Christoph Schuringa, "Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Christoph Scheringa about his recently published book, Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy. Christoph is a philosopher and associate professor in philosophy at Northeastern University London. As Christoph persuasively argues, this argument misses the truth of the matter. This book will appeal to those interested in the intellectual history of Marxism and the intellectual biography of Marx. Christoph, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network. Great pleasure to be here.

It's really great to have you on this. This book is, is interesting for a number of reasons. You know, as I was telling you offline, I read a lot of Marx in college and depending on who's teaching it, you get a very different Marx. I feel like for, for every person that reads Marx, there's a different Marx that comes out of it. And clearly, you know, you really dive very deeply into his, into his work. I also feel like taking on someone like Marx is in many ways difficult because there's

there's so many people that are, that study him that they can get really nitpicky too, if they, if they disagree with maybe some of your interpretations. But before jumping into the, into the text that you've written, why don't you just tell us a little about yourself and your background? Yeah. So as you say, I'm a philosopher living here in London and I'm,

I've become, as this book indicates, increasingly interested in really pursuing Marxism from an intellectual point of view. And really this work sits within larger perspectives of work maybe in history, philosophy. So I'm very interested in Aristotle and Hegel in particular, who are figures that you'll have seen figure very prominently in this book.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'd say you engage with a lot of different thinkers. Marx is a sort of a vehicle to explore other ideas. As far as this actual book is concerned, how did you come to write it? So sort of in a sense, gradually, I think, you know, the idea came to fruition that in a way really starting from

um these statements in very early works by Marx including his doctoral dissertation where he already talks about this idea of the actualization of philosophy um and that phrase and what it could possibly mean you know what what it could be to actualize philosophy sort of captured my imagination and my curiosity and I was sort of trying to think um

whether it might be that Marx really pursues this, you know, further in his intellectual trajectory. There's a sort of tradition, I think, of people trying to find a kind of the germ of Marxist thought in his very early work. And one has to be a bit careful about that. But it was really, you know, getting into the early Marx work and then seeing how deeply this is connected with Aristotle and with a whole philosophical tradition that sort of got

got me going and in part it was you know sort of immediate impetus was i spent a um semester of research leave at the university of pittsburgh where i was speaking a lot to a philosopher called michael thompson who um really um you know got me thinking about marx in a very serious way that that then um gave me the momentum to really get to get this project underway

That's, that's interesting. I think that this phrase, obviously it's the, uh, it's in the title of the book, the actualization of philosophy. I, I, I'm not sure if we should, you know, dig into what, you know, what is it, your sort of notion of actualization, or if we should, uh, just sort of start with talking a little bit about how people tend to think of Mark. So I, I'm wondering if you could just introduce the sort of standard interpretation of Marx's development, how people, uh, you know, in a kind of, uh, uh,

as like structuralist sense maybe think about Marx's ideas in terms of their, you know, the early Marx to the later Marx. Yeah, so I think there's a few different sort of standard interpretations which kind of collectively I go against in a certain way.

And they all have in common the idea that, you know, Marx really begins as a philosopher, that his early intellectual interest is in philosophy. And it's undeniable that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy. And that he was very closely involved with this group called the Young Hegelians. And there are all sorts of questions about exactly what

you know, who the Young Hegelians were and how to think of them as a group. But Marx, in a sense, you know, he wasn't just one of the central people in it, but it was recognized at the time that he was the most intellectually brilliant person in this group, the Young Hegelians. So it's clear, you know, that he was

in philosophy at the start and it's also clear that he intended to pursue philosophy as an academic career and he had a job in philosophy lined up for him by Bruno Bauer who was one of the other prominent people in the young Hegelian movement at the University of Bonn at the very time that there was a kind of

wave of repression against radical academics of the German universities and they all lost their jobs. So Marx never even was appointed to this job in philosophy at Bonn. So everyone agrees that he started as a philosopher. And then there are these various ways to try and make sense of how can it be that this figure who saw himself as a philosopher early on goes in this radically different direction later. So the idea is the kind of work that we see in Capital

must be radically different in nature. And one way to think about that is a kind of line of thought that comes from the French Marxist Louis Althusser, according to whom there was what Althusser called an epistemological rupture, which was this kind of decisive break around 1845 in Marx's output, where he effectively said,

transitions out of philosophy into this kind of radically new and unprecedented form of scientific activity, which is completely...

distinctive of Marx. No one before him has done this kind of science. And then there's another kind of view which is associated with a particular American philosopher called Daniel Bradney, who wrote this book called Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy. And that title really tells you what he's trying to put across in the book, which is the idea that Marx sort of wrestled with philosophy and he wrestled to get out of it.

