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PARTISAN REVIEW
of which it oppresses and exploits, and the whole sphere of political
action is characterized by the use of violence.
The Marxian identification of action with violence implies
another fundamental challenge to tradition which may be more
difficult to perceive, but of which Marx, who knew Aristotle very
well, must have been aware. The twofold Aristotelian definition of
man as a
dzoon politikon
and a
dzoon logon echon,
a being attaining
his highest possibility in the faculty of speech and the life in a
polis,
was designed to distinguish the Greek from the barbarian and the
free man from the slave. The distinction was that Greeks living to–
gether in a
polis
conducted their affairs by means of speech, through
persuasion, and not by means of violence through mute coercion.
Barbarians were ruled by violence and slaves by labor, and since
violent action and toil are alike in that they do not need speech to
be effective, barbarians and slaves are
aneu logou,
that is, they do
not live with each other primarily by means of speech. Labor was to
the Greeks essentially a non-political, private affair, but violence is
related to and establishes a contact, albeit negative, with other men.
Marx's glorification of violence therefore contains the more specific
denial of
logos,
of speech, the diametrically opposite and traditionally
most human form of intercourse. Marx's theory of ideological super–
structures ultimately rests on this anti-traditional hostility to speech
and the concomitant glorification of violence.
For traditional philosophy it would have been a contradiction
in terms to "realize philosophy" or to change the world in accordance
with philosophy-for Marx's remark about interpreting and chang–
ing the world implies that one can change the world only now, after
philosophers have interpreted it and because of that. Philosophy may
prescribe certain rules of action, though no great philosopher ever
took this to be his most important concern. Essentially, philosophy
from Plato to Hegel was "not of this world," whether it is Plato de–
scribing the philosopher as the man whose body only inhabits the
city of his fellow men, or Hegel admitting that from the point of
view of common sense, philosophy is a world stood on its head, a
uverkehrte Welt."
The challenge to tradition, this time not merely
implied but directly expressed in Marx's statement, lies in the pre–
diction that the world of common human affairs, where we orient
ourselves and think in common-sense terms, will one day become
