Marxism as Idealism? Response to Roberts’s “Ideology and Self-Emancipation”
Jensen Suther
This essay is published in response to William Clare Roberts’s essay “Ideology and Self-Emancipation”.
The stock of Marxist theorist Georg Lukács has fluctuated wildly since the appearance of History and Class Consciousness in 1923, but in recent years it has once again been on the decline. In a piece from 2019, Endnotes contributor Jasper Bernes rejects Lukács’s key category of consciousness as “confused” and as promoting an unpalatable vanguardism (2019: 200). In his blockbuster book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau, toeing the classic Althusserian line, identifies Lukács’s Marxism as a “kind of romanticism” and as a humanism (2023: 82). And finally, there is the recent work of William Clare Roberts, which undertakes an ambitious, sustained critique of Lukács as the originator of the Marxist theory of “false consciousness” and as the progenitor of the tradition of ideology critique (2022, 2024). In “Ideology and Self-Emancipation,” published recently on this site, Roberts aims to displace the model of Marxist theory derived from the “Lenin-Lukács-Frankfurt” lineage with a competing theory bearing the names “Lenin-Gramsci-Althusser” and spelled out at the end of the essay with the help, strangely enough, of Wilfrid Sellars. Roberts’ scholarly or textual goal is to recall us to Marx and Engels’ original rejection of the Enlightenment project of dispelling illusions and false consciousness through “rational argumentation.” His deeper conceptual and political goal is to supplant a Marxist project wedded to the notion that “incorrect ideas are a barrier to self-emancipation” with one that understands ideology as the ensemble of material practices and institutions that produce and structure human agency.
My aim here is not to pick apart Roberts’s readings of classic Marxist texts. While I do find Roberts’s interpretations of The German Ideology and of his evidently abridged edition of History and Class Consciousness forced and often tendentious,[1] what I want to offer here is not a clinic in close reading or a systematic defense of Lukács but a brief, competing account of the idea of a distinctly Hegelian Marxism. I believe that Roberts’s mischaracterization of key concepts in Lukács—especially false consciousness and imputed consciousness—leads him to formulate an incoherent and politically disastrous alternative. But I also think we must go beyond Lukács—beyond Lukács and back to Hegel—if we are to entitle ourselves to a concept that both Lukács and Roberts simply take for granted: a concept of historical agency. The key, Hegelian question raised by History and Class Consciousness, which to my mind has been covered over and greatly distorted over the course of its reception, concerns the conditions of possibility of being not just subject to history (to the “cunning of reason,” as Hegel calls it) but the subjects of history—not in the sense of an infallible sovereignty but in the sense of a recognized responsibility for our actions and form of life and of an openness and vulnerability to possible reasons to act and think otherwise. Lukács arguably presupposes such an account of agency (and Roberts, by virtue of his investment in emancipatory politics, arguably requires it) but—for complex reasons I will only touch on here—the methodological strictures of HCC prohibit Lukács from openly elaborating the assumed metaphysics of freedom.
I will begin by reconstructing Roberts’s basic picture of ideology critique and his chief criticism of Hegelian Marxism: its understanding of servitude as voluntary and of “false consciousness” as the ground of voluntary servitude. According to Roberts’s opposing account, the oppressed do not consent to their own domination but rather find their servitude necessitated by the way material production is organized. Following this reconstruction, I identify two major problems with Roberts’s approach, a form of institutional determinism that undermines his appeal to Sellars’ “space of reasons” and a form of normative indeterminism that renders his notion of freedom vacuous. I argue that the Hegelian account of rational agency is a necessary corrective. Finally, I return to Lukács’s notion of false consciousness in light of this Hegelian account of agency and defend it against Roberts’s objections.
To draw on Roberts’s own metaphor, according to the properly Hegelian notion of agency underpinning Lukács’s picture, ideas do not reside in an “incorporeal” “higher plane of pure normativity” but rather constitute the unifying form of living bodies like ours, grounding the very possibility of action and indeed of history. Marxism, on this view, is an idealism, but idealism, properly understood, is precisely not the idea that the world is sovereignly created by a transcendent mind. Rather, idealism is the idea that the source of the authority of both epistemic and pragmatic norms lies in us and that we alone can determine what ought to be believed and “what is to be done.” And as Hegel tells us, such idealism is an objective idealism because such self-determination is an embodied and material process through which we strive to flourish as the sort of animals we are. The point here is not that Roberts is right that ideas are in the head but wrong that they have no influence; the point is that ideas are precisely not in the head but in the world and just thereby the ground of possible servitude or emancipation. It is not the prettiest phrase, but I call this view hylomorphic materialism, for reasons that will become clear.
I.
The core of Roberts’s argument concerns a paradox at the heart of much of modern political thought: “If the oppressed can emancipate themselves and are even under an obligation to do so, it is hard to account for why they are not already free without recourse to the paradoxical claim that the oppressed freely choose to be oppressed.” The theory of ideology first developed by Destutt de Tracey in the late eighteenth century attempts to solve this paradox. According to Roberts’s account of de Tracey, ideology is the “science of ideas” through which we can learn to distinguish “true” needs from “false” ones. Our perceptions of the world around us are naturally truthful but are liable to distortion by desire, which mediates our relations to others and constitutes the basis of Destutt’s “liberal political economy.” The task of ideology, on this view, is to teach individuals that their autonomous pursuit of their ends is not ultimately opposed but conducive to the self-determination of others and thus to that of themselves. I satisfy my needs by working to satisfy yours and vice versa. Yet because no social institution or process is immediately accessible in its totality to natural perception, we can be led to desire what might harm us and fail to see our dependence on—and thus need of—institutions we are predisposed to resist. The pedagogical aim of ideology is thus to reconcile us to commercial society, in which the “greatest general prosperity” is achieved precisely through a mutual and generalized form of voluntary servitude.
