“The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.
This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master.
The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.
Grotius denies that all human power is established in favour of the governed, and quotes slavery as an example. His usual method of reasoning is constantly to establish right by fact.[1] It would be possible to employ a more logical method, but none could be more favourable to tyrants.
It is then, according to Grotius, doubtful whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or that hundred men to the human race: and, throughout his book, he seems to incline to the former alternative, which is also the view of Hobbes. On this showing, the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them.
As a shepherd is of a nature superior to that of his flock, the shepherds of men, i.e. their rulers, are of a nature superior to that of the peoples under them. Thus, Philo tells us, the Emperor Caligula reasoned, concluding equally well either that kings were gods, or that men were beasts.
The reasoning of Caligula agrees with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion.
Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition.[2] If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.
I have said nothing of King Adam, or Emperor Noah, father of the three great monarchs who shared out the universe, like the children of Saturn, whom some scholars have recognised in them. I trust to getting due thanks for my moderation; for, being a direct descendant of one of these princes, perhaps of the eldest branch, how do I know that a verification of titles might not leave me the legitimate king of the human race? In any case, there can be no doubt that Adam was sovereign of the world, as Robinson Crusoe was of his island, as long as he was its only inhabitant; and this empire had the advantage that the monarch, safe on his throne, had no rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear.
[1]”Learned inquiries into public right are often only the history of past abuses; and troubling to study them too deeply is a profitless infatuation” (Essay on the Interests of France in Relation to its Neighbours, by the Marquis d’Argenson). This is exactly what Grotius has done.
[2]See a short treatise of Plutarch’s entitled “That Animals Reason.””
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, chapter 2
Image: V.I. Lenin and Manifestation by Isaak Brodsky, 1919.
“It is characteristic of the entire crudeness of ‘common sense’, which takes its rise from ‘the full life’ and does not cripple its natural features by philosophical or other studies, that where it succeeds in seeing a distinction it fails to see a unity, and where it sees a unity it fails to see a distinction. If ‘common sense’ establishes distinct determinations, they immediately petrify surreptitiously, and it is considered the most reprehensible sophistry to rub together these conceptual blocks in such a way that they catch fire.”
– “Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritische Moral” by Karl Marx, printed in Franz Mehring’s Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Vol. 2, p. 456, quoted in The Concept of Nature In Marx by Alfred Schmidt, p. 50
“Marxist atheism, which is basically post-atheist, is against any devaluation of man and nature. For idealism, the supreme being is God; for the materialism which is identical with humanism, it is man. The concept of God is the most abstract expression of domination, always combined with the dogmatic assertion that the world has a total, uniformly spiritual meaning. If God exists, revolutionary man no longer comes into the picture as the maker, not – admittedly – of a world meaning, but of a meaningful social whole in which each individual is uplifted and honoured. It is no accident that Prometheus was the most distinguished saint in Marx’s philosophical calendar. Human self-consciousness, he wrote in his dissertation, must be recognized as the ‘supreme divinity’. If theory proceeds historically from the mediating connection of man and nature in social production, atheism is no longer a purely ‘ideological’ position:
[quoting from the 1844 ms:] “Atheism, as a denial of this inessentiality [of nature and man, A.S.] is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a negation of God, and asserts by this negation the existence of man. Socialism as socialism no longer requires such a mediation; it begins from the theoretical and practical sensuous consciousness of man and nature as essential beings.””
“In that … for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour, and the emergence of nature for man, he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own process of origination. Once the essentiality of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practice, and sensuously, the quest for an alien being, a being above nature and man (a quest which is an avowal of the inessentiality of nature and man) becomes impossible in practice.”
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 pages 166-7, as quoted in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature In Marx
“The renewed use of the secret orders to fasten the dictatorship of property over labor upon the South began in New Orleans in 1865, when the rebel armies were disbanded and began to return to the city. First, apparently, appeared the “Southern Cross,” determined to drive out the new Northern capitalist, and reduce the Negroes to slavery. …
Meantime, a larger and more inclusive secret order had been started in Tennessee known as the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas and North Carolina, soon fell under its action by the same methods. The new technique of the plan solidified the various objects and efforts, and provided a new unity through emphasizing the importance of race.
The race element was emphasized in order that property-holders could get the support of the majority of white laborer and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But the race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.”
– Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, by W. E. B. Du Bois, page 680
WARNING for an instance of the n-word in this image, and another in the text below.
“It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.
The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the Federal Government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the South, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of that there has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up. The methods of government have gone uncriticized, and elections are by secret understanding and manipulation; the dictatorship of capital in the South is complete.
The military dictatorship was withdrawn, and the representatives of Northern capital gave up all efforts to lead the Negro vote. The new dictatorship became a manipulation of the white labor vote which followed the lines of similar control in the North, while it proceeded to deprive the black voter by violence and force of any vote at all. The rivalry of these two classes of labor and their competition neutralized the labor vote in the South. The black voter struggled and appealed, but it was in vain. And the United States, reënforced by the increased political power of the South based on disfranchisement of black voters, took its place to reënforce the capitalistic dictatorship of the United States, which became the most powerful in the world, and which backed the new industrial imperialism and degraded colored labor the world over.
