On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:02:24 -0700 (PDT) andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
> Jim, you seem to think that Marx is some sort of hard
> determinist metaphysician enagged in philosophical
> analysis, arguind that retributivism presupposes a
> false metaphysical docreine of free will as opposed to
> the true metaphysical doctrine of determinism, which
> undermines attributions of responsinility
Well, determinism wouldn't necessarily undermine attributions of responsibility, as people Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume realized but it certainly would undermine retributivist understandings of what responsibility is and what it entails. And that is relevant to the points that Marx was making in his article.
> That seems
> to me so far from Marx's rejection of philosophy as to
> be totally off base. Marx rejects philosophy as
> ideology quite early; he never reasons like that, and
> does not do so here. On the contrary, I thonk insofar
> as he has a metaphysics he finds the Hegelian one
> "attractive," he says so, but says that it is merely
> abstract and that the defect in it is not that human
> behavior is abstractly determined, but that in class
> society, concretely speaking, the Hegelian docrtrine
> ignoresd the extent to which the ruling class control
> of the law ,makes it a mistake to talk about the
> self-determination of will thjat would make the
> imposition of punishment the criminal's own free act.
Actually, in that article, Marx said about class society as such. What he did say was:
"There is no doubt something specious in this formula, inasmuch as
Hegel, instead of looking upon the criminal as the mere object, the
slave of justice, elevates him to a position of a free and
self-determined being. Looking, however, more closely into the
matter, we discover that German idealism here, as in most other
instances, has but given a transcendental sanction to the rules of
existing society. Is it not a delusion to substitute for the
individual with his real motives, with multifarious social
circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of "free will"--one
among the many qualities of man for man himself!
Now, here when Marx speaks of a "free will" as being one among many human qualities in contrast with the idealist conception of man as a "free and self-determined being," we may well ask what was Marx talking about? It seems clear to me that he was rejecting Kant's conception of free will, which was a contra-causal free will that had reality within the noumenal realm. Such a conception would indeed have been inconsistent with Marx's rejection of metaphysics. I do think that Ted Winslow is on to something when he argues that Marx ". . .does buy into that aspect of the theory that recognizes "human dignity in the abstract" i.e. that recognizes human being as always to some degree and potentially fully a "free and self-determined being." " To the extent that is the case, then it seems to me Marx was embracing a different conception of freedom than the one that is rooted in contra-causal free will. Rather here, he seems to be embracing a notion of freedom as being self-control or self-mastery. Such a notion of freedom is not necessarily inconsistent with determinism. Indeed, Engels' later notion of human freedom as expressed in *Anti-Duhring*: *Anti-Duhring*:
"Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence fron, natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility of making them work towards definite ends."
In of itself, that formulation seems a bit vague but it seems to me that reading that within the context of the rest of that work and of other works of both Engels & Marx, what was meant was that he advancing a conception of freedom as power - over both nature and ourselves which is developed through our increasing knowledge of both nature and society within a social context in which we are able to actively apply this knowledge in controlling the determinants of our own existence. In other words, Engels here seemed to be advancing what was essentially a Spinozan-Baconian notion of freedom - a notion that was by no means necessarily inconsistent with determinism. Arguably, Marx, too, embraced a similar conception of freedom which he had picked up via Hegel.
If my contentions here are correct then I would go on to argue that in embracing such a conception or conceptions of freedom, there is no evidence of Marx embracing anything like the libertarian's conception of free will. That, as I have already argued, would have been inconsistent with his materialist outlook. And it should be noted in passing that most of the classical Marxist writers like Plekhanov, Bukharin, and Trotsky all took it for granted that Marx was a determinist. Anyway, without libertarian free will, the Kantian case for retributivism necessarily collapses, which I think was just the very point Marx was attempting to make in his article on capital punishment.
>
> >
> > It seems to me that Kant's defense of retributivism,
> > like most
> > philosophical defenses of retributivism that have
> > appeared since
> > his time, presuppose the existence of a
> > contra-causal free will.
> > Now, for Kant, that was no problem because in such
> > works as
> > *Critique of Practical Reason*, he argued that we
> > had to posit
> > the existence of free will, along with God, and
> > personal immortality,
> > as necessary postulates for the moral life. And to
> > rationalize this
> > even further, he argued that reality can be divided
> > up into a
> > phenomenal realm, which is cognizable, through the
> > senses,
> > and a noumenal realm which consists of
> > things-in-themselves,
> > that exists, forever, beyond the scope of human
> > cognition. Kant
> > located the existence of free will, God, and
> > immortal souls in the
> > noumenal realm of things-in-themselves. Thus, Kant
> > admitted
> > that we could never know for certain that God, free
> > will, and
> > immortality exist but that we could legitimately
> > posit their existence
> > as necessary presuppositions of the moral life.
> >
> > Now, it seem to Marx that it would have been very
> > problematical
> > for Marx to buy into this defense of retributivism
> > given the fact
> > that he was a materialist. The whole dualism
> > between phenomena
> > and noumena would have been inadmissible for him nor
> > could
> > he accept the notion of a contra-causal free will.
> > But without these
> > presuppositions the defense of retributivism would
> > necessarily collapse.
> > And that seems to be just what he was saying in the
> > New York Herald
> > Tribune article attacking capital punishment.
> >
>
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