Althusser’s epistemology

‘Let us say that public positions must always be judged against the system of positions actually held and against the effects they produce’ – Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (p115)

Introduction

The settling of accounts with ‘Althusserianism’ has been on the order of the day for some time now. The recent publication of Essays in Self-Criticism, however, makes available for the first time to English readers the author’s own judgements on his earlier work (1). His view has not changed much since 1969, when the initial rectification was published as a foreword to the Italian edition of Reading Capital. What was then an ‘error’ in the conception of philosophy has now become a ‘deviation’. The change in terms reflects the further development of the metaphor (2) of philosophy as a field of battle: the class struggle in theory. It was a deviation, though, from a line which is never straight; an ‘error’ in a field of theory for which truth is undefined. Overall, the view with respect to his earlier texts is that, while their argumentation may have been deviant, the positions they took up were and are correct. The ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, then, contain more than an element of self-justification. Nevertheless, they are useful as a point of departure for reflection on those earlier essays.

The fundamental position was that of combatting certain theoretically and politically dangerous tendencies within marxism, with the aim of restoring its political power and status, such that it might regain its political effectiveness. Althusser sums it up as follows: ‘I wanted to defend Marxism against the real dangers of bourgeois ideology: it was necessary to stress its revolutionary new character; it was therefore necessary to ‘prove’ that there is an antagonism between Marxism and bourgeois ideology…’ (ESC, p105). The grounds on which he undertood this defence and this ‘proof’  were epistemological ones. Althusser sought to establish the novelty of historical materialism by defending it as a science, in the strongest sense of the word. Marx’s achievement was compared to that of Galileo, who ‘opened up the continent of physics to science’. Insofar as the proof of this radical novelty was undertaken on the basis of a proposed theory of the difference between science and ideology, Althusser’s marxist philosophy undertook the primary task of an epistemology: the elaboration of concepts and theses which would permit the demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. Dialectical materialism, then, was thought to be the philosophical theory within which the scientific character of historical materialism could be demonstrated.

Althusser’s marxist philosophy, however, was no ordinary epistemology, but an ‘historical epistemology’, or ‘theory of science and of the history of science’ (RC, p145). The defence of historical materialism as a science also rested upon certain historical claims about the beginnings of all sciences, about the epistemological break which marked the emergence of historical materialism itself. Conversely, the understanding of the new science founded by Marx, the science of history, and of the mechanism of the birth of the new science, pointed towards ‘the concepts of a general theory of the history of the sciences’ (RC, p153). Hence the development of this marxist philosophy was thought to lead towards ‘a revolution in the traditional concept of the history of the sciences’ (RC, p44); a revolution embodied in dialectical materialism itself,  and made possible by the existence of historical materialism. 

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