Naturalized Dialectics

A Response to China Miéville's “Beyond Folk Marxism”

June 9, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/UH8FIUFL

What is the natural expression of an intention?—Look at a cat when it stalks a bird, or a beast when it wants to escape.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 140e

China Miéville’s “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism” challenges the standard affiliation of Marxism to philosophical materialism.¹ In a wide-ranging and erudite discussion, Miéville argues that the problem of consciousness—how it is possible and thinkable—amounts to a philosophical question unanswerable by materialism. Consequently, Marxism must remain open to idealism (long conceived of as its antithesis) and, ultimately, to theism as well.

Much of Miéville’s essay is salutary for the development of Marxist theory which has long been plagued by debates over issues such as structure, agency, individualism, and causation. These debates could be greatly clarified using the conceptual resources of philosophical idealism that Miéville advocates. By refocusing theoretical attention to the problem of consciousness and working against what he views as the kneejerk rejection of idealist positions, Miéville’s intervention opens the door for constructive theoretical conversations about genuine problems confronting Marxist theory.

Unfortunately, Miéville’s argument attains those ends by framing these problems in metaphysical terms that occlude their answers provided by philosophy, sociology, and natural science. To be more specific, Miéville’s argument revolves around a trilemma he draws among metaphysical materialism, metaphysical idealism, and dualism. This trilemma is premised on conceiving this debate in terms of substance ontology. On this view, philosophical reflection would determine the basic stuff out of which the natural world is made—is the world composed of matter or thought?—and would do so using the traditional tools of philosophy. As Miéville, approvingly quoting Colin McGinn, writes “‘matter…is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness.’”²

As an observable sociological entity, philosophy is best understood as: i) the study of a tradition of texts circumscribed through an ongoing, contested, and institutionalized practice of study and ii) a metaconceptual analysis of the conceptual. As I’ll argue in this article, Miéville’s framing of the problem and argumentative strategy make it clear that philosophy is meant to provide a logically unified ontology. Philosophical metaphysics is, in this sense, a master discourse that determines the scope of what is (and, moreover, what we ought to do).³ As an alternative to this view, the argument in this paper is motivated by two claims: 1) There is no such master discourse and 2) following Wilfrid Sellars, “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things.”⁴

Before outlining Miéville’s argument, I pause to note that the seeming contradiction to the above two claims is a product of a common misinterpretation of scientific objectivity. The epistemic advances of modern science do not spring from the identification of a singular and unified stratum of reality—some sort of metaphysical bedrock—that our language must refer to on pain of vacuity. Such a view of science reflects what Willem de Vries calls the reductionist aspirations of philosophy. Rather, and again following Sellars, science is a set of theoretical practices that describe and explain segments of reality through their categorial redescription. That is, science attempts to explain both patterns and anomalies by asking, for example, what if observable gases were actually unobservable molecules? The various distinct theoretical descriptions of phenomena are synoptically unified into a coherent worldview.

“Science” in this sense is not a master discourse and its epistemic advances result from its nature as a self-correcting collective practice, rather than some singular and unique insight it gives into the basic structure of the world. While theoretical reduction can play a role in unifying this worldview, this role must be limited because the wholesale identification of scientific explanation with such reduction undermines the sort of categorial redescription essential to scientific theorization. On the view I put forward, scientific theorization implies the stratified ontology at odds with Miéville’s argument for substance monism.⁵

This view of scientific objectivity is coupled with a different conception of the task of philosophy. Rather than collapsing our explanatory frameworks within a singular ontological vocabulary, philosophy, as the metaconceptual analysis of concepts, shows how the various relatively autonomous discourses we use to navigate the world—explanatory, normative, aesthetic—fit together. Philosophy, on this Sellarsian view, is the task of seeing “how things in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.”⁶

In contrast to the antimetaphysical view of science and philosophy this essay advocates, Miéville’s argument is built on centering metaphysical concerns. Miéville argues that consciousness poses a “hard problem” that metaphysical materialism is ill-equipped to handle. Quoting David Chalmers, Miéville characterizes this hard problem as that of answering “how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of mind and world.”⁷ The motivation for this hard problem is both philosophical and political: philosophically, the existence of consciousness is a fact Marxism must be able to explain. This becomes a problem for philosophical ontology insofar as the physical descriptions characteristic of scientific discourse do not seem to capture it. Metaphysical materialism’s shortcomings stem from this evident distinction between consciousness and physically describable phenomena.⁸ In terms of politics, the issue of consciousness conceptually underpins political debates throughout the Marxist tradition regarding the limits of voluntary action, the production of ideology, and the effect that material conditions have on conscious agents.⁹

Miéville divides the options for ontology between metaphysical materialism and idealism and, from there, poses the aforementioned trilemma between materialism, dualism, and idealism. Miéville contends that materialist attempts to answer the hard problem of consciousness through frameworks such as evolutionary biology or theories of emergence fail insofar as they fail to explain consciousness on its own terms.¹⁰ To borrow a phrase from philosophical debates about this issue, they are sideways-on explanations that work by simply changing the subject—that is, they explain consciousness as if it were simply a physical phenomenon like any other.¹¹ Consequently, they ignore the sui generis status of elements of consciousness—normativity, affect, freedom, qualia—whose explanation constituted the theoretical burden Miéville posed in the first place.

…the flaws with Miéville’s argument have less to do with his engagement with idealism than his wholesale leap into metaphysics, which does open the door to the mystification of the natural and historical world that modern scientific theory has done so much to counter. Such a leap amounts to the expectation that philosophical ratiocination gives us an unmediated access into the very structure of the world.

This essay will pursue those aims in three sections. The first section reviews several developments within post-Kantian philosophy to show that Miéville’s framing of the idealism/materialism debate simply ignores significant strands of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy that have made debates about substance ontology outmoded. In the following section, I’ll provide a conceptual reconstruction of the shift in our understanding of the natural world marked by the advent of modern natural science. By focusing on modern science’s challenge to the idea of a teleologically ordered natural world, I argue that Marx and Engels’s critique of idealism is part of a larger intellectual history that works against the overextension of rational analysis characteristic of classical metaphysics. Rather than being premised on identifying the correct metaphysical bedrock for scientific analysis—that is, the notion that Marx turns Hegelian idealism on its head—I argue that Marx and Engels’s turn to historical materialism is of a piece with modern science’s challenge to a fully rationalized conception of nature. Historical materialism, understood in this sense, is the refusal of the wholesale identification of the dynamics governing natural phenomena with the ideal relationships tracked by human rationality. Finally, in the third section I’ll return to Miéville and argue that the questions he poses can only plausibly be answered by such a fully rationalized conception of nature. In short, Miéville’s project takes us back to an intellectual point preceding the development of Kantian philosophy and contemporary philosophy of science. I argue, moreover, that Miéville’s substance ontology framing both fails to explain consciousness and unnecessarily discounts the explanations provided by evolutionary biology and emergentism.

Miéville views himself as responding to the “still common Marxist accusation that metaphysical non-materialism has an inexorable gravitational pull to irrationalism and political reaction.”¹² His response is given with the admirable aim of showing that “Subjective, Objective, Transcendental, Analytical, [and] Absolute Idealism, among many others…are all worthy of respectful engagement beyond any traditional leftist sniggering about ghosts.”¹³ Given that the (admittedly heterodox) interpretation of materialism provided here could not have been constructed without such respectful engagement with idealism, I applaud Miéville’s ambitions. However, the flaws with Miéville’s argument have less to do with his engagement with idealism than his wholesale leap into metaphysics, which does open the door to the mystification of the natural and historical world that modern scientific theory has done so much to counter. Such a leap amounts to the expectation that philosophical ratiocination gives us an unmediated access into the very structure of the world. Any answer to the question of consciousness not in line with that expectation is, to Miéville, merely Folk Marxism. By contrast, I view the answers given by modern science and post-Kantian philosophy to be intellectually satisfying once we temper that orientation to philosophical metaphysics. To borrow Miéville’s idiom, the problem of consciousness is just not that spooky if we recognize the limits of merely rational analysis. With that thought, we turn to Kant.

1781 and All That

Miéville’s stalking horse in “Beyond Folk Marxism” is the position he identifes as “Folk Marxism.” “Folk Marxism” alludes to the tag “Folk Psychology”—a moniker popular within philosophy of mind for “common sense,” pretheoretical beliefs that nonspecialists tend to hold about consciousness. For Miéville, most Marxists ignore the philosophical hard problem that consciousness poses and end up adopting a Folk Marxism that dismisses the challenge of idealism out of hand via appeal to Marxism’s prima facie commitment to materialism. Such Folk Marxism immures their preexisting beliefs about consciousness and ontology from philosophical questioning by simply assuming that the these problems have been solved “because something something materialism.”¹⁴ Miéville’s central contention is that serious consideration of the problem of consciousness should dispel the Folk Marxists’ placid acceptance of materialism as a baseline Marxist commitment. In short, consciousness makes ontology a problem.

Miéville’s turn to idealism hinges on the anxiety that, absent some satisfying metaphysical explanation, historical materialism is an intellectually disingenuous “Folk Marxist” dismissal of genuine philosophical concerns. It is, in a sense, oblivious to the necessity of philosophical reflection and critique. Materialism, if understood as the reduction of phenomena to the framework we use to describe physical objects (itself conceived of as a logically unified ontology), would indeed fail to “explain” consciousness. However, such a view interprets the explanatory ambitions of materialism in terms of the substance ontological framework that Miéville adopts and never questions. On Miéville’s view, all forms of materialism must be playing the game of philosophical metaphysics. However, thought in accordance with the Sellarsian view of science and philosophy, Miéville’s “hard problem” never lands. In this section, I will go over the developments in post-Kantian philosophy that have facilitated the development of that Sellarsian view. In doing so, I aim to show that Miéville’s own substance ontology framework is “precritical” (although this time in the Kantian sense). Additionally, by pointing to the widespread influence of these developments within Kant’s thought, I aim to show that Miéville’s objectives are out-of-step with the philosophical turn away from metaphysics common to most post-twentieth century philosophy.

