Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy

Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy Daniel Brudney HA R VA R D U N I V E R S I T ...

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Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy


Daniel Brudney

HA R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1998

Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brudney, Daniel. Marx’s attempt to leave philosophy / Daniel Brudney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-55133-8 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1804–1872. 3. Philosophy, German—19th century. I. Title. B3305.M74B78 1998 193—dc21 97-38497

To Ellen

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

1 Introduction

1

1. Themes from the Young Hegelians 3 2. Feuerbach’s and Marx’s Complaint against Philosophy 3. The Interest of These Texts 12 4. Chapter by Chapter 16

1

Feuerbach’s Critique of Christianity 1. The Content of the Critique of Christianity 2. The Method of the Critique of Christianity 3. Comparisons 45 4. The Natural Scientist of the Mind 54

6

25 27 37

2 Feuerbach’s Critique of Philosophy 1. The Status of Philosophy 59 2. The Method of the Critique of Philosophy 71 3. The Goal of the Critique of Philosophy 88 4. Problems 93 5. Antecedents 103 6. Final Comment 106

58

Contents

viii

3

Bruno Bauer

109

1. Self-Consciousness 110 2. State and Civil Society 114 3. The Critique of Religion 120 4. Taking the Critic’s Standpoint 128 5. Assessment 134

4 The 1844 Marx I: Self-Realization

143

1. Species Being: Products 144 2. Species Being: Enjoyments 152 3. The Human Relation to Objects 155 4. Species Being: Immortality 160 5. The Human Self-Realization Activity 160

5 The 1844 Marx II: The Structure of Community 1. Completing One Another 2. Mediation with the Species 3. Digression on Community

6

169 176 183

The 1844 Marx III: The Problem of Justification 1. The Workers’ Ignorance of Their True Nature 2. The Problem of Justification 197 3. The Problem of Communists’ Ends and Beliefs 4. Marx’s 1844 Critique of Philosophy 210 5. The Problem of the Present 217

7

169

The Theses on Feuerbach

192

193 201

227

1. Fundamental Relations/Orientations 228 2. Thesis Eleven 236 3. Labor 242 4. The Practical-Idealist Reading 247 5. The Problem of the First Step 254 6. Thesis Six 261

8 The German Ideology I: More Antiphilosophy 1. Some General Comments 265 2. The Attack on the Young Hegelians 3. Empirical Verification 278 4. Antiphilosophy I 282 5. Antiphilosophy II 287 6. Transformation 294

268

264

Contents

ix

9 The German Ideology II: The Picture of the Good Life and the Change from 1844

299

1. Division of Labor 299 2. Community 302 3. Self-Activity 307 4. The Change from 1844 310

10 The German Ideology III: The Critique of Morality (and Return to Philosophy) 1. What Is the Problem with Morality? 324 2. The Sociological Thesis 326 3. The Strong Sociological Thesis and the Structural Thesis 329 4. Morality and Moral Philosophy under Communism 5. Can The German Ideology Justify a Condemnation of Capitalism? 347 6. Returning to Philosophy 353

323

337

Conclusion

360

Notes

367

Index

419

Acknowledgments

This book has taken a long time and has acquired many debts. For comments on the manuscript and for conversations on these topics over the years, I am grateful to Frederick Beiser, Victor Brudney, Arnold Davidson, Michael Forster, Daniel Garber, Michael Hardimon, Peter Hylton, Edward Minar, Ellen Rosendale, Steven Vogel, Candace Vogler, Lindsay Waters, and the readers from Harvard University Press. I thank the Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago for a quarter without teaching responsibilities in winter 1993, and I thank the University of Chicago for a two-quarter leave in autumn 1995 and winter 1996 that enabled me to finish the manuscript. David and Allie Brudney generously allowed me to use an absurd amount of space (thus made unavailable for games) on the hard drive of the family computer. They are eager to learn what life is like without their dad working on this book. To my father, Victor Brudney, I owe my most important training in intellectual pleasures. All my life he has been my mentor. My mother, Juliet Brudney, has been an inspiring model of steadfast perseverance in the interminable struggle with words. I am also enormously grateful to them both, as well as to my wife’s wonderful parents, Eleanor and King Rosendale, for their unfailing and unflappable support and encouragement.

xii

Acknowledgments

At first, and for many years, my wife, Ellen Rosendale, was eager to be supportive; somehow, she also managed to be supportive to the end. To her I am grateful for much, much more than support and encouragement. She is what makes my world turn.

Abbreviations

Wherever possible, I have cited both the German original and an English translation. With the texts of Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, the citations are in parentheses in the body of the text, with an abbreviation to the German title, and then the German reference first, separated from the English by a slash mark. With other writers, the citations are in the notes, again with the German reference first. Translations of previously untranslated materials are my own. Where adequate translations exist I have made use of them; however, almost all have been altered to at least some extent. (I have omitted adding “translation amended” so as not constantly to clutter the text.) With quotations from several commentators and brief quotations from Althusser and Fourier, I have used existing translations without alteration and without citation of the original German or French. All italics in translated material are in the original.

Abbreviations

xiv

Feuerbach Werke

AB AP

BN

BWC

CA

CR Fr

G

JacP

Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Werner Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1967. Cited by volume. For the texts through 1845 taken from the Gesammelte Werke, I have given the titles and publication dates of the first printings. These are the versions in the Schuffenhauer edition (this edition provides footnotes to later variants). All these texts were slightly revised and in some cases their titles slightly changed for Feuerbach’s Sämmtliche Werke in 1846. Nothing of substance hangs on Feuerbach’s later changes. Ausgewählte Briefe von und an Ludwig Feuerbach. Edited by Wilhelm Bolin. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1904. “Einige Bemerkungen über den Anfang der Philosophie von Dr. J. F. Reiff” (1841). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. “On The Beginning of Philosophy.” Translated by Zawar Hanfi. In The Fiery Brook. New York: Anchor Books, 1972. Ludwig Feuerbach in seinem Briefwechsel und Nachlass sowie in seiner Philosophischen Charakterentwicklung. Edited by Karl Grün. Leipzig & Heidelberg: C. F. Winter’sche Verlagshandlung, 1874. “Beleuchtung der in den Theologischen Studien und Kritiken (Jahrgang 1842, I. Heft) enthaltenen Rezension meiner Schrift Das Wesen des Christentums” (1842). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. “Zur Charakteristik des modernen Afterchristentums. Herr D. Nepomuk von Ringseis oder Hippokrates in der Pfaffenkutte” (1841). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. “An Carl Riedel. Zur Berichtigung seiner Skizze” (1839). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Fragmente zur Charakteristik meines philosophischen curriculum vitae (1846). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. “Characteristics Concerning My Philosophical Development.” Translated by Zawar Hanfi. In The Fiery Brook. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Manfred Vogel. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Schuffenhauer uses the first German edition. In the second edition (1846), the section numbers for the second half of the work are one and, at the end of the text, two lower. The translation follows the second edition. As a result, section numbers there do not always match those in the German edition I cite. Section numbers to the German (designated by §) are followed by page numbers first to the German and then to the English edition. Readers wishing to find a passage in the translation should use the page, not the section numbers. One section, §44, is discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 8. In the translation this is §43. “Jacobi und die Philosophie seiner Zeit. Ein Versuch, das wissenschaftliche Fundament der Philosophie historisch zu erörtern. Von J. Kuhn.” (1835). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8.

Abbreviations KAH KB

KH

KP

NR NRP

OI

UPC

UW UWC V VT

VWR

WC

WC-1 WGL

xv

Kritik des “Anti-Hegels”. Zur Einleitung in das Studium der Philosophie (1835). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. “Kritische Bemerkungen zu den Grundsätzen der Philosophie” (1848–49). In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodl, vol. 2. Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1904. “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie” (1839). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. “Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy.” Translated by Zawar Hanfi. In The Young Hegelians, edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. “Zur Kritik der ‘positiven Philosophie.’ Über das Wesen und die Bedeutung der spekulativen Philosophie und Theologie in der gegenwärtigen Zeit, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Religionsphilosophie. Spezielle Einleitung in die Philosophie und spekulative Theologie. Von Dr. Sengler.” (1838). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. “Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution” (1850). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. “Notwendigkeit einer Reform der Philosophie” (1842). In Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 2. “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy.” Translated by Zawar Hanfi. In The Fiery Brook. “Outline for an Introduction to the Complete Works, 1845/46.” Translated by Lawrence S. Stepelevich. The Philosophical Forum 8, nos. 2–4 (1977). This consists of two brief fragments, first published in The Philosophical Forum. Über Philosophie und Christentum in Beziehung auf den der Hegelschen Philosophie gemachten Vorwurf der Unchristlichkeit (1839). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. “Ueber das Wunder” (1839). In Gesammelte Werk, vol. 8. “Über das Wesen des Christentums in Beziehung auf den Einzigen und sein Eigentum” (1845). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. “Vorwort” to the first edition of the Sämmtliche Werke (1846). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (1843). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Dahlstrom. In Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians. Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion (1851). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6. Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; rev. ed., 1843; rev. ed., 1849). Edited by Werner Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1956. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Das Wesen des Christentums. 1st ed. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luthers. Ein Beitrag zum “Wesen des Christentums” (1844). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. The Essence of Faith According to Luther. Translated by Melvin Cherno. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

xvi ZB

Abbreviations “Zur Beurteilung der Schrift Das Wesen des Christentums” (1842). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9.

Bauer BS CLF DN

ECh

Ein

Fä

Gat

GK GLJ J

JP

LF MH

“Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele” (1842). In Hans-Martin Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968. “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” (1845). In Wigand’s Vierteljahrschrift. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845. “Die deutschen ‘Nationalen.’” Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe, no. 69, March 30, 1842, Beiblatt. Reprinted in Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle, eds., Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik, im deutschen Vormärz. Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag G.m.b.H., 1986. Das entdeckte Christentum (1843), edited by Ernst Barnikol and published under the title Das Entdeckte Christentum im Vormärz. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1927. “Einleitung in die Dogmengeschichte. Von Theodor Kliesoth” (1843). In Arnold Ruge, ed., Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik. Vol. 2. Zurich and Winterthur: Verlag des Literarischen Comptoirs, 1843. “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden” (1843). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free.” Translated by Michael P. Malloy. The Philosophical Forum 8, nos. 2–4 (1977). “Die Gattung und die Masse” (1844). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. “The Genus and the Crowd.” Translated by Michael Malloy. In Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” (1844). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. “Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu mit steter Rücksicht auf die vorhandenen Quellen. Von Dr. von Ammon.” (1843). In Ruge, ed., Anekdota, vol. 2. Die Judenfrage (1843). Braunschweig: Friedrich Otto, 1843. The Jewish Problem. Translated by Helen Lederer. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College. The Jewish Problem. Translated by Helen Lederer, in Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians. Because Lederer’s complete translation is not readily available, whenever possible I have cited the sections published in The Young Hegelians. “Leiden und Freuden des theologischen Bewußtseins” (1843). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. “Die Mythe von Hegel.” Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe, no. 167, June 16, 1842, Beiblatt. Reprinted in Pepperle and Pepperle, eds., Die Hegelsche Linke.

Abbreviations Po

SF Syn SZ TS

xvii

Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (1841). Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841. The Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel, the Atheist and Antichrist. Translated by Lawrence Stepelevich. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842). Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1972. Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptike, vol. 1 (1841). Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841. “Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit” (1841). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik. “Theologische Schamlosigkeiten” (1841). In Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik.

Marx Werke Works AKZ

AM

Br DhF

DI

EP

Gr

Kap

KGP

Marx-Engels Werke (MEW). Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956. Cited by volume. Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW). New York: International Publishers, 1975. Cited by volume. “Der leitende Artikel in Nr. 179 der Kölnischen Zeitung” (1842). From Rheinische Zeitung, no. 195, July 14, 1842, MEW, vol. 1.“The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.” MECW, vol. 1. Auszüge aus James Mills Buch “Élémens d’économie politique” (1844). MEW, Ergänzungsband. Comments on James Mill, “Élémens d’économie politique.” MECW, vol. 3. “Briefe aus den Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbüchern (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.” MECW Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten. (1845) MEW, vol. 2. The Holy Family or Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company. MECW, vol. 4. Die deutsche Ideologie: Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner, und des deutschen Sozialismus in seinen verschiedenen Propheten (1845–46). MEW, vol. 3. The German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets. MECW, vol. 5. Das Elend der Philosophie: Antwort auf Proudhons “Philosophie des Elends” (1847). MEW, vol. 4. The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the “Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon. MECW, vol. 6. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857–58). Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1867, 1885, 1894). Vols. 1–3. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1982. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Vols. 2 and 3. New York: International Publishers, 1967. “Kritik des Gothaer Programms” (1875). MEW, vol. 19. “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” In Marx-Engels Selected Works. New York: International Publishers, 1984.

xviii KHE

KpÖ

KR

LK LSSF

MK ÖpM

TF TM

W ZJ

Abbreviations “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung” (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction.” MECW, vol. 3. Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859). MEW, vol. 13. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya, New York: International Publishers, 1970. “Kritische Randglossen zu dem Artikel ‘Der König von Preußen und die Sozialreform. Von einem Preußen’” (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform: By a Prussian.’” MECW, vol. 3. Lohnarbeit und Kapital (1849). MEW, vol. 6. Wage Labour and Capital. MECW, vol. 9. “Luther als Schiedsrichter zwischen Strauß und Feuerbach” (1842). In Ruge, ed., Anekdota. vol. 2. “Luther as Arbiter between Strauss and Feuerbach.” In Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Easton and Guddat, ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848). MEW, vol. 4. The Communist Manifesto. MECW, vol. 6. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844. MEW, Ergänzungsband. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. MECW, vol. 3. Thesen über Feuerbach (1845). MEW, vol. 3. Theses on Feuerbach, MECW, vol. 5. Theorien über den Mehrwert (1861–63). MEW, vol. 26.1. Theories of Surplus Value. Vol. 1. Translated by Emile Burns. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969. “Wages” (1847). MECW, vol. 6. “Zur Judenfrage” (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “On the Jewish Question.” MECW, vol. 3.

Engels Werke Works AntD

LE

LudF

Umr

Marx-Engels Werke (MEW). Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956. Cited by volume. Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW). New York: International Publishers, 1975. Cited by volume. Herr Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Anti-Dühring) (1878). MEW, vol. 20. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring). New York: International Publishers, 1939. “Die Lage Englands: Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle” (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “The Condition of England: Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle,” MECW, vol. 3. Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888). MEW, vol. 21. Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1978. “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie” (1843). MEW, vol. 1. “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” MECW, vol. 3.


Introduction

Th i s b o o k b e gin s with Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence

of Christianity (1841) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), moves to the journalistic and polemical works of Bruno Bauer in 1841– 43, on to Karl Marx’s 1844 writings, and up through his Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and The German Ideology (1845–46). It is about the transmutations of a set of ideas. These ideas concern human nature, the good life for human beings, and the human relation to the world and to other human beings. They concern how one ends up with false beliefs about these matters, and whether one can—in a capitalist society— know the truth about them; they also concern the critique of capitalism that would flow from knowing the truth. This five-year stretch in the Germany of the 1840s is a hot-house period, a time of ferment in which positions are staked out, attacked, defended, and changed at a breakneck pace. The Zeitgeist is thought to be in rapid flux. “A work which in 1841 was a noteworthy phenomenon,” Bauer declares, cannot in 1845 “still have value” for the age (CLF 126). In this period one finds the most important works of Feuerbach, and the works of his and of Bauer’s that most importantly influence Marx, as well as Marx’s own works most central to his different normative visions and to the different critiques of capitalism based on them. A more exhaustive account would start further back, with David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835) and Bauer’s Kritik der evangelischen 1

2

M a r x ’ s A t t e m p t t o L e av e P h i l o s o p h y

Geschichte der Synoptiker (1841). Indeed, I might have gone back to Hegel’s philosophy of religion and to eighteenth-century biblical critics such as Reimarus, Semler, and Eichhorn. My concern, however, is not the details of the Young Hegelian critique of the Bible but rather how their critique of religion turns into the critique of philosophy and, in Marx’s hands, into the critique of the critique of religion and philosophy. “The critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique,” Marx says in 1843 (KHE 378/175). A few years later he and Engels declare that “in direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven” (DI 26/36). I try to tell the story of this shift and of the conceptual problems it creates. For that purpose, Strauss’s work can be omitted, and Bauer’s journalistic writings of the early 1840s (with some attention to those of the mid-1840s) are more important than his voluminous biblical polemics. Commentators have worked, reworked, and re-reworked this material, yet it is still rare to find a serious philosophical treatment of any of the members of that amorphous group of radical German writers known as the Young Hegelians. They almost always appear either as precursors or as targets, inevitably as figures seen through the prism of Marx.1 Of course, they are both Marx’s precursors and his targets, and there is nothing wrong with reading them to gain insight into Marx’s texts. I do so in this book. But one must first read them properly, that is, for themselves. When one reads Feuerbach, in particular, properly one sees the continuing impact of the epistemological structure and the goal of spiritual transformation of Lutheran Protestantism. That tradition directly affects Feuerbach—indeed, it does so in two ways—and through him it indirectly affects Marx. The justificatory dilemma that I argue crops up in Marx’s work of 1844 stems ultimately from Feuerbach’s attempt to leave Protestant Christianity while remaining, to a great extent, within its epistemological framework. With Feuerbach, the issue is one of actual influence; with Marx, it is merely one of conceptual similarity. With both writers, my argument’s central focus is their texts’ internal structure, not their historical antecedents (and with Marx the former are merely indirect, i.e., through Feuerbach). Still, in understanding both writers it helps to remember the religious tradition from which they—and most clearly Feuerbach—emerge.

Introduction

3

The tale I tell starts with Feuerbach, for a time a kind of mentor for Marx, and then turns to Bauer, for a time Marx’s friend and teacher (and perhaps even collaborator),2 before moving on to Marx himself. The tale ends with The German Ideology. To some extent, any end point is artificial, but The German Ideology provides an obvious break. Marx’s theory of history first comes to articulation there, and extensive investigation of political economy is the work’s natural outgrowth. I do not focus on those themes, and the themes on which I do focus are more muted in Marx’s post–German Ideology work. My concern is with conceptions of a good human life, and it is in Marx’s texts of 1844 to 1846 that one finds his most interesting accounts of such things. The German Ideology provides a natural break for another reason. With it I will have considered several unsuccessful attempts by Marx to escape the justificatory problem that (as I argue in Chapter 6) flows from his adaptation of Feuerbach’s particular way of rejecting philosophy; moreover, I will be in a position to argue that, granting Marx’s own claims, he need not, in the end, flee at least one form of philosophy— namely, moral philosophy—at least not while capitalism lasts. This Introduction covers a fair amount of ground. In §1 I make some stage-setting remarks on the Young Hegelians. In §2 I discuss Feuerbach’s and Marx’s complaint against philosophy. In §3 I say a bit about the interest of these texts, about why they continue to be worth study. Finally, §4 describes the book’s chapter-by-chapter development.

1. Themes from the Young Hegelians According to the Young Hegelians, if individuals recognize what kind of creatures human beings truly are, they will see that existing institutions are incompatible with realizing our nature—incompatible with the conditions and/or the activities constitutive of the good life for human beings given the essential nature of human beings—and then they will change those institutions. “[W]henever the established order contradicts the Self-consciousness of philosophy,” Bauer says, “it must be directly attacked and shaken” (Po 83/128); in 1843, Marx declares that “the critique of religion ends with the teaching that the human being [der Mensch] is the highest being for the human being, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which the human being is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being” (KHE 385/182); and

4


in the same year, Engels writes, “The human being [der Mensch] has only to understand himself, to take himself as the measure of all aspects of life, to judge according to his nature [Wesen], to organize the world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature [Natur], and he will have solved the riddle of our time” (LE 546/464–65).3 Knowledge of human nature gives the standard for political change. The Young Hegelians intend to provide such knowledge. In doing so, they think they are changing people’s conceptions of human nature. And for them such change involves changing the kind of being one is. For them, to change one’s conception of human nature is to be transformed, for they are Hegelians, and in particular Hegelians descended from those of the 1820s and 1830s. Differ as they might from those Old Hegelians, they have some things in common.4 Chief among them is that becoming a Hegelian tends to be experienced as a conversion. In his excellent study, Hegelianism, John Toews traces the thread of conversion experiences among the Hegelians of the 1820s and 1830s. It is worth quoting a couple of the older Hegelians. “We may comprehend a complete system with our understanding, teach and learn philosophy,” Karl Göschel says, “and yet lack the standpoint that gives light and truth to what has been learned. The philosopher must also celebrate his day of pentecost. Without a second birth no one can rise from the sphere of natural understanding to the speculative heights of the living concept. That famous bridge that leads in one sudden leap from the limited horizons of the psychological sphere to the philosophical circle of light must be crossed by everyone.”5 Karl Rosenkranz talks of how the Hegelians of the 1820s, himself among them, experienced “a shudder of the most sublime emotion. . . A joyful earnest rapture came over many. . . and ennobled their life anew.”6 The twenty-year-old Feuerbach declares in 1824 that his encounter with Hegel is the “turning point” in his life. Later he will say that, through Hegel, his “heart and head” were “set right.”7 Schwärmerei is characteristic of the Hegelians, young and old, but such statements should not be dismissed. To the Hegelians, to become a Hegelian is to become a new person. For the Hegelians of the 1820s and 1830s, philosophy—Hegel’s philosophy—is both preparation for and in a sense the content of these conversion experiences. Theirs is a conversion produced by and con-

Introduction

5

sisting of an elevation to the standpoint of reason as construed in Hegel’s thought. Feuerbach and Marx (though not Bauer) differ markedly here from the earlier Hegelians in that, for them, the change in the agent involves a rejection of Hegelian philosophy. Nevertheless, I will argue (see Chapters 2 and 6) that here, too—and precisely in this rejection—the idea of a change in consciousness, a change comparable to a conversion, is crucial. Karl Löwith says of the Young Hegelians, “Their writings are manifestos, programs, and theses, but never anything whole, important in itself. In their hands, their scientific demonstrations became sensational proclamations with which they turn to the masses or the individual. Whoever studies their writings will discover that, in spite of their inflammatory tone, they leave an impression of insipidity. They make immoderate demands with insufficient means, and dilate Hegel’s abstract dialectics to a piece of rhetoric.”8 In two ways Löwith misses the point. (i) The Young Hegelian goal is merely to make conscious what is unconscious. It was a common belief in the 1830s and 1840s that an old era was closing and a new one beginning.9 The Young Hegelian slant is that the new era is not really so new; it is more the realization of intellectual and political possibilities developed in the old. Specifically, the Young Hegelians read Hegel’s philosophy of religion and his political philosophy as pointing toward the advent of atheism and the end of political absolutism. Their job, they think, is to make explicit the potential content of the present. “[W]e can formulate the trend of our journal,” Marx declares in 1843 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, “as being: self-clarification. . . by the age of its struggles and wishes” (Br 346/145). The time is ripe for the recognition that change is both needed and possible. Such recognition is usually phrased as a waking from a dream, the extracting of a kernel from a shell, or the removing of a veil—recurring metaphors in Young Hegelian writing. They indicate that this recognition is supposed to be self-certifying, to have the feel of a coming to clarity or self-knowledge (see WC 319/205). “The reform of consciousness,” Marx says in the Jahrbücher, “consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it its own actions. . . It is a matter of a confession

6


and nothing more” (Br 346/145). No external criterion is needed here to distinguish dreaming from waking. One simply knows when one has awoken. (ii) The Young Hegelians do not compete philosophically with Hegel. Those who regard themselves as his disciples are self-consciously epigones. Those who oppose him do not do so in the name of another system.10 For all of them, the point is to put philosophy into practice. For all, the point is to get people to see the need for and the possibility of change. For Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx (that is, the Marx of the Comments on James Mill’s “Élémens d’économie politique” and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; see Chapters 4 through 6), this means attacking Hegel. For Bauer, it means making explicit the implicitly revolutionary Hegel. These writers differ over whether Hegel’s philosophy (and abstract thought generally) is enemy or ally, but for none is the goal the development of further academic philosophical positions. For Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx, the goal is explicitly to stay away from such things (see, for instance, ZB 241). When Feuerbach and Bauer and the 1844 Marx are understood in this way, Löwith’s criticism can be seen to be off target. One can then go on to read the Theses on Feuerbach and especially The German Ideology not as announcing the crude philosophical materialism of the orthodox Marxist tradition but as a continuation of Marx’s attempt to understand and to condemn capitalism while altogether avoiding certain philosophical issues, in particular while avoiding precisely the questions of ontology and epistemology that eventually gave rise to the orthodox Marxist theory known as “dialectical materialism.”11

2. Feuerbach’s and Marx’s Complaint against Philosophy The title of this book refers to “leaving” philosophy, but philosophy is many things and can be left in many ways. In this section I say a bit about what Marx and Feuerbach object to in something called “philosophy.” When Marx or Feuerbach explicitly attacks philosophy, the explicit target is almost always some variant of Hegelianism or, more generally, some variant of the philosophical tradition descended from Descartes. That has often led commentators to slot Marx or Feuerbach into camps

Introduction

7

opposed to idealism and rationalism, into some form of materialism or empiricism. This is deeply misleading. For their attack on philosophy is an attack not so much on particular philosophical positions (although it is that, too) as on a particular “mode of being” (ÖpM 581/339). Their central targets are, variously, the claim that the best life for human beings is something spiritual and purely intellectual, something quite different from life in the world of what Marx calls “sensuous activity,” by which he means the panoply of ordinary interactions with the material world (and, for him, usually the activity of wresting subsistence and more from obdurate nature); the claim that the road to the deepest truths is through abstract reflection disconnected from the everyday world of sensuous activity; and the entire disengaged and abstract way of relating to the world that Feuerbach and Marx think is characteristic of the philosophical outlook. To put it in a slogan, their target is not idealism so much as abstraction. So Locke or Hume—whose texts are as abstract as the Meditations—would be, for them, as problematic as Descartes. Now I will frequently say that Marx or Feuerbach thinks that agents should not see some question as an abstract question or that Marx or Feuerbach objects to agents taking an abstract standpoint. But “abstraction” is itself a vague notion. When I say that Locke’s and Hume’s texts are abstract, I mean partly that they use rarefied technical terminology—“impressions,” “ideas”—but more that they require one to take a certain kind of mental standpoint. One must retire, at least mentally, into one’s study. One must detach oneself from one’s everyday life in order to reflect upon the arguments. Yet there can be no objection to all instances of retiring into one’s study. The mathematician does so, as do other kinds of inquirers. What I think Marx and Feuerbach object to is the idea that claims specifically about such things as human nature or the nature of reality or knowledge are to be looked at from such a standpoint. Abstract reflection may be the way to prove mathematical theorems. They think it not the way to understand these other matters. The 1844 Marx also objects vehemently to the traditional idea that the reflective activity associated with philosophical inquiry is itself the highest form of human activity (to a lesser extent, this latter theme is also a focus of Feuerbach and of the Marx of The German Ideology).12 Marx and Feuerbach further and crucially object to what they take to be the way the philosopher stands toward the world, the philosopher’s

8


way of seeing herself related to the world. For Marx and Feuerbach, philosophy as a mode of inquiry and as an activity goes (not logically but in practice inescapably) with seeing oneself—more accurately, with living—wrongly in the world. The idea is that the standpoint from which the philosopher engages in abstract reflection is in some sense disconnected or distant from the world, a kind of stepping back from it, and as such is at odds with the right way of being in the world, of being oriented to it in daily life. The standpoint of abstract reflection is not only not the road to truth (about, e.g., human nature); it also connects one in the wrong way with the world. Not just the content of the activity but the standpoint from which one engages in it is at odds with our nature. This particular theme appears in Chapters 1, 2, and 6 and is implicit in Chapter 4. In Chapter 7 I highlight it, and at that point I introduce technical terms for talking about it (see Chapter 7, §1). I wait until then to do so, first, because I think that until then the informal rendition is sufficiently clear without the imposition of technical terms that are inevitably somewhat straitjacketing, and, second, because the technical terms are themselves fairly abstract while the phenomena at issue are anything but. By Chapter 7, the reader should have got a feel for the phenomena, and when the technical terms are presented, she should find familiar what they are intended to pick out. An attack on something called “philosophy” has been among the academic cottage industries of this century. What Marx is up to has some resemblance to recent antiphilosophical positions, but it is also different in important ways. Here I do some brief comparison and contrast. To begin with, despite Marx’s frequent emphasis on the importance of “practice,” in none of the texts we look at would his position be usefully thought of as a form of pragmatism. For instance, Marx does not think that the point of any claim is its usefulness for improving human life. More important, neither Marx nor Feuerbach would agree with that species of pragmatist which opposes philosophical theorizing on the ground that there are no “deep” questions to be answered. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach writes that his goal is “to vindicate to common things an uncommon significance, to life, as such, a religious import” (WC 419/278). It can be said of all the Young Hegelians that,

Introduction

9

opposed as they are to religion, their world is never disenchanted. They are militant atheists but also secular millenarians. In an 1843 review of Carlyle’s Past and Present, Engels says (in terms influenced by both Bauer and Feuerbach), “We want to transcend atheism, as Carlyle portrays it, by giving back to humanity the substance it has lost through religion; not as divine but as human substance, and this whole process of giving back is no more than simply the awakening of self-consciousness. . . We lay claim to the meaning of history; but we see in history not the revelation of ‘God’ but of humanity and only of humanity” (LE 544–45/463). The program is to realize the goals of religion without—indeed, in opposition to—the means of religion. For the pragmatist, the good society is simply better than the alternatives. For the Young Hegelians, it enables one to realize one’s human nature (that is, one’s nature as a human being), and it provides the conditions for the proper way for human beings to be in the world. This is also true for Marx right through The German Ideology. For Marx, too, the sense that the world has a potential fullness to it is strong, especially in his work of 1844 and the Theses, but in The German Ideology as well (although admittedly with less stress on the issue; see Chapter 9, §4). One way Feuerbach and Marx are apparently like some recent writers is in their belief that sometimes asking a philosophical question embodies a mistake. Sometimes they think the mistake is what in modern jargon would be called a “category mistake.” A question is asked about one kind of thing, but the question makes sense only if asked about another kind of thing. (Gilbert Ryle’s famous example is of someone who, having been shown the buildings, grounds, faculty, and so forth asks where “the university” is;13 for a Feuerbachian move of this kind, see Chapter 2, §2.) At other times, they think the mistake is to believe that a philosophical question has interest, needs to be answered when, at bottom and seen in the right way, the question has no interest, needs no answer—at least no answer of the abstract kind that philosophy gives. It is to be abandoned not because it is unintelligible or in some way logically ill-formed but because it has no bite. For Feuerbach and Marx, this latter critique goes with having the proper stance toward the world. With the proper stance, it is supposed to be clear that certain claims— for example, for the 1844 Marx, that labor to transform nature is the highest form of human activity—are simply true, are clearly true. And there is then supposed to be no bite to the idea that further justification

10


is needed. Philosophical questions are thus supposed to lose their interest. One is supposed to have the sense that the answers to such questions are straightforwardly clear and so to see no point in challenging those answers and thus no point to that ascent up the ladder of abstraction which is the philosopher’s usual way of dealing with questions. Marx thinks that, under communism, philosophical questions in general, as abstract questions, will lose their interest. Marx and Feuerbach might, then, seem similar to some recent writers, especially the later Wittgenstein, in their concern to quiet the impulse to ask philosophical questions. (At one point Feuerbach even appeals, apparently like Wittgenstein, to the metaphor of therapy to characterize his own approach; see WC 7.) This similarity is, I think, merely superficial. I think it safe to say that Wittgenstein never sees the source of a philosophical question in socially generated illusions permeating individuals’ lives. Marx always does. Whether Wittgenstein in fact has an account of the source of philosophical questions is unclear, and it is less clear whether, if he does, it is ever a psychological account like Feuerbach’s, an account of a basic human impulse coming to expression in a distorted way. In any event, even if there is similarity, Feuerbach would have no truck with the idea that the temptation to philosophical thought is a subtle thing requiring subtle treatment. For him, this concedes far too much. The dialectical give and take of a text like the Philosophical Investigations is what he wants to forestall. For Feuerbach, philosophy should and can be simply shaken out of us.14 Incidentally, neither Feuerbach’s nor Marx’s program is supposed to depend on esoteric knowledge or an esoteric method. In contrast to another recent critic of the philosophical tradition, Martin Heidegger, for Feuerbach and Marx (and to a great extent for Bauer as well), there is supposed to be no need for a technical vocabulary or a special style of thought, nothing beyond “the human . . . language,” as Feuerbach puts it (WC 17/xxxv). Ultimately, it is daily life that is to have a supernal glow. Here, although they might disdain the association, Feuerbach and Marx are like many a Romantic writer.15 Let me pull some things together. Feuerbach’s and Marx’s complaint against philosophy is directed variously at a way of trying to find certain truths, at a type of activity, and at a stance toward the world. No one of these is the continually dominant theme across all the texts I examine. Different themes are prominent at different times in these texts, and are

Introduction

11

highlighted at different points in this book. What binds them together is, on the one hand, the tale of the conceptual root of these concerns in Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity and their development across the various texts, and, on the other hand, the question of Marx’s ability (in the texts discussed) to condemn capitalism without recourse to the type of abstract thinking he rejects. For Feuerbach and Marx, certain philosophical questions are to be put aside as ill-formed, and in general, for them, philosophical questions are supposed to lose their interest as abstract questions. Yet, despite their complaints against philosophy, Feuerbach and Marx do not simply ignore all traditional philosophical issues. They do deal with some. But in doing so they don’t want to be guilty of the various sins against which they inveigh. In Chapter 2 I sketch four ways of approaching a philosophical question. These represent four attitudes one might have toward such a question. Using these categories, I try to bring out the specific features of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s ways of handling philosophical questions without (they think) getting caught by them (see Chapter 2, §2; Chapter 6, §§4 and 5; and Chapter 8, §§4 and 5). I have written a book tracing Marx’s and also Feuerbach’s attempts to leave philosophy. In doing so I present these writers as holding views about human beings and the world that look sufficiently general and abstract as to deserve the (in their eyes ignominious) sobriquet “philosophical.” It might be asked why they bother to write at all about such matters. The answer is that they think such matters important and that writing philosophically about a topic, in the sense of developing an abstract and relatively systematic account, is not the only option. Both Feuerbach and Marx rejected the goal of a professor’s chair, yet neither rejected reason. When they proceed by means opposed to those of many a professor, they do so with the belief that reason itself is better served thereby. They think their grasp of the world is better than their opponents’. Their goal is to make thought practical. True, their writings (at least those dealt with in this book) are, as Löwith says, polemics and manifestos. And that fact opens them to criticisms of various kinds, for instance, that their works are, as a matter of cold, hard fact, ineffectual, or, as I will argue with respect to Marx, that, in the absence of the abstract concepts and arguments he rejects, his works are, on their own premises, without the resources to accom-

12


plish some of their central goals. Still, there is nothing necessarily inconsistent about attempting to deal with question Q in a nonphilosophical manner, even if Q is a traditional philosophical question.

3. The Interest of These Texts A distinction is often made between the historical interest of a text from philosophy’s history—say, its interest for understanding the trajectory of a set of ideas or for understanding the history of a particular country or period—and the text’s continuing philosophical interest, its continuing interest for our philosophical problems. There is also, I think, a third way a text can be of interest, what can perhaps be thought of as its aesthetic interest. This last sort of interest should not be underrated. A dialectic can be ingenious and lovely to follow; a conceptual picture can be fascinating. In general, there can be great interest to an argument or a conceptual picture, even if the argument doesn’t work or the conceptual picture is false. One should not read or read about philosophical texts from the past solely to place them in a historical narrative or to extract a philosophical lesson. Feuerbach and Bauer are of historical interest. They are important for understanding the move from German Idealism not just to Marx, but also to nineteenth-century materialism and to Nietzsche. I do not think their works have a great deal of continuing philosophical interest (although Feuerbach’s have more than is recognized). I do think, however, that their works have a great deal of aesthetic interest. As with other forms of aesthetic interest, this is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. With Feuerbach and Bauer, what I find fascinating is their heady belief in the simplicity of the profound philosophical and practical problems facing them, their sublime confidence that all manner of things shall be well if we human beings can only realize what kind of creatures we are. Each believes life’s secret will ultimately—will very soon—be worn on its sleeve. It is hard to share their fervor and impossible to share their confidence, but one can find them in a peculiar way to be admirable. In one of his novels, Thomas Pynchon has a character reflect on “the sort of personality disorder . . . he admires.”16 In a way, these writers have the sort of philosophical disorder I admire. Marx’s early texts (taking these to include the work through The German Ideology) clearly have great historical interest. Marx is, after all,

Introduction

13

Marx. And his texts have aesthetic interest of a kind similar to Feuerbach’s and Bauer’s. Marx’s works also have genuine philosophical interest. This book is not a defense of Marx. In fact, my treatment of his texts is often quite critical. Like many academic philosophers, I find that taking a text seriously means challenging it, and that challenging it often leads to pointing out one or another shortcoming. That I find shortcomings in Marx’s texts is, however, consistent with believing them to be of continuing philosophical value. To begin with, in his work of 1844, Marx provides a distinctive and interesting conception of the structure of communal relationships, a conception with direct relevance to recent debates in political philosophy (see Chapter 5). More generally, I think that the abiding value of Marx’s work through (at least) The German Ideology is as a source for, or a proto-image of, a nonmetaphysical humanism. In the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser drew a bright line between the humanist Marx and the “mature” Marx, endorsing the latter and consigning the former to the dustbin of preMarxism. In 1978, G. A. Cohen published a rigorous and profound interpretation of Marx’s theory of history.17 And in the past two decades, many writers have proposed Marxist or quasi-Marxist theories of ideology, theories explaining the hegemony of beliefs by reference to the social function of those beliefs.18 The humanist Marx has been in the shadows. I think it time he is brought into the light. Humanism has recently been criticized from many sides and on many grounds, and no doubt diverse things have been grouped under the label. My concern in the rest of this section is with one central criticism frequently thought to apply to the early Marx. That is the criticism that humanism commits one to some account of the content of human nature, and that any such account will be objectionably metaphysical. Now, one probably does need an account of human nature if one wants to use that notion for a particular purpose, but it is not clear that it must be objectionably metaphysical. Consider two ways of giving content to “human nature.” With the first, one proposes an account of the feature or features (and/or capacity or capacities) that are, at all times and in all places, the essential feature or features (and/or capacity or capacities) of a human being. With the second, one proposes an

14


account of which feature or features (and/or capacity or capacities) of human beings are, for one’s current time and place, most important for determining what the good life is for human beings. Perhaps the first kind of account is objectionably metaphysical. I leave that question aside. Let’s focus instead on the second. Here there is no aspiration to an account alleged to be true at all times and in all places. There is only an account of that feature or those features (and/or capacity or capacities) that one thinks human beings as we now know them do (or soon could) in fact possess, and whose appropriate possession (and/or exercise) is (or soon could be) central to leading a good human life. Clearly, the content of such an account could vary widely. The point is that it is rooted in a view of human nature as we now see it. It does involve claims about what is central to being human in the sense that it involves claims about which features (and/or which capacities) are crucial to the good life specifically for human beings. Such claims are, on the one hand, descriptive. They involve claims about what human beings can (or could) do, and claims about the psychological traits human beings do (or could) possess. Such claims may be at odds with the available evidence or in other ways unconvincing, but they are the same sort of claim as (and so no more metaphysically problematic than), say, the claim that all human beings have the capacity to appreciate and enjoy works of art, or the claim that all human beings are selfish at least some of the time. Such claims are also normative in the sense that their focus is on those features (and/or capacities) crucial to the good life for human beings. It won’t be easy to defend any particular proposed content of this type for “human nature.” But that is generally the case with fundamental normative notions. It is not obvious that it will be substantially harder to defend a proposed content for “human nature” than to do so for other normative notions, for example, “just” or “fair.” In the end, one must have some account of what human beings are like, more specifically, some account of what we are like such that it makes sense to say that one form of life is the kind of life that is good for us, that our nature fits us for.19 And it is not a cheat to say that one’s account is intended as an account of a group of human beings smaller than humanity at all times and in all places. Obviously the group cannot be too small if the account is to have interest; obviously there will be

Introduction

15

debate about where to draw the boundaries of one’s present time and place; but there is no need for the group whose members one is describing to be the species from the beginning to the end of time. Even if the second kind of account could be shown to avoid (at least some) objections to which the first kind is vulnerable, that might not seem to help Marx, for he is usually thought to propose an account of the first kind, not the second. Here I will keep to the 1844 Marx. What I say of that Marx (with respect to this issue) could be extended to the Marx of the Theses and to the Marx of The German Ideology. Those texts, however, are not usually the ones focused on by commentators who think of the early Marx as heavily metaphysical. Many commentators read the 1844 Marx as committed to the first—the metaphysical—way of giving content to “human nature.” A sketch of how that Marx could respond to the charge is what is needed. The 1844 Marx is not a representative of a nonmetaphysical humanism, but he is not a great way from such a position. He does have a particular view of human nature, yet for him what is as important is the question of what is involved in having a view of human nature. On his picture of communism, individuals engage in various activities out of personal preference and from a sense that this is the way for human beings to live, the way for them to live given what they are like. We might attribute to these individuals the belief that there is a timeless human nature, but they just go about their business with the sense that this is how, for human beings, things are to be done. And, as we shall see (in Chapter 6, §§4 and 5), to provide a general theory of human nature to back up one’s belief that this is how things are to be done would be, for these communists, precisely what is not to be done. On the 1844 Marx’s account, individuals under communism do know that their activities are those that realize their (human) nature. It would be correct to say that they have a conception of human nature. For them, however, this conception is not a thesis to be affirmed in reflective moments. Its central manifestation is not in how they think about themselves, but in their way of living, how they get on in the world. Does this mean that for the 1844 Marx the concept of human nature is a purely practical concept, in the sense that it is to be made sense of only as it operates in the practical life and only in the practical life of individuals in a communist society? To put things this way is not quite right, for in the 1844 Marx’s vision of a communist society, a split

16


between the theoretical and the practical is absent. In his picture of communist society, beliefs about the nature of the world and of human beings permeate and are permeated by practice. There is no felt need for an independent realm of theory, at least not about such matters. So there is no primacy of the practical in the sense of a primacy of one sphere of life over another. Nevertheless, this way of putting matters is right insofar as it points to the fact that, in the 1844 Marx’s picture of communist society, to have a conception of human nature is not (certainly not necessarily) reflectively to subscribe to a particular philosophical theory. It is, rather, to live a certain kind of life. Clearly, more needs to be said, although this is not the place to say it, about what would be involved in a nonmetaphysical account of human nature. Marx’s 1844 view is not an instance of such an account, but it is part-way there. His views—not just in 1844 but right through The German Ideology—should be seen as among those that seek to take a stand on the proper form of human social organization given a set of claims about what human beings are like, and yet seek to do so while avoiding many (perhaps all) of the questions that have traditionally gone along with such claims. (Another view of this kind, even if quite different in both its positive content and its strategy of avoidance, is John Rawls’s recent rendition of justice as fairness as a purely political view.)20

4. Chapter by Chapter Chapters 1 and 2 are on Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. I read Feuerbach here less as propounding philosophical doctrines than as attempting to change his readers’ lives. He wants to rid his readers (as much their daily lives as their reflective beliefs) of the view that a human being’s true life is in the care of her immortal soul or in the exercise of her capacity for abstract thought. It is, rather, the life of ordinary, this-worldly, material existence. There is an epistemological element to this change. The route to knowledge of human nature is said to be not through abstract cerebration but through the proper kind of perception. In these texts Feuerbach is quite sanguine about how easy it is to have such perception. He

Introduction

17

thinks that what one needs to know about human nature can be read right off the world. There is no need to plumb the depths. I have mentioned the Hegelian stress on the experience of conversion. This links the Young Hegelians to the structure of Christian and especially to the structure of Protestant thought. Such experiences are hardly unique to one religious tradition, but it is characteristic of the line leading from Luther that it stresses internal illumination, what Karl Göschel calls a “day of pentecost.” With Feuerbach, this link takes a further form. The standard Hegelian conversion is to the standpoint of reason: one is to rise, as Göschel puts it, “from the sphere of natural understanding . . . to the philosophical circle of light.”21 The Feuerbachian conversion goes in the opposite direction, away from philosophy and back to natural understanding. In Chapters 1 and 2 I argue that here Feuerbach’s work is strikingly parallel to that of two fideist thinkers from the German Counter-Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Jacobi. Feuerbach wants to rehabilitate the senses, to reject the religious rejection of the world. He ties this rehabilitation to the requirements of inner conviction and spiritual conversion. Now, in contrast to the Hegelians of the 1820s and 1830s, for Hamann and Jacobi, inner conviction and spiritual conversion are not the final stage of an intellectual development whose groundwork has been laid by abstract argument; rather, they are attained through rejecting such argument. In this respect Feuerbach is like them. The structure of his thought in his two most influential works of the 1840s (and especially in The Essence) is thus connected not just to Hegel and Hegelianism but also to the Counter-Enlightenment. To read Feuerbach, as is standardly done, simply as a philosopher who subscribes to materialism is to miss him badly.22 Chapter 3 looks at the 1841–43 work of Bruno Bauer. Bauer is not directly relevant to the theme of leaving philosophy. In his texts we examine it is ambiguous whether his method is fundamentally Hegelian and, if not, whether it is philosophical in the sense of being abstract and systematic. (What is not ambiguous is that Bauer’s favored standpoint, that of “the critic,” is not animated by Feuerbach’s and Marx’s impulse to see oneself as very much part and parcel of the material world.) Bauer is included in this study partly because he was the dominant Young Hegelian of the early 1840s (another figure of the time,

18


August Cieszkowski, compared his importance to that of the Reformation)23 but primarily because his ideas are significant both in their influence on Marx and as part of what Marx eventually attacks. Much of Marx’s 1844 conception of self-realization amounts to a variant—a variant that stresses the importance of the labor process—of Bauer’s view that humans are essentially creators, beings who realize their nature by continually changing themselves and the world they inhabit. And because Bauer differs in major ways from Feuerbach, an understanding of his work is needed to see the structure of The German Ideology’s attack on the Young Hegelian movement as a whole. The rest of the book focuses on Marx’s work from 1844 to 1846. Chapters 4 through 6 examine the 1844 Marx (the Marx of the Comments and the Manuscripts); Chapter 7 looks at the Theses on Feuerbach; and Chapters 8 through 10 deal with The German Ideology. (A reading of The Holy Family, another work of this period, is omitted because what Marx says there he says better in these other texts.) In Chapter 4 I discuss how Marx thinks human beings, under communism, would be oriented to objects, to the natural world, and to their common status as members of the human species. I also argue that, for the 1844 Marx, the key activity in a good human life, the activity through which individuals would realize their nature, is the activity of transforming the natural world in the process of creating the material goods necessary for human beings to survive and to develop at a decent level. It is the realm of what in Capital Marx will call “necessary labor,” labor that the species must accomplish. In Chapter 5 I look at the 1844 Marx’s conception of community, his picture of how individuals would relate to one another in a communist society. This is a distinctive and neglected aspect of his 1844 view. Chapter 6 sets up a problem of justification. The problem goes roughly like this. The Young Hegelians think their conversions give them an accurate grasp of human nature and so give them a standard by which to assess existing institutions; but Marx’s 1844 account of capitalism’s impact on existing beliefs about human nature undermines the claim that such conversions can provide an accurate grasp of human nature. Now, the 1844 Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach’s attack on philosophy, and he is as wedded as Feuerbach to avoiding abstract thought and to relying on what ordinary life tells us. The problem is that, unlike Feuerbach, he is pessimistic about what ordinary life cur-

Introduction

19

rently tells us: he thinks that it is currently deeply misleading. I argue that the 1844 Marx is, in the end, committed to the claim that, given what he believes is the essential nature of human beings, and given what he believes is the structure of daily life in a capitalist society, he himself has no resources, within a capitalist society, adequately to justify his own alleged recognition of the essential nature of human beings (and so also no resources adequately to justify his claim about what the activity is through which human beings, in principle, realize their nature). There is here no rejection of the concept of human nature. On the contrary, the problem depends on accepting a particular conception of that concept. In his work of 1844, Marx says quite a bit about what human life would be like were we to realize our nature (that is, were we to live under communism). Like Feuerbach and Bauer, Marx condemns the present by reference to a conception of what human beings truly are. His claim in 1844, however, is that scrutiny of the world under capitalism would reveal a false and distorted picture of what human beings truly are—worse still, a picture by reference to which the present would not be found lacking, at least not in the sense that existing social institutions would be found intrinsically and deeply incompatible—as Marx contends they are—with the most basic way of realizing one’s nature as a human being. Marx’s justificatory problem stems from his desire to condemn capitalism while he both eschews the kind of abstract theory that claims to penetrate behind the appearances (with respect to human nature) of ordinary life and asserts that in ordinary life what human nature currently seems to be is quite different from what it actually is. For the Marx of 1844, the oft-debated question of whether Marx makes a normative critique of capitalism (a moral critique of some kind, leaving open which moral concepts might be employed) should be construed instead as the question of whether Marx can provide something that (without inconsistency with his other beliefs) he could himself think is a cogent justification of such a critique. Chapter 7 is on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. I read them as an attempt to use the notions of activity or practice not as theoretical notions but as picking out a standpoint or perspective (what I talk of as a fundamental orientation). This turns out to handle the justificatory worry, once one has taken the proper standpoint. But the problem returns, only now as the problem of the rationality, under capitalism, of taking the step—the action—necessary to generate the proper perspective.

20


In Chapter 8 I argue that Marx’s attack on the Young Hegelians is different from what nearly all commentators have taken it to be. Marx is not simply attacking a patently absurd position, namely, the claim that social change requires only change of ideas and not concrete action—a position that certainly Feuerbach and Bauer (two of his prime targets in The German Ideology) do not hold. I argue that Marx’s central complaint is epistemological. It is that the Young Hegelians mistakenly believe that their conversions have given them a standpoint from which the content of human nature is clear. I then try to show that in this text, too, Marx is assiduously attempting to avoid traditional philosophical positions. In particular, I read the statements often taken as the birthplace of Marxist materialism actually to be attempts to sidestep commitment to any metaphysical view. Chapter 9’s focus is the picture of the good life in The German Ideology. The picture differs from the one of 1844 in being a less radical challenge to traditional conceptions. In this chapter I also lay out the other central differences between Marx’s work of 1844 and The German Ideology, the text in which he seems to reject some of his own earlier views. Chapter 10 looks at The German Ideology’s attack on something called “morality.” My concern is to understand just what Marx objects to about moral thought and to see what reasons he has to support his objections. The justificatory problem returns yet again—now as the problem that, given his own rejection in The German Ideology of any appeal to moral norms, Marx seems to have no way to justify the normative critique of capitalism plainly there in the text. I close with some speculations on the moral life under communism, and with what I take to be the surprising claim that, if one pushes hard on some of Marx’s claims in The German Ideology (claims whose initial expression is in the work of 1844 and that are crucial to generating the justificatory problem I trace), there turns out to be no good reason for Marxists not to engage in moral philosophy. In effect, I argue that, on second thought, Marx could, without inconsistency, appeal to philosophical theory to extricate himself from his justificatory bind. He need not, even on his own terms, be as closed to abstraction as he thinks. Three threads tie things together: the antiphilosophical aims of Feuerbach and Marx, the content of Marx’s (different) conceptions of the good life, and the justification of Marx’s normative critique of capi-

Introduction

21

talism. The underlying link is that a critique of capitalism based on either of Marx’s conceptions of the good life will need—under capitalism and on Marx’s premises—a justification that apparently only a philosophical theory could provide. Following Feuerbach, however, that is the last thing Marx wants or, without inconsistency, could make use of (although see Chapter 10, §6). The interest of all this is in the details. This is especially true in regard to the issue of justification, for the structure of a problem like Marx’s is well-known: if certain false beliefs stem from widespread and inescapable conditions that are epistemologically distorting in a particular way, if current conditions are still epistemologically distorting in that particular way, and if the intellectual devices by which scientists and philosophers try to surmount the effects of these epistemologically distorting conditions are either inappropriate to the task or even themselves reinforce the false beliefs in question, then justifying that the beliefs in question are false is likely to be extremely difficult. This “standpoint problem” has been familiar in Marxist discussions since at least Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. It is a staple of postmodernist thought and as a general schema is simple enough to see. Its interest comes from the details of how it arises—in this case, from the way that Marx, while trying to avoid precisely this situation, nevertheless boxes himself into it. Several points should be kept in mind about the problem of justification. • The problem is internal to Marx’s texts. Marx’s repeated difficulty is that the critique he mounts cannot, consistent with his other beliefs, be justified under capitalism. This is compatible with its being justifiable, even under capitalism. Part of the moral of the story is to support the familiar claim that those who sympathize with Marx’s hostility to capitalism should abandon their reluctance to debating that hostility’s philosophical justification. It is useful, however, to reach this conclusion from within Marx’s own texts, as a consequence of taking them very seriously. • The justificatory problem is distinct from the issues dealt with by a theory of ideology, understood as a theory that attempts to explain the existence of certain allegedly false beliefs by reference to the social function of those beliefs. My concern is how Marx might justify certain allegedly true beliefs. To be sure, the justificatory difficulties I claim

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Marx to face are difficulties whose ultimate causes Marx would say are due to capitalism. And it is possible (a) that the existence of such difficulties has some social function within a capitalist society and even (b) that this social function explains why such difficulties arise. A theorist of ideology would be concerned with (a) and (b). I neither affirm nor deny them. My focus is simply elsewhere. • The justificatory problem has to do with Marx’s conceptions of human nature and of the good life. It is irrelevant to other criticisms of capitalism. One recent commentator has claimed that “Marxism’s normative claims really are uncontentious.”24 Another has argued that “there is nothing problematic about saying that disguised exploitation, unnecessary servitude, economic instability, and declining productivity are features of a productive system which constitute good reasons for condemning it.”25 In fact, some of Marx’s normative claims are quite contentious. Nevertheless, much of his work, both early and late, does simply point out the existence of palpably horrible conditions and argue for their inevitability under capitalism. The truth in the old idea that Marxism is a value-free science is that if such claims are correct, capitalism can be roundly condemned without invoking a distinctively Marxist conception of human nature or the good life. Most of this book is about Marx, yet my reading of Marx is tied to my reading of Feuerbach and to a lesser extent of Bauer. Aside from its claims about particular texts, this book differs from other so-and-so-toMarx books in three basic ways. First, I look at Marx’s difference from Feuerbach and Bauer as a function of the dialectic of Marx’s own concerns rather than as his recognition of their “mistakes.” Second, I treat Bauer and especially Feuerbach in more detail than is usually done. Finally (and this also distinguishes the book from recent analytic work on Marx), my treatment of Marx is a work-by-work reconstruction (taking the Comments and Manuscripts as one work). I occasionally refer to Marx’s later works, and in the footnotes I mention subsequent continuities and discontinuities, but invocations of later works are intended to clarify conceptual points, not to buttress readings of earlier works. In principle, they could be dispensed with. (This is also true of my treatment of Feuerbach. With him, too, other texts are invoked merely as supplementary to the central focus—namely, his views between 1841 and 1843.) My concern is a step-by-step treatment of a nexus of problems. This means both that I restrict myself to that nexus and, more

Introduction

23

important, that I make no assertions about the views of “Marx” as opposed to those of “the 1844 Marx,” “the Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach,” and “the Marx of The German Ideology.”26 These inelegant references to different Marxes suggest that I think that changes occur in Marx’s views over time. And this is what I think. Now the most famous claim that Marx’s thought undergoes change comes from Louis Althusser. According to him, a dramatic shift begins with The German Ideology: a fissure appears, and the mature, the “real” Marx begins to emerge. Clearly, if the texts I look at have independent value, it makes little difference whether they count as having been written by the being honored as the “real” Marx. The crucial exegetical question is whether The German Ideology does mark a new phase. There is an obvious shift in the topics of Marx’s interest—for example, a turn to the theory of history. I think, however, that The German Ideology also shows significant change in two other areas: in the picture of the good life Marx presents and in the role accorded empirical verification (and, as a result of the latter, in the rejection of any appeal to a special standpoint). But I want to stress that such change goes along with a continued attempt to avoid traditional philosophical debates. In particular, it goes along with a continued attempt to avoid precisely the issues that obsess Althusser, most notably those concerning materialism versus idealism and those concerning the epistemologically proper standpoint from which inquiry is to proceed. Althusser is right that there is something different in The German Ideology, but he is very wrong about its content. (My discussion of Althusser is in Chapter 9, §4.) Something should be said about who is not included in this book. I do not discuss Max Stirner (except in passing; see Chapter 8, §2), Arnold Ruge, Edgar Bauer, Moses Hess, or other minor figures of the time. As with Feuerbach and Bauer, these were Marx’s influences and/or targets. Still, some selection must be made, and these writers were neither so persistently nor so centrally Marx’s influences and/or targets, nor are they as interesting as Feuerbach and Bauer. This goes as well for Engels’ independent work in this period. I should note that I refer to “the Young Hegelians” as a whole only with respect to issues on which I think there is substantial agreement across the group, including Feuerbach and Bauer. In presenting the texts that I do look at, I try to make sense of them.

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Where there is a choice to be made, I try to make the authors say plausible rather than implausible things, but the texts are supposed to bear out my readings, and my final assessments are often quite critical. My aim is to make Feuerbach’s, Bauer’s, and Marx’s texts and concerns intelligible, even—perhaps especially—where I argue that their views are, in the end, not convincing.

....

1 Feuerbach’s Critique of Christianity

Co m m e n t at o r s

o n Feuerbach always seem uneasy about his work, eagerly acknowledging his philosophical faults before going on to expound on his virtues, as if preserving their integrity as commentators requires an initial ritual criticism of their subject. Here is Friedrich Lange in his History of Materialism: “To a clear logic Feuerbach never attained. The nerve of his philosophizing remained, as everywhere in the idealistic epoch, divination. A ‘consequently’ [folglich] in Feuerbach does not . . . carry the force of a real, or at least intended, inference of the understanding, but it means . . . a leap to be taken in thought.” And so, Lange concludes, Feuerbach’s work “floats in a mystic gloom.”1 Or take Eugene Kamenka, who, before acknowledging “the importance and fruitfulness of a great deal that Feuerbach is saying,” feels called upon to stress the “literary imprecision and hyperbole” that were “fatal,” he says, “to any ambition that [Feuerbach] may have had of becoming a philosopher of the first rank.”2 Feuerbach is in fact hardly a paragon of logic and precision, but there is more to his “consequently’s” than his critics have seen. Feuerbach’s goal is not the elaboration and justification of a general theory. His aim is less intellectual assent than spiritual transformation, and his rhetorical strategy is shaped accordingly. He seeks to get the reader to view herself, the world, and her relation to the world in a new way. At the end of his Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach says that his wish has been “to transform friends of God into friends of humanity, 25

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believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world, Christians who, by their own profession and admission, are ‘half beast, half angel,’ into human beings” (VWR 320/285). The way Feuerbach writes is geared to prompting such a transformation. I have noted that it was common for Hegelians of all stripes to undergo conversion experiences. The peculiarity of the Feuerbachian conversion is its atheism. Feuerbach asks whether “a religious revolution [has] already occurred within us?” His answer is, “Yes; we have . . . no religion any more” (NRP 216/146). For Feuerbach, however, this revolution does not eliminate religion’s slot in human life. He insists that “a new conviction about the first elements and foundations of human existence” is needed: “[I]f we wish to retain the word—a new religion!” (VWR 243/217; see also G §64). According to Feuerbach, what is to “step into the place that religion had occupied” is philosophy, but a “totally different philosophy” (NRP 216/416). And Feuerbach’s philosophy does seem very different from other philosophy. Indeed, it often seems linked to traditional philosophy merely by counterassertion. For instance, Feuerbach notes that “[m]odern philosophy searched for something immediately certain” and that this led to deep doubt of the veracity of the senses and to the claim that there is certainty only in what the mind can register clearly and distinctly. However, Feuerbach retorts, “[i]ndisputable and immediately certain is only that which is an object of the senses, perception [Anschauung], and feeling” (G §38, 320/55). And, The true and divine is only that that needs no proof, that is immediately certain in itself, that immediately speaks for itself and convinces in itself, and in which the affirmation that it exists is immediately implied; it is that that is plainly decided upon, that is plainly indubitable, that is certain and clear as daylight. But only the sensuous [das Sinnliche] is clear as daylight; all doubt and dispute cease only where sensation [die Sinnlichkeit] begins. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation. (G §39, 321/55) Such declarations are hardly arguments. They are hardly attempts to respond, say, to Cartesian worries about the deliverances of the senses. They are more like attempts to get one to shift one’s standpoint, to look at the world in such a way that those worries will have no force.

Fe u e r b a c h ’ s C r i t i q u e o f C h r i s t i a n i t y

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In general, Feuerbach regards traditional epistemology and ontology less as elements of one or another incorrect theory than as expressions of a deeply distorted approach to human life. The proper response, he thinks, is not to give abstract arguments against abstract positions but to prompt the reader to look at life differently, to become oriented to the world differently. His totally different philosophy (the philosophy that steps into religion’s slot) is supposed to prompt us less to new philosophical beliefs than to a new way of existing in the world. (The Russian positivist P. L. Lavrov remarked that “Feuerbach’s effect on the reader was more like that of a speech in the pulpit than like that of a University lecture.”)3 Feuerbach has commonly been read as trying to answer the standard questions, as providing theories of knowledge and being— slack and loose theories but recognizable moves in the usual game.4 That is to miss his point. I am not claiming that Feuerbach never attempts a logically tight argument or an analysis of conceptual relationships. He attempts both. Nor am I saying that one cannot reconstruct his texts so as to attribute one or another ontology or theory of knowledge to him. As commentators admit, one can attribute too many such positions to him, often within the same text. My claim is that one makes most sense of the works of 1841 to 1843 especially (and can get some help with later works) if one recognizes that at the nodal points of particular arguments and in his overall approach to Christianity and philosophy what is most crucial to Feuerbach is the standpoint one takes, how one looks at the world, and that this is not so much argued for as demanded.5 My discussion of Feuerbach proceeds in two stages. In this chapter I look at his critique of Christianity as formulated in The Essence of Christianity. In the next chapter I look at his critique of philosophy in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and in the Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy.

1. The Content of the Critique of Christianity Religious belief, Feuerbach says, is a psychological projection. In The Essence of Christianity he uses this idea in two broadly different ways: a projection onto a transcendent entity of the capacities characteristic of the human species considered as a single entity enduring over time; and a projection onto a transcendent entity of the capacity to satisfy those

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human wishes that are beyond the capacities of the species, even considered as a single entity enduring over time. Let’s begin with the first. “All divine attributes,” Feuerbach says, “all the attributes which make God God, are attributes of the species—attributes which in the individual are limited, but the limits of which are transcended in the essence [Wesen] of the species, and even in its existence, in so far as it has its complete existence only in all human beings taken together” (WC 243/152). For instance, God’s knowledge of all particular facts corresponds to the unlimited knowledge cataloged by natural science, a claim Feuerbach makes most clearly in the Principles: The domain of the natural sciences is, because of its quantitative size, completely beyond the capacity of the individual human being to view and measure. . . But what the individual human being does not know and cannot do all human beings together know and can do. Thus, the divine knowledge that knows simultaneously every particular has its reality in the knowledge of the species. . . While one person notices what is happening on the moon or Uranus, another observes Venus or the intestines of the caterpillar. (G §12, 279–80/17) This passage refers only to observations and not to knowledge of causes, and it seems to assume that God’s knowledge is the sum only of those particulars known to at least one human being, leaving out of account the sparrows that have fallen unknown. Still, the point is clear enough. Any piece of God’s knowledge is or could be known by a human being. The gap between God’s and any individual’s knowledge is merely quantitative and so can be filled when the knowing subject is taken to be the human species extended into the future. Feuerbach deals with God’s power in similar fashion. It represents the control over nature that human beings are slowly acquiring. There is much we can now do that was recently beyond human powers, and Feuerbach is optimistic about the long-term progress of human capacities: “I firmly believe that many things, yes, many things, which with short-sighted, pusillanimous practical people today pass for flights of imagination, for ideas never to be realized, for mere chimeras, will tomorrow, i.e., in the next century . . . exist in complete reality” (WC 16/xxxiv; see also WC 243–44/152–53).


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Even God’s goodness can be handled in this way. True, at moments God’s goodness seems, for Feuerbach, more humanity’s regulative ideal than a condition it might actually attain. As “a morally perfect being,” he says, God “is nothing but the realized idea, the fulfilled law of morality” (WC 99/46). As God is not subject to the desires that lead humans astray, it would not be odd to find an asymmetry here, a human but not a divine difference between ideal and reality. The anthropomorphism would still obtain: God would be the realized form of a specifically human ideal. But Feuerbach insists on the moral equation of God and humanity. Moral perfection is understood in the same composite way as knowledge and power: “Human beings taken together are what a human being should and can be.” Agents counteract one another’s shortcomings. All are sinners, Feuerbach says, but each in her own way. One lies, another drinks, a third is libidinous, and so on. In the moral, as in other realms, he says, agents “compensate for each other [here for each other’s sins], so that taken as a whole, they are as they should be, they present the perfect human being” (WC 247–48/155–56). If Feuerbach seems untroubled by the negative side of this argument (as a composite the species is as much Satan as God), it may be because he believes the species is engaged in steady moral improvement (WC 15–16/xxxiv). Not only does humanity as a whole compensate for individual foibles; individuals themselves are getting better. And as with knowledge and power, the continual moral advances of individuals mean that no bound can be put on the future moral capacities of the species. The central claim, then, is that assessments of human knowledge, power, and morality must be in terms of the species as a whole, including its future achievements. Limits on what human beings might be thought able to know, to do, or to be are local limits, limits of individuals, not the species (WC 243/152–153). This reliance on the capacities of the species requires the exclusion of any divine knowledge or power qualitatively different from possible human knowledge or power (WC 341/221). However, God can allegedly know things humans, even as a species cannot. Any such alleged knowledge, Feuerbach claims, must be illusory. With respect to such alleged knowledge, Feuerbach sometimes makes a logical, at other times a psychological, claim. An example of the first

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concerns the world’s creation. Questions about the creation of particular phenomena, Feuerbach says, are real questions for which natural science will eventually provide answers. But to demand an account of the creation of everything—of “the All”—is meaningless. “God has not, like a human being, produced something in particular, this or that, but all things; his activity is absolutely universal, unlimited. Hence it is self-evident, it is a necessary consequence, that the mode in which God has produced the All is incomprehensible, because this activity is no mode of activity, because the question concerning the how is here an absurdity, a question which is excluded by the fundamental idea of unlimited activity” (WC 336/218). There can be no answer to the question of the “how” of the creation, no account of the creation as a natural causal event similar to other such events. For that would be to reduce it to the creation of some particular thing. Once cast in such terms, natural science could handle the question without God’s help: “Every particular thing arises in a natural way; it is something determinate, and as such it has—what is a tautology to state—a determinate ground, a determinate cause” (WC 337/218). But if by definition the “how” of the world’s creation cannot be given, then to ask the question is, Feuerbach thinks, to make a category mistake. It is to use the form of a naturalistic question to ask about something not describable in naturalistic terms. There is no answer to the question of how God made the world (WC 336/218). Natural science has no place for such a question. The consistent, natural scientific approach is to abandon it (WC 337/219). Miracles pose a related problem, for they are a “creation from nothing” (WC 214/131). But miracles are to be analyzed in terms of their psychological source rather than as a logical miscue. The problem with miracles, Feuerbach says, is not what they accomplish but that they accomplish it by violating the laws of nature. There is nothing miraculous about the sick becoming well. However, that the cure comes from “a mere word of command—that is the mystery of miracle. . . [I]t is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of nature and reason, but only in its mode and process” (WC 212/129). For Feuerbach, the crucial question is how to account for the persistent belief in a being with miraculous powers. Such powers cannot be reduced to projected human capacities, for they are not so much superior to as incommensurate with any possible human powers. But they


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can be reduced to projected human wishes and feelings. Human wishes, especially those that can never be naturally satisfied (that are unreachable by human progress), find their satisfaction in the image of a being not bound by the laws of nature, a being that can fulfill literally every wish (WC 210/128). In prayer, Feuerbach says, we express our deepest wishes and we believe in their fulfillment (WC 201/122). In doing so, we turn from the world and its limits. If we live with an eye on the world as it is, we know “that every effect has its natural cause, that a wish is only to be attained when it is made an end and the corresponding means are put into operation” (WC 202/123). A person who acknowledges this causal structure of the world “does not pray; he only works” (WC 202/123). By contrast, the believer, in prayer, averts his gaze from the world. “[H]e makes his wishes—the concerns of his heart—objects of the independent, omnipotent, absolute being, i.e., he affirms them without limitation [unbeschränkt]” (WC 202/123). Feuerbach’s idea seems to be that human feeling respects no limits. We want and feel to be possible what we know not to be possible. In prayer we turn from the real world to our deep-felt yearnings, and these are not so much unlimited themselves as simply impervious to the fact of real-world limits (WC 205–206/125). This is Feuerbach’s second kind of projection. Here God is not the projection of (collective) human capacities. He is the projection of (individual) human feelings and wishes. He is an imagined entity that can and will do those things we long to but could never—never in a million years—be able to do.6 Feuerbach has, then, two conceptions of the relation of the human to the divine. On the one hand, human capacities are attributed to God. These are capacities that human beings, as a species, already do possess or capacities that they can come to possess. God’s capacities are no different from human capacities as long as we focus on the species. On the other hand, human beings wish to do things that will remain beyond human capacities no matter how far science progresses. God’s capacities are, then, the capacities that human beings wish to but cannot have. It is important to keep these two forms of projection distinct, for they represent different kinds of mistakes. The error of the first stems from the human tendency to consider the limitations of individuals to be

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those of the species. Suppose that neither I nor anyone else is capable individually of performing some deed D. I overcome this limitation by imagining a being (God) that can do D. I thus fail to recognize that human beings either already can (jointly) do D, e.g., make the desert bloom; or that they will eventually be able (jointly) to do D, e.g., go to Mars. The concern to find a being capable of doing D can be satisfied without invoking God. He turns out to be an unnecessary hypothesis. This mistake is quite peculiar. It is not a mistake in our knowledge about anything. It is not a mistake about the attribution of a predicate to a subject, for the predicates are correctly attributed. What is said about God is correct—but as a description of the human species, not a transcendent entity. But neither is it a mistake about what the subject of these predicates is, for Feuerbach insists that where the predicates express the essence of the subject (which is the case, he says, “especially in theology”), identity of predicates entails identity of subject (WC 19– 20/xxxvii). What makes this mistake peculiar is that it is, in effect, a mistake solely about the name we have attributed to the subject of a certain set of predicates. That is why Feuerbach does not claim that we should attribute these predicates to humanity, but that in fact we already do so. Our worship of God is this attribution in concealed form. To get the name right, however, is not such a trivial thing, as the correct name is our name. Getting the name right reveals to us what we really have always done. When we have talked of God and his powers, we have really just been talking of humanity and its powers. That is why Feuerbach says that atheism is not opposed to religion but rather “the secret of religion itself” (WC 18/xxxvi). The other kind of error we make is to attribute an illusory objectivity to our wishes. We fail to see, for instance, that God’s miraculous powers are merely the imagined incarnation of a human wish, that they can exist only as a wish. Here a God with miraculous powers is a necessary hypothesis if the wish is to be satisfied. Here our mistake is not to see that belief in such a God is purely a function of that wish. This sort of illusory belief is akin to those investigated by psychoanalysis. The predicates of the imagined entity are different from the predicates of any possible actual entity, so there is here no identity of the human and the divine. Rather, the divine is an illusion whose source is in the human (WC 22/xxxix). Feuerbach’s task here is to extract religion’s “secret nature” from its “apparent conscious nature” (WC


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376/247). “I do nothing more to religion . . . than to open its eyes, or rather to direct its inward-turned gaze outward, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality” (WC 22/xxxix). What is inward is the image of God, the merely imagined subject, a “real [thing only] in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice”; what is outward are human beings with their needs and desires “in the light of reality and necessity” (WC 22/xxxix). To see things aright here is to see that our own wish has been the real (and only) source of our belief. Though distinct, the two forms of projection are also linked, for human wishes are crucial to both. In recognizing that I cannot do D, I not only imagine a being that can do D—I imagine a being that is ready to do D for me, ready to satisfy my wish to do D. Some wishes, however, can be satisfied without God’s intervention as long as I am able to identify with the species as a whole. I cannot make the desert bloom or go to Mars, but the species can. With respect to these wishes, the way to subvert the need for a deity is not by giving up the wish but by recognizing that, if my perspective is that of the species, my wish can be satisfied. Feuerbach’s discussion of immortality shows both the link and the difference between his two accounts of the human/divine relationship. Human beings, he notes, wish not to die (WC 219/135). Now, in modern Christian society, the wish for immortality is the wish for personal immortality. And this includes the wish to be certain of one’s immortality. That, however, is not something reason can provide. Reason “cannot give the certainty of my personal immortality, and it is precisely this certainty which is desired” (WC 219/135). The Christian attains the desired certainty through faith in Christ’s resurrection. That Christ, an actual human being, rose from the dead satisfies the desire “for an immediate certainty of [one’s] personal existence after death—personal immortality as a sensible, indisputable fact” (WC 220/135). Feuerbach is of two minds about this solution. On the one hand, he sees it as part of a general Christian antipathy to nature and natural processes. If one is not distanced from nature, he says, one can accept one’s finitude—that as a natural creature one is a finite creature—with something like equanimity. The wish for personal immortality does not dominate one’s life (WC 221/137 and 223/138). On the other hand, Feuerbach also stresses that the species is immor-

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tal, and that if one gives up the wish for personal immortality one can in fact realize immortality as a member of the species: “He therefore who lives in the consciousness of the species as a reality, regards his existence for others, his public, his socially useful existence, as that existence which is one with the existence of his nature [Wesen]—as his immortal existence. He lives with his whole soul, with his whole heart, for humanity” (WC 269/171). Here immortality is realized by the species, not the individual, or, rather, by the individual through identification with the species. These different responses to the wish for personal immortality are not incompatible. Presumably one could simultaneously take satisfaction in one’s identity with the species and its immortality and accept one’s individual mortality. The first response recognizes particular individual limits; the second, the species’ transcendence of those limits. By contrast, Feuerbach says, for the Christian, belief in Christ is both the (implicit) acknowledgment of the immortality of the species and the guarantee of personal immortality. Christ is the “real God of the Christians” (WC 245–46/154). Therefore, he has all the perfections characteristic of the Christian God, which, for Feuerbach, are the perfections of the species considered as a whole (WC 246/154); yet Christ is simultaneously an individual, an immortal individual of flesh and blood (WC 244/153). Of course this incarnation of the species in an individual transcends the laws of nature. It is a miracle, a product of the imagination (WC 246–47/155). The great appeal of Christ, Feuerbach says, is that he incarnates both what we do have through the species and what we wish for but cannot have for the individual. Having distinguished the two forms of religious projection, it is worth reiterating that both are rooted in the human desire to transcend one’s individual limitations. Feuerbach may have neglected the distinction I have drawn because what is crucial for him is that something human—be it capacities or wishes—explains the divine. Either way, “the human being is the beginning, the middle and the end of religion” (WC 287/184). Either way, Feuerbach can say that “I let religion itself speak; I make myself only its listener and interpreter, not its prompter. . . I have only betrayed the secret of the Christian religion” (WC 18/xxxvi). That the secret is in fact secrets is less important than that the divine is shown to stem from one or another feature of what is human.


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It is also worth stressing that, for Feuerbach, the wishes at the base of religious belief are not themselves problematic. Some are actually satisfiable in this world. For instance, poverty is said to be a source of religious belief (WC 136/73). Satisfying needs in this world would diminish the yearning for a different one (WC 454/296). Even the wish for personal immortality is not problematic as a wish (WC 244/153). What is problematic is how we respond to it. What is illusory in religion are not the wishes—they are quite real—but the objectification they produce.7 Feuerbach urges that identification with the species can substitute for belief in God. However, it cannot do so at all times and in all places. What Feuerbach calls the “idea of humanity as a whole” arises only in the course of history. Only in the course of history does the species replace Christ. As this occurs, religion withers. The needs that generated it find a different satisfaction: “[W]here there arises the consciousness of the species as a species, the idea of humanity as a whole, Christ disappears. . . The necessary turning-point of history is therefore the open confession and avowal, that the consciousness of God is nothing but the consciousness of the species” (WC 408/269–270). This is puzzling. Hasn’t there always been “the idea of humanity as a whole”? Is it really a recent phenomenon that individuals have conceived of themselves as members of the same species? Compare Hegel’s claim that only in the modern era has the consciousness arisen that human beings as human beings are free.8 According to Hegel, all human beings have always been free, or at least have had the capacity for freedom. His point is that only recently has this fact been both widely acknowledged and increasingly embodied in political institutions. The Feuerbachian analogue is that human beings have always been members of the human species, but only recently has this fact been acknowledged, only recently has “the consciousness of the species as a species [Gattung als Gattung]” arisen. Yet there is an important disanalogy. Freedom means many things for Hegel, but we can limit ourselves here to freedom of the person as distinct from slavery. It might be wrong but it would not be bizarre to the point of unintelligibility to deny that some human beings are essentially free creatures. There have been plenty of theories of the natural slave. By contrast, being human is quite palpable. Even if there have

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been disputes about superior or inferior variants of humans, the idea that all those in a certain very large class of beings count as members of “humanity” is not of recent origin and seems hardly a question for dispute. Recognition of the right to freedom of all human beings simply as human beings may be a modern achievement; recognition that all of us are members of the same species is not.9 I take Feuerbach’s point to be that recognition of this fact has not played a sufficiently important role in human life. It has not been a sufficiently important aspect of our self-descriptions. Either we have had no significant group identification or we have regarded as crucial the fact that we are Greeks or barbarians, women or men, Jews or gentiles, Germans or French. Merely being human has not provided a point of universal identification such that individuals could come to see the accomplishments of the species as their own. At most, they have regarded some far smaller group’s accomplishments as their own. And these come nowhere near the indefinitely large power, knowledge, and virtue that Feuerbach says humans long for and that he attributes to humanity as a whole. As a result, the human drive to raise oneself “above the limits of one’s individuality” (WC 408/270) has expressed itself only through the objectification of illusory, transcendent entities. Feuerbach is aware of the psychological difficulty of identifying with the species in the strong way he demands. And he is aware that the Christian religion especially is an attractive outlet for the emotional needs he has discussed: “Because of this immediate unity of the species with individuality, this concentration of all that is universal and essential in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; while the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings” (WC 244–45/153). The problem, Feuerbach says, is that humanity is just an idea, something abstract, but in the real world we do not see “humanity” but only “countless, separate, limited individuals” (WC 245/154). Feuerbach seems, then, to concede that the requisite identification may be difficult. But in his stressing the historical specificity of “the consciousness of the species as a species,” I take him to be saying that such identification has and will become progressively easier. This is because the species is in practice becoming less a mere collection of “separate, limited individuals.” With the rise of an intertwined and technologically progressive society, Feuerbach says, people are better able to counter the blows of nature and simultaneously have become


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more dependent on other human beings. As a consequence, Christian belief has itself begun to atrophy, to manifest an “inner decay” (NRP 217/147): “Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but from the life of humanity. . . [I]t is nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagrant contradiction with our fire and life insurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theaters and scientific museums” (WC 29–30/xliv). Collectively human beings are now increasingly able to control nature (“our railroads and steam-carriages”), and where they cannot control it, they can at least act to cushion its blows (“our fire and life insurance companies”). There is less need to substitute God for humanity. The preconditions for Christian belief are being progressively undermined. In an 1841 review of a book on Christian medical treatment, Feuerbach points out that even avowedly religious physicians, who ostensibly attribute all illness to sin, nevertheless treat their patients with medicine rather than with prayer alone (CA 115–42). This is an instance of how with the increase of human powers the need to turn to a transcendent entity fades. In the modern age, real faith—which includes a genuine belief in miracles—is fading fast. In practice, Feuerbach thinks, people now rely not on God but on other human beings and their accomplishments. In “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy,” Feuerbach even declares that “Christianity has really ceased to exist” (NRP 217/147). Feuerbach is certainly wrong in thinking that people’s reliance on doctors or the proliferation of inventions means that religiosity in general is altogether decayed (at about this time, Marx is pointing out that religiosity flourishes in that most modern society, the United States [see ZJ 352/151]). The exegetical point, however, is that Feuerbach thinks his message is one for which his contemporaries are ready. When he insists that atheism is the secret of religion, he does not think he is telling people something new. He thinks he is simply trying to make them acknowledge the nature of the lives they already lead.10

2. The Method of the Critique of Christianity This has been a skeletal rendition of Feuerbach’s substantive claims. Obviously much more could be said. (For instance, Feuerbach’s views differ from similar accounts of Christianity in his insistence that every

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detail of Christian dogma can be traced to particular aspects of human wishes and capacities. The first half of The Essence of Christianity is just such an item by item reduction.) In this section, however, my focus is Feuerbach’s method in The Essence. He describes it in a variety of ways. He calls it “the method of analytical chemistry” (WC 5) and calls himself a “natural scientist of the mind [ein geistiger Naturforscher]” (WC 16/xxxiv). His work is also a “historico-philosophical analysis” of religion (WC 25/xli); he says he “inverts” religious relations (WC 415/274– 75); he talks of translating “the Christian religion out of the Oriental image-language of the imagination into good, comprehensible German” (WC 14–15/xxxiii); he says he is religion’s “listener and interpreter” (WC 18/xxxvi); and he declares, “I resolve religion” into anthropology (WC 22/xxxviii). Translation and inversion involve redescribing a phenomenon or, really, calling it by its rightful name: the rightful name of the being with certain attributes (e.g., omniscience) is “the human species” rather than “God.” Call this the translation account of religion. On the other hand, giving a “historico-philosophical analysis” of religion involves showing point by point that religious phenomena are responses to or in some other way functions of nonreligious phenomena: belief in miracles is a response to human wishes. Call this the genetic account of religion.11 Interpreting religion or resolving it into anthropology seem construable in both these ways. Neither the genetic nor the translation account is supposed to be neutral with respect to the truth of religion’s claims. The language of plain sense is supposed to be the truth, the language of Oriental imagery an illusion. And the detailed genetic account of the content of religious belief is supposed to show that this content is false, that miracles do not happen. As an analytical matter, however, neither account, at least as Feuerbach provides them, proves its case. The availability of a translation does not privilege description in one language rather than another. And a genetic account of a belief entails nothing about its truth. Perhaps belief in the Christian God is generated by the wish to overcome the privations of human life. Nevertheless, the Christian God could exist. Indeed, part of God’s plan for leading agents to true beliefs about him might be through situating them in conditions that will drive them to belief. Merely as translations or as accounts of the psychological ori-


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gins of belief, Feuerbach’s claims do not show the believer’s beliefs to be false. I stress this point because commentators generally do not. They take for granted that Feuerbach’s account shows the real truth—or at least a substantial part of that truth—about Christianity without asking what justifies his claims. Yet insofar as all Feuerbach provides is a description of Christianity (a description of it as encoded truths about humanity or as the tinseled drapery of human wishes), his claims seem to need justification.12 “The ideas of my work,” Feuerbach says, “are only conclusions, consequences, drawn from premises [Prämissen] which are not themselves mere ideas, but objective—either existing or historical—facts” (WC 15/xxxiii). Conclusions that are validly drawn from true premises (“objective facts”) do have logical punch. If Feuerbach can mount that sort of argument, he will have shown the believer’s beliefs to be false. As Lange says, however, a “consequently” in Feuerbach cannot be taken in a strictly deductive sense. What Feuerbach himself says he means by drawing “conclusions, consequences [Konklusionen, Folgerungen]” is to generalize from “actual manifestations of human nature [menschlichen Wesens]” (WC 15/xxxiii).13 This is the case, he says, with “all the fundamental ideas of [The Essence]” (WC 15/xxxiii). Examples of “actual manifestations of human nature” or “facts” are (a) that human beings have certain needs, such as the psychological need to feel a connection to something transcending one’s individual life; and (b) that human beings believe religious propositions of various kinds, such as that God became human in Christ. From these Feuerbach draws the conclusion (c) that belief in Christ’s divinity is merely the imagined satisfaction of a human need, a need that he says “still exists in the religious sentiment” and that he calls “the basis [Grund] of the incarnation” (WC 104/50). Unfortunately, Feuerbach’s premises do not entail his conclusion. Human need may explain people’s readiness to believe in God’s incarnation in Christ, but this does not entail that such need is the “basis of the incarnation”—that is, that such an incarnation did not occur. Here Feuerbach’s “facts” show that a genetic account of Christianity is possible. They do not show Christian doctrine to be false. Similarly, Feuerbach says that “God became a human being out of mercy: thus he was in himself already a human God before he became

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an actual human being” (WC 104/50). That God possesses an attribute, mercy, in common with human beings does not, however, entail that he is “a human God” in the sense that he is not qualitatively different from human beings. Feuerbach is assuming that the translated description (the description of God in altogether human terms) must be the correct one. But that assumption needs defense. What if Feuerbach’s claims are weaker? Suppose he is merely proposing theses about the psychological origin of Christian beliefs, theses providing a plausible account of Christianity’s rise and existence, a plausible account of why people have believed in it—an account more plausible than reliance on the historical accuracy of the biblical stories. Though not proved false, the reasonableness of Christian belief would be undermined if Feuerbach could explain the data of Christianity in naturalistic (that is, psychological) terms. On this reading, Feuerbach would be asserting the implausibility of the biblical stories relative to his own account of the source of belief. And in a way, that is what he is doing. But he is also at pains to distinguish his work from the contemporary historical criticism of the Bible: I do not ask what the real, natural Christ was or may have been. . . [O]n the contrary, I accept the Christ of religion, but I show that this superhuman being is nothing but a product and object of supernatural human feeling. I do not ask whether this or that, or any miracle can happen or not; I only show what miracle is, and I show it not a priori but by examples of miracles narrated in the Bible as real events; in doing so, however, I answer or rather preclude [aufhebt] the question as to the possibility or reality or necessity of miracle. (WC 26/xli–xlii) Challenges to New Testament miracles had been ongoing in Germany (not to mention France and England) for generations. Feuerbach says he is not contributing to such challenges (see also his 1846 denial that his focus is the existence or nonexistence of God [V 189]). His description of Christianity is not intended as (although it may nonetheless be) one more ground for doubt. So what is Feuerbach up to? I think the reason he does not stress the relative plausibility of his own view but rather wants us simply to see the truth of his reading of Christianity has to do with the type of conviction


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he is trying to generate. His aim goes beyond extracting assent to a claim about the balance of reasons. His hope is that if one is convinced by his account, one will not even bother to assess the likelihood of this or that alleged miracle. He is concerned less with proving to agents where the balance of reasons lies than with changing their stance toward the world. Feuerbach wants to secularize us. He wants us to see ourselves as altogether material (though feeling and thinking) beings in a material world. As a result, certain questions are supposed to become nonstarters. The “question as to the possibility or reality or necessity” of miracles is not even to arise.14 It is sometimes said that, for the genuine believer, the world is replete with God’s presence. In the wake of a religious experience, Jonathan Edwards describes the world this way: “the appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be . . . [an] appearance of divine glory, in almost everything . . . clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature.”15 Feuerbach wants the world to seem utterly devoid of God (utterly devoid of a transcendent being) in the same way that for Edwards every flower manifests God’s presence. It is helpful to look at Feuerbach’s description of the phenomenology of religious belief: [F]or a specific religion—that is, relatively—the certainty of the existence of God is immediate; for just as involuntarily, as necessarily, as the Greek was Greek, so necessarily were his gods Greek beings, so necessarily were they real, existing beings. Religion is that view [Anschauung] of the nature of the world and of human beings which is identical with a human being’s nature [Wesen]. But the human being does not stand above his essential view of things [wesentlichen Anschauung]; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him. The necessity of a proof . . . the possibility of a doubt, ceases. (WC 61/20) To the genuine believer, God’s (or the gods’) existence is immediately certain. Proof is unnecessary, for doubt is the precondition of proof, and here Feuerbach thinks that doubt cannot come into play. The genuine believer, he says, can doubt God’s existence as little as she can doubt her own (WC 61–62/20). To the genuine believer, her gods are

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facts, self-certifying existences. . . A fact . . . is a conception about whose truth one does not doubt because it is not an object of theory but of feeling, which desires that what it wishes, what it believes to be the case, is indeed a fact, something it is forbidden to deny, if not externally then still internally. A fact is every possibility which passes for reality, every conception which for its age, there, where it is a fact, expresses a need and for that reason is an inviolable limit of the mind. (WC 319/205) The source of religious belief is human wishes. These wishes are satisfied by imagined objects. For two reasons, belief in the existence of these objects is impervious to doubt. First, the objects are objects of feeling. The mode of the believer’s encounter with them is her feeling of encountering them. Their existence cannot be doubted because the experience of feeling cannot be doubted. Second, for Feuerbach, our “view of the nature of the world and of human beings” determines what questions we ask, questions such as whether our feeling of an encounter corresponds to an actual encounter with an entity existing outside of us. His claim is that, where a religion really holds sway, this question does not arise with regard to religious experiences. Such experiences are felt as “self-certifying” in the sense that no proof could be more convincing than the experience. He is not, I think, claiming that, as a conceptual matter, one could not doubt the experience (that doubt would be unintelligible) but rather that one does not: the experience has sufficient authority to forestall doubt (WC 320/206).16 Feuerbach wants his own account of religion to generate a similarly self-certifying conviction. Again and again in his work, he demands an “immediate” conviction, one not the result of philosophical argument (NRP 219/149). Proofs of God’s existence, he says, can “give no satisfactory certainty” (WC 317/204); neither can proofs of God’s nonexistence or the nonexistence of miracles. Feuerbach’s idea seems to be that when it is a question of a chain of inference or the balance of reasons, doubt always remains possible: complete—what could be called exhaustive—belief or disbelief is not attained. The condition Feuerbach desires is one in which there is no need to draw inferences or to make judgments because the world simply has a certain look to it. God’s nonexistence (and the nonexistence of miracles) is to be as selfevident as that this is my hand.


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Of course philosophers have raised worries about precisely such selfevidence. As we will see in Chapter 2, this points to Feuerbach’s complaint against philosophers. Here, however, we must keep in mind that it is only the philosopher who raises this question. To the ordinary person, the self-evident presence of her hand is paradigmatic for seeing something to be the case. Feuerbach thinks that to the ordinary (genuine) believer, God’s presence is self-evident. He wants God’s absence to be equally palpable to the ordinary nonbeliever. I am not attributing to Feuerbach the view that an argument in terms of the relative implausibility of miracles cannot have the desired transformative impact. Perhaps it can. But it also might not. I think Feuerbach worries that conviction generated in such a way tends not to exclude doubt, tends not to fill the mind. If one is simply judging the balance of arguments, one can keep both opposing views in mind: argument A outweighs but does not completely displace argument B. By contrast, Stanley Cavell has pointed out that, with the famous duckrabbit figure, one cannot simultaneously see it both ways: at any moment the figure is only and completely—exhaustively—a duck (or a rabbit).17 Feuerbach does not want us merely to agree that the arguments for miracles are weak. He wants us to see the world as only and completely—exhaustively—nonmiraculous.18 I have read Feuerbach as attempting to change agents’ Christian way of seeing the world into an atheistic one.19 And this change is supposed to be self-certifying. There is supposed to be no need for a proof that one is now in touch with reality, not illusion. Here is an example of a self-certifying change. A child turns on the bedroom light and sees that it is not a dragon but a teddy bear sitting on the chair. With the light on, there is no doubt that it is a teddy bear. The trick the child must learn is not to see the dragon once the light is turned off, to internalize the light. This might not be easy to do. By contrast, Feuerbach thinks the religious believer can easily internalize the perception that her worship is really of humanity not God. First, because he is giving her a causal account of her misperception (akin to explaining to the child how the combination of darkness and her fears generated a false perception). Second, and more important, because, in effect, she has already internalized the new form of perception. She is not a genuine believer. A genuine believer’s perceptions

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cannot be shifted. Feuerbach, however, says that “our faith is not an unconditional, decided, living faith, but a skeptical, eclectic, unbelieving faith, broken and maimed by the power of art and science” (WC 510/323). Christianity does not currently satisfy the needs of the age (NRP 217/147). Current so-called faith is an avoidance of the actual atheism of modern practical life (NRP 216/146). It is a bad-faith faith. Lange is thus onto something when he speaks of “divination” as the nature of a Feuerbachian “consequently.” It is supposed to be, in a sense, revelatory. But all it reveals is what we already are. Feuerbach is articulating what, not so deep down, we already know: “Christianity is negated—in the mind as well as in the heart, in science as well as in life, in art as well as in industry, thoroughly, irretrievably and irrevocably negated, because human beings have now appropriated to themselves all that is true, human, and anti-holy. . . So far, the negation was an unconscious one. Only now is it or is it becoming a conscious one. . . This conscious negation inaugurates a new age” (NRP 218/148). Feuerbach’s description of religion is simply the final step of a path people are already on and whose end, he says, they have failed to reach only owing to “faint-heartedness and intellectual imbecility” (WC 58/17). The claims of Christianity are no longer “facts,” no longer an “inviolable limit of the mind.” In daily life they have long been surpassed. In its heyday, a religion is not self-delusion, because in its heyday it is identical with the selves of the believers. It expresses who they are, what their world is like. But Christianity no longer expresses what the world is like. In effect, human beings have had a change of heart and no longer need it. Christianity is now merely self-delusion, a shell to be sloughed off. Hence Feuerbach’s immense confidence in the instantaneous efficacy of his technique of inversion: “We need only, as we have shown, invert the religious relations—regard that as an end which religion supposes to be a means—exalt that into the primary which in religion is subordinate, the accessory, the condition—and at once we have destroyed the illusion and have the unclouded light of truth before our eyes” (WC 415/274–75). The idea that what Feuerbach is bringing is a kind of revelation characterizes both the translation and the genetic accounts of religion. Perhaps Feuerbach does not distinguish them because, methodologically, nothing hangs on the distinction. The goal for each is to get us to register that religious phenomena are, as Feuerbach constantly says, “nothing but” nonreligious phenomena.


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3. Comparisons It may be helpful briefly to triangulate here with reference to other contemporary thinkers. The most obvious contrast is to Kant’s rational faith. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says, “[I]n the necessary endeavor after the highest good . . . the existence is postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact agreement of happiness with morality.”20 Kant’s argument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum. If God (and immortality) do not exist, then the idea of the highest good is a chimera, and the moral law is false: “If, therefore, the highest good is impossible according to practical rules, then the moral law which commands that it be furthered must be fantastic, directed to empty imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false.”21 However, we know the moral law exists; therefore, we must postulate God’s existence as well. The reductio argument here is what, in his Lectures on Philosophical Theology, Kant calls an “absurdum practicum.” “An absurdum logicum,” he says, “is an absurdity in judgments; but there is an absurdum practicum when it is shown that anyone who denies this or that would have to be a scoundrel. And this is the case with moral faith.”22 The argument does not deduce a logical contradiction from the denial of God’s existence. It shows that such a denial would be incompatible with our consciousness of the authority of the moral law, and thus with our conviction in our own possibility of acting morally: “The foundation of faith is morality, the whole system of duties, which is known a priori with apodictic certainty through pure reason. . . [N]othing firmer or more certain can be thought in any science than our obligation to moral actions. . . It is only through making it his purpose to do his duty that anyone becomes a human being, and otherwise he is either a beast or a monster.”23 Belief flows from reason as the faculty that (a) knows that the moral law exists and (b) can make inferences from that knowledge. We must believe in God’s existence because we know the moral law exists, that we are neither beasts nor monsters. Kant says such a belief is “as certain as a mathematical demonstration.”24 The important contrast with Feuerbach is less to his claim that the source of religious belief is in human wishes and feelings than to his claim that the genuine believer relates to her beliefs via the senses. According to Feuerbach, the believer’s “view” of things so “animates, determines, governs” her (WC 61/20) that she actually sees the gods:

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primitive gods directly—“The first beings of whom human beings had immediate certainty and consequently their first gods were sensuous objects” (VWR 101/87)—the Judeo-Christian God through his miraculous manifestations. The genuine believer’s relation to her beliefs is as naive and unquestioning as her ordinary relation to her perceptions generally. To her, the existence of God (or the gods) is thoroughly obvious (see WC 320/206). Reason and inference play no role. So Feuerbach both applauds and reproaches Kant for pointing out that God’s existence is not a topic for reason: “Kant deserves blame only so far as, in making this claim, he thought he was saying something remarkable and as it were making a reproach against reason. But this [Kant’s claim] is self-evident. . . The proof of the existence of God goes beyond the boundaries of reason; correct, but in the same sense in which seeing, hearing, smelling go beyond the boundaries of reason. It is foolish to reproach reason with not satisfying a demand which can be addressed only to the senses” (WC 313/201). That the demand is addressed to the senses does not mean that one argues from physical events to God’s existence, i.e., X violates the laws of nature; the only way to account for X is to postulate the existence of a being that can cause violations of the laws of nature. That would not be immediate certainty. Feuerbach’s point is that the believer lives within her faith. She does not see a miracle as a phenomenon from which to infer God’s existence. She sees it simply as a manifestation of his existence. Her senses tell her God exists in the same way they tell her the world exists. Allen Wood points out that, for Kant, “moral faith is adopted ‘freely’ and ‘voluntarily.’”25 For Feuerbach, this would be no faith at all. So Feuerbach is poles apart from Kant. Yet he might seem close to John Stuart Mill’s “religion of Humanity.” In his essay “The Utility of Religion,” Mill writes, [T]he sense of unity with mankind, and deep feeling for the general good, may be cultivated into a sentiment and a principle capable of fulfilling every important function of religion and itself justly entitled to the name. . . This condition is fulfilled by the religion of Humanity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the supernatural religions. . . [I]f the Religion of Humanity were as sedulously cultivated as the supernatural religions are . . . all who had received the customary amount of moral culti-


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vation would up to the hour of death live ideally in the life of those who are to follow them.26 Contemporaries and later commentators have often read Feuerbach as replacing Christianity with such a religion of humanity.27 There is something correct about this, and the affinities between Feuerbach’s views and those in Mill’s essay are striking. For Feuerbach, however, Mill’s approach to religion would be too abstract. Although Mill stresses sentiments, emotions, and desires, his remains a rational religion in the sense that he is attempting to give the reader reasons for generating a particular form of faith. To Feuerbach, the idea of generating faith would be anathema. If Mill’s religion must be “sedulously cultivated,” then agents do not see the religion in question as the obvious and ineluctable way things are. Mill’s is a religion one has to work at. For Feuerbach, such a religion is dying; for him, one chooses to have faith as little as one chooses to see or to hear. As far as Feuerbach is proposing a new religion, it is one he thinks we already (unconsciously) profess. In “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy,” he says that a historical movement must be rooted in the human heart (NRP 216/146). This is supposed to be a general principle. Thus when Feuerbach goes on to say that a “religious revolution [has] already occurred within us” (NRP 216/146), he is saying that there has been a change in the human heart. That the form of this religious revolution is a change to atheism and to an identification with the human species does not keep it from having the same structure as other religious revolutions. Current Christianity simply conceals the change we have undergone (NRP 216/146). In contrast to Mill, Feuerbach does not demand an alteration in our sentiments. They are already what they should be. What is wrong is our understanding of them. A reform of philosophy is needed not to cultivate new sentiments but to acknowledge explicitly the ones we have. Feuerbach puts strong demands on genuine faith. He goes as far as to condemn the pallid faith of current religious thinkers because it is filtered through the modern, scientific viewpoint and so is incapable of conceiving of miracles now, in the present: “[A] faith is therefore only then a true and living one when special effects, immediate appearances of God, miracles, are believed in. . . [When] the belief in miracles is no longer anything more than the belief in historical, past, miracles, so the

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existence of God is also only an historical, in itself atheistic conception” (WC 316/203; see also UW 302). In his insistence on the nonrational nature of faith, Feuerbach is best compared with two writers of the German Counter-Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.28 In a 1759 letter, Hamann quotes the end of Hume’s essay “On Miracles” (Chapter 10 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding): “[U]pon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person.”29 Hamann comments that “Hume may have said this with a mocking or a serious air: in any event it is orthodoxy and a testimony to the truth from the mouth of an enemy and persecutor of it.”30 Faith, Hamann says, has nothing to do with reason: “The reasons of a Hume may be ever so cogent, and the refutations of them only assumptions and doubts. . . [But] [f]aith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attacks; for faith happens for reasons just as little as tasting and seeing do.”31 Jacobi makes similar assertions in Über die Lehre des Spinoza (1785). There he urges (in vain) a salto mortale on Lessing. Jacobi describes his goal here variously as “to unveil, to reveal existence”; to reach “that which cannot be explained: the insoluble, immediate, simple”; and to enable the soul to perceive God.32 Like Hamann, Jacobi is insisting on an immediate, nondeductive encounter with God. Although Jacobi’s salto mortale is not a response to Hume, it is presumably a leap across the “ugly, broad ditch” Lessing describes in “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” (1777).33 There Lessing argues that historical testimony concerning miracles can never provide adequate evidence of Christianity’s truth. He does not insist that human ignorance or deception are more probable than a violation of the laws of nature. Nor is he worried about “credible testimony against” the believer’s specific historical claims.34 Rather, for “metaphysical and moral ideas” historical evidence is intrinsically the wrong basis.35 “[A]ccidental truths of history,” Lessing famously says, “can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.”36 Lessing’s point seems to be that one cannot infer from physical events to religious (metaphysical) dogma, and especially not to dogma


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at odds with reason: “If on historical grounds I have no objection to the statement that Christ raised to life a dead man; must I therefore accept as true that God has a son who is of the same essence as himself? What is the connection between my inability to raise any significant objection to the evidence of the former and my obligation to believe something against which my reason rebels?”37 Lessing’s reason does not rebel against the claim that a dead man has been raised but against the claim that God has a son who is of the same essence as himself. His point thus seems to be that the spheres of facts and dogma are separated by a chasm. If the dogma is unreasonable on its own terms, what fact could show its truth? Yet Lessing concedes that an evident miracle would bridge the chasm. This is crucial. According to Lessing, an evident miracle would provide adequate grounds for altering even one’s “fundamental ideas of the nature of the Godhead”:38 In the last instance Origen was quite right in saying that in this proof of the spirit and of power [i.e., miracles] the Christian religion was able to provide a proof of its own more divine than all Greek dialectic. For in his time there was still “the power to do miraculous things which still continued” among those who lived after Christ’s precept; and if he had undoubted examples of this, then if he was not to deny his own senses he had of necessity to recognize that proof of the spirit and of power.39 So Lessing is not objecting to the move from physical events to religious conclusions. Indeed, such events can provide better proofs than reason (dialectic) of such claims as that God has a son who is of the same essence as himself. Lessing even asserts his willingness to submit his own intellect to such proofs: If I had lived at the time of Christ, then of course the prophecies fulfilled in his person would have made me pay great attention to him. If I had even seen him do miracles; if I had had no cause to doubt that these were true miracles; then in a worker of miracles who had been marked out so long before, I would have gained so much confidence that I would willingly have submitted my intel-

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lect to his, and I would have believed him in all things in which equally undoubted experiences were not against him.40 So what is Lessing’s objection? It is to the inference from merely probable empirical events to religious truths, especially when accepting those truths entails the submission of the intellect: We all believe that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia. But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great, permanent worth, whose loss could not be replaced? Who, in consequence of this belief, would forswear for ever all knowledge that conflicted with this belief? Certainly not I. I have now no objection to raise against Alexander and his victory: but it might still be possible that the story was based on a mere poem of Chörilus . . . just as the ten year siege of Troy is based on nothing more than the poetry of Homer.41 The reason that “accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason” is thus not because the former are contingent and the latter necessary; the reason is that the former are truths of history, and so my epistemic relation to them is indirect: “[R]eports of miracles are not miracles.”42 Direct personal observation would be sufficient to prove religious truths. It is not the empirical but the secondhand character of historical testimony that bothers Lessing (“Miracles, which I see with my own eyes . . . are one thing; miracles, of which I know only from history . . . are another”).43 This is the “ugly, broad ditch” over which he cannot “leap.” Christian dogma, however contrary to reason, can be proved by revelation, but the revelation must be to the agent himself, not merely reported as having happened in the past. Lessing is rejecting Pascal’s wager. One could rationally affirm, based only on probabilities, he says, “that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia.” For nothing “of great, permanent worth, whose loss could not be replaced” hangs on this claim. But probabilistic reasoning is too weak a basis to believe Christian dogma, for that belief would require one to “forswear forever all knowledge”—of which there is considerable—“that conflicted with it.” To affirm Christian dogma would be to risk something of great, permanent worth.


