Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism Part One: Sexuality, Mechanism and Vitalism

Michelangelo: God breathing the life force into Adam

This essay was intended as a response to Daniel Lazare’s polemic against me, Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism.  In his article Lazare makes a number of patently false statements attributing to me positions I do not hold. He also fails to respond to the bulk of my essay, Marxism, psychoanalysis and human sexuality. That essay was in turn written in response to his article, Materialism and Gender Theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck. I challenged the theoretical conclusions Lazare drew in that essay about gender theory, psychology, human sexuality and evolutionary theory. After reading Lazare’s response to my critique I was reminded of a statement by Engels when he characterized the arguments of a group of social Darwinists in Germany in the 1870’s. He wrote,

The puerility of …[ this method of argumentation]… is self-evident, and there is no need to waste words on it.[1]

I will therefore concentrate on the philosophical and scientific issues that Lazare touched on and spare the reader, as far as possible, a blow by blow account of his puerile arguments. I did consign a bit of that to the footnotes for those who are interested.

The first of the topics I will deal with is vitalistic biology, its history and the role it plays within gender theory.

Vitalistic Biology as one reaction against the dark side of mechanistic materialism

We got to this topic by way of a quote from Judith Butler,

Any theory of the culturally constructed body ... ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.  There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand ‘the body’ as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.[2]

Lazare serves up this quote from Butler but later he changes her reference from “vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century” to “modern biology.”  By way of this thoroughly dishonest sleight-of-hand Lazare then goes on to castigate Buttler as being an enemy of “modern biology”.  Whatever one thinks of Butler this is, to say the least, a shoddy piece of journalism.

Now one can legitimately say that vitalistic biology made significant contributions that were later incorporated into modern biology. There is certainly some truth to seeing an area of continuity between this form of 19^th century science and modern biology, but that hardly justifies saying they are the same. I once made a similar point about the precursor to the  Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century when I wrote,

When it comes to the history of science … the form of magic may be irrational, [but] the magical traditions of the Renaissance contained in embryo some of the seeds that would later mature to fruition in the Scientific Revolution.[3]

That being said, the magical tradition of the Renaissance is not the same as the Scientific Revolution that followed that gave us the science of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

In the above quotation Butler references “Christian and Cartesian precedents” of the concept of the human body. While she does not specify more than that, it is likely that the Christian theologian she has in mind is St. Augustine who literally believed that the sexual organs of the human body are an invasive product of original sin that constantly divide man from his better nature. Thereby all manner of proscriptions against unregulated sexual behavior follow.  The Cartesian precedent is a reference to the school of mechanical materialism that subscribed to Descartes’s dualism. According to Descartes the mind, which is further identified with the soul, exists apart from matter and vice-versa. The mechanists inspired by Descartes considered that animals, because they have no soul, are therefore mechanical devices with no consciousness and no feelings. Descartes called them, bête-machine, ‘beast machines’. Therefore all manner of horrific experiments were conducted on helpless animals which they thought did not experience pain.  Here is an account of this practice, one that I referenced in my earlier article:

A visitor in the 1650s, to the Port Royal School at Paris, reports that pupils were dissecting dogs who were nailed alive to wooden planks by their four paws. The purpose was apparently to inspect the circulation of the blood, a subject of controversy. Hammering in the nails inevitably caused pain to the victims, an ordeal dismissed by the experimenters. “Their [animal] cries when hammered were nothing but the noises of some small springs that were being deranged” (Gombay 2007:ix). The justifying associations of mere clockwork fit the Cartesian theory of animals as automata. The molesters made fun of persons who pitied the creatures feeling pain. The cruel situation was reported by Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709), who employed a testimony of his niece. Fontaine included the details in his Memoires pour servir a l’histoire de Port-Royal, published in 1736 (Delforges 1985:97).[4]

 Whereas we can say that Cartesian mechanical materialism was a positive moment in the history of science and the history of philosophy when it first emerged, overturning the previous scholastic and theological dogmas, it soon exhibited its dark side as the torture of animals at the Port Royal School showed. Vitalistic biology was a reaction to this dark side of the mechanical materialism that was empowered by Cartesianism.  Yet the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century had its precursors. It turns out that Descartes’ “bête-machine” had a larger application than those helpless animals being tortured at the Port Royal School.  Workers were also conceived of as machines whose miserable lives were seen as a necessary sacrifice for the cause of commercial progress. When the Industrial Revolution arrived in 18^th century England entire cities such as London and Manchester were turned into a living hell, a capitalist version of the Port Royal School of horrors re-imagined on a colossal scale. These conditions gave rise to the eloquent protests of the artisan-poet William Blake.

