Historical materialism and the economics of Karl Marx Part 10

When we pa.s.s to the question of the postulates, you will certainly be surprised if I tell you that the disagreement between us consists in your wish to introduce a _metaphysical_ postulate into economic science; whereas I wish here to rule out every metaphysical postulate and to confine myself entirely to the a.n.a.lysis of the given facts. The accusation of being _metaphysical_ will seem to you the last that could ever be brought against you. Your implied metaphysical postulate is, however, this; that the facts of man's activity are of the same nature as physical facts; that in the one case as in the other we can only observe regularity and deduce consequences therefrom, without ever penetrating into the inner nature of the facts; that these facts are all alike _phenomena_ (meaning that they would presuppose a _noumena_, which evades us, and of which they are manifestations).

Hence whereas I have called my essay 'On the economic _principle_,'

yours is ent.i.tled 'On the economic _phenomenon_.'

How could you defend this postulate of yours except by a _metaphysical_ monism; for example that of Spencer? But, whilst Spencer was anti-metaphysical and positivist in words, I claim the necessity of being so in deeds; and hence I cannot accept either _his_ metaphysics or _his_ monism, and I hold to experience. This testifies to me the fundamental distinction between external and internal, between physical and mental, between mechanics and teleology, between pa.s.sivity and activity, and secondary distinctions involved in this fundamental one. What metaphysics unites philosophy distinguishes (and joins together); the abstract contemplation of unity is the death of philosophy. Let us confine ourselves to the distinction between physical and mental. Whilst the external facts of nature, admitted by empirical physical science, are always phenomena, since their source is by definition outside themselves, the internal facts or activities of man, cannot be called phenomena, since they are their own source.

By this appeal to experience and by this rejection of all metaphysical intrusion, I place myself in a position to meet the objection which you bring forward to my conception of economic data. You think that the ambiguity of the term _value_ comes from this, that it denotes a very complex fact, a collection of facts included under a single word.

For me, on the contrary, the difficulty in it arises from its denoting a very simple fact, a _summum genus_, _i.e._ the fact of the very _activity_ of man. Activity is value. For us nothing is valuable except what is an effort of imagination, of thought, of will, of our activity in any of its forms. As Kant said that there was nothing in the universe that could be called _good_ except the _good will_; so, if we generalise, it may be said that there is nothing in the universe that is valuable, except the _value of human activity_. Of value as of activity you cannot demand a so-called genetic definition. The simple and the original is genetically indefinable. Value is observed immediately in ourselves, in our consciousness.[98]

This observation shows us also that the _summum genus_ 'value,' or 'mental activity' gives place to irreducible forms, which are in the first instance those of theoretical activity and practical activity, of theoretical values and practical values. But what does _practical_ mean?--you now ask me. I believe that I have already answered by explaining that the theoretical is everything which is a work of _contemplation_, and the practical everything that is the work of _will_. Is will an obscure term? We may rather call the terms _light_, _warmth_ and so on, obscure; not that of _will_. What will is, I know well. I find myself face to face with it throughout my life as a man.

Even in writing this letter, today, in a room in an inn, and in shaking off the laziness of country life, I have _willed_; and if I have delayed the answer for two months, it is because I have been so feeble as not to know how to _will_.

You see from this that the question raised by me, whether by _choice_ you meant _conscious_ or _unconscious_ choice, is not a _careless_ question. It is equivalent to this other one; whether the economic fact is or is not a fact of _will_. 'This does not alter the fact of the choice,' you say. But indeed it does alter it! If we speak of _conscious_ choice, we have before us a mental fact, if of _unconscious_ choice, a natural fact; and the laws of the former are not those of the latter. I welcome your discovery that economic fact is the fact of choice; but I am _forced_ to mean by _choice_, _voluntary_ choice. Otherwise we should end by talking not only of the _choices_ of a man who is _asleep_ (when he moves from side to side) but of those of _animals_, and why not? of _plants_ and why not again?

of _minerals_; pa.s.sing rapidly along the steep slope down which my friend Professor C. Trivero has slipped in his recently published _Teoria dei bisogni_, for which may he be forgiven![99]

