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Peter Critchley

Existential Self and Society



I feel the need to make a little comment on a new book which argues that the critiques of Marx and Kierkegaard are complementary rather than antithetical.




I’ve started to notice a number of books being published in the last couple of years which are presented as offering new insights into old problems, but which are actually making connections and highlighting themes that have been central to my own work for a long while now. So much so, I have found myself increasingly saying ‘I told you so.’ In 2018 I was working on a vast project which exposed the capital system and the modernity built on its drives and imperatives as a great disembedding. I was unable to finish the book as a result of a number of problems and pressures, and meant to go back to it. In 2019 Eugene McCarraher published The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. McCarraher’s book is incredibly similar to the work I was doing in 2018.



In fact, McCarraher’s book is so incredibly similar to my own work in general that I feel entitled to say ‘I’ve been telling you this for years’ again. The big difference is that I go further than capital as the new god and new idol to expose the dangers of idolatry and re-alienation in Marx’s own emancipatory project, to the extent that Marx overcomes social alienation, but not personal self-alienation as a self-estrangement from God.


The publicity blurb to Aroosi’s The Dialectical Self says this:


‘Although Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard are both major figures in nineteenth-century Western thought, they are rarely considered in the same conversation. Marx is the great radical economic theorist, the prophet of communist revolution who famously claimed religion was the “opiate of the masses.” Kierkegaard is the renowned defender of Christian piety, a forerunner of existentialism, and a critic of mass politics who challenged us to become “the single individual.” But by drawing out important themes bequeathed them by their shared predecessor G. W. F. Hegel, Jamie Aroosi shows how they were engaged in parallel projects of making sense of the modern, “dialectical” self, as it realizes itself through a process of social, economic, political, and religious emancipation.’


Again, this comes very close to the work I have been doing. In 2018 I issued three volumes of Marx studies under the title of Socialism from Within.





The first volume, Social Restitution and Metabolic Restitution in the Thought of Karl Marx presented Marx’s critical-practical transformative project in concise form; the second volume, Ethics, Essence, and Immanence sought to excavate the moral and metaphysical foundations of Marx’s emancipatory project; the third volume then swerved quite radically to critique Marx from the position of an explicitly religious ethic. It was a controversial turn. Critics would see it as similar to the development of Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. The first two volumes were hugely positive on Marx, and I stand by the claims I made in those books. The first book received some excellent critical attention. It was described as ‘meticulous’ and ‘significant’ by The Socialist Review in 2019.



John Bellamy Foster also expressed his admiration, publishing the long article in the Appendix in the Monthly Review. The second volume is more philosophically contentious, given its explicit defence of an essentialist metaphysics in Marx. That possibly gives a clue as to the development of the entire project in the explicitly religious argument presented in the third volume. My work is teleological. Marx praised Darwin for putting the final nail into the coffin of teleology. Many consider Marx to have repudiated essentialism in favour of a historicism which places the accent on determinate social relations. Marx certainly sharped his original essentialism in the latter direction, but I do not see them as antithetical. It’s a contentious argument. Here we should recall the critical views of structuralists like Louis Althusser, who recoiled in horror from the humanism of ethical Marxists who wrote in light of the publication of Marx’s early writings. The structuralists affirmed the later scientific Marx over the earlier humanist and ethical Marx. The implication seems to be that once ethical ideas around essence and alienation are admitted, we are headed in the direction which leads to contemplation of God and the divine. In 2018 I also completed a book on Istvan Meszaros.



