Woman (Book One of The Korsh Herem Wars 1)

In spite of the voluminous literature on Gramsci, remarkably little attention has been devoted to identifying the precise meaning or meanings he assigned to v.. Treatment and use of hegemony is Renerally marred by conceptual vagueness: When-ever certain Marxist analysts come across a situation involving what they deem to be the ideological predominance of a particular group or class, the term 'be"emon ,' is immediately adopted-as if the notion of 'ideological predominance' were itselffree of ambiguity.!

This lack of rigour tends to predude a full appreciation of Gramsci's efforts to enrich Marxist theory and practice with a sophisticated analysis of mass psychology. What follows is an attempt to reveal the complexities and implications of his scattered and fragmentary exposition of hegemony. In this chapter it is my intention: Such 'internal contfol' is based on hegemony, which rekrs to an order in which a common sodal-moral language is spoken, in whidl one concept or reali.

And whereas 'domination' is realized, essentially, through the coercive machinery of the state, 'intellectual and. But hegemony in this context has a purely instrumentaL stratef. Gramsci understands'the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gramsci, after alL applauds Lenin's 'realiza-tion'- of hegerrlOny and does, at one point in hi's notebooks, explicitlv use the term as the equivalent or intellectual and moral leadership plus political domination: Gramsci's usual-and decidedly unLeninist-use of hegemony is well brought out in a now fatnous letter he wrote to his sister-in-law from prison in The distinction is usually associated with Heg,l's Philosophy oJRight, but its origins can be found in the writings of the French and English philosophers, politicians, and economists of thc seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who first discovered and investigated 'society' as a speciaL independent realm of knowledge and activity.

The concept of society was the fruit of a long process of intellectual elaboration, All the same, Gramsci claimed that his definition of civil society was taken from HegeL 1S I I' so, then his inter-pretation of the German philosopher was, at least in this respect, rather idiosyncratic; for Hegel clearly understood bv civil society the complex oC commercial and industrial life, the totality of economic instruments and relations, together with the public services needed to maintain order within them e.

Gramsci, by contrast, identiii'ed civil soCiety with the ideological superstructure, the institutions and technical instru-ments that create and diffuse modes of thought. Marx himself concen-trated most or his mature cfic rts on the study of economic processes, After his death, most of his followers erroneously attributed an influence to the difkrent social spheres in propor-tion to the treatment accorded them in his published writings.

This error was facilitated bv the standard interpretation of Marx's well-known claims ,;n tbe relationship between the domain of material production and the superstructure. If the economic liil' of society is solely and wholly responsible for tbe character and development of other spheres, the activities which go on in the latter can be safely ignored or, if need be, deduced, Marxism from the start was preoccupied with the economic base to the virtual exclusion of the superstructure.

By the early thirties, it became patently obvious that this approach was deficient. Capitalism sbowed no signs of succumbing to its 'insoluble contradictions' and history' had not 'taken care of itself', The stage was set for systematic thought about the superstructure, and Gramsci took up the challenge. Before proceeding any further, some additional points about his dichotomy between political and civil society should be made, To begin with, the distinction is essentially analytical, a convenient device designed to aid understanding; in reality Gramsci recognized an interpenetration between the two spheres, For example: The crucial point, to his mind, is that governments can often mobilize the support of the mass media and other ideo-logical instruments, partly because the various dites, political or otherwise, share similar world-views and life-styles, and The Concept of Hegemony partly because the institutions of civil sQ ;: Political society in itsel!

The elaborate structure of liberal democracy e. At various points, he defines the state in the following manner: But in a disjointed and somewhat lI1Conc! In pam; culaL he is concerned to exam me the sIgmficance of raylonsm as a method used by American capitalists to subo. The chief goals of this ideology, Gramsci pomts out, arc to rationalize production and create 'a new type of man suited to the new type ofwork'.

Since America has no feudal past, she is relatively free of these 'parasitic' 'idle and useless' residues, whose presence has hindered the development of European industry and com-merce. To some extent, then, America hils realized the 'Taylorist' project: It follows that in the USA, 'hegemony is born in the factory' and requires for its exercise only a "minimal quantity' of ideological inter-mediaries. Gramsci did think that some ideo-logical mediation was necessary-hence his stress on how the Puritan ethic was manipulated to legitimate the behaviour abstention from alcohol and 'disorderly' sexual activity necessary for rationalized production techniques.

Once the worker adapts to the new conditions, his brain, 'far from being mummified, achieves a state of com-plete freedom'. Because of the routine nature of his task, the. For Gramsci, hegemony emanated primarily. Hegemony and the Marxist Definition of Power Disillnsioned by the failure of the revolution to spread beyond Russia, Gramsci came to yiew hegemony as the most important face of power.

The pro-letariat, in other words, wear their chains willingly. Con-demned to perceive reality through the conceptual spectacles of-the ruling class, they are unable to recognize'the nature or extent of their own servitude. Thus, he redefined the MarXIst view of power in bourgeois society in morc comprehensive terms. The idea that human society depends on voluntary agreement by its members to. For Marxists, dwelling on their apoca-lyptic vision, had invariably pictured capitalist society as little more than a battleground of irreconcilable forces and warnng classes.

I t is true that Gramsci' s conception harks back to the passage in The German Ideology where Marx and Engels declare that: The Concept of Hegemony I n every epoch th ' ideas of tht' ruling dass are the ruling ideas, that is, the class that is the ruling material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual power. The class having the means of material production, has also control over the means of intellectual produc-tion, so that it also controls. Still, the ounders of the 'philosophy of praxis' gravely underestimated the depth and pervasiveness of so-called 'false consciousness'.

In the very same work quoted ahove, they inform us that, for the pro-letarians, 'such theoretical notions [bourgeois ideology J do not exist'. If the working class ever did adhere to these notions, they 'have now long been dissolved by circumstances'. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois pre;judices behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

Commenting on the class structure of nineteenth-century England, Engels remarks that the proletariat has become a 'race wholly apart' from the middle classes. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: The problem of order, therefore, is typically solved by force or the threat of sanctions. The state IS a weapon, regularly and systematically used, because th: Power is the key variable in this model of society: If they do not comply, they are threatened WIth or made to suffer some sort of punishment or deprivation.