Blake understood that the factories of London were not only destroying the way of life of his fellow artisans and farmers but were literally poisoning the air they breathed, the land they cultivated and were enslaving the proletariat, including small children, condemned to work under horrendous conditions until the spark of life they were born with was snuffed out. Blake’s poetry borrowed  from the images of the English Revolution of the 17^th century and spoke in the prophetic Biblical language that marked the most radical voices of that bygone age.  To quote from an essay on Blake by Cyril Smith,

The visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827) and the revolutionary thinker Karl Marx, born 60 years later, were equally hostile to eighteenth-century individualistic materialism, the predominant way of thinking of their own times, and, in a cruder form, of ours. In an early work, There is no Natural Religion (1788), Blake attacked the outlook promoted by John Locke, who he often linked with Bacon and Newton.[5]

It is one of the great ironies of history that Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” was adopted as a patriotic hymn and turned into an unofficial national anthem of England.  Blake despised the monarchy and traditional religion, opposed nationalism and was aligned with the American radical Tom Paine in his support of the American and French Revolutions at a time when such sentiments were considered treasonous and subject to severe punishment. One can only guess what a great parody Blake would have written about the kidnapping of his poem to serve as a celebration of “little England”.

Marx also broke with mechanical materialism early in his intellectual life when he wrote in his Thesis on Feuerbach,

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

The point is further clarified in the Third Thesis:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated.[6]

It is noteworthy that Lenin came to similar conclusions after the outbreak of World War I when he embarked on a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic.  Having been educated up to that point in the version of Marxism espoused by Plekhanov – who minimized the difference between Marxism and mechanical materialism --Lenin was astounded by the revelation that, “…intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism”.[7]

Or take this quote from Lenin in which he explicitly places Plekhanov as sharing the conceptual outlook of vulgar materialism,

Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism .. more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint ...Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century the Kantians and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Buchner) than of Hegel.[8]

One can also produce numerous quotes from Trotsky that illustrate his approach to philosophy was the polar opposite of mechanical materialism.[9]

Finally,  one should be forewarned that sometimes critical remarks against ‘vulgar materialism’ are employed as a kind of back-handed defense of mechanical materialism.  It’s a phenomenon that we identified long ago as “the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism”:

Vulgar materialism isn’t some quaint, old annoyance that can be dismissed with a passing remark: it is, in the form of positivism, a default position of bourgeois ideology. The vulgar critique of vulgar materialism ignores this…[10]

When it comes to biology,  there is no shortage of criticisms of earlier theories that are today considered “vulgar materialism”. But that does not mean that the critic has overcome mechanical materialism. In many cases it indicates that the critic is proposing a more sophisticated version of mechanical materialism to replace an earlier one.  Thus a contemporary mechanist may claim that we can explain consciousness solely through the action of neurons in the brain and that earlier theories based on the structure of the face (physiognomy) or bumps in the skull (phrenology) were vulgar and unscientific.  Their criticism of the earlier theories would be completely valid but their own theory remains mechanical and reductionist.  It’s a phenomenon we will see over and over again -- and one often employed by vulgar Marxists – more sophisticated versions of reductionism still remain reductionist.

Who were the vitalistic biologists?

In any discussion of the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century it is important to distinguish the theories developed on behalf of vitalism from a practitioner such as Louis Pasteur. Pasteur has sometimes been placed in the camp of vitalistic biology because he was sympathetic to the argument  that fermentation requires the participation of a living tissue. But those who place Pasteur in this camp go way overboard.[11] He was a working scientist and was one of the first biologists to test theory with well-designed experiments. While there is some justification in seeing Pasteur’s work as aligned with vitalism early in his career, when he  studied fermentation and incidentally discovered the role of microbes, Pasteur also dealt the death blow to one of the most important principles defended by vitalistic biology, the idea of spontaneous generation. To quote a scientific review of his work in this area,

Since Aristotle (sixth century bc), it had been generally believed that the metamorphosis and decomposition phenomena, such as decay, putrefaction, rotting, fermentation and mouldering, resulted from a ‘vital force’ existing within the organic substances. Many living things came forth from non-living matters because the non-living material contained pneuma or ‘vital heat'. This theory of the spontaneous generation of living creatures was still prevailing in Pasteur's time, despite remarkable experimental and premonitory works by the Italians Francesco Redi (1626-1697) and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). Using well-designed experiments, Spallanzani had produced evidence in 1765 for the preventive role of heating on broth infusions, suggesting that the air was a source of contamination of the culture broth. Pasteur reproduced these experiments using yeast infusions (1861-1865).[12]

The rise of vitalistic biology was an important moment not only in the history of science but also in the history of philosophy.  For vitalistic biology grew out of the necessity to provide an alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic biology that was one of the outcomes of Cartesian dualism. Vitalism as a philosophical movement was responding to the problem of reductionism in the life sciences.  The Cambridge History of Philosophy provides a succinct summary of these debates:

