Читать книгу Gramsci's Plan - Robin Jacobitz - Страница 14

Gramsci’s suggestions for a philosophical work

Kant’s four questions form the philosophical architecture and Gramsci’s plan the common thread within this order. This provides readers with a basic orientation. The way this book was written follows a series of proposals Gramsci made in the “Prison Notebooks.” In these passages, he discussed his ideas about the form and content of philosophical books that he or other authors after him might write.⁷⁸ The suggestions, which guided the author, related to the choice of language, the intellectual effort required, and the literary form of the book. Beforehand, however, a personal note.

A personal note

Gramsci noted at one point in the “Prison Notebooks”: “This is interesting, because the Germans are not made to give foreign sources for their ideas.”⁷⁹ This note referred to the testimony of Eduard Bernstein, a representative of the reformist wing of the SPD before World War I. Bernstein had accordingly admitted that he had been inspired by the writings of the Italian philosopher Croce. Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) had taken his cue from Marx at an early stage and had written some outstanding books on Hegel and Marx’s historical materialism. The bad habit observed by Gramsci of “the Germans” not indicating the foreign sources of their ideas is to be broken in this book. The entire conceptual approach to the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of development, the critique of Soviet philosophy, the conception of the hegemony of the bourgeois classes, and the struggle for the emancipation of the subaltern classes in modern society go back solely to Antonio Gramsci. Without his work in prison, this book would not have even begun.

Intention and language

As the philosophers made thinking independent, so they had to make language independent into a realm of its own: At the beginning of this introduction, it has already been stated that for Gramsci all human beings are philosophers and as such are also permanently thinking, communicating, acting and making history. This is one of the brilliant and sustaining ideas that Gramsci develops in the context of Marx’s renewal of philosophy in the “Prison Notebooks.” This thought will run through the present book as well as all the others and will be comprehensively presented in the chapter on bourgeois hegemony. A reading of philosophical literature of the past decades suggests that Gramsci’s hope has not become a reality that philosophy could evolve from a special academic activity to a subject for all people, precisely because everyone is a philosopher. Rather, today’s reality is described by a statement made by Marx and Engels in 1846: “As the philosophers have made thought independent, so they have had to make language independent into a realm of its own. (…) The problem of descending from the world of thought into the real world is transformed into the problem of descending from language into life. Philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language from which it is abstracted, in order to recognize it as the twisted language of the real world.”⁸⁰ With this, Marx and Engels pointed out two problems in the activity of philosophers: Firstly, the making of thoughts independent in philosophical texts, and secondly, the resulting making of language independent. Marx and Engels criticized a philosophy that, by becoming independent, removes philosophical thoughts from their historical context and thus becomes incapable of establishing a relation to a practice that changes reality. By stating that the language of the philosophers had become independent, they pointed out the enormous difficulties that “everyman” encounters when reading the texts of classical German philosophy and their Young Hegelian successors. This statement is also valid for a large part of today’s philosophical literature. If only people make history, if all people are philosophers and live a colorful mix of philosophies in their everyday lives, both theoretically and practically, then there should also be books that appeal to these people and do not put linguistic obstacles in their way.

Descending from the world of thought into the real world: Marx is difficult to understand in his philosophical writings, but it is only with the writings of Kant and Hegel that things become really arduous, difficult to understand, and dark in places. This makes the reading of these and other texts an exhausting and time-consuming adventure that is often not rewarded with success, with an increase in knowledge. The consequences for the present book are: Refraining from convoluted sentences as well as – as far as possible – from the use of Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon expressions. In this respect, the intention is to make a small contribution to the dissolution of linguistic peculiarities of philosophy into ordinary language. Readers are to be introduced to the writings of classical German as well as Marxist philosophy in a comprehensible manner and through a systematic structure of the concepts used. What is offered is a long ascent to increasingly difficult topics, which are, however, presented in a linguistically comprehensible manner and with a clear thread before the eyes of committed readers. This concept entails a number of consequences for the material to be presented: concentration on the original sources of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Gramsci, as well as a few other philosophers; reduction of the topics treated to the building blocks that have relevance in Gramsci’s plan; extensive avoidance of the incorporation of secondary literature and, in particular, of the debates that have taken on a life of their own there. The author would not be able to work through the wealth of German and international academic literature anyway, to evaluate it, and to critically summarize the latest state of scholarship. The historical facts and contexts were taken from the works of the cited philosophers and are furthermore based on the website “Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia,” so that verifiability is possible without much trouble. Philosophy is seen in this book as a distinctly practical enterprise. The author’s aim is to introduce Gramsci’s plan to as many people as possible, so that they can check for themselves whether this plan can be an inspiration in their search for orientation in the globalized bourgeois society of the 21st century.