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Thus Lessing does not marshal arguments against the reliability of historical testimony concerning miracles, as Hume does. Nor does he assert, as Diderot does, that a dead man’s coming back to life is so improbable that he would not believe it even if all Paris reported it. Lessing is saying nothing about the evidence necessary to make a judgment as to whether or not a particular miracle occurred. His point is that the inference from that judgment to a particular religious conclusion requires the judgment itself to be grounded differently than were no such inference made. And this is not for the logical reason that the conclusion is at odds with what the intellect says, but for the practical reason that accepting the conclusion means that one henceforth forswears the intellect. Christian faith risks so much that the odds must be, in effect, overwhelmingly and indisputably in its favor. And historical testimony cannot satisfy that standard. Only a present miracle could. So it takes one to become a Christian. What Hamann and Jacobi do is to turn Lessing’s demand that one witness a miracle into Hume’s mocking requirement that one be “conscious of a continued miracle in [one’s] own person.” And they affirm that the latter can be accomplished. The inner experience of faith is precisely a revelation. “[A]ll religions bear a relation to the faith in a single, self-supporting and living truth,” Hamann says, “which, like our existence, must be older than our reason, and hence cannot be known from the genesis of the latter but by an immediate revelation [eine unmittelbare Offenbarung] of the former [that is, of the self-supporting truth].”44 Two elements are worth stressing in Hamann’s comparison of faith to “tasting and seeing.” First, faith is given to us just as the experience of sensation is. It is not a function of the will. Second, in that givenness there is no room for doubt. This follows directly if we talk only of the experiences of tasting and seeing. They cannot be doubted. The real force of the comparison, though (and here the picture is the same as Feuerbach’s) is that in the normal and ordinary experiences of tasting or seeing, one does not doubt—doubt never enters the picture—that one is tasting or seeing something. (Remember that Lessing was willing to take the testimony of his own senses to a miracle as reliable.) In Über die Lehre, Jacobi does not refer to his salto mortale in terms of sensation. Rather, he refers to faith [Glaube] as a distinct mental capacity.45 In the 1815 introduction to his collected works, however, he does

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talk of faith as a “spiritual feeling [Geistes-Gefühl]” that is the highest human capacity:46 And so we openly acknowledge, that our philosophy starts from feeling, pure and objective feeling; that it recognizes its authority as the highest, and, as a doctrine of the supersensible, grounds itself solely on this authority. We claim that the faculty of feeling is, for human beings, the faculty elevated above all others.47 Although Jacobi identifies this “feeling” with “reason”48 and in the 1815 text is anxious not to be perceived as an enemy of reason, he remains akin to Hamann in emphasizing both the immediacy of faith and its source in some form of feeling. The issue here is not Hamann’s or Jacobi’s direct influence on Feuerbach. Feuerbach never refers to Hamann in his writings.49 He does discuss Jacobi, assessing him differently at different times, including a crucial invocation in the preface to the second edition of The Essence. The real point of referring to Hamann and Jacobi, though, is to establish a context in which to situate Feuerbach’s views on faith, to try better to grasp those views by finding a tradition for them.50 Feuerbach has three points of thematic contact with Hamann and Jacobi. First, there is the shared stress on the immediacy of faith and in particular on the link of faith to sensation and feelings, on locating faith at an affective level. Second, there is an inverted parallel in Feuerbach’s work to Jacobi’s discussion in Über die Lehre. There Jacobi quotes Lessing as insisting that “everything be seen in terms of the natural.” Jacobi then tells us that he himself claimed that “there can be no natural philosophy of the supernatural and yet the two (the natural and the supernatural) are obviously given.”51 Since Feuerbach clearly thinks of himself as providing precisely a “natural philosophy of the supernatural,” as resolving the two obviously given phenomena into one, he seems diametrically opposed to Jacobi. Just a page earlier, however, Jacobi declares that “[i]n my own judgment a seeker’s greatest merit is to unveil, to reveal existence [Dasein zu enthüllen, und zu offenbaren].” In the preface to the second edition of The Essence, Feuerbach describes his own project by putting quotes around (though not giving a citation to) Jacobi’s well-known programmatic phrase: “Not to invent—to discover, ‘to unveil existence [Dasein zu enthüllen],’ has been my only goal; to see


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correctly [richtig zu sehen] my only endeavor” (WC 18/xxxvi). Jacobi’s remarks are part of his attempt to convince Lessing to make a salto mortale. In effect, Feuerbach is also demanding a salto mortale but one in which the leap is a leap of unbelief, a leap resolving the supernatural into the natural. Feuerbach is inverting the content of Jacobi’s program while explicitly accepting its form.52 Third, Hamann and Jacobi are a reminder of the presence of the theological tradition stemming from Luther, a tradition in which what is crucial are not proofs but the believer’s experience of her encounter with God.53 Between the first and second editions of The Essence, Feuerbach’s view of genuine faith changed. The first edition emphasizes the early Christians and their witnessing of external miracles. The second recognizes the internal revelations of the Protestant tradition as equally genuine and, indeed, Feuerbach says, as “miracles” (see BWC 194 and 196–97).54 Hamann and Jacobi do not claim to have witnessed external miracles, but their internal revelations can count as the kind of immediate experience that Feuerbach requires of the genuine believer—and that he is trying to prompt in the genuine nonbeliever. Luther himself was immensely important to Feuerbach. In The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844), he argues that all the claims of The Essence of Christianity could be extracted from Luther’s own words. He praises Luther for recognizing that reason cannot reach God with any certainty (WGL 379/68–69; see also Feuerbach WGL 375–76/63); rather, one must rely on the senses, the perception of Christ. And he goes on to quote Luther on the importance of the “tangible [greiflichen] arguments and signs” God has given as proof of Christ’s divinity: “For I do indeed see the water (in baptism), I see the bread and wine (in the last supper), I see the servant of the word, all of which is bodily, in which bodily figures or images he reveals himself.” “Indeed, he has established all this because he wished to make you quite certain and take from your heart the great deficiency and error of doubt, so that you would not only believe in your heart, but also might see with bodily eyes and grasp with your hands.” (Luther quoted in WGL 380/69–70)55 But tangible objects like water, bread, or wine, can provide certainty only if I see them in a particular way, that is, as tangible arguments and signs. They can “take from [my] heart the great deficiency and error

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of doubt” only if I have a change of heart. At the end of The Essence, Feuerbach similarly demands our transformation: “Therefore let bread be sacred for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred! Amen!” (WC 419/278). True, for Feuerbach the heart no longer wants to mount from bread and water to something supernatural (see G §34). It no longer regards such objects as signs of the divine but as the divine itself. Still, the influence of Luther is clear.56 Once again Feuerbach is turning a theistic into an atheistic move. The Hegelians of the 1820s and 1830s emphasized the need for a conversion experience. Feuerbach’s similar emphasis is consistent with and probably influenced by theirs, but it is also tied very directly to the impact of Luther.57

4. The Natural Scientist of the Mind To see Feuerbach as attempting to prompt a change analogous to a religious conversion might seem to fit poorly with his characterization of himself as a “natural scientist of the mind [ein geistiger Naturforscher]” (WC 16/xxxiv). For that suggests someone simply providing a theory to account for data. In the preface to the first edition of The Essence, Feuerbach describes his goal in an interesting combination of ways. “The content of this work,” he says, “is pathological or physiological” (WC 7). The analogy is of getting past the surface of a body to the hidden source of disease—a variant of the common view, of which Feuerbach is fond, that science reveals the hidden structure of the world. Clearly part of what it means to be a natural scientist of the mind is to uncover the psychological structures behind the phenomena of religious belief. But there is another dimension. The scientific goal is tied to a therapeutic goal: “The content of this work is a pathological or physiological one, but its goal is simultaneously therapeutic or practical” (WC 7).58 There are two points to make here. First, in the page leading up to this statement, Feuerbach refers to The Essence’s a priori proof that the secret of theology is anthropology (WC 6). We have seen the structure of this proof: it is Feuerbach’s interpretation of religious belief. And we have seen that he believes his interpretation will convince his readers because he thinks it in tune with the age, a point the preface stresses: the formerly “supernatural and superhuman content of Christianity has long been completely naturalized and anthropomorphized” (WC 6). All that is left, he says, is a “Gespenst im Kopfe,” a specter in the head.


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Feuerbach considers this specter scientifically irrelevant. He disdains as “without any philosophical interest” the task of proving that it is in fact merely a specter (WC 6). He does not say that he (or some other thinker) has a compelling proof. He simply denies, quite explicitly, the need for one. It is in this context that he announces his therapeutic goal: to exorcise the specter. That this task remains necessary, he thinks, is due solely to the weak character of the age (WC 6). Feuerbach’s therapy is to make conscious what we know but have thus far been too cowardly to acknowledge. Second, the therapy Feuerbach invokes is hydrotherapy: “The goal is . . . instruction on the need and use of the cold waters of natural reason—the reinstatement of the old, simple hydrotherapy in the area of speculative philosophy and first in the speculative philosophy of religion” (WC 7). The analogy is important. In the Germany of this period, cold-water baths were prescribed for a variety of ailments as a form of Naturheilkunde. The most famous bath of the time was run by the Silesian peasant Vincent Priessnitz. Far from being an elegant spa where one drank or bathed in mineral waters, Priessnitz’s establishment at Gräfenberg used pure water, a simple diet, and a regimen of exercise. Hydrotherapeutic treatment in lay establishments of this kind in effect demanded a change in one’s life, often including a moment of personal conversion.59 While there is no reason to think Feuerbach was especially learned in the theory or techniques of hydrotherapy, it is important that his analogy is to a therapy that is supposed to turn the patient to what is thought to be a simple and natural lifestyle.60 Feuerbach certainly does believe water has purifying and even revelatory powers. He feels that, like other apparently trivial aspects of a natural and ordinary human life, water is in fact quite wondrous. The real significance of baptism, he says, is as a symbol of the meaning [Bedeutung] of water itself. Baptism should represent to us the miraculous but natural effect of water on human beings. Water has, in fact, not merely physical effects, but also, and as a result, moral and intellectual effects. . . Water not only cleanses the human being from the body’s dirt, but in water the scales fall from his eyes: he sees, he thinks more clearly; he feels himself freer. . . The human being rising from the water is a new, a reborn human being. The doctrine that morality can do nothing

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without means of grace has a valid meaning if, in place of imaginary, supernatural means of grace, we substitute natural means. (WC 415–16/275–76; see also WC 7–9) Feuerbach is the hydrotherapist of the religious consciousness, washing the scales from our eyes, bringing us the grace of unbelief. That Feuerbach’s analogy is to hydrotherapy returns us to his refusal to argue against the plausibility of Christian doctrine. His goal is to cure a spiritual ailment.61 One could undoubtedly give other arguments to show that the patient is ill. Perhaps such arguments could have therapeutic impact. But I take Feuerbach to think that their impact is unlikely to be adequate. The point could be put this way. Arguments against the plausibility of Christianity are arguments about something in the world, for instance, about a divine being or an alleged historical fact. Feuerbach’s claims are about the agent, about the source of her own beliefs. His idea is that, once shown the psychological source and anthropological content of the various components of Christian doctrine, the agent will be able to overcome her spiritual cowardice. His claim is not that the agent does not already have sufficient reason to conclude that God and miracles don’t exist. No doubt Feuerbach thinks she does. His claim is that the agent must see the origin and underlying content of her own beliefs. She must see the needs her religious beliefs are supposed to satisfy, see that she no longer requires those beliefs to satisfy those needs, and see that in fact, not so deep down, she doesn’t really hold those beliefs. Only then will she be able to jettison her religious beliefs completely and lead a different life. It should be remembered that Feuerbach thinks there are few real religious believers left, and he is clear that his text is not directed at them.62 He is helping the rest of us to overcome our reluctance to confess that we don’t believe. To be the hydrotherapist of the religious consciousness is only partly to have an account of a disease; it is far more to have a technique of cure. What, then, is, as Feuerbach puts it, the “moral of the fable” (WC 24/xl)? It is that we should come to “accept and to understand [real beings and things] in the significance which they have in themselves” (WC 24–25/xl). Feuerbach defiantly acknowledges that his persistent


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move of substituting one thing for another—for example, real for baptismal water—may seem trivial: “How ‘watery,’ how trivial! Yes, indeed, very trivial. But so marriage, in its time was a very trivial truth, which Luther, on the ground of his natural good sense, maintained in opposition to the seemingly holy illusion of celibacy” (WC 25/xl). Apparently we are supposed to do what we have always done—bathe, eat, drink— but with a different orientation. These activities are supposed to have new meaning for us. They are supposed to have the same immense importance as in their religious guise, but now as daily human activities: “Eating and drinking is the mystery of the Lord’s Supper;—eating and drinking is, in fact, in itself a religious act; at least, ought to be” (WC 418/277). Feuerbach harps on the importance of what others might think trivial or common: “The profoundest secrets lie in common, in everyday things which supernatural religion and speculation ignore” (WC 416–17/276). As in a Freudian theory of psychic energy, in which the effect of the analytic interpretation is supposed to be to rechannel without diminishing the psychic energy, Feuerbach’s resolution of religion into the ordinary, profane activities of daily life is supposed to preserve the force of the religious impulse, rechanneling it to its proper place. The result will be to give “to common things an uncommon significance, to life, as such, a religious significance” (WC 419/278). Clifford Geertz writes that the “religious perspective” involves the sense that one has reached “the ‘really real.’”63 For Feuerbach, the goal is to shed the Christian religious perspective and to come to see that—and to live as if—the really real is really quite ordinary.

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2 Feuerbach’s Critique of Philosophy

In t h i s c h a p t e r I look at Feuerbach’s critique of philoso-

phy, primarily in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, and to a lesser extent in the Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy. The theme of transformation, the goal of shifting the reader’s sense of herself in the world, is carried over from the critique of religion. And, as in The Essence, the result is supposed to be that one’s view of the right way to answer certain questions (here philosophical ones) is also changed. Thomas Wartenberg has pointed out that the Principles can be divided into three sections: the first tying modern philosophy to theology, the second characterizing and attacking Hegel’s work as the culmination of modern philosophy, and the last presenting the themes of Feuerbach’s new philosophy.1 The first part is intended to establish that modern or “speculative” philosophy—basically the rationalist tradition from Descartes to Hegel (see VT 243/156 and G §10, 275/13 and §19, 295/31)—has the same conceptual structure as Christianity and, therefore, can be critiqued on the same grounds. The interest of the Principles is in this critique.2 But one first needs to see why Feuerbach thinks modern philosophy and Christianity are structurally similar. So I begin with that argument. It is not a good one, so my presentation is compressed to a sketch. I hope simply to give a feel for the dialectic that Feuerbach believes himself to be tracing. 58

Fe u e r b a c h ’ s C r i t i q u e o f P h i l o s o p h y

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1. The Status of Philosophy According to Feuerbach, religion is always a form of alienation—“the relation of the human being to his own nature . . . not recognized as his own” (WC 307/197)—but until turned into the conceptual structure of a theological system it has a kind of innocence (despite its role in the horrors of religious history [see WC 308/197]). Early religious belief is direct, palpable, and straightforwardly anthropomorphic. Early religion posits no qualitative difference between God and human beings. For instance, initially Jehovah had the same “inner nature . . . the same passions, the same human, even corporeal characteristics” as human beings. He simply endured longer (WC 308/197). Because the early gods are conceived as so like us, Feuerbach says, they are actually objects of perception. Jesus Christ is a perceptible being, as are fetishes in which the spirit is made flesh, wood, or stone. The separation of God and human beings is thus also perceptible, but it is only the separation of numerically rather than essentially distinct beings. Feuerbach calls this belief in the distinction of God and human beings “involuntary” (WC 308/197) because what is involved is the perception of an object. Initially, religious experience is not internal but external, so to the believer her faith is no more mysterious than any other of her perceptions. Intellect and religion are still “in harmony” (WC 308/197). Theology is different. It arises at a point in history when individuals have become more sophisticated and no longer believe in the palpable presence of a divinity, when faith as a form of sense perception has waned. Theology arises when insight into religion’s underlying truth— the complete identity of the human and the divine—has become possible. Human understanding now sees that such things as fetishes are merely human products, not the embodiment of the divine. The anthropomorphic elements of religion now become a problem: they make religion seem all too human. Skepticism can arise. And so theology begins. Rather than acknowledging the identity of the human and the divine, theologians reformulate the structure of religion, turning the objects of religion into transcendent entities without perceptible anthropomorphic qualities: “[Now] come the interpreters, the speculators, and [they] talk of the profound sense, because they

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no longer know the true one” (WC 194–95/117). God now becomes a being qualitatively different from the believer, a being apprehensible only nonperceptually. And so proofs of God’s existence are now required (WC 309/198). These proofs are proofs of the existence of a being essentially different from human beings (WC 308/197). Key to Feuerbach’s account here is the claim that what we are able to perceive varies from era to era. In his 1839 essay “On Miracles,” Feuerbach claims that miracles were merely natural events for a premodern humanity that did not live “within the harsh, critical distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, vision and experience, belief and reality, myth and history” (UW 309). Miracles were not doubted because the modern idea of interrogating one’s beliefs and seeing whether they squared with a reality understood as a sequence of natural causes had yet to arise. On the other hand, the premoderns could see things that we, with our critical stance, cannot: “How much was known of god, of the devils, or of the angels as long as these supernatural beings were still objects of a real faith! . . . [H]umanity in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensible [übersinnliche] world and its secrets” (G §15 286/23). Later I will discuss the extent to which Feuerbach really holds the epistemological relativism expressed here. For now, the point is that Feuerbach thinks theology begins in bad faith because he sees it as (a) closing its eyes to the way the world has changed, and (b) attempting, as a response to that change, to construct a faith at odds with the perceptual certainty Feuerbach thinks characteristic of genuine faith. The result, Feuerbach says, is that theology is perpetually inconsistent. For theology’s god is not an entity existing in some particular spot such that it can be seen and heard. It is “a non-sensuous being that is an object only of reason or intelligence” (G §6, 266/6). Yet theology simultaneously conceives it “as a being distinct from and independent of reason” (G §6, 266/6). The theologian’s god can be grasped only by reason, yet it is supposed to exist as independently and outside the human mind as any physical object. Feuerbach sees this as contradictory, for, he claims, what characterizes any entity that exists “outside thoughts or the imagination, is sensuousness [Sinnlichkeit]”—that it can be perceived by the organs of human perception (G §7, 269/9). Thus, he says, the theologian “distinguishes God from himself in the same sense in which he distinguishes sensuous [sinnlichen] objects and beings as existing outside him; in short, he conceives God from the standpoint of sensuousness


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[Standpunkt der Sinnlichkeit]” (G §7, 269–70/9)—and yet the theologian denies that God is perceptible.3 Feuerbach is not dogmatically insisting that only material objects exist outside us. His complaint is that the nonmaterial object in question is supposed not only to exist outside “thoughts or the imagination” but also to have causal powers in the material world. Indeed, it has created that world. However, “[m]aterial things can only be derived from God, if God himself is determined as a material being” (G §14, 285/22). The meaning of the claim that theology “conceives God from the standpoint of sensuousness” is that theology conceives God as having causal powers, and these can only be conceived from the standpoint of sensuousness. Feuerbach’s claim is simply that any entity that intervenes in the material world must itself be material: “As the effect is, so is the cause” (G §14, 285/22). The claim is the same as in Feuerbach’s attack on the idea of the creation. Causal explanations are explanations of how one material phenomenon affects another. This need not exclude superhuman causes as long as they are material. For Feuerbach, there is nothing incoherent about the idea of a god who hurls thunderbolts. It is at odds with the modern way of explaining meteorological phenomena, but it is not conceptually problematic. By contrast, Christian theology posits what is conceptually problematic: a nonmaterial cause of material events (including the creation of the material world itself). Feuerbach is aware that he is not the first to notice the Christian God’s peculiar combination of attributes. He is really just trying to clarify theology’s status so as to show what he takes to be the logic of its link to speculative philosophy. His point is that theology is neither primitive faith that relies on sensation nor speculative philosophy that apprehends all things, including God, from “the standpoint of thought” (G §7, 270/9). It is an unstable middle ground. Consistency, Feuerbach argues, requires going one way or the other. But a return to primitive faith is impossible (ZB 236).4 God is no longer visible. Moreover, the attributes of the theologian’s God go beyond what sensation could encounter. Our perceptual capacities are limited and cannot register what is unlimited. Only reason can do so (G §6, 267/6). The way to consistency is thus to acknowledge that God is to be grasped only by thought. And so “[s]peculative philosophy is the true, consistent, and rational theology” (G §5, 266/6).

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To Feuerbach, this move is momentous, for he thinks it now possible to show that God is not just apprehensible solely by human reason, but that God is human reason (G §7, 269/8). Feuerbach’s argument here is hardly compelling. He introduces the plausible premise (1) “God is an object only of human beings” (G §7, 270/9), and the dubious premise (2) “[T]he object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its revealed nature” (G §7, 270/9). He then argues (3) “If, now, God is an object of human beings—and, indeed, inasmuch as he really is so, necessarily and essentially—what is expressed in the nature of this object is merely the specific nature of human beings” (G §7, 270/9). Let’s grant (1). And even grant (2) in the limited sense that the primary “object” of a being reveals something fundamental about that being. Grant yet further that God is the primary object of humanity. It still does not follow that “what is expressed in the nature of this object [God] is merely the specific nature of human beings,” that this object is “nothing but [humanity’s] revealed nature.” Feuerbach says that plants are “the object” of herbivorous animals and that light is “the object of the eye” (G §7, 270/9). Still, this hardly makes them “nothing but” an animal’s or the eye’s revealed nature. Plants and light exist apart from their role for an animal or for the eye. One cannot simply move from the claim “X is the object of Alpha” to the claim “X has no independent existence.” Feuerbach himself seems uneasy about this argument, and he attempts to buttress it with a thought experiment: Imagine to yourself a thinking being on a planet or a comet seeing a few paragraphs of Christian dogmatics dealing with the nature of God. What would this being conclude from these paragraphs? Perhaps the existence of a god in the sense of Christian dogmatics? No! it would infer only that there are thinking beings also on earth; it would find in the definitions of the earth inhabitants regarding their god only definitions of their own nature. For example, in the definition “God is a spirit” it would find only the proof and expression of their own spirit. (G §7, 270–71/10) But why couldn’t the extraterrestrial conclude that the “definitions of the earth inhabitants regarding their god” are the definitions of an


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existing deity? Why must it anthropologize these definitions? As in The Essence, this thought experiment translates religious into anthropological assertions. And as in that text, no adequate argument is given for the superiority of the translation over the original. Feuerbach says that the extraterrestrial would infer from the attributes of the object to those of the subject, and he explicitly endorses this inference on the ground that “the distinction between what the object is in itself and what it is for human beings is removed in the case of this object” (G §7, 271/10). This is question-begging. The relation between “what the object is in itself and what it is for human beings” is what the thought experiment is supposed to settle.5 The thought experiment makes sense only if, as in The Essence, it is seen as Feuerbach’s attempt to shift our perspective. That is what we are imaginatively to do: leave our own lives and take the standpoint of an extraterrestrial, a being so separated from Christianity as to view it objectively. From that standpoint, we are to recognize the truth of the claim that “the definitions of the earth inhabitants regarding their god [are] only definitions of their own nature.” The move from the claim that God is apprehensible only by human reason to the claim that God is nothing but human reason is via shift, not argument. I take Feuerbach to assume, incidentally, that the extraterrestrial’s level of scientific development is at least moderately high. It is far from clear that an extraterrestrial whose scientific level was quite primitive would “find in the definitions of the earth inhabitants regarding their god only definitions of their own nature.” I take Feuerbach’s contention to be that a being with at least a moderate degree of scientific sophistication but who has not been infected by Christianity would immediately see Christianity’s anthropological core. Note also that for the thought experiment to work for us, we must already be sufficiently un-Christian as not to conclude from “a few paragraphs of Christian dogmatics” that Christianity is true. As with The Essence, this thought experiment is supposed to prompt acknowledgment of existing unbelief. Speculative philosophy, then, is consistent theology. Feuerbach then claims that this move from theology to speculative philosophy is effectively a move to pantheism, but that the move to pantheism necessarily leads to idealism. Here Feuerbach is ringing a change on an old tune. In the eighteenth

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century it had been argued, most notably by Jacobi in the Pantheismusstreit, that any consistent philosophical approach to religion inevitably ends as Spinozism, that is, pantheism. And pantheism is really atheism, for it denies the existence of a god external to the world.6 Feuerbach agrees that a philosophically consistent religion would lead to pantheism (G §14, 283/20). He even credits Jacobi with “a true stroke of genius” for having seen this (KP 185). And Feuerbach agrees that pantheism flirts with atheism: “Pantheism is theological atheism” (G §15, 285/22). Pace Jacobi, however, Feuerbach claims that pantheism ultimately leads back to religion. It is “the negation of theology from the standpoint of theology or the negation of theology that itself is again theology” (G §21, 295/31). Feuerbach has two arguments for why consistent religious belief is really pantheism. The first adapts the ontological argument for God’s existence; the second returns to the problem of how an immaterial being creates a material world. Neither holds water. The first begins as follows: [If] things are in God’s mind, how could they be outside his being? If they are the outcome of his mind, why not the outcome of his being? If in God his being is directly identical with his reality and if God’s existence is inseparable from the concept of God [vom Begriffe Gottes], how could the concept of the thing [Begriff des Dinges] and the real thing be separated in God’s concept of things [im Begriffe Gottes von den Dingen]? How, then, could the difference between the thing in the conception and the thing outside the conception, which constitutes only the nature of the finite and nondivine mind, take place in God? (G §14, 283/21) Since pantheism is the claim that nothing is ontologically distinct from God, the way to show that theism leads to pantheism is to show that, given the premises of theism, nothing can exist outside God. Feuerbach takes as premises: 1. Theology claims that God has knowledge of all things (God is omniscient). This means his mind contains the concept of everything there is. 2. Theology claims that “God’s existence is inseparable from the


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concept of God [vom Begriffe Gottes].” Feuerbach seems to claim that (1) and (2) entail 3. “[T]he concept of the thing [Begriff des Dinges] and the real thing [cannot] be separated in God’s concept of things [im Begriffe Gottes von den Dingen].” This is then rephrased as 4. “[T]he difference between the thing in the conception and the thing outside the conception . . . [cannot] take place in God.” The move from (1) and (2) to (3) is more than a little suspect. Why think God cannot have a concept without the attribute of reality? Is the thought supposed to be that God would be less than perfect if not only the concept “God” but also the concepts that God has were not automatically tied to real objects? (Off hand, I would think it an imperfection in God if he could never merely imagine anything.)7 Now if we do grant (4), the argument does go through, for then the reality of each thing is in the divine mind in the sense that reality is an attribute of the concept of that thing in the divine mind. And so, as Feuerbach argues, if both the concept and the reality of the thing are in God’s mind, nothing is left external to God: “[O]nce we have no more things outside God’s mind, so we soon will also have no more outside the being and finally outside the existence of God. . . But, if we were once to have no more things and no world outside God, so would we also have no more God outside the world. In a word, we have Spinozism or pantheism” (G §14, 284/21).8 Feuerbach’s second argument rests on (a) the fact that a material world exists and (b) the requirement that a cause be of the same kind as its effect: “Theism conceives God as a purely immaterial being. To determine God as immaterial, however, means nothing else than to determine matter as a thing of nothingness, as a non-being, for only God is the measure of reality. . . Matter for theism is a purely inexplicable existence” (G §14, 284/21). If God is both immaterial and “the measure of reality,” how can a different kind of reality, the material world, have come to exist? Theology, Feuerbach says, responds by making God the creator of that world. But this generates a problem, for God can create something material only if he is himself material (G §14, 285/22). And so, contrary to the original theological premise, God turns out to be “a material or, in the language of Spinoza, an extended being” (G §14, 285/22). The God of Christian theology, however, can-

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not be some particular material being. He is not like Zeus or Athena. If he is a material being, he must be all material being. The only way theism can account for matter is through pantheism. Such an account may not seem especially satisfying. Feuerbach asserts that “[h]e who is not ashamed to make shoes should also not be ashamed to be and be called a shoemaker” (G §14, 285/22), but God does not create like a shoemaker (who alters preexisting bits of matter), and a pantheistic God especially does not. It is hard to see in what sense Feuerbach thinks it a solution to the problem of material existence to say that the material world is created by a being identical with all that exists. One should not press too hard here. Feuerbach is trying to show the consequences of taking theology seriously, to show where an attempt at a consistent account of the Christian God must end. Pantheism represents an “advance” in that there is no longer an ontological divide between creator and creation. Feuerbach does think pantheism has its own conceptual problems. He will eventually argue that it, too, cannot successfully explain the fact of material existence. His claim at the moment is only that pantheism is a step that a rational defense of Christian theology must take. Pantheistic creation is simply slightly less puzzling than the creation of a material substance by an immaterial cause. Feuerbach says pantheism is a step toward the truth, because for pantheism, matter is a predicate or attribute of God (G §15, 285/22). Pantheism’s angle of vision is partially correct because it pays at least lip service to the importance of the actually existing world. Conceptually, it is not otherworldly. And so Feuerbach calls it “theological atheism or theological materialism” (G §15, 285/22). As directed toward this world, pantheism is in tune with the practical outlook of the modern era. It is in tune with the natural sciences, which Feuerbach says “negate” theology (G §15, 285–86/22). This negation is not theoretical but practical: “[It is] a negation by means of the act through which the realist makes that which is the negation of God, or at least is not God, into the essential business of his life and the essential object of his activity. He, however, who concentrates with heart and mind on the material and sensuous only, actually denies the supersensible its reality; for only that is real, at least for a human being, that is an object of true and real activity” (G §15, 286/23). As in The Essence, Feuerbach is asserting that God is no longer a part of our daily


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world. We conceive of our world naturalistically, and we take steps to solve our problems ourselves. We no longer look for the intervention of an external God into the fabric of our lives. The pantheistic identification of God with the world, Feuerbach says, expresses this practical disappearance of God. Still, pantheism is only a halfway house. Matter becomes an attribute of God, but God remains something that the senses cannot register, for the senses can only perceive finite phenomena, and each of God’s attributes is infinite. So he remains purely an object of reason. Here Feuerbach again claims that God must then simply be reason (G §17, 290/26–27). Feuerbach’s argument in this section of the Principles is substantially the same and so has substantially the same problem as before. He relies on two principles: (1) “As the object is, so is the subject” (G §17, 289/26); and (2) “The a priori, or first, being is . . . not the being that is thought, but the thinking being; not the object, but the subject” (G §17, 290/27). By (1), if God is a being of reason, then he can be apprehended only by reason. By (2), if reason apprehends God, it is ontologically prior to God. But nothing can be ontologically prior to God; the “first being” is God. So God must be reason. Feuerbach attributes these principles to “philosophy,” so it is not clear he endorses them. In any event, (1) is not troubling. Its claim is merely that the perceiving subject and the perceived object must have the same general mode of being, e.g., something material such as a sense organ is needed to perceive something material; something nonmaterial such as the mind is needed to perceive something nonmaterial. The central problem is (2). It asserts that the organ of knowledge is ontologically prior to the object of knowledge. Given that claim, it is not surprising that Feuerbach quickly says that “[a]ll that exists, exists only for consciousness, as comprehended in consciousness” (G §17, 291/27). So what justifies principle (2)? The argument seems dreadful: “Just as natural science turned necessarily from the light back to the eye, so philosophy necessarily turned from the objects of thinking back to the ‘I think’” (G §17, 290/27). This is clearly no good. The fact that science investigates the organ of per-

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ception does not mean that the object the organ of perception perceives has no independent existence. The argument improves a little when cast in practical form: “What is light—as the being that brightens and illumines, as the object of optics—without the eye? It is nothing” (G §17, 290/27). Here light is characterized in terms of its role in human life. Feuerbach is not denying that mechanical instruments might measure some phenomenon labeled “light.” His point is that “without the eye” light would be gone from our lives. And so he says, “It is identical whether I see without consciousness or whether I do not see” (G §17, 291/27). As a practical matter, there is something to this. If I do not register and make use of what I see—an admittedly difficult notion to make sense of—if what I see enters into none of my deliberations, plays no role in my decisions, then, at least for many practical purposes, it is as if I am blind. Still, this argument also fails. That for practical purposes I am blind does not mean there is nothing to be seen. I think what Feuerbach is really after is the tautologous point that if no one has ever had some organ of perception P, then those phenomena that only P can register do not exist for us. There is no space for them in our lives (G §15). If everyone, in all generations, had been blind since birth, the categories “sight,” “visual object,” and so forth would not exist. I take something like that to be his point when he says, “If I believe or think generally of no God, then by the same token I have no God. He exists for me only through me, and he exists for reason only through reason” (G §17, 290/27). These statements assert the tautology that if an agent is unaware of having any contact with an entity, then the entity does not exist “for” the agent, i.e., the agent is not aware of the entity’s existence. There is thus a (tautologous) sense in which Feuerbach is correct when he goes on to infer principle 2: “The a priori, or first, being is, thus, not the being that is thought, but the thinking being; not the object, but the subject” (G §17, 290/27). This by no means gets him what he wants, however. For once we do have the category “visual object,” the question of the ontological independence of the object is not answered by noting that without the category there would be no question. There is now a question. Similarly, if none of us “believe [in] or think generally of” a God, then there would be no space for us for the question of God’s existence. But there is such a space. “God” is a category in modern life. So one cannot infer


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that because God plays no role in the atheist’s life he does not exist any more than one can infer that because a blind person does not see something it isn’t there. Feuerbach mistakenly assumes that because preconditions exist for the possibility of asking a question, the question’s answer can be extracted from those preconditions.9 Nevertheless, suppose we grant principle 2. According to Christian theology, the world is entirely God’s creation: “Without God, nothing can exist and nothing can be thought” (G §17, 291/28). If reason takes over this role, then without reason nothing can exist. And so pantheism would lead to idealism (G §17, 289/26). Feuerbach has tried to show a dialectic leading to the displacement of God by reason, that is, by speculative philosophy. To Feuerbach, this is not much of a change. Speculative philosophy may not be otherworldly. It may have transferred “the divine essence into this world” (VT 243/156). Yet such an advance remains illusory if the world is conceived as purely a world for thought or consciousness. And that, Feuerbach says, is how speculative philosophy conceives it (G §17, 291/27). Like theology, speculative philosophy slights the material world, the finite world of daily life, conceiving it as something to be overcome and left behind, as inessential. Feuerbach says that “[t]he absolute or infinite of speculative philosophy . . . is nothing other than the old theologicalmetaphysical being or nonbeing which is not finite, not human, not material, not determined and not created” (VT 245/157). All the speculative philosopher has done, according to Feuerbach, is to make the divine essence into an object that is thought instead of an object that is imagined. “To what, then, is the difference between divine and metaphysical thought reduced? Just to a difference of imagination, to a difference between thought that is merely imagined and real thought” (G §11, 277–78/15). This is a gibe at Hegel’s view that the difference between religion and philosophy is the difference between imagination and thought. Feuerbach’s claim is that there is no difference if theology and philosophy each locates the crucial form of existence in a site remote from daily human life. Whether it is God or reason that is primary, human material existence is clearly secondary. Feuerbach thinks that speculative philosophy’s failure truly to break with theology stems from its requirement that philosophy be without presuppositions, for that requirement makes the senses suspect. To accept the truth of what they tell us would be to rely on what might be

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false. It would be to presuppose something. Only the testimony of the mind can be satisfactory in the sense that it can tell us that which cannot, logically, be doubted and so does not need to be presupposed. This leads directly to the various starting points of modern philosophy, which are all, Feuerbach says, one or another form of the mind. By contrast, “perception [Anschauung] . . . is [thought of as] only fantasy, untruth, and does not come into consideration” (G §18, 294/30). Given this initial abstraction from sensation, Feuerbach claims, the material world is inevitably viewed as something not quite real and dependent on the mind. Idealism is inevitable. So, Feuerbach thinks, is an encoded form of theism. For the organ of knowledge on which the philosopher relies must be immune from distortion, and this can be ensured only by making it undetermined by anything else. Only a cognizant being not determined by anything else, Feuerbach says, can have presuppositionless knowledge. And a being that fits that description begins to sound like God: “What, then, is the ego of Fichte that says, ‘I simply am because I am,’ or the pure, presuppositionless thought of Hegel if not the divine being of the old theology and metaphysics. . . The absolute absence of all presuppositions—namely, the beginning of speculative philosophy—is nothing other than the lack of presupposition and beginning, the aseity of the divine being” (G §13, 282 and 281/19 and 18). Speculative philosophy is thus structurally identical to theology. Like theology, it ignores the material world and projects the attributes of the human species onto a transcendent entity (G §23, 300/36). And as with theology, the existence of the material world remains a problem. However much matter “receives spirit and mind . . . [it] continues to contradict what philosophy presupposes as the true being” (G §21, 296/32–33)—that is, thought. Matter is still something to be overcome. Nevertheless, speculative philosophy is an advance over theology, for God is transformed into something human, even if it is only into human thinking. Hence Feuerbach’s ambivalent assessment: “Speculative philosophy as the realization of God is at the same time the positing and the cancellation or negation of God, at the same time theism and atheism” (G §14, 282/19). Modern philosophy thus has an internal “contradiction” (G §21, 295/33). Its focus is an avowedly human capacity—thinking— but it remains as distant as theology from humans as material, perceiv-


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ing beings. The task of Feuerbach’s new philosophy is to overcome this contradiction. The way to do so is to acknowledge that humans are essentially material beings. Just as speculative philosophy transferred the divine essence into the world of human thought, Feuerbach’s new philosophy will transfer thought into the world of finite human life: “The new philosophy has, according to its historical origin, the same task and position toward modern philosophy that the latter had toward theology” (G §20, 295/31). There is, however, also supposed to be a crucial asymmetry. Modern philosophy involves a contradiction. By contrast, Feuerbach says that his new philosophy will be both “the realization” and the “negation, and indeed the negation without contradiction, of . . . the philosophy that prevailed until now” (G §20, 295/31). There will be no contradiction because, unlike both theology and speculative philosophy, Feuerbach will accept—be untroubled by—the existence of the material world. That, he feels, has been the stumbling block of theology and speculative philosophy. On his account, by contrast, the material world is not something that hinders the apprehension of true reality. Thus he has no need to abstract from the senses. Rather, the senses will play a preeminent role: “If the old philosophy took as its starting point the proposition: I am an abstract, a merely thinking being, the body does not belong to my essence, the new philosophy, by contrast, begins with the proposition: I am a real, a sensuous being, the body belongs to my essence, indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself” (G §37, 319–20/54). What was trivial now becomes essential. Neither theology nor speculative philosophy denied that human beings are embodied. They denied that having a body is essential to being human. The thrust of the new philosophy will be that this fact is essential. The question, of course, is what this means.

2. The Method of the Critique of Philosophy Feuerbach believes he has shown a structural identity between speculative philosophy and religion. The method to be used against them can then be the same: “The method of the reformatory critique of speculative philosophy in general does not differ from the critique already applied in the philosophy of religion. We only need always make the predicate into

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the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle. Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked [unverhüllte], pure, bare truth” (VT 244/157). The method of inversion is supposed to work here in the same revelatory fashion as in The Essence. There Feuerbach says, “We need only . . . invert the religious relations . . . and at once we have destroyed the illusion and have the unclouded light of truth before our eyes” (WC 415/274–75). Here he says that “we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth.” And as with The Essence, Feuerbach believes he is merely making explicit what we already know: “The new philosophy . . . only affirms in reason and with reason what every human being—the real human being—admits in his heart” (G §35, 319/53). Feuerbach’s critique of philosophy will turn out to make sense only if one pushes hard on the methodological parallel to the critique of religion. But doing so also requires acknowledging disanalogies. First, the critique of religion relies on a psychological account of religious belief. Feuerbach gives no comparable account of philosophical belief. Speculative philosophy is said to derive from theology, and theology from religious belief, so perhaps the ultimate source of speculative philosophy would be the same feelings and wishes as with religion. At least on the surface, however, speculative philosophy looks different from Feuerbach’s conceptions of theology and religion. It is neither the bad faith of a caste of clerks nor the direct satisfaction of a yearning at the deep heart’s core. Perhaps the impulse to a particular philosophical conviction (or simply to philosophize) is a transmuted form of one or the other, but if so, an account of the transmutation is required. None is provided. Second, an important premise in the critique of religion is that Christianity is a form of life grown old, that real belief in it has long since departed, and we are ready for the change Feuerbach seeks to prompt. Whatever its merits, this view was an 1840s commonplace. Supporters and opponents of Christianity constantly lamented or cheered the fact that genuine religious belief was on the wane. By contrast, the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Hegel had certainly been robust at least into the 1830s. Arguably, 1840s Germany had just passed that tradition’s moment of greatest ascendancy, the dominance of Hegel’s thought in German intellectual life. If in attacking


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speculative philosophy Feuerbach is sweeping out cobwebs, they are very recent. These disanalogies suggest that, with regard to speculative philosophy, the preconditions for successful use of the method of inversion might not obtain. But the central problem for this method is simply that philosophers think that their views are supported by argument. What would be the relevance of even the most detailed and accurate psychological account of how I have (unconsciously) come to believe that X is true if I can provide rationally compelling reasons to believe that X is in fact true? And why would it matter if the rest of my culture had lost its belief that X is true if I could still provide rationally compelling reasons to believe it? According to Feuerbach, religious belief is invulnerable to argument. Doubt has no foothold against the immediacy of religious perception. In its decline, such belief rots from within. It dies less from the onslaught of skeptical argument than from a coming to consciousness of the fact that it is no longer believed; then it crumbles at the touch. A philosophical belief, however, is supposed to rest on argument and to be vulnerable only to counterargument. How could the method of inversion hope to work against speculative philosophy?10 Feuerbach’s answer, briefly, is that the beliefs of speculative philosophy are fundamentally at odds with human feeling and perception. Religious belief represents a distortion of human feeling and perception. Speculative philosophy, for Feuerbach, is more like their suppression. What the Principles are to reveal is not the hidden content of our feelings and perceptions (as in the critique of religion) but that we have feelings and perceptions—that our having them is of fundamental importance, is revelatory of our essential nature. Human feelings, Feuerbach says, “have ontological and metaphysical significance. In feelings— indeed, in the feelings of daily occurrence—the deepest and highest truths are concealed” (G §34, 318/53). This is what we all know deep down but what we all need to acknowledge. Prompting this acknowledgment is the task of the new philosophy, which is, Feuerbach says, “nothing but the essence of feeling elevated to consciousness” (G §35, 319/53). But what method could prompt this acknowledgment other than bare assertion against bare assertion? And while the goal of trans-

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formation might be appropriate for shedding religious belief, isn’t it question-begging as a response to a philosophical claim? With respect to a philosophical claim, it certainly looks insufficient merely to change agents’ beliefs or their stance toward the world. With respect to a philosophical claim, one seems to need reason to think such changes are improvements, that the new beliefs or the new stance are more rationally justifiable than the old. Can the new philosophy make any moves against the old that are rationally superior in terms of some independent standard? What is its method? It is, to say the least, a puzzling method. Consider the following assertions: 1. “Indisputable and immediately certain is only that which is an object of the senses, perception [Anschauung] and feeling” (G §38, 320/55). 2. “Only through the senses is an object given in a true sense—not through thought for itself” (G §33, 316/51). 3. “Only that thought which is determined and ratified by sensuous perception [sinnliche Anschauung] is real and objective thought—the thought of objective truth” (G §49, 330/64). 4. “That which I alone perceive I doubt; only that which the other also perceives is certain” (G §42, 324/59). These statements and many others like them in the Principles are not defended but merely asserted as dicta. In what register should we hear them? Is Feuerbach some form of materialist or empiricist? Perhaps a naive realist? The statements do seem naive. How can one blithely rely on the senses? Doesn’t one need to respond to the usual skeptical worries? Hasn’t Feuerbach ever read Descartes? Certainly he has. He has written a book on the history of modern philosophy.11 If there is naïveté here, it is deliberate. This should be stressed. Commentators constantly try to rescue Feuerbach from his apparent naïveté and so struggle to attribute to him one or another variant of nonnaive empiricism. My tack is to take his naïveté as deliberate and to look for his strategy within it. Here is another assertion: 5. “Pain is a loud protest against the identification of the subjective with the objective. The pain of love is that that which is in the imagination is not in reality” (G §34, 318/53).


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Is Feuerbach’s point that there would be one less piece of evidence against “the identification of the subjective with the objective” were there no such emotion as love? Suppose I feel pain when I realize I have merely imagined that my beloved loves me. Is that supposed to show something? That my beloved really does exist independent of my imaginings? What sort of argument is this? In his work after the Principles, Feuerbach often invokes features of daily life, especially of human sensation and physiology, as metaphysically significant. The most notorious example is the 1850 review of Jacob Moleschott’s Lehre der Nahrungsmittel, where Feuerbach makes the often-mocked claim that nourishment (die Nahrung) is the solution to the relation of mind and body: “Now we know on scientific grounds what the common people long have known from experience: that food and drink hold body and soul together, that the sought for link is nourishment. . . Nourishment is the Spinozan ‘one and all,’ the all-encompassing . . . nourishment is the identity of mind and nature” (NR 357 and 358). Commentators usually try to explain away this review as an aberration or as not serious, a mere “feuilletonistische” mockery of academic philosophy.12 No doubt Feuerbach was to some extent amusing himself—“Oh you fools, who with noisy astonishment open your mouths wide over the riddle of the beginning of philosophy, and yet don’t see that the open mouth is the entrance to the core of nature, that the teeth have long since cracked the nut over which you are today breaking your heads in vain!” (NR 359)—but the Moleschott review is only an extreme form of an earlier tendency. In the Lectures on the Essence of Religion, the “sexual drive” is said to undermine the “reality of universal concepts” (VWR 401/355). And Feuerbach also makes an argument of this kind in the Principles. He points out that if we were to start with Hegel’s insistence, in the first section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, on the “indifference and uniformity of the logical ‘this’” and apply it with a legal sense to “this house” and “this wife . . . we would directly arrive at a community of goods and wives where there is no difference between this and that” (G §28, 307/43). Now, Feuerbach is well aware that Hegel is engaged in a particular theoretical enterprise and is not concerned with the referent of each actual use of the word “this.” And he tries to counter that point: “Were one to retort that Hegel deals with being [Sein], not from the practical standpoint, as here, but from the theoretical standpoint, it should be

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replied that the practical standpoint is here completely appropriate. The question of being is indeed a practical question in which our being [Sein] participates; it is a question of life and death.” (G §28, 308/43). What does this mean? How is the “question of being” one of life and death? Is it that “the question of being” is really the question of my actual, material being, of what I require to keep my body alive? What is the content of the “practical standpoint” from which Feuerbach thinks the question of being should be seen? He writes that “the practical standpoint—the standpoint of eating and drinking—is itself taken by the Phenomenology in order to refute the truth of sensuous, that is, particular being. But here, also, I owe my existence never to the linguistic or logical bread . . . but always only to this bread, to the ‘unutterable!’” (G §28, 308/43–44). So the practical standpoint is the standpoint of eating and drinking. Actual eating and drinking. From the practical standpoint, I would see that I never eat the concept “bread” but always a slice of real bread. As a response to Hegel, this seems almost silly, as if Feuerbach were concerned that Hegel would forget to go to the bakery and attempt to live on the concept of bread.13 Schelling remarks that “[f]rom time immemorial the most ordinary people have refuted the greatest philosophers with things understandable even to children and striplings. One hears, reads, and is amazed that such common things were unknown to such great men.”14 Is Feuerbach’s move of this kind? In a sense it is. But Feuerbach knows he is pointing to common things. What he denies is that such common things are trivial. That they are not trivial is what he wants to inscribe in us. This is, I think, one meaning of his claim that “[t]he new philosophy regards and considers being as it is for us, not only as thinking but as really existing beings” (G §34, 317/52). Hunger, he is saying, has ontological significance. It tells us that we are fundamentally embodied beings. Of course, one could interpret some of Feuerbach’s remarks more narrowly, as simply claiming that actual objects have a particularity not captured by any account of the concept of an X. And I think Feuerbach is making this claim. Yet this claim is itself not supposed to be mere academic assertion. Feuerbach is not just opposing one philosophical thesis (“There are unique particulars”) to another (“There are no unique particulars”). His concern is that we change how we live with respect to the particularity of the world. It is not that Hegel is not aware


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of the particular. But for Hegel, Feuerbach says, the particular is irrelevant and indeed “irrational” (G §28, 308/44); for Feuerbach, it is precisely what “has meaning and rationality for itself” (G §28, 308/44). The point of the priority of the practical standpoint is not that there is some action that ought to be done, but that a way of being oriented to the world is to be altered. I am not saying that this is the only way to read these invocations of the everyday. In fact, I think they should also be read in a second way. They should also be read as a means of abandoning metaphysical issues altogether, as a way to turn philosophical into nonphilosophical questions—the question of being into the concrete question of how to keep body and soul together. As an answer to that question, nourishment (eating “this” bread) is an excellent answer. Feuerbach should be seen here as also arguing—as in his approach to the creation in The Essence— that philosophical issues must become natural scientific ones: they must be recast and then solved in the mundane, causal terms in which we understand our lives as “really existing beings.” Feuerbach is actually making, without distinguishing, several kinds of non- or really antiphilosophical moves. Here we need some distinctions. Let me briefly sketch four ways of approaching a philosophical question. These represent four attitudes one might have toward such a question (there are, of course, others). 1. A serious approach takes a philosophical question to be important and interesting. Many of the questions the natural sciences ask, for instance, about the physical structure of the universe are clearly important and interesting. Questions in theoretical philosophy have been thought to be as well, for example, questions about the nature of knowledge or reality. And questions in practical philosophy are often thought important and interesting, for they concern issues of practical significance, for example, our obligations to one another—in asking such questions we may be seeking guidance for action, or standards by which to assess one another or our social institutions. The general idea should be clear enough: some philosophical questions exert a pull, demand an answer. 2. A dismissive approach sees the philosophical question as easily handled. This approach is not that conversation stopper, “I don’t think about such things,” but it does deny that the philosophical question is difficult, requires serious thought. Often the dismissive approach is

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simply the voice of corn-fed common sense pronouncing judgment with the confidence of someone who thinks her target is the broad side of a barn. Dr. Johnson’s kick is of this kind. 3. A deflationary approach is reverse alchemy. It attempts to show that an apparently deep and important question makes sense only when understood as a more modest question, one that can be answered in a modest way rather than via large, abstract considerations. John Austin is an example of a deflationary philosopher. In “Other Minds” he insists that any question about the reality of something must be cast in concrete terms: “The doubt or question ‘But is it a real one?’ has always (must have) a special basis, there must be some ‘reason for suggesting’ that it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way, or limited number of specific ways, in which it is suggested that this experience or item may be phoney.”15 Once cast in concrete terms, the question is presumably answerable without recourse to metaphysics.16 In the nineteenth century, many writers talked as if the natural sciences would solve philosophical questions, but this strategy was not always deflationary. Some writers continued to attribute a high import to the questions. They saw themselves as answering the same questions that philosophers had wrestled with for centuries but showing the questions to be solvable in a way that philosophers had overlooked or had not understood. By contrast, a true deflationary strategy changes the great philosophical question into something more limited. Its solution thus becomes more likely, but also less grand an achievement.17 4. A diagnostic approach attempts to show that a philosophical question arises as a result of some contingent feature of social, psychological, or intellectual life. Remove the feature and the question will no longer be asked. The idea is that although a particular question may seem to be important, simply to be prompted by the human condition, in fact it is prompted by an alterable feature of social, psychological, or intellectual life. Alter that feature and the question’s apparent importance will vanish. Here there are two broad subcategories: (i) The diagnosis locates the philosophical question in a source such that acknowledgment of that source is either logically or psychologically incompatible with continuing to take the question seriously. Knowing where the question comes from either reveals the incoherence of asking it or undermines its interest.


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(ii) The diagnosis locates the philosophical question in a source such that changes either in one’s own life or in social conditions would remove the source and so dissolve the question’s interest. It would then no longer be taken seriously.18 Type (ii) diagnostic approaches may create a problem of justification, for compare the claims of a pair of type (ii) diagnoses. The first claims that human beings find philosophical question Q interesting and important only because our bodies contain traces of a food additive introduced in France and England in the seventeenth century but widely used ever since. The additive could be easily and costlessly removed from people’s diets. If it were, no one would find Q interesting or important. The second claims that human beings find philosophical question Q interesting and important only because, beginning in the seventeenth century, factories have released traces of carbon into the atmosphere, and the carbon has reacted with human brain chemistry to result in a widespread obsession with question Q. Completely purify the atmosphere and no one would find Q interesting or important. The second of these diagnoses presents a problem. A philosophical diagnosis is supposed to be intimately connected to a philosophical cure. With diagnoses of type (i), seeing the truth of the diagnosis is supposed to be the same as being cured. And the cure in effect certifies the truth of the diagnosis. For an agent who has been cured, the philosophical question no longer gets off the ground. Even with a type (ii) diagnosis such as the first example above, cure can be in practice the confirmation of the diagnosis. One rids everyone’s diet of the additive, and Q no longer seems to be an issue. With the second example things are different, for, absent a very improbable international commitment to complete atmospheric purification, the second example tells us that most people will continue to take Q seriously. But then why believe the diagnosis of Q? Why stop trying to answer Q? For each of these type (ii) examples, diagnosis and cure are separate steps. So for each, whoever first proposed the diagnosis must have had some reason to believe it prior to being cured. Presumably that reason could be made available to everyone. Suppose now, however, that the second example has an extra clause specifying that as long as the atmosphere remains impure, a theory attributing the interest of Q to an eliminatable chemical reaction will strike people as highly implausible.

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Call a diagnosis “a self-undermining diagnosis” if for a cure it both requires considerable change, which is not, in the near term, likely to be forthcoming, and concedes its own apparent implausibility in the absence of that change. Then, if a self-undermining diagnosis is true, it will seem implausible. There still could be reasons to believe a selfundermining diagnosis to be true—science and philosophy often try to prove the implausible—but these reasons will have an uphill struggle. Back now to Feuerbach. Before looking at the different kinds of philosophical approaches in the Principles, however, two things should be noted. First, we should keep in mind that accepting a philosophical view can be experienced as a basic change in a person’s life. In the Introduction, I mentioned that Hegelians, both Old and Young, often felt their lives transformed by their conversion to Hegelianism, and in Chapter 1 I briefly discussed the impact on Feuerbach of Luther, with his stress on transformation. The transformation that Feuerbach is after in the Principles (a transformation against Hegel) requires the agent to recognize herself as an essentially natural, sensuous being rather than an intellectual entity trapped in a body. This recognition is not to be merely the acceptance of a theoretical proposition. One is to recognize and, so to speak, embrace and affirm one’s daily life in the material world as one’s essential life, as the sphere in which one most truly exists. (There is a direct parallel to the concern in The Essence to secularize us.) This is not an affirmation of the body against the mind. The idea is, rather, that, even while engaged in intellectual activities, one is always in some sense still to relate to oneself as (essentially) an embodied being among other embodied beings (see G §52, 334/67 and §63, 339/72). One is to inhabit the world differently. Second, we should return for a moment to The Essence and apply the categories of philosophical approach there. In The Essence, Feuerbach is deflationary with regard to the question of the creation of the world. That question, he says, can be answered only if reformulated into questions about the creation of particular things. And for each such question, he insists, a naturalistic explanation is possible (WC 336– 39/218–19). With respect to religious belief, however, the account in The Essence is diagnostic (in terms of the categories just sketched, it is a type (i) diagnosis). Feuerbach thinks that once one recognizes that one’s religious beliefs are a function of one’s wishes and feelings, one will no


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longer believe in an external divine being (more accurately: one will admit one’s repressed disbelief). That is all the proof against Christianity that Feuerbach claims. And, of course, as I have stressed at length, the account in The Essence is supposed to be transforming.19 Now to the Principles. How do the categories of philosophical approach situate the Feuerbachian critique of philosophy? To put it briefly, I think Feuerbach is trying both (a) to be deflationary and (b) to be dismissive and transforming at the same time. First, the attempt at deflation: “[T]he community of human beings with human beings is the first principle and criterion of truth and generality. The certainty of the existence of other things outside me is mediated for me through the certainty of the existence of another human being outside me. That which I alone perceive I doubt; only that which the other also perceives is certain” (G §42, 324/59). The appeal to a community of perceivers can be read as a way to guard against subjective misperception. After all, most misperceptions are subjective. If the answer to “Do you see it that way too?” is “Yes,” my doubts can usually be put to rest. By insisting on confirming my perceptions by someone else’s, the worry about the reliability of perception in general has been ignored: I don’t doubt the accuracy of my perception that something exists “outside me,” namely, another human being. The global epistemological issue is deflated into my grounds for thinking some particular perception accurate. The question of the reality of what I perceive is turned into the question of the identity of what I perceive. Here is Feuerbach’s discussion of a famous example from Kant: The example of the difference between a hundred dollars in conception and a hundred dollars in reality—which was chosen by Kant in the critique of the ontological proof to designate the difference between thought and being and which was, however, mocked by Hegel—is essentially quite right. For I have the hundred dollars only in the mind, but the other dollars I have in the hand. The former exist just for me [sind nur für mich da]; the latter, however, exist also for others—they can be felt and seen. But only that exists [existiert] that is at the same time for me and others, on which I and others agree—what is not only mine but is general. (G §25, 303–04/39)20

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Note the role agreement plays here, the role of what is “at the same time for me and others.” It is said to be the determinant of what exists. As a claim about the ultimate constituents of reality, an assertion of this kind is always problematic. It is patently absurd, however, when the agreement in question is exemplified by being able to feel and see a hundred dollars and agree that it is a hundred dollars. Agreements of this kind cannot determine the nature of the universe. On the other hand, they might help to determine an object’s identity. They could help to determine, for instance, whether I am hallucinating, or whether the things in my hand are legal tender or play money. This passage makes sense if seen as deflating the question of the relation between thought and reality into the question of the relation between my beliefs about an object’s properties and the properties it actually has. What “I and others agree” cannot help with the former question, as the existence of those others would be as questionable as the existence of the hundred dollars. It can help with the latter. Others, too, can see and feel the object, and we might ultimately agree on whether what I have is in fact a hundred dollars. (Feuerbach, incidentally, seems not to realize this example’s peculiar propriety for stressing the role of agreement in determining an object’s properties: unless others generally accept that this object is money—that is, legal tender—then it isn’t.) If the issue is shifted from the relation of thought and reality in general to the determination of the properties of particular objects, Feuerbach’s appeal to the community of perceivers makes sense. Indeed, extend the community of perceivers far enough and the problem of universally shared but false perceptions can also be handled. To all of us, the sun seems to move. But if the others through whom what I know is “mediated for me” include natural scientists who develop theories and make experiments, then “that which the other also perceives” can be a corrective even for universally shared but false perceptions. In fact, Feuerbach is explicit that our initial perceptions often require correction, and that this is the job of natural science. In the Lectures he criticizes primitive religions for their unreflective relation to the senses: “Nature religion has no other foundation than sensory impressions, or rather, the impression which sensations makes on a person’s mind and imagination. Hence the belief of the peoples of antiquity that their country was the world or the center of the world, that the sun moved, that the earth stood still, that the earth was as flat as a plate, surrounded


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by ocean” (VWR 102/88). And the unreliability of immediate perception is emphatically asserted in the appendix to the second edition of The Essence: Reason divests things of the distortions and transformations which they have undergone in the violence and agitation of the external world, and reduces them to their true essence. Most, indeed nearly all, crystals—to give an obvious illustration—appear in nature under a form altogether different from their fundamental one; indeed, many crystals never appear in their fundamental form. Nevertheless, the reason of [the science of] mineralogy has ascertained the fundamental form. (WC-1 383/286) And in the important §4421 of the Principles, Feuerbach says that by the “sensuous” he does not mean what speculative philosophy calls “the immediate . . . the profane, flatly obvious [auf platter Hand Liegende], and thoughtless that is understood by itself”; rather, the sensuous is what “[the new] philosophy” and “science in general” make “visible” to us (G §44, 325–26/59–60). In his brief, unpublished “Critical Remarks on the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” (1848–49), Feuerbach glosses this section.22 He contrasts primitive and scientific explanations of rain. Primitive peoples, he says, explain rain as the overflowing of a lake in the sky. Science explains it as the evaporation and condensation of water (KB 323). The primitive sensuous perception—he calls it “thoughtless sensuousness [gendankenlose Sinnlichkeit]”—sees only an isolated appearance and explains it “without thought, without critique, without inquiry, without comparison to other appearances, directly through itself,” whereas science pulls together a variety of apparently disparate phenomena “into a whole” (KB 323–24). Science provides an explanation that both catches a wider range of phenomena in a single net and has been subjected to rational scrutiny. Feuerbach does not mention experiments here, but he does say that in constructing scientific accounts of “ground and consequence, cause and effect,” we “distinguish and unify things through our understanding on the basis of distinguishing and connecting marks given through the senses” (KB 322–23). And he insists that “the ground of all conceptual activity is a more or less encompassing perceptual activity” (KB 324). The idea seems to be that reason guides the senses

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through scientific theory, but the senses—as registering experiments? as registering new aspects of nature in the light of new theories?—still remain the ultimate court of epistemological appeal. Although this account is not especially clear, it is sufficient to show that Feuerbach is at least in part interested in the senses as the organs of scientific knowledge, and that this by no means involves mindless acceptance of what the senses tell us. But querying and pruning their testimony is a task for concrete scientific investigation, not a springboard to metaphysical abstractions. On this deflationary reading, Feuerbach’s new philosophy is practical because it pushes us to focus on knowing particular things rather than the traditional abstractions of philosophy. It pushes us toward natural science and its production of useful empirical knowledge. That is his point in the Moleschott review: “[H]ow powerless are abstract truths! How different is it by contrast with natural science” (NR 352). The deflationary reading captures part of what Feuerbach means by “[t]he new philosophy is the philosophy that thinks of the concrete not in an abstract, but in a concrete manner” (G §31, 314/49). This is far from the whole story, however, for the new philosophy also “recognizes the real in its reality as true, namely, in a manner corresponding to the essence of the real” (G §31, 314/49). This does not have a deflationary sound. And Feuerbach certainly thinks he has the answer to such basic questions of modern philosophy as the objectivity of our knowledge: The true and divine is only that that needs no proof, that is immediately certain in itself, that immediately speaks for itself and convinces in itself, and in which the affirmation that it exists is immediately implied; it is that that is plainly decided upon, that is plainly indubitable, that is certain and clear as daylight. But only the sensuous [das Sinnliche] is clear as daylight; all doubt and dispute cease only where sensation [die Sinnlichkeit] begins. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation. (G §39, 321/55) Here Feuerbach seems to be endorsing the Cartesian thesis that a clear and distinct perception is the ultimate criterion of truth, but to be asserting that only a physical, not an intellectual, perception can satisfy the requirement.23 This would be absurd. The unreliability of physical perception is


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Descartes’s starting point. Such perception could underpin particular knowledge claims in the way sketched above—the appropriate community of perceivers observes the evidence proving a claim true or false— but to ask for “[t]he true and divine . . . that needs no proof” is to ask for rather more. “The real,” Feuerbach says, “in its reality and totality . . . is the object of the new philosophy” (G §51, 333/66). This is the classic object of metaphysics. There is nothing deflationary here. According to Feuerbach, however—and this is his central claim—the real is “the object only of a real and complete being. The new philosophy has, therefore, as its principle of knowledge [Erkenntnisprinzip] . . . not the absolute, abstract mind . . . but the real and whole nature of the human being” (G §51, 333/66). Feuerbach’s starting point is anthropological, a picture of the human (G §37, 319–20/54). So Feuerbach does not begin with epistemology. Epistemology is to be addressed only after we have become real ourselves: “Only a real being recognizes real objects” (G §52, 333–34/67). Apparently, the way to solve the problem of knowledge is not to get a better argument but to change who we are. Feuerbach says many times that his new philosophy is supposed to be transforming. In the Principles he declares, “The new philosophy . . . is the dissolution of theology not only in reason—as was the case in the old philosophy—but also in the heart, in short, in the whole and real nature of the human being” (G §53, 335/68). And he says in the Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development that “[t]rue philosophy does not consist in making books, but in making human beings” (Fr 180/295). Again in the Principles he states that the new philosophy involves “the following categorical imperative: Desire not to be a philosopher, as distinct from a human being; be nothing else than a thinking human being . . . think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s oceans” (G §52, 334/67; see also UWC 441). Even §44 of the Principles (the one discussed above as deflationary) pushes transformation (as Feuerbach acknowledges in the “Critical Remarks”):24 “The task of philosophy and of science in general consists, therefore, not in leading away from sensuous, that is real, objects, but rather in leading toward them, not in transforming objects into ideas and conceptions, but rather in making visible, that is, in objectifying, objects that are invisible to ordinary eyes” (G §44, 325– 26/60). Scientific theory is one way of making the invisible visible. Certain

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crystals cannot be seen by ordinary eyes. Only reason makes them visible, in the sense of discovering their true structure. But at the end of §44, Feuerbach also distinguishes ordinary perceptions from “the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real,” where the model for the latter is “Greece after the demise of the oriental dream world.” This is a reference to Hegel’s philosophy of history and his characterization of Hinduism as a kind of dream world. Now in dreaming, Hegel says, we cease to be aware of the distinction between a self and an external world. He thinks that the Indian “mode of view [Anschauung]” makes no such distinction, and so is actually a form of pantheism. But it is not, Hegel says, a philosophical form of pantheism; it is merely a pantheism of the imagination.25 In this pantheism of the imagination, Hegel says, no attempt is made to understand the natural world. Rather, each natural object is seen as the embodiment of a god, of something otherworldly, and nature, the external world itself, is never reached or investigated: “[T]he finite loses its consistency and substantiality, and all understanding of it disappears.”26 Hegel argues that this view of things is tied to a rigid and debased moral and political life in which individual freedom is impossible. The only available compensation, he says, is retreat to the “boundlessly wild imagination” of Hindu religion that he likens to “a dream world and a delirious bliss” through opium.27 By contrast, the “Greek spirit was excited to wonder at the natural in nature. . . [The Greek spirit] regards it as something in the first instance foreign, in which, however, it has a presentiment of confidence, and the belief that it bears something within it which is friendly to the human spirit, and to which it may be permitted to sustain a positive relation.”28 For Hegel, this Greek attitude goes along with individuality and political freedom. Feuerbach’s analogy is of Hindu to speculative pantheism and of the modern to the Greek way of looking at things. Hegel stresses that the Greeks wondered at and investigated nature,29 and generally did their best to find explanations of natural phenomena, but he is clearly not just contrasting theories of nature. The contrast is of two kinds of human lives, different manifestations of Geist. Feuerbach insists on precisely this point: “[A] human being who devotes himself only to entities of the imagination or of abstract thought is himself only an abstract or fantastic but not a real and true human being” (G §44, 326/60). Section 44 has


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its deflationary moments, but here the injunction is not to become a scientist but to stop devoting oneself to abstractions (among them, notably, Hegel’s) and to become a real human being. How would a Feuerbachian “real and true human being” approach the basic questions of epistemology? She would dismiss them, for she would think the answers straightforwardly clear. More accurately, she would never seriously doubt her perceptions. She might doubt particular perceptions, but she would resolve such doubts via other perceptions (her own or those of others [see KB 324]). Doubt of perception in general would never arise. A “real and true human being” would forestall that step by which, Feuerbach feels, the Cartesian process gets under way (see G §10, 275/13 and §13, 281/19). Earlier I quoted dicta from the Principles, assertions that seemed philosophically naive. Now these assertions can be seen as dismissive of the problem of our knowledge of the external world. But as well as being dismissive, they are also supposed to be transforming—the two go together. If we are living and real beings, if we understand ourselves as essentially (thinking and feeling) material beings in a material world, then the problem of the existence of that world disappears. There is no doubt to be overcome: “Those who are not divided between a lord in heaven and a lord on earth—that is, those who embrace reality with undivided soul—are quite different from those who live in discord. That which is the result of the mediating process of thought in philosophy is immediate certainty for us” (NRP 219/149). Recall Feuerbach’s treatment of miracles in The Essence. His goal there was not to disprove miracles but to preclude the question of their occurrence. Nor did he attempt to disprove the Christian God’s existence. In the same way, Feuerbach’s goal in the Principles is not to prove our perceptions reliable or to prove the existence of the external world but to preclude such questions. And in the same way, he thinks this is possible because our genuine convictions about such matters are revealed in our daily lives, where we focus on actual material objects (see G §§15–16). These are the things that are real for us. The stress on eating, drinking, and all the elements of daily life is to get us to recognize what kind of beings we are: “But is eating and drinking an act of an idea, of an abstraction?” (UWC 430). If we acknowledge ourselves as essentially (thinking and feeling) material beings, we will also “acknowledge that . . . seeing is also thinking, that the senses [Sinneswerkzeuge] too,

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are the organs of philosophy” (AP 145/137). But if the senses are philosophical tools, then doubts about the existence of the external world will not get off the ground. True, the issue could be raised. It would not be conceptually incoherent to do so. However, just as the true believer does not feel threatened by her inability to prove God’s existence—for she has an immediate certainty of that existence—so the Feuerbachian human being will not feel troubled by her inability to prove the existence of the external world, for she, too, has an immediate certainty of its existence. The philosophical question will no longer be taken seriously. Feuerbach usually conflates what I have called the deflationary and the transforming moves. He often notes that philosophy and science are not the same, but just as often he forgets. He does once refer to the fact that he, unlike Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Bayle, was not a religious believer, was not “simultaneously a materialist and a spiritualist” but instead went “from the natural scientific reality of sensuousness to its absolute reality” (V 188)—thus making the distinction I have been after. Still, most of the time he conflates the reliance on the senses to discover particular truths with the turn to the senses as what are humanly essential. In effect, he conflates the practical activity of scientific discovery of new truths about bread with the way that real bread— when seen properly (that is, from the standpoint of eating and drinking)—provides a “refutation” of idealism. Here Feuerbach is partly a creature of his time. Many a nineteenth century materialist conflated the epistemological virtues of the natural sciences with the alleged ontological superiority of materialism.30 What distinguishes Feuerbach is that his materialism is preached less as an ontology than as a form of life. It is less an intellectual conviction than a feeling for material life that he wishes to prompt.

3. The Goal of the Critique of Philosophy Commentators tend to see Feuerbach as rejecting not philosophy generally but merely the rationalist distortions perpetrated by contemporary German philosophy. They then search for a more or less normal and plausible philosophical slot to put him in.31 The antiphilosophical diatribes are explained away as excesses directed against particular


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philosophical positions; the nonacademic stylistic devices are treated as excrescences (although Feuerbach calls them thematic [see Fr 172– 73/287]); and Feuerbach is then cast as some form of materialist or empiricist or realist—intellectually rather weak but still playing the usual philosophical game. This approach, however, ignores Feuerbach’s constant flouting of the usual style of philosophical discourse, his frequent eschewal of even a stab at an argument; it sees such general diatribes as “No religion!—that is my religion; No philosophy!—that is my philosophy” (Fr 180/296) as mere inflated expressions of local criticism. And it ignores Feuerbach’s insistence that his are “principles” for a philosophy fundamentally different “in its essence from the old philosophy” (G §67, 341/73). Marx Wartofsky comes closest to registering Feuerbach’s antiphilosophical dimension. He sees the Theses and the Principles as arguing for a “direct realism.”32 He points out the importance for Feuerbach of “what it is that is called to our attention practically by such a philosophical view.”33 And in discussing §44 of the Principles, he notes that Feuerbach wants us to learn to see ordinary things differently.34 In the end, however, Wartofsky concludes that “[i]n [a] less than systematic way Feuerbach [in the Theses and the Principles] does effect a certain reform of classical empiricism. For all the vagueness, the lack of rigorous and constructive analysis of sensation and thought, for all the poetizing rhetoric into which the argument dissolves at crucial points, there is a hard core of theory to be salvaged.”35 According to Wartofsky, Feuerbach’s view is that “[s]ensibility is therefore to be understood not on the ‘observer’ or ‘perceiving subject’ or ‘spectator’ model of empiricist epistemology, but in terms of a model of a being that is already involved in the world by its very nature. The context of sensation is therefore this primary involvement, this Dasein.”36 Wartofsky is right to emphasize that for Feuerbach humans are “already involved in the world.”37 But to call this a “model,” or to think of this involvement as primary in the sense of a principle from which to deduce philosophical consequences, is to make the point abstract in just the way Feuerbach rejects. It is to step outside those involvements. At one point Wartofsky complains that Feuerbach’s stress on a “sensibility involved in the mode of existence and the mode of activity or praxis of this being . . . is not easily compatible with the passivity Feuerbach attributes to sensation.”38 In fact, the incompatibility arises from

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the interpreter’s pursuit of an underlying philosophical principle. Wartofsky recognizes that Feuerbach wants to do away with such dichotomies as active and passive, or thought and sensation, yet Wartofsky worries that “the ground” of the unity of such dichotomies is not clear.39 In fact, Feuerbach is not searching for a philosophical ground. For instance, the statements in which he insists on human passivity have to do with elements of human life (such as suffering), which must not be forgotten in understanding what it is for human beings to be in the world. By contrast, here is Wartofsky: Feuerbach says that a philosophy that has no passive principle in it necessarily has the empirical as its opposite, is one-sided in positing Being as sheer activity. For this leaves out the principle of life—that is, of feeling, suffering existence. “A being which doesn’t suffer is a being without being. But a being which doesn’t suffer is nothing but a being without sensibility, without materiality.” Here, too, Feuerbach inherits the old dualism, in which matter is the passive, recipient principle.40 I think there is a failure here to see the kind of move Feuerbach is making. Wartofsky sees “life” as a philosophical principle for Feuerbach, and the remarks on suffering as pointing to data that a theory of “Being as sheer activity” cannot account for. To think of life as one more philosophical principle, a variant of “matter . . . the passive, recipient principle,” is, however, to miss Feuerbach’s point. It is to make “life” a corrective to a particular general theory rather than a basic alternative to appealing to a general theory as a way to understand what it is to be human. I take Feuerbach’s references to suffering as intended to make us register what kind of beings we are: beings who, among other things, are acted on in the world by others and thus suffer. To ask what metaprinciple we must embody so that we can be acted on while also being active agents involved in the world is to rise to an unwarranted level of abstraction. It would be to register the human capacity to suffer simply as a constituent of (if it is a principle) or a constraint on (if it is data that principles must handle) an ontological theory. And then we would not have a philosophy different “in its essence from the old philosophy.” Its content may be irritatingly vague, but the idea that we are to be


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transformed must be taken seriously. When Feuerbach says, “What was for philosophy the result of thought, is immediate certainty for us” (NRP 219/149), he is describing a difference between the lives of “them” and “us.” The difference is not in the grounds of knowledge but in what we and they are. Feuerbach insists many times that philosophy is not to be a special subject, but is (somehow) to be part and parcel of daily life: The new and only positive philosophy is the negation of all academic philosophy [Schulphilosophie] although it contains in itself what is true in the latter. The positive philosophy is the negation of philosophy as an abstract, particular, i.e., scholastic, quality. It has no special, no abstract principle . . . no special language, no special name. . . The new philosophy is no longer an abstract quality and special faculty. It is the thinking human being itself, the human being who is and knows itself to be the self-conscious essence [Wesen] of nature, the essence of history, the essence of states, and the essence of religion. This is the human being who is and knows itself to be the actual (not imaginary) absolute identity of all contraries and contradictions, of all active and passive, spiritual and sensuous, political and social qualities (VT 259–60/168; see also ZB 241) The goals of metaphysics are not disclaimed here. Yet neither are they to be attained via withdrawal to the philosophical study: “Think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, otherworldly God” (G §52, 334/67). The new philosophy is supposed to be the articulation of what the new human being is. The new human being does also know such things as that the external world or other minds exist. She does not, however, know them via separate acts of theoretical reflection (see G §60). In the Principles Feuerbach says that “love is the true ontological proof of the existence of an object outside our mind; there is no other proof of being but love and feeling in general. That object whose being affords you pleasure and whose nonbeing affords you pain—that alone exists” (G §34, 318–19/53). It is not that, having loved, one reflects on the experience and concludes that there must have been something one loved. Feuerbach is trying to describe what human life is like. His point is not that there are concep-

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tual preconditions for loving someone (for example, “One cannot love X unless one believes X exists”); his point is that what it is, in practice, to know that someone exists is for her existence to matter to one, to cause one pleasure or pain. And that is the end of the ontological question. That is what it means for “human feelings . . . to have ontological and metaphysical significance” (G §34, 318/53; see also KP 183). Our knowledge that other human beings exist is the consciousness of the life we are actually living, not a knowledge derived by thinking about that life as if it might not exist: “The human philosopher . . . says: even in thinking and in being a philosopher, I am a human being among human beings [auch als Philosoph Mensch mit Menschen]” (G §63, 339/72). Thus although Feuerbach’s specific polemics are only against figures in the rationalist tradition, they are, I think, supposed to cut more broadly. As I noted in the Introduction, the discussions in Locke’s Essay or Hume’s Treatise are hardly down to earth and straightforward. They are not qualitatively less abstract than those in Descartes’s Meditations. To be a receiver of impressions is as far as being a thinking thing is from being a human being in the world with other human beings. Feuerbach does sometimes play empiricism off against idealism. For instance, in an 1839 letter he remarks that “I miss in speculative philosophy the element of empiricism and in empiricism the element of speculation” (CR 12). So it may be tempting to see Feuerbach as aspiring to a third way that would unite what is valid in materialism and idealism. In a sense, that is his aim. It is not his aim, though, to provide in this third way a set of finally correct academic answers to traditional metaphysical questions. Even in the 1839 letter, he follows the assertion that his method unites the empirical and the speculative with the clarification that what he unites is empirical and speculative “activity,” and that the glue holding these opposites together is “skepticism or critique” with respect to the “merely” speculative or empirical (CR 12). What seems to be desired is a qualitatively different activity—one that, as an activity, is somehow simultaneously empirical and speculative— rather than a new theoretical principle. In this letter, Feuerbach also emphasizes the role of humor in his method (CR 11–12), and when claiming that the “practical tendency” of his writing is expressed in his union of the speculative with the empirical, he goes on to list other dichotomies that his method is supposed to unite: “the elevated always with the apparently common . . . the abstract with the concrete . . .


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philosophy with life. . . the universal in the particular” (CR 9–10). Such a program does not fit easily into any picture of what a philosophical theory would involve. Overall, these methodological remarks are hardly clear, but it seems to me best to reconstruct these and similar remarks as Feuerbach’s groping toward a way to avoid traditional philosophical issues altogether, rather than as his groping toward the expression of yet one more philosophical position.41 Consider again the later remark that the senses are organs of philosophy (AP 145/137). This might be an injunction to trust what the senses tell us. Or it might be an injunction to drop metaphysics and to pursue inquiries controlled by data accumulation—that is, natural science. Either way, idealism is left behind. However, idealism is not “refuted,” nor can one’s senses tell one that materialism or any other competing metaphysical thesis is true. If the senses are philosophical organs, it is for nontraditional philosophical purposes.42 In an 1845 self-description, Feuerbach registers his philosophy’s difference from all contemporary philosophy as follows: “For Feuerbach, God, spirit, soul, ego, are mere abstractions, and so are body and matter. Truth, being, reality is for him only sensuousness.” He goes on to say that he is “neither a materialist, nor an idealist, nor an identity philosopher.” What is he then? His ringing answer is that he is “a human being” (UWC 441).43 There is, then, to be no separate sphere of metaphysical reflection. One is to know “[t]ruth, being, reality” not by abstracting from one’s encounters with “sensuous, individual things and beings” (UWC 441) but through those encounters (see also Fr 180/295). This does seem like a philosophy different in its essence from all previous philosophy. And so “to all dull and pedantic minds, which place the essence of philosophy in the show [Schein] of philosophy, [my philosophy] appears to be no philosophy at all” (WC 17/xxxv).

4. Problems Feuerbach’s new philosophy tells us nothing new. We are merely to acknowledge what we already know: that we are human beings, members of the human species living among and relating to other members of that species, thinking and feeling material beings, a part of nature. And this seems altogether trivial.

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Feuerbach is aware of the problem. In the Theses he says that “[p]hilosophy is the knowledge of what is. Things and essences are to be thought and to be known just as they are [so zu erkennen wie sie sind]—this is the highest law, the highest task of philosophy” (VT 251/162). He thinks he has accomplished this task, but he concedes that the accomplishment may seem superficial: “To have articulated what is such as it is [so, wie es ist], in other words, to have truthfully articulated what truly is, appears superficial. To have articulated what is such as it is not, in other words, to have falsely and distortedly articulated what truly is, appears profound. . . Truthfulness, simplicity, and determinacy are the formal marks of the real philosophy” (VT 251/162; see also KH 61/127, WC 17/xxxv and G 264/3). Such remarks echo the first half of Hegel’s pronouncement that “[t]o comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy” while rejecting the second half: “what is,” Hegel says, “is reason.”44 Such remarks also echo a familiar Romanticism. We must learn to recognize simple but profound truths, to recognize simple truths as profound. In the Theses Feuerbach declares (with a quote from Goethe), Whoever speculates according to some particular real principle of philosophy as do the so-called positive philosophers Is like an animal in a field that is fallow Led around in a circle by an evil spirit While all around it lies a beautiful green meadow This beautiful green meadow is nature and the human being, for both belong together. Look upon nature, look upon the human being! Here right before your eyes you have the mysteries of philosophy. (VT 259/167–68)45 And in the Fragments he writes, “Logic I learned at a German university; but optics—the art of seeing—that I learned first in a German village” (Fr 170/284). And in “Towards a Critique” the (assertedly simple) return to nature (where the “deepest secrets are to be found in the simplest natural things”) is described as the “only source of salvation” (KH 61/127; see also VT 254/163–64). This is all rather cloying, but it flags no internal problem. If we are supposed to acknowledge trivial truths as profound, it is presumably our


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problem—the taint of the old philosophy—if we balk at doing so, if we find such truths altogether too pallid. There is a way, however, in which what Feuerbach is doing might be internally incoherent. Hans-Georg Gadamer claims that “[t]he appeal to immediacy . . . has always been self-refuting, in that it is not itself an immediate attitude, but a reflective activity.”46 The objection is that one can base a knowledge claim on a psychological experience, but then, as a knowledge claim, that experience must be open to reflective challenge; or one can immerse oneself in the experience and so be immune to reflective challenge, but one is then not also making a knowledge claim. However, so the objection goes, Feuerbach illegitimately wants to make a knowledge claim while being so immersed in immediate experience as to be immune to challenge. Now, if immediate knowledge—for instance, that another human being exists—is not knowledge unless (a) in some relatively conscious way I affirm as true the proposition “Another human being exists” and (b) I justify that affirmation in some way even if only by appeal to a direct intuition of its truth, then Feuerbach is indeed in trouble. As someone in love, I do not affirm the proposition “X exists” (and certainly not the syllogism: “X exists, X is another person, therefore, another person exists”); nor, as someone in love, do I intuit that proposition’s truth. Conversely, when I combat Descartes by appealing to what it is like to be in love, I am no longer acting as someone in love. The experience appealed to—the direct emotional encounter—is no longer happening and so can now be scrutinized and challenged, and must then be defended as epistemologically reliable. The claim is that a proposition about “what is” can be either affirmed (and justified) or lived, but not both at once. Yet to do both seems to be the idea behind being auch als Philosoph Mensch mit Menschen. Feuerbach could give two responses. The first would be to claim that we simply do not need to worry about the affirmation of certain propositions, for instance, that the external world or other minds exist. He could claim that we have no need for a philosophically justified knowledge of such things. Kant famously declares it a “scandal to philosophy” that there is no “satisfactory proof” of “the existence of things outside us.”47 So much the worse, Feuerbach could say, for such philosophy. This may be Feuerbach’s point in “The Necessity of a Reform of

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Philosophy,” when he says that “there is a fundamental difference involved between a philosophy that owes its existence to a philosophical need . . . and a philosophy that corresponds to a need of humanity” (NR 215/145). The former is a question of internal conceptual development, “as, for example, the Fichtean philosophy in relation to the Kantian”; the latter a question of “the need of the age” (NR 215/145 and 216/146). Feuerbach says little concrete about the need of the age, but the final sentence of the Principles asserts that “[t]he indispensable condition of a really new philosophy, that is, an independent philosophy corresponding to the needs of humanity and of the future, is, however, that it will differentiate itself in its essence from the old philosophy” (G §67 340/73). As Kant’s scandal is central to what Feuerbach considers the old philosophy, it is reasonable to think it will be irrelevant to his conception of the new philosophy. Moreover, Feuerbach’s new human being will clearly understand herself as living in this world. She will need no philosophical ladder back to it. The traditional epistemological problems can be dismissed. The difficulty with this response is that it does not explain why intelligent people, including those without much religion, have worried so about epistemological skepticism. I have mentioned this problem before. Feuerbach locates the source of religious beliefs in human feelings and wishes. He attempts an explanation of why people have such beliefs, how those beliefs are at odds with modern existence, and why we no longer need them, indeed, no longer really have them. But he attempts no analogous diagnosis of the concern with speculative (or any other) philosophy. He merely argues that speculative philosophy is the logical outgrowth of theology, that it is theology’s rationalized form.48 This is inadequate for two reasons. First, speculative philosophy is allegedly rationalizing theology—that is, it is allegedly rationalizing a form of religious deception, a replacement for lost faith—yet modern philosophy, speculative or otherwise, has never had an institutional role comparable to theology’s. Its relations to the powers that be and to the beliefs of the masses have always been ambiguous and ambivalent. It is not obviously a defender rather than a challenger of the intellectual or political status quo. Institutionally, philosophy is quite different from theology, and a genetic account of the latter leaves out a good deal of the historical role of the former. And second, even if philosophy’s answers do rationalize theology’s,


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that in no way explains the hold of philosophy’s questions. Human beings have been obsessed for centuries by questions about the relation of thought and being. “[H]uman reason,” Kant declares, “is burdened by questions [among them the classic questions of skepticism] which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore.”49 Feuerbach’s claim is that reason is so burdened only if one separates it from the senses, only if one makes a basic error in one’s approach to the world (G §33). That is the extent of his diagnosis of philosophy. Let us grant that he is right. We would still need to know why so many intelligent people have so obsessively gone wrong in just this—seemingly natural—way. To use recent psychological jargon, we would need to know what secondary gains one might reap by going wrong in this way. To maintain the analogy to religion, Feuerbach would have to uncover a layer of human feeling that expresses itself through precisely that repression of feeling, that urge to abstraction, which Feuerbach sees as characteristic of speculative philosophy. Perhaps such a layer of feeling is there to be uncovered. Feuerbach makes no attempt to do so. Feuerbach’s relation to Romanticism is worth a brief digression here. However multiple and multiform Romanticism’s themes, among them are an emphasis on the divinity of nature and on the fresh perception of ordinary and apparently trivial things. I take three examples among many. The goal of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge says, is “to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”50 The aim of Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdroeckh is to show “the Wonder of daily life and common things.”51 And Novalis talks of “Romanticizing” as giving to “the common a high meaning, to the ordinary a mysterious aspect, to the familiar the dignity of the unfamiliar, to the finite an infinite luster.”52 The theme of transformation is also a Romantic one, and Stanley Cavell has even argued that a nonphilosophical (that is, nonacademic) approach to epistemological skepticism is a Romantic concern as well.53 Thematic links are not the issue. Quality is. Feuerbach seems decidedly wan and weak when compared with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Novalis, or even Carlyle. He seems second-rate, but now in terms of sensibility, not logical acumen. “Measured by the standard of Hegel’s history

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of the ‘spirit,’” Löwith remarks, “Feuerbach’s massive sensualism must seem a step backward in comparison to Hegel’s conceptually organized idea, a barbarization of thought which replaces content by bombast and sentiment.”54 This is the worry that comparison to the Romantics evokes: that Feuerbach exhibits their worst traits, that he is an atheistic Schwärmer. There was definitely a good deal of Schwärmerei among the Young Hegelians. (Including Schwärmerei about Feuerbach. The Essence, Engels said later, had an immediate “liberating effect. . . Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians” [LudF 272/18]. And in 1842 Marx claims that “there is no other road for you to truth and freedom except through the stream of fire [the Feuer-bach]. Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present” [LSSF 208/95]. Still, no one called Feuerbach what Ruge called Bauer: the “Messiah of atheism” and the “Robespierre of theology.”)55 What is finally troubling about Feuerbach’s work, though, is less his bombast than his assumption that the revelation he brings is easy. What is superficial is less the content of what he tells us than his assumption that questions that have bedeviled philosophers for so long are a mere spell to be dissolved with the snap of the fingers, his assumption that a particular conceptually straightforward move—the inversion of subject and object—will lead to an equally straightforward psychic transformation, the seeing—truly seeing, and holding onto the seeing—that we are really sensuous creatures. T.S. Eliot writes that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”56 That possibility seems not to have occurred to Feuerbach. To return now to Gadamer’s complaint. Feuerbach could also give a quite different response to Gadamer. He could deny Gadamer’s premise that knowledge requires a reflective act. That premise, Feuerbach could say, is part of the picture to be attacked. As already noted, in “On The Beginning of Philosophy,” Feuerbach does demand the acknowledgment “that empirical activity, too, is a philosophical activity, that seeing is also thinking” (AP 145/137). In this sentence, and in “On The Beginning of Philosophy” generally, there is Feuerbach’s usual ambiguity between turning us to the pursuit of concrete forms of empirical research and changing our conception of the kind of beings we are. Feuerbach rejects the philosophical—here, especially Fichtean—attempt to get content from an “ego [Ich]” under-


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stood in terms of “the monotonous litany of the eternal I⫽I” (AP 152/144). Instead, he says, one must look at particular egos and their particular activities. He contrasts the ego “from which a musical note emerges” with that which generates “a logical category or a moral or a juridical law.” He proposes that psychology, the “science that precedes all other sciences . . . the first and the general science . . . follow the ego through all its inflections in order to deduce intrinsically different principles from the different relations in which the ego is involved” (AP 152/144). In effect, he proposes that psychology examine different types of human beings and their characteristics. “To be embodied,” Feuerbach says, “is to be in the world; it means to have so many senses, i.e., so many pores and so many naked surfaces” (AP 151/143). Psychology’s project would be to examine the varied forms the human personality takes in virtue of its different senses, in virtue of its different ways of being in the world. This program (of what appears to be the development of something like personality profiles) is vague enough. The key point is that such a program is deflationary: general, a priori questions are replaced by particular, at least partially empirical ones. Feuerbach also concedes, however, that such a program will not reach what he calls the “highest metaphysical principle.” He says that “the flesh or, if you prefer, the body has not only a natural-historical or empirico-psychological significance, but essentially a speculative, a metaphysical one” (AP 152–53/144). In pursuit of this metaphysical significance, he declares his opposition to the philosophy that “is essentially interested in answering the question: How is the ego [Ich] able to suppose the existence of the world, or of an object? Contrary to this type of philosophy there is another which creates itself objectively; which starts from its antithesis and asks itself the opposite, but much more interesting and fruitful question: How are we able to suppose the existence of an ego that thus inquires and can thus inquire?” (AP 147– 48/140). Here the question is not about the details of particular forms of our relatedness to the world (corresponding to the different types of ego), but about our ability to inquire about that relatedness at all. And the reason we can so inquire appears to be that we are in the world—that is, in a body with senses and involved with objects. We can inquire about that relatedness because we have such a relatedness. For the senses to be “organs of philosophy” here means that they provide

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knowledge of “what is, such as it is” (VT 251/162), including knowledge of what kind of beings we are—and the answer is that we are beings in the world, involved through our senses in a variety of particular relations with objects (see AP 150–51/142–43). A theme is announced here that will run through the young Marx: under proper conditions, one can know the deepest truths about reality by means of everyday activities. The conception of knowledge as only reflection upon rather than action within the world is rejected. Just what this means is not completely clear. For Feuerbach, the idea is not that the senses confirm and refute knowledge claims; nor is it that our activities or our senses are inchoate sources of knowledge, intuitive lodes from which insights can be extracted and refined into conceptual purity and then proved to be knowledge. Knowledge here is supposed to be in the senses or the activities. Such knowledge is not merely a skill like driving safely without paying conscious attention. The idea seems to be that ordinary daily life has “meaning and rationality” (G §28, 308/44) for agents who understand it properly. And the proper understanding seems merely to be the knowledge—though not just as the affirmation of a proposition but as something in which one is clothed— that human beings are sensuous beings involved in relations with other such beings and with the natural world. This seems relentlessly trivial. Feuerbach’s claim is that this is actually not a trivial but an essential fact about us. If one is clad in the knowledge that this fact is essential, if Feuerbach’s sole “endeavor”—to make us “see correctly” (WC 18/xxxvi)—has been successful, one will be the sort of person who does see that existence does indeed have meaning and rationality for itself. I have argued that Feuerbach eschews serious (in the sense laid out earlier in this chapter) epistemological debate, but there is one serious epistemological claim he often invokes, though without defense (or clear elaboration) and apparently without awareness of the problem it generates. This is the claim that in a given period there are constraints on what agents perceive. Miracles, Feuerbach says, occur in ages that possess the “senses and organs” for seeing them (G §15, 286/23; see also BWC 193–94 and UW 301–02). With such organs, faith is immutable; without them, it is impossible. Now, Feuerbach also claims that “every conception which for its


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age . . . expresses a need . . . is an inviolable limit of the mind” (WC 319/205; see also BWC 184–85, UW 309). In claiming this, he might be subscribing to (1) the strong claim that certain concepts, at certain times and places, are altogether unintelligible. They make no sense to agents. Or he might be subscribing only to (2) the weaker claim that certain propositions, at certain times and places, have no force for agents. They are—as a matter of fact—nonstarters for producing conviction. In Chapter 1, in talking of his concern to generate what I called “exhaustive disbelief,” I attributed (2) rather than (1) to Feuerbach. I will do so again here. All of his examples are of occurrences—miracles, the presence of gods—that ordinary people in a given period perceive. Such people could undoubtedly have understood the claim that the things they perceive do not exist, are merely natural phenomena or optical illusions or in some other way are not what people take them to be. Feuerbach is talking of historical periods—classical times, early Christian eras—in which there were skeptics, in which people certainly had the concept of a world without deities or miracles. I take him to be saying that, to ordinary people of such periods, the claim that there are no deities would have seemed simply false—intelligible but palpably untrue.57 To say that an ancient Greek interpreted the world in a certain manner (for example, interpreted a brook as a deity), a manner differing from how moderns interpret the world, might be a useful way to develop Feuerbach’s general claim that the world seems different in different eras. But (a) we must remember that, in ordinary life, the world just seems to be a certain way, not to be interpreted a certain way (what the Greek thought he saw when he saw the brook was a deity; he didn’t think he saw the brook as a deity), and (b) we must keep clear of the idea that there is some criterion for the truth of an interpretation of the world beyond whether it seems—perceptibly—true. For Feuerbach, there is no such further criterion. He takes the primacy of perception very seriously. The general issue of the connection between perceptual and conceptual change would take us too far afield. And I see no answer to the question of precisely what conceptual changes had to happen before pagan deities and Christian miracles stopped being visible. That there is a connection between conception and perception is something that Feuerbach affirms (see UW 309). No doubt he should have pursued the

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matter. In any event, in the texts we are looking at, his stress is on perception’s epistemological primacy and its mutability. For him, truth is thus relative to perception. This generates two problems. First, there is a problem of consistency, for Feuerbach also thinks that natural science tells us the timeless truth about the world and that he has told us the timeless truth about religion and philosophy and about what it is to be a human being. In the shift from speculative philosophy to his new philosophy, he says, we reach “the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real” (G §44, 326/60; see also BWC 224). He certainly believes his principles meet the needs of the future, not the past, but he never suggests that they are true only relative to the current and coming eras. Feuerbach cannot argue here that previous societies’ perceptions and needs were false or distorted while those of the present are true or undistorted and so reveal the timeless truth. This would require a criterion for such truth, and the only epistemological criterion he permits is perception. But perception cannot distinguish false from true perception. The point of using perception as his criterion is to avoid that issue. In appealing to a criterion for timeless truth, however, one must justify the claim that one’s criterion picks out what is true (and not what is merely perceived to be true): such a criterion must accept and survive precisely the epistemological challenge that Feuerbach invokes perception to avoid. Perhaps we can say that, for Feuerbach, this issue of consistency is only a theoretical not a practical problem. As long as his principles are in tune with the needs and perceptions of the age, as long as he is articulating the beliefs present in practical life, as long as his foe is a mere Gespenst im Kopfe ready for dissolution, agents ought to be able to see that what he is saying is (at least for the moment) true. Only the theorist need worry about the ultimate status of such truth. (And would such a worry betray that the theorist had not been paying attention?) At one point, in the preface to the Principles, Feuerbach does evince some uncertainty about whether his principles are in tune with the current as opposed to the coming age: I called them principles of the philosophy of the future because generally the present age . . . is incapable of understanding, not to speak of appreciating, the simple truths from which these principles


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are abstracted—precisely because of their simplicity. The philosophy of the future has the task of leading philosophy from the realm of “departed souls” back into the realm of embodied and living souls; of pulling philosophy down from the divine, selfsufficient bliss in the realm of thought into human misery. To this end, it needs nothing more than human understanding and human speech. To think, speak, and act in a pure and true human fashion will, however, be granted only to future generations. (G 264/3) But then one might wonder how Feuerbach’s age could register that what Feuerbach says about human beings and human understanding is in fact true. Still, such pessimism is rare in Feuerbach’s writings and does not accurately reflect the content of the Principles. So his epistemological relativism does not pose a problem for his own practical purposes. It would pose a problem if—as Feuerbach fears in the passage above—his claims cannot be obvious to current as opposed to future generations. For then he would be asserting (1) that method M is the sole and reliable road to truth, (2) that X is true, but (3) that currently method M reveals Y to be true, where Y is pretty much equivalent to not-X. At least one of these assertions would have to be jettisoned. As I say, Feuerbach is generally optimistic about the epistemological possibilities of the present, so overall I think the problem does not arise for him. As we will see in Chapter 6, however, something very much like this problem does arise for the 1844 Marx.

