same necessity for the conscious rehabilitation of the original unity between humans and nature through “association”: “The alien property of the capitalist in this labor can only be abolished by converting his property into the property of the non-individual in its independent singularity, hence of the associated, social individual.”70
In contrast to Althusser’s interpretation that simply dismisses Marx’s texts before 1845, one finds important insights in his Paris Notebooks of 1844 that fundamentally characterize Marx’s lifelong project of critique of political economy. His formulation is, however, not at all the final one, but a personal sketch without an intent to publish it. Thus the humanist interpretation of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts turns out to be one-sided, because though Marx preserved a certain economic insight attained in 1844, he also quickly gave up his philosophical conception of alienation, which he borrowed from Feuerbach and Moses Hess. The fact that Marx abandoned Feuerbach’s anthropological philosophy was of significance with regard to his ecology as well because his new critique of philosophy in Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology prepared the theoretical basis for a more adequate understanding of the historical modifications of the relationship between humanity and nature. Why did Marx have to abandon his earlier Feuerbachian schema, while he kept his economic insight? How did Marx reconceptualize the relationship between humans and nature?
LEAVING PHILOSOPHY
The German Ideology, together with Theses on Feuerbach, documents the moment when Marx decisively distanced himself from philosophy and began to move forward to the non-philosophic conception of the unity between humanity and nature. His evaluation of Feuerbach rapidly changed during this time, and he came to realize that Feuerbach’s avoidance of any practical engagement with the socialist movement was an inevitable consequence of his abstract philosophy, which aimed at educating the masses with the truth about species-being. As a result, Marx rejected not only Hegel’s idealism but also Feuerbach’s materialism, which claimed to have revealed the truth hidden under the estranged mystification by means of “sensibility.” In this divergence from Feuerbach’s philosophy, one can find a crucial development for Marx’s entire theory. Although his critique of bourgeois society in 1844 still opposed Feuerbachian concepts such as “love,” “sensibility,” “species-being,” etc., to an estranged reality, in order to describe historical progress as a process of reappropriating the human essence, the primacy of praxis in The German Ideology aims at the analysis of concrete social relations themselves, relations that structure the inverted consciousness and behaviors of individuals trapped within them.
One should be careful, however, not to confuse Marx’s rejection of philosophical questioning with an “epistemological break” from an old paradigm. As shown above, the central economic insight of 1844 remains without doubt in the late Marx as well. It is necessary to ask different questions: Why did Marx, in spite of this theoretical continuity, change his evaluation of Feuerbach’s materialism? How did he reconceptualize his earlier vision of “humanism = naturalism” as a truly materialist analysis of the relationship between humans and nature in accordance with this distancing from Feuerbach? In this context, the formation of Marx’s “materialist method” is of importance.71
The main point of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach and other Young Hegelians in The German Ideology is that they simply opposed a hidden “essence” to the estranged “appearance,” without examining the specific social relations that bestow an objective reality to this appearance. For example, Feuerbach argues that religious alienation in front of God is an “illusion” that humans themselves produce in their heads due to the misrecognition of their own species-being, thereby allowing an inverted essence to dominate their consciousness and activity. Marx in the Paris Notebooks was highly supportive of this Young Hegelian discourse because he believed that through the application of Feuerbach’s schema to labor alienation in bourgeois society it would be possible to envision the social abolition of private property as a way to reappropriate and realize human species-being.72 However, Marx now argues that Feuerbach’s critique is “purely scholastic” and incapable of leading to radical social change.73 This is because Feuerbach’s method only allows for the necessity of an epistemological change concerning the religious inversion “through the ‘spectacles’ of the philosopher” without an actual practical engagement.74 In other words, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for naïvely (and wrongly) believing that he could simply educate the masses with his philosophy that the essence of God is really that of humans themselves without touching upon the alienated social relations at the root of the problem.
The difference between the standpoints of Marx and Feuerbach after 1845 becomes clearer if one follows Marx’s various usages of “praxis” during this period. It is true that Marx from the very beginning consistently demanded the necessity of transcending philosophical dualism in actuality, in contrast to Hegel’s idealist philosophy, which tries to overcome the contradiction only on a theoretical level.
In September 1843, Marx had already formulated, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, his demand for “ruthless criticism of all that exists” with the following words:
The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be—as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion—to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.75
Here it is obvious that Marx, following Feuerbach’s critique of religion, primarily aimed at the “reform of consciousness.” The epistemological emancipation from illusion through ruthless criticism is, according to Marx, the most important task, from which radical praxis should emerge. This philosophical approach is also reflected in his political solution. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written between March and August 1843, Marx dealt with the contradiction of the modern world as a dualistic opposition between the state and civil society. In order to overcome this “alienation,” Marx opposed to alienated reality the philosophical idea of “democracy,” in which every private individual should be able to participate in the public sphere, overcoming the dualist separation between the two spheres.76
In On the Jewish Question, Marx rapidly came to criticize this type of democratic idea after he recognized the limitation of “political emancipation.” He realized that political emancipation through democracy simply contributes to the completion of the modern world, and not its transcendence. Marx argued that democracy alone cannot bring about a radical political action as long as the existence of bourgeois society is taken for granted. The political sphere remains depoliticized in order to protect the interests of “an egoistic, independent individual.”77 In this vein, Marx admitted that the abstract idea of “democracy” only reflects the abstract idea of the political state in modern society. Abandoning his naïve view of democracy, he began to problematize bourgeois society itself as the actual contradiction of the modern world. Here Marx was already carrying out a partial overcoming of Feuerbach’s schema, recognizing that the actual antagonistic dualism between the state and bourgeois society cannot be brought into a unity solely through a philosophic idea of democracy.
Despite this theoretical development, Marx at the same time still cherished another aspect of Feuerbach’s philosophy. Against the egoism of bourgeois society, with its endless desire to attain money, Marx opposed the concrete “sensibility” of human beings as the true principle for human emancipation. Thus, Marx argued in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Introduction of which was published in the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, that a radical transformation of bourgeois society is not possible through a political ideal but only through a “passive element” (sensibility), that is, as a result of alienated workers grasping their “universal suffering,” which can then become the basis for acting
