review Michael Sprinker The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science What is a consequent Marxist view of the history and philosophy of science? Reference to the work of Marx and Engels (or even of Lenin) will not yield a satisfactory answer, although certain signposts are evident. For example, there is the famous observation on method in the Introduction to the Grund- risse, which argues that, contrary to the procedures adopted in classical economy, where the starting point for investigation is apparently concrete phenomena from which abstract theoretical descriptions are then derived, ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind.’1 Or there are Engels’s late works, pre-eminently Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, in which the so-called laws of the dialectic are laid out schematically, and of which it is asserted that they constitute ‘the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought’.2 Or there is Lenin’s critique of positivism in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, on which the later works of Althusser would depend so 122 heavily for their justification of philosophy’s role in relation to science. Post-classical Marxism has been remarkably fecund in its treatment of epistemological themes and in elaborating competing versions of the Marxist theory of knowledge, emphasizing different passages or moments in Marx’s (less often Engels’s) corpus to buttress its claims for the authentically Marxist character of the theory. Western Marx- ism in particular, from Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci to Adorno, Della Volpe, Sartre and Althusser, has productively developed Marxist epis- temology to the point that, if serious disagreements remain, it is nevertheless possible to assess Marxist philosophy of science and—to appropriate a famous metaphor—discover the rational kernel inside the mystical shell. Such I take to have been the project of Roy Bhaskar over the past decade and a half, although the specifically Marxist pedigree of his work has only gradually become evident. (Marxism finds no place in A Realist Theory of Science, for example, his first, and still fundamental, book.)3 It is at any event fully evident in his most recent collection, Reclaiming Reality, which contains, among other riches, perhaps the finest brief historical and methodological assessment in English of the major issues in Marxist philosophy.4 Philosophical Underlabouring What is the task of philosophy of science in Bhaskar’s view? It lies, to cite the Lockean metaphor on which he has come increasingly to repose, in ‘underlabouring’ on behalf of the sciences. Underlabouring entails clarifying and explicating what it is the sciences do and how they do it, as well as, on occasion, criticizing existing scientific prac- tices for failing to meet the standards of scientificity they set for them- selves. Philosophical underlabouring (the proposed title for a planned further collection of essays; see RR, p. 208 n. 32) thus proposes a philosophy of science (what Bhaskar terms ‘transcendental realism’, the strong research programme first announced and elaborated in RTS) that is at the same time a philosophy for science (what Bhaskar is now willing to call ‘critical realism’; RR, pp. vii, 190). But why should the sciences need a philosophy at all? What is to be gained, in the first instance for science but in the end for humankind generally, from a coherent account of what Rom Harré has called ‘the principles of scientific thinking’? Bhaskar’s justification of his own enterprise is as follows: 1Karl Marx, Grundrisse,trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York 1973, p. 101. 2Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring,part I, ch. 13. 3Bhaskar has maintained, however, that this text was influenced by Marxism, notably by Althusser; see Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory,London 1987, p. 331. 4Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, Verso, London 1989(£11.95pbk, $34.95hbk), ch. 7; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as RR. Other texts by Bhaskar cited parenthetically include: A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn., Sussex 1978—RTS; Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Verso, London 1986—SHRE. 123 The essays collected in this volume all seek to underlabour—at different levels and in different ways—for the sciences, and especially the human sciences, in so far as they might illuminate and empower the project of human self-emancipation. They attempt, that is to say, for the explanatory- emancipatory sciences of today, the kind of ‘clearing’ of the ideological ground, which Locke set out to achieve for the prodigious infant of seventeenth-century mechanics. Such sciences, which only partially and incompletely exist, will not only interpret but help to change the world. But they will do so rationally only on the condition that they interpret