Now, according to Roberts, Marx and Engels inherit this notion of ideology from de Tracey—not in the sense that they sign on to his pedagogical project but in the sense that it is that selfsame project they are targeting whenever they see fit to criticize “ideology.” On the standard reading, The German Ideology conceives ideology as a set of (false) ideas promulgated by the ruling class that broadly determines how people act, facilitating their conformity to the prevailing social order. Such ideas manufacture the consent of the oppressed to their own oppression. Drawing on the work of Paul Bowman, Roberts calls this “protagonism-ideology,” according to which changing the world is equivalent to remaking it “either by force of words or so as to make it live up to an ideal.” If we can change what people think, in other words, we can thereby change social reality itself. For Roberts, however, this is not the position Marx and Engels advocate but precisely the Left Hegelian one they reject, in favor of a “sociological materialism” which holds that “practices of production, exploitation, and domination are […] causally prior to and effective apart from religious, intellectual, and political practices of discursive production, howsoever these latter are institutionalized.” Accordingly, servitude is not voluntary but necessary and it is not “in the head,” where the ideas are, but “in the reproduction of life,” beyond the sphere of mere ideas. Far from being an effective tool of oppression, ideology is thus said to be “functionally useless” to the elite and therefore not to constitute a barrier to the self-emancipation of anyone, let alone workers.
Let us consider the next step in Roberts’s argument, his account of the origin of false consciousness, which is traced to Lenin’s theory of ideology in What Is to Be Done? and is said to have been given its most sophisticated formulation in relation to class struggle in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. On one reading of the Leninist program (the one Roberts will resist), the proletariat serves as the practical conduit for the theories and ideas of an intellectual vanguard. The theoretical question that Lukács seeks to answer is how the spontaneous struggles of the masses—for, say, a better wage—can be given a genuinely revolutionary form. According to Roberts’s Lukács, “The only obstacle standing between the proletariat and complete emancipation [is] the absence of a correct ideology.” What Lukács calls class consciousness is meant to furnish the rationally required ideological corrective.
False consciousness, then, is the difference between what you take your interests to be and what your interests actually are given your membership in the proletarian class. Your “objective” interests lie in whatever would be required to achieve the self-emancipation of the class and, a fortiori, of yourself. If false consciousness “is equivalent to ideological subjection, or to serving the interests of your oppressors,” then class consciousness is your recognition of “the emancipatory interests of your class.” Roberts takes this to be the difference between crossing a picket line during a strike because it is in one’s immediate interest to do so and recognizing that one’s “true interest” lies in the collective resistance through which, say, better conditions and wages can be won.
This is a crucial juncture in Roberts’s account, since it is where he first identifies the two main “dangers” of the Lukácsian approach. The first danger is that of “forgetting that our interest in freedom is itself instrumental.” The idea of self-emancipation can suggest that freedom is the end of human life rather than just a means to my individual pursuit of my projects and interests. For Roberts, the “whole reason we ought to want to be free”—and I want to return to that “ought” below—“is because it would allow us to get on with living our lives as we think is best, without having to navigate the extraneous motivations generated by the dominant.” That is, there is no unifying end or value to which we all ought to commit our lives; freedom is merely a precondition for each of us to pursue our contingent and disparate, individual ends. What makes the failure to see this a danger is that it “inflates our interest in freedom into the moral demand to see the world from a purely human standpoint […] ‘of the awakening of humanity to self-consciousness.’” Such a standpoint would not only abstract away from the things that matter to me; it also illicitly assumes freedom as the “essence” of human action, history, and life. This is directly connected to the second danger. As Roberts puts it, the promotion of freedom to the final end of human life relieves the socialist of any hard judgments about our ends, which are always decided in advance; the only burdens are thus “burdens of conscience,” concerning whether or not we are living up to the preestablished “communist morality.” Taken together, both dangers amount to a “betrayal” of the very project of self-emancipation, since they turn “our interest in being free into a self-refuting interest in being without interests.”
Before I begin to sketch an alternative, we need to get two final elements of Roberts’s account on the table. First, Roberts argues that the most important inheritors of Lukács’s account of false consciousness are the members of the Frankfurt School, who found the tradition of ideology critique proper. According to Roberts’s reconstruction, the critique of ideology in the hands of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others, amplifies the moralistic dimensions of Lukács by focusing not on the social dynamics that impede our “conscious control” and “falsify our normative ideals” but on a critique of all present values and meanings in light of “a posited counterfactual ideal speech situation.” In other words, Roberts reads Jürgen Habermas’s later account of communicative rationality—of transparent, consensus-producing communication grounded in appeal to the force of the better reason—back into the original Frankfurt School method of ideology critique as its unstated yardstick or criterion. Habermas’s discourse-theoretical innovations, on this account, constitute the endpoint of a story that begins with de Tracey’s “science of ideas.”
And lastly, there is Roberts’s own briefly sketched, alternative picture, which claims Gramsci and Althusser as the true inheritors of the Marxist project of the critique of ideology (in de Tracey’s sense). On this account, ideological hegemony is a function not of false consciousness or incorrect ideas but of the “recruitment and deployment of agents” through a process of “interpellation.” The basic thought is that agents are not responsible for their own servitude through the (false) beliefs that inform their choices; rather, they are constituted as agents of a certain kind by the social structures in which they are imbricated. Ideology is thus no longer restricted to those ideas promulgated by the ruling class but is now to be understood as the score-keeping matrix that makes up the institutional fabric of social life and that regulates behavior through practices of sanction and affirmation. The actions of agents are thus effects of dispositional regularities, which are themselves functions of structure. Now, obviously this smacks of determinism and functionalism, but Roberts believes he has an ace in the hole: if we acknowledge a plurality of competing ideologies, then there is room for countervailing forms of interpellation within a given social order. This is meant to explain “how discursive practices” can effect change in lieu of the “protagonism” rejected by Marx and Engels.
Roberts’s concluding, and in my view most important, claim is that the social and material fact of domination is in itself “normatively neutral,” making no claim on us; domination only becomes normatively valenced in relation to particular commitments and interests. Correlatively, non-domination (or freedom) is valuable not in itself but only relative to our individual projects and ends, as we already saw above. The importance of this claim lies in what it reveals about Roberts’s understanding of normativity and the agent-relativity of the value of freedom: there is no general, humanity-wide imperative to end domination (“communist morality”); there is only my private interest in ending it, given the specific burdens it imposes on me.
II.
