Minding Marx’s Mind: A Philosophical Reflection on the ‘Mind’ Question—Part I

Abstract

The ‘mind’, one could say, is a dangerous thing, dangerous not only in terms of Kant’s ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’, but a dangerous ‘thing’ as in Marx’s concept of reification. According to the concept of reification, there is a personification of things with the consequent depersonification of human life. Apply this theory of reification to the ‘mind’ and what we get is the theory of the ‘mind’, where the ‘mind’ is depicted as having some sort of uncanny life of its own, doing magical things. Consequently, the ‘mind’ could mean everything and yet mean nothing. This essay keeps the mind in two forms: in inverted commas and not in inverted commas. Thus we have the ‘mind’ and the mind. One must understand this radical difference. This essay further claims that while there are idealistic conceptions of the mind, so too does one have biologist ideas of the mind developed by what is now called ‘brain sciences’, generously funded by the corporate world. In contrast to idealism, biologism and the brain sciences, contemporary studies that interface philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience offer newer possibilities on what the human mind means. Here the ‘mind’ has not to be understood as either in the form of ‘spirit’ or ‘thing-matter’, but in the form of historicism and humanism, where humanity as a species being is defined by labor. This essay analyzes whether there can be a real dialectical materialist theory of the mind, and how this new theory needs a critical humanist and naturalist grounding. It claims that there is a radical difference between this critical and humanist Marxism and the Marxism of post-Marx Marxism.