When I defined economic data as 'the practical activities of man, in so far as they are considered as such, independently of any moral or immoral determination,' I did not make an arbitrary judgment, which might authorise others to do likewise, in a science which does not tolerate arbitrary judgments; but I merely _distinguished_ further within the species _practical activity_, two _sub-species_ or grades: _pure_ practical activity, (economic), and _moral_ practical activity, (ethical); will that is merely economic, and moral will. There is ambiguity in your reproach that when I speak of approval or disapproval as aroused by economic activity, I am considering the matter from a _synthetic_ instead of an a.n.a.lytic point of view, and that approval or disapproval are _extraneous_ factors. I did not however speak (and I believed that I had explained myself clearly), of _moral_, _intellectual_ or _aesthetic_ approval or disapproval. No, I said, and I repeat, that a judgment of approval or reprobation was necessarily bound up with economic activity: but a _merely_ ECONOMIC judgment of approval or reprobation. '_By saying_ that Rhenish wine is _useful_ to me, has a _value_ for me, is _ofelimo_ to me, I mean only to say that I like it; and I do not see how this simplest of relations can be well or ill-managed.' You will forgive me if in this sentence of yours I have italicised the words _by saying_. Here is the point.

Certainly the mere _saying_ does not give rise to an internal judgment of economic approval or disapproval. It will give rise to a grammatical or linguistic, _i.e._ aesthetic, approval or disapproval, according to whether the saying is clear or confused, well or ill expressed. But it is no question of _saying_: it is a question of _doing_, _i.e._ of the action willed carried out by the movement that is willed, of a _choice_ of movement. And do you think that the acquisition and consumption of a bottle of Rhenish wine involves no judgment of approval or disapproval? If I am very rich, if my aim in life is to obtain momentary sensual pleasures, and I know that Rhenish wine will secure me one of them, I buy and drink Rhenish wine and approve my act. I am satisfied with myself. But if I do not _wish_ to indulge in gluttony, and if my money is all devoted to other purposes, for which I _wish_ as preferable, and if, in spite of this, yielding to the temptation of the moment, I buy and drink Rhenish wine, I have put myself into contradiction with myself, and the sensual pleasure will be followed by a judgment of disapproval, by a legitimate and fitting ECONOMIC REMORSE.

To prove to you how, in all this, I omit every _moral_ consideration, I will give you another example: that of a knave who thinks it _ofelimo_ to himself to murder a man in order to rob him of a sum of money. At the moment of a.s.sa.s.sination, and although remaining a knave at heart, he yields to an emotion of fear or to a pathological feeling of compa.s.sion, and does not kill the man. Note carefully the terms of the hypothesis. The knave will call himself an a.s.s and an imbecile, and will feel _remorse_ for his contradictory and inconclusive conduct; but not indeed a _moral_ remorse (of that he is, by hypothesis, incapable), but, precisely, a remorse that is merely _economic_.

It seems to me that there is another confusion, easy to dispel, in your counter criticism to my criticism of the _scale of values_ (economic) you say that 'there is no need for one person to find himself at the same moment under different conditions; it is enough that he can _picture to himself_ these different conditions.' Can you in truth _picture yourself_ being _at the same moment_ under _different_ conditions? Fancy has its laws; and does not allow the imagination of what is unimaginable. You can easily say that you _picture_ it to yourself: words are docile; but, to picture it _in reality_, is, pardon me, another matter altogether. You will not succeed in it any more than I. Ask me to imagine a lion with the head of a donkey, and I will comply at once; but ask me to imagine a lion standing _at the same moment_ in two different places, and I cannot succeed. I will picture to myself, if you like, two similar lions, two exactly alike, but not the same in two different positions. Fancy reconstructs reality, but possible reality, not the impossible or what is contradictory. Thus my demonstration of the absurdity of the _scale of values_ applies both to actual and to possible reality. Nay, in discussing science in the abstract it was framed precisely on the mere consideration of the possible.

I do not know whether I have answered all your objections, but I have endeavoured to answer all those which seem to me fundamental. A dispute, in which questions of method and of principle are at stake need not be carried on pedantically into minute details; we must depend to some extent on the a.s.sistance of the readers, who, putting themselves mentally in the position of the two disputants, work out for themselves the final application. I wish merely to add that it is my strongest conviction that the reaction against metaphysics (a far-sighted reaction in that it has freed scientific procedure from admixture with the arbitrary judgments of feeling and belief) has been pushed forward by many so far as to destroy science itself. The mathematicians who have a quick feeling for scientific procedure, have done much for economic science by reviving in it the dignity of abstract a.n.a.lysis, darkened and overwhelmed by the ma.s.s of anecdotes of the historical school. But, as it happens, they have also introduced into it the prejudice of their profession, and, being themselves students of the general conditions of the physical world, the particular prejudice that mathematics can take up in relation to economics--which is the science of _man_, of a form of the conscious activity of man--the same att.i.tude which it rightly takes up in relation to the empirical natural sciences.