The first thing to note about the above account is just how much it takes for granted regarding what it means to be an agent. Roberts is clearly sensitive to and concerned to meet the objection that his Althusserian account is functionalist—that agents’ actions are predetermined by structural laws—but the idea that we can save the notion of agency by multiplying the number of ideologies in play is a nonstarter. Given the basic understanding of the relationship between agent and structure, the pluralization of ideology would just entail more possibilities for being functionalized, not fewer. Social change would still depend not on the actions of agents qua agents (more on this in a moment) but rather on the “chemical” interaction among institutions which interpellate their members. It matters which competing ideologies are at play and whether they ought to be affirmed or disaffirmed. Yet the “sociological materialism” Roberts endorses leaves no room for appeals to reasons as to why one form of interpellation ought to be promoted and another resisted. That multiple ideologies, as a matter of fact, compete for more conscripts does nothing to establish which ideologies are worthy of endorsement; worthy of a theoretical defense; worthy of the ink spilled in the pages of journals. It is useful to recall here Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, written in 1845 alongside The German Ideology. “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, that changed men are thus products of different circumstances and a changed upbringing,” Marx chides, “forgets that circumstances must precisely be changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated” (2011: 793).[2] That is, we change our circumstances and are not simply changed by our circumstances, and those responsible for our upbringing are not simply algorithmically responsive to institutional prompting but must themselves be shaped and educated in light of our purposes and ends. The failure to grasp this point, Marx emphasizes, divides society into two parts, the “educator” and the “educated,” granting the former causal priority over the latter. And this results in the very “contemplative materialism” Marx, Engels, and Roberts himself all want to reject, according to which human activity is merely the function of its circumstances, an external object of theoretical contemplation we are powerless to change.
But to “educate the educator,” for Marx, precisely consists in doing what Roberts claims Marx disavows, namely “criticizing theoretically” as part and parcel of “revolutionizing practically” (2011: 793). Marx’s example here is instructive: for Feuerbach, the task is to show that the religious idea of the holy family has its material basis in the secular family, but for Marx, this does not go nearly far enough. “The fact that the secular basis lifts itself above itself and fixes itself in the clouds as an independent realm,” Marx writes, “is to be explained precisely by the self-division and self-contradiction of this secular basis” (2011:793). Marx’s point here in emphasizing “contradiction” is that the secular family projects an idealized, holy family in order to evade its responsibility for falling short of its own internal principles. This marks a passage from mere contemplation of an object (the family) subject to material laws to a form of critical-historical self-awareness: we become conscious of our reasons for changing our condition, for “revolutionizing in practice” the family form. The critique of the German ideology is thus not meant to show that there is no place in politics for the critique of ideas but rather that the critique of ideas opens onto—and opens up—the space of the political. Without such “consciousness of reasons,” of our sense of what we ought to do (and can thus fail to do), we cannot intelligibly be agents of political change. And as we will see, this undermines the hard distinction Roberts makes toward the end of his essay between the mere “fact” of domination and its normative significance in certain contexts, since there can be no social practice that is not already the consciousness of its own goodness (or badness) and thus of the reasons for sustaining it (or leaving it behind). But what exactly is the alternative conception of agency Marx’s account here presupposes?
I want to suggest that Marx—and later, Lukács—is tacitly relying on Hegel’s logical-metaphysical account of willing. This may come as a surprise, given Marx’s avowed aim of transforming dialectics into a respectably non-metaphysical, historical science. While this is not the occasion to demonstrate in any detail what Marx misses in his early engagements with Hegel, stated in brief, Hegel is attempting to entitle himself to concepts Marx simply assumes and to show us why social life must be understood—in Marx’s own words—as “essentially practical” and why the domain of objects (“sensuousness”) must be understood as a kind of result of “practical, human-sensuous activity” (2011: 792). This is a “logical-metaphysical” or “non-empirical” account, in other words, because it is derived not through observation or experience but through consideration of what it is to even purport to represent an object or an action.[3] To purport to do something is to claim to know how to do it, which immediately raises the question of the conceptual norms that constitute the measure of such know-how. We cannot learn about the nature of agency by observing how people do act, in order to arrive at a set of psychological laws (e.g., “Actors tend to formulate intentions”); rather, at issue are the concepts that must be operative if an activity is to be so much as intelligible as acting (e.g., “Actors, to be actors, must act in light of an intention”). And since such conceptual constraints cannot be given in experience (there can be no experience without them already up and running), they must be autonomously set by thinking itself, as Hegel’s Science of Logic shows.[4]
What distinguishes Hegel’s account of the “pure concepts” that thought “gives to itself” from the familiar Kantian one is that they are shown to be determinations not of our subjective representations but indeed of the very meaning of being itself (of what must be true of being, if it is to intelligibly be the concept of “what is”). Hegel, like Kant, holds that concepts function as “predicates of possible judgments,” or in Hegel’s own idiom, that the judgment is the “self-diremption of the concept.”[5] What this means is that concepts derive their sense from the way they are used in judgments; concepts can only be concepts in a “split” subject-predicate relation, wherein they act as rules for how they are to be applied. For example, in designating some object “car,” I thereby specifically rule out reference to it as “train” and am now entitled to other judgments (for example, that it is a vehicle). A “science of logic” concerns those meta-concepts that act as rules for thinking not this or that object but objectivity as such, “being.”[6] Hegel’s materialism thus consists in his commitment to giving an account of what would constitute a consistent account of what it is to “be” in general; and to thereby grasping the basic “logic” of material reality itself. An insistence like Marx’s that material reality falls outside the conceptual sphere is itself an inconsistent determination of its nature; that is, that concept, the concept of reality, also rules certain things in and certain things out.[7] If the nature of such concepts could be empirically or historically ascertained, then it would be only contingently—rather than essentially—true that social life is practical and historical; there could feasibly be non-historical practices. Yet this would not only dissolve the concepts (and the phenomena) in question; it would also undermine the very foundations of the materialist project.
We might take as our starting point Hegel’s key logical claim that all action is self-conscious.[8] The basic thought is that in taking a walk or writing an essay, I must be conscious of myself as walking or as writing. This does not mean that I can only know that I am walking by observing myself doing so, as if “I” were just another object in my environment; I do not infer that I am the one doing the walking from the available sensory evidence. Rather, I can only be conscious of myself walking by being the walker. This is to say that self-consciousness is not consciousness of an object but an attentiveness to what it is to be walking—to the rules that distinguish walking well from walking poorly. Such rules are not imposed from without or only applied in moments of overt reflection; they are instead understood by Hegel as constitutive of the activity itself. It is for this reason that, inversely, I can only be a walker by being conscious of myself as one. I take myself to be bound by such rules, which dictate not what I will do but what I ought to do or have reason to do. In failing to put one foot in front of the other or in failing to pay attention to obstacles in front of me, I do not contradict an external scorekeeper; I am contradicting myself.