Kant is both a common reference point and boundary marker for most contemporary philosophy in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions. Much of the development of the discipline of philosophy within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be traced to two insights that Kant systematically expounded: that the human mind is finite and, consequently, that knowledge is discursive. The latter claim amounts to the idea that human knowledge must be understood as a conceptually articulated structure: knowledge is a body of claims organized by inferentially (or, more crudely, logically) defined relationships of priority and dependence.¹⁵

This definition can be clarified when contrasted with the model of knowledge as perception against which Kant was working. Much of the philosophical tradition to which he was responding, particularly with the turn to subjectivity in the early modern period, thematized knowledge as a perception—that is, as some sort of presence or idea intuited directly by an apprehending mind. This view of knowledge underwrote both the rationalist tradition (which viewed knowledge as the intuition of rational essences) and the empiricist tradition (which viewed knowledge as the perception of an object via a sensation).¹⁶ Kant’s Copernican turn was his insight that the human mind was limited. That is, a finite human knower could not possibly intuit the entirety of the known as a present perception. Put in other terms, the God’s eye view over the totality of creation is an impossibility. Consequently, knowledge must be understood as a systematically organized body of claims. Hence, Kant replaces the idea (that is, a directly intuited representation) with a judgment (that is, two thoughts connected within a proposition via a discursive rule) as the basic unit of knowledge.

By reorienting our epistemic standards towards the analysis of the discursive rules organizing our claims about the world and away from some direct perception into its nature, Kant’s intervention bypassed many of the impasses of the seemingly intractable debate between empiricism and rationalism. Crucially for this essay, Kant’s Copernican turn began the developmental arc through which contemporary philosophy turned its attention away from the questions of substance ontology motivating Miéville’s discussion and towards an examination of the discursive frameworks we use to navigate the world. This shift blunts the force of the trilemma Miéville draws between metaphysical idealism, metaphysical materialism, and dualism.

More specifically, several trajectories within the arc of post-Kantian philosophy directly impact the debate between materialists and idealists that Miéville intervenes in. First, while Kant’s discursive conception of knowledge opened the door for German Idealism, it also provided a philosophical springboard for the development of historical materialism. Kant’s characterization of knowledge as discursive raised questions regarding the rules governing judgments. The centrality of rules is key here, as the idea of the conceptual as a rule-governed sphere led easily to the conceptualization of the rational in terms of rule-governed practices. Hegel’s subsequent reorientation of philosophy toward a conception of knowledge as the product of the history of social practices of self-reflection was a natural development from this point, as was Marx’s subsequent thematization of knowledge as the result of material practices of knowledge production.¹⁷

Second, the Kantian revolution in philosophy laid the groundwork for the linguistic turn in the twentieth century. Characterizing knowledge in terms of rule-governed practices made the preoccupation with language the natural subject matter for a metareflection on how we know. Centering language opened the door for reflections spanning Heidegger’s poetic mysticism to the Analytic tradition’s focus on propositional logic and ordinary language.

…the debate between materialism and idealism is actually a debate about rationality and its relationship to the world, broadly conceived. That is, the idealist notion that the world is necessarily given in a way that is amenable to reason (that is, its mind-dependence) is actually a claim that the world is rationally or (more narrowly, logically) structured.

Third, Kant’s revolution in philosophy also opened the door for a radical form of antifoundationalism. By decentering the direct connection between a subject and its thought that functioned as the model of self-evident truth for thinkers like Descartes and Hume, Kant implicitly undermined the notion that self-evident certainty could provide a foundation for objective truth. This move was both recognized and occluded in the German idealist tradition, which became preoccupied with a redefinition of the Absolute (that is, of an unconditioned point on which to found our certainty in what we know). The specter of antifoundationalism has led to a somewhat vexed relationship between philosophy and the truths generated by the modern natural sciences, and to objective truth more generally. Twentieth-century philosophers have tackled this problematic in both a skeptical mode (as in, for example, Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence) and a constructive one (as in, for example, Wilfrid Sellars assault on the Myth of the Given).

These distinct interventions led Kant to formulate a version of idealism distinct from the substance ontology framework motivating Miéville’s argument. Kant’s idealism amounted to his claim that the phenomenal world was structured according to the rules of the understanding (that is, the rules governing concepts mentioned above). While Kant, like the empiricists, held that knowledge of objects was given through experience (rather than, say, created by the mind), he held that the basic structure of experience was necessarily constructed according to certain basic rules—of quantity, causality, magnitude, and so on—and that these rules were what rational knowers used to make judgments about things: whatever the world was, it was necessarily given to human beings as something that was amenable to our understanding. Put crudely, perceptions are mulched up by the categories of understanding such that we experience the world as composed of objects that can be defined by practices of knowing (such as math or the natural sciences). Kant’s thought here opens up the notion that becomes commonplace throughout post-Kantian philosophy—the idea of a conceptual scheme or framework that structures the objects of our experience. Crucially, the linguistic, historical, and antifoundationalist trajectories of post-Kantian philosophy identified above also rendered the notion of a unitary and all-embracing conceptual scheme subject to challenge.¹⁸ That is, they facilitated consideration of the contingency and multiplicity of our conceptual schemes.

As Willem de Vries argues, Kant’s argument for idealism fundamentally changes the terrain of the debate between idealists and materialists. Rather than being about the substance (that is, the basic stuff) out of which objects are made, the debate between materialists and idealists became a debate about the structure of the world (that is, its formal characteristics).¹⁹ Idealism, understood most broadly as the ontological or conceptual priority of the mental over the physical became, in its contemporary articulations, the position that the objects that we know in the world are necessarily mind- or theory-dependent. Given that there is nothing necessarily unreasonable in excluding things we cannot meaningfully know or talk about as relevant considerations for epistemological debate, philosophical idealism of the Kantian and post-Kantian variety is actually a much more reasonable position than its characterization by some of its contemporary critics would lead one to believe.²⁰ Philosophical idealists have moved beyond the fantasies that the world is made up of the creations of our mind or, conversely, that we are all simply ideas housed in the infinite mind of a rational God.

I rehearsed these developments in the history of philosophy to suggest two things regarding Miéville’s essay: first, the debate between materialism and idealism is actually a debate about rationality and its relationship to the world, broadly conceived. That is, the idealist notion that the world is necessarily given in a way that is amenable to reason (that is, its mind-dependence) is actually a claim that the world is rationally or (more narrowly, logically) structured.

Second, while the debate between idealism and materialism is live, the two positions are not as incommensurable as Miéville contends. Much of the latter part of “Beyond Folk Marxism” rests on the thought that an intellectually rigorous acknowledgement of this debate leads to the choice between materialist monism, idealist monism, or an untenable dualism. While this may seem true if the conflict between materialism and idealism was about the fundamental stuff out of which the world is made—that is, it has to be either matter or ideas—it may not hold true if we take the approach suggested by de Vries.

To return to “Beyond Folk Marxism,” Miéville’s contentions that Marxism must grapple with metaphysical materialism and that metaphysical materialism cannot explain the nature of consciousness motivate his essay and license most of the substantive claims made in its conclusion. Miéville is quite right to claim that Marxists cannot ignore the problem posed by consciousness; the causal models put forth by the natural sciences are incapable of explaining historical phenomena by themselves.²¹ Second, metaphysical materialism, understood as a physicalism or a form of brute naturalism, cannot explain the nature of consciousness.

However, while Miéville’s two premises seem sound, his turn to pre-Kantian idealism—or really, metaphysics in general—takes for granted a conception of philosophy that ignores the development of post-Kantian thought within both the Analytic and Continental traditions. The linguistic turn I have outlined above opens the door for a conception of the distinction between materialism and idealism distinct from that which led Miéville ineluctably to the stark choice between dualism, metaphysical materialism, or metaphysical idealism. The trilemma Miéville poses is premised on the notion that what philosophers are arguing about is the nature of “substance”—that is, the task of philosophy is seen as to somehow determine the nature of the basic stuff that the universe is made of. What the preceding reconstruction suggests is that questions of substance ontology are fundamentally alien to broad streams of philosophical debate.

When materialists reduce consciousness to neurophysiology, the debate is about whether the language we use to describe thoughts, values, intentions, and feelings is a conceptual shorthand for neuropsychology, an utterly dispensable linguistic form, or a relatively autonomous explanatory framework.²² These debates are less about “reality” and more about how our different theories fit together. While this might sound relatively similar to the set of concerns Miéville brings up, the crucial difference is that these debates offer up different avenues for resolution than Miéville countenances and they don’t license the same conclusions. For example, the idea that our common sense language for talking about thoughts is autonomous from and irreducible to a neurological description of brain states does not make the existence of God any more or less credible. Similarly, the seeming irreconciliability of metaphysical materialism, metaphysical idealism, and dualism becomes less pressing once one abandons the pre-Kantian metaphysical framing of substance ontology.

In the next section, following De Vries’s Sellarsian interpretation of the idealism and materialism debate, I will resituate the issues that Miéville raises in light of Kant’s critical project. Consequently, the issues Miéville views as premised on an understanding of the basic stuff of the world will be framed in terms of naturalism and modern science’s challenge to teleological explanation.

