Article from Margin Notes 1
"This communism...is the genuine resolution of the conflict, between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."
— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in _The Marx-Engels Reader_, ed. Robert C. Tucker (Norton, 1978), 84.
I’ve never read an account of the socio-historical determination of philosophy that fully satisfied me. There always seems to be some level of mediation missing, some level of distortion or sleight of hand at play in the explanatory framework. This problem really crystallized for me when I read and presented on Marcuse’s essay “The Concept of Essence” with the Critical Theory Working Group last fall. The way it subsumed the history of philosophy under its gaze thrilled me at the same time as it set off alarm bells in the back of my mind. Its attack on the ahistorical pretensions of philosophy appealed to the historical materialist in me and its systematic account of Marxism as a theory of essence appealed to the philosopher in me. At the same time, I had a nagging sense that something was amiss on both counts, and I couldn’t really see how it all fit together. As I continued to engage with it, I began to suspect that the specter of totalization, which had been part of the essay’s initial appeal, covered over a number of confusions and deficiencies that prevented it from fulfilling the promises that I had originally read into it. These promises are of 1) a historical materialist account of the origins and development of the concept of essence that grounds both in the social conditions from which they arose and 2) a marxist theory of essence that facilitates the project of revolutionary praxis in the present day. I still believe that attempting to fulfill these promises is a worthwhile project, although one that (perhaps predictably) cannot be completed within the bounds of a single essay. With that in mind, I will focus here on laying the groundwork for that larger project, using Marcuse’s essay as a jumping-off point for developing my own historical materialist account of the emergence of a recognizable concept of essence in Ancient Greece.
In Part 1, I will begin with a critical examination of Marcuse’s account of the historical development of essence and the reasons for its failure to realize what it set out to achieve. I will argue that the most important of these reasons involve a formalist interpretive apparatus and the subsumption of the historical materialist elements in his work under an idealist philosophy of history, which lead him to neglect the concrete socio-historical conditions under which the concept of essence emerged in Ancient Greece. After that I will address the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, which bears some superficial similarities to the investigation undertaken here, but shares many of the problems that plagued Marcuse’s account, and use the discussion of his work as an opportunity to further distinguish my project from both of theirs.
In Part 2, I will begin my reconstruction of the social determination of the emergence of the concept of essence in Ancient Greece, starting with the pre-history of the concept of essence. This will involve 1) an examination of what I will call the bardic conception of truth and its situation within an earlier mode of production centered around the warrior-aristocracy depicted in the Homeric epics 2) an account of how the reciprocal dynamic of commercialization and the centralization of slavery within the mode of exploitation, along with changes in the practice of warfare, created a crisis of the traditional warrior aristocracy and the mode of production centered on them, which set the stage for the emergence of a recognizable concept of essence in Pre-Socratic Monism (PSM) and 3) a concluding examination of the works Theognis of Megara and the transitional conception of truth developed in them, which bears marks of both the bardic conception that preceded it and the concept of essence that followed it.
In Part 3, I will turn to PSM itself and its relation to the changes described in the preceding section. First, I will offer an examination and critique of Richard Seaford’s account of the origins of PSM and its relation to the money form as a result of what he calls “unconscious cosmological projection.” Then, I will elucidate my own positive account of the origins and development of PSM in terms of its ideological function in response to the aristocratic and social crises of the Archaic period and the inability of its proponents to recognize the latent content of the money form as an externalization of the total social labor that posits both the equality of labor and its thoroughgoing interdependence.
Finally, in Part 4 I will discuss the methodological, historical and practical implications of the preceding reconstruction, with an eye to the larger project set out in this introduction.
There are also two appendices attached to this essay, the first of which details the methodological background that underlies the arguments presented in the body of the essay, and the second of which provides a more concrete reconstruction of the relevant historical developments that took place between the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces and the consolidation of the poleis in the Archaic. The second in particular is important for putting the developments discussed in Part 2 in their proper perspective and justifying a number of the claims made there.
My beginning this piece with an examination of Marcuse’s essay “The Concept of Essence” is in some sense a nod to the biographical origins of the investigation I am undertaking here. It was his essay that sent me down the path that culminated in the writing of the essay you are reading now. So, if you’ll allow me to be a little loose with my terms, beginning in this way can be seen as an attempt to leave somewhat ajar the doors of the hidden abode of production whose product stands before you in the form of a finished work; Or, in a more Hegelian vein, to lay bare the process of mediation without which the result would appear as a bare immediacy stripped of its full meaning and conceptual content. To properly elucidate the concepts developed here, the conceptual and methodological problems in Marcuse’s essay that served as their origin must themselves be taken back up into their exposition, and so I must begin with an account of Marcuse’s position. At the same time, it should be understood that the primary purpose of this essay is not the evaluation of that position, but rather the development of an account of the emergence of the concept of essence and its socio-historical determination, which, despite inheriting its object and certain animating problems from Marcuse’s account, rests on different principles, principles that could be said to represent the determinate negation of those that Marcuse’s essay is founded on. In this sense, Marcuse’s position is only a starting point, but it is nevertheless an essential starting point.
At first glance, Marcuse’s essay has the appearance of offering a historical materialist account of the emergence and development of the concept of essence (and to some extent it does do so, as we’ll see below). It is framed as an attempt to show how “even [the] loftiest conceptions of philosophy are subject to historical development,” and how “so much of men’s real struggles and desires went into the metaphysical quest for an ultimate unity, truth, and universality of Being that they could not have failed to find expression in the derived forms of the philosophical tradition.”
The first way in which it does so is by restricting the scope of the socio-historical determination of thought. In order to account for the apparent invariance of the content of the concept of essence, which he glosses as “the abstraction and isolation of the one true Being from the constantly changing multiplicity of appearances,” Marcuse argues that it is the “position and function [of such concepts] within philosophical systems” [italics mine] that is subject to change.
The obscurity of the origins of this transcendent content creates a number of problems for the beginning of Marcuse’s historical account. Without the ability to give a historical explanation of the origins of the content of the concept of essence, he is forced to posit its emergence as an external bringing-together of independently pre-existing determinations (or of the philosophical problems that underlie them).
If there is an invariance in certain elements of the concept of essence, or of any other metaphysical category—which does have a certain plausibility given a cursory look at the history of philosophy—then that invariance must itself be understood historically. First, it must be established (which it isn’t clear to me has been done, whether by Marcuse or anyone else), and then it must be traced to its roots in the socio-historical conditions of the various periods in which it can be observed, whether this means finding some common condition, or set of conditions, that explain its persistence, or providing an explanation of how a set of relatively contingent circumstances led to its maintenance under different modes of production despite lacking such a common basis.
Additionally, this obscurity about origins begins to give us a sense of why there is no historical account of the social conditions of Classical Athens in Marcuse’s essay, despite his claim that that is where the concept of essence first emerged. The ahistorical nature of the content allows it to appear as a pure origination, one that seems to have been completely contingent and in no need of explanation. Still, even the supposedly ahistorical nature of the content does not fully explain the complete lack of socio-historical grounding that we are discussing. For example, one would expect the position and function of the Platonic concept of essence to still be subject to such grounding given Marcuse’s framing, but this is conspicuously absent from his exposition.
