9 - Pure and Impure Activity

Summary

When the vital activity unique to humans is considered in terms of natural beings existing objectively in nature it is perhaps only unique in that it is an activity that produces objects. Such an activity can perhaps be judged inessential only from the point of view of a philosophy that starts from the place of the subject and that examines only the act by which the subject poses and affirms itself as subject. Importantly, ‘in the act of establishing [objects]’, Marx writes, humanity ‘does not descend from its “pure activity” to the creation of objects; on the contrary, its objective product simply confirms its objective activity, its activity as the activity of an objective, natural being’. Nothing is more natural and nothing is more necessary, for a being itself produced by nature and therefore engendered by natural objects, than engendering and producing in its turn naturally existing objects: ‘It creates and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, because it is fundamentally nature.’ It is the essential break between passivity and activity that is overcome by Marx, as he demonstrates in the decisive and often remarked upon passage from the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘The domination of the objective essence within me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is passion, which here becomes the activity of my being.’ For Marx, as for Hume, the ‘mother of passions’ is a passion for activity, a drive for activity; it would not be false to call it a compulsory activity. The opposition of activity and passivity no longer makes sense for Spinoza, for whom the conception of human beings as part of nature certainly implies the affirmation of their natural passionate servitude, but also the thesis according to which, for the exact same reasons, the infinite power of nature is expressed in human beings as in every natural being under the form of a conatus, as that activity of persevering which, positively and for itself, produces a certain number of effects. In the same way, Marx could perhaps say that the human being considered as Naturwesen, that is, as a ‘natural active being’ endowed with ‘natural’ or ‘vital’ powers, is also ‘a suffering, conditioned and limited being’.