Notes for Illuminating Freedom and Knowledge in Das Kapital: Aristotle, Leibniz, and Spinoza

ABSTRACT

To understand some central presuppositions of Marx within an anti-scientistic and anti-bourgeois horizon, such as knowledge and freedom, some central elements within Leibniz and Spinosa are discussed, with a glance at Hegel. Capital turns out to be an anti-Leibnizian monad, while Das Kapital is undergirded by a Spinozist value-political treatise.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemology
• freedom
• Marx
• Leibniz
• Spinoza

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Bensaïd (1995, 230–231). I have been much stimulated by his rich and vivacious book, as well as by Vadée’s, to reflect further on the relations of Leibniz and Spinoza to Marx. This holds also for Negri (1981) and Lordon (2010), even where I largely disagreed. As to the well-known views of Aristotle about potential/ity, I have applied them in another work and simply recapitulate them here. This essay was much encouraged by the masterly work of Jameson cited. My thanks to the critiques of my old companion in utopia, Giuseppina Saccaro del Buffa, and of Jan Rehmann.

2 See Saccaro Del Buffa’s detailed survey of narrative argumentation in Ethics (2004, 457 and passim). She has also most usefully elucidated (on 369–396 and in other places) and edited Spinoza’s Neoplatonic-cum-Cabbalistic Amsterdam precursor Abraham Cohen De Herrera’s work Puerta del Cielo. This ought to be integrated with Yovel’s thesis on Spinoza’s marrano tradition. On Spinoza and knowledge (Spinoza 1992b; 1999, 5; 1992a, I. 25 Proof and I. 40 Scholium), also see Tosel (1994, 82–87).

3 I suspect a second intermediary would be the Diderot of Rameau’s Nephew but cannot enter into this here. Let me add that I am aware into what huge problems I rush here. One, which I avoid by focusing on Ethics, is the difference between Spinoza’s phases. Another, which is unavoidable, is his enforcedly equivocal language (Yovel 1991), where many key terms oscillate in meaning, when they do not jell in a pun—for example, perfectus = perfect and finished, or corpus = body human and body physical if not geometrical. And a proper narratological account of Spinoza would proceed by chords and rhythms, as in Rolland (2014), and by rhetorical devices, as in Saccaro Del Buffa (2004), which I cannot do in a compressed scope.

4 I cannot forbear pointing out that Spinoza is, because of the pure intensity of his figure and striving, the only philosopher I know of who has had four poems written about him, two by masters (Borges and Jack Lindsay) and two by famous people, if bad poets (Bukharin and Einstein)!

5 I do not think Ethics II. 13 or III. 2 argue against disincarnation—always bearing in mind note 4 above.

6 Thus I disagree with the forzatura of Deborin, Althusser, and Negri of promoting an impoverished Spinoza to the main ancestor of Marx.

7 Labriola wrote about Anti-Dühring that it was “not a thesis but an antithesis” (Ma quel libro non è tetico, anzi è antitetico [Labriola 1969, 211–212; Tosel 1994, 167–184 and passim]).

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Notes on contributors

Darko Suvin

Darko Suvin, scholar, critic and poet, born in Yugoslavia, studied at the universities of Zagreb, Bristol, the Sorbonne, and Yale, taught in Europe and North America, and is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. He was Co-editor of Science-Fiction Studies (1973–1981), Editor of Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, ICLA review organ (1986–1995), visiting professor at 10 universities in North America, Europe, and Japan, and Award Fellow of Humboldt Foundation in 1996. He wrote 27 books and many articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction, political epistemology, and three volumes of poetry. In the recent years, he has been writing mainly on S. F. R. Yugoslavia, communism, and poetry. Major publications: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979 and 2016); To Brecht and Beyond (1984); Lessons of Japan (1996); Defined by a Hollow (2010), Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (2016), Lessons from the Russian Revolution and Its Fallout (2017), Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (2020).