Materialism and the Disenchantment of Nature

Much of the impetus for the debates about consciousness reviewed in “Beyond Folk Marxism” results from the sui generis nature of human rationality. That is, from a certain light, human rationality seems to be both distinct and singular relative to the natural world. Human rationality is able to chart relationships between disparate phenomena that reflect normative commitments—whether something is, for example, right, just, or appropriate—and these norms are logically distinct from the patterns captured by the natural sciences. This capacity to track norms is more easily described through the intentional vocabulary that we use for conscious behavior. The standards of human rationality seem to imply a reference to subjective interiority—that is, the way “see,” “experience,” or “value” the world. The physical descriptions of the natural sciences do not capture consciousness because those explanatory frameworks often either limit or eschew reference to that intentional vocabulary. Consciousness can thus be “spooky” for materialists because (with some possible exceptions) human rationality seems to be the only capacity able to chart such normative commitments.²³ This distinctness and singularity is so pronounced that it makes it difficult to see reason as something natural.²⁴

Modern science provides explanations of natural phenomena that do not impute teleological organization to them, challenging such conceptions of nature. Science is materialist, not in the sense that it is a brute physicalism, but in that it limits the explanatory use of such rational ideals to their appropriate phenomena (that is, creatures who are responsive to reasons).

Miéville’s idealism is premised on this irreducibility between the vocabulary we use to describe mental states and the theoretical descriptions of the physical sciences. For Miéville, the ontological identification of an idea with a brain state does not “explain” consciousness because merely discovering a correlation between instances of these two phenomena (for example, noticing that a particular neurological state accompanies an idea) does not resolve the logical nonidentity between our descriptions of them.²⁵ A neurological description of a brain state (for example, “x synapse firing at a y moment”) lacks the basic orientation toward objects (broadly understood) that exhibit qualities indescribable in physical object language (such as correctness and, more contentiously, qualia like the color blue) characteristic of intentional description. The directedness of thoughts makes them perspectival in a way that is foreign to standards of the natural sciences. The “hardness” of “the hard problem of consciousness,” springs from the difference between the two types of phenomena and the vocabulary we use to describe them.

This disparity between (put loosely) rational relationships and natural relationships underpins the debate between materialism and idealism in its post-Kantian formulations, insofar as the latter is understood in terms of the natural world’s amenability to the structures of reason.²⁶ Ultimately, these debates concern the explanatory cache of teleology, as the normative properties identified by human rationality assess the world relative to an ideal standard of how things ought to be. Teleological understandings of the natural world view its very dynamics as determined by such ideals. Such a rationalized conception of the world is equivalent to the idealist conception of reality that identifies the dynamics shaping reality with the rational relationships that obtain between ideals within a normatively organized whole. Modern science provides explanations of natural phenomena that do not impute teleological organization to them, challenging such conceptions of nature. Science is materialist, not in the sense that it is a brute physicalism, but in that it limits the explanatory use of such rational ideals to their appropriate phenomena (that is, creatures who are responsive to reasons).

My aim in the following section is to outline this development of modern science, and to characterize historical materialism in terms of this limitation and specification of the explanatory power of rational and teleological relationships.²⁷ That is, Marx and Engels’s rejection of the merely philosophical criticism of the Young Hegelians is a materialist rejection insofar as it challenges a fully rationalized conception of the historical world analogous to the teleological understandings of the natural order characteristic of creationist theology. This materialist rejection places history within the context of the natural order it is imbricated in. On this interpretation, historical materialism is materialist without being beholden to metaphysical materialism.

Teleological interpretations of the natural world were a prominent feature of the premodern sciences, which licensed the analysis of phenomena according to some natural purpose or telos. A feature of this worldview is that natural facts and phenomena—such as the diversity of biological life on the planet or the eruption of a volcano—could be modeled as if they obeyed the same sort of rational norms as an intelligent agent. That is, natural phenomena could be understood as if they were persons or, in an ultimately identical move, as if they were designed by a rational person. To take a somewhat anachronistic example, the social Darwinists espousal of natural hierarchies treats “natural” differences as if they were the expression of some sort of normative order.

For the premoderns, the boundary between scientific and religious forms of explanation could be quite fluid: the diversity of organic life could be understood in terms of a “Great Chain of Being” organized by a beneficent and rational god. The eruption of a volcano could be understood in terms of the anger of a god or spirit. Creationism is an extension of this animism, insofar as the apparently rational organization of the world is taken to imply some rational power structuring the world just so. God fills the explanatory gaps, just as in Newton’s appeal to the creator God to explain the efficacy of action at a distance.

Modern science is marked by the gradual displacement of teleological interpretations of natural occurrences with more depersonalized models of explanation. Several conceptual developments—such as the application of mathematics to the understanding of nature, or the vast expansion of the relative timescale by which certain natural phenomena unfold (that is, deep geological time)—allowed for the explanation of natural phenomena according to patterns that did not exhibit the teleological and normative orientation typical of human rationality. As Wilfrid Sellars argues, the development of modern science was accompanied by the paring down of a teleological explanation via the gradual pruning of the concept of “person” and, consequently, a depersonalization of natural phenomena.²⁸ That is, persons were seen as a specific type of phenomena to be explained, rather than a general category to explain all natural phenomena. Darwin’s theory of evolution remains an instructive example here, as it allowed for the explanation of biological diversity in terms that did not conform to some notion of a divine plan, inherent purpose, or rational order. That is, while the notion of natural selection is often bastardized to incorporate normative valences that imply some sort of natural order of hierarchy, the story Darwin tells is one of an irrationally wasteful nature whose operations include mutation, random chance, and the brute facts that remain irreconciliable with a harmonious rational order. From the perspective of science, while nature is intelligible, it is not rational per se.

On this interpretation, the conceptual development of the modern scientific worldview amounts to a prolonged hashing out of the relative scope of intentional explanation. Intentional explanations are holistic, indexed to an individual, and normative.²⁹ They describe human actions insofar as they correctly identify the connections between beliefs, desires, and other mental states that cause human actions.³⁰ In short, they take for granted the causal power of reason—or, more precisely, the causal power of agents able to motivated by reasons rather than brute causality.³¹ By contrast, the forms of causal explanation we use to describe physical phenomena are, for the most part, generalizations that rely on either (or, ideally, both) the description of a mechanism operative on the individual level or a law that identifies which individual phenomena are instances of this mechanism’s operation.³² As John McDowell characterizes the distinction, both discourses “involve placing things in patterns. But in one case, the pattern is constituted by regularities according to which phenomena of the relevant kind unfold; in the other it is the pattern of life led by an agent who can shape her action in the light of an ideal of rationality,” that is, the intentional agency of persons or subjects.³³ Put simply, one explains things in terms of how things generally come to be, and the other in terms of how things ought to be. The latter vocabulary includes an explicitly normative context characteristic of conscious rationality. Modern science explained phenomena in light of the former in ways that did not also need to appeal to intentional agency. That is, it rendered phenomena intelligible without supposing that those natural phenomena were produced by a supernatural intelligence.

This type of explanation was seen as a challenge to established religious doctrine. This challenge was not only leveled by the content of, for example, Darwin’s theory, but also in that it rendered the appeal to an intelligent divinity superfluous at the explanatory level. That is, like similar developments in modern science, Darwin’s theory challenged the notion of a rationally organized universe, replacing it with a natural order that—while intelligible—was composed of normatively inert and value-neutral facts.

This intellectual history has exercised an inordinate influence on both historical studies and on contemporary political debates. The success of the natural sciences has led to the identification of their methodologies with scientific methodology and a corresponding identification of their criteria of rigor with intellectual rigor as such. These identifications were accompanied by the advancement of modern forms of statistical analysis of human behavior in fields like economics and sociology. The development of both the resources for gathering statistical data on human behavior and of statistical analysis more broadly showed the existence of mathematical regularities existing across mass human behavior. These regularities were analyzable in a fashion that was similar to the causal descriptions of the natural sciences, insofar as social or statistical facts could be identified independently of the intentions of the individual agents whose behavior on the microlevel constituted those macrolevel facts. Facts like the suicide rate or demographic decline could be rendered intelligible in theoretical terms independent of the goal-oriented structure of human rationality. Put in other words, the suicide rate could rise or fall without any rational agent intending it.

With the rise of statistical analysis, human action became intelligible in terms of large-scale historical processes or as structures that exceeded the scope of individual action.³⁴ The scientific bent of the Marxist intellectual tradition led to the overly enthusiastic adoption of natural scientific models. The consequence has been, in some corners, a theoretical preoccupation with identifying dynamic laws of history or, in more recent debates, the validity of structural determination. Crucially, these explanatory tools—adopted by the natural sciences, social science, and Marxism—are precisely those that Miéville discounts as avoiding the hard problem of consciousness.

Miéville mobilizes the thought experiment of the philosophical zombie (p-zombie) to illustrate this point. The hypothetical p-zombie is a creature that behaves exactly like a human being outwardly, but without the interior consciousness characteristic of subjectivity. Thus, while the p-zombie’s “mental life” can be described externally in terms of its outward behavior, such a description would not amount to a confirmation of the zombie’s mindedness. This, for Miéville, underlines the nonidentity between the two and the inexplicability of the latter in terms of the former. After outlining the thought experiment, he goes on to write that it “problematises the gestures at evolution or biology to deflate the hard problem [of consciousness].”³⁵ A metaphysical materialism—that is, a sort of physicalism that reduces reality to explanatory discourses of the material sciences—cannot tackle the intellectual problem Miéville identifies.

…if, as de Vries suggests, the debate between idealism and materialism becomes a debate about the systematic organization of the world, then idealism’s post-Kantian guise is that of intelligent design. The idea of the history as the development of a conscious subject is merely the application of that principle to history.

