Charles Kendrick								Hum 63
1400 words								Jordanna Bailkin

Marx'  Assumption, 
Nietzsche's Guess

	As we discuss Nietzsche's Gay Science and Marx's early writings, do we need to 
label a connection between politics, morality and science an assumption?  It is not much 
more of an assumption than that the universe exists: each of these fields is not only a part 
of the universe in general but a part of the part of the universe that is human affairs.  
Narrowing to a much closer connection, we'll find that politics is based on morality and 
sometimes vice-versa.  The politician puts forward a system of government which 
embodies his system of moral thought.  He votes for a societal model, or at least for some 
functional society model in which his system can exist as a subset.  In the middle of the 
society, many people's moral systems end up being defined by the society they exist in, 
including the future politicians.  The morals define the politics, in most systems the 
consensus of some group gets implemented and ends up as a strong force in defining 
morals for the next generation.  Politics and morality are intertwined to the point of being 
largely indistinguishable: co-evolving.
	To begin showing where science fits in, perhaps it is best to quickly assert that it 
is not absent from morality and politics.  In the 1990s we have the ultimate example of 
science's existence in the moral and political realm: genetic engineering, a scientifically 
raised question that has immense political and moral questions attached.  Showing the 
reverse connection, that politics in turn impacts science, is as easy as pointing out that 
funding for all science comes from the government, and is determined by such moral 
issues as whether experimentation should be done on animals and how.
	With a connection established, we can turn to the issue of how Nietzsche and 
Marx each very differently used science in presenting or deconstructing a moral and 
political model.  While Marx gives science, and his new "natural science", center stage in 
defining a new societal order, Nietzsche saw science as the murderer of God, and his 
concept of a "gay science" is an attempt to somehow get a handle on what systems, now 
not recognizable as moral and political, could be stable after such a deconstruction.
	Marx's new version of science is most clearly defined as he attacks psychology:

"... can never become a real science with genuine content.  What indeed should we think 
of a science which primly extracts from this large area of human labor, and fails to sense 
it's own inadequacy, even though such an extended wealth of human activity says nothing 
more to it perhaps than what can be said in one word-'need', 'common need' .. Man is the 
immediate object of natural science ... But nature is the immediate object of the science 
of man." (Marx, p.354-355)

Put briefly: science should shift focus from objective truth to the benefit of man.  This 
argument clearly derives the new science from a previously derived moral and political 
view.  Yet Marx's favorite argument tool is to point out that man is a social animal.  If 
you want to call this a highly scientific fact, you could make a case for Marx using a 
scientific claim to derive all his thought.  This wouldn't contradict Marx, but it might 
flavor your grouping of him into sociologist, scientist, or political theorist, if you are 
inclined to group him.
	In any case, the following passage (clipped from the middle of the above), 
presents Marx's view of science as affecting man:

"But natural science has intervened in and transformed human life all the more 
practically through industry and has prepared the conditions for human emancipation, 
however much its immediate effect was to complete the process of dehumanization." 
(Marx p.354)

Now we are hitting on science as a force accidentally creating the potential for a new 
society, one aspect of which would be Marx's new science.  While Marx has not yet 
written the Manifesto, he is already drawing a good outline of an alternate society simply 
by pointing out how it would be different from current society.  In this part of the 
definition-by-opposite, science as secular and as opposed to religion is seen as a cement 
for the alternate society:

"How does one make a religious opposition impossible?  By abolishing religion.  Once 
Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as nothing more than different 
stages in the development of the human spirit, as snake-skins cast off by history, and man 
as the snake which wore them, they will no longer be in a religious opposition, but in a 
purely critical and scientific, a human relationship.  Science will then be their 
unity."(Marx p.213)

What we really have is the secular aspect of any style of empirical science giving Marx 
several tools to suggest an alternate societal model with.  Marx can now treat man as 
primarily a social animal rather than a more difficult to predict, purely spiritual animal, 
and can rid the race of all religious conflict by postulating that science can hold man 
together in the absence of religion.  Beyond science as simply a secular force, Marx also 
thinks of it as preparing "the conditions for human emancipation", and his redefinition of 
science as benefactor to man is now almost redundant: he has already used it this way!
	Nietzsche, on the other hand, does not see Marx' society as a stable state in the 
absence of religion, because Marx uses bad assumptions about man to derive his society.  
The idea of man as a social animal is either a moral binding, which puts Marx in the 
teachers of a purpose category:

"There is no denying that in the long run every one of these great teachers of a purpose 
was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature..."(Nietzsche p.75 [1])

Or it is more scientific, in which case Neitzsche's reasoning, where some of the dynamics 
that hold society together appear rather violent and anti-social to the untrained eye, make 
Marx's ideal state (which, admittedly, he hasn't finished defining in this work) seem 
rather simplistic:

"One holds that what is called good preserves the species, while what is called evil harms 
the species.  In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and 
indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely 
different."(Nietzsche p.79 [4])

Marx expects most of the "problems" of current society, like violence, to disappear, and 
leave his system as a perfectly stable society whose pangs are gone.  He fails to see the 
subtlety of the stability of the current society, for instance, that the evil instincts 
mentioned above not only create a dynamic that co-preserves the society with the good 
instincts, but that the evil instincts are part of what spurs on the good instincts:
 
"The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again 
and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep...-" (p .79 [4])

It would seem that Nietzsche would reject Marx out of hand.
	So we return to Nietzsche's wide open question:  what systems are left, with God 
dead, and moral systems with him.  Nietzsche's gay science is a way at laughing at the 
patheticness of our own existence, from the freedom granted by a willingness to call it 
pathetic:

"I mean, when the proposition "the species is everything, one is always none" has become 
part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible 
to all.  Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only 
"gay science" will then be left."(p.74 [1])

I would hope the use of "perhaps" implies that Nietzsche means this as a possibility that 
occurred to him.  Partly I say that because this laughter that seems to free Nietzsche from 
the hard truth of human worthlessness, this humor with which Nietzsche totally 
disassociates from the idea of purpose, is probably just another social evolutionary 
dynamic.  That is to say that Nietzsche, with his readiness to call man's greatest triumphs 
frog-like, had better have spotted that his humor is probably an evolved response to the 
degree of purposelessness that he himself has pointed out.  Then again, perhaps it is more 
fair to assume Nietzsche is fully aware of this, and his "gay science" stable state is just 
another state that he values only as a possibility, not as ideal.