Anthropology and the Human Subject

By Brian Morris

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined anthropology as the study of what it means to be a human being. Following in his footsteps Anthropology and the Human Subject provides a critical, comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation of conceptions of the human subject within the Western intellectual tradition, focusing specifically on the secular trends of the twentieth century. Encyclopaedic in scope, lucidly and engagingly written, the book covers the man and varied currents of thought within this tradition. Each chapter deals with a specific intellectual paradigm, ranging from Marxs historical materialism and Darwins evolutionary naturalism, and their various off shoots, through to those currents of though that were prominent in the late twentieth century, such as, for example, existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology and poststructuralism. With respect to each current of thought a focus is placed on their main exemplars, outlining their biographical context, their mode of social analysis, and the ontology of the subject that emerges from their key texts. The book will appeal not only to anthropologists but to students and scholars within the human sciences and philosophy, as well as to any person interested in the question: What does it mean to be human?


Ambitions in scope and encyclopaedic in execution...his style is always lucid. He makes difficult work accessible. His prose conveys the unmistakable impression of a superb and meticulous lecturer at work.

Anthony P Cohen
Journal Royal Anthropological Institute


There is a very little I can add to the outstanding criticism Brian Morris levels at deep ecology...Insightful as well as incisive...I have found his writings an educational experience.

Murray Bookchin
Institute of Social Ecology

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490731056

Brian Morris

Brian Morris is the author of several books on anthropology and natural history including Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Western Conceptions of the Individual (Berg 1991). He teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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Copyright 2014 BRIAN MORRIS.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3104-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3103-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3105-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905158

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Karl Marx and Historical Materialism