This meant a tremendous change in the whole intellectual and spiritual development of civilization in the South and in the United States because of the predominant political power of the South, built on disfranchised labor. The United States was turned into a reactionary force. It became the cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis; and it has not only brought nearer the revolution by which the power of capitalism is to be challenged, but also it is transforming the fight to the sinister aspect of a fight on racial lines embittered by awful memories.
It is argued that Negro suffrage was bad because it failed, and at the same time that its failure was a proof of its badness. Negro suffrage failed because it was overthrown by brute force. Even if it had been the best government on earth, force, exercised by a majority of richer, more intelligent and more experienced men, could have overthrown it. It was not overthrown so long as the military dictatorship of the North sustained it. But the South proved by appropriate propaganda that Negro government was the worst ever seen and that it threatened civilization. They suited their propaganda to their audience. They had tried the accusation of laziness but that was refuted by a restoration of agriculture to the pre-war level and beyond it. They tried the accusation of ignorance but this was answered by the Negro schools.
It happened that the accusation of incompetence impressed the North not simply because of the moral revolt there against graft and dishonesty but because the North had never been thoroughly converted to the idea of Negro equality. When, therefore, the North, even granting that all the South said of the Negro was not true, contemplated possibilities, it paused. Did the nation want blacks with power sitting in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, accumulating wealth and entering the learned professions? Would this not eventually and inevitably lead to social equality and even to black sons and daughters-in-law and mulatto descendants? Was it possible to contemplate such eventualities?
Under such circumstances, it was much easier to believe the accusations of the South and to listen to the proof which biology and social science hastened to adduce of the inferiority of the Negro. The North seized upon the new Darwinism, the “Survival of the Fittest,” to prove that what they had attempted in the South was an impossibility; and they did this in the face of the facts which were before them, the examples of Negro efficiency, of Negro brains, of phenomenal possibilities of advancement.
Moreover, Americans saw throughout the world the shadow of the coming change of the philanthropic attitude which had dominated the early nineteenth century, with regard to the backward races. International and commercial imperialism began to get a vision. Within the very echo of that philanthropy which had abolished the slave trade, was beginning a new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia. Arising from this, as a result of this economic foundation, came the change in the attitude toward these darker people. They were no longer “Brothers in Black”; they were inferiors. These inferiors were to be governed for their own good. They were to be raised out of sloth and laziness by being compelled to work. The whole attitude of Europe was reflected in America and it found in America support for its own attitude.
The great republic of the West was trying an impossible experiment. They were trying to make white men out of black men. It could not be done. It was a mistake to conceive it. The North and Europe were still under the sway of individual laissez-faire in industry, and “hands off” in government. It was easy, therefore, for the North to persuade itself that whatever happened politically in the South was right. If the majority did not want Negro rule, or Negro participation in government, the majority was right, and they would not allow themselves to stop and ask how that majority was made. They knew that an organized inner group was compelling the mass of white people to act as a unit; was pounding them by false social sanctions into a false uniformity.
If that part of the white South which had a vision of democracy and was willing to grant equality to Negroes of equal standing had been sustained long enough by a standing Federal police, democracy could have been established in the South. But brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power in the actions of the whites to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.
Through the rift of the opposition, between votes for and against the Negro, between high and low tariff, between free land and land monopoly, plutocracy drove a silent coach and four.
What the South did in 1876 was to make good its refusal either to give up slavery or to yield the political power based on the counting of slaves.
And so the South rode the wind into the whirlwind and accomplished what it sought. Did it pay? Did it settle either the Negro’s problem or any problem of wealth, labor, or human uplift? On the contrary, it made the government of the South a system of secret manipulations with lying and cheating. It made its religion fundamental hypocrisy. And the South knows today that the essential Negro problem is just as it was—how far it dare let the Negro be a modern man.
It was all so clear and right and logical. A nation could not exist half-slave and half-free. If it tried, either its mass of laborers would by force of competition sink into the depths of exploited, ignorant poverty, or rising in bloody revolt break the monopoly of land and materials and endow the mass with more equal income and more political power to maintain their freedom.
So in America came Civil War over the slavery of labor and the end was not peace, but the endeavor really and honestly to remove the cause of strife—to give the black freedman and the white laborer land and education and power to conduct the state in the interests of labor and not of landed oligarchy. Labor lurched forward after it had paid in blood for the chance. And labor, especially black labor, cried for Light and Land and Leading. The world laughed. It laughed North. It laughed West. But in the South it roared with hysterical, angry, vengeful laughter. It said: “Look at these niggers; they are black and poor and ignorant. How can they rule those of us who are white and have been rich and have at our command all wisdom and skill? Back to slavery with the dumb brutes!”
Still the brutes strove on and up with silent, fearful persistency. They restored the lost crops; they established schools; they gave votes to the poor whites; they established democracy; and they even saved a pittance of land and capital out of their still slave-bound wage.