While vitalism can be traced to ancient Greece (Aristotle’s On the Soul is a vitalist work), modern vitalism arose as a rejection of Descartes’s mechanistic view that plants, animals, and even living human bodies are kinds of machines. Early modern vitalists such Georg Ernest Stahl maintained that what distinguishes living things from nonliving things is that the former contain an irreducible component that is responsible for animating the body. By the start of the nineteenth century, however, a number of researchers had followed Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s lead in applying the new chemical theory to physiology. And the debate between vitalists and mechanists became focused on whether it is possible to give chemical accounts of vital behaviour such as metabolisation, respiration, and fermentation (Asimov 1964). Many vitalists argued that an account of these vital behaviours would require the discovery of fundamental, vital forces, while mechanists argued that there are no fundamental vital forces, and that organic and inorganic processes differ only in complexity (see Bechtel and Richardson 1993 and 1998).[13]

The vitalists were correct in insisting that an explanation of a living organism is not possible in purely mechanical terms.  Some vitalists however completely dismissed all mechanical explanations as being irrelevant.  That was clearly a misstep as there is no denying that mechanical and chemical processes occur in any organism.  For example, William Harvey used the mechanics of a pump to explain the role of the heart in the circulation of blood. But mechanical explanations are clearly insufficient when it comes to life. For example, through the miracle of modern medical technology you can remove a heart from a body and when hooked up to the right machinery keep it beating.  Clearly it is a type of pump, but is it still a heart now that its function, the role it played as a critical part of an organic whole, a living organism, has been lost?  The vitalists were however wrong in attributing what was unique about living organisms to a vital force, a type of immaterial substance. It took a lot of experimental work throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century to disprove the theory of a “vital force”.  But the problem of reductionism remained and is still an issue that has been contested in modern biology. There is in fact a huge literature in the discipline known as the ‘philosophy of biology’ that deals with reductionism in modern biology.[14]

The philosophical solution to the problem of reductionism lay in understanding that newly emergent properties arise in a living organism, properties that cannot be understood as simply more of the same mechanical processes although more complex, but are instead defined through their relation to the whole of the living body and its interaction with its environment. This insight was articulated by Hegel, in the early part of the 19^th century, prior to the great discoveries in the biological sciences that were to follow.  Hegel’s anti-reductionist and dialectical understanding of a living organism was summed up by one commentator,

Hegel’s core position on the organic is as follows: he believes that organisms cannot be fully understood without the categories that are proper to them alone, and organic life is irreducible to inorganic nature. However, this position does not imply that the laws, as well as specific causal mechanisms that operate in inorganic nature, do not also operate in living organisms.[15]

It should be understood that Hegel was not doing philosophy completely removed from the individual sciences. His understanding of the philosophical issues in biology was firmly rooted in the science of his time. Engels, in his Dialectics of Nature, praised Hegel’s engagement with the biology of his time. For example, take this statement by Engels in which he credits Hegel’s dialectical conception of a living organism as in one fell swoop refuting both mechanistic materialism and vitalistic theories of biology,

Life and death. Already no physiology is held to be scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life (note, Hegel, Enzyklopädie, I, pp. 152-53), the negation of life as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this. But for anyone who has once understood this, all talk of the immortality of the soul is done away with. Death is either the dissolution of the organic body, leaving nothing behind but the chemical constituents that formed its substance, or it leaves behind a vital principle, more or less the soul, that then survives all living organisms, and not only human beings. Here, therefore, by means of dialectics, simply becoming clear about the nature of life and death suffices to abolish an ancient superstition. Living means dying.[16]   

Of course there have been several revolutions in our understanding of biology in the last two centuries, but the problem of reductionism remains with us, largely because the discipline of modern biology, as a byproduct of increasing specialization and compartmentalization, has walled itself off from philosophy. A modern dialectical understanding of biology requires an engagement between dialectical philosophy and contemporary biology. Working scientists in the field, if they have not reflected on the philosophical issues behind biology, do not thereby escape philosophy.  Rather they unconsciously adopt a “default” philosophy which in our time is a version of positivism.[17] 

However,  the announcement of the death of vitalistic biology has proven to be premature. Although an outlier when it comes to what we understand to be modern biology, a 20^th century version of vitalistic biology was championed by the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem.  Canguilhem’s version of vitalistic biology was strongly influenced by his reading of the early Marx.  According to one reading of Canguilhem’s work, he was the key representative of an undercurrent of European philosophy called “Vitalist Marxism”, designating "a theoretical position that not only recognizes ‘life’ as an essential foundation of the production process in modern societies, but also considers it a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation".[18] Canguilhem was also a critic of 19^th century vitalistic biology.  While recognizing their legitimate criticism of mechanism, he rejected their metaphysics of a living substance.  He was therefore not only inspired by Marx but was very much aligned with Hegel’s anti-reductionist conception of a living organism.  He held a very prominent position within French philosophy and directly influenced thinkers such as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Althusser. The connection with Foucault raises a number of intriguing questions, for Butler was heavily influenced by Foucault. Could she have appropriated Canguilhem’s critique of 19^th century vitalistic biology by way of Foucault? This remains an open question as Butler has never written on Canguilhem.

