Luke Morris

4/18/2004

Karl Marx and the Nature of Man

            Though Karl Marx has a lot to say about politics, economics, and labor relations, these do not form the core of his thought; his system rests, rather, on his view of the fundamental nature of man and reality.  The notion of the organic state that comprises the end goal of the communist revolution depends on the progressive movement of human history.  The key principle of man’s nature is productive activity.  Nature, then, provides the material upon which man acts.  History does not move towards its end by an idealized mental or spiritual process, as Hegel would have it, but through the productive actions of human beings it does approach a goal.  Can Marx have it both ways, though?  Can history evolve as a process of human development in itself, without the self-sufficient character of Geist to guide it?  I do not find in Marx’s work a satisfactory solution to the problem.  While he is right in holding a materialist metaphysics, and in viewing man’s nature as that of a productive individual, by doing so Marx cannot firmly ground the teleological view of history that leads to the organic society.

            To show where Marx goes right and wrong, we must first show where his ideas start.  What is the “organic state,” and how does it relate to Marx’s view of human society?  The original conception of a state – meaning society as a whole, not merely the government thereof – as a single organic body, of which the individuals form its “organs,” goes back to Plato’s Republic, but Hegel’s formulation has the greatest influence on Marx.  For Hegel, the state is the “spiritual individual,” the organized whole of the people, by which the “universal Idea,” or Geist, manifests itself.  Thus, “All the value man has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the state” (84).  This belief leads to Hegel’s unorthodox view of freedom.  As opposed to “abstract freedom,” the liberty to do whatever one wants, Hegel claims that true freedom comes only through acting rationally, according to natural law as expressed through the state.  Freedom, then, actually limits the “license of particular desires” (83).  Morality is actualized through the state’s prescience in individual action, law and morality are interdependent and inseparable, and the individual’s identity is tied in to his relations to others and to the state as a whole (91). 

            Hegel’s view of the organic state foreshadows Marx’s vision of the communist society, though our picture is vague on what Marx thinks that society might look like.  He seems to envision an ideal of final communism as a classless, stateless, property-less way of life.  Though he sees society as an organic whole, he wants to avoid the mistake of placing the abstraction “society” above, and in contrast to, the individual (323).  On the contrary, he claims that man’s social life and his individual life are one and the same – man and society are inseparably linked, each surviving for the sake of the other, though in reality there is no other – individual existence is social actualization.  In other words, “The individual is the social being.  The expression of his life . . . is therefore an expression and assertion of social life” (323).  But does this mean that Marx believes in the organic state?  He does not carry it out as explicitly as Hegel does; however, we can sense it lurking in Marxian thought beneath the notion of “species being.”

            “Man is a species-being,” Marx writes, “not only in that he practically and theoretically makes his own species as well as that of other things his object, but also . . . in that as present and living species he considers himself to be a universal and consequently free being” (315-16).  Wage labor, of course, alienates man from himself, from other men, and from his species as a whole; he sees himself as an isolated individual instead of a member of a species.  But man is only a conscious animal because he is a species-being – he only attains self-awareness and individuality, in Hegelian terms, by relating to other men – and only thus can he make his life his object (316).  Hence, a necessary part of man’s existing as a man is his membership in a particular species, and only in this context can he act freely.  The species is the essence of man.  And through his acting on the objective world, through labor, man actualizes his “species-life” (317).  As Peter Singer puts it, “It is because they are conscious of their existence as a species that human beings can see themselves as individuals . . . and it is because humans see themselves as a species that human reason and human powers are unlimited” (Singer 35).  Humanity, in this sense, is a unity.  The single being that represents the organic whole of society is the human species itself.

            Marx does not accept Hegel’s Geist, the spiritual process by which reason actualizes itself through human beings.  While he, like Hegel, holds that history is a process of development towards a goal, Marx believes that it is a material process of individual actions, not the movement of what he views as a more abstract Idea.  “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,” he writes, “is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” (355).  Instead of the “universal Idea” creating and expressing itself through the history of thoughts and ideas, the productive labor of real human beings is what drives the species towards its end course – ideas grow from the development of productive forces (Singer 50).  Marx seeks to throw off Hegelian abstraction and to concentrate instead on man’s “practical activity.”  Rather than the idealistic fancy of the spiritual activity of imaginary men, Marx looks to physical reality: “Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins:  the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men” (356).     

