Jaspers' Interpretation of Marx and Freud

Marx and Freud pointed out our blindness about the unconscious causes of individual and collective behavior. Their revolutionary intent was to liberate humanity by taking conscious control. Jaspers' evaluation of historical materialism and psychoanalysis turns on the contested relations between objectivity and subjectivity and science and philosophy. He tracks their two systems through stages: valid scientific discoveries within specified domains; then a de-evolution from science into world-views as a mix of pseudoscience and false philosophy; and finally, the meta-theories of Marx and Freud are absolutized into a mutually excluding universal scientific philosophy. In the century past, Jaspers argued that historical materialism and psychoanalysis (and racism) are dogmatic, dominant ideologies disguised as scientific philosophy that threatened Western civilization. From Jaspers critique we see that the relation between science and philosophy founders over a misinterpretation of the differences between knowledge and thinking. He argues that science, philosophy, and religion all rest on faith. But contemporary science produces a new form of faith as faithlessness. Modern philosophizing is contested by anti-reason and anti-faith and anti-transcendence. Marx and Freud offered profound insights about human beings that are worth preserving despite the fact that historically most of their particular data and generalizations have become irrelevant or false. The difference between what is profound and what is mistaken about historical materialism and psychoanalysis lies in their respective claims for recognition as true scientific philosophy. Two consequences follow: first, if either historical materialism or psychoanalysis is a universally valid science they has no need for further knowledge and Marxism and Freudianism become dogmatic and reactionary systems; second, if either is universally true as philosophical science then, the other totalizing system must be false. My argument is that Jaspers is qualified both as a scientist and as a philosopher to resolve these issues through his complex evaluation of Marx and Freud over the course of his life and career. Arguing for the contemporary importance of Marx and Freud is a daunting task. My student's response is that historical materialism or psychoanalysis does not matter because Marx and Freud have nothing to say. In sharp contrast to this current apathy, the experience of those over fifty offers a radically different zeitgeist in which over fifty percent of the world's population lived under communist rule. A Soviet leader confidently told Americans, "We will bury you." We lived through the Berlin airlift, forty years of a cold war based on mutually assured destruction (MAD), communist inspired wars of national liberation, the Cuban missile crisis, and the capitulation of much of the European left to Bertrand Russell's "Better red than dead" movement. And the United States fought two stalemated wars against communism in Korea and Vietnam. In less dramatic but through ways the principles of psychoanalysis were expanded in the 20th century to Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz Volume 3, No 2, Fall 2008 39 include explanations and interpretations of every aspect of culture and civilization. There are four reasons to re-accessing Marx and Freud. First, their radical intentions transcended their systematizations. Second, their claims as scientific philosophies detract from their philosophic importance. Third, the philosophic contestation over the analysis of human reality should not be reduced to epistemological claims that one scientific philosophy logically excludes all validity to other claims. Finally, despite all of the above, the unforeseen consequences to the conflict between historical materialism and psychoanalysis are central to the problematic of post-modern philosophy. First, Marx and Freud provide revolutionary theories of human liberation. Historical materialism defines reality as the material process of transformation of nature and humanity. The transformation of nature through labor is evident in the evolutionary processes of Asiatic, feudal, capitalist and future communist socio-economic formations. Marx predicts that history inevitably culminates within a communist society of socialized humanity operating "from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need." The fly in this salvific ointment is that self-transformation has been so laggard in comparison to economic betterment that humans live in a pre-history dominated by class conflict and unrecognized contradictions between the means and ownership of productive forces. For Marx history unconsciously makes men and men will make history consciously only after a revolution that overthrows capitalistic system that privileges the accumulation of wealth for the few over the selfrealization of human beings. Marx's historical materialism was the secular kingdom come of humanity, and communism was the necessary end to all individual and social contradictions. Marx and Engels, like early Christians, expected the eschaton to occur within their own lifetimes. And the periodic crises of overproduction and predictable economic recessions accompanied by proletarian upheavals throughout Europe in 1830, 1848, and 1870 lent empirical credence to these expectations. Freud formulated a revolutionary re-interpretation of the Western philosophic tradition of "know thyself." Raising the unconscious to consciousness changes pathogenic conflicts into resolvable human struggles "through an education in truthfulness toward himself."1 Freud's guiding metaphor was borrowed from anthropology: the psychoanalytic task is to reconstruct individual self-knowledge from buried chards of memories, associations, and slips of the tongue, dreams and other fragmentary mentations of the primitive buried deep within each of us. In late works, Freud extended the psychoanalyses of individuals to speculative meta-psychological theories about the overpowering unconscious forces of sex, aggression and death socially sublimated by imposing and/or manipulating guilt through myth, religion, philosophy and political authority. His pessimism centered on the struggle to maintain homeostasis between the play of irrational instincts and the rational necessities of civilized living. In sum, Marx and Freud were geniuses, and the first thinkers to offer original and substantive accounts of the realities of work and love. My second contention is that they were mistaken in believing historical materialism or psychoanalysis to be universally true scientific philosophy. Marx inherited an established science of political economy and his massive transfusions of empirical data lead him to general laws such as surplus value, the commodification process that privileges product or object over human producer or subject, and that the exploitation and oppression of labor is a necessary effect of capital accumulation, as well as the determined connection between economic base and socio-political superstructure, and the law governing the falling rate of profit. These laws had the same scientific status as Newton's and Darwin's laws of gravity and evolution.2 Additionally, Marx borrowed the notion of critique from German idealism that he used it as a cudgel to refute a-priori all other interpretations as ideological distortions or Utopian beliefs in contrast to the science of historical materialism. Similarly Freud, and later Jaspers himself, insisted that medical research provided a scientific basis for the new science of psychopathology. But Freud's psychoanalysis also included a systematics of unconscious forces in which neurotic behaviors were 1 Walter Kaufman, "Jaspers' Relation to Nietzsche," quotation is from Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis, in Paul Arthur Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1981), p. 430. [Henceforth cited as PKJ] 2 Marx offered to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. Darwin