bloomsbury group's like class situation, because the the class situation is of for all of philosophy is always interesting. I mean, the Marxist when we tend to be vulgar, we just dismiss it as bourgeois because it's a product of a bourgeois society. Of course, that also applies to Marxism, which becomes its own separate question. But I wonder, like, what do you have a feeling that there is a that that Moore and uh Russell's class situation was part of what was creating their perspective on this?

Bloomsbury, Class, And Moral Clarity

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Absolutely, in very different ways for each of them. Russell was from this, I think it's fair to say unique background. He was from one of the most powerful aristocratic families in England. His grandfather had been twice prime minister under Queen Victoria, Lord John Russell. And he grew up in, I mean, having lost his parents, both of his parents by the age of two, he grows up first with his with his grandparents, and then the thing gets more and more windowed down. And as he writes his autobiography, he he mostly remembers his servants rather than anyone else, as being involved in his childhood, and he was educated at home, surrounded by his grandfather's library, steeped in the English liberal uh political tradition. So Russell saw himself, I think it was quite natural for him to see himself as uh spawned by particular kind of both you know social and intellectual milieu, whereas Moore was from a very well-to-do family that was that you characterize basically you know all bourgeois. It was um they were the upper echelons of the English middle classes. And this gets played out in so Moore and Russell become friends very quickly. Russell arrives at Cambridge the year before Moore, and and when Moore arrives, you know, they have these uh societies, sort of secret, uh actually secret societies, this uh society called the Apostles, of which all the elite people at Cambridge were members. And um, Alfred North Whitehead was a person who had interviewed Russell as a mathematics student because he began began in mathematics and had set himself set him up with people from the society. And as soon as Moore arrives, you know, he's Russell works to recruit him for the apostles. At some point they tried to recruit Wittgenstein, which is a sort of predictably comical episode, because Wittgenstein does turn up, but it almost immediately decides it's you know beneath him in all sorts of ways to have anything to do with such people. But there's there's a sort of sense, I think, of uncomfortable social interplay between Moore and Russell. There's this episode where Moore Moore becomes the sort of leader of, in a way, the inner, the sort of inner group within the apostles, the most you know, serious and intellectually incandescent of the apostles, and organizes reading parties where they go away and spend time together and so on. And at some point there's a question about whether Russell's invited or not. And and Russell writes to Moore and says, you know, I rather think I should be invited or something. And and and Moore says, Well, if I'm honest, you know, I'd rather that you didn't come. So it's kind of strange. So I think, in some sense, socially to be understood, standoff between them. I think the crucial thing is that Moore very quickly was able to take up the mantle of the prophet within the apostles in a really remarkable way. So when he published Principia Ethica, which was his masterpiece in 1903, it was hailed by members of the Bloomsbury group. So the Bloomsbury group, to be understood, is very much continuous with the Apostles. The Apostles, of course, is all male because Cambridge University is all male, except for the beginnings of women's colleges, which involve women being able to study for subjects, but they're actually not even able to take the degrees and so on. So this is very peripheral at this stage. But it's basically a and and women couldn't join the apostles in any case. But uh the Bloomsbury group is essentially the apostles plus people like Virginia Wolfe, who are sort of part of this orbit and were women. And as soon as this book is published, it gets hailed by, I think, Lytton Straity called it the opening of a new heaven upon earth. And Virginia Wolf talked about the book that made us all so wise and good, and and so on. It was really seen as completely revelatory. And it was something about the way in which Moore went about you know performing this routine of making ethics completely transparent and clear by you know, taking a linguistic approach and asking what the meaning of the term good was, this became a central question and so on, and then modulating into by the end of it this sort of grand symphony in which it turned out that the highest goods were you know the the goods of polite conversation and the contemplation of artworks and all the sorts of things that the Bloomsbury group stood for. So I think you know, looking at the effect that Moore was able to have and the way in which he was regarded as, in some sense, the prophet of this this group of people, you know, artistic and cultural elite of Britain. I think I think that tells you something about sort of you know what what buttons he was pressing socially.

C. Derick Varn 15:44

That element of has always fascinated me because it's it it it's clear that this is a fairly elite, vaguely liberal project early on. But it's also interesting that, and more in particular, even to a best degree in Russell, that this turn to linguistic clarity is actually seen as a real moral advancement, which which is not the way it's discussed after you get to logical positivism and and uh neo-empiricism and all that. So it's it's it's interesting to think about this. One of the things is that focus on language does that I that you know I actually started studying another philosophy. I'll give you that as my background way, way long ago. I left that a long time ago, but is that it weirdly leads to a very ahistorical philosophy. I mean, like con most of the context is cut out for clarity, particularly. I mean, pretty pretty even early on. I think this is something you see in analytic philosophy almost from moment one. I this is a big theme in your book, but I want you to talk about why why cut out the history? I mean, particularly since so many other forms of philosophy at this time and other I mean, you know, you have the development of the German historical school, you have Marxism, you have you know the the the late embers of Hegelianism, all of which are very historical. Even even whatever Nietzsche's up to is very historical, but in its own weird way. But analytic philosophy moves decidedly against that. Do you think like, what do you think that is about exactly?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

I think it's clearer in a sense in the case of the Vienna Circle and its predecessors, because the Vienna Circle really comes out of a turn towards what they started to call scientific philosophy and a turn towards a kind of heavily empiricistic conception of philosophy that begins really in the 1890s in Vienna. So same sort of period as as Russell and Moore uh begin their version of analytic philosophy. I think it's easier to talk about that because it's A, it's starker, I think, what happens in terms of how it's expressed, but also the cultural context of Vienna helps a lot because there are so many other manifestations of the same thing, which is this felt need to perform an extreme break with the past. So the kind of cutting away of everything to do with Habsburg, Austria-Germany, the kind of the culture of ornament and decadence and so on that we know so well from Viennese modernism, both you know, the kind of artworks that people produced and the things that they said about them, and you know, satirical writers like Karl Krauss and so on. We have this whole sort of body of cultural sedimentation from which we can see that. So there's a wonderful book on Fan de Secla Vienna by the historian Karl Schorsky, where he says that the Viennese wanted to perform, in some sense, the ultimate Oedipul revolt, right? They wanted to reject the parentage, but they didn't just want to reject, you know, the parents that they happened to have, but they wanted to reject you know the very idea of having parents at all, being sort of this is this is one way of understanding modernism, where it was to be just completely self-generated. And and by being self-generated, you know, you do you detach yourself from all historical roots. So you just you figure as just the the non-historical human being. And it's much easier than in the case of England, because uh certainly in Russell, there are these statements about you know counteracting Victorian stuffiness and going against the inheritance of Victorian Britain, but there isn't the same theorization of it, and there isn't the same uh in a range of cultural expressions of it. But I I guess that there is a sense across Europe, and I'm including Britain in Europe, a sort of sense of impending cultural crisis that that you get at the end of the 19th century and as as we move into the 20th century, that made it seem natural to those who thought of themselves as you know intellectually innovative to want to detach themselves from the past and see themselves as you know the upholders of an of a new order that was no longer going to be no longer going to sort of pay pay homage to the past. I think, yeah, I think it's more difficult to decode in in Russell and Moore exactly how that's supposed to have worked, but but I think it's I think it's there across these different phenomena. It's just it's just much you know more clearly expressed in Vienna.

Vienna Circle’s Clean Break With History

C. Derick Varn 20:52

But in the German language work, I mean you do have the the the context of like everything politically is changing radically. I mean for a hundred-year period, uh basically, you know, it seems like every every like 15 to 20 years you have a major political upheaval. So in some ways that makes that makes total contextual sense too. Whereas like, you know, Britain has nominal continuity of government going back to to like I don't know, the 8th century or something. So it seems a little bit harder to pull off a historical thing, uh, particularly when you still have like aristocracy walking around. So I find that you know it makes a lot of sense to me that that would happen. I guess it leads me to think about the connection between the Bloomsbury group and Rev Vienna, which is Wittgenstein, who isn't really part of either, but you know, happens to be around both. I mean, what do we make of Wittgenstein? Because Wittgenstein's also, to me, the one of the weirdest of the analytic philosophers in that he's kind of sort of a socialist, but not totally, he's not a Marxist, but he seems to be influenced and be influenced by Shafra sometimes. He he's also kind of a mystic, which is strange for someone who's so interested in analytic philosophy, and he also seems to reject everything he came up with early on that was loved by the circle. So how does he fit in here?