1. Prologue

2. Hegel and Dialectics

3. Feuerbach and the Human Subject

4. The German Ideology

5. The Materialist Conception of History

6. The Critique of Marx

7. Reflections on Marx’s Humanism

8. Dialectical Science

9. Postscript

Chapter 2: Charles Darwin and Evolutionary Naturalism

1. Prologue

2. Darwin and Evolution

3. The Evolutionary Paradigm

4. The Descent of Man

5. Darwin and the Human Subject

6. Beyond Physicalism and Vitalism

7. A New Conception of Science

Chapter 3: Neo-Darwinian Perspectives

1. Prologue

2. The Modern Synthesis

3. Sociobiology

4. The Critique of Sociobiology

5. Varieties of Sociobiology

6. The Debated Mind

7. The Theory of Memetics

8. Gene-Culture Co-Evolution

9. Postscript

Chapter 4: Dialectical Biology and Autopoiesis

1. The Human Paradox

2. Stephen Jay Gould and the Critique of Neo-Darwinism

3. Dialectical Biology

4. The Politics of Human Nature

5. Autopoiesis

Chapter 5: Pragmatism and Social Life

1. Prologue

2. The Origins of Pragmatism

3. Dewey’s Empirical Naturalism

4. Dewey’s Conception of Human Nature

5. Mind, Self, and Society

6. Symbolic Interactionism

7. Wright Mills

Chapter 6: The Enlightenment Legacy and Durkheim’s Sociology

1. Prologue

2. The Legacy of the Enlightenment

3. The Counter-Enlightenment

4. Positivism and Sociology

5. Durkheim: His Life and Work

6. The Dualism of Human Nature

7. Postscript

Chapter 7: Marcel Mauss and Social Anthropology

1. Prologue

2. Marcel Mauss and Holistic Anthropology

3. The Category of the Person

4. Radcliffe-Brown: The Academic Nomad

5. The Natural Science of Society

6. The Demise of Structural Functionalism

7. Louis Dumont: Holism and Individualism

8. Conceptions of the Individual

Chapter 8: Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

1. Prologue

2. Freud: His Life and Works

3. The Freudian Synthesis

4. The Theory of Bio-Hermeneutics

5. Libido and the Unconscious

6. Freud and Human Culture

7. Freud’s Legacy

Chapter 9: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis

1. Prologue

2. The Frankfurt School

3. Horkheimer and Critical Theory

4. Hegelian Marxism

5. Eros and Civilisation

6. Adorno: Life and Work

7. Negative Dialectics

8. Dialectical Social Science

9. Postscript

Chapter 10: Neo-Freudian Perspectives

1. Prologue

2. Erich Fromm: Radical Humanist

3. Dialectical Humanism

4. The Concept of Human Nature

5 Fromm: Psychoanalysis and Politics

6 Karen Horney and Cultural Psychoanalysis

7. Erik Erikson: The Cultural Nomad

8. The Concept of Ego Identity

9 Ego Identity and Social Life

Chapter 11: Neo-Kantianism and the Hermeneutic Tradition

1. Prologue

2 Back to Kant

3. Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophical Anthropology

4. Ernst Cassirer

5 An Essay on Man

6. Gadamer and Philosophical Hermeneutics

7. Hermeneutics and the Human Subject

8. Postscript

Chapter 12: Franz Boas and Cultural Anthropology

1. Prologue

2. Franz Boas

3. The Concept of Culture

4. Culture as Destiny

5. Culture and Personality

6. Irving Hallowell and Psychological Anthropology

7. The Anthropology of Clyde Kluckhohn

8. Postscript

Chapter 13: Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology

1. Prologue

2. Edmund Husserl: Life and Works

3. Husserl’s Phenomenology

4. Phenomenology as an Eidetic Science

5. The Transcendental Ego and the Life-World

6. Critical Interlude

7. Merleau-Ponty

8. Phenomenology of Perception

9. Postscript

Chapter 14: Friedrich Nietzsche and Existentialism

1. Prologue

2. The Background to Existentialism

3. Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Life

4. Human, All Too Human

5. Nietzsche: Interpretations

6. Martin Heidegger

7. Heidegger’s Existentialist Phenomenology

8. Sartre’s Existentialism

9. Postscript

Chapter 15: Claude Levi-Strauss and Structuralism

1. Prologue

2. The Age of Structuralism

3. Levi-Strauss: The Making of an Anthropologist

4. Structural Anthropology

5. Levi-Strauss and Human Nature

6. Critical Interlude

7. Louis Althusser

8. Structural Marxism

9. Lacan’s Psychoanalysis

Chapter 16: Foucault, Deleuze, and Post-structuralism

1. Prologue

2. The Lure of Postmodernism

3. Michel Foucault

4. The Archaeology of Knowledge

5. Power and the Human Subject

6. Gilles Deleuze

7. Transcendental Empiricism: Key Influences and Concepts

8 The Ontology of Difference

9. The Nomadic Subject

Chapter 17: Anthropology as a Humanistic Science

1. Prologue

2. Ontological Realism

3. Truth and Representation

4. Individualism and Holism

5. Structure and Agency: A Dialectical Synthesis

6. Anthropology: Science and Hermeneutics

7. What Is the Human Being?

8. Postscript

To: Tony Atcherley

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined anthropology as the study of what it means to be a human being. Following in his footsteps, Anthropology and the Human Subject provides a critical, comprehensive, and wide-ranging investigation of conceptions of the human subject within the Western intellectual tradition, focusing specifically on the secular trends of the twentieth century. Encyclopaedic in scope, and lucidly and engagingly written, the book covers the many and varied currents of thought within this tradition. Each chapter deals with a specific intellectual paradigm, ranging from Marx’s historical materialism and Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism and their various offshoots, through to those currents of thought that were prominent in the late twentieth century, such as, for example, existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. With respect to each current of thought, a focus is placed on their main exemplars, outlining their biographical context, their mode of social analysis, and the ‘ontology of the subject’ that emerges from their key texts. The book will appeal not only to anthropologists, but also to students and scholars within the human sciences and philosophy, as well as to any lay person interested in the question: What does it mean to be human?

Brian Morris, Emeritus Professor in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, is the author of numerous articles and books on ethnobiology, religion, and symbolism, hunter-gatherer societies, anarchism, and concepts of the individual. His books include:

Insects and Human Life (Berg, 2004), Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (Humanity Books, 2004), Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (Trafford, 2006), Religion and Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Pioneers of Ecological Humanism (Book Guild, 2012).

‘Ambitious in scope and encyclopaedic in execution… his style is always lucid. He makes difficult work accessible. His prose conveys the unmistakable impression of a superb and meticulous lecturer at work’.

Anthony P. Cohen

Journal Royal Anthropological Institute

‘There is very little I can add to the outstanding criticism Brian Morris levels at deep ecology… insightful as well as incisive… I have found his writings an educational experience’.

Murray Bookchin

Institute of Social Ecology

PREFACE

Anthropology, according to many recent texts, is the study of ‘What it means to be human’. This was Immanuel Kant’s definition of anthropology, and Kant, along with Rousseau, Herder, and Ferguson, was one of the founding ancestors of the discipline. Although certain people write of some ‘great divide’ or schism within anthropology, it has always had, inspite of its diversity, a certain unity of vision and purpose. Both Karl Popper and Mario Bunge described anthropology as the key social science, for it is unique among the human sciences in both putting emphasis and value on cultural difference (Herder), thus offering a cultural critique of capitalism and much of Western culture, while at the same time emphasising people’s shared humanity (Kant), thus enlarging our sense of moral community, and placing humans firmly ‘within nature’. Anthropology has therefore always placed itself—as a comparative humanistic science—at the ‘interface’ between the natural sciences and the humanities. In many ways it is an interdiscipline, held together by also placing an important emphasis on ethnographic studies. Drawing therefore on both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, anthropology has always had a ‘dual heritage’ combining both humanism and naturalism, interpretive understanding (hermeneutics), and scientific explanations of social and cultural phenomena.

This present text, according to my own understandings, is fundamentally an anthropological study. I say this because an earlier study of mine Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987) was harshly criticised by one anthropologist, who declared that it was not a work of anthropology in that it included critical discussions of Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and Weber who (as everybody knows!) were not anthropologists, as then defined by Oxbridge scholars. But as I expressed it in the introduction to this work: ‘Anyone who studies the human condition is, for me, an anthropologist.’ And Kant would certainly have agreed!

This book is not then a philosophical text, but an anthropological study, focused on the diversity of Western conceptions of the human subject—thus addressing Kant’s fundamental question: ‘What is the human being?’

But I have to admit, as I have expressed in other contexts, that I have never considered myself a real anthropologist. A respected colleague of mine, Father Matthew Schoffeleers, once told me that I was not an anthropologist, given my interests in ethnobiology and natural history and the fact that I did not employ a coterie of research assistants! Thus, I have never considered myself a real anthropologist, even though I was initiated into anthropology at one of its most illustrious shrines. In fact, I can claim to be a direct intellectual descendent, via Edmund Leach and James Woodburn, of Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of British anthropology. I have rather always felt that I belong to a tribe of scholars that went extinct in the nineteenth century; they described themselves as naturalists, as students of natural history. My early intellectual heroes were therefore not anthropologists, not philosophers, or not even academics; they were people like Charles Darwin, Richard Jefferies, Peter Kropotkin, Ernest Thompson Seton, Jean-Henri Fabre, Frances Pitt, Seton Gordon, and W. H. Hudson. My intellectual tendencies and aspirations therefore tend to be that of an evolutionary naturalist, fundamentally realist and historical—and this will certainly be evident in the pages that follow.

I also have to admit that, in addition to being a student of natural history, I am something of a scholarly recluse; although like Dewey and Foucault, I have always looked upon myself, in vocational terms, as a teacher. I thus rarely attend academic conferences, do not have a literary agent—though I have published over twenty books on a diverse range of subjects—do not belong to any academic coterie (scholars who go around supporting and promoting each other’s work with regard to a specific intellectual trajectory—such as, for example, devotees of deep ecology and evolutionary psychology) and do not have any postgraduate acolytes or research assistants, which seems to be the norm among many contemporary academic scholars.

Throughout my life, I have had three essential interests, intellectual interests that is, anthropology, natural history (ecology), and anarchism. Thus almost all my writings—including the present text—have been interdisciplinary. I have also tried to write in a way that is lucid and readable and to communicate with as wide an audience as possible, thus bridging the gap between academic scholarship and a lay readership, but especially students and radical activists. This has its problems. On the one hand, I have been told that my writings are too erudite and advanced for ordinary readers, and that they contain ideas that should have been developed elsewhere in scholarly journals solely for the benefit of academic specialists! On the other hand, those who dwell in the narrow halls of academia have rebuked me for my interdisciplinary style and for writing with ‘too broad’ a brush. One anonymous reviewer suggested that I should learn to write like an ‘academic’, that I should stop writing comprehensive overviews but develop an argument or theoretical ‘thesis’, and thus, as he put it, ‘impress’ (no less than) other academics. This I have always refused to do. I must then confess that I have affinities with Aristotle, who was accused by his contemporaries of being little more than an intellectual jackdaw. I, too, am an intellectual jackdaw, though I make no claim to Aristotle’s intellectual stature! Like my other studies, this present text aims to be interdisciplinary, comprehensive, stimulating I hope, both sympathetic and critical, and, above all readable—that is, free of scholastic, neo-Baroque jargon.

