Creature and Creator
Vladimir Lenin recited a creed of science that echoed throughout the world: “The recognition of theory as a copy, as an approximate copy of objective reality, is materialism.”1 A copy is a repetition of something, its replication in new material with an identical form. If one assumes that absolute, infinite, perfect knowledge of the world is possible, one assumes a knower that’s absolute, infinite, and perfect. When one says that knowledge is the road along the way to this perfection, even if one limits this statement in saying that the perfect state is never reached, then one is assuming a Creator God.
G.W.F. Hegel knew this consciously, and for him humanity’s coming to knowledge is coming to agree with the fundamental rationality of God’s Creation. We can only do this by “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.”2 For God as the Absolute and Supreme Being, thought and creation are identical. There is no object outside of God that God contemplates or acts on. In God, “activity, creation, power, and so forth, are the bringing forth of an other.”3 The Other resolves to the Self-Same. There is no God but God. God is the One and the All. God only reveals himself to his Creation in his eternal being through their mortal experience of their historical time. The difference between God and Creation is time, because time does not exist if there is nothing except for eternity.
Friedrich Engels wanted to preserve this absolute knowledge, but within a scientific materialist system of thought instead of a theological one. He believed that the heart of this materialist inversion would be to grant the caveat that perfect knowledge of the world in all of its totality is never entirely attained. After all, we are mortals. Perfection is something that we strive to, more or less fragmentary, more or less successfully. Infinity is as knowable by us in our collective infinity as it is unknown to us in our finitude; “cognition of the infinite is therefore beset with double difficulty and from its very nature can only take place in an infinite asymptotic progress.”4
Humanity can never replicate the world in a map that is identical to the territory, but it has to strive towards it. Humanity must make a Faustian pact for comprehensive, infinite knowledge of the Cosmos, striving to become God. Nature must be made identical to human consciousness, so that it may be converted into a global and cosmic machine that thinking humanity rationally and efficiently manages. The raw material of knowing and working humanity is matter. Matter is immediately Being. Being is No-thing. Nothing comes from No-thing.
Alexander Bogdanov recognized the theology unconscious in this thought, and declared a project of God-Building. In a socialist society, “every member will directly participate in the struggle against nature.”5 Humanity strives towards absolute self-identity, and to achieve, it has to subject the Cosmos to its own subjecthood. This is the materialism of an idealism. The finite things of the world have to be broken under the yoke of the Self-Same, which in its total and uncompromising war against feeling and unfeeling life alike “can receive no illumination from the truths of experience.”6
Engels’ project of an atheistic absolute knowledge ends in failure. He had criticized Immanuel Kant’s concept of the unknowable thing-in-itself by arguing that we already have knowledge of the thing-in-itself as a thing-for-us in the act of discovery. Engels insisted that “what we can produce, we certainly cannot consider as unknowable.”7 This assumes that repetition is mastery of the logic of what is repeated. But this cannot be so without the guarantee of God’s logic in Creation. This project requires that we know something that is already rational in-itself, and that we discover the ready-made rationality of it by converting it into a thing-for-us. We only have to discover the truth of a thing in order to become the master of it, just as God’s creation of the Cosmos out of himself makes the Creator the master of Creation. The truth becomes a ready-made picture, the picture becomes an idol to be copied and distributed to the ignorant one reactionary mass, and a blueprint is issued to the workers struggling for self-emancipation as the leaders try to set them to work. The identification of freedom with necessity remains stuck in the thrall of the Absolute.
Karl Marx approached knowledge just differently enough for his project to become something else entirely. Marx never staked communism on absolute, perfect knowledge. To take something “at first sight,” in its immediacy” as “an extremely obvious, trivial thing” in its being a thing-for-us is Ideology.8 We forget that the thing is already rich in its relations, that our perceiving it as a thing is already a living and active relation itself. Nature crusts over into undifferentiated raw material to be made into infinitely accumulated things which constrict the possibilities of life, and “the mechanism of forgetting becomes that of reification.”9 Knowledge is not only an approximate copy-picture of the world, to strive to know is to work with the “problem of sense-perception and the unseen” of thought thinking thought itself.10 Thought has its autonomy from immediate, sensuous, bodily experience as a determination that also determines itself, even if life begins in unconsciousness rather than consciousness and thought cannot become absolutely independent.
The ancient practice of idolatry is Ideology. Idolatry manifests today in the fetishism that accompanies the fetish character of commodities. Relations of exchanges between people by means of products begin to appear as products exchanging with each other by the medium of people. The highest, crystallized form of this system of generalized commodity production is money. Money is the embodiment of the universal equivalent of commodities, the measure that is one of them and yet unites all of them in the single form of command over labor and products of labor alike, the face of the impersonal power that appears to rule as a God on earth in a world of the exchange of products for the sake of exchange and the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation. Money is the One, wealth is the All.
The infinitely striving human self-consciousness of Engels and Bogdanov's humanity already reigns over the earth as capital, and its self-consciousness thinks, plans, and acts through its viceregents—the capitalists. Human beings become mere means for the production process’s end of accumulating wealth as capital. The living and laboring human being’s body is reduced to a corporeal symbol for the universal substance of abstract human labor. The human substance is quantified into the human of flesh and bone, whose powers of recreating the world become a commodity labor-power that workers sell in exchange for the money they need to maintain their bodily capacity to work. Instead of humanity becoming a God rationally ordering nature, the human animal remains as a broken body owned by a precarious and desperate citizen.
Yet nothing is eternal, not even the idol of capital in its crisp, shining, undecaying form as money. Humanity is a part of nature, and only a part. Our sensation of the world is limited by our capabilities as an organism, and our attentiveness is drawn to what we need to sustain our life. Like any other mortal, humanity has come to know our mortality by hunger and neediness for things beyond us. We learn to find and use these things of need to both sustain and transform ourselves, for the “need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it.”11 Humanity is truly all animal, all animals perceive and need their world.
For humanity to be all animal is also to be all human. Unlike other animals, our life’s form is not entirely clear from our organic form alone. We are imperfectly adapted, we are not immediately at home in any place. That is why we can transform our own capabilities and needs instead of fitting into a more narrow but snug ecological niche. This transformation begins as self-adaptation, grows into the foraging and cultivation of objects of need, has floundered in need as only a means of production, but may become self-cultivation into new life. Freedom can grow from the act of molding ourselves into one particular way of life—one kind of person or character or class—into the free and multidirectional life made possible by abundant cooperative wealth. That is why our social history isn’t identical to natural history, even if it is one with it. And that is how we can become free without having to give up our mortal life as animals. The struggle against nature conducted for self-preservation culminates in the nihilism of infinite repetition. Freedom is realized through finitude, through the determinate and unique life of the creature that creates.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2022), p, 284.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni, Cambridge Hegel Translations (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 29.
Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 62.
Friedrich Engels, Engels: Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, vol. 25, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1987), p. 514.
Alexander Bogdanov, “Socially Organised Society: Socialist Society,” 1919, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bogdanov/1919/socialism.htm.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part One, trans. William Wallace (Marxists Internet Archive, 2009), https://www.logoilibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Hegels-Logic.pdf, p. 171.
Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p. 334.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 163.
Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, United Kingdom; Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013), p. 67.
Epicurus, Epicurus: The Extant Remains, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 21.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 92.