A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (33 page)

The early Marx

For the young Marx, the Hegelian philosophy of history and Hegelian theory of self-consciousness were inextricable. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote that the ‘outstanding achievement of Hegel’s
Phenomenology
is first, that Hegel grasps the self-creation of man as a process...and that he, therefore, grasps the nature of labour, and conceives of objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his
own labour
.’ This idea of ‘human nature’ as an artifact is apt to seem puzzling, especially when detached from the great ‘drama of the spirit’ which idealist philosophy had presented.

Hegel had spoken in terms of the necessary development of spirit towards the idea. While it is true that this spirit and this ‘idea’ were abstract things, and not to be confused with any individual consciousness, nevertheless it is impossible to conceive them in other than spiritual terms. Marx’s lifework consisted in the attempt to overcome the intellectual difficulties that stood in the way of expressing Hegel’s vision ‘materialistically’ (Marx’s philosophy was later to be called ‘dialectical materialism’). Initial encouragement in this task came from the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), a Young Hegelian whose sophisticated iconoclasm was later to recommend him (through his translator, George Eliot) to a generation of sceptical and anti-authoritarian Englishmen. Feuerbach, Marx wrote, ‘founded genuine materialism and positive science by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of his theory.’ This social relationship Feuerbach called the ‘species-life’ of man
(The Essence of Christianity,
1841). Only man has species-life, since only man
finds
his nature, through the recognition of himself as a social, and therefore socially determined, being. It is this conception of ‘species-life’
(Gattungswesen)
that created a materialist version of Hegel’s philosophy of man.

The theory of self-consciousness emerges in Marx in the following form: the self has three stages, or ‘moments’. (Marx makes it explicit that these ‘moments’ are not to be construed as historically sequential.) These are the stages, first, of primitive self-awareness, of man immersed in his ‘species-life’; secondly, of self-alienation, or alienation from species-life; and thirdly, of self-realisation, or fulfilment in free creative activity. As in Hegel, the theory is profoundly anti-individualistic: at every stage, the self is constituted only through its social activities, in which lies its essence. Marx wished to argue that the social essence was also, as it was for Feuerbach, a material and not a spiritual reality. He did not regard this social essence as residing in any Hegelian ‘idea’, or spiritual substance. It lies rather in the collective activity which Marx was to identify as ‘labour’. It is this ‘labour’ which generates the language, customs, and institutions—in particular the economic institutions— through which consciousness arises.

Corresponding to the three ‘moments’ of human consciousness, are the three stages of history, each manifesting a specific stance of man towards his world. These stages of history are constituted by the forms which social activities take. Now it is only in labour that man transforms the world and so defines himself in relation to it. Already, therefore, in his early philosophy, before he had developed his critique of political economy, Marx wished to describe the movement of history in economic terms. The first historical stage—that of natural man—is one in which nature dominates man, and the institutions of property, through which nature becomes an
object
for man, have not been developed. During the second stage, with the flourishing of private property, the separation between man and nature becomes dominant. But dominant along with it is the separation of man from man. Private property (which generates the institutions of exchange and therefore the mode of production which we know as capitalism) is the institution through which man’s selfalienation finds expression. This stage is due to be replaced by communism, in which man’s mastery of nature is so complete that the institution of private property, and the consequent separation of man from man, are transcended. Man will then be realised, free, in command of nature, and at one with his ‘species-life’.

Marx was later to detach the theory of history from the philosophy of mind. It is nevertheless true that his attempt to give a material basis to the ‘dialectic’ of self-discovery retained, even in its later version, the marks of the ‘drama of subject and object’ which had been scripted by Fichte. And its moral significance resides in the concept which came to him from Fichte via Hegel—the concept of alienation. It is Marx’s treatment of ‘alienated labour’ that has been at the origin of much of the more recent philosophical interest in his writings.

According to Marx there is some kind of ‘internal’ relation between alienation and the institution of private property. In order to illustrate Marx’s meaning, it is necessary to understand what ‘liberal’ economists had attempted. Such economists were less interested in the ‘natural’ right which, according to Locke, underlies the institution of property, than in the ‘contractual’ rights which stem from it. That is, they were interested in the movement of property under the laws of contract and exchange. Adam Smith, in his famous essay
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), had summed up a century of liberal and empiricist thought by attempting to demonstrate that the free exchange and accumulation of private property under the guidance of self-interest not only preserves justice, but also promotes the social well-being as a whole, satisfying existing needs and guaranteeing stability.

In order to establish that conclusion, Smith considers human nature to be something settled. The
homo economicus
of liberal theory is not thought of as a historical being. However, he is motivated by desires and satisfactions which, while represented as permanent features of the human condition, may in fact be no more than peculiarities of the eighteenth-century market economy, which is in turn to be explained by something deeper than the operation of economic laws. If the nature of man is not fixed, we must see obedience to these economic laws as neither ineluctable nor necessarily advantageous. Marx wished to argue that the laws of liberal economics, while they may govern the movement of property, represent the institution of property as permanent. Hence they discourage an examination of other arrangements in which property, and the alienation that stems from it, might disappear. In these other circumstances the rewards and fulfilments of human nature will also change. And if alienation is overcome, they will change for the better. It could be said that there is something objectionable in this idea: namely, that it represents the nature of man as self-created, and yet also argues that there is a state of man ‘restored to himself’ which has some kind of supreme and distinctive value. In other words it seems both to reject and to accept the idea of a permanent human ‘essence’. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the charge levelled against liberal economic theory demands an answer. No theory of economic activity can make sense without a philosophy of human nature.

