포이에르바흐에 관한 테제 6번 해설

The object of this essay is to explain the sixth of ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ written by Marx in terms of the ontological ideas of “external” and “internal” relations. This paper will examine how Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s reductionism and atomism in terms of his ontological ideas. And lastly it will compare concepts between Marx and Feuerbach on human essence in order to understand well Marx’s criticism.

1. Marx on Feuerbach’s Reductionism

“Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relationships.

In the above sentence Marx criticizes Feuerbach that the essence of man ‘as a whole’ cannot be reduced to that of an individual and vice versa. That is to say, for Marx, the essence of whole is not the simple set of that of parts, i.e. everyman’s essence is social essence. Marx means that even though Feuerbach is dealing with the essence of ‘a whole species’ he does not look at how it dynamically results from social relations[1]. Instead, Feuerbach tries to induce social essence directly from individual’s characters. Feuerbach’s approach is based on some assumptions: the essential quality of a whole is nothing but the common quality of parts; every man shares some essential qualities in common.

First of all, we need to examine the Marx’s organicist view. For him, the essential quality of an entity is internal to relations, i.e. it depends on its relations with other entities. In other words, the essential quality of an isolated man outside a relation is indeterminate and has nothing within itself; he is not a human being. Only when he exists within a specific relation, for example, within a family, his essential quality becomes determinate as a father or a mother according to his relations with other family members. Consequently, there is no the common quality for all individuals. For all individuals can share the common essential quality only when all make an identical relationship with each other. This identical relationship is impossible because a relation always presupposes different relationships and the different essential qualities from different direction: laborers cannot exist without capitalists, a father without children, a teacher without a student, and so forth. Moreover, these relations have particular character according to time and place; For example, the family relation has been changed according to the changes of historical social relations and is different in some aspect according to the culture and historical experience of different place. Also even one person should dynamically change his essential quality according to different relations; his essential quality as a generous father obtained in a family should be changed to a cool-headed and avaricious character as a capitalist within a business relation. In that sense, life is a playacting.

Consequently, for Marx, the essence of man ‘as a whole’ cannot be reduced to that of an individual and it is ‘the ensemble of social relationships’. For example, The World Wars, which show the essential quality of modern man, cannot be deduced directly from the essential qualities of each single individual but is the whole effect of their social relationships. A specific social relation makes a certain group of people able to kill 50 millions men at once; however, they cannot always kill them independent of specific social relations.

2. Marx on Feuerbach’s Atomistic View

For Marx, the "religious sentiment" of Feuerbach is no more than an essential quality of a certain group of people sharing a specific social relation within a specific place and time. However, Feuerbach wants to generalize this specific essential quality into the essence of all historical individuals. In the following sentence, Marx indicates that this approach of Feuerbach, therefore, leads him to presuppose an isolated human individual outside society and to regard the ‘religious sentiment’ as a naturally given character of an individual independent of social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence [the ensemble of social relationships], is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to establish religious sentiment [Gemut] by itself, and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual;

2. Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as “species”, as an inner, mute general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way.”

This presupposition of Feuerbach shows us one typical example of atomist views. For Atomists, the essential quality of an entity is independent of its relations with other entities and immutable within different relations; i.e. the essential qualities of an entity are external to relations. Therefore, its essential character is what is naturally given to an entity. This atomist view, on the one hand, is used for justifying a slavery system; one group of persons is naturally free; another is naturally slaved. On the other hand, it is used as a presupposition to prove the notion of equality that all individual is naturally given equal qualities.

One type of the methods, which atomists strictly apply, is generalization or induction. They enumerate each entity, and, then, extract the common characters from them. And they regard these common characters as the essential character of the whole. For Marx, the abstract result is mute, dead because they already remove the particularity of each entity. In turn, they deduce directly other facts from the general principle obtained by the induction or apply it to different relations. One example is ‘rational choice axioms’ of modern neoclassical orthodoxy. (P.13, Atomism and Organicism, Ted Winslow). As long as we remain at only this approach, this method is outrageous. Western capitalism has strictly and forcefully applied this one principle to the third worlds, which have different social relations and historical experiences, only for their gain.

3. Difference between the human essence of Marx and Feuerbach

Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach would be well understood if we look at his notion of human essence which is defined in his 『Economic and philosophic Manuscripts』. His notion of human essence is totally different in terms of the starting point and the methodology. Here we will not go into detail about his concept of it. We will simply compare it in order to well understand the sixth of ‘Theses on Feuerbach’.

First, while Feuerbach’s starting point of the inquiry is the essence of “species” and his concept results in an individual outside society, Marx’s starting point is the essence of “an living individual” inside society and explains the essential quality of man through social relations.

Secondly, while Feuerbach examines what is the essence of man in aspect of “quality”, Marx looks for the human essence in aspect of “how an living individual makes relations with others-the way of relating with each other”. We seem to be able to summarize his notion of human essence into his expression of “objective activity[2]”. In order to understand his concept we need to distinguish between ‘quality (or character)’ and ‘activity (or action)’ and examine the relationship between them in terms of Internal Relations and External Relations. Aristotle says, “A state [of character] results from [the repetition of] similar activities.”[3] Marx seems to follow this distinction of Aristotle.

In the ontology of External Relations, the action of an entity, that is to say, the way of relating itself with others is passive in that the action cannot change the essential character of the entity. A state of character is not the result from activities and, therefore, the essential character is external to relations. The development of the essential character cannot be possible and only its actions are limited or controlled by external forces. On the contrary, in the ontology of Internal Relations, the actions of an entity are active in that the essential character is the product of the actions and both interact with each other.

Every organicism has the unique way of its activity, that is to say, the unique way of relating itself with other members and nature. Marx says, “The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man[4]”. For Marx, human activities are more universal and free than other animals. Human activity is objective activity; not only because he creates and develops himself in a process of objectifying himself by making nature his objective world; but also because “he makes his own species his object[5]”.

However, for Marx, human essence is only potential and not yet fully developed. Like the words of Aristotle that “nature is an end; for we say that each thing’s nature…is the character it has when its coming-into-being has been completed.”[6], human being must and can fully develop his essential character and activities by his essential practical activity. Now the human essence appears as an estranged and inverted form in capitalism. For him we are now suffering our superiority to other animals.

4. Conclusion

This paper has examined some of the assumptions and concepts of Feuerbach’s essence of man in terms of the ontological ideas of “external” relations and how Marx criticizes his concepts using his ontological ideas of “internal” relations. This paper insisted that for Marx the essential quality of man could not reduce to that of an individual, and Feuerbach’s method as an atomist was confined to induction and deduction, which remove particularities from human essence. Lastly this paper compared Marx and Feuerbach’s view on human essence. It insisted that while Marx’s concept of human essence focused on the way of relating with each living individual-human activity, Feuerbach’s concept human activity centered on the quality of an individual outside social relations.

- Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume 3. Progress Publishers

Aristotle, - Nicomachean Ethics, Translated by Terence Irwin, Heckett Publishing

[1] These social relations include not only the relations between every individual but also those of between individuals and their object such as properties.

[2] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Selected Writings

[3] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch.1 §6, Translated by Terence Irwin

[4] Karl Marx, Estranged Labour, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume 3. Progress Publishers (The underlining is mine.)

[5] Ibid.

[6] Aristotle, Politics, p. 3, ch.2, Book1, translated by C.D.C Reeve