The masters feared their former slaves’ success far more than their anticipated failure. They lied about the Negroes. They accused them of theft, crime, moral enormities and laughable grotesqueries. They forestalled the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor and offering them alliance and leisure. They encouraged them to ridicule Negroes and beat them, kill and burn their bodies. The planters even gave the poor whites their daughters in marriage, and raised a new oligarchy on the tottering, depleted foundations of the old oligarchy, a mass of new rulers the more ignorant, intolerant and ruthless because of their inferiority complex. And thus was built a Solid South impervious to reason, justice or fact.
With this arose a Solid North – a North born of that North which never meant to abolish Negro slavery, because its profits were built on it; but who had been gradually made by idealists and laborers and freed slaves to refuse more land to slavery; to refuse to catch and return slaves; and finally to fight for freedom since this preserved cotton, tobacco, sugar and the Southern market.
Then this new North, fired by a vision of concentrated economic power and profit greater than the world had visioned, tried to stop war and hasten back to industry. But the blind, angry, bewildered South threatened to block the building of this new industrial oligarchy by a political power increased by the very abolition of slavery, until the North had to yield to democracy and give black labor the power with which white Southern landholders threatened Northern industry.
In return, Northern capital bribed black and white labor in the South and white and black labor in the North. It thrust debt, concessions and graft on the South, while in the North it divided labor into exploiting and exploited groups of skilled and highly paid craftsmen who might and did become capitalists, and a mass of ignorant, disfranchised imported foreign slaves. The West transformed its laboring peasant-farmers into land speculators and investors and united its interests through railways to the Solid South in return for non-interference with Big Business.
God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor. Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands and “breeds without the law.” Especially workers of the New World, folks who were American and for whom America was, became ashamed of their destiny. Sons of ditch-diggers aspired to be spawn of bastard kings and thieving aristocrats rather than of rough-handed children of dirt and toil. The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America but in Asia and Africa.
The world wept because within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque Profits and Poverty, Plenty and Starvation, Empire and Democracy, staring at each other across World Depression. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876—Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.”
– Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, by W. E. B. Du Bois, pages 630-635
Image: an 1850 political cartoon attacking “threats to the Union” such as “abolition,” “Free Soil,” and “Fourierism.”
“Or does critical criticism believe that it has even begun to grasp historical reality when it continues to exclude from the movement of history the theoretical and practical relations of men to nature, natural science and industry? Or does it think it has in fact already understood any period without having understood for example the industry of that period, the immediate mode of production of life itself? Of course spiritualistic, theological critical criticism knows only (at least it imagines it does) the main political, literary and theological events of history. Just as it separates thinking from the senses, the soul from the body, and itself from the world, so it separates history from natural science and industry, and sees history’s point of origin not in coarse material production on the earth, but in vaporous clouds in the heavens.”
The Holy Family by Karl Marx, as quoted in The Concept of Nature in Marx by Alfred Schmidt, page 21. Emphasis mine.
“Marx was helped towards the concept of the “basis” in his theory of history by the anthropological materialism contributed by Feuerbach. Feuerbach was concerned not with the mechanical movement of atoms but with the qualitative multiplicity of nature and with man as a sensuous and objective being. It was Feuerbach who, through his materialist inversion of Hegelian speculation, went beyond the purely internal criticism of idealism which was characteristic of the Left Hegelians. In the words of Marx, he abandoned “drunken speculation” and went over to “sober philosophy”.(9) The Paris Manuscripts emphatically indicate Feuerbach’s significance:
“Positive humanist and naturalistic criticism dates first from Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s writings are the only works since Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic to contain a genuine theoretical revolution, and the quieter their impact the more certain, deep, extensive, and lasting it has been.”(10)
With his abstract rejection of idealism Feuerbach laid the foundation of a new, non-idealist starting-point for Marx’s thought.
With his abstract rejection of idealism Feuerbach laid the foundation of a new, non-idealist starting-point for Marx’s thought.(11) Indeed, at this stage Marx temporarily abandoned certain important dialectical motifs to which he later returned. In some passages of the Holy Family it appears as if Marx agreed with Feuerbach in identifying the dialectic itself with idealism. However in the German Ideology, the Theses on Feuerbach, and the whole of his later work Marx returned to Hegelian positions, albeit mediated through Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel.
The naturalistic and anthropological basis of Feuerbach’s critical endeavours … had a much greater significance than is commonly assumed for the origins of the materialist dialectic. … Feuerbach’s influence on Marx did not rest so much on his atheism, … as on his emotional feeling for nature and man.
The traditional interpretations of the relationship between Marx and Feuerbach are mainly restricted to an investigation of how far Feuerbach’s atheistic critique of religion and spiritualist metaphysics suggested Marx’s critique of Hegel or first made it possible. The naturalistic and anthropological basis of Feuerbach’s critical endeavours is less emphasized, even though it had a much greater significance than is commonly assumed for the origins of the materialist dialectic. Erich Thier(12) is one of the few people to have pointed out that Feuerbach’s influence on Marx did not rest so much on his atheism, which was already familiar to a man who knew both the thought of the French Enlightenment and the biblical criticism of the Left Hegelians, as on his emotional feeling for nature and man. Feuerbach’s works of the years 1842 and 1843 (the Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie and the Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft) are more important for the understanding of the Marxist concept of nature than the book picked out by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach, namely The Essence of Christianity.