Meszaros was ruthless in extirpating notions of a reality that evades rational grasp, claiming that this leads inevitably to mysticism, obscurantism, and religion. As that introduction makes clear, I greatly admire the work of Meszaros. But I do very much reject the notion of a totalizing Reason, affirming an anarchic surplus or excess that forever transcends attempts at enclosure. This reality exceeds the human conceptual and rational grasp. As my work on Marx in the first volume started to generate interest among Marxist theoreticians and academics, I did consider whether I had gone too far in my criticisms in the third volume. Here I argued that the most penetrating criticism of Marx came not from the spheres of politics, economics, and philosophy – I reaffirmed the cogency of Marx’s critique of liberalism – but from religion. This view effectively identified Marxism as a Judaeo-Christian heresy. That view goes further than merely arguing that the strength of Marx’s emancipatory critique is its core religious ethic to argue that when a partial truth is presented as a whole truth, attached to extraneous elements, it will more than likely result in inversion and perversion. My religious critique of Marx here is strong, so strong that it crossed my mind to withdraw the book and tone down the language before re-issuing. But I decided not to. In the end, I had the courage of my convictions on this, both intellectual and instinctual. This comes right back to issues arising in my own doctoral studies on Marx. ‘That’s a bit Biblical,’ I was told as my work was analysed. I responded by arguing that alienation – which I argued to be a central concept in Marx – possesses religious roots and origins. In Homo Religiosus, I argue that Marx is strong on social alienation and its overcoming, but weak on personal alienation. The great danger of this one-sidedness is that the emphasis falls overwhelmingly on social transformation but misses the need for personal moral effort on the part of individuals. I argue that Marx comes close to identifying the personal roots of alienation when he writes on self-alienation, but proceeds to the social sources and consequences and their uprooting. Alienation, ultimately, is a personal self-estrangement from God. Marx and those who follow in his footsteps exhibit an aversion to this understanding. My argument is that this leads to a socialism that is strong on social critique and transformation but dangerously deficient with respect to personal moral transformation. An existentially empty project is also dangerously arbitrary, with gaps being filled by surrogates, collectivist communities and bureaucracies of various forms.


I am going to make a New Year's resolution to stop saying ‘I told you say/as I keep saying/as I wrote in […]’! But as ‘I have said many times’ ... Marx's determination to extirpate religiosity in all forms – both external and internal - blinded him to the fact that self-alienation is at root a self-estrangement from God, and that disalienation is a personal as well as a social process, and that the recovery of self requires a personal moral effort and commitment - call it existential if you like. Personal recovery is as important as the social recovery. Without that personal dimension, the social dimension is empty and abstract. In missing this, Marx's critique of alienation risks a re-alienation which turns socialism into an empty universalism, one of those illusory and surrogate communities that Marx himself criticised.


Hence my interest in Dante is not remotely as daft and eccentric as it may seem to many progressives and radicals. In fact, it is essential work. It is radical to get to the roots, both the personal and the social together.



And that is my central theme – ultimately, alienation is a self-estrangement from the transcendent source and end of all things, which is God. Miss that, and you have missed everything, and emancipatory attempts to deliver freedom, justice, and equality will more than likely deliver the opposite.


This new book by Aroosi argues something I have been arguing for a long time now – the need to put the self and the social together and argue that character-formation and social formation are two essential aspects of the same integral project. That Marx and Kierkegaard differently imagined the impediments to the self’s appropriation of freedom should lead not to an opposition between their distinctive views but an appreciation of their complementary one-sidedness. That is precisely what I have been doing in my work. (The works cited above, but also in many others, such as Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth’s Commonwealth of Virtue). And I am rather glad to see that, here and there, some bright new scholars are starting to get it.



I will end with a further description of this new book The Dialectical Self by Aroosi, and say, one last time, ‘I’ve been saying precisely this for years.’

‘In The Dialectical Self, Aroosi illustrates that what is traditionally viewed as opposition is actually a complementary one-sidedness, born of the fact that Marx and Kierkegaard differently imagined the impediments to the self’s appropriation of freedom. Specifically, Kierkegaard’s concern with the psychological and spiritual nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in subjectivity, such as in our willing conformity to social norms. Conversely, Marx’s concern with the sociopolitical nature of the self reflected his belief that the primary impediments to freedom reside in the objective world, such as in the exploitation of the economic system. However, according to Aroosi, each thinker represents one half of a larger picture of freedom and selfhood, because the subjective and objective impediments to freedom serve to reinforce one another.

