Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend

By Norman Geras

In this passionate and polemical classic work, Norman Geras argues that the view that Marx broke with all conceptions of human nature in 1845 is wrong. Rather, his later writings are informed by an idea of a specifically human nature that fulfills both explanatory and normative functions. Over one hundred and thirty years after Marx's death, this book-combining the strengths of analytical philosophy and classical Marxism-rediscovers a central part of his heritage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Feb 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784782368

Norman Geras

Norman Geras (1943-2013) was a political theorist and Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester. His books include The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg; Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend; The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust; and Crimes Against Humanity: Birth of a Concept. From 2003 onwards he also wrote at normblog.typepad.com.

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Introduction

Whatever might separate Marx’s intellectual development after 1845 from the themes of his early writings, it is not that he came to reject the idea of a human nature.

In this essay I devote close scrutiny to the sixth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, widely cited as evidence that he did so. My purpose is to discredit its status as evidence. In pursuit of this objective I show that Marx’s later writings unambiguously do embody the idea in question, which fulfils both explanatory and normative functions.

This should not really need to be shown. To anyone who has read his later writings with a minimum of care, the claim that Marx’s well-known emphases on historical specificity and historical change did not detach him from every general conception of human nature may seem too obvious to be worth the proof. A number of careful, albeit differing, treatments of his theory of history have already made the point clearly enough.¹ Against this, however, must be set the widespread influence of Althusser and his school in disseminating a belief to the contrary. Such a belief is especially prevalent amongst Marxists. It is indeed an old fixation, which the Althusserian influence in this matter has fed upon, that there is no place within historical materialism for the concept of a human nature. Because this fixation still exists and is misguided, it is still necessary to challenge it.

I begin (I) by specifying how the term ‘human nature’ is used here. The essay then proceeds from (II) analysis of the sixth thesis itself to (III) a consideration of its place within Marx’s work as a whole. Finally (IV) some other items of putative evidence for the view of Marx to be contested here and some arguments commonly directed against the idea of a human nature are reviewed in turn and criticized as unsound.

I

Definitions

Two ways in which it is customary to speak about ‘human nature’ may be distinguished. In the first, one purports to refer by the term to a constant entity, to qualities of human beings that are all but universal, amongst nature’s regularities so to say, and not part of the variety of history. This is typically what is involved in claims that human nature rules out the possibility of socialism, lasting human harmony, direct democracy and what have you. In a second usage, however, the same term can denote a variable entity as when it is said that human nature is different in different times or places or according to the influence of different circumstances. The idea here is of a historically changing, socio-culturally specific entity.

I am not sure if these usages must actually entail two distinct meanings of the term ‘human nature’. We could perhaps just understand it as signifying broadly ‘the character of human beings’, and recognize that one can assert of this character that it is a constant one, or that it is a changing one, or indeed that it is a complex of variant and invariant features, and so on. Something like this broad sense is what a closely related locution, ‘the nature of man’, is often used to convey.

But perhaps because repeated assertions of invariance have helped to associate the idea with it, the term ‘human nature’ can, I think, also carry an implication of invariance as part of its very meaning. One can deny, for example, that belief in God, or the desire to accumulate property and power, or apathy towards public affairs, is actually a feature of human nature, knowing that each of these is a significant element in the character of human beings in a wide variety of circumstances; the claim is that they are not permanent or general human characteristics. That is to construe ‘human nature’ more narrowly. Again, the not uncommon assertion amongst Marxists, ‘There is no (such thing as) human nature’, surely relies on this narrower meaning. It challenges the existence of a human character that is constant.

In any case, for clarity of argument I observe a terminological artifice and discriminate systematically between the expressions ‘human nature’ and ‘the nature of man’. Throughout this essay, save once above for illustrative purposes, I use ‘human nature’ only when I intend to denote a constant entity, namely, the set of all (relatively)² permanent and general human characteristics. Otherwise I speak of ‘the nature of man’, employing this, in the broader sense I have identified, to mean the all-round character of human beings in some given context. Whilst the first usage makes of human nature something unchanging by definition - though there can be argument about whether there is such a thing - the second leaves open the degree of mutability in the nature of man. This may be more or less variable. It will not exclude what anthropological constants there are, if there are any.

Where it may not be clear, and I wish to leave undetermined, which of these expressions is the appropriate one - as transpires in the immediate sequel at the beginning of my treatment of the sixth thesis - there I talk of ‘man’s nature’, or resort to some other phrase wherein the key word is bounded thus by scare-quotes as a mark of its indeterminacy. Unless otherwise indicated, ‘man’, ‘men’, etc. are used in the generic sense to include both sexes. I have adopted this usage for ease and consistency of exposition only, in circumstances where reference has constantly to be made to textual excerpts translated in accordance with the same usage.

II

The Sixth Thesis

Here is the sixth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach:

‘Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

‘Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged:

‘1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment by itself, and to presuppose an abstract - isolated - human individual.

‘2. Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as species, as an inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way.’

The main burden of Marx’s criticism is quite straightforward. Feuerbach’s conception of religion is characterized as being ahistorical and asocial: he locates the source of religion within the human individual as such, abstracted from any social formation. I leave aside whether or not the criticism is an accurate one. But the accents in which it is registered should be familiar to Marx’s readers: on history relative to nature; on social relations relative to the individual; on the social reality ‘out there’ as it were, relative to the individual’s intrinsic characteristics. In the next of the Theses, the seventh, Marx continues in essentially the same vein: ‘Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the religious sentiment is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of