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Yeah. Well, he's tricky because it's not only uh are there all these mysteries that you've just enumerated, but he's also, as you also said, he's a he's one of the central figures, if not sort of the central figure in a s in a certain way, particularly because he connects Cambridge and Vienna. So and uh more recently, it's very strange, it depends who you talk to. And w what sort of environments people have been in, how they think of Wittgenstein, because a lot of people who've been raised in analytic philosophy have got used to sort of wondering whether Wittgenstein might actually be a continental philosopher because of this sort of experience of strangeness. They think, oh, maybe he's actually, or maybe the early Wittgenstein we can count as still an analytic philosopher, but with strange tendencies that cause him later to break out of it. But I take him to being a paradigmatic analytic philosopher. He, more than anyone, I think, can be said to carry out what people call the linguistic turn. So his early masterpiece, The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, which he wrote largely in the trenches during World War I when he was fighting for the Austrian army. I mean, he was completing it then, is a work that presents the relationship of language to the world in a way that's in a very, very startling way where the idea is. The idea of language representing the world or standing in any sort of relationship to the world is itself really sort of straining at intelligibility. So we we must think of language as a sort of transparent medium. This makes sense of the idea of a linguistic turn in the sense of philosophy really becoming a in trying to be an exploration of the world, it becomes a linguistic kind of exploration because language is this medium, it's the only medium through which we could do it, and it's language that that affords us the clarity that we need, and so on. I couldn't think of anything more analytic philosophy than that. But the his relationship with Vienna is very curious because the Vienna Circle, which begins in 1924, begins to meet in 1924, is known at that time as the Schlick Circle because it's convened by a guy called Morwitz Schlick, who's an interesting figure because he sort of holds the circle together. He's he's politically quite sort of neutralist, so he's a relatively right-wing. He's a guy who likes to keep things calm and steady. But he convenes this group, and when the Schlick circle starts to meet, it's essentially a reading group on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. But the way that they read Wittgenstein's Tractatus, it's a hyper-empiricist text, which makes some sense because you know Wittgenstein distinguishes very sharply between meaningful and meaning and nonsensical statements, and various things that are that don't have a certain kind of logical form have to be relegated to being meaningless. So the statements of ethics, aesthetics, and religion, notably. Wittgenstein himself has this as you as you said, uh he has a this uh mystical dimension to him. This is where the mystical comes in. There are these great uh swathes of human experience, which are very important ones, like art, ethics, and religion, that we cannot say anything meaningful about. But they're extremely important to him. Whereas the the Vienna Circle reads this as well, there's there are meaningful statements, those are the statements for which we have some method of verification, namely just kind of statements delivered by the natural sciences. Everything else is to be you know effectively thrown in the bin. Kind of Humean idea of you know, commit it then to the flames. If it isn't if it doesn't uh pass muster as an empirical claim. And you know, Wittgenstein is at various points then invited to the circle. This is very difficult because he'll only meet with certain people. He doesn't like it when Rudolf Carnap is there, who's one of the leading figures, because he was just a bit sort of too annoyingly conventional for Wittgenstein's taste. So Wittgenstein will ask, could could Carnap please not be there? But Herbert Feigel, I think, was who's one of the more junior members, was tolerated. And Wittgenstein tried to explain to them that this empiricism was was the most hateful thing that he'd ever basically had to endure. And right, and then he goes off later. Then of course, he's in in the meantime, he's abandoned philosophy because he says in the Tractatus that all the problems of philosophy are solved in this work, uh, and he becomes a school teacher and a gardener and various other kinds of things. He helps to build a house for his sister in Vienna, so he does some architecture. Then he then he decides at some point. I mean, largely for political reasons, I think, he starts to think it's good to have some sort of secure job. And as an Austrian Jew, it seems like Britain's a good place. So he inquires whether there are any positions at Cambridge, and there is a position, so it's given to him. Then G. Moore at some point resigns, and there's an election process. So some of the most prominent philosophers of the day apply for it, but there's very little discussion because it's thought that uh denying denying Wittgenstein the chair in philosophy would be like denying Einstein a chair in physics. That was a statement by somebody who was very anti-Wittgensteinian at the time, said that. So and so he and he spent this period sort of roving around Europe, spending time with some of his former students in Ireland, and at some point he goes to the Soviet Union. But I think this foray of Wittgenstein's Soviet Union is very widely misunderstood in a quite tendentious way. Namely, it's thought that, well, there must have been something quite sort of left about him if he went to the Soviet Union. But Wittgenstein had this idea that he would go to the Soviet Union and he would because he would do honest work there, he would do manual work, so he would sweep the streets or something like this, which is an idea I think he got largely from reading Tolstoy, you know, the late, the late Tolstoy, who is the guy who abandoned his family and died at a railway crossing, so who by whom Wittgenstein was immensely impressed. And he thought, well, I'll go to this place, Russia, where someone like Tolstoy is from, and I will do this thing. He goes to the you know job agency and speaks to the clerk there who offers him various positions, but you know, there's a there's a professorship of philosophy at the University of Kazan, and he won't have that. And there's very and then various other professorships of philosophy. And he says, I don't want to do, I don't want to do that. You know, that's that's not a reputable way to employ your time. I want to sweep the streets. And they and she says to him, I'm really sorry, Professor Wittgenstein, but the only thing you're qualified for is this are these philosophy professorships. So he goes back very disappointed. My sense is in general that Wittgenstein really wasn't a leftist of any kind. I mean, he's obviously a very complex, ambiguous figure, and it's true that he had these discussions with Piero Sraffa, who is um you know heterodox economist, who himself, I mean, himself himself I think has a complex relationship to Marx, but certainly someone on the left. But these discussions have a very particular kind of meaning, I think, for Wittgenstein. In general, the sort of people that he was really impressed by were you know, people like Oswald Spengler and and really, really reactionary writers. He told the students to read Otto Weininger, who was this very compromised figure on the Austrian scene, famous for a book called Sex and Character, which was extremely misogynistic and extremely anti-Semitic, written by somebody who was himself a Jewish homosexual who then committed suicide. So very complicated business, but a very much one of the sort of classics of some kind of Austrian right-wing literature. So yeah, that was much more to say, of course.

C. Derick Varn 31:00

But I mean the when I first read Lukash's writing on Wittgenstein and thought he was profoundly unfair and destruction of reasons, how we get that text. But when I read whenever I read Wittgenstein's biography, I'm like, I don't know, maybe it was pretty irrational after all. I don't I don't know that I would go as far as Lukash would, but I just think about this with Wittgenstein because I think his politics are almost incomprehensible. Like I like I know his uh obsession with right-wing writers, it doesn't get brought up much. Everyone tries to make a lot out of his conversations with Shafra, they try to make a lot out of his visits to the Soviet Union. I mean, and even like his strained relationship with the Bloomsbury group, it will at least make him a liberal, but he doesn't even seem to be that coherent. Like it's like I wouldn't necessarily know that I call him a reactionary either. I'm like, no, he just doesn't make any sense.

Wittgenstein Between Vienna And Cambridge

SPEAKER_00 31:56

I recently re-reread for some reason this lecture on ethics that he gave, which is a very short text, and it's sort of revered in some some quarters. But what seems to come out to me is that Wittgenstein just didn't have very much to say about questions of how to live or let alone how to organize anything politically. You know, he had these sort of strangely mystical precepts about his own ability to know the right sorts of things in these areas, and it's just yeah, it's not a place I would go for any sort of ethical or social thought.

C. Derick Varn 32:35

I mean, I guess you know, this is gonna be a big big question with a big shift, but both of both the Vienna School, which is associated with Red Vienna, and the Bloomsbury group are associated with socialism in some way. Now, I'm I have to I'm being careful about how I phrase this because the uh the Red Vienna's relationship to Marxism, you know, outside of Autonuraf is unclear to me, and and I've read a lot about it. And the Bloomsbury group, you know, Fabian socialism seems very elite, very liberal, and I mean they were almost looking for something like John Maynard Cain's to uh to emerge they didn't have to be Marxist. I mean, I I know that's really psychological psychologizing them in an almost unfair way, but it does seem like as soon as they could get off the the socialism train for something other than laissez-faire capitalism and also Marxism, they did. But what what do you make of the politics of early uh of these early analytic philosophers in both groups? And because you know, another part of your book is that all gets erased in the 50s. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah. Well, Russell's interesting case because he goes to Berlin in the 1890s, I guess. He goes, so I think he goes on a trip. He goes on honeymoon with his first wife Alice to the Netherlands, and then I think they go to Germany for a bit. And she was uh she was from a Quaker background, and she was uh feminist. She had you know feminist commitments, so and she was really the driver for him or for the two of them to go and spend time with members of the Social Democrat Party in Berlin and you know just call some kind of apparently fracker with the Russell family that they were hanging out with such people. But as a result of that, he did meet the leading figures. And if you were someone like Russell, you know, you just went to meet the leading people. There's there's no doubt about that. Later when he went to the Soviet Union, he just arranged an interview with Lenin because Lenin was obviously the most interesting person to speak to in the Soviet Union. And Russell's first book is on German social democracy, and it's it's quite interesting because he does have quite a good grasp of what they were talking about, and it's more considered than you might think, and then it ends on this sort of slightly wishy-washy, well, liberalism is probably the best thing in the end, kind of note. But Russell really thought about it and you know sort of goes native or or returns to his sort of native instincts and returns to liberal empiricism. The history of Western philosophy book, which comes out in 1945, is very much kind of owed to liberalism, which explicitly invokes John Locke as the great guiding light of liberalism. As you know, then in his very late years, there's a seemingly radical turn to the left, which is very difficult to interpret because it's not really clear how much of that was entirely Russell's agency and so on. But clearly he felt very, very strongly about nuclear disarmament, and that took him into some quite left-wing circuits. Moore, very ambiguous. I mean, Moore was somebody who couldn't really make his mind up about political questions. So this is very clear in the First World War, he he has these long debates with himself about whether to participate in some way or whether to be a pacifist or whether to do something else. And then in the end, he thinks, well, he'll join this sort of fairly moderate organization. Then he changes his mind again and thinks that maybe he will join up, but then it's too late, and and so on. So he's sort of always dilly-dallying. So that's not too offensive a term to apply to the great GE more. But Vienna, you know, is a very different sort of scene because there really were possibilities for sort of direct political engagement in Red Vienna. And Neurath, whom you mentioned, was very, you know, it's indisputable that in an earlier period, immediately after the First World War, he was a crucial figure in the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which only lasted for a couple of weeks, but he was both at absolutely the center of it, and then managed to get himself off scot-free really remarkably. I mean, most most of most of the people who had the kind of influence he had were executed, but he claimed to have had no political role in the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which is sort of remarkable. And he had his sentence commuted to exile to Austria, which is more or less where he wanted to be anyway, and so sort of rejoined the people around the Austrian Social Democratic Party. So Otto Bauer was a close friend of his who was high up in the government of Red Vienna. And one thing I think is undeniable about those members of the Vienna Circle who really took this seriously, and it's and it's really most of them. So certainly Neurath, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Herbert Feigl, a whole host of them were very committed to the project of universal education, which is part of the sort of vision of the Unity of Science program, and they put in enormous numbers of hours of adult education, each of them. And Neuart was very closely involved with uh you know projects for universal housing. Various of them were uh involved with the Bauhaus when the Bauhaus was under uh what was considered to be an extremely left-wing leadership for a while in the twenties. So yeah, there's a you know, there's a very strong case that the uh members of what's have what's now become known as the Left Vienna Circle were you know not only signed up to what we might call Austro-Marxism, the sort of version of Marxism that that existed in Red Vienna, but were were deeply involved with actual political projects on the ground.

C. Derick Varn 39:27

World War II obviously breaks all this up across the board, and you see a massive migration of you know a lot of the students of these philosophers to some degree. I mean, I don't know if it's uh and stuff are very old by this point, but yeah, what logical positivism, which have moved have had dropped the positivism part by this point, also we should note that because they worked out that by their own logic it didn't make any sense. They had basically defeated themselves philosophically.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Well, the question was just can the verif can the verification principle be verified? And yes, once you see that that can't be solved, you'll that's it.

C. Derick Varn 40:08

Yeah, yeah, it's done. Um similar actually to Russell and Sat theory, but anyway, I I do uh you get to this this point in the in the 50s where you know logical positivism politics are like a race from the discussion about them. I mean, it's interesting because we do still talk. Like I was when I was taught this stuff as an undergrad in the in the early aughts, so 20 years ago, we still talked about the Bloomberry group's politics. We did not talk about uh the logical positivist politics at all. It was never mentioned. I learned about it significantly later.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

That's really interesting to me that that you talked about the Bloomsbury group's politics, because I did an undergraduate in in Cambridge and it was never it was never even that was never a topic, although it was very, very close to where all this had happened.

