Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital by William Clare Roberts.
Forthcoming book from Princeton University Press
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10892.html
‘Forthcoming at the end of this year, Marx’s Inferno by William Clare Roberts undertakes an entirely new reading of Marx’s magnum opus Capital. Roberts argues that Marx modeled Capital on Dante’s Inferno, playing the role of a Virgil guiding the worker through the social Hell engendered by insatiable capitalism. Rather than focusing exclusively on Capital as a work of political economy, Roberts returns us to the debates within nineteenth century socialism from which Capital emerged, while demonstrating their relevance to political life today. There can be no greater tribute to a thinker than that his ideas continue to generate such new readings and new thinking long after his death. Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Herr Marx.’
"Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modelled on Dante’s Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern 'social Hell.' In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism.
"Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world."
Endorsements:
"Marx's Inferno is the best book of political theory I’ve read that has been written in the last five years. Interpreting Capital as an integrated whole, it takes a canonical text we all thought we knew and makes us realize we never knew it at all. This is reading on a grand scale, reading as it was meant to be."
Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center.
"Marx's Inferno provides an innovative reading of Karl Marx’s Capital as a work of political theory. The unifying thread of this book is the author’s conviction that Marx’s work is heavily indebted to a set of broadly republican commitments about the nature of freedom. This original idea not only illuminates Marx’s writings, but also contributes to an important area of contemporary research in intellectual history."
--David Leopold, University of Oxford
Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society
‘The purpose of this paper is to read Part I of Capital – the chapters on the commodity, exchange, and money – in conjunction with Dante’s account of the sins of incontinence. Incontinence is a lack of self-control, a weakness that afflicts one’s deliberate choices, and makes one prone to doing what one wishes one wouldn’t. An incontinent is a slave to her or his passions. In Marx’s account of commercial society, I discern a socialized version of incontinence, a condition in which the producers of commodities suffer from a very peculiar lack of self-control: a propensity to do what they would rather not in the face of price-signals. Marx thinks there is something deeply wrong with this feature of commercial society. Because value is determined by abstract, socially necessary labour-time, no producer can know until after the fact whether or not their labour was productive at the socially necessary level. This exposes producers to all manner of forces outside her control, forces that take the form of the prices of goods. But, because these forces are merely the aggregated preferences of other people, the susceptibility of producers to act otherwise than they would like in the face of price-signals is simultaneously their enslavement to the actions of others, made without any consultation or debate. The preferences of others impose themselves on each producer without any need to justify themselves, and without any possibility of being contested. There is no way to ask whether the activities that set the terms of sale are themselves worthwhile. Being subjected to forces outside one’s control is the unalterable condition of every finite being. While this can be very frustrating, there is nothing wrong with it. But when these forces originate in the incontestable and unjustified desires of other people, there is something wrong. This wrong is the wrong of domination. The socialized incontinence of commercial society is also, on Marx’s account, the impersonal domination of each of its members.’
Yes indeed. That was how I read Marx in my PhD research (1995-2001), setting his critique of the capitalist economy and the instrumental relations of modern individualistic society in the moral and philosophical frame of 'rational freedom.' I have since 2001 continued to work with this concept. Marx understood well that individual freedom through liberating desire could well amount to becoming enslaved to empirical necessity and subject to the external coercive force of alien power. In moving from feudal to capitalist society, we exchange ties of personal dependence for the objective dependency of all upon alien power. I stand by that reading. In time, I have come to appreciate the extent to which my favourite modern philosophers working in this tradition of 'rational freedom' - Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx up to Habermas in the contemporary world - are attempting to reclaim the common good on socially and morally fractured ground. Marx went furthest in examining that fracturing of social relations and in outlining what needs to be done to reconstitute commonality through new solidarities and new forms of the common life binding individuals together. I now consider the claims for 'rational freedom' to be an attempt to recover the overarching ethical framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition dissolved by the monetary ties and secular impulses of capitalist relations. I also consider that the central themes of 'rational freedom', affirming the canalising of desires, appetites and inclinations and the reconciliation of particular interests through reason to ensure the long term common good, to require the foundation of the natural law buttressed by virtues ethics and what Alasdair MacIntyre calls communities of practice. In short, there is a large element of the Judaeo-Christian ethic embedded in Marx, as it was in Rousseau, Hegel and Kant, there is a hint of Leibniz's preordained harmony, which leads Marx to be critical of conflict and diremption. So I was never surprised by the extent to which I found parallels between Marx's work and that of St. Thomas Aquinas and the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri as I came to study them at length. There is, of course, a clear difference between the metaphysics. Marx's viewpoint is very much earth-bound. That said, I still detect a transcendental ethic and hope in Marx that in the very least implies a commitment to truths and values that are independent of time and place.