The hermeneutical dimension of vitalistic biology in gender theory

If you want to understand the role of vitalistic biology in gender theory then there is more going on than a strictly historical explanation. Rather you need to understand how this historical episode has been interpreted by gender theorists. That means that there is a hermeneutical dimension with which we must engage if you are going to critique gender theory or Judith Butler. This is just as important as getting the history right. I made reference to this hermeneutical tradition in a quote by another gender theorist that I provided:

Rogers argues that vitalism, in alliance with an emergent liberal feminism contested theories that stressed the passivity of matter and legitimized the imposition of masculine power on a natural world gendered as female.[19]

What the quote illustrates is a common practice among gender theorists, where concepts taken from the history of philosophy or the history of science become “sexed”. In the narrative of many gender theorists, one outcome from Cartesian dualism, mechanistic biology, represents the oppressed female principle of passivity in nature.  Its opposite, vitalistic biology, represents the oppressive male principle of life and activity that must be implanted in a passive nature to fulfill its destiny.  Understood in this manner it is easy to see why a gender theorist like Judith Butler would be singling out “vitalistic biology”. To return to the quote from Butler, what she is actually saying is  that both mechanistic biology and vitalistic biology fail to understand that they are social constructs, that working together, reinforce social norms that create an oppressive society for women and non-binary gendered people in general. While the narrative of mechanistic biology pushes the idea of the passive female body, claiming the authority of the natural sciences, its complement, the vitalistic biology, claimed the authority of essentialist metaphysics in categorizing male principles as animating and dominant. Thus, the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century did indeed posit an immaterial essence, an élan vital, that animated matter, lending credence to the gender theorists schema, which is undoubtedly why Butler specifically identified “vitalistic biology” in her statement.  Her case would be harder to make had she spoken of “modern biology” as the latter does not posit an immaterial essence explaining life.  It is impossible to understand Butler’s statement without this historical and hermeneutical background.  And it is necessary to understand what she is saying before writing an honest critique of her theories. I refer to my previous article, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and human sexuality,  for such a critique.

The problem of reductionism

What mechanical materialism leads to is the problem of reductionism, as we have shown in the discussion of vitalistic biology.

What is reductionism and what is the attitude of Marxism towards it? This is perhaps the single most important philosophical problem of our time.

Oftentimes we see critiques of reductionism from postmodernists. This is typically phrased as a questioning of “meta-narratives, by which they mean the materialist conception of history. The post-modernists question any philosophy that claims history can be understood rationally.  In this they are joined by anti-Marxists of the past century like Karl Popper. But of course it does not follow that every critique of reductionism comes from a postmodernist and anti-Marxist perspective.[20]   Reductionism has in fact been at the center of the Great Debate that have rocked the foundations of Marxism for well over a century. Reductionism was an issue that Engels felt compelled to address way back in 1890 when some followers of Marx thought that the materialist conception of history can be reduced to a doctrine of economic determinism, as if all the other layers of a social formation, its political dynamics, its legal institutions, its cultural forms, not to mention the psychology of the masses, are mere epiphenomena that automatically follow. He wrote,

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.[21]

Despite Engels intervention in his later years, reductionism remained a huge problem in the Second International, particularly in the versions of dogmatic Marxism expounded by Kautsky and Plekhanov. To explore this topic would require an entire volume but suffice it to say that reductionism lay behind the debate within the Second International on the theory of permanent revolution.[22]

If reductionism has proven to be a major problem in historical analysis, it is even more so when it comes to biology.  There, reductionism has been largely the rule rather than the exception.  There were good historical reasons for that, as noted by the dialectical biologists Lewontin and Levins,

Inevitably people see in physical nature a reflection of the social relations in which their lives are embedded, and a bourgeois ideology of society has been writ large in a bourgeois view of nature. That view was given explicit form in the seventeenth century in Descartes's Discours, and we practice a science that is truly Cartesian. In the Cartesian world, that is, the world as a clock, phenomena are the consequences of the coming together of individual atomistic bits, each with its own intrinsic properties, determining the behavior of the system as a whole. Lines of causality run from part to whole, from atom to molecule, from molecule to organism, from organism to collectivity. As in society, so in all of nature, the part is ontologically prior to the whole. We may question whether in the interaction new properties arise, whether the "whole may be more than the sum of its parts," but this famous epistemological problem comes into existence only because we begin with an ontological commitment to the Cartesian priority of part over whole.[23]

Lewontin and Levins then proceed to clarify the critical distinction between this “ontological commitment”, which has been called “Cartesian reductionism” with the methodology employed in many sciences of analyzing the parts and building up a picture of the whole from there. The latter, as a methodology, has been extremely successful, while at the same time passing over huge gaps in our understanding of the whole. But these partial successes reinforce the ontological commitment.  The ontological commitment on the other hand reinforces confidence in reductionism as a method. As Lewontin and Levins indicate,

“In actual practice, reduction as a methodology and reductionism as a world view feed on and recreate each other…”

Lewontin and Levins then go on to provide a materialist explanation of the success of the reductionist world view despite its numerous lacunae,

The great success of Cartesian method and the Cartesian view of nature is in part a result of a historical path of least resistance. Those problems that yield to the attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding by the commitment to Cartesianism. The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure.[24]

We will explore this issue further in Part II devoted to the “Darwin Wars”.