the world aright. (RR, p. vii) Or, as he opines some pages later in a gloss on the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The world cannot be rationally changed unless it is adequately interpreted’ (RR, p. 5). Critical realism is therefore ‘a necessary but insufficient agency of human emancipation’ (RR, p. 191). This, as Bhaskar himself observes, is at one with Marx’s con- ception of the theory/practice relation, at once virulently anti-idealist and anti-voluntarist (RR, pp. 128, 137). Critical realism is therefore not just an optional attainment for socialists; it undergirds the production of knowledge that enables their political practice. Why should this be so? Bhaskar’s technical justification for this view is given in chapters 5 and 6 of Reclaiming Reality (RR, pp. 66–114), which reprise the posi- tions of his two earlier books, The Possibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, respectively. But since a more access- ible account is presented in chapter 8, a long essay on Richard Rorty, I shall focus on this text. Rorty: Disabling the Human Sciences Bhaskar’s choice of Rorty as antagonist is doubly motivated. First, Rorty’s prestige has grown steadily, both in and out of the philosoph- ical community, ever since the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.5 He is now one of those philosophical figures whose views matter and whose writings, as a consequence, are ceaselessly criti- cized, debated, elaborated in and out of professional philosophy. Moreover, as Bhaskar observes at the outset, the position Rorty has staked out is in many ways representative of an emergent orthodoxy in philosophy—perhaps best characterized as ‘post-empiricist philo- sophy of science’—that Bhaskar has ceaselessly criticized over the years. A second reason for sustained treatment of Rorty is the latter’s increasing preoccupation with the domain marked out by the human sciences. If Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature attempted to map the terrain of traditional epistemology differently, the later essays in Conse- quences of Pragmatism6 and virtually the whole of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity7 evince Rorty’s conviction that what he once termed ‘edify- ing philosophy’ must cash out its claims in the domain of ethics and, pre-eminently, politics. As Bernard Williams judiciously put it in his 5Princeton 1979. 6Minneapolis 1982. 7Cambridge 1989. 124 review of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty’s aim is ‘to give liber- alism a better understanding of itself than it has been left by previous philosophy’.8 The real stakes in Rorty’s project are political, although the limitations it exhibits in this area derive from (in the sense of hanging together philosophically with) his continuing entanglement in a certain epistemological problematic. Bhaskar summarizes the mat- ter nicely: [I]t is Rorty’s ontology which is responsible for his failure to sustain an adequate account of agency and a fortiori of freedom as involving inter alia emancipation from real and scientifically knowable specific constraints rather than merely the poetic redescription of an already-determined world. (RR,p. 146) In short, Rorty’s project disables the human sciences; hence, on Bhas- kar’s view, it deprives human beings of a necessary (if insufficient) instrument by which they might become free. Bhaskar’s critique can be divided into two parts. The first, sections 1–3 in the essay, goes over ground familiar to readers of his previous work, especially RTS. It rehearses themes Bhaskar has emphasized and theses he has urged in the philosophy of science, particularly in regard to the epistemology and ontology of the natural sciences. These themes (the ontic fallacy, the epistemic fallacy, the failure to distin- guish between intransitive and transitive objects of knowledge) are replayed in a close explication of Rorty’s work (primarily Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). It would be impossible to summarize Bhas- kar’s argument, so I shall simply cite his conclusion here: [J]ustifications within science are a social matter—but they require and are given ontological grounds. In failing to recognize this, Rorty has furnished us with a post-epistemological theory of knowledge without justification which matches his account of science without being. The result is just the opposite of what he intended: the epistemologization of being and the incorrigibility (uncriticizability) of what passes for truth. (RR, p. 160) Rorty would certainly be surprised by this last charge, since his entire effort for nearly two decades has been to show that truth claims are always subject to criticism, or, as he now puts it, to redescription. A passage near the beginning of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity captures the essence of this view: To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human lan- guages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of human beings—cannot.9 On the face of it, this seems a pithy statement of the distinction 8‘Getting it Right’, London Review of Books,23November 1989, p. 5. 9Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 5. 125 between transitive and intransitive objects of knowledge—roughly, ‘sentences’ and ‘the world’. In fact it is not, for reasons Bhaskar makes plain. Rorty’s apparent commitment to a realist ontology is characteristic- ally hidden by his systematic exploitation of an ambiguity in his terms. Bhaskar cites the claim made in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that ‘physics gives us a good background against which to tell our stories of historical change’ and comments thus: If physics means ‘the physical world’ as described by [the science of] physics (hereafter physics —or the physical world), then it is true and id unparadoxical. If, however, physics means ‘the set of descriptions’ of the physical world in the science of physics (hereafter physics —or the td science of physics), then as a rapidly changing social product it is part of the process of historical change and so cannot form a background to it. (RR,p. 151) A similar ambiguity in Rorty’s use of the term ‘cause’ in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity vitiates the axial notion of creative redescription on which that book turns (RR,pp. 151–2). Bhaskar’s critique shows how such ambiguities are an absolute requirement of Rorty’s programme in philosophy, for they underwrite his fundamental conviction that an irreducible cleft divides the Natur- wissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften (RR, p. 165). This in turn is a consequence of his thoroughgoing empirical actualism coupled with his attachment to the possibility of human freedom. Bhaskar puts the matter well: The autonomy of the social and other less physicalistic sciences is rendered consistent with a comprehensive empirical actualism by allowing that physics (or the physical sciences) can describe every bit of the phenomenal world but that some bits of it, for instance the human, can also be truly redescribed in a non-physicalist way. (RR,p. 164) This unresolved antinomy—for such it is, and none other than Kant’s famous Third to boot, as Bhaskar notices (RR, p. 164)—will come to underwrite the celebration of contingency in Rorty’s most recent book, which does no more than elaborate on the Sartrean point already made in a footnote to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: ‘man is always free to choose new descriptions (for, among other things, himself).’10Are we? Yes and no. Patently, there is much about human beings as moral and political—not just physical—beings that they have been bequeathed and that they are not in any obvious position to change or, save in fantasy, redescribe. Workers are exploited under capitalism (and other modes of production); Blacks in South Africa, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, are systematically deprived of civil and political liberties; women everywhere continue to be subjected to various forms of social discrimination. None of these groups of people ameliorates the actuality of their situation just by ‘creatively 10Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 362. 126 redescribing’ it in better terms. In fact, it can be shown that such redescriptions characteristically sustain or even worsen the lot of those structurally prevented from exercising personal or collective power. For example, when workers accept the basic conditions of the capital–wage-labour relation (along with its attendant juridical legiti- mation) by labelling it free (if unequal) exchange, they deprive them- selves of the capacity to resist wage reductions when profits decline beyond a point capitalists consider acceptable. Or, to take a related instance, while certain short-term material gains may be obtained for workers by ‘creatively redescribing’ their relation to capital in purely economic (that is, contractual) terms, the long-term tendencies towards instability in the capitalist system make this a mug’s game in which workers ultimately remain at the mercy of their employers, having ceded the power to contol their fate to those whose interests are objectively opposed to theirs (a lesson painfully learned by the working classes in Western Europe and the USA since the 1970s). As Marx once pithily observed, the freedom to sell or withhold one’s labour power is precisely the freedom to starve in the streets. Freedom as a Regulative Ideal Rorty, of course, thinks that such freedom to engage in fantasy is pro- ductive and must be protected. But there is the rub: how do we get from the plausible idea that human beings are by nature free (if condi- tionally so) to the state of actual freedom? This is a problem that Rorty’s liberal recommendations cannot solve, and not just for nar- rowly political reasons. Bhaskar shows how Rorty’s liberalism is entailed