I t might be argued, with some plausibility, that Lenin did not accept the foregoing model. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development? Revolutionary consciousness is not the natural product of the life experience of the working people. This observation is widely regarded as epitomizing Lenin's theoretical contribution to Marxism. It is not generally realized, however, that the pessimism of What is to be Done?

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His writings are always difficult to assess because of their engaged and rhetorical character their intimate connection with concrete political activity, with specific cOl? Much more than Gramsci. Lenin was an activist first and a theoretician second. It is nsually forgotten that What is to be done? The point to be emphasized is that Lenin made no clear-cut attempt to deviate from the classical Marxist analysis of capita-list society, at least not on a theoretical level.

And regardless of whether he consistently or 'really' believed that the pro-letariat is spontaneously disposed to mere 'trade unionism', he was constant throughout his career in his interpretation of the bourgeois order as essentially coercive. Capitalist democracy was 'the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie', shot through with coercion and violence: But, in this Quaderni, Gramsci stresses that class conflict is not just channelled by generally accepted norms: To his mind, the present, antagonistic social reality Prior to social Iile, beneath it, enveloping it, is an underlying consensus.

As far back as ', long before he developed his concept of hegemony, he devoted considerable theoretical attention to hovv trade unions and socialist parties, by working within the categories of bourgeois democracy, come to accept the very presuppositions of its operation. Under their tutelage, class conflict hecomes domesticated and degenerates into a desire for marginally higher wages. This illusory conflict is consensus in disguise, and only serves to strengthen bourgeois hegemony by obscuring its true character. To ond ude this section, Gramscl seized upon an idea marginal or.

In so doing, he rerouted Marxist analysis to the long-neglected-and hopelessly unscientific-territory of ideas, values, and beliefs. More specifically, he uncovered what "'as to become a major theme of the second generation of Hegelian Marxists i. But before we can accept hegemony as a useful tool of analysis, it must receive much further clarifi-cation. Hegemonic rule is rule through 'consent' consenso , but what exactly does Gramsci mean by this notoriously vague concept? That is to sav, what sort of conform-ing behaviour does he have in mind?

And if hegemony involves some measure of societal consensus, what aspects of the social order must be included in this agreement? Consent, like many terms of political theory, is capable of a multitude of ambiguities and meanings, and it might prevent confusion to say a few words about its history and current 36 The Concept of Hegemony usage. Sorne notion of consent as describing the rdation of subjects with their government has been present throughout virtually the whole history of political speculation. Historically the idea has functioned within a theorY of political obligation: For example, in ancient Rome.

Justinian, acknovvledged this as the true theory'. To Gramsci, the contemporary liberal assumption that a people without the opportunity to express opposition or dissent cannot truly be said to consent -would seem most curious. In order to elucidate Gramsci's meaning, it would be useful, first" to map out what sorts of political and social conforming. Needless to say, conforming behaviour which is similar in its external manif,'stations may be the expression of very different attitudes, which can be grouped into three broad categories.

This is conformity through coercion, or fear of sanctions-acquiescence under duress. Thus, a man adheres to certain patterns of behaviour not because he consciously values them but because he has seldom entered situations in which the possibility of their rejec-tion or modification has arisen. Conformity in this sense is a matter of unreflecting participation in an estahlished form of activity.

Now there is no great linguistic impropriety in classifying 'forced compliance or unconscious adherence as consent; Gramsci, however, did not include them in his definition of consent. As we shall see more clearly in a moment, hegemony is instead characterized by a third type of conformity: This type of assenting behaviour, which mayor may not relate to a perceived interest, is bound up with the concept of 'legitimacy', with a belief that the demands for conformity are more or less justified and proper. Gramsci does not specify exactly what kind of con-sensus consensus with regard to what?

His vagueness on this matter is shared by later consensus theorists, working within the Parsonian tradition in sociology and political science. Certainly, there must always be- cdnsensus on linguistic and other norms involv-' ing- symbolic communication, or else no sodety could possibly exist. Consensus in fhis sense has little explanatory value: His concept oChegcmony embodied a hypothesis that within a stable social order, there must be a substratum of agreement so powerful that it can counteract the division and disruptivf forces arising from con-flicting interests.

Not included in hegemony are other types of unity or solidarity not fC fged around common objects, such as the in-tense bonds of affection and loyalty that may be present among the members ora family or kinship group. The 'centre', on Shils s definition, includes cognitive proposi-tions and moral standards about the societal distribution of benefits and about the worth of institu.

Consensus must focus on the allocation of scarce goods, the permissible range of disagreement, and the institu-tions through which decisions about such allocations are made-that is, on the values, norms, perceptions and beliefs that support and define the structures of central authoritv. But consent through voluntary agreement can vary in tensity.

On one extreme, it can flow from a profound sense oC obligation, from wholesale internalization of dominant values and definitions; on the other, from their very partial assimila-tion, from an uneasy feeling that the status quo, while shame The Omeept of Hegemony fully iniquitous, is nevertheless the only viable form of society. One conforms, On this theory.

On cases that fall near the margins, clear demarcation is impossible, DifTerent types of conformity flow imperceptibly into their neighbours. In any event, it is not our purpose here to quibble over marginal possibilities, but only to distinguish Gramsci's conception of consent irom other conceivable ways of defining the term. But even if we define consent as conscious agreement over principles and practices, it is, as has been noted, a condition compounded of attitudes and motives capable of ranging over many diflerent shades of quality and degrees of intensity.

This is not merely an academic point: Gramsei's aetnal words on the sub-ject are ambiguous though only superficially so and merit re attention than they have hitherto received. For example, he characterizes hegemony as the 'spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the popula-tion to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group, consent "historically" caused by the prestige and therefOre by the trust accruing to the dominant lirouP because of its position and function in the world of production' 54 Elsewhere he suggests'that those who are consenting must somehow be truly convinced that the in terests of the dominant group are those of society at large, that the heliemonic group stands for a proper social order in which all men are justly looked after: For in those passages where he is most explicit about The Concept of Hegemony 43 the nature of mass consciousness in bourgeois society his con-cept of hegemony takes on a richer, more penetrating character.

In the chapter of the prison notebooks entitled 'Relation Be-tween Science, Religion, and Common Sense', Gramsci focuses on the superficiality of consent within the capitalist system, by drawing attention to the frequent incompatibility between a man's conscious thoughts"and the unconscious values implicit in his action: Or that which emerges from the real activity of each man, which is implicit in his behaviour? S7 Gramsci goes on to answer these questions by suggesting a dIstInction between 'true' and 'aJse' conscio"usness: It signifies that the relevant social group [the working classes] has its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itselfin action, but occasionally, by fits and starts-when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality.