And the way to get out of philosophy would be to, again, engage in a certain kind of science, but here conceived very differently from the way Arthur Sayre thinks about this. But the idea of science for Bradney essentially involves the idea of being value-free, so being free of normative claims, claims about what ought to be the case or should be the case, as opposed to registering what's empirically verifiable. And Bradney's

account of what then happens in Marx's output is that Marx fails to perform this feat of extricating himself from normative claims. So for example, Marx has to say things like alienation, kind of alienation that workers experience under capitalism is a bad thing. And that's a normative claim. And Marx can't help himself but make such claims.

so he remains trapped in philosophy. So here the idea of Marx tries to escape from philosophy, but he remains trapped. So the sort of usual readings that are around, I think have it in common that, yes, Marx is a philosopher early on. And often it's thought Hegelian in a very deep sense, in a way I can test in the book. But he then, you know, by...

by means yet to be determined, try successfully or unsuccessfully to get out of philosophy.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I have quite a lot of sympathy for Althusser's view because I think if you take a certain view of philosophy as involving a certain kind of ideological formation, which requires a sort of stepping back from immediate immersion in reality,

which I think is part of what Artisau thinks is involved in philosophy, then it becomes very attractive to say that Marx must be doing something else, which has this sort of special characteristic that it can not only predict the revolution, but can give this sort of intellectual backing to the revolution that seems...

It doesn't seem available on a really traditional conception of philosophy. So I think if you think that philosophy means something more like the sort of thing that Marx is objecting to, and Marx does speak very pejoratively about philosophers and philosophy in the mid-1840s onwards. So there are good reasons for thinking that he's distancing himself from what he thinks is traditional philosophy.

I think if you think that philosophy must be traditional philosophy, it starts to make a lot of sense that he would be breaking out into this radically new kind of way of thinking.

It's very typical for philosophers to speak, especially if they view themselves as breaking new ground, to speak pejoratively of philosophy and other philosophers. Nietzsche, I think, spent his entire career bashing Kant, among other philosophers. I guess it's interesting to think about what to make of that.

I was really interested by your discussion of Marx's writing on ancient Greek philosophy because I think that this is just not something that I had really encountered before of his writing. I feel like in many ways it's just not treated properly.

treated very much in, you know, in surveys of, of his work, or, you know, it's, it's not, it's not like the communist manifesto where, you know, it gets assigned and, you know, in high school and some history classes, you know, depending on where you go to school, I guess. But can you talk a little about Marx's interpretations of various ancient Greek philosophers? Yeah.

Yes, I mean, I guess the first thing to say about the doctoral dissertation is just what an astonishing piece of work it is in terms of the scholarship. So something that one might not realize immediately is that he was working directly with the original sources in ancient Greek. So this shows you something about the kind of education that Marx had and his ability to wield the education.

And so what he's doing is, I mean, he's taking up an idea that's sort of circulating around the young Hegelians, which is that they are at a particular kind of juncture. So in the 1830s onwards, after the death of Hegel in 1831. So Hegel dies very suddenly during the cholera epidemic that sweeps through Berlin in 1831. And with the death of Hegel, it's like, well, this...

great sort of totalizing philosopher, a philosopher who claimed to have all bases covered and to have the system that included everything that sort of, you know, by definition had no outside to it. You know, what were they to do in the wake of

Hegel said, where could you go from there? And they had in mind, this is a kind of common idea among the young Hegelians, they had in mind the idea that, well, it was a bit like the situation after the death of Aristotle, because Aristotle was again one of these sort of total philosophers. And so they looked to the post-Aristotelian philosophers or the Hellenistic philosophers, the Epicureans, the skeptics, and the Stoics as a group of philosophical schools that were trying somehow to grapple with

not only living in the shadow of a total philosophy, but also in a quite politically disturbed world. And so Marx takes up the sort of cue from some of the other young Hegelians. And so in the first notebooks that go into the project, he's got this incredibly wide project where he's going to analyze all of Epicurean's stoic and skeptical thought,

in its totality as a response to Aristotle. And then he gets narrowed down to this much more specific project where he's comparing the atomism of Epicurus, who was a first Aristotelian philosopher, and that of his predecessor Democritus, who was a contemporary of Socrates. Democritus is quite interesting because he was a materialist.