William Clare Roberts’ claim is that the many Judaeo-Christian allusions in Marx's work, his citations of Dante in the “1859 Preface” and the preface to the first edition of Capital demonstrate that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his critique of political economy, ‘and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld. This undermines the dichotomization of religion and science prevalent in Marxology, and suggests that Marx must be read outside both of these traditional categories.’
The connection between Dante and Marx is not fanciful at all.
'Marx and Engels considered Dante as a Renaissance hero. As per them Dante was a genius poet and thinker and who was able to inspire the party with inflexible warriors spirit. Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia’ had incomparable influence on Marx. It is said that Marx had learned by heart every line of it. The introduction to Capital testifies his deep influence of Dante. Engels called Dante a person of ‘unequalled classic perfection’ and a ‘colossal figure’.'
Marx placed Dante amongst his most beloved poets.
Francis Wheen writes on the influence of Dante upon Marx, describing Marx as the poet of dialectics:
"What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk." Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession to the prejudices of others:
"Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. [Go your own way, and let the people talk]."
From the outset, then, the book is conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place and motion: Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that goes on is done in full view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold of the portal above which is written, "No admittance except on business". Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value. The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he proceeds on his way. Describing English match factories, where half the workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so appalling that "only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it", he writes:
“With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.”
S.S. Prawer (1976: 268) writes :
‘In Marx’s most serious vein, Dante’s Inferno is called upon to yield the nearest possible parallel to the sufferings of the poor, illustrated by a heart-breaking case of deprivation reported from the West Riding of Yorkshire:’
“The tragedy played out by Ugolino and his sons repeated itself, though without its cannibalism, in the Padmonden cottage.”
(Marx, MEW, 546; cf. Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIII).
From Prawer 1976: 339
‘Finally, of course, the hell of Dante’s Inferno holds horrors analogous to those in the modern world – if anything they fall too short. Victorian match-factories, for instance, with the terrible diseases unguarded handling of phosphorous could bring, go beyond anything the medieval writer pictured to himself and his readers:
“Dante will find the cruellest imaginings of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.”
(Marx, MEW, XXIII, 261).
Karl Marx, “Das Kapital” (1867)
Ending his preface to the first edition of Das Kapital, Marx states the following:
“I welcome every opinion based on scientific criticism. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: ‘Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dire le genti.'”
– Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. David Fernbach, Fowkes, and Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin Classics, 1976), p. 93.
'Go your own way, and let the people talk.'
As the editors note, Marx actually altered Dante’s words for his own purposes. The original line, Purgatorio V 13, is as follows: “Vien dietro a me, a lasica dir le genti.” This translates as 'Come, follow me, and let these people talk.' I would have thought that Marx, as a political leader, was concerned to induce people to follow him in the cause of social transformation. But his commitment here is clearly to truth, to something more that the surface level of appearances and the prejudices of public opinion as well as the dominant notions of the age. That points to Marx employing a critical standard by which to evaluate society. He mentions scientific criticism here, and in the 1859 Preface he refers to the 'entrance to science.' I'd just add that Marx affirms moral truth as well as scientific truth, he just buries his normative commitment deeply behind scientific critique, but that ethic is there all the same, driving that critique of dominant social institutions and practices.