            If the foundation of our reality is material, though, how does history develop as a process towards a goal?  And where does the notion of “species-being” come in to a purely material universe?  We have already seen, for one, how Marx tries to turn Hegel around.  “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Marx writes, “but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (357).  It is his interactions with others, as well as his acting on the world through labor, that makes a man what he is.  We do not have here either an abstract idealism or an observational, empiricist materialism; the world, rather, is conceived as the practical activity of the human senses (Theses 282).  So this, then, is the materialist conception of history:  the development of human sensibilities through the practical life-activity of labor, as determined at each stage by productive forces.  Material processes are really real, in a way that thoughts and ideas are not.  Man’s material, productive life is real, actual, empirically verifiable, while events of consciousness are mere reflections or echoes of reality (Singer 55).  As Peter Singer puts it, “for Marx the productive life of human beings, rather than their ideas and consciousness, is ultimately real.  The development of these productive forces and the liberation of human capacities that this development will bring is the goal of history” (Singer 56-57).

            The problem with this materialist view is that, without the universal Idea that actualizes itself in the development of the human mind, it is hard to see how history itself could have a goal.  A goal, a final cause, typically presupposes an agent – a role that Hegel’s Geist in some sense fulfills.  But Marx rejects the notion of Geist outright:  “The Absolute Idea . . . is from beginning to end nothing but abstraction, that is, the abstract thinker” (338).  Who, then, is the agent that sets the materialist goal of history?  Marx might say that we need not hold that there must be an agent for the process to have a determinate end.  Or he might say that history itself fulfills the agent role in setting its own end.  Either way, though, a problem arises in incorporating materialism into the philosophy of history.  While it makes sense to look at history as “the progress of the real nature of human beings, that is, human beings satisfying their wants and exerting their control over nature by their productive activities” (Singer 57), this does not necessitate history having an actual aim, a path to a particular end.  Indeed, Marx has little justification for saying that history actually has an end.  He seems to pull from Hegel’s notion of history’s progress towards the freedom of Spirit, replacing it with the drive towards the freedom of real human beings.  As Singer writes, “the development of Mind through various forms of consciousness to final self-knowledge was replaced by the development of human productive forces” (Singer 56).  Yet, despite the conclusion Marx draws from this (that history moves towards a material goal), it does not follow necessarily that there will be some “ultimate freedom” for man to attain, equivalent to the ultimate liberation of Mind – and we might say that we have seen, since Marx’s day, that history is not compelled to act towards any such goal as he envisioned. 

            Though Marx errs in his attempt to hold on to Hegel’s vision of history, while rejecting the idealistic grounds upon which that vision rested, he does take an important step in the right direction by supplying a materialist worldview that points to the importance of productive human activity.  Marx sums up his differences with Hegel in saying, “atheism and communism are no flight from, no abstraction from, no loss of the objective world created by man as his essential capacities objectified . . . Rather they are primarily the actual emergence and the actual, developed realization of man’s nature as something actual” (337).  Man’s nature, in this sense, is that of a productive, social being.  This human nature, however, is not something inherent within each individual, since a human being’s identity necessitates him seeing himself as objective through his relation with others – a Hegelian conception of self-consciousness.  Thus, for Marx (and Hegel), “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural one and has no part in the system of nature” (334).  This brings us back, naturally, to the concept of species-being.  But now we can see where problems might arise for the organic society – for how can man, the particular material being, have his essential nature only in the universal species that applies to him?

            Marx claims, reasonably, that man is a social being.  He also holds that man is a productive being, whose nature it is to work on the world, to change it to suit his needs, to remake it in his own image.  But if a man is to do productive work, he must do it himself.  A particular human being can only think, act, and exist for himself; he cannot, in any literal sense, live for others, nor can they live for him.  But Marx argues that “A being only regards himself as independent . . . when he owes his existence to himself” (327).  At the same time, though, Marx employs his theory of history, “the creation of man through human nature and the development of nature for man,” to prove man’s self-creative process.  Whether he here means man in the sense of the species or of a particular subject is irrelevant, since it appears that, in either case, man is both dependent and independent.  Man as a whole is dependent on nature, the individual man is dependent upon nature and other men, yet men are altogether independent of any God or spiritual force acting as “creator” outside the realm of sensual reality (327). 