Arrange and complete the puzzle pieces

One of the hints Gramsci gave in the “Prison Notebooks” about writing a philosophical book related to the relationship between originality and intellectual order in an author’s work. Gramsci approached this issue via the statement of a French philosopher: “It is easier to say new things than to reconcile those already said.”⁸¹ According to this statement, it is more difficult to bring intellectual order to already existing texts and statements than to invent new and original principles. To be socially effective, Gramsci argues, it is necessary to use everyday language and to dispense with “neologism addiction and bohemianism.” “In the claim to originality, there is much vanity and individualism and little creative spirit.”⁸² The author’s work, which resulted in the present book, was essentially of an organizing nature. This is especially true for the preparation of philosophy along with the four Kantian questions and the merging of the content of Gramsci’s early writings with his “Prison Notebooks.” The author’s activity can be described as putting together a large jigsaw puzzle. However, at the beginning of the work, a large number of puzzle pieces were not available. Puzzle pieces that Gramsci was missing were, in particular, some of Marx’s philosophical works that were not published until the 1930s such as the “Economical-Philosophical Manuscripts” from 1844 and the “German Ideology” from 1846. Likewise, Gramsci was missing many texts of classical German philosophy, of Kautsky, Lenin and other relevant authors in prison.⁸³ Even the wording of Kant’s categorical imperative was unknown to Gramsci, so that he could not discover any proper meaning in the verbalizations he had. The missing texts were identified based on the systematics of Gramsci’s plan and placed in the great puzzle.

The history of philosophy as a historical drama in progress

Gramsci, in the “Prison Notebooks,” considered various proposals for a textbook of philosophy and the main elements to be incorporated in it.84 The teaching of a certain direction in philosophy should have reached a classical stage of development to justify a textbook. In his view, Marxist philosophy had not yet reached this stage. Therefore, he made proposals for a book in which the aim should be “not to compile an organic repertory of political maxims, but to write a book that is in a certain sense ‘dramatic,’ a historical drama taking place at the same time, in which the political maxims would be presented as individualized necessity and not as principles of science.”⁸⁵ Kant is known to have used the concept “maxims.” Maxims are rules for action that stand before the reason of individuals. Gramsci, then, proposed to write a book in which philosophy would not be presented abstractly and separately from history. Instead, it was to describe certain actions that people in their time felt compelled to take because of their circumstances, and which were then taken up thematically by philosophy.

The history of philosophy is to be presented in the context of social upheavals and political revolutions: The term “drama” used by Gramsci in the above quotation points to his studies of Italian theater and literary history in the “Prison Notebooks.” Here, a “historical drama” is understood only as the narration of historical actions whose outcome was in principle open and on a knife’s edge. To implement Gramsci’s proposal, the history of philosophy is presented in connection with social upheavals and political revolutions along the historical timeline. The “historical drama” begins in the early 16th century with the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in Germany. The works of the philosophers are not torn out of the time in which they were written, not taken out of the social and political struggles that conditioned them. Therefore, the presentation of the essential aspects of their thoughts, even within their work, follows largely a chronological order. The emergence of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Gramsci are linked to the respective state of socio-economic development, the social and natural scientific horizon (What can I know?), and the social struggles of their time (What should I do?). Such a “historical drama” cannot claim to draw a historically balanced or even complete picture of the individual philosophers. The criterion for the selection of their writings and ideas always remains their relevance to Gramsci’s thinking about the defeats of 1917 to 1921. The incorporation of Greek philosophy has generally been omitted, since the author has no expertise in this area.

78 See, for example, Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 39, p. 504 and ibid, vol. 5, Vol. 8, § 21, p. 956

79 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 3, p. 1256

80 Marx/Engels, 1846, German Ideology, MEW 3, p.432/3

81 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 55, p. 1470 The name of the French philosopher is Vauvenargues (1715-1747).

82 Ibid. Neologism addiction is the addiction of intellectuals to invent new words (for prestige reasons). Bohemian is the pejorative term for a subculture of intellectual fringe groups composed primarily of artists. Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, §31, p. 1285: “Sometimes it even helps to put forward one’s own discovery of a truth as if it were the unfolding of another philosopher’s earlier theory, for it is a strength to join in the particular process of development of the particular science on which one is working.”

83 For the books and articles cited by Gramsci in the “Prison Notebooks” and those in his possession in prison, see Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks, notebooks 10, index, Argument Verlag, 2002.

84 E.g. Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 13, p. 472, vol. 3, issue 4, § 39, 503/4, vol. 4, issue 7, § 29, p. 883 in critical contrast to Bukharin’s “Common sense textbook.” Ibid. as well as vol. 6, issue 11, § 22, p. 1419 “Instead of a textbook, it would be better to present essential problems of doctrine monographically.”

85 Ibid, vol. 3, issue 4, § 10, p. 471