I’m looking forward to William Clare Roberts’ book. It brings out the moral character of Marx's Capital. I see Marx as working in the ancient tradition which combines politics and ethics in the field of practical reason. Reading Marx as a Dantista is not as fanciful as it may sound. (Although it is more accurate to write that Dante is being read as a Marxist, which is also not as fanciful as it sounds, although more problematic in that it loses Dante's supernatural ethics and metaphysics. More is lost this way than the other.) There is a peculiar flavour to Marx’s writings. One of the best books I’ve ever read is S.S. Prawer’s ‘Karl Marx and World Literature’, a book which is an education in itself. Marx was well-read, immersed in and a lover of literature. And he was very creative in his use of materials from this field.
But the point goes deeper than a literary influence. In my own work I read Marx in terms of a tradition and concept of 'rational freedom'. I trace this concept back to ancient Greece, focusing on Plato and Aristotle in particular. But also to the Judaeo-Christian ethic. My point is that Marx can be understood as standing in a line of descent from a particular way of understanding the world as a whole order, a rational order, an objectively valuable world, a world we have in common - a right order that has been torn asunder by monetary imperatives. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that a Dantesque reading of Marx is possible. (Acknowledging that what is going on here with this book, of course, is a Marxist appropriation of Dante, something which emphasises Marx's secularising use of Dante's Inferno, which is quite different). For my own part, I’ve found it very easy to read Dante and Marx together, the capital system as an alienated and dehumanised world that petrifies human powers is very similar to inertia that characterises Dante’s vision of the Inferno.
It is significant that Marx’s famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy concludes with a quotation from Dante’s Inferno:
‘This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political economy is intended merely to show that my views - no matter how they may be judged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the ruling classes - are the outcome of conscientious research carried on over many years. At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be made:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morla.’
Karl Marx
London, January 1859
From Marx, Early Writings, 1974
The quote from Dante translates as:
'Here all distrust must be abandoned;
here all cowardice must die.'
Dante, Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto III, lines 14-15.
Here you must abandon all division of spirit,
And here all cowardice must perish.
MEW XIII 114-115
Prawer comments:
‘How characteristic of Marx that he should find what he felt to be the most adequate formulation of his own unwillingness to compromise in the work of a medieval poet – a poet with whom he shared the fate of exile, but whose social experience and worldview were as far removed from his own as any that can be imagined.’
Prawer 1976 300-01
There are a few important things to note here, beyond the further proof of how immersed Marx was in the words and meanings of Dante.
It is interesting that Marx takes his stand on science, yet cites in his justification the words of one who is a religious poet. Dante’s refusal to compromise was based upon a knowledge that was more than what we had come to understand as science in the nineteenth century. Dante calls his poem 'lo sacrato poema' and ‘l poema sacro’, the sacred poem (Paradiso XXIII 62; Paradiso XXV 1). Marx quotes from it to justify his stance and its departure from common understanding – and dominant assumptions – as the entrance of science.
I would make the point here that Marx is concerned not merely with knowledge in the scientific sense of factual statements and explanations but with a human self-knowledge, something that integrates the worlds of fact and value, and is thus beyond the dichotomization of science and religion, the split between material concerns and morals/metaphysics. Marx’s unwillingness to compromise is based upon both scientific and moral truth, affirming an inclusive science that entails more than statements of fact.