For Hegel, nature, as opposed to the Idea, was something derivative
Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel started at the crux of any idealist system, the concept of nature. For Hegel, nature, as opposed to the Idea, was something derivative:
“Nature comes first in time, but the Absolute Prius is the Idea; this Absolute Prius is the last thing, the true beginning, the Alpha is the Omega.”(13)
Hegel’s philosophy of nature is, in Hegelian terminology, the science of the Idea in its other-being. In nature the Idea confronts us in an immediate form not yet purified to become the Concept. It is the Concept posited in its lack of conceptual content. Nature is not a being possessing its own self-determination, but the moment of estrangement which the Idea in its abstract-general form must undergo in order to return to itself completely as Spirit. One of the strangest and most problematic transitions in the whole of Hegel’s philosophy, criticized equally by Feuerbach and by Marx, is the transition from the Logic whose conclusion is the pure Idea, to the Philosophy of Nature, that is to say from thought to sensuous-material being:
“The absolute freedom of the Idea is that it … decides to release freely from itself, as its own mirror-image, the moment of its own Specificity, and of the first determination or other-being, the Idea Immediate, i.e. nature.”(14)
Nature [for Hegel] is not a being possessing its own self-determination, but the moment of estrangement which the Idea in its abstract-general form must undergo in order to return to itself completely as Spirit.
How far does the Idea, so to speak, lose its dialectical character in the course of its transformation into nature? How, in view of the fact that, as “absolute”, the Idea is always present to itself, does it come to estrange, to destroy itself in a world of objective-material existence? These questions remain shrouded in darkness in Hegel. Moreover, after having been brought forth by the Idea, nature gradually supersedes all natural determinations, and passes over into Spirit as its higher truth. The way in which Hegel presents this transition from nature to Spirit recalls the immaterial culmination of the dialectic of knowledge and the known in the Phenomenology at the stage of absolute knowledge which Marx precisely criticized. This is how Hegel put it:
“We have shown, in the introduction to the Philosophy of the Spirit, how nature itself supersedes its externality and particularity, its materiality, as something untrue, something which is not in accordance with the Concept internal to it, and through this attains to immateriality by going over into the Spirit.”(15)
Holding the view that nature progressively lays aside its externality and brings forth the soul, Hegel believed that he could deduce from this the immaterial character of nature in general:
“Everything material is superseded by the Spirit-in-itself working in nature, and this supersession culminates in the substance of the soul. The soul therefore appears as the ideality of all the material, as all immateriality, so that everything called material (however much it deludes common sense into accepting its independence) is recognized as dependent in relation to the Spirit.”(16)
Instead of beginning with philosophy in order to end with philosophy, [Feuerbach] wanted to begin with non-philosophy in order through philosophy to return to non-philosophy.
To this natural philosophical idealism of Hegel’s, Feuerbach – as we saw – counterposed his own naturalism. For Feuerbach, Hegel’s philosophy is philosophy from the standpoint of the philosopher, while he is a philosopher from the standpoint of non-philosophy. Instead of beginning with philosophy in order to end with philosophy, he wanted to begin with non-philosophy in order through philosophy to return to non-philosophy. In the Vorläufige Thesen, Feuerbach gave the following outline of his programme of a “negation of all school philosophy”:(17)
“The philosopher must accept into the text of philosophy what in Hegel is degraded to the level of a note, namely what in man does not philosophize, what is rather opposed to philosophy and abstract thought.… Philosophy has therefore to begin not with itself but with its antithesis, with non-philosophy. This is our internal essence, which is unphilosophical, absolutely anti-scholastic, and distinct from thought. This is the principle of sensualism.”(18)
The new philosophy no longer claimed any special position as against the other sciences but had its presupposition, like them, in nature. Feuerbach’s conception, appropriately transformed, can be traced in Marx himself right through to Capital:
“All the sciences must be founded on nature. A theory is no more than a hypothesis until its basis in nature is found.”(19)
Nature, without which reason would lack matter, is grounded in itself. “Being is from itself and through itself.” Nature is the causa sui.
Nature, without which reason would lack matter, is grounded in itself. “Being is from itself and through itself.”(20) Nature is the causa sui. Feuerbach’s main criticism was directed against Hegel’s view that nature is the Absolute Idea in estrangement:
“The Hegelian view that nature, reality, is posited by the Idea is only the rational expression of the theological teaching that nature is created by God, that material being is created by an immaterial, that is an abstract, being. At the end of the Logic the Absolute Idea even contrives to come to a nebulous “decision”, in this way itself documenting its origin in the theological heaven.”(21)
Feuerbach turned Thought, Spirit, from an absolute Subject into a human quality alongside other natural qualities.