5. Antecedents My antiphilosophical rendition of Feuerbach may seem to inject twentieth-century Oxbridge into 1840s Germany. Although Feuerbach’s texts are the final test of any reading, it will add to mine’s plausibility if they are given a context broader than the slot “Hegel to Marx” to which they are usually consigned. The purpose of the following (absurdly brief) remarks is to show that Feuerbach’s attack on speculative philosophy has antecedents, that he is not an antiphilosopher ex nihilo. As with the critique of religion, the antecedents are to be found in the work of Hamann and Jacobi. Even more interesting than their views on religion is their conviction that faith is the answer to the problems of

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the existence of the external world and of other minds. When Kant insists that it is a “scandal to philosophy . . . that the existence of things outside us . . . must be accepted merely on faith,”58 he may have Hamann and Jacobi in mind (as well, of course, as Hume).59 For here is Hamann: “Our own being [Dasein] and the existence [Existenz] of all things outside us must be believed and cannot be determined in any other way.”60 And Jacobi: “Through faith we know that we have a body and that other bodies and other thinking beings exist outside us.”61 And: For the existence in itself of such a thing outside us we have no proof but the existence of the thing itself. . . [B]ut we assert . . . with the most complete conviction that things really exist outside us: that our representations and concepts are formed in accordance with the things that are before us and not, inversely, that the things which we suppose we have before us are formed in accordance with our representations and concepts.—I ask: on what does this conviction rest? In point of fact on nothing but virtually on a revelation, which we cannot call anything else but a truly miraculous one.62 Both Hamann and Jacobi affirm the testimony of the senses with the same immediate and unquestionable conviction as they affirm God’s existence. It is the affirmation of something whose certainty, Jacobi says, we know “in advance”: “How can we strive toward certainty, if certainty is not already known to us in advance; and how can it be known to us, other than through something that we already recognize with certainty? This leads to the concept of an immediate certainty, which not only requires no proof, but utterly excludes all proofs, and is purely and simply the representation itself in agreement with the thing represented (and so has its ground in itself).”63 Kant’s scandal is thus none at all. “[T]ruth to tell,” Hamann says, “I look with pity on the philosopher who demands from me evidence that he possesses a body and that there exists a material world. To waste one’s time and wit on these kinds of truths and evidences is at once sad and ridiculous.”64 And in words Feuerbach would have echoed, Hamann writes to Jacobi: “Not cogito, ergo sum, but the other way round, or even more Hebraic, est, ergo cogito, and with the inversion of such a simple principle the whole system perhaps receives a different language and direction.”65


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In all this the influence of Hume is palpable though peculiar. Hamann and Jacobi each inflate such Humean remarks as “It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses” beyond Hume’s acknowledgment of the modest affirmations implicit in our everyday practices—the “reposing” of faith in our senses—into a certainty coextensive with the senses.66 Hume’s restrained (and easily challenged)67 faith becomes a fundamental conviction immune to doubt: “an immediate certainty which not only requires no proof, but utterly excludes all proofs.” Under this construal of Hume, our knowledge of a table and our knowledge of God are structurally the same. Life is literally impossible without faith. Hamann: “The Attic philosopher, Hume, needs faith [den Glauben] when he eats an egg or drinks a glass of water.”68 And Jacobi: “[For Hume] faith [Glaube] is the element of all knowledge and agency. . . The desperate word faith [Glaube] constantly crops up [in Hume’s text], and you will find that without faith [ohne Glauben] we cannot go to the door, nor can we come to the table nor go to bed.”69 (I translate Glaube here as “faith” rather than the less religiously resonant “belief” to stay true to Hamann and Jacobi, even though not to Hume.)70 Jacobi scholars dispute just what he means by “faith.”71 That is not our concern. Moreover, once again there is no basis for ascribing any direct influence on Feuerbach to Hamann, and the influence of Jacobi here is uncertain and ambiguous. Feuerbach assesses Jacobi differently at different times. In two pieces of the 1830s, he rejects Jacobi’s demand for immediate knowledge. In the first, however, what Feuerbach mocks is Jacobi’s claim to immediate knowledge specifically of God, of the “supersensible” (JacP 16). And in the second, Feuerbach does not reject immediate knowledge per se. In fact, he endorses it. He rejects only immediate knowledge in what he calls the “subjective sense of Jacobi” (KH 26/102). What seems to worry Feuerbach is that Jacobi’s intellectual intuition turns truth into a private affair. One can point only to one’s own feeling and not to any shared feature of the world. Truth as joint conviction is impossible. “[T]o prove,” Feuerbach says, “cannot mean anything other than to bring another person . . . to my own conviction. The truth lies only in the unification of ‘I’ and thou [Du]” (KH 41/113). By the time of The Essence, Feuerbach’s opinion of Jacobi has improved. As noted earlier, he explicitly invokes Jacobi’s declaration that

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“a seeker’s greatest merit is to unveil, to reveal existence” (see WC 18/xxxvi)—a declaration Hegel mocks with equal explicitness in his long attack on Jacobi in Faith and Knowledge, sneeringly denying that such revelation provides “philosophical cognition.”72 There is no evidence that Feuerbach had this passage of Hegel’s in mind when he invoked Jacobi, but he ought to have. For it is precisely revelations appropriate for philosophical cognition in Hegel’s sense that Feuerbach is rejecting. In a similar way, there is a striking parallel between Feuerbach’s own remarks and another Jacobi passage that Hegel rails against. In David Hume, Jacobi talks blithely of “where there exist single beings that are aware of themselves and stand in community with one another.”73 This sparks Hegel’s ire: “It is surely something which all speculation must recoil at, to see the absoluteness of a human consciousness, of a thing that senses, a thing that is sensed, and of their community, presupposed straight off, in the spirit of the most vulgar empiricism . . . [A]ll philosophy is already driven from the field by the unanalyzed, absolute assumption of a thing that senses and a thing sensed.”74 Yet when Feuerbach says “Indisputable and immediately certain is only that which is an object of the senses, perception and feeling” (G §38, 320/55), and insists that “the community of human beings with human beings is the first principle and criterion of truth and generality” (G §41, 324/59), he seems similarly and deliberately to be making claims “which all speculation must recoil at.”75 I don’t want to overstate the case. Hamann and Jacobi would have found most of Feuerbach’s ideas repugnant. And nothing I have cited establishes actual influence. My aim is to remove the anachronism from my reading of Feuerbach, to show that in flouting speculative philosophy and its approach to the problems of epistemology, he was not writing in an intellectual vacuum.

6. Final Comment So how in the end is Feuerbach to be assessed? To chastise him for not providing detailed, rigorous arguments for his new philosophy would be to miss the point. Yet it is too flip simply to say that if he has transformed you, if you see what he’s saying, his texts have worked; if not, they haven’t.


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Some of Feuerbach’s flaws, such as the frequent vagueness of his claims, are simply flaws, things that could be corrected without danger to his overall aims. More important, even if one remains untouched by a transformative account, one might still admire the way it confronts its chosen problem, and/or its diagnosis (if it has one) of the resistance its readers will put up. It is hard to admire Feuerbach in these ways. He seems not to grasp the depth of philosophical or for that matter religious obsessions, and so his analyses seem not really geared to the phenomena in question. In 1835, while still a defender of Hegel, Feuerbach discusses the “true critique” that attempts to articulate the inner “kernel” of a philosophy, to express “what the criticized philosopher had on the tip of his tongue” (KAH 65–66). He contrasts this with the “critique that misunderstands,” that looks at the philosophical system from outside. It would not be wrong to accuse Feuerbach of failing adequately to enter into his opponent’s views, of thinking that what is on the tip of the believer’s or the philosopher’s tongue is the complete expression of what is in her soul or her heart. Does this mean his texts are not worth reading, except perhaps as way stations on the road to Marx? In fact, I think that for themselves and despite their deficiencies, Feuerbach’s texts have considerable interest, certainly considerable of what in the Introduction I talked of as aesthetic interest. In his essay “Religious Rejections of the World,” Max Weber writes, “Wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently carried out the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism, the tension definitely comes to the fore with the claims of the ethical postulate: that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos.”76 Now Feuerbach wants it both ways. He contrasts the religious view of the world with the scientific view that sees the world in terms of a causal mechanism, and he regards his own work as part of that scientific process which continues to transform our view of the world more and more into the scientific one. Yet he also wants us to recognize that the world is meaningful. Of course, being a scientist is no bar to holding metaphysical or ethical views. With Feuerbach, however, the same move—his resolution of religion and philosophy into anthropology—is supposed both to disenchant the world and to maintain its meaningfulness. It is easy to scoff at this. But

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the urge to have done, finally, with abstractions is an urge many writers have felt. So is the urge to have done with religion. And so also, I think, is the urge to keep meaning in the world. What gives Feuerbach his interest, despite his deficiences, is his quixotic attempt to combine all three.

....

3 Bruno Bauer

In 1842, August Cieszkowski remarked that “if one wanted

to say that Bruno Bauer was not an important event, then this would be like asserting that the Reformation was not an important event. . . Bruno Bauer shines on the horizon of knowledge.”1 His star set quickly, however. By 1844 he was already dated, his views increasingly conservative and increasingly ignored. Bauer’s later work has some relevance to the history of nineteenth-century theology, but his relevance to the development of Marxist theory is in his brief period of radical notoriety in the early 1840s. Writing about Bauer is difficult. To begin with, his thought evolved very quickly from one position (pre-1840), to a second inconsistent with the first (1840–43), and to a third inconsistent with the second (post-1843), but by no means a return to his starting point, all while maintaining important strands of conceptual continuity.2 My focus is Bauer’s second period, although slightly later texts will also be relevant in clarifying some aspects of his views. There is no central text for the period 1840–43. Although Bauer’s detailed critique of the Gospels is set out in two basic works (Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes and Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker), his general critique of religion and his statement of the political role of “Self-consciousness” are developed episodically across a range of polemical and satirical writings. These are often filled with rhetorical devices designed to puncture prevailing conscious109

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ness by ridicule and invective. For instance, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment over Hegel, the Atheist and Antichrist has the most in the way of academic apparatus supporting a fairly clear argument; yet The Trumpet is an anonymously published diatribe, ostensibly by a scandalized conservative, and its tone is filled with hysteria: “Away with the mask! No one should deceive themselves! The day of judgment is coming in which that which is now concealed will be revealed!” (Po 46/95). It is hardly an attempt to convince the unconvinced. It is sometimes unclear how much and what kind of philosophical argumentation Bauer thinks necessary to grasp the truth he purveys, but, in contrast to Feuerbach, he is never hostile to (Hegelian) philosophy as such. What makes Bauer worth study is that he proposes the unlikely combination of a liberalism that insists on the self’s ability to transcend any prior self-description and the communitarian aspiration for all agents to see themselves as jointly constituting a community so tightly knit that they regard one another’s creations as their own (LF 173). It is said of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness that he was an “extremist.”3 That could be Bauer’s epigraph—as he seems to affirm. “Only truth is extreme,” he says (Ein 155).4 Bauer’s interest for the history of political philosophy is that, in the early 1840s, he is somehow simultaneously an extreme liberal and an extreme communitarian. As for Bauer’s place in our story, his views importantly influenced Marx. The 1844 Marx’s stress on individual self-development as well as on the creative character of the human species as a whole, its penchant continually to construct itself, derives from Bauer. And the thrust of The German Ideology’s critique of the Young Hegelians will be clearer when seen as an attack on what is common to the—in many ways very different—views of Feuerbach and Bauer.

1. Self-Consciousness Bauer’s target is “false appearance [falsche Schein]” (SF 198). His critique is supposed to make it “disappear” (SF 198); his critique is supposed to “dissolve . . . illusion” (Fä 184/142). By “illusion” Bauer means a particular kind of deception the human species perpetrates on itself. The structure of such illusion is that a phenomenon is mistakenly believed to exist and to have meaning independent of the development through human history of the collective self-consciousness of the human spe-

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cies—in effect, to be a natural or supernatural rather than a social phenomenon. The way to dissolve the illusion is to show both that in the course of its own development “Self-consciousness” (Bauer’s shorthand for the collective self-consciousness of the species) created the phenomenon, and that belief in the phenomenon’s autonomy was, but no longer is, a necessary moment in that development. If Self-consciousness can recognize that it has deceived itself, that it was necessary for it to do so, and that it need no longer do so, its self-deception will be overcome and the phenomenon’s “chimerical objectivity” (Ein 148) will be removed. The source of such self-deception is both social-psychological and metaphysical. On the one hand, owing to inadequacies in the real conditions of their lives, agents deceive themselves in various ways—for instance, by belief in illusory entities such as the Christian God with his consoling promise of otherworldly redemption, or by seeing the meaning, opportunities, and obligations of their lives as flowing from membership in some subgroup such as a social class or religious sect whose status is thought to be naturally or supernaturally grounded. On the other hand, there is also a necessary development that Self-consciousness must undergo in order to become Self-consciousness. In Hegelian fashion, it can become aware of itself as what it is—an entity to which nothing is in fact merely given and external—only by undergoing a period of alienation during which its own creations appear to it as autonomous (ECh 160–61; Po 137–63/177–202).5 Its logic dictates that only at a certain point of its development can it see that those creations are in fact its own. Bauer believes that this point has now been reached. There is no longer a metaphysical necessity to humanity’s ignorance of its own nature. Moreover, Bauer believes, like Feuerbach, that there has been a decisive change in those social-psychological conditions that prompted the belief in illusory entities. The human needs involved can now be satisfied (at least in principle) in other ways. Many current constraints on human life no longer express real limits but persist only because agents fail to recognize, and so to go about realizing in practice, the existing scope of human possibilities. This failure of recognition, Bauer feels, is largely a function of false beliefs inculcated by religious and state authorities. It is a function of agents’ failure to see their humanity as what is most important

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(J 19/22). Being a Christian or a Jew, a noble or a commoner, continues to take precedence (J 19/22). Such mistaken ways of identifying one’s essential properties limits agents’ possibilities in three ways. First, if one’s fundamental self-identification is as a Jew or a Christian, one will not engage in “forbidden” activities no matter how beneficial. Second, if political institutions discriminate on the basis of religion or social origin, members of some groups will be legally denied opportunities available to others. Bauer does attack those civil privileges that restrict some agents and benefit others (J 72, 94–96/75, 100–102), but his goal is not the extension of privilege P to group B as well as to group A. This he regards as a mere palliative and as self-defeating because it would forestall more radical change—namely, the overcoming of our selfidentifications in the sectarian terms (for example, as Jews or gentiles) that make the notion of a civil privilege coherent (J 61–62/64). Bauer also wants to overcome a third kind of restriction on agents’ possibilities, one that flows from agents’ failure adequately to identify with other agents as common members of Self-consciousness, from the failure of each to see others’ activities as her own. Bauer’s point is that the current hierarchical and divisive forms of self-identification undermine the possibilities for all agents because they undermine the possibility for any agent to identify with the genuine community. Membership in that community depends on having as one’s fundamental self-identification one’s participation in the historically developing selfconsciousness of humanity. By this I mean that the properties one thinks of as crucial to who one is, what one’s place in the world is, and what the ends are that express one’s deepest self must not flow from membership in any group less extensive than the species as a whole. Two caveats here. First, Bauer never suggests that understanding ourselves as members of particular families is problematic (as a Hegelian, it would be odd if he did). His worry is about the nonfamily group memberships most important to one’s identity. Second, Bauer often talks as if our most important group identity ought to be that of citizens of a rational state. He says that a rational state would embody (SZ 31) or be grounded on (Ein 150) Self-consciousness, but there is no discussion of what would count as noninvidious differences between individuals such that an agent could identify herself as a citizen of this rather than of that state (would it be just a question of “natural” geographic boundaries?).6 Here as everywhere Bauer is more polemicist

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than analyst. In reconstructing his views, it is unwise, because too frustrating, to demand either much precision or the resources to handle even obvious challenges. He must be taken as he is, an overwrought prophet manqué. His project is to get us to recognize ourselves as (fundamentally) members of Self-consciousness, and as neither (fundamentally) narrowly self-interested individuals nor social or religious sectarians. His project is to get us to recognize our “true life” not in the pursuit of egoistic or subgroup ends but only in “the life for the universal goals of humanity” (ECh 136). The ultimate aim of Self-consciousness is a world free from all illusion (SF 201). And the consequence of the dissolution of all illusion, Bauer says, would be our recognition of “our true, pure nature” (SF 209). The point of the critique of the present is to “free human beings from the fetters that have hitherto kept them from being fully human. . . Critique is the crisis that breaks the delirium of humanity and lets the human being recognize himself again” (SF 202–204). And what human beings would recognize would be simply that they are free: it would be “universally acknowledged that the essence of humanity [das Wesen des Menschen] . . . is freedom” (Fä 175/135). According to Bauer, for an agent to be free she must be undetermined by any entity other than herself. No external entity is to affect the agent such that the agent has any property in virtue of being or having been affected by the external entity. Bauer is subscribing to the definition of freedom stated in the introduction to Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history: “Matter has its substance outside of itself; spirit is being-within-itself [Bei-sich-selbst-sein]. But this, precisely, is freedom, for when I am dependent, I refer myself to something else which I am not: I cannot exist independently of something external; I am free when I am within myself. This being-within-itself [Bei-sichselbst-sein] of spirit is self-consciousness, the consciousness of self.”7 Clearly the only agent that could be free on this definition would be an agent such that (a) nothing would be not part of itself and (b) all its properties would be properties it has given itself (for to have a property given by X is a form of dependency on or limitation by X [Po 72/118]). Only a collective entity—indeed, only the most ontologically extensive possible entity—could satisfy these conditions. Self-consciousness is that entity. Self-consciousness is thus “the unique and creative force of

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the universe . . . the universe itself” (ECh 156; see also Po 70/115). It is “the All . . . the solution to the riddle of the Spinozan substance and . . . the true causa sui” (ECh 160). It is Bauer’s version of Hegel’s Geist: “The world-spirit has first its reality in the human spirit” (Po 69/115; the obvious problem, the status of nature, I deal with later). I should stress that as well as being all-encompassing, Self-consciousness is perpetually developing. It is in a process of continual evolution. In fact, this must be the case, or else the properties it has at some given moment would become a limitation. They would become what Self-consciousness from now on necessarily is. Any immutable property would be a barrier confronting Self-consciousness, a limit that Selfconsciousness could not overcome. On Bauer’s view, such a property would not be Self-consciousness’s own creation, and so would be incompatible with its freedom. This explains Bauer’s attack on Feuerbach. He says that Feuerbach’s list of a set of “perfections”—such as “‘reason, will, heart’”—as the “‘absolute essence of the human being as human being’” amounts to a constitution of human nature altogether outside the control of human beings (Gat 216/200). In effect, Feuerbach has set a limit to human capacities:8 “That essence which [the human being] does not make . . . is but the expression of his weakness. The truly human in him would thereby become a barrier [Schranke] which is unattainable for him. His perfections [would] confront him as fixed ideas or as dogmas” (Gat 216/200; see also CLF 104–05). Any stipulation of essential human properties, no matter how exalted, is a limit on human possibilities. The central illusion Bauer wants to combat is precisely the illusion that humanity, as a species, is limited in any way. Self-consciousness is thus the self-consciousness of the species as continually self-creating. “The human being,” Bauer says in 1845, is “a becomer [ein Werdender], a self-developer” (CLF 120). Humanity can always transcend itself. And so it has no essence, except its necessity to continually create itself.

2. State and Civil Society The state, Bauer says, “can only be understood when it is grasped as the objective existence of the universality of the free Self-consciousness” (SZ 31). But a state that embodied Self-consciousness would be quite different from the conservative monarchy of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of

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Prussia. The current Prussian state, Bauer says, is in no sense a state “that is a universal affair of all” (J 88/93). Bauer certainly sees his own attack on the state as a radical one. In The Trumpet of the Last Judgment, he declares that the philosophers “are the most consistent and unrestrained [rucksichtlos] revolutionaries” (Po 80/126), that philosophy sees “its highest goal in the overthrow of the established order” (Po 83/128), and that philosophy, “once having destroyed religion, and delivered a death blow to the church, [will] then most certainly want to overthrow the throne” (Po 6/60). Of course this is all merely programmatic and polemical. It is difficult to give precise content to Bauer’s political views. The problem is compounded by the fact that Bauer rejected the turn of Hess, Marx, and Feuerbach to socialism, and so by 1844 was directing attacks against them rather than against the Prussian state. Even looking only at 1840– 43, there is no commitment to particular institutional forms for the embodiment of Self-consciousness. There is a constant demand for academic freedom9 and a general preference for democracy, but the underlying animus is best described, in general terms, as a quest for a community life such that (a) each agent is herself concerned for the common good, not merely for her individual good, and (b) each agent has a genuine role in decisions about the common good. Each agent thus both would see herself as active in the community’s actions and would satisfy her most important interest (the common good) through those actions. The Prussian absolutist state provides no such point of communal identification. On the contrary, it aims at “isolation from the historical development of the idea of the state” (J 88/93). It has two basic flaws. First, there is no effective citizen participation in decision making, not even on the part of the privileged class (J 88/93). Second, the Prussian state makes no attempt to overcome the egoism of civil society by which, Bauer feels, individuals are systematically turned away from a concern for the common good and, indeed, from any consciousness of their participation in a community. According to Bauer, the state has the responsibility to liberate “the bourgeois helots” from the “bondage” of the narrow jobs and egoistic aims that keep them from glimpsing the whole of which they are a part, but, he says, the Prussian state has abdicated this role (SZ 33). Bauer’s view of civil society and of the state’s proper relation to it

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presents a contrast to Hegel’s. For Hegel, civil society plays a positive role. First, because it provides a sphere for purely private initiative, a sphere in which an agent may express her individuality through exercising her capacity to procure the satisfaction of her desires and generally to mold the external world to her ends; second, because within civil society the individual is to belong to trade organizations, Korporationen, which perform a variety of functions on behalf of its members, among these being self-help and social insurance.10 This is the counterbalance, for Hegel, to the general egoism of civil society. Within civil society, Hegel restricts egoism by the Korporationen; outside civil society he restricts it by the state. Still, for Hegel, it is a valuable feature of modernity that individuals have become subjects with their own particular goals and interests.11 Now, Bauer certainly stresses subjectivity. Indeed, for him, the property in virtue of which we are members of Self-consciousness is precisely the capacity to imagine and to pursue our particular goals and interests freely and individually. Bauer, however, tends to think of the specific interests pursued in civil society as unrelievedly selfish, both unsatisfying in themselves and decisively opposed to any adequate form of community life.12 In civil society, he says, agents are alienated from the state and “petrify” in “narrow work” with no awareness that this work “serves a larger whole” (SF 214). In civil society, “[e]veryone utilizes everyone else to satisfy his own needs, and he in turn is utilized by others for the same purpose” (J 8/JP 192). What distinguishes Bauer from Hegel is that Bauer does not want to sublate—to transcend while preserving—either this alienation from the state or agents’ purely instrumental use of one another. In contrast to Hegel, it is not Bauer’s goal to permit such phenomena to exist within one institutional sphere that is subordinated to another. He wants to abolish egoism altogether. (Here, incidentally, though out of step with Hegel, Bauer was in step with “Hegelianism,” that is, with such people as Rosenkranz and Michelet.)13 Even his 1844 attack on communism reveals no weakening of his hatred for civil society. His goal continues to be the abolition of “the spiritual slavery of universal competition” and the creation of “an order in which all interests are satisfied, in which casualties to a cause of egotistical solitariness are no longer demanded” (Gat 214/198–199; see also SZ 33).

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Bauer shows some resemblance to conservative critics of the market. He verges on lamenting the disappearance of those premarket distinctions that “although yet separating individuals, nevertheless united them and set them in a manifold relation.” The species has now decayed, he says, “into a mass of individual atoms” (Gat 215/199–200). And, in a concession to the value of sectarian forms of self-identification, he remarks that “[t]he Jew as Jew has, for example, the religious duty to belong to the family, the race, the nation; that is, to live for definite, human interests” (Fä 183/140–41). For the Jew, the commitment to community is not altogether obliterated. What is important here is Bauer’s emphasis on the need for connections among citizens (the need to “unite human beings with human beings” [J 102/109]). His objection to civil society is that its effect is to destroy such connections, that it fosters a way of understanding oneself that inhibits recognition of one’s basic links to a wider community. Bauer never proposes an institutional alternative to the market. Indeed, he never suggests that the market be abolished. As we shall see, his focus is civil society as the sphere of egoism rather than of a particular form of economic relationships. What he wants is for the state to provide a point of identification for agents such that their dominant end can encompass the common good. He wants to change agents’ motivational structure so that the conflict of bourgeois and citoyen disappears: agents will become solely citizens. With the appropriate fundamental self-identification, agents’ dominant ends will not be egoistic. Bauer’s claim is that the Prussian state cannot provide such a point of identification, cannot be the proper counter to civil society, because it is a state built on privilege, on sectarian interests. It can provide no point of identification with the community as a whole because it does not in fact express that community. Agents have, in effect, no choice but to engage in egoistic activities. There is no institutional expression of the common good. For Bauer, the proper form of our connectedness is through recognizing our joint membership in Self-consciousness. This, Bauer says, would be “the overcoming of egoism” (SF 199). By identifying with Self-consciousness, I would be able to see others as also part of Selfconsciousness and so as identified with myself, i.e., as myself: “I re-

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nounce my individuality in order to know myself as universal, but then to know even geniuses and their creations as my own determinations, as determinations of my universal self-consciousness” (LF 173). One cannot overstress the importance to Bauer of this identification with the collectivity. It informs even such things as his 1844 attack on the division of labor. He does not focus on the atrophy of the worker’s individual capacities but on the fact that the worker’s narrow life prevents his identification with the labor of the rest the species: “But the fixed vocation which the laborer already takes to be as such the highest and most beautiful is a barrier which bars him the view of the remaining collective labor of the species [Gattung]” (Gat 218/202). Identification with the collectivity (that is, with Self-consciousness) does not mean individual desires are to be suppressed. Bauer attacks communism for doing precisely that. In a communist society, he complains, the state “will ‘determine the principle for all questions concerning nourishment, clothing, lodging, marriage, family, work’—in short, through a condition which also abolishes freedom in the smallest things” (Gat 222/204). Bauer labels this a “despotic condition of subdued atoms” (Gat 222/205). He is not opposed to variations among individuals. He does not demand a mechanical uniformity among agents as mere instantiations of Self-consciousness. Indeed, to do so would be inconsistent. It would require specifying a set of properties for Self-consciousness, the properties the instantiated agents would have. And this would be to miss the essential feature of Self-consciousness, that it cannot be defined by any given set of properties. This is why Bauer remarks that the citizens of a communist society “would take vain comfort in the proposition: ‘for the human being nothing is innate, neither idea, nor taste, nor inclination, nor skills’” (Gat 223/205). He endorses the proposition but thinks it incompatible with communism. The Bauerian agent is thus to be an individualist yet never an egoist. Bauer does not address the potential tension between these requirements. I think he would argue that a genuinely free agent would regard her individual accomplishments as her accomplishments as a member of Self-consciousness, that is, as an agent pursuing the ends specific to Self-consciousness. But Self-consciousness does not exist apart from its individuals (LF 156; Po 69/115), and the defining end of Self-consciousness is freely to generate and to pursue ever new conceptions of

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the self. This end would be satisfied if individual agents were freely to engage (alone or jointly) in the generation and pursuit of such new self-conceptions. In this sense, for Self-consciousness to realize itself, agents must pursue the realization of their individual self-conceptions, but with the understanding that in doing so they are simultaneously contributing toward that of Self-consciousness. Like a good Hegelian, Bauer has a self-realization account of human flourishing.14 The basic idea is that human beings are particular sorts of creatures, and that the good life consists in exercising those capacities that express one’s essential nature qua human being. Bauer’s view is that human beings are essentially self-creative beings—beings whose nature it is continually to re-create themselves, continually to develop new conceptions of what kinds of beings to be. They realize their nature in a process of self-transformation satisfying three conditions: (1) that such self-transformations are voluntary, (2) that the agent is self-conscious— that is, conscious of what she is doing, namely, that she is engaged in the activity (self-transformation) that expresses her nature qua human being—and (3) that the agent is aware of herself as simultaneously contributing to the self-realization of Self-consciousness. The nature of Self-consciousness is, similarly, continually to transform itself. And it realizes itself when it transforms itself voluntarily and selfconsciously—these conditions being satisfied when individuals in general satisfy (1), (2), and (3). There is, then, no substantive but merely a formal content to Selfconsciousness’s basic end. It is to be satisfied by the individual (or joint) participation in a continual process of redefining the self and its ends. The individual’s free pursuit of her own ends with the appropriate understanding of the fact of her participation in Self-consciousness is the way that Self-consciousness realizes its basic end—that is, realizes itself. Note that Bauer’s goal is not new self-conceptions for their own sake. It is, rather, a view of freedom as consisting in continual self-creation ex nihilo. This could involve stable individual lives (and stable social structures), but they would be stable because agents had chosen them to be so, not because agents thought such lives (or social structures) to be mandated by nature, by the gods, or by anything else. Of course all this continues to leave indeterminate which concrete institutions would best facilitate the self-realization of the individual

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and of Self-consciousness. Here Bauer would likely invoke the owl of Minerva and refuse to specify the future in detail and would likely content himself with the general prophecy that “[s]tates will arise— their time will not long fail to come, something current states certainly know in their presentiment of a dark and uncertain future—states are coming which will confidently base themselves on the freedom of Selfconsciousness” (Ein 150).

3. The Critique of Religion Bauer holds that: 1. Religion is a human projection (Po 148/190; LF 156). As such it is a particularly virulent form of illusion. It claims that something other than Self-consciousness exists. Indeed, the core claim of the specifically Judeo-Christian tradition is that humanity is not creator but created. There can be no more fundamental challenge to the freedom of Selfconsciousness. 2. The Christian religion provides illusory satisfaction for unsatisfied needs. The individual responds to his “disconnectedness” from the state and the “alienation with respect to him of the totality of the state by a belief in a being and a world beyond” (SF 214). Religious belief is consolation for the absence of an appropriate relationship of individual to collectivity in this world. One takes refuge in the imagination of a future life in which everything is new and utterly different from the present. It is, Bauer says, like an “opium-delirium” (SF 212–13; see also SF 213–14).15 3. Christianity’s fundamental content is egoism. Its only concern is the individual’s soul: “[The believer] is supposed to have no greater care than for himself, for his soul and its salvation, and he must regard this so highly that, if necessary, he is obligated to sacrifice everything which otherwise for human beings has value and is held in the highest esteem” (J 48/51; see also Po 119/163 and ECh 112). The desires Christianity fosters are of a piece with the egoism of civil society. 4. Even so far as it is a form of common life, religion divides rather than unites. Each religious sect proclaims itself the true religion and all others false. A genuinely religious group—one whose faith is strong— must attack and contemn all other groups: “Every sect must abominate the others as satanic” (ECh 92). The use of force against those who

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differ is the logical consequence (J 21/24). While as members of religious sects individuals do belong to communities, this form of belonging only alienates them further from Self-consciousness, the genuine collectivity (J 19/22). 5. The relationship of the individual to the specifically Christian divine world is intrinsically inadequate, for Christianity’s transcendent being and its world beyond are “thoroughly alien [fremd]” to and “stand in no connection” with the world in which individuals actually live (SF 214). God is a supraindividual agent who infinitely transcends the collectivity of individuals. And the heavenly beyond, however ideal, is not a world consciously transformed by human agents. It is simply given by a transcendent power. The individual cannot see such a world as her own product. Her need to be part of the force creating the community in which she lives cannot be satisfied by such a religion (LF 156). Here Christianity does not compensate for the existing distorted relationship between the individual and the state (or between the individual and Self-consciousness). It replicates that relationship. It is thus the expression “of the imperfection and sickness of the established order” (SF 217). 6. Because the relation of the individual to the divine world replicates the estranged structure of real life, it functions as a justification of that structure. The relation of the individual to the divine world is seen as the standard to which political relationships in this world ought to conform. The king’s command over his subjects and the general hierarchical structure of Prussian society are seen as analogous to God’s hierarchical rule over the world. Religion thus also sanctifies “the imperfection and sickness of the established order” (SF 217).16 7. In sanctifying the established order, religion provides not only a justification for it but also a potent reason (the current conditions are divinely ordained) for agents not to try to change it.17 Some of these attacks on religion may be mutually inconsistent. For instance, it is not clear how Christianity can simultaneously offer consolation for the existing distorted relationship between the individual and the community and replicate that relationship. Putting such issues aside, we can now see the difference between Bauer’s and Feuerbach’s accounts of Christianity as alienation. Feuerbach identifies humanity with the Christian conception of God. Christian belief is problematic because it involves a failure to understand what one is doing, a failure to

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understand that one is worshiping one’s own projections, not a transcendent being. For Feuerbach, however, the structure of one’s relationship to God is not problematic. For Feuerbach, there is no distance between humanity and God. God is, as a conceptual matter, humanity under a different name, and as a practical matter we currently rely on one another, not on God. Not the conception of the divine but merely its label is problematic. All is in order except our acknowledgment of what we are doing. For Bauer, the Christian conception of God and the believer’s relationship to God are themselves pernicious. Bauer thinks that the believer still sees God as a being qualitatively superior to and distant from herself, as a supremely powerful being providing rewards and punishments. Feuerbach assumes we already see ourselves as, most fundamentally, members of the human species. We simply conceal this self-conception under a religious label. Bauer’s claim is that we do not yet see ourselves as, most fundamentally, members of Self-consciousness. Currently our fundamental self-conception is not merely mislabeled but distorted. We see ourselves as fundamentally individuals with separate interests and desires, and as members of sectarian social and/or religious groups (J 19/22). Even our unsuppressible longing to be part of a community is distorted into a purely egoistic longing, i.e., individual eternal salvation. Bauer claims that Christianity and the established church are the expressions of our current distorted lives, for instance, of the inadequacy of the current state: “The church is nothing but . . . the necessary expression of the fact that [the state] is not yet a real state, that it has not yet made people into human beings” (SF 39; see also SF 40). Moreover, for Bauer, the agent’s acknowledgment that the Christian God is an imaginary projection is not sufficient. An individual could acknowledge this fact without identifying her own goals with those of the state or of Self-consciousness (that is, without overcoming egoism). For Feuerbach, the individual must change only her interpretation of what she has been doing in worshiping God. For Bauer, she must also be motivationally changed. More is at stake than a label. A related contrast is that, for Feuerbach, religion is no longer a real power. It can disappear with just a shove. Although Bauer, too, believes religion an anachronism, he sees it as very much a live one: “The commands of the church have never been followed more obediently than in

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our day, when industry subjugates nature and yet humanity nevertheless does not dare to admit that it is the lord of the earth. . . One does quite wrong, if one speaks of the decay of church life. It has never been so powerful as at present” (SF 216). Feuerbach’s account of Christianity does not point immediately to political reform because, for him, Christianity no longer expresses the widespread conditions of individuals’ lives. His claim is that it is irrelevant to those conditions. For Bauer, by contrast, the connection is tight. He thinks that Christianity will not disappear without political change. Political change is impossible, however, unless we recognize that humans are not the beings Christianity declares us to be: powerless, created beings required by a transcendent commandment to obey the authorities. What must be combated first is the church’s power to impose a self-conception on us all, “even on those who perhaps have not set foot in a church since their confirmation” (SF 216; see also GLJ 166–67). Hence the role for Bauer’s critique. This is why the poet Georg Herwegh remarks that “through Bruno Bauer theology becomes politics.”18 We can now also understand why Bauer opposes Jewish emancipation. In “Die Judenfrage,” he says, The age is past, when the separation into castes, the division of the privileged from the nonprivileged . . . and so therefore the oppression the Jews experience can be explained on purely religious grounds or indeed on religious grounds at all. Even in the Middle Ages . . . when cities and their guilds excluded or persecuted Jews . . . they acted not only in their religious interest but at the same time for their craft and guild interest. Religious prejudice was at the same time guild prejudice, religious privilege only the celestial ratification of civil privilege, religious exclusivity the presupposition, model and ideal of civil and political exclusivity. (J 94/99–100) The thrust of this passage is that secular more than religious interests have been the causes of Jewish oppression. Two pages later Bauer emphasizes the causal priority of secular interests. Religion’s impact is as a feedback effect: “Religious prejudice is the basis of civil and political prejudice, but the basis which the latter, even if unconsciously, has given itself. Civil and political prejudice is the kernel which religious prejudice merely surrounds and protects” (J 96/101; see also J 93/98).19

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The view here is a familiar one. Those in power tend to promote religious beliefs whose content gives legitimacy to the social and political distinctions from which those in power benefit. Destroy the religious beliefs and the distinctions will be undermined: “The method of the fight against civil and political oppression . . . consists in attacking and dissolving the religious presupposition of this oppression.” For, Bauer claims, “[s]ecular prejudice” cannot openly admit its own nature—namely, “that it is nothing but the striving for private advantage” (J 96/101). As a psychological matter, even those who benefit from an ideology often have the need to believe it and so to believe that the distinctions from which they benefit have a more general justification. The revelation that such distinctions are without justification would reveal the utter egoism at the base of the existing social and political hierarchy. Moreover, this might not only sap the determination of the powerful to resist change but also embolden the victims to revolt (J 106/113). And, Bauer feels, the moment for such revelation has come: “The veil is ragged with old age, the prejudices show themselves in ugly nakedness” (J 93/98). Hence Bauer’s opposition to state recognition of Judaism and to the removal of Jewish civil disabilities. As a compromise with religion, it would be a retrograde step. The current Prussian state is in no sense the objective existence of the universality of the free Self-consciousness. The Prussian state is based on the egoism of the groups that benefit from the current hierarchical social and political structure (the fact that religion is invoked to conceal). Moreover, by using religion as a prop, the Prussian state fosters an institution whose fundamental content is egoism and so is at odds with the essential nature of a state. The Prussian state is so deviant as a state that it cannot give real civil rights to anyone (J 88/93). All such a state can give is privileges (J 106/113). To give state recognition to Jews as Jews would be merely to increase the state’s commitment to particular rather than universal interests. It would be to move the state further away from becoming “a universal affair of all” (J 88/93). For Bauer, the Jewish problem is an instance of the general antagonism between religion and a rational state (J 3/JP 188). To solve that problem, Jews, like Christians, must give up their religious identity, not seek its state sanction. To be properly emancipated, Jews must not be emancipated simply as Jews, that is, as beings who must be “forever

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alien to Christians.” Rather, Jews must make themselves into human beings. They will then no longer be separated from their fellow human beings by any barriers, including those they now “wrongly consider to be essential” (J 60/62). What is needed is a rigid church/state separation. Anything else fails to tear out the “evil . . . by the roots” (J 3/JP 189). In a rational state, religion would be “a mere private affair of the individual and [be] left to the private judgment of the individual” (J 72/75; SF 203). As such, Bauer thinks, it would soon disappear (J 67/69). It is important to remember that, for Bauer, religion serves purely egoistic ends. Religious goals are effectively the same as those in civil society: private gain (though the religious gain comes in the next world). Indeed, Bauer regards religion as part of civil society. This represents a contrast to Hegel. For Hegel, religion’s relation to the state is ambiguous. Religion and the state differ in significant ways, but they also have basic ties. Religion, Hegel says, “acknowledges and endorses [the state] . . . religion is that moment which integrates the state at the deepest level of the disposition [of its citizens] . . . religion constitutes the foundation which embodies the ethical realm in general, and, more specifically, the nature of the state as the divine will.”20 Indeed, Hegel says, the content of religion and of the state are the same; the difference is merely one of form.21 In a footnote, however, he says that religion represents an independent end and that a “comprehensive” account of the state would have to deal separately with religion.22 Hegel thus does not identify religion with the state but he also does not remand religion to civil society. In fact, because there is normally an identity of content between religion and the state, Hegel explicitly distinguishes as aberrant those religious sects (he mentions Quakers and Anabaptists) that see themselves as distinct from the state and without duties to it. Members of such sects regard their religious identities as in conflict with and superior to their identities as citizens. In effect, they are not citizens.23 Their religious identities represent a form of private interest. Consequently it is consistent for Hegel to recommend that the state “entrust” the members of these communities “to civil society and its laws.”24 For Hegel, this is the exception; for Bauer, it is the rule. For Bauer, all religions are a form of private interest and all religions see their own

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religious ends as superior to state ends. For him, there is no identity of content between religion and the state. The great sin of the Prussian state under Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he feels, is its effective subordination to the church, its goal of becoming a Christian state such that the state itself is subordinated to religion.25 This is why in Bauer’s eyes the Prussian state has retreated “from the historical development of the idea of the state” (J 88/93). A further difference between Hegel and Bauer comes out in what they highlight in civil society. Hegel begins his account of civil society in essentially formal terms. “Particularity,” he says, “in its primary determination as that which is opposed to the universal of the will in general, is subjective need. . . The end of subjective need is the satisfaction of subjective particularity.”26 In civil society, “the principle by which this or that end is governed is still that of the particular will.”27 In civil society, one is an egoistic agent pursuing the satisfaction of one’s individual desires, in contrast to the desires one has as part of a natural group (the family) or a political group (the state). Phrased this way, the content of egoistic activity is not specified. But of course, for Hegel, the central activity of civil society is work to fulfill human needs. It is that system of activities investigated by political economy. By contrast, what Bauer latches onto is the general principle of the advancement of purely individual ends, rather than any specific manifestation of that principle. If civil society is understood as the sphere of egoism generally, and if all religion is understood as a form of egoism, it makes sense to consider religion part of civil society.28 In this context, Bauer sees Judaism as a tempting target. For, he says, the Jews regard themselves as the chosen people with laws and customs distinct from (and in cases of conflict overriding) those of the larger society. Bauer argues that such exclusivity is opposed to true political emancipation, as it insists on the primacy of being Jewish rather than a free human being. It is an explicit affirmation of the particularity of civil society. Jews as Jews, he says, cannot see themselves as part of the free Self-consciousness that has been the maker of history: “As if they could feel at home in a world which they did not make, did not help to make, and which is contrary to their unchanged nature!” (J 2/JP 188).29 In a discussion of recent French regulations proclaiming equality before the law for all citizens, and yet setting Sunday as an official day of rest, Bauer argues strongly that legal equality is a sham if it punishes

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Jews for being Jews by effectively requiring them not to work two days a week (J 67/69; see further attacks on this law, J 68–69/70–72). Bauer then says, however, that Jews as Jews ought not to propose repealing the law: “If the law is against [a minority] and if [the minority] has progressed far enough in its education to want no privileges, not even for itself, then it should propose that the law be abolished, and should fight against the privileged majority” (J 70/72). But Jews as Jews, Bauer feels, do want privileges for themselves. Jews and Christians, he feels, suffer from the same disease (J 70/73). Jews as Jews are not opponents of all privileges but only of those that disadvantage themselves. As Jews, their problem—the same problem Christians have—is that they accord priority to their sectarian, not their human, identity. To be free, a Jew would have to accord priority to being human, would have to “break out of the barriers of his religion and recognize the world and human society” (J 95/101). But it would then be impossible to be truly religious, for crucial to religion, Bauer believes, and especially, he believes, to Judaism, is the primacy of its claim on the individual. Attempts to reconcile human and religious obligations will fail. Accord primacy to Judaism and one will have failed to “make the cause of humanity [one’s] own; [one’s] own cause the cause of humanity” (J 92/97). Accord primacy to humanity and one’s faith is effectively gone. One will have become merely “an illusory kind of Jew” (J 109). One cannot be both a Jew and a free human being.30 Of course, for Bauer, Christianity, not Judaism, is the real problem, and Christians, too, will have to abandon their religion. Nevertheless, Bauer says, repeating a standard thesis of the time, Christianity lies closer to political freedom than does Judaism, for Christianity contains the idea of human beings as universal creatures (Fä 179/138). This greater connection to universal humanity, however, is also, Bauer claims, what makes Christianity the height of “self-strangling unfreedom” (Fä 182/140): That in Christianity inhumanity is driven higher than in every other religion, indeed is driven to its highest summit, only comes about therefore, and was only therefore possible because it had taken hold of the most boundless idea of humanity and converted it into the religious form only, disfigured it, and had to make human nature inhuman. In Judaism the inhumanity is not yet so

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highly driven. The Jew as Jew has, for example, the religious duty to belong to the family, the race, the nation; that is, to live for definite, human interests. This superiority is however only apparent and only founded on the deficiency that the human being in his universal nature, namely, the human being who is more than only a member of the family, of the race or of the nation, was not yet known to Judaism. (Fä 183/140–41) Jewish particularity is thus double-edged. It permits the Jew to be concerned with this rather than the next world, but not for human beings generally, only for Jews. By contrast, Christianity does not focus on a chosen people but on human beings simply as human beings, on their “universal nature,” but for that very reason it is a more inhuman religion since it projects this nature into an unearthly realm. Ultimately, both religions are to be condemned; ultimately, both Christians and Jews must break with their religions if they are “to raise [themselves] to freedom” (Fä 195/149).

4. Taking the Critic’s Standpoint The goal of critique, Bauer says, is to overcome all limits and illusions, not merely this or that limit or illusion but limit and illusion in toto (SF 201). Bauer believes that the standpoint of the critic realizes this condition, for from that standpoint all human creations are seen to be human creations: “The philosophical rationalist is free from the object . . . because in the object he no longer sees the absurdity [Unding] of an alien substance but, rather, a determination of Self-consciousness” (Ein 154; see also Ein 159). But how does one know one has overcome illusion in toto? One view in Bauer’s texts is that, to reach the standpoint of Self-consciousness, an agent must grasp Self-consciousness’s historical and logical development. She must understand that Self-consciousness has had to go through a specific and extended historical process of alienation in order to free itself from any alleged limit on its capacities. She cannot understand what Self-consciousness is without knowing the history of its travails. And to understand the structure and necessity of this development is to understand that the critic’s standpoint is in fact that of realized Self-consciousness and that this standpoint is in fact free from

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all illusion: the agent’s grasp of the criteria of an illusion-free standpoint develops in tandem with her recognition that the critic’s position satisfies those criteria. This is a familiar Hegelian model. Bauer’s Self-consciousness, however, is importantly unlike Hegel’s Geist, for in its historical development it is often unclear whether Self-consciousness transcends while preserving its own prior stages, or simply abolishes them. Critique, Bauer says, is “ruthless” (Po 80/126). One commentator argues that its structure is “not dialectical but antithetical,” a process of Umsturz or revolution.31 It would take us too far afield to detail Bauer’s categorial transitions within and across texts in order to see how far his discussions are dialectical and how far they are antithetical. The Umsturz model is certainly prominent in the post-1840 writings, for instance, in his condemnation of civil society as utter error. To be sure, Bauer’s attack on Christianity might at moments seem to favor the transcend-but-preserve model (Self-consciousness “wants and effects what Christianity . . . also wanted and only falsely carried out, since it wanted to carry it out in religious form” [Fä 190/146]). And Bauer does see historical value in Christianity (it brought the principle of universality into the world). Still, his hatred for Christianity is so intense, he finds its sins so great, that it is wrong to attribute to him the view that Christianity is to be transcended and preserved. In the end, the Umsturz model is dominant here as well. Bauer acknowledges that Christianity may have been historically necessary, but he allots it no role at all in a future society. In the future, he says, “history” will no longer be religious (ECh 164). My concern here is not the precise balance between the models in Bauer’s often inconsistent texts. It is that the Umsturz model raises the question of why knowledge of Self-consciousness’s past is needed to attain the standpoint of Self-consciousness in the present. If Self-consciousness’s past were preserved within it, then it would not be a mere biographical fact that Self-consciousness went through a certain historical process to become what it is. That past would continue to be part of Self-consciousness. The correct description of Self-consciousness would refer not only to its capacity freely to construct itself but also to its history of victories over denials of this fact. By this account, one would not really be identifying oneself with Self-consciousness if one were ignorant of its past any more than one would really be identi-

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fying oneself with a particular family if one knew one had a biological and legal claim to inherit the family’s wealth but knew nothing of the family or its history. By contrast, with the Umsturz model, the standpoint of Self-consciousness would be defined simply as that standpoint from which humanity knows itself to be self-creating, to have no given and necessary characteristics. If the history by which it has attained this knowledge is something from which it can make a clean break, then that history would be only contingently connected to Selfconsciousness’s present, a ladder it had to climb but not an organic part of itself. And then why couldn’t one now proceed directly to the standpoint of Self-consciousness? Why still require the detour through historical knowledge? As Bauer’s work becomes more journalistic and polemical in the early 1840s, the importance of grasping the history of Self-consciousness appears to diminish. He sometimes seems to be saying that one can take the standpoint of the critic directly and that one can confirm the truth of one’s insights via something like the self-certifying experience we have seen with Feuerbach. From “the higher standpoint,” Bauer says in a review from 1843, all the “limits [of the interests of the dogmatic consciousness] dissolve and disappear the way a misty image at dawn dissolves in the clarity, glow and splendor of daylight” (Ein 146). At one point Bauer declares at length that not even his own standpoint is final, that he, too, may turn out to have been subject to illusions: A truth is true only once . . . until it is completely assimilated [by the historical spirit], that is, subjected to critique, and in its dissolution becomes the fertile soil for the growth of a new form of truth. The fire worship of the Parsees, too, was once truth! So was the law of Jehovah. But truth there is none, it does not exist like a rock, a mountain, a planet or a solar system . . . Truth is not, it only becomes. . . So far history has brought forth no truth that has not had to fall to the fire of critique, and the highest truth which now—through critique—is about to emerge, the human being, liberty, Self-consciousness, this is a truth which will least of all become petrified, resisting critique and historical development, for it is nothing but that finally liberated development. (J 81/85–86)

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Truth forever “becomes” (that is, humanity sheds ever more illusions). But are Bauer’s metaphors here of dialectical or antithetical growth? The balance seems to be toward the latter. That truth “exists only in history and through history” (J 81/85) appears to mean merely that there is no way to make a final truth claim, a claim that can be shown to be true once and for all. It does not mean that the fire worship of the Parsees is in some way still part of our truth. Overall, this passage seems to stress Umsturz, the “fire of critique” nothing can withstand. But then there seems no reason why proceeding with the fire of critique today—challenging any and all presuppositions—requires registering the chronicle of prior conflagrations. The difference between these models can also be seen in terms of the role of “presuppositions” (Voraussetzungen).32 For the Young Hegelians, to philosophize without presuppositions might refer to several things. It might refer first to David Friedrich Strauss’s assertion in the preface to The Life of Jesus that in studying the Gospels he starts without presuppositions as to whether the events narrated were supernatural or even historical.33 To be without presuppositions here is a precept of scientific integrity. It is not to begin research with one’s conclusions already in hand. In the Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Bauer admits to beginning with presuppositions (for example, that the Gospel descriptions have a necessary role in the ultimate destiny of Self-consciousness).34 Still, he argues, these are not “‘external’ philosophical presuppositions” (Syn I, xvi). Rather, they are the content of the material he is examining. His analysis liberates this content so that it can ultimately develop freely (Syn I, xvi). By the end of the exegetical process what initially appeared to be external to the object studied, an unmotivated stipulation, will be seen to have been the object’s core. In a footnote to the forward Bauer asks his reader to judge the conclusions of the book only at the end, when they have been developed and proved (Syn I, xxii–xxiiin). I take this as a general plea for open-mindedness (Bauer knows much of his audience will be hostile to his ideas) and as a request that the reader wait to see how apparently problematic moments in the text work themselves out (for example, the reader is asked not to assume too quickly that Bauer has produced contradictory claims whose tension cannot be satisfactorily resolved). I take it also as Bauer’s admission that antecedently there is insufficient reason to accept the

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central claims with which he starts: the dialectical development of the argument is the road to rational conviction. Here his work is without presuppositions not in Strauss’s sense but in the sense that he does not rely on any assumption that is not itself supposed to be adequately grounded in the course of the dialectical process. And here one does need to go through that process to see the truth of the claim being made. “Presuppositionless” philosophy, however, might also refer to yet a third notion, that of a philosophical program that tries to avoid presupposing the truth of any assertion. This is the program that Feuerbach attributes to the Cartesian tradition and attacks as disguised theology. And one could reconstruct Bauer’s program for an ever purer and more purely negative critique along analogous lines. For his critique challenges any putative characteristic attributed to humanity. Any attempt to pin down humanity merely reveals one more prejudice to be exploded, one more presupposition about what humanity is. Here the point of the standpoint of critique is that it has no such presuppositions. Although such a program seems implicit in pieces from 1844 and 1845, such as “Die Gattung und die Masse” and “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs,” it is not explicitly invoked, and so Bauer’s epistemological ambivalence in the mid-1840s remains.35 One might try to mediate between the model of dialectical growth and that of Umsturz by applying the first to agents deluded by outmoded institutions and the second to those effectively free from such epistemological taint. Perhaps an agent can extricate herself from Christian illusion and embrace the “highest truth which now . . . is about to emerge, the human being, liberty, Self-consciousness” (J 81/85–86) only by understanding the metaphysically necessary history of Christian illusion. To liberate someone possessed by this particular illusion, the illusion’s genetic account may be psychologically required. One’s early upbringing may be that hard to overcome. Bauer argues that even someone who believes himself to have long shaken off his Christian upbringing might still be influenced by an “indeterminate religiosity” (GLJ 167); such a person could presumably benefit from the genetic account. On the other hand, to someone never so infected, that account will be merely ancient history. If one is free from a particular illusion, one might have little need to know of its by-gone metaphysical necessity.

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Bauer does see history as reaching a nodal point in the present such that Self-consciousness can finally comprehend itself (Syn I, xxiv). Perhaps he thinks that future agents will start with fewer illusions, and so need less liberation through learning the philosophical history of their illusions. However, a neat separation of epistemological models into those appropriate for the past and those appropriate for the future leaves the present ambiguous. To be sure, for Bauer, the present is ambiguous. Religious institutions that are in principle long outmoded, whose pretensions we ought to penetrate with ease, still have a powerful impact even on those who no longer consider themselves Christians (GLJ 166–67). Thus Bauer talks of the church’s continued hold on people (SF 216–17) and yet declares that the “last illusion will now dissolve” (J 93/98). Judgment is difficult here because it is difficult to separate the development of Bauer’s thought at this period from its increasingly journalistic expression. In the end, one has little choice but to take the polemic of the moment as the expression of a considered conviction. And then for the Bauer of at least 1843, the dominant view is that the age has reached the point where a trip through philosophical science is no longer needed to see the truth.36 The issue, incidentally, is never that such a trip is beyond the average person’s capacities. This Bauer emphatically denies (MH 437).37 The point is that, by 1843, not philosophy but action is said to be needed. Bauer declares that “[a] scientific [wissenschaftlicher] conflict is no longer possible,” and he goes on to say that what is at issue is no longer a theoretical question but is now the practical question of whether an outmoded principle “rules in the real world, whether it should rule in a world that it no longer spiritually dominates, no longer can dominate, or whether the new, victorious principle should obtain practical recognition” (GLJ 163–64). Again and again Bauer insists that a new age has already dawned against which the old beliefs are impotent, even if they possess “external” power. “What does that matter to humanity, if humanity is oriented to Self-consciousness and has recognized its own omnipotence? Humanity has attained a new era” (Ein 156; see also Syn I, xviii). Again and again Bauer talks as if it is now merely weakness or cowardice or the wish to preserve their privileges that keeps agents from seeing that history has already passed its judgment (J 115/JP 197; Syn I, xxiv).

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Bauer is thus proclaiming a standpoint that the age permits each of us to take. The influence of church and (Prussian) state keeps practical life from fully expressing it—the contrast to Feuerbach and hence the need for radical institutional reform—but there is no conceptual bar to taking the standpoint of Self-consciousness. For Bauer, the agent’s transformation is psychologically more difficult than for Feuerbach. Epistemologically, however, it is just as easy; for, as with Feuerbach, it is the transformation for which in the end the time is ripe. The standpoint of Self-consciousness is also the standpoint from which the present is to be criticized. Existing institutions are to be criticized to the extent that they are incompatible with the truth about what human beings truly (and currently) are and therefore inhibit (current) human possibilities: “And so, philosophy becomes the critic of the established order. . . That which is and that which should be are now distinguished” (Po 82/128); “And so philosophy must be active in politics, and whenever the established order contradicts the Selfconsciousness of philosophy, it must be directly attacked and shaken” (Po 83/128).38 For Bauer, the standpoint of Self-consciousness is the place from which one sees that philosophy is to be put into practice (Po 82/128; see also SF 203 and 209). Theory clears the ground and states the program, but action is ultimately necessary.39 It should be stressed that, for Bauer, the truth of his claims about Self-consciousness can and ought to be seen prior to action. It is by recognizing their truth that one sees the need for action.40 The thrust of Bauer’s work, both early and late, is that the theorist can recognize the truth whose time has come. Such recognition should result in action, but action’s failure would not show the theorist’s claims to be false. At most it would show that theory had slightly overshot the times. Action is crucial because real change is the goal, but successful action is not among the criteria of truth.

5. Assessment Bauer represents a philosophical impulse (or, really, a couple of impulses) taken to the limit. Here I want to place him on the map of political philosophy by showing that his political views are extreme versions of otherwise common enough claims.

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First, there is Bauer’s extreme liberalism, his contention that human beings have no naturally given self-description, and that understanding ourselves as essentially Jew or gentile, noble or commoner is a culturally inculcated illusion. Bauer is a creature of his age and so does not apply the same analysis to gender and race, but there is no reason he shouldn’t and, given his conception of Self-consciousness, every reason he should. To consider race or gender more fundamental than membership in Self-consciousness ought to be, for him, one more illusion to be dispelled. The capacity in virtue of which we are members of Self-consciousness is the capacity to transcend any particular identity—any description of our short-term and long-term ends, of our beliefs about which activities or objects have value, of our beliefs about which of our characteristics are most expressive of who we are, and so on. The capacity to transcend any identity can in fact have practical value in a world filled with prejudice. There may be virtues to seeing ourselves as ethnically or religiously or culturally particular, but the associated vices have been decidedly awful. As an antidote to sectarian hatred, a widespread belief that human beings are not essentially white or black, Croatian or Serbian, etc. might be a very good thing. Bauer would laud such practical gains, but they are not his focus. He thinks the exercise of the capacity (individually and jointly) continually to create ourselves is how we realize our nature. What it is for a human being to realize herself is to exercise her freedom (Fä 175/135), that is, to exercise her capacity freely to create herself. A view of this kind is open to certain objections. For instance, Jon Elster has argued that, in general, self-realization is not something to be aimed at directly but is instead a by-product of activities geared toward other aims. As a goal, self-realization tells us nothing, and its direct pursuit would be self-defeating.41 There are two points to be made here. First, the claim that aiming at self-realization is self-defeating should be distinguished from the claim that one cannot be conscious of an activity as a self-realizing activity and still have it be a self-realizing activity.42 Bauer would want agents to be more or less constantly aware of their nature and of the meaning of their activities—aware that in engaging in certain activities they are in fact realizing their nature. Of course with some activities, being conscious of what one is doing undermines the doing. A basketball player

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may shoot brilliantly until she starts to watch herself shooting brilliantly. (It used to be said of a player in a groove that he was “unconscious.”) Is self-realization like that? I think not. Being aware that one’s children would be proud of what one is doing—say, completing a five-kilometer run—needn’t undermine the doing. Similarly, being conscious of oneself as in the process of realizing one’s nature (however one understands it) needn’t undermine one’s pursuit of one’s more particular ends. Self-consciousness needn’t undermine self-realization.43 Second, Bauer both is and is not vulnerable to the charge that the goal of self-realization is empty. Bauer operates with an objective conception of self-realization. Such conceptions usually provide accounts of agents’ proper ends. With most objective conceptions, these accounts specify quite determinate ends, and so the goal of realizing one’s nature—as each conception understands it—usually has plenty of content. With Bauer’s objective conception, however, the basic end he sees for human beings provides only the barest of outlines for determining more particular ends. All Bauer says is that one is freely to create oneself. So the worry about emptiness returns. Although Bauer’s is an objective self-realization view, it gives the agent little concrete guidance. This is not obviously a problem, for Bauer wants to leave the choice of more particular ends to the individual. Given that absence of limits which is definitive of Self-consciousness, Bauer cannot place any restrictions on choice except that it must be the agents’ own, not the result of her belief that nature or custom or anything else is authoritative over what she should do. His silence about more particular ends is essential. This does not mean that Bauerian agents would not deliberate about ends. Indeed, some degree of deliberation is probably required if, in practice, one’s choice is not to be the unconscious application of cultural or institutional dictates. Still, an immense amount is left to individual judgment. Individuals must generate their own standards for what counts as, in their eyes, a good form of self-creation. Bauer’s view does not in fact answer the question of what agents should, concretely, do with their lives. But there is nothing problematic about this. On the contrary, it places Bauer squarely in the liberal tradition. Bauer must also deal with a second problem. Will Kymlicka argues that the exercise of freedom can only be as good as the things in pursuit

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of which it is exercised, that freedom is valuable only as a means, never as an end.44 Kymlicka actually makes three claims. First, he points out that freedom is a condition for the choice and pursuit of things that are themselves good, but that freedom can play this role only if we have other standards by which to assess what is and is not good.45 This is unexceptionable. Second, he says that even if the exercise of freedom is valuable for its own sake, it is not the only thing valuable. “The more choosing the better” is false.46 Here, too, he seems right. Kymlicka finally says, third, that the exercise of freedom is not our “highest-order interest.”47 Bauer could accept the first claim. Indeed, he must accept it, since he wants agents to choose their particular ends. An agent must have some reason for freely choosing this rather than that end. I suspect that Bauer could even accept the second claim. But the third would strike directly at him. Is this third claim similarly clearly true? The difficulty with Kymlicka’s argument is that he never distinguishes and argues directly for the third claim. He argues well against the “quasi-existentialist view that we should wake up each morning and decide anew what sort of a person we should be.”48 But the argument against the quasi-existentialist is an argument for the second, not the third, claim. Kymlicka conflates these last two claims because he appears to take calling something a “highest-order interest” to mean that it should be pursued without limit and that it always overrides any other end. This is unnecessarily strong. Why can’t it be enough for something to be a highest-order interest—or, so as not to dispute about labels, to be a “basic interest”—that any life that as a whole satisfies the interest to a considerable degree (or if more than one such interest exists, satisfies the bulk of them) is better than any life that does not? This would be compatible with the existence of other, occasionally more important ends. Now, the exercise of many a human capacity is valuable in itself. Why not the exercise of the human capacity freely to choose and to pursue one’s ends? Kymlicka resists this. He argues that “[s]aying that freedom of choice is intrinsically valuable suggests that the value we attempt to achieve in our actions is freedom, not the value internal to the activity itself.”49 This works as an argument for the first claim. Exercising freedom means choosing an end we think worthwhile. We must thus have some independent criterion for what is worthwhile. I fail to see, though,

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how this shows that exercising freedom cannot also be valuable. Can’t I pursue an end for its own sake while also finding valuable the process of freely choosing and pursuing it? When passing through an impoverished village of barbarians, Caesar is said to have remarked, “For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows, than the second man in Rome,” suggesting that for some people power and precedence are more valuable as things to have and to exercise than as means to other goods.50 I see no reason why the freedom to choose cannot be similarly valued for itself as well as for what it can bring. The real issue is not whether the exercise of freedom is valuable in itself, but whether it should be placed high in our hierarchy of values. Perhaps it would be wrong to do so. But there would be nothing straightforwardly absurd in believing, say, that a human life is better if it involves free but often-erring choice than if it involves a panoply of unchosen though genuinely valuable activities, relationships, and objects. Bauer does not address such matters, and further discussion would stray too far from his texts. Kymlicka would attack him on behalf of a brand of liberalism. Communitarians would attack him for his picture of the self as unconstrained by any prior self-description. And they would probably be right to do so: the claim is prima facie psychologically implausible. Still, Bauer’s position here is within the liberal tradition even if at its outermost pole. (Interestingly, it has a recent proponent. Describing his own “superliberalism,” Roberto Unger remarks that his political aims rest on “an awareness of the infinite quality of the personality . . . the power of the self eternally to transcend the limited imaginative and social worlds that it constructs.”)51 In sum, Bauer’s liberalism is extreme but recognizable. Its basic claim—that the exercise of freedom (defined as continual self-creation) is the most fundamental value—certainly needs much (unprovided) defense, but it is neither clearly absurd nor sets Bauer beyond an intellectual pale. In addition to being an extreme liberal, Bauer is an extreme communitarian. He claims that an agent can identify with the human species to the point of seeing all others’ creations as her own: I can see Jill’s or Jack’s accomplishments as mine by virtue of our common membership in Self-consciousness. To see the sort of claim Bauer is making, we can

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extend Philippa Foot’s point that an agent can take pride only in something with which she believes she has a specific kind of connection. Foot writes, Consider, for instance, the suggestion that someone might be proud of the sky or the sea: he looks at them and what he feels is pride, or he puffs out his chest and gestures with pride in their direction. This makes sense only if a special assumption is made about his beliefs, for instance that he is under some crazy delusion and believes that he has saved the sky from falling, or the sea from drying up. The characteristic object of pride is something seen (a) as in some way a man’s own, and (b) as some sort of achievement or advantage; without this object pride cannot be described.52 Now, agents are in fact capable of taking pride in accomplishments that are “their own” solely as a function of their group membership. Consider a baseball pitcher whose team leads the league in home runs. She has hit none herself. Yet she can still take pride in her team’s accomplishment, see it as her own. It would be natural for her to speak of “our power hitting” or to assert proudly, at a postseason banquet, that “we broke the season record for home runs.” And it would be odd for her to say “my teammates broke the record.” This would show that she did not feel part of the team. The grammar of team membership often involves the personification of the team as a being to whose accomplishments all contribute simply as team members. Of course team accomplishments could be broken down into individual accomplishments. Perhaps only twelve people hit home runs. We could say those twelve broke the record. The point is that members of groups do often, and quite intelligibly, think of the group’s accomplishments as their own. So Bauer is appealing to a familiar form of psychological identification. No doubt identifying with the species as a whole is much harder than identifying with the team one belongs to, the team one roots for, or one’s country. On the other hand, humanism of this kind was common in Bauer’s day. And, like Feuerbach, Bauer is well aware of the practical difficulty of identifying with the species. That is the point of his attacks on religion and on civil society: in daily life, he thinks, agents have beliefs and act on motivations that separate them from rather than

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uniting them with other agents—beliefs and motivations that conceal their joint membership in Self-consciousness. I find this an unconvincing explanation of why it is hard to identify with the species to the degree Bauer would like. Nevertheless, even granting that Bauer is excessively optimistic about the scope of our capacity to identify with a group, this is not the worst of philosophical sins (and one shared by less extreme thinkers, e.g., J. S. Mill; see Chapter 1, §3). I have tried in two ways to domesticate Bauer, and in general my presentation in this chapter has focused on reconstructing his political rather than his metaphysical claims. But Bauer is not so easily tamed. Behind his extreme political claims is an extreme metaphysical claim. Self-consciousness is said to be “Alles” (Po 63/111). But then does nature have no reality apart from Self-consciousness? And is humanity not subject even to natural limits? The status of the natural world is a traditional difficulty for Hegel’s system, and would be for any program to realize freedom defined as an agent’s being unconstrained by anything external. And Bauer does not shrink from that program. (Indeed, if anything, Self-consciousness is in the end actually less constrained than Hegel’s Geist.)53 The inevitable existence of a material world apart from and constraining Self-consciousness is apparently denied. Bauer seems to believe that Self-consciousness really is, or at least can come to be, altogether free and self-creating. To help Bauer here, one could try to draw his metaphysical teeth. The many purplish passages on the power of Self-consciousness could be read as rhetorical exaggerations designed to make us recognize how much of the world human beings can in fact (jointly) change. For instance, one such passage is immediately followed by the sentence: “And so, philosophy becomes the critic of the established order” (Po 82/128).54 The primary purpose of the passage is to push for recognition that the established order can be changed, and ought to be criticized where it needs change. And an assertion such as “The human being as human being [Der Mensch . . . als Mensch] is not the product of nature but rather the work of his own freedom” (ECh 138) is followed by the less grandiose statement that human beings are not born but educated and cultivated. In general, Bauer’s talk of overcoming limits could be glossed as the claim that human beings become genuinely

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human and genuinely free to the extent that they challenge and overcome constraints that nature appears to impose—to the extent that they develop themselves. Humanity as a whole would be unconstrained here in the sense that, for many alleged human constraints, it is an open question whether the species, collectively and in the course of time, can overcome them. Finally, take Bauer’s assertion that the mistake of the philosophes was that they regarded humanity “only anthropologically . . . as a naturally determined subject and . . . overlooked its higher vocation in the spirit of a people and its free self-determination in history, art and science” (ECh 162). This could be read as merely correcting one overemphasis by another. That Bauer stresses what the philosophes overlooked need not mean that human beings do not also have a lower identity as natural creatures. The concern to mobilize agents to conscious reforming action is certainly central to the pre-1844 Bauer. Yet he is always still a metaphysician. He does believe there is nothing outside the process of human history as embodied in Self-consciousness (J 83–84/88; Syn II, 160). To be sure, Bauer insists that the standpoint of Self-consciousness is not that of any individual as an individual. In taking the standpoint of Selfconsciousness, the critic transcends her empirical situation (ECh 94). In the critic’s standpoint, she puts out of play any self-description that interferes with seeing herself as embodying Self-consciousness. The critical ego is distinct from the empirical ego with its trappings of particularity. Although Bauer is always convinced that he speaks as Selfconsciousness’s mouthpiece, he never regards himself, qua Bruno Bauer, as more than a mouthpiece. The metaphysical thesis nevertheless remains. “Science,” Bauer says, “elevates Self-consciousness to that standpoint, where at the same time it is the world-consciousness and comprehends itself as the essence of everything” (ECh 129). And he insists on the “unity of Selfconsciousness and nature” (ECh 161; see also Syn II, 160–61, where he says that Self-consciousness is both “the death of nature” and its “resurrection”).55 Bauer does not come close to providing the resources to concretize and clarify—let alone make plausible—such claims. They tend to be asserted either as self-evident to the critical mind or as conclusions any philosophically literate person ought already to have digested. Such claims derive from, though they are not identical to, Hegel’s. Adequate

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assessment would have to proceed first through Hegel and then to the way Bauer’s claims and arguments differ from his master’s. Here Bauer can only be situated.56 His is an idealism that permits the individual to see herself literally everywhere, as long as she takes the standpoint, in Marx’s and Engels’s mocking phrase, of the “critical critic” (DI 33/47).

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4 The 1844 Marx I: Self-Realization

Th e r e s t of this book examines what I take to be the

central works of Karl Marx between 1844 and 1846. My underlying concern is the nature of Marx’s normative critique of capitalism. Among other things, I look carefully at Marx’s view of how such a critique is to be justified. That means looking at his view of philosophy. I argue that Marx’s hostility to certain philosophical questions and methods generates a problem for the justification of his normative critique. In examining his texts from this period, a large part of my focus will be on successive but (I think) never successful ways in which he might be thought to solve that problem. The claim, I should note, is not that Marx consciously attempts to solve the problem; the claim is that it is useful to look at his texts in terms of whether they provide the resources to do so. In this and the next two chapters, I deal with the 1844 Marx, the Marx of the Comments on James Mill and the 1844 Manuscripts. In this chapter I begin discussion of the 1844 Marx’s conception of communism. I look at his view of how in a communist society human beings would relate to the products of their labor, to one another’s satisfactions and accomplishments, and to physical objects generally. To a considerable extent, these sections deal with aspects of Marx’s picture of communists as strongly communal beings. I then look at the 1844 Marx’s account of what I call the “human self-realization activity” (in subsequent chapters I sometimes refer to it as “the essential human activ143

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ity”), the activity that the 1844 Marx thinks distinctive of human beings and, more important, the activity whose proper exercise he thinks is central to agents’ realization of their (human) nature. In Chapter 3 I stressed Bauer’s extreme individualism and extreme communitarianism. Bauer does not merely think a concern for individualism and a concern for community compatible. That is true of many writers. But almost all other writers achieve this compatibility through a restriction of the scope of either individual or communal concerns. Bauer’s extremeness is in his refusal to engage in any such limitation. To an extent, the 1844 Marx is also extreme in this way. Marx, however, does impose some limits on the leeway an individual has in choosing how to realize her (human) nature. He has a quite particular view of the kind of activity that would do so. And by looking at the interactions that flow from agents’ exercise, under proper conditions, of that kind of activity, one can find in the 1844 Marx a distinctive conception of the structure of community. This is the topic of Chapter 5. I have argued that Feuerbach wants agents to “convert” from religion and philosophy to ordinary, material life. In Chapter 6 I return to this theme. Marx’s variant of this desideratum helps to generate the first version of the justificatory problem I have mentioned. It concerns whether, consistent with his other views, Marx can justify his conception of the human self-realization activity. And because Marx thinks that capitalism frustrates the proper exercise of that activity, this amounts to the question of whether, consistent with his other views, he can justify a particular normative critique of capitalism, namely, that it frustrates agents’ realization of their nature.

1. Species Being: Products In 1843 Marx publishes three pieces in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.1 In these pieces it is clear that Marx is hostile to capitalism as a form of social organization. What are not clear are the normative beliefs forming the basis for this hostility. In the Jahrbücher pieces, Marx makes two kinds of criticisms of capitalism. One goes to the general consequences of its workings; the other, to the kind of activities and the type of life it elicits. The first can be seen in such claims as that capitalism generates a systematically impoverished class that, under

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capitalism, cannot hope for improvement of its lot (KHE 390–91/186– 87); the second can be seen in such claims as that buying and selling for profit is the “highest practical expression of human self-alienation [Selbstentfremdung]” (ZJ 372/170). The first type of criticism says that capitalism generates straightforwardly bad social conditions. It is clearly bad for people to be hopelessly impoverished; if capitalism condemns large numbers of people to such a fate, that is clearly a problem with capitalism. The second type of criticism is different, for the actions of buying and selling for profit are not obviously bad. “[I]n civil society,” Marx declares, one “is active as a private individual, regards other human beings as means, degrades oneself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers” (ZJ 355/154). However, other descriptions of what goes on in civil society are possible—descriptions celebrating the individual’s triumph over all obstacles, human as well as natural, perhaps celebrating her attainment, through her own efforts, of her individual ends. It is not clear why Marx’s pejorative description should have priority. A similar problem arises in Marx’s polemic against Bauer in one of the Jahrbücher pieces (in “On the Jewish Question”). Marx claims that the kind of modern state that Bauer desires splits individuals in two: into egoistic beings in civil society and communal beings only in political society (ZJ 355/154). Moreover, Marx says, contrary to Bauer’s beliefs, in a real modern state, political society is structured so as to promote the workings of civil society. Bauer wants political society to control civil society. He wants agents’ communal nature to control their egoistic nature. In fact, Marx says, things work the other way around: in a real modern state, agents’ communal nature is subordinated to their egoistic nature. Now, there are difficulties with Marx’s claims about the modern state, but for our purposes these can be put aside.2 The issue for us is that here, too, Marx describes the phenomena pejoratively. And here, too, a different description is possible. Many writers would describe the subordination of the state to civil society as the emancipation of the individual, the opportunity at long last for individuals to develop without interference. Not everyone thinks that the type of life civil society fosters is bad. Marx believes that it is a bad thing for agents’ communal nature to atrophy and for agents to devote themselves to swapping for profit the

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objects that human beings have produced. Even aside from the pernicious economic conditions it creates, he thinks that capitalism is in some deep way at odds with human nature, at odds with the proper life for human beings. The problem is that, for some conceptions of human nature, at least some of the phenomena of capitalist life that Marx adduces would not in fact count as bad. Marx needs a conception of human nature and of a life in accord with it that shows that they are. A conception of a good human life—more specifically, of a life in accord with human nature—can be extracted from Marx’s work of 1844, from the Comments and the Manuscripts. This conception has internal tensions and is sometimes frustratingly vague, but it has sufficient content to warrant the torrent of commentary it has provoked. And if accepted, it would indeed show capitalism to be at odds with human nature, would provide a basis for a normative critique. Most commentators argue, correctly I think, that in these texts Marx (like Bauer) gives a self-realization account of the human good.3 For the 1844 Marx, having certain relationships to other agents and to the world, and, most important, engaging, under proper conditions, in a particular kind of activity—that is, exercising, under proper conditions, a particular (in Marx’s view the essential) human capacity—would realize one’s (human) nature. Such a life would be the good life for a human being. My presentation of the 1844 Marx’s account of human nature consists in specifying, in this chapter and the next, those relationships and that activity.4 In developing Marx’s account of self-realization, commentators tend to focus on the multidimensional communist individual exercising a variety of capacities: “the human being in need of a totality of human life-expressions” (ÖpM 544/304). This is not wrong, for it is Marx’s view that by engaging in a particular kind of activity the agent would realize (under communism) not only her nature qua human being but also her nature qua individual. A particular kind of activity is suited to realizing her species nature, and she would realize her nature qua individual by engaging in those forms of that kind of activity that she believes suit her best. It is not wrong, then, to stress the varied activities of the communist individual. But this focus does scant something important—the strength of the connections among communist individuals. Commentators have recognized that, for Marx, the agent’s realization of her nature


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qua individual requires her realization of her nature qua member of the human species. This has usually been glossed as meaning that agents have shared as well as individual ends, or that they have individual ends that are complementary or even harmonious (where the thought seems to be that the complementarity is itself a good beyond the mutual material benefits it bestows), or that agents have ties of mutual affection that are a constituent of their individual good.5 Such claims are consistent with what I take Marx to be saying. They tend, however, both to be inadequately developed and to circle around without getting directly at the role our communal identity has for Marx. Commentators tend to make the realization of our nature qua communal beings merely an additional component to the realization of our ends purely as individuals: we have various ends without regard to others, and in addition we have shared ends or complementary ends or mutual affections. This misses the way in which, for the 1844 Marx, no individual end could be realized in a communist community without the recognition and affirmation of oneself as a member of the community. In developing Marx’s 1844 account of community (in this chapter and the next), I say little about the idea that the varied exercise of human capacities is part of a good life for a human being. Although this idea needs qualification to fit what the 1844 Marx says, on the whole it has been well discussed in the literature.6 The 1844 view of community has not. A human being, Marx says, is a “species being” (ÖpM 515/275). As such, he says, a human being “adopts” the human species as his “object”; he “relates to himself as the present, living species” (ÖpM 515/275); and he “relates to the species as to his own nature [Wesen]” (ÖpM 517/276). Commentators have interpreted these and other statements to mean many things. Among them are: 1. An individual human being knows that there is the natural kind the human species, just as she knows there is the natural kind the horse species. 2. An individual human being is aware of herself as a member of the human species, conscious of herself as one human among others past, present, and future.

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3. An individual human being is aware that she lives a life that is human in the sense that, however different its content from other human lives, hers is a life only a human could lead.7 4. Human beings live together in groups. 5. Human beings tend to survive by means of activities in which they are dependent on one another. 6. By acting together to satisfy biological needs, human beings develop capacities and needs different in kind from those of other animals.8 Marx may have some or all these things in mind in talking of humans as species beings. Something important has to be absent from this list, however, for Marx says that the alienation of labor in a capitalist society alienates individuals from their species being (ÖpM 517/277). This presumably means, at a minimum, that some property or properties of human beings qua species beings are not understood to be properties of human beings, or in some way do not obtain for workers in a capitalist society. But (1) through (6) are certainly the case in a capitalist society. And (1) through (5) concern things even the most impoverished and degraded worker surely knows, if only in the sense that, if asked, she would readily assent to their truth. While (6) is more arcane, ignorance of it seems neither systematically unobtainable under capitalism nor obviously tied to being a worker in a capitalist society. If to be a species being involves only (1) through (6), it is hard to see how capitalism alienates us from our species being. What (1) through (6) fail to capture is how a human species being identifies fundamentally with the human species (as for Bauer, we are to identify with Self-consciousness) or would do so in a communist society. All six items could be true, and an agent could understand their truth, and yet she might not identify in the requisite way with the species. Items (1) through (6) could simply be facts with no important meaning for her life. It is clear, however, that for the 1844 Marx, membership in the human species is supposed to have such meaning. Some commentators have seen that, for Marx, agents are constantly aware of themselves as part of the species. Allen Wood says, “It is Marx’s view, I think, that some sort of species consciousness is ingredient in each person’s practical dealings with the world, even where the content of this consciousness has not been made theoretically explicit.”9


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This still leaves unclear, though, the role of such consciousness in daily life in communist society, and so leaves unclear certain inadequacies in capitalist society. In the rest of this and the next chapter I will sketch the major elements and consequences for Marx of an individual’s fundamental identification with the species. To begin with, as a species being, one’s capacities and the products resulting from their exercise are not limited to those one has as an individual. They are those of the species as a whole. That Marx believes this is shown in a remark from his description of the first aspect of alienated labor. He says that the worker relates “to the product of labor as an alien object that has power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous [sinnlichen] external world, to natural objects, as an alien world hostile and opposed to him” (ÖpM 515/275). Under capitalism, the worker is said to relate to the sensuous external world in the same (alienated) way as she relates to the product she has produced. There are two possible readings here. First, the human relation to the sensuous external world could be read as intrinsically—and so even under communism—a relation to something “alien” and “hostile and opposed.” Capitalism would then turn our relation to our product— which would be different under communism—into a similarly alien relation. On the second reading, our relation to the sensuous external world would not be intrinsically a relation to something “alien” and “inimically opposed.” Capitalism would then change for the worse not only our relation to our own product but our relation to the sensuous external world as well. The second reading seems to me more accurate. Marx is clearly characterizing the worker’s relation to her product as both bad and unnecessary. Her relation to the sensuous external world would then be equally bad and equally unnecessary. If it is unnecessary, the first reading cannot be right. If it is bad, the first reading would commit Marx to seeing as bad the intrinsic human relation to the external and specifically to the natural world—a view unsupported anywhere else in this text.10 The worker’s relation to the sensuous external world is thus, according to Marx, the same as her relation to the objects she has produced. Both have become alien and inimically opposed as a result of the same activity. That activity is the activity of producing an object under capi-

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talism. So to be alienated from the sensuous external world is to be alienated from it in the same way as one is alienated from the product of one’s labor—in effect, to be alienated from it as the product of one’s labor. Commentators have been properly skeptical about the claim that nature as a whole has been transformed by human action (that the human being “sees himself in a world he has created” [ÖpM 517/277]) and so is the product of human labor.11 Here a retreat can be made to two more modest claims: (a) for people living in urban areas, most of the physical world they encounter has been altered by human action; (b) even for people living in nonurban areas, the pristine nature they encounter (and how much first-growth forest or virgin prairie remains?) is pristine not because human beings could not easily transform it but because as yet no one has bothered to do so: its pristine condition is itself a consequence of (generally market-driven) human decisions.12 This leaves untouched the sea (parts of it anyway), the stars, the earth’s core, and so forth. So the scope of the claim is vastly reduced, although it still picks out the important elements in most people’s daily experience. Even if we limit the claim’s scope this way, however, no individual can be alienated from the humanized part of “the sensuous external world” if she is alienated only from her own individual products, even from all the products she has ever created. No individual can produce enough objects to affect her relation to any substantial part of the external world. For Marx, however, as for Feuerbach, the limits of the individual are not those of the species. Suppose one is also alienated from what all other humans have produced. Then one would be alienated from a large part of the physical world. And Marx does insist that “[w]hat applies to a human being’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a human being’s relation to the other human being, and to the other human being’s labor and object of labor” (ÖpM 518/277). Now one cannot be alienated from others’ products in the same way as one is from one’s own unless one sees others’ products as also, in some significant way, one’s own. To make sense of the claim that the worker is alienated from (a large part of) the sensuous external world, it must be that humans have (and in a communist society would exercise) the capacity to see others’ products as in some significant way their own.


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This does not mean that there is a collective entity, the human species, that transforms nature apart from the actions of individual human beings. Marx explicitly disavows this at several points (see AM 451/217 and ÖpM 539/299). The claim concerns a psychological capacity. When the relevant group is small, the claim is easy to see. Suppose a half-dozen workers build a house. One of them might tell a friend, “There’s a house I built.” This would not be elliptical for “There’s a house where I framed the dining room and the small bedroom, put on the northwest side shingles and laid the bathroom tiles.” The worker would likely regard herself as having participated in building the house as a whole, and would see the house as a whole as her product. And obviously the work crew has no existence apart from its members. To the extent that agents identify strongly with a group, they can relate to its products as their own, even when the group is large and so individual contributions are minuscule. The child of recent immigrants—indeed, the immigrants themselves—could take pride in the endurance of Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. Marx globalizes this psychological capacity. The claim is thus the same as Bauer’s assertion that, as a member of Self-consciousness, I “know even geniuses and their creations as my own determinations” (LF 173). Group members qua group members “have” the capacities of the group as a whole and see the resulting products as “theirs.” Yet this does not make the group ontologically independent. Here, as earlier in talking of Bauer, I have cast the issue in psychological rather than metaphysical terms. Bauer certainly thinks that metaphysics stands behind psychology: one will identify (psychologically) with Self-consciousness if one recognizes that one is in fact (metaphysically) a part of Self-consciousness; one will regard others’ products as one’s own because one will recognize that they are (metaphysically) one’s own qua member of Self-consciousness. With Bauer, keeping to the psychology and not the metaphysics is a way to try to save an at least potentially plausible point from an utterly implausible foundation. How about with Marx? The question must be put off until Chapter 6. There I argue that the 1844 Marx rejects philosophy in a Feuerbachian manner. The issue of a metaphysical backing to communist psychology will then turn into the question of how Marx thinks communist individuals could do without such a backing. However, much must be filled in first.

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2. Species Being: Enjoyments Marx says that in a communist society “the senses [Sinne] and enjoyment [Genuß] of other human beings have become my own appropriation” (ÖpM 540/300); and that “[i]nsofar as the human being, and hence also his feeling, etc., is human, the affirmation [Bejahung] of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment” (ÖpM 563/322); and that, under communism, “[n]eed or enjoyment” would have “lost their egoistic nature” (ÖpM 540/300; see also AM 459/225 and 462– 63/227–28). Marx could mean four things by such remarks. 1. Communist agents would be highly sympathetic to one another, would vibrate strongly to one another’s pleasures and pains. 2. In a communist society, need or enjoyment would not be egoistic in the sense that I would intend, through my work, to produce something that satisfies your need (AM 462–63/227–28). My concern would not be to get something from you through my product but to do something for you. So your consumption of what I have made would give me satisfaction. From my standpoint, your need would not be merely a means to my own ends. I would want to generate your enjoyment and in fact I would take satisfaction in it. 3. Assume further that you would know and appreciate that in consuming you are also realizing the purpose of my activity. Then from your standpoint your enjoyment would no longer be purely egoistic, for you would know and appreciate that another person is thereby getting satisfaction (AM 462–63/227–28). Now, it would make sense for Marx to think that the egoism of civil society inhibits human sympathy. Under communism, sympathetic feelings would presumably be far more widespread. Still, sympathy is too broad a notion to be useful here. It has nothing to do with humans as specifically producers and consumers, but in the work of 1844 it is those capacities that Marx highlights. Marx does clearly believe that (2) and (3) would obtain under communism, and in the Comments he devotes considerable space to them (see Chapter 5). There is also, however, a fourth, more literal sense in which another’s enjoyments could be appropriated. 4. Let’s return to the metaphor in Chapter 3 of a baseball team. Imagine a teammate has pitched a no-hitter. One might be pleased for


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her. And one might have a sympathetic response to her pleasure in her accomplishment. On the other hand, one might also dislike her or envy her, and so not be pleased for her nor respond sympathetically to her pleasure. Even if one did dislike or envy her, however, one might still obtain satisfaction directly from the accomplishment itself in virtue of the fact that it is a teammate who has pitched the no-hitter—a satisfaction that would be absent had she done so for a different team. Here one’s responses as a team member and one’s responses as an individual would be at odds. As an individual, one’s responses would have an “egoistic nature” in the sense that one’s feelings would flow from one’s purely individual identity and purely individual desires (e.g., to be oneself the best pitcher or to have the person one dislikes not do well); as a team member, one’s response would not be egoistic because one would regard the no-hitter as a team accomplishment not only by virtue of other team members’ contributions to it (e.g., as fielders) but also just by virtue of its having been accomplished by a team member. Here a common identity generates the sharing of enjoyments. The Marxian form of such common identity is species membership. I can share in another human being’s accomplishment just as I can share in a teammate’s accomplishment. Let me note some things with respect to this last form of shared enjoyments. (i) There is a direct sharing of the pleasure in question. It is not that I am happy for the pitcher. I might have that feeling as well, but then my feeling would be a different kind of feeling from the pitcher’s feeling. By contrast, qua teammates, our satisfaction in the no-hitter is the same kind of feeling. (ii) For Marx, the ability to have one’s humanity as one’s fundamental identity (or at least as sufficiently important that enjoyments can be shared in this way) is not something an individual might or might not have. It is the normal condition for a human being. Marx is aware that this condition has not always obtained—indeed, that as yet it has never obtained (see ÖpM 583/342)—and he has an explanation for why it fails to obtain under capitalism. For him, however, this psychological capacity is basic. (iii) Sufficiently strong group identification raises a worry. Wouldn’t one gladly forgo one’s own enjoyments for the sake of some general goal (the glory of the fatherland or the party or god)? Such group

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identification seems a potential threat to individual accomplishments and satisfactions. If I appropriate others’ enjoyments, why do I need my own? Plainly Marx does not intend identification with the species to lead to this kind of sacrifice. We are not supposed to live only for the species. Marx insists that in a communist society the individual would develop her particular talents and capacities (ÖpM 541/301, 544/304). Key to his complaint against “crude communism” is that it makes no space for the individual (ÖpM 534/295). In terms similar to Bauer’s, Marx attacks such communism for its leveling elimination of individual differences and its state control of individual development: it “negates the personality of the human being everywhere” (ÖpM 534/295). Individual development is crucial to the 1844 Marx. Still, are there reasons to think that appropriating one another’s enjoyments would be incompatible with suppressing the individual in favor of society? Isn’t group identification liable to severe abuse? The issue and solution here are the same as earlier with Bauer. One’s identification with the species (as, for Bauer, with Self-consciousness) is not with a group opposed to other groups. It is not like being a member of a religious sect or a political party. There is no actual or (short of science fiction) even potential conflict with a different group that might require individual sacrifice to realize a group goal. Moreover, Marx does not think the human species has a group goal distinct from the development of individuals. While Marx thinks it characteristic of the human species that it increases its powers as history progresses, he does not claim that such an increase is or ought to be the species’ conscious goal. The severity of his strictures on the division of labor (see ÖpM 473–74/237–38, 476/240, 552/317) would be unintelligible if he thought the development of the species’ powers a goal for its own sake, since the division of labor manifestly increases those powers. As with Bauer, Marx’s goal is individual self-development—and under communism this would itself constitute and be understood as species self-development.13 In a communist society, there would be no species goal to which the individual could be sacrificed (on this, see Chapter 5, §3). (iv) Identification with the species would presumably inhibit the lust to triumph over others. That drive for glory, which for Hobbes is a major source of conflict in the state of nature and a threat to peace in a commonwealth, would be severely dampened in a communist society.


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The passion to be rated higher than others would hardly be a source of civil strife if our basic self-description were as species members, and so our basic description of our relation to others were not as competitors for goods and honors but as members of the same group. If the senses and enjoyment of other human beings have become my own appropriation (however this is interpreted), their accomplishments would not belittle me nor mine be a triumph over them. Our relative ranking would not be so important. It is true that the person who pitched the no-hitter has accomplished something qua individual as well as qua team member. But these accomplishments would be at odds only if she were to see herself as (fundamentally) in competition with her teammates and so were to see her individual accomplishment as a triumph over them. Perhaps such dimensions of human psychology cannot be, and perhaps ought not to be, eliminated entirely. The point is that, on Marx’s account of communism, individualism and species being would be incompatible only if the pursuit of glory is essential to individualism. (v) The examples I have used are of significant accomplishments, just as Bauer speaks of knowing the creations of “geniuses” to be his own (LF 173). There seems to be a perfectionist strain to this reading of shared enjoyments. Of course, in a minimal sense there must be such a strain: one must first notice an accomplishment before one can share in its enjoyment. However: (a) I see no reason why the sharing need be restricted to successes. Teammates also share the pang of the ninth-inning hit that breaks up the no-hitter. (b) There is nothing in Marx to suggest that he sees such accomplishments as a species goal to which individuals could legitimately be sacrificed. He is never a perfectionist in that sense. (c) The perfectionist strain does not mean that all communist individuals are supposed to achieve greatly. They precisely do not all need to do so in order all to share in the enjoyment of human achievements.

3. The Human Relation to Objects Under the proper conditions (communist society), our relation to the objects we produce and consume would change. We would consciously produce for others and know they had produced for us.

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In a capitalist society, Marx says, I have produced for myself and not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me. In itself, the result of my production has as little relation to you as the result of your production has a direct relation to me. That is, our production is not production by a human being for a human being as a human being, that is, not social [gesellschaftliche] production. Neither of us, therefore, as a human being stands in a relation of enjoyment to the other’s product. (AM 459/225) Marx is trying to contrast producing for the market with producing so as to satisfy another human being’s need. The contrast needs development in detail. For, as Marx admits (AM 460/225), even in producing for the market I produce with the intention of satisfying someone else’s need. But: 1. In producing for the market, the satisfaction of the other’s need is only the means to realizing a profit, not the goal of my production. 2. In producing for the market, I take account only of whether you use the object, not how you use it. I make the object with an eye to satisfying a need, any need, and to satisfying it only to the extent that the market requires. On the one hand, I seek to develop “depraved fancies” and “morbid appetites” so as to create a market where none naturally exists (ÖpM 547/307); on the other hand, in serving a market for goods at or below the level of brute animal need, I have no concern to improve the product so as to improve the need. “The Irishman no longer knows any need now but the need to eat, and indeed only the need to eat potatoes, and indeed scabby potatoes, the worst kind of potatoes” (ÖpM 548/308). As a capitalist potato producer, I care only that my potatoes sell, not that they are good enough to raise the level of the Irishman’s need. In general, I produce only to realize a profit, not with an eye to satisfying a genuinely human need to its proper extent (AM 459–60/225). Under communism, Marx says, the production of objects would involve the objectification of only genuine human capacities; the consumption of objects would as well (see ÖpM 541/301). For Marx, there is both an objective and a subjective aspect to objectification. Agents objectify their human capacities when they produce objects. In a com-


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munist society, they would do so in a conscious, voluntary manner, using standards expressing human abilities to discriminate and to judge (they would deliberately produce good, not scabby, potatoes). This is the objective side. Agents also objectify their distinctively human capacities, however, when they consume objects in a conscious, voluntary manner, using standards expressing human abilities to discriminate and to judge (they recognize and appreciate the difference between good versus scabby potatoes): “[T]he meaning [Sinn] of an object for me goes only so far as my sense [Sinn] goes (has only a meaning [Sinn] for a sense [Sinn] corresponding to that object) . . . the most beautiful music has no meaning [Sinn] for the unmusical ear—is [no] object for it” (ÖpM 541/301). This is the subjective side (as well as an echo of Feuerbach’s claim that for those, and only those, equipped with the proper organs, the gods exist as sensuously perceptible objects [see Chapter 2, §1 and G §15 286/23]). Marx himself distinguishes the objective from the subjective side of objectification, and while it may be artificial to call the subjective side “objectification” (it does not make anything come to exist in the world; it is more the exercise of a capacity), the basic idea is clear enough: we are related to objects as both producers and consumers, and how we are so related will vary with the development of our various capacities.14 More confusingly, Marx conflates agents’ (subjective or objective) objectification as individuals with their (objective) objectification as members of the human species. For instance, he talks of how with the abolition of private property, all objects would “become objects which confirm and realize [my] individuality, become [my] objects” (ÖpM 541/301). But the objects other people produce cannot be my individual objective objectification. They cannot objectify Daniel Brudney’s productive capacities. They could be—or, more accurately, they could provide the opportunity for—my individual subjective objectification. They could provide the opportunity for the exercise of Daniel Brudney’s capacity to appreciate music or good potatoes. That is one way others’ products could “confirm and realize [my] individuality” (they might also do so if they contribute to the realization of my individual life plan). In addition, others’ products could also be my objective objectification as a member of the human species. They could objectify

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the productive capacities of the species with which I identify. Whether or not I have myself produced cars, desks, or soda machines, I can relate to them as human products. We are back to our capacity to see the species’ products as our own. That certainly seems the point of the assertion that “all objects become for him the objectification of himself” (ÖpM 541/301). This must mean: of himself qua human being. In a communist society, then, there would be a link between genuinely human production and genuinely human consumption, for the existence of the proper attributes in the object would be a function of conscious human agency to try to ensure that good rather than scabby potatoes were grown. (The market might do this by happenstance. Given a luxury potato market, farmers would put in the extra work to try to grow good potatoes, but if the market made no good/scabby potato distinction, neither would farmers.) Moreover, as a consumer in a communist society, I would know that the good potato I am eating owes its existence to a human intention to produce a potato fit for human consumption. (This is a condition the market cannot satisfy, because even if the market provides good potatoes, the ultimate intention behind their production is to make money, not to satisfy a genuine human need.) Overall, under communism there would be a fourfold transformation of our relations to objects: 1. Our senses would “relate themselves to the thing [Sache] for the sake of the thing” (ÖpM 540/300). The object would be related to not as unrealized exchange value, nor as an undifferentiated object of consumption for survival (“For the starving human being, the human form of food does not exist, but only its abstract being as food” [ÖpM 542/302]), but as a specific object with specific attributes. 2. “The eye [would] become a human eye” (ÖpM 540/300). Our capacities would develop as we come to appreciate the specific attributes of specific objects. We would then have “senses capable of human enjoyment, senses confirming themselves as human essential powers [menschliche Wesenskräfte]” (ÖpM 541/301). These two aspects are supposed to apply to natural as well as to humanly produced objects (ÖpM 542/302). They explain what is meant by “nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use” (ÖpM 540/300). Whatever the plausibility of such claims as descriptions of communist society, they are excessive as contrasts to capitalist society. No doubt Marx is right that poverty tends to stunt perceptive powers.