I wouldn’t want to push this point too far, and thus conflate Dante and Marx and risk confusing and losing the distinctive qualities of the particular contributions of each. Marx’s use of Dante’s Comedy, I would argue, is secularising, he employs Dante to express his outrage at and condemnation of iniquity and exploitation, in order to establish some point of rectification through punishments that fit the crime, demand justice and urge appropriate modification of behaviours. Marx enters the ‘dismal science’ of economics in the same way that Dante enters Hell, to face the truth without flinching, to know the truth, to know how bad things can be as a result of the wrong actions of individuals. Dante and Marx are operating in accordance with a standard of the true, the good and the beautiful, but with a different metaphysics. Dante’s Christian metaphysics locate Heaven beyond Earth, Marx’s metaphysics are naturalist. I’ll leave it open here which makes most sense, only to say that a standard of what ‘ought-to-be’ is by definition transcendental, beyond time and place, affirming a standard of evaluation that is independent of the 'is' and which holds it to account (as a good Aristotelian and Hegelian, Marx locates this 'is' within the reality he criticises). Marx’s supposed historicism is not the same as saying that principles are those that prevail in time and place. As the above passage makes clear, Marx is concerned with establishing principles in accordance with their truth and rightness, no matter ‘how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the ruling classes’ or to public opinion, that is, to the dominant interests and norms of time and place. Dante takes a supernatural standard to do the same thing; Marx offers a purely naturalistic explanation.
This brings me to the next point: Marx’s identification with Dante as a fellow exile.
Marx expresses the pains and indignities of a life of exile in response to a leader in The Times. He writes:
‘In the ‘heaven of Mars’ Dante meets with his ancestor, Cacciaguida de Elisei, who predicts to him his approaching exile from Florence in these words:
Thou shalt prove how salt the savour is
Of others’ bread, how hard the passage
To descend and climb by others’ stairs.
Happy Dante, another being of that wretched class called ‘political refugees’, whom his enemies could not threaten with the misery of a Times leader! Happier Times that escaped a ‘reserved seat’ in his Inferno.’
NYDT 4 April 1853 – L 174-5
This again is an example of Marx’s secularizing use of Dante’s Inferno, threatening sinners against humanity in the earthly human world with a place in a Dantean Inferno. I can already hear objections from devoted Dantista here as to what may appear to be a somewhat limited use of Dante’s rich meaning. Dante is full of warnings concerning hybris and the delusions of building a paradise through purely human knowledge and power. Surely, the Dantista would say, the lesson is that it is such self-will and conceit in attempting to build Heaven on Earth by entirely human powers that is resulting in the Earth being made an Inferno. The much vaunted productive powers of human beings being utilised in order to deliver ‘progress’ or paradise on Earth through endless ‘economic growth’ – that deliberately anemic euphemism for the accumulation of capital – has created an economic system that is a heating machine, warming the planet and promising to consume the Earth in an Inferno.
In other words, we need the supernatural ethic that Marx discards in order to avoid enclosing the world in a Reason that takes the place of God. We may be able to achieve the practical restitution of alienated powers back to society only to become subject to an idolatry that is just as delusional and oppressive.
Dante writes that humankind has through ‘foul usury’ humiliated the Creation, ('Paradiso', XXII, 151), that flower-bed that has been gifted to us. This "despising Nature and her goodness" is a violence against God and Creation and against ourselves. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48. We have the right to use what we need but have no right to do any more than that. It’s clear that Dante condemns usury and great accumulations of property: “the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere." (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, destroying our place within Creation, seeing ourselves as gods through our actions and powers in creating the self-made social world, we are destroying our own Being. The modern economic system, we know, is a heating machine, as a result of which we are not creating a Heaven on Earth as turning Earth into an Inferno. And there are some who bear much more responsibility than others. The virtues are now considered sins against the GNP.
I’ve addressed that question in many places. (Explore the Books section and Papers section for more detailed analyses). Here, I want to pick up on this theme of Dante and Marx as exiles. That, I would argue, gives them an independence from the societies in which they find themselves, and a moral and epistemological capacity to see through the dominant assumptions and norms of an age. It clears their sight and their moral and intellectual vision, they can see more clearly, more 'objectively', than those with a stake in the prevailing society.
Which begs the question of what standard visionaries employ in order to see through and see further than the prevailing notions of time and place. This, for me, is the most interesting and most important question of all. Marx is frequently portrayed as a historicist, a view which holds that truths and values are relative to time and place. As noted above, this crude view cannot be assigned to Marx. He clearly employs a critical standard that enables him to evaluate dominant conceptions and find them wanting, demanding transformation. Thus Marx can criticise the capital system as a dehumanisation, even though its treatment of human beings as exploitable labour is consistent with prevailing capitalist relations. Marx affirms a truth and a value beyond prevailing relations. By what standard can Marx do this? My view is that Marx’s praxis is infused with principles that draw upon notions of the true, the good and the beautiful, he just sees these principles as having a history in the way they are creatively unfolded through human agency.
