From the Kingdom of Ends to the End of Kingdoms: Marxism and Kantian Moral Theory

From the Kingdom of Ends to the End of Kingdoms: Marxism and Kantian Moral Theory

It seems clear that Marx intended to provide sophisticated scientific and critical analyses of capitalist social relations. Debates have raged since the early days of Marxism over how these dimensions fit together and whether one should have priority in the minds and actions of Marxists over the other. Yet, while Marx frequently identifies his over-all project as scientific in method and intent, Marx's references to morality are almost invariably disparaging and negative. Despite setting forth a theory of capitalism with emphatically critical dimensions, Marx famously writes of morality as ideological in the particular sense of tending to support the domination of the ruling class.

A Marxist "anti-moralism" has been identified by scholars on the basis of these and related observations according to which Marx's negative attitude toward morality is taken to reflect a general desire to replace moral critique wherever possible with a kind of scientific analysis. In this vein, several well-known forms of Marxism and Marxist philosophy regard the only real contribution of Marx to the discussion of morality as hastening its end. At the same time, almost all varieties of Marxism reflect a fundamental tension between concrete social-scientific analysis and revolutionary social critique, which brings them into connection with deeper principles, assumptions, claims, and commitments about the prospects, aims, and limitations of human praxis and conduct even when attention and concern for these is denied any significant role in Marxism.

Scholars and Marxists have responded to the idea of Marxist "anti-moralism" by attempting to draw connections between historical materialism and one or another well-established tradition in moral theory. I do not purport to understand Marx or moral theory any better than the many fine scholars and Marxists who have discussed these issues before. But starting with some of their achievements, I want to suggest a possible path to advance this important discussion. First, it should be observed that there are more than academic or textual issues at stake in the question of Marx and morality. Issues concerning the relationship between activism, revolutionary struggle, and moral ideas must arise anew for each generation of social struggle and for every person who regards himself or herself as an agent of change. Whatever texts or traditions we are discussing, each new generation faces the requirement to examine the moral dimensions of its ideas and assumptions in light of those questions and experiences that arise as its own. This renders the texts of a revolutionary tradition newly accessible to people in their struggles and to activists and revolutionaries in the light of whose work they are re-invented in light of the changing contexts of thought and struggle.

There are thus two background questions I wish to force so much as possible into the foreground. First is the question about Marx and Marxism: How should Marxist ideas and practice be understood in relation to morality and theories about morality? But the only good reason to ask this question brings us to a larger more interesting and general one: How and to what extent are radical struggles and critiques themselves invariably forms of moral praxis and theory? It is this latter question that ultimately we should be most concerned with, and it is because I regard Marxism as making a real and enduring contribution to this latter issue that I take up the former question here.

There have been many attempts to iron out the complexities of Marx's ideas about morality. Most of these have either tried to identify Marx with the Aristotelian tradition of communitarian virtue ethics or to connect Marx with some form of Kantian moral perspective. Lawrence Wilde recently notes that although, "…in the early part of the Twentieth Century the German theorists of the Marburg school and…Adler and Bauer attempted to supplement Marx's work with neo-Kantian moral theory, [nonetheless] such a move stands in flat contradiction to Marx's stated position." (Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and Its Critics, p. 1) Wilde himself defends a neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Marx's ethical standpoint. I quote him to identify a main issue I take up below in commentary on the Kantian reading of Marxist morality. That Marx "contradicts" or repudiates something substantial in the Kantian moral perspective may require closer scrutiny than it has sometimes gotten. Those who, like Wilde, deny any important connection between Marx and Kant naturally tend to emphasize the importance and scope of this "repudiation." Yet, even those who have seen Marx as close enough to Kant to be "fused with" or "reconstructed" along more Kantian philosophical lines have tended to overstate and misunderstand this departures. A closer look at some areas where Marx seems to depart from Kantian moral philosophy ironically lends strength to the view that Marx is deeply and importantly informed by Kantian moral ideas.

Part of what is suggestive about the claim that Marx "flatly contradicts" Kantian moral ideas is its implicit failure to place Marx's criticisms of Kantian philosophy in perspective. Marx is a complex and original writer who frequently repudiates philosophers and economists upon whom he is otherwise quite dependent. We could easily severely underestimate and mistake the significance of Hegel for Marx's work, for example, by failing to situate Marx's severe, direct, and repeated criticisms of Hegel properly in relation to Marx's broader project.

Many fine philosophers and Marxists have eloquently argued for the view that Kantian moral ideas inform Marx's theories and help to illuminate Marxist thought and praxis, but Hegel, the other key to Marx's thinking, is often overlooked, his impact underrepresented or misplaced. Some of the resemblances and connections between Kant and Marx become clearer when the idea of Kantian philosophy we are working with reflects the impact of Hegel. Marx's encounter with Kant was undoubtedly affected by the demands Hegel made of Kantian philosophy. There is good evidence that Marx agreed with Hegel that Kantian morality on its own represented an inadequate picture of the conditions that bear importantly upon praxis. At the same time, Marx did not merely take over Hegel's critique of Kant and make it his own. For historical and philosophical reasons, Marx would have been a kind of Kantian mediated by the impact of Hegel's critical appropriation. We must read Marx's Kant through Hegel as undoubtedly Marx himself did. I think Marx's overall moral position as well as other dimensions of his thought make better sense against something like this philosophical background.

Kant provides a philosophical account and reconstruction of the conditions for the possibility of right action. Morality is grounded in a formal practical principle which expresses the possibility of rational freedom and human dignity. In practical historical terms this principle itself counts for nothing. It is only by removing the content of historical and empirical determinations that it can be understood as the ground of moral law-- of any moral law. Moral duty requires us to regard our moral feelings, our sense of prudence, and our inclinations as inherently suspicious and as tending to confound our rational freedom. The historical and empirical determinations of the will are irrelevant to the moral character of any action duty might command.