            So how does Marx’s view of man as a productive, self-creating being fit in with his notion of human nature as essentially social?  Apparently, production and self-actualization are social events.  Indeed, the properly social human being perceives the sensible world in a different way than one who sees social productive activity as a mere means for his individual existence.  As Marx sees it, “Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature is the wealth of the subjective human sensibility either cultivated or created” (325).  But what does he mean in referring to human nature as “objectively unfolded?”  How can human nature as such be in any way objective, without an agent standing outside of human nature and viewing it as its object?  We have no universal Mind or Spirit or Geist to use as our lens through which we, as a species, may view the world objectively.  On the contrary, any materialism which holds that man actualizes himself through his life activity depends on the individual human subject who partakes in that activity, and whose own senses perceive the world around him.  This does not mean that we should not believe in the existence of an objective universe; it merely means that we cannot survey that universe, and the nature of man, from the point of view of all of human society, unless we abstract from the individuals who comprise that society.  After all, only an individual possesses a body and its senses.  In other words, if “the product of labor is labor embodied and made objective in a thing” (313), then that life-activity is objectified for the individual subject, to the extent that he puts his life into it. 

            Marx’s problem is more fundamental than a misunderstanding of economic relations.  From his materialistic premise and his view of man as a rational, self-creating, productive creature, the conclusions of his theory should serve the individual’s self-creative process.  But Marx gives short shrift to the individual.  While he decries such abstractions as population and class as set against the particular man, he is still willing to pull abstract “elements,” such as capital and wage-labor, from the differing “classes” of society, while making no mention of the particular, concrete individuals to whom these concepts are supposed to apply (368).  Marx rather refers to society as the concrete subject from which any investigation must begin (369).  Where is man in this system?  What becomes of the individual who thinks, judges, and acts according to his judgment, in a world in which his social existence determines his consciousness (357)?  This seems to deny that one can make of his life what he wishes to, even under the communist system which is supposed to liberate his consciousness.

            Oh, Marx talks about the individual; as a materialist, he must recognize the particulars to which his universals apply.  But his method of categorizing them according to classes and activities, in addition to his social determinism, undermines their autonomy as human beings.  Marx seeks to abolish private property and social classes in order to alter man’s consciousness away from socially ingrained selfishness, and to liberate his senses, that he may perceive things as they really are, and himself as he really is: a species-being.  But Marx does not recognize in all this the individual’s power to think and choose for himself, to produce and exchange as he so desires, to create his own life for himself.  While he does believe that his system will best give man the freedom to live as he should, Marx does not credit man’s personal ability to make that choice, regardless of one’s social situation or the “process of history.”  He instead discusses the inevitable struggle of the “proletariat” against the “bourgeoisie,” and its eventual resolution into a utopian type of communist society (345-48).  But within these abstractions, man’s social relations still determine his consciousness, the development of his senses, his life activity, even as progressive history determines how those social relations come about.  Man is not any freer under Marx’s system than he is in Dickens’ London.  His life has no more meaning than it did before, for after all, if he sees himself as primarily not a self-creating individual, but a member of a species, he need not attach any great significance to his own existence.  Truly, if we accept all of Marx’s premises, we have no reason to embrace his conclusions over any other – in fact, we have no need to make any choices at all, since our consciousness is determined by society, and society is determined by history, so there is always a scapegoat for personal responsibility. 

To give meaning to human existence, I, for one, cannot in good faith accept the foundation of Marx’s theory.  As stated above, I believe we should accept his materialistic view of the productive, social, self-creating man, as this gives us a good method for relating men to men, and man to nature; but we must discard the notions of species-being and a teleological process of history, along with the organic state/man relationship that such notions produce, as potentially destructive of man’s individuality.  Only then we can fully appreciate and use the good ideas Marx offers us.