transcendence can be understood.
Because Marx distanced himself from philosophy, he came to acknowledge the limitations of his own earlier schema of 1844. Even though Marx was aware that humans always relate to nature through the mediation of labor and that modern alienation deforms this relationship, his entire project of communism in 1844 was dependent upon a philosophically conceptualized idea of “humanism = naturalism.” Since his critique of alienation still roughly identified “capitalism” with “the system of private property,” Marx inevitably fell into a deterministic understanding of history, one that failed to carefully analyze the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production.
This is a reason why Marx’s project of 1844 still inevitably possessed a “Romantic” tone; it could only oppose to the alienated reality the philosophical idea of species-being that is supposed to realize the unmediated absolute unity of humans and nature.87 The more Marx depended on Feuerbach’s concept of “species-being” to ground his claim for the realization of “humanism = naturalism,” the more abstract his analysis of modern capitalism became. It is because of this that Marx initially envisioned the content of species-being ontologically, with abstract and ahistorical predicates such as “passion,” “sensuality,” and “universality.”88 Consequently, Marx’s own critique of political economy, which was supposed to reveal the specificity of modern society, became invisible, buried under the transhistorical discourse of the Young Hegelian philosophy.
Meanwhile, Marx intensively studied the problem of commodity and money in his Notes on James Mill in his Paris Notebooks, so that instead of falling into a rough schema of human history he actually continued his investigation into the specificity of the capitalist system. In The German Ideology, Marx finally came to be fully conscious of the danger immanent in Feuerbach’s abstractness: “Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always have needed each other.”89 An actual examination of the specific historicity of society is missing in Feuerbach’s philosophy. According to Marx, who had now distanced himself from his earlier project, there is no “essence” in Feuerbach’s sense such as “actual” nature and “actual” human beings, because both nature and humans are already thoroughly conditioned and constituted by social relations. The critical comprehension of the historically specific process of mediation now became the kernel of his scientific analysis:
Because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the actually existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognizing “the actual, individual, corporeal man” emotionally, i.e., he knows no other “human relations” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then idealized. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; therefore … he is compelled to take refuge in the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the species,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure.90
Instead of praising the primacy of practice in Feuerbach’s philosophy, Marx harshly criticizes it due to the separation between theory and practice. For Feuerbach, “man” as such is nothing but an abstract entity to which only ahistorical universal properties such as “human relations,” “love,” and “friendship” can be attributed. Feuerbach neglects real social relations as presupposition for actual individual activity and consciousness, so that he cannot explain why and how the inversion of the objective world in the modern society was produced and is constantly reproduced. “Man” as such, says Marx, exists only in “thinking which is isolated from practice.”91
The same theoretical limitation of Feuerbach’s philosophy manifests itself in his treatment of “nature.” Marx criticizes “nature as such,” which Feuerbach is seeking, because this does not exist anywhere. Nature as such, fully separated from humans, is a pure fantastic construction in thinking, which “today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach either.”92 When he talks about nature, Feuerbach is always compelled to abstract it from existing social relations, fleeing into the world of “eternity” with his philosophical intuition. As a consequence, he overlooks the historical process of the formation of nature through the human activity of production.
It is true that Marx in 1844 recognized the necessity to treat nature and humans in their interrelationship: “But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself—nature fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man.”93 However, his remark was only an abstract ontological statement according to which history needs to be understood as a labor-mediated process of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of human beings. In contrast to this early formulation, Marx in The German Ideology emphasizes the historical formation of what counts as “nature.” Nature is not just there, but is constantly transformed through social production, in which both humans and nature work upon and constitute each other. Of course, the statement that humans and nature do not exist in reality without this reciprocal relation still sounds abstract and banal. To avoid this abstractness, it is essential for Marx’s “materialist method” to analyze the process of social and natural formation in capitalism, paying particular attention to its specific historical interaction between humans and nature, mediated by labor. Marx clearly recognized this point in The German Ideology and later analyzed this historical reciprocal process much more carefully with the concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel), as will be shown in the following chapters.
In The German Ideology, Marx does not yet discuss the reciprocal constitution of humans and nature in detail. But in contrast to Feuerbach, he comprehends the antagonistic relationship between humans and nature as a specific modern product that resulted from capitalist industrialization. Furthermore, Marx intentionally formulates this historical development as a critique against Feuerbach:
The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water—to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.94
Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s remarks in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: “That which is my essence is my being.” The being of the fish is its being in water, and from this being you cannot separate its essence. Language already identifies being and essence. Only in human life does it happen, but even here, only in abnormal and unfortunate cases, that being is separated from essence.”95 Marx rejects Feuerbach’s Romantic tone, which only asks for the return to the essence as a countermeasure against the loss of that very essence. If the “water” is always the “essence of the freshwater fish,” there would be no room for a critique of water pollution. By opposing the polluted water to the “natural” fresh water as the essence of the fish, Feuerbach can at best show that the current water condition is “abnormal.” But simply pointing to the abnormality, Feuerbach cannot sufficiently analyze and identify the social cause of water pollution and comprehend the conditions for the cleaning of water. What he shows is that when the “essence” (water) is lost, the “being” (fish) must disappear. This statement is correct but obviously banal. In other words, Feuerbach’s analysis says nothing about the distorted relationship between humans and nature in modern society and laments the situation as an “unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly.”96 Marx argues