Hegel inherits this fundamentally anti-Cartesian thought from Kant, who had rejected Descartes’s observational and introspective model of self-awareness and replaced it with the radical idea of a “transcendental unity of apperception.”[9] Kant’s chief innovation lies in the claim that the unity of experience is a function of our consciousness of that unity, in virtue of which the understanding spontaneously binds itself to the a priori rules (the categories) for such unification of the objects of experience. In Kant’s practical philosophy, he expands this account of the spontaneity of mind in order to show that practical reason likewise “legislates” its own internal norm, the moral law; through our consciousness of this “ought,” we recognize that we are the exception to laws of nature, since we can always act otherwise than the law commands, and so thereby attain awareness of ourselves as free.[10] The details of this account need not concern us; the point here is that Hegel radicalizes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness in two ways relevant to our discussion of Roberts.
The first concerns Kant’s ethical monadism. For Kant, every agent, just as an agent, is conscious of the moral law as the overriding principle of autonomous action; the law demands that we treat all others as ends, but our consciousness of the law itself is a solitary, “monadic” affair.[11] This is to say that practical self-knowledge on the Kantian picture is purely a matter of my private understanding of what the law requires. This prompts Hegel to accuse Kant of confusing the most radical evil with the highest good, since if I alone determine what ought to be done, it is always open to me to claim that what the law asks of me just happens to be what I most desire—like the fundamentalist who justifies the most heinous, violent acts by purporting to possess special knowledge of the mind of God.[12] Whether this is a fair criticism of Kant is beside the point; what matters here is the alternative Hegel proposes.
As we saw above, Hegel shows that my doing something is not such a doing independently of my knowing that I am doing it. In teaching a class, I am conscious of what it is to do so and thus am purporting to adhere to a norm. But since this knowledge is non-observational, I also cannot know that I am doing it without being the embodied doer, and this implies that my action itself manifests—in a way that it does not for Kant—my self-understanding.[13] For Kant, what matters is that I take myself to be acting from duty, regardless of how things might appear; for Hegel, appearances are essential, such that it matters whether I am recognized by others as doing what I take myself to be. To be conscious of norms in acting is thus to be conscious of the (potential) justifiability of one’s act to others. Yet this also opens up the possibility of a discrepancy between my explicit self-understanding and the sort of intentional awareness implicit in the act itself. I can get myself wrong, as when I tell myself I am helping a friend in need while in actuality procrastinating some other task. And this is likely to inflect how I help—distractedly, say. To be acting for reasons—that is, to be acting at all—is to be conscious of what ought to be done, in a way that renders one’s reasons susceptible to contestation by others. And whether we can authoritatively give reasons or bind ourselves to norms will depend, in the end, on whether we confer authority on one another as reasoners, as self-legislators, as inhabitants of the social space of reason.[14]
Now, an important feature of Roberts’s argument is his own appeal to Wilfrid Sellars’ “space of reasons” idea to reconceive the notion of ideology as well as the relationship between ideas, concepts, and reasons and our practical reality. Strikingly, this argument assumes the form of the classic antinomy between idealism and materialism. On the one hand, ideas are held to exist in the head, and it is sufficient to change the way people think to change the world itself. This is the idealist view associated with the Left Hegelians that Roberts rightly opposes. On the other hand, ideology is the way that individuals are constituted by a discursive context and determined in their acts by institutional rules or reasons. On this materialist view, inspired by Gramsci and Althusser, ideology is decidedly not “in the head” but is instead identical with agents’ embodied, practical reality. Yet this latter conception cannot account for the distinction between a law and a norm or an event and an action and so risks assimilating the space of reasons to the space of causes. If my arm twitches and knocks over a vase, my body is causally responsible for what has happened, the event of the vase falling over. But if, in anger, I intentionally knock over the vase utilizing the same set of motions, then I have acted: I am morally on the hook for what has happened. The motions of the event and the action might be outwardly the same, but they bear radically different forms: the physical movements comprising my act are unified by my consciousness of their end, my reason for so moving. And unlike in the case of the twitch, I can act otherwise and can fail to do what I have reason to do (perhaps it was a Nazi relic and my anger appropriate in this instance). It is this point, not Roberts’s competing ideological apparatuses, that is needed to avoid functionalism.
To be participating in a practice, then, I must bind myself to institutional norms and thereby assume responsibility for determining what counts as a reason for what (what is permissible and what impermissible in the space of reasons). Discourse itself is unintelligible apart from our holding ourselves to discursive proprieties, “oughts” we can fail to live up to; this is so because it is only in light of such rational normative activity that the content of discourse exhibits determinacy: for example, in judging that it is impermissible to say of something wholly blue that it is wholly red, I determinately articulate the content of the concept of color.[15] Were the concept of color not such a self-consciously applied rule, there would be no necessity to denying the contrary; there could not so much as be blue things as distinct from red ones because there would be nothing that ought to be taken as blue, as specifically not-red. While Roberts rightly recognizes ideology as the “space of reasons,” the concept of the space of reasons is inseparable from the notion of normative self-governance that Roberts rejects. It is because I must always act on the basis of reasons that I am responsible for my actions and beliefs and can be called to account, asked to provide not exculpations (“the ideological apparatus made me do it”) but justifications (“I proposed because I love her” or “I cast a ballot because I am a citizen”).[16] And it is because we must act on the basis of reasons that we are responsible for determining what to do and for potentially changing how we act. The space of reasons is precisely not just a “structure” of interdependently defined roles but the normative process of mutual struggle to determine how we ought to live.
The above point can be summarized as follows: there can be no ideology without rationality and normativity; and there can be no reasons or norms without autonomy or freedom. Roberts, in rejecting the idea that norms are self-determined, is guilty of what Robert Brandom has characterized as a form of gerrymandering: Roberts demarcates a space of reasons, practices, and institutions, but this amounts to an illicit partitioning (a “gerrymandering”) because, as we have seen, the space of reasons is unintelligible except as the realm of freedom.[17] To genuinely lay claim to that space would be commit to the conception of rational agency that makes it possible.