Over the last forty years, I have been very appreciative of many friends and colleagues in anthropology who have given me encouragement and intellectual support (or reassurance!) and would especially like to thank the following: Tony Atcherley, Alan Barnard, Maurice Bloch, Peter Baynes, Pat Caplan, Roy Ellen, Chris Fuller, Olivia Harris, Signe Howell, Tim Ingold, Jean La Fontaine, Josep Llobera, Nici Nelson, Stephen Nugent, Judith Okely, David Parkin, Roy Willis, and James Woodburn.

I have been teaching a course titled ‘Psychological Perspectives in Anthropology’ at Goldsmiths College, off and on, for almost thirty years. It aims to bring together, particularly for students undertaking joint degrees in anthropology and psychology, the two disciplines and to suggest that important insights could be derived from an interdisciplinary perspective. I should, therefore, also like to thank the many students who sat in my seminars—too numerous to mention by name—for all their insights, feedback, and often warm friendships. But I would particularly like to express my thanks to three scholars who have given me tutorial support during these years: Gustaaf Houtman, Justin Woodman, and Sarah O’Neill.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and colleagues at Goldsmiths College for their continuing support, and Sheila Camfield, Steve Hudson, and Angela Travis for kindly typing my manuscript notes.

This book is dedicated to Tony Atcherley, my early tutor in Sociology at Brighton College of Education. For it was Tony’s stimulating course on the ‘Education of Persons’ that I attended over forty years ago, that first stimulated my interest in the topic that is the subject of the present study, namely, the Kantian question: What is it that makes us human?

Brian Morris

7 January 2013

INTRODUCTION

Through his own philosophical writings, and with regard to his deep influence on subsequent scholarship, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant has rightly been acclaimed as one of the key figures in the history of Western thought. What is less well known is that Kant not only had a deep interest in the sciences, particularly physical geography, but also for more than twenty years, gave lectures in anthropology and at the age of seventy-four published a fundamental text: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). By ‘pragmatic’ Kant meant the use of knowledge to widen the scope of human freedom and to advance the ‘dignity’ of humankind. Kant defined anthropology as an empirical study—‘the science of the human being’ (2007: 227)—and on many occasions claimed that the fundamental concern of philosophy should be to address the question: ‘What is the human being?’ In contemporary parlance: ‘What does it mean to be human?’

Kant along with Rousseau and Herder, can therefore be rightly considered as one of the founding ancestors of anthropology. Although Kant, in this text, was primarily concerned with the universal aspects of the human subject—especially as expressed in various faculties (such as those of the imagination, perception, memory, feelings, desire, and understanding)—he also recognised that an individual person has a unique self (selbst) and was a member of a particular group of people (volk). Even so, his student Johann Herder always insisted that Kant—with his focus on the human person as a universal species—being, as an (earthly being endowed with reason) (2007: 231)—tended to ignore or downplay the fundamental importance of language, poetry, and cultural diversity in the understanding of human life. But, like Kant, Herder emphasised that anthropology, not metaphysics or logic, was the key to the understanding of humans and their life-world (Berlin 1976: 170).

Throughout history and in all cultures, humans have responded to Kant’s fundamental question: ‘What is the human being?’ in diverse ways, even denying that humans have any relation to the material world. I have, elsewhere, written a short introduction to cultural conceptions of the human subject (or self) from a cross-cultural perspective (Morris 1994). This present text, in contrast, is devoted specifically to exploring cultural conceptions of the human subject within the Western intellectual tradition, focusing on those cultural configurations that continue to have contemporary relevance.

There exists, of course, an absolute welter of studies that have attempted to define or conceptualise the human subject. Responses to Kant’s fundamental question have indeed been extremely diverse and contrasting. Usually they entail defining humankind in terms of a single essential attribute. Thus we have the following characterisations: Homo economicus, Homo faber (the tool-making primate), Homo sapiens, and Homo ludens. Aristotle defined humanity as Zoon politikan (the political or social animal), Robert Ardrey as the ‘killer ape’, while La Mettrie and Richard Dawkins seem to envisage the human person as a machine or zombie, L’Homme machine (Bunge 1998: 49). A more recent controversial account of humans—for humanity, we’re told, does not exist!—depicts them in rather Hobbesian fashion as wholly predatory or destructive animals—Homo rapiens (Gray 2002: 151). Such misanthropy is debatable, to say the least. The complexity of human life cannot be encompassed simply in terms of a single attribute, still less by such a biased and negative portrait.

Equally significant, approaches to an understanding of the human subject—defined in terms of the people we all experience in everyday life—seem to gravitate to two extremes.

On the one hand, there are those scholars who firmly believe in the existence of a universal human nature. Generally adopting a highly individualistic approach, the human subject is thus defined either as a rational agent (as with rational choice theorists), or as having innate predispositions and social tendencies—a universal nature—that was forged though evolutionary processes during the Palaeolithic period, when humans were hunter-gatherers. Humans thus have a ‘nature’, and as one scholar put it, it is ‘fundamentally tribal’ (R. Fox 2011: 1). Evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists are the determined advocates of such a universal human nature, formed they suggest, within an ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’—as experienced by early humans (Pinker 1997: 21).

The concept of human nature has often been critiqued as a normative concept, with specific ideological overtones, especially in relation to gender. It is thus, of interest, that while some scholars suggest that capitalism, with its emphasis on egoism, acquisitiveness, and competition, is but an expression of a universal human nature, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, in contrast, came to conclude that human beings are ‘not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production’ (1994: 414).

On the other hand, therefore many scholars, particularly cultural anthropologists, existentialists, and postmodernists have fervently denied that humans have a ‘nature’. They continually affirm that there is no such thing as ‘human nature’. Such scholars suggest that, in becoming human beings, through the development of language, symbolic thought, self-consciousness, and a social existence, we have moved beyond nature. We have become in Cassirer’s term, Homo symbolicus. This is what Kenan Malik described as the ‘UNESCO man’, the human subject conceived as lacking any nature, in being defined as a purely cultural being. Such a conception, of course, has also often been critiqued in that it implied that the human mind was simply a ‘blank slate’, or perhaps, more exactly, it treated the human mind as having an inherent flexibility and plasticity (Malik 2000: 138-39, Pinker 2002).