When it comes to praxis, Marx is plainly someone who valued creative human agency, affirming the epistemological and structural capacities of (self)knowledgeable and moral human agents to see through and break through constraining relations and circumstances. The interesting point to debate here, however, is the extent to which exile gives a figure like a Dante or a Marx an external vantage point from which to observe reality at a certain distance from it, as the spectator of all time and existence in the words of Plato. I think that goes against Marx’s praxis oriented approach, one based upon the changing of circumstances as a condition of knowing reality and of knowing oneself. But that commitment to science as Marx describes it, that unwillingness to compromise on truth, clearly points to an objective standard that is in some way independent of time and place.
Could there be a relation between Marx and Dante?
Dante Alighieri was an Aristotelian and a Thomist. And Marx?
'Marx ... was the Aristotle of the modern age' (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003, ch 6).
'The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.' (R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1987 ch 1).
We know that Marx rated Dante’s Comedy very highly indeed, being able to recite it by heart it is said. I have always seen a parallel between the two of them, in that both believed that there is a right order and a right way of doing things, that this earth could be a Heaven or a Hell according to the choices we make and the actions we take. (That is a contentious claim with respect to Marx’s supposed historicism, I know, but one that can be defended. Marx criticised social relations with a view of a right order, not according to fixed and timeless ideals, maybe, but with respect to an 'objective' standard of rightness all the same, one immanent in existing lines of development.)
Dante's Inferno is the hell of the capital system as a thoroughly dehumanized world. The Paradiso is the future society, what for Marx is the 'truly human society', the world we can have, the better world that is immanent in human nature and its social expression but repressed within prevailing social relations. Dante’s Purgatorio refers to the transitional world, a world in which individuals are in movement, learning to make the right choices, appreciating that actions have consequences, good and bad, and thus coming to act wisely, bridging the gap between the 'is' and the 'ought-to-be'.
A world of reality-changing praxis in Marx’s terms:
'The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.'
Marx, Thesis III on Feuerbach
That reads against top-down, external vanguards of philosopher kings who have exclusive insight into the nature of reality. The responsibility is ours as individual knowledgeable and moral agents, however much we join together in collective projects to gain conscious control over the collective forces that govern our world.
But, I would emphasise strongly, Dante and Marx are united in their adherence to a critical ‘objective’ standard of evaluation, call it the Platonic trinity of the true, the good and the beauty (Dante’s Paradiso beyond Earth, Marx’s truly human society here on Earth). In other words, the rightness of a social order is determined by standards other than those that apply and are imposed in time and place. Any imposure involved in reality-constituting praxis proceeds in accordance with certain values and truths.
That's a contentious claim with respect to Marx, but it can be defended. In the Theories of Surplus Value, Marx criticizes David Ricardo’s book for its 'faulty architectonics' (TSV, vol. II, 169). For Marx, the discovery of truth is a matter of a correct method of investigation leading to a well-structured and well-presented theory. The 'faulty architectonics' of a theory is 'not accidental, rather it is the result of... and . . . expresses the scientific deficiencies of the method of investigation itself’. This conception of architectonics indicates that, for Marx, a true theory is compelled on account of its 'deep insight' to develop an elegant conceptual structure. It seems that Marx, then, adhered to the Platonic trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful and affirmed the rationalist belief in the harmony of truth, goodness (as human freedom) and beauty.