Feuerbach turned Thought, Spirit, from an absolute Subject into a human quality alongside other natural qualities. All consciousness is the consciousness of corporeal men. The understanding of man as a needy, sensuous physiological being is therefore the precondition of any theory of subjectivity:
“Man alone is the groundwork of the Fichtean Ego, of the Leibnizian monad, of the Absolute.”(22)
In the concluding stage of classical German philosophy the supra-empirical Ego, “consciousness in general”, finally proved to be an abstraction from the particular finite Subjects. The problem of the relation between the transcendental Ego and the empirical-psychological Ego was already very difficult in Kant’s philosophy. Kant ought, in accordance with his programme, to have insisted strictly on the distinction between the two Egos. However, in concretely implementing the critique of reason, he could not avoid blurring this distinction and allowing the two Egos to merge. Owing to this even his transcendental Subject took on a certain anthropological colouring. In Feuerbach, who stood at the end of this whole movement of thought, man became the unique theme, precisely as an empirical and natural being:
“The new philosophy makes man (including nature, as the basis of man) into the sole, the universal, and the highest object of philosophy. It therefore makes anthropology, including physiology, into the universal science.”(23)
Just as Feuerbach in his critique of religion sought to comprehend the content of religion as an alienation of man as a sensuous being, so here he viewed the absolute Spirit as an alienation of the finite human mind.
Just as Feuerbach in his critique of religion sought to comprehend the content of religion as an alienation of man as a sensuous being, so here he viewed the absolute Spirit as an alienation of the finite human mind. Hegel’s view that the logical categories existed before the creation of the world and of a finite Spirit, is in this way rejected and logical forms are declared to be the functions of transient human beings:
“Metaphysics or logic is only a real, immanent science when it is not separated from the so-called subjective Spirit. Metaphysics is esoteric psychology.”(24)
This idea of proceeding not from the absolute spirit but from the corporeal man is also of great importance for the Marxist theory of subjectivity. Marx is in agreement with the following passage from Feuerbach:
“The reality, the Subject of reason is only man. It is man who thinks, not the Ego or Reason.”(25)
The indissoluble distinction between concept and reality was indeed recognized by Hegel, but at the same time devalued by being allocated to the Subject side as a mere thought-determination. This distinction necessarily resulted from Feuerbach’s reduction of the absolute Spirit to the human mind. It is not possible to gain a grasp of “the real” through an unbroken chain of deductions. Feuerbach expressed this idea in a very penetrating manner:
“The real cannot be represented in thought in whole numbers, but only in fractions. This distinction is a reasonable one, for it rests on the nature of thought, whose essence is generality, as opposed to reality, whose essence is individuality. What prevents this distinction from becoming a literal contradiction between the thought and the real is the fact that thought does not proceed in a straight line, in identity with itself, but is interrupted by sense-perception. Only thought which determines and rectifies itself by means of sense-perception is real, objective thought: the thought of objective truth.”(26)
Marx went beyond Feuerbach in bringing not only sensuous intuition but also the whole of human practice into the process of knowledge as a constitutive moment.
Marx went beyond Feuerbach in bringing not only sensuous intuition but also the whole of human practice into the process of knowledge as a constitutive moment. In doing this he also fulfilled Feuerbach’s requirement that the new philosophy must differ “in toto genere from the old”.(27) Only by showing that they are dialectical moments of practice do Feuerbach’s authorities, man and nature, arrive at concreteness. Marx, like Feuerbach, wrote of “the priority of external nature”,(28) although with the critical reservation that any such priority could only exist within mediation.
Marx defined nature (the material of human activity) as that which is not particular to the Subject, not incorporated in the modes of human appropriation, and not identical with men in general. He did not mean that this extra-human reality was to be understood ontologically in the sense of an unmediated objectivism. In Feuerbach, man the species-being, provided with merely natural qualities, confronts the dead objectivity of nature passively and intuitively rather than actively and practically, in a subjectivity which remains empty. What Feuerbach described as the unity of man and nature related only to the romantically transfigured fact that man arose out of nature, and not to man’s socio-historically mediated unity with nature in industry.
Nature as a whole was for Feuerbach an unhistorical, homogeneous substratum … Nature was for Marx both an element of human practice and the totality of everything that exists. By unreflectively stressing the totality alone Feuerbach succumbed to the naive-realist myth of a “pure nature” and, in ideological fashion, identified the immediate existence of men with their essence. It was not Marx’s intention simply to replace Hegel’s “World Spirit” with a material “World Substance” which would be an equally metaphysical principle.