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No doubt he is also right that the pursuit of profit tends to stunt such powers. As attributions of tendencies (even strong tendencies) to a capitalist society, such claims are plausible. At times, however, Marx seems to claim that these are not just tendencies but inescapable consequences of capitalism, and in fact they are not. Workers and capitalists are still capable of appreciating the properties of both natural and humanly produced objects. At the time Marx is writing, Turner is painting his sunsets, suggesting that nature was in fact being appreciated as more than an aggregation of scabby potatoes needed for survival on the one hand, and as a source of profit on the other. Consider also Marx’s example of “the dealer in minerals [who] sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the specific nature of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense” (ÖpM 542/302). Does this mean that the dealer does not appreciate the beauty and specific character of the mineral at all, or merely that he is willing to forgo further appreciation in order to make money (that is, he is willing to sell his wares)? The second has been, by definition, true of trade from the beginning of time. It is not specific to capitalism. So I take Marx to be making the first claim. Is his contention, then, that a dealer in minerals cannot appreciate the beauty and specific character of the mineral? Perhaps at the office the dealer focuses on the object’s commercial, not its aesthetic, value. But need this really mean—is it even very likely to mean—that he is incapable of appreciating the object’s aesthetic value?15 With regard to humanly produced objects, Marx highlights two further features: 3. The object would “become a social, human object—an object made by a human being for a human being” (ÖpM 540/300). We would recognize that the object exists as it does—as a good not a scabby potato—because it was formed by human labor. 4. To keep the “made by a human being for a human being” from being egoistic—that is, made simply to be sold to human beings—the producers’ end must be the production of something that will satisfy a genuine human need. And in consuming, agents would be aware of this fact. I take this to be at least part of Marx’s point when he says that “[i]n practice I can relate myself to the thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly” (ÖpM 540/300n). In this section I have talked of how Marx thinks that individuals, under communism, would relate to the objects they and others have

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produced. One can see here the impact of Feuerbach’s concern for the agent’s stance toward the world. Marx’s point is not merely that under communism one would have certain beliefs about objects (although one would); it is also that one would relate to objects differently. One would have a sense of connectedness to them that is now absent. Feuerbach talks in The Essence of how bread and water are to be related to as full of meaning simply as bread and water.16 For Marx, one might say, under communism bread and water (and other objects) would be related to as full of meaning simply as human products.

4. Species Being: Immortality “Death,” Marx says, “seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a particular species being, and as such mortal” (ÖpM 539/299). The “seems [scheint]” suggests that death is not really a victory over the individual, except as far as the individual is merely an individual (“a particular species being”) and not also a member of the species. The text is hardly transparent, but given Marx’s 1844 Feuerbachianism, I take him to be asserting Feuerbach’s claim that identification with the species can provide something like a sense of immortality. This is not a big issue for Marx, and he does not recur to it. He is far less concerned than Feuerbach with religion, and so less concerned with secular interpretations of religion’s promises. It is worth noting Marx’s apparent adherence to Feuerbach’s position here simply to see how much he, too, in 1844, is willing to rest on our recognition of our species membership.

5. The Human Self-Realization Activity Like many philosophers, Marx, at least in 1844, conflates the capacity distinguishing humans from other beings with the capacity whose exercise would constitute realizing one’s nature qua human being. He has often been taken to task for this, and there is no need to do so again.17 My focus in this section is Marx’s account of the activity through which a human being realizes her (human) nature. Whether this activity is also taxonomically distinctive of human beings and what, if anything, would follow from its being so can be left aside.18


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“In its manner of life-activity,” Marx says, “is contained the whole character of a species, its species-character” (ÖpM 516/276). A human being’s life-activity, he says, is its work on the world (ÖpM 517/277), “the practical creation of an objective world, the working up of inorganic nature” (ÖpM 516/276). Such productive activity, Marx says, is the human being’s “active species-life” (ÖpM 517/277). In different places in the Manuscripts, Marx gives different accounts of which kind of productive activity is humanity’s active species-life, which activity realizes one’s (human) nature. In one place he declares that “the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of human essential powers” (ÖpM 542/302). He calls this a “large part of human labor” and “a wealth of human activity,” and he criticizes previous writers for having seen in this merely “‘need’, ‘common need’” (ÖpM 543/303). Elsewhere, however, Marx famously says that animals produce “only under the domination of immediate physical need, while the human being produces even free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from it” (ÖpM 517/276). These passages present different conceptions of the kind of labor through which an individual would realize her (human) nature. At issue is whether what I will call “the human self-realization activity” is the labor that overcomes natural necessity, the labor that bends the natural world to the human will in order to ensure the species’ survival at a decent material level. Over the ages, this kind of labor has enabled us increasingly to control our circumstances. Through such labor, humanity has imprinted itself dramatically on the external world. Dams, factories, canals, and so on are the most palpable and extensive form (“the open book”) of human objectification. If a Martian asked to see the primary objectification of human powers, it would not be odd to point to a steel mill rather than a museum or a library. In one crucial sense, though, labor under the pressure of natural necessity is not free: someone must do it. Crops must be planted and reaped, houses built, clothes woven if the species is to survive. If the activity through which a human being realizes her nature must be an activity the species as a whole has the choice to do or not to do—if human self-realization involves freedom in that sense—then it could occur only after the struggle with the natural world ends. “Truly” producing would then have to be labor beyond the realm of necessity. Of course all labor must overcome obstacles. The sculptor’s marble is

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as recalcitrant as the farmer’s frozen field or the dead engine of a semitrailer. With necessary labor, however, there is little choice about the obstacles to be overcome. There may be choice about who is to overcome them, but not whether they are to be overcome: if people are to eat, fields must be plowed. Art, philosophy, etc. present optional obstacles. (The distinction is not between mental and manual labor: gardening is no more mental labor than is farming, but it is beyond the realm of necessity; drafting the plans for a dam is within that realm.) This conflict is not resolvable. Needs for food, shelter, and clothing vary historically, and in principle human beings could collectively decide how, and how far past a minimum, to satisfy them. And these needs could be satisfied under less coercive social conditions and through more intrinsically fulfilling activities than is currently the case. Still, as the guiding frame of human life, they are forever. There is no postrevolutionary condition in which necessary labor could be eliminated. The conflict between conceptions of the human self-realization activity would not be resolved even if only individuals with avocations for farming, fishing, tool-making, and so on performed necessary labor. At least it would not be resolved if a vital element in individuals’ penchants for such tasks was the desire to confront natural necessity—that is, the desire to perform a task that is necessary. The labor of the self-subsistent farmer is often thought to be satisfying in a way that other labor (e.g., office work) is not. Among the elements that might make it satisfying are being outdoors, doing varied jobs, and being subject to no human taskmaster. Yet I suspect a central part of the satisfaction comes from the clarity of the point of the enterprise: one is manifestly meeting one’s basic needs, needs that must be met. The conquest of natural necessity can provide a specific satisfaction. This satisfaction might obtain even for those who farm for the market, who produce what others will consume. No doubt the commercial wheat farmer’s planning is profit driven, but he presumably knows and might even care that what he produces will meet many people’s basic needs. And surely communist wheat farmers would care. Artistic or athletic labor is gratifying, but this element is missing. Humanity’s traditional dual character—within and beyond nature— thus reasserts itself. If the sphere of self-realization is that of nonnecessary labor, it would still be important to change the structure of necessary labor (that is, to eliminate private property), but the ultimate goal


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would be to reduce the amount of such labor, to reduce the amount of time individuals must work.19 If the sphere is that of necessary labor, the labor needed to maintain the species, then the emphasis would be on change in the structure of such labor. The former is arguably the way Marx tilts in Capital.20 The latter is the dominant view in the Comments and the Manuscripts. Evidence for this last claim is: 1. The labor Marx describes in the Manuscripts as “alienated” is necessary labor. The workers simply do not exercise their artistic, athletic, or other such capacities. Under capitalism, those capacities might be stunted or undeveloped or suppressed or atrophied, but they are not alienated. 2. The fact that necessary labor is alienated does not expose a basic social defect unless such labor would have significant value given proper conditions. The 1844 Marx’s virulent attacks on the alienation of necessary labor under capitalism indicate that he thinks that, given proper conditions, necessary labor would in fact have such value. In 1844 Marx’s stress is on changing an agent’s relation to the activity and product of necessary labor, not on reducing the quantity of such labor an agent must perform. 3. In 1844 Marx is clear that in a communist society individuals would produce with the intention to make products that would be useful for others. It is at least debatable whether nonnecessary labor has this structure. Arguably, an artist creates without regard to whether her product will satisfy anyone’s needs. Arguably, art is something one does for oneself. The 1844 Marx does not discuss the issue, but this is the later Marx’s view. In Theories of Surplus Value, he says, “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reasons that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature” (TM I, 377/401). 4. Philosophers have long insisted that a condition of the best human life is freedom from necessary labor. Were Marx to locate the self-realization activity in nonnecessary labor, his difference from the philosophical tradition (including from Bauer)21 would be his advocacy of varied activities rather than a single “best” activity. In the Manuscripts, however, Marx’s rejection of the traditional picture seems more radical: “Hitherto [industry] was not grasped in its connection with the human being’s nature, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of alienation, one could only apprehend the human

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being’s general mode of being—religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc.—as the reality of human essential powers and human species-activity” (ÖpM 542/302). In fact, Marx says, “In ordinary material industry, we have before us the objectified essential powers of human beings in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects” (ÖpM 543/302). He immediately goes on to say that we currently have such objects before us “in the form of alienation” (ÖpM 543/302). Part of our alienated condition is that we fail to recognize ordinary material industry as the sphere of essential human powers. Part of the point of overcoming the alienation of “sensuous, alien, useful objects” is to be able to do so. Here Marx is not insisting that agents engage in a variety of nonnecessary activities, but rather that they recognize necessary labor as the realm of “the objectified essential powers of human beings.” I take this to mean that he thinks they should recognize it as the realm in which a human being would (ideally) realize her (human) nature. Does it now follow that the more necessary labor the better? Must we always find more dams and factories to build?22 I think that in 1844 Marx does believe that it is good for human beings jointly to transform nature with increasing efficiency and power in accordance with their own beliefs about how best to maintain and to improve material well-being. He does believe that, under proper conditions, the exercise of the powers involved in necessary labor is a good in itself. But this need not mean that there ought to be ever more necessary labor. The valuable features of necessary labor are (a) that in it human beings develop certain individual and species powers (e.g., carpentry skills and the ability to keep rivers from flooding), (b) that those powers are exercised via conscious—and, ideally, collective—decisions about which material goals to pursue, and (c) that one overcomes natural necessity. Mechanical insistence on increasing labor time would undermine (b). Only if human beings freely decided to strive for a level of material well-being whose attainment required additional hours of necessary labor (labor the community judges to be necessary to meet its view of its needs) would such additional labor be a good thing. Still, it does seem to follow that Marx would regard it as a loss if all necessary labor became superfluous. If Tahitian weather became the norm, and the good things of life were there for the picking, the 1844 Marx would probably not regard this as unequivocally good.23


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In Fourier’s phalanstères it sometimes seems as if all necessary labor is performed by those who wish to engage in it for reasons having little or even nothing to do with its social function—for instance, spreading manure on the fields is assigned to small boys because they have a fondness for filth: the job is pure play.24 Marx would reject this fantasy. In the Grundrisse (1857–58), he provides a different view: To be sure, the quantity of labor required seems to be externally given, through the end to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But . . . this overcoming of obstacles is in itself an activity of freedom . . . further, the external ends become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural necessity, and become posited as ends which the individual itself posits—hence as self-realization [Selbstverwirklichung], objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labor. (Gr 505/611) Central here is the shift involved in taking a “merely external natural necessity” and making it one’s own end. This shift would not occur if individuals engaged in necessary labor for reasons having nothing to do with the community’s need to produce food, clothing, and shelter. Now, the 1844 Marx would not be altogether content with my distinction between conceptions of the human self-realization activity. He says that, under communism, “society [will be] the completed essential unity of human beings with nature—the true resurrection of nature— the accomplished naturalism of human beings and the accomplished humanism of nature” (ÖpM 538/298). The sentence comes in the context of the discussion of the proper relation to objects, so Marx may in part be emphasizing that, under communism, the particular features of natural objects will be properly appreciated and neither exploited for profit nor consumed in degraded fashion. This would be consistent with humanity’s continued need to struggle with nature. It would specify the proper way to do so. But Marx could also be construed here as saying that under communism humanity’s dual nature will disappear, as if nature will no longer be something to be overcome. So perhaps he thinks the distinction between necessary and nonnecessary labor will be overcome as well.25 Art and industry will be different avocations but not deeply different kinds of activities. The 1844 texts do cut both ways, although I think the balance is

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heavily toward recognition of the distinction between conceptions of the human self-realization activity. In any event, there is a distinction to be made. There would be no distinction only if the realm of necessity were altogether obliterated, if communist agriculture, industry, etc. were to be run by self-regulating and self-maintaining machines. There would then be no natural imperative for human beings to engage in necessary labor (as there is no such imperative in the idealized image of Tahiti). Communist farmers, if there were any, would be gentlemen farmers. If they did produce it would not be in order to satisfy human beings’ basic needs but only because farming was something they just happened to want to do, perhaps because it is good exercise or in order to get a tan. Aside from its impossibility, I find it hard to believe that this would be the 1844 Marx’s considered ideal. My concern here is exegetical, so I will not argue for a particular view of the proper roles of necessary and nonnecessary labor in a good human life. (If possible, some middle ground would likely be optimal, some constrained version of Marx’s “human being in need of a totality of human life-expressions” [ÖpM 544/304]. But (a) it is probably not possible for most people under most economic arrangements; (b) under any arrangements it would probably not be optimal for many people; and (c) determining even crude rules of thumb for the proper balance would be daunting.) It is, however, worth noting two further things: 1. In the passage from the Grundrisse, Marx identifies self-realization and freedom, but this identification is tenable only if self-realization centrally involves activity beyond the realm of necessity. According to Bauer, we are to engage in the unconstrained construction of the self. As far as Marx stresses the human impulse to produce even when free from physical need, he, too, starts with a condition in which the production of objects and ultimately of the self is subject to no natural urgency. Here it does make sense to identify self-realization with a certain kind of free activity. On the other hand, if we are most free only when engaged in self-realizing activities but these are found in necessary labor, then conquering natural urgencies would turn out to be a central element of freedom (“real freedom . . . is, precisely, labor” [Gr 505/611]). Stripping off “the semblance of merely external natural necessity” and positing ends as one’s own would be, as the Grundrisse says, the “activity” of freedom.


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Yet on this view, since nonnecessary labor already is the agents’ own, it lacks an element of freedom, the element of making the natural necessity one’s own. So, paradoxically, the realm of necessity would afford the exercise of a freedom superior to that the realm of freedom itself affords. It looks as if Tom Sawyer missed an opportunity to exercise a freedom superior to that available to the boys who freely chose to paint Aunt Polly’s fence. For only he had the opportunity to turn a chore into an end that “the individual himself posits.” That Tom declined the opportunity ought to make us wonder whether, on this construal, some things have been conflated. What have been conflated are the attaining of freedom with its exercise. Perhaps it could be shown that overcoming obstacles and turning externally given tasks into one’s own ends are crucial to human self-realization. Perhaps doing so develops one’s powers. Perhaps it could even be shown that overcoming obstacles generates a psychological sense of being free: one knows more palpably that one does have the power to overcome obstacles. Still, freedom does not consist in making tasks one’s own or in overcoming obstacles; it consists in having only tasks that are one’s own and in not having obstacles to overcome.26 Marx ought to have separated self-realization from freedom, at least for the conception of self-realization dominant in the Manuscripts.27 2. Under communism, different individuals will no doubt find different kinds of labor fulfilling to different degrees. Presumably, individuals will freely choose which forms of labor to pursue. This raises a problem for both conceptions of how to realize one’s nature. Marx clearly believes some activities exercise and develop genuine human powers and satisfy genuine human desires, while others—for instance, pandering to “morbid appetites”—do not. But how does one tell them apart? A man is said to have approached Alexander the Great and shown him a horse he had trained to eat lentils. Was this accomplishment the exercise and development of genuine human (or even equine) powers? Alexander’s assessment seems the right one: he rewarded the man with a bucket of lentils. But how about developing one’s palate so one can truly appreciate rare wines? Or spending one’s time sewing together Bruno Bauer’s polemics? Marx provides no criterion by which to distinguish. I doubt there is a specifically Marxist criterion of the genuine to be constructed—other than whatever activities communist individuals

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turn out to opt for. In The German Ideology, that is Marx’s criterion for genuine desires in a long (and admittedly crossed out) passage: one part of these desires, namely desires which exist under all relations, and only alter their form and direction under different social relations, are also merely altered under this social form [i.e., communism], for they are given the means to develop normally; but another part, by contrast, namely those desires which owe their origin only to a particular social form, particular conditions of [production] and intercourse, are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which [desires] will be merely altered and [which eliminated] in a communist [society] can [only be determined in a practical] way, by [changing the real], practical [“desires,” and not by making comparisons with earlier historical conditions]. (DI 238–39n/256n)28 Something like this would probably be the 1844 view as well. It seems to me inadequate. Why think all distortion flows from economic relations? Human nature undoubtedly has a sufficient stock of pathologies that, even under communism, it would remain a question which desires and activities are genuine and which not. Although the 1844 Marx cannot generate a criterion of the genuine, he could at least claim that one is more likely to be discovered under communism than under capitalism. For under capitalism, the production of objects is geared to their sale. Producers care only about clearing the market, consumers are manipulated by advertising, and most people choose jobs solely to make a living. Determining which desires or activities are genuinely human is not a central issue. Whatever the standard of the “genuine” might be, Marx could argue that under communism there would be more possibility of finding it.

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5 The 1844 Marx II: The Structure of Community

In t h e p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r I looked at Marx’s view of the

human self-realization activity. In this chapter I look at how what Marx considers to be proper engagement in that activity generates a distinctive form of community.

1. Completing One Another In any even minimally complex society, human beings are not individually self-sufficient. Each needs things others have made. In a technologically advanced society, almost any object embodies the labor of thousands. Locke famously makes the point: “It would be a strange catalogue of things, that industry provided and made use of, about every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dying drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work; all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.”1 We are, then, interdependent. But under capitalism, Marx says, this interdependence occurs through our mutual instrumental use of one another in the market. We each try to get the most for our own products and to pay the least for everyone else’s (AM 459–62/224–27). Marx’s contrast is to a state of affairs in which individuals both would identify with the species and would understand 169

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which kind of activity realizes one’s nature qua human being. Marx believes individuals would then have no reason—at least with regard to the production and consumption of objects—to treat one another purely instrumentally, and solid reasons not to. This requires elaboration. It can best be provided via commentary on a long passage from the Comments: Suppose we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in his production, doubly affirmed himself and the other person. (1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual life-expression during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, sensuously perceptible [sinnlich anschaubare] and hence a power raised beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct [unmittelbar] enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified human nature [Wesen], and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another human being. (3) I would have been for you the mediator [der Mittler] between you and the species, and therefore would become recognized and felt by you yourself as a completion [Ergänzung] of your own nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. (4) In my individual life-expression I would have directly created your life-expression, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature [wahres Wesen], my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature. This relationship would moreover be reciprocal [wechselseitig]; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours. (AM 462–63/ 227–28) Marx’s numbers are puzzling, for he asserts that there are two ways of self- and other affirmation but then goes on to list four items. One might try to see him as listing two ways from each agent’s perspective, but the text doesn’t support such a reading. All four items proceed from a first-person perspective. The other agent’s perspective is accounted

Th e 1 8 4 4 M a r x i i : Th e S t r u c t u r e o f C o m m u n i t y

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for by the remark that “what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.” Perhaps two of the elements are supposed to be more connected to what one does for oneself, and two more connected to what one does for others (for “the other person”), although this also seems textually hard to support. Let us put such issues aside. Overall, I think it makes most sense to read Marx as having in mind, first, the individual’s self-affirmation as an individual, which is dealt with in (1). His idea here is clear enough: in a communist society, agents would find individual fulfillment in the process of production, both in the activity itself and in the fact that the activity’s result is something external in which an individual can see a concrete manifestation of her individuality. The rest of the passage focuses on the individual’s relation to other individuals. There are two connected concerns: a concern with individuals’ relations to one another one-to-one, and a concern with individuals’ relations to one another as members of the group, the human species. I discuss the first in this section, the second in the next. In (2)–(4), Marx emphasizes human interdependence. Here and elsewhere he says that in a communist society agents would “complete” one another.2 To begin with, the idea seems to be that, in various ways, agents would enable one another to attain their ends. In terms of the production of goods and services, this is straightforward enough. Cooperation generates benefits for all: additional goods and services agents can use to pursue their particular ends. Such reciprocal bestowal of benefits obtains in capitalism as well as in communism. However, Marx says, in market relationships people try to get the better of one another: The social relation in which I stand to you, my labor for your need, is therefore also a mere semblance, and our reciprocal completion [wechselseitige Ergänzung] is likewise a mere semblance, the basis of which is reciprocal plundering. The intention of plundering, of deception, is necessarily present in the background. . . If I have sufficient physical force, I plunder you directly. If the realm of physical force is broken, we seek to impose illusions on one another, and the more adroit defrauds the other. Who defrauds whom is, for the totality of the relationship, a matter of chance. The ideal, intended defrauding takes place on both sides, i.e., each in his own judgment has defrauded the other. (AM 460–61/226)

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Agents in the market are not centrally concerned to provide objects others can use. They want simply to get the most for the least, and to do so they are willing to deceive or coerce where they can. This deception or coercion need not be intended to frustrate other agents’ ends, but that is likely to be its effect. If I am deceived or coerced into a deal, I am likely to be making a deal I would not make in the absence of coercion and deception. That is why our reciprocal Ergänzung is a mere semblance. One party winds up with fewer means to attain her ends than the appearance of a mutually beneficial trade suggests. Now Marx is not only or even primarily objecting to the market success of deception or coercion, but to the content of agents’ ends. Unfortunately, he muddies his point by stressing agents’ intentions to deceive or coerce (“The intention of plundering, of deception, is necessarily present in the background”), for that suggests that he might not object to noncoercive, nondeceptive capitalist exchanges. In fact, what he primarily objects to is agents’ failure to have, in addition to their more self-directed ends, the end of providing something useful to others, something that facilitates others’ attainment of their ends. To take an example. Suppose Adam needs widgets, and Milton needs gadgets. Adam has gadgets, and Milton has widgets. Suppose they strike a genuinely mutually beneficial deal. Marx seems to countenance this possibility, for he says that, for the relationship as a whole, it is a matter of chance who defrauds whom. So possibly neither would defraud the other, and their deal would be mutually beneficial in the sense that each would wind up with just those objects a communist distribution mechanism would accord him. In material terms, the reciprocal completion would not be mere semblance. It’s true that Marx thinks the intent to deceive would remain: “The ideal, intended defrauding takes place on both sides.” Too much stress on this as the problematic element, however, would limit the scope of Marx’s attack, for much market activity—trading pork bellies on a commodity exchange—involves neither deception nor coercion.3 And clearly Marx would not consider a capitalist economy with rigid price controls and a strong police force an improvement in human relations.4 Take another example. Suppose Richard wants to write the score for a hit musical, while Oscar wants to write the lyrics. They agree to collaborate. Here there is neither deception nor coercion. Moreover, each knows he is providing something the other needs. Yet they could


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still be using one another solely as means. It is as if they both want to open a vault requiring two keys. For Marx, the central problem here, as with the Adam/Milton exchange, would not be an intent to coerce or deceive but the failure to have the provision of something useful to the other as basic to what one is trying to accomplish. So an important part of an agent’s ends is supposed to be to provide what others need to attain their ends. In a communist society, I would not only provide you with the cauliflower for your soup; in growing that cauliflower, my goal would be to provide you (anyway, to provide someone) with a cauliflower to use. Your use of it would thus contribute to attaining my end as well as to attaining one of your own ends. Our ends would not only not conflict, they would be complementary. And because you, on your part, would make something that I (anyway, that some other human being) would use, the complementarity would be reciprocal (at least within the community as a whole). This account is an anticipatory gloss on Marx’s dictum from the Critique of the Gotha Program of thirty-one years later: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (KGP 21/325). For the 1844 Marx, my production activity would be a good thing for me, a part of my self-realization (it would express my individuality and, given Marx’s view of the human self-realization activity, it would also help me to realize “my true nature, my human nature”). Here the idea of “From each according to his abilities” is not that I have an obligation to make my talents benefit the public or that I must make recompense for goods I have received. It is just a description of what communist life would be like. The exercise of my abilities would be simply a component of my own good.5 In the Comments, Marx goes on to say that, in the other’s use of my product, I would find satisfaction in “having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another human being” (AM 462/228). Suppose I have no personal financial worries, as I take what I need from the public till. I spend my time carving a chair. It is my form of self-realization. But I also want that chair to be used. My self-realization would be short-circuited if the chair were to rot in an attic. As with the cauliflower I grew, I want someone to use the chair I’ve made. Only then would I have helped to satisfy a human need, and only then would I “become recognized and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own nature” (AM 462/228).

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In a communist society, there would thus be a link between my production according to my abilities and your use according to your needs. My production would be for your needs, and your need satisfaction would be the final stage in my production. To help meet your (anyway, someone’s) needs would be among my ends; actually meeting your (someone’s) needs would also be a component of my good. Marx lauds this relationship, but it has several problems. First, there is the obvious coordination problem of how to ensure that while each produces as she pleases, together we generate the right mix of socially necessary outputs. The 1844 Marx does not share Fourier’s view that a random sample of 1,700 to 1,800 people would have sufficiently complementary desires such that each could do as she pleases and yet the socially necessary work be done, but he is clearly a bit too optimistic.6 A second coordination problem is rather ironic. Complementarity within a communist community must—ideally—be absolutely perfect. It is actually crucial that too much not be produced. Otherwise some individuals would have made objects that no one would use. With respect to that part of their output, those individuals would not have the enjoyment of satisfying another’s need, would not know themselves to be “confirmed” in anyone’s “thought and . . . love” (AM 462/228). Marx does not require individuals to be altruistic in the sense of forgoing consumption on one another’s behalf, but here an altruism of excess might be needed, where selflessness would be shown not by forgoing but by increasing one’s consumption so as to confirm another person’s production. The problem would be like that faced by the parent of a preschooler who must somehow find sufficient wall space to display the ceaseless stream of his child’s drawings. A final problem goes deeper. The requirement that we intend to facilitate one another’s ends need not generate acceptable relationships. In Richard Connell’s story “The Most Dangerous Game,” the ruler of a small island deliberately wrecks passing ships, nurses the survivors to health, and then amuses himself by setting them free, arming them, and then hunting them.7 Assume it is important to this ruler that his prey is human, not a machine with a certain degree of strength and cunning. Assume further that he sees humans as essentially hunters of other humans. Imagine now that one day someone with the same conception of human nature is wrecked on the island. They exchange views and are delighted to find their deep agreement. Consumed with mutual admi-


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ration, equally armed, and in the best of moods, they set off to hunt each other to the death. Each hunter is determined to win, but each takes satisfaction in knowing that if she loses she will have made the other’s triumph the right sort of triumph. Each not only seeks to attain her own end but to help the other attain hers as well. These are not incompatible. Only if she is truly trying to win will each be a worthy foe, and so facilitate the right sort of triumph should she lose. In steadfastly seeking to kill the other, each is doing all she can to help the other attain her end. There is thus the desired kind of complementarity of ends. If Marx is to object to this relationship it cannot be because its structure is wrong but because these agents have the wrong conception of human nature. In general, whether a relationship is acceptable goes to its content as well as its form. These agents in fact fail to treat each other as human beings. For the 1844 Marx, a human being would not realize herself through hunting and being hunted, but rather through transforming the natural world (freely, consciously, and in concert with others) in order to procure his and others’ means to pursue their individual ends. For Marx, to have the proper conception of human nature is to understand humans as beings who realize themselves through activity of this kind, and to treat another human being properly is to facilitate her realization of her nature, so understood. Assuming that communists have a correct understanding of human nature, they would not want to engage in human hunting.8 Does Marx think that communists would have this correct understanding? Toward the end of the long passage that I quoted from the Comments, he says that communist workers would “confirm [bestätigt]” their “true nature, [their] human nature, [their] communal nature” (AM 462/228). Is there supposed to be an epistemic element to this confirmation? Is it supposed to provide a rational basis for belief in Marx’s conception of human nature? Perhaps the idea is this. A communist worker has Marx’s conception of human nature and then, through producing as a human being, confirms that it is the correct conception. Now, where would this conception come from? And what kind of “confirmation” is this? At the beginning of the passage from the Comments, Marx says, “Suppose we had carried out production as human beings.” Would the worker then inevitably have the relevant conception of human nature?

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If social life is so structured that one produces as a human being, must one have this conception? That will be the view of the Marx of The German Ideology, and it can probably be attributed to the 1844 Marx as well. Confirmation would then be experiential: one confirms one’s sense of who one is; one acknowledges that this is indeed one’s nature. Note that, construed this way, the worker’s activity does not provide confirmation to anyone but the worker. The worker’s activity enables her to see from the inside that the activity in which she is engaged does indeed realize her nature. Nothing about this activity, however, enables it to function as a proof for anyone else. So there is a bit of a circle. Through their activities, communists realize and confirm a certain conception of human nature, but their activities give an outsider no basis to believe that this conception of human nature is correct. The epistemic sounding remarks merely describe how communist production would reinforce agents’ own beliefs. In Chapter 6 I come back to this circle.

2. Mediation with the Species For Marx, completing one another means more than just producing for one another’s needs. In a communist society, we would also mediate for one another with the species. Marx says, more specifically, that the producer would mediate between the consumer and the species. I take the idea to be that, under communism, when another person uses my product she sees me as a representative of the species generally. In her use of the product she no doubt recognizes the specific use value I have produced, but she also recognizes that a human being has produced something with the intention that she use it. It is as if the species generally has produced something for her. I take the idea also to be— although this is not explicit in the text—that in seeing the species produce for her, she regards herself as having her species membership affirmed, as going through what one might think of as a rite of affirmation. Actually, I don’t see why Marx wouldn’t want to reverse the mediating relationship as well. Insofar as I am a producer under communism, couldn’t the consumer similarly represent the species and mediate between me and it? Her consumption with the recognition that I have produced something for human beings to use could be seen as the


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validation of my activity of producing for others, which for the 1844 Marx is one central element in the essential human activity (production as a form of individual self-expression is the other). This, too, could presumably count as a way in which I can see my species membership affirmed. I suspect that Marx has something like this in mind when he says that “therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.”9 An agent’s species membership would be affirmed in these production/consumption interactions because these interactions involve the activity through which Marx thinks human beings realize their nature qua human beings. In such interactions, agents would affirm one another not just as members of some group or other but specifically as members of the human species, as the beings for whom such production/consumption interactions are the way to realize their nature. Production and consumption would have a certain resonance. In their daily activities individuals would see their essential nature and their group (their species) membership writ large. To get a bit more clarity on Marx’s view here, a brief detour through Feuerbach will be useful. The relation of “I” and “thou,” Feuerbach says in The Essence, is of beings who mutually reveal each other’s nature: “The other is my thou—the relation being reciprocal [wechselseitig]—my other ego [mein anderes Ich], the human being objective to me . . . the eye seeing itself” (WC 251/158). For Feuerbach, as for Marx, the proper relation between agents is said to be reciprocal or mirroring (“the eye seeing itself”). According to Feuerbach, this reciprocal relation shows me my identity, i.e., that I am a human being: “In another I first have the consciousness of humanity; through him I first experience, I first feel that I am a human being; in my love for him it is first clear to me that he belongs to me and I to him, that we two cannot be without each other, that only community [Gemeinsamkeit] constitutes humanity. . . [The other] is the deputy of humanity, in whose name he speaks to me, a solitary individual” (WC 251/158). What is Feuerbach saying here? That to understand oneself as a human being one must recognize someone else as a human being and see oneself in him or her? That would be a bad argument, for it assumes that one can pick out the properties one shares with the other so as to determine that there is common membership in

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the same species. But these are presumably the same properties one uses to identify the other as human. So one could determine whether one is human without having to see oneself in the other. The argument could be turned around, could start with one’s recognition of the other as the same kind of being as oneself. Then Feuerbach would be saying that one can identify oneself as a certain kind of being only by reference to the class of beings of that kind: one needs to see oneself in some other member of the class in order to register one’s identity as that kind of being. But that, too, would be a bad argument, for either one already has the concept “human being,” in which case one doesn’t need the other to identify the kind of being one is; or one doesn’t have that concept, in which case knowing there is another like oneself doesn’t help one to know what one is. Both these construals assume that Feuerbach’s concern is how one learns to classify oneself as a human being. In fact, however, I take him to be concerned with something quite different. I take his point, rather, to be that one relates to the fact of one’s humanity as of great importance, as mattering to one, only through having feelings for others, only through one’s experiences with and of others. To become conscious of one’s humanity does not mean to learn one’s taxonomic slot (what else would I think I am?). It means to focus on and to affirm the fact that one is human. I have been talking of “affirming” one’s species membership. The term or its variants is used by both Feuerbach (WC 202/123) and Marx (ÖpM 563/322; AM 462/227), but I have been extending it in ways not clearly licensed by their texts. What I am after is the idea that some of the classificatory descriptions under which we fall seem not just taxonomically accurate but to capture a central part of who we are. For example, people could be classified in terms of whether their navels are inside or outside, but where one fits in that classification is unlikely to be central to one’s sense of who one is. On the other hand, one’s gender is likely to be central. Moreover, as, e.g., a female, one might affirm that one is female. Adequate terminology is lacking here. A person’s group identity has historically been hard to keep separate from beliefs about status or moral value, and despite denying their equation, people still often seek normatively laden reasons to justify their acceptance of what they are. Those reasons, however, are not what is key. If a man were to refuse a sex-change operation, he would not necessarily be saying he thinks


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it better (along some axis) to be male. He might instead simply be saying that being male is who he is. He would then be affirming not the great worth of any allegedly male traits but simply his identity. He would be acknowledging the importance of the identity “male” to who he is. For Feuerbach and Marx, it is important that we are members of the human species. That identity is to be affirmed as constitutive. When Feuerbach insists on my need for the other person, I take him to be concerned with such affirmation. To say that only “through [the other] . . . I first feel that I am a human being” is to say that only through the other is the fact that I am a human being brought home as crucial to who I am. Of course no one would deny that being human is crucial to who one is. For both Feuerbach and Marx, however, what is specifically supposed to be crucial is one’s sense of oneself as a member of the group “the human species,” as bound in important ways to that group. Now, being human and being male are structurally alike in that, with each, classification is one thing, importance to one’s self-conception is another. They differ in that being human has no standard contrastive pole. Being male occurs against a background of beings like but also unlike oneself. There is no analogous contrast for being human. The contrast that Feuerbach and Marx draw is between regarding oneself as strongly bound to the human species and regarding oneself as somehow cut off from or at odds with it. “[O]nly community constitutes humanity,” Feuerbach says, and his contrast to community is “a solitary individual” (WC 251/158). He also says of the species that it takes a person “out of his egoism.”10 And when in the Comments Marx refers to “my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature” (AM 462/227), not only are the three apparently equated, but the contrast is clearly to the egoism he has inveighed against a few pages before. For Feuerbach and Marx, to affirm oneself as a member of the species is to take a different stance toward the fact of that membership than the egoist or the solitary individual would take. (In fact, affirming one’s identity as an X need not involve regarding oneself as bound in community with other Xs. A man could acknowledge being male as crucial to who he is without seeing any fundamental bond between himself and other men. In principle, being human could function similarly. There is no necessity for it to function like patriotism, where grasping oneself as having a certain nationality is supposed

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to involve a bond with one’s fellow citizens. Feuerbach and Marx, however, clearly think that it does function in this latter way. And it certainly can do so.)11 Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx each believes there is a particular mechanism—a mechanism of “mediation”—by which agents affirm their humanity through establishing strong ties to the species as a whole. Feuerbach thinks that, in general, our interactions with other human beings can play this role (see WC 251/158), but the particular activity he highlights is lovemaking. In an unpublished introduction to The Essence, he says, “[I]n love I embrace in this woman, woman herself, she represents the species to me” (see also WC 266–67/168–69).12 She stands for and makes me conscious of the larger group and my membership in it. (Feuerbach is rather unromantic here: shouldn’t my beloved block out everything else, including—especially?—the species?) At first glance Marx seems similar to Feuerbach. He says that “[t]he direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person [des Menschen zum Menschen] is the relation of man to woman [des Mannes zum Weibe]” (ÖpM 535/295). And as with Feuerbach, Marx thinks that one embraces the species through this natural relationship to an individual (see ÖpM 535–36/295–96). Nevertheless, Marx’s focus is different. For first, Feuerbach says that one of the things I learn through love is “that only community constitutes humanity.” In the Comments, however, Marx says that under capitalism human beings’ communal nature “appears in the form of alienation” (AM 451/217). His contrast is between our genuine communal nature—human beings’ “reciprocal completion [wechselseitige Ergänzung] the result of which is species-life, truly human life” (AM 451/217)—and our communal nature as currently existing. Even if community does constitute humanity, for Marx it does so under capitalism “in the form of alienation,” and love cannot change that fact. Moreover, in the Manuscripts Marx argues that existing sexual relationships replicate the current “infinite degradation” of human relationships generally (ÖpM 535/295). From the character of the relation of man to woman, he says, one can see how far social relations are from being properly human relationships.13 It shows “the extent to which the human being’s need has become a human need . . . [that] the other person as a person [Mensch als Mensch] has become for him a need, the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a communal being [Gemeinwesen]” (ÖpM 535/296).14 In Feuerbach’s pic-


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ture of the relation of man to woman, individuals relate to one another in such a way that their mutual humanity is affirmed. Marx’s claim is that this is currently not the case. Like other relations, sexual relations are currently relations of purely instrumental use (the structural equation of sexual and work relations is made explicit at ÖpM 534/295). But then in that relation, individuals cannot be one another’s mediators with the species. Perhaps the relation of man to woman could play that role under communism; however, under communism, so would other things—most obviously, economic relations. For Marx, the relation of man to woman is merely a weathervane for human relations generally. According to Marx, mediation between an individual and the species takes place in the activities of producing and using objects. He talks of the reciprocal mirroring of our nature via our products: “Our products would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature” (AM 463/228). Now, suppose that the activity through which human beings realize their nature is in fact the production of objects in order to express one’s individuality and to provide the means for others to attain their ends, and suppose that communists would know this. Then it would make sense for them to see the objects so produced as embodiments of their nature. And as such embodiments, the objects could be said to “reflect” their nature. The image of reciprocal mirroring, used by both Feuerbach and Marx, is worth pursuing: the reflection in mirror A includes the reflection in mirror B, as well as B including the reflection in A, as well as A including B including A, etc. Products are Marx’s mirrors, but they can function as mirrors only if interpreted in a certain way. To reflect human beings’ essential nature, they must be interpreted as embodying it: presumably, communists would so interpret them. And with products reciprocally mirroring our nature, it is not only that I would see both my product and your product as embodying human beings’ essential nature; I would also see that you see my product and your product as embodying human beings’ essential nature; and I would see that you see that I see, etc. So in general, communists would see human nature reflected in their products (and would be aware of this fact about one another, and of one another’s awareness, etc.) and would believe that this nature involves producing for one another. They would regard the objects of economic

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commerce as the expressions of their common essential nature (and believe them to be regarded as such). The mirroring would express communists’ belief that they share a common nature and that their current (and essential) relation is that of intentional and reciprocal completing. Under such conditions, strong communal ties would presumably obtain. I suspect that Marx is claiming that one’s products would reflect both one’s individual and one’s species nature. For the most part, however, other people could register only the latter. Marx speaks of having “the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, sensuously perceptible and hence a power raised beyond all doubt” (AM 462/227). The implicit model seems to be an artist’s individual expression, for instance, in a book or a painting. Now, perhaps a farmer could see her cauliflowers that way. They embody her sweat, her forethought about irrigation and pest control, her anxiety about the weather, and so on. Still, a cauliflower is a cauliflower is a cauliflower. Those that different farmers produce are likely to be indistinguishable. Cauliflowers could express a person’s individuality in the sense that producing them is part of her life plan, and that is unique. Unlike a work of art, though, cauliflowers are not themselves unique. A consumer could not see one as the product of a particular individual. Mass-consumption objects cannot mirror unique individuals. Whether our products could ever really mirror our shared species nature goes to the psychological plausibility of the strong identification with the species that Marx has in mind. Part of what we register in appreciating a painting of a mountain vista, as opposed to the vista itself, is that the painting is a form of human expression. Marx’s point in claiming that “the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of human essential powers” (ÖpM 542/302) is that we could take a similar attitude toward the products of industry and agriculture. I do see the tomatoes that are a gift from my neighbor’s garden in a different light from those I bought at the supermarket, and not just because they taste better and I appreciate my neighbor’s largesse. They are more palpably products of someone’s labor. Marx’s claim is that were we to identify strongly with the species and to have the right conception of human nature, the tomatoes at the public commissary would resonate with that nature. Unfortunately, it is so hard to think oneself into the premise here that it is also hard to say


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whether—more accurately: hard to overcome one’s doubt that—the result would be as Marx says. The same issue arises when one tries to make sense of Marx’s invocation of love in the long passage quoted from the Comments. In describing economic relations under communism, he says, “I . . . would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love” (AM 462/228). Is he asserting that in a communist society there would be intense affective bonds among citizens? What I think Marx has in mind is not individual intimacy or the depth of feeling that goes with it. Rather, I think he has in mind the replication of the structure of personal relationships at a more general level. It is a feature of friendships that it is good for friends to give one another things. It is better that I buy you a scarf and that you buy me gloves than that we agree not to give gifts this year and I buy myself gloves and you buy yourself a scarf. What is confirmed in the gift exchange is our relatedness or, if one likes, our solidarity, the fact that we do matter to one another. Communist production is supposed to have this structure. Individuals produce for one another. So one might say that there would be widespread relationships of “friendship,” but that these would be structural, not personal.15 I think Marx does believe that such arms-length relationships—production/consumption relationships between (usually not even physically present) strangers— would have an affective component, but I doubt he thinks the feelings involved would be remotely comparable to those in individual relationships. This is more plausible than the picture of millions of communists relating to one another as intimate friends. Admittedly, however, it is still hard to imagine. Here again it is hard to imagine production/consumption activities and the objects they involve as having the resonance I have attributed to Marx (a resonance similar to what Feuerbach is after in his demand that bread and water be sacred). It is hard to imagine oneself as that kind of person in a world of that kind of people (as Marx in fact knows; see Chapter 6, §5).

3. Digression on Community I have presented the 1844 Marx’s picture of community. In this section I digress a bit to show that picture’s distinctiveness.

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Marx’s community of the species is the generalization of a set of relationships. In these relationships agents (a) engage in activities at least part of whose point is to facilitate others’ attainment of their ends; (b) recognize that fact about one another’s activities; (c) reciprocally mediate for one another with the group; and (d) recognize that fact about one another’s activities. It would distort matters to think of such relationships as either simply self-interested or simply altruistic. Take my desire to carve a chair that others will use. I would not attain my end were God to rain chairs from heaven and so no one needed mine. My concern is not solely for others’ comfort. What I want is to satisfy a need; my desire is not merely that somehow or other a need be satisfied. Yet this apparent egoism cannot be understood apart from a focus on what others actually need. I take care to make my chair durable and comfortable and pleasant to look at. And I take satisfaction in others’ use and appreciation of what I have done. Although my end is not simply to benefit others, it is to make something useful to others. For me to attain my end, others must in fact find what I have made useful.16 As for reciprocal mediation, on Marx’s account one desires such mediation in order to realize one’s nature as a communal being. A person cannot receive such mediation, however, unless she gives it back in the right way. I must see both myself and you in a certain light if I am in fact to see us as engaged in a mediating activity. I must see that you recognize me as engaged in an activity an important part of whose goal is the satisfaction of your (anyway of some human being’s) need. And since I want to realize my nature, I must actually have the requisite goal in producing (since, according to Marx, that is what my nature requires). Thus, in order to realize my nature, I must produce objects useful to others, and I must regard others as the kind of beings who can appreciate in the right way that I have produced objects for them to use. And that means regarding them also as beings who produce for me. It means appreciating others’ products in the right way. In effect, if you are to mediate between me and the species I must satisfy the condition for me to mediate between you and the species.17 In the relationships that Marx describes, individuals complete one another, to use his term. On the one hand, your use of my object (with the appropriate kind of appreciation) completes my project of producing a particular object to be used, and is, more generally, part of the


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completion of my essential (human) nature (which centrally involves being a producer of objects others can use). On the other hand, being mediated with the human species completes me as a member of that group; it realizes my nature, Marx says, qua communal being. The idea of completing one another may sound odd. It smacks of Aristophanes’ image in Plato’s Symposium of a divided soul at last finding its other half. But Aristophanes’ spatial image makes it seem as if what we need from one another is merely some thing, merely some object with particular properties, and that is to miss the point. Crucial to both forms of their reciprocal completion is communists’ recognition of their interactions as the reciprocal completion of one another. “Recognition” is not a fully adequate term here. A communist would not merely note that something is the case, namely, that it is a human being who has produced this object I am using. Rather, recognition here would involve both acknowledgment and affirmation. Marx thinks that under capitalism individuals acknowledge but regard as trivial the fact that they have produced objects for one another’s use. They merely register this fact. He thinks that in a communist society individuals would regard this fact not as trivial but as vital. Only by seeing this fact as vital could communists see their production activity as a way to complete one another. That is, I take it that one would not regard an activity or state of affairs as completing oneself unless one saw it as picking out something vital to who one is. In the end, the idea of completing one another is the idea that individuals can relate to one another in such a way that they do not merely acknowledge but also affirm their particular form of interdependence. The idea is that, lived in the right way, this interdependence would be a major part of an individual’s good.18 Marx’s view can be clarified further by contrasting the relationships in the Comments to those in two other pictures of good societies. Consider first a variation on Kant’s notion of a realm of ends.19 Imagine such a realm in which agents do not believe that other agents are acting as Kantians. Each believes that others are motivated exclusively by their particular desires. Each believes that no one else is even trying to act from a concern for the moral law (although each is in fact doing so). And each believes the others believe that she is motivated exclusively by her particular desires. These agents are interdependent. They need one another to pursue

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happiness under the conditions of human life. Still, consistent with Kant’s requirements, their relationships of mutual aid could be altogether impersonal in the sense that, in principle, what such agents need from one another might be only those objects and services necessary to satisfy their various desires. Such agents don’t necessarily need help, that is, the aid specifically of other human beings. An agent who by good luck was entirely self-sufficient would—qua Kantian—have lost nothing. In addition, Kantians do not need one another to express their essential nature, their nature as rational beings. For this, a Kantian needs neither aid nor recognition from others.20 A Kantian can realize her nature on her own. In these ways the Kantian picture is individualist. There is no necessary reciprocal dependence.21 The contrast to the 1844 Marx should be clear. For him, agents realize their nature through a set of interactions that must be interactions of reciprocal dependence with other human beings who, moreover, must understand the content of the interactions. A communist cannot be self-sufficient. And she would not realize her nature if she did not have the proper beliefs about other communists and their ends and beliefs in producing and consuming, or if they did not have the proper beliefs about her and her ends and beliefs in producing and consuming. A communist cannot realize her nature on her own. My second example is G. A. Cohen’s sketch of life under communism. Cohen writes, One way of picturing life under communism, as Marx conceived it, is to imagine a jazz band each player in which seeks his own fulfillment as a musician. Though motivated to secure his own fulfillment, as opposed to that of the band as a whole, or of his fellow musicians taken severally, he nevertheless fulfills himself maximally to the extent that each of the others also does so, and the same holds for each of them. . . I do not say that no one cares about the musical fulfillment of the others. . . But no concern for others is demanded.22 Cohen is here focusing on a phrase from The Communist Manifesto. Communism, Marx says in the Manifesto, is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development


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of all” (MK 482/506). At issue is not Cohen’s understanding of the Manifesto (I think he is accurate about that text) but the contrast of his view to that in the Comments. In Cohen’s example, “each player . . . seeks his own fulfillment as a musician.” Each depends on the others to gain this fulfillment, because he depends on the others’ playing to create the context for his own performance. But nothing in Cohen’s picture requires a player’s fellow musicians to be humans rather than machines. If machines with sufficient musical proficiency could be constructed, Cohen’s jazz musicians could attain fulfillment by playing with those machines rather than with one another. The 1844 Marx says that communists would mediate between one another and the species. That is something only human beings can do for one another. “[A]s a human being [als Mensch],” Marx complains, “. . . [in a capitalist society] you stand in no relationship to my object” (AM 461/226).23 This could be equally true in Cohen’s jazz band. No doubt Cohen’s musicians know they are playing with musicians, not machines, but, as he describes them, this fact need not be important to them. In principle, they could attain their ends without recognizing (in the sense of both acknowledging and affirming) one another qua musicians. Now, Cohen’s description of this jazz band seems to me too thin. Keith Graham faults him for not seeing that the members of a band have a shared final end—presumably to have a good performance—like the goal, Graham says, “of winning in a team sport.”24 But even this does not adequately specify the relationships among the individuals in the course of playing. (It also stresses the wrong type of shared end; see below.) Musicians in a band, especially a jazz band, are likely more or less consciously to play in continually shifting response to one another: they have a musical conversation. Implicit in that conversation is likely to be a reciprocal recognition (both acknowledgment and affirmation) of one another as members of a band with a shared end. And suppose part of these musicians’ shared end qua musicians was to play music in which a conversation with another musician could occur. Musicians with such a shared end would help complete one another qua musicians.25 As a last way to get at the specificity of Marx’s picture, I want to look at two distinctions in how agents might share ends. First, communists’ shared end is an internally directed end.26 Their shared end is simply to

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live in a society structured in a certain way. There is no further goal. Marx’s communists seek to realize their nature as beings who simultaneously express their individuality and produce for others as part of the species’ continual joint transformation of itself and the external world. Their shared end is the creation of a society in which individuals can realize their nature so understood. There is no social goal distinct from this.27 By contrast, an externally directed shared end involves attaining some goal held by the collectivity as a whole. This could take many forms: attaining God’s kingdom on earth, attaining the nation’s manifest destiny, winning in a team sport, and so on. The point is that agents are concerned to promote something going beyond merely a certain form of living with one another. The second distinction is between overlapping and intertwined shared ends. Ends overlap when agents have the same end, but attaining it with and through others is not a necessary condition of attaining the end. Consider the donors to a fund drive to raise money for research to eradicate some disease. These people share an end, but they need one another only because a joint effort is required to raise money. It would hardly defeat their shared end if one donor gave enough to support all the research, or if fortunate natural circumstances made the disease disappear. By contrast, it is part of the description of a communist’s activities that she is producing for other human beings (and that in consuming she appreciates what others have produced for her). Her ends would not be attained if her products were to rot or God were to rain manna. Persons with such ends in common—persons for whom it is crucial that they help satisfy one another’s ends—have intertwined ends. I take the standard communitarian view to be that having shared final external ends is the way to generate communal ties. Perhaps this is often true. But the appropriate comparison is not between external and internal overlapping shared ends. That comparison might be between a community united by a shared religious belief (external end) and a libertarian society in which agents share the end of living in a stable, minimal state (internal end). Some degree of communal ties could obtain among the latter group, but it would likely be weak. When final ends merely overlap, it may be that a shared external goal is needed to generate communal ties.


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The proper comparison, though, is between external overlapping and internal intertwined shared final ends. Communists’ shared final ends are intertwined. It is not a contingent fact that they need one another, and each knows and affirms this. Given their nature, it is vital that they attain their ends through one another’s assistance. Assuming this sort of relationship, it is reasonable to think that strong communal ties would obtain even in the absence of any shared external end.28 Communities formed via overlapping external shared ends are structurally different from those formed via internal intertwined shared ends. In a community characterized by external overlapping ends, agents are bound to one another not one-to-one but through their shared final end. We do not necessarily see ourselves as doing things for others; nor do we necessarily see others as doing things for us. Rather, we see ourselves and others as doing things for the sake of the external end that we share. That my actions contribute to attaining your end (the advent of God’s kingdom) is a contingent consequence of the nature of my end (the advent of God’s kingdom); it is not part of the content of my end. I want God’s kingdom to come even if you don’t. I might be pleased you do as well (but I also might not), and that you do might establish an important relationship between us (but it also might not). Here community would be a consequence of ends not themselves geared toward satisfying one another’s needs. An analogy to friendship is useful. People often become friends by pursuing a shared interest, and pursuing a shared interest is often part of a continuing friendship. But consider two shared interests. First, friends might share an interest in a particular brand of politics: they might share political commitments. Second, they might share an interest in tennis: they might enjoy smashing a fuzzy ball back and forth over a net. I think for most people with a shared interest in politics the key concern would be to get the right candidate selected, elected, and so forth. In doing so it would be nicer to work with friends than with people you don’t like, and the people you work with might become your friends, but your focus would be your particular political goal. Tennis is likely to be different. Of course a person could be passionately devoted to the game, and even devoted to winning every match, eager to play any time with anyone and always desperate to win. But that is not what tennis is like as an interest one shares with a friend. As such it is not just

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an activity one enjoys, but an opportunity to do something with one’s friend. A significant part of one’s enjoyment in playing tennis with X could be that one is playing tennis specifically with X. A significant part of the point of playing tennis with X could be to maintain one’s relationship with X. It has often been noted that many valuable things are essentially by-products of activities pursued for other reasons. One cannot attain these things by aiming directly at them.29 Some things that are initially by-products, however, can subsequently be aimed at, perhaps not directly but at least half-on. Friendship can be of this kind. Once one is in a relationship of friendship it is not odd to search for things to do with one’s friend. If pushed hard, the analogy of friendship to community will break down. My claim is simply that it can be a feature of an activity that it is structurally the right sort of activity to promote a particular kind of relationship. The production and consumption activities of Marx’s communists are structurally the right sort of activities to promote a particular kind of communal tie.30 Communitarian thought has always been vulnerable to two connected worries: that a tight-knit community is impossible under modern conditions, and that attempting to implement such a community might threaten other important things, especially individual rights and liberties (although an internally directed community could be a paradigm of respect for individual rights: John Rawls’s well-ordered society fits this model).31 An adequate communitarian account would have to address such worries. But I think they should be put aside until a prior issue has been addressed: What sort of relationship should a community promote? I have sketched two candidate relationships. No doubt there are others. Communitarian accounts need to probe further the range of possible relationships a community might involve. This issue should be distinguished from the frequent emphasis on the fact that each of us is the product of some specific community, where community is understood in terms of the existence of a common culture, usually meaning (at least) a common history and language. Call this a concern with one’s cultural community, and the issues I am raising a concern with the one’s sociopolitical community (emphasizing both the


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social and the political so as to avoid any suggestion of an inevitable split between bourgeois and citoyen). I take the prior normative question to be the question of what kinds of relationships are most desirable in a sociopolitical community. Perhaps having those relationships, whatever they are, will turn out to require membership in a cultural community. Perhaps further examination of the relationships involved in membership in a cultural community will show that those relationships point to the best form of sociopolitical community. Cultural communities are always social and political, and sociopolitical communities are always rooted in a culture (at least one). The distinction between these types of community will often be tenuous. Nevertheless, we can distinguish the fact of cultural membership from the fact of membership in a particular set of social and political relationships. Determining which of these latter kind of relationships is best is an independent and largely unexplored question.

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6 The 1844 Marx III: The Problem of Justification

I

n Ch a p t e r 4 I argued that, for Marx, what I called the human self-realization activity is the activity involved in necessary labor. In Chapter 5 I discussed the communal relationships resulting from (what Marx thinks of as) proper exercise of that activity. We can now see that, for Marx, the correct description of the human self-realization activity has an important social component. That activity involves more than the physical actions of plowing fields, felling trees, and so on. It must be engaged in with certain ends and beliefs, and when it truly functions as the human self-realization activity, it is carried on in a social context in which those engaged in it correctly believe that the products of their activity will be consumed by agents who have certain beliefs about their (the producers’) ends in engaging in the activity.1 The claim that a particular activity is the human self-realization activity is a strong normative claim. If it is true, then agents who wish to lead a life in accordance with their nature as human beings—agents who wish to realize their specifically human nature (that is, to lead the good life for human beings)—should engage in that activity. And any society that systematically prevents the proper exercise of that activity is a bad society. Of course the 1844 Marx thinks capitalism is a bad society, and he thinks a significant part of its badness is that it prevents the proper exercise of the human self-realization activity. In this chapter, however, my focus is not Marx’s polemic against capitalism. It is whether he can justify his conception of human nature in general, and especially his conception of the human self-realization activity. I argue that, given his own premises, there is a problem, under capitalism, in doing so. 192

Th e 1 8 4 4 M a r x i i i : Th e P r o b l e m o f Ju s t i f i c at i o n

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1. The Workers’ Ignorance of Their True Nature Commentators on Marx often distinguish between alienation as a felt psychological condition and alienation as a state of affairs in which agents fail to exercise capacities or fail to take advantage of opportunities or in general fail to procure benefits they could in principle obtain given the existing state of technological development. The first form of alienation is often labeled “subjective”; the second, “objective.” The cognitive distortions I discuss are clearly connected to various aspects of Marx’s account of the objective alienation of labor. I am not, however, providing a general interpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation. The problems I focus on do arise within the framework of Marx’s views on alienation, but my focus is those problems. I discuss alienation only so far as that focus requires. Allen Wood says that, for Marx, alienation involves “a lack of a sense of meaning and self-worth,” and he says that “[t]he alienation Marx finds in capitalist society . . . is the condition of being unable to actualize oneself. . . More basic than consciousness of alienation (the lack of a sense of meaning and self-worth) is real alienation: the failure (or inability) to actualize one’s human essential powers.”2 Wood sees the second element as more basic because he (correctly, I think) believes that Marx would disregard an agent’s psychological state in determining whether he has realized his (human) nature. For Marx, whether he has done so is not a question of how he feels but of the content of his actions, beliefs and ends, and of the social conditions in which he lives.3 Although Marx believes that capitalism generates subjective alienation, for him, objective alienation is more basic. Objective alienation involves workers’ inability “to actualize [their] human essential powers.” It also involves the absence of certain (for Marx, true) beliefs. Objective alienation is not caused by a cognitive deficiency, and it cannot be remedied merely by cognitive means, but that does not mean it has no cognitive component. For the 1844 Marx, there are things that workers under capitalism don’t know. They don’t know that they are species beings in the sense described in the last two chapters, or that the human self-realization activity is as described (that is, that the transformation of nature is the operation of the “essential powers of human beings” [ÖpM 543/303]). They don’t know their own nature. Marx thinks that communist work-

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ers would have the correct conception of human nature, and that this knowledge would play a role in their experience of the work process. It would be part of what would make work the key form of selfrealization. There is no inevitable link between workers’ ignorance (under capitalism) and the lack of a sense of meaning in their lives (subjective alienation), but, granted a plausible empirical hypothesis, a link could be generated. The hypothesis is that workers will tend to lack a sense of meaning in their lives to the extent that (a) they don’t know their real nature and what would realize it, and (b) they have little opportunity to pursue and to realize false conceptions of their nature. One can probably have a sense of meaning in one’s life based on false beliefs about what gives it meaning, but developing even inchoate beliefs about such things and pursuing the relevant activities tends to require time and resources not available to Marx’s workers. And in the place where they have the time and where they in fact ought to realize themselves—the sphere of necessary labor—they do not know their true nature. Mere knowledge of their true nature would not of itself enable the workers to realize that nature. First, they would have to abolish capitalism. However, such knowledge might put a dent in their anomie. Suppose the workers know what their true (human) nature is and know they are failing to realize it, and know that this failure is unnecessary, that it is a function of alterable social conditions. I suspect that they would feel frustration and anger, not a lack of a sense of meaning. I think the latter involves (among other things) not having clear beliefs about what would give one’s life meaning. Having such beliefs and having little or no opportunity to put them into practice might make one angry or bitter or frustrated, but I think it unlikely to generate the flat affect that Wood describes.4 Coleridge’s “A Grief without a pang, void, dark and drear” suggests the absence, not the frustration, of a purpose.5 If this is something capitalism causes, it must be because capitalism denies workers the opportunity to generate and pursue even false purposes, while systematically undermining workers’ knowledge of their true purpose.6 The issue I want to look at is how it does the latter. To begin with, let us look at the two elements of alienated labor not directly concerned with the worker’s relation to other workers: alienation from the activity of labor, and alienation from the product of labor


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and the sensuous external world (see ÖpM 516–17/276–77).7 Marx believes that labor to transform nature, in the course of providing for humanity’s survival and greater material development, is how human beings realize their nature qua human beings, but that under capitalism this labor becomes merely a means to physical survival. Capitalist workers do not relate to their work as a form of self-realization, something for which they have an “inner, essential” need (AM 463/228). On the contrary, it is “not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labor” (ÖpM 514/274). One works only because one needs money. Otherwise, labor is “shunned like the plague.” It is “not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (ÖpM 514/274). As a consequence, the worker “only feels himself freely active in his animal functions, eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal” (ÖpM 514–15/274–75). In a communist society, Marx says, the worker relates to the products of his (and others’) labor as his creations and feels satisfaction in that fact (AM 462–63/227–28); he “sees himself in a world he has created” (ÖpM 517/277). The world of objects becomes something he, in conjunction with his species, has helped to form: “nature appears as his work and his reality” (ÖpM 517/277). Under capitalism, however, the worker does not own the products of his labor. Nor do other workers own the products of their labor. The products belong to the capitalist. They come to seem opposed to the worker, not his products. They are not seen as mirrors reflecting his human nature: “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. . . [T]he life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (ÖpM 512/272). Under capitalism each worker is alienated from his product (ÖpM 515/275), and workers are alienated from one another (ÖpM 517/277). As a result “the sensuous external world” becomes “an alien world, hostile and opposed” to the worker (ÖpM 515/275). These senses of alienation have both a practical and a phenomenological dimension. The former involves such things as that a worker does not have effective control over either his activities or the products he creates. He must sell his labor to live. Depending on the demand for labor, he may have some choice over the type or conditions of labor, but his latitude is rarely very wide and sometimes vanishingly

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narrow (ÖpM 481–82/244–45). The capitalist has legal ownership over what the individual worker has himself produced, while the world of finished human products is split into billions of private fiefdoms. The worker, individually or even if identified with others, has little opportunity to exert his will in the world. These aspects of alienation are clear enough. However, alienation from the activity of labor and from the sensuous external world also involves shortcomings in how the worker relates to something: to his own labor activity and to the external world. In each case, the relation in question is not what it ought to be. Something is missing. What? The problem is not that the worker does not assent to the assertion that the conscious transformation of nature is the human self-realization activity (though in fact he does not). The problem is that he does not relate to his labor as the human self-realization activity, as the way to realize his nature. He does not relate to his own labor as other than instrumentally important. The issue is even clearer with respect to the human transformation of (a large part of) nature. That (a large part of) the world is the product of human labor is something workers presumably do believe. Hamburgers, computer chips, and spinning jennies are clearly not the result of undirected organic growth. But the worker does not regard this fact as significant. If asked, he would assent to its truth, but it does not affect how he relates to his daily environment. The truth that (much of) this world is a human product is always a trivial truth in the sense that it is obvious; for capitalist workers, it is also a trivial truth in the sense that it is unimportant. Four claims can be distinguished: 1. Human beings work on the natural world and in doing so transform it. 2. This labor is the human self-realization activity, the activity by which human beings realize their nature; it is the operation of the “essential powers of human beings” (ÖpM 542/303). 3. Nature (much of it anyway) has been transformed by human beings; (many of) the objects among which we move are human products. 4. Nature (much of it anyway) is the result of the human self-realization activity; (many of) the objects among which we move are


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the results of the human self-realization activity; (many of) the objects among which we move are the results of the operation of the “essential powers of human beings.” Now, (1) and (3) are indisputably true. The point of (2) and (4) is that (1) and (3) are not trivial. They describe the most important human activity and the most basic relation that human beings have to the world. Under capitalism, however, (1) and (3) are seen as trivial. Labor is not seen as the human self-realization activity, and the fact that our material environment is to a great extent humanly shaped is not regarded as revelatory of the kind of beings we are: “[T]he most tangible and accessible part of history” is a closed book (ÖpM 543/303). Marx sometimes seems to say—and commentators have often attributed this view to him—that the parts of nature that have been formed by human labor do not now “appear” as such, that they seem autonomous, have the “chimerical objectivity” that Bauer condemns (Ein 148). This would be straightforwardly false. Most of the results of human labor are obviously the results of human labor. The problem that Marx is after is not that they literally appear as other than what they are. It is that workers—indeed, people in general—relate to the fact that so many of the objects in their daily lives are the results of human labor as something barely worth registering.

2. The Problem of Justification I am trying to show that the 1844 Marx faces a problem of justification. To see that problem a further subjective/objective distinction is needed, this time between forms of illusion. Objective illusion involves objective circumstances, things no individual can escape. Appearances are somehow wrong, and while an agent can perhaps come to know this fact, she has no power to change the appearances by herself (or even with a small group of others). To use an example of Marx’s as adapted by G. A. Cohen, air appears homogeneous. We do not perceive that it is a combination of nitrogen and oxygen. Were we so constructed that nitrogen entered one nostril and oxygen the other and we could sense the difference, the heterogeneity of air would be apparent. But this is not the case, and so although we have a correct theory of the composi-

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tion of air the appearances have not altered. The illusion that air is homogeneous is objective.8 By contrast, subjective illusion involves distortion that the individual can overcome, at least in principle. Subjective illusions may include religious beliefs, psychological problems, conceptual confusion, vanity, greed, and other things. Mere knowledge that something is a subjective illusion does not necessarily dissolve the illusion (you may still see the pink elephants), but (a) it might do so (perhaps they will go away), and (b) noncognitive techniques (having a good night’s sleep or a cold shower) might do so as well. In principle, one can get outside of a subjective illusion so that it loses its effect. One can be liberated from it. One can only come to know that one suffers from an objective illusion. The distinction here is not between illusions that are physically or socially caused versus those that are psychologically caused. Not only can some physically caused illusions be overcome (for example, those resulting from myopia), but the actual causal account of even the classic allegedly psychologically caused illusions is likely to be complex. For instance, religious belief is often seen as filling some psychological need. Yet writers differ about the role of social and psychological factors in generating this need, and it seems unlikely that an adequate account would include just one factor. (Indeed, the weights of the different factors would probably vary from individual to individual.) Instead of classifying religious belief by reference to whether social or psychological factors are causally most important, it seems to me more sensible to say that religious belief is subjective illusion by virtue of being something an individual can, in principle, overcome. The advantage of this emphasis is that it allows the subjective/objective distinction to match up with a distinction in ways to justify the claim that something is an illusion. The claim that subjective illusion existed at time t can be justified (at least prima facie) at time t⫹1 by the agent’s assent to that claim from a standpoint in which appearances have changed and where there is reason to think that appearances from the new standpoint are more likely to track reality than are those from the old (e.g., one is sober rather than drunk). The claim that objective illusion existed at time t requires some other form of justification, for instance, the kinds of reasons that the natural sciences give. The line drawn by this distinction could shift. It is not currently within any individual’s power to change her physiology to detect the heterogeneity of air. And it is not within any individual’s (or any small


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group of individuals’) power to change social conditions. But how far individuals might eventually be able to liberate themselves from such things as stereotyped views of racial and ethnic groups, hallucinations, physiologically induced psychosis, deep envy that systematically leads to faulty evaluations of others, and even just plain bad thinking is unclear. To the extent that progress can be made (and so the agent can, from the appropriate standpoint, come to attest that the illusion was an illusion), the illusion is subjective. By emphasizing the practical aspect I have made the distinction a rough and ready one. Take the inveterate religious believer, impervious to all argument and experience. If hers is an illusion, isn’t it really an objective one? In fact, if we have adequate reason to think she cannot let go of her belief, then her illusion (if it is one) is objective. The point of invoking the distinction as a practical distinction is to focus on the conditions under which it makes sense to try to dissolve the putative illusion for someone—to shift her perspective à la Feuerbach—and the conditions under which one needs instead to give reasons that the person can rationally assent to regardless of whether the way she sees things changes. The religious believer might be unable to give up her belief, but, then, if one thought her belief illusory, one’s focus (if one found the enterprise worthwhile) would be on getting her at least to recognize that her belief was not rationally based. Clearly the belief at t⫹1 that one did suffer from illusion at t but does so no more might be false. Clearly everything depends on the reasons for thinking one’s standpoint at t⫹1 to be such that present judgments are more likely to track reality than are those from one’s standpoint at t. For the moment, however, I am simply pointing out the difference between (alleged) illusions where one could, at least in principle, go from the (allegedly) “illuded” to the (allegedly) “no-longer-illuded” standpoint (leaving aside why the later standpoint is supposed to be epistemologically superior to the earlier) and (alleged) illusions where this is not the case. Now, a true communist society, Marx says, would be “the positive abolition of all alienation” (ÖpM 537/297) and “the real appropriation of human nature” (ÖpM 536/296). From such a standpoint, one would see that (free, collective) labor to transform nature is the human self-realization activity. And, as transcending all alienation, the standpoint of a true communist society would provide a standard by which to assess the present. Institutions preventing agents from engaging in the human

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self-realization activity under conditions permitting it to function as that activity would be understood to be—and so condemned as—incompatible with our nature. As has often been pointed out, however, the standpoint of a true communist society cannot currently be taken. It is important to see exactly why not. For one will then see why, for the 1844 Marx, important illusions generated by the capitalist labor process are objective. According to the account in the Comments and the Manuscripts, claims (2) and (4) of the four claims stated earlier will seem, within a capitalist society, to be false. And according to that account, this is because, within a capitalist society, they are false. In a capitalist society the fact that human beings transform nature is trivial. Labor is not free, collective activity. It is engaged in only under pressure of material need. In a capitalist society, the products of human labor are alien in the sense that our daily relation to them involves no affirmation of them as specifically human products. As a worker, one’s concern is one’s wage, not one’s product. And as a consumer, one’s concern is the product’s function, not its genesis. One considers the product one’s “own” only when one either has legal ownership of it or uses it (ÖpM 540/300; see also AM 459/224), and in such ownership or use it is irrelevant whether the object is a human product or a natural growth. So how, from within capitalism, can the claim be justified that labor is the human self-realization activity and that (much of) nature is the result of that activity? Why believe that (1) and (3) are not trivial? In particular, why believe that (1)—"Human beings work on the natural world and in doing so transform it"—is not merely a fate to which we are condemned and from which we should escape if we can? For the issue of the human self-realization activity, let us take the categories “Appearance,” “Essential Reality,” and “Existing Reality,” and take the propositions “God exists,” “Air is homogeneous,” and “Labor is the human self-realization activity.” We then have the following: Appearance

Essential Reality

Existing Reality

God exists

True (to the believer)

False

False

Air is homogeneous

True (to anyone)

False

False

Labor is the human self-realization activity

False (to the worker)

True

False


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Marx would say that these appearances are all illusory. They do not correspond to how the world is “essentially.” The peculiarity of the claim that labor is the human self-realization activity is that here the appearance—that labor is not the self-realization activity—matches up with how the world actually is now even though it fails to match up with how the world is essentially. Bauer and Feuerbach believe that they are fighting subjective illusion. Each believes that the message he brings can currently be grasped and that the agent’s religious illusion can be dispelled. Marx sees himself as fighting objective illusion. He says of humanity’s “true communal nature” that it does not depend on human beings whether it “exists or not.” But he also says that as long as human beings do not properly recognize themselves as human beings, “and therefore [have] not organized the world in a human way, this communal nature appears in the form of alienation” (AM 451/217). Marx’s claim is that human nature in general currently appears “in the form of alienation” because the world is not organized “in a human way.” Now, no individual or small group could simply alter the current appearance of human nature (for example, the appearance that for human beings, labor is only a means to the preservation of life). Only a basic transformation of the world could do that. So what could—under capitalism—justify the claim that labor is the human self-realization activity?9

3. The Problem of Communists’ Ends and Beliefs That existing reality confirms appearances in this way is the central problem. The particular way that communists’ ends are intertwined adds a further twist. Marx asserts that the ultimate cause of the illusion that labor is merely a means is something real within the existing social world: capitalist production relations. The Young Hegelians assert that the underlying cause of religious belief is also something real within the existing social world: poverty and powerlessness. Yet someone who is poor and powerless can come to see that belief in God is a false belief. She can attain the standpoint of the species or of Self-consciousness and so shed her illusions. Why can’t the illusions that capitalism generates likewise be shed? Although the coincidence of appearances and existing reality

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may make it psychologically difficult to extricate oneself from the impact of capitalist production relations, isn’t this only a tendency, just as being poor and powerless tends (but only tends) to make people turn to belief in God? Take a self-sufficient farmer or a self-employed furniture-maker, individuals somewhat outside of the web of capitalist relations. Or take an unusual factory worker who somehow is able to take pride and satisfaction in her work. Couldn’t such an individual regard her labor as the human self-realization activity? In fact, she could see her labor as her own individual self-realization activity. She could regard it as realizing her own individual nature. She could not, however, regard it as realizing her nature as a member of the human species as Marx understands that nature. Under capitalism, Marx says, “I have produced for myself and not for you, as you have produced for yourself and not for me. In itself, the result of my production has as little relation to you as the result of your production has a direct relation to me” (AM 459/225). The goal of my production is to amass wealth. The satisfaction of another’s need is irrelevant. According to “political economy” (that is, conventional theorists of political economy), Marx says, the content of humanity’s communal nature goes no farther than competitive interaction as buyers and sellers (AM 451/217). Applied to capitalism, Marx thinks that political economy’s description is accurate.10 Let us grant Marx that mutual indifference and/or competition is indeed capitalism’s general tendency. Couldn’t I nevertheless train myself to regard my labor both as realizing my individual nature and as realizing my species nature through producing things others will use? Why couldn’t I regard what I am doing in such a spirit as to make it the realization of my species nature? Marx’s answer is that to regard my labor that way would be to regard it falsely, because for it to be the realization of my species nature depends not just on how I regard it but on how others do so. According to Marx, an individual under communism would regard her labor as the activity through which she realizes her nature. She would also regard my labor as the activity through which I realize my nature. “Labor” here involves production for others: under communism, among my ends in producing would be to produce something others would use, and in using what I produce others would regard it as produced for their use. Now, suppose I produce something for others to use (that is, suppose


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my ends in producing are as Marx requires); however, suppose you mistakenly regard my product as something I produced simply to make money. Then you would not recognize and feel me “as a completion of your own nature” (AM 462/228) but merely as someone seeking financial gain. And then in my activity of producing I would not have realized my human nature, for to do so requires precisely your confirmation of my end in producing (AM 462/228). So my labor would not have been the activity through which I realize my nature. The point is that, on Marx’s account, we are dependent on one another for labor actually to function as our self-realization activity. This generates an intractable problem. Under communism, six conditions would be satisfied: 1. I would see my labor as the activity through which I realize my nature, both my individual nature and my human nature as Marx construes the latter—namely, as crucially involving producing objects for others’ use. 2. I would see your labor as the activity through which you realize your nature, both your individual and your human nature (as Marx construes the latter). 3. You would see your labor as the activity through which you realize your nature, both your individual and your human nature (as Marx construes the latter). 4. You would see my labor as the activity through which I realize my nature, both my individual and my human nature (as Marx construes the latter). 5. I would see that you see (1)–(4). 6. You would see that I see (1)–(4). On my own I might be able somehow to satisfy (1) and (2). I cannot on my own satisfy (3) or (4). This means I cannot on my own satisfy (5). And (5) is crucial to my self-realization. If I am to realize myself through my labor, I need to regard the other members of the species as regarding my labor as my production of objects for their use—more generally, as my attempt (among other things) to “complete” them. I can have no control, however, either in principle or in practice, over how the other members of the species regard my labor. And capitalist institutions will, according to Marx, tend to make them not regard it in the right way. They will tend to regard my labor as something I engage in purely to make money. They will tend to regard my product simply

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as a consumption good, not as the embodiment of a human intention to facilitate their ends. (The other side of the coin also obtains. I cannot know others’ ends in producing, and I have reason to think that their ends are not the right ones. So I cannot rationally regard their products “as a completion of [my] own nature.”) These may be mere tendencies. They may not hold in particular cases. However, I cannot know in which cases, and if capitalism is as Marx describes it, then I have reason to believe that there will not be many exceptions to the general tendency. Thus, for me to regard my own activity of labor under capitalism as my human self-realization activity would be to delude myself. The issue is only partly that it is difficult to escape the impact of capitalist institutions on me. More deeply, the issue is that I have no control whatever of their impact on others. The earlier set of categories can now be expanded.

Appearance God exists

Cause of Essential Existing Deceptive Type of Reality Reality Appearance Phenomenon

True False (to the believer)

False

Social Individual institutions

Air is True homogeneous (to anyone)

False

False

Human physiology

Labor is the human selfrealization activity

True

False

Social Interactive institutions

False (to the worker)

Individual

Social institutions are the causes of the illusory appearances that God exists and that labor is not the human self-realization activity. But the illusory appearance that God exists is an individual phenomenon in the sense that it does not concern an agent’s relations to others and their relations to her. The illusory appearance that labor is not the human self-realization activity does concern these relations. It is the combination of being a socially caused and an interactive phenomenon that makes this illusion especially intractable. Agents’ ends and their beliefs about one another’s ends are crucial to distinguishing capitalist from communist interdependence. But com-


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munists would not be transparent to one another. Just as in a capitalist society, no communist producer or consumer could be certain about other agents’ ends in producing. So why is the problem sketched above specific to capitalism? The answer, I think, is that, under communism, agents would have adequate reason to believe that one another’s ends and beliefs are the right ends and beliefs. Institutional pressures would not promote egoism and competition. Human nature, as the 1844 Marx conceives it, would have the opportunity for undistorted expression. It would make sense to believe that people were in fact generally producing for one another. At issue is not a philosophical question about knowing another person’s mind, but a local question about the basis for regarding workerworker relationships in a certain light. Under capitalism, ends are likely to be egoistic, and beliefs about the human self-realization activity are likely to be false. So in general under capitalism, it would not be rational for a worker to regard her worker-worker relationships as relationships of reciprocal completion. By contrast, those who produce “as human beings”—that is, under communism—would tend to have the right ends and beliefs. So, in general, under communism, it would be rational for a worker to regard her worker-worker relationships as involving those ends and beliefs, and so to regard them as relationships of reciprocal completion. In individual cases she might be mistaken, but that would not undermine the propriety of her view of the general state of affairs. Can the problem sketched above be extended beyond the issue of justifying the claim that labor is the human self-realization activity? That depends on how far the importance of workers’ ends and beliefs extends for the 1844 Marx. I will note four ways in which such considerations might generate problems for Marx. I think that in each case the best reconstruction of the 1844 texts would show that a problem does arise; however, as there is not space here to make the necessary textual arguments, that claim must remain mere assertion. 1. To be a species being involves many things for Marx, and there is no reason to think that all are somehow connected to agents’ work-related ends and beliefs. To be a species being does, however, involve a strong identification with the species. The question is whether this identification consists only of an agent’s sense of herself as part of a particular larger whole, or whether it is also supposed to involve the

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belief that she is essentially related to other human beings in a very specific way, that is, a being who produces for others who (reciprocally) produce for her. 2. Human beings certainly currently recognize themselves and others as human beings. The question is whether Marx thinks that they can affirm this identity in the appropriate sense without regarding themselves as having the particular connection he emphasizes, that is, without seeing their essential relationship as that of agents who produce for one another. If identification with the species and (the right kind of) affirmation of one’s humanity do require regarding oneself as related to others in the way specified, then such identification and affirmation are problematic under capitalism. For under capitalism one cannot rationally regard oneself as related in this way since one cannot know others’ ends and beliefs, and those ends and beliefs are unlikely to be the right ones. 3. Suppose, for Marx, the proper relationship between workers involves (among other things) the reciprocal recognition of the belief that workers are essentially cooperators, not competitors. Suppose, however, that Marx also feels that under capitalism (a) workers are in fact competitors in the sense that they compete for scarce jobs (ÖpM 481– 82/244–45), and (b) workers tend to believe that they are essentially competitors. Capitalist workers would then regard each other as competitors, including presumably regarding each other as regarding each other as competitors. Transforming workers’ relationships would then require changing both the external conditions (removing the fact of competition) and changing workers’ beliefs, including their beliefs about other workers’ beliefs. Perhaps an individual worker under capitalism could change her own beliefs about her essential relationship to her fellow workers. She could not, however, change external conditions. Nor could she change other workers’ beliefs. So it would not be rational for her to change her own beliefs about other workers’ beliefs. And then it would also not be rational for her to regard her current worker-worker relationships as cooperative rather than competitive. 4. In her alienation from the sensuous external world, the worker (a) fails to regard the products of human labor generally as the results of the human self-realization activity, as the results of the operation of the “essential powers of human beings” (and so also as mirrors for human nature), and she (b) fails to regard the products of other workers’ labor


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as her own. (a) flows from the general failure to regard labor as the human self-realization activity. (b) flows from the workers’ alienation from one another and from one another’s products. If the problem of ends and beliefs makes more intractable the failure to regard human labor and the other worker in the proper ways, then it also makes more intractable the worker’s alienation from the sensuous external world. In these various ways, then, it is not rational for an individual to think that, while remaining in a capitalist society, she can relate to the world (or to others or to the fact of her humanity) in the way that Marx desires—i.e., in the way workers would under communism. The difficulty Marx faces may not yet be clear. I have noted that the issue of workers’ ends and beliefs is an extra twist to the problem that the appearances of capitalist life are at odds with the 1844 Marx’s views about human nature. But one might argue that Marx could deny that this generates any justificatory problem, any special problem about justifying his claims about human nature (here, most notably, that labor is the human self-realization activity). First, Marx might claim that how things appear to the workers in either a capitalist or a communist society is irrelevant to justifying the beliefs in question. To keep to the issue of the human self-realization activity, he might claim that how things appear to the workers is irrelevant to the thesis that a certain kind of activity is the human self-realization activity. That, he might say, is a question for philosophers to handle. Even if workers have the requisite ends and beliefs, and even if they know this about one another, to be aware of themselves as realizing their nature they must interpret their productive activity as the human self-realization activity. And don’t they then need to have reasons that justify that interpretation? The fact that the activity appears (under communism) to be the self-realization activity scarcely seems sufficient justification. What such an interpretation seems to need is philosophical defense. It looks as if sooner or later philosophy must join the fray. So why worry about the appearances? Second, Marx might argue that while the illusory appearances of capitalist life may be as objective as the illusory homogeneity of air, the empirical science of political economy can penetrate the former just as the empirical science of chemistry penetrates the latter. Here I discuss only this second response; Marx’s 1844 views on philosophy are discussed in the next two sections.

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In the preface to the Manuscripts, Marx says, “I do not have to assure the reader familiar with political economy that my results have been attained by means of an entirely empirical analysis based on a conscientious, critical study of political economy” (ÖpM 467/232). What follows is forty pages of extracts from and comments on the work of various political economists. The subjects discussed are such things as wages (ÖpM 471–83/235–46), profit on capital (ÖpM 483–97/246–58), and ground rent (ÖpM 497–510/259–70). Marx then begins the manuscript “Alienated Labor” by saying, “We have started from the presuppositions of political economy” (ÖpM 510/270). Although there is little explicit to draw on here, it seems that Marx believes that the alienation of labor is an inevitable concomitant of a society for which the presuppositions of political economy are true. Let’s assume that in a society for which the presuppositions of political economy are true certain phenomena do obtain, for example, that workers regard their work solely as a means to survival, not as life’s prime want. It is only on a particular interpretation of those phenomena, however, that they count as instances of the alienation of labor (rather than as, say, responses to the constraints endemic to the human condition). Only if such phenomena are a distortion of our natural relation to the labor process can they be instances of alienation. Alienation is a normative category—and to classify a phenomenon as an instance of alienation something more is required than a “wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.” Marx says that, in a capitalist society, “to the worker the maintenance of his individual existence appears to be the aim of his activity and what he actually does is regarded by him only as a means; that he carries on his life’s activity in order to earn the means to live” (AM 454/220). In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith remarks that “[e]qual quantities of labor, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal value to the labourer. In his ordinary state of health, strength and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness.”11 For Smith, labor and happiness are opposites. Smith would not find in capitalism the phenomenon of alienated labor, since he does not see labor as—what Marx calls—a human being’s “life-activity” (ÖpM 516/276). In the


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Grundrisse, Marx cites the passage from Smith and attacks him on the ground that, for Smith, labor is a curse: “That the individual, ‘in his ordinary state of health, strength and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity’ also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of rest seems quite far from Smith’s mind” (Gr 504– 505/611).12 If Smith were saying that a good life is one of utterly passive consumption, a couch potato life, most people would agree with Marx’s attack. However, Smith is only asserting that labor, the making of a living, not activity as such, is a sacrifice. He is saying that the worker would prefer to be active in some other way. Marx can object to this only if he believes that a specific kind of activity, the activity in the (necessary) labor process, is a human being’s “life-activity” (i.e., her self-realization activity). I leave aside Marx’s views in the Grundrisse. In 1844, this is his belief. But (a) on Marx’s own account this belief is currently unorthodox, and (b) this sort of belief cannot be substantiated either by empirical analysis or by deduction from the presuppositions of political economy. So neither empirical analysis nor deduction from the presuppositions of political economy can show that under capitalism the worker is indeed alienated in the ways that Marx describes. It is possible that Marx sees the point. There is a moment at which he asks us to “rise above the level of political economy” and try to answer two questions. The first question is: “What in the development of humanity is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of humanity to abstract labor?” The second is: “What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages . . . as the aim of social revolution?” Marx then says: “In political economy labor occurs only in the form of activity as a source of livelihood” (ÖpM 477/241). At this point there is a blank in the manuscript, and the discussion is not resumed. The text does not give us much to go on, but perhaps Marx sees that to answer certain kinds of questions—such as the meaning of some event in humanity’s development, or why equality of wages is the wrong goal—one must go beyond political economy. So perhaps he also sees that one must do so to explain why political economy is wrong to regard labor only as a source of livelihood.

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4. Marx’s 1844 Critique of Philosophy Under capitalism, Marx’s claims can be confirmed by neither appearances nor empirical science. But aren’t claims confirmable by neither appearances nor empirical science meat and drink to philosophers? Why not try to confirm them philosophically? To see why this strategy is not open to Marx, we need a quick summary of his views on what he calls “philosophy.” In the Comments and Manuscripts, Marx is avowedly a Feuerbachian (ÖpM 468/232 and 570/328), and there are certainly similarities between the two writers. There are also differences, however. Here are the methodological similarities: • Feuerbach insists on a self-certifying perception as the basic epistemological criterion. Marx explicitly endorses this criterion, lauding Feuerbach’s commitment to “the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself [das auf sich selbst ruhende und positiv auf sich selbst begründete Positive]” (ÖpM 570/328). • Marx also praises Feuerbach for establishing “true materialism” and “real science” by “making the social relationship of ‘human being to human being’ the basic principle of the theory” (ÖpM 570/328). I take the reference to be to Feuerbach’s insistence on shared, not individual, perceptions as the criterion of truth (G §42, 324/59). • Marx repeats Feuerbach’s tendency to confront philosophical abstractions with features of daily life. For instance, against the mental positing of the idealist tradition Marx invokes the “real, corporeal human being, standing on the solid, round earth” (ÖpM 577/336; see also ÖpM 587/345). Here are the substantive similarities: • Like Feuerbach, Marx claims that the Hegelian tradition wrongly begins with a conception of the person as an abstract thinking being, divorced from the natural world (ÖpM 571–2/330–31). • Like Feuerbach, Marx claims that philosophy, as an activity, is divorced from humanity’s genuine life. He endorses what he calls Feuerbach’s “proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the alienation of human nature; hence equally to be condemned” (ÖpM 569/328; see also ÖpM 572/331). • Like Feuerbach, Marx thinks that many traditional philosophical an-


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titheses can be overcome by nonphilosophical means. Just as Feuerbach had appealed to “the human being who is and knows itself to be the actual (not imaginary) absolute identity of all contraries and contradictions” (VT 259–60/168), Marx declares true communism to be “the genuine solution to the conflict between human being and nature and between human being and human being—the true solution to the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution” (ÖpM 536/296–97). Here are substantive differences between the writers: • One central belief that Feuerbach attacks is the belief in the existence of a certain entity (God). Marx’s claims are about the importance to be attributed to certain features of an entity (the human species) whose existence is not in doubt. (On the other hand, Feuerbach’s insistence on the importance of the obvious fact that we are human has a parallel in Marx’s insistence on the importance of the obvious fact that human beings work on the world. Moreover, Marx shares Feuerbach’s stress on the importance of being human.) • For Feuerbach, species capacities such as omniscience are alienated from the species. For Marx, a species capacity, labor, is alienated. However, the nature of the alienation is different. To say that God is omniscient is, for Feuerbach, to attribute the property “omniscience” to the wrong agent. Feuerbachian alienation is an attribution mistake. To say that labor is alienated is not, for Marx, to attribute the capacity to labor to the wrong agent. It is to say a variety of things about what has gone wrong with both the exercise of that capacity and with workers’ relationships to it. Here is a methodological difference: • For the “social relationship of ‘human being to human being’ [to be] the basic principle of the theory” means more for Marx than for Feuerbach. As with Feuerbach, it involves common testimony to identical perceptions. For Marx, however, it also involves common participation in the transformation of nature in the labor process. Marx’s view of philosophy can be developed further: 1. Marx believes that Hegelian philosophy takes our daily immersion in the natural world to be intrinsically problematic. In that immersion it sees the suppression of the essential nature of human beings, namely,

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our nature as thinking beings. The Hegelian philosopher, Marx says, “takes himself as the measure of the alienated world” (ÖpM 572/331). The philosopher thinks that his own activity, the activity of pure thinking, is the standard to which human activity generally ought to aspire. Labor on nature (that is, necessary labor) is then a problem not because it currently exists in an alienated form, but because it immerses the human being in the natural world. Such immersion, Marx says, is what Hegel considers alienation: “It is not that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the alienation and the thing to be superseded” (ÖpM 572/331). For Marx, our essential activity as human beings intrinsically involves immersion in the natural world. He thinks Hegelian philosophy’s conception of human nature is wrong. 2. Marx believes that, under capitalism, we are in fact alienated from the natural world. The daily exercise of the human self-realization activity (labor on nature) is not (and could not be) experienced as the exercise of the human self-realization activity. According to Hegelian philosophy, however, labor on nature is not the objectification of essential human powers. So Hegelian philosophy finds nothing problematic about the current form that the human self-realization activity takes. If one holds the philosopher’s conception of human nature, one will not see current forms of human economic interaction as alienated forms of such interaction (AM 217–18/451–52; ÖpM 574–75/333). 3. As an activity, philosophy, Hegelian or otherwise, is clearly separate from labor on nature. Yet mathematics is equally so, and Marx grinds no ax against it. So what bothers Marx about philosophy is probably not the fact that it is mental rather than physical labor. Nor is it likely to be the fact that philosophy focuses on abstractions, e.g., “being,” for the objects of mathematics are equally abstract. I think what bothers Marx about philosophy is that it occurs at all, he believes, only because we live under conditions in which certain questions need to be cast in abstract terms. Take the “abstract enmity between sense and spirit.” The question of their relation and priority relative to each other is only “necessary,” Marx says, “so long as the human sense [Sinn] for nature, the human sense [Sinn] of nature, and therefore also the natural sense [Sinn] of the human being, are not yet produced by the human being’s own labor” (ÖpM 552–53/312). Presumably, they would be so produced under communism, and therefore,


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presumably, the “abstract enmity” would disappear, which I take to mean that the issue would no longer be an issue for abstract investigation—whereas mathematics will presumably always be an area for abstract investigation. According to such an account, philosophical questions as questions to be answered by abstract thought only arise because of the alienated conditions of our lives. Under communism, “subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and passivity [would] lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence as such antitheses” (ÖpM 542/302). Marx thinks that they would then not need answers of the kind that philosophers give. Feuerbach distinguishes between “a philosophical need” and “a need of humanity” (NR 215/145). For Marx, traditional philosophical questions correspond to a need of humanity only under certain conditions. Change those conditions and the need would be gone. In terms of the categories of philosophical response (see Chapter 2, §2), certain questions—as abstract questions— would not be taken seriously. To see how this works, we can look at Marx’s discussion of the creation. Feuerbach treats that issue as a category mistake. The questioner asks for an answer on the model of a natural cause but stipulates that the cause cannot be a natural one. For Feuerbach, however, all causes are natural causes: to ask for a nonnatural causal explanation is to talk nonsense. Marx, too, thinks the question of the creation is self-defeating, but for a different reason: Who created the first human being, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a point of view to which I cannot reply, because it is a distorted one. Ask yourself whether that progression as such [back to the first creator] exists for rational thought. When you ask about the creation of nature and human beings, you thus abstract from human beings and nature. You posit them as nonexistent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question (ÖpM 545/305). Marx’s point here is hardly original. It would not be news to anyone demanding an explanation of the creation to be told that asking the

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question means abstracting from daily life. Marx goes on: “Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of human beings and nature as nonexistent, then think of yourself as nonexistent, for you too are surely nature and a human being. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and human beings has no meaning” (ÖpM 545/305). To ask about the creation, one must take a standpoint outside one’s immersion in the natural world, outside all causal chains (ÖpM 545/305). And then what has become of the questioner, who is surely a part of the natural world? This has the air of a half-clever undergraduate. Take seriously your step-by-step challenge of each causal explanation, Professor, and you don’t exist and you couldn’t even ask your question. “Or,” Marx finishes, “are you such an egoist that you posit everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?” (ÖpM 545/305). Two things keep this from being sophomoric. First, Marx himself lets the interlocutor give the proper comeback: “You can reply: I do not want to posit the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.” (ÖpM 546/305). Second, and far more interesting, Marx himself gives an account of the creation. The proper account, Marx says, would be visible to socialist workers in their daily work: [F]or a socialist human being the entire so-called world history is nothing but the creation of human beings through human labor, nothing but the development of nature for human beings, so he has the visible incontrovertible proof [unwiderstehlichen Beweis] of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the essential reality of human beings and nature . . . has become evident in practice, sensuously perceptible [sinnlich anschaubar] the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and human beings—a question which implies the admission of the unreality [Unwesentlichkeit] of nature and of human beings—has become impossible in practice. (ÖpM 546/305–306) This is a remarkable passage. Under communism (socialism in this passage) practical life would ultimately be the “incontrovertible proof” that humanity continually creates itself and the world it inhabits by


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the continual transformation of itself and nature (see ÖpM 542– 43/302–303). Marx cannot mean that this process creates nature and humanity literally ex nihilo. At most, labor shapes nature. The material world is already there. Nor can he mean that under communism individuals could not abstract from their immersion in the transformation of nature and ask about the status of nature as a whole. I take his point to be that the question would lose its bite. It would no longer be taken seriously. One would not feel a need to ask a global question on that model (e.g., What is the cause of everything?). The daily development of humanity and nature before one’s eyes in the work process would forestall it. In reading Marx, here I am attributing to him both a sociological hypothesis and a diagnostic philosophical thesis. The sociological hypothesis is that, under changed social conditions, certain things—for instance, people asking about the creation—would not occur. The diagnostic thesis is that to ask certain kinds of abstract questions, one must detach oneself from one’s daily work activities and one’s ties to one’s fellow workers; one must regard the world as distinct from one’s own and one’s fellow workers’ activities. The reason one asks the questions from such a detached standpoint is that one believes doing so is the way to get to some deeper truth, a truth not accessible through ordinary practical activity. For Marx, this is the false step. Note that Marx is not being deflationary here. He is not denying that traditional philosophical issues are important. He is denying that they are properly to be answered through abstract theory. It is only as abstract that they are unimportant. Real solutions to philosophical problems, Marx says, are “only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of human beings. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one” (ÖpM 542/302). The “practical way” is, of course, the creation of a true communist society. There are two ways that this might be thought to be a solution. First, the creation of a true communist society might be thought of as a successful experiment confirming Marx’s sociological hypothesis. An external observer could see that communist workers do regard labor as an inner need, do regard (substantial parts of) the external world as

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their product, and do identify strongly with the human species. She could also see that certain abstract questions are simply never asked. The external observer, however, could not confirm that communist workers in fact see the nature of the world and of human life correctly. She could not confirm that, in believing labor to be a genuine inner need, individuals are now not laboring under any illusion. The external observer could confirm that communist workers are in many ways different from capitalist workers, but she could not confirm that the difference is that communist workers have realized their (human) nature. No such worry arises for the second reading of the “practical way.” Here the standpoint is that of communist workers. On this reading, communist workers would see things differently because their practical lives would be different. Marx famously says of communist society that in it “[t]he senses have . . . become theorists directly in their practice” (ÖpM 540/300). And, as noted above, he claims that the “essential reality of human beings and nature . . . has become evident in practice, sensuously perceptible” (ÖpM 546/305). These are Marx’s version of Feuerbach’s claim that the senses can be the organs of philosophy (AP 145/137). The idea is that communist daily life would have a resonance different from current daily life. Somehow the answers to philosophical questions would be so woven into communist daily life that there would be no need (no “need of humanity”) to ask these questions in their abstract form. Even under capitalism, “the question about a being above nature and human beings” is “impossible in practice” in the sense that asking the question requires stepping back from one’s ordinary activities. Marx’s idea seems to be that, under communism, one’s daily experience of the human interaction with nature would genuinely answer the question of the creation. It is not that one would see the logical flaw in asking the question. That would be a deflationary move. Rather, I take Marx to think that the fully satisfactory answer to the question would be given in one’s daily experience: that experience would adequately scratch the metaphysical itch. In another famous line, Marx says that the “[f]orming [Bildung] of the five senses is a labor of the entire previous world history” (ÖpM 541–42/302). This could mean merely that our sense capacities develop only with the opportunity to exercise them under proper conditions (ÖpM 542/302; see also ÖpM 541/301). This is straightforward


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enough, and something I take Marx to be asserting. But I think that Marx is also asserting something stronger, namely, that our senses interpret the world differently in different eras (a claim Feuerbach makes many times). “The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshiper,” Marx says, “is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different.” This example, he says, shows how far “the solution to theoretical riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice” (ÖpM 552/312). The general point of the example is that our senses have always been directly theorists in practice. The fetish worshiper interprets a particular bit of metal or wood as having powers not usually associated with metal or wood. To say that she interprets it that way is to say that she sees it as having such powers. The ancient Greek interprets such things differently. We currently interpret them in a third way, as simply “sensuous, alien, useful objects” (ÖpM 543/302), as independent things out there. Under communism, they would be interpreted yet differently, as “the objectified essential powers of human beings” (ÖpM 543/302). Apparently, under communism individuals would be as different from us as we are from fetish worshipers. They would literally see the world differently. As a consequence, certain kinds of questions would no longer be felt to need abstract answers. Like Feuerbach, Marx is dismissing philosophical questions as abstract questions, yet saying that transformed human beings would have knowledge, as Feuerbach puts it, “of what is” (VT 251/162). Under communism, the goals of philosophy would be realized literally in practice. Individuals there would see no need for a distinct theoretical justification of the claim that the way they now regard themselves and the world is correct. They would see no need for a distinct theoretical justification of (among other things) their conceptions of human nature and the human self-realization activity. And as with Feuerbach, this may seem superficial. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx knows this. As we will see in the next section, Marx knows that his diagnosis of philosophy is unlikely to seem convincing.

