Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito
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his earlier vision of “humanism = naturalism” as a truly materialist analysis of the relationship between humans and nature in accordance with this distancing from Feuerbach? In this context, the formation of Marx’s “materialist method” is of importance.71
The main point of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach and other Young Hegelians in The German Ideology is that they simply opposed a hidden “essence” to the estranged “appearance,” without examining the specific social relations that bestow an objective reality to this appearance. For example, Feuerbach argues that religious alienation in front of God is an “illusion” that humans themselves produce in their heads due to the misrecognition of their own species-being, thereby allowing an inverted essence to dominate their consciousness and activity. Marx in the Paris Notebooks was highly supportive of this Young Hegelian discourse because he believed that through the application of Feuerbach’s schema to labor alienation in bourgeois society it would be possible to envision the social abolition of private property as a way to reappropriate and realize human species-being.72 However, Marx now argues that Feuerbach’s critique is “purely scholastic” and incapable of leading to radical social change.73 This is because Feuerbach’s method only allows for the necessity of an epistemological change concerning the religious inversion “through the ‘spectacles’ of the philosopher” without an actual practical engagement.74 In other words, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for naïvely (and wrongly) believing that he could simply educate the masses with his philosophy that the essence of God is really that of humans themselves without touching upon the alienated social relations at the root of the problem.
The difference between the standpoints of Marx and Feuerbach after 1845 becomes clearer if one follows Marx’s various usages of “praxis” during this period. It is true that Marx from the very beginning consistently demanded the necessity of transcending philosophical dualism in actuality, in contrast to Hegel’s idealist philosophy, which tries to overcome the contradiction only on a theoretical level.
In September 1843, Marx had already formulated, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, his demand for “ruthless criticism of all that exists” with the following words:
The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be—as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion—to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.75
Here it is obvious that Marx, following Feuerbach’s critique of religion, primarily aimed at the “reform of consciousness.” The epistemological emancipation from illusion through ruthless criticism is, according to Marx, the most important task, from which radical praxis should emerge. This philosophical approach is also reflected in his political solution. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written between March and August 1843, Marx dealt with the contradiction of the modern world as a dualistic opposition between the state and civil society. In order to overcome this “alienation,” Marx opposed to alienated reality the philosophical idea of “democracy,” in which every private individual should be able to participate in the public sphere, overcoming the dualist separation between the two spheres.76
In On the Jewish Question, Marx rapidly came to criticize this type of democratic idea after he recognized the limitation of “political emancipation.” He realized that political emancipation through democracy simply contributes to the completion of the modern world, and not its transcendence. Marx argued that democracy alone cannot bring about a radical political action as long as the existence of bourgeois society is taken for granted. The political sphere remains depoliticized in order to protect the interests of “an egoistic, independent individual.”77 In this vein, Marx admitted that the abstract idea of “democracy” only reflects the abstract idea of the political state in modern society. Abandoning his naïve view of democracy, he began to problematize bourgeois society itself as the actual contradiction of the modern world. Here Marx was already carrying out a partial overcoming of Feuerbach’s schema, recognizing that the actual antagonistic dualism between the state and bourgeois society cannot be brought into a unity solely through a philosophic idea of democracy.
Despite this theoretical development, Marx at the same time still cherished another aspect of Feuerbach’s philosophy. Against the egoism of bourgeois society, with its endless desire to attain money, Marx opposed the concrete “sensibility” of human beings as the true principle for human emancipation. Thus, Marx argued in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Introduction of which was published in the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, that a radical transformation of bourgeois society is not possible through a political ideal but only through a “passive element” (sensibility), that is, as a result of alienated workers grasping their “universal suffering,” which can then become the basis for acting upon it.78 This is why Marx emphasized the power of praxis, based on the workers’ concrete sensible desires, as the sole means of solution for the modern contradiction: “As the resolute opponent of the previous form of German political consciousness, the criticism of speculative philosophy of law turns, not towards itself, but towards problems which can only be solved by one means—practice.”79 One finds a certain ambivalence in Marx’s argument. On the one hand he recognized the limitation of a simple opposition of an abstract philosophical idea against the alienated objective reality and emphasizes the primacy of practice more strongly than Feuerbach. On the other hand Marx still followed him, appreciating his concept of “sensibility” precisely as the concrete materialist foundation of revolutionary practice.
The following sentence from the Paris Notebooks represents the same ambiguity. At first glance, Marx’s claim may give an impression that he had already established the primacy of practice against Feuerbach’s philosophical position:
We see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.80
It is true that Marx without doubt acknowledged the necessity of practice for the transcendence of “theoretical antitheses” that reflect the contradictory reality, criticizing that idealist philosophy for failing to make any practical engagement with the concrete objective contradiction. However, his claim still accepted Feuerbach’s schema when he also demanded overcoming the antitheses, such as those between “subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering,” through Feuerbachian “sensuous perception.”81 Since Marx’s critique was directed only against the abstract nature of idealist philosophy from his own standpoint of sensuous perception, he, together with Feuerbach, recommended overcoming these philosophical antitheses with concrete sensuous praxis and, more precisely, “labor” that can actualize the free and universal subjectivity of human beings in the concrete objective world. Thus what Marx problematized in the notebooks of 1844 is essentially dependent upon the return to concrete “sensuous perception” in labor being the true principle of radical materialism, and in this vein Marx demanded that human beings should first correctly recognize their own species-being and then get engaged in revolutionary praxis against alienated reality under capitalism.
It is not hard to understand why Marx highly valued Feuerbach’s concept of species-being. He was convinced that in contrast to Hegel’s “spirit” and Bruno Bauer’s “self-consciousness,” the human subject conceptualized by Feuerbach could function as a real and true basis for the progress of historical movement and show the way to transcend alienation. His critique of philosophy in 1844 principally aims at correcting earlier misrecognitions of the true philosophical principle in a similar way that Feuerbach opposed his species-being to Hegel’s spirit as the true subject of history. In this sense, Marx’s demand for praxis in 1844 still clearly moved within the paradigm of the Young Hegelian philosophy.
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