Marx defined nature (the material of human activity) as that which is not particular to the Subject, not incorporated in the modes of human appropriation, and not identical with men in general. He did not mean that this extra-human reality was to be understood ontologically in the sense of an unmediated objectivism. In Feuerbach, man the species-being, provided with merely natural qualities, confronts the dead objectivity of nature passively and intuitively rather than actively and practically, in a subjectivity which remains empty.(29) What Feuerbach described as the unity of man and nature related only to the romantically transfigured fact that man arose out of nature, and not to man’s socio-historically mediated unity with nature in industry. The latter type of unity, however, is at all stages just as much a differentiation, the appropriation of something external, and a separation. Feuerbach’s man does not emerge as an independent productive force but remains bound to pre-human nature. Physical activity does, it is true, presuppose this natural basis as a counter-block to man’s transcending consciousness. All work is work on a fixed being which nevertheless proves transitory and penetrable under the action of the living Subjects. Feuerbach’s anthropological accentuation of man as opposed to the rest of nature was always abstract. Nature as a whole was for Feuerbach an unhistorical, homogeneous substratum, while the essence of the Marxist critique was the dissolution of this homogeneity into a dialectic of Subject and Object. Nature was for Marx both an element of human practice and the totality of everything that exists. By unreflectively stressing the totality alone Feuerbach succumbed to the naive-realist myth of a “pure nature”(30) and, in ideological fashion,(31) identified the immediate existence of men with their essence. It was not Marx’s intention simply to replace Hegel’s “World Spirit” with a material “World Substance” which would be an equally metaphysical principle. He did not reject Hegelian idealism abstractly like Feuerbach, but rather saw in it truth expressed in an untrue form. Marx accepted the idealist view that the world is mediated through the Subject. He considered however that he could bring home the full significance of this idea by showing what was the true pathos of “creation” as presented by philosophers from Kant to Hegel: the creator of the objective world is the socio-historical life-process of human beings. In modern times extra-human natural existence has been reduced more and more to a function of human social organization. The philosophical reflection of this is that the determinations of objectivity have entered in greater and greater measure into the Subject, until at the culminating point of post-Kantian speculation they become completely absorbed in it. As a result, in Hegel too, the process of production remains in general an action of the Spirit, despite his magnificent empirical insights in points of detail. As Feuerbach said, in Hegel’s logic thought is ‘in uninterrupted unity with itself; the objects of thought are only its determinations. They are entirely incorporated in the Idea and have nothing of their own which could remain outside thought.”(32) The contradiction between the Subject and the Object is superseded in Hegel within the Subject as the Absolute. However much non-identity is the driving force of the dialectical process in its individual stages, it is idealist identity which triumphs at the end of the system. In the Marxist dialectic the reverse is the case: it is non-identity which is victorious in the last instance, precisely because Marx, unlike Feuerbach, fully recognized the significance of the Hegelian dialectic:
“Hegel’s dialectic is the basis of any dialectic, but only after its mystical form has been cast off.”(33)
Marx meant by the “mystical form” of the Hegelian dialectic the idealist interpretation of the idea of the mediacy(33a) of everything immediate. He retained Feuerbach’s naturalistic monism to the extent that he regarded both Subject and Object as “nature”.
At the same time he overcame the abstractly ontological character of this monism by relating nature and all natural consciousness to the life-process of society. Since the mediating Subjects, finite, temporally determined men, are themselves a part of the reality of things mediated through them, the idea of the mediacy of the immediate does not in its Marxist version lead to idealism. In fact for Marx, the immediacy of nature, in so far as, in opposition to Feuerbach, he regarded it as socially stamped, does not prove to be a vanishing appearance but retains its genetic priority over men and their consciousness.
However much non-identity is the driving force of the dialectical process in its individual stages, it is idealist identity which triumphs at the end of the [Hegelian] system. In the Marxist dialectic the reverse is the case: it is non-identity which is victorious in the last instance … [Marx] retained Feuerbach’s naturalistic monism to the extent that he regarded both Subject and Object as “nature”. At the same time he overcame the abstractly ontological character of this monism by relating nature and all natural consciousness to the life-process of society.
Marx described extra-human reality which is both independent of men and mediated or, at least, capable of being mediated with them, by using the following synonymous terms: “material”, “nature”, “stuff of nature”, “natural thing”, “earth”, “objective moments of labour’s existence”, “objective” or “material (sachlich) conditions of labour”. Since men constitute a component of this reality, the concept of “nature” is identical with the “whole of reality”(34) in the Marxist view. This concept of nature as the whole of reality did not result in an ultimate Weltanschauung or a dogmatic metaphysic but simply circumscribed the horizon of thought within which the new materialism moved. Materialist philosophy consists, in the words of Engels, in explaining the world from the world itself.(35) This concept of nature was ‘dogmatic’ enough to exclude from the theoretical construction anything Marx called mysticism or ideology; at the same time it was conceived undogmatically and broad-mindedly enough to prevent nature itself from receiving a metaphysical consecration or indeed ossifying into a final ontological principle.
Nature in this broad sense is the sole object of knowledge. On the one hand, it includes the forms of human society; on the other, it only appears in thought and in reality in virtue of these forms. In taking this view Marx showed himself to be rooted in the sensualism of Feuerbach, and in fact he proceeded from sense experience as the “basis of all science”.(36) Materialist theory was for him identical with a scientific attitude in general:
“Science is only genuine science when it proceeds from sense experience, in the two forms of sense perception and sensuous need; i.e. only when it proceeds from nature”.(37)
[Marx’s] concept of nature was ‘dogmatic’ enough to exclude from the theoretical construction anything Marx called mysticism or ideology; at the same time it was conceived undogmatically and broad-mindedly enough to prevent nature itself from receiving a metaphysical consecration or indeed ossifying into a final ontological principle. Nature in this broad sense is the sole object of knowledge. On the one hand, it includes the forms of human society; on the other, it only appears in thought and in reality in virtue of these forms.
