Solipsism

That thinking can not be separated from praxis is demonstrated by a logical fallacy thinkers often fall prey to. It is a form of solipsism in which the act of thinking is confused for the object of thought. Kant warned us a bout this logical fallacy in his Critique of pure reason, where he writes that we necessarily commit it when thinking about absolutes (god, soul, immortality) - the mind is running on empty, coming to know nothing but itself, but then the result of this process is presented as something objectively existing.

I will arbitrarily select four instances of this fallacy and look into them. The first is Hegel's absolute spirit. The movement of his dialectics starts with the absolute - that is with the abstraction which denies its own genesis as abstraction from the particular, thereby becoming absolute nothingness - and returns via the particular back to absolute nothingness: "You are dust and you return to dust." That is why Marx had to turn Hegel on his head so that things might once again catch a foothold: the movement of Kapital starts with the particular (use value and value of the commodity, the façade capital presents vis a vis individuals) to move from there to the essence of capitalistic production (the extraction of surplus value) and then return to the commodity in the third volume of Kapital. While Hegel's dialectics is solipsistic, Marx' is hermeneutic - the movement between particular and universal does not return to its origin, it moves concentrically towards the truth.

The second is Heidegger's concept of being. Heidegger quite explicitly stated that he wanted to commit the aforementioned fallacy: he believed being is unveiled in language. What is being? As with Hegel's spirit it is the highest degree of abstraction from anything particular, or to put it another way: it is at once the purest concept, and at the same time it is none at all. It is the ultimate concept since it is an ultimate abstraction. It is not a concept, because it does not signify anything: it does not signify any object (it is abstracted from all particular objects), nor does it signify any subjective phenomenon (it is hypostatized as something objective)

The third is Freud's infamous libido. Freud's fallacy is somewhat different since it does not take the process of abstraction to the absolute limit of nothingness but stops half way. Nonetheless one can immediately see the fault in his theory: the concept of libido is an abstraction from all positive desires, but is given metaphysical life of its own. Freud treats libido as an actually existing object. Since he is lacking sociological concepts (and most of the classic works in sociology had already been written when he was developing his theory), he has to conjure speculative metaphysical concepts - libido, eros, thanatos - to patch up the holes in his theory. They become spectres, unable to recall their carnal history, that is their social origin.

The fourth example is rather special, since it does not involve the singular subject but the body politic. Theories of natural law succumb to an analogous type of circular reasoning. The social contract, by which men entered the political state, they tell us, was agreed upon by atomized individuals acting in their own interest. Atomized individuals are an abstraction, or rather an institutionalised fiction of the political state, which is then projected into an antecedent state of affairs, meant to justify themselves by and through themselves. Abstract individuals are what the state and market create, they are products, not the soil from which state and capitalism grow. Bentham was sceptical of the speculative natural state and avoided circular reasoning by introducing the idea of utility, yet he forgot to ask himself: whose benefit?