and his views were so reprehensible to Plato that Plato doesn't even deign to mention him once in the dialogues, which is a kind of curious fact. So Marx, I think, was partly interested in materialism. So if atomism in the ancient world meant materialism,

an atom is something unsplittable or was thought to be unsplittable at that time. So, you know, the smallest components of reality to the view that there were just atoms in the void. And Marx makes this scholarly claim that contrary to received opinion,

Epicurus, the later philosopher, wasn't merely, as he put it, a plagiarist of Democritus. So he wasn't just replicating the early atomism, but he had this much more interesting view which made room for human freedom and that leads into what he'll then do with the idea of the actualization of philosophy. So this very early work on Greek philosophy, it already shows...

something of, you know, the extraordinary reading habits that Marx had, which you'll be familiar with, you know, from looking at work from other parts of his career, just this incredible tenacity about drilling down into texts and just reading and reading and reading and working with them incredibly fruitfully. So, yeah, one of the things about the work on Greek philosophy is just, you know, the depths and the intellectual power

that Marx brings to this is just really extraordinary. And it's recognized also by classical scholars in the 20th century. If you look up what they have to say about Marx on Epicurus, and these people are not Marxists, they comment on the breathtaking level of scholarship there.

Right. Yeah. I mean, Marx is, I think he's very famous for basically having lived in, not exactly, but lived in the British Museum's reading room and reading essentially every single work of economics that had ever been written in order to do his work. Like that's part of what's so interesting too, is that like you say, like you read so voluminously that.

Even just through reading him, you can encounter so many different ideas. Obviously, one of the people that he really wrestled with was Hegel. Can you talk about his relationship to the philosophy of Hegel and then to the other young Hegelians?

I do. Yeah. And I suppose this is one of the, you know, with other philosophers, in any case, one of the most controversial aspects of the book in a certain way, because, I mean, my line on Marx's relationship to Hegel is that Marx was extraordinarily true in a certain way to Hegelian ideas and to, in particular, to Hegel's conception of philosophy. So Hegel's conception of philosophy is something like, well, philosophy isn't

a special discipline, right? So it's not like physics or chemistry in that it doesn't have a determinate object that it, as an inquiry, is directed toward. But philosophy is, in Hegelian jargon, it's the unity of the concept and actuality. But this means something like philosophy is just human inquiry or intellectual inquiry as such in its complete generality.

And I think that's really the core idea about philosophy that Marx has in mind when he then talks about actualizing that thing. And he thinks it's inherent in what Hegel says about philosophy, that philosophy is such as to actualize itself. It's just that in Hegel, something goes profoundly wrong, Marx thinks, because in Hegel, philosophy remains as Marx thought.

often says in these kind of mid-1840s writings in which you know all the all the drama is happening um he says um hegel's philosophy remains self-sufficient philosophy or an indulgence in the kind of fantasy of self-sufficiency right so there's the idea that um a certain kind of conceptual work could be done and could be completed but in isolation from the world um so

I think in a certain way, Marx is very, very true to this Hegelian idea, but he also thinks that Hegel, you know, very fundamentally fails to realize this idea. So his critique of Hegel, which I think comes from a vantage point that's very, very close to where Hegel starts from, ends up being really deep. And it has the consequence, I argue in the book that

Marx has a critique of Hegel's dialectic, which is a very powerful critique of the way Hegel does dialectic. Namely, he tries to do it self-sufficiently. So he tries to do it as, you know, the mere movement of concepts one from another in a kind of great circle. And Marx not only criticizes Hegel for that, but, and this is probably the more controversial claim, that in Marx's mature work, so in Capital in particular, what you get is actually

a superior form of dialectic than what Hegel does. So one of the kind of, I guess, key claims of the book is that Marx is a better philosopher than Hegel.