The sensuous world and finite men in their existing social setting (the essence and the appearance at the same time) are the only quantities taken into account by Marxist theory. At bottom, there existed for Marx only “man and his labour on the one side, nature and its materials on the other”.(38) On the basis of the objective logic of the human work-situation, he attempted to comprehend the other areas of life as well:
“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them”.(39)
Men construe the world, in the various spheres of their culture, on the model of their contemporary struggle with nature. Holding this view, both Marx and Feuerbach regarded all notions about supra-natural regions of existence as expressions of a negative organization of life. The historical movement,(40) they said, is a mutual relation between men and men, and between men and nature. It is true that the “world-material” comprises both Subject and Object. However, what is essential is that historically the incompatibility of man with nature, i.e. in the last analysis the necessity of labour, triumphs over the unity of man and nature.”
– The Concept of Nature In Marx by Alfred Schmidt, pages 21-30
9. Holy Family, p. 168.
10. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 64.
10. In an article entitled ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie’, Karl Löwith dealt exhaustively with Feuerbach’s role after the collapse of speculative idealism, and correctly pointed out that one cannot do justice to the specific character of Feuerbach’s philosophy as the consciousness of this collapse in the conditions of Vormärz (see note 4a), if one measures him abstractly against the intellectual achievements of the German Idealists: ‘With Feuerbach begins the epoch … of philosophy cut off from tradition. In hindsight, this was admittedly a relapse into primitive concepts and methods, but if we look forward, it represented the productive attempt to transform the questions posed by philosophy in accordance with the actually changed conditions of existence of these later generations’ (Logos, Vol. XVII, Tübingen, 1928, p. 327). For an evaluation of Feuerbach’s part in the origins of dialectical materialism, see also Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, Berlin, 1952, pp. 378–84, where those aspects of Feuerbach’s naturalistic and anthropological theory are brought out which point beyond mechanical materialism. Marx’s final judgment on Feuerbach is also of interest. This judgment was formed during the 1850s and 1860s, while Marx was for the second time thoroughly working out his own relation to Hegel, in the context of his economic analysis: ‘Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is extremely poor. All the same he was epoch-making after Hegel because he laid stress on certain points which were disagreeable to the Christian consciousness but important for the progress of criticism, and which Hegel had left in mystic semi-obscurity’ (Marx to Schweitzer, 24 January 1865, Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels [cited as MESC], p. 185).
12. cf. Thier’s introduction to his edition of the Paris Manuscripts, published as Nationalökonomie und Philosophie (Berlin, 1950), p. 25.
13. Enzyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (cited as Enzyclopädie), II, Naturphilosophie, supplement to paragraph 248, p. 58; English translation, A. V. Miller, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Oxford, 1970, p. 19.
“14. Enzyclopädie, 1817 edition, paragraph 244, p. 201.
15. Enzyclopädie, III, Die Philosophie des Geistes, supplement to paragraph 389, p. 54.
16. op. cit., p. 58.
17. ‘Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie’, published in Kleine Philosophische Schriften (1842–45), ed. M. G. Lange, Leipzig, 1950, p. 74.
18. op. cit., p. 67 et seq.
19. op. cit., p. 77.
20. op. cit., p. 73.
21. op. cit., p. 72.
22. op. cit., p. 77.
23. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, paragraph 54, published in Kleine Philosophische Schriften, p. 167.
24. Vorläufige Thesen, p. 58.
25. Grundsätze, p. 163.
26. op. cit., p. 159.
27. op. cit., p. 170.
28. German Ideology, p. 59. See also The Holy Family, p. 224, where Marx wrote: ‘In Hegel’s philosophy of history, as in his philosophy of nature, the son engenders the mother, the Spirit nature … the result the beginning.’
29. This brings the abstract naturalist Feuerbach into a peculiarly complementary relation with Kierkegaard. Feuerbach too invited his readers to think ‘in existence’. Cf. Grundsätze, p. 164. Both thinkers charged Hegel with excessive abstractness, in the name of principles far more abstract than those met with in Hegelian idealism. The critique of idealism does not attain a more concrete medium either with the aid of a naturalistic thesis of priority in which its socio-historical preconditions are not reflected or as religious inwardness. In his book From Hegel to Nietzsche, London, 1965, Karl Löwith placed Marx and Kierkegaard side by side as critics of Hegel, whereas in fact Marx, as the exponent of a theory of mediation, stands far closer to Hegel than Kierkegaard does. Marx saw that Hegel’s theory of mediation could not simply be replaced with the cult of an ‘immediately given’, no matter how this was constituted, but rather that the only way of proceeding beyond Hegel’s form of the dialectic was to turn the concept of mediation against its idealist surroundings. On the ontological character of Feuerbach’s materialism, see also Lucien Sebag, ‘Marx, Feuerbach, et la critique de la religion’, La Nouvelle Critique, Paris, 1955, No. 64, p. 32.