Humans are, of course, fundamentally both biological (natural) and cultural (historical) beings, and language, self-identity, and social existence (within an ecological setting) are intimately interconnected and have been throughout human history and in all cultures. Humans are not simply an ‘effect’ of language, nor are they simply ‘natural’ beings. There is no human nature that is purely biological in form. As Marx expressed it:

History is the true natural history of man. (1975: 391)

Or as Kenan Malik more recently puts the same idea:

Human nature is as much a product of our historical and cultural development as it is of our biological heritage. (2000: 252)

There is, therefore, as numerous scholars have intimated, and which Erich Fromm especially strongly emphasised, an essential ‘paradox’ or ‘contradiction’ at the heart of human life, an inherent duality in social existence. For humans are an intrinsic part of nature, while at the same time through our conscious experience, symbolic life, and above all, our human culture, we are also in a sense, separate from nature. We have what Cicero described as a ‘second nature’. Humans have therefore been described as an ‘explicit animal’ (Tallis 1999).

This ‘paradox’ in human life is a recurrent theme or leitmotif throughout this study. Any understanding of the human subject must therefore adopt an integral or synthetic approach, one that combines both humanism, with its emphasis on culture and language and naturalism, which firmly situates humanity within the natural world.

This book, as already noted, is devoted to exploring cultural conceptions of the human subject or person within the Western intellectual tradition, as Jacob Bronowski long ago described it. Each chapter is focused on and outlines a specific cultural configuration within this diverse and changing tradition. As examples, we may note, existentialism and psychoanalysis. Such configurations may, perhaps, also be described as symbolic forms (Ernst Cassirer), images of thought (Gilles Deleuze), conceptual systems (Ernst Mandel), or cultural perspectives (Kay Milton). Such cultural configurations or modes of thought are important in that they mediate (but do not wholly determine) our everyday understandings of the human subject, as well as our sense of personal identity.

The first part of the book (Chapters 1-10) focuses on those cultural configurations that are close to the Enlightenment legacy (outlined in Chapter 6). These include Marx’s historical materialism, Darwin’s Evolutionary naturalism, Pragmatism, Durkheim’s Sociology, and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, together with their various offshoots. With regard to the latter, we focus particularly on Neo-Darwinian theory, Social anthropology, critical theory, and Neo-Freudian scholarship.

In the second part of the book (Chapters 11-16), we focus on those cultural configurations that, in a sense, distance themselves from the Enlightenment and discuss Neo-Kantianism and the hermeneutic tradition, Boasian cultural anthropology, Husserl’s phenomenology, Nietzsche and existentialism, Structuralism, and the ‘post-structuralist’ thought of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

In each chapter and with regard to each cultural configuration or perspective we focus specifically on two or three seminal scholars, who, in a sense, exemplify or illustrate the tradition. Unlike Heidegger—with regard to his attitude towards Aristotle—we feel that the biography and personality of specific scholars is of interest and important, especially in situating the various cultural configurations within their socio-historical context. We therefore offer short biographical vignettes on each scholar—recognizing that they are not only intellectuals but also living human beings, with frailties and peccadilloes. Within each intellectual configuration and with regard to each scholar, we also attempt and often discuss at some length, the way in which they conceptualise the human subject, and how, in fact, they respond to Kant’s fundamental question and offer some critical reflections on these various conceptions.

Although this is an anthropological study, we do not engage with the various religious traditions within Western culture, or specifically with feminist theory. We recognise the importance of both within Western culture. Indeed, Richard Dawkins has stressed that the cultural ethos of the United States is so biased against any form of scientific rationalism that it is virtually impossible for any ‘honest atheist’ to win a public election in America (2006: 45).

Feminist theorists of course, differ not only in their politics, but also in their philosophical affiliations. They may, therefore, belong to any one of the various cultural configurations that we discuss in the following pages. But several women scholars are discussed in specific contexts. However, both feminist theory and religious traditions within Western culture are beyond the scope of the present study. Nor do we discuss the extensive literature on ‘postmodern’ identity, cyborgs, or cyberpeople, or the posthuman body. These are important to some scholars, given developments in biotechnology and the extraordinary emphasis on hybridity and the virtual construction of the self and human identity in the realms of science fiction, cult films, and advertising. But this extensive literature also lies beyond the parameters of the present study.

It must, of course, be recognised, and this has been self-evident to most anthropologists ever since Boas—that the cultural configurations depicted on the following pages are not some timeless, monolithic entities, rigidly demarcated within the Western cultural milieu. To the contrary, there are complex, changing traditions of a diverse nature, embedded within specific socio-historical contexts. But as an assemblage—to use Deleuze’s concept—of specific ideas, values, and ways of understanding the world, especially human life, that are associated with specific scholars, they do have a certain integrity and salience and are meaningful and important in understanding contemporary Western culture, in all its diversity. Nor, it must be said, are the views of specific scholars isomorphic with the cultural configurations in which we have placed them. Durkheim, Boas, and Kroeber never denied that humans were living beings; Nietzsche and Heidegger were not existentialists in any narrow sense (Heidegger always denied that he was an existentialist); and Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre went well beyond that of phenomenology.

Long ago the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (along with the psychologist Henry Murray) made a statement that is in some ways rather banal, but which has always seemed to me to encompass an important truth. Critical of dualistic conceptions of the human subject, in terms of the nature/culture dischotomy, they suggested that every person is, in some respects, like every other person—as a species-being (humanity), that they are like no other human being in having a unique personality (or self), and finally, that they have affinities with some other humans in being a social and cultural being (or person). These relate to three geo-temporal levels or processes in which all humans are embedded; namely, the phylogenetic, pertaining to the evolution of humans as a species-being; the ontogenetic, which relates to the life-history of a human person within a specific social and ecological setting; and, finally, the socio-historical, which situates the person in a specific sociocultural context.

Throughout this study, we stress the importance of understanding the human subject in terms of this triadic ontology. The human subject has therefore to be conceptualised in terms of three interconnected aspects or components. These are the human subject as a species-being characterised by biopsychological dispositions, self-consciousness, and sociality, as a unique individual self, embodied and embedded within a specific historical and ecological context, and finally, as a social being, or person, enacting multiple social identities or subjectivities. The human subject therefore not only has a human identity and a self identity but also various social identifies, relating to the social structural aspects of human life. These include such identities as gender, kinship, locality (community), ethnicity, ‘race’, nationality, class, occupation, as well as a person’s social, religious, and political affiliations (Jenkins 2008).

As we shall discuss in the following chapters, scholars within the different cultural configurations tend to put a focal emphasis on, or to highlight, one or other of these three aspects of human subjectivity. Neo-Darwinian scholarship, for example, particularly evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists, invariably put the focus on the human subject as a species-being. They thus specifically emphasise genetic and biological factors and tend to downplay or ignore existential or sociocultural factors in the understanding of the human subject. Their emphasis is on a universal human nature.

In contrast, existentialists and phenomenologists put a fundamental emphasis on the unique individual self and subjective experience and tend to completely ignore the important insights to be derived from evolutionary biology and historical sociology.