by his ontology, how a flawed politics is underwritten by a wrong-headed philosophical programme. Where does Rorty (along with his hero Mill) go wrong? First, Rorty’s exemption of human beings from the absolute con- straints characteristic of nature and described in the physical sciences does not sufficiently recognize the ‘sui generis reality and causal efficacy of social forms’ (RR, p. 174). He cannot do so because he systematic- ally undervalues (or misdescribes) the nature of ‘objective social struc- tures (from languages to family or kinship systems, to economic or state forms), dependent on the reproductive and transformative agency of human beings’.11As Bhaskar goes on to observe: These social structures are concept-dependent, but not merely conceptual. Thus a person could not be said to be ‘unemployed’ or ‘out of work’ unless she and the other relevant agents possessed some (not necessarily correct or fully adequate) concept of that condition and were able to give some sort of account of it, namely, to describe (or redescribe) it. But it also involves, for instance, her being physically excluded from certain sites, definite loca- tions in space and time. That is to say, social life always has a material dimension (and leaves some physical trace)...(RR, p. 174) This is again the point about inherent limitations on redescription. The problem with Rorty’s conception of freedom is that, like Kant’s, 11A similar criticism has been lodged against Rorty by Alexander Nehamas; see the latter’s ‘A Touch of the Poet: On Richard Rorty’, Raritan,vol. 10, no. 1, Summer 1992, pp. 104–26. 127 it is merely regulative; such an ideal tells us little if anything about the objective constraints that operate on humankind in society and in nature to make certain courses of action at best unlikely or at worst impossible. In opposition to the Rorty–Kant regulative ideal of freedom, Bhaskar proposes the concept of human emancipation, which, he observes, entails: (1) a stronger sense of being ‘free’, namely as knowing, possessing the power and the disposition to act in or towards one’s real interests...; and (2) a stronger sense of ‘liberation’, namely as consisting in the transform- ation of unneeded, unwanted and oppressive to needed, wanted and empowering sources of determination. Emancipation, that is to say, depends upon the transformation of struc- tures rather than just the amelioration of states of affairs. And it will, at least in the case of self-emancipation, depend in particular upon a conscious transformation in the transformative activity or praxis of the social agents concerned. As such, emancipation is necessarily informed by explanatory social theory. (RR,p. 178). There is, to be sure, a role for creative redescription in changing the conditions that render human beings unfree, but it is strictly depend- ent upon prior explanations of the social structures that are the under- lying causes of unfreedom. To provide such explanations is the function of the (emancipatory) human or social sciences, which on this construal are neither methodologically distinct from, nor concept- ually opposed to, but take their place alongside (and contribute to the emancipatory project of—in part by criticizing activity in) the physi- cal sciences. The potential for there to be more Rortean liberal ironists who hold that their descriptions of the world are always contingent— or, better, revisable—thus depends for its realization on a, possibly unironic, commitment to the truth-value—that is, the real descriptive power—of social theory. Or, to adapt a famous sentence from Kant, we shall have to embrace reason in order to preserve poetry. Althusser and the Production of Knowledge Near the end of Reclaiming Reality, Bhaskar lays at Althusser’s feet responsibility for the sins of some of the latter’s more prominent Brit- ish offspring, charging that the French philosopher’s ‘failure to give any apodeictic status to the real object rendered it as theoretically dis- pensable as a Kantian thing-in-itself and helped to lay the ground for the worst idealist excesses of post-structuralism’ (RR, p. 188).12 The passage refers the reader to a fuller elaboration of this claim in Scien- tific Realism and Human Emancipation, which I shall consider in a moment. At stake here is not merely the scholastic question of whether or not Bhaskar has got Althusser right—though this is far from a 12Cf. the similar judgment made in Bhaskar’s encyclopedia article on the Marxist theory of knowledge: ‘In Althusser one finds...a form of scientific rationalism influenced by the philosopher of science G. Bachelard and the meta-psychologist J. Lacan, in which the intransitive dimension is effectively neutralized, resulting in a latent idealism’ (RR,p.142). 