5. The Problem of the Present In the end, Marx has three reasons for not wanting to appeal to philosophical theory to justify the claim that labor is the human self-realiza-

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tion activity. First, as a psychological matter, those who see an abstract standpoint as the way to the deepest truths about human beings are unlikely to conclude that labor is the human self-realization activity: if one believes that truth comes via abstract reflection, one is unlikely to believe that the essential human activity is fundamentally at odds with such reflection. Second, were one nevertheless to do so, one’s belief would likely be of the wrong kind. The philosopher’s conviction is likely to be merely cerebral. She need not see her daily world differently. A person could be argued into belief in God’s existence yet not see, in Jonathan Edwards’s words, an “appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.”13 When Marx talks of the senses as theorists, his picture is of one’s convictions permeating one’s daily life (as with the exhaustive conviction that Feuerbach attributes to the genuine religious believer). The philosopher’s belief could be of this kind, but it seems highly unlikely. Transformation—the agent’s conversion to seeing things as Marx wants—might come from engaging in the relevant activity under the right conditions, but, as with Pascal’s argument for faith, accepting a philosophical theory is likely to be only the prelude to such activity. At most, it might get one to take the first step. But it is subsequent steps—one’s engagement in the relevant activity under the right conditions—not merely accepting the theory that will transform one. And of course, with respect to the human self-realization activity, under capitalism the right conditions are lacking. In any event, for Marx, philosophical theory suffers from a third and overriding defect. Pascal thought his argument for taking the first step toward faith was sufficient to generate rational conviction. Given Marx’s beliefs, no abstract argument that labor is the human self-realization activity could be sufficient to generate rational conviction. For Marx thinks that, as a way of finding the truth about such issues, abstract thought is inferior to what the senses—that is, daily life—can tell us. With respect to such issues, abstract arguments should not make one doubt appearances. The point of Feuerbach’s anti-Cartesianism— a part of Feuerbach Marx endorses—is that appearances are reliable. Philosophical argument A might have as its conclusion that labor is the human self-realization activity, but as long as labor does not seem to be the human self-realization activity, Marx would have to say that A has not provided a good enough reason to believe that labor is the human


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self-realization activity. Only the way the world looks can do that. But Marx says that the way the world looks under capitalism does not show labor to be the human self-realization activity. On the contrary, it shows labor as something to be shunned. So we come again to the problem of how Marx might justify his claims about self-realization. In fact, there are two issues, and they apply to a number of Marx’s claims. On the one hand, according to Marx, under capitalism some of his claims will seem implausible, perhaps especially so to workers. There is, then, the issue of whether, from within his own account, he has the resources to overcome this acknowledged apparent implausibility. On the other hand, his claims could be assessed on independent grounds. Some may seem implausible to us—that is, to his present readers. There is, then, the issue of whether our worries can be addressed, either from within Marx’s account or by adding to (or subtracting from) it. If present readers live in a capitalist society and one accepts (at least some of) Marx’s claims about capitalism, then these issues overlap. Still, there is a difference between the question of what, on his own premises, Marx can defend, and the question of what can be defended. Let us start with the first, the internal question. In Chapter 2 I noted that Feuerbach’s optimism about the present forestalled a potential problem arising from his reliance on perception. Marx’s pessimism about the present prompts that problem. Marx cannot be consistently committed to the claims (a) labor is the human self-realization activity, (b) reliable knowledge (including about such things as the human selfrealization activity) comes via the appearances of daily social life, and (c) in daily social life labor does not appear to be the human self-realization activity. I should stress that it follows from Marx’s own account that some of his claims will seem, under capitalism, implausible to both worker and nonworker. The nonworker will not see labor—what the worker does—as the human self-realization activity, nor would it be rational for the nonworker to identify with the species or to see the world as (in large part) his product. Still, given the worker’s life experience, some of Marx’s claims (e.g., labor is the human self-realization activity) will probably seem especially implausible to her. At issue is not the motivation to revolt. Knowing that labor is the human self-realization activity and seeing its distortion under capital-

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ism might be a reason (for worker or nonworker) to revolt. Nevertheless, at issue here is something else: whether, without inconsistency, and from within a capitalist society, there are reasons Marx can give, and in particular give to the worker, to accept some of his central claims—despite his own assertion of their apparent implausibility. At one point, in some remarks on the issue of the creation, Marx acknowledges the general structure of the problem. He says, A being only considers himself self-standing [selbständiges] when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A human being who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life, if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a ground outside itself, when it is not my own creation. The creation is therefore a conception very difficult to drive from popular consciousness [Volksbewußtsein]. That nature and human beings exist through themselves [das Durchsichselbstsein der Natur und des Menschen] is incomprehensible [unbegreiflich] to it, because it contradicts everything tangible [allen Handgreiflichkeiten] in practical life. (ÖpM 544–45/304) There is a good deal going on in this passage. I want to focus on Marx’s stress on what is tangible (literally: “something graspable with your hand”) as the criterion of proof. According to him, what is tangible under capitalism is a world that does not exhibit the fact that “nature and human beings exist through themselves,” the fact that human beings have formed and are constantly forming (large parts of) the world of their daily lives. Or, rather, this is exhibited as a trivial rather than a crucial fact about humanity and the world. Such formative activity is not exhibited as the objectification of essential human powers. And so the idea of the creation is “difficult to drive from popular consciousness.” For Marx, the world and one’s activities in it are supposed to be interpreted in a certain way. That interpretation is supposed to be selfcertifying in the sense that it is supposed to be directly confirmed by one’s senses. Under capitalism, however, individuals do not interpret


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the world in the proper way. And their incorrect interpretation itself seems self-certifying. So, for Marx, it is natural for individuals under capitalism to wonder about the initial creation of the world. To them, “the entire so-called world history” is not “nothing but the creation of human beings through human labor, nothing but the development of nature for human beings.” To them, this is not “the essential reality of human beings and nature.” Under capitalism, one’s life does not seem to be one’s own creation. So, Marx thinks, it is natural to posit a source outside it and to wonder about that source, that is, to wonder about the creation. The problem is that Marx seems to have no resources to show that such wonder is, at bottom, unnatural. (Marx’s diagnosis is thus of the kind that in Chapter 2 I called a self-undermining diagnosis, and it has the problem I noted as characteristic of that type of diagnosis.) Marx wants to give roughly the same sort of diagnosis of all philosophical questions, so the problem here cuts broadly. It stems from the (in Marx’s view) misleading condition of the present combined with the fact that Marx’s diagnoses cannot have an impact on the diseases diagnosed. His diagnoses attribute the apparent importance of certain questions to social conditions, but accepting the diagnosis does not change those conditions; and since Marx rejects the attempt to answer those questions via philosophical theory, the questions will continue to appear both unanswered and important. Feuerbach thinks it easy to shift his reader’s way of being oriented to the world because he thinks it already shifted. He thinks that, in practical life, people already live the account he propounds. Marx’s claim is that they deeply do not. Let’s look briefly now at Marx’s account of the creation from outside his view; let’s assess that account on independent grounds. Marx believes that under different social conditions “the essential reality of human beings and nature” would be so “evident in practice” that a full-fledged answer to the question of the creation would be absorbed by nontheoretical means. This is hard to accept. According to Marx, under communism one would recognize (a) that the world and human beings are thoroughly natural phenomena; (b) that they are not static, pregiven entities but have been and are still developing; and (c) that human beings are self-creators in the sense of being continually self-shaping. Such claims are certainly comprehensi-

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ble. They might even be successful as deflationary (e.g., creation is not creation of “the All”; it is creation of particular things: if you want to know how the world was formed, ask the scientists; if you want to know how human beings have been formed, ask the scientists and the historians). For Marx, however, such claims are supposed to be more than deflationary. It is, I think, difficult—certainly at present—to see them that way. Marx’s account hardly seems a fully satisfactory answer to the question of the creation. There are similar problems with other of Marx’s claims, but I do not have the space to go into them. I can only note that the problem of his claims’ plausibility (in the present) is foreseen by Marx’s diagnosis, at least with respect to readers living in capitalist societies. It follows from his diagnosis that if what he says is true, it will seem unsatisfactory and perhaps even arbitrary. But of course that does not make the account more compelling. Marx might claim that the objector is merely bothered by the fact that in addressing certain questions he does not appeal to a standpoint abstracted from daily life. He might say that the objector doesn’t realize that under different social conditions there would be no impulse to do so.14 And Marx might be right. Still, again, right now, this is unsatisfactory. There is a class of theories with this structure. So far as the later Heidegger’s views have a structure, it may be of this kind. Certain religious views may have this structure as well.15 Unlike a Heideggerian or religious view, however, there is no Marxist hermeneutic circle to enter or leap of faith to take. If the problem is a hermeneutic one, the circle to be entered lies on the far side of the revolution.16 In 1843, Marx says that the goal of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher is to enable the age to attain “self-clarification . . . of its struggles and wishes. . . It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to be forgiven for its sins, humanity need only declare them for what they are” (Br 346/145). A year later, as a result of his 1844 account of capitalism, Marx has a problem about how to justify his declaration of what humanity’s sins in fact are. Perhaps one could find resources to buttress Marx’s claims, even if these were resources (e.g., a philosophical theory) that he would disdain. I am not saying that Marx’s claims are indefensible, only that they need much more defense than he has offered.


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Other commentators have read Marx’s 1844 views about the creation somewhat differently. Allen Wood reads Marx’s “claims that ‘man and nature’ are ‘essential’ or ‘have their being through themselves’ . . . [as involving] the thesis that the natural world does not exist contingently, but is in some sense self-existent or metaphysically necessary.”17 Wood sees a Hegelian element in Marx’s assertion that the being “which exists ‘essentially’ or ‘through itself’” includes “man,” although, Wood says, “Marx places the emphasis not on people’s theoretical comprehension of the world but on their practical shaping of it to human purposes.” Wood tries to handle the implausible role for “man” here by calling Marx’s language “highly metaphorical and hyperbolical.” In a similar way, John Plamenatz says that “the ‘humanizing of nature’ is not literally making nature human, though Marx sometimes speaks as if it were; it is rather man’s coming to feel at home in a natural world which he understands intellectually and appreciates aesthetically and in which he is active in ways that satisfy him.”18 Both Wood and Plamenatz try to water down Marx’s claims, try to turn them into relatively plausible claims about the proper psychological or intellectual or aesthetic relationship of human beings to the natural world. I agree with what Wood and Plamenatz say about Marx’s views on those relationships, and I agree that Marx is not to be taken as asserting as a basic philosophical thesis that nature does not exist apart from the human activity of shaping it. On my reading, though, the stress is on Marx’s view of the proper way to justify the claim that human beings and nature exist “through themselves” (ÖpM 545/304). I read him as like Feuerbach in making assertions that sound like conventional philosophical theses but that are not supposed to be understood as abstract claims to be defended by abstract means. Wood actually seems to be making a similar point when he says, “Once the ‘essentiality’ of man and nature has penetrated practical consciousness, we can raise the old cosmological questions only by turning away from this consciousness, by ‘abstracting’ ourselves from it. Marx thus insists that these questions must disappear as soon as the abstraction is given up.”19 My objection is, first, that Wood does not distinguish between giving up the abstract question and seeing it as answered by other nonabstract (i.e., practical) means, and, second, elsewhere Wood continues to hold that Marx asserts the thesis that the world’s existence is “metaphysically necessary.”20 In effect, Wood attrib-

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utes to Marx both a conventional philosophical position and a rejection of such positions. I think Marx’s claim that philosophical problems can be solved in practice is actually an attempt—as with Feuerbach—somehow really to solve those problems (to provide fully satisfactory answers to them) while doing without philosophical positions. Marx’s texts here are fragmentary and obscure, and it would be silly to claim that a developed and consistent methodology is operating throughout. There are places where the best reading probably is that Marx is making some kind of (usually not very good) conventional argument; and when he is not making a conventional argument, just what kind of unconventional argument he is making may be difficult to disentangle. So perhaps my difference from Wood ought not to be pressed too far. Still, as with Feuerbach, I think that it obscures the thrust of Marx’s project to see him as engaged in any significant way in the usual kind of philosophical argument.21 To summarize. In his rejection of philosophy both as a way to understand such things as human nature (including the human self-realization activity) or the nature of reality or, as we have seen, the issue of the creation, and as a stance toward the world, the 1844 Marx is very much like (and clearly deeply influenced by) Feuerbach. Moreover, he wants to invoke the self-certifying aspect of the Feuerbachian shift of one’s stance away from that of abstract thought. He wants it to be obvious in daily life that one’s new stance is correct and that what one sees from it (e.g., that labor is humanity’s self-realization activity) is the way that things really are. He wants there to be no need for further justification. The problem is that, on Marx’s account, the condition for a shift à la Feuerbach is that one live in a communist society. But then the selfcertifying element seems currently out of reach. So some other form of certification—that is, of justification of Marx’s views—seems needed. Given the content of Marx’s claims and Marx’s strictures on philosophy, however, there seems no form of justification that would both be appropriate to the task at hand and that Marx could endorse without inconsistency. Three things should be noted here. First, I may seem simply to have foisted on the 1844 Marx an issue that he would disdain. It is, after all, precisely the kind of issue that philosophers like to bother themselves with, and in fact it seems likely to lead to just that quagmire of abstrac-


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tion that Marx condemns and contemns. My point is that he should not disdain the issue. It is one thing to reject the whole question of the justification of claim C either if C seems quite plausible or if an effective justification, at least in one’s own eyes, of C is, on one’s premises, available. It is another thing to do so when, on one’s premises, C seems implausible and, again on one’s premises, no such alternative is currently to be had. Second, as I noted in the Introduction, if Marx’s empirical claims about capitalism are true, little in the way of a normative account is needed to condemn it. Any moral view would condemn such things as widespread and unnecessary poverty, or excessive, unhealthy labor that stunts most human capacities.22 The 1844 Marx’s justificatory problem has no impact on the claim that capitalism produces these ills. However, the 1844 Marx is committed to the view that even a capitalism that eliminated these ills would still isolate the worker from “life itself . . . human activity, human enjoyment, human nature” (KR 408/205). That is a claim Marx seems not in a position to justify. Third, Marx says, “If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion” (ÖpM 581/339). With the alienation specifically of labor, however, I cannot have “my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its nature, confirmed” in annihilated and superseded private property until private property is annihilated and superseded. At one point, though, Marx seems to suggest that existing workers’ organizations can provide something like an anticipation of that condition: When communist workmen associate with one another, doctrine, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need, the need for society, and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of connection or means that bring them together. Society, association, and conversation, which again has society [Gesellschaft] as its end, are enough for them; the broth-

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erhood of man [die Brüderlichkeit der Menschen] is no phrase but truth with them, and the nobility of humanity shines upon us from their work-hardened forms. (ÖpM 553–54/313) In such organizations, social interaction becomes an end, not a means. The problematic aspects of human relationships under capitalism are overcome. The worker’s initial end in joining is his own material advancement, but this context elicits new needs and so new ends. And “the nobility of humanity shines upon us from their work-hardened forms.” The purple prose here is not boilerplate. I think that Marx is asserting that something approaching unalienated human relationships has been attained. In the next chapter I use the Theses on Feuerbach to look at the idea that participation in workers’ and especially in revolutionary workers’ organizations—more generally, that something called “practice”—can provide a way to deal with the justificatory problem of Marx’s 1844 view.

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7 The Theses on Feuerbach

Th e s t o ry s o fa r has taken us from Feuerbach’s critique

of Christianity to Marx’s 1844 critique of capitalism. Key to the story has been that justifying certain claims—for instance, that there is no god distinct from and creator of the world and humanity, or that self-realization involves a particular kind of activity—comes not through abstract argument but through the proper stance toward the world. I have argued that this creates a problem for the 1844 Marx. In this chapter I look at the Theses on Feuerbach to see if the 1844 remarks on French workers’ associations can be developed into a solution to that problem. My further reason for generating yet another interpretation of the Theses (the volume of commentary on this text is an ironic comment on its eleventh thesis) is that it has been the locus classicus of an influential interpretation of Marx. The roots of that interpretation are in Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, and the interpretation has been articulated in different forms by Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kolakowski, Shlomo Avineri, Jean-Yves Calvez, Alfred Schmidt, and others.1 Distinctive of this interpretation in its various forms is the role accorded to labor or activity (or sometimes “praxis”). Roughly, the idea is that labor (or activity or praxis) is how human beings latch onto the world. An external world altogether distinct from human labor (activity, practice) is held to be opaque in principle, something to which no content can be given. Writers who subscribe to this reading see Marx as continuing the 227

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epistemological concerns of German Idealism. Indeed, many commentators, of various interpretive persuasions, have seen Marx as attempting to handle the problem, descended from Kant, of accounting for the objectivity of the objects of our experience. This is a mistake. In the 1844 idea that under capitalism workers are alienated from the sensuous external world, the claim was implicit that human beings have what I call a fundamental relation to the world (one from which, under capitalism, they are alienated), but Marx’s 1844 view had nothing like an account, explicit or implicit, of the objectivity of the objects of our experience. Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx think that issue doesn’t need to be addressed. And the view I attribute to Marx in this chapter concerns the agent’s stance toward the world in daily life, not how the world is transcendentally constituted. Overall, I argue that a particular view of the fundamental relation and what I call the fundamental orientation to the world is the main focus of the Theses. I also argue that this reading of the Theses comes close to giving Marx a way to handle the problem from Chapter 6. In the end, construing the Theses as focused on our fundamental relation and orientation to the world generates a new version of the old problem. But it gives Marx a good run for his money. In his work of 1844, Marx praises Feuerbach; in the Theses he attacks him. This has led many commentators to group the Theses with The German Ideology as part of a post-1844 change in Marx’s views. Other commentators see the Theses as generally continuous with the work of 1844. I think the balance of evidence shows no deep break between 1844 and the Theses. However, the issue of a post-1844 change is not profitably discussed by reference to a text as sketchy as the Theses. It is more usefully looked at in the context of an examination of The German Ideology. For my discussion of this issue, see Chapter 9, §4.

1. Fundamental Relations/Orientations In this section I introduce some categories to give more precision to the idea of a stance toward the world.2 Now, there can be pros and cons to introducing technical terms. The pro is that they provide at least a surface clarity. The con is that the phenomena in question may be sufficiently amorphous and the technical terms sufficiently abstract that the clarity is merely superficial. One does not have a proper feel for

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what the technical terms refer to, and in the end the terms come to hide more than to illuminate the phenomena. I have delayed introducing the terms I present here both because until now I could say what I wanted to say without them, and because I think that this is a danger with the phenomena at issue. My hope has been that, by looking at different texts and by discussing such things as Feuerbach’s goal of secularizing his reader and the 1844 Marx’s focus on how one relates to the fact that so much of the world is the product of human labor, the phenomena would become sufficiently familiar that when technical terms were introduced they would clarify rather than obscure. The categories I introduce are obviously not those of Marx himself. They are introduced as tools to explain what is going on in the Theses. As I say, they should not seem unfamiliar. They have been implicit, at moments pretty much explicit, throughout the earlier chapters.3 At times in subsequent chapters I will use these categories to refer back to themes examined in the first six chapters. Let’s start with the category the fundamental relation to the world. To talk of an agent’s relation to the world is to talk of the kind of connection an agent has to the world. One could imagine many such connections. The agent-world relation could be that of knowing subject to known object, of recipient of impressions of various kinds, of experiencer of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings, and so on. Each of these picks out, vaguely enough, a way an agent might be hooked up with the world. I call a relation to the world fundamental if it is the agent’s most basic, her essential relation to the world. One’s fundamental relation to the world is the most basic relation to the world one has qua human being, the relation to the world essential to one’s nature specifically as a human being. The claim that human beings have some fundamental relation R to the world is thus a claim in philosophical anthropology. The general category of the fundamental relation to the world is supposed to be neutral among competing accounts of such a relation. And that means that the notion of “the world” must be left ambiguous, for how one construes it may determine how one construes the fundamental relation to the world. For some writers, the notion of “the world” might be quite straightforward (the world is simply a very big object); for others, it might be very subtle (see Heidegger’s Being and Time); for still others, it might be ultimately incoherent. The category I

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am introducing is supposed to be sufficiently abstract that it situates debates among these positions without itself leaning in any direction. We should add now another category, that of the fundamental relation to other human beings. This category is less important for my exegetical concerns, so I will be brief. Clearly, we are always related to others in various ways: as friends, relatives, fellow citizens, etc. As before, to call a particular relation the fundamental relation is to say that it is the relation—here to other human beings generally—essential to one’s nature specifically as a human being. (In this case, one’s humanity might also play a second role, for it is often said that one way we are related to others is simply as human beings. For Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, our fundamental relation to others is just as members of the human species under the particular description of the human each writer gives.) The idea of a fundamental relation to others is the idea that there is some central way (some basic description under which) we are, qua human beings, connected to other people. It could be the case that agents have a particular fundamental relation R to the world (or others) but do not know this about themselves. Presumably, Christians believe that agents to whom the Christian Gospel has never come have a particular fundamental relation to the world (for example, agents are ensouled in a body whose destiny is of a certain kind) of which these agents are ignorant. Even more important for our purposes, agents can have such a relation without living it. That is, as a matter of philosophical anthropology, one’s fundamental relation to the world could be R, and yet the way one relates to the world in one’s daily life could be S. This should not be surprising. How one relates to the world is a psychological matter (in a broad sense); how one is related to the world is not. To keep the terminology clear, I call the way that one relates to (as distinct from being related to) the world (or others) the way that one is oriented to the world (or others). That gives us two new categories: the fundamental orientation to the world and the fundamental orientation to others.4 How one is fundamentally related to the world does not always match up with how one is fundamentally oriented to the world. Social roles show clearly that in general there can be a difference between how one is related and how one is oriented to something or someone. I am someone’s son, brother, and so on. I am related to other people in

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particular ways. I might not know this, however, and even if I know it I might not be oriented to the relevant individuals as son, brother, and so on. To return to the earlier example, those to whom the Christian gospel has not come are not oriented to the world as Christians are, although Christians presumably believe that their fundamental relation to the world is the same. With social roles, what it is to be oriented to someone as a son, brother, and so on is, among other things, to behave in certain ways and to have certain beliefs and feelings. And to be oriented to the world as a Christian involves (at least) having certain beliefs. But sometimes what it is to be oriented to the world in a particular way is more nebulous. When in the dark I suddenly put my hand on a piece of metal that is surprisingly cold, I might momentarily have a sense not just of cold but of a kind of alien aspect to the object; I might have a sense of a profound separation between myself and the object. Suppose I were to have that sense generally about objects, to have it generally about the external world. My fundamental orientation to the world would involve this sense of alienness and separation. I would be oriented to the world as an alien place. As with the Christian decrying the pagan’s orientation, however, here, too, someone—for instance, the 1844 Marx—might argue that the sense of the world that I have belies my real relation to it. Marx might press hard on the fact that the object that I felt is the product of human labor; he might press that it is not in fact so separate and alien; and he might go on to press the extent to which this is true of the objects I deal with in general. Granting his claims, there would then be a difference between my fundamental relation to the world and my fundamental orientation to it. The idea that one’s fundamental orientation to the world is out of sync with one’s fundamental relation to it is the idea that one’s more or less constant way of seeing one’s connection to the world is out of sync with one’s real connection. The categories I make use of in explicating the Theses are those of the fundamental relation and fundamental orientation to the world. I should say a bit more about the latter. A fundamental orientation to the world might be thought of as a kind of attitude, for it is like an attitude in the sense that it involves a psychological stance. But it is not an attitude toward any particular object. If it is an attitude, it is one toward the world as a whole, as it were, toward everything. An analogy can be

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made to another condition that pervasively affects one’s daily experience, being in love. That involves an attitude toward one’s beloved. But beyond that, one’s way of going about one’s business in the world is also deeply affected by being in love, yet not (certainly not necessarily) in the sense that one has a new attitude toward anything in particular. One’s way of getting on is simply different. The case is similar with a fundamental orientation. The idea that one might be oriented in various ways toward the world, is, I think, fairly familiar. Somewhat less familiar but still not uncommon is the idea that there is a fundamental way in which human beings or at least human beings at a given time and place are oriented to the world, the idea of an orientation that is pervasive. It is sometimes said that the transition from pagan to Christian beliefs involved a change in how people saw the connection between themselves and the world. In 1852, in The Age of Constantine the Great, Jacob Burckhardt (himself a product of the same intellectual life as Marx and the Young Hegelians) wrote of the advent of Christianity: “The time was come for human beings to enter into a new relationship to sensuous [sinnlichen] as well as to supersensible [übersinnlichen ] things, for love of God and neighbor and separation from things earthly to take the place of older views of the gods and the world.”5 And the rise of modern science is sometimes said to have produced another change in the way that human beings relate to “sensuous as well as to supersensible things.” Feuerbach, Bauer, and the 1844 Marx differ over the content of the correct fundamental orientation to the world, but this sort of change— that is, yet another such change—is one of the things they are after.6 Some further clarity on the general idea of a fundamental orientation (to the world or to others) can be gained by a few comparisons and contrasts. • A particular fundamental orientation is undoubtedly connected to having particular beliefs, but it is not reducible to having those beliefs. Consider Derek’s Parfit’s remarks, in Reasons and Persons, on the change wrought by his conversion to a new account of personal identity: [Earlier] I seemed imprisoned, in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view [of personal identity], the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now

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live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. . . Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.7 Parfit’s philosophical belief has changed, and this has produced a change in his life. In the terms I am using, his fundamental orientation to others has changed. Conversely, a shift in one’s fundamental orientation might lead one to affirm or to reject philosophical propositions. The point is that there is a difference between the beliefs that Parfit holds and the way that Parfit lives. The latter is what a fundamental orientation concerns, whether it is to the world or to others.8 This example shows quite palpably that “fundamental relation” is the more theoretical and “fundamental orientation” the more practical of the two basic concepts I’ve introduced. An agent’s beliefs about her fundamental relation to others might change without her fundamental orientation changing. Parfit’s arguments might convince her, but her life might remain as it was. • A change in fundamental orientation might affect which actions one performs, but it also might not. Parfit’s transformation might have no external manifestations. A fundamental orientation is a practical notion but it is not necessarily geared toward action. • A fundamental orientation is not the same as a sensibility. No doubt people’s sensibilities differ, but different sensibilities are compatible with the same fundamental orientation. This is perhaps clearest with respect to orientations to others. Both a person with the sensibility of one of Henry James’s less pleasant but more subtle characters (say, Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl) and a person with a sensibility like that of Budd Schulberg’s transparently egoistic character Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run? could be fundamentally oriented to others as objects to be understood and manipulated for the agent’s own ends. The former would be more nuanced in her comprehension and manipulation, but the orientation would be the same. • A fundamental orientation might seem similar to a Weltanschauung. As the latter notion is infinitely protean, there is undoubtedly a way to make it match up with the idea of a fundamental orientation. But (a) a fundamental orientation is not merely a set of beliefs (as a Weltanschauung is sometimes taken to be), and (b) it is not a picture of how the

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world is from which one can stand back and then choose or refuse to adopt. Weber seems to subscribe to such voluntarism in “Science as a Vocation.” He emphasizes the role of science in clarifying the structure of any given Weltanschauung, but both denies that there is a fact of the matter about which to choose and seems to think that one can choose.9 A fundamental orientation cannot, however, simply be put on and off. One might know that over time certain actions will produce change in how one is oriented to the world (as Pascal thinks going through the motions will generate faith). And perhaps at any moment one can mentally take different standpoints, momentarily see the world differently. But one’s fundamental orientation goes beyond that. It has to do with how, day to day, one lives with respect to the world (or others), and presumably that is not a matter of choice. It should be remembered that Marx does not see himself as Hegel’s philosophical successor. I reconstruct his claims in terms of such concepts as “fundamental relation” and “fundamental orientation,” but it should be remembered that his own animus is practical (that will be precisely the thrust of my reading of the Theses). An analogy may be useful to the distinction between the moralist and the moral theorist. The former is concerned with changing human conduct, the latter with answering certain abstract questions, e.g., What are the referents of moral terms? What is the supreme principle of morality? The analogue to the moral theorist is the metaphysician, but we have no term for the metaphysical analogue to the moralist. Call her the metaphysical moralist. Like the regular moralist, the metaphysical moralist is concerned with the conduct of our lives. It is just that her focus is not particular actions, but our stance or what I have called our orientation. The idea is that one could be oriented to X as O, and that if one were, one’s life would be better, in the sense that it would now be in line with one’s nature (for example, the worker’s life would be in line with her nature if capitalism did not impose on her a distorted fundamental orientation to the world and to others—the distorted orientation is what the 1844 Marx calls “alienation”). The metaphysical moralist wants to understand our fundamental relation, but her deeper goal is to change our orientation. Now, the regular moralist needs at least one brand of moral theorist, the normative theorist. In principle, the latter shows that the former’s prescriptions are correct. Similarly, the metaphysical moralist seems to

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need the metaphysician. She needs to know what kinds of creatures human beings in fact are. She needs the metaphysician to show that our fundamental relation to the world (or others) has a particular content: being oriented that way would then be to live as our nature requires. Suppose, however, that the metaphysical moralist thinks that the activity of the metaphysician is itself suspect, involves precisely the wrong orientation, presupposes the wrong fundamental relation to the world. That is the case with Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx. The philosopher’s orientation—the taking of a standpoint from which an abstract justification of claims about one’s fundamental relation/orientation could be given—is just what they want to avoid. As a result, they certainly seem to hold metaphysical beliefs (e.g., beliefs about features essential to human nature), and yet they do not want those beliefs to be cast and assessed in the form in which such beliefs are usually cast and assessed. This is also the case with the Marx of the Theses. It is why the reading I give, although I think it a correct reading, is itself an instance of an enterprise that the Marx of the Theses would, on my reading, disdain. I have introduced these categories to help in the exegesis of a particular text (and developed them only to the extent necessary for that purpose). I take the Marx of the Theses to believe that human beings have a particular fundamental relation to the world. I think many philosophers have subscribed to this kind of claim (although attributing different contents to the fundamental relation). I strongly doubt, however, that human beings have any such thing. We probably have many relations to the world and to others, with different and changing degrees of priority. I strongly doubt that any has basic priority over the others, is fundamental in the sense I have used. I also doubt, then, that human beings have any fundamental orientation to the world or to others. Nevertheless, I think the idea that we can have different orientations to the world and to others points to important issues. The phenomena that the categories of orientation try to capture need not be tied to claims about fundamental relations. Moreover, they are not unknown to philosophers. They have tended, however, to be neglected in moral and especially in political philosophy. I think that is a mistake. Many issues here need investigation (for instance, the connection between being oriented to others in a certain

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way and having a certain kind of social identity). The point is that they are worth investigating. Even if we have no fundamental orientation, some orientations (to the world, to others, to social institutions) might be more important than others, and some might be better than others for a good human life, and the extent to which social institutions promote or inhibit one or another orientation might be grounds for significant praise or criticism. The focus of such categories is the nature of agents’ ordinary experience. To a considerable extent, that is a function of social institutions. It should be a topic for political thought. On now to the Theses.

2. Thesis Eleven Let us start the textual discussion at the end, with the famous Thesis Eleven: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (TF 7/5). What does Marx mean by the injunction to change as opposed to merely interpreting the world? There are a number of possible readings. • The injunction is to cease cerebration and to commence revolutionary action, to act spontaneously and without theoretical analysis or forethought. Aside from being an absurd doctrine, this seems unlikely to be that of a man who produced more than thirty volumes of theoretical work, more than twenty-five of them after 1845. • The injunction is to do something in addition to cerebrating, to act as well as to think. Seen as an attack, such an injunction would be sensible against an opponent who thought political change required only new ideas and not also concrete action. However, first, the Theses are theses against Feuerbach, and in Chapter 8 I argue that Feuerbach does not hold this view. Second, that view, too, is so untenable that even if Marx does attribute it to Feuerbach, I think we are licensed to search for something in Thesis Eleven that goes beyond it. Let us put aside the injunction as an attack. Then we have: • The injunction is to engage in an interaction of cerebration and concrete action. One needs a theoretical analysis to act effectively, but (a) one’s ultimate goal is practical change, not knowledge (the relevant analysis is analysis about how to change the world), and (b) one’s analysis is to be continually reassessed, refined, and perhaps altered in light

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of one’s practical experiences. Call this the feedback model of interaction with the world. • The injunction is against (a) the view that, for human beings, the fundamental relation to the world is that of an agent disengaged from the world and mentally grasping something external to and (as yet) unchanged by her, and against (b) the view that a correct understanding of the fundamental relation to the world is to be attained from the standpoint of the agent as described in (a). On the contrary, for human beings, the fundamental relation to the world is that of an agent continually changing and being changed by it, and a correct understanding of this fact is to be attained in and through the process of changing the world. In contrast to the feedback model, here correct understanding involves no three-step sequence of analysis, practical action, and reassessment in light of practical action. Rather, understanding inheres in one’s actions. There is no separate theoretical standpoint. In the phrase from 1844, the “[t]he senses have . . . become theorists directly in their practice” (ÖpM 540/300). Changing the world is the correct way to interpret it. Call this the simultaneity model of interaction with the world. Let us assume that only the feedback and the simultaneity models are live candidates for the type of interaction with the world that Marx is demanding. Some remarks in the Theses are compatible with both. For instance, Thesis Eight says, “All social life is essentially practical [praktisch]. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice [Praxis] and in the comprehension of this practice” (TF 7/5). The first sentence could mean that what is important to human beings are those activities that procure useful commodities, e.g., food and shelter (the feedback model), or that the fundamental relation to the world and to one another is practical (the simultaneity model). In a different way, the second sentence is also ambiguous between the two readings. Human practice and its comprehension are separated, thus favoring the feedback mode. However, the rational solution to all mysteries is not said to be the comprehension of human practice but apparently both the practice itself and the comprehension (the practice is part of the “rational solution”), thus favoring the simultaneity model. The sentence in the Theses that seems most to favor the feedback model is in Thesis Two: “The human being must prove the truth, i.e.,

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the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice” (TF 5/3). This suggests that split between idea and proof which is part of the feedback model. Here an interpretation of the world seems to precede and to be confirmed or refuted by attempting to change it. Evidence for the simultaneity model is in Theses One and Five. In Thesis One, Marx says, “The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or of perception [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, practice” (TF 5/3).10 What is said not to be conceived properly is “the thing, reality, sensuousness.” A failure properly to conceive this is not the concern of the feedback model. For that model, such a concern would count as “scholastic” (see Thesis Two, TF 5/3). Marx goes on to complain in Thesis One that in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach regards “only the theoretical attitude as the genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirtyJewish form of appearance” (TF 5/3). The feedback model has no place for a “genuinely human attitude.” For it, that, too, would count as a scholastic concern. That Marx cares about such matters—is concerned to point out Feuerbach’s mistake about “the thing, reality, sensuousness” and the “genuinely human attitude”—indicates a scope beyond what the feedback model can handle. For Marx, a practical rather than a theoretical attitude is the correct one. For the Feuerbach of The Essence, however, a practical attitude, Marx says, is that of agents who merely manipulate the world to satisfy their needs. The phrase “dirty-Jewish” refers to such a purely instrumental use of nature. Marx probably has in mind a passage from Feuerbach’s chapter on “The Significance of the Creation in Judaism”: The doctrine of the creation stems from Judaism. . . The principle which lies at its foundation is, however, not so much the principle of subjectivity as of egoism. The doctrine of the creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that standpoint where in practice the human being subordinates nature to his will and needs, and so in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will. . . To him who feels that nature is a beautiful being, to him it appears an end in itself [Zweck ihrer selbst], for him it has the ground of its existence in itself: in him the question, Why

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does it exist? does not arise. The concept of nature and of godhead does not differ in his consciousness, his perception [Anschauung] of the world. . . Thus does the human being think where his relation to the world is aesthetic or theoretic. . . Only there, where such a perception [Anschauung] animates human beings, can a thought be grasped and expressed like that of Anaxagoras: The human being is born to the contemplation [Anschauung] of the world. The standpoint of theory is the standpoint of harmony with the world. . . When, on the contrary, the human being places himself only on the practical standpoint and regards the world from there, making the practical standpoint itself the theoretical one, there he is divided from nature; there he makes nature the abject servant of his selfish interest, of his practical egoism. (WC 186–88/112–13) In the Manuscripts, Marx feels that, under communism, nature would appear to be an end in itself (see ÖpM 546/305–306). I take him to be saying in the Theses that this fact is not to be apprehended via Anschauung but via practical activity. Marx thinks that Feuerbach fails to see this because he understands activity or practice only in terms of an individual’s manipulation of nature to satisfy her selfish needs. Marx thinks that this egoistic attitude to nature is in fact the attitude of agents in civil society. Feuerbach has correctly seen that the dominant current practical attitude toward nature is problematic. But this is neither the only nor the genuinely human practical attitude. According to Marx, Feuerbach correctly grasps the significance of the Judeo-Christian “doctrine of the creation” and its instrumental orientation, but he “does not grasp the significance” of another kind of transformative interaction with the world: “‘revolutionary’ . . . ‘practical-critical,’ activity” (Thesis One; TF 5/3). The standpoint of such activity is the real standpoint of “harmony with the world.” Now, there are two elements to the practical attitude that Feuerbach condemns and that Marx associates with the stance of agents in civil society. There is the agents’ egoism (the needs they seek to satisfy are individual, not communal), and there is the agents’ manipulation of nature (nature becomes their servant). The feedback model concerns how to go about attaining a goal. As a model for the link of theory and practice, it is indifferent to whether the goals are egoistic or selfless, individual or communal. The simultaneity model is simply not goal-

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directed. Its focus is our fundamental relation to the world, not the achievement of any particular aim. The feedback model need not (though it can) be egoistic. The issue does not touch the simultaneity model. On the other hand, the feedback model’s focus on achieving particular aims makes it the proper model for manipulating nature. A merchant has a set of beliefs about what the market will bear. He acts on those beliefs, then reevaluates and acts again. A revolutionary has a set of beliefs about how successfully to create a revolution. She acts on those beliefs, then reevaluates and acts again. Feuerbach clearly objects to more than the egoism of the practical standpoint. His objection to what he identifies as the Jewish doctrine of the creation is not that God is conceived as egoistic, but that nature is pictured as subject to God’s command: “Nature or the world is made, created, a product of command . . . God commanded, Let the world be, and forthwith it presented itself on this command” (WC 188/113). If Marx, too, objects to such a command relation to nature, then it is hard to see how he can be endorsing the feedback model. In the work of 1844, Marx does object to the command relation (see ÖpM 537/298, 540/300). The reference in Thesis One to the “dirty-Jewish form of appearance” does not, however, indicate whether Marx is here aware that Feuerbach sees two distinct elements in that form of appearance. It does not show whether Marx objects here merely to egoism (not essential to the feedback model) or also to a picture of nature as humanity’s servant (essential to the feedback model). It is likely that he objects to both but, as with all the theses, this one is simply too sketchy to be sure. Thesis Five reads: “Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants perception [Anschauung], but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity” (TF 6/4). Marx’s concern here is with how we conceive sensuousness (die Sinnlichkeit). Human-sensuous activity is contrasted with both abstract thinking and perception, presumably with what Feuerbach calls “sensuous perception,” perception by the senses (Marx might be thinking of such Feuerbachian claims as that “[o]nly that thought which is determined and ratified by sensuous perception [sinnliche Anschauung] is real and objective thought—the thought of objective truth” [G §49, 330/64]).11 Abstract thinking and (sensuous) perception are both held to be problematic: the first because it never touches the real world and the second because it conceives itself

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as merely touched by the world. There is a lack of materiality to the first and a problematic passivity to the second. The issue here does seem to be our relation to the world. The feedback model either has no place for such an issue, or, if it implicitly takes a stand on the issue, seems committed to precisely the kind of materialism that Marx attacks, for the feedback model involves a passive stance toward the material world in that it sees that world as already there, fully formed and waiting to be manipulated. It understands “sensuousness” as the site of practical activity, as the field for its exercise. But Thesis Five wants us to conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity. This the feedback model cannot do. Thesis Ten also seems to favor the simultaneity model. It reads, “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity” (TF 7/5). Here Marx links two views about reality to two orientations: old materialism/civil society; new materialism/human society or social humanity. The orientation of civil society is that of an agent who sees the world as a set of objects to be manipulated to satisfy his individual needs. The orientation of social humanity is that of an agent to whom “nature appears as his work and his reality” (ÖpM 517/277). Given what is said in Thesis One, the old materialism is presumably the view that human beings are passive recipients of the impact of an external material world (see The Holy Family’s discussion of French materialism [HF 137–41/129–34]). One is formed by that world, and one can turn around and manipulate it (as agents in civil society do), but it remains out there and recalcitrant. Agent and world are essentially separated. They impinge on each other, but more or less as armies in conflict do. By contrast, with the new materialism, social humanity does not just manipulate an external datum but somehow recognizes the world around it as, in a sense, its own activity. The orientation of civil society is the orientation corresponding to the old materialism’s incorrect picture—basically that of the feedback model—of one’s relation to the world. The orientation of social humanity corresponds to the new materialism’s correct picture— that of the simultaneity model—of that relation. It should be clear that there is considerable ambiguity in the Theses. The feedback model is obviously the model for success in changing the world in the sense of manipulating it to satisfy one’s desires. Now the reason to endorse the feedback model could be either (a) to give an

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answer to the question of what, for human beings, the fundamental relation to the world is, or (b) to ignore that question, to stigmatize it as scholastic. The text is undeniably ambiguous, but I think the bulk of the evidence indicates that Marx rejects either reason for endorsing the feedback model. In several places he addresses questions that are utterly irrelevant to whether the plan to storm the Winter Palace is in fact going to work: he worries about “real, sensuous activity” (Thesis One), about “the genuinely human attitude” (Thesis One), and about “sensuousness” (Thesis Five). And if Marx is concerned with the correct model of our relation to the world, the model he favors in the Theses is not the feedback model, for he agrees with Feuerbach that such a model is pernicious. The text is slim and opaque. If one must construe the Theses one way or the other, however, the bulk of the evidence favors the simultaneity model.

3. Labor In 1844, Marx says that a communist lives in a world he has created, and even offers the idea that nature and human beings exist through themselves as the communist alternative to the Judeo-Christian account of the creation (ÖpM 545/304). The individual under communism, Marx says, “has the visible, incontrovertible proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis” (ÖpM 546/305). In 1844, the mechanism of this genesis is generally said to be human labor. The Theses are often read as involving a similar claim, and the simultaneity model is certainly in tune with it. But what exactly, then, is the extension of “labor” or, in the Theses, of “activity”? In this section I explore this question. I focus on “labor” even though that term plays no role in the Theses, for, as will quickly be clear, the difficulties in fixing what counts as “labor” would be even more pronounced with “activity.” These difficulties prompt, in the next section, my interpretation of the Theses. Clearly, the core enterprise Marx has in mind when he talks of labor is the immediate physical transformation of nature: felling trees, sowing grain, casting steel. But this would rule out mental activities, and that would be absurd. The engineer’s activity is as vital to the new bridge as the riveter’s. Labor might then be mental or physical activity that contributes to

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the immediate physical transformation of nature: drafting blueprints or using a jackhammer. In the Manuscripts, however, Marx refers to being “scientifically active,” where the context indicates that he thinks both that scientific activity need not be directed toward immediate practical results and that he sees such activity as a form of labor (ÖpM 538/298). Certainly it would be odd to think of the engineer’s but not the theoretical chemist’s activity as labor.12 Is labor, then, mental or physical activity that contributes immediately or over the long run to the physical transformation of nature? Here the slope gets slippery indeed. Yesterday, mathematician M’s results had no application. Today, an application is found. Should M’s activity now be reclassified as labor? Yesterday, I amused myself by carving bits of wood into odd shapes. Today, one piece turns out to be perfect to plug the hole in the local dike. Was I laboring yesterday? In any event, if the transformation of nature is the key, we need to know what counts as such a transformation. Was the work on the pyramids labor? How about the work on the new bowling alley in my neighborhood? Is there a difference with regard to changing the world between growing cabbages and putting up billboards? When pressed, “labor” seems to have no boundaries at all. Yet it needs boundaries if Marx’s claim is not to become trivial, for if building a bowling alley counts as changing the world, why not knocking down pins with a bowling ball? Why not combing my hair? But then all human activity turns out to be labor. Some commentators have effectively collapsed all human activity into labor. They claim that, according to Marx, all our contact with the world is mediated by human labor. Even to begin to make sense of this claim clearly requires “labor” to extend far beyond making dishwashers or planting potatoes. Here is Habermas’s version of this reading: The nature that surrounds us constitutes itself as objective nature for us only in being mediated by the subjective nature of man through processes of social labor. That is why labor, or work, is not only a fundamental category of human existence [for Marx] but also an epistemological category. The system of objective activities creates the factual conditions of the possible reproduction of social life and at the same time the transcendental conditions of the possible objectivity of the objects of experience.13

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The idea seems to be that, through labor (broadly construed), human beings shape not just bits of nature but nature in its entirety. Labor is said to function as a transcendental category, akin to Kant’s categories of the understanding. Labor is an activity of “synthesis” but of material rather than mental synthesis. “Synthesis no longer appears as an activity of thought,” Habermas says, “but as one of material production.”14 In contrast to Kant, the phenomenal world is not structured by a set of mental categories or forms of intuition but by the perpetual human transformative interaction with nature.15 “Of course the forms are categories not primarily of the understanding but of objective activity; and the unity of the objectivity of possible objects of experience is formed not in transcendental consciousness but in the behavioral system of instrumental action. Nevertheless, the matter that is given is first shaped in the labor process as in the cognitive process.”16 At this point the problem of the extension of “labor” reappears, for it is crucial to know whether “the matter” that is “first shaped in the labor process” has or has not already been shaped by the human sensory and cognitive apparatus (however one understands these things), or whether labor is actually supposed somehow to function as that apparatus. Does labor operate on an already given world, a world of ordinary, physical objects, or is Habermas saying that it literally functions as a transcendental category in the Kantian sense? Suppose labor shapes an already given world. “Labor” would then mean physical and mental activities for which preexisting physical objects are the raw material. Human beings take trees, chop them down, turn them into lumber, build desks, carve their initials in those desks, and so forth. Here labor does not function as a transcendental category. Even if all physical objects have in fact been shaped by human labor, the objectivity of the objects of experience would have nothing to do with that fact. That what used to be a tree is now a desk has nothing to do with either object’s objectivity. Suppose instead that labor somehow really does function transcendentally. Somehow it plays a role in the objectivity of the objects of experience. Habermas sounds as if he holds this latter view.17 The problem is to explain how labor can possibly function as a transcendental category. Habermas stresses that Marx’s “famous sentence that the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire previous world history is meant

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literally.”18 Suppose we assume that most of the “labor” of world history is actual labor, work. Habermas’s thought might then be that interaction with nature in the work process has given a particular development to the human species’ sensory capacities. At least as far as the world is filtered for us by our senses, and as far as these are the products of the history of labor, labor might then be thought to play a kind of transcendental role. There is something appealing about this claim. Still, there are several considerations against it. It may be true that particular forms of labor develop particular sensory capacities. As a fisherman, one might come to distinguish yellowtail from winter flounder at a glance. As a result of one’s labor, one might perceive things that others do not. Unless everybody works at the same tasks, however, this sort of sensory development is irrelevant. It generates no change in the human species’ senses. It may be true that there are features common to what the senses of, say, members of North American cultures tend to register. This fact (if it is one) is undoubtedly a function of the kind of life common to members of that culture. The key causal elements, however, are at least as likely to be television and advertising as they are to be our more nitty-gritty, laborlike interactions with the world. In North American cultures, an individual’s senses are probably formed as much by her consumption and leisure activities as by her world-transforming activities. Another passage from Habermas reveals a more general problem: “On the one hand Marx conceives of objective activity as a transcendental accomplishment; it has its counterpart in the construction of a world in which reality appears subject to conditions of the objectivity of possible objects of experience. On the other hand he sees this transcendental accomplishment as rooted in real labor processes.”19 The problem is to understand how “this transcendental accomplishment” can be “rooted in real labor processes.” For to call those labor processes “real” is to assert an objectivity to them, and this objectivity either is or is not itself a “transcendental accomplishment.” If it is not, then why is any such accomplishment ever needed (for apparently a form of objectivity would be possible which is not a transcendental accomplishment)? And if the real labor process is a transcendental accomplishment, then in what is it rooted? Presumably, it must itself be rooted “in real labor processes” if the account is to remain Marxist. But the same issue can be

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raised about these labor processes, and so on. The problem flows from claiming that capacity C functions transcendentally when your whole point is that C is something concrete and tangible. The status of C, then, becomes problematic to say the least.20 Other writers construe Marx more or less as Habermas does. JeanYves Calvez says that, for Marx, “[t]he basis of reality is an initial dialectical connection between man and nature” and claims that, therefore, for Marx, “[n]ature without man has no sense, it has no movement, it is chaos, undifferentiated and indifferent matter, and thus ultimately nothing.”21 Shlomo Avineri writes that Marx’s “view is a secular version of the Hegelian notion that actuality is not an external, objective datum, but is shaped by human agency.”22 And according to Alfred Schmidt, Marx brought “the whole of human practice into the process of knowledge as a constitutive moment,” and Marx believes “that material reality is from the beginning socially mediated.”23 Common to all these readings is the claim that, for Marx, there is some basic interaction between human beings and the world, an interaction so basic that Marx denies that “material reality” can be made sense of—be given a determinate content—independent of it. I do not have the space to go through each variant of this “idealist” interpretation to show how each does or does not diverge from what Marx actually says (most rely heavily on passages from the Manuscripts, which I have read differently). Nor do I have the space to assess each on independent philosophical grounds.24 Philosophically, however, any such account does face a significant problem. It must specify the relevant interaction in such a way that: 1. The account does not amount merely to the claim that human beings have a cognitive and sensory apparatus, that they use this apparatus in all their daily activities, and that throughout human history human beings have encountered the world only in the course of such activities and by the mediation of that apparatus. If that is what the interaction amounts to, the claim is trivial. 2. The attempt to give more determinate content to the interaction keeps that content tied to Marx’s own concepts. “Labor” or “activity” may not be extended until they include, for instance, seeing and hearing. Otherwise, the Marxist element disappears.

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I doubt seriously that any account can satisfy both these requirements and be a plausible account of the objectivity of the objects of experience, for labor is not normally seen as an activity one lives within. One can step back from the labor process and scrutinize the interaction of human laboring activity and the material world. But then labor—at least construed narrowly enough to keep touch with anything Marxist—cannot be the transcendental activity in which all else, including one’s stepping back, is rooted. Given the philosophical difficulties of the idealist reading, I think we are warranted in looking for an alternative.

4. The Practical-Idealist Reading The idealist reading has significant problems. Yet it does seem to capture something central to the spirit of the Theses. In this section I propose a variant of the idealist reading, what I call the practical-idealist reading. Its underlying idea is that Marx’s concern in the Theses is not with a theory about the world but with getting us to change our standpoint (what I have called our orientation)25 within it. The goal of my reading is to hang onto the impulse behind the idealist reading while sidestepping its problems by avoiding the kind of account that generates those problems. I take the claim common to the various idealist readings of the Theses to be that, for human beings, the fundamental relation to the world is that of being continually immersed in the world and continually engaged in (collectively) transforming it. Now this sort of claim—the claim that relation R to the world is fundamental—is distinct from a second claim: that correct understanding of one’s relation to the world (or to others) can proceed only from a particular standpoint, or, put differently, only via a particular orientation—namely, fundamental orientation R.26 That claim is that if R is for human beings their fundamental relation to the world (or to others), then it is both sufficient and, more important, necessary to be in orientation R—to have the proper fundamental orientation—in order properly to grasp R as the fundamental relation to the world (or to others). One’s orientation must be in sync with one’s relation in order properly to see that relation as one’s fundamental relation to the world (or to others).

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As a claim about all possible R, this claim is almost certainly false. A given writer might hold, however, that, with respect to what he believes is the correct conception—that is, his conception—of how human beings are fundamentally related to the world (or to others), taking the proper standpoint (having the proper orientation) is both necessary and sufficient for genuine understanding of that relation. Here the claim is not with respect to all possible R, but only with respect to what the writer thinks is that specific R which does pick out the way in which human beings are fundamentally related to the world (or to others). Call this the privileged standpoint thesis. Understood in those terms, I attribute the privileged standpoint thesis to the Marx of the Theses. In my version of the idealist interpretation, Marx is asserting not the truth of a metaphysical theory but the need for a particular practical stance toward daily life. Labor or activity are to be understood as worldconstituting only within a way of being oriented to the world that would not permit the assertion of a theory of labor or activity as worldconstituting, or at any rate would not see the assertion of such a theory as the road to truth. To assert a theory of the transcendental status of labor or activity involves stepping back from the world to see how it is constituted—that is, it involves taking up what Marx thinks is the wrong orientation to the world. And given the privileged standpoint thesis, taking that wrong orientation cannot lead to a correct understanding of one’s relation to the world. The practical-idealist interpretation involves the following claims: 1. Human beings have a fundamental relation to the world. 2a. Their fundamental relation to the world is that of continual engagement in activity within the world, continual immersion in it. 2b. More specifically, their fundamental relation to the world is that of continual collective engagement in transforming the world by labor in order to provide objects that human beings can use to pursue their individual projects. 2c. Their fundamental relation to others is as members of the group, the human species, a group whose members are engaged in the continual collective transformation of the world by labor. 3. There is a proper way for human beings to be fundamentally oriented to the world and to others—namely, the way that puts them in sync with the descriptions in (2a), (2b), and (2c).27

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4. That (2a), (2b), and (2c) are true can only be seen by (and would be seen by) agents with the proper fundamental orientation. (This restates the privileged standpoint thesis.) I have separated (2a) from (2b) and (2c) because the Theses do not talk of “labor” but of “activity.” The 1844 Marx is committed to (1), (3), (4), and all of (2). I think that the Marx of the Theses is committed to at least (1), (3), (4), and (2a). Now the Theses do focus on human activity as transforming the world. So perhaps the Marx of the Theses is also committed to (2b) and (2c). Is the view in the Theses, then, the same as the 1844 view? A reason for skepticism is that the 1844 view involves commitment to the claim that human beings have a particular nature, and in Thesis Six Marx is famously scornful of that claim. I deal with the issue of human nature in §6. Here I want to note the consideration in favor of attributing (2b) and (2c) to the Marx of the Theses. Earlier I read Thesis Ten as evidence for the simultaneity model; here I read it as evidence for attributing (2b) and (2c) to Marx. Thesis Ten says, “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.” The idea of a different standpoint could be simply the idea of a different way of seeing the world in the sense of providing a different account of the world.28 But other of the theses insist that our relation to the world is practical, not theoretical. I argued earlier that the feedback model’s picture of a practical relation to the world is incompatible with much in the Theses. The practical-idealist reading involves a different picture. On the practical-idealist reading of Thesis Ten, the standpoint of social humanity is the standpoint of a person who sees herself as, fundamentally, part of a certain large group—namely, humanity (see (2c)). Such identification with humanity is a reason to call this standpoint that of social humanity or of human rather than civil society. And from this standpoint, the world is not related to as something registering on the individual in passive isolation. Rather, the individual relates to it as something she encounters in the (collective) activity fundamental to the human relation to the world, the activity of transforming the material world (see (2b)). This is the sense in which the standpoint of social humanity is that of a new materialism. Attributing (2b) and (2c) to Marx is, I think, the best way to make sense of Thesis Ten.

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Overall, I think that the practical-idealist interpretation—all of (1) through (4)—makes the best sense of what Marx is trying to get at in the Theses. It makes the best sense of those moments when he seems to be pressing change not only in our beliefs and our actions but in the angle from which we lead our lives. Before moving on, I should note several things. 1. The privileged standpoint thesis is the descendant of what I have earlier called a “self-certifying perspective.” In my use of the latter notion, my focus was the claim that such a perspective was a sufficient condition for knowledge of certain things (for instance, the nonexistence of miracles). I took the phrase from Feuerbach, and in his usage it was not clear whether it was also a necessary condition. With the privileged standpoint thesis, the claim is that a particular perspective or, as I have put it in this chapter, a particular standpoint or orientation is both sufficient and necessary for knowledge of certain things—for example, our fundamental relation to the world. 2. No one would deny that in ordinary life human beings are constantly engaged in interactions with the world, nor that for the most part what most human beings have had to do is to struggle with nature. But a philosopher might point to Descartes’s mental abstraction from (Descartes believed) all his connections to the social and physical world as proof that such engagements are not a necessary feature of human life. Moreover, such a philosopher might say that the transformation of nature is only statistically central to human life. She might admit that most people are, or at least historically have been, engaged in such activity most of the time. More is the pity, she might say. It keeps them from seeing that their fundamental relation to the world is quite other than Marx thinks. The philosopher might point out that one can mentally abstract oneself from the world, and she might claim that doing so is the road to the most basic truths about human nature, and that one would thereby learn that one’s fundamental relation to the world is that of a knowing subject knowing an object. Marx would, I think, retort that (a) to take the philosopher’s abstract standpoint as the road to basic truths about human nature is to stamp as legitimate a deviant or distorted standpoint, and (b) claims from such a deviant standpoint are irrelevant. Now (b) simply follows from (a) coupled with the privileged standpoint thesis: (a) is the key. So the ques-

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tion becomes, What, for Marx, could license the claim that the standpoint of “social humanity” (equated with that of the new materialism) and “practical-critical activity” reveals our true condition (that it is the correct standpoint), while the standpoint of Cartesian cerebration does not? For that matter, what could license the claim that the standpoint of civil society (equated with that of the old materialism) is incorrect? The only thing that could do so is the standpoint of social humanity itself. This is the only form of justification available to Marx, because anything else would require stepping outside one’s engagements, would presume that the truth about one’s fundamental relation to the world is accessible from a disengaged standpoint, from an orientation not in sync with what Marx believes is one’s relation to the world. And that would be contrary to the privileged standpoint thesis. 3. Three standpoints have been in play in this chapter: the standpoints of the philosopher, of civil society (the old materialism), and of social humanity (the new materialism). The first is characterized by disengagement from the world—by a kind of standing back from the world and a giving of priority to abstract thought. The second is also characterized by a standing back from the world, a separation of self and world, but it is not disengaged or abstract in the sense of the philosopher’s standpoint. Rather, it is a practical standpoint in the sense of the feedback model of practicality: the world impresses itself on the agent, and the agent then acts on the world, manipulates it.29 Finally, the standpoint of social humanity is supposed to involve being thoroughly engaged in the world. One is, as it were, part of the world, not just its manipulator. And of course this standpoint is supposed to be not at all abstract. In earlier chapters I discussed Feuerbach’s and the 1844 Marx’s attacks on the philosopher’s standpoint. In the Theses, Marx’s target is the standpoint of the old materialism, that is, of civil society. A rejection of the philosopher’s standpoint is implicit, but it is not Marx’s main concern. In giving the practical-idealist reading of the Theses I have read into Marx a more direct rejection of the philosopher’s standpoint, for the point of this reading is to preclude the need to defend the standpoint of social humanity (the new materialism) against philosophical challenge, and so to preclude the need to take the philosopher’s standpoint in order to counter such a challenge. 4. Both the theoretical-idealist and the practical-idealist interpreta-

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tions are interpretations of the simultaneity model. Neither has a place for a picture of a world apart from our interactions with it. The point of the practical-idealist interpretation is to keep this fact from being the focus of a philosophical challenge. On the practical-idealist reading, Marx’s view is thus question-begging (although he would say that to make that claim requires taking the wrong standpoint). The reading commits him to contentious beliefs (to [1]–[4]) yet permits him no genuine—certainly no usual type of—defense of those beliefs. As a philosophical matter, the view the idealist reading presents cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Yet it does seem to capture a central impulse of the Theses. Hence, the practical-idealist reading, which (as with Feuerbach and the 1844 Marx) seeks not to answer but to avoid the challenges to the earlier idealist reading by avoiding the standpoint from which they originate. (Of course presenting the reading, so far as it involves articulation of a fairly abstract theory of one’s relation to the world, is to take the standpoint that Marx wants to discourage.) 5. Much of the ambiguity of the Theses comes from two interwoven conflations of how one might be “practical,” or rather from the same conflation at two levels. First, one might (a) be oriented to the world as a place that the human species is always in the process of transforming or (b) consciously transform the world in a particular way (e.g., plow the north forty). Communists will do both, but they are not the same. Second, one might (a) be oriented to the world as a place that the human species is always in the process of transforming or (c) deliberately change the world (i.e., make a revolution) so that it becomes a place in which individuals are oriented to it as a place the human species is always in the process of transforming. Communist revolutionaries under capitalism will do the latter; people who live in a communist society will do the former. There are thus three kinds of practicality in play: an orientation to the world, a change of the world within a context (plowing the north forty), and a change of the context (changing society from capitalism to communism). In contrast to the first, the latter two are quite concrete ways of changing the world, but they change different parts of the world. 6. Marx’s view of the proper orientation to the world can be contrasted usefully with that of his contemporary, Kierkegaard. The contrast is really a contrast of Marx with two Johanneses—Johannes Cli-

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macus, pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Johannes de silentio, pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling.30 Like the Marx of the Theses, each Johannes stresses that his concern is practical. And by this each means, in part, that his concern is a mode of orientation. Johannes Climacus asserts such things as that Christianity “has nothing whatever to do with the systematic zeal of the personally indifferent individual to arrange the truths of Christianity in paragraphs; it deals with the concern of the infinitely interested individual for his own relationship to such a doctrine.”31 And “Here is . . . a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual. . . But the above definition of truth is an equivalent expression for faith.”32 In these and other passages, the similarity to Marx is the claim that our fundamental relation to the world is not that of knowing subjects affirming propositions about an object, and that our fundamental orientation should mirror that fact. Johannes Climacus says, “When the believer exists in his faith his existence acquires tremendous content, but not in the sense of paragraph-material.”33 Nor is the content of the proper orientation to the world reducible to the performance of this or that action, even remarkable actions, as with those of the biblical Abraham. Johannes de silentio discusses at length a knight of faith who is outwardly indistinguishable from an ordinary bourgeois. In fact, he looks like a tax collector. Nevertheless, he is a knight of faith. Unlike Abraham, who does something extraordinary, this knight of faith seems as ordinary as could be. But he is not. His orientation to God, the world, and himself is not in the least bit ordinary.34 Similarly, whatever the differences in the knowledge of workers in capitalist and communist societies, one central difference will be in how they are oriented to the world. And, as with the bourgeois knight of faith, communists will be different from you and me even if the lives they lead are utterly ordinary. There are also, of course, basic differences between Marx and the Johanneses. The first and most obvious is that, epistemologically, for Marx, the proper standpoint is that of social humanity; for the Johanneses, that of the individual. Johannes de silentio emphasizes that the knight of faith cannot make himself comprehensible to anyone. This does not mean

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that his assertions will strike others as gibberish. It means that his assertions will strike others as extraordinarily implausible, and that he can give no evidence or arguments that others might reasonably find convincing. Now a worker under capitalism who claims that labor is the human self-realization activity is similarly situated. For Marx, however, this situation is not in the nature of things. In a communist society, recognition of the content of our fundamental relation to the world will be social in the sense that our (human) nature will be and be seen to be reflected in one another’s products. Second, the world does not have to change for Christian faith to be possible. Basic social change is a precondition for Marx’s communists to exist: they can be oriented to the world properly only under certain social conditions. Finally, the two Johanneses continually stress the difficulty of faith. It is sometimes described as a task with which one is never finished.35 Although also characterized as having a grace to it (the leap—of faith— is that of a dancer who can land with no trace of wobble or exertion),36 such grace is the consequence of concentration. By contrast, Marx thinks that individuals in a communist society will live easily in their orientation. Their skins will fit. The orientation Marx seeks is our “natural” one; the orientation the Johanneses seek is not. Once a communist society is reached, agents do not have a goal-directed orientation. They have individual goals of various kinds, but they do not relate to the world generally as the site of any goal. The Johanneses’ Christian does. Such a person wants to be a certain sort of being, a knight of faith. If it were possible to become a knight of faith and then more or less automatically to remain one, then that situation—the situation of being a permanent knight of faith—would be similar to the situation of Marx’s communists. But it is in the nature of Christian faith (as the Johanneses see it) that one cannot automatically remain a Christian.37 The Johanneses’ preferred orientation necessarily involves a continual striving. Marx’s does not.

5. The Problem of the First Step The standpoint Marx advocates is that of a changed humanity. It involves a changed orientation to the world. Of course, it follows from Marx’s account that individuals can have that new orientation only once

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the world has changed (capitalism has been overthrown), only once they have become new human beings. But Thesis Three charges, “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by human beings and that the educator must himself be educated. It must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” (TF 5–6/4). It looks as if Marx himself is vulnerable to this charge, for he is saying that what is needed is a new standpoint (that of social humanity), yet that this standpoint can only arise under communism, and that our current actual standpoint, that of civil society, is at odds with the new standpoint. Marx’s ability to articulate these very claims seems to mean that he is claiming to be somehow superior to existing society. But how can one now take the standpoint of social humanity and thus see that it is in fact the correct standpoint? This was the problem that arose at the end of Chapter 6.38 As in the work of 1844, here, too, a transformed standpoint does not seem readily available. In the Manuscripts, Marx says that working men initially join together for strategic reasons, but that they then develop a need for one another. Their intercourse becomes an end, not a means. For such individuals, the brotherhood of man is more than a phrase; now “[s]ociety, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them” (ÖpM 554/313). One could give Marx a good deal of rope here. Individuals are often changed by group dynamics, and the more meaningless one’s other activities the more likely one is to find meaning and satisfaction in one’s group participation. By hypothesis, workers under capitalism have few meaningful activities available to them, so it is not odd to think that they would soon find their workers’ organizations to be ends as well as means. In light of Marx’s references to “the significance” of revolutionary activity, however, and to the need to understand “the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change . . . as revolutionary practice,” I think an even more profound impact is accorded in the Theses to the activity of specifically revolutionary organization. Thesis Three stresses the epistemological role of revolutionary practice; Thesis Ten, the epistemological role of the standpoint of “human society, or social humanity.” The idea seems to be that revolutionary activity is like activity in “human society,” that is, in communism. For the Marx of the

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Theses, the structure of life in a communist revolutionary organization anticipates the structure of life in communist society. I take him to be equating the practical activity of a true communist society with the practical activity of revolutionary organization.39 The standpoint of “human society” is the standpoint of the free, conscious, collective ordering of the world—an activity in which “circumstances” are deliberately changed, and in which the individuals who do the changing are changing themselves as part of the circumstances. But this is also a description of revolutionary activity.40 Now the revolutionary collectivity is far smaller than communist society. And the revolutionary’s target is the social, not the natural, world: she seeks to change the social context, not to make a change within a social context. Moreover, revolutionary action must have some significant degree of success if it is to mimic the structure of a society in which the world is in fact changed in accordance with free, conscious collective decisions. This raises the question of how much success is enough to prompt the desired change in consciousness (and also the question of what form of party organization is required).41 Marx needs there to be sufficient structural similarity so that individuals engaged in currently available forms of revolutionary activity are transformed so as not only to see the group and its activity as an end but also to see their own basic relation to the world as that of “[collective] practical-critical” activity. Whether sufficient similarity actually obtains is presumably something only those engaged in revolutionary activity could tell. One must not conflate the orientation to the world of agents in a revolutionary party with the feedback model. Revolutionaries are trying consciously to change the world, but this need not mean that their fundamental orientation is that of mere manipulators (that would be the orientation of civil society) any more than mere manipulation need be the fundamental orientation of communist workers deciding how best to irrigate the north forty. Individuals in a communist society can be simultaneously engaged in two types of practical activity (see above, §4). The claim is that individuals in a revolutionary organization can be as well. For our purposes, what is important is not the goal of such activity but agents’ way of being oriented to that activity (the activity of creating revolution). Still, as noted, the desired form of the latter requires considerable success in reaching the former. And of course revo-

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lutionaries’ own central focus would be creating revolution. Change in consciousness would be a by-product of revolutionary activity. The idea that premillennial activity can anticipate the life of the millennium is not new. For Kant, to act morally in this world is to act as if one were a legislator in a realm of ends. As a moral being now, one is what one would be were a realm of ends to obtain. In effect, moral conduct instantiates—partially and fleetingly—a realm of ends. For Marx, humans are beings of a certain kind; in a communist society, they would realize their nature as beings of this kind and would know this about themselves. On the account that I am putting forward, revolutionary activity is a good enough facsimile of communist society that this realization and this knowledge would obtain.42 On this account, workers are driven by need—by egoistic motives, motives of the kind that capitalism generates—to organize; organization (assuming it is communist and sufficiently successful) transforms them; and this transformation is self-certifying. Need pushes the workers to take the crucial first step. Change in consciousness ultimately follows. In this chapter I have focused on the human relation and orientation to the world, not on the human self-realization activity. But suppose we assume that such a change in consciousness, generating a proper orientation to the world, would also reveal the content (as Marx conceives it) of the human self-realization activity.43 The problem from the last chapter would thus be overcome. Or perhaps not. Allen Buchanan’s work has spawned an ongoing debate about whether it would be rational for individual workers to organize to revolt. A successful communist revolution is a public good, something whose benefits cannot be denied to any person or, in this case, to any worker. And since revolutionary organization involves considerable sacrifice and risk, and its material benefits are far off and uncertain, purely self-interested rationality would counsel free-riding. Start the revolution without me. If it succeeds I’ll join later. But if all workers reason this way, there will be no revolution.44 And there will also be no workers taking that first step into revolutionary activity that leads to change in their consciousness and the overcoming of the problem from Chapter 6. Some writers have responded to Buchanan by pointing out that

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nonegoistic psychological benefits (the benefits of solidarity with others) accrue to those who engage in revolutionary activity.45 That seems to be Marx’s view in the passage quoted from the Manuscripts. And it is at least possible that such benefits would make worthwhile the risks and sacrifices of revolutionary activity. This does not solve the problem, however, for an individual formed by civil society needs to be changed by revolutionary activity in order to be the kind of person who can see the benefits of solidarity as benefits. Such a person would not calculate potential risks and benefits. She would understand her true nature and interests and would have a commitment to action with other workers. Unfortunately, at the moment of deciding whether to take the first step into revolutionary activity, the worker is, by hypothesis, reasoning in a narrowly self-interested manner and does not know her own nature and interests—for her motivations and beliefs have been shaped by civil society. Only after engaging in revolutionary activity will her beliefs and commitments change. So initially such a proletarian seems still to have no reason—from her current point of view, the standpoint of civil society—to take the first step into revolutionary activity.46 A similar issue arises with respect to any bourgeois contemplating becoming a revolutionary. Until “the class struggle nears the decisive hour,” as The Communist Manifesto puts it, self-interest, narrowly understood, is inadequate to motivate her to join “the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands” (MK 471/494), for until that decisive hour, her material situation is, by hypothesis, fairly good. Presumably, she, too, could be transformed by the process of revolutionary organization (and so would see where her deeper interests qua human being lie), but would anything make it rational for her to take the first step? In response to these worries, Marx might say: 1. Fortunately, workers do not always act like free-riders, either because they scorn to do so or because they are ignorant that they can. 2. Workers are not so atomized in their current self-conceptions as to see no intrinsic value in the activity of organization. They see enough value in the early, relatively nonrisky stages of revolu-

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tionary activity as to overbalance the initial inconvenience. And with time that activity will change them so that they will see more and more intrinsic value in it.47 3. There is no need to give a bourgeois reasons to engage in revolutionary activity. Responses (1) and/or (2) might be empirically true. That would be fine (although one hopes a proletarian’s step into revolutionary activity reveals more than his ignorance of rational choice theory). But if workers have nonegoistic motives sufficient to overbalance considerable inconvenience and perhaps some risk, then Marx’s 1844 claims about the impact of capitalism on workers’ beliefs and motivations must be qualified. In particular, workers must be assumed now to be not especially alienated from one another. The problem here, we must remember, is that of the first step. It is not a question of how easily revolutionary or other kinds of worker organizations can change people. It is a question of what workers are like antecedently so as to be able to take the first step into such organizations. If they can recognize and be motivated by the nonegoistic benefits of doing so, alienation must not go all that deep. This strikes me as a large qualification, one I think Marx would be reluctant to make and one that would be hard to account for while maintaining the rest of the 1844 picture. But if alienation does go very deep, workers will never (if they are rational) take the necessary first step. As for the bourgeois, we can imagine her as a well-meaning, openminded person who wants to understand the truth about the world and to help those who are badly off. More than a few of Marx’s readers have fit this profile. Such a person could perhaps see that individuals who are engaged in revolutionary activity think of themselves as members of a larger whole, part of the brotherhood of man, etc. Such an observer could see that these participants regard themselves as beings whose fundamental activity is the simultaneous transformation of the world and themselves. But the observer could not confirm that such activity is actually what the participants believe it to be. From her perspective, the undeniable fact that “the changing of circumstances and . . . human activity or self-change” coincide has no force. It does not reveal anything essential. From her perspective, the participants’ belief that it

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does reveal something essential could merely express personal quirks or even psychological dysfunctions. Of course, Marx does not have to offer such an observer reasons to believe revolutionary activity has “significance.” Let her come down from her ivory tower and get involved, and she will see its significance! But what would be her motive for doing that? Moral commitment to the downtrodden? A more enlightened view of her own interests? The first is something Marx has not mentioned (and in The German Ideology will disdain), and why the second should lead her to take the risky and costly step into revolutionary activity is just the question. I want to be clear about what is at issue here. As in the last chapter, at issue is not revolutionary motivation for its own sake. Here such motivation is relevant only because, by hypothesis, participation in revolutionary activity can so transform agents that they see the truth of Marx’s claims about human nature. By hypothesis, such participation can generate, agent by agent, the kind of justification for those claims that, consistent with his other views, Marx could accept. Theorists initially introduced the collective action problem to raise the question of whether individually rational conduct is likely to lead to revolution. I introduce it for a narrower purpose: to raise the question of whether such conduct is likely to lead agents to a standpoint from which Marx’s claims about human nature can, on Marx’s premises, be seen to be true. Marx himself does not see the collective action problem. I take him not to see the problem of the first step, and so I take him to think that it would be individually rational for workers to organize. Transformation with its cognitive consequences would follow: the dilemma from the last chapter would be solved (as a by-product of the rather more important fact of successful revolutionary action). The collective action problem does not generate a problem of internal consistency for Marx. It is an external challenge. Still, even if it is external, the challenge is there. There remains the problem of how Marx can convince the unconverted that his claims about human nature are true, or at least convince them to take that step which will lead, on his premises, to seeing his claims’ truth. One of the interesting features of The German Ideology is that there Marx will attempt, among other things, to provide a way to justify his claims that does not rely on the need to take—or to take the first step toward taking—any special standpoint.

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6. Thesis Six In Thesis Six, Marx says, “Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion [das religiöse Wesen] into the human essence [das menschliche Wesen]. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (TF 6/4). This has often been taken to mean that, according to Marx, there is no such thing as the human essence or, as I usually put it, human nature.48 Rather, what human beings are at any given moment is determined by “the ensemble of social relations.” Marx is read as subscribing to a social determinist view according to which nothing informative can be said about human beings conceived apart from their social circumstances, at least nothing beyond what biology could tell us. Informative statements can only be about human beings as the products of specific social circumstances.49 This would contradict my reading of the Theses. I read them as saying that human beings have a particular fundamental relation to the world. So I read the Marx of the Theses as holding that there is something that it is to be human, that there is a human nature. Something, then, needs to be said about why it is a mistake to read Thesis Six as expressing a social determinist position. To begin with, according to the social determinist view, human beings are passive consequences of social circumstances. This is precisely what Marx rejects in the “old” materialism (see Thesis One). By itself, this seems to me a sufficient reason not to attribute social determinism to the Marx of the Theses. Moreover, what is attacked in Thesis Six is a specific way of understanding human nature—“as an abstraction inherent in each single individual.” I take Marx’s specific complaint to be that Feuerbach represents human nature as something distinct from social and historical circumstances, something abstractable from those circumstances and unaffected by them. On such a view, the “many individuals” would be united only “naturally” (Thesis Six; TF 6/4), in the sense that they would be classed together as a function of something naturally given, a shared natural characteristic, as rhinoceroses might be classed together because they have horns on their snouts. An individual’s nature would not be even partly a function of her active relationships with other human beings and society in general (thus Feuerbach is said to deal with

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an “isolated” individual); it would be given in its entirety prior to such things. This Marx rejects. Putting aside whether this description of Feuerbach is accurate, we need to see whether it proves Marx hostile to the idea that there is a human nature. The claim that human nature in its reality is a function of the ensemble of social relations could be read in two ways: (a) Human nature is what social relations make it. (b) Human nature is what human beings through their social relations are continually in the process of creating. The question is whether “social relations” are relations that human beings cannot control, things of which they are merely the victims, or whether they are relations in which human beings are always embedded but that they are also always creating (“[t]he coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of . . . self-change” [Thesis Three; TF 6/4]). I take Marx’s claim to be that, until now, human nature has been thrust upon us. This is because, until now, social relations have been thrust upon us. The isolated individuals of civil society have been by and large the passive products of social relations over which they have had no control. On the other hand, those social relations have nevertheless been social relations, that is, relations among human beings. The new materialism differs from the old in conceiving human beings as not only constantly being changed by circumstances but also as constantly changing those circumstances, and until now as having done so without an understanding that this process of change is something that, as a group, they can control. Reading (a) describes the past. Reading (b) describes what the past has been implicitly and the future can be explicitly. That is why in Thesis Six human nature is said to have a “reality,” but one that ought to be criticized. There is no rejection of the term Wesen, but what human beings are like in a given era—in terms of all their even relatively concrete characteristics, such as beliefs, desires, psychological propensities, mores, etc.—is denied to be something immutable and outside human control. What human beings are like in a given era can be criticized and changed, for it is a function of the era’s social relations, and those relations are, in principle, subject to human control.50 Recall Bauer’s criticism of Feuerbach in “The Species and the Crowd” (Gat 216/200). He attacked Feuerbach for holding a concep-

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tion of a determinate human nature. Bauer’s complaint was that any determinate nature was a constraint on the human capacity continually to re-create itself (see also CLF 120). The new materialism conceives human beings in Bauerian terms as active agents who are continually (collectively) re-creating their world and themselves (“the active side was developed . . . by idealism” [Thesis One; TF 5/3]), but, in contrast to Bauer’s view, they are continually doing so in concrete physical ways. I am claiming that the Marx of the Theses does hold that there is a human nature in the sense that there is a correct description of the kind of beings we are. That description is that we are (collectively) selfforming beings. We are beings who are always already immersed in the world and engaged in the (collective) process of continual transformation of the world, and this includes the transformation of that part of the world that is ourselves (and so our fundamental relation to the world is as such beings).51 Marx thinks that, until now, we have not been conscious of the content of our nature. Nevertheless, he thinks that this has been the content of our nature. And that it is the content of our nature is not itself a function of social relations. This is an extremely general description of human nature, leaving much to be filled in differently in different eras. Merely by virtue of being so general it leaves room for change across time. More important, the content of this description is the claim that it is the nature of the human species constantly to change itself. That the species keeps changing is not merely a possibility kept open by the generality of the description. To do so is its nature.52 What there is no room for here is anything like a conception of a determinate human nature, characterized as involving a determinate set of concrete properties a, b, c. That kind of conception of human nature is what Bauer rejects. It is what I take Marx to be rejecting as well.

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8 The German Ideology I: More Antiphilosophy

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n h i s wo r k o f 1844, Marx asserts that, under capitalism, agents’ conceptions of how to realize their nature (their conceptions of what I have called “the human self-realization activity”) are distorted. He also believes that agents’ conceptions of how they are related to the world (their conceptions of what, in the last chapter, I termed their “fundamental relation to the world”) are also distorted. And Marx provides alternative conceptions of these things. Yet Marx seems, on his own premises, to have no adequate justification, under capitalism, for the assertions or the alternatives. I have read the Theses on Feuerbach as claiming that revolutionary practice can make the missing justification accessible, but I have argued that this tack, too, has its problems. In the final three chapters I trace these issues and their descendants in The German Ideology. In this chapter I deal with Marx’s attack on Feuerbach and Bauer and, indeed, on the Young Hegelians generally, with the new method he thinks he has settled on, and with his belief that he has rid himself of philosophy. In the next chapter I look at the conception of the good life in The German Ideology, and at the change that text makes from Marx’s earlier work. In Chapter 10 I examine The German Ideology’s critique of morality. The German Ideology brings to a close the line of development I have been tracing. With it Marx thinks that he has made a change, that, as a matter of method, he has abandoned the goal of shifting one’s standpoint. He turns to a new method that he believes obviates the need for such shifts. This does not, however, solve the problem of how to justify a normative critique of capitalism. Still, in The German Ideology there is a change in that problem’s structure. Marx now focuses less on the issue of the agent’s relation/orientation to the world and no longer highlights 264

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a particular kind of activity as central for human life. More conventional normative themes appear, and with them a picture of the good life somewhat different from that of 1844. Nevertheless, once again the question arises whether Marx can, without inconsistency, justify his normative critique. By the end of Chapter 10 I will have gone through several twists and turns with respect to the same basic problem. I will have argued in several chapters, with respect to several texts, that Marx’s strictures on abstract thought hinder his ability to provide the justification he needs for his normative critique of capitalism. At that point I question whether Marx must be committed to those strictures. I question whether, even granted Marx’s claims against philosophy (and against morality), one must now, at present, under capitalism, abandon philosophical thought, in particular moral philosophical thought.

1. Some General Comments In terms of pages, most of The German Ideology consists of extended attacks on Max Stirner’s 1844 book, The Ego and His Own, and on Bruno Bauer’s writings from 1844 and 1845. As such, the book is the next move in a local struggle: Bauer attacked communism and Feuerbach in “The Species and the Crowd” and “What Is Now the Object of Criticism?”; Marx and Engels, as avowed communists and (at that time) Feuerbachians, attacked Bauer in The Holy Family and in the DeutschFranzösische Jahrbücher; Bauer replied and attacked Feuerbach further in “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”; and Stirner attacked Feuerbach, Bauer, communism, and implicitly Marx and Engels in The Ego. Marx and Engels now reply (and keep on replying) with tedious venom. In this reply, Marx and Engels think they have proclaimed a change from warfare within the Young Hegelian movement to warfare against it. Although this is itself a typical Young Hegelian conceit (instantiated in both The Ego and the post-1843 Bauer), the interest of The German Ideology is in fact in the new direction Marx and Engels claim to be taking. They say that their target is the Young Hegelian movement in general, presumably thus including the Bauer of 1841–43. In the famous 1859 Preface to The Critique of Political Economy, Marx says that, in 1845, he and Engels “resolved to work out in common the opposition

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of our view to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy” (KpÖ 10/22). The point of The German Ideology is not merely to eviscerate Stirner and the post-1843 Bauer, writers explicitly hostile to communism, but to mark out a position distinct even from current socialists and from Marx’s and Engels’s own former philosophical mentors. In August 1844, Marx writes to Feuerbach that “you have provided . . . a philosophical basis for socialism,” and he says “I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and—if I may use the word—love, which I feel for you. Your Philosophy of the Future, and your Essence of Faith, in spite of their small size, are certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together.”1 Less than two years later, Marx includes the views expressed in those books as among the “innocent and child-like fancies [which] are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy” (DI 13/23).2 Not surprisingly, many commentators see The German Ideology as marking a deep break not just from Marx’s mentors but from his own earlier views.3 And there is undoubtedly a change. Only textual examination can determine its content, but a few anticipatory points can be made. To begin with, despite the palpable break with Feuerbach, Marx himself denies that his views are substantively altered since 1843. He and Engels, his co-author, several times declare the ideas in The Holy Family and the Jahrbücher to be continuous with their current outlook. They insist that the earlier books could have put the Young Hegelians on the right track.4 (As late as the 1859 Preface, Marx approvingly cites the 1843 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” and refers to Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” from the Jahrbücher as a “brilliant sketch” on the critique of economic categories [KpÖ 10/22]). Marx and Engels do disavow the verbal form of their earlier discussions, the use of “philosophical phraseology,” specifically of “traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as ‘human nature,’ ‘species,’ etc.” (DI 217–18/236). What they affirm as continuous is “the real trend of thought” (DI 218/236). Marx and Engels certainly understate how far they have come from 1843. Beyond the rejection of Feuerbach, the most obvious and significant development is that in The German Ideology the materialist the-


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ory of history takes the stage for the first time. There were undoubtedly seeds of this theory in the earlier texts, but the change from acorn to oak tree is a big one. If their own statements suggest a break it is with the pre-1843 Marx, especially the Marx who edited the Rheinische Zeitung. More indirectly, there is also a break with Marx’s claims in the exchange of letters in the Jahrbücher called “A Correspondence of 1843.” In The German Ideology, the Rheinische Zeitung is mentioned only once and then as an organ of “liberal and radical,” not of communist, theory (GI 96/112). This is an appropriate assessment, even of what Marx wrote for it, since there he endorses “the more ideal and profound view of recent philosophy . . . [which] considers the state as the great organism, in which juridical [rechtliche], ethical [sittliche], and political freedom must obtain their realization, and in which the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, of human reason” (AKZ 202/104). The German Ideology is contemptuous of such views, but then so is “On the Jewish Question” (published in the Jahrbücher). In The German Ideology, the “Correspondence” is never mentioned. All the references to the Jahrbücher are to “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” and “On the Jewish Question.” This is as it should be, for in the “Correspondence” Marx says that “[i]t will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it only needs to be conscious in order to possess it in reality” (Br 346/144). This was already incompatible with Marx’s 1844 view, and there is no way to square it with The German Ideology’s claims. There is thus a change from the earlier texts, but it is not the kind of change often foisted on Marx: from “idealism” to “materialism” or from a “philosophical” to a “scientific” Marx. This is not because in The German Ideology Marx is a Hegelian, but because Marx’s attempt to disentangle himself from what he calls “philosophy” began at least as early as 1844. The German Ideology shows a difference in the treatment of this theme, but it is a variation on the same theme. The “real trend of thought” continues amid terminological change. For the 1844 Marx, references to “human nature” or to the “species” were never as metaphysically weighty as he now (to some extent mistakenly) takes them to be for the Young Hegelians. I think that is why he does not regard himself as having recently held the views he now attacks. Much is new in The German Ideology. A methodological change is

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discussed in this chapter; a change in Marx’s conception of the good life is discussed in the next. And, as noted, the materialist theory of history is introduced. This does not, however, add up to a sudden break from “philosophy.” To see The German Ideology in such terms is to have too coarse a view of Marx’s complex and hostile relation to philosophy in 1844. It is also to have too coarse a view of that relation in The German Ideology itself. Parts of The German Ideology are remarkably original and sophisticated, especially considering that Marx and Engels were in their mid- to late twenties when they wrote it; parts are staggeringly crude. Much consists of endless tirades against figures remembered only because Marx and Engels wasted vitriol on them. Reconstructing the text means separating polemics against straw figures from interesting attacks on interesting positions. I regard Marx as co-author of all parts of The German Ideology, in contrast to The Holy Family, where he and Engels wrote separate sections. So I refer from now on only to “Marx” and not to the more cumbersome “Marx and Engels.” There is a large omission in my discussion. I do not deal with the materialist theory of history. To do so properly would require looking at Marx’s later texts, and it would shift the focus to questions in the philosophy of the social sciences. Adequate treatment of that theory requires a separate study.5

2. The Attack on the Young Hegelians The German Ideology is a nearly six-hundred-page polemic. It has many targets and many reasons for targeting its targets. In this section I try to identify the most important line of attack. At moments, the central enemy seems to be philosophers who claim that the social world can be revolutionized solely by the force of their own critiques—as if the pen were not just mightier than but altogether obviated the need for the sword. Here is how The German Ideology begins: Hitherto [say the philosophers] human beings have always formed false ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. . . Let us teach them, says one [Feuerbach], how to


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exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the nature of human beings; says another [Bauer], how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third [Stirner], how to drive them out of their heads and—existing reality will collapse. These innocent child-like fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy. . . (DI 13/23) Shortly after The German Ideology, in a December 1846 letter to P. W. Annenkov, Marx makes a similar attack on Proudhon: “Now you will understand why Mr. Proudhon is the avowed enemy of all political movements. For him, the solution of present-day problems does not consist in public action but in the dialectical rotations within his head. Because to him the categories are the motive force, it is not necessary to change practical life in order to change the categories; on the contrary, it is necessary to change the categories, whereupon actual society will change as a result.”6 The references to making “existing reality” collapse by getting rid of the wrong ideas make it sound as if Marx believes the Young Hegelians (and Proudhon) hold that thinking literally makes it so, that thought has a direct and immediate causal impact on the physical world. In places, Stirner is accused of just this view (DI 219/237; 417–18/432–33).7 And the lesson the editor of the Marx-Engels Collected Works believes he has learned from the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach is precisely that thinking does not make it so. The editor writes, “The world cannot be changed by merely changing our notions of it, by theoretically criticising what exists; it must be understood, and then, proceeding from this, transformed by effective action, material revolutionary practice. This thesis concisely formulates the fundamental difference of Marxist philosophy from all earlier philosophy, including pre-Marxian materialism.”8 This has, oddly enough, frequently been taken to be Marx’s great advance over his predecessors. But of course no one, including the writers that Marx attacks in The German Ideology, has ever believed that thought could change the world without action. Indeed, the view is so manifestly absurd that, despite the fact that Marx does certainly seem to attack it, I think it best not to see it as his central concern, especially as two worthier targets suggest themselves. They are: 1. The Young Hegelians do not care about practical political change. The only thing they think wrong with the present and so in need of

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change is our conception of human nature. Institutions are not part of the problem. 2. In practice, the Young Hegelians act as if all that needs to be done is to change people’s ideas. Once they have demonstrated that existing reality is at odds with correct ideas, they think that their job is done. This is to act as if ideas are causally efficacious on their own. The Young Hegelians wish their ideas to become practical, but they have no even minimally plausible account of how this is to occur. Charge 1 has considerable validity against the post-1843 Bauer and against Stirner, but the Bauer of 1841–43 is quite committed to practical political change (see Chapter 3). In 1842, he writes Feuerbach that “L’infâme is immortal if it is not demolished in politics and law,”9 and in The Trumpet, as we have seen, he writes that “philosophy must be active in politics, and whenever the established order contradicts the self-consciousness of philosophy, it must be directly attacked and shaken” (Po 83/128; see also Po 82/128). And while Feuerbach is not so clearly concerned with politics, in 1845 he at least claims to be “a communist,”10 and he does seem to have some (admittedly very vague) form of political change in mind when he closes the 1843 preface to the Principles with the remark that “[t]he consequences of these principles will certainly follow” (G 265/3).11 In the passages from The Trumpet, Bauer’s understanding of the relation of ideas to political change is the standard Young Hegelian one: change of consciousness is a form of ground-clearing, a necessary condition for social change but scarcely its equivalent. This position is essentially Marx’s in The Holy Family, where he insists both that “[ideas] cannot carry out anything at all” and that they can “lead beyond . . . the ideas of the old world order” (DhF 126/119). It is also Engels’s in an 1843 review of Carlyle’s Past and Present: “[T]he proper social function of talent [is] not in ruling by force but in acting as a stimulant and taking the lead. Talent has to convince the masses of the truth of its ideas, and it will then have no need further to worry about their application, which will follow entirely of its own accord” (LE 548/466). And in the 1843 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Marx famously says that “[t]he weapon of critique cannot, of course, replace critique by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force when it grips the masses” (KHE 385/182).


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Perhaps the Young Hegelians are often read as proclaiming the direct power of thought because their polemics do emphasize the battle of ideas. For instance, Bauer, in a famous 1841 letter to Marx, declares that Marx should keep to his philosophical work rather than turning to practical activity because “[t]heory is now the strongest practice.”12 This does not mean that Bauer thinks theory directly and immediately produces practical change. His view here is like Engels’s in the 1843 “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” Talking of the shift in economic theory away from mercantilism to free trade, Engels declares that the new theoretical “presuppositions . . . begot and reared the factory system and modern slavery, which yields nothing to ancient slavery in inhumanity and cruelty” (Umr 500–501/420). It is not clear what presuppositions Engels has in mind (one of them seems to be the belief that human beings are inevitably driven by “avarice and selfishness” [Umr 499/419]), but it does not really matter. His point is that a particular set of human beings, acting on particular beliefs (here, apparently, beliefs about human nature as well as about the benefits of free trade) made particular institutional changes, such as lowering tariffs, and the net result was the conditions in which the factory system could arise. Such influencing of human beings who would be the real causal agents is the usual and perfectly sensible Young Hegelian picture. It is unlikely that in The German Ideology Marx is disavowing these earlier views. The quoted passages are from The Holy Family and the Jahrbücher and, as noted, Marx claims to stick by those texts. The complaint against the Young Hegelians is unlikely to be charge 1. It could be charge 2. In the 1843 “Introduction,” Marx points out that “revolutions require a passive element, a material basis” (KHE 386/183). Some group of agents must think that they have sufficient reason and sufficient power to make a revolution. Unless one’s theory includes a plausible account of who exactly will carry out the revolution and why they will do so, one may seem, in practice, to be putting one’s faith in the eventual efficacy of one’s ideas. The Young Hegelians are in fact generally oblivious of this aspect of any serious theory of revolution. (For instance, in 1842, when conservative nationalists reproach theory for being “impractical,” Bauer’s response is merely to appeal to Faust—“the image of the German”—as a being who, like the Germans, first needs a “magic potion”—that is, theory—before he can enter the “movement of life” [DN 411–12]).13

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There are three things to note about charge 2. First, the flaw here applies to most philosophers. Philosophical theories of what is wrong with the present or what a proper state of affairs would be like have usually neglected the issue of how to get from here to there. The Young Hegelians ought not to be singled out as especially benighted. Second, it is not obviously ridiculous to think that an idea will eventually turn into action by imponderable and unpredictable means—that is, without specification of a powerful agent whose needs the idea articulates.14 Third, the flaw here is irrelevant to the truth or rational grounding of the Young Hegelians’ beliefs. The Young Hegelians may be wrong about what follows in practice from attaining “critical” or “human” or “egoistic” consciousness (DI 20/30). They could still be right that such consciousness is correct consciousness, represents the standpoint or set of beliefs that reveals what the world and human beings are truly like.15 All that said, charge 2 is very likely part of Marx’s complaint against the Young Hegelians. “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers,” Marx writes, “to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the connection of their critique with their own material surroundings” (DI 20/30). Here, too, the charge is not clear. It might be: 3. The Young Hegelians think that the beliefs they criticize are detached from particular human interests and arise regardless of social and political conditions. That charge would be false with regard at least to Bauer and Feuerbach. In Chapter 3, we saw that Bauer thinks that individuals’ political interests have been the driving force of historical events (see, for instance, J 94–95/99–100). And Feuerbach asserts that “God springs out of the feeling of a lack; what the human being misses, whether this be something definite and therefore conscious, or unconscious—that is God” (WC 136/73); and “[o]nly in humanity’s wretchedness does God have his birthplace” (G §29, 312/48; see also WC 454/296). Feuerbach rarely infers from God’s attributes to specific social conditions—though he does declare that “[o]nly the poor human being has a rich God” (WC 136/73)—but he is clear that, where religion exists, central human needs have not been met. That religion is a stupefying consolation for avoidable real-life misery—the “opium of the people” (KHE 378/175), a phrase adapted from Bauer16—was a Young Hegelian commonplace. Marx might nevertheless be making charge 3, but it seems worth


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looking for an additional different complaint. I think Marx is also saying: 4. The Young Hegelians fail to see that economics is the basic level for historical and social explanation. This charge is accurate. Bauer is as harsh as Marx about the evils of civil society (see Ga 213–14/198), but neither he nor Feuerbach focuses on economics as explanatorily primary. For them, the reality of which religion is the consoling expression is that of political, economic, and ideological servitude, but not of forces and relations of production. And while at moments Stirner says things that Marx actually echoes, Stirner is clearly oblivious of economics. For instance, Stirner declares, “It is not the idea of liberty that develops itself but human beings develop themselves, and, of course, in this self-development develop their thinking too.”17 Marx says, “Morality, religion, metaphysics . . . have no history, no development; but human beings, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their reality, also their thinking and the products of their thinking” (DI 26– 27/36–37). Both Stirner and Marx insist that ideas do not develop independently but rather only as part and parcel of the general development of human beings. For Marx, however, the latter development involves the explanatory priority of “material production” and “material intercourse.” Stirner’s “self-development” has nothing to do with such things. So the Young Hegelian’s failure, for Marx, involves their ignorance both of the need to specify an agent for revolutionary change and of the nature of social and historical explanation. Yet Marx’s settling of accounts goes deeper. The Young Hegelians, he says, demand that we “change consciousness” and “recognize reality by means of another interpretation” (DI 20/30). This is to be done prior to social change. Here, I think, is the basic Young Hegelian sin. They see that institutional interests affect people’s beliefs but think that, having mentally distanced themselves from such interests, their own beliefs are unaffected. They recognize that particular beliefs grow in particular soils but think that the rational basis of their own beliefs is unconstrained by this fact. They think that in recognizing “reality by means of another interpretation”—in changing consciousness—they are moving to a rationally more adequate interpretation—to a more adequate form of consciousness. They think that their philosophical methods can sur-

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mount reality’s taint (as seems also to be the view implicit in the “Correspondence” from the Jahrbücher). This Marx denies. When Marx says that “German critique has, right up to its latest efforts, never left the realm of philosophy” (DI 18/28), the complaint is methodological. It is that the Young Hegelians do not see consciousness as constrained by its social context. They feel that they can attain an Archimedean mental standpoint, one insulated from all aspects of social life or individual psychology that might distort one’s judgment. In the last chapter I introduced the privileged standpoint thesis, the claim that correct understanding of central facts about human beings can proceed only from a certain standpoint. I change the terminology here in order to incorporate a claim about what is supposed to make each of the Young Hegelians’ standpoints privileged (I leave aside the question of whether the claim applies to all privileged standpoints)— namely, that it is sufficiently free from the distortions generated by the senses, institutional conditioning, psychological yearnings, etc. that beliefs formed from such a standpoint about such things as the human relation to the world or the human self-realization activity—about human nature in general—are justified simply because they are beliefs formed from that standpoint (justification is thus purely procedural).18 Each Young Hegelian—so I read Marx as saying—specifies such a standpoint. Call a privileged standpoint of this kind an insulated standpoint.19 With the knowledge of human nature they think accessible from an insulated standpoint, the Young Hegelians believe that they can assess whether existing institutions facilitate or inhibit a truly human life. In the end, then, I take Marx’s basic accusation to be that the Young Hegelians remain methodological rationalists. For Descartes, the illusions produced by the senses can be left behind, and one can ultimately attain to truth by the light of reason. The Young Hegelians, Marx is saying, similarly think that the illusions of social life can be left behind if one takes the standpoint of “self-consciousness” or the “species” or the “ego.” The objection to an insulated standpoint is not so much that it is abstract or disengaged (in contrast to the objections to the philosopher’s standpoint or to that of civil society [see Chapter 7]). The objection is that it mistakenly presumes insulation from the impact of social reality, and so mistakenly presumes that what it registers must be pure truth.