A few general comments are in order here to give some kind of background with respect to the intellectual and moral context in which Dante’s Comedy is to be understood, the assumptions in which the themes of Dante’s work come to life and thrive. The Comedy tells the tale of a quest for meaning, a journey in which the traveler comes face-to-face with God and then returns to tell the tale and begin the journey again anew on Earth. But it involves more than a mystic tradition. The work is visionary and the traveler is indeed overwhelmed by the experience. But is also a learning experience. It is about writing and education and knowledge, not just a wordless visionary experience. The Comedy is an encyclopedia, it combines all the genres such as autobiography, romance and epic. It is autobiography in the sense of being the sum total of human experience. And it is an encyclopedia in the classical sense of being a circle of knowledge.
I referred above to a conception of architectonics in Marx’s critical philosophy. What I wrote there is commensurate with the idea of the encyclopedia here. The idea goes back to the architect Vitruvius. In this understanding, the encyclopedia refers to the circle of knowledge, beginning with a point of departure that takes us through the various disciplines which constitute the liberal arts, before taking us back to the start again. The beginning and the end coincide in this education. But you return to the beginning with a different viewpoint or different standpoint. In discovering things in the learning process, your view of the world and your place in it changes. The researches of Ursula Franklin, physicist, author and educator at the University of Toronto, set technology within a political and social context. For Franklin, technology is a comprehensive system that includes not merely machines but also methods, procedures, organization, ‘and most of all, a mindset’. (Franklin 1992: 12). Her work makes clear the extent to which the most important social transformations in history are those which are grounded by the presence of a ‘standpoint’, an ethical framework that informs a person’s life and work, and brings a sense of purpose and obligation. It is in this sense that I refer to the architectonics that lie at the centre of the idea of the encyclopaedia. We determine the right thing to do not in acting in response to the external and imperatives set by systems and organisations but by reference to an independent standard or moral compass which is the expression of one’s character, and which forms an integral part of one’s identity.
This is the architectonics that I say is implicit in Marx’s work, the idea of the encyclopedia which is central to Dante’s Comedy. Such notions entail the ordering of the world according to certain truths and values. With respect to Dante’s Comedy, the encyclopedia is about human self-knowledge, coming to know ourselves and our world and to act in accordance with this knowledge. Dante respects the old medieval distinction between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts. The liberal arts are so-called in that they affirm the power of knowledge to free us from various forms of tyranny, particularly the tyranny of action, of that kind of action that distracts us from the great aims revealed by theory, contemplation and thinking. This raises important questions concerning the connection between contemplation and action, between disclosure and imposure when it comes to discerning the truth, whether we attain true knowledge of reality through contemplation or whether truth is something produced by praxis. I take these questions up elsewhere in my work and can’t do more here than raise them. I have just written a nice piece on the difference between Leibniz and Kant on this question, which will come out in some form in the near future, Leibniz as arguing for disclosure of truth through contemplation, Kant as arguing for the production of truth through praxis. And Marx? I argue elsewhere that Marx, in contradistinction to Plato, who holds the realm of political action to be inferior to the realm of philosophical contemplation, maintaining a wrenching distance between them, holds that a superior view of reality lies in bridging the gap between theory and practice.
The question comes down to what kind of knowledge we are referring to when we talk about self-knowledge, whether we discover or generate such knowledge, and just what is the nature of ‘reality.’
Dante’s Comedy as an encyclopedia takes its stand on the liberal arts and the way they order the world intellectually and morally. It is worth spelling out what lies behind Dante’s conception here. The liberal arts refer to the arts of words and the arts of number. The arts of words are grammar, encompassing also poetry and history. This includes rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and dialectics, the art of deciding the truth of a statement. The arts of numbers are arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.
The aim of these liberal arts would be ethics, metaphysics and theology. Dante states that ethics is the Queen of the sciences, bringing meaning and order to all other forms of knowledge.
‘The Crystalline Heaven, which has previously been designated as the Primum Mobile, has a very clear resemblance to Moral Philosophy; for Moral Philosophy, as Thomas says in commenting on the second book of the Ethics, disposes us properly to the other sciences.’ [Convivio (II, xiv, 14)]
He also affirms Philosophy to be the Queen of the sciences.
