Peter Emmerson

 4.2.2.1 Beyond Marx to Nietzsche and further still.

Marx believed that he was enlightening us to the clash between the truth of science and the insidious fallacies of ideology. He alerted us to the fact that much of what we believe to be true is in fact merely opinion, the opinions of influential figurations of people who can manipulate the processes by which knowledge is produced so as to give it the appearance of truths: the practices of the theometaphysicians being a case in point. The statements of the experts in what is correct are then used by the established to maintain and if possible, extend their dominance. This is a very similar conclusion to that arrived at by Nietzsche a little later, the difference being that for Nietzsche there is no absolute truth to be had at all. Where Marx idealized the human collective, Nietzsche idealized the human individual. However, what both point to is the relative uncertainty of what we know.

Marx presents a picture of oversocialized people and neglects to give proper consideration to the impact of personal reflection on human activity by overemphasising the significance of structural forces such as class. On the surface this seems quite a useful strategy because it appears to open up the opportunity to analyse social experience in terms of tangible things that can be measured scientifically such as practices. However, it could be construed as an empiricist reaction to the problem of interpretation and has parallels with Foucault’s response to the problem meaning in 2.3.3 above, i.e. when confronting a theoretical conundrum let’s move the analysis to something measurable that can be relied upon. I would argued that we can see a similar strategy adopted in psychology with the development of behaviourism by the pragmatists Watson and Skinner who wanted to put their psychological feet on more solid ground and get away from mind games of introspection. Both Foucault and the behaviourists opted for hard evidence, whether as archaeological objects in the case of the former, or in the case of the latter, the carefully measured learning behaviour of reinforced rats in Skinner’s boxes. I think Marx is an earlier example who in focussing on work (economic) activity, manages to circumvent the problem of consciousness and how to measure it. Because human thinking is so difficult to quantify and understand it is put aside as if social and psychological modes of analysis can be viable without taking into consideration the processes of reflection. This is surely a serious error when so much of our behaviour is learned. How can a model that pretends to offer insight into human behaviour ignore the importance of thinking? – such models chuck out the baby with the bathwater producing a social world populated by androids.

By contrast, Nietzsche overindividualizes people understating the influence of social processes in human functioning, by giving precedence to the power of interpretation practised by the oversimple notion of human will. This model is the dialectical counterpart to Marx’ socially determined android; a totally self-motivated, subjective, sociopathic robot, that pursues the possibilities of ultimate individualism in constant danger of being corrupted by the degenerate temptation to conform to the will of others by behaving in line with social convention. Nonetheless, from my point of view, the respective structural/individual emphases are not in themselves the real difficulty with the theories of Marx or Nietzsche. It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in their work is related to an overindulgence in theometaphysical thinking that produces models too rich in idealism, with an overemphasis on the need to satisfy conditions for absolute truth or relativism. In operating in this fashion, Marx and Nietzsche assembled two theometaphysical monsters, thereby perpetuating a human idealistic stereotype described by Norbert Elias as ‘Homo clausus’ (closed man).