KARL MARX

PARIS
objected, then he could establish outside himself only abstract objects
that were constructs of his mind. These objects would have no independence
vis-a-vis man's self-consciousness. Marx's own view of human nature
was very different:
When real man of flesh and blood, standing on the solid, round earth
and breathing in and out all the powers of nature posits his real objective
faculties, as a result of his externalisation, as alien objects, it is not
the positing that is the subject; it is the subjectivity of objective faculties
whose action must therefore be an objective one. 179
Marx called his view 'naturalism' or 'humanism', and distinguished this
from both idealism and materialism, claiming that it united what was
essential both to idealism and to materialism.
Marx followed this with two concise paragraphs (very reminiscent of
the previous section on private property and communism) on the meaning
of naturalism and objectivity. Nature seemed to mean to Marx whatever
was opposed to man, what afforded him scope for his activities and
satisfied his needs. It was these needs and drives that made up man's
nature. Marx called his view 'naturalism' because man was orientated
towards nature and fulfilled his needs in and through nature, but also,
more fundamentally, because man was part of nature. Thus man as an
active natural being was endowed with certain natural capacities, powers
and drives. But he was no less a limited, dependent suffering creature.
The objects of his drives were independent of him, yet he needed them
to satisfy himself and express his objective nature. Thus, 'a being that
does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and has no
part in the natural world'. 180 Marx concluded: 'To be sentient is to suffer.
Man as an objective, sentient being is therefore a suffering being and,
since he is a being who reacts to his sufferings, a passionate being. Passion
is man's faculties energetically striving after their object.' 181 This contained
echoes of the eighteenth-century French materialists, Holbach and Helvetius,
but the main source for Marx's ideas and terminology when discussing
nature and objectivity was Feuerbach's Philosophy of the Future. l82
Following this digression on his own concept of human nature, Marx
continued with his critique of the Phenomenology by emphasising that
I legel seemed to equate alienation with any sort of objectivity and thus
only transcended alienation in thought: the consequence was that, for
I legel, man was truly human only when he was engaging in philosophy
and that, for example, the most authentically religious man was the philosopher
of religion. The last few pages of the manuscript degenerate into
absolute obscurity. Indeed, throughout this whole section where Marx
was wrestling so tortuously with Hegel's dialectic, the modern reader must