6 - The Secondary Nature of the Consciousness of Self

Summary

What is it to be a finite mode or, in Marxist terms, an ‘objective being’? To be an objective being is first of all to be dependent upon other objects; it is be in an essential and necessary relation with other objects. Such is the case of a human being who, like all living things, depends on other things that are exterior for the perpetuation of its life. These are the objects that are indispensable to appropriate or produce in order to maintain a life; as such they are, as Marx says, ‘essential objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers’. An objective being is therefore a being that is in an essential and vital relation with other objects: ‘to say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers’, Marx explains, ‘means that he has real, sensuous objects as the objects of his being and of his vital expression, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects’. Being objective or existing naturally means having existential and vital relations to objects outside of oneself. This confirms the properly ontological significance of needs and affects as basic as, for example, hunger, which, says Marx, ‘is a natural need; it therefore requires a nature and an object outside of itself in order to satisfy and still itself’. This is an admission of dependency where a certain body is found to be in need of another body; it is the admission that what is essential to me is in outside of me. It is because the human being has, as Marx says, ‘a nature outside of himself’ that it ‘is a natural being’; a being is an objective being, and therefore is really a being, only from the moment it relates to objects that are essential to it and from the moment it is itself such an essential object for another. This is the first thing Marx borrows from the first chapter of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, according to which ‘[o]ne knows the man by the object that reflects his being’.