When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Nonhumanist Activity

by Tracie Matysik

Explores concepts that bring together the thinking of Spinoza and Marx.

Karl Marx was a fiery revolutionary theorist who heralded the imminent demise of capitalism, while Spinoza was a contemplative philosopher who preached rational understanding and voiced skepticism about open rebellion. Spinoza criticized all teleological ideas as anthropomorphic fantasies, while Marxism came to be associated expressly with teleological historical development. Why, then, were socialists of the German nineteenth century consistently drawn to Spinoza as their philosophical guide? Tracie Matysik shows how the metaphorical meeting of Spinoza and Marx arose out of an intellectual conundrum around the meaning of activity. How is it, exactly, that humans can be fully determined creatures but also able to change their world? To address this paradox, many revolutionary theorists came to think of activity in the sense of Spinoza—as relating . Matysik follows these Spinozist-socialist intellectual experiments as they unfolded across the nineteenth century, drawing lessons from them that will be meaningful for the contemporary world.

Genres: Philosophy

368 pages, Hardcover

Published January 23, 2023

About the author

Tracie Matysik is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She works in the field of modern European intellectual history, with a particular focus on the evolution of secularism as a social movement. At present she is working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled "When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiements in Democratic Activity, 1830-2000. She is the author of Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930 (Cornell University Press), and is co-editor German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (Bloomsbury Press). In addition, she has written articles on the histories of psychoanalysis, secularism, subjectivity, international activism, and Spinozism. In 2016 she became co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History.

Reviews

[Drenda]

In 'When Spinoza Met Marx', Matysik asks how can a socialist/communist who claims to be a materialist also be a revolutionary? How can someone who professes to believe that all effects are determined by prior causes, also believe he can produce a change in that series, change the structure of present society? If that was/is a problem for most socialists, it is particularly acute for Marx, who slowly developed into one of the most materialist of all thinkers of the 19th century.

Marx was obviously concerned with this problem in his dissertation, 'The Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of History'. Both Democritus and Epicurus were Greek materialists, Atomists, who nonetheless, Marx wanted to show, differed greatly in their view of necessity within materiality itself. For Democritus, atoms were totally determined by the laws of motion and inextricably tied to other atoms. For Epicurus, however, atoms had a touch of concept, allowing them to swerve from the straight path of Democritus' atoms. They were both determined but could repulse what nature commands. In Matysik's words, what results is a dialectic of freedom and necessity. In Marx's words, Epicurean atoms 'reveal something in its breast that can fight back and resist'. (Remember, Marx was young once, too) Epicurus seems to provide the possibility [not without its problems, which Marx discusses] of creative change within a materialist framework.

Marx read Spinoza intently soon after finishing his dissertation. We know this because he copied forty four pages of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise directly into his signed notes. That he should do so was very predictable for a philosophy student in the early and mid 19th century. Matysik beautifully summarizes how much Spinoza was in the air while Marx was developing his arguments for historical materialism, the former being the primary philosopher who articulated a wholly materialistic philosophy after Platonism and Christianity came to dominate Western philosophy.
Even for Hegel, even if Spinoza was in basic ways wrong, he was still essential as the philosopher who convincingly (for those he convinced) eliminated any kind of transcendental sphere that directed/approved nature below.

One of the reasons Spinoza can be interpreted in so many, essentially conflicting ways, some very interesting ones documented by Matysik, is that he lays out two programs in his body of work. In one, he charts an image of all nature/God, better substance, as having no beginning, no end, no transcendence, no hierarchies. Human beings are embedded in the laws of nature as fully as a tree or a stone. On the other hand, there is the theme presented in the Theological-Political Treatise which Spinoza broke off from his Ethics to write when Holland was threatened by a conservative backlash that aimed to decrease the political, philosophical, religious freedom the country had so famously enjoyed previously. The Treatise hoped to demonstrate that a democracy is the most natural political organization, since everyone will inevitably have their personal attitudes and if they can't express them, resentment and turmoil follows. Freedom of thought cannot be decreased without decreasing the peace in that state. Spinoza provides a reasoned argument for resisting any decrease a (relatively) open society.

Could Marx have seen in Spinoza an analog to Epicurus’ freedom loving atoms-that out of a materialist base, if that base is fecund enough-there can be change in the movement of affairs? Matysik thought he could, and concludes that ’both Epicurus and Spinoza had given the student Marx a logic by which to think of materiality as determined and also as intrinsically dynamic’. P. 130 The student never directly remarked on the pages he copied, but he did later invoke Spinoza, using the word substance, as the endlessly transformative process whereby humans make new things, essentially Marx’s use of labor. Meaning, of course, that he totally redefined it to his own ends. But that endlessly transformative process sounds a lot like Epicurus, and with this redefinition, Marx pulls Spinoza toward the use he (and Matysik) seem to want to make of him.

Can Spinoza be brought in line with this need for dynamic materiality? Certainly he was no naïve physicalist. He saw mankind’s making contact with/ conceiving infinite substance through the modes of the mental and of extension. However, these two modes were a tiny sampling of the ways of conceiving infinite substance; human beings live in a world so much more complex that they could possibly imagine. Spinoza’s materialism was a very fecund materialism. Was it possible that there was so much going on that it could contain contingency?

I am going to make a pause in the direction of this essay and consider what it means to have a dynamic materialism in the way of Epicurus. If truly considered, it is not just arcane wording in an academic argument; it is saying something shocking to most of us who are little Cartesian dualists in our everyday lives. It is saying something like ‘will’ and ‘consciousness’ extend far beyond the borders we normally restrict them to. While we might easily extend their application to a certain range of animals- dogs, cats, horses-it is hard for me to apply it to a stone or a chair. But Epicurus is saying it extends all the way down, to the smallest partitionable unit, to an atom. I was equally shocked when I came across a similar statement in a 20th century philosopher, Alfred N. Whitehead, who asserted that if consciousness exists in this material world, and it obviously does, then consciousness has to be part of materiality. Consciousness is everywhere and must be if you are to avoid troublesome dualisms. And we must use this realization of persistent consciousness in developing our relations with the world. One extension of this direction of thought is to put mankind in its place. We who thought we were the privileged carriers of a special cargo become swimmers in a sea of consciousness.
This is where Spinoza and Epicurus make their closest contact. Whether described as part of a sea of consciousness or a sea of substance, they flatten hierarchies and flatten human exceptionalism. It is this line of thinking that motivates many French Marxist since the 1960s, especially Althusser- ‘the lesson from Spinoza as that from Epicurus is the lesson of philosophy completely freed of origin, telos, subject.’ P 132

This anti-humanist picture of Marx as developed through Spinoza and Epicurus can be countered with Charles Taylor’s Hegelian interpretation whereby Marx turned Hegel upside down by placing mankind in the role of Hegel’s Spirit, mankind thus inevitably coming to full self awareness through history. In this version, Marx becomes the ultimate humanist.

It seems generally accepted that Marx himself wavered between these readings, sometimes presenting a teleological view of history and other times anti-foundational, anti-teleological. As Matysik points out, he provided his immediate followers with no means of mitigating the tension between them; they (Georgi Plehanov, for example) pivoted from one interpretation to the other within a single work. But Marx, as Matysik concedes in passing, was in the process of working out his own thoughts and ambitions, and took his inspiration where he found them. Later analyzers can scalpel out the threads of his influencers, and declare their all encompassing dominance.