The image of there being two sides to the same coin was bloody brilliant, however. This recognition allowed Kant to postulate two ways to look at things: at things in-and-of-themselves, what consciousness saw or defined as their essential nature (the Thing-in-Itself, the noumenon) and things as might be represented for the mind, the thing as the mind understood or received them to be (the appearance of the object, the
phenomenon). Man could be regarded as a subject for himself, and an object for other men; a pot could be regarded by men as a thing, a subject, a “pot”, as conceived and possessed of an essence by men, but also an object, as a phenomenon, appearing before men’s mind.15
As Hegel was quick to note, this revealed all things could be seen from two points of view: the subject, as the object would see itself per
se, whether man or the pot; and the object as things would be seen by others per se, whether
the pot or man. I am a subject, and I can think of myself as an object; thus I can imagine myself to be both a subject and an object. It is this synthesis, developed from the relational nature of the subject and object dichotomy, that allows for all forms of being to exist, if you will, as matter for consciousness.16 Whether man or the pot is regarded as a subject or as an object is really of little concern: each is but a matter of perspective, generated for the greater development of the essential Mind/Spirit moving through History. At this point in the history of ideas, Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction has seriously been challenged. A pot only matters insofar as it facilitates the explication of the Mind/Spirit racing through History, or more precisely History as it comes to reveal Mind/Spirit.
It was for this reason that Marx both embraced and challenged Hegel. Marx realized that Hegel’s subject/object dichotomy, and the dialectic that proceeded from it, was an advance that the people living in the world of Aristotle could never understand. Turning to a specific argument in Book Five of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Marx used the dialectical method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to demonstrate how it would be possible to transform one object into another, thereby making sense of exchange that occurs within capitalist societies. The pot that was originally developed as an object for use by man could now be established as a subject for exchange to be traded for other things (say a hammer), other objects which could also be regarded as but a means for use (commodity for commodity, C-C), including men themselves, who, though once a subject, had become nothing more than objects of labor. The definitive synthesis was labor time, producing both use-value (the physical component of the man or pot) and exchange-value (the metaphysical nature of man or pot, inherent or imposed). As labor (the more general term for labor time, the time labor itself is expended on any product) became formalized, it became the universal for exchange. It was only through this means that commodities could be exchanged for other commodities (C-C) or for money (C-M), ultimately creating a framework where money alone, as the formal embodiment of labor time, could be exchanged for other commodities (M-C). Money (M) thus becomes the more fully expressed general form of labor (C-M-C to M-C-M), through which all things, all commodities (C) are valued. The theory of labor is the basis of Marx’s Theory of Value; and as all things are products of labor (bundles of energy to be exchanged), labor/energy is Value itself, the essential nature of all things both physical and metaphysical.
Let us ignore for the moment whether Bertell Ollman’s theory of internal relations or Louis Althusser’s theory of external relations really defines Marx,17 or even grander whether Marx had actually anticipated by approximately one hundred years the fourth dimension of Einstein, wherein all things merely being bundles of energy can be transformed into another at any particular place or time: the fact of the matter is Marx well understood the dangers inherent in such a system. Marx understood that under a system where man himself is placed on the same level of a pot, or a pot on the same level as man, alienated as each would be from their essential nature as subject, each would be
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