While Miéville concedes that Marx and wide swathes of the historical materialist tradition have denied the dependence of historical materialism on metaphysical materialism and physicalism, his criticism ultimately views such antimetaphysical strains of Marxism as Folk Marxist refusals to consider the need for a rigorous metaphysics. As Miéville writes “[Marxism] is not predicated on a rigorous metaphysics. Which–as the anti-metaphysical historical materialists above might attest–is fine as far as it goes: but it is less so if one believes itself to be so predicated. And, even in the best case, that can only go so far. Once you become interested in consciousness, then things go bump in the night.”³⁶ As Miéville makes clear, his critique of the limits of physicalism extends to the explanatory tools of social sciences and history. As he goes on to write, “the hard problem is a logical/philosophical problem. ‘Historical, social and psychological context’ is an invaluable thick description, but that logical gap it does not come close to filling.”³⁷

In the next section of this paper, I will argue that “filling this logical gap” as Miéville prescribes can only be achieved through a fully rationalized concept of nature that the development of modern science challenges. In the remainder of this section, I want to interpret Marx and Engels’ break with idealism in terms that render it consistent with the trajectory of modern science I outline above. In this, I want to echo Miéville’s claims that there are broad tendencies within the intellectual tradition of historical materialism that are independent of brute physicalism or metaphysical materialism. However, by doing so I also want to foreground that the rejection of a metaphysically robust idealist conception of nature and history is a central part of Marx and Engel’s theoretical commitments. It is this fully rationalized concept of reality that I view as intrinsic to Miéville’s commitment to metaphysics.

Marx and Engel’s break with Left Hegelianism is both a continuation and a counterweight to the depersonalization of phenomena that I identified with the development of modern science. As noted in De Vries’s discussion of idealism in the previous section, Hegel’s response to the antifoundationalist implications of Kant’s thinking was to attempt to, in some way, identify the rational and the actual. In historical terms, this entailed that the actual course of history was somehow shaped by rational normative standards. A key segment of Marx and Engels’s first volume of The German Ideology contrasts the materialist view of history as the product of historically determinate individuals with the Left Hegelian view of history as the emancipation of a universal subject (generally understood as “Man”) through the development of specific forms of consciousness. This Left Hegelian view amounts to a form of idealist abstraction that remains divorced from its historico-political conditions insofar as it: i) generalizes the self-consciousness of a specific individual (or set of individuals) as representative of the self-consciousness of the social whole and ii) it reduces historical and social dynamics to those of self-consciousness. This idealist view of history thus actively excludes the relationships of conflict and oppression characteristic of actual history by representing them as logical contradictions between different normative attitudes.³⁸ Thus, the German ideologues dehistoricized history precisely through their substitution of the consciousness of specific historical agents for history as a whole. Put in other terms, they cut history out of history by talking about history as if it was a form of consciousness.³⁹ The idealists’ reduction of social dynamics to consciousness made philosophical criticism crucial for emancipation insofar as social transformation could be represented in terms of the resolution of logical contradictions internal to a consciousness.

The central target of Marx and Engels’s critique in The German Ideology was such merely philosophical criticism—or, to use Marx and Engels’s term, critical criticism. Marx and Engels held that philosophical criticism’s exclusive focus on the demystification of conservative ideas substituted conscious awareness of subjugation for emancipation from it.⁴⁰ Actual emancipation required the change of the social relationships that placed human beings in relations of exploitation and domination. In short, the point became to change the world rather than interpret it.

To return to the discussion of idealism and materialism relevant to Miéville’s essay, Marx and Engels’s historical materialist intervention against Left Hegelian idealism is a reaction against their thoroughgoing reduction of reality to a rational structure. As De Vries argues, Hegel’s “absolute idealism constitutes his attempt to explain and defend the autonomy of reason.”⁴¹ This absolute idealism is an idealism precisely because it “preserves…the explanatory primacy of the mental precisely by spiritualizing nature and valorizing teleological explanations over causal ones.”⁴²

As De Vries writes, Hegel’s defense of the autonomy of reason and absolute idealism does not rely on substance dualism, but by “pointing out that there is a ‘logical space of reasons’ within which all our discourse occurs and which has a structure uniquely and irreducibly its own. In particular the salient features of this structure are justification and enlightenment; they are distinct from the causal structures of the physical and even the historical realm.”⁴³ The Left Hegelians erred in their interpretation of history as the development of consciousness and this error led them to overextend the dynamics of justification and enlightenment as if they were dynamics governing historical transformation. To view history as the product of contradictory normative positions that push toward some sort of logical resolution is to view the dynamics of history as governed by the same rational imperatives that govern an individual mind. The impetus to resolve contradictions is a rational norm that an individual can decide to obey or disobey; that is, the imperative to behave “rationally” is a normative stricture, rather than a metaphysical necessity. Viewing history in Left Hegelian terms represents historical struggle as the result of a justification game. Marx and Engels’s historical materialism reject this by pointing out that, rather than the working through of distinct normative positions by a collective but singular self-consciousness, history is actually the result of a concatenation of the actions of masses of people distributed within a physical world whose dynamics are irreducible to the demands of reason.⁴⁴

My overall suggestion in this section then, is that Marx and Engels are responding to the conceptual position that the subject of history (the Left Hegelians’ Man) plays in structuring history as a whole. The representation of history as the development of a rational and self-conscious subject ultimately turns history into a Bildungsroman. Additionally, the subject placed in this central position plays the same role of a creator God in a theistic universe, in that it reduces a complex historical totality incorporating distinct phenomena, externalities, contingencies, and brute facts into a rationally organized whole in the same manner that a divine demiurge does the natural world. That is, if, as de Vries suggests, the debate between idealism and materialism becomes a debate about the systematic organization of the world, then idealism’s post-Kantian guise is that of intelligent design. The idea of the history as the development of a conscious subject is merely the application of that principle to history. Marx and Engels’s critique of idealism, viewed minimally, is a rejection of that approach, just as Darwin’s explanation of biological diversity rejected the great chain of being. Such a move is both materialist and naturalist, not in that it reduces history to some other logically homogenous ontological vocabulary, but in that it grants the causal power and relative autonomy of processes that are irreducible to the ideal relations charted and produced by human reason.⁴⁵

In the main, the Marxist tradition has attempted to navigate this rejection in two distinct ways: on the one hand, many Marxists have claimed that Marx and Engels’s rejection of idealism amounted to their identification of the correct subject of history. Rather than the abstract concept of Man put forward by the working class, Marx and Engels viewed the proletariat as the true subject of history and in doing so identified an agent that is actually capable of determining the course of history through its collective power. Materialism, in this sense, amounted to identifying the actual material conditions of the transformation of social conditions rather than the ideal conditions for the emancipation of consciousness. While there is some truth to this approach, insofar as Marx does displace the dynamics of historical transformation onto the transformation of social relationships, many formulations of this approach ultimately reproduce the same teleological bildungsroman structure that the Left Hegelians did.

Second, and as a purported counterweight to Hegelian idealism, a significant number of Marxists have adopted a commitment to a scientific worldview. Crucially, this strategy has been tied to attempting a unification of the sciences—that is, the extension of the quantitative and experimental techniques and mechanistic theories of the natural sciences to the domain of history and sociology. Such approaches also aim at finding the real dynamics of historical development.

The first of these trajectories is clearly at odds with modern scientific movements beyond teleological explanation, so in what follows I will argue that the latter path—the attempt to embrace materialism through the methodological unification of the sciences—should not entail the ontological reduction of reality to a singular theory. That is, it does not entail either the reduction of higher-level macrolevel generalities to the dynamics of their microconstituents, nor the elimination of the intentional vocabulary we use to describe thoughts. Following McDowell, these different dynamics are simply patterns of eventuation. It is a metaphysical, rather than scientific, demand that reality conform to such a singular pattern. Thus, while a methodological unity of the sciences is a useful ideal, as I argue in the next section, interpreting it in reductionist or eliminativist terms falls into an overly philosophical understanding of the natural sciences that demands explanation be reduced to a single thread for it to count as explanation at all.

In a sense, Miéville is correct. On its own, holding that different phenomena display system-level properties distinct from their ontologically identical constituents is not, in itself, an explanation. However, emergentism is a philosophical perspective on ontology, so its inability to “explain” consciousness is only problematic relative to one’s expectations of the explanatory burdens placed on philosophical ontology.

As de Vries writes, “[t]he reductionist dogma that is ever attractive to philosophers—the notion that there is a limited, privileged vocabulary for the description of experience in terms of which all our experience must be definable—requires that our mentalistic and our physicalistic vocabularies either have some reduction relation between them, or are entirely disjoint, independent, and basic.”⁴⁶ As I have suggested, that reductionist impulse runs counter to the basic critical commitment that Marx and Engels expound in their articulation of historical materialism. As I will go on to argue in the next section, Miéville’s espousal of rationality as demanding the reductive unification of our basic framework for understanding reality to a single framework amounts to, roughly, the thought that the world is necessarily structured in terms of a single logic. By contrast, I want to put forth a conception of the ambitions of historical materialism as profoundly nonreductionist, explanatorily pluralist, and therefore materialist.

Darwin contra Miéville

To return to “Beyond Folk Marxism,” Miéville purports to have shown that the existence of consciousness has revealed metaphysical materialism to be untenable. Having raised these considerations to dispel the “hermeneutic of anti-idealist suspicion” that “colours folk-Marxist attacks,” Miéville goes on to argue that metaphysical idealism is the only available option for an intellectually scrupulous Marxism.⁴⁷ Following that, he suggests toward the end of the essay, “once you have argued yourself out of an ontologically materialist universe, of the many varieties of materialism, theism is probably not the least unlikely.”⁴⁸

As noted above, the “hard problem” of consciousness that motivates Miéville’s essay is the distinction and explanatory gap between consciousness and physical phenomena. In sections one and two, I have characterized this logical distinction and explanatory gap in terms of the intentional vocabulary used to describe subjective mental states. Miéville’s insistence on the logical nature of this problem leads him to conclude that evolutionary biology, history, and sociological explanations of behavior cannot fill that explanatory gap because they lack the reference to intentional discourse intrinsic to the phenomenon of consciousness. In short, they are external or, as I characterized it at the beginning of this essay, a “sideways on” view. In this section, I argue that Miéville’s explanatory demands cannot be met without positing a rationally ordered and purposive concept of nature as a whole. Crucially, positing that order ultimately raises further questions concerning the agent both capable of and with the occasion to structure nature in that way.