The reason for this has to do with the deeper set of deficiencies revealed by Marcuse’s framing, which themselves have to do with the overall interpretive apparatus of the essay, which is over-reliant on “expressive causality” or homology and ultimately subsumes its historical materialist elements under an idealist philosophy of history.
We can call the first level quasi-Heideggerian because it is where the lingering influence of a Heideggerian problematic—recall that Marcuse was a student of Heidegger—is most prominent. It is also the level on which the bulk of the interpretation of Plato’s concept of essence is conducted. At this level, Marcuse reads Plato’s concept of essence according to an altered version of the Heideggerean conception of metaphysics in which the primarily question is of the relationship between Being and beings, a relationship that is made possible by a transcendence of the “facticity” of beings.
We can call the second level the historical materialist level because it operates on the basis of the concept of the mode of production, although it does so according to an economically determined expressive causality that might incline us to label it “vulgar” historical materialism. This is the level at which the socio-historical determination of the concept of essence is read on the basis of changes to its position and function. It is this level of interpretation that generates the most interesting insights in the historical section of the essay, despite the limits of its expressive mechanism. In each case, changes in the function of the concept of essence are read first in terms of the division set up on the first level between bad facticity and potentiality, as embodying, distorting, displacing or eliminating the “critical gap” between them that was established in the the case of Plato, and then reread in terms of the homology between these changes and changes in the configuration of the forces and relations of production.
The third level can be labeled the quasi-Hegelian or idealist level because it operates on the basis of the concept of freedom, building on the readings of the previous two levels and rereading them in terms of freedom in order to construct a teleological metanarrative that resembles the Hegelian philosophy of history in its broad outlines. In this metanarrative, the “interest of freedom” is seen as the originating impulse and inner essence of the development of philosophy, and Marxism, or the “materialist doctrine of essence,” represents the culmination of that development insofar as it takes as its object the actualization of freedom—which has been made into a real possibility by the social conditions of the modern era.
It is the idealist philosophy of history constructed by the third level, and its subsumption of the historical materialist interpretation, based on the concept of the mode of production, under itself, that forms the most objectionable part of Marcuse’s overall position and causes the most distortion of both the historical material and the project of historical explanation itself. At the same time, even without that subsumption, Marcuse’s reliance on homology would have limited his ability to properly explain the socio-historical emergence and development of the concept of essence, even according to the determinations of the “materialist doctrine of essence” that he himself set out in the latter half of his essay.
To avoid the problems that prevented Marcuse from developing an adequate account of the socio-historical determination of essence, our investigation must rest on a thoroughly different methodological foundation from his—one whose basic impulses arise from the determinate negation of the abstract transcendence, formalism and idealist philosophy of history that subsumed and restricted the historical materialist elements that gave Marcuse’s essay its original appeal. This means starting with the concrete socio-economic conditions themselves that gave rise to the concept of essence and any antecedents it may have had, rather than starting from presupposed conceptual determinations of that concept and interpreting them on the basis of a teleological metanarrative or philosophy of history.
Another prominent Marxist figure who has attempted to address the social determination of Ancient Greek philosophy is Alfred Sohn-Rethel. In his book Manual and Intellectual Labor Sohn-Rethel, like Marcuse, attempts to construct a grand historical narrative that explains the origins of a central feature of bourgeois thought—this time the epistemological foundations of “scientific cognition” as a whole and trace it back to its socio-historical foundations, which he locates in the “exchange abstraction” and, more generally, in the division between manual and intellectual labor. Also like Marcuse, Sohn-Rethel does this in order to say something about the overcoming of capitalism, this time in terms of the overcoming of said division between manual and intellectual labor, rather than in terms of the realization of freedom. In examining the work of Sohn Rethel, we will find that it is plagued by many of the same problems as Marcuse’s attempt. Our old friends formalism, homology, transcendence and idealism will all rear their heads once again, although in enough of a different manner as to remain instructive. If nothing else, this examination will serve to differentiate the methodological principles at work in this essay and the questions it attempts to answer from those of a superficially similar, but fundamentally different project that it might be associated with.
The first point to make about Manual and Intellectual Labor is that despite its historical materialist dressing, Sohn-Rethel’s project is completely enveloped by the Kantian problematic it takes as its object of critique. He starts by saying that he accepts Kant’s premise that “the principles of knowledge fundamental to the quantifying sciences cannot be traced to the physical and sensorial capacity of experience.”
In addition to the formalism of his ahistorical conception of abstract intellect, Sohn-Rethel’s Kantian problematic also leads him to to formulate his conception of “the exchange abstraction” and its “laws” or “formal structure” on the basis of its necessary conditions of possibility. At first, he attempts to give his derivation of the structuring concepts of abstract intellect a materialist veneer by arguing that they derive from the act of exchange in its opposition to the act of use. But, as Jameson reminds us, historical materialism “does not assert the primacy of matter so much as it insists on an ultimate determination by the mode of production,” a reminder which equally applies to activity abstracted from its mode of production as it does matter.
Neither does “the physical act of transfer,” which Sohn-Rethel puts forward as the pseudo-materialist base upon which these social postulates are supposed to operate, play any part in Marx’s analysis of the commodity form.
It is here that we can finally begin to understand the otherwise strange and highly idiosyncratic decision to ground the account of real abstraction in the act of exchange considered as physical transfer and the social postulates considered as necessary conditions of possibility—a conception that one would be hard pressed to derive from the works of Marx taken on their own. It is the typically Kantian concern with establishing the validity of the non-empirical concepts involved in mathematical and scientific cognition in relation to experience that best makes sense of the motivation for this decision.
In order to avoid the formalism and dualism that Sohn-Rethel is led into by his Kantian problematic, in this essay I will be focusing not on the emergence of some transcendental structure or general mode of thinking (whether this be conceived in terms of “scientific thought,” “abstract intellect,” “philosophy,” or “rationality”), but rather on the emergence of a determinate concept, abstract substance, as it arises in the determinate circumstances in which it was developed, and insofar as it represents the first clear formulation of the opposition between being and an abstract substratum thought to posit it and constitute its truth—without assuming that this recognizability entails a continuity in with later formulations of essence in terms of its meaning or function. This means to bracket off those other questions, not because I don’t think there is anything to them—I suspect that there are actually multiple relatively independent processes taking place on different time scales, but do not discount the possibility of a significant and transformative convergence of some of these processes in Archaic and Classical Greece that corresponds with the purported object of the above theories—but because I don’t think approaching such a question in such broad strokes is productive for understanding the actual historical developments under consideration. It is only by paying attention to the intricate and particular details of historical processes, and situating them within the context of the total social process that they form moments of, and of the determinate mode(s) of production on the basis of which that process takes place, that these questions can be answered without running the risk of falling into the schematic and ahistorical kind of thinking that overtook Sohn-Rethel. Unlike Sohn-Rethel, I do not think that there is a singular key to unlocking the mysteries of the social determination of abstract thought, and so, to sail through the narrow passage between the Scylla of this kind of reductionism and the Charybdis of losing oneself in the immensity of the details, broader questions must be sacrificed (at least temporarily) in order to preserve the seaworthiness of our explanatory vessel.
As we saw above, in order to understand the emergence of a recognizable concept of essence in Pre-Socratic Monism, we must situate it within the total social process that its development constituted a moment of.
