A Magic Deeper Still: An Essay on Ideological Critique

In Marx's The German Ideology, he rakes the Young Hegelians and their masters (Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner, et al.) over the coals for a fundamental failure. These German idealists had become ideologues because they had gotten everything upside down. Dealing in abstraction and imputing agency to ideas, Marx compares them to the effects of camera obscura, artificially inverting the world:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

The Young Hegelians mistook the real process of consciousness and thought, namely one's social place, lived experience, and material surrounding, and then imputed the derived thought upwards coming down. In other words, they invented various ideas befitting their bourgeois status and then projected these upwards as universal abstractions. But this process itself is not perversion, so much a product of the very same life processes. Again, in other words, it is precisely the position of these Young Hegelians (urbane, bourgeois, intelligentsia) that produces their own ideologies. They too are products of their class and society. And yet, perhaps despite the point, this points beyond simple materialism.

Marx's ruthless criticism, and its scientific materialism, still has some strong utility today. It is precisely because contemporary "Democratic-Socialists" are themselves the bourgeois professional-managerial class (PMC) that they fuss about proper pronouns. Their ideological fixation with culture (even making class a culture) as the force of inequality is itself a product of their material circumstances. As these people ran Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, they drove away many 2016 working-class supporters. The emphasis on financial capital and banks gave way to amorphous identity-politics. And as the New Left traded street-theater and Bohemian aesthetics for corporate jobs and respectability, so too will the New New Left fold their IdPol into whatever careerism they find themselves in. Per Marx, it's all a product of concrete access to material goods. The ideological fixation on intersectionality is a product of bourgeois class forces.

And while Marx was right (and still right) to criticize the intelligentsia's ideological idealism, his materialism hits the brick wall of his own analysis. How could Marx, himself a product of the bourgeoisie with aristocratic pretensions, ever make this analysis? The obvious answer is dialectics, self-awareness gained from contradictions. But unlike Hegel, Marx's materialism sees ideas strictly as products of the material. Perhaps the problem is simply the dichotomization between "mental production" and material reality. The best option is the nuclear option: all is idea, there is no material.

Prima facia, the above is absurd, but first a digression. In the classic sense of the term, the "mage" was the wise man, he who knew the true name for things. Thaumaturgy and magic was a form of this wisdom, where names gave one access to extraordinary (but wholly natural) powers. Critical analysis, true knowledge, understood the world and tapped into the energies the sustain the cosmos. While the "social sciences" posited the disenchantment of the world, it is more like the abolition of one magic for another. One can see how superstitious pollsters were in trying to predict election results, which looked as accurate as ancient augurs counting birds or reading intestines. Of course, the utility remains the same: both of these manufactured legitimacy. The truthfulness of it was irrelevant: magic dulls the mind and lulls one into sleepy shackles. It's perhaps for this reason that the Bible condemns witchcraft. It not only rejects the ultimately personal nature of reality (the governing Logos), it (in so doing) creates forms of control and mastery. A professional-clerical class mystifes the population into spiritual bondage (a process that is itself a product of its class).

Nevertheless, the quest for names goes on. False knowledge (literally science) does not obviate all knowledge. Technology opened up new domains on what mankind could know. The success of the truth was due to its empirical basis: it worked. Yet, as stated above, the same principle could be used to mystify relations as well. How can we tell the difference? Through critical thought, the process of linking together various empirical phenomena into coherence. As much as Marx was right about the production of ideas according to class, not everyone acts accordingly. People may become class-traitors. How is this possible? Because the truth will set you free: the revelation of the ultimate gives a concrete man a vision of reality which he then tries to proximate with his own thoughts. While this sounds equally mystical, it is a rational process. While I depart from Hegel that is necessitated by contradiction, it does depend upon accounting for class interests as part of reality. One's access to material goods heavily shapes one's own perception, its ideas that produce other ideas. It's only through this process, an appearance of the Logos (whether through Christian apocalypse or Hegelian contradictions), that the Truth is set apart from the lie. But to reckon these things, as said, requires careful tallying of all ideas involved. Interest is something that need be assessed.