There is a second, deeper form of gerrymandering, however, that is systematically missed by theorists of rational agency like Brandom and that is essential to diagnosing the tendency towards antinomian thinking not only in Roberts but in both the idealist and the materialist discourses more broadly. The neo-pragmatist, post-metaphysical reading of Hegel associated with Brandom and others has been heavily influenced by Sellars’ distinction between the “manifest” and “scientific” images.[18] (Not coincidentally, this distinction is also present in Roberts, in the guise of the contrast between normative and empirical facts.) Very roughly, the manifest image is how the world appears from our practical standpoint: certain bodily movements show up for us as intentional acts, just as certain arrangements of matter show up as purposively organized, like tools and organisms. The manifest image is, more or less, just a subjective illusion. The scientific image, by contrast, is not an image of how things manifestly or apparently are, given our practical concerns, but an image of how they really are: what shows up for us as an action is, from the scientific vantage, just an effect of physiological laws and causal principles. What makes the manifest image a form of gerrymandering is that it illicitly carves up material reality in accordance with our practical norms; Hume famously makes this point in noting that no “ought” can be derived from what “is.” But if this is so, then is intentionality itself not an illicit form of demarcation, an instance of gerrymandering? The Hegelian might have a point against Roberts, but the victory is Pyrrhic: he has built his castle in the sky. If Roberts is not entitled to the ideas of action and practice because he lacks commitment to the idea of normative self-determination, is the Hegelian not also hamstrung by his commitment to the manifest/scientific distinction?
III.
This brings us to the second of Hegel’s two ways of radicalizing the Kantian account of self-consciousness. In the Science of Logic, Hegel praises Kant for reviving Aristotle’s understanding of living organisms as internally purposive.[19] According to Aristotle, a substance is a composite of matter (hyle) and form (morphe), where the form of a thing lies in its characteristic activity or function. Form, on this account, is the actuality of a substance, individuating its matter as an instance of a kind, and matter is its potentiality for fulfilling its function. It is not that form is added to a preexisting material; form is rather the principle of the unity of matter, dictating what and how things hang together. An organism, then, is a substance par excellence, in that its function is not relative to an external designer, as in the case of a tool, but is internal to the organism itself: its function consists in the activity of unifying and maintaining itself.[20] Following the rise of Newtonian mechanics, this Aristotelian account of self-movement on the basis of internal principles fell out of favor. Newton introduces a rectilinear understanding of motion, according to which generic masses move measurable distances in space and time under the influence of external forces. This breakthrough was reflected in Descartes’ influential—and still pervasive—understanding of animals as automata that obey the basic laws of matter in motion.[21] Yet in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant raises a serious objection to the modern scientific worldview, arguing that the distinction between animate and inanimate is not so much as intelligible without appeal to the (Aristotelian) concept of inner purposiveness. Disease, injury, and death are not just different states but deficient states, reflecting that something has gone wrong. But in a purely mechanical universe, there is no room for “going wrong.” Hence Kant’s famous line that it would be absurd “to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws.”[22]
Now, the problem with Kant’s account is that he understands inner purposiveness not as an objective determination of certain kinds of natural objects but as a subjective principle constraining our representations of living beings. In other words, Kant is agnostic about whether anything actually is internally purposive. What Hegel shows, in a complex argument that need not concern us here, is that the intelligible structure of nature collapses if it is taken to be coterminous with the space of causes; nature must also comprise a proto-normative space, the “space of purposes,” if you will, which arises with the most primitive instance of life. It is in light of its purpose of self-maintenance that a cat discriminates instrument from obstacle, good-for from bad-for, in the environment surrounding it. And indeed, it is its evolved species-form that furnishes normative criteria, in relation to its contingent, natural-historical circumstances, for flourishing versus withering. A tiger that loses an eye is a “bad tiger,” not from our zoological standpoint but from its own standpoint, given its purpose of maintaining itself not just willy-nilly but as a tiger. It needs its eyes to hunt—to engage in the vital activity characteristic of its kind.
Hegel refers to life in a stunning turn of phrase as an “objective idealism,” since the “idea” of an organism—its animating purpose or norm—“is not at all only our reflection on life; it is objectively present in the living subject himself.”[23] It has become popular to refer to laws, norms, or even tendencies, as “emergent” properties of a process, but this is nonsensical.[24] The Aristotelian point Hegel is here making is that living entities cannot so much as be the material things they are except in light of such an animating purpose, which is not emergent but originally constitutive. Without such a form, there would be no material process from which it could emerge.[25] An implication of Hegel’s anti-emergentist view is that some proto-form of autonomy or spontaneity is a condition of possibility of organic life: a tiger is not caused to act by sense impressions of its prey; rather, it is the inner purpose of the tiger that enables the prey to show up as prey, as an object worth going after. This is significant in relation to Roberts because it demonstrates that ideas are not epiphenomenal or “in the head” but in the world. And they are in the world already in the case of non-rational animals not as codifications of behavioral regularities but as principles of self-movement—of a primitive form of self-determination.
We can now return to Hegel’s account of self-consciousness and its implications for Roberts—in particular, for his own understanding of the relationship between freedom and material interest or desire. Against Kant, Hegel argues that self-consciousness (or “apperception”) is not just a formal condition of the unity of my representations; it is rather the condition of the unity of a certain kind of substance, the rational sort of organism. For Kant, the degree to which we allow our animal desires to determine what we do is the degree to which we have forsaken our freedom and given ourselves over to the “realm of necessity,” to causal laws. Yet the above account establishes that, already in the case of lower-order organisms, desires are not simply causal impingements but are in fact only intelligible as a spontaneous responsiveness to what is good-for or bad-for in the environment. (Otherwise, the rusting of a piece of metal and an antelope crying out in pain would be formally indistinguishable, and we would lose the distinction between a difference that matters (a defect) and one that does not (a mere change of state).) Spontaneity or autonomy thus has its basis in nature, not outside of it. This does not mean, however, that self-consciousness is just a capacity for overt reflection on desires that we share with the other animals. Rather, self-consciousness is constitutive of our desires, meaning that we cannot desire at all without being conscious of the desirability of what we desire; self-consciousness is the form without which our matter (our bodies) would fall apart.[26] To feel pangs of hunger, for example, is to feel the force of one’s reasons to eat and to thereby be sensitive to potential justifications for eating that others would accept. This suggests that, in the case of animals like us, we do not just desire this or that but desire to be recognized as desiring rightly, or as one ought to desire. We can maintain ourselves as animals, in other words, only through initiation into the social space of reasons.