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of this activity. It binds together a specific social group, it innuences moral conduct and the direction of will, in a manner more or less powerful but often powerful enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory character of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice and produces a condition of moral and political passivity. It emerges not so 44 The Concept of Hegemony much because the masses prof undly reg-ard the social order as an expression of their aspirations as because t.

Presumably this would include all forms of collective worker action-bargaining, strikes. Because it is devoid of overall direction or purpose, thi;. C n the one hand, his education has never provided him with the abilitv to manipulate abstract symbols, to think clearly and systematically; on the other. The very framework fe r his analysis of the existing system is fixed bv the dominant ideology60 In this respect, language itself serves a hegemonic function.

Trained in linguistics and aware of its latest discoveries, he recognized that every culture discloses and guides its system of values and its general cognitions in it' language: So, all things considered, while the workers may be dissatisfied, while they may sense the contradiction between the positive official definition of reality and the stark-ness of their own subordination they are unable even to locate the source of their discontent, still less remedy it. Such social con-flict as exists is limited in both intensity and scope: What overall picture emerges of the nature of mass consent in advanced capitalist society?

It is well surrlmarized in ;ramsci's felicitous phrase, 'contradictory consciousness'. To be more schematic, on a general and abstract plane. This account of mass consciousness is meant to be paradig-matic. Gramsci of course understood that reality is far more complex and differentiated. Some men are more successfully socialized than others, who may be at the margins of the dominant consensus or even outside it. A society which unjustly inflicts the distress of exclusion or deprivation cannot wholly succeed in assimilating into its affirmative consensus those whom it mistreats.

The Concept of Hegemony Gramsci's df'scription of popular consciousness in modern bourgeois society is, in principle, empirically testable: But his conceptualization of 'contradictory consClO'US-ness' also possesses a rationalist. On the contrary, these expressions of deviance fit into a pattern: What is more, Gramsci posits that the ideology the masses adhere to on a general level is 'false'.

A man's 'real' conception of the world should not besought in his verbal affirmations; it is implicitly revealed in his practical activity. Beset by contradictions and sustained by deception, bourgeois hegemony is characterized by equivocal consent-at least as far as the majority is concerned. I t is rarely noticed that Gramsci speaks of three different levels, or types, of hegemony.

Hence the apparent inconsistency in his definition of consent.

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In" paradigm case, which we can call zntegral hegemony, mass aniliation would approach unqualified commit-ment. The society would exhibit a substantial degree of 'moral and intellectual unity', issuing in an 'organic' tu use the Gramscian idiom relationship between rulers and ruled, a relationship without contradictions and antagonisms on either a social or an ethicalleve! Because of trasformismo, 'the popular masses' of the I talian nation 'were decapitated, not absorbed mto the ambit of the new State' 69 For tbem the institutions of the liberal state were either nothing but names, distant and irrelevant.

The seeds of this disaffection were sown during the Risorgimento, when the dominant Moderate The Concept olHegemony Partv which represented the company bosses, rich farmers, estate managers and entrepreneurs succeeded in unifying the countrv politically but failed to establish an ideological bond between it. To quote Gramsci's bitter condemnation: In the ancient and mediaeval State alike, centralization. I t is far more fruitfuL he believed, to view them as mechanical assemb-lages of distinct units, characterized by an absence of inter-dependence in the critical sphere of economic activity.

The system is rigid: But the bourgeois state, as the first modern state, 'substitutes for the mechanical bloc of social groups their subordination to the active hegemonv of the directive and dominant group, thus abolishing certain outmoded autonomies, which are. The revolution which the bourgeois class has brought into the con-ception of law, and therefore into the function of the State, consists especially in the will to conform.

The previous dominant classes 50 The Concept of Hegemony were essentiallv consCfvatiV , in the sense'that they did not tend to allow an organic passage from the other classes into their own; i. The entire function of tbe State has been transformed: Thus, the modern state assuminp; Ihat it is functioninRProperly transcends the particularism of the 'economic-cDrporate phase': No ont' spoke of deviating from the Russian model which remained the unquestioned paradigm of revolutionary practice , only of adhering to it in more reso-lute and imaginative ways.

Refurbishing one feature ofthe old L'Ordine The Concept of Hegemony Nuovo theory of '9 ', he focuses on how the development of capitalisln has created 'a worker aristocracy with its adjuncts of trade union bureaucracy and social-democratic groupings'. J uly of ' and August of ' Gramsci compares political struggle to military conflict. The latter has been 'reduced to more of a tactical than a strategic function', 'The same reduction'.

T'hc reasons for this 'reduction' are then elaborated: The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. This is what happens in politics during the great economic crises. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the bourgeois state 'war of movement' or 'war of manceuvre' can result only in -disappointment and defeat. Gramsci associates this futile strategy with Trotsky's forrnula of 'permanent revolution', and consigns it to: The Concept of Hegemony an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist.

So th, optlmlsm QfMarxist thinking had been misplaced. The march of industry, according to him, I-cads not to certain revolution but to the integration of the masses into 'the capitalist system,. This strategy requires steady penetration and subversion of the complex and multIple mechanisms of ideological diffusion.

The point of the struggle IS to conquer one after another all the agencies of civil society e. I n the absence of a prior 'revolution of the spirit', a seizure of state power would prove transitory if not disastrous. I t would be a matter of destroying only the 'outer perimeter' of the capitalist system of defence. The momen-tarily triumphant revolutionary forces would find themselves facing a largely hostile population, still confined within the mental universe of the bourgeoisie. Attention must therefore be directed to the inner redoubt of civil society, to the dissemina-tion of radical ideas about man and society-in short to the creation of a proletarian counter-hegemony.

Gramsci expresses some doubt as to whether this mental transformation can befully achieved before the demolition of the capitalist state apparatus; in two passages he admits that the new Marxist regime will need to employ legal punishments and rewards In order ;to eradicate certain customs and attitudes and encourage The Concept of Hegemony 53 others'88 Despite this qualification his message emerges with clarity: But it is not simply a matter of substituting one hegemony for another.

The principle of hegemony must itself be transformed-b'om a principle that mystifies the social situation to one that exposes exploitation and supersedes it. What Gramsci's proposals amounted to, in effect, was the abandonment of the hallowed Bolshevik model. He placed much emphasis on a distinction between the 'organic' and 'conjunctural' dimEnsions of revolutionary change.