The third approach emphasises—sometimes to an extreme—that the person is fundamentally a sociocultural being. This approach is well exemplified by Durkheimian sociology, American cultural anthropology, especially as reflected in the writings of Alfred Kroeber and Leslie White and the structuralist theory of Levi-Strauss and Louis Althusser. It is a current of thought that interprets human cognition and human subjectivity as largely determined by sociocultural factors, or, as with the postmodernists, as simply an ‘effect’ of discourses and to downplay the relevance of biological and ecological factors, in human life, even with some scholars virtually denying human agency.

Each of these three approaches to human subjectivity, whether emphasising that the human individual is a species-being, or existential self, or a social being, have a certain validity and are fundamentally important in answering or responding to the Kantian question: what is the human being? They are, however, rather narrow and limited approaches, for what is needed, as we explore in this study, is a systemic or synthetic approach that acknowledges and integrates each of these three perspectives. For a host of causal mechanisms and generative processes—biological, ecological, psychological, social, and cultural—are implicated in the constitution of the human subject.

Such an integral or synthetic approach, one that went beyond the basic dichotomy between biology(nature) and culture (history) and their corresponding reductive approaches—reflected in positivism and cultural idealism—was anticipated by many scholars whom we discuss in the following chapters. Marcel Mauss, for example, in contrast to Durkheim’s concept of Homo duplex, conceptualised the human subject as l’homme total, as a living, psychological, and social being. Likewise within the pragmatist configuration, both George Herbert Mead and C. Wright Mills emphasised that the human being was simultaneously a biological organism, a self with a psychic structure that was fundamentally social and a person embedded within a specific socio-historical context. Many other scholars, from within contrasting cultural configurations—as we’ll explore throughout this study—have attempted in various ways to convey, the complex nature of human subjectivity, in the process developing an essentially triadic ontology.

Unlike the writings of my illustrious and early tutors Tim Ingold and Maurice Bloch, this study does not have a single controlling argument; it is simply a critical exploration of Western conceptions of the human subject. The notion that humans are not merely passive culture-bearing organisms or the replica of some universal human nature, but are existential, living beings situated in a changing environment (Ingold 2011: 7), or that humans are to be understood as active psychological beings (Bloch 2012: 146) seem to me to be hardly contentious issues. The reason that my own study, though comprehensive, has no thesis or sustaining argument—as with the two scholars above—is that I do not hold that the human subject—or any complex social phenomena (such as religion cf. Morris 1987)—can be understood, explained, or encompassed solely by reference to a single argument or perspective. This book therefore offers an integral or synthetic approach to an understanding of the human subject.

In the final chapter of the book, we outline the scope of anthropology as a humanistic science, the kind of anthropology which informs the present text. We thus present a defence of ontological realism and the correspondence theory of truth as against the conflicting claims of cultural idealism (textualism) and reductive materialism (positivism), advocate a theoretical perspective that involves a synthesis of individualism and holism (as social ontologies) and hermeneutics and social science, in the formation of anthropology as a humanistic science and conclude the chapter and the book with the affirmation of the triadic ontology (discussed above) as a fruitful way of addressing the Kantian question: ‘What is the human being?’

References

Berlin, I. 1976. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: Chatto and Windus

Bloch, M. 2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bunge, M. 1998. Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Toronto: Toronto University Press

Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. London: Banton Press

Fox, R. 2011. The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Gray, J. 2002. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta Books

Hobsbawm, E. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Abacus

Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge

Jenkins, R. 2008. Social Identity (original 1996). London: Routledge

Kant, I. 2007. Anthropology, History and Education. Trans. M. Gregor et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Malik, K. 2000. Man, Beast and Zombie. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Marx, K. 1975. Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

Morris, B. 1987. Anthropological Studies of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

—1994. Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective. London: Pluto Press

Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. London: Penguin Books

—2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Penguin Books

Tallis, R. 1999. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (original 1991). Basingstoke: Macmillan

CHAPTER 1

Karl Marx and Historical Materialism

1. Prologue

2. Hegel and Dialectics

3. Feuerbach and the Human Subject

4. The German Ideology

5. The Materialist Conception of History

6. The Critique of Marx

7. Reflections of Marx’s Humanism

8. Dialectical Science

9. Postscript

1. Prologue

‘The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy’, so wrote a much-acclaimed biographer of Karl Marx (Wheen 1999). Given that Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro all claimed to be his heirs, this may well be true, but it hardly adds to our understanding of one of the great intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. In any case, as Wheen acknowledged, Marx would undoubtedly have repudiated the politics and tyranny associated with the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese State under Mao, both of which were forms of state capitalism under a party dictatorship and far, far removed from Marx’s embracing of democratic politics and his conception of a communist society. As Sidney Hook succinctly put it:

Marx was a democratic socialist, a secular humanist, and a fighter for human freedom. His words and actions breathe a commitment to a way of life and a critical independence completely at odds with the absolute rule of the one-party dictatorship of the Soviet Union. (1971: 2) or any other party dictatorship.

Leszek Kolakowski (1978) began his important study of the history of Marxism with the words, ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher’. Indeed he was, but he was something more, an economist, a revolutionary scholar with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of many fields of study, and something of a prophet. In many texts, he has been compared with Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad, given the unique influence of his ideas on human history, as well as with intellectuals of the rank of Aristotle, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, given Marx’s impact on the development of human sciences (Singer 1980, Callinicos 1983a). He was indeed something of a colossus, even though his fame largely stems from the fact that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all transformed his ideas into a state ideology.

Born in Trier in the German Rhineland, Marx (1818-1883) went to study law at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He soon turned to philosophy, and it is of interest that his doctoral dissertation was on the contrasting materialist philosophies, Democritus and Epicurus—the atomistic Democritus emphasising necessity while the more empiricist Epicurus emphasised chance. For Marx, of course, chance and necessity were both aspects of the material world and dialectically related. Marx had hopes of becoming a university professor. Instead, he became a journalist and editor of a liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne. But his radical views soon upset the Prussian authorities, and in October 1843, at the age of twenty-five, Marx moved to Paris, having recently married. There he began associating with many radical philosophers and socialists who lived in the city, then a Mecca for political dissidents—Louis Blanc, Max Stirner, Michael Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Bruno Bauer. From these radicals, Marx learnt much, as he had an encyclopaedic mind. Yet he was to subject the writings of these radicals to harsh, even scathing critiques. Most important, however, was his meeting in the summer of 1844 with Friedrich Engels, with whom he was to form a lifelong friendship and intellectual collaboration. The relationship between the two men and the degree to which they shared a common philosophical world view, has long fascinated Marx scholars (see Sheehan 1985: 48-64).