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As an attack on Bauer, there is nothing surprising here. Both before and after 1843 he believes the standpoint of “critique” to be free of all illusion. That defines the Bauerian critic’s standpoint. That is what makes it “the higher standpoint” (Ein 146). From such a standpoint, one could not be deceived about, e.g., the human relation to the world or the human self-realization activity. With respect to Stirner and Feuerbach, though, Marx might seem off the mark. Both explicitly attack the rationalist tradition. Stirner declares that “[t]he fixed idea may also be perceived as ‘maxim,’ ‘principle,’ ‘standpoint,’ and the like. Archimedes, to move the earth, asked for a standpoint outside it. People sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the world of mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences; it is heaven. Heaven is the ‘standpoint’ from which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and—despised.”20 Stirner says further, “Philosophy”—which he is attacking—“cannot hereafter achieve anything higher, for its highest is the omnipotence of mind, the almightiness of mind.”21 He swipes at Feuerbach with the remark “[t]he human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion,”22 and he swipes at the Young Hegelians in sarcasm that reads like The German Ideology itself: “Now nothing but mind rules in the world. An innumerable multitude of concepts buzz about in people’s heads, and what are those doing who endeavor to get further? They are negating these concepts to put new ones in their place! They say, ‘You form a false concept of right, of the state, of human being, of liberty, of truth, of marriage, etc.; the concept of right, etc., is rather that one which we now set up.’ Thus the confusion of concepts moves forward.”23 The Archimedean standpoint—“a standpoint outside” the world (that is, insulated from it)—is attacked; the goal of “negating” concepts is attacked; the claim is made that even those who think themselves philosophically radical, e.g., Feuerbach, remain within the (implicitly religious) tradition they reject. Possibly part of Marx’s fury at Stirner, and clearly part of the reason for responding to him, stems from Stirner’s claim that communism, too, fits this pattern.24 So what is the basis for Marx’s tu quoque response to Stirner? It is that Stirner, in the end, thinks that all one must do is to recognize oneself as an “egoist.” “The own person,” he writes, “is the freeborn, the person free to begin with. . . [He] is originally free, because he

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recognizes nothing but himself.”25 And: “[M]y object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it.”26 Like those he attacks, Stirner in the end demands a change of consciousness. The change he demands is that people stop trying to change their consciousness, but rather accept their existing individual impulses and desires: “Christianity’s magic circle would be broken, if the strained relation between existence and calling, that is, between me as I am and me as I should be, ceased.”27 Here the Archimedean point is “what I am.” Stirner even calls this a standpoint without presuppositions: I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself . . . [but] I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore none at all: for, as I am the Unique, I know nothing of the duality of a presupposing and a pre-supposed ego . . . but this, that I consume myself, means only that I am. I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature [Schöpfer und Geschöpf] in one.28 I am supposed to be engaged in a process of “positing” and so “creating” myself. Now, (a) from within the process certain distinctions (presupposing/presupposed; creator/created) do not arise, and (b) seeing oneself as within that process is the correct standpoint, reveals the truth about oneself. Here again there is something reminiscent of Marx. In the Manuscripts, Marx insists that we are always engaged in a self-creative process and that certain distinctions (such as creator/created) make sense only in abstraction from that process. He says similar things in The German Ideology. Such similarities, however, only highlight what, to Marx, is Stirner’s fundamental mistake: to believe that this change of consciousness is something an individual can accomplish now—i.e., prior to social change. Marx is talking specifically of Stirner when he says that the philosopher “imagines that his moral demand to people— the demand that they should change their consciousness—will bring about this altered consciousness, and in people who have changed owing to changed empirical conditions and who, of course, now also possess a different consciousness, he sees nothing but a changed [con-


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sciousness]” (DI 232/250). Stirner is guilty of urging us to bridge, by purely intellectual means, the gap between the consciousness that agents currently do have and the consciousness that they allegedly ought to have. He tells us, Marx says, that “you should be different from what you really are” (DI 233/250). As for Feuerbach, he attacks the Cartesian tradition on the grounds of its abstractness. He explicitly rejects any rationalist Archimedean standpoint. He does not, however, reject an Archimedean standpoint per se. The illusions of religion and philosophy that Feuerbach attacks are to be dispelled by a mental shift, by his method of inversion. Feuerbach urges us to engage in this inversion and so to attain to truth: “[W]e need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth” (VT 244/157; see also WC 415/274–75). Marx’s complaint is that this is to be a Cartesian by other means. It is to assume that some form of purely mental acrobatics can separate the false from the true. Feuerbach’s desired standpoint may be that of a redeemed everyday life; it may be not at all an abstract standpoint whose goal is to surmount the mire of ordinary, material existence; nevertheless, it is supposed to be an insulated standpoint. Feuerbach too, then, believes that human beings can get rid of “false ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be” (DI 13/23) by taking a new standpoint. He and Stirner may think that they reject the rationalist tradition. I take Marx to be saying that their reliance on an insulated standpoint keeps them within it. The Young Hegelians think that the changes in consciousness they demand are changes to standpoints insulated from distortion with regard to beliefs about such things as self-realization or, more generally, human nature. They think that beliefs acquired via such standpoints are true by virtue of being acquired in that way. Marx denies that such a standpoint can currently be taken. This certainly looks like a change from the Theses, where great emphasis was put on taking the proper standpoint. It is probably correct to say that in the Theses Marx thinks of the standpoint of social humanity as an insulated standpoint. So it looks as if in the Theses he is guilty of the methodological sin against which he now inveighs. I defer until the next chapter the discussion of what is new and different in The German Ideology. I defer until Chapter 10 the assessment of Marx’s denial of the possibility of an insulated standpoint.

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In this chapter I want to get clear on his methodological alternative, what he calls “empirical” verification.

3. Empirical Verification Marx acknowledges that his own “mode of approach is not presuppositionless [voraussetzungslos]” (DI 27/37). But he says of these presuppositions that they are “real” (DI 27/37) and asserts that they can be “verified in a purely empirical way [sind . . . auf rein empirischem Wege konstatierbar]” (DI 20/31). There are two reasons for this insistence on empirical verification. First, much of The German Ideology represents a shift in subject matter from religion to history and economics. The materialist theory of history is, of course, the centerpiece here. Even aside from it, however, Marx makes many specific historical claims. These are clearly intended to be confirmed or disconfirmed by historical data. For instance, Marx says, “In the case of the nations which grew out of the middle ages, tribal property evolved through various stages—feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture—to modern capital, determined by large-scale industry and universal competition” (DI 61–2/89). Marx would undoubtedly think it proper to revise this claim were evidence found that tribal property has usually moved directly to capital invested in manufacture, bypassing the stages of feudal landed property and corporative movable property. Here “empirical verification” is straightforward. One tests one’s thesis by the data. (From this angle, part of the complaint against the Young Hegelians is actually an inversion of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: it is less that the Young Hegelians do not see that reality has to be changed than that they do not see that reality—social and economic life—has to be interpreted, that is, understood.) The second source of empirical verification’s appeal is that it can defeat objective illusion (see Chapter 6). It is rational to believe that air is not homogeneous because the science of chemistry has a theory about the composition of air, and that theory has been empirically tested and has passed the test. Air may still appear homogeneous. It is rational to believe that it is not. My claim is that Marx turns to “empirical verification” in large part because he sees it as providing a kind of objectivity that obviates the


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need for a standpoint shift. If empirical tests can provide a rational basis to believe the truth of some thesis T, then there is no need for agents to change consciousness or take some specialized standpoint or shift their orientation in order to have good reason to believe T is true. Empirical verification provides, even prior to social change, rational ground for one’s beliefs. It obviates the need to wrestle with whether one’s standpoint really is free of institutional or psychological taint. In contrasting his method to those of the Young Hegelians, Marx believes his is not only rational because empirical, but that because his method is empirical, his claims can currently—under capitalism—be seen to be rationally justified.29 My concern is not whether Marx’s faith in empirical testing as the paradigm of rationality is justified. Nor is it with the similarities and differences between him and positivist or empiricist contemporaries such as Comte or Mill. My concern is the kinds of claims that Marx thinks empirically verifiable. Many are claims about social and economic history. But where Marx actually talks of the “presuppositions” that are to be empirically verified, he says some quite peculiar things: “The presuppositions [Voraussetzungen] from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas [Dogmen], but real presuppositions from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These presuppositions can thus be verified in a purely empirical way” (DI 20/31). “Dogmas” refers to the religious dogmas that the Young Hegelians deciphered and attacked. Marx is concerned with something more concrete: “the real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live.” In one sense this is again just a shift in subject matter from religion to economics and social and economic history. The oddity is in speaking of individuals, activity, and material conditions as “presuppositions.” Marx’s Voraussetzungen are elements and processes of the physical world. What is being presupposed? That such things exist? That the proposition “Individuals and their activity, etc. exist” is true? In the first sentence of the next paragraph, Marx says, “The first Voraussetzung of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals” (DI 20/31). Reading Voraussetzung here as “prerequisite” rather than “presupposition” we get: “The first prerequisite

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of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.”30 This is a clear enough claim. It is also at least partially a tautology. Without the existence, now or in the past, of human individuals, there is no human history. Whether the existence of such beings is the “first” prerequisite of human history is perhaps harder to say (or even to make sense of). The real question, though, is how to verify empirically the Voraussetzung in question. That Voraussetzung is the claim: “There are or have been living human individuals.” This is not a tautology. Human beings might never have existed. The question is how we empirically verify that they do. The answer is puzzlingly simple: not by amassing data or making tests, but by simply turning one’s gaze and seeing that human beings do exist. This is, to put it mildly, a strange form of “empirical verification.” Take another passage: With the presuppositionless [voraussetzungslosen] Germans we must begin by stating the first presupposition [or prerequisite] of all human existence and, therefore of all history, the presupposition [or prerequisite], namely, that human beings must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But to life belongs before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and various other things. (DI 28/41–42; see also DI 217/236) There is the mockery of Bauer’s (and perhaps Stirner’s) presuppositionless standpoint. And the assertion of an “empirical” presupposition: human beings must find a way to keep themselves alive. This is “a basic condition [Grundbedingung]of all history, which, today as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled” (DI 28/42). Perhaps this claim is another tautology: if human beings are not “in a position to live,” they will die, and there will be no human history. Still, presumably the other assertions in the passage are to be empirically verified. But once again verification is not the stuff of social science: “[T]o life belongs before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and various other things.” This is not a logical truth. Human physiology might have been different. Animals do not need clothing. Some do not need habitations. It is, though, a truth about the


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human condition. How is it to be empirically verified? By common experience and the simplest observations of daily life.31 Again Marx appeals to what is there, directly before our eyes. I am stressing passages that might seem to be mere carelessness or hyperbole. I think they are not. Read in the context of the Comments, the Manuscripts, and the Theses (at least as I have read those works), they express Marx’s continuing uncertainty about the scope of the epistemological role he attributes to our practical interactions with the world. They also lead directly to The German Ideology’s attempt to settle accounts with philosophy. Empirical verification is not only the method appropriate for the new research areas that Marx wants us to turn to. It is also said to be the method for handling the classic problems of philosophy: taking matters, Marx says, “as they really are and happened . . . every profound philosophical problem is resolved quite simply into an empirical fact” (DI 43/39). This is reminiscent of the claim in the Manuscripts that the resolution of philosophical antitheses is “only possible in a practical way” (ÖpM 542/302). The difference is that, in appealing to “an empirical fact,” the Marx of The German Ideology thinks that the resolution of “every profound philosophical problem” is possible now, prior to that communist society in which “[t]he senses have . . . become theorists directly in their practice” (ÖpM 540/300). The idea seems to be that we can currently see the “empirical facts” into which philosophical problems can be resolved, just as we can see other empirical facts (e.g., the results of the tests for air’s heterogeneity), without the need to change consciousness or take an insulated standpoint. I have examined Marx’s odd use of “empirical verification” in part as a lead-in to his accounts of how particular philosophical problems can be resolved into empirical facts. For terminological clarity, “scientific empirical verification” should be distinguished from “everyday empirical verification.” Scientific empirical verification is simply a commonplace positivist view of science. A theory is tested by data that are both (more or less) uncontroversial and (more or less) distinct from the theory being tested. Everyday empirical verification involves observing human life and confirming the presence of certain easily visible aspects of that life. The antecedents of this distinction are in Feuerbach’s distinction between “the natural scientific reality of sensuousness” and “its absolute reality” (V 188), and in his ambiguous insistence that the “senses, too,

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are the organs of philosophy” (AP 145/137). For Feuerbach, the break from philosophy involves both a commitment to natural science and a transformation in how we relate to (in the terms from the last chapter, how we are oriented to) the natural world. In §6 I discuss whether the Marx of The German Ideology is in the end also concerned with such a transformation.

4. Antiphilosophy I Like Feuerbach, the Marx of The German Ideology is an antiphilosopher. And like Feuerbach, for Marx, this means several different things. Here the categories from Chapter 2 will again be useful. Let us begin with Marx’s moments of utter dismissal of philosophy: “[W]here speculation ends, in real life, begins real, positive science. . . Empty phrases about consciousness end, and real knowledge has to take their place. When the reality is depicted, a self-sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, which can be abstracted from the observation of the historical development of human beings” (DI 27/37). One sense in which philosophical problems are to be solved empirically is apparently through a process of generalizing from data.32 This “summingup” of general results might mean that philosophical problems are to be replaced by topics in the special sciences. Perhaps we are to make empirically verifiable generalizations about human behavior rather than untestable abstract arguments about mind and body: “One has to ‘leave philosophy aside,’ one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary human being to the study of reality” (DI 218/236). Traditional philosophical issues would simply be ignored. This is consistent with the contempt that Marx sometimes shows for philosophy: “Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love” (DI 218/236). The first activity is empty and sterile; the second, satisfying and life-creating. The first is to be left “aside.”33 Elsewhere Marx is doing something more complicated. This is best seen in the passages sometimes cited to prove Marx’s alleged metaphysical materialism.34 An exhaustive account would have to exhaust the variants of metaphysical materialism and so the senses in which Marx is


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not a materialist. Here I stick to the variants that have played a significant role in the Marxist tradition. Take the following claims: 1. Matter is metaphysically primary: (a) Consciousness can be reduced to matter, i.e., only matter “really” exists. (b) Consciousness is a product of matter. 2. Matter is chronologically prior to consciousness. 3. Matter can exist apart from consciousness, i.e., there are extramental entities. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, Engels asserts (3). The message of materialism, he says, is that “[n]ature exists independently of all philosophy” (LudF 272/18). Engels also asserts (1b), praising Feuerbach for having realized that “[m]atter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism” (LudF 277–78/25). And Engels asserts (1a): “[M]aterialism conceives nature as the sole reality” (LudF 272/17). Most interestingly, Engels says: “The question of the relation of thinking to being, of mind to nature, the paramount question of the whole of philosophy . . . the question: which is primary, mind or nature—that question, in relation to the Church, was sharpened into this: ‘Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?’” (LudF 275/21). Here Engels is presenting a schematic history of philosophy, but he accepts that the debate between idealism and materialism should be phrased as a debate about the creation: “[t]hese two expressions, idealism and materialism, primarily signify nothing more than this” (LudF 275/21; presumably Engels here has materialism in sense 2 in mind). This way of casting the issue entails (implausibly) that atheists must be materialists (as they deny the creation). Now, if the issue is cast this way, and if one is an atheist and thus a materialist in sense 2 (and so also in sense 3), and if one accepts the findings of natural science, one might end up reasoning as Lenin does in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Natural science positively asserts that the earth once existed in such a state that no man or any other creature existed or could have

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existed on it. Organic matter is a later phenomenon, the fruit of a long evolution. It follows that there was no sentient matter, no “complexes of sensation,” no self that was supposedly “indissolubly” connected with the environment in accordance with Avenarius’ doctrine. Matter is primary, and thought, consciousness, sensation are products of a very high development.35 Lenin’s argument is that (2) and (3) are true, and therefore (1b) is true. The point is not the details of such arguments. The point is that in posing the metaphysical question, neither Engels nor Lenin is deflating it. They take it very seriously. Feuerbach argued that the question of the creation was incoherent if asked as a question about the creation of “the All” (WC 336/218). Only questions about the creation of particular entities are coherent, and these natural science can answer (WC 337/218). Engels is addressing the creation of “the All.” In AntiDühring, he says that “[a]s soon as each separate science is required to get clarity as to its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous” (AntD 24/31). A special philosophical science is said to become superfluous at a certain point in time (it is not said to be revealed always to have been logically misguided), to be replaceable by the proper aggregation of the “separate sciences.” Engels seems to think such a unified science (“our knowledge of things”) will actually answer the philosophical question.36 Similarly, in the passage quoted above, Lenin takes the results of natural science to refute, not to deflate, idealism. To see how Marx differs, we can look at a passage in which he mentions the same issues. The context is a polemic against Feuerbach’s failure to recognize the alteration of nature by human industry: “So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labor and creation, this production, the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole human world and his own perceptive faculty [Anschauungsvermögen], nay his own existence, were missing” (DI 44/40). Marx then says, “Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original human beings produced by generatio aequivoca; but this distinction has meaning only insofar as the human being is considered to be distinct from na-


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ture” (DI 44/40). The final clause is crucial. Marx is struggling with two perspectives. On the one hand, he is committed to the results of the natural sciences. Chronologically, nature existed prior to human beings and would continue to exist were human beings to disappear. Human beings must work to keep themselves and their “perceptive faculty” in existence. We do not need to work to keep nature in existence. On the other hand—and this is the difference from Engels and Lenin—Marx does not then jump to a metaphysical materialism of any stripe. Instead, he says, “this distinction has meaning only insofar as the human being is considered to be distinct from nature,” suggesting that the human being is not necessarily to be considered in this way. Moreover, just before this passage, he refers mockingly to “the important question of the relation of the human being to nature” and he attacks Bauer for thinking of human history and nature as “two separate ‘things’” (DI 43/39). Apparently, neither human beings nor their history are to be thought of as “things” that are “separate” from nature. Care is needed to see the different levels at which Marx is addressing different questions. One might ask whether particular objects—the building my office is in, the keyboard I’m typing on, even the earth— would continue to exist were human beings to vanish. The answer is, of course, yes. Our knowledge (based on experience) of how material objects decay tells us that if human beings suddenly vanished, the building, the keyboard, and the earth would all continue to exist for varying lengths of time. On the other hand, one might ask whether these objects as a totality—Feuerbach’s “All”—would exist were human beings to die out. This is more difficult. I know what it is for particular objects, even an object as large as the earth, to stop existing. It is not clear to me what it would be for the All to stop existing. And even to attempt to answer such a question seems to require a standpoint outside the All from which its potential nonexistence could be observed. It may be that such a standpoint is not coherent. At a minimum, it requires imagining oneself as no longer part of the natural, embodied world. The question has “meaning only insofar as the human being is considered to be distinct from nature.” One must (at a minimum) take the standpoint of a being outside of nature to get the question going. In the first clause of the crucial sentence (beginning “Of course, in all this . . .”), I take Marx to be affirming a particular existence claim

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(nature—trees, dirt, oceans—existed before humans), and in the second clause (“but this distinction has meaning . . .”) I take him to be avoiding a more global one. I take his point to be that human beings can be considered distinct from any particular part of nature, so that one can meaningfully ask whether that part exists independently of human existence, but that (and here there is no change from the 1844 discussion of the creation) human beings ought not to be considered distinct from nature as a whole (“as though these were two separate ‘things’”). They ought not to be considered as beings abstracted from nature (as a whole), and so faced with questions like whether nature (as a whole) can exist apart from the existence of such abstracted human beings.37 I take Marx to be trying to avoid the standpoint from which the idealism/materialism issue can be formulated.38 That is different from claiming that the way to answer the issue is via the appropriate organization and development of unified science. Consider the remark that labor is “the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists.” This assertion might seem to support the idealist reading that holds that Marx believes that there is no nature apart from human laboring activity. In fact, the phrase “as it now exists” indicates that he means only that the natural world has by now been everywhere affected by human labor. That is his explicit claim at the end of the paragraph when he asserts that “the nature that preceded human history . . . no longer exists anywhere” (DI 44/40). Marx may be wrong about this, but nothing metaphysical hangs on the matter. Even if he were right, a physical world would remain, and it would be composed of physical objects that would be ontologically the same as before their alteration by industry. To raise the issue of whether there is some independently existing reality on which labor operates is either to ask concrete questions about particular instances of human world-shaping activity (tree-cutting, atom-smashing), in which case the answer is yes (the trees and atoms do exist independently), or it is to abstract from all such concrete questions and to ask whether human labor is a transcendental category constitutive of reality, of the All. Putting aside the implausibility of “labor” as such a category, to raise this question requires taking a standpoint outside of nature. That is what Marx refused to do in 1844 and in the Theses. He is still refusing to do so.


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5. Antiphilosophy II We need to look further at Marx’s alleged resolution of the problem of “the relation of the human being to nature.” He sneers at the attempted solutions by the “‘unfathomably lofty works’ on ‘substance’ [Hegel] and ‘self-consciousness’ [Bauer].”39 So I take the problem to be the traditional one of the relation of mind or consciousness to an external world. Marx says that the problem “crumbles of itself when we understand that the celebrated ‘unity of the human being with nature’ has always existed in industry” (DI 43/40). As a serious philosophical account of that relation, Marx’s invocation of industry is as much of a nonstarter (and oddly akin to) Feuerbach’s invocation of digestion as an account of the unity of body and soul. But Marx is not providing a serious philosophical account; rather, this is Marx’s paradigmatic example of how a philosophical problem is to be resolved into an empirical fact. (Incidentally, verification of this fact— the fact that in industry human beings alter nature and themselves— must be everyday empirical verification: one observes the human interaction with nature in the work process.) In what sense does the fact of industry resolve the philosophical problem? There is a deflationary element. Marx seems in part to be trying to deflate the question of the relation of human beings to nature into concrete questions about the historical development of human productive forces: “the celebrated ‘unity of the human being with nature’ has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry” (DI 43/40). Apparently, what needs examination are these varying forms, not some metaphysical question. But if deflation is at work here, it operates differently from Feuerbach’s deflationary move with regard to the creation. Feuerbach took himself to be making a logical point. He claimed that the question of the creation relies on categories (natural cause/effect) that are inapplicable to the entity (the All) whose creation is asked about. Marx never says, nor should he say, that the “unity” of human beings and nature can, logically, only involve particular forms of concrete human/nature interaction, that to ask about a larger form of unity is to make a category mistake. To rule out of court any larger form of unity is to make a substantive claim. The question is what justifies such a claim.

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Marx says that he wants us to see things “as they really are and happened” (DI 43/39). What do we see? That in the process of industry human beings interact with nature in various ways, simultaneously changing it and themselves? Granted. That this fact makes the philosophical problem crumble? Why should it do so? One could read Marx here as entirely dismissive. It is not that one cannot make sense of issues larger than the examination of particular forms of the work process; one simply ought not to bother. The philosophical problem crumbles in the sense of being discarded. In fact, however, what Marx says is that the problem will crumble of itself when we understand that the unity of human beings and nature has always existed in industry. The problem will crumble not when we ignore it but when we have a certain insight about it. There is something Marx wants us to grasp. I take Marx to be concerned here with the fundamental human relation to the world. He thinks that industry is our fundamental relation to the world. In one form or another this has been his view since 1844. Of course now Marx is neither deflating nor dismissing the issue of the relation of human beings to nature. He is answering a real question. As in Chapter 7, however, it is not a metaphysical question to be answered by the construction of a metaphysical theory. For this second reading to work, though, one must come to regard our interaction with nature in the work process as exemplifying our fundamental relation to the world. One must regard it as the “celebrated ‘unity of the human being and nature.’” And this means that one must undergo a change of consciousness—just what empirical verification was to make unnecessary. This is one instance of a recurrent problem in The German Ideology. To make palpable the force of his approach to philosophical issues, Marx seems to need to change our consciousness (to get us to take—and to see the “correctness” of—a new standpoint). That was all right for Feuerbach, for whom such a move generated no internal inconsistency. It is not all right for Marx. To see the problem’s further manifestations we need to look at other passages. Marx says that the first historical act is the production of the means for satisfying human needs (DI 28/42). This in turn, he says, produces new needs.40 The general process of satisfying needs also involves the production of new human beings: “The third circumstance which from


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the beginning, enters into historical development is that human beings, who daily re-create their own life, begin to make other human beings, to reproduce” (DI 29/42). A fourth circumstance is that a social element is, then, part of the “production of life, both of one’s own in labor and of fresh life in procreation” (DI 29/43). Then Marx says, “Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary historical relationships, do we find that the human being also possesses ‘consciousness’” (DI 30/43). And later in this paragraph: “Consciousness is, therefore, from the beginning a social product, and remains so as long as human beings exist at all” (DI 31/44). Consciousness is called a “social product.” It looks as if Marx is being a materialist in sense 1b. Now, in saying that consciousness is a social product, Marx does not mean that consciousness follows the existence of society chronologically, that first there were the “four aspects of the primary historical relationships” and then consciousness arose. Chronologically, the first three aspects are said to be simultaneous: “These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages but just as three aspects . . . which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first human beings, and which still assert themselves in history today” (DI 29/43). The fourth aspect is apparently on the same footing: “Thus it is quite obvious from the beginning that there exists a materialist connection of human beings with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as human beings themselves” (DI 30/43). Finally, consciousness, too, is a social product right from the start. If it is “‘burdened’ with matter,” it is so “from the beginning” (DI 30/43 and 30/44). There is no suggestion that “from the beginning” refers to the start of consciousness as distinct from the simultaneous start of the satisfaction of needs, of reproduction, and so forth. Chronologically, consciousness is on a par with the other “aspects of social activity.” What it means for consciousness to be a social product is that, unlike nature, it does not exist apart from human society. Empirical verification of Marx’s claims about the various aspects of social activity clearly has nothing to do with tests or data. The “first historical act . . . a basic condition of all history . . . today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled” (DI 28/42). Those first three “aspects of social activity . . . still assert themselves in history

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today.” In general, the simultaneous production of consciousness and the physical means of existence should be visible in our everyday world. Verification here can only be everyday empirical verification. What follows from the simultaneity of these various aspects of social activity? From the chronological priority of nature to humanity, Lenin deduced a metaphysical conclusion. Marx deduces nothing so grand. A crossed-out passage in the manuscript contains the sentence “We know only a single science, the science of history” (DI 18n/28n). If it is history that is to resolve “every profound philosophical problem . . . quite simply into an empirical fact,” then the facts are that nature existed prior to human beings (and so prior to consciousness) and that society and consciousness have always existed together and still visibly do so. The questions are questions of chronology and have concrete answers, and that is an end to the issue. Marx is thus a materialist in senses 2 and 3 (matter existed prior to and so can exist apart from consciousness). But he is in fact not a materialist in sense 1b, the metaphysical materialism often attributed to him. Of course one could say that the chronological priority of matter and the denial of God’s existence together suggest that in some sense consciousness arose out of matter. But I take (1b) to be the claim that particular bits of matter (bits of human matter) are constantly producing particular bits of consciousness. And the question that this claim is supposed to answer is one I think Marx wants to be rid of. Chronologically, human matter and consciousness are said to be simultaneous. And here I take chronology to end the issue. Once again, however, Marx seems to need one to look at things in a particular way if one is to see that chronology does end the issue, to see that the relation of mind to matter does reduce to the readily observable everyday intertwining of mental and physical activity. One could easily admit that in daily life there is this intertwining, yet argue that this shows nothing about the relation of mind and matter. To see Marx’s facts as dispositive, as the resolution of the mind/matter relation, one seems to need to look at things from a particular perspective. Marx admits that his is a particular “mode of approach” (Betrachtungsweise—other possible translations: mode of view, manner of observation): “With the first mode of approach one starts from consciousness taken as the living individual; with the second—which corresponds to real life—from the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness


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is considered solely as their consciousness” (DI 27/37). The philosopher has her reasons for starting with consciousness. What justifies using Marx’s and not the philosopher’s Betrachtungsweise? Marx says of his Betrachtungsweise that it “is not presuppositionless. It starts out from the real presuppositions and does not abandon them for a moment. Its presuppositions are human beings, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity but in their real, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (DI 27/37). This sounds as if once more Marx is trying to show that his view differs methodologically from the Young Hegelians’. Even if we are supposed to begin with a certain Betrachtungsweise, its legitimacy will be argued for empirically— that is, without needing to take any special standpoint. But of course the only thing that can be empirically verified is that human beings do exist in a “process of development under definite conditions.” It cannot be empirically verified that the Betrachtungsweise that focuses on such beings “and does not abandon them for a moment” is the road to truth about such things as the mind/matter relationship. Marx might get important results for the study of history and economics from this Betrachtungsweise. In general, with respect to the social sciences, such a mode of approach might be the most productive way to go. But that fact would show nothing about the approach’s rational superiority with respect to such topics as the mind/matter relationship, its superiority compared to that philosopher’s Betrachtungsweise that starts out from consciousness. As before, recognizing that form of rational superiority seems to be something one must simply see, seems to require a shift in the standpoint from which one sees the world—but according to The German Ideology that is to relapse into Young Hegelianism. At issue is how to show that a philosophical problem is reducible to an empirical fact. One possibility would be to explain how the question has arisen, to diagnose it: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity, the material intercourse of human beings, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of human beings at this stage [of history, i.e., comparatively early society] still appear as the direct efflux [Ausfluss] of their material behavior. The same applies to

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mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. (DI 26/36) This passage is often read as evidence that Marx believes that ideas are produced by (human) matter, that they are the “direct efflux” of material behavior. On the basis of this phrase, Marx is sometimes classified, in current jargon, as an epiphenomenalist.41 My claim, however, is that he is not concerned with answering but with diagnosing and dissolving the philosophical problem. In fact, the phrase “direct efflux” comes after the phrase intended to provide whatever view there is here of the relation of mind to matter. Mental and physical processes are said to be “at first directly interwoven.” This is a historical claim. In early society, there is no cultural sphere so distinct from agriculture, hunting, etc. as to have the appearance of autonomous development. Consciousness is merely consciousness of a limited set of direct interactions with the material world: “Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious” (DI 31/44). As always, ideas do occur within the process of material production. In early society they also appear to do so. In subsequent eras, the ways in which consciousness and material behavior are interwoven become more indirect. With the rise of a distinct sphere of mental production, consciousness comes to appear autonomous. Marx seems to believe that as brain-work becomes a special activity ideas come to appear to have a life of their own, appear to exist apart from their roles in the complex web of all human activities. And consciousness, as the part of human life dealing with ideas, comes itself to seem distinct from the rest of human life, no longer appears to be the direct efflux of material behavior (DI 31/45). The emphasis on the interweaving of consciousness and material life might lead philosophers of mind to give Marx a different label, now to see him as an interactionist. But I don’t see his remarks as staking out any philosophical position. He is noting what is clearly the case, and talking about how appearances have changed historically. Mental and physical processes are clearly interwoven in ordinary life. “Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of human beings” continues to exist in


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the process of material production, and even a speculating philosopher is always a breathing material being, standing or sitting or pacing. In a straightforward sense, ordinary human life always involves both mental and physical activity: body and mind always exist and function (well or ill) together. I don’t think any philosopher of mind would deny this. Pointing it out doesn’t commit one to any particular philosophical view. Marx’s stress is on the fact that ideas now appear to be independent. He is claiming that the disjuncture (generated by the division of mental and manual labor) between appearance and reality is what has created the issue about their relationship, has—as a matter of historical fact— created the philosophical problem of the relation of mind and matter, has made that relation seem to be a problem. In the terms from Chapter 2, here the resolution of the philosophical problem into an empirical fact is diagnostic. Now, a diagnosis of a philosophical problem is also supposed to effect a cure. If one sees that the mind/matter problem has arisen along with the division of mental and manual labor, one is supposed to see that there is no problem per se. Unfortunately, the resolution of the philosophical problem requires a particular interpretation of the empirical fact, for Marx’s account (even granting its truth) of the genesis of the mind/matter problem is not obviously relevant to that problem’s resolution. The question of whether certain subatomic particles exist only arose with the development of recent scientific theory and technology; that hardly undermines the question. So why should our insight into the historical origin of the philosopher’s question make it crumble? Marx objects to the idea that the ego can be “divorced from all its empirical conditions of life, its activity, the conditions of its existence . . . separated from the world that forms its basis and from its own body” (DI 270/289). But he has said nothing to prove that it is incoherent to attempt such divorcing and such separating. Under communism, one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner” (DI 33/47). Mental and manual labor would not be separated. One would not engage in all these activities simultaneously, but there would be no distinct group of persons systematically engaged in only mental activity. Let us grant Marx the mammoth hypothesis that under such conditions the true (intertwoven) relationship of the mental and the material would be clear. Grant that under such conditions Cartesian or other rationalist

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(or metaphysical materialist) views would have no bite. Still, current conditions are not communist, and so we have no reason to stigmatize the current appearance that there is a real issue about the relation of mind and matter as merely an appearance. This follows from Marx’s own claims, for as the division of mental and manual labor continues, so do its effects. The illusion is objective. Pointing to the fact that consciousness and material activity are always interwoven ought not—given Marx’s other claims—to have the requisite force. It ought to seem—given Marx’s other claims—merely a trivial fact about human life.42 To demand the opposite would be to demand a change in consciousness prior to social change. Once again we are back with a variant of the problem Marx faced in 1844.

6. Transformation Feuerbach wants his antiphilosophy to be transformative. He is at one with Hegelians young and old in holding, in Karl Göschel’s words, that “[t]he philosopher [or antiphilosopher] must also celebrate his day of pentecost.”43 Marx castigates the Young Hegelians for seeking such pentecostal change. Yet to justify his own critique of philosophy he seems to require something similar. Is Marx, despite himself, trying to transform us? Marx certainly thinks that communism will produce a transformation of human beings. He rebukes Stirner for believing that “the communist proletarians who revolutionize society and put the relations of production and the form of intercourse on a new basis—i.e., on themselves as new people, on their new mode of life—remain ‘as of old’” (DI 195/214). Under new conditions, Marx says, they will become new people. Under communism “[t]he individuals’ consciousness of their mutual relations will, of course, likewise be entirely different” (DI 425/439), and in the course of the revolution the proletariat “rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society” (DI 68/88; see also 70/53, 403–404n/418n, 423–24/438). Communist individuals and their mutual relations will be very different from capitalist individuals and their mutual relations. There is nothing inconsistent in such statements. There would be inconsistency only if Marx were trying to get us to become communist individuals now. The best evidence of an unacknowledged push in this direction


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comes from Marx’s attack on Feuerbach. I have argued that in §4444 of the Principles and in his later gloss on it in the “Critical Remarks,” Feuerbach is both endorsing empirical science and trying to transform us (see Chapter 2, §2). Marx spends some time polemicizing against a phrase from §44. What is interesting about his attack is that it so misinterprets Feuerbach as to come close to replicating Feuerbach’s own position. The attack is made in a combination of text and footnote. Here are the sentences between which the footnote is set: [In] the contemplation [Anschauung] of the sensuous world, [Feuerbach] necessarily runs into things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of human beings with nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception[Anschauung], a profane one which sees only the “flatly obvious” [“auf platter Hand Liegende”] and a higher, philosophical one which perceives the “true essence” [wahre Wesen] of things. (DI 42–43/39)45 Now the footnote: “Feuerbach’s error is not that he subordinates the flatly obvious, the sensuous appearance, to the sensuous reality established by detailed investigation of the sensuous facts, but that he cannot in the last resort cope with the sensuous world except by looking at it with the ‘eyes,’ i.e., through the ‘spectacles’ of the philosopher” (DI 43n/39n). The footnote stakes out the area of agreement. For Feuerbach, nature is sometimes deceptive, and scientific investigation must find the true structure behind everyday appearances (for example, in the case of minerals [see WC-1 383–84/286]). Marx admits this as well: sometimes we need to find “the sensuous reality established by detailed investigation of the sensuous facts.” The area of apparent disagreement concerns the “flatly obvious.” Marx accuses Feuerbach of turning from the flatly obvious to a “higher, philosophical [perception] which perceives the ‘true essence’ of things.” Marx thus seems to endorse the flatly obvious as the “‘true essence’ of things,” even if not under that title. At any rate, it is truer than “philosophical” perception. I have argued that, for Feuerbach, ordinary reality is not to be retreated from as something flatly obvious; rather, we are

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to strive for “the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real” (G §44, 325–26/60). Our current failure to do this is due to the impact of philosophy and Christianity: we mistakenly regard ordinary reality as flatly obvious. Feuerbach’s move is supposed to be the opposite of a retreat to the “spectacles” of the philosopher. He wants precisely to remove those spectacles. Marx has misread him. Feuerbach’s injunction is the same as Marx’s: concentrate on appearances, on the natural world present at hand. Still, there are areas of genuine disagreement. For Marx, the empirical science of history is vital, whereas it does not come into Feuerbach’s ken. For Marx, natural sciences such as physics and chemistry are the handmaidens of, are given their “aim” by, economic interests (DI 44/40). For Marx, the everyday world consists crucially of human beings sweating and suffering to produce their means of existence. Social life is harsh, and nature itself is plenty red in tooth and claw. Late in The German Ideology, Marx mockingly quotes the “true socialist” idealization of “‘gay flowers . . . tall and stately oaks’” and the absurd anthropomorphizing of the heavens: “‘In these revolutions [of the heavenly bodies],’” one of the true socialists writes, “‘I see a unity of life, movement and happiness’” (DI 459/471). Feuerbach himself is not nearly so bad, but there is more than a trace of treacly romanticism in him. Yet what follows from such disagreement? That serious study of ordinary life involves historical and economic explanations? That study of science’s history involves study of its economic function? These are unexceptionable prescriptions. They are also irrelevant to what Feuerbach is saying. One could declare, “[L]et bread be sacred for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred!” (WC 419/278), and still admit that social science needs to give empirical accounts of why particular social classes have or have not had sufficient bread, wine, and water, and to explain the economic determinants of technological progress. One could also easily admit that Feuerbach “does not deal with history” and even that “as far as he considers history he is not a materialist” (GI 45/41), if by that one means that Feuerbach does not understand the explanatory importance of economics for historical and social analysis. Feuerbach’s transformative project is in no way incompatible with such analysis. No doubt he knew little of it, and perhaps his project diverts one from it. On the other hand, so would an obsession with pure mathematics, and Marx does not object to that activity. That Feuerbach’s project is diversionary does not show its content to be false.


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Its content would be false if a different transformative project’s content were correct. Marx says, [Feuerbach] does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society. . . Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry tree, like almost all fruit trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach. (DI 43/39) Feuerbach might be ignorant of the fact that the cherry tree is a transplant to Europe, and Marx could adduce bills of lading, merchants’ and travelers’ reports, etc. to establish that fact. But Feuerbach can hardly be ignorant of the fact that at least many objects of daily use are “the product of industry and of the state of society.” If he were, he need only look around his study to see that Marx is right. What Feuerbach must not be seeing is that this fact is important—just as he himself claimed that the fact that we are all members of the human species is important (see Chapter 1, §1). Marx says that “in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this basic fact [Grundtatsache] in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance” (DI 28/42). The basic fact is that “to life belongs before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things” (DI 28/41–42). The most obvious way in which this is important is as the guiding thread for historical explanation. But its importance for Marx does not seem limited to this. Suppose a different theory of history turned out to be empirically superior to Marx’s, for example, a theory emphasizing climate as the primary determinant of historical change. Leave aside whether Marx would really accept that his own theory must be jettisoned, whether his central social scientific claims are as empirically falsifiable as he asserts. Even were he to jettison the materialist theory of history, life would still “involve before everything else eating, drinking,” and so on. Human beings would still have to produce their means of existence. Marx’s basic fact would still obtain. In what sense would it now be basic? Merely biologically? That sur-

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vival is the prerequisite for all else? In the Manuscripts, Marx accords this basic fact additional priority: it shows how human beings express their essential nature: “[T]he history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of human essential powers” (ÖpM 542/302). In The German Ideology, however, there is no reference to “human essential powers.” The ambiguity goes like this. To explain why Feuerbach’s view is not just diversionary but genuinely wrong, Marx must hold that the fundamental human relation to the external natural world is a very specific relation that Feuerbach overlooks, namely, the human/natural world relation in the labor process, the human interaction with nature to produce material well-being. This is in fact Marx’s view in 1844, and I have read the Theses as continuous with it. The link to The German Ideology’s critique of philosophy is that if this interaction with nature is the fundamental human relation to the world, then the fact of this interaction, properly recognized (seen as fundamental), would be the answer (moreover, the right kind of answer) to the philosophical question of the relation of human beings to nature. The problem of currently justifying (without a shift of consciousness, without taking a new and ostensibly insulated standpoint) the claim that labor is the fundamental human/nature relation would remain—but at least Marx’s view and its substantive difference from Feuerbach’s would be clear. I think that this is the situation in The German Ideology. Some commentators deny, however, that in that text Marx continues to hold to his views from 1844. They see in The German Ideology a major break with Marx’s past. A concept such as “human essential powers” is said not only not to appear under that name but to be altogether absent (this undoubtedly goes as well for reconstructed notions like “fundamental relation”). This reading of The German Ideology would (apparently) absolve Marx of the charge that he falls back into Young Hegelianism, but it would do so at the cost of making utterly opaque why in that text Marx thinks Feuerbach not just ignorant of vital research areas but wrong in his basic stance. There is clearly a change between 1844 and The German Ideology, and any reading must specify it. To do so we must first look at The German Ideology’s account of the good life.

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9 The German Ideology II: The Picture of the Good Life and the Change from 1844

In t h e p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r I argued that Marx wants to

avoid appeal to any special standpoint, but that his way of resolving philosophical questions seems to force him back to an appeal of this kind. In giving this reading I have presented The German Ideology as in many ways continuous with the work of 1844. That may suggest that the only change from 1844 is in Marx’s attempt to appeal to a new (and ambiguous) method, what he thinks of as empirical verification. In fact, further change occurs in The German Ideology. In the first three sections of this chapter I look at the change in Marx’s conception of the good life. I then deal with the nature of the overall change from 1844.

1. Division of Labor In the 1844 Manuscripts and the Comments, the labor to produce material plenty is said to be the human self-realization activity. The alienation of such labor under capitalism is said to be a significant flaw in that social system. It prevents people from living the good life for human beings. In The German Ideology, the image of the good life, and so capitalism’s flaw with respect to it, appear to be different. Marx famously declares, “[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt 299

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in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd or critic” (DI 33/47). The contrast is of a society without the division of labor (communism) to one with it (capitalism). Self-realization seems here to consist in the performance of varied activities, what Marx calls the “all-around realization of the individual” (DI 273/292; see also DI 245/263). Indeed, the emphasis on the performance of varied activities is sufficiently great in The German Ideology, and there is sufficiently little of the 1844 stress on agents realizing their nature through a specific self-realization activity, that in this chapter I usually talk not of self-realization but simply of Marx’s picture of the good life. It is worth noting a trace of ambiguity in Marx’s picture. His complaint is not just that under capitalism each worker has an exclusive sphere of activity but that this sphere “is forced upon him and . . . he cannot escape” (DI 33/47). A communist individual, Marx says, can engage in this or that activity “just as I have a mind.” At other places Marx inveighs against the capitalist worker’s lack of freedom to choose his activities: “[H]e has only the choice between definite things which lie within his province and which are in no way posited by his individuality. As an Irish peasant, for example, he can only choose to eat potatoes or starve, and he is not always free to make even this choice” (DI 293–94/312). Here what is at stake is not the variety of one’s activities but the freedom to choose them. Of course, Marx thinks that communists will freely choose to engage in a variety of activities. This seems sensible enough with regard to plowing or to working in a factory. No one wants to do only such things. Marx thinks, however, that even current vocations—for instance, painting—will have a less exclusive hold: [W]ith a communist organization of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises purely from division of labor, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of this professional development and his dependence on division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters but only people who, among other things, also paint. (DI 379/394)

T h e G e r m a n I d e o l o g y i i : Th e G o o d L i f e

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Yet ambiguity remains here, too. The artist is currently subordinated to “local and national narrowness” and to “some definite art,” and she is dependent on the division of labor. Her exclusive focus on painting is a function of factors external to the demands of becoming a good painter. If she wants to make a living she has to specialize. The market determines the range of her activity (DI 378/393). Her limitations are forced on her. This suggests that although Marx thinks that communist individuals will in fact not specialize, he might not object to their doing so, as under communism such a choice would be free (a fortunate result for communist art, given the obvious link between specialization and quality). Marx’s belief that communist individuals will choose to engage in a variety of activities seems to rest on the claim that specialization is caused by property relations: “Division of labor and private property are, after all, identical expressions” (DI 32/46). Marx puts the causal claim most succinctly in a slightly later text, “Wage Labor and Capital,” drafted in 1847 and published in 1849: “[T]o sell more cheaply without ruining himself [the capitalist] must produce more cheaply, that is, raise the productive power of labor as much as possible. But the productive power of labor is raised, above all, by a greater division of labor. . . Hence, a general rivalry arises among the capitalists to increase the division of labor (LK 417/222–23).”1 Assuming the correctness of the analysis, however, all it shows is that capitalism cannot do without the division of labor. It does not show that a communist society would not opt for some division of labor in order further to raise the productive power of labor. More important, Marx has not shown why individuals ought not to specialize to attain their own freely chosen goals. He seems to have no normative resources to do so. In Chapter 4 I quoted a passage from The German Ideology that declares, “Which [desires] will be merely altered and [which eliminated] in a communist [society] can [only be determined in a practical] way, by [changing the real], practical [‘desires’]” (DI 239n/256n)—that is, by seeing what happens. Marx believes that no one would want to engage exclusively in a single activity, but as long as such a choice were free, he can have no reason to deplore it. (In effect, communist society is, for Marx, an insulated standpoint: whatever desires are formed there are ipso facto acceptable.) In The German Ideology, the normative critique of capitalism focuses

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on the division, not the alienation, of labor. Restricted to “an exclusive sphere of activity,” the individual under capitalism is said to be “onesided [and] crippled” (DI 245–46/262). The division of labor is the structural feature of capitalism that is incompatible with the proper life for human beings. Putting aside the question of freely choosing to specialize, it is clearly a bad thing for a person to work many hours, day after day, at a dull task. Marx may confuse the Renaissance person with the jack-of-all-trades, and he may be poignantly deluded about the requirements of modern technology, but he is certainly right that a society that forces exhausting, monotonous, and in principle unnecessary work on large numbers of people is seriously flawed.2

2. Community The themes from 1844 do not disappear in The German Ideology. For instance, Marx says that communism will abolish the “alien attitude of human beings to their own product” (DI 35/48; see also 33/47). More interestingly, he claims that under capitalism “the productive powers [Produktivkräfte] appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals” (DI 67/86). What is stressed about the productive powers is not only that, as objects, they appear “independent of and divorced from the individuals” but also that, as powers, they seem independent, even though they require human beings for their operation: “[W]e have a totality of productive powers, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals themselves no longer the powers of the individuals but of private property” (DI 67/86). Nobody would deny that the productive powers are human creations and require human operators, but (I take Marx to be saying) the importance of these facts is not apparent. There are several reasons for this. Most obviously, the workers do not legally control the productive powers. A particular productive power (e.g., a machine or a factory) is controlled by “individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property” (DI 67/86)—and those individuals are not workers. Marx says, further, that the productive powers appear independent because “the individuals, whose powers they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another” (DI 67/86). Two points are made here, one


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technological, the other sociological. The technological point is that the division of labor results in individuals’ being “split up” among various tasks. It then becomes psychologically difficult to see the productive powers as one’s own. If one performs a single small task, it is hard to see oneself as “producing” a large, complex object.3 The 1844 Marx faced an analogous problem: how to see the “sensuous external world” as one’s own, since no individual physically affects more than the tiniest fraction of it. The solution was the worker’s identification with the human species. She then would see other workers’ products, and so a substantial part of the physical world, as her own. For the 1844 Marx, the worker’s alienation from other workers precluded this kind of identification. In The German Ideology, workers’ opposition to one another generates a similar result. That is the sociological point in the sentence quoted above. Workers compete with one another for jobs and with capitalists for wages.4 If one cannot regard oneself as part of a community that controls and operates the productive powers (because in fact there is no such community), one cannot overcome the psychological impact of the division of labor. The complaint that the workers are “split up” under capitalism suggests that they would not be split up under communism. And in The German Ideology, Marx does frequently attack the “cleavage” between “the particular and the common interest” (DI 33/47). He thinks that overcoming this cleavage requires abolishing the division of labor.5 The point is made concrete in an attack on Stirner’s picture of communism as a condition in which the worker has the capacity to perform all the different tasks required for making a product. Having such a capacity is irrelevant, Marx argues, if one actually performs only a single operation: “‘The human being’ remains a maker of pin-heads, but he has the consoling knowledge that the pin-head is part of the pin and that he is able to make the whole pin. The fatigue and disgust caused by the eternally repeated making of pin-heads is transformed, by this knowledge, into the ‘satisfaction of the human being’” (DI 206/225).6 Abolishing the social fact of a particular interest/common interest cleavage will not overcome such “fatigue and disgust.” Change in the content of individuals’ activities is also required. This example shows only that some activities are so stultifying that nothing can redeem them. Marx must think that most activities productive of material plenty can be pleasanter, for he insists that under com-

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munism the “opposition between labor and enjoyment” will disappear (DI 199/218). For that to happen, either activities productive of material plenty must become intrinsically satisfying regardless of their relation to the common good, or knowing that such activities promote the common good must make them satisfying. The Manuscripts and Comments emphasize the latter. The example of making pin-heads shows that The German Ideology puts at least some limit on the redemptive role of individuals’ understanding of themselves as working partly in order to promote one another’s interests. The question is whether such understanding remains at all. At issue is the content in The German Ideology of the proper individual/community relation. For the 1844 Marx, the good life involved engaging in a particular kind of activity (material production) and doing so both to pursue one’s individual ends and to produce what others need for their life plans. The activity of material production as a way to pursue individual ends will be dealt with in the next section. Here I want to focus on whether The German Ideology’s communists would find satisfaction in producing for one another. For the 1844 Marx, communists share an identity. They recognize one another as human beings (in the sense both of acknowledgment and affirmation [see Chapter 5, §2]), and as such share one another’s enjoyments. In The German Ideology, what is stressed is a communist’s choice of her own activities. This need not be incompatible with a strong sense of a shared identity, or with the 1844 view that producing for others is intrinsically important, but it does not require such things. Toward the end of The German Ideology, Marx asserts the distributive principle “to each according to need” (DI 528/537).7 The dictum does not appear in the 1844 texts, but I have argued (a) that it is implicit there, (b) that “from each according to his ability” is implicit as well, and (c) that producing for others—having others’ use of one’s own products as among one’s ends in producing—links the two dicta in a conception of how agents realize their nature (and so lead the proper life for human beings) in a (communist) community. Although “from each according to his ability” does not appear in The German Ideology, the passage on hunting, fishing, and so on indicates that people will pursue activities they find satisfying. Let’s assume that on the whole people will find most satisfying the activities they are best at (and let’s assume that everyone can do well at something other than deadening, repetitive labor). So it is not a huge stretch to say that “from each according to his


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ability” is implicit in The German Ideology as well. What is missing is the claim that overcoming the particular interest/common interest cleavage involves deliberately producing for others. The link between the two dicta is missing. Communists’ activities are conceived as mutually complementary, but such complementarity no longer seems crucial to individuals’ goals. That others use what I produce no longer seems crucial to the success of my productive activity. So what does overcoming the split between the particular and the common interest amount to? What is the conception of community? In The German Ideology, Marx actually says very little about this. Let me note his central remarks: • He says that hitherto individuals have been members of classes, but their relation to one another has embodied only a mere coincidence of interests in opposition to other classes, a kind of modus vivendi; within a given class, individuals have remained competitors (DI 54/77, 61n/75). With the abolition of classes, there will be no further basis for this sort of coincidence of interests. • He says that hitherto individuals have been born into particular classes, and their activities have been effectively restricted on this basis. He distinguishes between an identity foisted on one at birth (noble versus commoner) and an identity one is prevented from shedding by the absence of educational and economic opportunity (DI 76–77/78– 79). A classless society would abolish both forms of restriction. • He declares that The transformation of personal powers (relations) into material powers . . . cannot be abolished by driving the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subordinating these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labor. This is not possible without the community. Only within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his talents in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community. . . In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. (DI 74/77–78) This passage suggests that collective effort is needed both to take control of society’s material powers and to organize those powers to provide the “means” for people to cultivate their “talents in all directions.”

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Thus the workers, both before and after the revolution, have an interest in cooperation and coordination so as to organize and operate the productive powers efficiently. Individuals obtain their freedom in and through the community in the sense that the community creates and maintains the conditions for each to pursue her individual goals. This construal of community, however, does not adequately distinguish communism from capitalism. Under capitalism individuals are rivals, but in fact each can derive his freedom in and through the community as long as capitalist competition as a whole is not a zero-sum game—as long as precisely this competition creates and maintains the conditions from which each benefits. Moreover (or, really, to make the same point from a different angle), this construal of community makes a communist’s interest in creating and maintaining the conditions for others’ flourishing indistinguishable from a purely instrumental interest in creating and maintaining the conditions for her own flourishing. Such a construal of community is effectively indistinguishable from the example of Oscar and Richard in Chapter 5. • He says that “[i]n the previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed under the conditions of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class” (DI 74/78). Personal freedom seems here to be a question of the opportunities available to individuals: many for members of the ruling class, few for other folk. It seems to have no necessary link to positive mutual relations. Bourgeois individuals, after all, are mutual competitors (DI 61n/75). Nothing in Marx’s remarks here suggests that the proper form of community could not be universal individualism. • Finally, he says that relations among communists will transcend the egoism/selflessness dichotomy. Individuals’ “consciousness of their mutual relations . . . will no more be the ‘principle of love’ or dévouement than it will be egoism” (DI 425/439). This is consistent with the 1844 view. It is also consistent with benign mutual indifference. To sum up. On the 1844 view, individuals realize themselves by producing for others. In The German Ideology, this element is not to be seen. In 1844 Marx thought it important for individuals to realize themselves both as individuals and as members of the human species. In The German Ideology, only the former is mentioned. The German Ideology seems not to have a view about why, aside from the mutual benefits generated by their productive capacities, human beings need one another.


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The difference from 1844 is not that a conception of a shared, reciprocally realized identity is rejected. Nevertheless, it is scarcely mentioned (is such an identity implicit in the remark that communists obtain their freedom not just “through” but also “in” their association?) and certainly not developed in the text’s skimpy descriptions of communist society. This makes unclear how in The German Ideology a communist picture of the good life differs from a picture of a liberalism of plenty. It also makes unclear whether a communist would be motivated to engage in necessary labor for any reason other than that she finds the particular activity intrinsically enjoyable—enjoyable by virtue of the capacities it exercises, not by virtue of its contribution to others’ opportunities. Nothing in The German Ideology is incompatible with a rich conception of community. In rejecting both “love” and “dévouement,” Marx may well have had a rich conception in mind. But he does not develop one.

3. Self-Activity In The German Ideology, “self-activity [Selbstbetätigung]” is said to be inhibited or distorted by capitalism. Self-activity is not the same as self-realization, for Marx sees self-activity as capable of a “negative” or “restricted” form (DI 67–68/87), and this cannot be true of self-realization. Self-activity seems to designate activity that is and that the agent takes to be a form of self-expression. The phrase “complete self-activity” seems to be used to pick out the kind of activity that is best for agents (the way they properly and fully express themselves), best for them as human beings.8 Under capitalism, Marx says, labor “has lost all semblance of self-activity and only sustains [the worker’s] life by stunting it” (DI 67/87). And he says that “the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive powers . . . to achieve their self-activity” (DI 67/87). Under communism, the proletarians will achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive powers and in the development of a totality of capacities entailed by this. . . Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations.

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The transformation of labor into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive powers by the united individuals, private property comes to an end. (DI 68/87–88) Three claims should be taken from this compressed eschatology. 1. Under communism self-activity and material life would be unified. Marx sometimes refers to the “production of material life” and sometimes simply to “material life,” but I think he is referring in both cases to labor to produce material plenty. In precapitalist periods, he says, “the production of material life was considered a subordinate mode of self-activity” (DI 67/87). Under capitalism, things have gotten yet worse: mere survival “appears as the end” and labor is regarded only as a means to this end. Labor, he says, “is now the only possible but, as we see, negative form of self-activity” (DI 67/87). The idea is that prior to capitalism labor was a positive form of self-activity. It may have been low in the hierarchy, but it was regarded as having value in itself and not just for the articles it produced (for example, in Plato’s Republic a carpenter is said to need to “perform the task which is his,” or else “life is of no benefit to him”).9 Marx’s claim is that now manual activity is regarded as having no value at all. On Marx’s account, there appear to be three reasons for this. First, workers are coerced into a slot in the division of labor in the sense that they must take some capitalist-offered job, and the capitalist offers only slots within the division of labor. One sense in which labor has currently “lost all semblance of self-activity” is simply that it is not freely chosen. It is not an activity initiated by oneself. Second, the division of labor makes the content of work deadening. Third, under capitalism, the productive powers do not appear to be the worker’s own powers. If work is coerced, dull, and alien, it is not surprising that it seems without value. There is continuity with the Marx of 1844 in that both there and here the labor to produce material plenty is supposed to be at least part of a good human life—an end, not a means. And both there and here Marx claims that under capitalism such labor is purely a means, and, moreover, a means not to rich and varied leisuretime activities but only to survival—to the return to (deadening) work (DI 404n/418n).


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By contrast, under communism self-activity and material life would “coincide.” Material life would be among the different forms of self-activity (“the development of a totality of capacities”). One might in fact choose to fish or to hunt. 2. In all prior social forms, production has been at best indifferent to and at worst incompatible with agents’ intercourse as individuals. Under communism, it would facilitate that intercourse. Individuals would engage in varied activities (hunt, fish, paint, and so forth), would be “complete individuals” (DI 68/88), and would relate to one another as such. The stress is on relating to others as beings with varied capacities. An “individual as such” is not so much a being with a certain species identity (a crucial component of the 1844 view) as a being capable of freely and consciously developing a range of individual powers. The “intercourse of individuals as such” would then be that of beings who relate to one another as beings of this kind. 3. In the phrase “the casting-off of all natural limitations” there is an echo of Bauer and the goal of surmounting all natural constraints. This brings us back to the question of whether there is a link between the activity or activities constitutive of the good life and the conquest of natural necessity (see Chapter 4, §5). Marx says that, in a communist society, the distinction between labor and enjoyment will disappear (DI 199/218). By this he seems to mean that communists will want to be active and not merely loaf around. They will not care for “enjoyable idleness,” which Marx says belongs “to the most trivial bourgeois outlook” (DI 199/218). But the phrase “the casting-off of all natural limitations” suggests further that communists will hunt and fish because they want to, not because people need food. Now, it is utopian but not incoherent to think that the labor/enjoyment distinction could disappear in the sense that people could find satisfaction in engaging in those activities that just happen to be necessary to generate a high level of material comfort. Eliminating the distinction, however, raises a question about the source of that satisfaction. Assume that, for the Marx of The German Ideology, “labor” refers to activities that must be done for the survival and material improvement of the species. Suppose now that the labor/enjoyment distinction were overcome. No one would now engage in an activity because it must be done.

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To take a sentimental example, in the movie Shane, Alan Ladd and Van Heflin wrestle an enormous tree stump from the ground so that the range can be farmed. Aside from its interpersonal dynamics, the scene suggests that sometimes there can be satisfaction in performing an activity in part precisely because it must be done. But a condition is that “all natural limitations” not have been cast off. This satisfaction rests on a distinction between labor and something else. I have argued that, in 1844, Marx sees the performance of necessary labor as crucial to the good life. The overcoming of the labor/enjoyment distinction suggests that in The German Ideology he does not. According to the new account, communists will freely choose to plow, sow, and reap, but not even in part because (as a matter of fact) someone has to.10 Two final points on The German Ideology’s image of the good life. First, that necessary labor has no special status is connected to Marx’s (critical) stress on the division rather than the alienation of labor. The latter concerns necessary labor; the former, specialization in all forms of labor. Overcoming the division of labor does not logically require obliterating the labor/enjoyment distinction, but where the focus is the development of individuals’ all-around capacities, particular features of particular activities (for instance, that some involve necessary labor) will be less important. Second, as with so much in The German Ideology, some ambiguity remains. In one passage Marx comes close to asserting the 1844 view. He ascribes “the narrowness of the previously existing forms of enjoyment” to the fact that they have been “outside the real life-content of people and in contradiction to it” (DI 403/418). Clearly Marx thinks that what most people have always done most of the time—necessary labor—ought to be a central element of “enjoyment.” What he does not quite say here, however, is that it ought to be a central element of enjoyment in part because it is necessary.

4. The Change from 1844 We can now turn to the question of the change between 1844 and The German Ideology. Let us start with the change in the picture of the good life. The German Ideology’s depiction of communism contains little talk of reciprocal relationships and little stress on the value of changing the


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material world. The idea seems to be that communists will choose a range of activities for their intrinsic satisfaction. If we ignore Marx’s excessive worry about specialization, we have a perfectly sensible and quite attractive picture: a society in which individuals freely choose the good life for themselves. This picture is: 1. In line with the one that G. A. Cohen extracts from The Communist Manifesto (see Chapter 5, §3). Agents mutually create the conditions for each to pursue his ends, but no value is placed on creating and maintaining those conditions or on agents’ reciprocal relations. 2. At odds with Marx’s picture from 1844. 3. One to which a capitalist could not object unless she were to insist on the intrinsic value of either the amassing of great relative wealth or the overcoming of natural necessity. So between 1844 and 1846, Marx presents two pictures of the good life. The difference between them is not primarily in the activities that communists are likely to pursue. Each picture presumes that individuals will engage in a range of satisfying activities, and the range in the two pictures could be much the same. Where the pictures differ is in how individuals will regard their activities. In Marx’s 1844 picture, activities are engaged in because the individual finds them satisfying, but part of what makes them satisfying is that they both contribute to others’ life plans and express one’s nature as a being that participates in the species’ overcoming of natural necessity. These latter elements are missing (or at least severely downplayed) in The German Ideology. There, communists hunt only for the thrill of the chase. (The difference points to different Marxist criticisms of capitalism: that it unnecessarily fails to provide all individuals with a variety of opportunities for a good life and that it systematically distorts our understanding of what a good life would be.) I should stress again that The German Ideology is ambiguous. To a lesser extent, so is the work of 1844. For instance, there it is said that “the human being produces even free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from it” (ÖpM 517/276), and the 1844 Marx certainly imagines communists to be very broadly developed individuals. And in Chapter 4 I quoted a passage from the Grundrisse (Gr

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505/611) that indicated that the later Marx continues (at least at moments) to see value in overcoming natural necessity.11 Perhaps the difference between 1844 and The German Ideology is a difference in emphasis. Still, if so, it is a large difference in emphasis. Moreover, it is a conceptually significant difference. It shows that Marx is of two minds and for good reason. Part of what binds a society together is that, in our various ways, we participate in the collective response to nature’s imperatives and we recognize the value of one another’s contributions to this response. This hardly means that we should destroy technology to impose more contributions on us all. Releasing humanity from necessary labor is the great promise of technology. Nor should such contributions be thought of solely in terms of minimal food, shelter, and clothing. What counts as necessary is highly elastic.12 The point is that our understanding of ourselves and our social relations would be changed—much for the better but not only for the better—if the earth were suddenly to bloom either on its own or as the unintended consequence of billions of people pursuing individual aims. Both of Marx’s pictures of the good life are plenty utopian, but they are appealing in different ways. That of 1844 emphasizes communal bonds and our struggle with natural necessity; that in The German Ideology emphasizes individual development. In a way, Marx’s texts exhibit a variant of the debate, in current mainstream political philosophy, between communitarian and liberal ideals of the good life. In Chapter 8 I discussed Marx’s belief that in The German Ideology his method of justifying his claims is a matter of empirical verification. A key benefit, Marx thinks, is that there is no need to appeal to any special kind of standpoint, one with some sort of epistemological privilege. It is not completely clear how big a change this is. It does appear to be a change from the Theses, where (certainly on my reading) there is an insistence on the epistemological virtue of taking a particular standpoint. It might not, however, seem to be so big a change from the work of 1844. True, the justificatory issue raised in Chapter 6 concerns the problem of taking the standpoint (a communist society) from which (some of) Marx’s 1844 claims could be seen to be true; nevertheless, the 1844 Marx does claim to be providing an empirical analysis (see ÖpM 467/231), and in the Manuscripts (although I did not discuss the relevant


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sections) he does attempt to come to grips with the empirical phenomena studied by political economy. Moreover, The German Ideology’s use of everyday empirical verification is quite reminiscent of the 1844 stress on what ordinary life can, and under communism would, show. Still, the degree to which in The German Ideology Marx is actually engaged in more or less positivistic empirical work, and the invocation of empirical verification as an alternative to all shifts of standpoint, Feuerbach’s included, are, I think, genuine differences from 1844. Overall, and despite the ambiguities in the idea of empirical verification, I think that The German Ideology does represent a change in method. And other possible changes from 1844? In The German Ideology, Marx attacks the claim that society or “the species” exists and is causally active apart from the activities of individual human beings: All-around dependence, this primary natural form of the worldhistorical cooperation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of human beings on one another, have till now overawed and ruled them as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed again in a speculative-idealistic, i.e., fantastic, way as “self-generation of the species” (“society as the subject”), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals can be regarded as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself. (DI 37/51–52) The attack here would mark a change from 1844 only if in 1844 Marx holds that the species is causally active in this way. He does not, however. For the 1844 Marx, the “species” is a collective agent only in the sense that an army or a mob is a collective agent. One can talk of an army winning a battle, a mob running amok, or humanity developing its productive capacities without attributing causal power to an independently existing entity. The causal powers are those of individual soldiers, mob members, and human beings, including the powers resulting from their combined forces. There are plenty of ways to talk of group membership, group identity, how individuals are altered in groups, the way a group can seem to have a life of its own, and so on

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without reifying the group ontologically. Nothing in the 1844 Marx makes him subject to the attack in the passage above. Still, the 1844 Marx does talk of human nature and of “human essential powers,” and in The German Ideology he does not mention such things. Behind the change in terminology, has “the real trend of thought” changed? Philip Kain writes, “In the German Ideology Marx abandons the metaphysical conception of essence which had been central to his thought up to 1845. In criticizing Feuerbach for holding a doctrine of double perception, Marx now rejects his own earlier position as much as that of Feuerbach. Marx no longer accepts a doctrine which accounts for reality at two ontological levels.”13 The reference to Feuerbach’s “doctrine of double perception” is to the phrase Marx attacks from §44 of Feuerbach’s Principles. I have argued that Marx seriously misreads that phrase. Feuerbach does not believe that “reality” is properly registered by a special perception distinct from that of ordinary life. I have also argued that, in this respect, the 1844 Marx is at one with Feuerbach. Neither in 1844 nor later is abstract reflection, for Marx, the road to knowledge. The 1844 Marx does think that our perceptions would change under communism and that our new perceptions would be accurate in ways that current perceptions are not. (In The German Ideology he similarly insists that communists will be quite different from individuals under capitalism.) This is not, however, an appeal to a “double perception” in the sense of an appeal away from the senses. It is precisely an appeal to the senses. To the extent that belief in a metaphysical essence requires belief in a realm discernible only by mental insight, by a distinct mental perception, there is no change from 1844, for the 1844 Marx subscribes to no such belief. There is also no change from 1844 in Marx’s commitment to an objective conception of the good life (although the content differs). The German Ideology’s “self-activity” is highly elastic but not completely so. Selling oneself into slavery or becoming a couch potato would be unacceptable. Marx continues to operate with a conception of what human beings are like such that there is a form of life proper to them. Right through The German Ideology he is committed to whatever beliefs such an objective conception commits one to. For both the 1844 Marx and the Marx of The German Ideology, communism provides the conditions for the all-around development of the individual (ÖpM 544/304). And for both, the activity of material pro-


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duction is likely to be part of such an individual’s life. For both, this activity is pursued for its own sake. But in Marx’s work of 1844, material production is seen as the activity that realizes a specifically human being’s essential nature and whose alienation is among capitalism’s deeper sins. In The German Ideology, Marx says that human beings “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence,” but that sentence is preceded by this dismissive one: “One can distinguish human beings from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else one likes” (DI 21/31). Here Marx seems less concerned with what is distinctive of human beings. At this point we need to separate (1) a property (or properties) by reference to which humans are classified as different from other species, that is, a property (or properties) whose possession makes a being human rather than something else; (2) the content of the fundamental human relation to the world; and (3) the content of the good life for human beings. Using these distinctions, we will see that one change worth remarking since 1844 is that although in The German Ideology Marx still has a conception of human nature, that conception is less unified than in 1844—its elements no longer form so tight a whole. What in general is the relation among (1), (2), and (3)? (1) is clearly distinct from (2) and (3). Taxonomy can clearly be separated from both the fundamental human relation to the world and the good life. With respect to (2), a link to (3) may seem more plausible. If there is a fundamental way R that humans are related to the world, it may seem as if R should dictate the activity (or activities) central to the good life for human beings. But this is not so. Suppose one’s fundamental relation to the world is in some way tightly tied to the fact that one will ultimately die. This does not entail that the good life involves activities focused in some way on mortality. Or suppose one’s fundamental relation involves labor just as the 1844 Marx claims, but now construed as the consequence of Adam’s curse. This does not entail that the good life involves aching labor in field or factory. That will depend on the rest of one’s theology. A fundamental relation R tells one something basic about one’s nature, but it need not determine the activity (or activities) central to the good life. For Bauer, however, (1) through (3) do go together. This is also true of the 1844 Marx. For the latter, humans are distinguished by their production of their own material life, this fact points to our fundamental relation to the world (that of beings who are continually and collec-

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tively changing it in the course of producing), and material production is the human self-realization activity, the activity most central to the good life for human beings. It is not, I think, that either Bauer or the 1844 Marx sees direct logical links among these elements. Rather, what each takes to be his central insight about human nature ramifies in different directions, pointing variously to (1), (2) and (3). The shift from 1844 to The German Ideology is, among other things, a shift in the degree to which (1) through (3) flow from the same source. In The German Ideology, Marx appears not to care about (1). In the passage quoted above, he mocks not only Bauer (consciousness) and Feuerbach (religion) but the whole project of finding a distinguishing property—one can invoke “anything else one likes.” The key issue, however, is (2). The 1844 Marx (like the Marx of the Theses) thinks that there is a fundamental way in which human beings are related to the world, namely, via the labor process. He also thinks it important for human beings to recognize this fact about themselves. For the 1844 Marx, the alienation of labor is to be undone and humans are to realize themselves through unalienated labor largely because human beings just are laboring creatures. Is there a change in The German Ideology? Despite the mockery, in The German Ideology, Marx does assert a criterion (“produce their means of subsistence”) distinguishing humans from other animals. And he does think that it tells us something important about human life. For instance, he insists that the fact that humans must produce their means of subsistence is the Grundtatsache for all historical study (DI 28/42). The question is whether it is important in any other way. In Chapter 8 I claimed that Marx would continue to regard this fact as a Grundtatsache even were the materialist theory of history shown to be false. That can be now stated as the claim that he would still regard it as capturing the fundamental human relation to the world. This seems to me the only way to make sense both of how “industry” can be the real answer to the traditional philosophical question of the “relation of the human being to nature” and of Marx’s apparent belief that Feuerbach’s work is not merely diversionary but wrong. This would represent a strand of continuity with the 1844 Marx. In The German Ideology, however, Marx does not also conclude that the good life consists primarily in material production. He does wish to retain material production as among the activities of a complete individual, but it is not accorded its previous priority. The earlier and later


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texts are similar in the content of (2) and share elements in the content of (3), but the stress in The German Ideology is on overcoming the division of labor, and on the all-around individual as Marx’s social ideal. The content of the good life no longer seems the obvious complement to one’s relation to the world. The conception of human nature is less unified.14 A change and an important one connected to this concerns the category of fundamental orientation. I don’t think that Marx rejects that category (does not reject it implicitly, obviously, as it is my category, not his); however, in The German Ideology, it no longer seems as important to Marx for agents to have a particular orientation to the world. He criticizes Feuerbach for not understanding the “relation of the human being to nature” and, as in 1844, would probably say that under communism agents would have such an understanding built into their daily interactions, would have the proper orientation to the world (I am assuming that this would be a component of the transformation he insists would happen to individuals [see DI 195/214 or 70/52–53]); but agents’ current failure to have the proper orientation now seems a less glaring capitalist sin. This is understandable. So much was tied in 1844 to humanity’s struggle with nature that it made sense there (and similarly in the Theses) to care a great deal about how human beings are oriented to the world. With The German Ideology’s greater focus on the division of labor rather than the struggle with nature, one’s orientation to the world is less prominent a concern. This change, to repeat, is important. Beginning with my discussion of Feuerbach’s attempt to secularize his readers, I have pressed that a large part of what he and Bauer and Marx care about is how one sees the world, the glow that the world does or does not have for one. The category of fundamental orientation was supposed to capture this concern. To the extent that this concern is less important to Marx in The German Ideology, he is, as he claims, less squarely in the Young Hegelian line. Were Marx altogether to reject this concern, the change would be even more dramatic. He would have rejected a significant component of his conception of human nature. That would be a basic break from 1844 and the Theses. To see Marx as making this more dramatic change, one would need to read his assertion that human beings “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of

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subsistence” (DI 21/31) in a particular way: not merely as claiming that humans were not deeply different from animals until they began to produce, but also as claiming that humans do not even now have a nature essentially different from that of animals.15 A consequence of the latter claim would be that if human beings were to stop producing their means of subsistence and to go back to living on nuts and berries, they would not be betraying their nature, for they would have no such thing. And because they would have no such things, they would have no particular fundamental relation/orientation to the world. So such issues could no longer be a concern. I think that this is not Marx’s view in The German Ideology. Everything he says about the Grundtatsache, which must always be given its due importance, suggests that he thinks that human beings now have a particular nature, including a particular relation to the world. Certainly, he would regard those who return to nut and berry gathering as deviant human beings, and not merely as harbingers of the next evolutionary turn. And, as noted above, I think that he sees an understanding of this Grundtatsache as relevant to how one ought to get on in the world, to the orientation one ought to have to it. The forms of alienation that the 1844 Marx discusses are ways in which (given one’s nature) one is improperly oriented to the world (or to others). This is not Marx’s focus in The German Ideology, but the conceptual resources to make it his focus are still there. A significant change in emphasis occurs, but there is no actual rejection of former concerns. Overall, then, there is change but also continuity. The 1844 Marx was also concerned with the idea that communists would be all-around individuals. More important, the 1844 Marx was not as metaphysical as has been thought, and even in The German Ideology, Marx continues to hold to (although without putting the same stress on) what might seem the most metaphysical element of my interpretation of the 1844 Marx and the Marx of the Theses: the claim that there is a fundamental human relation/orientation to the world. The change in The German Ideology is by no means only methodological; however, where it goes beyond method, the continuities and discontinuities are complex. To see some sort of fundamental divide here is a mistake. In a famous collection of essays, Louis Althusser argues that between Marx’s works of 1844 and those of 1845 and 1846 there is a shift from a


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Feuerbachian toward a genuinely Marxist “problematic.”16 Althusser says of The German Ideology that it is an “unequivocal ‘epistemological break,’” and that “[i]t offers us precisely a thought in a state of rupture with its past.”17 Althusser’s reading is in service to an overall account of Marxism. This is not the place to grapple with that account. It is the place to argue that his reading of the 1844–46 Marx is deeply misguided. Althusser’s periodization of Marx’s development is sketchy and overly rigid, but readers of his work will have seen that he and I agree on a number of things: that the 1844 Marx is more Feuerbachian than Hegelian, that Marx’s thought does change between 1844 and 1846, and that The German Ideology in particular marks a new stage. We agree further that Marx sees this new stage as the start of a more scientific approach to the study of society. Our differences are as follows. 1. As argued above, there is in fact a good deal of continuity from 1844 through The German Ideology. 2. Althusser sees the Theses on Feuerbach as on the same side of the something new as The German Ideology; I read the Theses as a further development of the themes of 1844. 3. Althusser believes that “for two or three years Marx literally espoused Feuerbach’s problematic.”18 The 1844 Marx is certainly heavily influenced by Feuerbach. I have gone into some detail on that matter. I have also pointed out, however, important differences between his and Feuerbach’s conceptions of alienation (see Chapter 6, §4). Pace Althusser, Marx’s conception of alienation is not just Feuerbach’s applied to political economy.19 Moreover, the 1844 Marx is influenced by thinkers other than Feuerbach. I have traced some of the connections between his and Bauer’s views, and commentators have pointed out Fichtean and still other elements in Marx’s early works.20 The point is not to monger sources but to cast doubt on the image of a Marx so captive to a Feuerbachian problematic that he can free himself only by a grand rupture. 4. Althusser writes as if the central target in The German Ideology is Feuerbach. This is far too simple. In terms of pages, Stirner is the central target. More important than pages, Marx’s settling of accounts is clearly supposed to be with the entire Young Hegelian movement, including such thinkers as Bauer, whose differences from and similarities to Feuerbach (especially his more sophisticated grasp of the link of

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politics and ideology) need an elucidation that Althusser never provides. Marx’s target in The German Ideology is indeed a variety of beliefs with which he was once sympathetic or even that he affirmatively held, but they are not only Feuerbach’s. If there is a “problematic” from which Marx is breaking, it is composed of more disparate elements than Althusser allows. 5. Althusser sees The German Ideology as the beginning of a Marxist scientific practice, where the force of “scientific” is that the practice generates knowledge, but with no stress on the methods of empirical science as what justifies calling the output of the practice “knowledge.” I read The German Ideology as insisting on the (in that text oddly and ambiguously applied) method of empirical verification (DI 20/31). 6. Althusser wants to take Marx at his word when he later claims that The German Ideology was a settling of accounts with his philosophical conscience.21 This is a major textual support for the idea that The German Ideology represents a significant break with Marx’s earlier texts. Althusser does not take as seriously Marx’s claim, in The German Ideology, that his “real trend of thought” was already evident in the works of 1843 (and so presumably in those of 1844).22 Of course, detailed textual investigation might show the first claim to be true and the second to be false. Still, detailed investigation is needed to warrant accepting one but not both of Marx’s self-assessments. Althusser does not provide it. 7. Althusser sees Marx as generating a new philosophy to go with his new science. I see Marx as struggling to avoid philosophical commitments. Here there might appear to be no conflict, for my claim is that Marx tries to avoid entanglements in traditional metaphysical and epistemological questions, whereas Althusser sees the task of philosophy as merely ground-clearing for science. Philosophy, he says, has no problems of its own to solve—and so seemingly need not address traditional metaphysical and epistemological questions. In fact, there is a conflict. For (a) according to Althusser, there remains a traditional issue on which a stand must be taken—namely, the conflict between idealism and materialism23—and (b) what Althusser says philosophy attempts to establish is that science is knowledge in contrast to something called “ideology.”24 Now, according to Althusser, to see that a theoretical activity generates knowledge, not ideology, is to see it from a certain standpoint. Althusser speaks of the “depth of the theoretical revolution


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[that the concepts of historical materialism] imply and inaugurate.”25 For him, the Marx of The German Ideology is doing something more than merely turning his attention to economics or history or emphasizing empirical verification. For Althusser, there is a basic conceptual change—in effect, a change of standpoint. This way of understanding what Marx is trying to do in The German Ideology is altogether at odds with what I have argued is Marx’s attempt to avoid precisely the problem of having to defend one’s standpoint, his attempt to avoid precisely the need to occupy an (ostensibly) epistemologically privileged position. (It is for their obsession with just this that he castigates the Young Hegelians.) Althusser would not be content to let the correctness of the new problematic be determined by its fruitfulness for empirical studies. It is not a working hypothesis. He regards the new problematic as correct, as providing knowledge, but that it does so is not to be verified empirically.26 In Chapter 8 I argued that, despite his best efforts, Marx does sometimes end up with the need to defend his standpoint. Althusser saddles him with the problem right from the start. Still, I might seem unfair to Althusser. First, because he himself says that The German Ideology is a transitional work and so continues to contain earlier themes even as it takes strides away from them.27 And, second, because I have not tried to reconstruct the theory of historical materialism, and so I have not approached the turf on which Althusser claims to find “a scientific discovery without historical precedent.”28 Whatever the competing strands in The German Ideology, however, Marx is trying to find methodological firm ground in a notion of empirical verification open to all, a method not dependent on a special standpoint. This is at odds with Althusser’s reading. As for Althusser’s account of historical materialism, it deserves a detailed treatment that cannot be given here. (It should be remembered that Althusser’s account encompasses all of Marx’s later works, and Althusser’s account has its own developmental history, while I have limited myself to a few of Marx’s early texts; dispute over the later ones would require a separate study.) What I want to stress is that Althusser’s work pushes Marx back into epistemology.29 A central, even if not always successful, goal of The German Ideology is to find a way out of it. As for whether there is some point at which Marx becomes Marx, the

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answer is the prosaic: yes and no. Even assuming that one wants to baptize the Marx of Capital as “Marx,” there are many steps in his development. Some are certainly more important (show more originality, point to a more novel focus) than others. None—at any rate, none right through The German Ideology—seems to me illuminatingly described as a rupture.

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10 The German Ideology III: The Critique of Morality (and a Return to Philosophy)

In t h e p e n u l t i m at e s e c t i o n of this chapter I return to

the issue of justifying Marx’s normative critique of capitalism (not necessarily the same critique as in 1844). We need first, however, to examine The German Ideology’s attack on morality. The Young Hegelians, Marx jeers, “end in moral philosophy, where the various heroes squabble about true morals” (DI 349/366). Despite the fact that it contains its own picture of the good life, The German Ideology is deeply hostile to something called “morality.”1 Yet the specific content of that hostility— its targets and its underlying impulse—is obscure. The first three sections of this chapter try to make it clear. Recently there has been a thriving debate about Marx and morality. This chapter is an indirect contribution to that debate. It is indirect for two reasons. First, I am dealing only with The German Ideology, and the debate concerns Marx’s overall views. Second, although to some extent the issues I address do track those in the wider debate, they also differ. In §§1–3 my focus is on what the Marx of The German Ideology thinks is wrong with moral judgments. I conclude, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Marx has not shown that one cannot have warranted confidence in such judgments. In §5 I conclude, perhaps equally unsurprisingly, that, while remaining consistent with his other views, the Marx of The German Ideology (once again) cannot justify the condemnation of capitalism so clearly there. These conclusions are not new. I hope, however, that the steps to323

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ward reaching them clarify the issues. In §§4 and 6 new issues are raised. In §4 I speculate on the role of morality and of moral philosophy under communism, and in §6 I argue that, on second reflection, Marx can, while remaining consistent with his other views, attempt to justify his condemnation of capitalism by appealing to philosophy, more specifically to moral philosophy. In effect, I end the book by putting a different spin on the problem that first cropped up in Chapter 6. I accept—really accept—that Marx, in his own terms, is epistemologically hedged in with respect to his normative claims. I then argue that precisely because Marx is so hedged in there is actually nothing problematic, even in his own terms, about a Marxist foray into moral philosophy.

1. What Is the Problem with Morality? In The German Ideology, Marx has a wide range of complaints about morality. Here are two straightforward ones: 1. Moralists (be they ordinary people or moral philosophers) have wrongly thought that revolutions have been made by people who believed that there ought, morally, to be change—believed that revolution was right or obligatory or otherwise morally required (DI 229/247; 35/49). In fact, revolutions have been made because to do so has been in the interest of those who made them. They have not been made by individuals sacrificing their own interests at the behest of some moral imperative. And communists will ask no one to sacrifice her interests. “The communists do not preach any morality at all. . . They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.” (DI 229/247). 2. Focus on the immorality of capitalism or on determining the moral standard to be applied to it diverts energy from social and economic analysis and from political organization (DI 456–7/469, 305/323). Assume (1) and (2) are true. The moralist turns out to be little help to a revolution and to be positively pernicious if many people take up her useless activity. Nevertheless, her assertions (both normative and, should she have them, metaethical) could be true. Indeed, her situation seems similar to that of an artist or mathematician. (1) and (2) do not show the moralist to be problematic in any special way.

The German Ideology iii: Critique of Morality

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Marx also holds: 3. The moral beliefs dominant in a society tend to justify that society’s property relations. The connection that Marx asserts between social conditions and moral beliefs can be very crude (this is most pronounced with respect to moral philosophy proper: Kant is said to have been the “whitewashing spokesman . . . [of] the German middle class” [DI 178/195; see also DI 176/193]). Still, let’s give Marx some rope. Assume that dominant moral beliefs do tend to justify a society’s property relations. Many societies have exhibited not only moral beliefs that justify the status quo but also nondominant moral beliefs that are critical of existing property relations. In any case, the reasons a belief attains hegemony are irrelevant to its truth. As with (1) and (2), even if she accepts (3), it does not follow that the moralist must doubt her beliefs. All (3) suggests is that if moral belief B tends to justify existing property relations, one should scrutinize one’s reasons for accepting it very carefully. Now, to defend particular moral judgments, philosophers have often appealed to a standpoint immunized from the impact of personal interests and social conditioning. They have often invoked one or another form of an insulated standpoint. For instance, those who subscribe to the theory of the ideal observer believe that the response of the observer—defined as, among other things, “disinterested [and] dispassionate”—determines whether an action is good, bad, obligatory, prohibited, and so on.2 A certain impartiality, a putting of one’s interests and prejudices out of play, is often said to be constitutive of the moral point of view. Marx says that the Young Hegelians want us to take a similarly impersonal standpoint (DI 20/30). And we have seen that he denies that such a standpoint can currently be taken. Still, nothing said so far shows the Young Hegelians to be wrong when they tell us, in Marx’s caricature, “You have always been human beings, but you were not conscious of what you were, and for that very reason you were not in reality True Human Beings [Wahren Menschen]. Therefore your appearance was not appropriate to your essence. You were human beings and you were not” (DI 232/250). Marx’s objection is to the legitimacy of relying on a change in consciousness to justify the claim that we are not yet true human beings. He thinks that the content of correct consciousness—what it is to be a true human being—

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cannot currently be known to be the correct content, at least not through the device of an insulated standpoint. Nevertheless, any putative claim about what it is to be a true human being might be correct. And of course Marx himself thinks that we are not currently true human beings. In the next two sections I examine and assess the different kinds of reasons that Marx might have to think that one cannot currently have warranted confidence in moral assessments of social and political institutions, and to think that one cannot currently take an insulated standpoint.

2. The Sociological Thesis Not all philosophers try to justify moral claims by reference to an insulated standpoint. Here some of The German Ideology’s remarks on ideology become relevant. Of course, myriad notions have been subsumed under “ideology.” My focus is narrow. I want to look at two broadly different things that Marx might be after in his famous assertion that “[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (DI 46/59). To see both elements at work, we need to read the passage in its entirety: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual [geistige] force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of intellectual production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of intellectual production are on average subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (DI 46/59) Sentence 2 suggests that the claim is sociological. It is a question of who controls “the means of intellectual production”: at a minimum—and anachronistically—electronic and print media, primary and secondary


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schools. The capitalist means of intellectual production, for instance, have a strong impact on everyone’s ideas. They have an impact on the topics promulgated for public debate, on how those topics are formulated, and on the slant given to certain ideas (e.g., a negative slant to the possibility of successful communism). The claim is that any individual who tries to think about a topic does so within a context created at least in part by the means of intellectual production and subject at least in part to its slant. Nevertheless, the claim is but a tendency claim. The ideas of those without the means of intellectual production are only “on average” subject to what the existing means put forth. Presumably, some people have been and will continue to be able to resist indoctrination. This sort of claim is empirical in the scientific sense. One could study past societies and see whether ruling ideas do correlate to the ideas of the ruling class. Moreover, a plausible causal mechanism (the workings of particular institutions) is alleged as explanation for the correlation, a mechanism itself open to empirical study. Sentence 3 suggests a different reading. The ruling ideas are said to be the “ideal expression of the dominant material relations,” as if these ideas could arise even without the mediation of the means of intellectual production. Call the claim in sentence 2 the sociological thesis and the claim in sentence 3 the structural thesis. I return to the latter in §3. Here I concentrate on the sociological thesis. I take it to be the claim that, given the impact of institutions, it is very difficult for individuals to have warranted confidence in their moral judgments, for these judgments are likely to be the products of institutional manipulation. If the sociological thesis is true, and if taking an insulated standpoint is impossible, then the person making moral claims is in a bind. She cannot justify her claims by invoking such a standpoint, and the sociological thesis makes suspect any appeal to one’s intuitive beliefs or to the beliefs currently dominant in one’s society. Of course, the sociological thesis only shows such beliefs to be suspect, not false. It is a genetic thesis and does not prove the falsehood of the beliefs whose genesis it explains. Moral beliefs, however, often regulate conflicts of interest. Where such conflicts involve class conflict, beliefs embodying the influence of one class are likely to favor that class’s interests. They thus need severe scrutiny. Severe scrutiny is espe-

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cially needed for any claim that the rule of the ruling class is just. One ought to be reluctant to put weight on beliefs that are at least partially shaped by that class’s rule. To put weight on such beliefs would be to make a class the judge in a case to which it is a party. Here, especially, recourse seems needed to a standpoint insulated from social conditions. I have argued that Marx accords no metaphysical priority to either mind or matter, but in the ruling ideas passage he clearly accords some sort of priority to what is outside the mind. The question is what sort. We can start with the claim that individuals are significantly shaped by their environment. Marx points out that the circumstances of an individual’s life constrain the beliefs she is likely to have and the capacities, including the mental capacities, she is likely to develop: “It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life” (DI 245/262). This is one of those passages sometimes cited to prove Marx a metaphysical materialist. Actually, his claim is quite mundane. “If the circumstances in which the individual lives,” he goes on to say, “allow him only the [one]-sided development of one quality at the expense of all the rest, [if] they give him the material and time to develop only that one quality, then this individual achieves only a one-sided, crippled development. No moral preaching helps here” (DI 245–46/262). It is useless to urge a factory worker—or, indeed, a businessperson obsessed with money making (one of Bauer’s “bourgeois helots” [SZ 33])—to transcend their narrow existences and, say, to learn to appreciate art and literature if they lack the requisite money, the requisite education, and/or the requisite leisuretime. By contrast, with a person “whose life embraces a wide circle of varied activities and practical relations to the world, and who, therefore, lives a many-sided life, thought has the same character of universality as every other manifestation of this individual’s life” (DI 246/263). The constraints of an individual’s circumstances affect the kind of life she can lead. Presumably, they also affect the adequacy of many of her judgments, for instance, her judgments about the acceptability of existing social and political institutions. Presumably, adequate judgment here requires some degree of education, some awareness of alternative forms of social organization, sufficient experience and knowledge to be able to judge the potential malleability of human psychology, at least a little time for reflection, and so on. An individual’s life circumstances (a businessperson’s as well as a factory worker’s)3 might


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be so restricted that, with respect to this issue (among others), her judgment is likely to result from ignorance and prejudice rather than rational deliberation. The sociological thesis is the claim that it is very difficult for individuals to have warranted confidence in their moral judgments. And under capitalism, this may be especially the case with assessments of existing social and political institutions. Still, difficult is not impossible. As long as one does one’s best to immunize one’s assessments from distorting social conditioning, why shouldn’t one assess existing social and political institutions in moral terms? What could be misguided about the attempt to make an objective assessment? I think that Marx would say that an attempt would be misguided if (1) the likelihood of successful transcendence of the impact of (distorting) social conditions were small, and (2) general reliance on the output of such attempts as authoritative would tend to sanctify existing institutions. I think Marx believes that both conditions currently obtain. He believes that the impact of an individual’s immediate environment and of the class control of the means of intellectual production is very significant, and he believes that there is an increasing tendency for the ruling class to rationalize its rule by claiming that current arrangements promote universal, not class-specific, interests (DI 47/60 and 176/193), to insist that unbiased considerations justify its rule. (1) and (2) are empirical claims whose plausibility cannot be assessed here. They do at least point to a danger in the attempt to transcend the impact of social conditions—in effect, to appeal to a (more or less) insulated standpoint. Wittingly or unwittingly, it could be a potent defense for prejudice. And yet, once again, if one had reason to think one could control for such a danger, what would be wrong with the appeal to a (more or less) insulated standpoint?4

3. The Strong Sociological Thesis and the Structural Thesis There is another reason Marx thinks such an appeal to be misguided. Here we reach the structural thesis. Marx says that “Saint Sancho [Stirner] separates the ideas of individuals from the conditions of their life” (DI 270/288), but, Marx insists, thoughts are always the thoughts “of a particular definite individual . . . his definite thought, determined by his individuality and the conditions in which he lives” (DI 246/263).

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The appeal to an insulated standpoint denies this: the authority of such a standpoint is precisely a function of its abstraction from a person’s “individuality and the conditions in which he lives.” To make the attempt to reach an insulated standpoint is to accord a kind of independence to ideas. One makes the attempt in order rationally to assess social and political institutions. This means to assess them in light of a standard, and if this standard is to function as a standard it must be a standard for some reason other than that it expresses an individual’s or a class’s form of life. Even if the content of the standard is that institutions ought to promote existing forms of life (and even promote them because they are existing forms of life), the authority of that standard cannot come from its expressing an existing form of life. It must be accorded some independent validity. That is what the structural thesis refuses to do. The structural thesis is actually ambiguous between the structural thesis proper and the strong sociological thesis. The latter is the polar form of the thesis that institutions affect one’s ideas and beliefs. It does not specify any particular causal mechanism. Rather, the claim is that the various impacts of institutions so interpenetrate as to generate a causal web, and this web is so strong that no one can break free. This is an empirical thesis, but one immunized against refutation. The strong sociological thesis makes no claim about the impact of any particular causal mechanism (about the impact of any particular institution), and so the (presumed) fact that one has defeated some particular mechanism cannot show that one has broken through the web as a whole. (This is clearly a stronger thesis than that from the previous section; from now on, I call the latter the weak sociological thesis.) By contrast, the structural thesis proper is not an empirical thesis. It is the thesis that ideas are mere reflexes of social conditions. It is a claim about the generative, not the distorting, impact of institutions. The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class not because human beings fail to overcome various institutionally produced blinders but because ideas simply arise in a certain way. The structural thesis entails that moral beliefs cannot have the authority that they claim, for such authority depends on the denial that these beliefs are mere reflexes. One might think that, however a belief arises, one can always judge its claim to truth. But there is no point in doing so if one’s beliefs cannot change in response to one’s judgments,


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and the structural thesis seems not to permit such change. More important, as noted, all beliefs cannot be mere epiphenomena if some belief is to function as a standard, if one’s judgments of truth claims are themselves to be more than reflexes.5 But the structural thesis rejects any such independence. The strong sociological thesis is not a claim about the nature of ideas. It is an empirical claim about moral beliefs. It is a skeptical thesis but in an empirical sense, just like the thesis that no one can run a three-minute mile or live to be two hundred. Both the weak and the strong sociological thesis assert that there is reason to distrust the claims to authority of moral beliefs because those beliefs have been significantly influenced by social institutions. There is an implicit presumption that it is coherent to assess moral beliefs in terms of some independent standard, in the sense that one could, in principle, assess the evidence for accepting or rejecting such beliefs. Both forms of the sociological thesis hold that, in a class society, there is a (probable or, with the strong thesis, inevitable) failure to satisfy the proper standard for the acceptability of moral beliefs. They do not deny the possibility of such a standard.6 Even the strong thesis denies only its current accessibility.7 Marx himself seems to accept some standard for assessing individuals’ belief when he contrasts the individual with a “one-sided development” to the individual who “lives a many-sided life” (DI 245–46/262–63). The latter’s “thought” is said to have “the character of universality,” where this clearly means that it satisfies some independent standard. Let us assume that Marx subscribes to the strong sociological thesis. Does he also subscribe to the structural thesis? The claim that thoughts are always the thoughts “of a particular definite individual . . . his definite thought, determined by his individuality and the conditions in which he lives” (DI 246/263) is compatible with both. Marx’s denial of the independence of religion, morality, and metaphysics (DI 26–27/36– 37) may seem like an endorsement of the structural thesis, but in fact the strong sociological thesis also denies that such realms of thought have thus far escaped the institutional causal web. The strong sociological thesis has the virtue that it can handle the fact that Marx says that social conditions determine the tasks for the natural sciences but never denies that natural scientific claims are valid apart from the conditions under which they arise. Moreover, it is unlikely that the Marx of The German Ideology believes that logic and

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mathematics “have no history, no development” (DI 27/37). But then scientific, logical, and mathematical beliefs can legitimately be assessed for truth or falsehood or in general some form of adequate grounding, but moral, religious, and metaphysical beliefs cannot. Hobbes remarks that “the doctrine of right and wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword; whereas the doctrine of lines, and figures, is not so, because men care not, in that subject, what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man’s ambition, profit, or lust.”8 Substitute “class’s” for “man’s” profit and one could hazard an explanation of why some but not all beliefs tend to be affirmed for independent reasons. The structural thesis seems unable to account for this distinction. It seems to saddle Marx with the dubious contention that beliefs about mathematics can have no independent warrant. Actually, the structural thesis denies independent warrant to any belief, for all are equally “ideal expression[s] of the dominant material relations.” Putting aside the self-reflective problem here, this is plainly unacceptable. The only way out would be to assert some principle distinguishing between the ideas to which the structural thesis does and those to which it does not apply. But it is hard to see how this could be anything but a claim about the way in which social institutions warp some but not other ideas away from the constraints of the standard that is appropriate to that set of ideas. And this would be to abandon the structural for some version of the sociological thesis. I have gone on at such length to isolate and attack the structural thesis because something like it gets assumed all too often in current debates about false consciousness (of various kinds) and is all too often attributed to Marx. The weak sociological thesis is plausible and the slide from it to the strong sociological thesis and then to the structural thesis can seem easy if the different claims are not distinguished. The structural thesis, however, is untenable. Since it has no textual superiority over the strong sociological thesis—indeed, it rests on precisely the metaphysical materialism I have argued that Marx tries to avoid— and is philosophically dubious, I think it should not be attributed to Marx, or at any rate, he should not be seen as wholeheartedly endorsing it. Marx probably accepted the strong sociological thesis. Should we? It claims that all moral beliefs are likely to be the result of institutional


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brainwashing. In fact, it would not be hard to find cases in which many people thought they had had adequate grounds to believe M (some moral claim) but (1) one can now see that there is no adequate ground to believe M, and (2) one can now see that people have believed M only because they were manipulated by social institutions. The problem with the strong sociological thesis is that it can provide reason to doubt current moral beliefs only if an overwhelming number of past cases have this form. Any individual case reveals not a tendency to error but a tendency at long last to find the truth, for instance, that belief M in fact has no adequate ground. This last claim (that belief M has no adequate ground) presumes that one thinks one’s current account of when moral beliefs are or are not adequately grounded is more or less correct. So shouldn’t one have confidence in those of one’s current moral beliefs that have passed that test? Why think they are not adequately grounded, as the strong sociological thesis requires one to think? Suppose case 1. History shows only a chain of moral delusion piled on moral delusion. Generation A has a set of moral beliefs Alpha; generation B concludes that all members of Alpha are false and that A’s belief in them was purely an artifact of institutional manipulation; generation C concludes the same about B’s moral beliefs Beta; and so on. Worse, in this sequence there is no continuity of beliefs, nor any progress in the articulation of underlying principles. One might then have sufficient reason to think that one’s own moral beliefs Zeta, no matter how compelling they now appear, will eventually turn out to be equally delusory. This scenario is a pessimistic variation on Blackstone’s claim that all points of English common law, no matter how seemingly bizarre, are in fact rational even if the rationality is not currently apparent. Here the claim is that even if beliefs Zeta do appear rational, history still gives one sufficient reason to doubt them. There is no genetic fallacy here. The weak sociological thesis says that one’s current beliefs are a product of social institutions and therefore suspect. That is a genetic account, and the obvious response is to say that, wherever one’s beliefs came from, one must simply do one’s best to assess them by proper standards, whatever those are. Even if the impulse toward an insulated standpoint is itself a product of social institutions, that does not mean it is misguided to ask whether an insulated standpoint is the proper position from which moral assessment should

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proceed. Case 1 is different. It sets up an inductive basis to doubt one’s current moral beliefs: past evidence suggests that, with respect to moral beliefs, current standards of adequacy are likely to be wrong. On the other hand, suppose case 2. History shows change in moral beliefs but also considerable continuity, as well as considerable progress in the articulation of underlying principles. Moreover, many of the core beliefs in Alpha, Beta, and so on have never been convincingly shown to be artifacts of institutional manipulation. Here there is no reason to doubt one’s beliefs Zeta (assuming they have survived scrutiny by current standards of adequacy). Here one seems entitled to a Whiggish view of the history of moral thought. Cases 1 and 2 are polar cases. Somewhere in between one would conclude that, however adequately grounded they have seemed, enough moral beliefs have turned out to be mere artifacts of institutional manipulation that one’s current moral beliefs, however adequately grounded they seem, are likely also to be merely such artifacts.9 Where that nodal point lies is uncertain, but wherever it lies it undoubtedly involves the claim that the change in moral beliefs over time (at least in the more central ones) has been very great and that the evidence for the link of such beliefs to institutional manipulation has been very strong—a good deal greater and stronger, I suspect, than a reasonable view of the historical record would make one think has actually been the case. So it is not likely that the strong sociological thesis is true. (Admittedly, the strong sociological thesis might hold that one’s view of the historical record is itself a product of institutional manipulation, providing a noble lineage for current—manipulated— moral beliefs. But there is a limit to how hermetic a sociological claim can be: somewhere it must meet the evidence.) Note that as long as one’s historical description is not very close to case 1, it makes sense to check whether one’s moral beliefs are adequately grounded. Let’s suppose that a good number of one’s current moral beliefs are not mere products of institutional manipulation. Then one’s situation is like that of the manufacturer who knows that part of the advertising he pays for is useless but doesn’t know which part. How would one determine which of one’s moral beliefs are not mere products of institutional manipulation? It looks as if those that best survive scrutiny by what does seem to be the proper independent standard (whatever that is) are least likely to be mere products of institutional manipu-


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lation. But then it looks as if one can have (at least some) confidence in one’s ability to judge moral claims. In any event, there is really no alternative.10 In Chapter 8 I introduced the idea of an insulated standpoint, and in this chapter I have often referred to it. We are finally in a position to assess Marx’s claim that taking such a standpoint is impossible. Two things should be kept in mind. First, for our purposes, the issue is not whether knowing that a judgment has proceeded from a certain standpoint is ever sufficient reason for warranted confidence in that judgment. That is a general question, having to do with the nature of good reasons for one’s beliefs. I leave it aside. Our concern is Marx’s reason for thinking that, even if knowing that a judgment has proceeded from a certain standpoint would be sufficient for warranted confidence in that judgment, it is simply impossible to take the particular standpoints beloved of the Young Hegelians. Second, an insulated standpoint is not a condition in which all distortion of any kind is absent. It is a condition in which distortion from such things as personal bias, social conditioning, religious training, and institutional manipulation (in particular cases the list might be different) are sufficiently out of play with respect to some question Q such that one can have confidence that judgments made from such a standpoint with respect to Q are warranted, by virtue of their being made from that standpoint. Taking Marx’s impossibility claim as a weak sociological claim (in the sense of “weak sociological” sketched in this chapter) with respect to some Q, it might be possible to make a compelling argument for it— that is, for the claim that taking an insulated standpoint with respect to Q is likely to be impossible. It will depend on Q, on the circumstances, and so forth, including the determination, for the case at hand, as to what counts as sufficient insulation from the relevant potentially distorting influences for confidence in a judgment with respect to Q to be warranted (merely by virtue of proceeding from a certain standpoint). To keep to Marx’s particular complaint in The German Ideology, the Young Hegelians may well be too quick and glib in thinking that their own beliefs about human nature are unaffected by the social institutions within which they live. Perhaps compelling cases could be made (although this is not the place to make them) against their various claims to have taken insulated standpoints. Taking Marx’s impossibility claim as a strong sociological claim (in the

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sense of “strong sociological” sketched in this chapter), I think it improbable that one could ever make a compelling argument that taking a sufficiently insulated standpoint is impossible (remember, a strong sociological claim is a very strong claim). Still, with respect to some topics, a strong sociological claim of this kind might have at least some surface plausibility. The topic on which the Young Hegelians focus— namely, human nature—might be thought to be such an issue. It might be thought that, with respect to such an issue, their beliefs could not be sufficiently insulated (for nobody’s could be) for one to have warranted confidence in those beliefs merely by virtue of where they come from. Perhaps (although I doubt it) a plausible argument to that effect could be made. Thus far I have cast the claim against an insulated standpoint as a sociological claim. But in the history of Marxist thought, a great deal of ink and not a little blood has been spilled on the claim that “ideas” (taken very broadly to include—at least—beliefs as well as concepts) must be merely the output of institutions. This has led to a slide (a variant, really, of the slide from the weak sociological thesis to the structural thesis) from the issue of the impact of particular institutions on particular agents’ ideas to the general question of the dependence of ideas on “reality,” and so to much wrangling about Marxist theories of knowledge. Here the following points can be made: • If one holds the claim that all ideas must be merely institutional outputs, one is back with the structural thesis and all its problems. • If one weakens the claim so that one is talking only of some ideas or of the degree of impact of particular institutions on particular agents’ ideas, one will need causal stories to justify asserting that idea X is free from institutional impact while idea Y is not, or to justify asserting that here there is this degree but there merely that degree of institutional impact. One will be back with a sociological claim of some kind. • In fact, there is no general issue about the dependence of ideas on institutions. Clearly, institutions have impact on agents’ ideas; just as clearly, they do not thoroughly determine agents’ ideas. The interesting issues have to do with particular cases, or with middle-level generalizations. • As I have been at pains to argue, turning these matters into a general philosophical theory about the dependence of ideas on reality is exactly what the Marx of The German Ideology would not want to do.


