Chapter three Metacritique of the Concept of Nature marx’s concept of nature

As I explained in the previous chapter, Marx sought to realize philosophy and to develop a new concept of reason based on the practical identity of subject and object metacritically reconstructed in the domain of labor. The dialectic of the natural subject and object of labor now carries the weight of idealistic identity theory.¹ This is the first appearance in philosophy of praxis of its most difficult conundrum, which Lukács and the Frankfurt School must also address. The problem can be formulated simply: how can the subject, once naturalized, constitute its natural objects? This chapter will focus primarily on Marx’s solution. In conclusion, and in anticipation of the detailed discussion in Chapter 6, I will introduce some basic resources developed by later thinkers addressing the same problem.

Marx writes, “[that] the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.”² By itself such a statement only classifies man as a natural being without elucidating the essence of nature or establishing man’s active powers in the natural world. However, Marx aims to prove more than this; he wants to convince us that the unity of man and nature results from human labor, which objectifies human faculties in transforming natural objects. This is the form in which human creative power in nature is most completely expressed. But since man is a natural being, it is also the self-relation of nature.

Alfred Schmidt summarizes Marx’s conception as follows:

The hidden nature speculation in Marx [holds that] the different economic formations of society which have succeeded each other historically have been so many modes of nature’s self-mediation. Sundered into two parts, man and material to be worked on, nature is always present to itself in this division. Nature attains self-consciousness in men, and amalgamates with itself by virtue of their theoretical-practical activity. Human participation in something alien and external to them appears at first to be something equally alien and external to nature; but in fact it proves to be a “natural condition of human existence,” which is itself a part of nature, and it therefore constitutes nature’s self-movement. Only in this way can we speak meaningfully of a “dialectic of nature.”³

Marx’s materialism is thus quite different from all previous materialisms since he believes that human consciousness is a moment in nature’s self-development and not an external spectator on the latter.

However, his position is not without problems. Throughout the Manuscripts one senses that there is something wrong with his concept of subject–object identity. In claiming that “man himself becomes the object,” to cite but one example among many, he seems to hover between hyperbole and absurdity. Reading such passages, one wonders if he really means it. The grandeur but also the paradox of this culminating aspect of the theory consists in the universality of Marx’s claims for human labor. He is not content to confine human creative powers to the narrow domain that mankind actually and potentially transforms in an imaginable labor process, but wants to extend those powers to “objective reality everywhere.” Under what conditions can human beings qua social beings, with their fully developed subjective capacities, recognize consubstantiality with “objective reality everywhere” as “the reality of human faculties”? Will not the realm of independent nature always transcend society, hence the human subject? In short, will not human beings always be strangers in the universe, whatever their social interactions?

Marx seems to argue the contrary, that under the appropriate social conditions it will be possible to recognize the essence of nature as human activity. Formally, this recognition exactly parallels Vico’s notion that history is knowable as a human product. Just as this notion opens the way to the dereification of history and the recognition of human creative power in the historical domain, so Marx wants to dereify nature and to attribute to human beings a comparable creative power in the natural domain.

The paradox results from casting the dialectics of the labor process in the form of identity philosophy, metacritically redefining the subject and object as labor and material. The resulting theory is profoundly unsatisfactory. It is not only that some things are unimaginable as potential objects of labor; equally questionable is the reduction of the fundamental human relation to nature to labor. It is by no means self-evident that the transformative impulse is the primary one through which being is disclosed. In everyday coping, play, aesthetic appreciation, recognition, and contemplation humans relate to being perhaps just as fundamentally as they do in labor without attempting to remake objects in their own image. And to these less active modes of involvement in the world there correspond dimensions of the real perhaps just as fundamental as any revealed to the laboring subject.

