By Gordon Hull
The last couple of times (here then here), I’ve started trying to work through a disparaging reference in the mid-1960s Foucault to “Chardino-Marxism.” Foucault is associating it with Marxist humanism, and comparing it unfavorably to the Althusserian alternative. As I noted, the name Foucault uses is Teilhard de Chardin, but the consistent target of the Foucault-aligned theorists appears to be Roger Garaudy.
So why, exactly, might Teilhard appeal to Marxism? More precisely, in what sense would Teilhard appeal to Garaudy? In a 1969 paper, Ladis KD Kristof offers some context (for Kristof’s remarkable life, see the memorial notice here). The “Phenomenon Teilhard” was widely discussed within the Soviet bloc countries, and within the USSR as early as 1962; a Russian translation of Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man appeared in 1965. Kristof suggests that the initial Marxist attraction to Teilhard lies simply in that he has a world view – something they can respect, as opposed to (for example) American positivism or empiricism. More specifically, Teilhard: (a) has a scientific worldview, in that he has a Baconian belief that science can solve all problems; (b) has an evolutionary worldview, arguably even more so than Marx. On Kristof’s account, the difference is first in scope: Teilhard’s evolution is cosmic and Marx’s human.
This leads to a second fundamental difference; following Engels in Anti-Dühring, Marxists think that when man [I am following 1960s usage here – this is the generic “man”] starts taking control of nature (= making history), that is the final qualitative change, and that that future changes are quantitative. Teilhard, on the other hand, thinks that the end of the process of what he calls “hominization” will involve a qualitative leap. However, both camps are fundamentally anthropocentric in that “man” is the focus throughout. Finally, (c) Marxism involves a movement of faith: if one is struggling for the revolution, this requires a prior faith that one can effect progress and so forth; in this, there is a convergence with Teilhard’s optimism. Something of the sense of all this is conveyed in the following (long) passage from Teilhard’s Future of Mankind (I’m getting it from Kristof, who quotes part of it):
“It is true that at the outset it [“Faith in Man”] presupposes a certain fundamental concept of the place of Man in Nature. But as it rises above this rationalized common platform it becomes charged with a thousand differing potentialities, elastic and even fluid -- indivisible, one might say, by the expressions of hostility to which Thought, in its gropings, may temporarily subject it. Indivisible and even triumphant: for despite all seeming divisions (this is what matters) it continues unassailably to draw together and even to reconcile everything that it pervades. Take the two extremes confronting us at this moment, the Marxist and the Christian, each a convinced believer in his own particular doctrine, but each, we must suppose, fundamentally inspired with an equal faith in Man. Is it not incontestable, a matter of everyday experience, that each of these, to the extent that he believes (and sees the other believe) in the future of the world, feels a basic human sympathy for the other – not for any sentimental reason, but arising out of the obscure recognition that both are going the same way, and that despite all ideological differences they will eventually, in some manner, come together on the same summit? No doubt each in his own fashion, following his separate path, believes that he has once and for all solved the riddle of the world’s future. But the divergence between them is in reality neither complete nor final, unless we suppose that by some inconceivable and even contradictory feat of exclusion (contradictory because nothing would remain of his faith) the Marxist, for example, were to eliminate from his materialistic doctrine every upward surge towards the spirit. Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.”
Elsewhere in that text, Teilhard writes (this passage is also cited by Kristof):
“It would seem, then, that the grand phenomenon which we are now witnessing represents a new and possibly final division of Mankind, based no longer on wealth but on belief in progress. The old Marxist conflict between producers and exploiters becomes out-dated -- at the best a misplaced approximation. What finally divides the men of today into two camps is not class but an attitude of mind – the spirit of movement. On the one hand there are those who simply wish to make the world a comfortable dwelling-place; on the other hand, those who can only conceive of it as a machine for progress -- or better, an organism that is progressing. On the one hand the ‘bourgeois spirit’ in its essence, and on the other the true ‘toilers of the Earth’, those of whom we may safely predict that, without violence or hatred, simply by biological predominance, they will tomorrow constitute the human race. On one hand the cast-offs; on the other, the agents and elements of Planetization”
It is not hard to see why Foucault would find this interesting at most as a symptom of something else, or as evidence of a particular worldview. There are at least three problems. First, Foucault and Althusser want to directly understand what “man” refers to. I do not know Teilhard’s work, but the Garaudy I’ve seen never directly interrogates what “man” refers to. At least, not in the way that someone like Foucault develops. I will say more about Garaudy on this point later, because his view is not as simple as this indicates, but while insisting on the historical concreteness of human beings, he also defaults to terms about “man” in general and he repeatedly latches onto the early Marx’s “species being” language. Second, the syncretism is striking. The idea that there is a “basic sympathy” that Marxists and Christians see in each others’ views would be a surprise to a lot of Marxists and Christians. To be sure, neither Teilhard nor Garaudy thinks theirs is a majority view, but it’s not going to get far with a lot of people in either camp. In particular, from the Marxist side, it is hard not to wonder if a Marxism that finds itself sympathetic to Christianity is not itself a holdover of religion, precisely insofar as it is, at the end of the day, ahistorically humanist. Finally, and this is related, there is a sense in which the faith of which Teilhard speaks is indistinguishable from teleology. This shows up in Teilhard’s sense of “progress” and in Garaudy’s repeated elevation of Kant (again, more on this later).
Still, it’s also hard to understand why Foucault would have anything to say about Teilhard, except for the fact that Teilhard is a central figure in Marxist humanism. Kristof observes that “In virtually all of [Garaudy’s] voluminous writings devoted to the problem of ‘the dialogue [between Marxists and Christians]’ the discussion of Teilhard's ideas occupies much space and is pivotal to the argument, and in this he is by no means an exception among his fellow Marxists” (279). As Foucault said, the problem is “Chardino-Marxism,” and Garaudy is its chief proponent.
More on Garaudy next time…
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