Karl Vogt, and Ludwig Büchner. Such claims immediately sound very suspicious, considering that Marx referred to these authors only in private letters in a negative and pejorative tone.50 This misinterpretation shows the importance of correctly grasping Marx’s parting from Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism and the originality of Marx’s theory of metabolism, which must be understood not just philosophically but in a close relation to his system of political economy.
THE LIMITATION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM
Those who overvalue natural scientific materialism misinterpret not only Marx’s metabolism theory but also his entire project, because the theoretical affinity between Feuerbach and these natural scientific materialists often hides Marx’s non-philosophical, practical standpoint after The German Ideology. A typical misunderstanding of Marx’s project through the lens of Feuerbachian materialism and natural scientific materialism is characteristic of Alfred Schmidt’s famous book, The Concept of Nature in Marx: “It may be concluded with some certainty that Marx made use of Moleschott’s theory of metabolism, not, of course, without altering it.”51 Although Schmidt’s view is widely accepted, a careful examination of the texts makes his claim difficult to accept. There is no philological evidence for his claim; Schmidt and his admirers should have seen that Moleschott’s view, as elaborated in The Cycle of Life (Kreislauf des Lebens, 1852), is hardly compatible with Marx’s alliance with Liebig.52
Accordingly, Schmidt underestimates, perhaps intentionally, Liebig’s influence on Marx, but provides no convincing reason for doing so. In only one footnote, he succinctly refers to Liebig: “The chemist J. von Liebig, whose views were not without influence on Marx (cf. Capital, Vol. I, p. 506, n. 1), compared the metabolism in nature with the same process in the body politic, in his book Chemische Briefe, Heidelberg, 1851, p. 622 et seq.”53 Schmidt’s book does not go into Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry because he believes that Marx “made use of the term ‘metabolism,’ which, for all its scientific air, is nonetheless speculative in character.”54 He clings to the philosophical concept of nature in the young Marx, no matter what it costs in terms of the truth. For Schmidt, Liebig is too “natural science” compared to Moleschott. However, it is not necessary to interpret the concept of metabolism in such a “speculative” manner, and Schmidt’s remark also contradicts the fact that Marx did not study various disciplines of natural science in accordance with a definite program of the philosophy of nature, as Hegel and Schelling did.
In order to ground his own claim, Schmidt quotes from Moleschott’s theory of metabolism in The Cycle of Life:
What man excretes nourishes the plant. The plant changes the air into solids and nourishes the animal. Carnivorous animals live on herbivorous animals, to fall victim to death themselves and so spread abroad newly germinating life in the plant world. The name “metabolism” has been given to this exchange of material.55
Moleschott’s explanation of metabolism, which is also expressed as “metempsychosis” among all material substances, is so general and abstract that one cannot immediately infer his influence on Marx’s theory.56 Thus it is necessary to look at Moleschott’s theory of metabolism more closely to judge whether Marx would be willing to integrate it “not, of course, without altering it.”
Moleschott was a Dutch doctor and physiologist who participated with Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt in a heated “materialism debate” in the 1850s. He advocated a radical materialist view that every mental activity is “only a function of substances in the brain,” and that “the thought stands in the same relation to the brain as bile to the liver or urine to kidneys.”57 Moleschott also reduced thought to a product of the movement of matter in the brain: “Thought is a movement of matter [Stoff].”58 While Liebig in his Agricultural Chemistry emphasized the importance of phosphoric acid for an ample growth of plants, Moleschott argued its importance for humans in a provocative manner: “No thought without phosphorus.”59 Admitting the necessity of further research on the functioning of the brain, he put forward a view that with the development of materialist physiology, both physical and mental activities and talents can be determined by measuring the assimilation and excretion of matter. In this vein, he argued that nourishment plays an important role in determining these activities. For example, he contrasted the English worker with the Italian lazzarone: “Who doesn’t know the superiority of the English worker fortified by roast beef compared to the Italien lazzarone whose predominat vegetable diet explains the large part of his disposition to laziness.”60
Moleschott’s mechanistic understanding of the relationship between mental and physical characteristics and nourishment is also reflected in his theory of metabolism, in terms of which he supported the “humus theory” of Gerardus Mulder in Utrecht and criticized Liebig’s “mineral theory.” Liebig maintained, as a result of various chemical experiments, that the direct effect of humus—that is, the dark material of decayed plants in the top layer of soil—upon plant growth occurs only as a result of its decomposition into water and carbonic acid. In contrast, Moleschott and Mulder insisted, in agreement with Albrecht Thaer, on the direct and essential contribution of a soil nutrient called Dammsäure contained in humus for plant growth: “In contrast [to Liebig,] Wiegmann and Mulder, getting rid of any doubt, proved through experiments that neither carbonic acid nor ammonia can replace the effect of Dammsäure.”61
As he counted ammonium compounds of Dammsäure as the “most important substance of nourishment,” Moleschott undervalued Liebig’s theory of inorganic substances for plant growth, a theory still valid today, and ignored the concrete chemical reactions of bonding and dissolving among various organic and inorganic substances in the atmosphere, soil, and plants.62 While Liebig argued for the importance of a chemical analysis of soil composition, Moleschott reduced the chemical and physiological process of plant growth into an abstract and overgeneralized “metempsychosis,” forgoing concrete investigations.
In this metempsychosis that subsumes everything under it humans also lose their own labor-mediated historicity and functions within the social and natural metabolism. Moleschott simply stated that humans as ephemeral beings are decomposed into “Dammsäure and ammonia” in the soil after death, so that plants can again grow on the soil without exhausting it:
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