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Cast as claims about particular ideas and particular institutions, or cast as middle-level generalizations, some of the Marxist tradition’s claims about the dependence of ideas on reality have had merit. Cast as general philosophical claims, they have not. And, ironically, they have been deeply opposed to Marx’s own concerns, at least through The German Ideology.

4. Morality and Moral Philosophy under Communism It is worth asking what might happen to morality under communism.11 Does Marx think there would be moral judgments? And if so, would they have the kind of authority we tend to think they have now? In effect, does Marx think that our social practice of making and acting on moral judgments and of regarding ourselves as moral beings would altogether disappear? Because he doesn’t directly address the issue, I will not be concerned in this section with Marx’s own beliefs but rather with the beliefs to which he is committed by his other views combined with an extremely optimistic but (I hope) not completely absurd picture of human possibilities. So this section is even more reconstructionist than the rest of the book. Indeed, it is downright speculative.12 I suspect that Marx does think that morality would disappear under communism (meaning: if asked point blank he would have said, “Yes, morality would disappear”). But this view may not be intelligible (what would we be like if we were incapable of moral judgments?); it is almost certainly false; and I will argue that Marx is not committed to it. The claim to which Marx is committed is, I think, the claim that a certain way of thinking of ourselves as moral beings would disappear. Now, with respect to any sphere for which the structural thesis obtains, authoritative standards have been jettisoned, for those standards turn out to be mere reflexes. They turn out to be not, as with the ideal observer, responses with respect to a state of affairs but merely responses of a state of affairs. If something like our social practice of morality as we currently understand it—that is, as imposing authoritative standards— is to be possible under communism, the structural thesis must not apply to it. If the argument against attributing that thesis to Marx is correct, this is not a demanding requirement. Of course denying the structural thesis for communism does not

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show that morality would obtain. Marx says that religion, metaphysics, and morality have no independence. He clearly thinks that, with the advent of communism, religious belief—understood as the belief in a transcendent entity with supernatural powers—would vanish without remainder. The question of the existence of such an entity would not arise. As for metaphysics, in the work of 1844 metaphysical questions are said to disappear under communism as questions posed in abstraction from daily life. They are said to continue to have answers but not purely conceptual ones. Communists would grasp the nature of reality in their practical lives, not by separate acts of thought. In The German Ideology, it is less clear that the nature of reality would even remain a question (answered in any way) for communists. A tie to traditional questions would remain to the extent that Marx still thinks that there is a fundamental human relation to the world. Again, however, such questions would presumably not be seen as independent issues. With the division of labor overcome, there would be, for Marx, no point to a separate realm of discourse about, e.g., the relation of mind to matter. How about morality? Marx does seem committed to the claim that at least some moral questions would not arise. Take questions of distributive justice. Might, Marx says, is the “basis of right [die Macht (is) die Grundlage des Rechtes]” (DI 304/322; see also DI 307/324). Among other things, this means that right or Recht is applicable only where there is might. And “might” is a relational term. It is might over someone else—with respect to distributive justice, the might of one group over another. For Marx, class conflict is a central feature of the circumstances in which there is a need for the moral concept specifically of distributive justice.13 Eliminate scarcity and social classes (eliminating the former is for Marx actually a condition of eliminating the latter), and there would be no need for judgments of distributive justice.14 Yet such judgments are but one element of our current moral lives. Would others survive? Marx holds that certain social practices are responses to real-life problems, that intellectual focus on certain kinds of questions is a response to real-life problems, and that these different responses are linked. The model is Feuerbach’s: religion is the practical response to real human needs; theology is the intellectual response. If morality and religion are strictly parallel, then our moral and religious natures are


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equally evanescent, and so in a communist society the social practice of morality (as with the social practice of religion) and reflection on morality (as with theology) would not exist. Perhaps Marx believes the parallel to be strict. But he could reject it without inconsistency. He is committed only to the claim that if (a) a need exists only owing to alterable conditions of human life, and if (b) in response to that need certain beliefs and practices arise, and if (c) the conditions of human life are suitably altered, then (d) the need and with it the beliefs and practices will eventually vanish. The move here does not always work, for a social practice might be self-sustaining even if it would never have arisen but for some now defunct set of circumstances. (One could easily tell a story about why spectator sport S arose to prominence at time t, but even if conditions change radically, S might still thrive, having created its own fan base.) Still, let’s assume that the move from (a), (b), and (c) to (d) works for many beliefs and practices. I see no reason to think Marx committed to the claim that all or even most human needs satisfy (a). Clearly many material needs (for instance, food and shelter) do not. Why think Marx committed to the claim that all nonmaterial needs do? Why think communists would have no need for friends and lovers? In any event, the conditions generating morality are not a function of alterable conditions of human life. There may be no inescapable need to believe in a transcendent entity, but there is an inescapable, an unalterable need to make practical choices. Borges, in his story “The Immortal,” tells of a group of beings who are immortal and indestructible.15 In the fullness of time, each performs all actions, plays all roles. For such beings, no choice is irrevocable. They always have another chance (thus inverting Nietzsche’s eternal return). They never truly choose. For such beings, morality may have little point. Nothing hangs on their decisions. Key to all accounts of the circumstances of distributive justice is the claim that having rules of justice matters to human life. If it didn’t, such rules would lapse. For Borges’s immortals, the rules of morality in general would be equally otiose. Perhaps our finitude, our consignment to consequences, is a necessary condition of any sphere of morality. (Some philosophers might dispute this point, claiming that an immoral act makes the world as a whole worse—for instance, there is more pain in the world than there need be. Strictly speaking, such a claim is not undercut by the idea that in the expanse of eternity all

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persons will do and experience all things, for these philosophers would claim that it would be better if some things that in fact happened had not. But if one really looked at matters from the standpoint of beings who will—forever—do all things and be unaffected by the doing, I suspect that such worries would not seem pressing.)16 In this respect, individuals under communism would be like us. They, too, would have to make decisions. There would be interpersonal conflicts and individual and social choices. Humans would not become angels, nor the earth Eden. There would be lovers’ triangles, sibling rivalries, and disputes about who should go out in the rain to get the cat down from the tree. And when confronted with concrete questions— “Should I tell my friend that his painting stinks?” “Stop smoking?” “Spend today with my kids or visit the lonely people in the nursing home?”—communists would presumably believe some answers better and some worse. They would have such views even if there were universal moral agreement about particulars. That is, suppose that explicit and articulated moral judgments do not arise merely given conflicts between individuals’ desires, for in all cases everyone might instantly acknowledge the same resolution to such conflicts, and also instantly acknowledge others’ acknowledgment: there would then be no need to talk or barely even to think about such things. Suppose moral judgments are made explicit only given conflict in judgments about particular cases, and suppose (absurdly) that communism exhibits no such conflict. It could still make sense to attribute moral judgments to communists. The absence of explicit moral discourse would be explained not by the absence of moral assessment but by universal implicit agreement in all particular moral judgments. Unless all communists’ desires meshed perfectly, communists would remain moral beings in the sense that moral judgments would be at least implicit in their conduct. Which array of such judgments would obtain would depend on which practical problems would (at least implicitly) remain. I suspect that this would include the bulk of the ordinary moral enigmas of present daily life. So how would the moral life in communism differ from the moral life in capitalism? No doubt there would be more agreement in moral judgment at all levels of abstraction. I take Marx to be committed to the claim that many causes of moral disagreement (for instance, scarcity, class conflict,


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opposed religious beliefs) would disappear. Communism would exhibit more moral unity than capitalism. I think Marx is also committed to the more interesting claim that there would be no tendency to see human beings as having a special moral sense or faculty, in general no tendency to use the fact that we do make moral judgments as a springboard to a philosophical account of the person. Recall Marx’s claim that in a communist society there are no painters but only individuals who, among their other activities, paint (DI 379/394). Marx’s focus is on overcoming the division of labor, but his remark can be extended to reject any romantic divinizing of art and the artist as hallowed, as the deepest locus of spiritual values, the replacement for religion. Under communism, individuals would paint, and they would make judgments of artistic merit. But such activity would have no special status. Art would not be a questing after the beyond. Just as he rejects a material division of labor, I think Marx would reject any division of labor in the soul. He would reject any attempt to move from the practice of making moral judgments to the derivation of an allegedly supreme principle of morality, P, and from thence to a grounding of P in some part of the person distinct from and nobler than the rest. No communist account of what it is to be a moral being could split us into mind versus body, reason versus emotion; nor could it attribute to us a special and especially dignified moral sense or intellectual capacity. My suggestion is that, under communism, moral judgments would be merely one kind of judgment among others, a way to handle particular problems. The sphere of morality would exist (for instance, individuals would be praised and criticized for their conduct), but it would be no more transcendently resonant than anything else. The notion that morality involves the application of a standard could still obtain, just as it does now with an artist’s decision to paint the ocean azure, not indigo. But just as we need not see the artist’s decision as involving a triumph over the more pedestrian features of human life, so a moral judgment or morally correct conduct would be simply a particular judgment or a piece of praiseworthy conduct, not a victory in a metaphysical battle. Moreover, moral judgments could be thought to be rational if what is meant is that agents could give reasons in cases of disagreement. Communists could presumably give reasons to one another were they to

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disagree about whether an action ought to be taken, just as they could presumably give reasons were they to disagree about whether to use shades or blinds for the windows. Marx is not committed to the claim that human life would proceed without cerebration or discourse. Still, if the moral life under communism is to look sufficiently like what we think of as the moral life, then moral judgments under communism must normally be weightier than other judgments. When a moral judgment dictates action it must normally override what, say, aesthetics or convenience dictates. But I see no reason for Marx to object to this feature of moral judgments as long as it is not accounted for by some theory of a special moral faculty. If moral considerations simply normally outweigh other considerations—as for home buyers considerations of structural integrity normally outweigh those of closet size—there should be nothing problematic for Marx about morality as a social practice. But don’t we need to ask why communists would believe that moral considerations normally outweigh others? Structural integrity normally outweighs closet size because most people want a secure roof more than easy access to their clothes. Would communists believe, for instance, that reason requires giving moral considerations extra weight? Don’t we need to ask about communists’ account of the priority to be given to the moral? Determining just why morality outweighs convenience is not a topic for everyday discourse. The claim that consideration X outweighs consideration Y in this current dispute between you and me is a claim that one might make in ordinary discourse. The claim that consideration X outweighs consideration Y because, for instance, X is tied to our essential nature as rational beings, is unlikely to be a claim made in ordinary discourse. It is a far more abstract claim. In asking about communists’ account of morality’s priority we are speculating about their moral philosophical thought. We are speculating about the status, under communism, of certain moral philosophical questions—for instance, the question of the source of the special weight of moral considerations. It is tempting to say that communists would be so different that they would find such questions unintelligible. I think this is wrong. After all, we are their history, and Marx never recommends a communism without a past. They could understand our science and our art, so why not our moral–philosophical questions? Anyway, it is easy enough to lead


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someone to abstract issues (professors do it all the time). So I see no bar to intelligibility. Communists could try to solve the very problems that bedevil us. Even in a land of plenty one could ponder how best to distribute goods were goods in fact scarce. And one might wonder why certain kinds of considerations tend to outweigh others. There are, I think, two issues here: Would communists feel pushed to ask (many of) our questions? And if they would, are there philosophical moves that Marx is committed to regarding as wrongheaded from the start, as inevitably abjuring a correct understanding of human beings and their relation to the world? I want to approach these matters by looking at some common academic divisions. Consider “political philosophy,” “moral philosophy,” and “applied moral philosophy.” The first (often) and the third (usually) focus on questions with relatively direct institutional implications: What are the proper principles of distributive justice? Is abortion morally permissible? By contrast, moral philosophy proper is often not concerned with hot-button issues. The debate between Kantians and utilitarians rarely starts from worries about what we ought to do in some real-life case. Its focus is usually why we ought to do whatever it is we ought to do. Other topics—for instance, moral realism—are even more remote from immediate practice. A reason sometimes invoked for looking at such issues is that one believes that concrete moral disputes are best resolved by seeking agreement at a higher level of abstraction.17 Jill and Jack cannot agree what to do. But perhaps they can agree on the proper principle to adjudicate their case and by applying it can eventually resolve their disagreement. The search for a supreme principle of morality is the extreme form of this strategy. I don’t see how Marx could object to this reason for conceptual ascent. There will be disputes under communism, and conceptual ascent might be a sensible way to try to resolve them. Practical concerns, however, are not the only motive to such ascent. Even if one knew that Kantians and utilitarians would answer all concrete questions the same way (and one knew the answers), one might still wonder what the supreme principle of morality is. One might wonder just because one wanted to know, but also because one thinks that through understanding why a particular principle is the supreme principle one will learn something deep about human nature. If, as many

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writers think, it is a remarkable fact about human beings that we are moral beings (Kant speaks of it as “the something in us that we cannot cease to wonder at when we have once seen it”),18 then determining the supreme principle of morality is likely to teach us something deep about ourselves. My suggestion is that, under communism, the fact that we are moral beings would not be thought a remarkable fact about us, no more remarkable than that we can laugh at jokes or appreciate beauty. Whatever it is that makes us moral beings would not be seen as revelatory. So the purely intellectual impulse to certain questions would atrophy. They would no longer seem important (in the sense discussed in Chapter 2).19 No doubt communists could ask about such things as the status of “good” or “right” (one could do philosophy after dinner [DI 33/47]), but such issues would seem, I suggest, no more pressing than the status of “funny” does now. One could ask now whether “funny” corresponds to a simple, nonnatural property or is a label we apply when we have a certain special response. But (perhaps for bad reasons) humor has not been thought revelatory of our nature, and the status of “funny” has rarely been investigated. This stops us neither from laughing at jokes, from distinguishing good jokes from bad, from explaining why a particular joke is good or bad, nor from criticizing people for lacking a sense of humor.20 (And although philosophers could look for the supreme principle of humor, scrutiny of the wide variety of things that bring a smile to one’s face ought to make one smile at the idea.) In this area we are less tempted to abstraction. It is not so easily forced on us. Imagine morality as similar, as not so obviously needing investigation. Note that I have said nothing to explain why this state of affairs could not obtain under capitalism. My account might in fact seem reminiscent of some recent discussions of the moral life.21 Perhaps Marx need not be bothered by this; perhaps not everything he attacks need be a consequence of capitalism. Still, one could hazard a Hume-style account to enable Marx to claim that a communist form of morality is likely to be different from a capitalist one. Hume claims that justice is a virtue only under certain natural and social circumstances. Marx could claim that which features of persons we take to be revelatory also depends on circumstances. Hume notes that “bodily strength and dexter-


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ity” was a greater virtue for the ancients than it is for us.22 Assuming that the causes of interpersonal conflict would be much reduced under communism (even though not eliminated), Marx might claim that our ability to comply with moral requirements would seem a less deep part of our nature. Pace Kant, we would cease to wonder at it. All this is too quick even as brazen speculation. Communists could understand current philosophical controversies. And since they could understand those controversies, they could have views about what are better or worse arguments for the competing positions. Presumably they could offer their own arguments. In principle, they could even write books, articles, and so forth on our present disputes. Suppose some of them just took a mind to do so. And suppose the argument pushed them up the ladder of abstraction. How could they resist? Presumably they could also be pushed that way by the quest to resolve disagreement. And if they ascended that ladder, wouldn’t they end up disputing more or less as we do? I think that Marx is committed to saying no. He could not accept that such controversy would reopen the metaphysical fissures he has tried to close, so he could not accept that communists’ debates could be exactly like ours. For instance, nothing prompting us to see ourselves on either side of the reason/emotion divide could pass muster for Marx. And yet, at least some of the considerations pushing toward abstract debate, and so toward those abstract conceptions of the person that stress one or another side of the dichotomies that Marx opposes, seem likely to be in place under communism. Even if the impulse to such debate would be weak, it seems likely to exist. Short of cut off by mere fiat, it is hard to see how the dialectic of an argument could be definitively forestalled from leading where Marx doesn’t want it to go. It might well go where Marx doesn’t want it to go, but I think there is a line of response that Marx could then take. To see this, to see how moral philosophy might exist yet have no teeth under communism, we need to look at different ways to accept a philosophical argument without becoming committed to it, different ways to assert a philosophical thesis without having it affect one’s picture of life. 1. One accepts the premises of an argument solely for the sake of the argument. One argues for what one does not believe. Unless one suddenly becomes convinced of the truth of the premises, one can easily remain unaffected by one’s own argument.

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2. One does not adhere to the practical implications of one’s arguments. In Hume’s famous mockery, even the most extreme skeptic will leave the room by the door, not the window.23 Perhaps this shows that the skeptic does not really believe the argument; perhaps not. In any event, his belief does not go far enough to have practical impact. 3. The argument has impact but the impact is short-lived. Imagine that I want to drive a piling to support a bridge. To do it right I might have to learn some theoretical mechanics. What I really want, however, is to drive that piling to support that bridge, and having done so my theoretical knowledge might recede. Or, to return to humor, suppose I want to make a good joke. I might need to think about what makes jokes funny, or even about what part of our nature our capacity for humor is located in. Let’s pretend such cerebration prompts a good joke. Having generated my joke, my reflections might fade (perhaps because, as noted earlier, the fact that people find things funny does not seem to point to the deepest layer of human nature). Call this the Sherlock Holmes model, after Holmes’s penchant for forgetting any and all information without bearing on his criminological concerns. Suppose moral thought instantiated the Sherlock Holmes model. The possibility of conceptual ascent would be preserved in the sense that one way to resolve a practical problem or to stay hitched to the train of argument would be to look at one or another increasingly abstract claim. Missing, however, would be the distinctive resonance of conceptual ascent within much moral philosophy. By moving up the ladder of abstraction, one often thinks oneself to be getting to a profound truth about human beings. I suspect that that thought would be absent under communism. The 1844 Marx thinks that certain facts about human life can be acknowledged to be true, and yet not resonate for the agent. Under capitalism, this is supposed to be the case with the fact that most of the objects of daily life are the products of human labor. Under communism, that fact would have the proper resonance, and Marx thinks that in general our orientation would be less abstract. It might then be the case that even when we engage in abstract moral thought, the force of doing so—the force of that activity—would be different, flatter than it is now. And so conceptual ascent would be a mere tool, not a means of revelation.24 So much for speculation. And this has been merely speculation. Marx


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never says any of what I have claimed in this section, and what I have claimed would need much elaboration to be a picture of a world with morality but without a metaphysics of morals. The goal has been to show the possibility that Marx could be hostile to a certain picture of morality—not to its content so much as to its role in human life—without being wholly hostile to morality as a social practice.

5. Can The German Ideology Justify a Condemnation of Capitalism? The issue for this section is whether the Marx of The German Ideology can, consistent with his other views, justify a normative critique of capitalism. We have seen in Chapter 8 that he now thinks that his method is thoroughly empirical, although there is an important ambiguity as to what this comes to (and problems with its efficacy in putting philosophical problems to rest without invoking any standpoint shift). Still, whatever it comes to, it is not a method for justifying Marx’s normative claims, at least not in the present. For suppose that empirical verification is scientific empirical verification. I think it would be generally conceded that justifying a conception of the good life requires more than the array of truths that the sciences can provide. And under capitalism everyday empirical verification will not do the trick, at least insofar as the 1844 emphasis on the role of necessary labor in a good life remains strong, for under capitalism that labor seems (and is) something to be shunned. In Chapter 9 I noted, however, that The German Ideology’s conception of the good life puts less stress on the role of necessary labor, and that overall that conception is not out of tune with non-Marxist views. This points to the possibility of a different critique of capitalism. Of course, there is some stress on necessary labor in The German Ideology, so let’s say that the text is ambiguous. The issue with respect to justifying a condemnation of capitalism would then be as follows. Depending on the degree of emphasis accorded the 1844 elements, The German Ideology’s condemnation would be either (1) capitalism fosters and inculcates the wrong conceptions of human nature and the good life, and systematically makes the correct conceptions unrealizable (the 1844 critique); or (2) capitalism violates the requirements of distributive justice.25

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According to the 1844 view, individuals in a capitalist society are deeply deluded about the content of our nature and so about what counts as realizing it. Moreover, it follows from the 1844 view that the way correctly to grasp the true content of our nature—and so the way correctly to grasp the true content of the good life for human beings— is available only under communism. This creates an epistemological problem. The 1844 conception of the good life—according to the 1844 view itself—will look highly implausible to individuals in a capitalist society. So the 1844 conception needs justification—yet is currently unable to get it. If The German Ideology’s conception of the good life retains the 1844 stress on material production, it would retain the 1844 problem as well. As in 1844, a change in consciousness, something The German Ideology refuses to invoke, would be required to see the conception’s correctness (and so to see a particular significant shortcoming of capitalism). Alternatively, if the text is read as severely downgrading the 1844 elements, a new problem arises. A conception of the good life substantially stripped of the 1844 elements would not be at odds with current beliefs. Its central censure of the present would be directed at the tendency to hyperspecialization and at the absence of effective freedom to choose one’s activities. Whatever capitalism’s flaws, however, a belief in the virtue of coercion or hyperspecialization is not among them. What educators under capitalism call a “liberal education” is in fact supposed to produce a well-rounded individual, a person capable of freely exercising a wide range of capacities and, ideally, having the resources and opportunities to do so. A capitalist economy may impose severe constraints on agents’ choices, and there may be irresistible pressure to specialize, but neither the constraints nor the specialization are lauded as good in themselves. On Marx’s non-1844 view, the failure of capitalism would be that it affords only a few people the opportunity successfully to instantiate a more or less correct conception of the good life. This would be condemnation 2. It would be a complaint about the distribution of resources and opportunities, the complaint that a more or less correct conception of the good life is livable only by a few. The complaint would be that the capitalist distribution of resources and opportunities is unjust. But distributive justice is a concept that the Marx of The German Ideology seems unable to appeal to without conflict with his other views. In their different ways, the above alternatives eliminate the ambigu-


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ity in The German Ideology. Yet, each leads to a problem—either to that of 1844 or to the need to justify a critique implicitly couched in terms of the (for Marx) problematic concept of distributive justice. The structural and sociological theses might seem to show straight off that Marx cannot, without inconsistency, invoke any kind of moral norm. They might seem straight off to make his justificatory problem insoluble. In the next section I argue that this is not the case. Before doing so, however, I want to examine several passages in which Marx appears to address the issue of his ability to make one or another moral condemnation of capitalism. Commentators have sometimes appealed to them to get Marx out of the box he seems to be in. What is common to these passages is that they claim that social development produces new epistemological possibilities. The question is whether Marx can appeal to any such new possibilities to justify his normative critique. I quote and examine these passages for the sake of thoroughness, but I don’t think that they help Marx. A tired reader may want to skip ahead to the final section of the chapter. Marx says, [E]ven within a nation the individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have quite diverse developments, and an earlier interest, the peculiar form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that belonging to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in possession of a traditional power in the illusory community (state, right [Recht]), which has won an existence independent of the individuals; a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution. This explains why, with reference to individual points which allow of a more general summing-up, consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical conditions, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can draw upon earlier theorists as authorities. (DI 72–73/83) It is unclear what the “individual points” would be, and it is unlikely that Marx has moral standards in mind (and the reference to “individual points” indicates that he thinks relatively little can be known in advance of changes in “empirical conditions.”) More important, Marx’s claim here seems to apply only to revolutions in which a shift in economic

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relationships precedes a shift in political power. The bourgeoisie attained economic before political power and so to some extent could free itself from the grip of prebourgeois conceptions prior to the bourgeois political revolution. On Marx’s account, however, communists will not gain control of the means of production within a still functioning bourgeois state. They will seize economic and political power simultaneously. At any rate, neither in 1846 nor now do they hold economic power. So a temporal gap between economic and political power could not be the basis for any putative proletarian moral insight, either at present or at the time of Marx’s writing. Marx says, The more the normal form of intercourse of society, and with it the conditions of the ruling class, develop their contradiction to the advanced productive forces, and so the greater the rift within the ruling class itself and between it and the class ruled by it, the more untrue, of course, becomes the consciousness which originally corresponded to this form of intercourse (i.e., it ceases to be the consciousness corresponding to this form of intercourse) and the more do the old traditional ideas of these relations of intercourse, in which real private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealizing phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. (DI 274/293) The claim is that there is an increasing conflict between consciousness and the existing form of social life, the first no longer “corresponding” to the second. The idea seems to be that ways of describing the world that once seemed accurate (in the sense of seeming to match up with an individual’s experience) no longer do. For instance, Marx asserts that if the proletariat “ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances” (DI 40/56). Religion has lost its hold not because of atheistic arguments but because it no longer has touch with practical life, at least practical life for the proletariat (this is a variant of a Feuerbachian claim in both The Essence and the Principles [see WC 29–30/xliv and G §15, 285–86/22–23]). Similarly, Marx says, palpable class conflict has made bourgeois claims that bourgeois rule promotes “universal interests” seem utterly empty, seem to be what they are, “mere idealizing phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy” (DI 274/293).


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There is a difference between the irrelevance of a transcendent being to the nitty-gritty of daily life and the disparity between an assertion and the evidence that refutes it, but put this aside. Marx is pointing out that capitalism is failing to satisfy its own justifying norms. Bourgeois rule is different from what it claims. And exposure of this fact is tied to recognition that bourgeois and proletarian interests are opposed. Yet while such recognition might help to prompt revolutionary action, it does not prove the moral superiority of communism. There is a conflict of class interests. Bourgeois denials may reveal that class’s hypocrisy, but they do not prove that communism, as a social system, is the morally superior resolution to the conflict. Of course, Marx does not suggest that it proves any such thing. Still, if one wanted to push this passage to license a condemnation of capitalism, I think it would be in terms of capitalism’s suppression of some agents’ interests in favor of others’. It would be condemnation 2. Beyond pointing out bourgeois hypocrisy, however, the passage provides no reason to think such condemnation justified. Marx says, It was only possible to discover the connection between the enjoyments open to individuals at any particular time and the class relations in which they live, and the conditions of production and intercourse which give rise to these relations, the narrowness of the previously existing forms of enjoyment, which were outside the real content of the life of individuals and in contradiction to it . . . it was, of course, only possible to discover all this when it became possible to criticize the conditions of production and intercourse in the previously existing world, i.e., when the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had given rise to communist and socialist views. That shattered the staff of all morality. (DI 403–404/418–19) The topic is the kind of “enjoyment” proper for human beings—in effect, the account of the activities constitutive of the good life. The central claim is that all previous forms of enjoyment—forms existing among all “previously existing estates and classes” (DI 404n/418n)— have been inadequate. In the text, Marx condemns them as “narrow.” In a crossed-out passage he says that they have been “childish, exhausting or crude” (DI 404n/418n). Moreover, he says that such forms of enjoy-

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ment “were always completely divorced from the life activity, the real content of the life of the individuals, and more or less reduced to imparting an illusory content to a meaningless activity” (DI 404n/418n). Activities—specifically, materially productive labor—that would be seen as components of the good life under communism have thus far not been seen in this way. Current forms of enjoyment are thus inadequate; communist forms will be better. This is a way in which communism is superior to capitalism. It is condemnation 1. This is the place where the 1844 view surfaces most clearly. Marx defends the legitimacy of his attack on previous forms of enjoyment by reference to the development of “the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.” This has given rise to communist views and “shattered the staff of all morality.” Here is a key place where Marx asserts that current conditions permit transcendence of capitalist forms of thought. Unfortunately, this does not get Marx very far, for why should the rise of communist views undermine morality? Even given the rise of such views (indeed, even in the face of the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) people continue to have moral beliefs (concerning, among other things, how properly to resolve that contradiction). Marx thinks that moral beliefs are inevitably fundamentally slanted by (and perhaps even simply the effects of) social institutions. If the rise of communist views proved that claim about moral beliefs, it would indeed shatter the basis of all morality. But the mere rise of communist views cannot prove such a claim. On the other hand, the rise of communist views would shatter the basis of earlier conceptions of “enjoyment” if this rise provided an alternative conception that could be shown to be correct. In this passage, which is reminiscent of 1844, Marx is referring, however obscurely, to what he thinks is a new conception of enjoyment, and he may be right that the rise of this new conception is tied to the “rise [of] communist and socialist views.” He is wrong, however, if he thinks that the mere rise of such views shows the new conception to be correct. Suppose Marx were at least able to show that a conception of this kind is likely to be associated with a particular social group, with the proletariat. Even then, unless he provides reasons to think that this group’s beliefs about this topic are epistemologically privileged, he has


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not shown that its conception of enjoyment is likely to be correct. And there is no reason, on the basis of the account in The German Ideology, to think that prior to communism—that is, prior to an actual new society, not just the eruption of some degree of social conflict—the proletariat’s beliefs are epistemologically privileged.26 Overall, the situation is more complicated than in 1844, but once again it looks as if Marx cannot provide needed justification for the condemnation of capitalism that is clearly there in his text. Of course, Marx does not intend these passages as sustained attempts at justification of his critique of capitalism, so showing their shortcomings in this respect is a bit unfair. I have examined them in these terms only because they are the most prominent places in the text from which something like such an attempt might be extracted. Under certain circumstances, knowing the fruits of capitalism would be sufficient to condemn it. When the facts of capitalist life are manifestly horrible, and horrible because of capitalism, there is no need to invoke a particular conception either of justice or the good life. In this century, however, the capitalist facts of life have sometimes not been manifestly horrible. And then the need does arise to justify condemnations 1 and/or 2.

6. Returning to Philosophy The conclusion to draw from the justificatory problems I have detailed since Chapter 6 is that Marx needs a moral philosophy. That may seem, and historically has long seemed, obvious. I think it is not obvious that the conclusion follows from accepting most of Marx’s claims, as I have done, but there is no doubt that for more than a century writers have wanted Marxism to develop a moral philosophy. Certainly if it or any radical theory is to help change social conditions it needs a relatively explicit account of the good society. This need not be a detailed blueprint, complete to meal, marriage, and clothing regulations, but it should be a picture rich enough in content and deep enough in conceptual structure to be able to explain why communism would be better than benign capitalism. And it should be something whose justification is both reasonably compelling and currently visible. The goal of developing a moral philosophy to condemn capitalism is clearly at odds with Marx’s claims in The German Ideology. It is also at

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odds with Marx’s picture of communism. Under communism, it would be superfluous to give abstract arguments about the proper form of human life, and the commitment to argue abstractly might itself be at odds with that form of life. In this section I want to alter the angle from which the issue is approached. In discussing the question of Marx and moral philosophy, we need to remember that we do not live in a true communist society, and that nothing in Marx requires us now to take the standpoint of such a society. In this section I argue that, in Marx’s terms but from our current standpoint, it is not problematic to attempt to develop a moral philosophy condemning capitalism. From our current standpoint, there is clearly nothing problematic as long as only the weak sociological thesis is true, for that merely tells us to be careful to filter the impact of institutions. It tells us that our moral judgments are likely to be warped to fit the interests of the dominant class. But then appeal to all sorts of considerations, including the ones philosophers favor, might be a good way to guard against such warping. Two questions might be thought to arise here: Can available moral concepts support an at least seemingly convincing moral condemnation of capitalism?27 And even if a seemingly convincing condemnation could be developed, can moral claims actually be the sort of thing in which one could—in which the Marxist could—have warranted confidence? The first question can be put aside, for the proper response is simply to make the attempt. The second question is what is key. Now, if the structural thesis is true, developing a moral philosophy looks like a problematic enterprise. I have argued against the plausibility of that thesis and against attributing it to Marx. Let’s assume, however, that is true and that Marx holds it. In fact, it does not follow that Marxists should eschew moral philosophy. The structural thesis is an extremely strong thesis, and its very strength undermines its practical impact. It says that all ideas are mere reflexes of social conditions. But then any particular set of ideas will be with us as long as the conditions that generated it are, and so will be the appearance, itself a reflex of those conditions, that the ideas are more than mere reflexes. Now Marx notes that moral ideas do not appear to be tied to particular social conditions (they have become “ever more abstract” and “increasingly take on the form of universality” [DI 47/60]). He ought also to note that in daily life moral beliefs do appear


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to have authority. He ought to note further that some arguments for moral beliefs appear to be better than others. Moreover, the abstract arguments and theories of philosophers at least sometimes do seem to provide good reasons for holding one or another moral belief. Finally, if Marx holds the structural thesis, he ought to concede that such appearances will persist as long as capitalism does. The structural thesis says that ideas are “the ideal expression of the dominant material relations” (DI 46/59). The idea that morality provides an independent standard and the idea that abstract thought can sometimes generate good reasons must also be expressions of these relations. Perhaps all of these appearances are illusory and will vanish “as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form of social order” (DI 48/61). But as long as class rule continues, so will they. The situation is familiar. Under capitalism, what is the case may diverge from what it is rational to believe is the case. If the structural thesis is true, it will currently appear false (ideas will appear to be more than “the ideal expression of the dominant material relations”). We are stuck with mere appearances. But precisely because we are in fact stuck with mere appearances, we might as well get on as best we can within them. And from within the realm of appearances there seems no reason not to try to develop a moral philosophy whose conclusion is that capitalism ought to be destroyed. Switching now from the structural to the strong sociological thesis, suppose that the latter is true (and that Marx holds it). Its scope includes only moral beliefs, so the worry that distorted appearances are ubiquitous does not apply (as it did with the structural thesis). Here we need to divide things further. First, suppose the strong sociological thesis is true but, as in fact seems the case, we do not have adequate grounds to accept it as true. Then with respect to moral beliefs, matters do turn out to be the same as with the structural thesis. For moral beliefs do not now appear to be mere rationalizations of the dominant class’s interests (certainly they don’t always appear to be such rationalizations), and philosophical thought about morality at least sometimes seems cogent, and, by hypothesis, we do not now have adequate grounds to believe that these are mere appearances. So once again there is no reason not to construct an anticapitalist moral philosophy. Alternatively, suppose that the strong sociological thesis is not only true but that there are adequate grounds to believe it true. Then there is

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a problem, for then we have reason to doubt the claim to authority of any and all moral beliefs (philosophically supported or not), including beliefs condemning capitalism, for presumably those, too, must somehow be mere expressions of the interests of the ruling class. So the strong sociological thesis does seem to undermine the impulse to a Marxist moral philosophy if that thesis is not only true but also accepted as true. At this point I want to stress the content of our standpoint. Let’s take the most worrisome case for the Marxist who wants to appeal to moral philosophy. Assume that both the structural and the strong sociological theses are true (and that Marx holds them), and that there are adequate grounds to accept them. Even so, I will argue, the Marxist need not avoid moral philosophy. And then clearly moral philosophy need not be avoided in less worrisome cases. If each thesis is both true and we have adequate reason to believe it, then our current situation—our situation under capitalism—with respect to moral beliefs is like our situation with respect to air. We know that what we perceive (the homogeneity of air, the authority of moral beliefs) is wrong, but that knowledge does not change the conditions generating the perceptions and so does not change the perceptions. I want to look at two possibilities here. In the first case, our knowledge that moral beliefs in fact do not have authority is somehow with us all the time, somehow seeps into us and keeps us, moment by moment, from attributing authority to our moral beliefs: a mental warning light goes on every time we are on the verge of doing so. Then it would seem impossible to develop a condemnation of capitalism that could carry conviction. The appearance that moral beliefs have authority would still be there, but so would be the knowledge that in fact they don’t. It would be like wearing split-screen glasses with this difference: we would always see two things at once but would know that only one, and which one, was real. By contrast, in the second case, our knowledge is not with us except at certain moments of metaethical reflection. It is something we have to keep reminding ourselves of. Here, instead of the analogy to air, we might compare the situation to a (thoroughly inaccurate) way of taking Kant’s distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. With this way of taking that distinction, one believes what one has always believed, but with the episodic mental rider that, for instance, “This


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isn’t really a chair, not a chair-in-itself.” Every so often one catches oneself and remembers that one resides in the realm of appearances. Overall, however, such knowledge is detached from one’s life. It trails always two or three steps behind. One’s knowledge here is not “inactive,” like the akratic’s knowledge that he shouldn’t eat the chocolate cake. Presumably the akratic’s knowledge is there, even if ineffectual, at the moment of eating. In the case I am imagining, one’s knowledge is more like something carried around, half-forgotten, in the trunk of one’s car. It exists, but always tucked away, not quite available. An argument against the thing-in-itself, understood this way, is that if it plays so empty a role it ought to be junked. One might as well stop intermittently reminding oneself that the chair is merely an appearance. Key here is that the piece of knowledge at issue cannot affect one’s life except as an episodic mental reservation. Suppose now that our knowledge that the structural and strong sociological theses are true were to spin similarly free of our lives. Suppose we are currently so constituted (perhaps as a consequence of the impact of capitalist institutions) that in practice we simply cannot hold onto this knowledge. Even if we assent to the two theses, their hold is much weaker than the role of moral beliefs in our lives. My claim is that the truth of the two theses would then be no bar to formulating a moral condemnation of capitalism, a condemnation to be taken seriously (that is, not merely formulated for strategic reasons). This may have the air of paradox. How can we both accept the two theses and accept that moral beliefs can have authority? The underlying claim is that some convictions (here our convictions with respect to the two theses), regardless of their truth and even of our intellectual assent to their truth, may be inevitably uncoupled from our lives as long as our lives are as they are. If good is to be done (more accurately, if it appears that good is to be done) by ignoring the implications of such convictions, we should do so.28 If we accepted the two theses, the question of whether our situation would be more like the first or the second of the two cases I’ve sketched is one concerning present human psychology. I believe that our condition would in fact be more like the second. If I am correct, there is no Marxist bar to trying to generate a moral condemnation of capitalism. What I have given is actually an argument only for retaining moral

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beliefs, not for retaining a particular way to develop and to support those beliefs, namely, philosophical argument and theory. Suppose, now, that it is the case that the appearance that abstract considerations at least sometimes do provide good reasons for moral beliefs is an extremely powerful appearance; suppose that, as with moral beliefs themselves, its role in our lives is effectively impossible to shake. Then there would be no bar to developing a Marxist moral philosophy. The idea that abstract thought about morality is inescapable may seem amusing. It is important to remember, however, that much philosophical theory, and perhaps especially moral philosophical theory, is continuous with—and often begins with—ordinary observation and reflection. At least some degree of abstract moral thought is as embedded in the discourse and cerebration of ordinary life as is the holding of moral beliefs themselves. A first step toward abstraction is extremely easy to take and often seems unavoidable. And each succeeding step can seem equally compelling (much more so than one’s ostensible belief that this sort of activity must—in principle—be a network of illusions). It can seem a dodge not to go further with the argument. I am not claiming that everyone is always speaking moral philosophy. Few people engage in systematic moral thought. The possibility of further, and increasingly extensive reflection on one’s own (and/or others’) moral beliefs is always there, however, and I think most people sense this, even when they have little or no inclination for the activity. I think the idea of continually heeding a warning light (flashed by the structural and strong sociological theses) warding one off, thought by thought, from one’s reflections on moral beliefs would seem to most people to be nearly as impossible as continually heeding a warning light warding one off from one’s moral beliefs themselves. To think about moral matters is not the intellectual tic of a few academics. To different degrees and in different ways, it is one of the things human beings do, and, until life is quite other than it is now, it is something they will continue to do. Here, too, I think that the structural and strong sociological theses, even were one to accept them in principle, would spin free of one’s life. And if they would, we should not see any Marxist bar to developing a moral philosophy to condemn capitalism.29 Two clarificatory points. First, Marx himself would surely not endorse my conclusion. My claim is that this conclusion is not inconsistent with his view that moral beliefs are in one or another way a mere


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effect of social institutions—if one takes that view very seriously. Second, I have used the vague phrase “moral philosophy” in order not to prejudge whether we might be able to expunge some moral notions from our lives. The argument I have given depends on the inescapability, for us, of seeing society under certain concepts. Recent Marxist debates have focused on the concept of justice. I think that the concept of a just society and its claim are in fact, for us, inescapable. Eighteenth-century writers analogized morality to the senses. Marx analogizes it to religion. Now people do proclaim themselves atheists and do seem able not to see the world in religious terms. The question is whether, in a capitalist society, we can stop seeing society as something to be assessed in terms of justice, whether the claim of that particular concept can at present wither. This seems to me extremely unlikely. Among the things that most prompt a concern for, a worry about, the justice of existing institutional arrangements is surely the existing enormous inequalities in people’s lives and life prospects. It is hard to see how the concept of justice could wither until such inequalities were to wither as well. The claim of justice will be with us for a while. The contribution of my argument to debates about Marx and justice is, then, that, whatever Marx himself thought, he could, consistent with his other views, use a theory of justice as part of a critique of capitalism.

Conclusion

Th e t a l e I h av e t o l d began with Feuerbach’s critique

of Christianity. It moved to his critique of philosophy, and then to Bauer’s and the 1844 Marx’s stress on human beings as creatures who realize their nature by continually transforming themselves and, for Marx, by transforming the material world as well. This pointed to a critique of capitalism as a social system in which individuals do not and cannot realize their nature. In Chapter 6 a question arose about Marx’s justification of his claims about human nature, more specifically his claim about the type of activity through which human beings realize their nature. Feuerbach demanded a shift in orientation from his reader, and this functioned as a justificatory device. The 1844 Marx could not, without inconsistency, demand a similar shift. And the Feuerbachian critique of philosophy, which Marx substantially adopted, deprived him of justificatory resources he turned out, on his own premises, to need. In Chapter 7 I presented a reading of the Theses on Feuerbach as a way (ultimately not wholly successful) to handle Marx’s problem. In the final three chapters I looked at The German Ideology’s attack on the Young Hegelians, at its critique of philosophy and of morality, and at its (somewhat different from 1844) picture of the good life; and I examined again the issue of justifying a critique of capitalism. What I have traced is a series of attempts to explain how human 360

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beings are fundamentally related to the world and to one another, and to explain what the good life for human beings is; to use accounts of these matters as standards by which to judge existing social institutions; and for the most part to do it without relying on metaphysical or moral theories. Such attempts, however, have all turned out to be flawed. In particular, Marx’s attempts to condemn capitalism have turned out to need justification of a kind that he both disdains and cannot, without inconsistency, avail himself of. In the end, the resources that these thinkers, especially the different Marx’s, allow themselves are insufficient for their aims. The attempt to avoid philosophy has been driven by the hope that human life could become transparent, that our nature and the content of the life that is good for us could come to be read off the world. But this aspiration goes ill with the claim that existing social institutions are not only bad but systematically misleading about their badness, and it goes ill with the goal of convincing as yet unconvinced and supposedly deeply misled people of such claims. When the reasons for condemning existing social institutions are not palpable, philosophy or something like it is needed to argue the case. The purpose of this study has been exegetical. It has been intended as a contribution to the understanding of a set of texts. Still, in closing I would like briefly to go beyond textual claims. To begin with, there is a moral for Marxists. I have pointed out a pair of conceptions of the good life in Marx’s work. Even aside from my claim that philosophy is not forbidden ground to the dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, it seems clear that Marx himself in one text emphasizes communal ties and the struggle with nature, and in another text stresses varied individual self-expression. Just where the final emphasis should be, and how far such themes are mutually compatible, are questions even the Marxist must resolve in order to have a consistent view. And textual evidence alone won’t do that job. The questions will have to be answered on the merits. That means the Marxist will have to deal with issues in moral and political philosophy. The second point I’d like to make is simply an observation along with a suggestion for further research. As far as Marxist writers in the twentieth century have attempted to generate Marxist theories of knowledge or to generate arguments for materialism or against idealism, they have been engaged in activities that Marx (following Feuerbach) has scorned

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in all his texts we have examined. These activities are just what he has tried to avoid. For him, this century’s Marxist debates and polemics about these matters—apart even from the foolishness of many of the views expressed—have been wrongheaded from the start. Still, some Marxist writers—most notably, Georg Lukács and members of the Frankfurt School—have more or less seen this fact and have attempted to deal with such issues without recourse to any general theory of knowledge or ontology, or else by devising theories deliberately geared to sidestepping the usual philosophical categories. With respect to these writers, it would be interesting to examine how far the various texts we have looked at anticipate their twists and turns (quite a bit, I suspect).1 My last point concerns the role of the utopian element in the 1844 Marx’s work. The social ideals in Marx’s texts have often been thought to be utopian, where affixing that label has been intended as a devastating criticism. It has sometimes even been said that there is no point in looking at Marx’s early writings, for the social ideals he recommends in them could never actually exist—that is, they are utopian. What I want to note, as a final word about Marx’s texts, is that several different sins could be hidden under the label “utopian,” and that Marx’s 1844 work suggests that, sometimes, some might be worth committing. Here are four ways a social ideal might be utopian: 1. It might be politically utopian. It might require institutional changes that everyone knows will not come about in the near future, not because they defy technological or economic reality or go beyond the capacities of human nature, but simply because existing political forces are too powerfully stacked against them. 2. It might be technologically utopian. It might rely on highly implausible premises about society’s technological capacity to produce the material resources necessary to realize the social ideal in question. 3. It might be economically utopian. It might rely on highly implausible premises about society’s capacity sufficiently easily to elicit from individuals the productive activities necessary to realize the social ideal in question. 4. It might be utopian about human nature. It might rely on highly

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implausible premises about human capacities, interests, and motivations.2 To demand of a political philosophy that it avoid utopianism in the first sense is too stringent. Few works in the history of political philosophy would satisfy this constraint, including what is often taken to be this century’s most important work in political philosophy, A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s well-ordered society will not soon be a reality. Of course, if a political philosophy is not utopian in the first sense it certainly ought not to be in the others. It is a very bad idea to attempt to create institutional arrangements premised on false technological or economic claims or on false claims about human nature. I think that much of the hostility to utopianism in the last three senses derives from an awareness of how disastrous it would be to attempt actually to instantiate a social ideal guilty of one or more of these forms of utopianism. But what if we concede that a view is utopian in the first sense, politically utopian? This is no doubt a matter of degree, but let’s imagine a political–philosophical account sufficiently utopian in this sense that we need not worry about politicians soon taking it seriously. At that point it is not clear that it must always be wrong for an account to be utopian in the second or third senses. Being utopian in either or both of these senses might be a useful way to get at something one wants to examine, such as a conception of human nature (or a particular aspect of it) for the purposes of political philosophy. Being utopian in either or both of these senses could be a way to isolate the element that one wants to put under the microscope. What political philosophy must always avoid is utopianism in the fourth sense, utopianism about human nature, for there is no point in developing a political philosophy that is not about us. The account of human nature that a political philosophy adopts must be one in which we can recognize ourselves or at any rate can recognize beings we could take to be our fairly close descendants. It must pick out something we can recognize as a human possibility. Now Marx would have recoiled at the prospect of his ideas being utopian in any of the senses I’ve sketched. Nevertheless, his greatest philosophical interest, certainly at present, is as a utopian writer.

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To see what is at issue, we need a further set of distinctions. Among the things a conception of human nature could do are: (a) provide a picture of what human beings are like; (b) provide a picture of what it would be good for human beings to come to be; (c) emphasize an important but neglected aspect of human life. To do (a) clearly has value, especially for revealing the gap between the immediately possible and the immediately actual. Given a set of existing human and institutional possibilities, a failure to realize those possibilities might count as a (perhaps profound) social failure. Pointing out that human beings, as they are today, can realize some unrealized set of institutional possibilities could be a powerful practical point. Still, I suspect that to do (b) has even more value. The deep power of Rawls’s work comes in part from the picture it gives of the way we would like human beings pretty much to be.3 It points not merely to the present failure to realize present possibilities in human nature but to the present failure to lay the groundwork for the future realization of better possibilities in human nature. The importance of Marx’s 1844 work is that it does (c). The 1844 Marx will, I think, turn out to be the philosophically most enduring Marx. The German Ideology’s account of the good life is really not all that different from non-Marxist accounts. That text’s emphasis on the wellrounded individual is overdone, but one can also overdo the criticism of it. The picture of a social world in which all agents freely choose to engage in a range of activities is undoubtedly utopian in senses 1 through 3 but it is not—anyway, not obviously—utopian in sense 4, and it is a picture that many non-Marxists would find appealing. The conception of the good life in Marx’s work of 1844, specifically the importance that the conception accords to community and to labor, is more distinctive. In the Introduction I talked of the 1844 Marx as taking a step toward a nonmetaphysical account of human nature. Here I want to press that although his picture of communism is surely utopian in senses 1 through 3, it is precisely because his picture is utopian in these ways, precisely through his imagining what it would be like genuinely to produce “as human beings” (AM 462/227), that the 1844 Marx can place the great weight that he does on the role of community and especially on the role of labor in a good human life. And in this lies

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much of the value of his work. An emphasis on community is now rather common. Marx’s emphasis on labor is not, however, and it points to a large and crucial lacuna in recent political philosophy. The importance of the right kind of institutional structure for work—the broad impact that such a structure has on life both inside and outside the workplace—has been neglected, indeed, usually ignored. It should be central to any political philosophy for the modern world. Finally, in closing a book on a set of texts most of which are utopian (in one or more of the senses I’ve sketched), I want to urge that political philosophy should not be concerned solely with what is likely to be practicable in the comparatively near future. Among its tasks should also be to tell us, given a reasonable account of human nature and its possibilities, what the proper life for human beings would be.

Notes

Introduction 1. There has recently been a spate of work in English on the Young Hegelians, primarily by intellectual historians. For readers interested in an overview of the Young Hegelians, the best account is John Toews, Hegelianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Robert Gascoigne, Religion, Rationality, and Community (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), and Harold Mah, The End of Philosophy, the Origin of “Ideology” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), are also useful, as is William Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), and Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. 1. David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: MacMillan, 1969), remains the best work on the topic by a historian of philosophy. The only full-length treatment on Bauer yet in English is Zvi Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). Philosophical accounts of Feuerbach are Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), and Marx Wartofsky, Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The latter is the more scholarly, and while Wartofsky casts Feuerbach too much as Marx’s precursor, it is the best work on Feuerbach to date. Perhaps most important, there is now an English collection of Young Hegelian writings; Lawrence Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I should say something in particular about how my work differs from Harold Mah’s The End of Philosophy and the Origins of “Ideology.” I read Mah’s work only after drafting this book. I discovered that he had anticipated some of my themes. Mah’s focus on Marx’s attempt to leave philosophy and the link of this attempt to some conception of socially induced illusion is similar to mine. Mah, like Toews, notes the conversion element in these writers grappling with Hegel’s thought; he notes

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Marx’s 1844 flight from abstraction, and he notes the appeal to an empirical method in The German Ideology as well as Marx’s interest in everyday events. (In fact, Mah is the only writer I have read who notices the oddness of The German Ideology’s appeal to the everyday [see Mah, The End of Philosophy and the Origins of “Ideology,” 212–15], although I don’t think he adequately motivates and explains what is transpiring in that appeal. For my discussion of that appeal, see Chapter 8, §§3–5. I discuss Mah on this matter in Chapter 8, note 31.) The differences between us are in part in how we trace the line of development to The German Ideology. I do not discuss Arnold Ruge, someone Mah emphasizes; on the other hand, I stress Feuerbach and the Counter-Enlightenment resonances in Feuerbach’s work. Detail by detail, there are many differences. But the fundamental difference is in approach, and this informs the differences in the details. My focus is the philosophical reconstruction and assessment of texts. I do not deal with the social history of the time, nor with the psychology of the writers. It would be nice to be able to do so. Unfortunately, I have neither the requisite expertise nor the requisite space. Mah’s work is not (and is not intended as) a piece of philosophical analysis. This book is. I reconstruct and assess the writers’ arguments. That is not Mah’s concern. So where we plow the same ground, we turn the earth in different ways and for different purposes. 2. It has sometimes been thought that Marx and Bauer co-authored one or even two works. For an overview of the scholarly debate, see Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 129–30. 3. I have usually translated Mensch as “human being.” Where the German sense is of something characteristic of human beings generally, I have sometimes used “human beings,” sometimes “humanity,” sometimes “people.” I have avoided using “man” because Mensch does not pick out only male human beings. I have deferred, however, to the masculinity of the pronouns used with Mensch and translated them by “he,” “his,” and so on. 4. The “old/young” distinction is misleading, and does not match up with differences in theological and political positions. See Toews, Hegelianism, chap. 7. 5. Karl Göschel, Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhältnisse zur christlichen Glaubenserkenntnis (Berlin, 1829), 160; quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 90. 6. Karl Rosenkranz, Kritische Erläuterungen des Hegelschen Systems (Königsberg, 1840), 354; quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 90. 7. Feuerbach to Daub, August 1824, in Ascheri, “Ein unbekannter Brief von Ludwig Feuerbach an Karl Daub,” in H. Braun and M. Riedel, eds., Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1967), 450; quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 183; and BN 387, quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 183. 8. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 64. 9. The Young Hegelians often compared their era to that just before the Reformation (see Syn I, xxiv). 10. David McLellan discusses the Young Hegelian view that their situation was similar to that of the thinkers who came after Aristotle. See David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 34–35. Bauer’s most explicit statement that philosophical system-building ended with Hegel comes in 1853 in Rußland und das Germanenthum: “there will never again be a metaphysical

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system, that is, there will never be such a system set up which will maintain its place in the history of civilization.” See Karl Löwith ed., Die Hegelsche Rechte (StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman Verlag, 1962), 102. 11. Engels is, of course, co-author of The German Ideology, and my reading of that text is quite at odds with his own later work, Anti-Dühring. The disparity might be accounted for by the fact that Marx was always the senior part in their collaborations or perhaps by the time gap—more than thirty years—between The German Ideology and Anti-Dühring. Accounting for the disparity seems to me less important than demonstrating its existence. That can only be done textually. I attempt to do so in Chapter 8. 12. These two things are logically distinct. One could believe that the road to truth about certain issues, including about human nature, requires engaging in rarefied, abstract inquiry, and yet also believe that the highest form of human activity (the type of activity that best realizes our nature) has nothing to do with such inquiry. At times it seems as if Marx, especially the 1844 Marx, believes that the epistemological and the type-of-activity preference for abstraction go together. In any event, he objects to both. 13. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1949), 16. 14. I am grateful to Edward Minar for help with the last three paragraphs. 15. Take Wordsworth in “The Recluse”: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. Neither Feuerbach nor Marx would stress the discerning intellect as opposed to the discerning senses, but each would agree that fortunate fields can ultimately be seen as “a simple produce of the common day.” On the similarity of Feuerbachian themes to those in Romanticism, see Chapter 2. 16. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 390. 17. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). 18. For a good historical and analytical discussion of the theory of ideology, see Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). For the now canonical analysis of the concept of ideology, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1. 19. For further development of the same point, see Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17. 20. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 21. Göschel, Aphorismen, 160, quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 90.

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22. I might have connected Feuerbach as well to the group of late eighteenthcentury German writers known as the Popularphilosophen, writers who believe the ultimate touchstone of truth to be the healthy common sense of the ordinary person, not the tangled arguments of professional philosophers. Philosophers, complains Christian Garve, one of their more prominent members, tend to end up with “hollow, that is, empty ideas” (Christian Garve, “Ueber die Laune, das Eigenthümliche des Englischen humour und die Frage: ob Xenophon unter die launigen Schriftsteller gehöre?” in Garve, Popularphilosophische Schriften [Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung], 2:1148). This has something of the look of the view I attribute to Feuerbach, but in the end for him it would be insufficiently radical, for the Popularphilosophen are not worried about professional philosophy as the expression of a problematic stance to the world. They see the philosophical enterprise as problematic only because it gives unnecessarily obscure and/or wrong answers to the right questions. Garve writes, “But it seems to me that the word ‘popularity’ should not denote the object dealt with so much as the manner with which it is dealt” (Garve, “Von der Popularität des Vortrages,” Popularphilosophische Schriften, 2:1061). For Feuerbach, the abstract questions themselves are unacceptable. On the Popularphilosophen, see Fred Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 6. I thank the reader of Harvard University Press for urging me to indicate Feuerbach’s relation to the Popularphilosophen. 23. See August Cieszkowski, Gott und Palingenesie (Berlin, 1842), 93; quoted in McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 70. Gustav Mayer speaks of Bauer as the person the Young Hegelians “revered” as their intellectual leader. See Mayer’s still useful “Die Anfänge des politischen Radikalismus im vormärzlichen Preussen,” Zeitschrift für Politik 6 (1913): 46. 24. William Shaw, “Marxism and Moral Objectivity,” in Marx and Morality, ed. Kai Nielsen and Steven Patten (Guelph, Ontario: Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy, 1981), 33. 25. Allen W. Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” in Marx, Justice, and History, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40–41. 26. With the exception of Chapter 8’s discussion of the targets of The German Ideology, I also do not assess these writers’ attacks on other writers—neither Feuerbach’s on Hegel in the Principles, nor Marx’s on Hegel in the work of 1844, nor his on Feuerbach in the Theses. My focus is the positive content of the texts presented. Chapter 8 discusses the accuracy of Marx’s possible German Ideology complaints against the Young Hegelians solely to get clear on the content of his attack. The question of whether these writers hit their targets is a topic for a separate study.

1. Feuerbach’s Critique of Christianity 1. Friedrich Albert Lange, History of Materialism, trans. Ernest Chester Thomas (London: Trübner & Co. 1880), 2:247. 2. Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 38. Marx Wartofsky begins his full-length study of Feuerbach by stating, “I take Feuerbach seriously. This is not always easy to do” (Feuerbach, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 1). Henri Arvon begins Ludwig Feuerbach ou La Transformation du Sacré by saying, “The German philosopher Lud-

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wig Feuerbach, whose The Essence of Christianity has alone not sunk into oblivion, passes for a thinker of the second rank” ([Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957], 1). Sometimes the left-handed compliment is made that Feuerbach was, after all, not a systematic but a critical thinker. See, for instance, S. Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie: Ursprung und Schicksal, 2d ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1964), 9, and Gregor Nüdling, Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionsphilosophie (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schôningh, 1961), 3. 3. Quoted in Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, 38. Kamenka often sees just how different Feuerbach is. For instance, he notes (85) that Feuerbach never tries to prove the existence of the external world. Yet Kamenka is in the end primarily concerned to domesticate Feuerbach as much as possible, to make him more or less respectable. 4. See most recently Marx Wartofsky’s discussion of Feuerbach’s “materialist humanism” in Feuerbach, 341–432. 5. Two commentators who do see the almost hortatory rather than argumentative character of Feuerbach’s work are Karl Barth (Theology and Church, trans. by Louise Pettibone Smith [London: ScM Press, 1962]) and Gregor Nüdling. Nüdling approvingly quotes Barth’s remark that “Feuerbach’s teaching was essentially a summons, an appeal, a proclamation.” The citation is from Barth, Theology and Church, 218. It is quoted in Nüdling, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Religionsphilosophie, 75. 6. Wartofsky argues that in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach’s account of religion is only in terms of human wishes and not simultaneously in terms of human capacities, by which Wartofsky means the capacities humans (as a species) already have. The appeal to capacities, Wartofsky says, comes in later works such as the 1846 Essence of Religion (see Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 394). This does capture something of a difference between The Essence of Christianity and the later texts. True, in The Essence Feuerbach insists on the identity of divine and human predicates, and presumably this means the identity of divine and human capacities; however, the emphasis in The Essence tends to be on the species’ future overcoming of present limits, rather than on its current powers. But Wartofsky pushes the difference too far. A stress on humanity’s current powers is very much present in the earlier texts. My initial citation for the projection of capacities was from Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, published in 1843, only two years after the first edition of The Essence of Christianity. And the cited passage refers to current human capacities. So if there was a change in emphasis it came quickly. Moreover, in the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach stresses that belief in the Christian God is at odds with the fact that we already have a great deal of power to order and control the world (WC 30/xliv). This preface was written in February 1843, but Feuerbach apparently did not see it as marking a change in the content of The Essence. And while making the claim in question, Feuerbach (accurately) cites a variety of his own writings going back to 1838 as making the same claim. 7. On this topic, see Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 216. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bände (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 12:31; Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 24. 9. Feuerbach seems not to have been aware of the contemporary zoological debates between supporters of monogenesis (single creation) and supporters of

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polygenesis (separate creations for different races). At any rate, none of the protagonists is mentioned in the Namenverzeichniss to the Sämmtliche Werke or to the Ausgewählte Briefe. Kant (a major defender of monogenesis) is of course mentioned, but Feuerbach never discusses his biological works. At one place Feuerbach does credit Kant with the introduction of the concept of the Gattung into philosophy, but the works he cites are “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and the “Reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity” (see Feuerbach, “Über Philosophie und Christentum,” Gesammelte Werke, 8:254). In the latter work, the question of the unity or diversity of the human species is raised very briefly, but it is hardly the focus of either the review or the work reviewed. What probably caught Feuerbach’s eye were Kant’s remarks toward the end of the last review that “no single member in all of these generations of the human race, but only the species, fully achieves its destination.” Two protagonists in the zoological debate, Georg Forster and James Prichard, are mentioned in the Namenverzeichniss to the Ausgewählte Briefe, but they are mentioned only by others—by Moleschott, in two letters of 1854 (Prichard in one, Forster in both), and by Konrad Deubler (only Forster), in a letter of 1866, and there is no reference to the zoological debate. For four reasons I think that Feuerbach’s use of the idea of the Gattung is altogether distinct from the zoological debates: 1. He seems not to have been aware of those debates. 2. The dominant view in the 1840s was in favor of monogenesis. 3. Feuerbach’s use of the data of comparative religion takes for granted that the differences between the races are not relevant to his work (see, for instance, the discussion of nature religions in Lecture 10 of the 1851 Lectures on the Essence of Religion). 4. Feuerbach’s emphasis on the Gattung is on the idea that we should see ourselves as part of a larger, ongoing collectivity. Even if this collectivity were to be different for members of the different races (that is, if the different races were thought to be different species), what he says about the relation of the individual to the species could still hold group by group. It would not do so only if one added that some races were incapable of the scientific and moral progress that Feuerbach stresses. While this was the theme of most contemporary adherents of polygenesis (especially in America), it would be going an absurdly long way from anything Feuerbach anywhere says to saddle him with a worked-out view that different races are not only biologically distinct but qualitatively different in their cognitive and moral capacities. For a good discussion of the zoological debate in Germany up to 1800, see Phillip Sloan, “Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological Species,” British Journal for the History of Science 12, no. 41 (1979): 109–53. See also Owsei Temkin, “German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 24 (1950): 227–46; Earl W. Count, “The Evolution of the Race Idea in Modern Western Culture during the Period of the Pre-Darwinian Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, ser. 2, 8 (January 1946): 139–65. For a fine account of the philosophical dimension to the zoological debate, see Richard Popkin, “The Philosophical Bases of

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Modern Racism,” in The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980), 79–102. 10. On the theme of acknowledgment generally and on the difference between knowing and acknowledging, I am indebted to the work of Stanley Cavell. See especially “Knowing and Acknowledging” and “The Avoidance of Love” in Cavell’s, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) and his The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pt. 4. 11. In a letter to his publisher, Feuerbach says that “[t]he method by which religion is dealt with here . . . could be described as the speculative-empirical, the speculative-rational or also, as I otherwise call it, the genetic-critical. Only as a result of this method do the most difficult puzzles dissolve themselves in a manner which is as profound as it is comprehensible, as simple as it is fruitful” (AB 2:55). Other than suggesting that different, potentially incompatible things are happening in the text, these labels are not especially helpful. Feuerbach’s remarks about his method in the “Letter to C. Riedel” are equally vague. In “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” however, there is a statement that has content but is not quite apposite for The Essence. Feuerbach says that his “genetico-critical philosophy” resembles “the purely physical or natural philosophical view [Anschauung] which sees, for example, the cause of the gallnut in the innocent sting of an insect rather than looking upon it as theology does, as a sign of the existence of the devil as a personal being” (KH 53/121). The difficulty here is that the natural scientist provides an explanation that is more plausible than, but still competes with, the theological explanation, while in The Essence Feuerbach demands a more internal defeat of religion, one that forestalls any competition between alternative explanatory accounts (see this chapter, §3). 12. Nüdling notices this. He even says, “One might almost call [Feuerbach’s] procedure a kind of intellectual conjuring trick” (Nüdling, Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionsphilosophie, 150). 13. I should say something about my translation of Wesen. The word can mean many things, among them “nature” or “essence.” In places such as this one where it is modified by a form of menschlich, I use “human nature.” “Human essence” seems to me tied too closely to the technical terminology of the philosophical tradition. In all but one instance, the phrase comes from Feuerbach’s or Marx’s texts. Now, Feuerbach and Marx do have conceptions of the kind of beings that human beings are; however, neither ever sees such a conception as part of a general philosophical theory. “Human nature” better captures the resonance of their usage. 14. George Eliot translates aufhebt here as “precludes.” While in general this would be an unfortunately unidimensional translation of a notoriously multidimensional word, I think here Eliot is right. Feuerbach wants altogether to eliminate the question of the possibility (or reality or necessity) of miracles. 15. Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 384. 16. Moreover, where a religion holds sway it satisfies the needs of an age. The believer has wishes rooted in the conditions of human life; through religious belief, she satisfies them in an imaginary way; but she experiences their satisfaction as altogether real, as real as herself. Within the circle of the religious conception, there is no space for doubt.

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17. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 36. 18. Cavell claims that a condition of “seeing-as” with respect to a phenomenon is the possibility of a live alternative to one’s current way of seeing the phenomenon (Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 36). Feuerbach wants to eliminate the reading of the world in terms of Christianity—as it were, to destroy one’s ability to see the rabbit. Using Cavell’s terms, in seeing the world nonmiraculously, one would not be seeing the world as nonmiraculous. One would just be seeing the world. That is the condition Feuerbach wants to prompt. 19. Commentators have often lamented Feuerbach’s purple prose. James Massey argues that in Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Feuerbach deliberately, though inexpertly, uses literary devices as a way to transform the reader (see Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980], xxiii–xxiv). Another commentator who has seen that Feuerbach is pressing for a kind of conversion is Claude Welch in his Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972). See vol. 1, 176. See also Barth, Theology and Church, 219. 20. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1911), 5:125; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 131. 21. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:114; Critique of Practical Reason, 120. 22. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1972), 28.2,2:1083; Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 122–23. In my presentation of Kant I am indebted to Allen Wood’s excellent discussion of the absurdum practicum argument in his Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), chap. 1. 23. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 28.2,2:1011; Lectures, 40–41. 24. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 28.2,2:1011; Lectures, 40. 25. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion, 33. 26. John Stuart Mill, “The Utility of Religion,” in Nature, The Utility of Religion, and Theism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1874), 110, 109, 119. Although this collection was not published until 1874, the essay from which the citation is taken was written between 1850 and 1858. 27. See, for instance, Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirches (1895): 403. Thomas Masaryk interprets Feuerbach this way, too (Humanistic Ideals [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971], 67). These citations come from Rawidowicz, 310. For another contemporary thinker who talks of a religion of humanity, see Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity (New York: Burt Franklin, 1875), vol. 2 (originally published in 1852). 28. Existing translations of Hamann are James O’Flaherty, Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), and Ronald Gregor Smith, J. G. Hamann, 1730–1788: A Study in Christian Existence (London: Collins, 1960). An existing translation of Jacobi is Gérard Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi (Maryland: University Press of America, 1988). 29. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 90.

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30. Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), 1:356. I owe the reference to Isaiah Berlin, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 178. For Berlin’s most extended discussion of Hamann, see The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London: J. Murray, 1993). The best philosophical discussion in English of Hamann and Jacobi is in Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), chaps. 1 through 4. In general, I agree with Beiser’s interpretation. However, he argues that Hamann holds that faith is distinct from but not at odds with reason (Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 29). I find this puzzling. Hamann quotes the same passage from Hume in a letter to Kant a few weeks later. There he comments that it shows that “one can preach the truth in jest and without one’s knowledge or intent, even if one were the greatest doubter and like the serpent, wished to doubt what God says” (Briefwechsel, 1:380; Study, 240). Thus Hamann twice endorses Hume’s statement that belief in the Christian religion “subverts all the principles of [the believer’s] understanding.” For an interesting discussion of Jacobi’s conception of faith, see B. A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 4. 31. Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke (Wien: Verlag Herder), 2:73–74; O’Flaherty, Socratic Memorabilia, 167–69. 32. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1819), vol. 4, pt. 1, 72–73; Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 95–96. 33. Gotthold Lessing, “Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft,” Gesammelte Werke in Zwei Bänden (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1966), vol. 2; “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Lessing, Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1956). 34. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 767; “On the Proof,” 54. 35. Ibid. 36. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 766; “On the Proof,” 53. 37. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 767; “On the Proof,” 54. 38. Ibid. 39. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 764–65; “On the Proof,” 52. 40. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 764; “On the Proof,” 51–52. 41. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 766–67; “On the Proof,” 54. 42. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 765; “On the Proof,” 52. 43. Lessing, “Über den Beweis,” 766–67; “On the Proof,” 51. Jacobi seems to be echoing this worry when he remarks that “[c]onviction through proofs is a second-hand certainty and rests on comparison; it can never be altogether certain and complete” (Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 210; Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 120– 21). Feuerbach makes a similar claim: “all proofs give no satisfactory certainty” (WC 317/204). 44. Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, 3:191, Smith Study, 258. Beiser gives a similar reading of the shift from external to internal revelation (although explicitly only with reference to Jacobi). See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 58. Hamann and Jacobi both make the interesting claim that faith is prior to reason and forms something like a context into which we are born and within which we exist: “[W]e are all of us born within faith, and in faith we perforce continue, just as we are all born within society and in society we must needs continue” (Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 210;

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Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 120). And “[T]he ground of religion lies in our whole existence, and outside the sphere of our powers of cognition, which taken all together constitute the most casual and abstract mode of our existence” (Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, 3:191; Smith, Study, 258). For a link between Hamann’s insistence on faith as akin to sensation and Hume’s influence on him, it is worth noting that Hamann translated the first half of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. There one of the characters (Cleanthes) says, “Consider, anatomize the eye; survey its structure and contrivance, and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.” 45. See Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 210–12; Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 120– 122. Here Hamann parted company with Jacobi. On this topic, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 332n46. 46. Jacobi, Werke, 2:60. 47. Ibid., 2:61. 48. Ibid. 49. Hamann’s name is not in the Namenverzeichniss to either the second edition of Feuerbach’s Sämmtliche Werke or the Ausgewählte Briefe. 50. Schleiermacher’s focus on feeling is one obvious influence on Feuerbach. In The Essence, Feuerbach does acknowledge that influence (WC 28/lxiii; in the same sentence he acknowledges a similar influence by Jacobi). However, Schleiermacher’s is precisely the anemic faith Feuerbach attacks. Elsewhere he castigates Schleiermacher for failing to draw the proper conclusions from the fact that belief is based in feelings (see ZB 230). 51. Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 75; Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 97. 52. The inverted parallel is not precise. Jacobi is trying to get Lessing to reject the Spinozan pantheism he has allegedly confessed to Jacobi. For Feuerbach, however, Spinozism does not entail atheism but theism (see Chapter 2, §1). Like Jacobi, he wishes to prompt the abandonment of Spinozism, but for him that move is from a religious to an atheistic standpoint. The key parallel, though, is that Feuerbach’s resolution of the supernatural into the natural is supposed to rest conviction on a kind of revelation that needs no justification beyond itself but is “self-certifying.” In the secondary literature on Feuerbach, little attention has been paid to the connection between him and Jacobi. Commentators have mentioned (what Feuerbach explicitly acknowledges) Jacobi’s role in Feuerbach’s stress on religion’s affective quality (see, for instance, Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie, 260), but other similarities have gone unremarked. 53. Here, for instance, is John Wesley: “The most infallible of proofs [is] inward feeling.” See Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1:27. For an account of the tradition stemming from Luther, including the emphasis on a “selfvalidating” criterion of religious truth, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 1. The term “self-validating” is from p. 9. 54. I am indebted to the discussion of this issue in Carlo Ascheri, Feuerbachs Bruch mit der Spekulation (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969), chap. 4. 55. See Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, (Weimar: H. Böhlav, 1912), 43:459, 462, 460.

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56. Feuerbach, incidentally, explicitly compares his mission to Luther’s. In a letter he says, “I am Luther II” (quoted in John Glasse, “Feuerbach und die Theologen: Sechs Thesen Über den Fall Luther,” in Atheismus in der Diskussion, ed. Hermann Lübbe and Hans-Martin Saß). And in the fragment “Outline for an Introduction to the Complete Works” (1845/46) he says of his early Thoughts on Death and Immortality: “As badly done and as filled with faults as this writing is, it nevertheless draws the boundary line between the Christian and the human worldview. Here, for the first time in the history of mankind a ground and starting point for a new life is established. Here man categorically and unscientifically declares himself, here he makes short shrift of the old belief, and simply says ‘I can do naught else’” (OI 26). 57. The obvious thinker to whom to compare Feuerbach is Søren Kierkegaard. Writing at precisely the same time, Kierkegaard’s attacks on speculative philosophy, on the irrelevance of biblical criticism to genuine faith, and on the anemia of contemporary belief often sound startlingly similar to Feuerbach’s. And Kierkegaard was strongly influenced by the Counter-Enlightenment (see, for instance, his discussion of Lessing and Jacobi in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, chap. 2, and the account in his journals of his response to Hamann’s comments on Hume on miracles). An extensive comparison of Feuerbach and Kierkegaard would certainly be in order. Still, there is a basic difference between Feuerbach’s and Kierkegaard’s conceptions of faith. For Feuerbach, genuine faith is easy and natural at certain periods of history and effectively impossible at others. It is never a problem confronting the potential believer. For Kierkegaard, it is. The problem of faith is precisely his subject. It is for his too easy account of how one comes to faith that Kierkegaard mocks Jacobi (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968], 91–97). (Feuerbach also mocks Jacobi for his talk of an easy “immediate knowledge” of the “supersensible”—he calls him “Sunday’s child,” into whose mouth the roasted pigeon flew—but the grounds for the mockery are different [see JacP 16]). 58. See also Feuerbach’s letter to the publisher of The Essence, in which he claims that at the root of the book is a “profound, practical interest” (AB 2:55). 59. On Priessnitz and other German water healers of the time, see Susan Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 19–24; Vladimir Krizek, “History of Balneotherapy,” in Medical Hydrology, ed. Sidney Licht (New Haven, Conn.: Elizabeth Licht, 1963), 140–42; and Alfred Martin, Deutsches Badewesen in Vergangenen Tagen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1906), 367–98. 60. There is no mention in the Namenverzeichniss to the second edition of the Sämmtliche Werke or the Ausgewählte Briefe of Priessnitz or others who were prominently associated with hydrotherapy, such as John Floyer, John Currie, or the members of the Hahn family. There are three letters (December 1840 to January 1841) to Christian Kapp, in which another hydrotherapist, E. F. C. Oertel, is mentioned, but Oertel’s interest in hydrotherapy is brought up only once and then only in passing. 61. Interestingly, although physicians did attempt to understand what made hydrotherapy—apparently—successful, it was at least as much folk as scientific medicine. The structure of the practice Feuerbach analogizes to his scientific treatment of religion is itself as much like religion as like science.

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62. See BWC 195, and especially UPC 234, where Feuerbach denies that reason can influence genuine faith and notes that “[t]he philosopher knows . . . the limits of philosophy.” 63. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 112.

2. Feuerbach’s Critique of Philosophy 1. See Thomas E. Wartenberg ed., Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1986), xvii. 2. I should repeat the warning from note 26 to the Introduction. In presenting Feuerbach’s attack on Hegel and other philosophers, I by no means endorse its accuracy. The Principles is a polemical piece. It is unlikely that its account of its targets would stand up to scrutiny. 3. Feuerbach voices the same complaint in The Essence (see WC 312/200). 4. Should “one give the old faith new clothes? That is just as ridiculous as if one wanted to make an old man young again by sticking him in the clothes of a stripling” (ZB 236). 5. In a reply to a cleric’s review of the first edition of The Essence, Feuerbach tried to respond to this problem. The reviewer had complained that the assertion in the Introduction that “[w]ith sensuous objects consciousness [of the objects] and self-consciousness are to be distinguished, but with religious objects they coincide” (BWC 179; the quotation is slightly amended from the passage at WC 50/12) was really just an “axiom” or “unproven presupposition” (BWC 179) and so amounted to a form of question-begging. The context is the reviewer’s contention that Feuerbach is committed to denying the existence of objects outside the mind since Feuerbach claims that objects are known only so far as they mirror a person’s nature (see BWC 178–79). Feuerbach’s attempted way out is through distinguishing between those objects that do exist outside us and for which consciousness of the object outside oneself and consciousness of oneself (that is, consciousness of the object “within” oneself, i.e., consciousness of it as a representation [see WC 50/12]) are separable (see BWC 179) and those objects for which such a separation does not obtain. The reviewer’s point is that Feuerbach’s consignment of religious objects to the latter camp is merely asserted, not proved. Feuerbach’s reply is that the Introduction to The Essence was written after the book itself and so its claims should be taken as the results of the book, not as its presuppositions. But of course this is no answer to the critic if that critic is unable to see the text’s various analyses of religious phenomena from the necessary angle of vision. And Feuerbach finally seems to think that the reviewer’s starting point is in fact the problem (BWC 195), for presumably, as a cleric, he cannot give up the religious standpoint, and so cannot see religious objects—for example, God—as in the camp where Feuerbach puts them. Still, the fact remains that Feuerbach can cite only “my entire book” as the “proof” of the disputed statement (BWC 195), not some discrete, articulable argument. 6. The texts of the Pantheismusstreit are collected in Heinrich Scholz, Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn (Berlin: Verlag von Reuther & Reichard, 1916). For a fine—and delightfully told—account of the battle, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, chap. 2.

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7. It almost seems as if Feuerbach is trading on the ambiguity of the phrase “Begriffe Gottes.” He uses it to refer both to the concept “God” and to a concept God has, a concept in the divine mind. But even if we accept that reality attaches to the first, that hardly means it must attach to the second. 8. To get this last part of the argument going, Feuerbach has assumed that (4) means that “we have no more things outside God’s mind.” In fact, (4) says only that “the difference between the thing in the conception and the thing outside the conception . . . [cannot] take place in God.” But couldn’t this difference take place outside God? Feuerbach does not address the issue. Lessing does so in “On the Reality of Things Outside God.” He takes as given that “if the concept [Begriff] of [something] is in [God], then the thing itself is in him: all things are real [wirklich] in him.” In effect, this is (4). Lessing then says: But, it will be said, the concept which God has of the reality of a thing does not do away with the reality of this thing outside him. Does it not? Then this reality outside him must have something which distinguishes it from the reality in his concept. That is: in the reality outside him there must be something of which God has no concept. An absurdity! But if there is nothing of the sort; if in the concept which God has of the reality of a thing everything is present that is to be found in the reality outside him, then both realities are one, and everything which is supposed to exist outside God exists in God. (Gotthold Lessing, Werke [München: Winkler Verlag, 1972], 3:76; Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings, 102) The distinction between concept and thing cannot fall outside God, for if it were to do so there would be an attribute of the thing different from the attributes in God’s concept of the thing (otherwise, by (4) the reality of the thing would not be outside but in God). But if there is something missing from God’s concept of the thing, then God is not omniscient. But God is omniscient. 9. One might want to interpret the philosophical turn from the objects to the subject of thinking (G §17, 290/27) as Feuerbach’s variant of Kant’s Copernican revolution. He would then be seen as radicalizing that revolution via the claim that an object of knowledge one has no organs to register might as well not exist. Whether or not this is textually accurate (and I see no evidence that it is), such a move would be philosophically misleading. True, one might claim (a) that an object (the thing-in-itself) that is utterly opaque to us in principle, an object for which we cannot even conceive a mode of access, might as well be jettisoned in our account of things. But Feuerbach’s claim is different. Either he is making the tautologous claim that I discuss in the text—call it (b)—or he is making the very strong claim (c) that the existence of objects for which people do claim a mode of access is dependent on that mode of access. And (c) is very different from (a). To say that we should not see the thing-in-itself as existing because it cannot—ever—play a role in our thoughts or lives (because we cannot—ever—have access to it) is very different from saying that we should not think of visual objects as existing outside us because our access to them is dependent on our vision, or that we should not think of God as existing outside us because our access to him is dependent on our reason. These latter claims beg the question of whether our modes of access to such objects accurately register their existence. The point of (a) is that with the thing-in-itself there cannot be a mode of access to it. The issue of its existence is not a question of the accuracy

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of our mode of access. But that is precisely the question with respect to our contact with visual objects or with God (at least as far as our access to God is said to be via some organ or faculty, here via reason). 10. Of course one could always challenge religious belief as well via rational argument. For Feuerbach, however, the goal of the method of inversion with respect to religion is to generate exhaustive (atheistic) conviction. And in the end, with religion (and perhaps even with irreligion), it is at least arguable that one’s proper goal is in fact a condition of exhaustive conviction, not a condition of (mere) rational belief. But philosophical convictions are supposed to be based on rational belief. And they should always be open to renewed doubt: exhaustive conviction is a philosophical sin. Here Feuerbach’s method and goal seem out of place. 11. See Ludwig Feuerbach, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie von Bacon von Verulam bis Benedikt Spinoza, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. 12. See Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie, 204. 13. Feuerbach’s specific reference is to the section in the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel claims that the things that sensuous certainty grasps are merely particulars and so are transient and disappear—for instance, they get eaten up. In effect, Hegel denies “the truth and certainty of the reality of sense objects.” See Hegel, Werke, 3:91; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 65. Feuerbach’s point is that the fact that objects get eaten up should be taken not as a denial but as an affirmation of their reality; or, in Hegel’s terms, it should be taken not (as Hegel takes it) as an affirmation of their “nothingness” but as an affirmation of their “intrinsic being.” It is precisely such transient particulars from which we live. But of course it isn’t as if Hegel doesn’t know that, as if he ever denies that particulars are crucial in that way. 14. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag), 2:19; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14–15. 15. John Austin, “Other Minds” in Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 87. For a discussion of Austin’s strategy, see Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 49–64. 16. William James provides another good example in Pragmatism when he “solves” an apparently difficult question by introducing a distinction that turns the difficult question into two easy ones. See William James, Pragmatism (New York: New American Library, 1974), 41–42. 17. For an account of various ways in which nineteenth-century German writers appealed to science as a means to solve philosophical problems, see Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 95–100. Most of the approaches Schnädelbach catalogs are not deflationary, for to reinterpret “epistemological questions in terms of the physiology of perception” (97) is deflationary only if what one is doing is pointing out certain concrete features of human perception, and not proclaiming that one has now solved the problem of knowledge. But, on Schnädelbach’s account, the latter was the more typical move. 18. Sometimes a deflationary may be hard to distinguish from a diagnostic approach. Which kind is Carnap’s attack on metaphysics? It turns profound statements into nonsense, which is certainly deflationary, but it does so by explaining the underlying problem as a failure to make statements in what Carnap calls a “logically

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correct language” (Rudolph Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer [New York: The Free Press, 1959], 70). And that sounds like diagnosis. Since deflationary accounts proceed by changing the structure of a question, they will also often be diagnostic (of type (i)), for they will often argue that the question has hitherto seemed important only because improperly formulated—that is, they will provide a diagnosis of its (illusory) interest (Ryle’s category mistake example is of this kind). A deflationary move, however, does not necessarily rely on a diagnosis. 19. It is also worth noting that in the Principles, Feuerbach repeats his earlier charge (WC 29–30/xliv and CA 115) that his contemporaries’ belief in Christianity is not genuine. When he says that the “real sciences” are the “practical negation” of theology (G §15, 285–86/22–23) he means in part that standard theological beliefs entail actions that agents are unwilling to perform: when they are ill, people go to doctors, not priests. More generally, whatever agents may say, Christianity no longer informs their lives. One “does not deny God’s being, that is, maintaining God as a dead and indifferent being; but [one] denies God the being that proves itself as being [das sich als Sein beweist] that is effective, palpable [fühlbare], and active in life. [One] affirms God but negates all the consequences necessarily connected with this affirmation” (G §16, 288/25). 20. For Kant’s discussion, see Gesammelte Schriften, 3:401; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 505; A 599/B627. 21. Section 43 in Manfred Vogel’s English translation. 22. In the “Critical Remarks,” Feuerbach refers to section 43. That is because he is referring to the text in the 1846 Sämmtliche Werke. The Schuffenhauer text, from the Gesammelte Werke, uses the first edition of the Principles, in which this section was 44. Although the available English translation puts this section as 43, I have thought it best to keep to the first edition’s numbering. 23. On this, see Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 372. Wartofsky, however, draws conclusions quite different from mine. See this chapter, §3. 24. “I declare first—in opposition to the philosophy which separates itself from the senses—the sensuous as the immediately certain. And anyone will accept this assertion who has not already taken that standpoint of abstraction” (KB 321). One will accept Feuerbach’s assertion if one has not taken the wrong standpoint. In the following paragraph, Feuerbach begins his discussion of the difference between the primitive and scientific way of using the senses. 25. Hegel, Werke, 12:176; Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 141. 26. Hegel, Werke, 12:177; Philosophy of History, 141. 27. Hegel, Werke, 12:208; Philosophy of History, 167. 28. Hegel, Werke, 12:288; Philosophy of History, 234. 29. See Hegel, Werke, 12:289–90; Philosophy of History, 235–36. 30. See Frederick Gregory’s discussion of Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner in Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1977), 51–121. 31. One commentator who seems to see the different elements in Feuerbach’s critique of philosophy is Claudio Cesa in his “Feuerbach’s Kritik des Idealismus und seine Versuche zu einer neuen Erkenntnistheorie,” in Atheismus in der Diskussion,

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ed. Lübbe and Saß, esp. 226–27. See also Nüdling, Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionsphilosophie, 77. 32. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 372; emphasis in original. 33. Ibid., 369; emphasis in original. 34. See ibid., 374. 35. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 376. Kamenka comes perhaps even closer, but he, too, finally shies away from Feuerbach’s antiphilosophical stance. At many places he sees how different Feuerbach is trying to be (see Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, 85, 90, 92, and esp. 95, where he says, “Feuerbach simply side-steps some of the central problems of [philosophy]”), yet in the end Kamenka attributes to Feuerbach “a number of different views—views that might be characterized, respectively, as realism, nominalism, and agnosticism” (102); sums him up as “not so much a non-reductive materialist at one stage and a reductive materialist at another, as a confused interactionist all the way through, over-emphasizing various aspects at various times” (112); and argues that Feuerbach’s “epistemology” is weak because he does not confront basic issues—a confrontation “he was able to skirt because of his unsystematic and unprofessional way of writing” (110). Perhaps Feuerbach ought to have been less deflationary and dismissive; perhaps he ought to have confronted philosophical questions more directly and professionally; however, it seems to me a misunderstanding of his project to see him as trying to do so but as failing out of a self-imposed stylistic confusion. For another commentator who seems to me to have gone only part way down the line of interpretation that I am pressing see, Alfred Schmidt, Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit (Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1973). 36. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 377. 37. Wartofsky points out Feuerbach’s anticipation of Heidegger in Feuerbach, 377. 38. Ibid., 377. 39. Ibid., 371. 40. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 371. The passage that Wartofsky quotes from Feuerbach comes from the Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy (see VT 253/163). Wartofsky is here recording an ongoing set of claims by Feuerbach, so the quoted passage should not be read as his final account of Feuerbach’s views. To be fair to Wartofsky, he does come very close to making claims similar to mine. “The force of Feuerbach’s statement, then, that ‘Being here [Dasein] is primary being’ is that primary being is already being in the world, already determined by its relation to an other, and is not abstractable in isolation as a ‘subject’ that has then to be put in relation to an object” (377). Yet Wartofsky goes on immediately to consider this as an early Feuerbachian theory of knowledge. 41. In an 1840 letter to Christian Kapp, Feuerbach notes that “I lack a talent: the formal-philosophical, the systematic, the encyclopedic-methodical talent, or I have at least never cultivated it” (AB 2:50). Commentators tend to take this as an accurate self-assessment but then to attempt to generate a “formal-philosophical” account on Feuerbach’s behalf, as if his fundamental ideas could in fact profitably be put in this form with the proper reconstructive assistance. See, for instance, Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, 95: Feuerbach was in part right but “was inclined to exaggerate [his method’s result], to think of it as removing prob-

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lems instead of seeing it as enabling us to tackle problems in the appropriate manner and the appropriate context.” And see Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 201–204, for an interesting psychological and political explanation of Feuerbach’s failure to put his claims, especially at this period, “in the clearest philosophical terms.” See also Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie, 116–17, who notes that “[i]n both these forms [criticism and aphorisms] the new spirit of philosophy is supposed to declare itself,” and then remarks that “an aphoristically constructed train of thought can bring many details before the reader in a lively and vivid way, but here and there it will lack the particular terseness, precision . . . and logical inevitability which is only possible with the purposive creation of a systematic argument.” My claim is that more sense can be made of Feuerbach’s texts once the formal-philosophical method is taken as intrinsically hostile to the substance of what he is doing. 42. Feuerbach does declare that “[n]o law of metaphysics is valid for me if I cannot establish it as a law of natural science” (see the letter to Christian Kapp, quoted in Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, 94). But this does not show that he is searching for a competitor to idealism and materialism. On the contrary, it shows that he has yet to see that his turn to the senses entails a fundamental hostility to metaphysics of any stripe. Certainly the philosophical theses that commentators reconstruct on his behalf are incapable of being established as laws of natural science. 43. Feuerbach goes on to add that he is “a communist.” 44. Hegel, Werke, 7:26; Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21. 45. The lines Feuerbach quotes are spoken by Mephistopheles at lines 1830– 32 of Faust. 46. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975), 308. I thank Ulf Nilsson for bringing this comment to my attention. 47. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:23n; Critique of Pure Reason, 34n; B xl. 48. Feuerbach is aware that it might seem impossible to make ancient Greek philosophy (even begin to) fit with this claim. He explicitly distinguishes the ancient philosophers from his targets. “The ancient philosophers were still wise men, that is, physiologists, politicians, zoologists; in short, they were anthropologists, not theologians, or at least only partly theologians. To be sure, precisely for this reason they were also at first only partially anthropologists, hence limited and defective anthropologists” (G §29 309–310/45). 49. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:7; Critique of Pure Reason, 7; A vii. 50. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 378. Abrams does not give the reference to where Coleridge says this. 51. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 267, quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 390. For other examples see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, chap. 7. Interestingly, Abrams links Hamann to these concerns. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 399–408. 52. Novalis, Schriften (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1907), 3:46. 53. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 54. Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 80. Elsewhere Löwith remarks on “the

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banal and vulgar aspects of Feuerbach’s naturalism.” See Karl Löwith, “Mediation and Immediacy in Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach,” in New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. W. E. Steinkraus (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 128. 55. Arnold Ruge, quoted in McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 70. 56. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943), 14. 57. In the relevant section of The Essence, Feuerbach insists that there are internal or external barriers to accepting as true anything but a “fact” that—for its age— “expresses a need” (WC 319/205). He does not make anything along the lines of a distinction between what is and what is not intelligible. 58. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:23n; Critique of Pure Reason, 34n; B xl. 59. Popkin credits Hamann with influencing Kant’s decision to make room for faith. But of course this is faith in God’s existence (see Popkin, “Skepticism and Anti-Skepticism,” in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, 74–75). Beiser credits Jacobi as well. Neither commentator seems to see that Kant’s scandal may also derive from them. That it derives as well from Hume is perfectly consistent. 60. Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, 2:73; O’Flaherty Socratic Memorabilia, 167. 61. Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 211; Vallée, Spinoza Conversation, 120–21. 62. Jacobi, David Hume, 1st ed., 52–53. This edition appeared in the spring of 1787 (preface dated March 1787). The second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason also appeared in the spring of 1787 (preface dated April 1787). 63. Jacobi, Werke, vol. 4, pt. 1, 210; Vallée, Spinoza Conversations, 120–21. 64. Quoted in Berlin, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” 177. Berlin gives no citation here to Hamann’s work. 65. Hamann, Briefwechsel, 5:448; Smith, Study, 252. 66. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, 104; see Jacobi, David Hume, 33–53; the passage from Hume is cited on 33–34. 67. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, 104. 68. Hamann, Briefwechsel, 1:379; Smith, Study, 241. 69. Jacobi, David Hume, 49. 70. It is not that Hamann and Jacobi do not know the English word Hume tends to use. In David Hume, Jacobi footnotes long passages from the first Enquiry containing many uses of “belief.” The point is that Jacobi and Hamann understand (that is, misunderstand) Hume’s appeal to “belief” as the same sort of thing as faith in God. They misrepresent the force of Hume’s claims about the role of belief in human life. In translating their texts, I have tried to be true not to Hume but to their misrepresentations. 71. See Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, chap. 4. 72. Hegel, Werke, 2:358; Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 119. 73. Jacobi, David Hume, 118; see also Werke, vol. 4, pt. 2, 213. 74. Hegel, Werke, 2:338; Faith and Knowledge, 101. 75. Against Jacobi’s insistence on the immediacy of faith, Hegel says, “The faith of a man who has not lifted himself to the level of abstract reflection, is naive because it is not opposed to reflection” (Hegel, Werke, 2:381; Faith and Knowledge, 141). Although his faith is different, Feuerbach would presumably laud just such naïveté. 76. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen: J. C. B.

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Mohr, 1920), 1:564; Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 350–51.

3. Bruno Bauer 1. August Cieszkowski, Gott und Palingenesie (Berlin, 1842), 93; quoted in McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 70. 2. There is a scholarly debate about whether Bauer’s ideas underwent a basic change in the mid-1840s. See, among others, McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 48–82; Hans-Martin Sass, “Nachwort,” in Hans-Martin Sass, Feldzüge der Reinen Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); Horst Stuke, Philosophie der Tat (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1963), chap. 1. For an overview of the debate, see Zvi Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), chap. 2. There is no doubt that Bauer’s politics changed. What did not change was his insistence on penetrating all illusions, and that is the feature I highlight. 3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: New American Library, 1978), 151. Actually, if Bauer has a literary alter ego, it is Tennyson’s Ulysses, who in 1842 says, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / life to the lees” as if the two are the same. The eternal restlessness of Bauer’s Self-consciousness is Ulysses’ philosophical counterpart. 4. Bauer is not the only Young Hegelian to link truth and being extreme. Here is Feuerbach in 1844: “[O]nly the final, uttermost degree, only the extreme, is always the truth” (WGL 356/36). 5. See Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 105–106. See also Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 138, 140. 6. In an article in the Rheinische Zeitung (“Die deutschen ‘Nationalen’”), Bauer explicitly opposes national chauvinism. See DN 408–12. 7. Hegel, Werke, 12:30; Reason in History, 23. 8. Bauer is citing Feuerbach’s statements in The Essence of Christianity (see WC 37/3). 9. Bauer’s own university career was derailed by the Prussian state’s refusal to find his interpretation of the Gospels academically (that is, politically and theologically) acceptable. Now, Bauer’s texts are invariably informed by the deep conviction that he, Bruno Bauer, stands at the most advanced position yet attained by reason. It was thus perfectly in keeping that after losing his license to teach in a Prussian university Bauer wrote a book called The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Affair, for to him his affair represented the next step in the development of reason and so of freedom. Not surprisingly, opponents on both left and right mocked Bauer for his apparent megalomania. See, for instance, Marx’s polemic against “the critical redeemer of the world” in The Holy Family (DhF 113/107). 10. See Hegel, Werke, 7:394–95; Philosophy of Right, 270–71, §252. On this topic, see Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 197–204, and Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought 239–41. 11. See Hegel, Werke, 7:341–42; Philosophy of Right, 222–23, §185, Remark. See also Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 240. 12. Bauer’s hostility to civil society is mitigated to the extent that he, too, thinks that the Korporationen play a real role in it (J 9/JP 193).