Marx argues that the institution of private property only
seems
to create that freedom of movement and expression, that power over nature, which the liberal economists had ascribed to it. In fact it creates a deeper form of subjection. In his attachment to property man is ‘self-alienated’. The institution and the state of mind are related not as cause and effect, but inherently. What exists objectively as features of ownership, is felt subjectively as the alienation of the individual from himself and his species-life.

What is meant, in this context, by self-alienation? Historically speaking the origin of the idea is not difficult to trace; similar observations can be found in Aristotle’s critique of the mercantile way of life, in Christian doctrines of the destructive nature of worldly attachments, and in the medieval attacks on usury. But for the purpose of philosophical evaluation it is necessary to detach Marx’s conception from all but two of its antecedents.

The first is the concept of the ‘fetish’, introduced into Enlightenment thought by De Brosses
(Du culte des dieux fétiches,
1760), and given philosophical content by Kant in his incidental discussions of the philosophy of religion. Kant argued that there is a distinction between genuine religious thought, which aims at the understanding of God, of the self and of the true relation between them, and spurious religious thought—or ‘fetishism’—which involves the outward projection onto the world of principles which represent only subjective characteristics of the idolator, and therefore serve to instil his world with mystery. Fetishism obscures the subject’s relation to the world, absorbing his human life into the vain worship of objects, and cutting him off from the true understanding of himself, as an autonomous being in intrinsic relation to others of his kind and to a transcendent God. Fetishism does not make the transcendent personhood of God immanent in the world. It endows the world with a false aura of immanence, painting phenomena in the subjective colours of a finite will. It therefore creates an impassable barrier between the self and God.

The term ‘alienation’
(Entfremdung)
became attached to that of fetishism, in something like the following way. Hegel argued that the religious spirit is a spirit which, because it sees itself detached from and in opposition to the sphere of perfection, is a spirit in self-alienation, essentially unhappy in the consciousness that it is not what it is naturally destined to be. (It is ‘fallen’, as the Christian doctrine puts it.) This applies not only to the Kantian fetishism but also to any religion, in so far as religion reflects man’s sense of his own imperfection, of his absolute solitude in the world of creation, and of his dependence on a being that lies beyond the sphere of objective knowledge. In a bold step that had an immediate
succès de scandale,
Feuerbach argued that this alienated character in religion is simply proof that all religion is nothing
more
than fetishism. Christianity itself is a species of self-projection. Men project out of themselves, and make into properties of a divine being, the perfections which are really theirs. These perfections have no objective reality outside man’s social life, but there they can have real existence. In removing his perfections from himself, and installing them in a transcendent world, man makes his own perfection seem unobtainable, since it now lies outside the sphere of his social action. Hence he becomes estranged from his own nature, and conscious of himself as an incomplete and limited being. Religion alienates man from the ‘species-life’ in which his perfection is possible, and hence from himself as constituted by that life.

The Marxist theory of alienation can only be understood if we also add to it a second Kantian idea, one with which we are already familiar. According to one formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative, a rational being is constrained to treat all others of his kind as ends and never as means only. We have seen, in Hegel, the attempt to found this imperative in an analysis of lordship and bondage as necessary ‘moments’ in the self-consciousness of a rational being. To the extent that a man treats another as a means, so does he become a means to himself. In exploiting the other he exploits himself, losing his freedom in a form of subservience all the greater for his inability to recognise it as such. It is this theory that lends support to Marx’s contention that alienation, being a form of isolation from social life, is
experienced
as alienation from self.

We might put the developed forms of the two original ideas thus:

1. A man is an object for himself to the extent that he invests objects with human powers, and so ceases to see those powers as having their origin in himself.
   
2. A man becomes an object for himself to the extent that others are objects for him (where X is an object for Y = X is only a means for Y).
   

The combination of 1 and 2 is the state of self-alienation. The true realisation of oneself as subject requires and is required by two things: first, the recognition of others as ends, and secondly the rediscovery through social life of one’s actual human potential. But any lapse into self-alienation must also precipitate an alienation from species-life, and vice versa.

The difficult philosophical claim, never properly established by Marx, and in itself contentious, is that this state of alienation is directly connected with the institution of property. Marx hoped to make the connection in the following way. Under the rule of private property, objects become the focus of individual rights, and thus take on the character of human life. There is a sense in which, through the institution of property, we endow objects with a soul. Since the only origin of this soul must be in us, it follows that there is an element of systematic ‘fetishism’ in the process. This fetishism develops as property develops from use-value (which is intelligibly related to human need) to exchange-value, in which the commodity begins to acquire life and autonomy of its own. With the arrival of pure exchange-value in the form of money, the transformation of objects into fetishes is complete; and with this transformation—effected only under the rule of the free market, which is itself the consummation of property relations—we have the establishment of capitalism. Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means. Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life remain will be dissipated, being projected outwards onto the world of commodities. To summarise all this in Marx’s colourful ‘Young Hegelian’ style:

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it ('On the Jewish Question').