Chapter 4 - Humanism and Naturalism in the Paris Manuscripts

Summary

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.