In the Homeric poems, we can see both poles of this process of development—despite the archaizing perspective of the bardic author. For now, our focus must be on the earlier pole, which was characterized by a mode of production in which commodity production and exchange were relatively marginal and slavery had not yet taken on the central place in the mode of exploitation that it would in the later period.
The bard was another figure involved in this system of divine sanction, and it is in the religious structure of Homeric society that connects the bard and the warrior aristocrat—and in its mytho-poetic representation—that we can most clearly see the place of truth in Pre-Archaic Greek social formations, in which it had a different content and set of conceptual relations than it would come to have in PSM. The bard was seen as able to imbue action and speech with divine sanction, though of a particular type: the sanction of the Muses.
Should we understand this social function of the bard, in which the truth of their statements was embedded, as merely an ideological support for the rule of the warrior-aristocrat? This was clearly one aspect of the bard’s function, but even it must be taken in the context of a social situation in which that rule was based on the role of the aristocrat in the necessary social labor that ensured the reproduction of the community. Furthermore, the bards themselves clearly played an independent role in that necessary labor insofar as their praise and blame, as well as the broader narrative context in which it was allocated, did not merely sanction the rule of warrior-aristocracy, but also preserved and transmitted the customs and broader cultural heritage through which social relations, both within a community and between communities in a broader network of alliance and obligation, were mediated. This is the function that secured their truth, that gave it its meaning, that vested it in them as bearers of that function, and that was expressed as an oracular connection with a divine world in which memory provides access equally to past, present, and future as elements of an atemporal ‘plane of truth.’
At this point, it is useful to compare this mythico-religious conception of truth with the determination of truth as it would appear once it had become situated within the conceptual relations of PSM. In the latter, truth will have taken on the determination that Marcuse identifies with it of establishing a hierarchical relation between levels of reality in which one level is taken to be in some sense more “real” than another. It will also have assumed the connection to unity, universality, and abstraction that Marcuse posits as characteristic of the concept of essence. In the earlier bardic conception, despite significant continuities (which we will return to shortly) the overall determination of truth is different on both scores. On the first, while it is does appear to distinguish between two different levels of reality, and does do so to some extent—i.e. between the divine, atemporal “plane of truth” and the mortal realm—its real opposition is with oblivion (lēthē), and its function is primarily to distinguish, within the mortal realm, and through the action of divine memory, that which is to be preserved and elevated up to the undying realm of the gods from that which does not merit preservation and so will be forgotten and sink down into oblivion.
Still, the similarities are significant. Most importantly, bardic truth does posit a division between different planes of reality, one sensible and mortal, and the other supersensible and in some way atemporal. This atemporality has a certain ambivalence between the senses of immortality as that which does not die and permanence as that which is invariant or eternal. Both of these senses can be seen as related to the social function of the bard. The first relates to the distinctly personal and subjective aspects of this function. It is the mechanism of oral transmission and its characteristic objects (warrior-aristocrats and their words and deeds) that determine atemporality as immortality, as an elevation of particular elements of the concrete mortal world to a special status in which their temporal nature is not so much removed as infinitely extended by the memory of the bard and the act of preservation and transmission through the process of telling and retelling.
In preserving and transmitting the customs and broader cultural heritage in which the social relations of production and reproduction were embedded, the bard reproduces the necessary social presuppositions of the social formation. As presuppositions, these stand outside the sensuous activity of the community as conditions of communal production that are not themselves produced by the community. They thus stand outside the normal process of becoming that characterizes the everyday life of the community, and bring together past (as pre-existent), present (as conditions of the current existence of the living community) and future (as conditions of the continuing reproduction of the community) in their separation from that process. This can be seen as the foundation of the second sense of atemporality as being outside the flow of time, as well as of the basic separation between a sensuous and temporal plane of reality and a supersensuous and atemporal one on which the bardic conception of truth as a whole rests.
Despite the otherwise general reconfiguration of the concept of truth in the time between the bardic conception and that of PSM, in which the interactive parallelism of the earlier conception became a foundational relationship based on logical-metaphysical rather than moral categories, the basic division on the basis of which the latter conception continued to be structured, between a sensible and temporal realm and a supersensible and atemporal one, can be seen to have already been present in the earlier conception. How should we explain this continuity? Given the basis of the earlier form of the division in the social function of the bard of reproducing the necessary presuppositions of the social formation as a whole, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the persistence of this division was based on the persistence of this social function and to posit that the changes in its organization have their basis in changes in the operation of that function. If we then look at the historical evidence, we do in fact find that this function both persists and undergoes significant change. As we shall see in more detail below, in the later period the impersonal institution of monetary exchange had come to replace the relational institutions of the earlier period as the primary form of social mediation on which the unity of the social formation as such was based, and so also it had itself become the primary social presupposition on which social production rested.
As we shall see in the following sections, the emergence of essence in PSM and its relation to the money form is more complicated than this correspondence would suggest. For one, the objectification of the primary social presuppositions of the changing mode of production meant the dissolution of the direct relationship between speech and the social function of reproducing those presuppositions. It is this direct relationship that grounds the truth of bardic speech, and without it, any assertion of the continuing relevance of that social function to the determination of truth runs the risk of being reduced to mere homology. Relatedly, the correspondence on its own is unsatisfactory insofar as it does not explain why the objectification of the social preconditions of the process of production resulted in a transformation of the determination of truth rather than its abandonment as the social system in which it was embedded collapsed. In fact, there is a divergent intellectual tendency among the Greek aristocracy that did abandon the concept of truth after the collapse of the social conditions of its mytho-religious formulation—the intellectual lineage leading from Simonides of Ceos down to the sophists and beyond.
Filling out the tapestry whose warp has been laid out above means turning to the transformations wrought by commercialization, military reform and the consolidation of a slave mode of production in the development of Greek social formations between the Early Iron Age and the Archaic Period.
Even the most noted change of this period, the development of the polis, can be seen to be a result of this process of commoditization and monetization. In Appendix 2, I describe how the centers of concentrated settlement that would develop into the first poleis were themselves nodes of long distance trade and the expanding commodity relations that accompany it, as well as the role of this commercial expansion in the centering of slavery within the primary process of production. The polis, as an urban area that incorporated its surrounding countryside, on which it was dependent for subsistence, was made possible by these same developments.
That the typical polis was centered around its agora, or marketplace, is indicative, but even more decisive is the composition of the poleis, or more specifically, of the astē. Their primary residents were 1) aristocrats enabled to live away from their land holdings by the surplus labor extracted from slaves, serfs, or debt bondsman 2) craftsmen whose livelihoods were primarily dependent on selling commodities to those aristocrats in exchange for the products of that same surplus labor, and 3) the urban poor who begged or sold their labor-power to the aristocrats or to the polis itself for a wage.
In contrast to the personal authority that gave unity to the earlier social formations discussed above, and the institutions of personal reciprocity that mediated social relations within and between them, the monetized exchange relations that formed the primary basis of social mediation within the polis were impersonal and given objective unity by money itself as the universal embodiment of commodity-producing human labor. As the universal equivalent, money is separated off from the diverse mass of commodities as the material body in which each and all of them represent their value. It homogenizes the diverse particular forms of human activity whose products it is exchanged for. When a commodity producer exchanges their product for money, they exchange it for the embodiment of human labor in the abstract, for a commodity that has the exclusive function of representing the value of all other commodities. In this act of exchange, they posit their concrete, particular, private labor as abstract, universal, social labor. To the extent that a member of society produces commodities that they exchange for money, they posit their labor as social and qualitatively equal with all the other particular forms of labor that express their values in money. They posit their own labor as a fraction of the total social labor, but at the same time as social only insofar as it is exchanged for money, that is to say only indirectly. In this way the money form privatizes at the same time as it socializes, obscuring the social character of the productive activity of the members of society by embodying it as an external object, and one which can be possessed by an individual.
