Materialisms

Q: You speak of “transcendental materialism.” What would be some of its differences compared to previous forms of materialism?

Adrian Johnston: At the risk of being too schematic, I feel this question (along with the immediately subsequent question too) is most easily answered by contrasting transcendental materialism with three other forms of materialism: physicalist, historical, and dialectical materialisms. Physicalist materialism, as the oldest Western philosophical variant (with its earliest beginnings to be found in certain of the pre-Socratics and the ancient atomists), is what most people think of when they call to mind materialism as a philosophical position. This would encompass a range of reductive or eliminative naturalisms tending to identify the very smallest constituents of physical objects (whether these be identified as atoms, corpuscles, sub-atomic particles, super-strings, or whatever else) as ontologically foundational, as the only “really real” plane of existence.

Relatedly, such materialisms tend towards subject-squelching determinisms in which everything is strictly governed by efficient-causal laws, with reality being nothing more than the bump-and-grind of matter in mechanical motion. Hence, for physicalist materialism, a causally closed, monistic Nature-with-a-capital-N is the sole being, an ultimate ontological unity, within which there are no places for minded and like-minded humans as both individuals and collectives. All of the latter is seen to be thoroughly reducible and/or epiphenomenal.

Transcendental materialism inherits from Marx and his historical and/or dialectical materialist successors—I will address both historical and dialectical materialism shortly—a critical distance from physicalist materialism (with Marx’s first of his eleven “Theses on Feuerbach” condemning naturalistic materialisms from Greek atomism to Feuerbach’s secular humanism as “contemplative”). The mechanical, reductive, and eliminative approaches of physicalisms fail or refuse to do justice to the subjective and socio-historical dimensions of human existence, leaving these to the tradition of idealist orientations. Like Marx, I insist upon a materialism that incorporates within itself, in a non-reductive manner, much of what pre-Marxian materialisms unwisely abandon to idealists. A materialism with no room for subjects, societies, and histories as genuine realities is, by my Marx-colored lights, deeply unsatisfactory, dismissively explaining away rather than properly explaining these realties. As even Lenin himself once said, intelligent (i.e., dialectical) idealism is preferable to stupid (i.e., contemplative) materialism.

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Before contrasting transcendental materialism with historical and dialectical materialisms, I need to go into more detail apropos my differences with physicalist materialism. To begin with, transcendental materialism involves a defense of a strong emergentism (against reductivisms) coupled with endorsement of the concept of downward causation (against epiphenomenalisms). Its strong emergentism insists upon a stratified ontology of emergent layers irreducible once they have emerged from other levels of being (with the chemical as irreducible to the physical, the biological as irreducible to the chemical and the physical, the mental as irreducible to the biological, the chemical, and the physical, and so on). Transcendental materialism’s commitment to downward causation maintains that emergent strata can react back on what they emerged from, with these strata thereby not being deprived of actual causal efficacy. Insofar as physicalist materialism involves naturalisms treating more-than-physical dimensions as reducible phenomena or eliminable epiphenomena, transcendental materialism is at odds with it.

Related to transcendental materialism’s strong emergentism with its stratified ontology, it opposes the monisms of unity typically accompanying variants of physicalist materialism. Due the latter’s naturalism, this usually is expressed as the idea that Nature forms a grand Whole or Totality (i.e., a Lacanian big Other or Badiouian One-All). After the advent of modern natural science, physicalism tends to suggest that an integrated, seamless web of efficient-causal physical laws, formally spelled out in the languages of mathematics, represents the Alpha and Omega of what counts as truly existent. By contrast, not only does transcendental materialism’s strong-emergentist stratified ontology posit a plurality of un-unified, heterogeneous levels and layers of being—it also upholds the separate identities of individuated entities within particular strata, especially those characteristic of the distinctively human (i.e., the subjective, social, historical, and the like). I will say more about the topic of individuation in response to your sixth question below.