C. Derick Varn 41:10

I I I find it interesting, I think it's because like you know, can fabian socialism and Keynesian to a certain American humanity is left liberal is really appealing, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, you know, which is like I was trying to catch contextualize my own education. I'm like, yeah, I'm I'm going to school not even a full decade after the Soviet Union fell. So, you know, this is like we read two things by Marx at all, period. In fact, I was taught more autiser than Marx, interestingly enough. And now admittedly, I didn't go into you know, my graduate my graduate work is in literature and and in education, not in philosophy. So maybe it would have been different if I'd have gone higher. But I find this very interesting today because like when I learned about the Vienna circles for ties to Rep Vienna, I was actually like, why didn't anyone ever mention this? This seems important. But you kind of tell me why, in a way, in the book on what happens after World War II and like the relationship of these of these groups to McCarthyism. So you want to talk about that really quickly?

Politics Of Red Vienna And Austro‑Marxism

SPEAKER_00 42:22

Yeah, I mean, just to pick up on the sort of sentiment, in a way, what you've just been saying, it's just hard to take in, I think. I found it very hard to take in in thinking about this stuff and in researching this book, just to what extent you know what happened in the 30s not only was erased in the 50s, but continues to be it continues to feel sort of either inaccessible, or when you when you start to access it, it just it there's this sort of perpetual feeling of astonishment about the level of radicalization that occurred in the 30s, whether it's in Europe, whether it's you know, if you look at discussions in Oxford, even you know, Oxford philosophers felt that they had to talk about Marx and even things like Lenin's theory of perception, you know, were topics. That's one sort of indicator. But just thinking about McCarthyism, the way in which so many people had been active communists in the in the 30s, and the continuing need to repress all of that, first of all, because of the you know the the first wave of of McCarthyite repression, but then after all of that had happened and had started to to die down in terms of the actual you know operation of these committees, like the House on American Activities Committee, but all the other ones, like the Rap Kudot Committee and a whole series of them, after they sort of, you know, they they they they wrap up and stop doing their work, of course, there's a continuing memory of everything that went down there that means there's you know there are there are all these things that can't be talked about that happened in that period that mean that basically it's not until the the people who were directly involved, in particular some of the red hunters, have died, that we could even really talk about what happened in that what happened in that period. Because the just the the shadow of McCarthyism is so incredibly long, it's sort of difficult to difficult to take in, I think. And I mean one one way to look at it is to. It's just a juxtapose, what we were just talking about, you know, Red Vienna, people like you know, Rudolf Karnap is fairly far on the left, more moderate than Neugart, but but fairly far. Herbert Feigel, these sorts of people. If you look at what they were saying when they were in Europe, and then just just juxtapose, I just put that side by side with philosophy of science as it gets to be called, which I think is itself an interesting shift. You get sort of professionalization, where in Vienna, you know, the Vienna Circle consisted of scientists. Muller Schlick did his PhD under a guy called Max Planck, and it was on some you know arcane topic in physics. Neural was a sociologist, Hontan was a mathematician, etc., etc. etc. These are people who were who are practicing scientists who had sort of got together in order to talk about the respective foundations of their sciences and the way in which they were connected. In the 50s in America, you get philosophy of science, which is something done in special departments, and it becomes you know, it's a professionalized activity. And the people doing this, many of them European emigres, no longer say anything about the social dimension of the Vienna project. You know, in Vienna they published this thing that's become known as the Manifesto of the Vienna Circle in 1928, where they talked about the unity of science and they talked about their vision for the social transformation of society. And admittedly written by the more left-wing members, so they emphasize you know certain aspects of the work, but they they're able to speak about all this stuff sort of in one breath. Because it's to them, it's obvious. I mean, it's a project of basically universal enlightenment. What you know, what's the point of universal enlightenment? Well, it's to get the ordinary people, the citizens, to enlighten themselves and thereby empower themselves in order to participate in the society. That's that's the point of universal enlightenment. You don't you don't just have some people in university departments pursue various empirical sciences and then analyze how they work. Uh no, that's you know, enlightenment is a social project for them. Um in the in the states, this comp it's just completely flattened out. There's there's no trace of it.

C. Derick Varn 47:11

Yeah, yeah, I was I learned all most of this through the philosophy of science, which you know, popper, some degrees of Lakatosh. Popper's you know, rabidly anti-communist. Lakatosh is weirder, but approaching this from that perspective, it's just amazing how much this seemed to be this seems to uh clear out analytic philosophy, but also I mean I've read a lot of analytic philosophy in the American context. And this, I mean, uh after reading American Analytic Philosophy, I'll tell you the truth. Oxford ordinary language stuff feels refreshing because it's like not pretending to be math. But uh it just you you you have a hard time imagining that philosophy having any ties to radicalism, any ties to a social project, even other than demarcating what does and does not count as science, and frankly, failing to come up with any consistent way to do that, even popular pauperism doesn't really work. So, you know, it also seems interesting to me because it makes philosophy a really a discipline that seems completely remote, at least America, from like everyday life almost entirely. And that's really remarkable.

SPEAKER_00 48:34

That's really remarkable, in particular in the American case, because I don't know to what extent you experience this in this way as somebody that's in the states, but from this side of the Atlantic, the more I learned about what philosophy in the States was like before the Second World War, the more I realized just how different the culture was in the United States from Europe. Because in America, it was considered clear and even obvious that that philosophers had this role to play in public life. I mean, people like John Dewey are maybe the most prominent example, but but so many. And so there's this really big transformation in how philosophy is understood as a you know, as an as an entity from the pre-second world war to the post-second world war period in in the states where you get this uh extreme professionalization. That that's really striking, sort of from over here, because that it doesn't seem to have been the case. Uh you know, because of the difference between American and European society, I guess that before the second world it's not like you know, before the second world war there was this kind of great public exploration of philosophy.

C. Derick Varn 49:58

Oh no, it's more I agree with you, it's more extreme in our our case, but we are taught our 19th century philosophy as literature. Like, like because I was uh I I did dual studies, so I studied both. And like I read way more 19th century philosophy in literature classes than I did in philosophy classes. Basically, philosophy classes seem to start with you know, you go you go through the ancients, you jump to Europe, and then American philosophy starts around World War II, you know. Like we don't talk about the transitionalist, the transcendentalist, we don't talk about the pragmatist even that much. I mean, they come up, but not a ton. You're probably more likely to study them in psychology or political science, and then eventually you hit someone like Peirce, and then you have to kind of deal with it because it you know looks a little bit like modern philosophy. But or you encounter it through literary. I mean, the like the other thing is we learned I learned continental simultaneously learning analytic through literary studies, like rewed Foucault and and all that, which require me reading Kant and and all that to understand that. I didn't learn it in my philosophy classes except on ones that were what we would kind of classify as historical philosophy classes, so classes on German idealism for the context, classes on Nietzsche for the context, etc. And you know, I'm always interested in the difference between us and Britain on this topic because it does seem like we have followed Britain's league lead in some ways, but and not in others, and uh which is often the case with our education system, and we've followed Germany's lead in some ways, including the structure of our education system, but not in others. So but the bearing of you know the extent of McCarthyism is like even certain kinds of liberalism become uncomfortable for it in the 50s and and early 60s. I guess this brings me though to like what what gets associated with it. I told you somewhat sincerely that when I was reading like a lot of the the ordinary language philosophers, and then you know, people who I think we more associate, we don't actually in America associate strongly with philosophy, which is the women around that. Like we associate flip a foot with philosophy for the return of virtue ethics, and uh Elizabeth Elcon's scene is important. Mary Midgley's almost read as a sociological or anthropological figure. Um but I wanted to talk about that because both in America and in Britain, it seems like analytic philosophy dominates the the the institutions of philosophy and becomes very removed, but also they have kind of different paths. I wanted to talk to you uh about that a little bit before we you know kind of backtrack it back to um the good old Clarcis of German idealism, but but you know how how do you see the ox the Oxford philosophers in context of McCarthyism and the Cold War? And how how are they affected with it since they're across the ocean?

McCarthyism And The Great Erasure

SPEAKER_00 53:20

Yeah, so I it's a tricky one in in a sense, this question of sort of where to fit ordinary language philosophy and kind of what Oxford philosophy of the of the 50s, how to understand it in relation to analytic philosophy and to whether to see it as part of a core or not. I mean, I I made the decision to treat it as something very close to the core because I think it does come out of Wittgenstein's later philosophy in a quite direct way. That's something that used to be disputed. So J.L. Austen, who was the leader of Oxford philosophy, made his very disparaging remarks about Wittgenstein and and instructed his disciples to say that there was no influence and it was all quite different. But there's there's that direct influence, and there's also the way in which it's again, you know, highly linguistic, it's all about the meanings of terms, it's very continuous with someone like GE Moore in that way. But on the other hand, I do have the feeling, which I think I share a bit with you, which is that much of what happens in that area and also what's happening now. So now we have people who are either analytic philosophers or maybe a little bit on the fringes of analytic philosophy who are sort of seeking to revive some of that tradition, ordinary language tradition, through figures like Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. So I'm thinking people like Alice Craig at the New School and various people like that. Often what those people are doing are towards the more interesting end of the spectrum of what I would still think of as basically analytic philosophy. And one reason for that is that they question a lot of the things that seem particularly dubious about the whole kind of analytic setup. So one thing I've been interested in recently is the treatment of ethics in analytic philosophy, and in particular the rise of what analytic philosophers call meta-ethics, which happened really in a big way in the in the 1950s. This is when they started to thematize and use this word. So there was this idea that there are kind of two ideas. One was you can divide ethics into two sort of levels. There's the so-called first order questions about how we ought to live and all sorts of things associated with that, like what command might be what commands to follow or whatever, what principles to adopt, and so on. And that was sort of the first order level. And then there was this other level at which philosophers would merely analyze what people were doing at the first order, and this is meta-ethics, right? So, what what's the nature of ethical discourse was then basically the question. And this is usually approached in a highly linguistic way. So it's like, what's the nature of you know moral talk, as I used to like to say? So there's that idea, and then the the other idea is which was the main idea in the 50s, really all that philosophers should be doing is meta ethics, because they shouldn't really be involving themselves in saying how you ought to live, because that's for you know preachers and novelists and politicians and other kind of disreputable people who aren't who don't who don't have this kind of great clarity, and the idea was that the philosophers would bring this clarity to others that they could then employ and so on. And one of the people who argues against this very interesting way in the 1970s is Mary Midgley who says, Hang on a minute, is it really the case that there's this thing called ethical discourse that's it's so obvious what its nature is? And she says, you know, these philosophers that do, she doesn't use this word, but the people who do meta ethics, she calls it the neutrality, the neutrality of the moral philosopher, this this attempt to have this neutral stance where it doesn't matter what your substantive ethical views are, you just you're at this neutral level, so sort of surveying it all. She says, these people assume that ethical discourse is basically kind of homogeneous all the way through, and it consists of a basic kind of utterance, like an X is good or X is right, basically. And people are just constantly saying things like that to each other. And she says, Well, quite clearly, ethical discourse isn't like that, it's much more complex. So to get back to the ordinary language people, one of the people that she cites actually is Jeffrey Warnock, who is one of these philosophers. And Warnock had already pointed out long before that, that ethical discourse consists of a whole variety of different sorts of things that people are doing when they uh when they make moral recommendations or they dispute about what's right and what's right and wrong and so on. So there's there's a certain kind of richness in that tradition. The richness tends to consist in you know seeing that there are lots of different ways in which things are done. I think certainly in the work of I think neither in the work of Wittgenstein as a sort of progenitor of this later Wittgenstein nor J.L. Austen do you get much of a sense of you know what what are you to do with this profusion? Wittgenstein talks about language games and you get similar kind of setups in Austin where we're invited to consider you know what people do with words or how they interact with each other. And it looks sort of anthropological in a certain way, but they're not really able to talk about should we be doing should we be doing this stuff or not? So these sort of patterns of speech that they engage in, like saying, Well, you know, this is how we go on. Well, surely the task of the philosopher is is to have at least curiosity about whether these are the practices that we should want to have, or you know, how how how we might go about revisionary projects about our own practices. But but we just sort of uh my sense, anyway, is that we sort of just stagnate with uh well, there's this profusion, and isn't that interesting? Um which you can then get just if you if you remain sufficiently stagnated in that, then it's a fairly conservative role.