This means that social mediation lost its interpersonal basis to the extent that it became monetized. If a man had money, he didn’t need a patronymic and lineage, nor loyalty, nor customary obligation, nor reputation, nor martial prowess to exercise social power or accumulate its trappings; he could pay for whatever product of the labor of others he wanted or needed and they wouldn’t ask who he was or why he wanted it, so long as they received money in return. To command an army no longer required one to inhabit a defined place in a hierarchy of privileges and obligations defined by honor and heredity but merely to have enough money to pay mercenaries to do your bidding, and this is how many Tyrants usurped power in the Archaic period and beyond.
These developments resulted in a series of acute social crises that spread out across the Greek Mediterranean as the traditional social forms that undergirded the personal authority and class cohesion of the warrior-aristocracy were undermined. These crises began as crises of the warrior-aristocracy in the face of changing social conditions that then turned into general social crises—to a large extent as a result of the aristocratic responses to those very conditions. We already see this state of crisis expressed in the Homeric epics, both of which revolve around crises of aristocratic reciprocity and the institutions that mediated it.
The Homeric response to the crisis laid out in the poems is characteristic of the overall aristocratic response to crisis in its tendency to lionize the outmoded institutions and values that previously upheld and legitimized aristocratic rule while ignoring or degrading the elements of change that undercut its viability. In a sense the aristocracy as a class acted in similar fashion to Achilles or Odysseus, obstinately trying to hold on to their honor, to the system of values and institutions in which their power and their way of life were embedded, in the face of a reality that ensured that this attempt would lead them to ruin. This impulse to double down on the traditional ideals and modes of conduct in the face of changing circumstances is part of what spelled trouble for the hereditary aristocracy in the context of a social world in which the development of commodity relations had created more integrated social formations with new incentives for accumulation of individual wealth, and possibly had also reduced the tolerance of the lower classes, especially the upper strata of these lower classes, for being treated as targets of appropriation rather than partners to an equal exchange.
The fuller extent of this dynamic comes into view when we look at what we know of the early laws of Athens and the circumstances that gave birth to them. The homicide law of Drako is clearly a response to the untenability of inter-elite blood feuds and the general impression we have of the seventh century BCE is that it was riven by crises arising from this kind of violent inter-elite strife within the hereditary aristocracy and between them and newer claimants to wealth and power.
At the same time, this violent spasm was not just the death rattle of an old form of aristocracy, it was also the final labor pang in the birth of a new form. One of its most significant functions was to allow the consolidation of land in the hands of the aristocrats through direct violence, debt and the exercise of political power, thereby establishing the basis of their continuing supremacy within the emerging relations of exploitation.
Solon’s laws also abolished the hektemoroi, the situation in which a portion of the population had to pay one-sixth part of their product to others. Harris argues that this did not represent the abolition of debt or the ending of a type of serfdom, as has been traditionally argued, but rather the prohibition of tribute payments like those seen in the Homeric epics, but which had become formalized into a system of fixed payments.
It is also worth noting in connection with this that Solon made wealth—defined by agricultural output—the primary criteria for political participation, which likely expanded the base of that participation to certain upper-middle strata who had previously been excluded, even if the distinctions between the ‘classes’ were fairly fine and all referred to owners of substantial amounts of property, as Osborne argues.
Across the Greek Mediterranean, the primary agents in the overthrow of the old aristocratic political order were a series of figures known as tyrants (among whom some count Solon himself, although he was somewhat unusual in being appointed to resolve the civil strife in Athens rather than seizing power by force). The tyrants were not just agents but also expressions of the crisis of aristocracy—and of the class struggle that it was enmeshed with. They often rose to power using the new means made available to them by the process of commercialization and the conflict generated by the exhaustion of traditional modes of aristocratic power. They played aristocratic factions and clans off each other, took up the causes of the burgeoning middle strata of medium sized landowners and larger landowners excluded from the hereditary aristocracy’s monopoly on political power (some of whom probably derived their wealth from commercial activities before using it to buy land), played on the discontent among the lower strata of small and dispossessed peasants, hired mercenaries to back their coups, and bought off important people and segments of the population either directly or through public expenditure. Many of these means were based directly on money as a new impersonal form of social power that could be accumulated by an individual and used to purchase things (status, good will, military forces) traditionally reserved for those who had personal authority issuing from their place in a system of defined social roles and obligations. Others were based on the conditions of class struggle associated with large-scale shifts in social relations produced by both commercialization and the consolidation of a slave mode of production. It was these conditions that were decisive for the tyrants writ large and that defined their overall historical role in breaking the political control of the hereditary warrior-aristocracy and expanding the class base of political participation.
Along with commercialization, changes in the mode of exploitation, and the class struggle that accompanied these, the final major factor that drove the crisis of aristocracy in the Archaic was a shift in the organization and conduct of warfare known as the Hoplite Revolution. Though the orthodox position that a revolution in the conduct of warfare—in which the adoption of the hoplite panoply and phalanx tactics led to the increasing importance of a middling stratum of independent farmers in the composition of Greek armies starting in the 7th century BCE, and, as a result, to the increasing political and social power of this middling stratum—remains controversial, and continues to be challenged in many of its details, Hanson persuasively argues that it holds up in its broad strokes.
It is in the context of this need that we should understand the development and spread of Pre-Socratic Monism and the concept of essence which emerged within it. But, before turning to PSM itself, it is useful to look at the writings of Theognis of Megara, in which we can see evidence of the shifting aristocratic response to this crisis and the changes it brought to the determination of truth even before development of PSM.
The poems attributed to Theognis are thought to have been written sometime between 650 and 550 BCE, thus firmly within the early period of the acute crisis of aristocracy that I have been discussing, but slightly before (or contemporaneous with) the first thinkers of PSM. In them, the poet bemoans the state of affairs in his polis, where, “this city is a city still, but lo! her people are other men, who of old knew neither judgments nor laws, but wore goatskins to pieces about their sides, and had their pasture like deer without this city; and now they be good men, O son of Polypaus, and they that were high be now of low estate.”
The first thing to note here is that unlike in the Homeric picture of the crisis that we discussed above, the commercial origins of the more acute crisis faced by Theognis can no longer be omitted or downplayed. At the same time, the effects of commercialization—represented here by wealth (the abstract expression of which is almost certainly a sign of its monetization)—can still be, and constantly are, denigrated and disavowed. This shows a certain continuity in the aristocratic response to commercialization and its effects—despite the shift in emphasis from omission and downplaying to denigration and disavowal, and despite the explicit foregrounding of (the bearers of) monetized wealth as the cause of the crisis.