128 trivial matter, given the importance (conceded by Bhaskar; see RR, p. 187) of Althusser’s corpus to contemporary Marxism. The substan- tive issue concerns what are licit views in the philosophy of science from the standpoint of historical materialism. To anticipate, I shall be arguing that if Bhaskar is perhaps correct to chastise Althusser for undertheorizing the intransitive dimension in knowledge production, it may be said that Bhaskar’s own comparative slighting of the ways in which ideology permeates the transitive dimension risks the charge of metaphysical dogmatism, which, in the current ideological Kampfplatz of philosophy, is perhaps the greater danger to the success of the real- ist programme.13 Althusser’s ‘scientific rationalism’ (RR, p. 142) is more than matched by Bhaskar’s rationalist faith that in philosophy the better argument and in science the superior hypothesis will neces- sarily carry the day. Bhaskar’s critique of ‘the British post-Althusserians’ (SHRE, p. 237) comes in the midst of a detailed examination of positivism and of its continuing legacy in the philosophy of science. He locates twin, sym- metrical dangers in rationalism of the Popper–Lakatos sort and in empiricism. A corollary of the latter position, he suggests, is the Feyerabend–Bachelard line ‘that philosophy should have no effect on science’, on which view positivism has always depended. The odd thing, however, is that this latter has mutated, in the hyperempiricism of Hindess and Hirst, into a classical idealism, and this, Bhaskar avers, is the more or less inevitable result of Althusser’s underemphasis on ‘the real object’: An account that cannot think the necessity for both, and the irreducibility of, the concepts of thought and being...must lapse into idealism where concepts are part of being. The origin of these errors is clear. It lies in Althusser’s initial inadequate theorisation of the concepts of the ‘real object’ and the ‘thought object’. His failure to provide an apodeictic status for, or indeed give any real function to, the former rendered it as dispos- able as a Kantian ding-an-sich—a service duly performed, against the con- tinuing materialist letter of Althusser’s texts...(SHRE, pp. 237–8) Althusser’s own commitment to materialist (or, in Bhaskar’s terms, tanscendental realist) ontology is thus not in doubt; rather, his declen- sion of knowledge production (the infamous Generalities I, II and III) gives insufficient weight to what he calls ‘the real-concrete’ (concret- réal), as opposed to the ‘concrete-in-thought’ (concret-de-pensée). Of these latter Bhaskar writes: This does not correspond to the realist distinction between the intransitive and transitive objects of knowledge. For while, for the realist viewing knowledge in the transitive dimension as a process of production, the transitive object of knowledge may be said to correspond to Althusser’s 13I am not saying that such a change is warranted, but it isplain that Bhaskar’s insist- ence on the irreducibility of the intransitive dimension tends to be construed thus; see, for example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scien- tific Facts (1979), Princeton 1986, p. 178. In the current euphoria over constructivist accounts ofscientific discovery, something more than a firm distinction between tran- sitive and intransitive dimensions isrequired to make the case against a totally social- ized view ofthe nature oftheories. 129 Generalities I, the intransitive object of knowledge—what is known in and via this production process—is precisely the real object. It does not follow from the fact that we can only know in knowledge that we can only know knowledge! (or even knowledge of knowledge would be impossible). (RR, p. 188) I shall make two comments. First, the transitive dimension is not con- fined only to Generalities I, but is fully constituted by Generalities I, II and III. These are, respectively: the raw materials (observational data, previous hypotheses, ideologies, and so forth) on which science works (Generalities I); the existing body of scientific theory that works on the raw materials (Generalities II); and the knowledge (new hypotheses) that is the outcome of this process of knowledge production (General- ities III). The latter then become part of Generalities I and II in the ongoing process of scientific inquiry described so aptly by Bhaskar (see RR, pp. 19–20). Second, Althusser is perfectly explicit about knowledge itself (it is always knowledge ofthings, including the theor- etical things that give knowledge of the real), nowhere more than in Reading Capital: No doubt there is a relation between thought-about-the-real and this real, but it is a relation of knowledge,a relation of adequacy or inadequacy of knowledge, not a real relation, meaning by this a relation inscribed in that real of which the thought is the (adequate or inadequate) knowledge. This knowledge relation between knowledge of the real and the real is not a relation of the real that is known in this relationship. The distinction between a relation of knowledge and a relation of the real is a fundamental one: if we did not respect it we should