The profound implication of this line of argument for Hegel is that my attempt to satisfy my desires affects what other agents would otherwise be able to do; I must thus be able to justify to others the desires I choose to satisfy as well as how I satisfy them.[27] Whether my reasons actually have the authority I take them to will depend on whether that authority is recognized by others—and whether they themselves are authorized to confer such recognition. And if they are not, the question will arise as to whether their reasons for acting are truly theirs, and not just alien ends or norms imposed from without. Hegel will claim that we can only “actually” be the free agents we have always potentially been through commitment to what he calls the “rational system of the will”—a system of interests, ends, and institutions that enable and exemplify our mutual exercise of our freedom.[28] Hegel tries to show that no rational, historically situated, self-conscious sort of animal could fail to be motivated to sustain such a system.
The point for Roberts, by contrast, is that “freedom from domination” is not a self-determined norm but “a basic good” and that domination itself is “normatively neutral.” Freedom is not itself an end but a mere means to the fulfillment of my actual end, my satisfaction of my contingent interests. And domination is only positively normatively valenced to the extent that it precludes me from the pursuit of my interests. Yet one should take note of just how abstract and indeterminate an individual’s “interests” are on this account. Given that freedom for Roberts is just one interest among others and that our participation in institutions that secure our freedom is merely strategic or instrumental, our interests themselves appear to exist prior to and apart from our membership in society. Such an account presupposes the satisfaction of one’s own individual interests as an overriding, transhistorical interest. And this presupposes in turn a quite historically specific, and here undertheorized, conception of individual agency as end-setting prior to and in independence of the socially formative process through which we come to have interests and ends in the first place. Marx makes exactly this point in his critique of Feuerbach, who is said to miss that “the abstract individual whom he analyses actually belongs to a particular form of society” (2011: 794). It is only under such egoist—indeed, bourgeois or capitalist—assumptions that one could imagine a pre-institutional individual taking a state of non-domination or “freedom” to be a means to the realization of her self-interest.
Marx’s criticisms here of egoism in Feuerbach are, strikingly, anticipated by Hegel’s own critique of Rousseau in passages like the following:
If the state is confused with civil society and its determination is equated with the security and protection of property and personal freedom, the interest of individuals as such becomes the ultimate end for which they are united; it also follows from this that membership of the state is an optional matter. – But the relationship of the state to the individual is of quite a different kind. Since the state is objective spirit, it is only through being a member of the state that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life. Union as such is itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a universal life: their further particular satisfaction, activity, and mode of conduct have this substantial and universally valid basis as their point of departure and result. (1991: 276/§258)
Stated in this way, without any argument, the assertion that the individual “has objectivity and truth […] only through being a member of the state” is hardly dispositive. But there is a powerful argument for this point that Hegel makes in other places and is here taking for granted. If it is established that domination is bad for me, because it inhibits my pursuit of my interests, then it is not “normatively neutral” but in fact bad for all, since I cannot be free from domination unless all others are. If domination were normatively neutral, there would be no reason to prefer domination to non-domination; indeed, it would be a matter of mere preference. But by Roberts’s own lights, I have reason to oppose domination in my case (the burdens it imposes on me), and that reason—as a reason—will have force for any other agent similarly situated, dictating what she ought to do. Given that my own freedom from domination will affect and constrain other agents, limiting what they can do, I must thus take them into account. I have the authority or normative standing to demand that others respect my freedom if and only if I recognize their authority and standing to recognize mine.
Yet if, as in Roberts’s picture, I have only strategic reasons for coordinating with others, as soon as it is to my advantage to renege on my promise, then I have a good reason to do so. Because the “ultimate end” is the “interest of individuals,” association with others will always appear as a negative restriction. This sort of egoism is not just the formal condition of setting and having ends but is itself a substantive end, a principle of self-satisfaction that we must be able to justify to one another. “Once this principle is accepted,” Hegel writes, “the rational [the demand for justification] can of course appear only as a limitation on the freedom in question” (1991: 58/§29) The problem, then, is that such a principle itself contradicts the forms of cooperation, mutuality, and trust that would be required to sustain it. And this is exactly the point Marx makes about capitalism, initially in On the Jewish Question: “The sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being. […] It is not man as citoyen, but man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true man.” (1973: 164). It is eerie just how closely Roberts’s positive picture of an emancipated society parallels the form of life Marx is here calling into question. For Roberts, my “communal being” (my cooperation with others to secure our freedom or non-domination) is subordinated to my “partial being,” the interests I am above all committed to satisfying. It is worth quoting Marx’s strikingly Hegelian response to this model at some length:
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a genus-being [Gattungswesen] in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘forces propres’ as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished. (1973: 168)
A detailed consideration of genus-being here would take us too far afield, but it is worth noting that the idea of a species conscious of its own normative requirements (its inner purpose) is nothing other than the Hegelian notion of rational life considered above.[29] What Marx is hinting at here is precisely a rationally articulated system of interests, desires, and ends—or the Hegelian idea invoked earlier of a “rational system of the will”—in which the community is not simply a restriction on individual end-setting or just an “enabling condition” of the private pursuit of interests. Such conceptions—like Roberts’s—remain confined within the capitalist imaginary.