I can encapsulate some of these differences between physicalist and transcendental materialisms by describing my ambivalence vis-à-vis ontological monism in general. On the one hand, as a (quasi-)naturalistic materialist, I lean towards a monism in which the physical universe before and apart from any and every sentient being is the lone ultimate ground of all other existences. On the other hand, as a (quasi-)naturalistic materialist simultaneously opposed to all homogenizing ontologies (whether reductive, eliminative, etc.), I seek to preserve much of what fuels the intuitions behind dualisms, namely, manifest structural and phenomenal distinctions between different, irreducible-to-each-other levels of reality (physical, chemical, biological, human, socio-historical, individual-subjective…).

As regards the monism-dualism distinction, I advance what could be characterized as an emergent dualism, one in which the immanence of a physical universe gives rise out of itself to more-than-physical layers of being. The types of dualisms I flat-out reject are those with metaphysical realist inclinations proposing eternal, non-emergent level-distinctions, timeless structural dichotomies between, for instance, nature and culture or body and mind. Like such dualists, I believe that there are real and irreducible differences between natural and non-natural (qua denaturalized) strata. But, like anti-dualistic monists, I reject visions of being as always-already partitioned into neat and clean divisions between absolutely separate ontological dimensions.

Now, what about the distinctiveness of transcendental materialism with respect to historical and dialectical materialisms? As I already have acknowledged here and on many other occasions, I avowedly situate myself in the lineage of these materialisms. I would go so far as to say that I see transcendental materialism as a contemporary permutation of those materialisms developed primarily within the Marxist tradition.

That said, I must stipulate that the contrasts I am about to draw with “historical materialism” and “dialectical materialism” concern mainly what these labels of journalistic convenience standardly are (mis)understood to designate. As I have argued at length elsewhere—and, admittedly, I here might be at risk of appearing to indulge in self-serving anachronisms—I perceive a lot of what transcendental materialism entails as making explicit arguments and models often implicit in its Marxist forebears. In other words, I allege more continuity between historical/dialectical and transcendental materialisms than the standard (mis)representations of the former would admit. But, to repeat for the sake of clarity, in the following series of drawn contrasts between, on the one hand, transcendental materialism and, on the other hand, historical and dialectical materialisms, my references to the latter largely are invocations of textbook pictures of those positions, not necessarily the correctly interpreted and reconstructed theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, et al.

Historical materialism, because of the adjective in this label, frequently is taken to be tantamount to a pan-historicism. Even many of those who have spent a decent bit of time reading Marx’s texts believe that a historical materialist always should historicize everything under the sun. Such a (mis)conception of Marx and company also goes hand-in-hand with the view that historical materialism dictates a thoroughgoing social constructivism in which even things (supposedly but deceptively) “natural” are socio-historical phenomena too (the assertion of ubiquitous social mediation is operative in, for instance, the young Lukács’s signature maneuver of playing off historical materialism against Engelsian dialectical materialism to the detriment of the latter). Much of the past century’s worth of Western Marxism assumes historical materialism to rest upon an axiomatic thesis according to which all is socio-historical without exception.

Against the pan-historicist image of historical materialism, transcendental materialism rejects the claim that, “Everything is historical!” To begin with, and whatever one’s philosophical inclinations, one can and should ask: Is this claim itself also historical? Both the affirmative and negative answers to this question promptly result in falsifications of the essential assertion at the core of any universal historicism. Just as unqualified empiricism and logical positivism wreck themselves against liar’s-paradox-style self-refutations, so too does unrestricted historicization.

Crude historicist versions of historical materialism go so far as to deny the very existence of anything trans-social or trans-historical (unlike, I would argue, Marx himself and many of his more philosophically astute progeny). Opposed to this, transcendental materialism insists on two varieties of the trans-social and trans-historical. First, there are strata of nature, including the biological dimensions of the species homo sapiens, that both precede and continue to subsist along with societies and their histories. Social history is an internal (or, with Lacan, one might say “extimate”) portion of a much lengthier natural history. Moreover, the social and the historical are what they are in part due to natural origins and persisting influences shaping (but not entirely determining) them. These strata would be what is prior to and independent of social history, what cuts across it.