C. Derick Varn 59:53

Right. I mean, it it replicates the Hume is aught problem to like a such an absurd degree that it's hard to make a normative judgment about anything. And I do think this leads to, you know, we we can kind of wrap up a discussion of of analytic philosophy here, but it leads to the crisis that you see right now, where you had experimental philosophy and which overlapped a lot with experimental psychology and uh even by their own standards. I mean, this is the thing that keeps on happening in analytic philosophy. Uh, I brought it up earlier, but like even by applying their own standards to themselves, these projects start to have major foundational issues. Um, replicability and experimental philosophy, which seems to come out of this natural language stuff. It's like, okay, so we actually can't, we don't know as much about this as it seems like we do. You know, applying uh applying these norms to themselves in the case of earlier positivism and to a to a lesser degree early analysis, analytic philosophy around the Bloomsbury group, you know, set theory kind of eats itself, etc. etc. etc. I think this is interesting because you know, I get I get the feeling that this is experienced very differently between the two continents. Like in America, we have like the the crisis of experimental philosophy seems to be tied to the crisis of replication of psychology. Whereas in Europe, it felt like you know, when I was vaguely following that 10 years ago, that you had this eliminationist turn and this attempt to like re to re-reconcile analytics philosophy, the continental philosophy that everybody was excited about for about 15 minutes and then totally went away. Um so I wanted to ask you about, you know, this social history seems to indicate that analytic philosophy has some kind of major self-limitation that it can cannot seem to overcome in its various varieties, and yeah, it also to be vulgar and a little bit blunt, doesn't fucking go away. So, you know, so uh what do you think that is?

Ordinary Language Philosophy’s Promise And Limits

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

Well, that's ideology for you, isn't it? I mean, that's the short answer. Fair enough. Well, it's interesting that if you look at the history of philosophy, history of European philosophy, in the 18th century, there was a guy who was deeply, deeply disturbed by the outcome of empiricism, basically, uh by which I mean Hume and tried to address head on where empiricism leaves you, right? So empiricism leaves you with all these problems like okay, so you you your basic stance is the only bona fide building blocks of knowledge can be inputs from sensory experience, all things related in some very particular way to inputs from sensory experience. But if you try to build knowledge in that way, you come up against all these problems like you can't equip yourself with even very basic concepts that are needed to make sense of what happens in the world, like causation, right? So it was one of Hume's uh big problems. Maybe even more fundamentally or even more sort of viscerally, we can't really assure ourselves of the continued existence of objects in the world. So Hume had this big problem. I mean, Hume's a wonderful philosopher because uh reading him, especially his earlier work of the Treatise of Human Nature, it's a sort of enactment of his own philosophical perplexity and sort of descent into a state of sort of philosophical bewilderment a lot of the time. Because he's you know he's very, very in tune with his own problems. And one of the really visceral things that happen is that he wonders about you know how can I be sure that this object that's in front of me now, that I see now, and that after I turn away and look back, I see again was there when I wasn't looking. So empiricism presents us with these problems that are to do with our ability to assure ourselves that anything other than our own subjective experience connects to anything at all. Right. And there's also a problem about how to connect it to logic, which the logical positivists try to solve by means of fancy new logical set of techniques that have been developed at the end of the 19th century. But basically, sorry, the reason I'm going on about this is about the 18th century, is that you then have, as you don't need me to tell you, this whole development in the work of Kant and his successors through Hegel and then through you know Husserl, Heidegger, and so on, right into the 20th century in European philosophy, which is you know, whose purpose it is to grapple with the problem of empiricism, and which is the very thing that analytic philosophy at its inception shuts down, right? So there's this idea that I mean Kant is much more acceptable to analytic philosophers than Hegel is, or Hegel was until there was a way of as the term until Brandom tried to analyticize it, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So and domestication was the word that was used right back in the day. So make Hegel fit for consumption by American and British and other kinds of analytic philosophers. And that was very much thematized, you know, it's still in sort of 1945, you'll see British analytic philosophers certainly talking about the chasm, as they call it, between Hume and Russell. There was this kind of this great period in which all these weird, nefarious things happened, and Russell and Moore were reconnecting themselves, which is odd given what I said before about how Russell and Moore were in some way building on an anti-empiricist project at first, before then sort of slipping back into empiricism themselves. But sorry, I've lost sight of your question now, but I felt that this was we needed to go through this route of route back to the 18th century to see that German idealism it's not it's not accidental that German idealism is the thing that analytic philosophy tries to.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:48

circumvent right but the question was right about the the the ever reasserting it's it's it both seems to fail and reassert itself constantly like yeah like you know like uh like when i when i talk about continental philosophical movements they seem to often have distinct endings like we run like deconstruction we can talk about from here to here like i mean maybe somebody's still gonna try to revive it but but in general we we you know it kind of died when i was in college actually whereas when i talk about analytic philosophy people would even look at you like very strangely when you talk about it dying because they make it sound like oh no but this is what we've been doing all the way back to Aristotle and like Aristotle's analytics is not analytic philosophy even if there is some you know continuity in the the concepts of logic they are very different things and even stuff you know I think we've seen this I think about someone who really worked on this problem like in America the the Italian American philosopher Massimo Pegliucci who like just jumped ship and started talking about stoicism you know I've seen a lot of that like people just like you know what we're not gonna answer what science is so bye I'm gonna do something else and uh but but yet it's you know it doesn't it doesn't seem to go away the other thing it seems to do as we've talked about this a little bit in like Brandom's reading of Hegel I mean we I've just implied it and and then the the the the new continental analytics synthesis out of Britain that lasted I don't know five years maybe it's still going on but it feels like it's dead is that there's this attempt for continental philosophy or analytic philosophy excuse me to like get into other fields of philosophy to try to like assert themselves we'll tie the I I want to tie this in that again but definitely with analytic Marxism which is what one of the most confusing disciplines I've ever dealt with depending on like what you accept because in a way analytic Marxism is is neither all that related to Marxism nor all that related to historical analytic philosophy. Either kind of in the kind of banal stuff that you're talking about or as like Aquanians and whatever Alastair McIntyre was on. You know like so it does seem like these these things exalt themselves but it also seems to be you know maybe from the structural the both its history and its placement in society unavoidable for this to just keep on coming up and then running into basically the same problem of not being able to self-justify.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:54

Yeah. Well I suppose one driver this is a maybe kind of overly obvious uh observation but one driver is that there is a sort of fit between you know the production of academic material and sort of academic industrial complex in the form of journal articles of a certain kind that are supposed to be published in journals that have a certain kind of prestige and so on and the imperatives of analytic philosophy. So you could see you know once we started to get you know analytic Heidegger and analytic Nietzsche in analytic Sartre and analytic just about anything analytic feminism analytic post-colonial theory what analytic um basically what you were getting was the the sort of moving of analytic philosophers into these territories in order to sort of repackage the materials in a way that made them fit for analytic consumption and part of what fit for analytic consumption means I guess is saying things in relatively short clipped sentences with with the with the repetition of semantic units across the page. One of the first things that you learn when you write an analytic philosophy essay is keep repeating the same word. I actually got quite good reasons for this it's not a terrible practice because as opposed to where they tell you vary the word of course when you vary the word it's much more difficult to keep track of the the you know very precise semantic unit that you want to to keep tracking but you know it's we live in a society in which things are set up to favor a certain kind of production of a certain kind of product and it's connected with the sort of way of thinking that's favored and that's not accidental because you know analytic philosophy has these cousins like neoclassical economics one of its cousins now dead is behaviorism in psychology but it was very clearly for a long time clearly connected to that where the idea is you know we deal in sort of little units of content and we're very interested in delineating those units, you know drawing clear lines around them and then and then looking at the patterns of inference between them and they're all to be manipulated as these sort of little it's it's almost a sort of like little Lego blocks that we put together in certain ways. And this is a conception both of what the world is like and what what the world is that the autonomous liberal subject then is faced with. Because the autonomous liberal subject has it all foisted on herself that she's to you know make sense of this in whatever way she pleases because there's to be no pressure put on any liberal subject in terms of how she's to conduct her life because you know all the ways of life are to be encouraged let them let them choose but the world is this sort of big container of all these little bits like this big box of Lego and we can we could put the bits together in the in the right sorts of ways and that's you know that's what a journal article of a certain kind looks like you've got your claim and then you've got your way of building up to your claim and all of this happens in quite a small space happens at about 1000 words it's not really connected to anything outside it except what can be put into a reference and so we've got a kind of culture that promotes you know the sorts of things that analytic philosophy is very conducive to just in that way.

C. Derick Varn 1:13:31

Animization emotivism you know the the stilo term from West America direction although he uses it almost as a conspiracy theory but that's neither here nor there you you see this whole like way in which the individual subject doesn't have to contextualize themselves and also then doesn't have to have any normative commitments and when and when analytic philosophers seem to to want to do something normative they they're they're just not analytic philosophers anymore it's almost like definitional like um I mean we can talk about some exceptions after we talk about marks but like in general that's where it seems to go you know like I said you think I think about Alasta McIntyre and Philippa Foot and they're both kind of out you know eventually Mary Midgley kind of we're not we're just gonna move her over here to this other field of study you know and that seems to happen significantly particularly after the 1950s I think I I think this like traumatic rupture of McCarthyism and that your book points out is really significant but I also think you're right that in some ways analytic philosophy is an operative ideology like it is a it is whether it intends to be or not and you know I think you I think you're fair in saying early on it probably doesn't intend to be but it is both metrologically individualistic and historical and like at a fundamental level and the focused on logic can seem that way and I think another thing is that it can seem like this is what philosophy always was because you can look at like the analytics by Aristotle and think that this goes all the way back to that or but you have to you basically have to excise whole parts of most philosophers before the 19th century Scorpus for that to work.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:31

You just have to like yeah we only study this yeah well you have to read them in a very particular way I mean they right they used to be it's much less popular now. And you know it's it's important I guess for me to acknowledge that the field is is more complex and variegated now in various ways. So it's and it's also true that when you raised the point about earlier analytic philosophers thinking themselves thinking of themselves as not committed to the ideology of liberalism and empiricism but something else that's true. Of course there are many now as well that think of themselves as not so committed. I think they are nonetheless because of the various blind spots that have to be have to be there in order for them to be doing analytic philosophy at all. But sorry I've forgotten what I was going to say now.