So this is really, you know, there's this enormous interest at the moment in not only Marx's relationship to Hegel, which there's always been in many places, but in understanding Marx, especially the early Marx philosophically from a kind of Hegelian perspective and often, you know, in philosophy departments in the universities now, which is really a new and a very exciting thing. But I often find myself, you know, sort of,

saying the inverse of what is often said in those discussions because I think often the impetus is to play up how Hegelian Marx is, so, you know, how much it helps to think in Hegelian categories and so on when reading Marx. And in a sense, I'm, you know,

going against that by saying, well, let's not, let's not Hegelianize Marx too much, because Marx actually has this very, I think, deep and far reaching critique of Hegel. And it's not just, you know, sort of external critique. He says in these early writings that are

usually not much discussed, like this text, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which is an unfinished text, but an incredibly powerful and fruitful text, I think. Marx says at various points, Hegel's failure here is a philosophical failure or a logical failure. So it's not just that he thinks, you know, Hegel's a good philosopher, but then he goes wrong, you know, he takes some wrong turnings here and there. He's really, Marx is really setting himself up

up as somebody who's in a position to criticize the way Hegel does philosophy, the philosophical methodology that's at play in Hegel. There's this common sort of line that Marx just inverted Hegel. What do you think of that? I mean, is that oversimplistic? What do you think about that framing? Well, I really love Louis Althusser's quip about this, which is something like,

If you turn a man through 180 degrees, it's still the same man, which is a clever quip, but it's also quite profound because if you think about, if you take the Hegelian dialectic, and the idea is that the Hegelian dialectic is idealist, whatever that exactly means. But by inverting it, what Marx is supposed to do is to turn that idealist dialectic into a materialist dialectic. So it becomes somehow radically different in character.

But if you think about this rotation, the image of the rotation, we still need to know how it could possibly be that, okay, someone who was standing on his feet is now standing on his head. But what is it about this inversion that gets you from idealism to materialism? And

This was one of the places where actually in the course of writing the book, I became much more convinced by some Althusserian arguments than I had been at the beginning, largely through reading lectures that Althusser gave that remained unpublished during his lifetime, in which he was really exploring Marx's engagement, especially with Ludwig Feuerbach in this sort of mid-1840s,

in a very detailed way. And Althusser presents Marx's relationship to Feuerbach, which really gets played out in the famous Paris Manuscripts in, I think, a very suggestive way. So Althusser ends up presenting the Paris Manuscripts as a place where Marx's own position is sort of quite unstable.

and sort of vacillating from one thing to another at various points. And the instability, Althusser thinks, and I think this is persuasive, is located in Marx's trying to grapple with Feuerbach's own stance on this idea of inversion. And the way Althusser presents it, it is in Feuerbach, the notion of, well, we've been idealists until now, but that turns out to be no good.

We've got to do this other thing, materialism. And Feuerbach simply announces this. So there's no actual philosophical argument for the materialism. And Althusser calls these Feuerbach writings in which this happens manifestos to capture the way in which they're more like announcements of what needs to be the case in philosophy now. So Feuerbach's texts are called things like Principles of the Philosophy of the Future.

Um, and I think, um, one of the profound things that happens in the, in this period in Marx's writing where he's sort of in this negotiation with Feuerbach, um, and, and arriving at his own view, um, is that he comes to see that, um, we have to think very, very differently about, um,

in particular, our material nature as human beings. And so something that starts to happen in this text, the German ideology, which is this huge, sprawling text that he wrote together with Friedrich Engels and that was never published, but as he famously put it, abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice. There he starts to say things like, we have to begin from...

real human individuals. That's our starting point. And in the English translations, it's often called the premises. But in the German, it's sort of, you know, the presuppositions are like where we start from is sort of the real life that human living individuals have with one another in a society. And that then becomes historical materialism. And that's something that's, you know, not in Feuerbach at all. In Feuerbach, it's still

The idea of a kind of flipping of, I think in the book somewhere I say the flipping of an idealist pancake. The idea that if you flip it, it will turn kind of materialist side up. But I'm very resistant to this notion of inversion because I think it just explains so little. In fact, I think it doesn't explain anything at all, really.

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Right. Yeah. And I think that it's oftentimes probably used or continue to be used in college courses because it's a kind of an easy way to explain it. If you want one class to teach at Hegel and Marx, then, you know, it's a it's a kind of a nifty trick in many ways. So I wonder if that's probably part of the persistence, too. Do you think that?