The latter refers to the rcalm of contingency, to the momentary period of crisis in which political f rces contend! Imprisoned by their scientific categories, Marxist revolutionaries had taken the 'organic' component for granted and focused their energies on the 'conjunctural', thus abandoning thc'mselves to the momentary practicalities of economic and political struggle.

They saw no need fix a genuine cultural confrontation wit. Gramsci was advocating a reversal of emphasis, Value conflicts could no longer be dismissed as illusory or unimportant. On the contrary, one of the movement's first tasks, according to the Sardinian, was to discredit or refute the 'cornerstones' of the dominant value-system-i. A new science [in this case. Marxism] proves its efEcacy and vitality when it shows that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it, when it either resolves, in its own way, the vital questions they have posed or demonstrates, peremptorily, that such questions are false.

Marxists could no longer afI rd to remain encased in their 'economist' shells. In light of all this, we can attempt to make sense of his vaguely formulated though often cited thesis, propounded in 54 The Concept of Hegemony his discussion ofthe Risorgimento, that 'a social group can and indeed must, already exercise leadership [i. But understood as a universal hypothesis, it would seem, on its face, to be contradicted by the Russian revolution, prior to which, as he himself noted. In Russia the State was everything and civil society was primitive and amorphous; in Jhe vVest there was a proper relation between the State and civil society, and when the State trembled a robust structure of civil society was at once reveaJed.

The State was merely an outer trench, behind which there stood a powerful chain of fortresses and casemates. The various peoples within the Empire clung to beliefs of autochthonous origins and were in no way integrated into the regimels scale of values. But where does this leave Gramsci's thesis about the universal necessity of hegemonic activity as a preliminary to the conquest of power?

Given the nature of the Quaderni, we would be foolish to expect absolute consistency. If we come across apparent contradictions, perhaps we should resist the temptation to collect debating points and instead attempt to sort out the origins of these contradictions or to trace them back to a more fundamental unity.

In any case, Gramsci's overall position is, I think, clear enough: In the conditions of The Concept of Hegemony 55 advanced capitalist society, for instance, the hegemony of the proletariat would have to be self-conscious, widespread, and deeply-rooted. But all this is very general and leaves open the thorny questions of concrete analysis and application. As Gramsci says 'an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country' is required.

Implicit here is the need for a complex, differentiated analysis of the revolutionary process and of the strategies appropriate to it. Gramsci does not himself cast this insight in the form of a testable hypothesis. Thus, there are not simply two grand strategies: The gradations of social integra-tion l Gramsci seems to believe can be arranged: Yet, for purposes of simplicity, we can focus on the areas near the two poles of the continuum. On one extreme l where civil society is 'primitive and amorphous'l revolution can be viewed as a technical-military operation, depending less on the empirical consciousness of the masses than on the deploy-ment and structural relations of forces.

This would be, in Stanley Moore's classification, a 'minority revolution'. On the other extreme, where civil society is healthy, a prolonged ideo-logical struggle is a necessary precondition. On this conception of revolution what Moore labels a 'majority revolution' , the state apparatns is finally left isolated and helpless, its ideo-logical and institutional supports eroded. Revolution takes the form not cifsudden destruction but of gradual dissolution. That is to say. In other words, the proletariat is a class whose conditions of life, whose experience at work and else-where, whose common struggles and discussions, will sooner or later bring them to an understanding of their state and what must be done to transforrn it.

Some major f ,'atures of Marx's view of class consciousness are summarized in the following passaRe li'om The Holy Family: Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. The limited economic achievements of their unions lead workers to adopt political forms of action, and ultimately to challenge directly the wbole structure of class domination.

And so, 'The knell of capitalist private property Thr Concept oj Hegemony 59 sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The philosophical basis of this argument is given blunt expression in The Gennan ideoio,gv, where he and his partner observe that: The phantoms formed in the human brain, too, afe necessary sub-limations of man's material lift"-proc: Morality, religion, meta-physics, and all the fCSt of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer seem to be independent.

They have no history or development. Con-sciousness dews not determine life. In his own eyes this difficulty was resolved because such subjective elements as revolutionary science and political activism were themselves necessary by-products of the structural deficiencies inherent in capitalism. While Marx obviously realizes that no revolution can be made without some sort of prior change in proletarian consriousness he consistently denies that this change has any independent causal significance. But, in the final analysis, he and his later disciples tailed to supply a convincing account oftbe theoreti-cal link between determining conditions and determined re-sponse; he and they did not correctly estimate the real gap between 'objective' and subjective interests.

But Gramsci's theory of class conSClOusness cannet be fully understood in isolation from his theory of social causa-tion. What, if any, are the underlying conditions for the emer-gence of a new culture, a new mode of thought and being? Prima facie, his preoccupation with hegemony, with intellectual and spiritual supremacy, does seem to situate him in the idealist camp.

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For was he not, after all, speaking in terms of the autonomy of ideas? The idea that revolution can be conducted in the realm of thought, that liberation can be attained through philosophy, was always considered a Young Hegelian heresy. If, according to Marxism, the course of history is shaped by the determined action of material conditions operating in con-formity to immutable laws independent of human will, then how could Gramsci, with his denial of historical inevitability and stress on the subjective dimension of human experience, possibly be a Marxist?

Not surprisingly, it has been the view of many thatl in the Sardinianls writings l a quasi-idealist volun-tarism replaces historical and economic determinism. This way of looking at Gramsci is fortified hy his apparent aversion for serious infra-structural analysis. Applying the idea that nature was simply matter and motion and that movement was conditioned by such forces as resistance, attraction, and repulsion, Holbach insisted that the soul was in actualiry nothing more than the brain. To see God in nature was for Halbach an unnecessary duplication, since nature could be explained in its own terms.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, he argued, distracted humanity from its present conditions and the need to make the world over according to its own freedom and necessity. Man will ever remain a mystery, to those who shall obstinately persist in viewing him with eyes predisposed to metaphysics. Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopedie, adopted a materialisrn similar to that of Holbach, who influenced him, but drew also on the history of materialism in philosophy extending back to the ancient Greek philosophers Democritlls and Epicurus.