30. cf. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, London, 1968, pp. 67–8: ‘Feuerbach’s humanism is thus founded on a myth: pure nature. Nature and the object seem to him to have been “given from all eternity”, in a mysterious harmony with man – a harmony which the philosopher alone can perceive. The object is posited as an object of intuition, not as a product of social activity or practice. Feuerbach’s nature is that of the virgin forest, or of an atoll recently arisen in the Pacific Ocean.’ See also p. 106: ‘Nature itself exists for us only as a content, in experience and human practice.’ The critique of Feuerbach’s ‘pure nature’ could be pushed still further. Lefebvre states correctly that nature is already modified by man; in addition to this, those areas of nature not yet drawn into the sphere of human production – Lefebvre’s primitive forest or atoll in the Pacific – can only be viewed and comprehended through the categories of the already appropriated part of nature. Just as in Hegel’s aesthetic the perception of natural beauty presupposes the perception of artistic beauty, in opposition to the common view, Marx saw the as yet unmediated part of nature as only relevant from the point of view of its possible future modification.
31. The youthful Engels pointed this out in the fragment on Feuerbach, printed in the German Ideology, pp. 673–5, which refers to paragraph 27 of the Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, in Kleine Philosophische Schriften, pp. 132 et seq. This is the passage from Feuerbach: ‘My essence is my existence. The fish is in the water, but its essence cannot be separated from this existence. Even language identifies existence and essence. Only in human life is existence divorced from essence – but only in exceptional, unhappy cases; it happens that a person’s essence is not in the place where he exists, but just because of this division his soul is not truly in the place where his body really is.… But all beings – apart from abnormal cases – are glad to be in the place where they are, and are glad to be what they are, i.e. their essence is not separated from their existence, nor their existence from their essence.’ To which Engels replies, in line with the general critique of ideology: ‘A fine panegyric upon the existing state of things. Exceptional cases and a few abnormal cases apart, when you are seven years old you are glad to become a door-keeper in a coalmine and to remain alone in the dark for fourteen hours a day, and because it is your existence, therefore it is also your essence.… It is your “essence” to be subservient to a branch of labour.’ Because Hegel’s rich context of mediation shrivelled up in Feuerbach into a context of positive immediacy, the latter’s naïve materialism became an equally naïve idealism, which viewed the identity of appearance and essence in man as a simple natural datum, although, precisely in social reality, this identity is not present.
32. Kleine Philosophische Schriften, p. 99.
33. Marx to Kugelmann, 6 March 1868, Letters to Dr Kugelmann, p. 63.
33a. [The word ‘Vermitteltheit’ has been rendered throughout as ‘mediacy’.]
34. cf. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 311.
35. Dialectics of Nature, p. 7.
36. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 164.
37. loc. cit. This principle is also valid for the mature Marx. Cf. Capital, Vol. I, p. 372, n. 3. Sidney Hook, in his book From Hegel to Marx, New York, 1936, p. 28, also takes the view that Marx regarded materialism as ‘the clearest expression of the methodology of science’.
38. Capital, Vol. I, p. 184.
39. op. cit., p. 372, n. 3.
40. Marx criticized Feuerbach in the German Ideology for separating the movement of history from nature: ‘As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist’ (pp. 59–60). But even when nature does enter into the purview of history, this never occurs in such a way that nature appears as an element of social production. In particular, ever since Montesquieu there have been many different ‘theories of the geographical environment’, where nature is seen as an external factor, operating mechanically, to which men must conform in a similarly mechanical way. Plekhanov himself was not free from such Darwinian distortions. In his Beiträgen zur Geschichte des Materialismus, Berlin, 1946, p. 135, he had the following declaration to make: ‘The character of the natural environment determines the character of the social environment.’ Even in Hegel’s Vernunft in der Geschichte, Hamburg, 1955, p. 187, the ‘natural context’ is merely found to be the ‘geographical basis of world history’, and not in the first place the objective precondition for social labour, however much the labour-relation is otherwise seen to reflect the natural context. Engels emphatically opposed the theory of the geographical environment in the Dialectics of Nature (p. 172) bringing out against it the factor of intervention by the human Subject: ‘The naturalistic conception of history, as found, for instance, to a greater or lesser extent in Draper and other scientists, as if nature exclusively reacts on man, and natural conditions everywhere exclusively determined his historical development, is therefore one-sided and forgets that man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself. There is damned little left of “nature” as it was in Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it. The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the human beings themselves have continually changed, and all owing to human activity, while the changes of nature in Germany which have occurred in the process of time without human interference are incalculably small.’ On the relation between the theory of the environment and the Marxist conception of history, see also Leo Kofler, Zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Halle, 1948, p. 511. On the merely indirect impact of geographical factors on the course of history, cf, J. V. Stalin, ‘On Dialectical and Historical Materialism’ (1938) in Leninism, London, 1940, pp. 604–05.”
“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive state. We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.”
– Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, Chapter 7: The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value, Section 1 – The Labour Process or the Production of Use Values, pages 187-188 in the Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 35
GLOBAL BODY 