To broach these criticisms, I focus in this section on Miéville’s critique of emergence. In the previous I characterized modern science as the “paring down” of our concept of person. Scientific theory explains things in terms of patterns of eventuation logically distinct from intentional or teleological explanations, carving out a range of phenomena that can be explained without recourse to intelligent rationality. In this section, I expand on this, arguing that scientific explanation as a form of categorial redescription that implies a stratified ontology. As Miéville’s dismissal of emergence shows, the entire framing of the “hard problem of consciousness” is premised on dismissing such a view of ontology. For Miéville, substance ontology rationally leads to the demand for substance monism. Any other answer would be metaphysically unsatisfying and thus “Folk Marxism.”

To use Miéville’s gloss on the term, “emergence is the model by which the properties of a complex entity are greater than, and distinct from, those of its parts.”⁴⁹ While this may appear like a trivial observation for many complex entities—say for example cars, whose function is obviously distinct from their mechanical components—the crux of emergence is that it posits an ontological identity between complex wholes and their constituents even in cases in which the theoretical vocabulary used to describe the constituents is incapable of accounting for the functioning of the whole. To take an example, the explicability of social-level phenomena as mere aggregates of individual actors is a debated issue within the Marxist tradition.

Emergence, and similar philosophical concepts like supervenience, would allow a Marxist to accept that social trends are ontologically identical with aggregates of individual behavior (that is, they are the same thing) while denying that such trends could be explained in terms of the concepts we use to understand individual choices. For example, emergence would allow us to consistently hold that the capitalist mode of production is ontologically identical with the aggregate of individual actions undertaken by the members of the society while still denying that the capitalist mode of production could be analyzed in terms of individual choices. The key tenet of emergence is that such ontological identity does not imply the logical reducibility of the explanatory theories used to describe complex phenomena. According to emergentism, the use of different explanatory vocabularies at different levels of complexity is simply a byproduct of the fact that different properties “emerge” at different levels of systemic complexity. Emergence is usually appealed to in philosophy of mind debates to claim that consciousness is just such an emergent property. For the emergentist, consciousness is nothing other than a system-level property that assemblages of physical constituents (read: living, conscious bodies) display.

For Miéville, emergence, like evolutionary biology, is a Folk Marxist strategy for explaining away the hard problem of consciousness without explaining it. As he writes, quoting David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, “with particular regard to emergence, ‘one is really just talking about some marvelously inexplicable transition from the undirected, mindless causality of mechanistic matter to the intentional unity of consciousness. Talk of emergence in purely physical terms, then, really does not seem conspicuously better than talk of magic.’”⁵⁰ Emergence does not, for Miéville, “explain” consciousness in that it does not account for its origin.

In a sense, Miéville is correct. On its own, holding that different phenomena display system-level properties distinct from their ontologically identical constituents is not, in itself, an explanation. However, emergentism is a philosophical perspective on ontology, so its inability to “explain” consciousness is only problematic relative to one’s expectations of the explanatory burdens placed on philosophical ontology. As I have mentioned above, I view his critique of emergentism to be a result of his overinflation of this burden. To put the point the other way: given Miéville’s rejection of emergence on the one hand and of the discourses of evolutionary biology, sociology, and history on the other, what kind of answer of the hard problem of consciousness would be satisfying for Miéville?

Rational consciousness, although sui generis relative to other natural phenomena, could be thought in terms of the functions of living creatures with a specific historically developed form of social life; the thought of emergence would provide a picture of the world that acknowledges the ontological identity between humanity’s mental capacities with their physically described bodies despite the irreducibility of the descriptions of the former to the latter.

Miéville’s rejection of emergence makes it clear that some sort of account of the origin of consciousness would be necessary to answer the hard problem of consciousness. As Miéville writes with regard to John Lewis’s claim that thought is a function of a certain kind of matter rather than a substance added to matter, such statements are mere “restat[ements] of the problem with a flourish,” rather than resolutions.⁵¹ However, as his references to Pannekoek show, Miéville is clearly framing his rejection of emergentism in terms of the logical disparity between consciousness and physical phenomena that motivates much of his argument. That is, emergence can only be a “restatement of the problem” because it does not address this logical disparity. At issue then is not simply that emergence presumes a missing causal account for of the origin of consciousness, but that any accounts materialists cite to supplement emergent ontology and answer the hard problem—evolutionary biology, sociology, history—are given in the same “sidways on” terms that that fail to close the logical gap. That is, they leave the nonidentity of thought and physical matter untouched. Emergence for Miéville is subject to the same interaction problems that have plagued philosophical dualisms (which Miéville goes on to reject later on in his essay). As he writes “it is hard to conceive of a systematically dualist philosophy of mind, and thus of reality, in which one or other of the two poles does not ultimately assert ontological primacy. Whether or not it’s true that nature, as has been said, abhors a dualism, as Hart insists reason does. The simple fact that the two, mind and brain, are related–indeed, that any two phenomena in the world are related–militates against any foundational dualism.”⁵²

Miéville’s framing of the hard problem of consciousness thus demands an explanation of its origin that also provides grounds for the reduction between the explanatory discourses used to describe rational behavior and those used to describe physical phenomena. The two choices available would thus be eliminative materialism or a fully rationalized conception of nature (the latter of which, as I argued in the previous section, science has done so much to dispel). However, these options are the products of the way in which the problem is framed. Miéville’s claim that interrelation between thought and consciousness militates against dualism is simply a reformulation of what I, following de Vries, have been characterizing as the reductionist aspirations of philosophy.

However, rejecting that reductionist aspiration dispels the force of Miéville’s objections and affords a view of evolutionary biology and emergentism as explaining consciousness. Moreover, this explanation has more explanatory power than Miéville’s metaphysical idealism does. Put schematically, evolutionary biology allows one to explain the self-reflection and interiority characteristic of rational human knowers as the product of our natural history; it results from adaptive behavior developed over an immense period of time by a species of social creatures. This explanation for the emergence of consciousness—itself a highly plausible answer to Miéville’s “why consciousness”—could be supplemented with a commitment to emergence. Rational consciousness, although sui generis relative to other natural phenomena, could be thought in terms of the functions of living creatures with a specific historically developed form of social life; the thought of emergence would provide a picture of the world that acknowledges the ontological identity between humanity’s mental capacities with their physically described bodies despite the irreducibility of the descriptions of the former to the latter.

Miéville’s purported contender—metaphysical idealism—supposedly explains consciousness. However, his essay does not indicate how metaphysical idealism’s explanatory resources tackle the “hard problem.” Presumably, given Miéville’s situation of this debate on the terrain of substance ontology, metaphysical idealism would “explain” consciousness insofar as it allows for the substantial existence of thoughts or ideas. But such an “explanation” is no stronger than the variety of options Miéville rejects in his consideration of metaphysical materialism. Simply positing that there is a thinking substance is not an explanation. Rather, this “explanation” works by route of metaphysical stipulation: simply saying that thought exists does not explain consciousness. The causal account Miéville demanded from the theory of emergence is no less absent from metaphysical idealism, no matter how rigorously posed. Moreover, given the seeming veracity of the descriptions of reality given by the physical sciences, it is entirely unclear how a metaphysical idealism would solve the problem of dualism that Miéville identifies.

My objections with Miéville thus center on this uneasy relationship with the natural sciences and, more importantly, the natural world. As I suggested in my Sellarsian reconstruction of the modern sciences in the second section, modern science is marked by the displacement of teleological interpretations of natural occurrences toward depersonalized models of explanation. Thus, the move away from the conception of nature characteristic of the Aristotelian sciences towards a modern scientific understanding has been understood in terms of an increasing predominance of efficient causality over teleological explanations. In this context, efficient causality has generally been understood in terms of law-governed regularity.⁵³ Explanation within the physical sciences requires the identification of causes and causal relations as those relations that can be verified (or falsified) as functioning with a lawlike regularity via their reproduction in experimental contexts. The important feature of these sorts of causal explanations of natural phenomena is that it requires no recourse to a description of the aims or intentions of, for example, tectonic plates or subatomic particles. In fact, interpolating aims or intentions into these causal processes often obscures their nature.

For the natural sciences, explanations according to models of causal regularity became the norm. A necessary feature of this conceptual space is that science required postulating the existence of imperceptible entities. For example, scientific theory asks “what if gases were actually complexes of interacting molecules?” This kind of theory construction explains by virtue of postulating unobservable entities (like molecules) that can account for both the regularities and anomalies in the behavior of observed entities (like gases). Crucially, this postulation of unobserved entities is not identical to positing spirits or invisible properties.⁵⁴ Rather, scientific theory-construction involves a redescription of what we think an object actually is.⁵⁵ For this approach to have explanatory power, whatever unobserved molecules are, they would have to behave in a different manner than is typical for the medium-sized physical objects, like gases, that we normally observe. This entails the stratification and differentiation of the space of intelligibility.⁵⁶

Scientific theory explains by virtue of categorial redescriptions of phenomena that include both regional and microlevel theories. For this reason, also, the scientific investigation of nature does not entail the reductionist consequences that many view it to have. We use science to explain the behavior of medium-sized physical objects, just as we use it to explain subatomic particles or, arguably, the functioning of social phenomena like capitalism; all of these ways of understanding objects view them as operating according to distinct logics.