Rather, Hegel’s point is that freedom is not just a condition for pursuing one’s desires or interests but a specific set of ends themselves that we must come to espouse if we are to be the agents we take ourselves to be and live genuinely self-determined lives. As noted above, desire in our case is only intelligible as self-conscious—as the consciousness of the desirability of what we desire (of its justifiability to other agents). And it is owing to this self-consciousness of desire that we can be responsive to the rational requirement to revise our desires. This indicates a “drive” within desire itself to a rational and sharable set of desires and ends, which are precisely not, therefore, merely assumed and imposed from without. On Roberts’s conception, by contrast, what is to prevent my ends from including dealing heroin, polygamy, or anti-Black propagandizing? The problem is that Roberts’s notion of freedom is indifferent to content; and as soon as one starts putting restrictions on content (ruling out obviously abhorrent, historically obsolete practices like slavery, vassalage, indentured servitude, and so on), it will quickly become clear that our interest must lie in mutually justifiable practices, that is, practices in which we mutually regard ourselves as the authors. This will entail, for Hegel, a certain form of the family (of how we reproduce ourselves individually), of work (of how we reproduce one another collectively), and of politics (of how we collectively decide how our form of life is to be structured). For example, if, in taking myself to be a spouse and in inheriting the various responsibilities and entitlements of such a role, I am supposed to act as a unilateral patriarchal authority, those in my household who recognize my authority will themselves lack the normative standing to do so; my authority will thereby be undermined. The failure of patriarchy as a model of normative authority in the sphere of romantic or erotic or reproductive interest begins to tell us something about what a viable interest in that sphere would have to be. Or said differently, freedom itself must be our highest end; the content of our ends that the condition of freedom or non-domination is meant to secure must be freedom itself.
Now, it must be emphasized that all of the above is supposed to follow, on Hegel’s account, just from our attempts to satisfy our desires in a distinctly self-conscious way. Hegel is not dogmatically asserting freedom “as the end of human life,” in Roberts’s words. We discover through the historical experience of failed attempts at mutuality that freedom must be our end, that there is no livable alternative. This implies that, on the Hegelian account, human beings do will their own condition of slavery and servitude and (potentially) learn from its failure, but this claim must be made with care. Slavery is not simply “voluntary” (or a “choice,” as Ye notoriously put it). To recognize a master’s authority and to abide by his commands is to take there to be a reason for doing so—the value of one’s own life, for example. Bondage carries justificatory weight because it appears to enable me to satisfy my interest in living my life. In the master-slave dialectic, it is the experience of servitude and the fear of death that first teaches the slave the value of her own life. But she also learns from the experience the dispensability of the master. The threat of violence, the slave comes to realize, lacks normative authority precisely because it preempts authoritative recognition by the slave. As Hegel puts it, “It is in the nature of the case [Sache] that the slave has an absolute right to free [herself], and that, if someone has agreed to devote his ethical life to robbery and murder, this is null and void in and for itself, and anyone is entitled to revoke such a contract” (1991: 97/§66A). The master-slave dialectic thereby establishes domination not as a normatively neutral condition but as the original and abiding normative defect to which no one can be indifferent, because it is an obstacle for master and slave alike to a free and flourishing life.
In other historical episodes, as in (Hegel’s account of) the Roman Empire, the promise of “legal personhood” and a limited individual right to property paves the way to subjection to the whims of a tyrant; domination is accepted in the guise of non-domination. Yet this is not simply “false consciousness”; the Roman way of life constituted a partial, imperfect advance through the introduction of the rational idea—an idea people had good reasons to endorse—of state recognition of personhood. That idea was not just a lie contradicted by an opposed reality but an idea that itself proved contradictory in what its own actualization demanded. The state recognition of personhood, in other words, would have to be radically revised to be properly realized—as it later was, for Hegel, in the modern state.
IV.
I want to conclude by addressing Roberts’s understanding of Lukács as moralistic and of class consciousness as impositionist. We have already seen how our interests cannot be abstract and indeterminate in the way Roberts thinks because (1) “interest” in general already bears a proto-rational, purposive shape in the case of other living beings and (2) the interests of self-conscious agents—just to be the determinately contentful interests that they are—must always be the consciousness of their own goodness or justifiability. Such interests become increasingly rationally articulate through the historical struggle to determine which sorts of reasons and norms are actually viable, mutually sharable, including the norms that establish the source of normative authority itself. I call this view hylomorphic materialism because it understands concepts, rules, and norms as the form (morphe) of the matter (hyle) of animals like us. Our modes of production, accordingly, cannot be specified independently of our normative self-understanding regarding how we ought to reproduce ourselves.
According to Roberts, Lukács’s notion of “imputed” or class consciousness represents a form of moralism (or Moralität, a Hegelian term of art). Roberts takes this to mean that the class-conscious proletariat “sees all, knows all, and acts only and always for the sake of humanity as a whole.” This constitutes a “perverse betrayal of the entire project of self-emancipation,” Roberts writes, “since it turns our interest in being free into a self-refuting interest in being without interests.” The moral ideal of “human freedom” displaces the actual interests of the members of the class.
I find this questionable as an illustration of Hegel’s critical notion of Moralität, but I will hold that issue to one side. The real difficulty here lies in the tendentious characterization of class consciousness as an alien imposition on the working class and as a form of practical “omniscience.” Consider first the claim that the revolutionary commitment to freedom is at odds with the actual interests of the individual revolutionary. What Roberts ignores in Lukács’s picture is his insistence that the “antagonism between momentary interest and ultimate goal” must be “inwardly overcome” (my emphasis) (1971: 73). This is to say that the immediate interest of the member of the class is not simply cast aside and “sacrificed” for the sake of the interest of the class; rather, the immediate interest cannot be satisfied on its own terms and so rationally necessitates movement towards the “ultimate goal.” To take Marx’s own example, the trade unionist motto of “a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work” is structurally impossible under capitalist conditions and so gives way to the “revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” (1976: 61).
More fundamentally, the basic interest of the worker lies in the freedom the wage system purports to provide, namely, the freedom to lead a self-determined life. But it is precisely that freedom that is contradicted by the necessity of laboring for a wage. Class consciousness does not compete with one’s own interests; it is rather the consciousness of what the realization of one’s own interest in freedom would actually require. As Lukács himself puts this point, “Only when the immediate interests are integrated into a total view and related to the final goal of the process do they become revolutionary, pointing concretely and consciously beyond the confines of capitalist society” (1971: 71). Contrary to Roberts’s claim that the aim of the revolution for Lukács is “to make revolutionaries [i.e., those who sacrifice themselves for the external end of freedom] rather than to make revolutionaries unnecessary,” the point is exactly the opposite: “The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle” (1971: 80). And this is so because—as we saw above—one can only successfully constitute oneself as an agent by willing freedom as one’s own end.