‘Then when it says: you will see The beauty of such lofty miracles, it declares that through her shall the beauty of these miracles be perceived; and it speaks truly, for the beauty of wonders is the perception of their causes which she demonstrates, as the Philosopher seems to assert at the beginning of the Metaphysics when he says that by the sight of these beauties men began to fall in love with this lady. We will speak more fully of this word "wonder" in the following book.’ [Convivio (II, xv, 11)]
This, then, shows the architectonic of the Comedy. I have spent some time on this to suggest that when Marx criticises the 'faulty architectonics' of economic theory in Theories of Surplus Value (TSV, vol. II, 169), he is drawing on this encyclopedic conception of learning and education, of human self-knowledge, the idea of the Comedy as human autobiography. And at the same time, I draw the parallel between Dante and Marx here to underline that when Marx insists on the refusal to compromise on truth as ‘the entrance to science’, he draws on this older tradition of the liberal arts as structuring human learning and knowledge of the world. In other words, the claims he makes are for ‘science’ in the broad sense of the liberal arts – it is a claim for the dignity and worth of ethics. Marx’s self-knowledge is a fundamentally moral project.
In his book Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, Scott Meikle writes that ‘With Marx, human self-understanding reached a point of attainment yet to be surpassed.’ That’s a bold claim which Meikle shows to be grounded in Hegel’s understanding of human self-creation as a process. That’s a praxis-oriented view in which we generate knowledge and produce truth in creating ourselves and our world. Meikle thus calls Capital ‘our greatest work of human self-understanding.’ (Meikle 1985 ch 4). I would argue that what separates Dante and Marx most is this issue of whether truth and value is disclosed, that is, is already immanent in the world, or is imposed, that is, is produced by human praxis. But maybe, in those stark terms, the distinction is false. Whilst Dante affirms an objective order whose truths and values are independent of time and place, he is nevertheless clear that we must come to know these truths and values and act in accordance with them for them to become existential realities. Similarly, with respect to Marx, truths and values are not simply produced by human praxis, they are made manifest by that praxis.
In both Dante and Marx, the concern is with education and a coming to self-knowledge in relation to the world. The work of both pertains to the autobiography of the human species, the process by which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. And so both Dante and Marx address all the key issues of human life, the nature of the real world and how we may come to know it, questions of theoretical reason, and who we are and how we are to act and live well together, questions of practical reason, of ethics and politics. What is justice and how are we to achieve it? How can we reconcile the claims of justice with the realities of conflicting interests and passions in the world? Both Dante and Marx address directly the questions of relating reason and desire, reconciling conflicting interests, and turning the collision of conflicting demands to political peace. It is in this sense that I am clear that for all of his references to science, Marx’s project is inherently ethical and political, and invokes the ancient understanding of the intertwining of ethics and politics. Also key to both Dante and Marx is what we call moral character, personal (and collective) responsibility and agency. Both address the question of the relation of knowledge and will. What social relations are involved in generating the will to act? What kind of knowledge gives us not merely the ability to act, but positively makes us want to act? We all know we should be just, but that knowledge alone is not enough to make us virtuous or incline us to engage in virtuous action. The good, as Martha Nussbaum wrote, is fragile. We do things we know we shouldn’t do and which are not in our better interests. Why? A failing of character? A failing of the social relations that lock us into destructive patterns of behaviour? My view is that, in their different ways, Dante and Marx take on these fundamental questions of philosophy and ethics and do so in deep and trenchant ways.
As for the Inferno, that’s the nightmarish vision of a world without hope, without choice, without agency, a world where nothing makes a difference, a world in which the consequences of past actions catch up on the agents and imprison them in an inescapable fate. I leave to others to decide whether Hell really exists as this underworld beyond redemption. The way I read Dante and Marx is this, that actions have consequences, and so long as the bad actions of some are inflicting bad consequences on others, these actions will carry on being taken until in the end the consequences embrace all by creating a Hell on Earth. The key point established by Dante and Marx is that human beings are moral and knowledgeable agents capable of acting with a view to right reasons, with a view to the true, the good and the beautiful. We need to set action within the right architectonics, get out of self-destructive patterns of social behaviour, and rearrange our actions in accordance with a vision of the world and of ourselves. And this is a fundamentally moral project because at its heart is the question ‘who am I?’ In answering that question, we come to relate ourselves to others and to the world around ourselves and seek to order our activities in line with these realities.