Yeah, it's an easy way to, and it does capture something, but it's, yeah, I think it's too easy. Yeah. This notion of historical materialism, I feel like, you know, there's sometimes this idea that, I mean, if you want to give a brief summary of it as well, I think it's interesting.

It might be an idea that people aren't familiar with. I feel like it's one of the main ideas that people learn about with Marx. But there's also this idea, too, that Marx eventually abandoned it. What do you see about his long-run relationship with historical materialism? Historical materialism, as I understand it, I think it's probably best captured by thinking about this idea of beginning from, in a sense, within human life.

and understanding that we're historical beings. We make our own history in a certain sense. It's possible to talk about human nature if one wants and what it is to be human. But you then very, very quickly discover that actually what it is to be human is to have all sorts of productive and creative and imaginative capacities and so on. That means that we are in a very strong sense capable of creating ourselves.

So I take it that historical materialism means to be contrasted in a certain way from philosophical doctrines called things like materialism and idealism, because I think historical materialism isn't it isn't something like a metaphysical thesis to the effect that everything is made up of a certain kind of thing. Right. Namely, sort of material entities somehow finding their way through history.

I think it's something like an approach to how we think about the world in which we don't allow ourselves to fall into the trap of sort of wondering, but, you know, how is it that we as these thinking beings, these thinking entities relate to something outside of ourselves, which is material reality somehow? I think Marx wants to...

Completely block out that question from the start. So you get something like an insistence on the reality that we know ourselves to be thinking material beings that are

And then these are sort of weasel words, right? Like engaged in the world. But here we are, you know, performing our activity with material reality as in some sense, as he says in one of the passages in the Paris manuscript, inorganic body. The world is in some sense for us, right?

And I think what historical materialism tries to do is to overcome the idea that that's supposed to be mysterious and sort of restore to ourselves a sort of perfectly straightforward understanding that we are material, thinking material beings who make stuff and make stuff to supply each other's needs. And as soon as one starts asking these questions like,

But how can it be that I can have some thought about what my need is and then I'm able to get somebody else to answer to this need and so on? How can it be that there's such a thing as society? We've wandered off into sort of hallways in which we shouldn't be finding ourselves. So in a way, I understand this as sort of quite similar to ideas that you find in something like Wittgenstein,

where the idea is to kind of disabuse ourselves of the notion that we don't really understand what it is to be human, as if we could imagine ourselves not to be engaged in what Wittgenstein calls forms of life with other human beings.

I, you know, but before we get into talking about capital, I think, you know, it's relevant to a lot of discussion that we've had before. But I really do want to get into this notion of actualization of philosophy that you talk about and what you actually mean by actualization. Obviously, you borrow it from Marx, but how do you understand this concept? Yeah, so...

I mean, picking up the Hegelian idea that philosophy is, as he puts it, the unity of concept and actuality. The idea there is something like, well, philosophy just is the thinking of reality or the thinking of, to put it slightly more potentiously, the illimitable object, right? This thing that's just everything, that's around which no limit can be drawn, right?

If that's what philosophy is, then philosophy is going to be equivalent to or is going to be the very same thing as our thinking, the thinking of humans in its generality. And that thinking isn't merely theoretical thought.

That is, it isn't merely contemplative, right? It isn't merely taking in how things are in the world, but it's also practical thought. And the thing that's distinctive of practical thought is it produces its own object. So our practical thing, so when we do things knowingly and thinkingly and intentionally and so on, we're not merely registering how the world is, but we are in some sense producing reality.

So the way I understand the actualization of philosophy and why it's such a powerful idea that's sort of looming large in Marx's mind from so early on is that it's the notion of there not being any sort of barrier between our thinking and what our thinking is of. So to put it in very metaphorical terms, it's something like the reaching out of our thinking right into reality.

So the contrast, I guess, is with self-sufficient philosophy, where the idea is that there could be some intellectual activity that would settle the great questions about reality by engaging in some special exercise of the mind that wasn't at the same time an active engagement in the world.

