Morning Comrades,
Rather than starting the week with another onslaught on your attention ranting and raving about the death of social media at the hands of another autocratic megalomanic I wanted to offer a short introduction to Aristotle, Marxism and in the grand scheme of things, purpose, for us all. During the work induced adrenaline highs over the week several thoughts made themselves appear mostly revolving around the bleakness and void of purpose we all feel due to the advanced stages of alienation, related to the machinery of capitalism. Or, I felt an omnipresent void of purpose in people that is increasingly being filled with individualistic identity projection, rather than materialistic purpose. Thus, rather than punching down, let’s aim and potentially look for purpose, and where better to look than Aristotle and of course, Marx.
Before that, throw on some tunes. Here is your new weekly jams playlist for this week.
Aristotle & Marx
I know, it seems a little far-fetched to want to draw a line that can help us today all the way back to the classical period of ancient Greece and yet it doesn’t. A few weeks ago I wrote down the following:
Analysis & debate without consequence is a bourgeois trap.
I was referring to the reality, that particularly in my own experiences within left wing political circles in Western Europe and Northern America the utmost focus is on debate, and to a certain degree, education and teaching that stifles most, if not all, actionable consequences. Obviously, the least I want to do is stifle learning, nor discussion, quite the opposite to be frank, however, if the analysis of our oppression remains theoretical and does not result in material consequences, all we are doing is playing by the masters rules, and the oppression will not only remain, but increase. It is not a case of anti-intellectualism to call the constant onslaught of debate nothing but a bourgeois trap because we have been made to believe that it is enough to talk, vote every few years and call that progressive activism. It changes nothing, or rather, not enough, as any and all “progression” in thought is engulfed by the oppressor faster than we can materialize its consequences and sold to us in form of another Obey print.
Onto Aristotle and Marx.
For those who do not know Aristotle, he was a student of Plato, Alexander The Great’s teacher and one of the most formative and influential philosophers that we know off to this date. Daddy Marx we all know at this stage.
Aristotle, along with many other classical Greek thinkers, believed that the appropriateness of any particular form of knowledge depends on the telos, or purpose, it serves. Knowledge is broken down into 3 categories. In brief, the purpose of a theoretical discipline is the pursuit of truth through contemplation; its telos is the attainment of knowledge for its own sake. The purpose of the productive sciences is to make something; their telos is the production of some artifact. The practical disciplines are those sciences which deal with ethical and political life; their telos is practical wisdom and knowledge.
"The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge." -Aristotle
The Practical Sciences is what directly relates to Marx and this is how:
Karl Marx famously states in volume one of Capital that “man, if not as Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal”.
Marx’s distinction between politicality and sociality is revelatory, both echoing his prior analyses of alienation under capitalism as well as expressing what, for Aristotle, would have been profoundly alien in spirit: the factionalization of the social and the political. That Marx draws from Aristotle’s work has been long-recognized, but one could argue that Marx’s very conception of man—what other philosophers would call “human nature” and what Marx calls “species-being”—supervenes upon Aristotle’s theory of the good life.
The intimate connection between the social and political is a theme that underlies much of Aristotle’s writings beyond merely “Nicomachean Ethics” and the Politics. Aristotelian dialectics always begins with what is—the commonly accepted rather than abstract first principles, the concrete and material rather than the metaphysical—as a means of understanding the “whatness” of the subject matter at hand. Marx, too, begins with the concrete, that is, the historical, the material, and the contingent. It is only by dealing with man as he is—not as the abstract, ontological protagonist of Enlightenment thought—but as he is found in his social world, and through such an analysis comes to light the material and sociopolitical contradictions and crises of the age. To understand man, for both Aristotle and Marx, then, is to understand the social, insofar as the machinations of nature are manifest in man’s movement in the world and interactions with others—and the world of man is always, of course, the world of politics.
The practical sciences in regards to Aristotle are understood then as a term that many educators encounter through the work of Paulo Freire1 and has been given a number of different political meanings, particularly within Marxist traditions of thinking.
Theory and practice are not opposites or separate entities. ‘Practice’ cannot be lacking theory. Similarly, it is difficult to conceive of ‘theory’ that is purely descriptive and devoid of reference to purposeful action. In other words, practice is soaked in theory. It is a constant process of theory making, and theory testing. Thus, it is in this sense that we can begin to talk about practice as praxis – informed action. As Freire put it:
‘We find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers’
Perhaps the best way of approaching practical reasoning is to look at the starting point. Where the productive began with a plan or design, the practical cannot have such a concrete starting point. What we begin with is a question or situation. We then start to think about this situation in the light of our understanding of what is good or what makes for human flourishing. Thus, for Aristotle, praxis is guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly; a concern to further human well being and the good life. This is what the Greeks called phronesis and requires an understanding of other people.
In short, theory has to bet praxis. If you want to add my other moral and physical cornerstone to life that is:
“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”- Muhammed Ali
to the most logical of realities of both Aristotle and Marx:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.
you’ll find yourself in not only good company but I believe with a set of guidelines that will help you do what is needed.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
Revolutionary Greetings,
V.
Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is one of the most important books you will read in your lifetime. Google it, there is a free version available online.