fall irreversibly into either speculat- ive or empiricist idealism.14 Nothing in the Althusserian account of knowledge production is at odds either with Bhaskar’s general conception of the transitive dimen- sion, or with his commitment to the ontological priority of the rela- tively enduring real structures or mechanisms described in scientific laws. If Althusser has comparatively little to say about the ‘real- concrete’, this is just because he (perhaps wrongly) conceives that to be the exclusive prerogative of the sciences. The real is the object of scientific discourse; philosophy’s task, as we shall see, lies elsewhere. However, Bhaskar has another bone to pick with Althusser, one that follows naturally enough from what is termed Althusser’s ‘scientific rationalism’: Although opposed to any reduction of philosophy to science or vice-versa, 14Louis Althusser, ‘The Object of Capital’, in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London 1970, p. 87; hereafter cited parenthetically as RC. Cf. the following passage from a text of 1966, ‘On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resour- ces’: ‘Naturally, the knowledge of formal-abstract objects [the objects posited by theory —MS] has nothing to do with a speculative and contemplative knowledge concerning ‘pure’ ideas. On the contrary, it is solely concerned with real objects; it is meaningful solely because it allows the forging of theoretical instruments, formal and abstract theoretical concepts, which permit production of the knowledge of real-concrete objects’. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays,trans. Ben Brewster et al., London, p. 51; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PSPS. 130 in maintaining that criteria of scientificity are completely intrinsic to the science in question, Althusser leaves philosophy (including his own) with- out any clear role; in particular, the possibilities of any demarcation criter- ion between science and ideology, or critique of the practice of an alleged science, seem ruled out. (RR,p. 143) Bhaskar’s reference here, one presumes, is to the self-confessed theor- eticism of the early (circa 1965) Althusser. It is somewhat surprising, then, that he will subsequently assert his preference for the texts of this period over the transitional Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philo- sophy of the Scientists and the later texts of auto-critique. More surprising still is that Bhaskar had recognized quite early on, in his essay on Feyerabend and Bachelard,15 the originality and validity of Althus- ser’s new position in and on philosophy that was announced pro- grammatically in Lenin and Philosophy (PSPS, pp. 167–202), but is more thoroughly elaborated in his lectures on philosophy and science. We now turn to these latter to consider what it means to be a Marxist philosopher of science. That this is no simple task should go without saying. A Philosophy ForScience It will be recalled that the Althusser of For Marx and Reading Capital characterized philosophy, more specifically Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism), as ‘the Theory of Theoretical practice’, a definition, he shortly recognized, that proposed ‘a unilateral and, in consequence, false conception of dialectical materialism’ (RC, p. 321). This ‘false conception’ was more than anything else the warrant for the charge of ‘scientific rationalism’, particularly in the relationship it asserted between theoretical work and ideological struggle. This latter is made explicit in a text of 1965, ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice, and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle’, where Althusser writes: It istheoretical formation that governs ideological struggle, that is the theoret- ical and practical foundation of ideological struggle. In everyday practice, theoretical formation and ideological struggle constantly and necessarily intertwine. One may therefore be tempted to confuse them and misjudge their difference in principle, as well as their hierarchy. This is why it is necessary, from the theoretical perspective, to insist at once on the distinc- tion in principle between theoretical formation and ideological struggle,and on the priority in principle of theoretical formation over ideological struggle. (PSPS, p. 38) Now in one sense this is unobjectionable and in fact follows from Lenin’s slogan about the relationship between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. But in another sense it is entirely wrong, for it seals off theory (here historical materialism, but at this stage in Althusser’s career, philosophy as well) from the domain of empirical confirmation (or refutation), which is what ideological struggle can in principle provide. Althusser is indeed guilty at this period of the ‘theoreticism’ (more properly, speculative idealism) with which he has been charged. 15See RR, p. 48; the essay was originally published in 1975. 131