Back in Cambridge, we get a discussion between Max, Eleanor, and Czech student Lenka on, fittingly enough, the role of the Muses in the consciousness of Sappho. Max, uninvited to the lesson, interjects himself into the conversation, and Lenka, a Czech graduate student who is infatuated with Max, is only happy to oblige against Eleanor’s objections. The discussion of Sappho’s “Poem of Jealousy” stalls on the question of whether the poet’s experience of “love, desire and jealousy” comes from her body or from the god’s interjection into her soul. What should be a lesson on Sappho quickly turns into a more general discussion of free will versus determinism, with Max arguing in favor of a brain “which you can make out of beer cans,” Eleanor defending the mind/body distinction on the grounds that “experiencing love is different from experiencing a bee sting.” Lenka, though the only student in the scene, becomes the Socratic moderator of the discussion.
Max’s defense of biological determinism is quickly exposed as a necessary extension of his lapsed Marxism. Lenka has read one of Max’s books (either Class and Consciousness or Masses and Materialism), and notes that Max’s only acceptable definition of the mind is the collective mind, which makes him hesitant to support the concept of an individual mind except as a uniform brain. Lenka accuses his stance in the mind/body debate as having a “materialist agenda.” After Lenka leaves, Max quickly confirms her larger points, as he defends the original idea of the Communist Party, which was “made from a single piece of timber. The struggle…for socialism through organized labor.” Max dismisses the current Western European manifestation of Marxism as scattered, namely the Social Democratic missions of “anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice.”
Max maintains a rather idealistic perspective on Marxism, one that flies in the face of the materialist implications of Marxist philosophy. It’s interesting that Max would use such a biological approach to defending Marxism, particularly since, in The German Ideology, Marx lumped consciousness with religion and all the other social structures that derive from the base relationship of man’s ability “to produce their means of subsistence,” where “men are indirectly producing their actual material life.” To Marx, the biological approach to the mind was secondary to the social and political relationship between man and his labor. To Marx, consciousness derives not from the beer can machinery of the mind, but from social relationships, arguing, “the phantom forces of the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material-life processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”
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