Unconditioned principles can be formally understood as apriori structures. But, importantly, Kant recognizes that formal structures alone considered independent of their content are merely abstractions. From a Kantian perspective, morality involves both a formal apriori principle and a set of options defined by history and political life. In this sense the empirical content of morality is always its historically definite content. This is an important epistemological caveat for Kant, who is at all times philosophically most concerned with the formal structures themselves, as he is grounding a moral apparatus not wielding one.

Marx, however, is wielding one. Assuming the apriori structure Kant regards as present in empirical content, Marx makes this also a point of departure: moral claims as such are empty schemata compared with concrete concepts of practice. On their own, such ideas exist only in discourse, in moral philosophy, where they make only abstract commands. On their own formal principles lead us nowhere. But when we switch from the philosophical realm of the formal apriori to the possible content that it might command, we move with Marx from the realm of abstractions to the realm of practical content--from the grounding of the command to the historical demands it makes of us.

After Hegel, the apriori could not be regarded as frozen in an abstract formal eternity, or an isolated thinking mind. Marx would have understood the apriori on the level of its emergence in history, surrounded by an actuality that involves its own negation. This was possible because Marx thought of Kant in Hegelian terms. The principle of autonomy emerges historically overcoming its external negativity and becoming more what it is. It thus unfolds as the rational kernel hidden within the mystical obfuscating shell. It is a priori as imminent within sensuous practice rather than as abstractly true or independent of the practical empirical events for which it provides the rational key. The a priori runs through history like a thread, whose outward signs show a pattern of progress, whose message is rational freedom or autonomy. But the core of this moral progress in history is expressed in an apriori practical principle of dignity.

The negativity of morality is associated with the moral law as heteronomous and external, which is identified by Kant and Marx with historical-empirical moral claims. This content falls away constantly and is built-up anew so long as there is moral debate, so long as there is class struggle, and so long as (for Kant) we are not angels. The a priori practical principle exists only in acts, or in possible choices of the will. Some of these are better than others from the standpoint that they correspond to our duty to secure for humans their dignity and autonomy. This is what we have to reason and debate about morally: how well or ill our historical-empirical options realize the requirements of human dignity. The a priori part of morality is hidden or assumed, just as Kant said it should be. What is not is its constant array of bewildering disguises, short-hand versions, and compromises of human dignity that pass for morality on the historical stage. Marx identifies the part of morality that is available to inquiry and analysis with the ideological claims of an historical epoch to instantiate the conditions for rational freedom. Ideological morality is the part that is known in the history of morality, and all historical morality is ideological, in the sense that it is always at best merely a claim to instantiate and realize the a priori practical principle.

Marx's appropriation of Kant via Hegel also helps explain what happens to the Kantian focus on personal will and intention in light of Marx's more historical and sociological thinking. Hegel regards ethical substance [Sittlichkeit] as mediating, overcoming, and not merely negating personal morality [Moralitaat]. Yet, Hegel's idea that Spirit in history progresses "behind our backs," his famous notion of the "cunning of reason," seems to remove all responsibility from the moral agent, whose life and will seem reduced to mere manifestations or effects in the development of Consciousness. Marx rejects the Hegelian suggestion that the "cunning of reason" necessitates the eclipse of human subjectivity, while accepting its historically and sociologically salient observation that history is marked by real patterns of determination which can be explored and investigated to provide guidelines for future choices.

Not only is the a priori now possible as an historically emerging and developing principle, it no longer has to be thought by its agents. What they will have to think through and act upon is the reasoning it takes to carefully analyze and evaluate the actually existing institutions and processes by which their form of social life is reproduced. Understood through Hegel, Kant's important contribution to Marx's moral thinking here is a consistent focus on the a priori factors determining events and actions as opposed to the consequences and outcomes themselves. The effect of this on Marx is, I think, dramatic, in part for its suggestion toward a lessening of the tensions we see today between the scientific and moral dimensions of his theories. Marx doesn't have to evade either because he consistently assumes a moral a apriori principle emergent in history which provides the criterion for reasoning in the context of historical-empirical morality, which, as the ongoing reflection of continuing class struggles remains necessary and necessarily ideological.

Further, this appropriation of Kant via Hegel takes morality out of the individual hearts of separate persons and places it in their collective hands. Kant makes morality thinkable and Hegel sets it within the broader context of historical-temporal effect, just where Marx needs it to be. From the standpoint of history understood as rational in this sense, we can infer from the structures and processes described in social analyses backward to grasp their inner core, their structural essence, their historical secret. For example, the commodity is an object defined by the intentions that motivate its production, which are exchange and profit, not consumption and use.

In moral terms, it is precisely the fine line between poverty and murder that Marxist analysis seeks to erase. This doesn't involve abolishing or devaluing individual will and intention but it does involve the refocus of inquiry away from the intentions of individual wills toward the historical and social 'will and intentions' instantiated in the structures and processes of a mode of life. At this level, social relations become the object of an analysis which, always reading backward from results, asks of our practices and institutions what kind of people and what kind of world they are making of us. And this will tell us something about who we are and what we intend by tolerating such practices and institutions.

As philosophers we may legitimately concern ourselves with the nature and the grounds of the a priori practical principle Kant brought to light. Our task as Marxists is to renew moral and ethical debate in precisely the sense that this view of Marx would endorse: that our praxis and vision of the future be guided by the requirements of human dignity and autonomy so far as these can be realized in a system of social relations. But I consider it wholly appropriate to regard Marxists as among those for whom such commitments arise as apriori practical principles which set a task for history but do not in themselves set before us the content of possible moral and political choices.