 

NOTES

---

[1] MECW, vol. 25, 584.

[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 42-43, 164.

[3] Downward Spiral, Chapter 5, p. 137. https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch05.pdf

[4] https://www.citizenphilosophy.net/Rene_Descartes.html#vivisection

[5] Cyril Smith, Marx and the Fourfold Vision of William Blake, 2002, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/blake.htm

[6] See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Numerous commentators have explored Marx’s break with mechanical materialism, particularly in relation to the Theses on Feuerbach. My contribution to this literature can be found in The dialectical path of cognition and revolutionizing practice, 2004, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf

[7] Lenin. C.W. Volume 38, p. 276.

[8] Ibid. p. 179.

[9] See for instance, Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Progressive Publishers, 2006 and Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:  The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010, and Trotsky as a Marxist Theoretician: The Evidence in the Notebooks, Critique, Volume 47, 2019 – Issue 2, by Alex Steinberg.

[10] Frank Brenner, On the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism, 2008, 

https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf

[11] Lazare claims that I dismiss vitalistic biology as a “pseudo-science” where in fact what I said was that “Some would even call it a pseudo-science”.  Clearly my use of the pronoun “some” should have tipped off Lazare that I am characterizing the opinion of others and not necessarily my own. I also said nothing at all about Louis Pasteur, but Lazare insinuates that I would have called Pasteur a “quack”.

[12] Berche P: Louis Pasteur, from crystals of life to vaccination. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2012, 18 Suppl 5:1-6. 10.1111/j.1469-0691.2012.03945.x

[13] 1. McLaughlin B. Vitalism and emergence. In: Baldwin T, ed. The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press; 2003:629-639.

[14] One volume that discusses the problem of reductionism in modern biology is Promises and Limits of Reductionism in the Biomedical Sciences, Edited by Marc H. V. Van Regenmortel and David L. Hull, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

[15] Anton Kabeshkin, Hegel’s anti-reductionist account of organic nature,

 Intellectual History Review, 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 479–494

https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2021.1956073

[16] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 295-311; Progress Publishers, 1934, 6th printing 1974;

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07g.htm

[17] Adam Becker makes this observation about physicists, but a similar one can be made about biologists:

“Physicists had simply adopted a caricature of the positivists attitude. If something can’t be seen, why worry about it? Things that can’t be seen are meaningless anyhow. And if anyone still wasn’t convinced, there was a large pile of borrowed and bastardized arguments from the positivists about why this kind of reasoning worked, enough to keep most people from worrying – especially with the wide variety of interesting work using the mathematical machinery of quantum physics.”

There is a no less wide variety of “interesting work” for biologists to do today using the mathematical models that have been developed in 21^st century biochemistry.

Adam Becker, What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, Basic Books, 2019, p. 177.

[18]   Prinz, Benjamin; Schmidgen, Henning (2024). "Vitalist Marxism: Georges Canguilhem and the Resistance of Life". Theory, Culture & Society. 41 (4): 3–21, p.4. doi:10.1177/02632764241240399

[19] Alvin Snider, Cartesian Bodies, Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women: Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), p. 303, Published by: The University of Chicago Press.

The reference is to the book by John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution

[20] One of Lazare’s puerile arguments is that because I bring up the problem of reductionism that I must be holding out an olive branch to postmodernism. Enough said!

[21] Engels letter to J. Bloch In Königsberg, 1890,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm

[22] See the book by Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:  The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010

[23] Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 1-2.

[24] Ibid. p.3. 

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Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism

Bonobos grooming each other

[Note: We are publishing this piece as part of our commitment to encourage an atmosphere of debate among Marxists over contentious issues of contemporary philosophy and science. A rejoinder from Steiner will follow shortly.]

 

Daniel Lazare

 

Alex Steiner has responded to my Feb. 2 article about trans ideology (“Materialism and gender theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck”) with a broadside of his own charging me with a wide range of intellectual and theoretical offenses.  Interestingly enough, none of the alleged transgressions has to do with the article’s discussion of the trans movement itself even though most people would assume that would be the most controversial aspect.  On that score, Steiner is actually quite complimentary.  My article, he says: 

...neatly exposes the largely fictitious narrative about the beneficial effects of transgender surgery, particularly when it involves adolescents who have not matured sufficiently to make an informed decision about a matter that will affect them for the remainder of their life.  Lazare does a nice job in exposing the lies and banalities of the proponents of these dangerous medical practices and the mostly leftwing theorists who provide them with the theoretical justification for their work.    Lazare also demonstrates how the irrationality behind much of “woke” ideology feeds into atavistic fears that are exploited by the right.   Much of what can be called the Marxist left has prostrated themselves before the petty bourgeois radicals pushing “gender identity” politics. 