It's in this way that the great crime of the Young Hegelians was their fraud. They did not account concrete men as they were, but imposed upon them a paradigm of how they ought to be. It was this ignorance that blinded these same urbane bourgeois from their own self-interest in the process. Again, this judgement depends upon some revelation, refracted through man's intellect, of reality. Marx considers this real as material nature, which not only subsists but has actualizable potential. He is not simply insulting the Young Hegelians as Nietzsche would: they're not just ugly imbeciles, but wrong. For Marx, there truly is a new world on the horizon, a spectre haunting Europe, the eschatological spirit of Communism. Marx played the role of the true mage against the hacks and charlatans. He knew the names, not the neo-Hegelians (hence why the majority of The German Ideology is a general history of the world). And in this way, Marx's materialism is far more similar to Aristotelian hylomorphism. He makes this position known in a following passage:

"In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process."

Marx's materialism is dialectic, not the crude sort that atheists often advocate. It is through an interaction with the contradictions of material reality (limited resources and the social hierarchies in relation to them) that one comes to an awareness of man's future. "Heaven" is naturally derived eschatological fulfillment, where the contradictions are sublated into history's end. This awareness does not derive through intellectual ascesis (rejecting Platonic rationalism through the ages) but analysis of concrete men as they live and work. The telos of human history become manifest, not naively through analysis or rational cogitation, but through dialectics. Man is not ultimately plastic but possesses a form that is a product of nature. Communism is simply the telos of planet Earth and humankind as it is. Contrary to later revisionists, Marx truly believed there was a destiny on the horizon, not polyvalency where Communism was something that needed action lest it fail to come about. While the realization of Communism would inevitably require struggle, it was a struggle born from the social contradictions that plague industrial societies.

Marx may very well be wrong, but it's because of the limitations of materialism. For the Christian, angels ascend and descend Jacob's Ladder (the Logos Himself). Heaven and Earth should not be dichotomized but synthesized (Heaven may be symbolically above Earth, but not metaphysically so; the fullness of reality is multilayered). In other words, if all things are ideas (from the sensual to the abstract) it is not about fundamental difference but proper arrangement. Material reality is not radically different from mental production, but these are simply ideas that need to be properly related to each other. The pain of hunger is not fundamentally difference than the pain of grief. The material is mental. Our abstractions can become fantasies only when we forget that abstraction is itself related to concrete particulars. Per Berkeley against latter day Cartesians, a man can't imagine a triangle without a particular shape, color, and form. The energetic fluctuations of ideas (the constant experience of both sensual and abstract ideas) is simply the world. But if there's a fundamental passivity, one cannot (per Marx's materialism) default to a self-generative and self-actualizing negativity (i.e. Nature). One must acknowledge the divine.

The above may seem like a return to neo-Idealism, mysticisim, and a deux ex machina. But it's rather trying to give Marx's critique a fuller account. While the Young Hegelians lapse into forgetting the primacy of the material, Marx seems unaware of how may be awakened by the abstract. In other words, many a convert to Marxian analysis were struck by the theory, which then corresponded to reality, rather than being struck by the dialectical contradictions of social inequalities. And the reason this is possible is because reality is fundamentally personal. Behind the ideas, both sensual and abstract, earthly and heavenly, is God. The Logos is the absolute subject, reality at is ultimate level, the Creator of both Heaven and Earth.

Without this awareness of struggle (something quite clear in Scripture, even if it's not ultimate), one can easily lapse back into the naive rationalism of the Platonism. Theology has often been captive to this form, which allows it to become the haunt of bad magicians. Often theology is a product of a certain class that reinscribes its own interests or the interests of its employers. When Christians fail to be self-aware of these forces (the full pleotheora of ideas, ascending and descending Jacob's ladders), they may become mystifiers and obfuscators. With an abstract God upon a chain of being, Christianity simply becomes the naive tool of domination in the unwitting hands of the intelligentsia (hence why Marx lampoons "Saint Max" [Max Stirner] and "Saint Bruno" [Bruno Bauer] as theologians). These neo-idealists became idolators, functionally pantheists, denying both concrete men and their history. Berkeley's defense of Christianity, coming long before Marx or dialectical theory, depends upon a formatting of the abstract in relation to the concrete. It defends the integrity of personal agency within a world of sensual ideas (the experience of the material). The living God remains the better alternative to the idols of neo-idealists (naive rationalists or dialecticians).

Or, in other words, it's the deepest magic of them all. In conclusion, I quote C.S. Lewis' Aslan when he rose from the dead in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Aslan's return to life is shocking because he had just pledged his life for Edward's, which was itself grounded on the Witch's knowledge of Narnia's magic. Aslan is queried about this utterly bizarre, and seemingly contradictory, turn of events, when he responds:

'It means', said Aslan, 'that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.

Christian theology is not against the functionalist critique Marx offers. It simply appeals that there's a magic deeper still.