From what I have now stated you will easily discover exactly how far we are in agreement in the establishment of the principles of _Economics_ and how far we disagree. If my new observations should a.s.sist in further reducing the extent of the disagreement, I shall indeed be glad.

Perugia, _20th October, 1900_.[100]

FOOTNOTES:

[93] _Comment se pose le probleme de l'economie pure._ Paper read in December 1898 to the _Societe Stella_.

[94] _Giornale degli economisti_, March 1900, pp. 216-235.

[95] _Rivista di sociologia_, III. no. vi., pp. 746-8, see _Materialismo Storico_, pp. 193-208.

[96] DR CHRISTIAN V. EHRENFELS (Professor at Prague University): _System der Werttheorie_, vol. I, _Allgemeine Werttheorie, Psychologie des Begehrens_, Leipzig, Reisland, 1897; vol. II, _Grundzuge einer Ethik_, the same, 1898.

[97] PARETO answered this letter in the same journal, _Giornale degli economisti_, August, 1900, pp. 139-162.

[98] I have before me Professor A. GRAZIADEI's article _Intorno alla teoria edonistica del valore_. (In _Riforma Sociale_, September 15th, 1900); in which A. fails to see how the purist theory of value dovetails in with the doctrines of Psychophysics and Psychology. I can well believe it! Psychophysics and Psychology are natural sciences and cannot throw light on economic fact which is mental and of value. I may be allowed to point out, that, even three years ago, I gave a warning against the confusion of economics with psychology. (See in this volume pp. 72-75.) He who appeals to psychology (naturalistic) in order to understand economic fact, will always meet with the delusion, opportunely shown up by Graziadei. I have stated the reasons owing to which economics cannot dwell where the psychologists and hedonists say; now Graziedei has questioned the door-keepers (Fechner, Wundt, etc.), and has learnt that it does not dwell there. Well and good!

[99] CAMILLO TRIVERO, _La teoria dei bisogni_, Turin, Bocca, 1900, pp.

198. Trivero means by _need_ 'the condition of a being, either conscious or unconscious (man, animal, plant, thing), in which it cannot remain': so that it can be said 'that all needs are ultimately condensed into the supreme _need_ or _end_ of being or becoming.'

_Need_ for him is hence actual reality itself. But since, on the other hand, he declares that he does not wish to solve nor even to consider the philosophical problem, it is hard to understand what a _theory of needs_ (_i.e._ of reality) can be, and for what reason he goes back to such generalities.

It is true that Trivero believes that, by going back to the general concept of _need_, he can establish the _parent theory_ on which rest the particular doctrines of needs; and amongst them economics, which concerns itself with _economic_ needs. If there are _species_--he says--we ought to determine of what _genus_ they are species. But he will allow me to remark that the genus to look for is, as logic teaches, the _proximate_ genus. To jump to such a great distance as to reality or to fact, would only lead to the n.o.ble discovery: that economic needs are part of reality, are a group of facts.

And what he does is to make an equally valuable discovery: that the true theory of history is the theory of needs, which, granted his definition of _needs_, is as much as to say that history is history of reality and the theory of it is--the theory.

I have then no objection to make to the meaning which Trivero wishes to give to the word _need_; but I must a.s.sert that, having given it this meaning, he has not afterwards constructed the theory of anything, nor thrown light on any special group of facts.

For real economic theory his book is quite useless. Economists do not recognise the needs of things and plants and animals, but only human needs, or those of man in so far as he is _h.o.m.o oeconomicus_ and hence a conscious being. I too believe that it is right to work out philosophically the principle of economics; but in order to do this, Trivero should have studied economic science. He declares that 'he does not want to hold fast to anyone's petticoats.' This statement is superfluous if it means that each individual ought to base his own scientific convictions on reason and not on authority. It is dangerous if it signifies, on the contrary, an intention to spare himself the trouble of studying other people's books, and of reconstructing everything from the beginning by his own personal efforts and by the aid of general culture alone. The result obtained--being far from satisfactory--should deter the author (who will not grumble at my plain speaking), from returning to this unfruitful method in the future.

[100] PARETO answers this second letter in the _Giornale degli economisti_, February, 1901, pp. 131-138.