So something like Hegelian dialectic, as Marx, I think, quite accurately presents it, which is this idea of a kind of self-closed, systematic kind of inquiry that is purely intellectual. The way Hegel talks, it's, well, one concept gives birth to another concept. One concept moves into another. One concept, you know, it produces a contradiction that must be resolved by moving through this whole series of

interrelated concepts. So the actualization of philosophy is, I think, the contrast to that idea. And it gets us, in a sense, to a view of philosophy in which philosophy, in a certain way, isn't really anything very special or unusual because it's just the thinking that we do and that, to a large extent, we know to do.

Of course, a lot of our thinking is deficient in all sorts of ways and it falls short. But the thinking that philosophy is, insofar as it is actualizing itself, isn't anything other than the thinking that goes into making an omelet or crossing the street or doing basic arithmetic or any of these sorts of things. There's a sort of practicality towards it or a pragmatic nature to it.

um of it you you uh you do spend a lot of the book talking also about um about capital marx's kind of momentum opus that he he never uh was able to finish i think he had like uh 20 volumes in mind but you know only made it to uh you know two kind of three i guess i don't know if the third one is is sort of unfinished cobbled together um

But can you talk about capital and how you think about capital in relation to philosophy? Because it's oftentimes, you know, treated as just this, you know, it's kind of a purely work, you know, economic work. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it sounds maybe surprising or even eccentric to talk about capital as a work of philosophy. And then to say that this is where philosophy is actualized might sound even more alarming in a certain way. Yeah.

But I think it's right that Marx was... This is the great work that he was always working towards. And there were these earlier incarnations of it, of which... So this earlier work, Critique of Political Economy, of which then Volume 1 of Capital, the one that he did finish and give to the world, is the kind of perfection of that work that he'd been working on for such a long time. And I think...

The way to see that it's philosophy is that it implements, I think, dialectic in the way that Marx thinks it will look once the Hegelian version of it has been corrected. So

The experience of reading Capital Volume 1, I think, bears this out. I think it should be read, and this is how I tried to read it in the book, as an extended argument of a certain kind, which has as its conclusion the revolution. So it's a practical argument. It's what Aristotle would have called a practical syllogism, which has this special character that unlike...

a deductive argument that's just about things that are the case. Its conclusion actually isn't a statement or a judgment. It's an action. So the conclusion of Capital Volume 1 is the proletariat seizing the means of production, the expropriators being expropriated. And he works up to this very, very meticulously with this argument that's at once a historical argument. It's also, I think, an argument in political economy

So I take the view that Capital Volume 1, even though its subtitle is a critique of political economy, I don't read this in the way that a lot of people now read this, which is that it's a critique of the whole field of political economy. Marx is somehow trying to take on this sort of meta stance on what the great political economists, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and so on, had been doing.

I think in a certain sense, it's right. It's a critique of what they're doing and of their framework, but that doesn't mean that it isn't also engaged in trying to determine economic reality. So if that's what you mean by economics or political economy, I think the argument is doing that. And what he's doing essentially is he's beginning from right inside at the heart of

and how it works and developing a series of contradictions that he seeks in part to resolve and in part to show how a contradiction can be sort of passed on through different parts of the system and sort of passed around. And he begins from the commodity, which is the place in which there's a kind of fundamental opposition that's contained in that very thing, which is the opposition between

the use value that a thing has, so the actual utility it has to human beings, and then its exchange value, the special form of value that it has in the system of exchange. And he then traces this contradictoriness or this opposition that's at the heart of it through the system as he unfolds this whole argument. And that I take to be... And here I'm actually following a set of papers from the 1970s by a

by an Italian scholar called Carlo Natali. At that time was writing about Marx on opposition and contradiction. And since then, there's been mostly known as an Aristotle scholar and someone who's written a great deal about how deeply Marx knew the work of Aristotle and was also being guided by it. So the following Natali, I understand what's happening in Capital Volume 1 as...

This, as I would put it, this is not necessarily Natali, the kind of superior form of dialectic inaction. And it's superior because it doesn't subscribe to the idea of self-sufficiency again, right? So it isn't that there isn't a kind of schema. So in Hegel's great work, The Science of Logic,

you get a whole series of concepts and negation, opposition, contradiction that Hegel tries to show the interrelation of by simply thinking through those concepts themselves and showing how if you begin with one of them, you'll get the next one, not by looking at anything that's in the world, but through a kind of sheerly intellectual act. And I think Marx is directly opposing this.