On the same day the article appeared, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced that it would become the first major US medical association to oppose gender surgery for adolescents, in itself powerful evidence that the article was correct in arguing that the current approach to “gender-affirmative” treatment is fundamentally unscientific.  Considering that NO Marxist outlets have had the courage or insight to take a clear stand on this issue, Permanent Revolution is to be congratulated for hosting the first Marxist polemic against a medical scandal that has been going on for years. 

But that is not the subject of Steiner’s ire.  What is, rather, is a host of related issues having to do with biology, sexuality, and evolutionary theory.  Among other things, his rejoinder (“Marxism, psychoanalysis, and human sexuality”) accuses me of neglecting Freud, “the godfather of all gender theory”; misconstruing the ideas of gender theorist Judith Butler; over-reliance on the flawed work of gender critic Kathleen Stock, and failing to understand the uniqueness of human sexuality because I allegedly insist on seeing it “through the prism of a general concept of sexuality appropriate to other animal species which is rooted in the innate drive to reproduce and little else.” 

Needless to say, it’s all wildly askew.  Although Steiner’s complaints are diverse, there is a common thread throughout: hostility to science, Darwin, and the historical-materialist analysis that is at the core of Marxist methodology.  Given Steiner’s confusion on this topic, he is unable to see that postmodernists like Butler suffer from a similar blind spot. As a result, he lets them off with a slap on the wrist at most while saddling historical materialists with “the sin of reductionism” because they insist that the bio-evolutionary nature of gender and sexuality must not be overlooked. 

Steiner shows his poor grasp of science when he sides with Butler on the question of “vitalistic” biology.  This is important because Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble, the 1990 book that all but single-handedly launched the gender movement, is that biology is just as much a myth as any other theory about the human body and that true freedom lies in casting it off.  My Feb. 2 article quoted Gender Trouble as saying: 

Any theory of the culturally constructed body ...  ought to question “the body” as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.   There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand “the body” as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.[1] 

Hence my conclusion that, according to Butler’s upside-down logic, “[m]odern biology is as much a social construct as medieval theology.”  To which Steiner replies: not so fast!  The reason is that the term “vitalistic biologies” refers not to 19^th-century biology in general, but to “an outdated school of biology – some would even call it a pseudo-science” – and that Butler “is not referencing ‘modern biology’ at all.”  As a result, “her critique of both the mechanical materialist concept of a biological organism and the vitalist concept is essentially correct,” while my own interpretation is the one that’s flawed.  

This is off-base for reasons having to do with historical context.  Vitalism may seem like a pseudo-science in hindsight, but at the time it was anything but.  Where Descartes dismissed living creatures as nothing more than mechanical devices, no different than a clock or pulley, the 18^th-century French vitalist Xavier Bichat intensively studied living tissue in an effort to determine what made it distinct.  The pioneering organic chemist Justus von Liebig studied animal and plant metabolism for the same reason, i.e. to see how it differed from ordinary combustion.  “There is nothing to prevent us from considering the vital force as a peculiar property,” Liebig wrote in 1842, “which is possessed by certain material bodies, and becomes sensible when their elementary particles are combined in a certain arrangement or form.”[2] 

Another vitalist was Louis Pasteur.[3]  He was eager to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation, which is to say life emerging out of non-life, because he was convinced that, due to some ineluctable quality, living creatures could only arise out of other living creatures.  This led to his famous fermentation experiments in which, beginning in 1854, he showed that the process could not take place when the substance was isolated from foreign biological contaminants.  Fermentation, according to Pasteur, was thus a “vital process” that was fundamentally different from ordinary chemistry.  We now know that Pasteur was wrong and that spontaneous generation must have occurred in some primordial era when life first arose.  But that’s because Darwin, whose Origin of the Species came out five years after Pasteur began his fermentation studies, has provided us with an understanding of biological history that didn’t previously exist. 

But if vitalism is a pseudo-science, as Steiner suggests, what does that make Pasteur – a quack? 

Steiner’s defense of Butler is wrong on two counts.  First, he fails to see that Butler is so dismissive of science and therefore so ignorant of what it means that she has little idea of what biology even is, “vitalistic” or otherwise.  She is intellectually unequipped to make the distinction that Steiner ascribes to her.  Second, he doesn’t realize that even though vitalism turned out to be incorrect in certain respects, it still constituted an important advance.  After all, Copernicus also turned out to be incorrect in certain regards.  (He thought that planetary orbits were circular whereas Kepler would later show that they were elliptical.)  But that doesn’t make heliocentrism anything less than a revolutionary advance over earlier forms of cosmology in which the Earth was seen as at the center of the universe. 

