Scientific Socialism and The Soul

The Marxist philosophy of ‘scientificsocialism’ is usually thought of as a form of crude, materialistphilosophy, as suggested by terms such as ‘dialectical materialism’ and ‘historical materialism’. That Marx’s understanding of both ‘materialism’ and ‘science’ was in fact completely at odds with that ofmodern materialist science was made clear in his Theses on Feuerbach,where he writes:

The chief defect of all previousmaterialism … is that the object, actuality, sensuousness, is conceivedonly in the form of the object of perception, but not as sensuous human activity … not subjectively.

The most basic scientific ‘fact’ of all – ignored in all modern sciences - is not the existence of a universe of perceptual objects, butrather the fact of our immediate subjective and sensuous awareness of such a universe. The problem is that ‘subjectivity’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ has hitherto only been conceived as the property of apoint-like human ‘subject’ or ‘ego’, bounded by the body or evenmysteriously localised in the brain. Modern science is precisely amaterialism of the sort that reduces even the human body and brain tomere perceptual objects, and then finds itself in the impossiblesituation of having to explain how such objects can miraculouslygive rise to subjective awareness. In this science of the human bodythere is no place for the human being, who is reduced to a phantom ofthe brain, a homunculus looking out at the world through the peepholesof the senses.

But what if all seemingly localised and point-like centres or ‘subjects’ of awareness are the expression of non-local fields of awarenessor subjectivity? What if subjective awareness is not a blank sheet onwhich we passively register sensory impressions coming from perceptualobjects – but has its own innate sensuous qualities and patterns – forexample the subjectively sensed lightness or darkness, colour and tone,levity or gravity of our moods, the subjectively sensed dullness orclarity of minds, the subjectively sensed size and weight, solidity orfragility of our bodies, or our subjectively sensed closeness ordistance, warmth or coolness towards other beings? What if such sensedqualities and patterns of subjective awareness as such are thesource of all ‘objective’ energetic and perceptual patterns or ‘gestalts’? What if ‘the soul’ is nothing suprasensible, insubstantialor disembodied, but is instead the bodily shape and form taken by suchinnate field-patterns and field-qualities of awareness? What if the verysubstantiality of our bodies themselves is the sensed and sensualsubstantiality not of some material body object of perception but ofsubjectivity as such? What if all the sensory qualities ofnature are the expression of soul qualities - innate qualities ofsubjective awareness? What if these sensual qualities of the humanbeing’s soul or inner nature can link us directly with thevery inwardness or soul of nature itself? Then and only then, could webegin to comprehend Marx’s concept of a natural science of man that is at the same time a human science of nature.

This will not be a crudely objectifying, materialist science of the sortwe see today, but a ‘subjective’ or ‘phenomenological’ science – ascience of immediate subjective awareness and experiencing. Moreprecisely, it will be a field-phenomenology of the sortarticulated by the Marxist physicist and phenomenologist Michael Kosokin his seminal essay entitled Dialectics of Nature. For as hewrites:

Subjectivity, phenomenologically,simply refers to a field of presence, i.e., an immediate non-localisedgestalt, ‘opening’ or ‘awareness’ whose content is constituted by eventsof mediation of determination – by ‘objects’ of awareness … Subjectivity, as a non-localised field of presence is nothing butconcrete immediacy, i.e., experience as an on-going process, in whichthe events or event-complexes present are any objects, products orstructures appearing out of the field … be they symbolic systems,physical objects or egos.

It is precisely this PHENOMENOLOGY of awareness between field andevents which at the same time expresses itself as a DIALECTIC ofinseparable distinctions, or what in modern science is called aNON-linear field of relations. In a dialectic relation, all elements aregrasped as elements OF relation and never simply as elements INrelation.

For Marx, revolution wasintrinsically connected with the liberation of the human senses and ofhuman subjectivity – the soul - understood sensuously. This means theliberation of subjective experiencing as an on-going process fromits domination by any and all of its products – whether thesetake the form of scientific models and mathematical abstractions,religious myths and symbols, perceptual objects or material commodities.

The function of myth or abstraction – in science as well as society – which alienates a product from theprocess of experience is … to delimit all actual and conceivableexperiences as expressions of that product.

Growth and genuinetranscendence come only when one can re-grasp the relationship thatexists between the process of experience and its products, realizingthat products and results are neither ends (positive or posited goals),nor something to be denied (negative goals) but are rather the vehiclesand means through which experience can enrich its self-mediated state ofconcrete immediacy and express itself in visible forms.

Degeneracy, however,sets in when the reverse takes place and man defines and delimitsexperience…in terms of its products and results. Such is the paradoxicalchallenge of existence – not to be ‘done in’ by the very products of itsprocess!

So-called ‘false’ or ‘inauthentic’ consciousness is simply the product of ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ consciousness, instead of being the process.
Michael Kosok Dialectics of Nature

This is not ‘psychologism’ or ‘subjectivism’ in the narrow sense.For as Michael Kosok points out:

Emotional reactions, thoughts and object modifications are NOT examplesof experience, but rather PRODUCTS of experience …
Ibid.

Such ‘psychical’ phenomena, like ‘physical’ phenomena all emerge orarise (Greek physis) from non-local fields of awareness. ‘Dialecticphenomenology’, with its recognition of the field character of awarenessor subjectivity, is a subjectivism which avoids all solipsism and withit the false philosophical question of how much reality we can attributeto the subjective awareness of others – the question of ‘other minds’.

The so-called problem of the ‘other’ or of ‘other minds’ only appears ifyou think (Laing notwithstanding) that experience is private and in needof being communicated, i.e., that experience can be ‘owned’ like acommodity’.
Ibid.

The way we ‘privately’ experience others is automatically sensed by theother and automatically communicates to the other - just as does the waythey experience us. Subjectivity or awareness is in essence reciprocalor ‘inter-subjective’. ‘Scientific Socialism’ is a new science of ‘soul’ understood as a social field of inter-subjective relationality – unitingthe soul inwardness of human beings not only with that of others butwith the aware inwardness or soul of all apparent ‘objects’ ofperception. Understood in this way, Scientific Socialism is The NewScience, a revolutionary science that stands in radical oppositionto all current forms of social and scientific reductionism – thereduction of the human senses to the single sense of ‘having’ that Marxwrote of, and the reduction of all immeasurable qualitative dimensionsof human subjective experience to ‘objectively’ measurable quantities.


[link to www.thenewyoga.org]