Marx And Laozi: A Dialectical Synthesis

In this experimental thesis the theories of Marx and Laozi are dialectically combined.The resulting synthesis is a positive materialist negation of Hegel’s idealist dialectics.Syntheses are presented for Marx and Laozi in ontology,metaphysics,epistemology,scientific method,ethics and politics: in short,the full spectrum of their foundational principles.While the thesis will compare and contrast the theories of Marx and Laozi this thesis is not primarily concerned with exploring similarities and differences between them.Rather the thesis is an attempt to reconstruct a materialist interpretation of Laozi,which can be put to work for Marxist theory.The thesis is old and traditional in its interpretation of Marx’s materialism as fundamentally an ontological position.It deepens the interpretation of the ontological dimension of Marx’s thought in its reconstruction of Marx’s theory’s emergence from a materialist refutation of Hegel.Materialist ideas that precede and inform Marx’s materialist arguments will be identified as running through all of his work.This will be combined with a dialectical humanist interpretation of Marx’s social theory,which usually has no ontological dimension or an idealist one.While these ideas are not new they will be combined in a novel way.Old and familiar ideas from Laozi scholarship will be radically reinterpreted to produce a novel theory of Laozi.This novel interpretation will situate his ideas in the alien setting of the idealism/materialism controversy.The result will be that while Laozi scholars will see ideas they recognize,the ideas will have a different orientation in such a way as to constitute a paradigm shift in Laozi research.The case will be made for relative hermeneutic freedom in Laozi studies to justify this radical transformation.Probably the most important character in the thesis will be Hegel because the materialism that the thesis will propound will be presented as a refutation of Hegel’s idealism.It will employ the materialist modification of Hegel’s dialectics to make its synthesis.All of the materialist theoretical principles of the thesis will be counterpoised to Hegel’s position.Because of the pivotal importance of Hegel’s idealism for understanding Marx and the reconstruction of Laozi the thesis will take great pains to argue for its traditional ontological interpretation of Hegel’s idealism.The ontological dimension of Hegel’s idealism is a subject upon which there is even greater controversy than the ontological dimension of Marx’s materialism.Because this issue is so complex and there is so much literature on it I have chosen to argue for the traditional interpretation of Hegel’s idealism through a critique of one of the more recent and sophisticated interpretations of Hegel’s idealism,which dismisses the traditional interpretation.Laozi will be introduced via an account of Hegel’s critique of the Dao de Jing.An interpretation of Laozi will be reconstructed which makes him an opponent of Hegel’s philosophy whose significance Hegel failed to identify.It will be explained that this failure is partly the result of the linguistic and cultural distance between them.However,it will argue the main reason why Hegel failed to understand Laozi was that his idealist conception of the history of philosophy directed Hegel to accord Laozi a low status in his historical narrative.A close analysis of the first chapter of the Dao De Jing will reconstruct a basic ontology,epistemology and metaphysics from Laozi compatible with the materialist rejection of Hegel’s idealism.This materialism is antithetical to Hegel’s whole approach as Hegel’s doctrine was based upon the denial of its meaning and power.Laozi will be inserted into the materialist refutation of Hegel’s idealism via a brief comparison with Feuerbach in which certain unusual similarities are apparent.This is just a prelude to an introduction of Marx’s materialist rescue of the science of concepts,in the form of the materialist theory of history,from the one-sided materialist refutation of Hegel that had preceded him.Marx will be shown to outline the principles for the science of concepts reinterpreted as a moment of historical praxis.Laozi,by contrast will be shown to produce an aesthetic of concepts constituted by a sympathetic comportment to experience.Both of these views will be argued to have their roots in a shared ontological principle.The ontological roots of the science of concepts inform Marx’s method in Capital.His science of capitalism is the employment of a materialist concrete universal.This directly follows from a materialist refutation of Hegel’s idealist concrete universal.This refutation takes the same form as the materialist refutation of idealism preceding it.Marx’s materialist concrete universal is the methodological embodiment of a materialist ontology.The thesis presents a sophisticated metaphysical apparatus to ground the complex series of principles governing Marx’s methodology.This metaphysics rests upon the primacy of a version of Laozi’s idea of absence – wu.Marx’s ethics is a form of historical humanist naturalism,which has its source in Aristotle.Laozi’s ethics is a form of non-historical anti-humanist naturalism,when these terms are understood in their Aristotelian sense,which is critical of the essentialism of Aristotle.This difference between Marx and Laozi appears to be very stark.Yet the thesis will try to present it as one between the scientific and aesthetic employment of concepts,represented by Marx and Laozi respectively,in the philosophy of ethics.Both of these doctrines will be argued to spring from the same materialist principles,teased out of a dialectical tension in Aristotle’s essentialist ethics.This thesis exploits the profound differences between Marx and Laozi to show them as representing archetypal scientific and aesthetic theories respectively.The thesis will argue that according to the materialism they both advocate in radically different ways metaphysical reality is the dialectical union of two movements,which take the forms of the scientific and aesthetic faculties of cognition in human lived experience.When thought of in this way the radically disconnected streams of thought they separately pursued can be combined in a single outlook,just like the dialectical world they theorized.As a study aid in the concrete-in-thought both sides enrich the other,not merely by contrast but complementing each other.In terms of the relationship between the two,the thesis will present a Laozi useful for a comprehensive and systematic version of Marxism as a science,a struggle,a worldview and a life-project.