Steiner’s anti-scientific attitudes are even more obvious in his discussion of “shoe fetishism” and other forms of human non-procreative sexual behavior: 

[T]he panoply of human sexuality is full of examples similar to a shoe fetish in being at several removes from any connection to biological reproduction.  A glaringly obvious example is homosexuality, another would be sadomasochism.  I have no doubt that some of today’s more “creative” sociobiologists – now calling themselves “evolutionary psychologists,” would nevertheless come up with remarkable “just so” stories to explain this conundrum. 

The argument here is three-fold: that my article fails to understand the uniquely non-procreative nature of human sexuality and consequently suffers from the aforementioned “sin of reductionism”; that evolution has little to do with human nature as it currently exists, and that sociobiology is a little more than collection of arbitrary stories about how the tiger got his stripes or the elephant his trunk. 

All of which is again mistaken.  Take the idea of human sexuality as uniquely non-procreative.  In fact, Volker Sommer, an anthropologist at University College London, has documented homosexuality in gorillas, langur monkeys, and macaques as well as in flamingoes and certain breeds of geese.[4]  Bonobo chimpanzees, also known as pygmy chimps, are famous for engaging in all sorts of non-procreative sexual behavior between and among males, females, and children in order to foster social bonds and resolve conflicts.[5]  Autoeroticism has been documented in lions, bats, walruses, baboons, sheep, deer, warthogs, and hyenas.[6] 

As for Steiner’s wholesale dismissal of an entire field of scientific inquiry – this while citing (in a footnote) no authority other than the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, whose principal work appeared more than a half-century ago[7] – as Kipling-eque tomfoolery, any such conclusion is staggering.  Whatever Wilson’s misdeeds may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that the study of the evolution of human behavior has emerged as one of the most exciting and fruitful areas in all anthropology.  

How could it be otherwise given that the vast behavioral differences between homo sapiens and chimpanzees, their closest living relative?  Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an award-winning anthropologist at the University of California – Davis, begins her 2009 book, Mothers and Others, with a thought experiment.  Observing hundreds of people murmuring “excuse me” and “sorry” as they squeeze onto a crowded jetliner, she can’t help wondering: “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees?”  Given the ultra-violent nature of chimp society, her answer is clear: 

Anyone of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmaimed.  Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.   Compressing so many highly impulsive strangers into a tight space would be a recipe for mayhem.[8] 

So how is that one species of African ape is peaceful and cooperative in such circumstances while another is violent and anarchic?  Is it because of some divine spark as in Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel?  Or is it because of the dreaded e-word – evolution? 

The answer is obvious.  When hominin and chimpanzee lines diverged as recently as six million years ago, social development was a central part of the process.  Engels was clearly on to something when he noted in his 1876 essay, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” that: 

[T]he development of labor necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by multiplying cases of mutual support, joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.  In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another.  The need led to the creation of its organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by means of gradually increased modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate letter after another. 

Rather than separate and distinct, physical and cultural development were interwoven in that language required anatomical modifications in the form of an improved larynx so that words and sentences could emerge.  It was not first one thing and then another, but a dialectical interplay in which both elements evolved in tandem.  Where Engels emphasized bipedalism and the opposable thumb, Hrdy stresses another aspect of development, which is to say the emergence of hominins as “cooperative breeders.”  She notes that an orangutan, gorilla, and chimp baby is:

...inseparable from his mother, remaining in intimate front-to-front contact 100 percent of the day and night.  The earliest a wild chimpanzee mother has ever been observed to voluntarily let her baby out of her grasp is three and a half months.  

But among Hadza hunter-gatherers in modern-day Tanzania, a baby is: 

...held by grandmothers, great-aunts, older siblings, fathers, and even visitors from neighboring groups.  Other group members are so attracted by this new addition to the community that Hadza newborns are held by alloparents 85 percent of the time in the first days right after birth.[9] 

Is this because chimps love their babies more than human mothers do?  No, it’s because anthropological field work makes it clear that hunter-gatherer bands are so tightly knit that mothers can be confident that infants will be as safe in other hands as her own.  Hrdy notes that infanticide among gorillas and chimps is rife: 

[B]ecause females typically leave their natal kin to breed in other communities, they have to worry about unrelated and potentially infanticidal females as well.  This is especially true of highly omnivorous common chimpanzees, who eat baby gazelles and colobus monkeys when they can get them.  Baby chimpanzees are a no less delectable source of proteins and lipids.[10] 

A chimp mother is afraid to leave her baby alone for fear another chimp will eat it.  Mothers and Others tells of a team of primatologists studying forest chimps in Uganda in 2006.  The group: 

...noticed an unfamiliar female moving in from another community ... carrying a week-old infant.  The pair was attacked by six resident females.  Five had infants of their own, clinging tight to their mothers as they charged.  Screaming and bleeding, the strange female was no match for this xenophobic consortium.  As her attackers caught hold and pounded on her back, she crouched low to the ground, shielding her baby. ...  The alpha female wrested the baby away, only to lose it to another female who snatched it from her and delivered a lethal, neck-spanning bite.[11] 

Such behavior is not without a modicum of Darwinian logic.  Chimp babies are tasty, apparently, while chasing away a female interloper reduces competition for food.  But cooperative child-rearing turned out to be more advantageous in that it allowed hominins to cooperate by raising offspring with brains that would eventually grow to three or four times the size of chimp brains even though such children require more food, nurturing, and training and were slower to develop and mature.  While other African apes remained trapped in tropical micro-zones, homo erectus, which emerged some two million years ago, consequently developed a socio-technological toolkit that enabled it to leave Africa and venture as far afield as China, Indonesia, and New Guinea.  As Engels observed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State ((1884), cooperative labor not only provided for the production of food, tools, and dwellings, but for “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.”  