Why Analytic Philosophy Persists

C. Derick Varn 1:16:22

What was the last thing that you oh I just I uh I think let's talk about how if you if you get too into normative commitments on analytic philosopher you almost get kicked out of the grouping i I would agree with you that like today that's a that's a little bit less common partly because if I'm honest I think funding in departments are driving some of this you know yeah I always talk about this in like neo-Kantianism in Germany in the in the 19th century because I'm like yeah that's that's just as much about what Bismarck's willing to pay for as it is about like uh what's actually going on so you know I I think that's interesting to me I I also think yeah Karl Marx is back in a big way everyone's talked about it blah blah blah but I do it I was you know academically I was kind of interested in this attempt where like continental and analytic philosophy were going to try to engage with each other again but then it just felt like it was reappro like it you know on both sides actually I could talk about this in with uh with um alay and badu too where I feel like it's reappropriations of of concepts from it but are completely removed and decontextualized like like Badu's set theory to me has like absolutely very little to do with what Russell was up to and Brandom's hegel seems cool as Brandom's hegel but I have no idea what it has to do with Hegel Hegel which I know is unfair I actually like Brandom's work but it just feels like it's it's it's reappropriating for a different project um I guess this brings us back though to to like a key question on why I see your two books as as similar and we've been going for a while now but your your your book about marx is about the actualization of philosophy which is like philosophy in some ways more closely atten to what the ancient Greeks meant by it which is something that you actually applied as a social project and lived as a social project. And as we've discussed analytic philosophy just can't seem to be able to do that and if you try to do it you you you move into a different category almost definitionally but you know I wanted to get to get back to this because the actualization of philosophy that you write about with Marx seems to come from the exact same problem that spurn Moore and Russell all the you know slightly later but only slightly and I think it's interesting and important to to like remind people that Karl Marx's anti philosophy if you're gonna take that category and both a lot of analytics and a lot of Marxists do and actually Badu and some other continental philosophers do is oh people read it as just a negation of philosophy and I think you're it's important to point out that doesn't even make that much sense from the Hegelian methodology that Marx was working from so I wanted to get to come back to that question for a second and maybe yeah we can chart this as a parallel course what is Marx responding to in the same kind of crisis of German of German idealism and what is he attempting to do with philosophy that so many people take as just saying that it's irrelevant or needless now which you very clearly argue that's not what he means.

Marx’s Actualization Of Philosophy

SPEAKER_00 1:20:20

Yeah so the immediate crisis is the crisis that really all of the young Hegelians experience in the face of the death of Hegel. I mean there's the event of Hegel actually dying and there's more widely the event of Hegel having produced this seemingly complete philosophical system which is in a completely sort of self-sealed completely consummate system. And then there seems to be this question of well what do we do now in relation to this intellectual project that seems to be complete and they see it as being analogous to the situation that the um post-Aristotelians were in. So because Aristotle in a similar way sort of seemed to have provided for everything in his philosophical work. So you could do you could do more things along the lines of what Aristotle was doing like you know his disciple Theophrastus did more biological work sort of continuing Aristotle's project sort of filling in what Aristotle had been doing but it was like this was a consummate completely sealed off total system. And in in some of Marx's very earliest philosophical writings which are partly notebooks on ancient Greek philosophy and partly his PhD dissertation which was also on ancient Greek philosophy he starts to speak of this issue of what's now to be done if philosophy is apparently complete as the question of the realization or the actualization of philosophy. And he uses these phrases like philosophy must now enter the world which are evidently metaphorical and there's a question about what image exactly you're supposed to have in mind if you think about philosophy entering the world. But what he seems to have in mind already from very early on is the idea that if we're to take seriously Hegel's conception of philosophy which is you know in fancy Hegelian terms it's that philosophy is the unity of concept and actuality or in sort of more ancient philosophy sort of terms traditional terms philosophy is the place where thinking and being are one or where the concept where concept and world coincide Marx is Marx takes up this Hegelian idea and he thinks that if that idea is correct then it must be that philosophy in its very concept is so to speak such as to actualise itself and thereby enter the world so to be what it is by being the thinking of the world and it's to me very interesting that he puts it that way so so early on because he's already I think in the doctoral dissertation arguing against certain people in the sort of in his surroundings so in particular Bruno Bauer who's one of the major young Hegelians who talked about there's this wonderful correspondence between Bauer and Marx of which we only have one side that survives and it's Bauer writing about what he calls the terrorism of true theory and the idea of the terrorism of true theory is that you work out everything philosophically correctly and once you've done that you just you just tell the world about it. You inform and Bauer thinking here of radical politics thinking if you just if you just tell if you just publish a book with all the correct philosophy in it the revolution will just happen. You know there will be this great world event and because you know consciousness will be transformed and thereby the world will be transformed. And Marx already sees that that can't be right and I think so what he then does I think from there is he develops that suspicion about why Bauer must be wrong into actually a very far reaching critique of Hegelianism itself. So well what I try to do in my book on Marx is to show that Marx has this very profound critique of Hegel and it's profound precisely because he begins from a point of sort of almost absolute proximity to Hegel. He's the person who really really takes seriously Hegel's idea that philosophy is the unity of concept and actuality and really sort of you know drives it all the way through. And in really holding on to that idea he comes to think that even in Hegel himself there's something that just keeps on going wrong which is that Hegel thought you could do something called logic and logic was the self-generation out of itself of thought in such a way that if thought were to you know somehow be put on the right track, it would exhibit the interrelations between all the fundamental concepts that it's possible to have in this thing called dialectic, which would be the sort of self-movement in which thought sets itself on a path and and by being on on the correct path right one in which every move is made out of necessity it leads back to itself. So you have this thing called logic and then you also have this other thing which Hegel called real philosophy or real philosophy and the real philosophy which is about these two things nature and spirit so basically what physics broadly speaking what physics studies and then you know the the study of the human or the social those two things which are you know the the real things in the world would be expressions of the logic because the structure of the logic would be manifest in these things but in some important way you have to do the logic first you can't you can't do the logic by reference to the Real philosophy this philosophy of the real because what the what the logic is doing has to be this necessary self movement. And Marx keeps on coming back to this and he says and the the most interesting way that he criticizes this is by doing this really concrete criticism of you know step by step what happens in one bit of the real philosophy which is Hegel's doctrine of the state where Hegel tries to show why it is that in political life you have to have all these different institutions that are related to each other in certain ways like why you have to have an executive and a legislature and you have to have different representatives of different walks of life that were called estates and how they had to mediate the relationships between them was these sort of mediating relationships which enabled them to all function as a whole together as a kind of organ. And and Marx keeps saying when he does this very concrete critique of Hegel sort of at each step he says but how does he know this is the right step you know he says this is the well we we look at the logic oh I can I can see you know if I look in the kind of the tea leaves of the logic so to speak oh there it is and then Marx says but you only think that that's to be found in the logic because you've already made some presupposition about some connection in empirical reality that that underwrites that so you're always having to some way in some way import the empirical back into your consideration of why that completely abstract logical progression is is the one to refer to so as he becomes more and more conscious of that I think what Marx then more and more explicitly criticizes is this thing we call self-sufficient philosophy. And that's just the idea that you could do something like Hegelian logic. You could go through the sort of circle of concepts and establish how all the concepts are related to each other and then you could and then you could try to find that structure in the world and one of the places where I think Marx is very interesting about this is his critique of Proudhon in the poverty of philosophy which is a response to Proudhon and what Poudhon basically does is Poudhon says well you know as Hegel teaches us there are all these relationships between concepts and I'm going to find those in the economy and Marx says no no no no that that doesn't work that's trying to do self-sufficient philosophy so as I as I read Marx then in the in the late work so in his in this great work that he'd been Working on for such a long time, the first part of which he publishes, and the rest of which remains in complete capital. This is the place where he tries to show us how actually to do dialectic. And it's a way of doing dialectic that overcomes the idea of self-sufficient philosophy. A kind of philosophy that's trying to make good on the idea of the unity of concept and actuality, but that falls short of what that really means, right? And never falls short of the actualization of philosophy. Because for philosophy to be what it really is, is for it to be the thinking of the world itself without without the first step in which it retreats into itself and tries to be self-sufficient. So that's a very long answer to the question of what's its relationship to what's the relationship of kind of Marx Marx's project as I understand it to you know where German idealism has left things. But essentially the idea is you know German idealism ends up with this notion of a kind of self-sufficient intellectual activity. And if you think you can have that, then you haven't yet got philosophy in its actuality.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:10

So that's a pretty major critique of German idealism, but one that kind of maintains its goal, as you said. But you know, I didn't know that you could even read that because I'd never found it in all my as an obsessive reader of Marx, who even spends time in like the the the volumes of letters all the time. I'm like, where's this dissertation at? Damn it. But you make a good use of it. I I wanted to ask you, what does Marx take from classical atomism and classical Epicureanism? And and why is that important in this critique of Hegel?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:30

It's quite a difficult question to answer, actually, what exactly what he takes from it. I think partly because so the dissertation is a very difficult thing to read. It's at this extremely high intellectual level, but it's not totally clear. Because it's such an early work and he's figuring things out.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:46

It's it's like it's math manuscripts to me, too. Like those are the things when I go to read Marx and I'm like, never mind, I've got to give them up now.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:54