This bears directly on our final point. Far from relieving the socialist of her responsibility to reflect on her own ends, as Roberts contends, the ideal of freedom as our highest end is itself arrived at through a historical process defined by an increasingly radical form of self-scrutiny. Habermas’ transcendentally derived, “counterfactual ideal speech situation,” which Roberts suggests is the organic endpoint of the Lukácsian tradition of ideology critique, is precisely the wrong model. Rather, for Lukács, it is through the contradictory experience of false consciousness—of, say, the unfreedom of wage labor as freedom—that a possibility of a higher form of knowledge is generated. The “apperceptive” responsiveness such experience exemplifies, the responsiveness to the potential need for self-correction, is what constitutes the opening for Marxist theory—for the sort of work we are trying to do.
Jensen Suther is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He recently completed his first book, Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in Modernist Literature and Philosophy.
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—. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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—.1976. Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit. New York: International Publishers.
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—. 2024. “Ideology and Self-Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciousness, and the Career of Critical Social Theory,” in b2o.
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Suther, Jensen. 2023. Forthcoming-A. “The Desire for Desire: Hegel’s Constitutive Model of Rationality in Chapter IV.”
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—. Forthcoming-B. Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in Modernist Literature and Philosophy.
I want to thank Alex Gourevitch, Yanis Molindris, and Alejandro Fernández Barcina, for several conversations that contributed in decisive ways to the development of the argument in this essay.
[1] Strikingly, Roberts never cites or discusses the book’s crucial, final chapter, which is where Lukács theorizes the communist party as the context in which the acquisition of theoretical knowledge of capital as a system (a “totality”) becomes possible and assumes the form of a highly precarious and defeasible collective praxis.
[2] I cite here Engels’ revised version of Marx’s text, which preserves and, in my view, amplifies its spirit.
[3] On the investigation of the “objective purport” or the world-directedness of thought as the defining Kantian innovation, see Brandom 1994, 6-7. See also Conant (2012).
[4] See Pippin (2019).
[5] See Kant 1998, A69/B94. See Hegel 2010b, 552/12.55
[6] And Hegel pursues such an account independently of consideration of any limiting “forms of sensibility” or “pure forms of intuition,” responsible for ensuring thought’s constraint by a reality outside it. That is because Hegel shows that that very notion of “reality” is itself a pure thought-determination, not a thought-alien “thing in itself,” but this claim must be carefully distinguished from the claim that thought produces the empirical objects it thinks. See Hegel 2010a, 83-85/§41.
[7] Consider the opening move of Hegel’s Logic. To try to claim—as Parmenides does—that being is simply “what is” and that whatever is not is thereby excluded from being has an unexpected result: on that conception of being, not only are motion and change illusory, since they involve transition to states that are not; one thing cannot be distinguished from another because we do not have license to say that this is not that. That is, no entity can be the determinate entity it is, since such determinacy requires a basic form of negative difference. This is meant to show that such a conception of being, of how things are, fails. If we are to make sense of the concept of being (if we are to make sense of what it means for things to be), we must conceive being differently. The task of a Science of Logic is, at bottom, to determine how to think being consistently. See Hegel 2010b, 59/21.68-69. See also Suther (2023).
[8] See Hegel 1988, 20-21.
[9] For an important account of Kant’s critique of Descartes (and the limits of that critique), see McDowell 1994, 101-104.
[10] See Kant 1997, 53/4:448.
[11] See Rödl 2021, 631ff.
[12] See Hegel 2018, 382/662.
[13] For the classic account of non-observational knowledge, see Anscombe (1981). Anscombe’s account has heavily influenced the “analytic” reception of German Idealism.
[14] This is Terry Pinkard’s important reformulation of Sellars’ idea. See Pinkard 1994, 7-8.
[15] See the powerful critique of the “semantically naïve” character of genealogical and structuralist approaches discourse in Brandom (2012).
[16] For the distinction between exculpations and justifications, see McDowell 1994, 8.
[17] See Brandom 1994, 36.
[18] See Sellars (2007).
[19] See Hegel 2010a, 277/§204.
[20] See Book II of Aristotle (2017) and Book IX of Aristotle (2016).
[21] The “machine metaphor” that Descartes introduces remains extremely influential; indeed, the ongoing attempt to engineer AGI presupposes that the mind is a “biological computer” reproducible in a lab. Yet a “computer” cannot itself determine what counts as worth doing or believing; the activity of any machine is parasitic on the values and beliefs of a designer who cannot herself, therefore, be a machine. It is a supreme irony that, instead of overcoming a theological, creationist picture, the machine metaphor reinforces it: if all biological entities are machines, then it follows that someone must have designed and created them. See Chapter 20 in Rosen (1991).
[22] See Kant 2000, 271/5:400.
[23] See Hegel 1975, 1:123.
[24] See, for example, Mau 2023, 43ff. His account is influenced by Malm (2018). The logical point here is that the purposive form of a living whole cannot be an “emergent property” that results from the interaction of its parts because the purposive form is the ground of the parts. The parts of such a whole could not so much as be parts prior to the emergence of their form; they therefore could not “give rise” to anything. It is also worth emphasizing that purpose, unity, principles, forms, and so on are not “properties,” emergent or otherwise; they are that in virtue of which a thing can have properties. Marx, like Hegel, was steeped in the Aristotelian hylomorphic logic, and Marxist interpreters would do well to heed this fact.
[25] The Aristotelian way of making the anti-emergentist point is to say that actuality is “prior” to potentiality in terms of the account (logos) and of substance (ousia). See Chapter VIII of Book IX of Aristotle (2016).
[26] See Suther (forthcoming-a) and Boyle (2016).
[27] For a concise statement of this argument, see Pippin (1991).
[28] Hegel 1991, 51/§19.
[29] It is also worth noting that, contrary to the common wisdom, Marx continues to employ the term Gattungswesen in the same sense in the 1850s, in the Grundrisse; see Marx 1973, 243. This suggests a deeper continuity between the early and the late Marx than is usually acknowledged. But beyond this philological issue, there is the substantive philosophical question as to the defensibility of such a concept, which has long been criticized as “humanist.” For a recent example, see Mau 2023, 93. There have been a number of important recent defenses of the concept, such as Khurana (2023) and Ng (2015), but I do not believe that they grasp Marx’s notion in its full radicality. In my forthcoming book, Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in Modernist Literature and Philosophy, I pursue a rethinking of the notion of a Gattungswesen in the context of a systematic grounding of a hylomorphic materialism. This essay exploits one of the key lines of argument developed in the book: the notion that rationality is constitutive of the sorts of living, material beings we are.