As an end of history, the marxist vision amounts to the realization of the philosophical ideal within the real. It is not so much Plato’s Philosopher Ruler as the rule of philosophy, Spinoza’s free humanity governing itself with adequate ideas, or Descartes’ ‘clear and distinct ideas’. That is a philosophical vision and will be realised when humanity finally does evolve the long term strategic thinking capacity that joins all together for the common good. It is not politics and to engage in politics on these assumptions is to invite not human emancipation in general but its total enslavement as institutions, laws and bureaucracies intervene to compensate for a failing moral conversion.
We make of this world a Heaven or Hell according to our praxis - the choices we make, the decisions we take, and how we exercise freedom and responsibility in relation to each other. But this 'practice' doesn't point to some mere 'made-up' world. We don't simply create our own world. Locating Marx in an older tradition adumbrated above, I read him as arguing not just for the 'self-made' world of human creation, but for the right world and the just world and the true world of which humans are a part. Without an understanding of the right order of things, there is no basis for a distinction between Hell and Heaven, between Inferno and Paradiso, between the capital system as a dehumanisation and communism as the 'truly human society'.
Marx’s Capital presents a nightmarish vision of the Hell on Earth that has come about through the inversion of subject and object, the alienation of power so that human creations come to acquire a life of their own, the world of objects robbing the human subjects of their own vitality and spontaneity and autonomy. Marx’s capital system as a dehumanisation and an alienation of powers is personified by Dante’s Lucifer as the greatest of the angels frozen and immobile in the pits of the Inferno.
Dante believed we could, through right choices and actions, take moral responsibility for all that we do, and enter Paradise. Marx thought that the practical restitution of the power we have alienated to the state and capital and its reorganisation as social power would enable us to bring about communism as the ‘truly human society’, the realized society of realized individuals. Which sounds like Paradise enough.
Actions have consequences. Dante wishes to strengthen personal responsibility when it comes to choices made and actions taken. If human beings do the wrong thing, indulge the wrong behaviours, they will succeed in making a Hell on Earth. Purgatorio is a place of movement, a place where sinners are on the move, taking the opportunity to right wrongs and, in the process, work their way back to the Paradise that is within our reach, if we just live right.
Does anyone dare to think Paradise is possible? Do we have the moral courage and imagination, let alone the political and organisational wit and determination, to bring such a society about? And is our role one of disclosure or imposure? Is our job one of contemplating and giving thanks to God for the preordained harmony of the universe, with a view to going beyond earthly flourishing to a heavenly beatitude? Or are we charged with making a Heaven for ourselves on Earth?
Either way, there are many without hope for either. We live in Godless times, and the conditions for Marx’s truly human society are diminishing all the time.
So here is my approach.
I make no predictions and no promises, I offer no guarantees at all. Whether we speak of Dante’s Paradise or Marx’s Communism or Plato’s true, good and beautiful, here is a world that certainly exists. That world possesses a reality, whether or not we, the creative human agents acting within specific social relations, succeed in developing the intellectual, institutional, moral and psychological capacity to make it an existential reality. If the worst comes to the worst, and runaway climate change destroys all the hopes, dreams and ideals of philosophy, poetry, literature, then this world will still exist. It will be the world we could have had. And for those who opt for Dante over Marx, it is the world that could still be ours – just not on Earth. We abolished God and thought, through our powers, we had become gods ourselves. We have brought about not Heaven but Hell on Earth.
As I say, I’m looking forward to William Clare Roberts' book. Its themes are very pertinent.
In the meantime, here are links to my own writing on Dante and on Marx.