Yeah, those are very difficult, and also because he's working with the conception of calculus that's been superseded in such a way that we understand it in a more straightforward way than it was anyway. But yeah, it's it's deep into it. And I mean, if you look at the notebooks on ancient Greek philosophy, there his scope is much wider, and he's interested in uh Epicureans and Stoics and skeptics. Um, and then he sort of, you know, as happens with PhDs, he had to narrow it to this project, which was specifically about atomism. So the the question is Epicurus, so Epicurus came after Aristotle. Was his atomism in any significant way different from that of Democritus, who's a contemporary of Socrates? And Marx goes against the scholarly consensus, and he does this by reading all of the original texts in Greek and Latin. That's an extraordinary piece of scholarship. And he says, no, no, no, Epicurus is this important advance on Democritus, because in some sense, and it's difficult to know how to interpret this claim exactly, but in in Epicurus, it's seen how the atoms are somehow self-conscious, at least potentially, or something like this. And so, I mean, your question is interesting to me because I did think in working on this that there's something going on when Marx, towards the end of the dissertation, he talks about Epicurus thinking of the celestial bodies as themselves, these great atoms that are related to each other in a sort of community where their being the atoms that they are has something to do with their interdependence on each other. I did think that this might have something to do with the way he thinks about communism and that he would the way that he thinks of communism as involving something like social individuals. Because Marx is very keen on the idea of what individuality is exactly in the human case, and individuality is something to be had through a certain kind of interdependence with others. So I I think that there might be a line there. But the the the one thing that I took from the doctoral dissertation was really this idea that we're to think of the relationship between thought and reality in a particular way, which comes out of his reading of Epicurus, where even to speak of it as a relationship is slightly misleading. So we're to think of thought as being the sort of thing that's directed at reality without us being able to think of reality as something that's somehow outside thought, like the thing that thought sort of reaches towards. And that I think puts him on the path of thinking that thought is something like the form of human life, in a way that picks up from his reading of Aristotle. So Aristotle was someone that he read really closely. We know that because he translated from Greek to German a large part of Aristotle's De Anima, the treatise on the soul. And he was particularly interested in the passages where this sort of thing happens, where Aristotle's talking about the idea that we're a certain kind of living being, namely a thinking living being. So I took it that, and this is sort of evident in some of the sort of wider reading that he does on ancient philosophy, that's preserved in the notebooks, that he's particularly interested in this question of how thought how thought relates to reality and what that means for the kinds of beings that we are. That I took to be sort of somehow the central concern of this whole field of work. But then he's also focused in on this very narrow question about atomism, which is the kind of official topic of the dissertation, and which he which he pursues in this very Hegelian way, because he he tries to lay out what atomism is by thinking first, we think of the atom as just this one single thing that's completely independent and is unrelated to anything else, and he says, Well, that doesn't yet get you the idea of the atom, and then he tries to sort of build in a whole series of kind of further determinations that the atom must have. So the atom must must fall in some way in order to preserve its independence, and then it must swerve and it must stand in relations to other atoms and so on. So you get this kind of Hegelian reimagining of what atomism is. Uh it's yeah, it's a very perplexing text. I do recommend people read it, but no one has come up with any sort of definitive reading of it, I think.

C. Derick Varn 1:36:53

Yeah, I would agree. I was thinking about this. This is more off of your your stuff on the early humanism and naturalism, and and maybe to contrast what you're developing with. I don't know, someone like officers, we'll come back to that in a second. When you talk about the the holomorphic theories of the unity of matter and form, uh, which I do see is related to Epicureanism. Like I like when you think about what materialism is for Epicurus, there is a formal component that is not mere monism of just undifferentiated stuff. And you know, you see that also in modern physics, that's why you know modern physicists will sometimes try to claim atomism and epicureanism, even though it's kind of a stretch because they're not really operating off of the same baseline assumptions of why these things are the way they are. But and when you talk about the development in particularly in the manuscripts of 1844, uh to this focus on species being, which I also admit has a lineage, and you know, I believe it's from Hess that's that's different than the way probably Marx is using it. But there's this shift from the unity of matter and form into like into like this being becoming category that you talk about in in this this period, and like what we'll say late early Marx to not be confusing at all. What do you make of that? You know, my my reading of it being related to Epicureus aside, but what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:30

So, how it is that he starts to talk about species being and so on, yeah, and and like what do you think that's answering for him, you know? Like, right, yeah. So so species being has this link. I mean, I mean it goes all the way back to Hegel through Hesse and also Feuerbach, right? And Putin. I take it he's I mean he's still thinking there about the question of fundamentally what it is to be a human being. And he's thinking, well, what sort of being is it? It's the being that knows itself to be itself. And also, as he importantly says, it's the being that makes other th other things genera for it, right? These these universal things. So, in other words, we're the being that can think in concepts that has language, and we have this medium through which I can say something and it can be the very thing that you understand me to say, insofar as we grasp the same concept. And thereby we're also free and rational beings. So I think he's trying to it's I suppose I mean it's not it's not really so much a theory of the human as it's just sort of laying out for us what he takes to be that which we know about ourselves. I mean it becomes crucial. So there's there's a way of reading what he says about species being where it's supposed to be the kind of foundation for the critique of alienation. The idea is, well, if our essence, so to speak, is to be this way and then something else fucks with that, then well, we can criticize that thing. But I take it that really what he's trying to do is just just sort of rehearse um rehearse the human. I'm I'm even leaving out things like what it is to be human, just rehearsing the human. Because you know, when he talks about the various modes of alienation under capitalist production, I think it's taken to be just clear that if somebody screws with you while you're doing what we as humans do, you're gonna object. That so there's no, I don't think there's any moral argument, right? I don't think he's saying, well, there's some an inalienable right that we have in that means that we shouldn't be messed with in these ways. It's just like if somebody you know puts their hand over your nose and mouth and presses down very hard so you can't breathe, your response is get your hand off me. I think that that that's the form of argument. So I think the species being stuff is there to just sort of articulate again what it is what it is about us that means that we respond in that way. We're the we're the free, rational, self-conscious beings that have this character which other other beings don't have, right? So interestingly he says other living beings have a gattung character. They have gattungsleben, they have they they live like a gattung, like a like a species, like a genus. But we're the only ones that actually are that thing. Because how how we relate to each other. How do we know we relate to each other like that? Well, I guess try and deny it. Right.

Species‑Being And Human Freedom

C. Derick Varn 1:42:27

What is interesting me for this, you were mentioning Aristotle, is this actually gets around the kind of problem that you see in both Aristotle and Hegel. That we just kind of like at least in Aristotle, there is a there is a kind of reduction in categories, but I need to actually get to my point though. That the teleology isn't just assumed now, species being gives us a way to talk about what it is to be human without just assigning some trait that we think is too generous, unique to humanity, and then saying our teleology relates to that. Whereas species being gives a way to talk about it that is in a way socially emergent, because like the idea, for example, of knowing what it is to be a human outside of interactions with other humans for Marx is just like almost a dumb question. Like, for example, when I talk about like species being in Marx versus human nature, like in some ways, species being is a theory of human nature, but in another way, you know, Marx situates it so completely in interactions and historical context that we can't know any essential trait, yeah, other than this thing of interacting with each other and this in this way that proves our being, that we could say is always there and always and always human. So we don't say, like, oh, it's rationality or oh, it's selfishness or or whatever. Like it seems that Marx gets us out of that problem entirely, you know, and that's a problem that plagues analytics too. They're also trying to get out of that problem back together.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:07

But yeah, no, I think uh the way you put it is great because it also shows how in the German ideology, Marx and Engels at the beginning of the German ideology as we know it, find a way to put all of this, you know, much more elegantly, I think, than what was going on in the manuscripts, which is that there they begin by talking about real living human individuals as their starting points. So you don't even get the impression of any sort of heavy baggage about you know the nature of the human. He says, let's let's begin from real living human individuals, and then very quickly they talk about these real human individuals making their own history, making the world that they live in. As if that's very easy to not even access. We are we're we're we're there to just be there and and to begin from there.

C. Derick Varn 1:45:03

I guess that does lead me to you know the shift that you talk about with the critique of self-sufficient philosophy, that we really start to see, and I guess even later early Marx man, I'm sorry guys, that I came up with this dumb uh, but in the whole in the holy family and German ideology, where you know, self-sufficient philosophy, since it thinks it can exist outside of social reality, also is given to just replicating social reality and like you know, as an ideology, basically, by exempting it. So, like by removing that context, you're actually creating a way in which that context can double assert itself as just like a naturalized truth, right? This is a problem for self-sufficient philosophy over and over again, and you point that out pretty strongly. You know, historical materialism, and I know Ingels named it, not Marx, whatever. At least it's actually from one of them, unlike the other materialism, which comes later. The historical materialism for you is not really a replacement for free for philosophy as like a pure science in the same way or in the same way, although science is definitely a part of this. I mean, the scientific socialism project is is definitely a strong part of this, but that there's also a way in which you're trying in which you say that Marx is trying to overcome this self-sufficiency, aka, this this abstracting away from the reality of our of our interactions in real world. How big of a deal do you think that is? I mean, it seems like a crucial step, and it's a step that that I think to maybe expand the question a little bit, parallels what the analytics are trying to do, but you know, kind of actually succeeds at doing it. But yeah, go ahead. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:07

Yeah, there's something. I mean, there's something sort of Wittgenstein adjacent. I I have thought and continue to think about the way I understand historical materialism. Because it's kind of like, well, let's begin in Medias Res, kind of, you know, here we are in the world. We have some understanding of to use that horrible phrase again, how we go on, that we're to work with rather than try and sort of step out of it somehow per you know per absurdum to have this vantage point on ourselves that's from outside our life. So there's that, but the analogy, in a sense, doesn't go that much further because the Wittgensteinian thing is very sort of deflationary, right? It's uh let's not theorize, let's not get involved with the traditional business of philosophy. Let's the philosopher, there's this remarkable statement that Wittgenstein makes somewhere he says the philosophy is not the citizen of any community of ideas. There's the philosopher just sort of surveys other people, the philosophy really stands apart. And I I take the idea of actualization of philosophy to be in a sense the opposite of that. Because to actualize philosophy, which is to do something that we were in some sense always doing, because it's not like, well, there was when we weren't actualizing it, and now there's when we are, because actualization isn't that kind of concept, right? Actualization is making something into what it is, like bringing it to its actuality. What does it come to? Well, it comes to the exercise of human thought, really. And the exercise of human thought is to be thought of as encompassing all of our theoretical as well as practical, directly practical activities. So it's going to incorporate the kind of scientific work that we do. This is part of what human living thinking activity is, is to engage in highly speculative and highly technical and highly complex theoretical inquiry, and it's going to be historically mediated. You know, it's like one thing that we know about ourselves is that we make our history. So we must be you know constantly situating ourselves and investigating that history and coming to an understanding of ourselves as historically produced and as producing history. So, in that sense, there's a great deal to do. In stark contrast, I think, with the Wittgensteinian conception, which is if you want to think about stuff, you know, do as little as you possibly can. It's it's more like, you know, if you thought that just doing Hegelian logic and then a bit extra was going to be enough. No, think again. Right, human human thought is is thought of the illimitable object, as I put in one place. So it has no it has no limits, or at least it has no limits that fall short of the limits of reality. And reality isn't just you know how the world happens to be, but reality is also the object of practical thinking, which is something that we bring bring bring into the world. So this is strictly not something that could be quantified, but if one wanted to speak it in kind of quantificatory language, it's it's very, very big.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:36

Yeah. Um I mean it's a project that unite uh so many different disciplines, it's a little bit baffling, but um but I you know uh you may This is clear for me in your discussion of capital as a work of actualized philosophy and a critique of you know the actual world that we currently exist in, which is yeah, you know, several chapters in your book. But you not that capital is just a philosophical work, but that by dialectically going through and in this use of Hegelian dialectics, and you know, we didn't talk about this, but analytics, analytic philosophy is avoid of dialectics is interesting because I point out to people dialectics, even though yeah, some Marxists use it lazily as almost a magic word, is a discipline and a way of doing philosophy that you find convergently developing in multiple traditions. You see it in Taoism, you see it in Argagunadharmic thought, you see it in in Socratic and pre-Socratic thought. It's it's it's a way of of parsing contested categories, and the historicizing it in Hegel is major because it gives you a way of making it beyond basically an argument. And so people understand, you know, most Marxists get that you have to have that understanding of dialectics to get capital, really. But this actualization element of it is not usually part of the way we read capital as a philosophical work. So I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about that before we we talk about ethics and then pivot to the connection between two books.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:13

But go ahead.