Prior to going to Paris, however, Marx wrote a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right (1843), which consisted of an annotated and detailed examination of Hegel’s political philosophy. Only the introduction to the critique was published in Marx’s lifetime, the main text not appearing in print until 1927. While in Paris, Marx also wrote, in the summer of 1844, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. These manuscripts focused mainly on economic issues, but also included in the final section, a discussion of Hegel’s dialectics. This work was not published until 1932. Since then, it has invoked a good deal of controversy, for it was interpreted by Erich Fromm (1961) as portraying Marx as an existentialist, or a socialist humanist. The Manuscripts have been seen by Davis McLellan (1973: 105) as the first drafts of a major work on the capitalist system, which eventually appeared, much revised and expanded, in 1867 as Das Capital.

In February 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, and in the following two years, produced three important texts which, in varied ways, outlined his own distinctive philosophical world view, familiarly known as ‘the materialist conception of history’ or historical materialism. These books were The Holy Family (1845), a critique of the left-Hegelian ideas of Bruno and Edgar Bauer, which included praise for Proudhon’s What Is Property (1840) as pioneering empirical study of private property; The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) which, in contrast, is a devastating critique of Proudhons mutualism, which Marx dismissed as a petit-bourgeois ideology; and finally, The German Ideology (1845). This is a critique of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and His Own (1845) had recently been published. The manuscript book The German Ideology written like The Holy Family jointly with Engels, remained unpublished until 1932. According to Engels, it had been abandoned, left to the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’, and served mainly as a form of ‘self-clarification’ (Marx and Engels 1968: 584). It has been described as one of Marx’s major achievements although it consists largely of a hostile and satirical diatribe against Stirner’s anarcho-existentialist philosophy. More important are the early chapters devoted to Feuerbach, which outlined what Engels was to describe as a ‘new world outlook’, historical materialism, or the ‘materialist conception of history’ (1968: 585).

In 1848, Marx, in collaboration with Engels drafted the famous Communist Manifesto outlining the doctrines of the newly formed Communist league, an international association of working men. Translated into many languages, the text came to be recogonised by Marx and Engels as a significant ‘historical document’ and a classic expression of their views. It is a pamphlet that begins with the words, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism’ and ends with the famous appeal: ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ It was, of course, in the Manifesto that Marx and Engels famously declared that the history of all hitherto existing societies, at least since the dissolution of tribal society and the emergence of the state, had been the ‘history of class struggles’ (1968: 31-63). For Marx and Engels, class struggle was thus always an important factor in understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

With revolutionary movements and struggles occurring throughout Europe, Marx attempted to continue his political activities. But eventually reaction prevailed, and Marx was forced into exile. He came to London in August 1849 expecting his stay would be brief. But here he remained for the rest of his life, a political émigré, supported by his journalism and by financial gifts from his friend Engels. He took no part in active politics until the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1884. But his political activities were relatively brief, although his writings on the Paris Commune 1871 and his political disputes with the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin were important in clarifying Marx’s own political ideas. (For useful accounts of the life and thought of Karl Marx see Berlin 1963, McLellan 1973, Wheen 1999.)

Only a few years ago, Marxism was seen as being at a very low ebb and presented as having ‘an inglorious past and no future’ (Sheehan 1985: xv). Apologists for global capitalism like Vernon Bogdanor described Marx as a ‘relic’ from the past, and Marxism was seen as a religious cult that had no contemporary relevance. However, over the past decade, ever since the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, there has been a resurgence of interest in Marx, both as a social theorist and as a major critic of the capitalist economy. The literature on both Marx and Marxism is therefore now vast. I have no intention of trying to review this literature. Here I will focus only on two topics: Marx’s social theory and his suggestions for a new kind of science and his conception of the human subject, as both a natural (biological) and social being. (For useful studies of Marxism from an orthodox Marxist-Leninist perspective see Cornforth 1954, 1980, Mandel 1979, Callinicos 1983a, Bensaid 2002).

2. Hegel and Dialectics

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 represent not only, as McLellan suggests, a first draft of Capital, but also a loose, initial synthesis of the ‘three sources’ of Marxism. For in an important sense, as Lenin famously declared, the genius of Marx was to continue and complete the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century: English political economy, French socialism, and classical German philosophy. Importantly, Marx’s research on these was substantive, as he spoke all three languages, and as Lenin noted, there is an essential consistency and integrity in Marx’s views (1967: 7).

But Marx subjected the main representatives of these three currents of thought—Ricardo, Proudhon, and Hegel—to trenchant criticisms, while absorbing many of the essential tenets of their work. The notes of the Manuscripts themselves focus on a number of key concepts—capital, labour, alienation, species-being, dialectics, communism—and these reflect the combined influences of Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Adam smith.

What Marx was essentially engaged in was combining Hegel’s philosophy with its emphasis on the historicity of being and a dialectic form of understanding—while rejecting its idealism—with the philosophical materialism of Feuerbach, with its emphasis on our earthly existence and on the human subject rather than on the Hegelian geist (as spirit or universal mind). Unlike Feuerbach, however, Marx stressed that humans are not only biological beings, with a shared humanity, but also fundamentally social beings, whose essence was expressed in their history and in the changing forms of social life. Naturalism or humanism, for Marx, was the ‘unifying truth’ of both idealism (Hegel) and materialism (Feuerbach) (Marx 1975: 389). In contemporary terms, what the young Marx was attempting was to combine humanism (Hegel, history) with naturalism (Feuerbach, science) to form a ‘new outlook’ historical materialism.

Although Marx sometimes dismissed Hegel’s philosophy as ‘pantheistic mysticism’ (1975: 61), it is clear that he accepted some of the basic premises of Hegelian metaphysics.

‘The importance of Hegel’s phenomenology’, he wrote, ‘and its final result—the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle—lies in the fact that Hegel conceives of the self-creation of man (humanity) as a process… that he therefore grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—as the outcome of man’s own labour’ (1975: 336).

Humans according to Marx, thus only realise their species through labour, through the cooperation of humankind and as a result of history—though under capitalism they have become estranged from the full recognition of their humanity. But Hegel’s philosophy was seen as limited and ‘one-sided’ for Hegel tended to equate the human subject with ‘self-consciousness’; the ‘vital, sensuous, concrete activity’ of humans in their ‘self-objectification—in the creation of culture—was reduced, Marx felt, by Hegel to a ‘mere abstraction’ (1975: 396).

