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Trouble understanding part of Marx's dissertation
I'm reading Marx's doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, and am really enjoying it. However, there is one argument I've read over a couple times and still can't quite understand.
"Sensuous appearance, on the one hand, does not belong to the atoms themselves. It is not objective appearance, but subjective semblance [Schein]. “The true principles are the atoms and the void, everything else is opinion, semblance.” (5) “Cold exists only according to opinion, heat exists only according to opinion, but in reality there are only the atoms and the void.” (6) Unity therefore does not truly result from the many atoms, but rather “through the combination of atoms each thing appears to become a unity". (7) The principles can therefore be perceived only through reason, since they are inaccessible to the sensuous eye if only because of their smallness. For this reason they are even called ideas. (8) The sensuous appearance is, on the other hand, the only true object, and the aisthesis [sensuous perception] is the phronesis [that which is rational]; this true thing however is the changing, the unstable, the phenomenon. But to say that the phenomenon is the true thing is contradictory. (9) Thus now the one, now the other side is made the subjective and the objective. The contradiction therefore seems to be held apart, being divided between two worlds. Consequently, Democritus makes sensuous reality into subjective semblance; but the antinomy, banned from the world of objects, now exists in his own self-consciousness, where the concept of the atom and sensuous perception face each other as enemies."
-Part 1, chapter 3a.
Maybe it's because it's quarter of four in the morning, but I get lost at the part about aisthesis and phronesis and on. Can anyone help clarify? Thanks.
I think that he means that world as we see it is only our personal perception of it. What we perceive in a certain way doesn't necessarily make it that way. That's why the only way to understand what surrounds us better is to base our knowledge only on purest reason, since we don't really have any other way to interact with things, we can't really understand it in any other way than with our senses.
It's not just that. He's describing all human concepts of interpretation as necessarily subjective, while the only objective facts would be material and energy. But our interpretation of that material and energy is still subjective.
He goes on to tak about the limits of human science - in fact, all we can be sure of is at least what we see, and that there is change in it. But change being true is a contradiction, since it cannot be precisely measured or determined.
Don't forget that this is a rhetorical piece; a lot of this is him describing the ideas of Democritus, apparently.
Valdyr, Thanks much for reading Marx's doctoral dissertation so that I, among many others, do not have to wade through the difficult passage you quoted.
This passage is quite important, though, for it points to the gulf between human perception/consciousness and the natural, material relations from which they emerge. I have posted much on "the human perception/consciousness problem," and on the material organization of the brain that produces a "partial consciousness" that engages the things of life but misses the critical organization of those "things."
Enough on a personal crusade of mine. I think you would really enjoy John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology (2000). Foster is the editor of Monthly Review, and this book explores the roots of Marx's ecology in Epicurus' materialism and the expression of this in his doctoral dissertation.
My red-green best.
Foster's books are excellent, I have that one. It's part of what got me interested in Epicurean studies.