Capital As Dialectical Inquiry

SPEAKER_00 1:52:14

Yeah, so I mean, uh one consequence of thinking of the actualization of philosophy in this way is that the way in which capital is going to be philosophy is going to be in this very, very uh expansive sense. And a sense in which all kinds of things are gonna be philosophy other than the critique of political economy. And so, I mean, to people who are used to operating with the sort of traditional category of philosophy, I think it's sort of a bit confounding to say that capital is a work of philosophy. Because it isn't in the sense it's not a work of philosophical doctrines, right? It's precisely not saying, well, here's a philosophical doctrine, you know, the labor theory of value or something, and then well, from that it follows, such and such. That's very much not what he's doing. And what he's doing is you know putting into action a certain kind of thinking, which is dialectical in its nature, and that's directed at a crucial part of current reality in 19th century Europe, the thing that that Marx takes as most urgent to think about, which is capital and its you know it's impending self-destruction. So, I mean, the answer to the question, how can this possibly be philosophy if it doesn't look like philosophy, is well, there are many, many forms of rational inquiry that might be pursued in an actualized form, right? In the form of the actualization of philosophy. And this is one of them. And this is this is what this is where Marx chose to direct his efforts. One thing about Marx in this period, you know, the the later decades of his life is that he suffered a great deal from economic distress, which meant that he had to write for newspapers to make money, and from various kinds of medical issues that meant that he was often sort of incapable of working. And he had all these other projects. The project of mathematics was one of the ones he mentioned, but projects in ecology and all sorts of things that that go beyond the scope of what went into even the projected work capital. So it's strange in a certain way to think of it as philosophy, but that's I that reflects that there is a strangeness relative to how we think of philosophy in the idea of the actualization of philosophy. Because we want we have this urge to kind of restrict philosophy and make it into this circumscribed thing that will have a relationship to other forms of rational inquiry where it will sort of sit alongside them, you know. So you'll have your economics and you'll have your geography, and then you have your philosophy, which is this weird, slightly a prioristic seeming but claiming to be empirical thing that's sort of jostling with these other disciplines. And in a way, I mean I'd be happy also to just you know abandon all talk of philosophy and say don't worry about whether in what way it's distinctively philosophical. Marx, as a historical materialist, sees that he must do anthropology and geography and political economy and all these things, and it's it's all of these things at once. And philosophy would be thinking in terms of rational inquiry as the thing that articulates itself into all these different disparate fields with their own particular boundaries. So we could just sort of not worry about philosophy. But a reason to really hold on to the concept of philosophy, I think, is that it would be a mistake to think that the work was anti-philosophical, that it thought it could dispense with philosophy. Because you know, people have argued this about Marx, that his critical remarks about philosophers from the kind of mid-1840s onwards suggest that he just breaks with philosophy. But this is a kind of to me, anyway, incoherent notion. Well, would you just break with what rational inquiry as such, which is how how he thinks of philosophy?

C. Derick Varn 1:56:29

Well, what where are you not logic anymore?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:31

Like, yeah, I mean, where are you supposed to stand intellectually? Well, you're you you're standing at at this if you know you have to sort of stance of the cynical detachment from the very idea of rational inquiry. That doesn't seem to make much sense. And there's also just lots of evidence as we read Capital that currents from philosophy of the kind that permit actualization, like some of what Aristotle's doing, is sort of pulse, you know, this stuff's pulsating through the veins of Capital Volume One, I think. Um so that's another reason. I mean what I guess what I what you know what I try and do overall is to to try and show up how the analytic conception of philosophy is is this restriction. Uh right, it thinks of itself as because it's the most obvious form in the kind of world that you know you and I as English speaking people with an academic background sort of operate in. We think, well, analytic philosophy seems the obvious thing. It's not at all obvious that as your remarks about dialectic being not merely European but all over the place sort of bring out. It's it's a particular decision to say, no, no, no, we can really think of the world as you know decomposable into bits that we can then stick back together once we've you know carefully delineated what all the bits are. In this sort of I mean, I I used the word empiricistic earlier, which analytic philosophers bristle at because I'll say, I'm not an empiricist. And then I have to say it doesn't matter that you're not an empiricist, you still think empiricistically, but the other word to use is just uh is just anti-dialectical, I think. The sort of you know, we can we can think of all the things that we need to think of on their own terms, you know, as if they were as if they were all parcelable. Is that a word? Parcelable from each other, you know, the the the other side to the methodological individualism. So so you and I are these individuals to be made sense of on their own, and then we put the aggregate together and that society similarly, right? The world's made up of these, as Hume would say, matters of fact, or these uh bits of pieces. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:54

Well, I mean, he gives me like, you know, one of the greatest, longest, and in my opinion, dumbest debates in Marxist philosophy is like the debates between certain analytical Marxists and certain hardcore sectarian Marxists is there's no morality in Marxism. Because I'm like, when Marx says we don't need ethics, he means philosophical ethics, he means self-sufficient philosophy that's just abstracted from any social case. In some ways, there is, you know, not that that like Lester McIntyre's answer to this problem is anything like Marxist, but like uh Lester McIntyre's complaint about enlightenment ethics is something Marx would completely recognize because the rules to which you try to abstract don't end up working, like they just you can't draw any coherent set of uh ethical principles from them, and you also don't really deal with contextualization at all, and you know, maybe a little bit in utilitarianism, although we know what Marx thinks about that. He's very clear about it in his notebooks. But you you have this this problem, and I tell people it's because partly it has to do with the the fact that both not it's not just that just the individual is atomized, it's also like the collective is atomized too. Like this is not put in proper like dialogue with itself, like it's not just an aggregate that just happens to exist that we can describe, and then individuals who have agency. It's no individual agency is an interplay with other individual agencies which can come together in various ways. And yeah, the aggregates are what we're gonna study, and the aggregates tried hip history, but there are these other forms of collective action that that exist in the way we interact, and I take that to be part of what you're getting at with the actualized philosophy. It gives us a way to understand that distinction that that you just can't you you just can't really do an analytical. I mean, because you know, to give you something, you talk about analytic philosophy and behaviorism. Well, the other thing that happened when behaviorism didn't work anymore was analytic philosophy and hyperdeterminism. Like everything is the way it has to be, going all the way back to the Big Bang, which was popular in analytic philosophy and scientific discussions of you know 10-15 years ago. The issue with that though is they thought it was important to convince people of it, which I was like, doesn't the very action that you're doing indicate that you actually do believe that there is some agentic choice to be had, in which case you can't actually believe in determinism in the way that you're talking about it. And Marx is Marx does believe people are determined, but not solely determined, they're determined by emergent social interactions, right? Like to use our not, I'm using non-hegelian parlance for this, but that's basically what he's describing.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:55

Yeah, I think the question of ethics is is super interesting. It's one that it's interesting me. Interesting me personally a lot at the moment, how to think about ethics having come out of spending a lot of time with analytic philosophy, and and it's the ethics, it's ethics where I pull my hair out, I think, the most, actually. And I didn't write about it that much in the book, partly because of that, and partly because I wanted to show that there was a social history of you know metaphysics and logic where people might think it's less like likely to be found. But I feel like the attitude should be when it comes to Marx to reclaim ethics from a certain kind of philosopher whose expertise is in alienating us from the ethical, basically. I mean, if you look at I mean, I wouldn't say this of Kant himself, or maybe not even of Mill himself, but if you look at you know deontological and utilitarian theories of ethics that get you know circulated in textbooks and things, I mean we're invited to think that there are principles that ought to settle our ethical decisions that are so unfit for the task of dealing with the complexity of the ethical world. Where one of the most striking things about people who are ethically admirable is that they negotiate a world that seems completely confounding in terms of the the idea that one might make any ethical sense of it or do the honorable thing or do whatever you know is demanded of us as humans. And yet they do it in situations where completely unforeseeable demands are made on them and they do, you know, they they act in this way. That's that seems to me kind of like the locus of the ethical. To understand that would be to understand the ethical, which I think can only really be done by thinking about you know the sort of thing that Aristotle meant by the virtues. And I think that's not that's not incompatible with Marx. You know, used to be fashionable for a while to say, you know, the political sort of trumps the ethical, we don't need to worry about the ethical, let's just be political realists. But we are people who have to navigate the world and are faced with the demands on us to find a way through, and that's as much true of us as we live in community as it is you know living individually. Yeah, so I mean, in that sense, it's just it's obvious that there's an ethical dimension in Marx's project. I mean, there just absolutely must be. Right, it's not, and it's and it's also very obvious he'll have nothing to do with Bentham or with Kant or with people who are trying to theorize in that sort of way.