Engels many years later was to stress the importance of Hegel’s philosophy and the dialectical outlook, which both he and Marx embraced. He described Hegel’s philosophy as ‘epoch-making’ and said that Hegel had a truly encyclopaedic mind, and wrote:

for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process i.e. as in constant motion, change, transformation, development. (Engels (1969): 34)

Marx always and continually paid tribute to Hegel as a dialectical thinker. It is therefore, I think, somewhat misleading to view Hegel as a ‘monkey’ hanging around Marx’s neck (Harris 1980: 145) or that Marx made a radical epistemological leap from ideology to science in renouncing the Hegelian dialectic (Althusser 1969). He never did renounce dialectics, but rather incorporated it into his own understanding of science. His dialectics was a materialist form of dialectics and thus very different from that of Hegel. It was, in fact, Marx wrote, its direct opposite (1957: lix).

The Hegelian dialectic, Marx wrote, in its rational form, enables us to recognise that all historical forms are transient and is of its very nature, critical and revolutionary. But for Hegel, human thought and culture is transformed into an independent subject, and given the name Idea: the real world is then viewed simply as a manifestation of the abstract Idea. Thus Hegel equated thought and being, and so the dialectic in Hegel’s hands, Marx wrote, became something of a mystification. So although Marx was keen to describe himself as a disciple of the German philosopher, he concluded, in these famous lines, that

In Hegel’s writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.(Marx 1957: lix)

A good deal has been written on the concept of dialectics. Some have dismissed the notion as a form of mystical mumbo-jumbo. Kropotkin long ago suggested that the ‘dialectical method’ was reminiscent of medieval scholasticism and was thus obsolete, having been replaced by the scientific method of induction and deduction (Baldwin 1927: 153). Likewise, Mario Bunge considered dialectics as an unhelpful legacy of Hegel and essentially obscurantist, though he acknowledged the importance of Marx and Engels as materialists and as pioneer social scientists (1999: 133).

What then, exactly, is the ‘dialectical method’ as conceived by Marx and Engels?

To answer this question, it is perhaps best to turn to the writings of Engels, whose own intellectual and philosophical interests were extremely wide-ranging. Engels was in fact especially interested in the development of the natural sciences, and like Kropotkin, he was particularly excited regarding the new metaphysics of nature that had been heralded by Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

Engels conceived of dialectical thought as entailing a materialist conception of nature (and history) that was directly based on the scientific developments that had occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. He saw this new conception of nature as ‘mode of thought’ as directly opposed to what is described as ‘metaphysics’—whether in terms of Hegel’s idealism or the static Newtonian conception of the universe that Engels referred to as ‘mechanical materialism’. For Engels ‘dialectics’ essentially implied three principles—an emphasis on process, temporality, and change, a conception of totality or holism, and a stress on ‘contradiction’. We may briefly outline each of these three principles in turn.

Engels has often been portrayed as a crude positivist or as a mechanical materialist. This is, I think, extremely unfair to Engels and displays a woeful misunderstanding of his work. Such criticisms are often disguised criticisms of scientific rationality itself in favour of some form of religious mysticism or aim to uphold—even after Darwin—a radical neo-Kantian dualism between humanity and nature. But Engels was perceptive of the scientific revolutions that had occurred in the nineteenth century, which had completely transformed our understanding of nature. These developments above all, Engels suggested, proved that ‘nature also has a history in time’ (1969: 35). Thus the first principle of dialectics is the view, expressed long ago by Heraclitus and the Stoics, that all things in the universe are in a process of change. Thus nature is historical at every level, and no phenomenon of nature simply exists—it has a history, it comes into being, it endures, changes, and develops, and finally ceases to exist. Aspects of nature may appear to be fixed or stable, or in static equilibrium, but nothing is permanently so.

In this connection, it of interest to note that in a letter to Marx that Engels wrote in May 1873, he recorded how while lying in bed he had envisaged the dialectical aspects of nature:

Bodies cannot be separated from motion… one cannot say anything about bodies without motion, without relation to other bodies. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. (quoted in Sheehan 1985: 24)

It is clear from his study Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science usually known as Anti-Duhring (1878) that Engels not only denied that social life could be understood in a mechanistic fashion, but as I have noted, strongly emphasised that contemporary developments in physics, chemistry, and biology had completely undermined the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment. A ‘new outlook on nature’, he sensed, was in the process of development. With regard to this first principle, Engels noted the naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world had first been formulated by Heraclitus: ‘everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away’ (1969: 30).

Or as Engels expressed it elsewhere:

The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes in which the things apparently stable no less than the mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away. (Marx and Engels 1968: 609)

The great merit of Hegel’s philosophy was thus to recognise the historicity of being, but while Engels criticised Hegel not only for his idealism but also for not conceding to nature ‘any development in time’—for Hegel was not an evolutionary thinker (Morris 1987: 9-10).

The first principle in Engels’s understanding of dialectics is then the idea that both the natural world and social life are in a constant state of flux and that modern science has made the ‘immutable’ concepts of nature held by Newton, Linnaeus, and Hegel redundant. Thus long before Bergson and Whitehead, or contemporary luminaries like Deleuze, Badiou, and Judith Butler, Engels was emphasising the importance of ‘becoming’ and suggesting in embryonic fashion, a process philosophy that stressed that the world was not a spiritual entity (Hegel) nor a machine (Newton) but a historical process.

The second principle in Engels’s understanding of dialectics emphasised the notion of totality. This is the idea that all the seeming disparate elements of which the world is constituted are interconnected and that no phenomenon (whether natural or social) can be fully understood in isolation, but rather must be seen as part of a complex totality. This principle entailed an evolutionary form of holism and a conception of nature that was neither cosmological nor mechanistic but ecological (Morris 1981). As Engels put it, dialectics is the ‘science of interconnections’ in contrast to metaphysics (1940: 26). Dialectics, he wrote, ‘comprehends things and their representation in their essential connection’, and Engels emphasised the importance of Darwin’s theory that had dealt a critical blow at the ‘metaphysical conception’ of nature, in showing that all organic beings—plants, animals, humans—are the products of a process of evolution, and this is interconnected (1969: 33).

Engels thus emphasised that humans are an intrinsic part of nature, and though Barbara Noske has alleged that Engels, along with, Marx emphasised that humans could ‘transcend’ nature and that they advocated the ‘domination’ of nature (1997: 75-78), this is quite misleading. For Engels not only drew attention to ecological problems like deforestation, but he also ridiculed the idea that humans could ‘transcend’ or ‘dominate’ nature. ‘At every step,’ he wrote, ‘we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain belong to nature, and exist in its midst’ (1940: 292). Engels therefore called for a ‘comprehensive view of the interconnections in nature by means of the facts provided by empirical natural science itself’.