The second is that heredity has become the defining feature of aristocracy rather than honor or martial prowess, despite the supplemental quality power (authority/influence) preserving some residue of the origins of the former in the latter. On the other hand, the other two supplemental qualities represent newer values that were absent in the Homeric portrayal of the warrior-aristocrat (although we might see a precursor to the foregrounding of judgment in the craftiness of Odysseus), ones determined by the crisis and changing material basis of aristocracy itself. It is telling in this respect that one of the primary meanings of judgment within the poems seems to be the ability to correctly discern who and what is truly good in the face of the deceptive appearances generated by wealth, which is to say that judgment, as a definitional attribute of true aristocracy entails to a large extent the very ability to distinguish the aristocratic from the common. In this sense we could say that in Theognis, the aristocratic value system that upheld the legitimacy of the Homeric warrior-aristocrat has been evacuated of much of its concrete meaning and reduced to a bare status distinction the primary determination of which—heredity—is not substantial enough to clearly delineate it in the eyes of even its defenders.
The third thing of note is that the conception of truth put forward here represents a sort of intermediate conception between the mytho-religious and philosophical conceptions discussed above in relation to bardic truth. In Theognis, truth had not yet taken on its relationship to the metaphysical categories of unity, universality, and abstraction that it would in the concept of essence. Its sorting process still operated on the basis of moral criteria (albeit new moral criteria) and took people, words, and deeds as its characteristic objects. It was concerned with separating the good (aristocratic) person—or their actions, words or intentions—from the bad, though this had already become a process that functioned on the basis of a split between hierarchically ordered levels of reality, between sensible outward appearances and an imperceptible true content seen to underlies them.
At the end of Part 1, I argued that the transition from the bardic conception of truth to that of PSM was a result of the objectification of the function of reproducing the primary social presuppositions that underlie the existence of the social formation as a whole. Theognis lived in a social formation in which this objectification was relatively incomplete and it is on that basis that we can understand the incompleteness of his conception of truth. This incomplete objectification had proceed to the point where the individual-subjective aspects of the social function of the bard had been supplanted, but the generalization of monetary mediation had not yet reached the point that it would after the introduction of coinage, and so the position of money as the primary presupposition of the social totality had not been fully solidified.
It is also in this light that we should see the inaccessibility of truth in Theognis, as well as the relative diminishment of the importance of atemporality in his conception of it. It is because the social function of the bard had broken down and the reproduction of the social presuppositions had not yet found a stable bearer in money that the status of the truth, which had previously been grounded in that function, became uncertain
Additionally, the opposition between the material body of money and its value had not been brought out into the full clarity that it would achieve after the introduction of coinage. In the distinction between legitimate and counterfeit coinage that undergirds Theognis’ conception of truth, it is the material body of money (its weight, purity, etc.) that distinguishes the true from the false, whereas, with the introduction of coinage, the heightened visibility of the difference between a coins value and the value of the metal it is coined from will reverse this relation—making it the abstract value rather than the material body of money that takes precedence—and thereby facilitate the transition to a conception of truth centered around the determinations of money as the embodiment of value, i.e. unity, universality and abstraction.
It is the combination of both of these factors—the incomplete objectification of the primary social presuppositions and the underdevelopment of the opposition between use-value and value—that explains the peculiarities of Theognis conception of truth, especially the incompleteness and problematic character of it that led us to see it as intermediate or transitional. In the poems of Theognis a new conception of truth began to emerge from the husk of the old, just as in his social situation a new mode of production was being born from the crisis of the preceding forms. It is only with the consolidation of this new mode, whose fundamental moments were monetary mediation and the exploitation of slave labor, that the fledgling determination of truth glimpsed in his works was able to develop into the fully-fledged concept of essence that characterized the thought of the Pre-Socratic Monists.
As we shall see in Part 3, this did not happen of its own accord—a brute movement of the economic base that resounded through the superstructure and can be interpreted on the basis of homology. It was rather a reciprocal process in which certain conceptions were taken up and developed by certain (class-determined) subjects in response to the economic and social transformations facing them and on the basis of the functionality of those conceptions for those subjects within the class struggle that situated them, and, perhaps, on an inability on the part of those subjects to recognize the true content of the value form.
It is now time to turn to the emergence of the concept of essence itself and begin to build an account of its socio-historical determination. In this section, I will build off of Richard Seaford’s account of the relationship between money and Pre-Socratic Monism in Money and the Early Greek Mind in order to establish a baseline conception of this relation. Then, in the next section, I will provide a critique of Seaford’s account, showing how it runs into many of the same pitfalls that we saw earlier in Marcuse and Sohn-Rethel. This critique will provide a basis for developing my own positive conception of this relationship and its broader socio-historical determination in the third section. There, I will argue that it is only by understanding the determination of the concept of abstract substance developed in PSM in terms of its function as part of an aristocratic ideological project in response to the crisis outlined above that we can explain it adequately.
The great merit of Seaford’s analysis of the relationship between money and Pre-Socratic thought, and what sets him apart from Marcuse and Sohn-Rethel, is the attention he pays to the concrete conditions in which this relationship developed. In part, this attention to the concrete is probably a product of general intellectual orientation and training as a classicist, but it is also a result of his delimitation of his object of investigation to what he identifies as the emergence of a specifically metaphysical content in the thought of the Pre-Socratics.
The most important consequence of the concreteness enabled by this delimitation is that Seaford, unlike Marcuse or Sohn-Rethel, is able to offer an explanation of why the emergence of the concept of essence occurred at the specific time and in the specific places that it did. His answer to these questions will ultimately turn out to be incomplete, but they provide us with many of the building blocks out of which my own explanation will be built. For Seaford, the most important of these changes is the introduction of coinage, which both leads to an intensification of the pace and extent of monetization and to a development of the opposition between use-value and value inherent in money.
Seaford also further specifies the significance of these two factors to the development of PSM and its central concept of abstract substance in ways that align with our exposition at the end of Part 2. He argues that rapid monetization results in what he calls the “social transcendence” of “monetary value” which he aligns with the “integrative power” of money, that explains the impersonal cosmology of the Pre-Socratics.
In a similar fashion, Seaford’s account of the development of the opposition between concrete use-value and abstract value in coinage confirms and expands our understanding of its role in the development of PSM. He argues that coinage brings out this opposition, in two ways. The first is by diminishing the importance of the material qualities of the metal (its weight, purity, etc.) in favor of abstract quantity (the determinations of unit and amount) and the second is by establishing a “systematic discrepancy between the conventional value of a coin and the concrete value of its bullion.”
In addition to the introduction of coinage, Seaford’s concreteness allows him to specify a number of other important socio-historical conditions of the emergence of the concept of abstract substance, although, without an explicit concept of the mode of production, he is left to present them (for the most part) as an external aggregate of independent conditions, which prevents him from giving an adequate account of the determinate relationships between them. The most important of these are the crisis of the traditional social order centered around the warrior-aristocracy, the class struggle that accompanied the rise of the Tyrants, and the aristocratic ideology of self sufficiency.
The third, on the other hand, introduces a new consideration, and one that will play an important part in my own conception of the social determination of PSM. Seaford introduces this ideological consideration in his discussion of Parmenides in order to explain the “problem of why value is abstracted from circulation.”
This ideological determination of PSM brings us closer to our own concern with its ideological character, although it doesn’t go far enough in that direction insofar as it posits the ideological as an external influence that shapes the development of the concept of abstract substance—and does so at a relatively late stage in this development. This relative externality of ideological considerations to the determination of the substance concept of PSM raises the question of what, for Seaford, differentiates the ideological character of the concept of self-sufficiency from the supposedly non-ideological character of the money-derived content of the concept of substance. Seaford does not explicitly spell this out, but it is clear from the way he discusses self-sufficiency that it must be the derivation of the former concept from the class structure of the social formations in question—and from the position of the aristocracy within that structure—that marks it as ideological.