that way of thinking of dialectic by showing how it can be done non-self sufficiently that is by taking you know the world in which we live and by which we're formed and showing up the contradictions that are there in the world as we experience it. This book is obviously an extremely you know deep and thoughtful study of Marx's work and

Obviously, Marx is one of those philosophers where part of his relevance as a thinker is also just in the people that he has inspired, the history that has come from his pen in many ways. There are very few...

few uh philosophers who have this kind of claim on a modern history uh extending from their ideas and that to a certain extent whether uh whether correct interpretations or incorrect interpretations or all sorts of uh you know modifications uh but you know when you think about marx today in terms of his relevance you know i think a lot about how you know last year there was that new interpretation new uh translation that came out of marx's capital in english um

And I think it, you know, generated a lot of excitement about people about, you know, introducing people that might have struggled in the past through his, you know, some other translations through this new version. But when you think about Marx today, what do you see as his primary relevance and then the kind of the ways in which you want people to think about him or approach his ideas? Yeah.

Well, I suppose one thing to say is that, you know, it's no accident that so many people are turning to Marx and that Marx is having a, you know, really having a moment in philosophy as well as in many other places. And that's because of the kind of social world that we live in and the way in which it operates.

exposes the kind of you know certainly the type of problems that um marx was talking about in his analysis of uh capitalism so right that just the sheer way in which capitalism tends to produce crises and the social effects that this has um it means just sort of almost directly that people will look at marx um i mean a particular interest that

I suppose I have and where I feel like thinking about the actualization of philosophy and thinking about Marx in the sort of terms that I do in the book is something that can be applied to a contemporary situation is the way in which we're often sort of called upon as philosophers or intellectuals to justify how

thinking has application or relevance to the world. And I think one of the profound points that Marx makes is that we shouldn't be answering, we shouldn't be trying to answer that question. There shouldn't be a question about how is it that human thinking, human thinking done well in any case, right, is going to have application to the world. It's the people who claim that thinking rigorously works

about things in their generality need some justification that should be put on the back foot. The onus should be on them in a certain way. And I think that the idea that we already know in a certain way what's demanded of us in terms of thinking about the world, I think it's a very powerful idea in Marx that has application to things like if we think about

what remains still intact of the National Health Service and the United Kingdom. I used this as an example of somewhere where it would be weird to say that, you know, we didn't understand already that what happens in the National Health Service when it works well is what should be happening. Namely that, you know, if I walk in with an injury, somebody tends to my need. You know, this is perfectly well understood.

And that is a little indication of what it might be to see communism in action, even in the world that we live in. Rosa Luxemburg makes this very important point that communism or socialism is, in a certain sense, a thing that we, any of us, don't really know what it is. We have to try and imagine what it is because we don't live in such a world. But there are pockets of the sort of thing that Marx is talking about all around us where it would be very odd to deny communism.

that we know how to think about such things. I'm curious with this work done, if there's any, you know, maybe one really interesting response that you've, obviously it's very early on and it's a dense book in many ways. So I'm sure, you know, if there are reviews that are coming, they're probably still working through your book. But is there any like really interesting response you've received? Just like one response that you've kind of sticks in your mind?

Um, well, one of the things that's that's sort of intrigued me the most is people who've said that, well, you're not that far from not that far from Altaea on the end. So perhaps I do think that there's more of a so the idea is I think that there's more of an epistemological rupture, perhaps, or, you know, I give more credence to that idea.

um than might at first appear to be the case and i sort of like this and it's something i'd like to think about more and explore because of you know the experience of writing the book did involve me um not just you know following marx through this very complex and dense trajectory and um you know trying to figure out the way in which he was to use a marxian

a phrase that Marx uses when kind of settling accounts with himself the whole time and finding his way through these complicated problematics. But I was also, you know, the writing of a book is a kind of transformative experience where you see things in a different way from how you did at the beginning. And I think exploring more of Althusser's work and just exactly what I want to say about it will be an interesting further avenue that comes out of this.

Yeah, well, you definitely have a busy year ahead. Obviously, you have another book coming out very soon, too. So, you know, we definitely love to have you on to discuss that as well, because, you know, you clearly have a lot to say and a lot of interesting ideas about, you know, continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and, you know, really curious to see that. So, Christophe, thanks so much for being at Slim Books Network. It was really wonderful to speak with you. Thanks so much, Caleb. It's been a real pleasure.