For Diderot, the ultimate reals were atoms endowed with both motion and sensibility. Soul is manifested only in certain combinations of atoms. Nature is complete within itselfrequiring no teleological principles of a religious nature. Individual objects come into being in the form of particular combinations of atoms and then pass away, in ceaseless cycles. One was an emphasis on materialisnl in more mechanical terms and more easily integrated with notions of a divine spirit above and beyond nature and thus a moderate deism , and the other was an approach that focused more on organic interactions and sense experience , sometilnes leading to a universal vitalism, and often of a pantheistic character.

The latter carne to be thought of as naturalism, vitalism, or pantheism and was frequently separated from materialism, which came to be interpreted as lnere mechanism.

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But the broad designation of materialist for these theories owed much to their conUllon repudiation to greater or lesser degrees of divine principles in nature. A classic example of the more pantheistic version of materialism was to be found in the great French biologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon , who sawall of nature as composed of "organic molecules. In general both the mechanical philosophy associated With Newton and a more thoroughgoing materialism raised the issue of where to perceive the divine influence.

The complex nature of the relation between religion and science paralleled in some ways the ancient Epicurean philosophy, since Epicurus, despite his materialist philosophy of a universe governed by the arrangement of atoms, had chosen ultimately to gIve the gods a place--if orlly in the spaces between the worlds. Paradoxically, the intellectual culture of Britain in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries was dominated not only by the growth of science, materialism, and utilitarianisln, but also by a shift withll1 theology toward natural theology in which divine providence was chscovered in the natural laws and utilitarian principles that were presumed to govern the material universe.

Design 11lUst have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God. The Supreme Deity was more and more in the backgroundthe ultimate designer of the world, hut one who constructed a nature so contrived, Paley's view, that it was in a sense self-organ. As science and materialism progressed, there were attempts, at each stage, to synthesize this with a theological understanding of the world. But the realm attributable directly to divine providence, as opposed to the realm of science and nature, kept on receding.

Hence, despite the e1asticiry that theological doctrines displayed throughout this period, there can be no doubt that the growth of thoroughgoing materialism was perceived as a threat by the established order-one that was resisted every step of the way. Although Bruno was accused of numerous heresies, his most serious heresy had been to adopt the Epicurean argument via Lucretius on the boundless nature of the universe.

The fate of Bruno was one that Oa: The book resulted in such a stonn of public outrage that Lawrence had the book withdrawn. And when three years later a publisher brought out a pirate edition, Lawrence sued the publisher. The court ruled that Lawrence's book was so seditious and inunoral that the author had no property rights in it; which meant-according to an odd English law dating back to the seventeenth century-that a publisher was legally entitled to issue a pirate edition without paying the author.

Lawrence, who was a sophisticated biological thinker for his day, had argued that living organisms conformed to higher natural laws than those that could be attributed to inanimate nature. Yet he denied any "vital principle" beyond that of the organization of matter and bodily organs, and thus denied the existence of any mental property independent of the brain.

For the British establishment this was silnply too lllUch. The Tory Quarterly Review castigated "the doctrine of materialism, an open avowal of which has been made in the metropolis of the British Empire in the lectures delivered under public authority by Mr.

• References;
• Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process!
• Antagonismes communautaires et dialogues interculturels : Du constat des polarisations à la construction des cohésions (Compétences Interculturelles) (French Edition)!

Lawrence was thus forced to withdraw the book and to resign from his post as lecturer. He owned a copy of Lawrence's book which he had marked up with marginal strokes, and he referred to La'wrence'5 work in his notebooks on transmutation and later in The Descent ifIVIan. Only a few years after the persecution of Lawrence, moreover, a young Charles Darwin had personally witnessed a similar case of the suppression of materialist ideas.

In r Darwin attended a meeting of the Plinian Society-a club formed by undergraduates at Edinburgh University for the formal reading of papers on natural history-in which a fellow student, William Browne. Although Gall is today associated with the long-discredited "science" of phrenology, it was not this, but rather Gall's pathbreaking insistence on a nlaterialistic interpretation of the body-uund relationship which led to his lectures in Vienna being proscribed as dangerous to religion in In Gall ernigrated to Paris, where his books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; on his death he was denied a religious burial.

As the editors of his N'otebooks observed: There were laws on blasphemy and sedition acts aimed at radical freethinkers. Between and the newspapers were full of the notorious activities of Chartists, Owerutes, and others who espoused materialism in the cause of social reform. There were also radical materialists, particularly in medical circles, centered in London who were elnbracing evolutionary ideas, but whose views were anathema to Darwin because of their extreme anti-church and anti-state character.

Darwin's views, on the one hand, tended to reduce the stature of the human species by attributing their origin to descent from other, "lower" species. Monkeys and apeshitherto viewed as only slightly lower in the scale of nature but inuneasurably divided off from "man" by separate creation-could now be seen as sharing a common, if extremely distant, ancestry. On the other hand, Darwin's views tended to elevate the stature of other species in relation to human beings, since in his eyes anilnals too expressed intelligence in limited ways.

If all men were dead, then monkeys make men-Men make angels"27 This statement has to be viewed in two parts and is in fact built around a cwofold criticism of the traditional Scale of Nature idea. If human beings were to die out, Darwin was suggesting in his Notebooks, other species-. But it was also true that human beings were evolving and could evolve into another species.

Playing on the traditional Scale of Nature conception in which human beings were seen as halfway up the scale of creation, Darwin wrote: In this way he struggled with the implications of his own ideas and the probable reaction of Victorian society: In his later published writings on the transmutation of species Darwin was to stave off much of the criticism by dividing the question up and leaving the more dangerous issues until later.

Thus the question of the evolution of human beings was almost entirely excluded from TI" Origin of Spedes when it was published in and was not treated until later-when some of the controversy was dying down-in TIlt Descent of Man ; while the issue of the continuity in the minrls and emotions of human beings and animals was dealt with-materialistically-in his Expression if rile Emotions in Man and Animals The latter work was in some ways Darwin's most radical, since it literally annihilated the traditional anthropocentric interpretation of "brute creation," which was thought to be inseparably divided from human beings by lack of intelligence-as well as by the supposed fact that the earth and all of its creatures had been created by God for "man," In Darwin's view.

This was materialism, and Darwin knew it; but it was a naturalism that humanized nature every bit as much as it naturalized man. As a student in Berlin, Karl Marx had come partly, reluctantly, under the spell of the idealist philosophical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel which then dominated German philosophy, and which purported to explain the development of spirit or mind in history. Hence, Marx, we are led to believe, was not attracted so much to the content of Epicurus' philosophy as to the fact that it reflected a sort of parallel "spirit" of the times.

