I know what you’re going to say—there are no citations to Sohn-Rethel in this criticism! Two things: first, I know that’s bad intellectual practice and I will return to I&ML to self-crit when I am inevitably told I am wrong; second, by not re-reading Sohn-Rethel before I write and citing Sohn-Rethel while I write this I am actually staying true to Sohn-Rethel’s approach to criticizing philosophy.

The notes are also out of order but at least they are divided by topic.

His Contribution

What’s he supposed to give us that no one else can? “The scandal of real abstraction.” Maybe this scandalizes empiricists. If you like real abstraction you should check out the realism-nominalism debate in Medieval Philosophy.

Blindspot: World Religion, World Philosophy

Generally, he does not pay attention to the role or origin of abstract thinking in religion either. When he does, it’s still only in Ancient Greece. This is a problem given that ‘religious’ thought, broadly construed, from around the world not only has moments of abstract thinking but also has an essential relationship to wisdom traditions / philosophical schools that develop independently of the origin of philosophy in Greece. If, as a good materialist, you don’t want to say that religion is a more important condition for philosophy than the production/reproduction of social life in a society, the task then is still to account for how abstract thinking in religion or philosophical traditions was possible under different “material conditions” than those you find in Ancient Greece. If you want to save his argument by claiming what he *means* by abstract thinking is distinctively Western, you have to explain what it is that distinguishes it from thinking elsewhere. You could also make the claim that “philosophy/abstraction/universality/reason is inherently Western.” If you make that claim it’s safe to assume you haven’t read any non-Western philosophical traditions.

Marx’s Aristotle

For someone who claimed to have been so familiar with Capital that he could visualize the way the logic of exchange in the first few chapters mapped perfectly onto Kant’s transcendental subject (more on Kant below), it’s bizarre that he doesn’t discuss the section in the first chapter where Marx explicitly addresses philosophical abstraction in Ancient Greece—when Marx argues that Aristotle could not, in fact, think abstractly *enough* because the real abstraction of human labor had not undermined the apparent difference in kind between different concrete labors (especially between free artisan labor & slavery). This is one of the many places that SR’s own abstract formalism—the exchange-relation is complete wherever it appears as soon as it appears & shapes thought in the same way—proves to prevent the recognition of real qualitative difference in history.

Sohn-Rethel’s Kant

The one philosopher SR confidently claims he can anchor his thesis on is Kant. (He hedges the two or three times he mentions Hegel.) His most sustained engagement with Kant is with the table of categories. Instead of doing what he said he’d do—derive abstract thinking from the real abstraction of the exchange relation—he does the reverse—derives a possible conceptualization of the exchange-relation from abstract thinking. It is the most fun section of the book. Does this reverse engineering work? Well, what he proved was that you could use Kant’s table of categories to understand the logic of exchange. This is part of the broader problem: SR cannot specify the actual connection between the logic of exchange and the logic of abstract thought. (Why Kant’s categories & not the unexplained function of the schematism that allows for the manifold of intuition to be subsumed under the categories in determinative judgment? Why didn’t SR look there for the mediating logic of exchange?)

The Logic of Exchange and the Logic of Abstraction

SR doesn’t read the philosophers he talks about because he doesn’t have to. He is content to make provocative parallels between coinage & Being in Ancient Greece. It’s enough to say coin has to be relatively immutable to circulate & commodities need to be relatively imperishable to be exchanged. Then he gets to shrug & say “Damn, that sounds like Being doesn’t it.” How are we supposed to think about the relationship between the logic of exchange (real abstraction) and the logic of abstract thought? If we agree with him that the logic of exchange and the division of intellectual and manual labor depend on one another, we would still have to develop a new theory about the relationship between the logic of exchange and the logic of abstract thought that explains how the former enables, causes, provokes, etc. the latter. Or, how the output of intellectual labor in scientific/philosophical texts necessarily reflects, expresses, etc. the logic of exchange despite itself. I can make analogies between concepts I find in Marx and concepts I find in philosophy all day. For example: Plato’s form of the Good is analogous to value and participation in the forms is analogous to price. Or: Hegel’s description of Geist as substance become subject is analogous to the self-valorization of value as capital. (I’m coming for you next, Postone, don’t think I forgot about you.)