Ethics Beyond Rules And Utility

C. Derick Varn 2:04:51

Yeah, I I think about like the you know, some of the Soviet writing on the uh on ethics, no matter how you feel about it, it does pick up on this almost Aristotelian notion of contextualized virtue. I mean, they talk about class virtues, and some of it's post hoc and kind of self you know self-exempting in a bad way, but a lot of it does give you an indication, yeah, that this is not, you know, we're not all the cartoon characterization of Machiavelli here. And you know, as Machiavelli wasn't either, but you know, that's a different question. Um one of the things I got about your uh one of the two things I thought about your book is like many scholars, I mean, most famously Al Tuser, have picked up that there's a shift in Marxist thinking around the German ideology, what the the the the writings around Capital, and you have you know Al Tuser's famous epistemological break, which is I mean, when he first came up with it, he hadn't even read that much Marx. He admitted to that, you know, he expanded his Marxist readings later, blah blah blah blah blah. And otherwise thought, like, yeah, okay, the epistemological break is obviously too easy, it seems wrong, but there is something happening in the late 1840s and 1850s. And I wanted to talk to you about that because you know Altuser kind of thinks that capital is almost a completely scientific work, completely devoid of philosophy, and that's that that's good. Although, again, as I've argued with Outisarians, Otisair's concepts of of science actually don't match up with my concepts of science either. Um and his weird Spinoza stuff is also kind of strange, and in some ways seemingly self-defeating. But yeah, I'm just giving my opinion on that. But how is what you're describing different from that? Because a lot of people have picked that up. You seem to describe a similar change, but it's not, it doesn't seem to be what Altasier is describing as an epistemological break.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:01

Yeah. I have great respect for Altasser, I have to say, which grew as I was writing the book, and particularly as writing about the Paris manuscripts. A friend of mine happened to say sort of casually, oh, you should read these lectures that Altasser gave on Marx's relationship with Feuerbach and Feuerbaching and humanism. And I thought that's interesting, I'll give that a go. These lectures, you know, are much more accessible than reading Capital, and just the cogency of Altusser's way of making sense of sort of the very quick way in which Marx is shifting his position, you know, really grabbed me. And I think, as I also say in the book somewhere, I I think Altus Altus must be right that there's some kind of profound shift or transformation that happens. And the question is how to understand that one's sense of the profoundness of this of this change. And I want to insist that it should be understood in terms of philosophy coming into its own, because I think you can't have I think you can't have everything that Marx gets from this transition into historical materialism while somehow situating yourself away from philosophy. I mean, you could situate situate yourself away from philosophy and call it science, but then I don't know, you know. There's a question what what's the what's the basis of calling it science if it isn't that it's actualizing philosophy?

C. Derick Varn 2:08:44

Although serious got a Spinoza, right? But go ahead. Like you go not to interrupt you, but yeah, that's because he doesn't like Hegel, I guess. Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:54

So actually that's helpful because maybe maybe one reason why I persist differentiating myself from Altasier on this point is that what the way I understand the argument of Capital Volume One, I didn't try to talk about the other volumes mainly because it's you know, because Capital because volume one is this very finished text and very kind of presented in this incredibly polished way. I mean it's obvious it's polished, but it's it's so consummately done, I think. I mean one thing about spending time with Marx's texts is just being more and more impressed by just how towering an intellect he is, and just how much material he assimilates and then and then presents it in this incredibly carefully worked out way. The way I understand the argument is that it's a dialectical argument in the sense of what Marx takes dialectic to be, where dialectic is no longer trying to be self-sufficient. And so I was sort of building here on the work of certain Italian scholars from the 70s, especially Carlo Natali, who who stopped working on Marx and then became one of the most prominent Aristotle scholars in Italy, who I thought was absolutely on the right, uh, was on the money on this, where Natali in particular tries to show very carefully how Marx doesn't have a sort of a preset dialectic. And by preset, I don't mean just the kind of the obviously wrong idea about Hegel, which is you know, Hegel just does a logic and it's just a sort of schema, and then and then he applies it. But but by preset I mean that the relationship between different logical categories could be understood on its own terms. So, for example, Hegel has a story in his logic about the relationship between negation, opposition, and contradiction, which is laid out in logical terms. And that relationship is, although it's dialectical, it's in some sense always the same. I mean, that's just you have to understand what's said in that part of the logic in this contextual way, in light of the whole, but that but that's this the story, according to Hegel. Whereas I think what Marx is trying to do, as I was convinced by the Italians, was to show in each concrete case how an opposition, for example, and he often argues this way, how an opposition develops into a contradiction. And that depends on what opposition it is, and it depends on grasping the opposition as that particular opposition, and then seeing so it might be a question about the tension between you know, hyper-specialization that you get the hyper-specialization of the worker when you get large machinery, and so each worker has to become the sort of appendage of merely one part of the machine, so to speak, right? And the tension between that and the need to have a workforce that's kind of constantly circulating so that you always have a reserve army of workers. So you have these sort of specialized workers, but who are being thrown around the labor force, and and Marx tries to show how at a certain point, you know, historically and in terms of the economic reality of this, that opposition becomes a sort of intolerable contradiction, to the point that you'll get something like a revolutionary movement emerging from this experience that the working class has. And that I think can only so I so I think the sort of the basic structure of the argument can only. You be understood as enacting this kind of dialectic. And that is not Hegel's dialectic, but I guess it's sufficiently Hegelian that I'm I'm comfortable to that extent still thinking of Marx as a dialectical thinker in a Hegelian line and not going to the to the Spinoza or going down the Spinoza view. Yeah. But I think I think one could almost it's impossible to have too much respect for Altasier um as a reader of Marx.

C. Derick Varn 2:13:21

Well, I I I was about to say one of the things that I I will tell you about my journey with Al Tisera is I started off hating him, and then the more I read, the more I was like, I think I was given Lenin and philosophy first, and I was like, bullshit. And then the more I read of Al Tasera, the more I was like, no, this guy is brilliant and he's on the something. He just got Hegel trauma. He doesn't put a pretty um, but I do think he really is on the something. I mean, you know, I always talk about this too. I was I've read I've read so much of the 70s Marxist scholarship about the split between the the the quote unquote humanist like Lukash and the quote unquote structuralist like Altasir. And I'm like, well, that might be true in like EP Thompson reading Altasarians, but when I read Lukash and Altasir themselves, they weirdly come to similar conclusions by the end of their lives.

SPEAKER_03 2:14:11

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:14:12

So like um there there is something interesting there. We've been talking for quite a while, so this is gonna be the last question, and you can take it as far or as not far as you want, but this will tie this is also a tip to tie the two posts together a little bit more. Um, I was gonna ask you one on analytic Marxism, too, but I'll spare you. Um thanks. Analytic analytic no, what are we gonna call it? Cohenism? Yeah, coenism. Yeah, um, I really do think it is mostly coenism because it's not like Elster and Romer and and Preswalski get cited all that much. It's mostly just G. Cohen now. But so to the question I do want to actually want to ask you. Your last chapter, really uh in the Marx book in the actualization book, is about, you know, uh as you just pointed out, how this actualization could actually lead to thinking through how revolutionary changes could happen. I I wanted you to kind of contrast this to where when when uh the Oxford ordinary language people started doing this, how this almost becomes philosophy as an instrument of therapy or psychology, and not a particularly helpful one either.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:25

But so I but it's a therapy that doesn't that doesn't actually perform any therapeutic action, right? Right.

C. Derick Varn 2:15:32

Yeah, uh certainly in Vicken.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:34

Wittgenstein John McDowell is absolutely right to use the the word exorcism he talks about Wittgenstein because that's Wittgenstein's way of looking at it, right? You you identify the demons and then you expel them, and then and then the patient's cured. But of course, no therapy works like that. Therapy requires the patient to address in some way, or it depends on the modality of the therapy, right? But they have to in some way look at themselves or or experience something. It's not it's not just something that happens to you. But yeah, sorry, I interrupted you.

C. Derick Varn 2:16:09

No, no, I think that's that's actually a very good point. I just it seems like the the philosophy as therapy or philosophy as psychology is about the best we've got out of analytic philosophy as far as like pure analytic philosophy goes, where it's not like glomming onto something else. Whereas this actualized philosophy that you see in Marxism does explain, you know, with stuff we still have to work out. It's not a completed finished project, but how how like the therapeutic might be even opposed to what actualized philosophy and Marx would be doing. Like I just wanted you to kind of like you know, you know, not only to me as your point about ordinary language philosophy being being a therapy that doesn't even do anything in terms of therapeutic, but also is the therapeutic a goal we should even want, you know, if if we're right through the actualized philosophy.

Revolution, Therapy, And Doing The Work

Closing And Where To Find The Books

SPEAKER_00 2:17:04

Yeah, no, I don't think so. I mean, I think in that sense, traditional philosophy is fine. You know, there's always this kind of well, first we have to convince people that they suffer from the need to do metaphysics, and then we'll relieve them of this. And to some extent, you know, human thought involves thinking about things like the difference between appearance and reality. Fine, just let leave people be, let them do it. It's it's a good sign if they're thinking about that, because it's a constant problem of human life to think about what's real and what's not, and so on. What's the basis of what, what's the essence, what's the you know, what's a mere accident, and all of that. So I I guess the way I'd like to think of it is that to think about the actualization of philosophy is really just to think about the sense in which it's already in our hands. Uh to think about the world. It's actually so one thing that we're educated into, say if you you know study a lot of philosophy in the philosophy department, is that first of all, we have to come up with some set of very non-obvious abstract principles. We we place ourselves under a veil of ignorance, blah blah blah. At this point, the Rawsians always say, no, it's not we don't really like I know, but so to speak, we do this thought experiment, we go through all these complex procedures in order to formulate some you know high solution principles. We don't really need that because we're already in a position to see what human life is, and we're already in a position to see how we're screwed by it, or more accurately, how differently placed social people in different different social positions are screwed by it in ways that open to view. I got a certain amount of flack from some Marxist quarters for saying in that final chapter of the book that communism is in some sense already here, but I think this is I I I very firmly believe this. That and the example I always use is if you live in the UK, and it's an example I think kind of works partly because it's evident what its limits are as well as its truth. If you suffer an injury, you go to your local hospital, and now the waiting time might be actually quite long, and there might be all sorts of things that go wrong, but in principle, and you will experience this when you go to the local hospital, somebody will treat, somebody will tend to your injury and will treat you and will heal you of this thing, or at least do the best that they can by medical science to heal you of that thing, and no money changes hands in that process, and that is a very small instance of it, it's a kind of pocket of it, and it might be given to you in this sort of in many ways distressingly perverted way, but that's a bit of communism, and I think that we all know this that human life is lived for and through each other, in the taking account of and ministering to each other's needs and and producing beautiful and and exciting and wonderful things to have in our world that that we share with each other. And we can also see that the things that quash that are the things that, in some sense, we are to employ our rational powers to overturn and resist with all of the immense coordination problems that that generates of do we form small associations, do we try to influence an elected government? Do we do can we do this in the workplace? What are the limits of this? What kind of community organizations would we have? Who do who do we talk to? Is that is the bourgeois family as some of it, you know? Yes, these are all questions, and these are all the right questions, and we should be getting on with uh thinking about those very things, which in some sense we understand very well. What we don't want is for somebody to interpose themselves and say, well, first you must do philosophy, you know, first you must read rules or nozick or something, and then and then we'll take it from there. No, don't don't stifle the human's self-understanding of his own uh thinking activity in that way. Let us get on with it. We're more capable than we think in a certain way.

C. Derick Varn 2:21:41

Well, that's a great point to end on. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people find your work, Christoph?

SPEAKER_00 2:21:48

Probably go to my website. Try to keep that updated. So Christophschuringer.com. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:21:56

All right. I I'm gonna endorse both your books. I got a lot out of reading both of them, and preparing for this show I read on back, uh, I was rereading the analytic one and then reading the marksman for the first time, and I was like, my mind was like, Oh, these are way more related than people seem to think. So I was glad we were able to talk about both. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:16

Great, thanks so much. I've I've really, really enjoyed it. All right.