Further, Marx was to go on to insist in his subsequent writings that Epicurus was central for all those thinkers who developed materialist views in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. J1 Here it is important to remember that Marx's relation to the Hegelian system was ambivalent from the start; indeed his initial inclination appears to have been to see it as a threat to the Enlightenment views that had inspired him thus far. He referred to falling into the "arms of the enemy"; to making "an idol of a view that I hated"; and to his repeated attempts to escape its "grotesque craggy Inelody.

More than that, it was an indirect attempt to come to grips with the problem that the materialist tradition of the English and French Enlightenments-which drew heavily upon Epicllrus for their inspiration-raised for Hegelian philosophy. Given its importance for British and French materialism, "atomistic philosophy," as James White has observed, As Maximilian Rubel and Margaret Manale have remarked, Marx's decision to do his doctoral thesis on Epicurus was a most un- Hegelian turn Marx's attention is drawn to Epicurus by his naturalness, his manifestation of imeUecrual and sensual freedom, a freedom from gods and from doctrines which concede to chance an equaUy great, if not greater, role in human life as to necessity.

Individual will is asserted; an understanding of contingency becomes central to the wisdom of life. Man frees himself here from superstition and fear and becomes capable of forging his own happiness. In he opened up the "Garden," the home of his school of philosophy, which by the time of his death in B. Epicurus lived through the tragic aftermath of the Macedonian hegemony during which Alexander's successors battled over his empire; a time in which political activity seemed particularly ineffective.

Hence, he preached a kind of contemplative materialism to his followers-yet one in which more radical, practical implications could be perceived. Epicurus' philosophy had a large impa ct on ancient thinking up through Roman times, but his work had been almost entirely lost during the Middle Ages when he and his followers were declared among the leading heretics opposed to Christianity. Hence his work was k. EpicllruS was inspired by the work of the Greek atomists Leucippus Ijl.

These atoms had the quality of motion and combined and separated in various ways to form the objects of the senses. In Democritus, atoms had two primary qualities: Many interpretations of Democr itus since the ancient sources conflict also claim that he assigned the quality of weight to the atom, so that motion occurred in a downward direction and in straight lines though these properties of atoms are more closely associated with the work of Epicurus.

Where Epicurus most clearly deviated from Democritus was in his addition of the proposi tion that atoms did no t move according to patterns that were entirely determinant; rather some atoms "swerved," creating the e1ement of chance and indeterrninancy and thus leaving room for free will. Among the most important deductions were the notions of boundless space including infinite numbers of worlds and infinite time.

Hjs matenalist philosophy seemed to anticIpate to a remarkable degree the discoveries of science, and indeed was extremely influential among many of the leading scientists of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. The lIutlal propositions of Epicurean natural philosophy were that "Nothing is ever created by dIvine power out of nothing" and "nature The gods, though they continued to exist, were confmed to the spaces in between the worlds. Further, Epicurus opposed all teleology and all absolute determinism in the treatment of nature: It were better to follow the myths about the gods," he wrote, "than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers: So you may see that events never at all Exist by themselves as ma [er does, nor can Be said to exist in the same way as void.

But rightly you may call them accidents Of matter and place in which things happen. While sensation itself has no mental coment, it gives rise to the mental process of sorting out sensations in 36 MARX'S ECOLOGY terms of general categories built up on the basis of repeated sensations, but that once acquired exist in the mind somewhat independently and become the basis for organizing data into ready-made categories. It is in this sense that Epicurus refers to thern as "anticipations. Again they denote the activity of the subject in the acquisition of knowledge. What mattered for Epicurus, as George Panichas has written, "was the contemplation of what could materialize in human existence and not in an eternal beyond.

But Epicurus saw this not in short-sighted, crudely hedonist terms, but rather in terms of the whole of existence, which recognized that some ill1lnediate egoistic pleasures only created greater pains. He therefore argued for a simple life, abandoning the pursuit of wealth. Long and David Sedley point out, "has a political resonance absent from the modern concepts Among Epicurus' most important contributions was his concept of justice which heavily influenced Marx.

As Marx was later to point o ut, it was Epicurus who fmt originated the notion of the social contract. This is particularly evident in Lucretius' work, which, in the words of noted historian of ancient ecological thought J. Donald Hughes, "asked some questions that are now regarded as ecological. The idea had originally been raised by Empedocles fl.

L and Anaxagoras c. Summarizing Empedocles, Aristotle had written, Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e. Those species that survived, and were able to perpetuate "the chain of offspring," Lucretius explained, were those that had developed special attributes that protected them from their environment in the struggle for existence, "but those who were gifted with none of these natural assets were free game and an easy prey for others, till nature brought their race to extinction.

We are left with the conclusion that the name of mother has rightly been bestowed on the earth, since out of the earth everything is born. Guthrie, an authority on the protoevolutionary thought of antiquity, remarke-d, "was perhaps, in the ah"ence of modern biological knowledge and a soundly-based theory of evolution, the only reasonable alternative": In his IdfaS of Life and Matter: In the and , following " the revolution in ethnological time" associated with Darwin's Tile Origin of Species and with the first widely accepted scientific discoveries of human fossils, it became COJrunon for important Darwinian thinkers, such as John Lubbock and Henry Morgan, to refer back to Lucretius' discussion on ethnological development, which had taken account of the evolution from an age of stone and wood, to that of bronze, and then of iron-also incorporating discussions of the development of speech, of mutual assistance, the revolution in the use of fire, and so on.

But by the face of nature and her laws. It is therefore not surprising, as evolutionary biologist Michael Rose has noted, that " Lucretius is regarded by some scholars as the greatest classical forer unner to modern science. Elaborate scholastic taxonomies were combined with a view of nature that was essentially static and tautological. As a result the leading scientists turned to Greek atomism, and particularly to the ideas of Epicurus. Matter came to be understood as consisting of atoms, and hence, following Epicurus, in terms of particles of lnatter which could be explained simply in terms of size, shape, and motion-a view easily translated into essentially mechanical terrllli.