But, there is another mode of cutting across the social and the historical. This second variety of the trans-social and trans-historical is posterior and immanent, rather than prior and external, vis-à-vis social history. Transcendental materialism—and, I am in this very close to Badiou, especially his version of “materialist dialectics”—is also quite preoccupied with instances of the socio-historical genesis of the thereafter trans-social and trans-historical. Badiou’s examples of truth-events, such as mathematical discoveries, are cases of determinate socio-historical locales giving rise to things that subsequently achieve delocalization; they attain independence of their specific birthplaces and traverse an indefinite number of subsequent contexts across the arc of social history. Marx himself, in the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, brings up Homer’s Iliad as an illustration of history-born defiance of the ravages of historical time.

At this juncture, I can encapsulate transcendental materialism’s resistances to both physicalist and historical materialisms with relative brevity. Against physicalist materialism, there is the human qua more-than-natural/denaturalized as irreducible to the natural. Correlatively but conversely, against (the pan-historicist caricature of) historical materialism, there is the natural as irreducible to the human qua more-than-natural/denaturalized.

I now would add that there is a pivotal third dimension created at the intersection of the natural and the human qua more-than-natural/denaturalized. This additional dimension is embodied by forms of both laboring (as per Marxism) and unconscious (as per psychoanalysis) subjectivities coming to be “in history more than history itself” (put in Lacanian phrasing), becoming conditions of possibility for the further unfurling of social history itself. Once such subjects are generated at the intersections of natural and (early) social histories, they thereafter possess a peculiar transcendental status of being possibility conditions for the historical while simultaneously not being purely eternal. Such a neither-eternal-nor-historical dimension is utterly missing from vulgar historicist renditions of historical materialism (as well as being equally absent from more traditional varieties of transcendentalism, as I explain in two recent essays [“Whither the Transcendental?: Hegel, Analytic Philosophy, and the Prospects of a Realist Transcendentalism Today” and “Meta-Transcendentalism and Error-First Ontology: The Cases of Gilbert Simondon and Catherine Malabou”]).

But, finally, what about dialectical materialism? Two features often attributed to classical dialectical materialism furnish points of sharp contrast with transcendental materialism. First, as can be found in Engels’s own texts, classical dialectical materialism sometimes promotes a metaphysical Weltanschauung privileging continuity and unity over their opposites. This sort of more Spinozistic fundamental ontology imagines being qua being to be a sort of cosmic, holistic super-organism harmoniously maintaining its own inner equilibrium and self-consistency. Its motto very well could be “hen kai pan” or, in language from controversies involving Mao, “Two unite into One.” However, transcendental materialism emphasizes instead structures and phenomena more along the lines of the Maoist “One divides into Two.” It is interested in how, starting from nothing more and nothing less than pre/non-human physical nature, being shatters and splits itself into series of multiple dimensions not entirely integrated with each other. Disunity and discontinuity past, present, and future are given priority in transcendental materialism.

Second, and again as Engels sometimes unfortunately exemplifies, classical dialectical materialism periodically lapses into being a sort of Heraclitean flux doctrine or process metaphysics. All is becoming, change, transformation, and so on. Against this, transcendental materialism stresses how, within and out of such frenetic flows, configurations and trajectories enduring across continuing fluctuations can and do manage to congeal and persist. Perhaps one could think of this as fluxes or processes internally generating stubborn resistances to themselves.

In addition to these two features of classical dialectical materialism distinguishing it from transcendental materialism, there is also the association of the former with Stalin’s “diamat.” Like many other partisans of historical and dialectical materialisms, I completely reject the Stalinist vision of a (pseudo-)scientific knowledge of necessary laws dictating the shapes and sequences of not only of nature, but also of a human history flattened out into a mechanical succession of preordained developmental stages. Even within the Marxist tradition, transcendental materialism is far from alone in repudiating the deterministic and teleological aspects of Stalinist diamat.

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Brainlet here.

1. ELI5
2. What implications does this “transcendental materialism” have?

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It's a good omen, imo.

Did you read the excerpt?

I did though I didn't understand it.

Which parts would you like elucidated?