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13. See Toews, Hegelianism, 89–94. 14. For a good account of what he calls the “self-actualization” type of ethical theory, see Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, chap. 1, § 8. 15. The citation is from Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 91. Bauer also uses the metaphor of religion as opium at SZ 9. On his and Marx’s use of the metaphor, see Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 91, 140–41. 16. Religion represents “the universal essence of all human relations and endeavors” but what it presents and so sanctifies is the “inverted” and “disfigured” essence, not the real essence, of those relations and endeavors (SF 217). The religious world is not simply a veiled form of the truly human world. It is a veiled and distorted form of that world. As David McLellan puts it, for Bauer, “God might have been created by man, but he was a subhuman God” (The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 65). 17. For the distinction between an ideology as justifying some norm and an ideology as giving reasons not to rebel against that norm, see Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 15. 18. Quoted in Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 160. 19. For Bauer, a prejudiced judgment about an individual attributes a characteristic to her merely by virtue of her membership in some group (for instance, a religious denomination or a biological line of descent)—that is, with no proof of a link between possessing the characteristic and being a member of the group. Bauer’s attack on privilege is an attack on rationally unjustifiable advantages accorded individuals by virtue of their group membership. Such privileges are a function of prejudice in that the judgment that the privilege is legitimate assumes what needs demonstration—the link between group membership and a characteristic providing a rational entitlement to the advantage in question. 20. Hegel, Werke, 7:420, 417; Philosophy of Right, 294–95, 292, §270, Remark. 21. Hegel, Werke, 7:425; Philosophy of Right, 299, §270, Remark. 22. Hegel, Werke, 7:417n; Philosophy of Right, 292n; §270, Remark. 23. Hegel, Werke, 7:421n; Philosophy of Right, 295–96n; §270, Remark. 24. Hegel, Werke, 7:420–21; Philosophy of Right, 295, §270, Remark. With regard to such sects, Hegel recommends tolerance, including for a sect “whose religion does not recognize even their direct duties towards the state”; see Werke, 7:420– 21, 421n; Philosophy of Right, 295, 295n, §270, Remark. 25. See Toews, Hegelianism, 253. 26. Hegel, Werke, 7:346; Philosophy of Right, 227, §189. 27. Hegel, Werke, 7:382; Philosophy of Right, 260, §231. 28. In The Trumpet, Bauer discusses Hegel’s ten-page Remark on the relation of the state and religion in section 270 of the Philosophy of Right. Bauer thoroughly distorts what Hegel is saying, turning what for Hegel are differences in form between church and state into a basic opposition of content: the church as particular, the state as universal (see Po 123–25/167–68). 29. Bauer even argues that the morally problematic role of Jews as usurers has been, at least in part, a consequence of Jewish exclusivity. He concedes that legal barriers undoubtedly kept Jews out of other trades, but he claims that the inherent separateness of Judaism made Jews fit only for activities, such as usury, with no relation to the needs of society as a whole (J 9/JP 193). The point of those estates and corporations of civil society from which Jews have been excluded is that the

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members care not only for themselves but “for the needs of society in general” (J 8/JP 192). These organizations are supposed to transcend egoism and separateness. The question Bauer asks is whether a people who affirm that their interests are not those of the larger society could “have been able to assume a real and sincere position in those circles” (J 9/JP 193). Bauer never sees that his own focus on Jewish rather than Quaker or Anabaptist privileging of religious over state law itself reflects and expresses mere prejudice. 30. On this, see the further discussion of the French debate over the Sabbath law, J 70–72/73–74. 31. Sass, “Nachwort,” in Feldzüge der Reinen Kritik, 257. David McLellan makes the same claim (see The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 52). See also Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 134ff. 32. In this paragraph and the next I am very indebted to Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 46–48. 33. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (Tübingen: Verlag von C.F. Osiander, 1835), iv–vii; The Life of Jesus, trans. George Eliot (London: Chapman, Brothers, 1846), ix–x. 34. See Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 47. 35. For a discussion of Bauer’s work in these terms, see Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 186. 36. The difficulty of pinning Bauer down is shown by some remarks in his 1844 article “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?,” in which he announces his break with politics. There he criticizes the earlier incarnations of critique (by which he seems to mean the period from 1841 to 1843) for its emphasis on the practical, where he feels this has meant eschewing the “scientific conflict” (GK 202), thus suggesting that my reading is right that around 1843 he was not placing a premium on such conflict. On the other hand, nothing in “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” is more “scientific” than the polemics of the previous years. 37. Bauer, the Hegelian, writes of Hegel’s work: “Neither the Hegelian lectures . . . nor his writings are so incomprehensible, as to prevent any somewhat intelligent person from attaining comprehension of them, especially provided that he is not alien to all modern academic and worldly education. It is a question of almost nothing more than what is required with any rigorous science, namely, industry, persistence and making one’s own an only partially new terminology” (MH 437). 38. On the question of who will perform “the deed,” see Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 173, and Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 119. 39. The point is made most explicitly by Bruno’s brother Edgar: critique “no longer sends mere ideas against ideas, it sends human beings into the field against human beings.” It now finds the proof of its power not in theoretical “refutations” but in the “practical force which it exercises.” See the review by Edgar Bauer, “Geschichte Europas seit der ersten französischen Revolution von Archibald Alison, deutsch von Dr. Ludwig Meyer,” in Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zu Philosophie und Politik, im deutschen Vormärz, ed. Heinz Pepperle and Ingrid Pepperle, (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg-Verlag G.m.b.H., 1986), 526–27. I owe the citation to Stuke, Philosophie der Tat, 172. Stuke argues that there is a tension between quietism and voluntarism in Bruno Bauer’s approach to the transformation of theory into practice (see 159–78). On the one hand, Bauer often writes as if he is the servant of

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a history whose inevitable onrush will destroy all institutions incompatible with Self-consciousness (SF 225). On the other hand, there is (even in the same text) a high estimation of the power of theory. Theory must “ruthlessly” tear away “the prejudices, the fetters, the bonds . . . from our hearts” (SF 209). I see no tension. One can believe history has an inevitable telos and yet see the exercise of theory as part of the process leading to that telos. Indeed, since the telos in question is the freedom of Self-consciousness, and since Self-consciousness must free itself and can do so only through the efforts of actual human beings (Po 69/115), the activity of theory is a necessary element in the attainment of that freedom. 40. See Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 123. 41. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 100, and Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 523. 42. I am not attributing this latter claim to Elster. 43. Of course engaging in some activities involves being single-minded for stretches of time. In such cases, one’s consciousness of the activity’s self-realization value—one’s consciousness of it as part of and/or contributing to the good of realizing one’s nature—is likely to be intermittent or perhaps a mere background awareness. So there could be a conflict, but only in the sense that single-minded concentration conflicts with being conscious of anything else. Self-realization presents no special conundrum. 44. See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47–50. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Ibid., 49. 47. Ibid., 12. 48. Ibid., 49. 49. Ibid. 50. Caesar’s remark is quoted by Plutarch, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (New York: The Modern Library), 861. 51. Roberto Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 26. Bauer would also endorse another of Unger’s programmatic statements: “To imagine and establish a state that had more truly ceased to be hostage to a faction, in a society that had more truly rid itself of a background scheme of inadequately vulnerable division and hierarchy, we might need to change every aspect of the existing institutional order” (30). 52. Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 113–14. 53. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, Bauer declares, “It is necessary to overcome substance completely” (letter to Arnold Ruge, quoted in Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 50). Contrast this with Hegel’s famous requirement in the preface to the Phenomenology: “In my view . . . everything turns on grasping and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject” (Werke, 3:22–23; Phenomenology, 9–10). With Bauer, the “equally” appears to be missing. In general, and in contrast to Hegel, there is little Bauerian impulse to be reconciled to and to admit the rationality of what is. His view is far more subjective than Hegel’s. 54. This sentence follows these: “At one time substance, self-affirming, lay at the foundation of reality, directly dominating it, and expressing itself in outward

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laws. Hence, the mind [der Geist] was not radically free. But now, knowledge has been freed, and the mind and its related determinations have taken upon a new form—the form of freedom and self-consciousness” (Po 82/127–28). 55. I owe this reference to Gascoigne, Religion, Rationality, and Community, 94. 56. For a brief but useful discussion of Bauer’s relation to Hegel, see McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx, 51–55.

4. The 1844 Marx I: Self-Realization 1. “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” and “On the Jewish Question.” 2. There are two central difficulties. First, at times Marx seems to be making conceptual claims about the nature of the modern state in its more or less pure incarnation; however, if the attack is on Bauer, Marx must (and often seems to) have in mind either Hegel’s model of the state or Bauer’s variant—and in these models, civil society definitely does not control the state. Second, more often Marx’s claims seem to be sociological claims about how modern states currently function in practice—but then he needs to explain why reform to restrain civil society and to enhance the role of agents’ communal nature is in practice impossible. 3. Commentators who give such interpretations of Marx include Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); R. G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Elster, Making Sense of Marx. 4. In effect, for the 1844 Marx I am giving what in the Introduction I called a “normative” account of human nature. I should stress, however, that I am not claiming that the 1844 Marx thinks that his view of human nature applies only in some times and some places. He doesn’t. He thinks it applies generally. On the other hand, change is built deeply into his account. As with Bauer, for the 1844 Marx, what human beings are, in a relatively concrete sense, is always changing. His account is thus not vulnerable to the charge that it reifies relatively concrete and determinate properties into timeless features of human nature. On that issue in the Theses on Feuerbach, see Chapter 6, §6. 5. On the link of individual self-realization to the advancement of others’ aims, see Wood, Karl Marx, 22; on harmonious aims, see George C. Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 127. 6. For an attack on the ideal of the many-sided individual, see Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 88–90. 7. For these first three aspects of species being (as well as other aspects), see Wood, Karl Marx, 16–21. 8. See Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 50. 9. Wood, Karl Marx, 20. 10. One could also make a linguistic argument here. In the Hegelian tradition, the words translated as “alien [fremd]” or “alienation [Entfremdung]” or “alienated [entfremdet]” connote a falling away from a logically prior condition in which the thing now alien was in some important sense one’s own. English usage of “alien” or “alienated” does not always suggest this. I can simply find another tradition alien

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and opaque without any suggestion that this is a falling away from a normal state of affairs. However, being “alienated from” something does tend to have this connotation. One might find Mars and Martians and the objects on Mars opaque and alien, but it would be odd to describe oneself as alienated from these things unless one either had or perhaps ought to have a relation to them in which they were not opaque and alien. To talk of being alienated from something suggests a departure from a baseline condition. It would seem to follow in at least a general way from Marx’s remarks that he thinks that under capitalism agents don’t just find the sensuous external world alien, but that they are alienated from it. 11. See, for instance, Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 57. 12. On this point see Steven Vogel, “Marx and Alienation from Nature,” Social Theory and Practice 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988): esp. 377. 13. On this point, see Wood, Karl Marx, 20. 14. Although Marx does make this distinction, his usage is not precise. Sometimes his sentences seem to refer simultaneously to both the objective and subjective aspect: On the one hand, therefore, it is only when objective reality becomes everywhere for the human being in society the reality of human essential powers— human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers—that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is, he himself becomes the object. The way they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for precisely the determinateness of this relationship shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. (ÖpM 541/301) This passage ought to be about objective objectification, for the “On the one hand” is set off by the next paragraph’s “On the other hand” as the lead-in to a discussion of the subjective aspect. In fact, it is unclear in this passage whether the sense in which an object becomes the objectification of a person is in the producing or the consuming of it. The next sentence in this paragraph says, “To the eye an object is different than to the ear” (ÖpM 541/301), and that certainly sounds like a concern with the use, not the production of an object. 15. The example is a little confusing because it is not fully clear what level of trade Marx is talking about in referring to a “Mineralienkrämer.” If he is talking not of a retailer but of a wholesaler who deals in minerals without ever seeing them, his point would be true but not in the way Marx intends. The wholesaler’s ignorance of the mineral’s aesthetic charm would be a consequence of his place in the structure of large-scale trade rather than of the debasing impact of the profit motive. 16. He puts it that they are to be related to as “sacred” (WC 419/278), although without any connotation of investment with other-worldly meaning. 17. See, for instance, Kai Nielsen, “Alienation and Self-realization,” Philosophy 48 (1973). 18. Some of the traits Marx picks out do not in fact distinguish humans from other animals. See Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 62–68. 19. The “must” here is related to but not exactly the same as the imperative “work or starve” directed at an individual. That may be what Marx has directly in

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mind by the phrase “the domination of immediate physical need” (ÖpM 517/276). Presumably, under communism as Marx conceives it, that imperative will not function as a form of coercion directed at individuals. Some other motivation to work will ultimately be operative. And presumably the distribution of necessary labor will be more equitable than at present. But the imperative “work or starve” will continue to apply to the species and so, derivatively, to the individual. The question is whether working specifically to satisfy that imperative—under the proper conditions—counts, for Marx, as realizing one’s (human) nature. 20. Marx’s view seems to shift quite a bit. In Capital he says, “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and external expediency ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production” (Kap III, 828/820). Even as late as 1857–58, however, Marx says that necessary labor can be of the right kind: “(1) when its social character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all the forces of nature” (Gr 505/612). See also Gr 507/614, where, against Adam Smith, labor is referred to as “a positive, creative activity.” In Capital Marx does assert that communist production would differ from capitalist production. Under capitalism, “the laborer relates to the social nature of his labor, to its combination with the labor of others for a common purpose, as to an alien power. . . The situation is quite different in factories owned by the laborers themselves” (Kap III, 95–96/85). But he clearly thinks that however different necessary labor becomes, it will not be the realm of freedom, and presumably not the primary realm of self-realization. (See note 25 to this chapter.) On the other hand, in 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx famously says that under communism labor would be “life’s prime want” (KPG 21/324). 21. Bauer considers such things as art, science (that is, Wissenschaft), and politics as the crucial spheres of human activity (ECh 112). 22. This would not be an unheard of view in the 1840s. Here again is Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842): “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d not to shine in use!” 23. Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, deplores this Tahitian scenario (see Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:423; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper & Row, 1964], 90). The Marx of Capital does as well. Capitalism, he says approvingly, “is based on the domination of human beings over nature.” It takes place under conditions where there is a “natural necessity” for humanity to develop itself, a necessity that pushes humanity on “to the multiplication of [its] needs, [its] capacities, and the instruments and modes of [its] labor” (Kap I, 536–37/649). But both Kant and Marx here seem concerned only with the development of human capacities rather than with the process of overcoming nature itself. For the latter emphasis in the later Marx, see the quote from the Grundrisse in the text. 24. See Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 662. Fourier sometimes sees additional motives as important to the doing of the dirty work. He says that the “corporations” to which the children who perform “foul functions such as

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sewer-cleaning, tending the dung heap, working in the slaughterhouses, etc.” belong are “ardently patriotic,” and that “as members of [such] unitary and philanthropic brotherhood[s], their work is inspired by devotion to the community and not by the hope of remuneration.” So motives not tied solely to individual predilections are sometimes said to be mixed in. See Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, trans. and ed. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 317–18. 25. The Marx of Capital seems clear that the problem is immutable: Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man. . . Freedom in this area can only consist in this, that socialized humanity, the associated producers, rationally regulate their interchange with nature, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by a blind force. . . But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human powers which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom. (Kap III, 828/820) 26. For a different view of these matters, see Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom, 94–105. 27. The dominant view in the Grundrisse is unclear, for in addition to the passage emphasizing the overcoming of external necessity, Marx also says of communism that it will bring about “[t]he free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labor time so as to posit surplus labor, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. cultivation of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created for all of them” (Gr 593/706). 28. The brackets in the text are those of the editors of the Marx-Engels Werke.

5. The 1844 Marx II: The Structure of Community 1. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), §43, 26–27. 2. The German I have translated as “completion” is Ergänzung. Translators of the Comments have rendered Ergänzung in the three places I ultimately cite (AM 451, 460, 462) variously as “completion,” “complement,” “supplement,” and “redintegration.” (Ergänzen and Ergänzung is each used one other time in the Comments—at AM 446 and 455 respectively—but with a different reference, i.e., not with reference to human agents and what they do for one another.) I prefer “completion” for its suggestion that what agents provide one another is something crucial, something that fills a fundamental gap. “Supplement” suggests something relatively unimportant. “Complement” is better but still not quite right. It suggests something that is fitting but perhaps not necessary, something whose absence is not obviously very bad. “Redintegration” (defined by the OED as “restoration, reestablishment, reconstruction, renewal”) is better still, but it is both awkward and suggests that Marx is after the reestablishment of something that existed prior to capitalism and that capitalism has destroyed, and I think that is not in fact his view. I am indebted to Candace Vogler for urging that, in the relevant places, “completion” is the best translation. 3. Marx himself makes this point in the Grundrisse. See Gr 153/241.

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4. No doubt Marx would argue that capitalism impels agents to deceive or coerce, but to rest the 1844 critique of capitalism on its tendency toward such things would raise the possibility that an increasingly regulated capitalism would be increasingly acceptable to Marx. And that is false. I should mention an element to Marx’s attack that I have ignored. The 1844 texts deal both with capitalism and with its depiction by contemporary political economists. That political economists are not appalled by the possibility or even likelihood of pervasive cheating and deception—that they find nothing troubling about the motivations they (accurately) portray—is part of the focus of Marx’s fury. My concern, however, is to see precisely what Marx finds problematic about daily economic activity under capitalism in order to see what he thinks a proper form of daily economic activity would be. So I have ignored the fact that Marx is attacking not only capitalism but also its theoretical expression in contemporary political economy. I thank the reader of Harvard University Press for bringing the latter aspect of Marx’s attack to my attention. 5. Gerald Cohen makes this point. See Gerald Cohen, “Marxism and Contemporary Political Philosophy, or: Why Nozick Exercises Some Marxists More than He Does Any Egalitarian Liberals,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16, suppl. (1990): 381–82. See also Gerald Cohen and Keith Graham, “Self-Ownership, Communism, and Equality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64, suppl. (1990): 31–32. See also Allen Buchanan, Marx and Justice, 24. The manifestoes of several Saint-Simonians from 1831 and 1832 suggest anticipations of Marx as understood in this way: “To each, labor according to his calling and rewards according to his works”; “An education and function that conform to one’s natural calling and a reward that conforms to one’s works”; “Performance of the function to which a man’s natural calling destines him.” The distributive principle is one Marx rejects for communism, but note that the contributory principle emphasizes (as with my reading of Marx) what the individual feels naturally called to do, not what she is socially obligated to do. These quotes come from Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 707. 6. See Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 659. 7. See Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1924 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925), 71–92. 8. Actually, the human hunters would remain a problem for the 1844 Marx because communists presumably engage in activities other than grappling with nature. If this hunt were the hunters’ leisure-time activity, then, in the absence of an antecedently known standard for genuine activities and desires, Marx could no more antecedently exclude it—could he at least exclude the final kill?—than he could antecedently exclude training one’s horse to eat lentils. There is, incidentally, a further question for Marx’s picture. Would it matter to me how you used my product? Suppose I carve the chair and you use it in a piece of conceptual art or a theater production such that (a) you have to paint it magenta and (b) no one ever sits in it. It is vital to the pursuit of your ends. Has this use of it helped me to attain mine? 9. For a reading stressing themes similar to those I highlight in this and the previous section, see David Archard, “The Marxist Ethic of Self-realization: Individuality and Community,” in Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems, ed. J. D. G. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 32–33.

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10. Quoted in Ascheri, Feuerbach’s Bruch mit der Spekulation, 20. 11. See Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” in Human Being, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–62. 12. Quoted in Ascheri, Feuerbach’s Bruch mit der Spekulation, 20. Feuerbach sees this easy leap to a relation to the species as a justification or explanation for monogamy: “[I]n love I embrace in this woman, woman herself, she represents the species to me; therefore, one woman is sufficient.” 13. Marx also contrasts true communism to purely natural relations: “[T]he relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which the human being’s natural behavior has become human” (ÖpM 535/296). There is a potential/actual distinction here. Human nature needs to be developed. Our “natural” relationships—relationships in abstraction from the species’ historical development (in fact, for Marx an incoherent notion)—would not realize our essential nature as human beings. Marx has no yen to return to a presocial condition. True communism would realize human nature in the sense of culminating the “natural” development of our nature. And so Marx talks equally of natural behavior becoming human and of human nature becoming natural (ÖpM 535/296). 14. The context here is Marx’s contrast of “a human need” with the aim of “crude communism” simply to universalize instrumental relations (“woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust . . . a piece of communal and common property” [ÖpM 534–35/294–95]). This crude communist ideal is said to be merely an extreme expression of the relationships actually existing under capitalism. 15. In Alienation, Richard Schacht claims that “Marxian sociality . . . is direct and personal” (Alienation [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970], 90). Schacht’s point is that, in contrast to Hegel, Marx rejects institutional roles—for instance, citizenship—as the basis for solidarity among individuals. Marx does reject such roles, so Schacht is right that Marxist sociality would be direct, not mediated. On the other hand, it need not be personal, at least not in the implausible sense of involving intimacy on a wide scale. 16. This example is structurally identical to one Christine Korsgaard uses in “The Reasons We Can Share: An Attack on the Distinction between Agent-Relative and Agent-Neutral Values,” Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (1993): 37–38. 17. There is an apparent similarity to themes in Hegel’s master/slave relationship, so it is worth a footnote to locate the differences. Hegel’s agents seek to negate the external world in three ways: (a) by risking their lives and so affirming that they are not merely material objects; (b) by transforming the world through work; and (c) by consuming the world. In the situation Marx describes, it is clear that (b) and (c) are satisfied; however, bees, beavers, and other creatures that work on nature and are interdependent also satisfy (b) and (c). For Hegel, the key in (a) is the element of recognition the master wishes to extract from the slave. But this recognition is supposed to be recognition precisely that the master is a being who is not essentially material, who is also crucially and in fact essentially consciousness. For the 1844 Marx, this is a false dichotomy and a misunderstanding of the kind of beings we are. It is the mistake characteristic of alienated thought under capitalism. For Marx, the desired recognition is recognition as a material being who is a conscious transformer and consumer of the material world. In the section on the master and the slave, Hegel says, “The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of

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self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence [Dasein], not the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life” (Werke, 3:148; Phenomenology, 113). For Hegel, this independence from any specific existence is key. By contrast, for Marx, agents are in fact tied to a specific existence or at least to a specific kind of existence—that is, they are conscious transformers and consumers of the material world—and they recognize one another under that description. For Marx, there is no need for a separate recognition as a being not attached to life, as mere consciousness, and so no need to risk one’s life. There is a further difference. For Hegel, the fight for recognition obtains in its extreme form of a fight to the death only in a pre-political condition “where human beings exist only as single, separate individuals; but it is absent in civil society and the state because here the recognition for which the combatants fought already exists. . . What dominates in the state is the spirit of the people, custom, and law” (Werke, 10:221; Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990] 172, §432, Addition). For Marx, the recognition for which people strive would obtain in their direct economic interactions. Its primary occurrence would not be through such things as customs and laws. 18. As I attribute its use to Marx, the notion of completion is “essentialist” in the sense that it assumes that human beings have a specific nature to be completed. The degree of metaphysical commitment will vary, however, with what is to be completed. For instance, completing oneself qua citizen presupposes some relatively determinate conception of what it is to realize one’s nature as a citizen, but this could be spelled out in a rough and ready way—for example, citizens participate in public affairs and put the concerns of the state high on the list of their own concerns. There need be no commitment to the view that human beings are essentially citizens, but only a view of what it is to complete oneself under the description “citizen.” Completing oneself is always doing so under a particular description, and that description must have a relatively determinate content. The degree of metaphysical commitment embedded in the description is a separate question. 19. See Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:433–39; Groundwork, 51–54. 20. I have said “in principle” because perhaps in practice benign external circumstances make it easier to express one’s nature as a rational being. Kant remarks that adversity might tempt one “to violate one’s duty” (see Gesammelte Schriften, 6:388; The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 192–93). Benign circumstances, however, are not a necessary condition for expressing one’s nature as a rational being. 21. Robert Pippin raises this question about Kant. See his “Hegel on the Rationality and Priority of Ethical Life,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 35 (1995): 109n33. For an argument that Kant’s realm of ends involves reciprocal recognition, see Andrews Reath, “Legislating for a Realm of Ends: The Social Dimension of Autonomy,” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine Korsgaard, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 22. Cohen, “Marxism and Contemporary Political Philosophy,” 381. See also Cohen and Graham, “Self-Ownership, Communism, and Equality,” 32. Jon Elster uses a similar analogy; see Elster, “Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,” in Marxism and Liberalism, 121.

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23. In the Grundrisse, Marx insists that—in principle—the way human beings satisfy one another’s needs involves awareness of one’s species being: The fact that this need on the part of one can be satisfied by the product of the other, and vice versa, and that the one is capable of producing the object of the need of the other, and that each confronts the other as owner of the object of the other’s need, this proves that each of them reaches beyond his own particular need, etc., as a human being [als Mensch], and that they relate to one another as human beings [als Menschen]; that their common species-being is acknowledged by all. (Gr 154/243) 24. Keith Graham in G.A. Cohen and Keith Graham, “Self-Ownership, Communism, and Equality,” 53. 25. Charles Taylor seems to be seeing this point in his essay “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” where he, too, uses the image of a musical group, this time a symphony, and stresses the dialogue between orchestra and audience. This is supposed to be an example of what Taylor calls an “‘immediately’ common good.” See Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 169. 26. In the article “Community and Completion,” the phrase I use is “internally (or externally) oriented.” See Reclaiming the History of Ethics, ed. Reath, Herman, and Korsgaard, 397–99. I prefer that phrase. Here, however, I use “internally (or externally) directed” so as to avoid confusion with my other uses of “orientation” (especially in Chapter 7). 27. Another instance of a society with internally directed shared ends is the well-ordered society sketched in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Although Rawls of course does not use this terminology, he seems to mark the internal/external distinction at 528: “Everyone’s more private life is so to speak a plan within a plan, this superordinate plan being realized in the public institutions of society. But this larger plan does not establish a dominant end, such as that of religious unity or the greatest excellence of culture, much less national power and prestige, to which the aims of all individuals and associations are subordinate. The regulative public intention is rather that the constitutional order should realize the principles of justice.” I suspect that T. H. Green’s picture of a proper society is also of this kind. See his Principles of Political Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) §§ 24 and 25 and especially §62. 28. In principle, externally directed ends are similarly divisible into overlapping and intertwined ends. Here, however, there could be conflict, for the conditions for having the ends be intertwined might, conceivably, inhibit the attainment of the collectivity’s goal. This could not happen with internally directed shared ends, as there is no such goal. 29. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100. 30. Another word on Hegel. The state he depicts (in the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of Mind) is basically an externally directed community. It is toward the state, not toward one another, that agents’ eyes are primarily turned. But agents’ eyes are also at times turned toward one another. Hegel’s state is complex. Agents play various social roles at various times and relate to one another differently de-

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pending on the role. In some respects their relations are in fact direct, one-to-one (for instance, in their reciprocal recognition of one another’s “honor” from the trade each plies; see Philosophy of Mind, §432, Addition, and Philosophy of Right, §207). Still, I think the overall directedness of a Hegelian community is external. 31. See Brudney, “Community and Completion,” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics, ed. Reath, Herman, and Korsgaard, 399–408.

6. The 1844 Marx III: The Problem of Justification 1. In Chapters 4 and 5 I talked indistinguishably of “communist workers,” of “workers,” and of “communists.” In this chapter I continue to do so. Yet clearly not all persons in a communist society will spend their time transforming nature. How such persons would see things is a complication I haven’t the space to go into. What should be remembered is that even nonworkers presumably identify with the species in the strong sense that Marx (following Feuerbach and Bauer) has stressed, and so they presumably share in a great deal of the outlook of those who actually alter the external world. See, for instance, the account in Chapter 4 (§§1–3) of agents’ relations under communism to one another’s products and enjoyments. I see no reason why such relations should depend on the extent to which an agent actually alters the external world. 2. Wood, Karl Marx, 23. 3. See ibid., 24. 4. Elster criticizes Wood for not distinguishing between a lack of a sense of meaning and a sense of a lack of meaning. There is certainly a difference, but I don’t think much hangs on it. Elster appears to think something practical does: “In the present context, the failure [to make the distinction] is especially fatal, since the link between alienation and collective action undertaken to overcome it depends on which of the readings is chosen” (Making Sense of Marx, 75). But neither condition seems to me to provide much incentive to revolt. No doubt a sense of a lack of meaning (what Elster calls the “presence of a negative feeling”) provides more than the alternative, but I am assuming that the feeling here involves the sense of the absence rather than the frustration of a purpose in life. If so I fail to see how it will produce much action of any kind, and especially how it would prompt action specifically against capitalism. Such feelings may be good reasons to condemn capitalism. They don’t seem to me much of a psychological fulcrum for overturning it. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On Dejection” in Selected Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Heinemann, 1973), 94. Coleridge’s poem indicates that the condition involved could also be caused by something other than the nature of labor under capitalism. 6. Of course, in most actual capitalist societies it is likely that almost all workers are able to have, and at least some workers are able successfully to pursue, a set of purposes that they think constitutive of a good human life. Some (perhaps many) workers surely lead lives that they consider satisfying. However, if in such lives necessary labor is not the primary locus of self-realization, the 1844 Marx would consider those workers to be objectively alienated. 7. Alienation from the sensuous external world makes sense only so far as we are capable of seeing others’ products as our own (see Chapter 4, §1), so there is an indirect link here to the worker’s relation to other workers.

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8. See Kap I, 88/167, and Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 329–30. 9. This is the point at which to be clear that my concern is not with a theory of ideology. I am not concerned with how the false beliefs about human nature that capitalism generates help to perpetuate capitalism as a social system (though presumably if capitalism seems solidly in tune with human nature, people will be less discontented with it). Nor—and more important—am I concerned with the question of how to establish (or whether one can establish) a link between the (putative) facts (1) that social systems tend to generate (a particular class of) false beliefs, and (2) that the pervasiveness of those beliefs tends to help perpetuate the social system in question, where the link is of the form (2) explains (1). (On this latter topic, see Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology.) My concern is how, from within his own texts—here those of 1844—and without inconsistency, Marx might try to justify his claims about human nature (including about the human self-realization activity). The claim that the false beliefs that capitalism generates are there because they play a role in perpetuating capitalism is another matter entirely. 10. Marx’s complaint is that political economy thinks that it has described normal and natural human cooperation, that it takes “the alienated form of social intercourse as the essential and original” rather than as a distorted form of human cooperation (AM 451/217). 11. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 37. 12. Marx’s version of The Wealth of Nations, for the Comments and Manuscripts as well as the Grundrisse, is the two-volume French translation, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, a new translation, with notes and remarks; by Germain Garnier (Paris, 1802). The text from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute has the Smith in German. Martin Nicolaus, in his English translation of the Grundrisse, translates Marx’s French quotation. I have used Smith’s English text directly. 13. Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 384. 14. This is, incidentally, the same response that Marx might make to the charge of epistemological relativism. For Marx, as for Feuerbach, the senses both change historically and are the criterion of truth. This certainly looks like epistemological relativism. Here, too, Marx might claim that to worry about such things requires stepping out of one’s daily existence, just what one would not do under communism. 15. Alasdair MacIntyre notes that the opening hypothesis of After Virtue is of this form: “[I]f the hypothesis is true it will necessarily appear implausible.” See After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 4. 16. Paul Ricoeur notes that there is a form of circularity in the Manuscripts, and he even notes the analogy to Heidegger (see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 57–59). However, Ricoeur does not see the precise form the circularity takes. He approvingly cites Heidegger as having claimed that “every good philosophical work is circular in the sense that the beginning belongs to the end; the problem is to enter correctly into the circular movement” (see Ricoeur, Lectures, 57). But the problem for the 1844 Marx is that he is committed to the claim that it would be irrational, indeed inconsistent, to enter the circular movement: it would be to defy common sense, the way the world looks

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and Marx’s own methodological pronouncements. This is a deeper circularity than Ricoeur sees. For an argument that in Capital there is a problem of appearances somewhat similar to the one I’ve depicted in Marx’s earlier work, and that Marx’s rhetoric in that text is an attempt to surmount it, see Robert Paul Wolff’s fascinating Moneybags Must Be So Lucky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 17. Wood, Karl Marx, 170. The phrase “have their being through themselves” is Wood’s translation of a phrase from Marx. The Marx phrase is at ÖpM 545. Earlier in this section I quoted the phrase and translated it slightly differently. 18. Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, 76. 19. Wood, Karl Marx, 172. 20. Ibid., 173. 21. Consider an apparently conventional and atheistic argument in the section “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole.” There Marx says, “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, plays no part in the being of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not related objectively. Its existence is not objective” (ÖpM 578/337). Marx goes on to claim that there can be no being “which is neither an object itself, nor has an object.” His claim seems to be that if such a being is to be apprehended (or related to in some other way), then this presupposes some other being doing the apprehending (or other kind of relating), i.e., making the first being its object (or perhaps being an object for the first being)—and so the initial being would turn out not to be “neither an object itself, nor [have] an object.” As it stands, this argument doesn’t always work with respect to its intended target, namely, God. A pantheist thinks of God as all there is. She also regards herself as part of God, not as an object other than God, different from God, and, as it were, looking at God. She is not God’s object in the sense of being an object distinct from God; and while in a sense God is an object for the pantheist, according to her that does not make God less thoroughly independent and altogether selfsubsisting—God remains not dependent on being her or anyone else’s object. Marx’s point, however, doesn’t actually seem to be that the concept of such a being (of a being that neither is an object for a distinct other nor has an object distinct from itself) is incoherent or in some way logically problematic. Rather, he stresses that were there such a being it would be a “non-objective” being, which he glosses as an “unreal, non-sensuous, merely thought of, i.e., merely imaginary being, a being of abstraction” (ÖpM 579/337). One could not apprehend such a being by the senses but only in thought. It is probably true that one could only apprehend such a being (were there one) in thought, but that is no argument against the existence of such a being, i.e., no argument that such a being is unreal or nonobjective—unless one assumes that real existence, genuine objectivity, is only sensuous existence. And that would be question-begging. I think that Marx does beg the question this way. In the atheistic and antiHegelian (as Marx following Feuerbach construes Hegel) arguments in this section, Marx seems to operate from the start with the premise that objectivity means being an object for the senses. I take Marx’s real point to be that seeing objectivity any other way requires abstracting from our life as natural beings. This is hardly an

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argument against the theist or philosopher determined to engage in such abstraction. It seems, as with Feuerbach and as with the reading I give of the Manuscripts, more like an attempt to get us not to do so. If that is the strategy, then Wood is wrong in claiming (173) that the passages quoted in this note are at odds with those discussed in the text. The various passages are at odds only if, with Wood, one sees Marx as articulating metaphysical theses in the passages quoted here and conflicting metaphysical theses in the passages discussed in the text. I don’t deny that the various passages could be seen that way. But the strong resonances from Feuerbach’s Principles should keep us from doing so. (Those resonances, incidentally, include an invocation of hunger as an apparent way of pressing for the existence, as object, of a nature outside us: “Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled” [ÖpM 578/336]. For Feuerbach’s similar invocation of hunger, see G §34, 318/53. For my discussion of Feuerbach’s claims of this sort, see Chapter 2, §2.) 22. See Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” 40–41.

7. The Theses on Feuerbach 1. See Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), trans. Frederick Lawrence, lecture 3; Leszek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968); Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1956); and Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: New Left Books, 1971). See also A. Giles-Peters, “Objectless Activity: Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’” Inquiry 28 (March 1985): 75–86. 2. I am grateful to Michael Hardimon for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this section. 3. The antecedents of these categories are in Hegel, in the forms of consciousness discussed in the Phenomenology. Tracing their lineage would take us too far afield, however. 4. Kant famously uses the idea of orientation in the essay “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” However, I think that he is talking of something quite different. Properly to distinguish our uses of the term would require extended discussion. To put the point in a few phrases, Kant’s concern is reason’s place on the map, the space within which it has its proper function, and why belief in God’s existence is required for that proper function; my concern is the vector of one’s daily life, not where one is but the mode in which one is always getting onward. 5. Jakob Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen (Basel: Verlag von E. A. Seemann, 1853), 158; The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 124. Themes of this kind are common among German thinkers of the period. In his excellent Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Michael Hardimon stresses the role for Hegel of reconciling people to their social world. The stress is on Hegel’s desire that people be oriented

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in a particular way to their social institutions and the norms regulating them. For Hardimon’s remarks on orientation, see Hegel’s Social Philosophy, 38–39. 6. Of course with Feuerbach it is not a new orientation that is desired so much as the explicit recognition (acknowledgment and affirmation) of the orientation that he thinks agents in the modern world already have. 7. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 281. 8. Kierkegaard stresses that to have Christian faith is not merely to assent to a set of propositions: “What modern philosophy understands by faith is really what is called having an opinion or what in everyday language some people call ‘to believe.’” See Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 141. I take him to be concerned not merely with what agents believe but, in the terms I am using, also with how they are oriented. 9. See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 129–56, esp. 150–52. 10. Existing translations of the Theses render Anschauung and its variants as “contemplation” and its variants. This makes Feuerbach’s view seem misleadingly intellectual. I have used “perception” instead, in line with my frequent translation of Anschauung in Feuerbach’s own texts. In one place I do use “contemplation” to translate Feuerbach’s Anschauung. It is in a passage from The Essence of Christianity where Feuerbach is presenting Anaxagoras’s view, and in context “contemplation” seems most accurate (see Chapter 7, §2). In referring to this passage in The German Ideology, Marx invokes Feuerbach’s use of Anschauung, so there, too, I translate it as “contemplation” (see Chapter 8, §6.). 11. There are two versions of the Theses, the original by Marx, first published in 1924, and a version slightly edited by Engels and first published in 1888 as an appendix to Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach. Where there is a difference, as in Thesis Five, I stick to Marx’s original. In Engels’s 1888 version, Thesis Five reads: “Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous perception; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.” I do not see that much rides on the difference between Feuerbach “wants” and Feuerbach “appeals to.” The addition of “sensuous” before “perception” is surely warranted as an interpretation, and many translations of Thesis Five include the word (sometimes in brackets, sometimes not). Still, it is an addition to Marx’s text. I think it should be left out. Both versions of the Theses are printed in Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 3, and Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. 12. In the Grundrisse, Marx considers “composing,” apparently meaning scientific—including social scientific (i.e., his own)—writing, to be labor (Gr 505/611). 13. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 28. 14. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 31. 15. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 64: “For [praxis philosophy] not self-consciousness but labor counts as the principle of modernity.” 16. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 34. 17. See, for instance, his attribution to Marx of a position analogous to Kant’s on the thing-in-itself: “Marx is assuming something like a nature in itself. . . ‘Nature in itself’ is therefore an abstraction, which is a requisite of our thought: but we always encounter nature within the horizon of the world-historical self-formative

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process of mankind. Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ reappears under the name of a nature preceding human history.” See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 34. 18. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 30, translation amended. See ÖpM 541–42/302. 19. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 27. 20. My worry about Habermas is an instance of the tension that Steven Vogel finds in Marxism “between the heritage of a German Idealism that insists on the irreducible contribution of an active, world-constituting subject to what is called ‘objectivity’ and a claim to materialism that wants to find, as it were, behind the constituting subject, a ‘real’ natural world that makes both the subject and the act of constitution possible, and that itself can be investigated by science.” See Vogel, “Habermas and Science,” Praxis International 8 (October 1988): 329. Habermas’s account of Marx is somewhat more complicated than I have presented, but the basic problem remains: “labor” is just not the right kind of category to get a transcendental structure going. 21. Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx, 380. The translation of the second passage is from Wood, Karl Marx, 183. 22. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, 65; see also 136. 23. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 26, 35; see also 28. 24. For a good textual and philosophical discussion, see Wood, Karl Marx, 182–86. 25. I have equated “orientation” and “standpoint” largely for textual reasons: if the category of orientation is to be useful in interpreting the Theses, it will have to be matched to Marx’s use of “standpoint” in that text. Now, to some readers, “standpoint” may suggest a position somehow disengaged from the world, a place from which one theorizes about the world. I don’t think it must suggest that, however, and certainly in my usage the content of one’s standpoint in this very respect (with respect to how engaged one is with the world) is what is at issue. The idea of a standpoint is supposed to help focus, not to answer, that issue. In (more or less) ordinary usage, I think “standpoint” can pick out the same phenomenon as “orientation.” An agent oriented to others as Parfit is would, I think, be said to have the same standpoint toward others as Parfit. 26. That claim was part of the simultaneity reading of Thesis Eleven. See Chapter 7, §2. 27. There may seem to be a Heideggerian cast to some of these claims (for instance, to (2a)). The impulses expressed in Feuerbach’s, Marx’s, and also Kierkegaard’s breaks from Hegel do have affinities with impulses expressed in Being and Time, but this is not the place to explore how far such affinities go. 28. See note 25. 29. It is sometimes claimed that there is an identity between the abstract standpoint of the philosopher and the manipulative standpoint of civil society. There is certainly the shared feature of a kind of distance from the world. But there is also a clear difference. I have tied the standpoint of civil society to the feedback model of practical interaction. That model has no place for philosophical abstraction. It is also sometimes claimed that the standpoint of the philosopher and/or the standpoint of civil society necessarily have conservative political implications. For the philosopher’s standpoint, this is true if that standpoint is assumed to be com-

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pletely disconnected from action in the world (the philosopher closets herself away, her ideas have no impact, and so on). Not every philosophical thought, however, is completely disconnected from action (some lead in indirect ways to individuals taking action; some lead to the philosopher herself taking action). As for the standpoint of civil society, it is the most effective standpoint for practical manipulation of the world, whether in the service of revolution or reaction. Of course, if one stipulates that to create a social revolution with the wrong orientation is to be conservative, then the standpoint of civil society is necessarily conservative. But that has not been the usual claim. 30. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 31. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 19. 32. Ibid., 182. 33. Ibid., 340. 34. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 38–41. 35. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 159, 439. 36. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 41. 37. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 159. 38. Other commentators have noticed that Marx apparently runs afoul of the Third Thesis. See, for instance, Giles-Peters, “Objectless Activity,” 81–82. 39. This may also be Habermas’s interpretation of Marx when he says that “the concept of praxis is also supposed to include ‘critical-revolutionary activity.’” See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 65. 40. For a slightly different reading on this point, see Giles-Peters, “Objectless Activity,” 82. I differ with Giles-Peter in that he sees successful revolutionary action merely as a kind of confirmation process (the feedback model). He is not concerned with the transformative impact of such action. 41. Participation in revolutionary activity could be transformative in ways that would be at odds with the picture I’ve sketched of life in a communist society. Georg Lukács writes that “[o]nly when one’s function in the party is not an office, that is perhaps exercised conscientiously and with devotion but still only as an office . . . do the members of the party come into a living relationship, with their entire personality, to the totality of the party life and the revolution” (Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein [Darmstadt and Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1968], 508, and History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971] 335–36). Total commitment to the party life is, moreover, consistent with an authoritarian party structure. Lukács’s essay itself emphasizes the need for party discipline as “the only possible way of realizing an authentic freedom” (Geschichte, 486; History, 320). 42. There is a difference between the Kantian and Marxist pictures in that Kant says one can never know whether one is in fact acting morally (see Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:407; Groundwork, 74–75), while it is crucial to Marx’s picture that one be in a position to know that one is acting in accordance with one’s nature. 43. There is no necessary connection between particular orientations and particular conceptions of the activity or activities crucial to self-realization (see Chapter 9, §4). And even if for some orientation there were, it could be that taking that

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orientation would not automatically reveal the content of the allegedly proper self-realization activity. In the text I am assuming that changing to Marx’s desired orientation tends to put one in position also to see, and to see relatively easily and compellingly, what, for him, counts as the human self-realization activity. The link is supposed to be causal, not logical. 44. For the work that started the debate, see Allen Buchanan, “Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality,” in Marx, Justice, and History, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 264–87. See also Allen Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allenheld, 1982), chap. 5. 45. For a response to the free-rider issue along these lines, see Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 65–73. 46. See Buchanan, Marxism and Justice, 95. A way out that is occasionally suggested goes like this. As the workers’ movement gets stronger, a working-class way of seeing the world will arise. Workers will tend to see the world from the proper standpoint (i.e., that of social humanity). So there will no longer be a first-step problem. This is a variant of the idea that life in a revolutionary party can presage life under communism, working-class life generally here being accorded the transformative power. Clearly, this argument only works for circumstances in which the workers’ movement has reached the point that working-class life is both different from the rest of social life and more in tune with humanity’s essential nature. However, 1. By most construals, either of 1840s Britain or France or Germany or of late twentieth-century capitalist countries, the workers’ movement has not reached this point. So the problem of the first step remains, at least for these salient circumstances. 2. This view has little textual support in Marx’s works. Marx usually thinks of social attitudes as society-wide. The ruling ideas, he says in The German Ideology, are those of the ruling class. And when he does distinguish between worker and nonworker outlooks, it is usually to point to ways in which the latter are debased, are less in tune with humanity’s essential nature (see DI 245–46/262– 63). 47. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx insists on the transformative impact of organization even if initially engaged in for reasons of narrow self-interest (for instance, to raise wages): “combination” eventually “takes on a political character.” It turns the working class, Marx says, using Hegelian jargon, into a class “for itself” (EP 180–81/210–11). At this point, Marx notes, workers are willing to ignore narrow self-interest (they sacrifice some of their wages) for the purpose of combination. But Marx takes for granted that circumstances—ultimately, narrow self-interest—will force workers to combine. It is the rationality of this first step that the collective-action theorist disputes. Marx is on good ground in noting that workers do combine. But no one denies this. The issue is whether it is rational for them to do so. Marx seems not to see this issue. 48. In order to retain the tie to the title of Feuerbach’s first important work, The Essence of Christianity (which Marx is clearly thinking of), I have translated “das religiöse Wesen” here as “the essence of religion” rather than as “the religious na-

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ture.” I have also translated “das menschliche Wesen” here as “the human essence” rather than as “human nature” (as I have usually translated it). 49. For an interesting discussion of Thesis Six, see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983). 50. For a similar claim, see Wood, Karl Marx, 17. 51. If one reads the Theses—as I think one should, although I have not argued the point—as in line with the 1844 Marx, then Marx also holds in the Theses that there is a particular way for human beings to realize their nature, namely, through the proper kind of engagement in the process of the (collective) transformation of the world. 52. Communism itself will not bring this process of change to a close. That is why Marx speaks of it as marking the end of “the prehistory of human society” (KpÖ 9/22). History—that is, change, but now what Marx thinks is the proper kind—will then begin.

8. The German Ideology I: More Antiphilosophy 1. Marx to Feuerbach, August 11, 1844, in MEW 27:425; MECW 3:354. 2. In terms of publication dates, the targets in The German Ideology are varied. The mockery is more of the post-1843 than of the earlier Bauer, but Feuerbach’s central works of 1841–43 come in for attack. Marx and Engels certainly never distinguish an “acceptable” earlier from an “unacceptable” later stage of Young Hegelianism. Their attack is always on the entire movement. 3. Louis Althusser is the writer whose work is most prominently associated with the idea of a fundamental break between an early and a later Marx. For my discussion of his work, see Chapter 9, §4. 4. Marx and Engels express approval of their work in the Jahrbücher six times (DI 33–34/47, 180–81/197, 190/209, 217/236, 229/247, 503/514). 5. The best account is G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. 6. Marx to Annenkov, December 28, 1846, in MEW 27:460; MECW 38:103. This charge should be distinguished from another charge that Marx makes in this letter: that Proudhon thinks that the categories of political economy are eternal and so deeply misunderstands the state of affairs he attempts to analyze. This latter charge could be accurate even if Proudhon attributes no causal efficacy to ideas. 7. Marx and Engels say similar things about other writers in many other places. For instance, in Anti-Dühring Engels attacks English, French, and German socialists because to all of them “socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and needs only to be discovered to conquer the world by virtue of its own power” (AntD 18/25). 8. MECW 5:xv. 9. Bauer to Feuerbach, March 10, 1842, in Hans-Martin Sass, “Bruno Bauer’s Idee der ‘Rheinischen Zeitung,’” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 119 (1967): 322; quoted in Toews, Hegelianism, 324–25. 10. See UWC 441. 11. Most Marx commentators have taken the Young Hegelians to care little for practical change. See, for instance, Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 71. Even as perceptive a writer as Allen Wood says,

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Marx is prepared to agree that alienated individuals are in the dark about what goals to pursue, about how to lead fulfilling lives, about what sort of society to build. But he does not see this as the basic problem. The basic problem is that alienated individuals lack the practical power to take meaningful action, whether individually or collectively, to realize whatever worthwhile ideals they might have. This is because there are real, extramental obstacles in their way. Before they can begin to decide how a truly human life ought to be constituted, they must first come to terms with these obstacles, understand their nature, and set about removing them. (Wood, Karl Marx, 14) The Young Hegelians would have accepted all but the last sentence. And if the claim is that these obstacles must be removed before one “can begin to decide how a truly human life ought to be constituted” (my emphasis), that is a very strong and not at all obvious claim. Much of this book is devoted to explaining why, beginning in 1844, Marx might think it true. 12. Bauer to Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), sec. 3, vol. 1, 353. 13. Bauer is thoroughly aware that critique is vulnerable to mockery from all sides for its pretensions, and although he does insist that ideas have effects, his is no more than a general faith in the long-run efficacy of some ideas (see GK 202). 14. Gustav Mayer sometimes seems to conflate the absurd charge (the charge that the Young Hegelians believe that thinking will make it so) with charge 2, and as a result, in “Die Anfänge des politischen Radikalismus im vormärzlichen Preussen,” he is often more dismissive of, say, Bauer than is warranted. To think that one’s ideas will in the long run have practical impact or that one can see the direction of historical change is not obviously crazy. Of course, a writer’s account of the direction of historical change may be wrong, and he may think wrongly that his ideas will have impact. Those would be devastating criticisms, and the Bauer of 1841–43 is undoubtedly vulnerable to them. They are, however, different from the criticism that he thinks that his thoughts can bring about change without having to percolate through anybody’s muscles. 15. Engels, in the Jahrbücher, sometimes seems as guilty as Feuerbach and Bauer of insufficient clarity about the group whose enlightenment will produce practical results or about the way that group will go about producing those results. In “Outlines,” for instance, he wishes to analyze matters “from a purely human, universal basis” (Umr 502/421). And, as I have noted in the text, in the review of Past and Present he cavalierly declares that there is “no need further to worry about their application [the application of ideas], which will follow entirely of its own accord” (LE 548/466). My claim is not that Marx and Engels stand by everything from the Jahrbücher. Certainly they cannot do so and remain consistent. The German Ideology does attack views held in the Jahrbücher. Those views, however, are not simply “idealist,” and the new view in The German Ideology is not simply “materialist.” The central change is epistemological, not ontological. It continues the earlier epistemological change from abstract philosophy, and even the assertions in “A Correspondence of 1843” are a part of that change. 16. On his use of the term, see Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, 91, 140–41. 17. Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (Leipzig: Verlag von Otto

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Wigand, 1882), 369; The Ego and Its Own, trans. Steven Tracy Byington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 315. 18. This is, I’m afraid, a change in terminology coming hard on the heels of an earlier change. The privileged standpoint already descends from the self-certifying perspective (see Chapter 7, §4). The point of yet another change is to focus on why the Young Hegelians think their standpoint epistemologically special, for it is their reason for thinking it special that Marx attacks. 19. Presumably most claims that standpoint S is privileged will be cashed out as the claim that standpoint S is insulated. One could try to collapse the two by insisting that since in S one knows that p, then S must be (sufficiently) insulated from distortion with respect to p. However, this would make the connection go the wrong way. The idea of an insulated standpoint is not that one starts by knowing that p and then infers that one’s standpoint must be free of distortion with respect to p. The idea is, rather, that one believes one’s standpoint to be free of distortion and then infers that one’s belief that p must be true (or at least sufficiently justified). The issue of the relation of privileged to insulated standpoints is less whether all privileged standpoints are insulated than whether insulation is the only way to explain how standpoint S could be privileged. 20. Stirner, Einzige, 64–65; Ego, 59. 21. Stirner, Einzige, 77; Ego, 69. 22. Stirner, Einzige, 179; Ego, 158. 23. Stirner, Einzige, 99–100; Ego, 88. 24. Stirner, Einzige , 120–27; Ego, 105–11. 25. Stirner, Einzige, 168; Ego, 148. 26. Stirner, Einzige, 327; Ego, 280. 27. Stirner, Einzige, 377; Ego, 323. 28. Stirner, Einzige, 155–56; Ego, 135. 29. Would this new method also enable Marx to solve the justificatory problem from Chapter 6? That problem depended on the existence of objective illusion under capitalism with respect to such things as the human self-realization activity. Can the new method penetrate objective illusion with respect to that sort of issue? The clear answer, I think, is that it cannot. Empirical verification cannot confirm or refute the claim that human beings are essentially producing rather than reflecting, cerebral creatures. 30. Cassell’s German Dictionary (New York: Macmillan, 1977) lists “prerequisite” as the seventh of its definitions of Voraussetzung. 31. Harold Mah, in The End of Philosophy: The Origin of “Ideology,” is the only commentator to have seen the oddness of the discourse in The German Ideology. Mah argues that Marx is now setting up as “his non-philosophical standard of knowledge or belief . . . an antiphilosophical common sense” (Mah, 213). According to Mah, common sense is what Marx now opposes to philosophy: “Rejecting out of hand the philosophical questioning of everyday or common-sensical belief, they [‘Marx’s empirical descriptions’] enshrine the everyday consciousness as the arbiter of truth” (Mah, 214). The problem is that Mah ignores both (a) Marx’s insistence in The German Ideology, as in the 1844 Manuscripts, that under capitalism common sense is itself distorted, and (b) Marx’s bizarre identification of common sense with “empirical

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verification” (common sense does not confirm the heterogeneity of air). Mah does not see, and so does not motivate, the specific oddness of this text—the oddness that has “empirical verification” referring both to trivial everyday perceptions and to a method invoked in order to penetrate the systematic deception that everyday perception involves. 32. In Anti-Dühring, Engels sees philosophical issues replaced by those of the special sciences. Only logic survives for philosophical study. Modern materialism, he says, is essentially dialectical, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each separate science is required to get clarity as to its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. What still independently survives of all former philosophy is the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is merged in the positive science of nature and history. (AntD 24/31; see also AntD 34/43) 33. The phrase “leave philosophy aside [die Philosophie beiseite liegenlassen]” is from Moses Hess, “Die letzten Philosophen” (see Hess, Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961], 384; Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians, 363). Marx actually takes the phrase from (and cites) Stirner’s mention of it in Wigand’s Vierteljahrschrift, 187. 34. Many recent commentators don’t read Marx as a metaphysical materialist. But they do not adequately explain the passages in which he appears to be one. For good discussions, see Wood, Karl Marx, 159–86, and especially George L. Kline, “The Myth of Marx’s Materialism,” Annals of Scholarship 3, no. 2 (1984): 1–38. 35. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, trans. Abraham Fineberg, in Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 14:75. 36. A notorious instance of Engels thinking that he has really solved a philosophical problem by scientific means is his attack, in Ludwig Feuerbach, on Kant’s thing-in-itself. See LudF 276/22–23. 37. Marx’s 1844 discussion of the creation had similarly rejected the standpoint outside the world from which (Marx claimed) the question of the All is posed. And he had similarly urged that, from the proper perspective, something more or less equivalent to what he now calls “unceasing sensuous labor and creation” is the way to understand the genesis and maintenance of the world. 38. One writer who, in his usual gnomic way, has anticipated my reading is Theodor Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983). Adorno writes, “The line that consciousness depends on being was not a metaphysics in reverse; it was pointed at the delusion that the mind is in itself, that it lies beyond the total process in which it finds itself as a moment” (200). And, “The controversy about the priority of mind and body is a pre-dialectical proceeding. It carries on the question of a ‘first’” (202). 39. The editor of the Marx-Engels Collected Works notes that in the first quoted phrase, Marx is paraphrasing a line from Goethe’s Faust, “Prolog im Himmel.” 40. Satisfying a need and producing a new one seem to be the same thing—two aspects of the same act—as if attaining even a moment of quiet contentment were inconceivable.

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41. See, for instance, the article by Jerome Shaffer, “Mind-Body Problem,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 5:339. 42. As in 1844, Marx’s diagnosis is a self-undermining diagnosis. 43. Karl Göschel, Aphorismen über Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen im Verhältnisse zur christlichen Glaubenserkenntnis (Berlin, 1829), 160; quoted in Toews, 90. 44. Section 43 in Manfred Vogel’s translation. 45. I have translated Anschauung in the first sentence as “contemplation” because in the reference to Feuerbach’s belief in the “harmony” of the sensuous world Marx is almost certainly referring to the passage from The Essence that I quoted at length in Chapter 7 (see WC 188/113 and Chapter 7, §2), a passage in which Anschauung is best translated as “contemplation.” See Chapter 7, note 10.

9. The German Ideology II: The Picture of the Good Life and the Change from 1844 1. The ideas in this paragraph are implicit in The German Ideology, but it seemed best to state them in their most succinct form. “Wage Labor and Capital” was first published in April 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. However, it was given as a set of lectures to the German Workers’ Society in Brussels in December 1847. The editors of the Marx-Engels Collected Works report: “A manuscript of the pamphlet prepared at the time and entitled Wages has survived. It is written in Joseph Weydemeyer’s hand and its text is almost identical to that published later in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. A draft outline of Marx’s concluding lectures, which he had no time to prepare for publication, is extant as a manuscript written in his own hand and also bearing the heading Wages” (MECW 9:560n183). In Wages (so no later than December 1847), Marx makes the same point as in the passage from “Wage Labor and Capital.” See MECW 6:422, 430–31. 2. For an attack on the goal of a society with no division of labor, see Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 82–92. 3. In Anti-Dühring, Engels makes the same point. In a capitalist society “[n]o individual can say of such products: I made it, that is my product” (AntD 251/294). Of course, if I am ever to say of a product that I have made it, I must either be working as a very small-scale producer or come to regard others’ products as my own—that is, something like the 1844 conception of community must come into play. 4. See Wages (MECW 6:415–37), especially 422–26. 5. Once again, incidentally, there is a ripple in the text suggesting that not the division of labor per se but its current compulsory character is the problem: “And, finally, the division of labor offers us the first example of the fact that, as long as human beings are in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally divided, the human being’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him” (DI 33/47). Suppose activity were voluntarily divided. Would there necessarily be a particular interest/common interest cleavage? All precommunist forms of the division of labor have generated the particular interest/common interest cleavage, but those forms of the division of labor have all been forcibly promoted by

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private interests. Once again it seems possible that a voluntary division of labor would be compatible with communism. Instead of being “naturally evolved,” such a division of labor would be subject to collective human control. Once again, Marx seems uncertain about which aspect of the current division of labor needs to be abolished. 6. Marx is responding to some of Stirner’s remarks in The Ego and Its Own (see Einzige, 123–24; Ego, 108). In fact, Stirner’s words suggest that he thinks that the worker must actually make the totality of the object to attain satisfaction in his work, not merely be capable of doing so, as Marx charges. 7. Of this section of The German Ideology, the editor of the Marx-Engels Collected Works reports: Unlike the other extant chapters of Volume II, which are in Engels’ handwriting, the manuscript of Chapter V is in Joseph Weydemeyer’s hand and “M. Hess” is written at the end. In December 1845, the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel No. 6 carried an article by Hess under the heading “Umtriebe der Kommunistischen Propheten” which discussed the same subject in a similar way as this chapter. It is probable that Chapter V was written by Hess, copied by Weydemeyer and edited by Marx and Engels. (MECW 5:606n143) Assuming that Marx participated in editing the piece, there is no reason not to think that he agreed with the view stated there. Interestingly, here the dictum is asserted with the rider “insofar as it relates to enjoyment in its narrower sense” (DI 528/537). Does this suggest a recognition that, once past basic consumption needs, “to each according to need” may be beyond any society’s capacity to instantiate? 8. If one wants to tie self-activity to self-realization, one could say that in The German Ideology “complete self-activity” picks out the content of human self-realization. 9. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1974), 76, 407a. In the Socratic lie concerning the mixture of gold, silver, iron, or bronze in the ideal state’s citizens, some value attaches to all citizens and to the activities that each is “naturally fitted” to perform. See Republic, 414d–15c, 423d–e; Grube, 82–83, 89. 10. In Capital Marx seems to see a fulfilling life as primarily involving activities that are engaged in after the necessary work is done (see Kap III, 828/820). G. A. Cohen has pointed out that in Capital Marx ignores the possibility that work that the species must do could, in principle, become intrinsically fulfilling work—work one does for its own sake. (See G. A. Cohen, “The Dialectic of Labour in Marx,” in History, Labour, and Freedom [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 1988, 201–208). Cohen is surely right, but two distinctions must be kept separate: work that is economically necessary versus work that is not, and work one does for its own sake versus work one does for some other reason (for instance, social obligation or to earn a wage). What I have pressed about the 1844 Manuscripts is that there Marx seems to think that the fact that the work is necessary (at least for the species as a whole) can be one of the motives to its performance and one of the features of the work that makes doing it satisfying. So one might freely choose to do it and find it enjoyable (do it for its own sake), but part of what would make it enjoyable would be that it was necessary. That potential feature of work is missing in The German Ideology and rejected in Capital. It seems to return in the Critique of the Gotha

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Program, in the famous line that under communism labor would be “life’s prime want” (KGP 21/324), although, strictly speaking, the phrase is ambiguous, as the kind of labor and the variety of reasons one might have for engaging in it are not specified. For some of the other relevant passages, see Chapter 4, notes 20, 23, and 25. For an argument that Marx’s views remain fairly continuous, see James Klagge, “Marx’s Realms of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Necessity,’” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 4 (1986): 769–78. 11. And, as in the previous note, see also the phrase from the Critique of the Gotha Program. 12. Construing social contributions in this way inevitably raises questions about the status of many activities that make life valuable even if they are not what makes it viable, for example, the arts. There is no need to deal with that question here except to note that the line between what makes for viable and what makes for valuable is shifting and disputable. Some activities are no doubt on both sides of the line, and of course both kinds of activities are of basic importance in any decent society. 13. Philip Kain, Marx’ Method, Epistemology, and Humanism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1986), 34. 14. Now, it might be thought that the distinction between a conception of human nature in which (1) through (3) are tightly linked versus one in which they are not matches up with a distinction between holding and not holding what Kain calls a “metaphysical conception of essence” (Kain, Marx’ Method, Epistemology, and Humanism, 34). This would be a mistake. One can hold a unified conception of human nature, as Marx does in 1844, and have it not be metaphysical in Kain’s sense of involving a doctrine of double perception. And one can have a less unified conception of human nature, as in The German Ideology, where it is still the case that claims are made about what human beings are essentially like, including about such things as what their fundamental relation to the world is or what would be the good life for them. 15. This may be Kain’s reading (see Marx’ Method, Epistemology, and Humanism, 35). 16. Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 66. 17. Ibid., 33, 36. 18. Ibid., 46. 19. See ibid., 46. 20. For instance, see Tom Rockmore, Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). 21. See Althusser, For Marx, 33. 22. In For Marx, Althusser attacks commentators who claim that the change from 1844 to The German Ideology was just one of terminology. See For Marx, 61. 23. See, for instance, Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 61. 24. Ibid. 25. Althusser, For Marx, 229. 26. This is something that Althusser seems to acknowledge. See Lenin and Philosophy, 56. 27. See Althusser, For Marx, 33–35.

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10. The German Ideology III: The Critique of Morality (and a Return to Philosophy) 1. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5–6, where a discussion of Marx’s antimoralism begins with four long passages from The German Ideology. 2. See Roderick Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” in Readings in Ethical Theory, ed. Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 200–21. Writers in the tradition on which Firth draws include in particular David Hume and Adam Smith. 3. That the business or at least the middle classes also lead stunted lives was stressed by many nineteenth-century social critics. Matthew Arnold’s castigation of the “Philistines” in Culture and Anarchy (1869) is perhaps the most famous such criticism. The 1844 Marx makes the point in his criticism of “the dealer in minerals [who] sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the specific nature of the mineral” (ÖpM 542/302). Of course, the worker’s situation differs from the capitalist’s in that she can easily see that her condition is bad in the sense of being a condition of poverty. If such a condition is easily avoidable, worries about warranted confidence in one’s moral judgments can be put aside. A condition of widespread, easily avoidable poverty is clearly a bad thing. On the other hand, conceptions of justice or of a good human life might reveal other problems with existing social institutions (and show these problems to obtain even in the absence of easily avoidable poverty). With respect to these questions the worker may be in no better position than the businessperson (that is, on Marx’s view, not in a good position) to make an assessment. 4. The general point is simple enough. One’s circumstances shape one’s beliefs in a variety of ways, and one cannot get behind those circumstances. But this is insufficient reason for permanent skepticism. It often makes sense to be suspicious of one’s beliefs, to worry that bias, environment, sloth, impatience, and so forth has made one take for justified a belief that is not. In principle, one’s beliefs (anyway, many of them) should be subjected to various tests. But once one’s beliefs have passed those tests (whatever they are) there is no room left for skepticism. If one’s belief B has passed every test that a theory of false consciousness sets it, shouldn’t one accept B, at least until the false consciousness theorist proposes another test? Any reason one would have not to accept B must involve the claim that there is a specific way in which B might be false—in effect, that there is some other test B must pass. But assume that B passes that test. Shouldn’t one accept B now? The bite to a theory of false consciousness comes from the fact that factors P, Q, R, and so on can prompt one to false beliefs, and from the fact that one can know this because one has an account of how they do so. But once one has sufficient reason to think it not the case that one thinks B acceptable only because of false beliefs prompted by P, Q and R, there is no bite to the claim that one thinks B acceptable only because of false beliefs prompted by X, Y and Z, unless that claim is accompanied by an account of how X, Y and Z have prompted particular false beliefs that are allegedly the basis for one’s acceptance of B. And once given the

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account of how the mechanism of false consciousness is supposed to work, one will be in a position to assess whether, discounting for the impact of X, Y and Z, B is in fact acceptable. 5. The structural thesis may seem akin to cultural relativism in morality. The difference is that by taking the relativist claim to the extreme, the structural thesis undermines the notion of a standard. The cultural relativist does not think that her assertion, “The truth of a moral judgment is relative to the society in which it occurs,” is itself true only relative to the society in which it occurs. 6. That proper standard might lead to skeptical conclusions, e.g., “Moral beliefs have no truth value.” The point is that this would still be the output of the application of a genuine standard to the question of the acceptability of moral beliefs. The skeptical conclusion would not be a mere reflex of social conditions. 7. It should be noted that the sociological thesis, in both its forms, is neutral with respect to some current academic debates. The sociological theses assert that, under capitalism, one cannot have warranted confidence in one’s judgments of the acceptability of moral claims; still, the theses presume the coherence of the idea that, under some set of circumstances, one could have such warranted confidence (were such beliefs still to exist—satisfying the conditions for warranted confidence, e.g., communism, might also involve satisfying the conditions for eliminating this class of beliefs). But (a) as noted in note 6, the warranted confidence might be in a thoroughly skeptical judgment, and (b) whether this confidence would be based on the proper functioning of one’s reason, of one’s moral sense or of something else, is a question about which both sociological theses are silent. 8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 61. 9. For what it’s worth, Engels, in Anti-Dühring, thinks both that all morality has thus far been class morality, and that there has been progress in morality (see AntD 87–88/104–105). But then it ought to be possible to figure out in what the progress consists and to use that knowledge as at least a partial touchstone for the proper assessment of current moral claims. Engels thus does not endorse the strong sociological thesis. 10. In a famous passage, Marx says of ideology that “in all ideology human beings and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura” (DI 26/36). I have banished consideration of this passage to a footnote because overall I think it adds nothing to the ruling ideas passage. For the record I note the following: 1. It is not obvious why the asserted systematic inversion should generate beliefs that are the ideas “of” one class rather than another. The claim is thus weaker than that in the ruling ideas passage. 2. Suppose we take the passage to assert that all ideas are inverted presentations of reality. This might be meant to describe an initial condition of inversion with the possibility of re-inversion. There would then be no problem (at least not in principle, though perhaps in practice) in getting from beliefs that don’t track reality to beliefs that do. Alternatively, the passage might be saying that the inverted condition is permanent: attempts to get things right will themselves be unstrung. In effect, there is no road to true beliefs. Then the view eviscerates the distinction between true and false beliefs (for all beliefs are said to be inverted). Yet in its employment of the concept of inversion to make current beliefs suspect, the view is itself employing something like a standard of truth (inversion is, presumably, a

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contrast to standing on one’s feet, the latter being the “correct” way to be). Such a view would be incoherent. 3. Suppose we take the passage—as I think we should—as asserting only that some beliefs are ideological. The passage’s context is the paragraph on the “interweaving” of mental and material life (see Chapter 8, §5). Its final clause says, “this phenomenon [that circumstances appear upside-down] arises just as much from [human beings’] historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” The sentence as a whole should be read as part of Marx’s discussion of how things appear in ordinary life. It should be read as saying that how things appear is a function of the structure of daily life processes and that this might not track how things actually are—for instance, in some circumstances there appears to be a separate and distinct realm of ideas, but in fact there isn’t. Ideological beliefs would thus be a particular species of beliefs that fail to track social reality. They would be (false) beliefs that arise because they seem natural enough (appear to track social reality) in daily life. But then: (a) This understanding of ideological beliefs adds nothing to a Marxist skepticism specifically about moral beliefs not already covered by the weak sociological thesis, the strong sociological thesis, or the structural thesis. And: (b) There would remain an open question as to whether some (or all) false beliefs that arise in this way have a particular social function to play, and a very open question as to whether, if they do have such a function, it can help explain the fact that they arise. Those are topics for a general theory of ideology. 11. I am indebted to Candace Vogler for helpful conversations on the issues in this section. 12. Allen Wood distinguishes among “(1) textual facts, (2) interpretations which can be based on the texts and (3) speculative extensions which cohere with the texts” (“Justice and Class Interests,” Philosophica 33 (1984): 10). This section requires a fourth category: very speculative extensions that cohere with the texts. 13. For classic discussions of the circumstances in which justice is necessary, see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 3, pt. 2, sec. 2, and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sec. 3, and Rawls, A Theory of Justice, §22. 14. For the opening of the flourishing debate on Marx and justice, see the essays reprinted in Cohen, Nagel, and Scanlon, eds., Marx, Justice, and History. For a good bibliography to more recent works, see Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice. See also Allen Buchanan, “Marx, Morality, and History: An Assessment of Recent Analytical Work on Marx,” Ethics 98 (1987). 15. Jorge Louis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964), 105–18. 16. Borges’s characters are in fact devoid of our usual moral responses: “I have mentioned the ancient quarries which broke the fields on the other bank; a man once fell headlong into the deepest of them; he could not hurt himself or die but he was burning with thirst; before they threw him a rope, seventy years went by. Neither were they interested in their own fate” (Labyrinths, 115). 17. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 46. 18. See Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 7:58; The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 105. 19. In general, questions that are (at least in part) prompted by current meta-

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physical contrasts would lose (at least some of) their grip on us. Why worry whether morality is based in reason if there is no bite to the picture of the person as split between reason and emotion? 20. For a lovely philosophical essay on jokes, see Ted Cohen, “Jokes,” in Pleasure, Preference, and Value, ed. E. Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). It is, incidentally, worth noting the absence of a temptation to jump from our ability to find things funny to the postulation of a special faculty for humor. We do have the phrase “sense of humor,” but I think this functions differently from “moral sense.” The latter conjures up the specter of the being without one, the being who sees no moral distinctions (who sees only that others see things they describe in—to him—peculiar terms). We do sometimes say of a person that he has no sense of humor. But I take this to mean not that he does not have the concept “funny” and that he could not find anything funny—that he literally lacks a capacity the way someone might lack organs of sight. I take the phrase to be applied to someone who does have the concept “funny” but just finds little or nothing that falls under it. (That the term is one of criticism suggests this—how could one be faulted for failing to see that something is funny if one lacks the capacity to do so?) With humor, we don’t in fact postulate a distinct faculty that might be lacking. 21. See, for instance, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), and Cora Diamond, “How Many Legs?” in Value and Understanding, ed. Raimond Gaita (London: Routledge, & Kegan Paul, 1990). There is a line of thought stemming from G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” that might be thought to have affinities with Marx as I construe him here. 22. See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988), 58. 23. See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), 5. 24. Note that I could still accept the truth of various propositions, e.g., “Reason can determine the will.” What I could not do is to regard them as revealing humanity’s essential nature. They might show me something interesting, just as the proposition “Reason can make me laugh” might show me something interesting. But the full impact would be gone. 25. Stictly speaking, (2) is compatible with (1). Capitalism could frustrate agents’ realization of their nature and also generate an unjust distribution of goods. On the other hand, (1) and (2) could each obtain alone. The issue here concerns the central criticism of capitalism in the different texts. And since my claim about The German Ideology is that, on one reading, it does not say that capitalism inculcates the wrong conception of the good life, it seems less confusing to think here in terms of an “either/or” rather than an “and/or” claim. 26. There is also a passage in which Marx returns to a theme from the Theses. For a successful communist society, he says, “the alteration of human beings on a mass scale is necessary, which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution . . . only in a revolution [can the proletariat] succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of the ages and become fitted to found society anew” (DI 70/52–53). Revolutionary activity is said to be transformative (a claim also made at DI 195/214). It makes one “fitted to found society anew.” A person so fitted has a specifically

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“communist consciousness” (DI 70/52). Marx seems to be claiming that revolutionary activity generates new insight, perhaps including insight into the true content of the good life—and so into the conflict between it and life under capitalism. Marx says that the proletariat is a class “which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which is ousted from society and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes.” It has “the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution” (DI 69/52). Nevertheless, Marx continues to hold that, under capitalism, workers are competitors, and that their beliefs and desires are shaped by capitalist society. They are not yet what they will become in the course of a revolution (and so their beliefs are not yet epistemologically privileged). He even notes that, under capitalism, egoism may be an appropriate motive for action (DI 229/247; 234/252). He thinks that it will give proletarians reason to revolt. But that brings us back to the problem of the first step, from Chapter 7 and the Theses. For if proletarians don’t yet have a communist consciousness but rather are at present basically egoistic, then, from their present perspective, it does not seem to be individually rational (despite what Marx thinks) for them to engage in the activity that, were they to engage in it, would eventually give them a communist consciousness. Revolutionary activity might generate the needed transformation, but, as before, some nonegoistic reason is needed to make it rational to begin to engage in it. On this issue, The German Ideology adds nothing new. 27. An unconvincing condemnation would be easy to formulate: 1. All material inequality, no matter how small and no matter how necessary to efficient economic functioning, is wrong. 2. In a capitalist society, there is always at least some material inequality. Therefore: 3. A capitalist society is wrong. Perhaps part of what Marx means in claiming that the “ruling” ideas are the ideas of the ruling class is that those ideas make easily available at least apparently convincing arguments supportive of the status quo. 28. For a similar claim with respect to the theory of knowledge, see Mark Kaplan, “Epistemology Denatured,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994): 360. 29. How far this sort of argument could rehabilitate other philosophical issues for the Marxist is a case by case question. It depends on how inescapable one thinks a particular philosophical issue is, and on what good one thinks might come from tackling it.

Conclusion 1. To take just one example, Georg Lukács’s famous theory of “reification.” “[T]hought and existence,” Lukács declares, “are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process” (Lukács, Geschichte, 349; History, 204). This sort of claim could be endorsed by the Marx of the Theses (see the discussion of the simultaneity model in Chapter 7, §2), and it is reminiscent of the interweaving of consciousness and material activity from The German Ideology (see Chapter 8, §5). Interestingly, from the perspective of The German Ideology, Lukács’s account also generates a familiar problem. According to Lukács, if one sees that “reality is not, it becomes” (Lukács, Geschichte, 349; History, 204), one can recognize that the

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“reification” of life under capitalism is reification, not the natural state of things. Unfortunately, the theory of reification says that, under capitalism, reality does not seem to become. It seems simply to be there, obdurate and alien and at most a thing to be manipulated. That reality in fact does become can be properly grasped only from the standpoint of an epistemologically favored group, namely, the proletariat. But because the proletariat is itself still subject to reification, Lukács stresses the consciousness its position within capitalism should, in principle, allow it to have (its “imputed” consciousness; see Lukács, Geschichte, 126, 155–69; History, 51, 70–81). At present, however,—that is, until both the objective possibility of revolution and a very considerable degree of revolutionary organization obtain—this “standpoint of the proletariat” is just as much of an idealized standpoint (what I have called an insulated standpoint) as the standpoints of Self-consciousness or the human species. So to the Marx of The German Ideology it would be just as unsatisfactory. 2. A further distinction could be made with respect to this type of utopianism. One might be utopian in proposing a social ideal that relies on a conception of the person that goes beyond the possibilities of human nature, or one might be utopian in proposing simultaneously to instantiate two social ideals, each of which is possible, but which are mutually incompatible. The latter is the sort of thing that Isaiah Berlin has worried about. One cannot simultaneously realize the ideal of the medieval Christian and the classical Roman. Marx is certainly not vulnerable to this latter criticism. His two social ideals, as I have sketched them, may be utopian in other ways, but neither involves simultaneously realizing incompatible human possibilities. 3. Rawls writes, “Let us begin, then, by trying to describe the kind of person we might want to be and the form of society we might wish to live in and to shape our interests and character” (“A Kantian Conception of Equality,” Cambridge Review [February 1975]: 94; quoted in Norman Daniels, “Reflective Equilibrium and Archimedean Points,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 [March 1980]: 95).

Index

Abrams, M. H., 383n50, 383n51 Adorno, Theodor, 408n38 Age of Constantine the Great, The (Burckhardt), 232 alienation, 148–151, 163, 193, 194–195, 208–209 Althusser, Louis, 13, 318–321, 405n3, 411n22, 411n26 Anscombe, G. E. M., 415n21 Anti-Dühring (Engels), 408n32, 409n3, 413n9 Archard, David, 393n9 Arvon, Henri, 370–71n2 Ascheri, Carlo, 376n54, 394n10, 394n12 Austin, John, 78 Avineri, Shlomo, 227, 246 Barth, Karl, 371n5, 374n19 Bauer, Bruno; introduction to writings, 1–3, 17; Self-consciousness, 3, 110–114; differences between Hegel and, 116, 125–126, 141; interest of his texts, 12–16; state and civil society, 114–120; attack on Feuerbach, 114, 262–263, 265; critique of religion, 120–128, 129; differences between Feuerbach and, 121–123; on Judaism, 123–128, 386–387n29; taking standpoint of Self-consciousness, 128–134, 387– 388n39; Umsturz model, 129–130, 131, 132; Hegel’s Geist and Self-consciousness, 129, 140; presuppositions and, 131–132,

280; assessment of, 134–142; Marx and, 145, 151, 154–155, 265–266, 285, 315– 316; fighting subjective illusion, 201; Marx’s attack on Young Hegelians, 268– 278; political change and, 270, 271 Bauer, Edgar, 23, 387n39 Beiser, Frederick, 370n22, 375n30, 375n44, 376n45, 378n6, 384n59 Berlin, Isaiah, 375n30, 384n64 Borges, Jorge Louis, 339, 414n16 Brenkert, George, 389n5, 392n26 Buchanan, Allen, 257–258, 404n46 Burckhardt, Jacob, 232 Calvez, Jean-Yves, 227, 246 Capital (Marx), 163, 391n20, 391n23, 392n25, 410–411n10 capitalism; workers’ ignorance of their true nature, 193–197; Marx’s problem of justification, 197–201, 347–353; and labor, 200–201, 204, 208–209, 302; and political economy, 202, 393n4, 398n10; selfactivity under, 307, 308, 314; condemnation of, 192, 347–359, 416n27 Carlyle, Thomas, 97 Carnap, Rudolph, 380–381n18 Cavell, Stanley, 43, 97, 373n10, 374n17, 374n18, 380n15 Cesa, Claudio, 381–382n31 “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” (Bauer), 132, 265

419

420 Christianity; Feuerbach’s critique of, 27–37; method of critique of, 37–44; Bauer’s critique of religion, 120–128, 129 Cieszkowski, August, 18, 109 civil society; Bauer on, 114–120; Marx on, 145, 239, 241, 249, 251; standpoint of, 402–403n29 classless society, 305–306 Cohen, G. A., 13, 197, 393n5, 405n5, 410– 411n10; sketch of life under communism, 186–187, 311 Cohen, Ted, 415n20 Coleridge, Samuel, 97, 194 Comments on James Mill (Marx); on good life, 146; on community, 152, 170, 175, 180; on human self-realization activity, 173; on love, 183; on completing one another, 185, 392n2; contrast with Cohen’s views, 187; and The German Ideology, 281, 299, 304 communism, Marx’s view of; species being and products, 144–151; species being and enjoyments, 152–155, 351–353; individual development and Marx of 1844, 154– 155; human relation to objects, 155–160; immortality, 160; human self-realization activity, 160–168; production and human self-realization activity, 173–174; Cohen’s sketch of life under, 186–187; Marx’s problem of justification, 197–201, 347– 353; problem of ends and beliefs, 201– 210; Marx’s picture of the good life, 299– 302, 310, 311, 364; division of labor, 299–302, 341, 409–410n5; classless society, 305–306; self-activity, 307–310, 314; morality and moral philosophy under, 337–347; See also community Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 186–187, 258, 311 community; completing one another, 169– 176, 184–185, 392n2, 395n18; mediating for one another with the species, 175– 183; digression on, 183–191; described in German Ideology, 302–307 completing one another, 169–176, 184–185, 392n2, 395n18 Comte, Auguste, 279, 374n27 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard), 253 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (Marx), 266, 267, 270, 271

Index “Correspondence of 1843, A” (Marx), 267, 274 Counter-Enlightenment, 17, 48 creation; Feuerbach on, 30, 61, 213, 239– 240, 284, 285; Marx on, 213–216, 220– 221, 223–224, 408n37 “Critical Remarks on the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” (Feuerbach), 83, 85, 295 Critique of Political Economy, The (Marx), 265 Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx), 173, 410–411n10 David Hume (Jacobi), 106 deflationary approach to philosophical questions; defined, 78, 380n17, 380–381n18; Feuerbach and, 81, 84, 85, 88, 99, 382n35; Marx and, 215, 216, 222, 287 Descartes, René, 6, 7, 58, 72, 74, 85, 88, 92, 95, 250, 274 Deutsch-Franzöisische Jahrbücher (Marx), 5, 144, 145, 222, 265–267, 271, 274 diagnostic approach to philosophical questions; defined, 78–79, 380–381n18; Marx and, 215, 217, 221, 222, 291–293, 409n42 Diamond, Cora, 394n11, 415n21 “Die Gattung und die Masse” (Bauer), 132 “Die Judenfrage” (Bauer), 123 dismissive approach to philosophical questions; defined, 77–78; Feuerbach and, 81, 87, 96, 382n35; Marx and, 217, 282, 288, 315 Edwards, Jonathan, 41, 218 Ego and His Own, The (Stirner), 265, 410n6 egoism, 99–100, 117, 120, 179; Marx on, 239–240, 293; Stirner on, 275–276 Eliot, George, 373n14 Elster, Jon, 135, 389n3, 389n6, 390n11, 390n18, 395n22, 397n4 empirical verification, 278–282, 312–313; scientific vs. everyday, 281 Engels, Friedrich, 4, 23, 98, 265–268, 283– 285, 369n11, 401n11, 405n2, 405n4, 405n7, 406n15, 408n32, 408n36, 409n3, 413n9 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (Hume), 48 Essence of Christianity, The (Feuerbach); goal of, 8, 54; method of critique of Christianity, 38; Engels on, 98; Jacobi and, 52, 105; differences in editions, 53; religion and

Index practical life, 66, 350; method of inversion, 72; on bread and water, 160; on love, 180; Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and, 238–239; on Judaism, 238–239 Essence of Faith According to Luther, The (Feuerbach), 53, 266 external vs. internal shared ends, 187–189, 396n27 faith, 47–48, 51–52, 105, 254 Faith and Knowledge (Hegel), 106 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 253 feedback model of interaction with the world, 237–242 Feuerbach, Ludwig; introduction to writings, 1–3, 17; and Hegel, 6, 75–77, 86, 94, 106, 107, 384n75; and Marx’s complaint against philosophy, 6–12; interest of his texts, 12–16, 106–108; critique of Christianity, 27–37; on creation, 30, 61, 213, 239–240, 284, 285; and miracles, 30– 31, 40–41, 43, 47–51, 53, 60, 87, 100; and immortality, 33–34; and Hegel, 35, 75– 77, 86, 94, 106, 107; method of critique of Christianity, 37–44; as natural scientist of the mind, 38, 54–57; comparisons to contemporary thinkers, 45–54; on Kant, 45–46, 81–82, 95–97; on faith, 47–48, 51– 52; on water and hydrotherapy, 55–57, 377n61; on theology, 59–61, 63–65; status of philosophy, according to, 59–71; method of critique of philosophy, 71–88; sensuous perception, 83–84, 240–241; goal of critique of philosophy, 88–93; Wartofsky on, 89–90; problems with critique of philosophy, 93–103; relation to Romanticism, 97–98; Young Hegelians and, 98; Marx and, 98, 160, 210–213, 216, 217, 224, 266, 314, 316; on knowledge, 100; antecedents of Feuerbach’s new philosophy, 103–106; Bauer’s attack on, 114, 262–263; differences between Bauer and, 121–123; views on species membership, compared to Marx, 177– 179; on relation of man to woman, 180– 181; reciprocal mirroring, 181–183; fighting subjective illusion, 201; on Judaism, 238–239; Marx’s attack on Young Hegelians, 268–278; differences with Marx, 294–298; unaware of contemporary zoological debates, 371–373n9; Kierkegaard, compared to, 377n57

421 Firth, Roderick, 412n2 Foot, Philippa, 139 Fourier, François Marie Charles, 174, 391– 392n24 Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development (Feuerbach), 85, 94 fundamental relations/orientations, 228– 236, 288, 298, 315, 317–318 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 95, 98 Garve, Christian, 370n22 Gascoigne, Robert, 389n55 Geertz, Clifford, 57 Geras, Norman, 405n49 German Ideology, The (Marx), 3, 6, 12–16; criterion for genuine desires, 168; interpretations of Theses on Feuerbach and, 228; general comments on, 260, 265–268; attack on Young Hegelians, 265, 268–278; attack on Stirner, 265–266, 276–277; empirical verification, 278–282; antiphilosophy I, 282–286; antiphilosophy II, 287– 294; transformation, 294–298; division of labor, 299–302, 341, 409–410n5; community, 302–307; self-activity, 307–310, 314; change from 1844 Marx, 310–322; Althusser on, 318–321; morality, the problem with, 324–326; sociological thesis, 326–329; strong sociological thesis and structural thesis, 329–337, 354–358; condemnation of capitalism, 347–353 Geuss, Raymond, 369n18 Giles-Peters, A., 400n1, 403n38, 403n40 Göschel, Karl Friedrich, 4, 17, 294 Graham, Keith, 187 Gregory, Frederick, 381n30 Grundrisse (Marx), 165, 166, 311–312, 392n27, 396n23 Habermas, Jürgen, 227, 243–246, 401n17, 402n20, 403n39 Hamann, Johann Georg, 17, 48–53, 103– 106, 375n30, 375–376n44, 376n45, 376n49, 377n57, 383n51, 384n59, 384n70 Hardimon, Michael, 385n10, 400n2, 400– 401n5 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 110 Heflin, Van, 310 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; and Feuerbach, 6, 35, 75–77, 86, 94, 106, 107, 384n75; and Marx, 6, 394–395n17; differ-

422 Hegel, (continued) ences between Bauer and, 116, 125–126, 141, 386n28, 388n53, 389n56; Geist and Self-consciousness, 129, 140; externally directed community and, 396–397n30 Hegelianism (Toews), 4 Heidegger, Martin, 222, 382n37, 398n16, 402n27 Hess, Moses, 23, 115, 408n33, 410n7 Herwegh, Georg, 123 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 227, 403n41, 416–417n1 History of Materialism (Lange), 25 Hobbes, Thomas, 332 Holy Family, The (Marx), 265–268, 270, 271 human nature; giving content to, 13–15; completing one another, 169–176, 184– 185, 392n2, 395n18; Thesis Six and, 261– 263 human self-realization activity, 160–168, 192; labor as, 161–168, 196–197, 199– 210, 218–219, 299; production and, 173– 174; workers’ ignorance of their true nature, 193–197; capitalism and, 193–197; Marx’s desired orientation and, 257, 403– 404n43; standpoints and, 274. See also standpoints Hume, David, 7, 48, 51, 92, 104, 105, 344, 346, 375n30, 376n44, 377n57, 384n59, 384n70, 412n2 hydrotherapy, 55–56, 377n61 illusion; objective, 197–199, 278, 294; subjective, 198, 201 “Immortal, The” (Borges), 339 immortality, 33–34, 160 internal vs. external shared ends, 187–189, 396n27 intertwined vs. overlapping shared ends, 188–189, 396n28 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 17, 48–53, 103– 106, 375n30, 375n43, 375n44, 376n45, 376n50, 376n52, 377n57, 384n59, 384n70, 384n75 Judaism; Bauer on, 123–128, 386–387n29; Feuerbach’s The Essence on, 238–239 Kain, Philip, 314, 411n14 Kamenka, Eugene, 25, 371n3, 382n35, 382n41 Kant, Immanuel; 228, 244, 325, 344, 345, 356, 371–372n9, 384n59, 400n4, 401–

Index 402n17, 403n42; Feuerbach and, 45–46, 81–82, 95–97; realm of ends, 185–186, 257, 395n20, 395n21 Kaplan, Mark, 416n28 Kierkegaard, Søren, 252, 377n57, 401n8, 402n27 Kline, George, 408n34 Kolakowski, Leszek, 227 Korsgaard, Christine, 394n16 Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Bauer), 109, 131 Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (Bauer), 109 Kymlicka, Will, 136–138 labor; alienation of, 148–151, 163, 193, 194– 195, 208–209; necessary, 161–166; as human self-realization activity, 161–168, 196–197, 199–210, 218–219; workers’ ignorance of their true nature, 193–197; Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 242–247; division of, 299–302, 341, 409–410n5 Ladd, Alan, 310 Lehre der Nabrungsmittel (Moleschott), 75 Lange, Friedrich, 25, 39, 44 Lavrov, P. L., 27 Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Kant), 45 Lectures on the Essence of Religion (Feuerbach), 25, 75, 82 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 283–285, 290 Lessing, Gotthold, 48–53, 376n52, 377n57, 379n8 Life of Jesus (Strauss), 1, 131 Locke, John, 7, 92, 169 Löwith, Karl, 5, 6, 11, 98, 383–384n54 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (Engels), 283 Lukács, Georg, 227, 362, 403n41, 416– 417n1 Lukes, Steven, 412n1 Luther, Martin, 53, 57, 80, 376n53, 377n56 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 398n15 Mah, Harold, 367–368n1, 407–408n31 Manuscripts, 1844 (Marx); on good life, 146; on human self-realization activity, 161, 167, 200; on alienated labor, 163, 208; relation of man to woman, 180; and The German Ideology, 281, 299, 304; “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” 399–400n21 Marx, Karl; introduction to writings, 1–3,

Index 18–20; critique of religion, 3; dialectical materialism, 6; of 1844 (defined), 6; and Feuerbach’s complaint against philosophy, 6–12; interest of his texts, 12–16; attack on Proudhon, 269; Feuerbach and, 98, 160, 210–213, 216, 217, 284–285, 294–298, 314, 316; Bauer and, 145, 151, 154–155, 265–266, 285, 315–316; species being, interpretations of, 147–148, 313; alienation of labor, 148–151; nature and human activity, 150–151; species being and enjoyments, 152–155, 351–353; human relation to objects, 155–160; species being and immortality, 160; human selfrealization activity, 160–168, 192, 257, 402–403n29; completing one another, 169–176, 184–185, 392n2, 395n18; on market relationships, 171–173; production and human self-realization activity, 173–174; mediating for one another with the species, 175–183; species membership, compared to Feuerbach’s views, 177–179; on relation of man to woman, 180–181, 394n13; reciprocal mirroring, 181–183; contrasted to Kant, 185–186; workers’ ignorance of their true nature (work of 1844), 193–197; problem of communists’ ends and beliefs, 201–210; critique of Smith (work of 1844), 208– 209; 1844 critique of philosophy (work of 1844), 210–217; on creation, 213–216, 220–221, 223–224, 408n37; problem of the present (work of 1844), 217–226; fundamental relations/orientations, 228– 236, 288, 298, 315; Thesis Eleven, 236– 242, 269, 278; practical-idealist reading, 247–254; problem of the first step, 254– 260; on revolutionary activity, 255–260, 404n46, 415–416n26; human nature and Thesis Six, 261–263; change from earlier texts, 266–268, 306–307; Stirner and, 265–266, 268–278, 294, 303; presuppositions, 279–280, 291; picture of good life, 299–302, 310, 311, 364; change from 1844, 310–322; problem with morality, 324–326; sociological thesis, 326–329; strong sociological thesis and structural thesis, 329–337, 354–358; condemnation of capitalism, 347–359; on ideology, 413– 414n10 Marx-Engels Collected Works, editor on, 269, 410n7 Massey, James, 374n19

423 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Lenin), 283 Mayer, Gustav, 370n23, 406n14 McLellan, David, 368n10, 386n16, 387n31, 389n56 mediating for one another with the species, 175–183 method; of critique of Christianity (Feuerbach), 37–44; of critique of philosophy (Feuerbach), 71–88 Michelet, Karl, 116 Mill, John Stuart, 46–47, 140, 279 Miller, Richard, 404n45 miracles, Feuerbach on, 30–31, 40–41, 43, 47–51, 53, 60, 87, 100 Moleschott, Jacob, 75, 84 morality, Marx’s critique of; problem with morality, 324–326; sociological thesis, 326–329; moral philosophy under communism, 337–347; strong sociological thesis and structural thesis, 329–337, 354– 358 natural scientist of the mind (Feuerbach), 38, 54–57 “Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy, The” (Feuerbach), 37, 47, 95–96 Nielsen, Kai, 390n17 Novalis, 97 Nüdling, Gregor, 371n2, 371n5, 373n12, 382n31 objects and communism, 155–160 “On Miracles” (Feuerbach), 60 “On Miracles” (Hume), 48 “On The Beginning of Philosophy” (Feuerbach), 98 “On the Jewish Question” (Marx), 267 “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” (Lessing), 48 “Other Minds” (Austin), 78 “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (Engels), 266, 271, 406n15 overlapping vs. intertwined shared ends, 188–189, 396n28 pantheism, 64–66 Parfit, Derek, 232–233, 402n25 Pascal, Blaise, 50, 218 Past and Present (Carlyle), 9, 270, 406n15 Peffer, R. G., 389n3 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Hegel), 75–76, 380n13

424 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard), 253 philosophical questions, approaches to, 77– 80 philosophy; Feuerbach’s and Marx’s critique of, 6–12; status of, according to Feuerbach, 59–71; speculative, 63–64, 70–73; Marx’s 1844 critique of, 210–226; moral under communism, 337–347; developing Marxist moral philosophy, 353–359 Plamenatz, John, 223, 389n8 Plato, 185, 308, 410n9 Popkin, Richard, 372–373n9, 376n53, 384n59 Popularphilosophen, 370n22 Poverty of Philosophy (Marx), 404n47 practical-idealist reading, 247–254 presuppositions, 131–132, 276, 279–280, 291 Priessnitz, Vincent, 55 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Feuerbach); on natural science, 28; critique of philosophy, 67, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 96, 102–103; Marx on, 266, 295, 314; on political change, 270 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 269, 405n6 Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy (Feuerbach), 58, 89, 94 Prussian state and civil society, 114–120 Pynchon, Thomas, 12 Rawidowicz, Simon, 370–371n2, 374n27, 376n52, 380n12, 382–383n41 Rawls, John, 16, 190, 363, 396n27 realm of ends and Kant, 185–186, 257, 395n20, 395n21 Reasons and Persons (Parfit), 232 reciprocal mirroring, 181–183 relations and orientations, fundamental, 228–236, 288, 298, 315, 317–318 religion; Feuerbach’s critique of, 27–37, 59– 61, 63–65; Bauer’s critique of religion, 120–128, 129; attacks on, differences between Feuerbach and Bauer, 121–123; Judaism and Bauer, 123–128 “Religious Rejections of the World” (Weber), 107 revolutionary activity, 255–260, 404n46, 415–416n26 Rheinische Zeitung (Marx), 267 Ricoeur, Paul, 398–399n16, 405n11 Romanticism, 97–98 Rosen, Michael, 369n18, 398n9

Index Rosen, Zvi, 368n2, 385n2, 385n5, 386n15, 387n32, 387n38 Rosenkranz, Karl, 4, 116 Ruge, Arnold, 23, 98, 368n1, 388n53 Ryle, Gilbert, 9 Schacht, Richard, 394n15 Schelling, Friedrich, 76 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 376n50 Schmidt, Alfred, 227, 246, 382n35, 402n23 Schnädelbach, Herbert, 380n17 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 234 self realization; Bauer and, 119–120, 135– 136; Marx and, 146, 160–168, 300; difference between self-activity and, 307 self-activity, 307–310, 314 Self-consciousness, 3, 110–114; taking Bauer’s standpoint of, 128–134, 387– 388n39 sensuous perception, 83–84, 240–241, 401n11 serious approach to philosophical questions; defined, 77; Feuerbach and, 100; Marx and, 213, 215, 287 Shaffer, Jerome, 409n41 shared final ends, 187; internal vs. external and overlapping vs. intertwined, 187– 189, 396n27, 396n28 Shaw, William, 370n24 simultaneity model of interaction with the world, 237–242 Smith, Adam, 208–209, 412n2 sociological thesis, 326–329; strong and structural thesis, 329–337, 354–358 “Species and the Crowd, The” (Bauer), 262, 265 species being; and products, 144–151; and enjoyments, 152–155; immortality, 160; species membership, comparing views of Feurbach and Marx, 177–179 speculative philosophy and theology, 63–64, 70–73, 96–97 Spinozism, 64–65, 376n52, 379n8 standpoints; privileged, 248, 250; human self-realization activity and, 274; insulated, 274–277, 326, 330, 335–336; Archimedean, 275, 276, 277; of civil society, 402–403n29 state and civil society, 114–120 Stirner, Max, 23, 269, 270, 273, 275, 276; Marx’s attack on, 265–266, 268–278, 294, 303, 410n6

425

Index Strauss, David Friedrich, 1, 131, 132 structural thesis, 329–337, 355–356 Stuke, Horst, 385n2, 385n5, 387n31, 387n35, 387n38, 387–388n39

Über die Lehre des Spinoza (Jacobi), 48, 51 Unger, Roberto, 138, 388n51 “Utility of Religion, The” (Mill), 46 utopian thought, 362–363

Taylor, Charles, 396n25 theology; Feuerbach on, 59–61, 63–65; speculative philosophy and, 63–64, 70– 73, 96–97 Theories of Surplus Value (Marx), 163 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 363 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 6; fundamental relations/orientations, 228–236; Thesis Eleven, 236–242, 269, 278; feedback model of interaction with the world, 237– 242; simultaneity model of interaction with the world, 237–242; Thesis Two, 237–242; Thesis One, 238, 240, 242; Thesis Five, 240–241, 242, 401n11; labor and, 242–247; practical-idealist reading, 247–254; privileged standpoint thesis, 248, 250; Thesis Ten, 249; Thesis Six, 249, 261–263; problem of the first step, 254–260; Thesis Three, 255; and The German Ideology, 281; Althusser on, 318 Toews, John, 4 “Towards a Critique” (Feuerbach), 94 Trumpet of the Last Judgement over Hegel, the Atheist and Antichrist, The (Bauer), 109, 115, 270

Vogel, Steven, 390n12, 402n20 Vogler, Candace, 414n11 Wartenberg, Thomas, 58 Wartofsky, Marx, 89–90, 370–371n2, 371n4, 371n6, 371n7, 381n23, 382n37, 382n40, 382–383n41 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 208–209 Weber, Max, 107, 234 Welch, Claude, 374n19, 376n53 “What Is Now the Object of Criticism?” (Bauer), 265 Williams, Bernard, 415n21 Wolff, Robert Paul, 399n16 Wood, Allen, 46, 148, 193–194, 223–224, 369n19, 370n25, 389n3, 389n7, 397n4, 399n17, 399–400n21, 400n22, 402n24, 405–406n11, 414n12 Young Hegelians; introduction, 2; themes from, 3–6; and Hegel, 6; and Feuerbach, 98; on religious belief, 201; attack on in The German Ideology (Marx), 265, 268– 278; on political change, 269–270, 405– 406n11

Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy

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Hungarian-British Diplomacy 1938-1941: The Attempt to Maintain Relations

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