the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

devised by the human conceptualizations. The brain conceives in a waythat is solely human and pan-human, but what it conceives and the materiathat it has to work with varies from people to people. Both the universallyand solely human culture and the particular cultural variations areat work in the'r interaction in the conceptualizations of the brain. Second,they are not determinate, still less are they deterministic, in the sense thatour knowledge of the laws of nature and of natural workings, whetheranimate or inanimate, and of the human brain, is incomplete; therebylikewise a determinacy of human affairs is excluded.A teleology on the other hand introduces the extra-human knowledgeof man, his works, relations to other men and to nature; it has becomeassociated by those who have recognized the inadequacy of man and thepower of his brain in the face of these problems which are insuperable atthe given state of development of our mental and material equipment,with an appeal to an extra-human source of knowledge: The knoweroutside our sphere is the deity who sees the direction in which we aregoing, in some versions can change the direction on appeal, in others isthe do-nothing god. These fables for children have occupied great mindsas well, and the empirical anthropologists have danced up to and awayfrom these tacit or open admissions of our ignorance. A teleology islikewise presupposed in the talk of objective laws which move mankindfrom a lower to a higher stage of development of society. They arerather a basis for the social morale of given political States. But theperiodization of human progress is at once like and unlike the naturalteleology. The political relation was conceived by the theorists of thenatural right and social contract as' the human relation as such, that is,the relation in which man intervenes most closely and substantially inthe control of his own fate. It was conceived by them as the human relationa fortiori because it attributes to man the power to subject his fateto his reason and will, which have been determined to be the particularlyand peculiarly human faculties, shared with no other beings of the naturalorder. Thus they conceived the final human relation as the politicalrelation in society, that toward which man tends, just as the technologywhich gives man control over nature is the end of man in the naturalrelation. This arbitrary divorce of society from nature is specious for itdivorces man both from nature and from society, as we have already seen,making him independent of the one and prior to the other. It is a selfvaunting,moreover, because it presupposes a greater degree of knowledgeof nature, society, and self, and control of these, than is in any sensethe case. The political solution in this sense was carried forward into thetwentieth century as an exaggerated act of self-confidence in the abilityto control human destiny. It was criticized by Marx in relation to Bakunin,and by Karl Korsch in the twentieth century. It is necessary, asMarx showed in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, to separate the56