Marx is reacting against idealism, which sums up access to reality in the concept of consciousness. And he may well be right to protest that a more fundamental practical relation to the real should have priority. Yet the imaginable extension of the concept of an object of consciousness is in truth far greater than that of an object of labor. Thus if a Fichte or a Berkeley were to declare that “consciousness itself becomes the object,” we might disagree with the philosophical premises that lead to such a conclusion, but at least the notion of consciousness refers potentially to every possible object. The idealistic conclusion need not be rejected out of hand because consciousness self-evidently requires an object irreducible to it.⁴

Marx thus encounters a barrier to generalizing his concept of the object of labor from the human scale to the totality of nature. The universe is not, in principle, mere raw material: the very idea is either absurd or abhorrent. Even admitting that labor achieves subject–object identity in a partial domain such as history, this still falls short of the requirements of philosophy of praxis. As a result, the whole Kantian problematic of the thing-in-itself threatens to return, for alongside history, in which subject and object are one in labor, another sphere of nature and natural science must be distinguished in which man is not the object.

Instead of accepting the Kantian view, Marx elaborated a theory of sensation in which the senses “become directly theoreticians in practice,” acting on their objects as does the worker on his raw materials.⁵ The senses, unlike labor, have traditionally been conceived as a potentially universal mode of reception, relating to all possible (real) objects. The senses can therefore take over where actual labor leaves off, supporting the assertion of a universal identity of subject and object in nature.

Marx’s theory of sensation is distinguished by his metacritical reconstruction of the senses as a historically evolving dimension of human being. He argues that the object of sensation contains a wealth of meaning available only to the trained and socially developed sense organ. In alienated society man experiences nature as a dog or cat might experience a symphony. And, just as the “musical” ear recognizes itself “affirmed” in the music it hears, so will liberated humanity recognize itself affirmed in nature. “The distinctive character of each faculty is precisely its characteristic essence and thus also the characteristic mode of its objectification, of its objective real, living being. It is therefore not only in thought, but through all the senses that man is affirmed in the objective world.”⁶ On these terms, the emancipated senses are active transformers of their objects and not mere passive receptors; they can be understood on the model of the labor process as engaging in a theoretical-practical activity, objectifying human nature and releasing the implicit potentialities of the material on which they work, in this case as meanings rather than as artifacts.

For the early Marx, the senses are alienated in the alienation of labor. Only under communism can the senses achieve their highest pitch of perfection. When the revolution transforms the senses by abolishing alienation it attains the core of being itself, as required by the philosophy of praxis: “The suppression of private property is, therefore, the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses … The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and destined for him.”⁷ Revolution unites subject and object in liberated sensation and thereby reveals the truth of nature.

But can one really speak of “truth” in this context? Conceivably, the historically evolved senses of communist man are different from those of man in class society, but are the senses in any case significantly related to the truth about nature? Is it not natural science that discovers this truth, often by the most arduous effort to transcend the given social-sensory horizon toward deeper representations? In the Manuscripts, Marx explicitly rejects the epistemology implied by these questions, and with it, the existing natural sciences as well.

Marx insists that he is seeking the “unifying truth” of “both idealism and materialism.”⁸ Given his quasi-naturalistic assumptions, he cannot claim that the senses “posit” their objects in some sort of prior constitution. This would be to deny the reality of nature while affirming the natural, sensory character of man, an obvious contradiction. He therefore argues, on the one hand, that the sense object is real and not simply a product of consciousness. On the other hand, he rejects any notion of a thing-in-itself transcendent to perception in principle. His position is compatible with neither realism nor Kantianism.

Marx cannot allow, as does British empiricism, that the sense object is merely a sign, causally (or otherwise) connected with a “real” object. If the sensed object is only a sign or image, then no real unity of subject and object is achieved as Kant’s first Critique makes abundantly clear. The “real” object is not “humanized” by sensation in realistic and critical epistemology, but flees behind experience to where it can be reached through thought alone, if at all. Marx therefore rejects the attempt to conceive nature as a reality transcendent to sensation: “Nature too,” he writes, “taken abstractly, for itself, and rigidly separated from man, is nothing for man.”⁹ To this “abstract” nature, he opposes the concrete, lived nature of direct sensory experience. Marx’s synthesis of idealism and materialism thus culminates in a unique form of phenomenalism.

Marx rejects the natural sciences for their “abstract materialistic, or rather idealistic orientation.”¹⁰ His critique might be elaborated more fully as follows. The materialist interpretation of science asserts the reality of the ideal objects of scientific laws, in contrast with the mere appearances perceived by the senses; but the ideal objects of science are objects of thought, and so via materialism we return to the basic premise of idealism, the notion that in its essence being is an object of thought and not of a natural, sensuous subject. This is merely a secularized version of the theological priority of spirit over matter. Marx’s own radical epistemological atheism insists on locating both appearance and reality in the sphere of sensation, as levels or degrees in the unveiling of what is. The truth of the object does not lie beyond sensation or in thought but in truer and deeper sensation, in the developed and liberated senses of social man. Only on this assumption can Marx overcome the split between man and nature threatening his philosophy of praxis.

