us return to the letter of the Theses to evoke the other great question they pose: that of the human essence. The two are clearly linked. ‘Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence’, i.e. he shows, particularly in The Essence of Christianity of 1841, that the idea of God is merely a synthesis of human perfections, personified and projected out of the world. ‘But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’ (in a sort of mixture of French and German, Marx writes das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse): this thesis has been the cause of as much debate as the eleventh. There are many things worthy of comment here, if we take care to follow the letter of the text.
Marx poses the question of the essence of man, or, at least, answers that question. What could be more natural? Yet that question, which we might regard as being constitutive of anthropology, is not at all straightforward. In a sense, it is as old as philosophy. But when, in our own day, Claude Lévi-Strauss explains that the essence of man is the conflict between nature and culture; or when Lacan coins the word parlêtre to say that the essence of man is constituted through and through by language, they place themselves in the same tradition as Aristotle defining man by the fact of his having the power of speech and being a member of the polis, or St. Augustine defining man as the ‘image and resemblance of God on earth’. Moreover, if we take things at a sufficient level of generality, they are all dealing with the same question. From Antiquity to our own times, there is a long succession of definitions of human nature or the human essence. Marx himself will advance several, each of them revolving around the relation between labour and consciousness. In Volume 1 of Capital he will cite a very characteristic definition by Benjamin Franklin (man is ‘a toolmaking animal’), not to reject it, but to complement it by specifying that technology has a history which is dependent on the ‘mode of production’, and going on to recall that neither technology nor technical progress can exist without consciousness, reflection, experimentation and knowledge.11 And in The German Ideology, not long after the formulation we are examining here, he wrote:
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.12
This is a way of seeking the answer to the question of the essence of man in things themselves – which has, indeed, provided a starting-point for a whole biological and technological anthropology, both Marxist and non-Marxist alike.
Theoretical humanism
Yet a nuance crucial to understanding the import of our text here separates the mere fact of defining man or human nature from the fact of explicitly posing the question ‘What is man?’ (or ‘What is the human essence?’) and, a fortiori, making this the fundamental philosophical question. If we, in fact, make it such, we enter upon a new problematic which we might, with Althusser, call a theoretical humanism. Astonishing as it may seem, such a problematic is relatively recent and at the point when Marx was writing, it was not very old at all, since it only dates from the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany the most important names are those of Kant (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798), Wilhelm von Humboldt13 and Feuerbach, which indicates that the trajectory of theoretical humanism connects with that of idealism and its refutation. The parallel is an illuminating one. We see in effect that, where the rival (spiritualist, materialist) theories of human nature are concerned, Marx will proceed to a critique of the same order as the one he carried out on the theories of the subject, of activity and sensuous intuition. To say that, ‘in its effective reality’ (in seiner Wirklichkeit), the human essence is the ensemble of social relations is clearly not to reject the question. But it is to attempt radically to displace the way in which it has until now been understood, not only where ‘man’ is concerned, but also as regards ‘essence’.
Philosophers have formed a false idea of what an essence is (and this error is so … essential to them that one can hardly imagine a philosophy without it). They have thought, firstly, that the essence is an idea or an abstraction (one would say today, in a different terminology, a universal concept), under which may be ranged, in a declining order of generality, specific differences and, finally, individual differences; and, secondly, that this generic abstraction is somehow ‘inherent’ (innewoh-nend) in individuals of the same genus, either as a quality they possess, by which they may be classified, or even as a form or a force which causes them to exist as so many copies of the same model.
We can see, then, the meaning of the strange equation made by Marx. At bottom, the words ‘ensemble’, ‘social’ and ‘relations’ all say the same thing. The point is to reject both of the positions (the realist and the nominalist) between which philosophers have generally been divided: the one arguing that the genus or essence precedes the existence of individuals; the other that individuals are the primary reality, from which universals are ‘abstracted’. For, amazingly, neither of these two positions is capable of thinking precisely what is essential in human existence: the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each other (whether of language, labour, love, reproduction, domination, conflict etc.), and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment in multiple forms. They thus provide the only ‘effective’ content of the notion of essence applied to the human being (i.e. to human beings).
The transindividual
Let us not go into the question of whether this point of view is absolutely original and specific to Marx here. What is certain is that it has consequences both in the field of philosophical discussion (at the level of what is called ‘ontology’),14 and in that of politics. The words Marx uses reject both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of an individuality which could be defined in itself, in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behaviour or whatever), and the organicist point of view (which, today, following Anglo-American usage, is also called the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered as an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely the functional members).15 Marx will embrace neither the ‘monad’ of Hobbes and Bentham, nor the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte. It is significant that Marx (who spoke French almost as fluently as he did German) should have resorted to the foreign word ‘ensemble’ here, clearly in order to avoid using the German ‘das Ganze’, the ‘whole’ or totality.
Perhaps things would be clearer formally (though not in their content) if we, in our turn, added a word to the text – if need be by inventing that word – to characterize the constitutive relation which displaces the question of the human essence while, at the same time, providing a formal answer to it (and one which thus contains in embryo another problematic than that of theoretical humanism). The word does in fact exist, but is to be found in twentieth-century thinkers (Kojève, Simondon, Lacan …): we have, in fact, to think humanity as a transindividual reality and, ultimately, to think transindividuality as such.16 Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or a substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.
Althusser
Louis Althusser (born, Birmandreis, Algeria, 1918; died, Paris, 1990) is better known today by the general public for the tragedies which marked the end of his life (the murder of his wife, his internment in a psychiatric institution; see his autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey,