Irrespective of attempts to unify the theoretical space of the modern sciences, there still remains a fundamental logical irreducibility of intentional explanation (which allows us to represent reasons as causes) and other forms of causal explanation. While many of these theories can and often are theoretically reduced to each other, this is not necessary, plausible, or unequivocally desirable feature for scientific discourse in total.⁵⁷ Moreover, whatever theoretical reductions of one scientific discourse to another are possible through theoretical and empirical investigation, stipulating that a singular theory can serve as an ultimate foundation for all other theories—as in, say, a philosophical metaphysics—forecloses the categorial revision necessary for further scientific theorization.⁵⁸ The idea of a baseline foundational understanding of reality would halt the motion of science, whose successes stem from its advances as a self-correcting practice.

…the unification of our worldview is practical and rational rather than logical. In this task, bereft as we are of a traditional foundation, our main tools are our engagement with the world, our self-reflexive knowledge of natural and social history, and the orientation provided by the purposes that we set for ourselves. This vision of thought as the process of rational organization of a variety of irreducible logics within our practical and reflective self-activity is nothing less than dialectics.

But if the difference between the types of processes we identify in the natural world and the activities we identify in conscious rational beings is simply—as McDowell suggests—the identification of two distinct kinds of patterns, then where do Miéville’s deep existential worries come from? It is entirely unremarkable to think that different phenomena can be understood according to different patterns, particularly if the resources of the scientific worldview can explain why some natural beings behave in a rational manner. The sui generis status of our rational capacities provokes no deep metaphysical worries if we factor in the long natural and historical process through which human beings gained the ability to respond to each other’s reasons.

As a way of softening the “hardness” of the hard problem of consciousness, I suggest that we both adopt the evolutionary biologists view that complex organisms can develop different capacities and view the vocabulary we use to communicate our thoughts, intentions, desires, and wishes as the product of a theory we use to understand the behavior of other beings who occupy our social space.⁵⁹

For much of our history, we have been unable to understand the processes that lead us to acquire these capacities, cast adrift in a universe vaster and older than we could have comprehended. From that perspective, it makes sense to have thought that the natural world may operate according to the same kinds of reasons that we are ourselves respond to. However, science has opened up different explanatory possibilities.

The purported metaphysical difficulties of understanding how this is possible really only arise if we demand, as Miéville does, a singular metaphysical ontology that explains the operations of the entire universe. Such a demand for a definitive statement about the basic stuff the world is composed of is akin to what De Vries called, in a passage already cited above, “the reductionist dogma that is ever attractive to philosophers—the notion that there is a limited, privileged vocabulary for the description of experience in terms of which all our experience must be definable.” But, as I have suggested, such a demand is alien to the practices of scientific construction, which requires the continual revision of our ontology in order to further account for the functioning of the natural world. The place of philosophy should be no more than trying to figure out how these distinct logical spaces relate to each other, rather than stipulating a singular vocabulary to talk about the world. Such a metaphysical demand ought to be pruned if we recognize the inability of rational analysis to investigate reality without the cooperation of empirically informed scientific theorization. In short, such a demand must recognize the limits of pure reason.

The question at this point might be: what other explanation could one want for the hard problem of consciousness? To go back to Miéville’s concerns, the answer I am endorsing here seems more like an answer to “how conscious is possible?” rather than “why consciousness?” tout court. But if one wants an answer to why human beings are conscious in a manner that is not satisfied by the how answer outlined above, then theism is not simply an equally likely option: it is the only option. Given that the ontological identity of thought and matter is insufficient for Miéville, we can conclude that a satisfying resolution to the hard problem of consciousness must provide the grounds for an in-principle theoretical reduction of such scientific discourse to the intentional vocabulary we use to human rationality. In short, the story of why and how consciousness is possible must be phrased as a result of processes that are themselves rational (as opposed to merely intelligible in the manner of causal regularities). This leaves us with the quandary of either believing human rationality is somehow alien to the order of nature (an option which motivates a supernatural view of the origins of thought) or with viewing the natural processes that allowed for the development of consciousness as rationally structured. Consequently, this path simply subordinates scientific explanation to the philosophical speculation of metaphysics. On such a basis, it is entirely unclear how one could answer the problem of consciousness without assuming that natural processes were a result of a rational intelligence, as in, for example, a creator God.

Thus, what I have tried to suggest in the preceding is that it is unsurprising that Miéville’s essay ends where it does. Insisting on an answer to the why question undercuts the scientific and historical materialist worldview by placing rationality at the natural world’s center and origin rather than alongside it.

Coda: Every Cook Can Dialectic

In the preceding, I have tried to respond to Miéville’s argument for metaphysical idealism by outlining a conception of historical materialism that is naturalist, antireductionist, and consistent with scientific inquiry. However, one might object to the neopragmatist direction in which I am attempting to push Marxist theory on several grounds.

First, this essay is thoroughly wedded to the Sellarsian doctrine of the scientia mensura—the principle that science is the sole measure of what things are such that they are, and what things are not such that they are not. This may raise two concerns: the first with the sort of reductionist programs of physicalism and brute naturalism (that is, the reduction of our ontological vocabulary to physical theory, or to the discourses broadly understand as the natural sciences) and the second with regard to scientism (that is, the idea that science has the monopoly on truth-bearing discourses). With regards to the first, I hope that my presentation of Sellars’s philosophy of science as both antifoundationalist and nonreductionist is sufficient to allay those concerns.⁶⁰ With regards to the charge of scientism, I briefly note that, while science is preeminent in our theoretical vocabulary for describing and explaining the world, those two concerns do not exhaust the entirety of rational discourse and human truth. Just as the logical irreducibility of our intentional normative vocabulary leaves a relative autonomy and value to the special sciences, humanity’s rational interest in linguistic practices like judgment, deliberation, narrative carve out a space for intellectual practices like ethics, logic, aesthetics, and politics that must be related to our understanding of what is.⁶¹ Equally importantly, this relation must be achieved without collapsing those considerations within the logic of some overarching ontology.⁶²

With regard to the presentation of nature provided in this essay, it is true that the bulk of the essay relies on the conception of modern scientific theory as depersonalizing nature and interpreting it as a set of value-neutral facts. This conceptual development—thematized by Sellars as the development of the scientific image of the world and in Weberian–Adornian lines as the disenchantment of nature—perhaps resonates poorly with Marxists attempting to theorize an intrinsic value to nature.⁶³ More to the point, the notion that reason—and, by extension, rational value—are sui generis and inherent in human practices appears to run counter to the purposes of many ecosocialists and animal protectionists.

While these concerns are valid, the thrust of the preceding argument is to deny that nature as a whole is structured according to an overarching telos or ideal. That is, the critical target is less whether animals have some sort of self-determining orientation that requires our recognition and respect, or whether ecosystems have some sort of intrinsic value irreducible to human utilization, and more with undermining the overextension of logical structure characteristic of metaphysics. Crucially, the bulk of the third section is devoted to propping up a holistic worldview in which these sui generis rational capacities are a wholly natural occurrence. Thus, while accepting the logical irreducibility of rational capacities to the theoretical vocabulary of the natural sciences, the overall trajectory of this line of thought underlines the continuity between human reason and the natural world.⁶⁴ As others have argued, the goal-directed activity of nonhuman animals—and of life more generally—seem to exhibit claims to normative status that, if not on the scale and complexity of human reason, minimally warrant some kind of moral consideration.⁶⁵

On that note, I close this essay by briefly addressing the bait-and-switch surrounding the title. The naturalistic understanding of human rationality put forth in this essay works primarily by undermining the prevailing assumption that explanation relies wholly on logical reducibility (or to put it in more familiar terms for Marxists, conceptual subsumption). In place of that assumption I leaned on the Sellarsian analysis of the scientific image of the world. Following Sellars, I highlighted the confusion and misrepresentation that occurs when logical reduction is taken too far. In its place I preferred a view of science as a self-correcting practice that refines explanation by continual categorial redescription and theorization. Human beings are rational animals with a variety of explanatory and practical discourses they use to navigate their world, the diversity of which must be maintained. In a sense, we must correlate these discourses within our holistic picture of what the world is and our own stake in navigating it without thinking that they can be reduced to a single overarching logic. In short, the unification of our worldview is practical and rational rather than logical. In this task, bereft as we are of a traditional foundation, our main tools are our engagement with the world, our self-reflexive knowledge of natural and social history, and the orientation provided by the purposes that we set for ourselves. This vision of thought as the process of rational organization of a variety of irreducible logics within our practical and reflective self-activity is nothing less than dialectics. I use this last term somewhat grudgingly, as I view it as an overall mystification of the activities of thought that all of us are constantly and unproblematically engaged in.

Notes & References

China Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics, and Spooky Materialism,” Salvage, October 6, 2025, https://salvage.zone/beyond-folk-marxism-mind-metaphysics-and-spooky-materialism/.

Thanks to my comrades on Spectre’s editorial board for their work in editing and publishing this piece. In particular, this paper was significantly enriched thanks to comments from Aaron Jaffe, Maga Miranda, Izzy Plowright, and, especially, Vanessa C. Wills. While the final shape of the paper was only possible thanks to them, its flaws are all my own.

Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
As Miéville argues following Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “a Marxism that brackets metaphysics will always be ‘question-begging’, and ‘always searches for a borrowed normativity not derived from “what is” but only chosen according to one’s own whim’. Metaphysics is ultimately necessary fully to earn, rather than just ‘borrow’, our political ethics.” Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception, Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991 [1963]), 173.
While Miéville’s argument for substance monism is the proximate object of criticism here, the influence of substance monism and corresponding overinvestment in philosophical metaphysics is more broadly shared, particularly among Spinozist appropriations of Marxism. For example, Frim and Fluss’s argument for monism places metaphysics within a central political role for Marxist politics. They write that “universal solidarity, the unity of all peoples…is built on this more fundamental, and metaphysical, unity.” Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss, “Reason is Red: Why Marxism Needs Philosophy,” Spectre, August 29, 2022, https://doi.org/10.63478/NUVK9DBQ. Neil Braganza’s characterization of philosophy as lifemaking struggle, while a sympathetic corrective to Fluss and Frim that urges that philosophy “self-consciously subordinate itself to the living plurality and diversity of liberatory struggle” still suffers from an overly broad characterization of philosophy that would, ultimately, identify it with a range of liberatory practices unrecognizable as philosophy to most of those engaged in the practice. This tendency is also expressed in contemporary readings of Marxism that attempt to read it as the actualization of the German idealist tradition. Neil Braganza, “Philosophy as Life-Making Struggle: Spinoza, Marxism, and Moby Dick,” December 17, 2022, https://doi.org/10.63478/A0YDSNRG. See also, Christoph Schuringa, “Was Marx a Philosopher?” Philosopher, November 2, 2025, https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/was-marx-a-philosopher. (Parenthically, Braganza has remarked in conversation that he views Miéville as engaged in a symmetrical and obverse error to Fluss and Frim, likely for different reasons than my own).

