the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

a small proportion of the total of humanity; it is a potentiality of man,his final end, his ultimate or best nature, furthest removed from the lifeof animals and of barbarians. According to Aristotle it is the life ofhuman nature to which the barbarians as known to him had not yetattained, but to which all men aspire. Marx differentiated between manas a social anim al in general and a political animal in particular, notingthat the life in the polis or in civil society was characteristic of men in thatera, in a concrete society. The idea was formulated more abstractly byMarx in 1857-1858, whereby the generality of sociability was opposed toindividuation, passing dialectically into its opposite only in society, thelatter remaining here without particular concretion. In the formulationin Capital, the condition of man in society passes dialectically from itsabstraction to a concretion in particular societies, ancient Greek in onecase, and eighteenth century America in another. It does not pass fromone particularity to another, but rests in each as separate concretions,without their historical connection. There is therefore no historicaldetermination of the passage from one concretion to the other. Man istherefore in a dual relation, on the one hand to man in a particular,concrete society, and on the other to nature by the intermediation of tools;the positing of the problem is on the one hand the transition of a concreteto an abstract relation, on the other from the actual to the potential stateof man, passing thereby from the intermediation of social relations to theintermediation of work-tools in the definition of human nature. Eachcriterion is at once specific and concrete in its determination, and anabstraction in reference to the entire species. What is excluded is theholistic, gestaltist abstraction of the determination of man and of humannature on the one hand, and the Cartesian determination of man as thedetermination of mind, on the other.The two societies are juxtaposed, but not as irreconcilable antinomies.They are at the same time exemplifications of two definitions of thehuman in Marx; they were selected as concrete expressions in theirjuxtaposition of how man becomes human: that is, by life in society andby the use of tools. Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach defines man as theensemble of social relations; the isolated individual is an abstraction.44(We will take up this problem below, in reference to Marx’s excerptsfrom Maine.) The Introduction to the Grundrisse further develops thisidea, which was already adumbrated in the “ Critique of the HistoricalSchool of Right” (1842) and in the Critique o f the Hegelian Philosophy o fRight (1843). The formulation in C apital expresses it concretely, as thepraxis of particular societies. The intermediation of tools in the developmentof man was introduced in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts(1844): man relates to his generic being (Gattungswesen) by his workupon the objective world, it is man’s generic life;45 this was givenfurther concretion in The German Ideology,46 the Communist Manifesto, the20