The Dialectic of Knowledge and the Idea of History

In this chapter, we demonstrate how the incompleteness of theoretical attitude to the world emerges as a fundamental problem of modern philosophy and, through Cartesian rationalism, its Kantian transcendental critique and Hegelian dialectic, triggers a decisive turn to the understanding of philosophy as social praxis by Hegel’s early nineteenth-century liberal critics, Marx included. In this context, we trace in what way the Cartesian interplay of knowledge and being finds a new form in the circular Hegelian dialectic of the Notion, providing a foundation for Marx’s, allegedly materialist, dialectic of labor. As we argue in the two subsequent chapters, Marx’s conception of labor, as both a universal and material mode of human activity, replicates the Cartesian circle of formality and actuality and, as a result, proves inconsistent with the ideal of infinite directional progress driven by the unbounded progress of science and technology.