Additionally, the problematic of substance monism exerts a subtle influence on Althusserians approaching Spinoza from a less explicitly ethical or normative orientation. For example, the characterization of concepts such as “immanent structure” or “structural causality” as unthinkable by thinkers like Warren Montag stems, in my view, ultimately from the implicit thinking of the materialism/idealism debate in terms of the opposition immanence/transcendence despite the self-conscious and explicit attempt to avoid the problematic. This lingering influence leads them to attempt to move past distinctions between cause/effect and appearance/reality that structure scientific theorization. Warren Montag, “Althusser’s Nominalism: Structure and Singularity (1962–6)” Rethinking Marxism 10:3 (Fall 1996): 69, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935699808685541; Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv120qt5x; Giorgios Fourtounis, “On Althusser’s Immanetist Structuralism: Reading Montag Reading Althusser Reading Spinoza,” Rethinking Marxism 17:1 (January 2005): 101, https://doi.org/10.1080/0893569052000312926.

Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception, Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991 [1963]), 1.
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
As Miéville writes, “the issue of consciousness tout court has always been central to the ontological questions here, precisely because it is so evasive, particularly to materialism.” Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
As Miéville begins his essay, “consciousness…could hardly be more important for Marxists. As radicals for whom theory and practice must be inextricable, it has been key to our investigations.… As historical materialists, we investigate consciousness in its complex relations with… society’s underlying ‘economic base.’ Debates follow such as those between… ‘spontaneists’ and ‘vanguardists,’ over how consciousness moves or… between Maoists and Deutscherites over limits to conscious, voluntarist will.” Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Emergentism is the view that macrolevel systems have distinct properties from their microlevel constituents. The fuller discussion of emergence and Miéville’s treatment of it occurs in section three below.
For a discussion of such “sideways on” descriptions of mind, see McDowell’s Mind and World. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 34_42, 82–83, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjghtzj. The paradigmatic examples of such “sideways on” views are the reduction of mental entities to neurophysiologically described brain states or eliminative forms of behaviorism. McDowell’s usage is even broader, including most causal accounts of the generation of ideas.
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Allison’s influential Kant’s Transcendental Idealism provides the most sustained defense of this view. Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 11–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1cc2kjc.
Following Graciela De Pierris, Allison outlines the predominance of this perceptual model in Custom and Reason. Henry E. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6–11. See also, Graciela De Pierris, “Causation as a Philosophical Relation in Hume,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 499–545, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00159.x; Graciela De Pierris, “A Fundamental Ambiguity in the Cartesian Theory of Ideas: Descartes and Leibniz on Intellectual Apprehension,” Dialogue,

Language, Rationality: A Festschrift for Marcelo Dascal, Manuscrito, 25 (2002), 105–46.

For a standard interpretation of Hegel along these lines, see Pinkard’s Hegel’s Phenomenology. Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Donald Davidson provides a useful critique of this Kantian inheritance in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/0199246297.003.0013. In many ways, this essay is an attempt to cash out John McDowell’s suggestion that an exhaustively nomological conception of causation is a byproduct of the dualism of scheme and content. Ultimately, for McDowell, challenging that dualism leaves us with “no respectable metaphysical impulse” that monism helps us to gratify. John McDowell, “Functionalism and Anomalous Monism” in Mind, Value, Reality, 339–40 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
As De Vries writes, philosophy began to “move away from the coarse idea that idealism vs. realism debate is about the basic objects of the world—are they material or are they mental?—to a more refined debate about the formal characteristics of the world. Willem de Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealism,” in Willem de Vries, ed., Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfred Sellars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 224.
While the above point may sound like a bit of philosophical snobbery, my distaste for substance ontology as a framework of debate is that it leads to the characterization of your opponents as far stupider than one could reasonably imagine. For example, Vivek Chibber characterizes the debate in these terms: “[Materialism] is the view that reality exists independently of our minds, which is true of the natural world as well as the social world. This is in contrast to what is sometimes called idealism, which supposes that what we take to be real might just be a product of our imaginations.” Vivek Chibber, “Materialism is Essential for Socialist Politics,” Jacobin, May 25, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/05/materialism-socialism-democracy-left-wing. The thought that anyone involved in serious debate actually denies the existence of external reality, or supposes that the reality may simply be a product of our imaginations is risible.

One of the major virtues of Miéville’s essay is that he voices concerns with these kinds of hyperbolic framings of idealism. To my mind though, Miéville underestimates the extent to which taking substance ontology as the frame for these debates is itself responsible for generating them.

I argue that explanations for historical phenomena have to be supplemented by intentional descriptions of rational actors in “Dilemmas of Analytical Marxism.” Joshua Nicholas Pineda, “Dilemmas of Analytical Marxism,” Spectre, no. 8 (2023): https://doi.org/10.63478/LI1M7P28.
For example, see Jaegwon Kim’s various challenges to theories of emergentism and nonreductive views of the physical sciences. Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jaegwon Kim, Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Donald Davidson, “Mental Events” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 207–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/0199246270.003.0011; Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of the Special Sciences as a Working Hypothesis),” Synthese 28, no. 2 (1974): 97–115, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485230; Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences: Still Autonomous After All These Years,” supplement: Philosophical Perspectives: Mind, Causation, and World, Nous S11 (1997): 149–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.31.s11.7.
For ease of exposition, I leave aside, the issue of the biological sciences. See fn 60, 64, and 65 for an indication of some of the complications these sciences pose and an indication of how they might be reconciled within this exposition.
For a systematic exposition of this line of thought, see McDowell, Mind and World.
Miéville approvingly quotes Sayers’s framing of the problem materialism in terms of “‘the old problems of the relation between the mental and the physical’, the fact that ‘the psychological standpoint cannot be captured in purely physical terms’.” Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
As De Vries puts it, “Post-Kantian idealists…no longer held that the world is built out of subjective mental things—ideas—but rather that the world is built in accordance with intelligible normative structural principles—ideals.” De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 224. Crucially, and to anticipate my line of argumentation in this paper, this philosophical move “begins to leave behind the simple dualism that plagued the pre-Kantians.” De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 224.
The basic characterization of modern science this section follows the line put forth by Sellars in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” The following analysis is only loosely historical, as it will be done in broad strokes and gloss over the continuities and historical overlap between the modern scientific and premodern ways of explaining natural phenomena. This is, in part, a consequence of its aims, which is to outline the conceptual logics at play in their clearest terms.
Wilfrid Sellars “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” 9-14, 18-20. See

John McDowell, “Scheme Content Dualism and Empiricism” in John McDowell, The Engaged Intellect (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 115–33.

