KARL MARX

PARIS 105
wares. For his faculties to become human faculties, man needed to be
liberated from all external constraints.
It is passages such as this that have led some commentators to argue
plausibly that Marx's model of human activity was an artistic one and that
he drew much of his picture of man from romantic sources and particularly
from Schiller. The idea of man's alienated senses finding objects
appropriate to them, the attempt to form a connection between freedom
and aesthetic activity, the picture of the all-round man - all these occurred
in Schiller's Briefe. 164 It is also possible that there was a more contemporary
and personal influence of the same nature, in that Marx spent a lot of his
time in Paris in the company of Heine and Herwegh, two poets who did
their best to embody the German romantic ideal. Marx's picture of the
all-round, unalienated individual was drawn to some extent from models
that were very present to him at the time.
Marx went on to sketch the importance of industry in the history of
mankind. The passages anticipated his later, more detailed accounts
of historical materialism. It was the history of industry, he maintained,
that really revealed human capabilities and human psychology. Since
human nature had been misunderstood in the past, history had been
turned into the history of religion, politics and art. Industry, however,
revealed man's essential faculties and was the basis for any science of man.
In the past, natural science had been approached from a purely utilitarian
angle. But its recent immense growth had enabled it, through industry,
to transform the life of man. If industry were considered as the external
expression of man's essential faculties, then natural science would be able
to form the basis of human science. This science had to be based on
sense-experience, as described by Feuerbach. But since this was human
sense-experience, there would be a single, all-embracing science: 'Natural
science will later comprise the science of man just as much as the science
of man will embrace natural science: there will be one single science.' 165
Thus the reciprocal relationship that Marx had earlier outlined between
man and nature was reflected here in his idea of a natural science of man.
The last part of his manuscript on communism consisted of a discussion,
both digressive and uncharacteristic of his usual approach, on the
question of whether the world was created or not. One of the key ideas
in Marx's picture of man was that man was his own creator; any being
that lived by the favour of another was a dependent being. Accordingly,
Marx rejected the idea that the world was created, but got bogged down
in an Aristotelian type of discussion about first causes in which he was
defeated by his imaginary opponent until he broke off the argument and
continued in a much more characteristic vein: 'But since for socialist man
what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human