WILLIAM LEWIS interviewed by RICHARD MARSHALL
French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser PHOTO/Wikipedia
‘Just being a Marxist in academic philosophy is incredibly difficult, even in France. Althusser, though, was fortunate enough to be his most philosophically active during the two decades where being a Marxist philosopher was not only an institutional possibility but during revolutionary years where such work was of global interest. Althusser’s tide rose with the post-Stalinist communist left and it fell as this movement became fragmented and declined. By 1980, Althusser’s arguments for a scientific Marxism, for the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat, and for democratic centralism were seen as hopelessly old-fashioned.’
‘That humanist Marxism might now become the party’s official philosophy jolted him into action. As much as anybody, Althusser wanted to repudiate Stalinism. However, he thought that humanism smuggled bourgeois ideology back into Marxist philosophy. Starting in the early 60s, then, his goal was to provide a philosophically sophisticated and defensible alternative to both humanist Marxism and to the discredited official Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.’
‘Like Galileo with astronomy and Darwin with biology, Althusser argued that Marx opened up a new “scientific continent.” According to him, what makes Marx’s or Darwin’s or Galileo’s thought scientific is not necessarily their empirical investigations but the fact that each developed new understandings of certain types of objects. These objects and concepts could then be investigated and our understanding of them developed using scientific methods of research. For Darwin, obviously, the chief concept was that of natural selection. However, there are other concepts such as mutation, heredity, and adaptation which comprise evolutionary theory as a whole and that Darwin needed but did not name in his work (it took others like Mendel to do so). Similarly, For Marx, the chief concept in the Marxist science of historical materialism is that of class struggle.’
‘But Marx’s voice is not univocal; Althusser reads a tension in his works. The tension is that between a Marx that is the heir to modern political philosophy and to Hegel and to all the other ideologies of his day and a Marx that is struggling to break free of this tradition and to found a materialist science of history.’
‘Althusser attributes the development of his method of reading to Freud, to Spinoza, as well as to Marx himself. I know that some people make a big deal about the relation between Althusser and Lacan. However, I don’t think that Lacan is as important to Althusser’s philosophy as are the other three.’
‘Philosophy is conceived as class struggle in theory. It is said to operate in the void between ideological and scientific concepts, allowing us to critique them. Acting in this void, philosophy is able to represent scientificity in the field of politics and politics in the field of science.’
‘The claim about us being structured by material relations is the core of Althusser’s anti-humanism: our natures are formed, not fixed, and there is no overall plan to this formation. We neither control our own becoming, nor are we fated to become what our nature requires. To the extent that we understand the material relations which form us and to the extent that we can exert the necessary political forces to change them, we may structure these forces and thereby recreate ourselves. That we are eventually going to do so, there is no guarantee.’
William Lewis has interests in social & political philosophy, American Pragmatism, Marxism, ethics, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of race and gender and environmental philosophy. Here he discusses Althusser, why his reputation faded, his early thinking on Hegel, Christianity and Marx, his work on Montesquieu, his work in the 1960’s, why he returned to the early Marx, why and how he introduced hermeneutics to Marxism, the influence of Spinoza, Freud and Marx, gives a bravura summary of his non-empiricist theory of epistemology and philosophy of science, the role of philosophy in his thinking, whether he was a Marxist structuralist, his anti-humanism, the status of his later writings, and whether he is still of relevance.
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?
William Lewis: My parents both believed that as long you loved what you were doing and did it well, then you could keep on doing it. Being the fourth kid and the only boy, I was left alone with books a lot. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, a university town with lots of used bookstores, so secondhand literature was cheap and plentiful. Foreign exchange students were also in ample supply and my parents hosted a different one each year, or so it seemed. When I was in junior high, one of these students was from France. We got along well and, before he left, he told me that I must read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. I found a used Penguin edition and just devoured it. At 14 years of age and having grown up in a kind of idyllic, left-leaning university town, I had no idea how the world was put together. Stendhal’s protagonist, Julien Sorel slices vertically through the social and political worlds of 19th century France, revealing its power relations and its hypocrisy. Even if this was not my world, the journey was thrilling and it made me want to know how American society hung together, what controlled it, and whether or not it might be changed for the better.
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