On this set of points, see John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism” in Mind, Value, Reality, 169–74.
On the disparity between this form of explanation and covering-law models of causal explanation see Donald Davidson, “Hempel on Explaining Action,” in Essays on Actions and Events, 261–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/0199246270.003.0014.
See McDowell’s prolonged discussion on the relationship between our conceptual capacities and freedom. McDowell, Mind and World.
For the purposes of simplification, although both forms of explanation can be construed as “causal” in the broader sense used by someone like Davidson, I will sometimes designate nonintentional forms of causal explanation as “causal explanation” in order to facilitate a contrast between the two. This strikes me as in keeping with many of the more standard conceptions of causality that view it strictly in terms of nomological regularity.
John McDowell, “The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars” in John McDowell, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 211.
Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchnell, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181–96. For a lengthier discussion of these issues see Hackings, The Taming of Chance. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1990]), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819766. For a discussion of the conceptual problems surrounding this epistemological shift within the Marxist tradition see Anderson’s Arguments Within English Marxism, Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980) 17-21.
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
This point is further emphasized by his critiques of behaviorism later on in the essay. Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
For an analysis of contemporary political theory that highlights the persistence of this sort of criticism, see Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).
For an outline of the continuity between this sort of Hegelian idealism and Analytical Marxism, see my own “Dilemmas of Analytical Marxism.” Pineda, “Dilemmas of Analytical Marxism.” Marx and Engels’ break with idealism, according to this view, is a shift in the methodology, subject matter, and focus of Marxist theorization away from logical analysis or textual commentary and towards empirically rooted analyses of history and its conjunctures. Aaron Jaffe’s unpublished dissertation takes a similar strategy in conceptualizing the break with materialism. Aaron Jaffe, “Alienation from ‘Species-Being’: An Investigation of Marx’s Philosophical Anthropology,” (PhD diss., The New School for Social Research, 2014), 30–57.
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 72.
De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 231.
De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 230.[
De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 232, emphases added.
For a broader discussion of this sort of reductionism, see Pineda, “Dilemmas of Analytical Marxism.”
I am well aware that there are several places within Marx and Engels’ corpus at which they evince more reductionist and metaphysically ambitious objectives than this deflationary account of their break with idealism. My short response is that I do not care. In that I view Marxism as a living tradition, I view the role of Marxology as simply clarifying different theoretical trajectories in Marxism with the view to helping contemporary Marxists construct an intellectually coherent worldview. For a fruitful commentary on Marxology see Ryan Breeden, “After the Last Word: Review of Kevin B. Anderson’s ‘The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads,’” Spectre, December 3, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/TPSYWEDW.
De Vries, “Getting Beyond Idealisms,” 225.
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
Miéville, “Beyond Folk Marxism.”
A prominent example of this identification of causal explanation with generalization is Carl Hempel’s attempt to argue that both deductive and statistical explanations as causal explanations are logically formalizable in terms of the covering-law model. That is, as Hempel argues, both forms of scientific explanation, while logically irreducible to each other, can still be considered causal explanations insofar as they explain particular phenomena in terms of general laws. See Carl G. Hempel, “Deductive Nomological versus Statistical Explanation” in Carl G. Hempel, The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation and Rationality (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 87-145, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195121360.001.0001; Philip Kitcher, “Explanatory Unification,” Philosophy of Science 48 (1981): 507–31, https://doi.org/10.1086/289019; John McDowell, “Functionalism and Anomalous Monism.”
Despite the tendency to represent all explanatory appeals to imperceptible entities as equivalent, the categorial redescription is distinct from appeal to “spirits” in that the latter explains natural occurrences by simply by personalizing them.
This point is that scientific theories explain theoretical laws solely through generalization. Rather, they explain why observable things obey theoretical laws to the extent they do, and why they behave anomalously relative to those. This explanation requires categorial redescription and, consequently, implies that empirical generalizations, even when refined in scientific inquiry, are approximations of the truth. See Wilfrid Sellars, “The Language of Theories,” in Science, Perception, Reality, 118–23; Charles O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Medford: Polity, 2007), 38–39.
This point is shared by the critical realist strand of Marxist philosophy of science. Despite my agreement with critical realism on this point, I depart in their strong identification of causality with lawlike regularity. While most causal explanations rely on such nomological generalization, I do not view such regularity as a necessary feature of all causal explanation. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (New York: Verso, 2020); cf. fn 10, 46, and 47.
This viewpoint coincides with strands in contemporary philosophy of science pursued by authors such as Jerry Fodor and Phillip Kitcher. That is, attempts to reduce the sciences to more foundational or primary sciences have given way to recurrent challenges to reductive conceptions of the relationship between theories. As Philip Kitcher argues, explanatory unification need not entail logical reduction of different discourses. As he argues in “1953 and All That,” successor theories supplement and extend antecedent scientific theories, rather than entail their reduction. Philip Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences.” The Philosophical Review 3 (Jul 1984): 335–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/2184541.

As Kitcher argues, microtheories (that is, local theories that examine the micro-constituents of macrolevel phenomena) explain the unexplained claims (for example, axiomatically adopted principles) of the theories that they succeed. Kitcher, “1953 and All That,” 365–66. To use his example of molecular genetics and classical genetics, molecular genetics is more fundamental insofar as it explains the behavior of genes by describing the internal structure of DNA. Using the techniques of molecular biology, examination of the internal structure of DNA as a chain of nucleotides with a double-helix structure allowed scientists to provide more detailed and robust explanations of DNA replication and genetic mutation. Furthermore, it opened up new research questions and possible experimental programs for genetics.

This ontological claim about the internal structure of DNA did not entail the elimination of the discourse of classical genetics. As Kitcher notes, biological phenomena can be described by disparate discourses that operate at distinct levels. Kitcher, “1953 and All That,” 371. Although molecular genetics does extend the explanatory purchase of genetic theory by describing the microstructure of DNA at the molecular level, certain general phenomena can be best pursued at the “less fundamental” level of cellular structure. For example, in the case of mutant limb bud alleles, while explanatory questions may begin by analyzing the molecular constitution of mutant alleles, the abnormal morphology of limbs characteristic of this mutation is explained in terms of the absence of certain genes. This absence is in turn explained by abnormal tissue geometry that prevents crucial molecular interactions. Given that the absence of certain molecular interactions can only be explained at the cellular level of tissue geometry, the explanatory relationship involve multiple levels of analysis and is not unidirectional. Kitcher, “1953 and All That,” 371–72. Thus, in spite of the ontological identity of macrolevel phenomena and their microstructures within the natural sciences, claims about “more fundamental” microstructures are explained by appeal to “less fundamental” macrostructures. Insofar as interesting macrolevel regularities can still be usefully identified, both discourses must be used to describe the same phenomena (albeit at distinct levels). Eliminative reductions of distinct discourses of ontologically identical phenomena are counterproductive because eliminating the patterns of explanation at macrolevels can lead us to “fail to employ the relevant laws, or fail to identify the causally relevant properties.” Kitcher, “1953 and All That,” 371. Thus, for Kitcher, maintaining distinct levels of explanation is compatible with assuming the ontological identity of biological phenomena and is necessary given the explanatory ambitions of science.

On this point, see the exchange between Sellars and Bas Van Frassen on scientific realism and empiricism. Bas van Fraassen, “On the Radical Incompleteness of the Manifest Image,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2 (1976), 335–43, https://doi.org/10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1976.2.192389; Wilfrid Sellars, “Is Scientific Realism Tenable?” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2 (1976); see also Jay F. Rosenberg, “On Sellars’s Two Images of the World” in Willem de Vries, ed., Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity and Realism: Essays on Wilfred Sellars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 283–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573301.003.0011.
See Sellars’s construction of the myth of Jones in the concluding sections of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,”183–96.
In short, I am advocating a sort of “weak” naturalism that denies supernatural explanations and not a sort of “bald” naturalism which tries to understand rationality in the nonintentional vocabulary characteristic of many forms of scientific explanation. For a discussion of these varieties of naturalism, see McDowell, Mind and World, 72–88, 108–110.
See Bernstein’s engagement with Sellars on these issues. Richard Bernstein, “Sellars’ Vision of Man-in-the-Universe I,” Review of Metaphysics 20, no. 1 (1966): 113–43; Richard Bernstein, “Sellars’ Vision of Man-in-the-Universe II,” Review of Metaphysics 20, no.2 (1966): 290–316.
These concerns motivate a significant part of my reservations with Miéville’s general line of argumentation and its affinity with the metaphysical orientation of Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim. I view this conception of the relationship between philosophical ontology and normative claims as of a piece with the same reductionist impulse that De Vries criticizes. For a critique of Fluss and Frim on this point see the set of responses in Spectre. Aaron Jaffe, “Marxism, Spinoza, and the Radical Enlightenment,” Spectre, no. 5 (2022): https://doi.org/10.63478/RD9M8M08; Frim and Fluss, “Reason is Red”; Braganza, “Philosophy as Life-Making Struggle”; Darren Roso, “Materialism and the Crisis of Marxism: On Nature and the Role of Marxist Philosophy,” Spectre, April 25, 2023, https://doi.org/10.63478/AG9A2WDJ; William Clare Roberts, “On ‘Being Serious About Ideas: A Rejoinder,” Spectre, April 20, 2023, https://doi.org/10.63478/NY0BHEZF.

For my own part, I view the attempt to derive political claims from general ontological statements to be of a piece with what Isabelle Garo has called the hyperpoliticization of philosophy. See Isabelle Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx: La politique dans la philosophie (Paris: Éditions Demopolis, 2011).

Additionally, my rejection of the relevance of monism/dualism debates can be seen as a circumvention of debates concerning the metabolic rift caused by capitalism’s disruption humanity’s lifemaking engagement with its environment. For a helpful review of those debates, see Isaacs and Seconi’s review of Alan Sears’s Eros and Alienation. Sean K. Isaacs and Isadora Seconi, “The Hopes of Disalienation: review of Alan Sears’s Eros and Alienation,” Spectre, September 16, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/VRK1FMEO.
Several interesting recent strands of philosophically inflected Marxist work have pursued similar lines of inquiry. Karen Ng’s work highlights the necessity of viewing self-consciousness as the practical activity of a determinate form of life. Karen Ng, Hegel’s Conception of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). For a short summary of the relevant argument in relation to Marx, see her “Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits.” Karen Ng, “Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits,” Qui Parle 34, no. 1 (2025):177–203, https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-11701022, available at https://karen-ng.com/research/. While I agree with the general line of Ng’s thought, I hold reservations about the robust normative content she assigns to species-being and strongly disagree with her articulation of the relationship between philosophical and empirical debate. Aaron Jaffe’s unpublished dissertation also provides similar resources for a naturalistic interpretation of conscious practice, albeit from a more explicitly practical and social perspective than Ng’s work that likely results from Jaffe’s more full-throated embrace of historical materialism. Aaron Jaffe, “Alienation from ‘Species-Being.” Lastly, though they may disagree with the term “naturalist,” Søren Mau’s recent work on embodiment also provides an interesting platform to think about naturalist interpretations of human practice from within a Marxist framework. Mau’s approach, unlike Ng and Jaffe, does not entail the more normatively robust concept of species-being, nor their deep commitment to humanism in that it eschews their emphasis on the concept of alienation. Søren Mau, “Karl Marx and the Body: Towards an Eco-Marxist Philosophical Anthropology,” Body and Society 32, no. 1 (2026): 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034×261428998.
See for example Alice Crary, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 92–164. For an interesting discussion of examinations of practical activity and intelligence across species—and, if I am correct, of possibilities for interspecies solidarity—see Common Ruin’s “Of Dams and Deluge.” Common Ruin, “Of Dams and Deluge: On Communist Niche Construction,” Heatwave Magazine, no. 1 (2025), available at https://commonruin.noblogs.org/dams-deluge-on-communist-niche-construction/.

Naturalized Dialectics

A Response to China Miéville's “Beyond Folk Marxism”

1781 and All That

Materialism and the Disenchantment of Nature

Darwin contra Miéville

Coda: Every Cook Can Dialectic

Notes & References

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Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy

Service with a Scowl

On Rick Roderick

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