Exchange as Transhistorical Context

If you grant his thesis for the sake of argument that philosophy/abstract math-science depends on & could not exist without (1) the exchange relation (2) the division between intellectual & manual labor in Ancient Greece, he still doesn’t account for how abstract thinking—philosophical, mathematic, or scientific—is taken up *outside of* the specific context of Ancient Greek exchange+divlab. Again, if we assume “abstract thought” (from Parmenides to Kant, from Pythagoras to Newton) is always the same & the logic of exchange is always the same (from the Athenian agora to the world market) like he does, this isn’t a problem. It’s also not an accident his historical points of reference are primarily Ancient Greece and Modern Europe: the argument relies on an assumption that the logic of exchange and the logic of science is identical in both historical periods.

Bad Critique of Idealism

If you don’t care about the fact he doesn’t read the philosophy he talks about, you won’t care about this, but we can look at his thesis that the division between intellectual & manual labor generates the false impression for intellectual laborers that either (1) their thinking is the plan the manual laborers have to follow (so he asserts there’s a straight line between Parmenides’ poem about Being & Fred Taylor’s science of management, which you have to admit sounds cool) &/or (2) their thinking reproduces itself without practice & manual work. This is a classic critique of idealism from within the materialist tradition (it begins with Marx+Engels in their work in the 1840s). It sounds elegant. It does not check out even in the idealist supervillains of the history of western philosophy. In Plato & Aristotle, for example, when they say “thinking returns to itself / produces itself” they mean that humans are the kind of (living) being whose activity is already saturated by thought. Not only do I do things for reasons/ends, but even my unreflective activities—my habits or things I do automatically without having to think about them—may have been things I once did not know how to do & I had to learn them with great effort. We also do things habitually/automatically because of the ways in which we are socialized without realizing it’s happening. (Unless you accept the idea that there’s some essence of human behavior that exists outside of human social history and social thought, you don’t get to be smug about ‘idealists’ thinking thought makes itself.) Practice is a kind of thinking & it is a social kind of thinking for Plato & Aristotle. So “thought returns to itself / produces itself” because our thinking shapes our practice and our practice shapes our thinking. There is no “social being” *before* thinking that shapes human consciousness in one direction. What would that even look like? How could you meaningfully think or talk about it? (Marx had plenty of confused things to say about philosophy on his own without Engels. He got it right when he said humans make history but not under conditions of their own choosing + humankind sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve.)

Bad Critique of Epistemology

SR doesn’t have a critique of epistemology (by which he means Kant), he just has a bad epistemology. *The* epistemological question is “how can I know X” (or some derivative formula that involves truth or belief or etc.). SR seems to claim at some points in the book that we only need to ask this question because of the division of intellectual and manual labor:

The separation of I/M labor allows people to claim to know abstract things (abstract mathematics/concepts) disembodied from practice as the source of all knowledge (so mathematics went wrong for SR when geometry became independent from the use of ropes to create measurements for land surveying). For SR we can’t know these things anyway, so asking about the status of abstract mathematics is meaningless for him.
If you ask “how do I know X,” SR seems to think you have just proved to us that you are an intellectual laborer. If you were not you would not ask this question. Aside from being defensible only through a tautology (“a manual laborer is thinking like an intellectual laborer when they ask this question”), the accusation assumes that *practice* is not only the source of thought but the ultimate solution to disagreements over the status of knowledge or meaning. Overcoming the division between intellectual and manual labor in SR bears traces of the petty bourgeois intellectual’s self-loathing: when parasites like me no longer exist, no one will ask the questions intellectuals do now. (Nevermind if they were asked by people who weren’t Ancient Greek aristocrats or modern intellectuals before.) How does practice serve as the ultimate criteria for adjudicating criticisms of knowledge claims? Should we follow SR & just say “practice will answer how we know everything, because any question that cannot be proven immediately in practice is meaningless”?

SR joins a long line of romantic anti-capitalists who think of “the return of primitive communism at a higher level” as a restoration of the primordial unity of humans with humans and humans with nature which we fell from when the first exchange of a commodity for coin occurred. Like the romantics, this extends into a criticism of modern science for its abstract mishandling of the richness of the world. Unlike the romantics (and maybe here he is really original), he traces this back to Ancient Greece (rather than holding, as some romantics did, that Ancient Greek life in the polis was the model we should emulate to solve the alienation of modernity). [Correction: someone reminded me after I posted this that Heidegger extends the romantic criticism of scientific modernity to scientific antiquity like this as well. You know what they say, great minds etc.]

In the end I think it’s worthwhile asking the question SR says you’re proving your status as a class enemy by asking: how do you know what you know, SR? How do you account for your own critical theory? He might not have an answer, but to be fair he did tell you not to ask.

Crane's Corner

Rough Draft for a Critique of Sohn-Rethel