Cooperative child-rearing and food-gathering led to bigger brains, which led to better tools, bigger populations, and widening fields of activity.  Is all this nothing more than “just so” stories?  Chris Knight, a Marxist anthropologist formerly at University College London and now a mainstay of London’s Radical Anthropology Group, argued in his 1991 book, Blood Relations, that cooperative sexual relations were no less important than cooperative child-rearing and labor.  Indeed, he theorizes that woman engaged in a Lysistrata-like “female strike” in early hominin history in which the goal was to hammer out a social contract in which men would provide food in exchange for sex and children.  Knight thus declares: 

We begin, then, not with the supposed sudden emergence of male sexual generosity and self-restraint – as in the origins models of Freud and Lévi-Strauss – but ... with female child-rearing and economic priorities, female ultimate determination of social structure, and female sexual self-restraint in women’s own direct material interests.  From this, the incest taboo, food taboos, and other basic features of the human cultural configuration will be derived [emphasis in the original].[12] 

This is a far cry from the image that so many of us grew with of a primitive man in a bear skin dragging a woman by the hair home to his cave.  In a fascinating aside, Knight observes that where the orangutan menstrual cycle lasts 31 days while that of the common chimp lasts 37, the human menstrual cycle averages 29.5, which happens to correlate almost exactly with the lunar cycle.  This alone suggests that human biology evolved in such a way as to promote a monthly cycle of ritual and celebration.[13]  Ritual, culture, sex, food, fertility, and biology all came together in a single powerful package. 

Is this biological determinism?  Yes, provided, that is, that biology is properly understood as a complex interaction between species, environment, culture, and the struggle to survive. 

Steiner’s dismissal of evolutionary theory cuts the developmental thread, so to speak, enabling him to argue in an a-historic way that sex and reproduction have reached the point where they are now effectively divorced.  We thus get statements to the effect that “human sexuality has developed a relative autonomy from the reproductive instinct” or “that ‘sex’ understood in the broader manner introduced by Freud is a mediating level of human behavior that exists between the strictly biological level of ‘instinct’ and the strictly cultural level of ‘gender.’” 

This may be Freudianism, but it is not Marxism.  As Engels observed, sexual reproduction, social reproduction, and technology developed in ways that were not autonomous, but highly integrated.  The idea that biological instinct occurs at one end of the human spectrum and gender at the other, with sex mediating in between, smacks of liberal compartmentalization and eclecticism.  To be sure, making babies and engaging in other intellectual or cultural pursuits may seem like a far cry from one another.  But it is precisely this seeming separation that makes the process so powerful when a wide range of cultural and technological developments come tother to foster human self-reproduction.  

Postmodernists like Butler have it backwards when they urge people to free themselves by casting off biology.  People free themselves not by casting it off, but by mastering it in the same way they master nature in general.  It is what gives them the scientific tools needed to explore new fields and question the previously unquestionable, which is why society has been immersed in an unprecedented gender debate for two decades or more.  If a gothic cathedral seems to soar, it is not because it defies gravity, but because, thanks to pointed arches and flying buttresses, it uses gravity to seemingly rise above it.  By the same token, human beings use their mastery of biology via modern medicine and the like to seemingly rise above it as well. 

Human liberation arises through science, not in opposition to it.  It is meanwhile astonishing to see an attack on Darwinian theory in the name of Marxism.  And it is no less dismaying to see an attempt to wall off sexual and social reproduction from one another in a way that goes counter to the essential unity of human development.  It was this unity that Marx was referring to when he said that the goal of socialism was to enable man to “think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun.”  Moving about oneself in such a manner means learning to see sexual reproduction, social reproduction, scientific development, and the like as a unified whole.  Where bourgeois liberalism seeks to compartmentalize such functions, Marxism seeks to bind them together more tightly than ever.

---

[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 164.

[2] William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson, “Vitalism,” in E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110515081858/http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philbio/vitalism.htm.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See his lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjd7hMhoeAM&t=1857s.

[5] Natalie Angier, “In the Bonobo World, Female Camaraderie Prevails,” New York Times, Sept. 10, 2016.

[6] Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 209-10.

[7] Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap, 1975).

[8] Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009) 3.

[9] Ibid., 68, 76.

[10] Ibid., 233-34.

[11] Ibid., 235.

[12] Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1991), 153.

[13] Ibid., 215, 248.

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