Following De Ste. Croix, Seaford describes the “ideology of economic self-sufficiency” as an expression of the “crucial opposition between those who by virtue of their command over the labor power of others were free to lead a civilized life (the ‘propertied class’) and those who had to work to maintain themselves.”
As I said at the beginning of the last section, Seaford’s account of the emergence and development of PSM gets us a long way towards our goal of explaining the socio-historical determination of the concept of essence. In this section, I will identify the aspects of Seaford’s analysis of the relationship between money and Pre-Socratic Monism that make it insufficient in relation to this goal. I will argue that this insufficiency is related to the formalistic framework of his project, which bears a number of similarities to the aspects of the works of Marcuse and Sohn-Rethel that I criticized at the beginning of this piece.
The formalism of Seaford’s approach can be detected in both its aims and its method. It aims at showing that money, or monetization, is a necessary historical condition of possibility of the “genesis and form” of the “metaphysical preconceptions about the basic constituent of the world and its transformations” shared by the various pre-socratic philosophers, or, in other words, of “the counter-intuitive idea of a single substance underlying the plurality of things manifest to the senses.”
Seaford’s argumentative method, while perhaps adequate to this aim, is constrained by the same formalism insofar as it centers around establishing that there is a (relatively complete) homology between the determinations of money and those of abstract substance, then eliminating other possible sources of the content of the latter (or assimilating them under the dominant influence of the monetary determinations on either historical or formal grounds (i.e. by showing the relative incompleteness of the homology between these and abstract substance), thereby establishing money as the source of those conceptual determinations.
Seaford does attempt to offer an explanatory mechanism that could bridge the gap between socio-historical conditions of possibility and the actual relationship between thought and those conditions, but it is caught up in many of the same problems as his overall approach. His proposal for addressing both the why and the how of the homology between the money form and the substance concept of PSM is the “unconscious cosmological projection of abstract monetary substance.”
The largest problem with this explanation is that the concept of projection itself is vague and Seaford does nothing to clarify the sense in which he is using it. As Laplanche and Pontalis had already pointed out in 1967, projection has been used in a number of different, often ill defined, senses, most of which can be reduced down to a general notion of displacement or externalization of an element (typically a psychological or neurological element).
Another reason for the inadequacy of Seaford’s account for our purposes is that he doesn’t give enough consideration to the function of PSM, or its central metaphysical concepts, within the broader social situation that they arise in, or within the determinate class relations that condition the individuals who developed it. This further consigns his explanation to its repetitive dependence on the homology between the money form and the concept of abstract substance and prevents him from escaping the charges of developing a reflection theory of socio-economic determination, despite his attempts to avoid the latter by acknowledging and integrating into his conception other sources of determination like political developments, mythological predecessors, ideological influences, and ego formation.
In order to avoid the problems that we attributed above to the formalism of Seaford’s approach, we must return to the crisis of aristocracy, and the series of developing social crises it kicked off and remained entangled with, and understand PSM in terms of how it functioned as a response to those crises and their development. In particular, we should understand it as a response to acute moments of crisis by members of the aristocracy that had specific functions in relation to their class position. The acute crisis brought on by rapid monetization after the introduction of coinage would have brought into sharper focus the disjunction between the ideological and libidinal constitution of the aristocratic subject, whose lingering attachment to certain ideas, values, and forms of activity still corresponded to a significant extent to a position within older relations of production that no longer characterized the reality they found themselves in and had to navigate in order to reproduce themselves both as individuals and as a class.
In this light, the conceptual innovations of PSM should be seen as a part of the broader aristocratic response to the acute developments of this crisis brought on by the rapid monetization of the social formations in which they arose. In general, it functioned to refashion the ideological foundations of the rule, self-conception and general worldview of the aristocracy in response to the threats posed to them by crisis—and the role the previous aristocratic ideological forms continued to play in the development and perpetuation of said crisis. Earlier, we saw how neither the nostalgic omission characteristic of Homer’s early response to the crisis brought on by commercialization, nor the anxious denigration of Theognis’ response, was able to adequately orient them to these changing conditions. At the same time, we saw how the parallel development of commercialization and the crisis allowed this need for ideological reconfiguration to come out more clearly in the poems of Theognis—where the emptying out of the previous value system had already prompted the beginnings of a reorientation towards new ones—and how this was accompanied by a reconceptualization of truth that mirrored the (still incomplete) objectification of the social function of reproducing the presuppositions of the social formation as a whole. We should understand the development of Pre-Socratic Monism as a new stage in this development of the aristocratic response to crisis in which the rapid and pervasive monetization brought on by the introduction of coinage (along with the other features of coins mentioned above) allowed the early philosophers to develop an ideological account that was able to more adequately respond to the crises they faced.
This functional conception aids our attempt to explain the socio-historical determination of the concept of essence in a number of ways. The first is by allowing us to develop a better account of the reasons for the isomorphism between the determinations of its concept of substance and the form-determinations of money. In order to more effectively respond to the social developments facing them, aristocrats in rapidly monetizing poleis, both individually and as a class, needed to develop a more adequate understanding of their societies. The crisis had created an unusual situation in which the reproduction of the exploiting class as a class required not so much a (more or less direct) reproduction of the ruling ideology, and its forms practice and “know-how”, as a fundamental transformation of the ruling ideology on the basis of which the exploiting class could refashion its misaligned and counter-productive forms of practice and “know-how.”
Our functional conception also allows us to return to the question we raised in Section 2.1 about the continuities between the Bardic conception of truth and the determination of truth in PSM, in which key elements of the earlier conception persisted despite the objectification of the social function of the bard, which eliminated the direct connection between speech and the reproduction of the social presuppositions of the social totality—a connection on which the truth of that speech had rested. As I noted above, Theognis’ transitional conception of Truth did not just correspond to the (incomplete) objectification of the formerly subjective presuppositions, but also to the attempt to reconfigure aristocratic values and redefine aristocracy on the basis of those values, however limited that attempt may have been. This ideological project provides a functional reason for the retention of the concept of truth among both Theognis and the pre-socratics, despite the collapse of the social relationships in which the traditional conception had been embedded.
There was a double reciprocality between the subjective project of the aristocratic proponents of PSM and the objective conditions in which that project was formulated. On the first level, the objective conditions determined the needs that the project constituted a response to and the class situation in which those needs and that response were situated, while the subjective project determined the specific way in which those needs would be taken up—i.e. in terms of the inherited traditions of the aristocratic subjects who formulated and developed that project and the promise of restoration that they held out. On the second level, the objective conditions also made it so that the subjective project could not be formulated along the same lines as it had been before. The objectification of the reproduction of the social presuppositions of the social formation as a whole, and the need for a reality schema on which to base the project of ideological realignment, meant that the traditional concept of truth had to be reformulated, while, from the subjective side, the contours of that traditional conception seem to have determined that reformulation as a reformulation that retained its connection to the (now objective) social presuppositions.