The emphasis on totality is by its very nature opposed to any form of reductionism, of explaining the whole by means of its parts, nor, it must be stressed, does it abolish the role and autonomy of the part (the individual) in favour of the whole—the totality. Engels was not advocating a mystical ‘holism’.

It may be noted that in emphasising the close interaction between humanity and nature, Engels (like Marx) stressed both a naturalistic conception of history—nature influenced human life—and the fact that humanity acts upon nature ‘changing it and creating new conditions of existence’. Thus Engels wrote: ‘There is damned little left of nature as it was in Germany at the time the Germanic peoples immigrated into it’ (1940: 172).

On the issue of totality, Engels clearly affirmed a theory of evolutionary holism, a relational epistemology and an ecological perspective.

(On the ecological insights of both Marx and Engels see Foster 2009).

The notion that Engels failed to mention the most vital form of interaction, namely the ‘dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process’, as Georg Lukacs (1971: 3) contended, is simply untrue. Engels, in fact, devoted a whole section of Anti-Duhring to labour and production (1969: 339-54)—which, of course, essentially involves the interaction of humans with nature. Deeply influenced by Neo-Kantian philosophy, Lukacs rejected Engels dialectics of nature, but like other Neo-Kantians, he equated science with positivism and had a general disdain for science. As Sheehan put it, in striving to solve the dichotomy between nature and (human) history, Lukacs simply left out nature (1985: 258).

The third principle of dialectics was expressed by Engels in terms of the notion of ‘contradiction’ or the ‘unity of opposites’. Ordinary common sense, understanding, traditional logic, and metaphysical philosophy (Descartes) tended to imply, Engels suggested, thinking in terms of ‘absolutely irreconcilable antitheses’—a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude each another. (1969: 31). This mode of thinking Hegel referred to as understanding (verstand), thinking in terms of dualistic oppositions. Engels described it as metaphysical, an abstract, restricted mode of thought, lost in ‘insoluble contradictions’.

Engels thus wrote:

In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and the end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. (1969: 32)

Every organic being, Engels suggested, was at every moment the same and not the same. Every moment it absorbs matter from without, while at the same time getting rid of waste materials (1969: 32). Engels therefore stressed the need to understand things and processes in terms of what he described as the ‘laws of dialectics’, and these he conceived as providing a dynamic of change. He maintained that certain oppositions—cause and effect, identity and difference, appearance and essence, for example—mutually interpenetrate and are best conceived as a ‘unity of opposites’. He further argued that a characteristic typical of processes of change is the ‘negation of the negation’—the development of a new synthesis that negates, preserves, and transcends (aufheben) the elements of the contradiction. Engels therefore made a clear distinction between two philosophical tendencies:’The metaphysical with fixed categories; the dialectical (especially associated with Aristotle and Hegel) with fluid categories’ (1940: 153), and he concluded that ‘modern materialism is essentially dialectical’ (1969: 36). In the simplest terms, he wrote, dialectics was ‘nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought’ (1969: 169).

Engels’s basic contention then was to emphasise the importance of historicism, historical understanding in the widest sense, that science itself was historical mode of thinking, and that the familiar dichotomies identity/difference, chance/necessity, body/mind, subject/object, humanity/nature, and individual/society must not be viewed as irreconcilable oppositions or antitheses, but as dialectically related, as expressing ‘a unity in opposition’.(For useful discussions of Engels’s dialectics of nature see McGarr 1994, Sayers 1996, Callinicos 2006: 209-16).

There are, of course, many loose ends and problems relating to Engel’s diatectics of nature. What have Galileo’s laws of motion and the life history of an insect got to do with dialectics, asked Sidney Hook and responded, like many critics of Engels, by suggesting that diatectics was only applicable to human social activities (1971: 75-76). Mario Bunge questioned whether the emphasis on ‘oppositions’ and ‘contradictions’ was really helpful and contended that it was quite misleading to postulate the existence of ‘contradictions’ in material entities, particularly elementary particles. The notion that everything was a ‘unity of opposites’, he suggested, was a reflection of muddled metaphysics, and with Hegel, it bordered on sophistry. Thinking in terms of ‘oppositions’, Bunge wrote, was a relic of archaic thinking, for there was no struggle of oppositions, for example, in mechanical motion, in chemical reactions or in biological growth. What could be accepted by science, Bunge concluded, was a ‘watered down version of dialectics’ that did not insist on polarity or contradictions, but rather emphasised change and variety (Mahner 2001: 37-40).

It has to be acknowledged also that scientific explanations are always specific, and therefore, dialectics can only be understood as a general mode of historical understanding and as implying an opposition to both dualistic and reductive modes of thought. This is how the concept will be used in this study. Nothing too metaphysical!

3. Feuerbach and the Human Subject

From Hegel’s idealist philosophy, Marx and Engels derived what they termed the ‘dialectical method’, which implied an emphasis on temporality, on history and process, as well as what might be described as a relational epistemology.

A recent Marxist scholar has written confirming that the ‘dialectic’ explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen, but that it is simply a mode of thinking, emphasising that for Marx the focus is less on ‘things’ than on relationships. Even so, he admits that Marx did not attempt to reify relations nor reduce things to their relations (Ollman 2003: 36). But what was crucial was the fact that both Marx and Engels attempted to link dialectics to a materialist ontology, and the inspiration for this, at least in their early years, was the Bavarian philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach.

In 1841, Feuerbach published a book entitled The Essence of Christianity. It is a remarkable book, given the context in which it was written, in that Feuerbach expounded anatheistic materialist philosophy, which sought to explain religion as simply as the ‘projected image of human nature’ (1957: 213). ‘I hate that idealism’, he wrote, ‘which tears man out of nature’, and the most real being, for Feuerbach, the basic principle of his philosophy, was not the substance of Spinoza, the ego of Kant, or the absolute mind of Hegel—it was less of a conceptual or abstract entity—but a real being-humanity. He wrote:

‘I am a real, a sensuous, a material being; yes, the body in its totality is my ego, my being itself’, and he described his own approach as an empirical or ‘sensuous’ philosophy (1957: xii).

There is no doubt that Feuerbach’s philosophy and his critique of Hegel had a profound impact on Marx and Engels. As Engels described it, Feuerbach’s study ‘placed materialism on the throne again’. It was greeted with enthusiasm by Marx and Engels and had a real ‘liberating effect’ on their way of thinking (1968: 592). But they were nevertheless critical of Feuerbach’s conception of the human subject, and his materialism. In this section, I want to focus on the first topic, Marx’s own conception of the human subject.

In recent decades, the very idea of ‘human nature’ has fallen into disrepute. Structural Marxists,