Philosophy
and Religion, Part 5
Before we consider the main downloadable text of this post
(see below), which is Christopher Caudwell’s essay on “Liberty”, here
are two quotations from Caudwell from Helena Sheehan, taken from Helena Sheehan’s Christopher
Caudwell web page, preceded by Sheehan’s remarks. These quotations bear
on the fundamental question of “which is first, mind or matter”.
The act of
knowing transformed what was known. It was never possible to detach the thing
known from the knowing of it. Caudwell opposed all passivist imagery in describing
knowledge. Knowledge was not a matter of copying, mirroring, photographing,
reflecting. Although he never remarked on Lenin's use of such imagery in
[Lenin’s] Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, he had read the book and his rejection of the reflectionist
model was quite explicit and polemically expressed. In no uncertain terms,
Caudwell made his point:
“The mirror reflects accurately: it does not
know. Each particle in the universe reflects the rest of the universe, but
knowledge is only given to human beings as a result of an active and social
relation to the rest of reality.”
In terms of
the debate within [Lenin’s] Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism,
[Caudwell’s] was neither the position of Lenin nor that of Bogdanov. Nor was it
the position of Lukacs or Korsch either. It was perhaps the position Gramsci
was groping for, but never expressed with such confident clarity as Caudwell.
When it came down to it, being preceded knowing, knowing flowed from being and
evolved as an extension of being. Decidedly post-Cartesian, Caudwell asserted:
I live therefore I think I am. In a concise statement of the fundamental
contours of his theory of knowledge, he wrote:
“The question of which is first, mind or
matter, is not therefore a question of which is first, subject or object ...
Going back in the universe along the dialectic of qualities, we reach by
inference a state where no human or animal bodies existed and therefore no
minds. It is not strictly accurate to say that therefore the object is prior to
the subject any more than it is correct to say the opposite. Object and subject
as exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultaneously.... We can
say that relations seen by us between qualities in our environment (the
arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all the entities of physics) existed
before the subject-object relationship implied in mind. We prove this by the transformations
which take place independent of our desires. In this sense, nature is prior to
mind and this is the vital sense for science. These qualities produced, as
cause and around produce effect, the synthesis, or particular subject-object
relationship which we call knowing. Nature therefore produced mind.
But the nature which produced mind was not nature "as seen by us." .
. . It is nature.... as having indirect not direct relations with us.... Such a
view reconciles the endless dualism of mentalism and objectivism. It is the
universe of dialectical materialism. Unlike previous philosophies, it includes
all reality: it includes not only the world of physics, but it includes smells,
tastes, colors, the touch of a loved hand, hopes, desires, beauties, death and
life, truth and error.”
Caudwell on Liberty
Christopher
Caudwell’s “Studies in a Dying Culture” were published at a particular moment
in history. Caudwell had been killed while defending the Republic in the
Spanish Civil War [Image below: Caudwell
on the eve of his departure for Spain, from a group photograph]. With its
references to his contemporaries H G Wells, Bertrand Russell, and E M Forster
(and the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau) Caudwell’s
essay may seem dated at first glance, but actually, like a lot of Caudwell’s
work, it remains critical today and right up to date, in a time when the
question of the free-willing human Subject is once again at the forefront.
“Implicit in the conception of thinkers like
Russell and Forster, that all social relations are restraints on spontaneous
liberty, is the assumption that the animal is the only completely free
creature. No one constrains the solitary carnivore to do anything. This is of
course an ancient fallacy. Rousseau is the famous exponent. Man is born free
but is everywhere in chains. Always in the bourgeois mind is this legend of the
golden age, of a perfectly good man corrupted by institutions. Unfortunately
not only is man not good without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no
man at all; he is neither good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.
“Russell's idea of liberty is the unphilosophical
idea of bestiality… The man alone, unconstrained, answerable only to his
instincts, is Russell's free man. Thus all man's painful progress from the
beasts is held to be useless. All men's work and sweat and revolutions have
been away from freedom. If this is true, and if a man believes, as most of us
do, as Russell does, that freedom is the essential goal of human effort, then
civilisation should be abandoned and we should return to the woods. I am a
Communist because I believe in freedom. I criticise Russell, and Wells, and
Forster, because I believe they are the champions of unfreedom.”
Caudwell
had got to the heart of the matter: “I
am a Communist because I believe in freedom,” he wrote. And what is that?
Of all politicians, only those who are communists will be able to answer the
question “What is freedom?” in a satisfactory way. Others will echo the
sophisticated Bertrand Russell’s bourgeois-romantic version of freedom, as a
return to the condition of the wild beasts, or otherwise they will say little,
or nothing.
“Power to
the People” is our slogan. This is the essence of our project. It means that
the masses will have agency. The masses will be human, which is to say, able to
think and to act upon their thoughts. This is the active freedom that Caudwell
writes about. “This good, liberty,
contains all good,” he says.
After
Caudwell, and after the war that ended in victory over the fascists against
whom Caudwell had fought with his body as well as his pen, bourgeois thinkers
did not embrace Caudwell’s idea of liberty. Instead, they fled to irrational,
anti-humanist and even outright anti-human philosophies: existentialism,
positivism, structuralism, and especially the overtly irrational
“Post-modernism” that became the house philosophy of Imperialism. Some of them
declared “The Death of the Subject”. In other words, they denied human free
will.
In 2002
another English author and philosopher called James
Heartfield defied the Post-Modernists and published a book called “The
‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” thereby helping to inspire the Johannesburg
Communist University that started in 2003. Heartfield kindly allowed the CU to
use some extracts from his book. These are contained in the second linked
document below.
We
communists are for freedom. We are human, not post-human. We are part of a
liberation movement, not only of the colonially oppressed, but of humanity
worldwide against Imperialism. We are the ones with the theory of freedom. It
is the source of our morality. Power to the People! Amandla!
The concept
of the free-willing human Subject is the most valuable product of philosophy,
including the philosophy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. We are going to
defend it, including, if necessary, against the concept of materialism, if
materialism is taken to say that human life and culture is only a transitory
arrangement of molecules.
The image
at the top of this post is the “Uomo
Vitruviano” of Leonardo da Vinci, from the humanist period of the Italian
Renaissance. Its meaning is that Man (humanity) is the measure of the Universe.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Liberty, a Study in Bourgeois
Illusion, 1938, Caudwell.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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