To fully understand this last point, we must examine the subjective reasons for retaining a conception of truth a little more closely. What was the appeal of a conception of truth for the aristocratic proponents of PSM? While we cannot say for certain, the most likely reason for this appeal, and the one that best explains the continued centrality of the social presuppositions to this conception, is that it has something to do with the transcendence enabled by the supersensible and atemporal aspects of truth, which was based on the social transcendence of the presuppositions of the social formation.
We can see here how the function of legitimating the rule of the aristocracy, which, in Section 2.1, we separated out in discussing the social function of the bard in as the less important side in terms of understanding the determination of truth, actually played a role in the persistence of that determination after the concrete relations in which it was embedded dissolved, and of its connection to the social transcendence of the social presuppositions. Without the direct connection that existed between bardic speech and the reproduction of those presuppositions, it was this function of legitimation and its connection to that transcendence that maintained the overall connection between truth and the now-objectified presuppositions. At the same time both the dissolution of that direct connection and the objectification of those presuppositions meant that truth had to be configured differently to maintain its general ideological functionality.
The third way in which our functional conception of PSM helps us is by allowing us to specify the relationship between the monetary content of PSM and the aristocratic ideology of self-sufficiency that we discussed in Section 3.1. This ideology of self-sufficiency, already recognizable in Homer, increasingly revealed itself to be the bedrock on which the distinction between aristocrat and non-aristocrat could be made as the monetary confusions of the crisis were worked out and weaker elements of the traditional concept of aristocracy, like heredity, fell to the wayside as the class was reconstituted along the lines set out by the transforming mode of exploitation and commercialization.
Both the reconfiguration of truth according to the determinations of the money form and the definition of aristocracy in terms of self sufficiency should be seen as part of the same project of ideological realignment that represented the subjective moment of the determination of PSM. The ideology of self-sufficiency centered around an abstract negation of dependence that allowed the aristocrat to be distinguished from both the commoner and the slave (and from women, who, even if part of an aristocratic household, were considered dependent on the male householder), and made the definition of aristocracy the same as that of freedom, which as a moral ideal provided both a justification for aristocratic rule and a normative standard on which individual conduct could be guided and evaluated, and thereby brought into line with the continuing reproduction of the mode of exploitation.
If we take a closer look at that class position in relation to the monetized economy of the polis, and the way in which aristocratic ideology represents a one-sided abstraction that covers over the contradictions inherent in that relation, this resemblance becomes even more telling. As the primary owners of the land and slaves through which the surplus product, on which the whole monetary economy of the polis was based, was appropriated, the aristocracy did indeed have a certain foundational independence in relation to that economy. At the same time, this appearance of independence, which expressed itself in the one-sided abstraction of the ideology of self-sufficiency, was matched by a reciprocal dependence on the slaves whose surplus labor supported their consumption, on the commodified division of labor that was inseparable from said surplus appropriation, and on the goods (and services) they received in exchange for the products of the surplus labor they appropriated, without which they could not have lived as they did.
This combination of determinations derived from the money form and the ideology of self-sufficiency (or the contradictory objective situation that it covered over) were complementary and helped to stabilize each other. The determination of truth as essence allowed the proponents of PSM to compensate for the one-sidedness of aristocratic self-sufficiency by aligning independence with true reality and consigning the side of aristocratic dependence to the inessential (and, following the absolute distinction posited by Parmenides, untrue) world of becoming. It also supplemented the ideological function of distinguishing between aristocrats and non-aristocrats on the basis of self-sufficiency with a positive account of their right to rule on the basis of intellectual superiority or access to truth. The determination of self sufficiency, on the other hand, allowed them to cohere and stabilize the concept of abstract substance itself in its reflection of the contradiction between the abstract value and concrete embodiment of money.
Our functional conception of PSM has already allowed us to develop a much more concrete conception of the emergence of the concept of essence in PSM, but there is one crucial question left to be answered in order to fill out this picture. This is the question of why the determinations of money took the form of cosmological or metaphysical determinations about the universe, or why they were displaced from their social context into the cosmological/metaphysical register. The first likely reason for this is that despite the innovativeness of their new conception, the early philosophers still did not produce it from thin air. The thinkers in the tradition of PSM needed to draw on the ideological resources present to them in order to refashion them, and these were largely cosmological and mytho-poetic.
The primary contradiction that motivated this displacement was between the equality of abstract human labor, which is posited by the money form, and the relations of exploitation that determined the class position of the aristocracy, which posited an inequality between the labor of slaves and that of free men. Marx himself notes this as an explanation for Aristotle’s inability to develop a concept of value in the first chapter of Capital. He says that “Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity values, all labor is expressed as equal human labor and therefore as labor of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labor-powers.”
There is another way in which this equality posited by the money-form may have served as a negative ground of the development of PSM. In order to posit the equality of different concrete labors, money must simultaneously posit them as homogenous fractions of the total social labor. In exchanging their products for money, the owners of those products posit the labor that went into them as as equal not to a specific other kind of labor, but rather to all other kinds of labor that have their equivalent in money, and this is what allows the value of the different products of those labors to appear “as values of quantitatively comparable magnitude.”
This explanation of the displacement also allows us to understand the process of progressive abstraction that we discussed above, in which the attempt to identify the nature of the underlying substance moved from candidates that resembled the concrete use-value of money to candidates that resembled its abstract value.
This absence created an instability in the conceptual content of the early formulations of PSM in which it oscillated between the poles of the contradiction, and it was the determination of self sufficiency that helped stabilize this oscillation by driving the process of progressive abstraction noted by Seaford. As PSM developed, there was a simultaneous increase in the prominence of self sufficiency in the substance concepts of its proponents and in the abstraction of that concept as it moved from a greater resemblance to concrete money toward one to abstract value, until, with Parmenides concept of abstract Being, the determinations of truth became completely identified with determinations of self-subsistent abstract value.
Now that our account of the emergence and development of the concept of essence in this first phase is drawing to a close, I will summarize the conclusions that can be drawn from what has been said in this section.The emergence of the concept of abstract substance should be understood as a functional response to the crisis caused by the reciprocal development of commercialization and the centralization of slavery in the relations of production. This crisis, and the misalignment it caused between the ideological constitution of the aristocracy and objective conditions they found themselves in, created a demand for fundamental ideological realignment that the Pre-Socratic Monists attempted to meet. To do so, they took up and adapted the traditional conception of truth as a means of both reasserting the legitimacy which it had conferred upon their predecessors and providing a reality schema on the basis of which the required reorientation could be grounded. This meant reconfiguring that conception on the basis of the determinations of money, which had taken the place of the customary and cultural traditions reproduced by the bard as the social presupposition of the social totality. At the same time, the contradiction between the substance of value and the position of the aristocracy required the determinations of money to be taken up in a disguised form in order to retain their functional value, displacing them into the cosmological/metaphysical register. But, this reconfiguration of truth on the basis of the displaced form determinations of money could not fulfill the ideological function demanded of it by the crisis on its own. It both required supplementation from, and helped cover over the one-sidedness of, the pre-existing and developing aristocratic ideology of self sufficiency, which provided a basic definition of the aristocrat on the basis of their place in the relations of exploitation, helped stabilize the conceptual confusion caused by the displacement of money, and determined the development of the concept of substance towards increasing abstraction and correspondence with abstract value rather than its concrete embodiment in money.
