The Hylozoic Abyss: An Inquiry into Joseph Dietzgen’s Materialist Subjectivity
In the obscure annals of proletarian philosophy, the name Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888)—that tanner-philosopher of Rhineland extraction—seldom receives the solemn consideration befitting the originality and breadth of his dialectical materialism. Mistakenly aligned too frequently as a mere mouthpiece of Marxian orthodoxy, Dietzgen’s own writings betray an altogether different current—a hylozoic intuition of mind and matter that refuses to subordinate the subjective faculty to mere derivative of external conditions, asserting instead their unity in a superficially paradoxical but ontologically fecund scheme.
It is this unity, particularly as revealed through Dietzgen’s peculiar conceptual handling of the term “mind-stuff” (Geistesstoff), wherein an apparent conception of material subjectivity emerges, obscure yet profound. To dismiss this as an idiosyncratic formulation—perhaps a rhetorical indulgence of a semi-literate autodidact—would be to overlook a subtle substantiation of an extremely rare epistemological gesture: the naturalization of dialectic within a decidedly non-dualistic framework, one that neither evaporates the subject in material determinism, nor abstracts consciousness into a noumenal ether.
Where Hegel had dramatized Spirit’s journey toward self-knowing in the theatre of Weltgeschichte, and Marx famously inverted the dialectical method to anchor it in practical human labour, Dietzgen introduced an altogether more audacious claim: that thinking itself is not merely conditioned by material existence—it is a subclass of materiality. “Mind is a thing,” he writes, “a part of nature’s totality, not its antipode.”¹ This assertion, so elegant yet daring, undermines the Cartesian sedimentation of centuries—all without recourse to idealism or spiritualism.
The subtlety arises, however, when Dietzgen elaborates this fundament upon the notion that concepts, ideas, and all mental operations are themselves “material in nature”—not metaphorically, as in some convenient analogy, but ontologically. This diverges not only from dualistic traditions, but also from emergent materialist paradigms such as those found in Feuerbach or even in Engels’ dialectics of nature. Indeed, Dietzgen insists that no meaningful distinction can be drawn between the atoms composing a stone and the “atoms of thought”; this amounts to a radical continuity, a hylozoism of cognition, or more precisely, a universal monism wherein not only life but mentation per se is a quality of matter².
To appreciate this fully, one must examine a particularly illuminating but oft-neglected passage from the “Philosophical Letters,” wherein the philosopher discusses “the consciousness of the concept of consciousness itself.”³ This reflexivity—consciousness thinking about its own nature—becomes, for Dietzgen, the key to dissolving the illusion of transcendence. In pondering ourselves, we do not escape nature; rather, we enact its most complex moment. Thus, the thinking of thought is not some rupture in the material order but is its apex. Here lies precisely the hylozoic abyss: in positing no gap between knowing and being, Dietzgen confronts us with a world in which every act of intellection is also an event in the unfolding of matter.
What renders him a fringe figure is precisely the unwillingness, both in his lifetime and thereafter, of mainstream philosophical discourse to adopt this uncompromising flattening of ontology. Materialism had fled from animism; subjectivity was to be flaunted as a ghostly epiphenomenon, not integrated into an unbroken continuum of substance. Dietzgen’s refusal to entertain these dichotomies—his insistence that “consciousness is a natural function, like digestion or combustion”⁴—shocked both the idealist and the mechanist, for it undermined the methodological premises of both camps.
Further, this position implies an enchanting, even mystical corollary: that epistemology is merely the vertical striation of ontology. Knowing is not the apprehension of the world by a separate soul or mind, but the world’s mode of self-differentiation. The “mind-stuff,” in this reading, is not a special category, but an inflection of organization, an order of complexity in the general topology of the real. There can be no “outside” of matter from which to judge its properties; the judge is always already folded within the judged.
Hitherto, commentators have typically misread Dietzgen as simply prefiguring a coarse neuroscientific realism, as though his insistence on the materiality of mind meant only that thoughts are the byproducts of corporeal mechanisms. But this is a vulgar misinterpretation, wholly insensitive to the synergetic dimension of his work. For Dietzgen, the entanglement of idea and object is not mechanical, but dialectical and synthetic, requiring a reformulation of perception itself. Each act of naming, for example, is not a passive labeling but an active construction of reality; thus, semantics is ontogenesis.
This has implications not only for metaphysics but also for praxis. For if human cognition is a material force akin to fire or gravity, then its political application—memory, imagination, critique—is transformative not merely ideologically but ontically. Dietzgen’s proletarian materialism thereby transcends Marxist reductionism, promoting thinking itself as a revolutionary activity in the strongest material sense.
In this perspective, Dietzgen anticipates certain poststructuralist insights (that language constitutes reality), while eluding their drift into performative arbitrariness by rooting language in the same substance as clay, blood, and sun. Where Derrida dissembles the sign, Dietzgen re-composes its substance. Where Foucault disperses subjectivity into power, Dietzgen regathers it under the banner of nature-with-awareness.
In conclusion, the mind-stuff of Dietzgen is neither the ethereal soul nor the passive effect of processual flesh, but a liminal body—which is to say, a fulcrum in the self-knowing of matter. The subtleness of this view lies in its disavowal of supernaturalism while preserving the sacred; its radical implication that matter can think, and in thinking, become more than itself. Thus, Joseph Dietzgen—obscured by the shadows of his more radiant successors—emerges, upon closer examination, as the clandestine progenitor of a distinctly proletarian gnosis: one in which epistemic humility reveals ontological wonder.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
materialism, epistemology, hylozoism, dialectic, monism, proletarian philosophy, ontology
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¹ Dietzgen, Joseph. _The Positive Outcome of Philosophy_. Trans. Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1906. p. 58.
² The comparison here parallels Spinoza’s doctrine of attributes, but Dietzgen robustly avoids any pantheistic or theological overtones in his conceptualization.
³ See Letter 5 in _Philosophical Letters to a Working Man_, in which Dietzgen elucidates the recursive dimension of consciousness as integral to nature’s immanence.
⁴ Dietzgen, “Letters on Logic,” in _Selected Works_, ed. M. Hauptmann, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1956.