ThOlnas Hariot , one of the most brilliant figures of the English scientific revolution, had been exposed to Epicurean atomism by Bruno. In a letter to Johannes Kepler explaining the workings of physical optics, Hariot wrote: HI have now led you to the doors of nature's house, wherein lie its mysteries. If you cannot enter because the doors are too narrow, then abstract and contract yourself into an atom, and you will enter easily.

And when you later come out again, tell me what wonders you saw. Bacon went on in his essay to displace Prometheus with the figure of Democritus, who, along with Epicurus, represented the true heroic quality of Prometheanism in its materialist guise. For Bacon, Epicurus was an inferior figure to Democritus because he subordinated "his natural to his moral philosophy," refusing to accept anything counter to freedom. Yet, Bacon was to see Epicurus' attack on superstition as the essence of enlightenment.

Here he quoted Epicurus' statement in his "Letter to Menoeceus" that, "Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly llnpious. It was printed in and went through some thirty editions between then and the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, it wasn't until the early to midseventeenth century that Epicureanism was to make major inroads into European thought. In Pierre Gassendi , a French cleric, theologian, philosopher, and mathematician and one of the leading proponents along with his contemporaries Hobbes and Descartes of the mechanical philosophy, produced a grand Epicurean--Christian synthesis.

Gassendi's explicitly stated purpose was to overthrow the old Aristotelian conception of l1ature. In his DOrlbts, written in , Gassendi attacked Cartesian metaphysics, which had as its starting point innate ideas: Emphasizing the priority of the materia! Charitonia was the first systematic effort in England to merge Epicurus with the mechanical philosophy.

In his Sylva, Or a Disco,,,,e of Forest- Trees and tire Propagatio" of Timber in His Mqiesties Dominions , the first official publication of the Royal Society a work that went through four editions in Evelyn's lifetime , he complained of the "prodigious havoc" wreaked on English forests by the demands of shipping, glassworks, iron furnaces, and the like.

Here Evelyn's enthusiasm not only for Bacon. In Book VI of hiS great poem Lucretius had written, "How easily the drowsy fume and scent of chatcaa1 passes into the brain," whIch Evelyn quoted on the title page of his work. It is chis Ihorrid smo;akeJ wluch scaners and strews about chose black and smutty Atomes upon all th1l1gs where It comes. II, Boyle's moderate mechanistic philosophy was exp1icitly developed in opposition to the pantheistic materialislll associated with the more radical clements of the Engli!!

Mter Boyle and his associates attached themselves to the restored lllOIlarchy. In 16 2 the Royal Society was estab- ',! I am hiT fmm supposing, with the- Epicureat1s, th;lt atoms, accidentally meeting in an infinite vacuum, were able, of themselves, to produce a world, and all its phenomena: The philosophy I plead for. Thus, the univefS Thus Boyle managed to combine a mcchanical view of the laws of naturc rooted in an atomistic concept of matter with a theological position that attributed both the origin of matter and the laws of Illotion of nature to the design of an omniscient God.

Indeed, Boyle wrote as much on theology as science and can be regarded as one of the principal proponents of natural theology. His Disquisition About the Final Causes if. Natural TIlings I6SS represented an early articulation of the argUlllent from design for the existence of God, developed also by Boyle's contemporary John Ray, that foreshadowed the ideas of William Paley a century later. For Boyle "Epicurus and nlost of his follmvers Hence, while Boyle adopted certain hypotheses from Epicurean atomism , essential to the construction of his own mechanistic views, he rejected thoroughgoing materialism and atheism.

Instead, as Stephen Jay Gould has written, he " neatly married m echanism and religion into a co herent system that granted higher status to both sides. N ewton 's own philosophy of nature and its relation to natural theology stands out most clearly in four letters that he wrote in to Richard Bentley, who, in devising the final two of eight sermons in natural theology the Boyle Lectures , which were targe ted at the threat posed by Epicurean materialism and atheism , called on Newton for help in providing a scientific rationale.

Newton, as these and other letters reveal, was not above abandoning his commitment to the m echanical philosophy at points when he thought it necessary in order to combat materialism and to defend his religious beliefS. Thus he hypothesized in a letter to Thomas Burnett that the earth's rotation had origi nally occ urred very slowly, produci ng days of virtually any length, in order to square the biblical story of the creation of the world in seven days with geological evidence on the earth's antiquity. Aristotle' an ass to Epicuras. Rather "the history of early modern thought," as Margaret Osler and Letizia Panizza have noted, "can perhaps be understood at least in part as the interplay of one set of ancient models with another.

It was not just the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius that created a storm of controvcrsy in the seventecnth and eighteenth centuries, but also the notions of "dcep time" associated with the ancient materialists though in Lucretius the earth, as opposed to the universe, was explicitly referred to as "newly madc" , which threatened the Christian world-view, and yet which seemed to be receiving increasing support with the developl11ent of science. The religious struggle against what is now called "geological time" thus had, as its classical adversaries, the Epicurean materialists.

VieD derived many of his ideas from Lucretius, particularly in relation to the developmental notio ns of human culture to be found in Lucretius' great poem. N evertheless this had to remain hidden, since the Inquisition in Naples had led to the imprisonment of some of Vieo's friends on charges w hich included the m ere m ention of Epicurus or Lucretius.

The religio lls view that had consigned Epicurus and his followers to the sixth circle of H ell in Dante's Infe rno, where they were to be found in countless half-opened burning tombs, still prevailed. VieD himself was attacked for having adopted Lucretian ideas on the feral origins of human beings. As a result, Vico-as modern scholarship has conclusively demo nstrated-adopted a posture of the "feigned repudiation of Lucreti us," w hile building on and refashioning Lucretian ideas.

The development of science only seemed to offer confirmation of Epicurean materialism. Through the argunlents of the ancient materialist Epicurus, Hume thus presented some of his own self-justificati on in respo nse to those who had ' leveled similar charges against him. In his last mo nths Hume cheered himself in the face of his approaching death by rereading Lucretius and Lucian.

In France Voltaire considered Lucretius' De reTHm natura so important that he kept six different editions and translati ons on his shelves. For "when Lucretius spoke of dispelling night, lifting shadows, or clarifying ideas, he m eant the conquest of religio n by science. Epicurean atomism, ethics, discussions of animate nature, criticisms of religion, and treatments of mortality were evident throughout their work.

