the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Man in the civilized condition is formed as a divided individual, withopposing elements both within himself and to the collectivity whichpurportedly serves his interest and whose interest he purportedly serves.Man in all conditions, civilized or not, is at once subject and object inhis relation in society, by his composition in that relation, and thereforeto himself; it is by virtue of that relation that he is subject and object.The relation of subject and object in the individual is partial and fragmentarybecause it is not separated from its development, or its temporalrelation. The consciousness of the relation is incomplete, for man isseparated from nature, and from his own nature, the content of man’ssubjectivity ill fits, fits but does not fit well, the form of his objectivity.The externalization of wants and their internalization as satisfactions aresocial relations on the one side and human relations with nature on theother, the latter being intermediated by human work with tools, whichwere conceived after Hegel by Marx as the social instruments of labor.The concept of culture in empirical anthropology has one of its rootsin the Hegelian theory of mediation, given that the mediate relation ofman to nature is at the same time the alienation of man from nature andthe intermediation of man’s work in the natural relation; hence theformation of the opposition culture-nature, however empirically it isdetermined, is incomplete because onesided. The conjoint relation (ordoubly, relations, for both singular and plural, the one and the manyrelations between human society and nature are maintained) of intermediationand alienation is at the same time the dialectical passage of thelinking of man to nature and the distancing of man from nature, bywhich we mean on both sides the intervention of culture. The concept isstill abstract in Hegel’s philosophical anthropology, and has been madeonly partially concrete in the empirical. There are to begin with twodialectical moments that are to be elaborated: The first is the passagefrom the concrete culture, from culture in the plural sense, the many, tothe abstract, the actual many and the potential one, and the reverse. Thishas been already formulated in the empirical side of anthropology as theinterrelation of the abstract relation by which man produces himself andhis kind in general, and the concrete act of work, or the shaping of thingsof use to the given society. The second was expressed by Hegel, to whomculture meant the cultivation of the individual, or his life cycle of enculturation;in Marx it was constituted by the socialization of the individualby means of his particular relations in society, concretely in the collectivitiesthat make up his social environment and form his social being.The abstract and the concrete labor are likewise separate in Marx, andjoined as the abstract potentiality and the concrete actuality.The Hegelian system is an organicism in the sense of the actualizationof a potentiality, but as an organicism within a teleology; it is in thissense that Marx interpreted the Hegelian dialectic of anthropology and47