Now science must be transformed in its methods and its structure. Following Feuerbach (and definitely not Locke), Marx states: “Sense experience … must be the basis of all science.”¹¹ Presumably, the perceptions of the liberated senses can be raised to consciousness by a new science although it is difficult to imagine in what form. Furthermore, the division of natural and social science must be overcome: the very object of natural science has been aufgehoben and in its place stands the “humanized” nature disclosed to liberated sensation. “There will be,” Marx prophesizes, “a single science.”¹² Marx seems to be saying that a reformed science will, in studying nature, really be studying the objectifications of man’s socialized senses, hence man himself.

The first object for man—man himself—is nature, sense experience; and the particular sensuous human faculties, which can only find objective realization in natural objects, can only attain self-knowledge in the science of natural being … The social reality of nature and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical expressions.¹³

In these passages, Marx takes the step that Lukács later refused to take: the rejection of the existing natural sciences as the precondition for a radical historicization of the concept of nature. Undergirding the “abstractly conceived” nature of the existing sciences there is a primordial practical relation of human subject to natural object. This practical relation cannot be explained as an external interaction between the sort of entities conceived by natural science, but constitutes a more fundamental reality.

The next step, which Marx did not take, would be the development of a philosophy of nature based on a teleological concept of being as in essence subordinate to human aims. Rather than go this route, Marx rejects his entire early philosophy. In the works immediately following the Manuscripts, particularly in the “Theses on Feuerbach” and The German Ideology, he begins to backtrack. He first rejects not so much the premises of the Manuscripts as the conclusion they were supposed to establish, the identity of subject and object. In The German Ideology, for example, Marx sets out at one point to prove that the entire universe is a product of human sensuous activity. But, in the very middle of a passage that could have been lifted from the Manuscripts, he suddenly notes, “Of course the priority of external nature remains, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca.” ¹⁴

This is a damaging admission from the point of view of his earlier philosophy of praxis: it presupposes that nature can be meaningfully conceived apart from man, and so presumably, comprehended in abstraction from its sensuous appearance. Perhaps this implication still makes Marx a bit uncomfortable, for he immediately tries to patch things up. He continues, “But this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered distinct from nature,” a perspective which, Marx assures us, is irrelevant in the modern world where industry has transformed nature except “on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin.”¹⁵

These are schoolboy squirmings compared with the daring and rigor of the Manuscripts, and show to what extent Marx has abandoned his philosophy of praxis even though some of his arguments still tend toward establishing his old conclusions. Such hesitation and wavering occur several times in the first part of The German Ideology, where occasional passages prepare proofs of the identity of subject and object despite the fact that Marx now ridicules the very terminology in which such a conclusion would have to be stated. Soon even this backhanded reference to the philosophy of praxis of the Manuscripts is dropped, and Marx plunges into economic and historical research.

Marx’s later concept of nature is not based on philosophical arguments but on a materialistic faith in science. Yet some important aspects of the philosophy of praxis survive the abandonment of its most daring theses. The early metacritique continues to influence his later works. It will be recalled that the metacritique has three moments, the first two of which reconstruct the categories of identity philosophy in social reality, while the third resolves the philosophical antinomies of that philosophy through projecting the historical transformation of the reconstructed terms. The later works restrict the metacritique to reified forms of social thought. The metacritically reconstructed categories still interact dialectically in history, but the resolution of the antinomies no longer has ontological import.

It was left to Engels to elaborate an ontology corresponding to the social theory of the mature Marx. He did so in numerous articles and books that espouse an unabashed naturalism. Marx himself seems to have accepted this as a satisfactory substitute for the philosophy of praxis. Lukács was, of course, aware of Engels’, views that he condemned as precritical, still unawakened from the “dogmatic slumbers” Kant interrupted for all time. On this point Lukács is undoubtedly right.