At the beginning of this piece, I said that in it I would focus on laying the groundwork for a larger project with two aims: providing a historical materialist account of the origins and development of the concept of essence and developing a Marxist theory of essence that facilitates the project of revolutionary praxis in the present. It is now time to evaluate our progress on these fronts, although, due to the preliminary nature of our investigation, what we will be able to say about the latter will necessarily be more abstract and provisional than what we can say about the former.
The contribution made by this piece with respect to the first aim can be broken up into two categories. The first is the confirmation and development of certain theoretical and methodological principles and the second is the provision of a baseline understanding of the emergence of the concept of essence itself in the Greek context. In terms of methodology, the main principles whose fruitfulness I believe has been shown in the course of our investigation, and which I would like to highlight here are:
Any explanation of the socio-historical determination of the concept of essence must be grounded in a reconstruction of the concrete historical material corresponding to particular social formations rather than transhistorical determinations or teleological schemas that determine that material retrospectively.
Such a reconstruction must itself have its basis in the mode of production and its transformations considered as a total social process in which relatively independent spheres and elements reciprocally condition one another in an asymmetrical fashion that gives priority to the broadly economic base.
Attention must be paid to uneven character of such a process, and especially to the lag between the ideological and subjective elements and the economic base, such as we saw in the case of the misalignment between the ideological constitution of the aristocratic subject and the demands imposed upon them by their changing position in the class structure of their social formations.
The identification of a homology between conceptual or ideological elements and economic or more broadly social ones can serve as a starting point for investigation and indicator of a connection between those elements and their conditions of possibility, but this identification must be surpassed to offer a proper explanation.
A key element of any such explanation is a functional account of the taking up of certain of the objective contents of such a homology into thought.
Such a functional account should involve the two moments of class-situated response to the objective situation and subjective project oriented towards intervening in class struggle–and so acting on the objective conditions that solicited the response.
Principles 4–6 in particular represent the methodological results of the investigation undertaken here, and though they remain open to revision or qualification on the basis of further study, I believe that they provide a strong foundation upon which to conduct such study. One way of viewing such a contribution is as an extension of the Hegelian determination of the concept as purposive activity that takes up and transforms its external conditions, and its Marxist reformulation in terms of labor, to the question of the socio-historical determination of philosophy.
On the side of the historical content of the emergence and development of the concept of essence, the conclusions outlined at the end of Section 3.3 provide us with a starting point for constructing a broader narrative of that development up to the present. At the same time, we cannot assume a continuity in either the content or function of the concept of essence after this first phase, and so that construction would require a renewed effort of historical reconstruction of the development of both the concept itself and the conditions in which it developed. It is very possible that its persistence and development, if these can be established, resulted from its taking on different functions for different individuals and class fractions in different periods and circumstances. There is also a need for examining other regions like India and China in which a concept of essence seemed to emerge independently around the same time and incorporating those developments into our overall narrative.
The first is the connection between the reconfiguration of truth and the emergence of essence. Since it was the monetized objectification of the social presuppositions that determined the contours of the reconfiguration of truth at the heart of the emergence of the concept of essence, this also seems like a good place to look in terms of generating research questions on the basis of which to investigate the persistence of that concept. Is there a persistent connection between the determinations of essence and the role of money as a preposition of social production? Or between essence (or truth) and the general presuppositions regardless of whether or not these are monetary? Or, is this just a condition of their emergence that ceases to play a role in their persistence as time goes on? What happens when capital takes up both the monetary and non-monetary presuppositions into its own process of realization? Similarly, it seems like the negative conditioning of that emergence due to the inability to recognize the substance of value raises a similar set of questions. In particular, the question of whether the persistence of the displacement at the core of the emergence of the concept of essence has its basis in a continuing inability to recognize the equality and interdependence of human labor seems fruitful, and I have already given some provisional indications of how this continuity might manifest itself under capitalist relations of production in note 126. These are just two possible avenues of inquiry suggested by the project undertaken above, but I think they already provide a more promising basis for developing a concrete account of the history of the concept of essence than those currently available.
There is a significant historical distance between the object of my investigation here and revolutionary practice in the present day that makes it harder to evaluate its practical significance, so all of the following will have an even more provisional and suggestive character than even the historical conclusions discussed above. Still, I think elements of the research conducted here can help direct our attention in some pertinent directions in terms of developing a marxist concept of essence adequate to the task of facilitating contemporary revolutionary praxis. Before getting into this, I think it is important to point out that my research has led me to rethink Marcuse’s assumption that truth is a subordinate determination of the concept of essence, and to recognize that it was rather essence that appeared to be a form of the concept of truth, a reconfiguration of it on the basis of changing material conditions and ideological imperatives. It will take further research to determine how this relationship continued to be reconfigured over time, so, for now I will speak of the concept of essence with the understanding that it may in fact be the concept of truth in general that I’m attempting to refer to.
The first practical consideration I want to discuss has to do with the points made in section 3.3 about the function of essence as both a reality schema used to ground practic-ideological reorientation and as a means of legitimation of the place of the ruling class in the mode of exploitation. On the one hand, I think that the connection between essence and legitimation calls into question its usefulness for a revolutionary project, in which case it might only be the critique of the concept of essence that is useful to us—insofar as it provides us with a means of dispelling the connection between reality indexing and legitimation propagated by that concept. On the other hand, any revolutionary project itself needs a means of effecting practico-ideological reorientation on the basis of current realities, and this might be one of the ways in which a Marxist concept of essence would be valuable, although it would require disentangling these two functions in such a way that its reality schema could be based not on the reproduction of the current relations of production but instead on their overthrow. How to do this, and whether we need to, remain open questions, but I think the research undertaken here has provided a useful basis for beginning to think these questions through.
The second practical consideration relates to the negative grounds discussed near the end of section 3.3 and to Marcuse’s assertion of a relation between essence and freedom. I hope that my overall argument has served to dispel the notion that the concept of essence has any positive connection to any substantive idea of freedom that is not premised on exploitation. At the same time, I do think that the role of the negative grounds of an inability to recognize the equality and interdependence posited by the money form could indicate a negative and indirect relationship between the concept of essence and freedom, although this would require more historical work to verify. If the inability to recognize this content and/or opposition to the implications of its realization continued to provide a foundation for the maintenance of the projected determinations of money as metaphysical determinations in the concept of essence, then we should see this content as the continually returning repressed content that haunts thought throughout the history of philosophy, and the concept of essence as preserving the possibility of the realization of equality and interdependence in a negative manner, as that which cannot be realized in order for it to continue to function conceptually. We could also see this as part of the reason why the concept of essence is able to function as a reality schema for monetized social totality, which itself relies on the non-realization of substantive equality and direct interdependence in order to continue to exist as self-externalized social totality. Ultimately, freedom, in its adequate form as collective self-determination, is derivative of these latter determinations insofar as it is premised on the absence of exploitation and the directly collective self-determination of social production and reproduction, without which the possibility of purposive control of the production apparatus and the free mediation of the relationship between human beings and nature according to consciously determined purposes are impossible. Whether we determine that it is solely the critique of the concept of essence or also its reformulation that facilitates revolutionary practice today, we should take this primacy of equality and interdependence into account and orient ourselves more towards them than towards the freedom that would follow from them, or, in other words, we should orient ourselves towards freedom only insofar as it is seen as a product of the instantiation of substantive equality and collective mediation of our interdependent social production.
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