Halbach's System cif 1Varure was written in a Lucretian vein, and was condemned by parliamentary decree to be burned in the very year of its publication. The indictment spelled out the Epicurean origin of his theories. What interested Kant was essentially an evolutionary account of the universe. Such views were widely associated with Epicurean materialism, causing Kant to declare that [ will nor deny that the heory of Lucretius, or his predecessors, Epicurus, Leucippus and ] emocritus, has much resemblance with mine.

I assume, like these philmophers, that the first state of nature consisted in a universal diffusion of the primitive matter of all the bodies in space, or of the atoms of nutter, as these philosophers called them. Epicurus asserted a gravity or weight which forced these elementary particles to sink or tall; and thi'i does not seem to ditfer Il1uch from Newton's Attraction, which I accept.

He also gave them a certain deviation from the straight line in the falling movement, although he had absurd fancies regarding the causes and consequences of it. This deviation agrees in some degree with the alteration from the falling in a straight line, which we deduce from the repulsion of particles: JI , Nevertheless, Kant opposed the Epicurean attribution of all of this to mere "chance"; rather he pointed to certain "necessary laws" producing a "well-ordered whole.

In his Critique of Judgement, and in particular his critique of teleological judgement, the mature Kant, author of critical philosophy. He thereby agreed in part with the materialist tradition stemming from Epicurus, with its strong anti-teleologICal orientation. Hence, while the material world did not offer proof of God, l[ was necessary to exanune the matena] world as if there were mtelligence hehmd it. Kant thus tried to square a materialist methodology wIth a nOtion of teleological judgement as a regulative prInciple of knowledge.

For Kant, Epicurean philosophy belonged to a group of theories in whICh purposiveness or intelligibility existed but was undcsigned. Only on the basis of nature's mechamsm, he mamt3ms, are we able to have any insight mto the nature of thmgs at all and wHhout that mechanism there can be no natural science Schelling's spiritualistic response to materialism is most evident in his poem "The Epicurean Confession of Faith of Hans Brittleback," in which his fictional protagonist, Brittleback.

Philosophical criticislll thus meant the laying bare of all of those forces that stood opposed to the free development of human self-consciousness, recognizing them for what they were--the alienation of thought or mind. The highest form of such self-consciousness was the Enlightenment itself.

In contrast to German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel who had attacked "the crude materialism of EpiclI[us," and who had deplored the fact that in modern times "the teaching of Epicll[US, augmented and supplcmcmed by modern discoveries in the Natural sciences," had grown "to be the dominant phil- osophy of the latter half of the eighteenth century especially in France," Koppen-who later indicated that all of his thinking in this period derived from Marx-saw the connection between Greek atomism and the EnlightCilment as a virtue: Marx and Epicurus In the preface co his doctoral thesis, which was submitted in and accepted shortly after , Marx referred favorably to Koppen's Frederick the Great.

But Marx chose in his thesis co look back at Epicurus' philosophy itself-in order to throw light on the way in which Epicurean philosophy had prefigured the rise of the materialism, humanism, and abstract Individualism of the European Enlighteillilent of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For Marx, Epicurus was "the greatest representative of the Greek Enlighterunent, and he deserves the praise of Lucretius. As the great Epicurean scholar Cyril Bailey, who translated Epicurus into English, was to exclaim in Almost as a pioneer he rejects the ancient tradition, represented glibly in the histories of his time, that Epicurus adopted the Atomism of Democritus wholesale, changing it here and there for the worse. Epicurus' own atomism, in contrast, allowed him to delve into the nature of human sensation and existence.

Marx reversed their roles making Epicurus appear as the deeper of the two [in comparison [0 Democritus] inasmuch as he had labored to find room in his system both for animate and inanimate being, both for narure and society, both for the phenomena of the external world and the demands of the moral consciousness. Farrington observed "While Plato warred against the scientific materialists, Epicurus [as Marx was to show] based his philosophy upon them, rejecting only the theory of mechanical determinism.

Epicureanism was "not a purely mechanical system; it was the specific originaliry of Epicurus in the domain of physics to have defended freedom of the will in man as a product of evolution. The analysis thus pointed to human cultural evolution as representing a kind of freedom for rational organization of historical life. It is not a metaphysical, but an historically acquired, character of man.

Armstrong in an essay in the Classical Quarterly in , where he states: We see that what Epicurus has done, and he seems to have been original in doing it, is to split the traditional conception of Chance-Necessity so that, while remaining strictly within the bounds of his system and involving no principle of explanation which is inunaterial or possessed of reason [that is, teleological], he provides himself with a framework or background of regularity 54 MARX'S ECOLOGY and o rder while leaving room for an erratic, capricious principle in the world Ie is tempting 0 recognize in this distinctio n a conscio us attempt to provide an adequ: In Epicurus, Marx contended, the one-sided determinism of Democritus is transcended.

For Democritus, necessity is everything, but Epicurus also recognizes chance, contingency, and the possibility of freedom. It was "an old and entrenched prejudice," Marx observed, "to identify Epicurus' modifications" of Democritlls in this area "as only arbitrary vagaries. It made the world itself possible, as Lucretius had written, since otherwise there would be no collision of atoms and "the world would never have been created.

Further, to argue, as some did, that one needed merely to add some degree of spirituality to the argument-referring to the "soul of the atom"-gained nothing from this but the addition of a word and the introduction of nail-material principles. In EPICurUS "the law of the atom" is "repulsion," the collision of elements; it no longer needs fixatlon any form. Marx contended followlIlg Kant in thIs respect.

Hence, "the pure form of the world of appearance IS tnne. Ancient materialism is often portrayed as a view that reduces thought to "paSSIve sensations," which are themselves "merely a product of forces acting from without, to Democritus' view that nodung eXIsts but 'atoms and the void"'-as the young Sidney Hook wrote. IdealIsm, contrast, is usually credtted with having provided the "active" SIde to the "dialectic of perception.

Thus Epicurus wrote that "It would be better to follow the myth about the Gods than to he a slave to the destiny of the physicists. The first, imagining my own little stories, is relevant because they always reached a point where I could not drive them forward Just the right word. Just the right word, to give a sentence the right kind of juicy PUNCH that it needs to bring the point home, to make it utterly beautiful. I can't always find it either, when I write. It's like a gap where a tooth should be, an ache in your mind. I either don't know it, or it is right on the edge of memory, but I just can't get it to come forward into my conscious brain!

Surely a cause for writer's block. Hung up on a single sentence, a single. Or I just hit a point where the story, crystal clear up unt. All Formats Kindle Edition Sort by: Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now.

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