By synthesizing the writing of these two diametrically opposed figures, Aroosi demonstrates the importance of envisioning emancipation as a subjective, psychological, and spiritual process as well as an objective, sociopolitical, and economic one. The Dialectical Self attests to the importance and continued relevance of Marx and Kierkegaard for the modern imagination.’


I’ve been doing this for a long while now. Homo Religiosus makes explicit reference to Kierkegaard in emphasising self-alienation and its overcoming by way of personal moral effort and commitment. I put essence and existence together, a ‘true existentialist’ as my dear old DoS Jules Townshend once called me.


None of this should be so surprising, once it is understood that the ‘rational freedom,’ the eudaimonics of happiness as flourishing, and the critique and restitution of alien power I have been concerned to develop in my work have their roots in natural law. Hence my interest in the passage from Paul Sigmund’s Natural Law in Political Thought (1971) which heads up this post. My interest in Marx is concerned to trace a line of thought that goes back to ancient Greek thought and highlights those potentialities and drives which dynamically express those things which are fundamentally essential to a healthy human self-actualisation. (Healthy in being a true fulfilment in recognition of limits). There is both a personal and a social aspect to this self-actualisation, both being essential to each other. Lon Fuller defines the ‘one central indisputable principle’ of the ‘substantive Natural Law’ as ‘the injunction to open up, maintain, and preserve the integrity of the channels of communication by which men convey to one another what they perceive, feel, and desire …’


As Sigmund comments, similar arguments are made by Marxist writers who are concerned with human alienation. I am most certainly one of those writers. Marx’s critique of the capital system as a dehumanisation implies a notion of what humanisation would look like, what human beings ought to be and need to be in order to flourish, and a practical commitment to a truly human society. Those notions all imply a normative essentialism, a standard by which to critique prevailing arrangements. ‘For what is man alienated from but his true self, the potentiality and need for which is suppressed by the real or supposed requirements of the capitalist system?’ That’s true as far as it goes. That’s certainly how Marx presented his case (although many Marxists are leery of the language of alienation and essentialism and are concerned to emphasise Marx’s scientific credentials. I emphasise ‘science’ here in terms of Marx unified science, an integral conception). But I go further to argue that the true self of human beings is itself dependent not only on immanent potentialities and their actualisation in relation to others in wider society (a genuine public life as a condition for the flourishing of human beings as social beings), but God. Foucault was right to argue that with Nietzsche’s death of God, the death of the human subject would soon follow. Human self-alienation is, at bottom, not merely an alienation of human beings from their own social creations but, at a deeper level, an alienation from the Creator God and from Creation.


Writing from a socialist perspective, C.B. Mcpherson refers explicitly to ‘the essence of man’ as understood by ‘the western tradition’ derived from Plato, Aristotle, and ‘Christian natural law’ to argue for the transformation of the capitalist system to create a system of economic production and provision that corresponds to the human ontology. Sigmund identifies Marxist Sydney Hook as a critic of natural law. Hook argues that the theory of alienation is ‘foreign to Marx’s concept of man’ and an ‘obscurantist legerdemain.’ My view is that alienation is central to Marx’s emancipatory critique and that the aversion to the concept on the part of certain Marxists derives from an awareness, whether instinctive or intellectual, that in tracing the line of alienation we would, inevitably, return to God and the contemplation of the divine. That’s my view. A purely secular concern with disalienation, in my view, leads to a realienation in idolatrous form. Hence my controversial religious critique of Marx and Marxism in volume 3 of ‘Socialism from Within.’ Hook admits that if Marx did indeed espouse a theory of alienation then ‘this would entail the acceptance of a natural law morality,’ and an explicit recognition of the ‘standard of the unalienated self.’


Marx did espouse a theory of alienation, as a practical critique motivated by an awareness of human nature and the requirements of its flourishing. As for natural law morality, God, and a religious ethic, I think they are buried deep and concealed in Marx. But they are there, and Marx’s normative critique and emancipatory commitments risk misfiring badly if they are not properly foregrounded to properly order and orient transformative praxis.



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