3 - Homo faber

Summary

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIETY

Though Marx's Weltanschauung is widely called materialistic, Marx himself never dealt with materialism systematically. This neglect caused some speculation about the exact content of his materialistic approach, and led scholars to rely heavily on Engels' later writings on materialism. Much of what is known as ‘Marxist materialism’ was written not by Marx but by Engels, in most cases after Marx's own death. Students sometimes forget that Marx himself never used the terms ‘historical materialism’ or ‘dialectical materialism’ for his systematic approach.

Marx's postulate about the ultimate possibility of human selfemancipation must be related to his philosophical premise about the initial creation of the world by man. Philosophically such a view is a secular version of the Hegelian notion that actuality (Wirklichkeit) is not an external, objective datum, but is shaped by human agency. For Hegel this shaping is performed by consciousness; Marx extricates the activist element of Hegel's doctrine from its metaphysical setting and combines it with a materialist epistemology.

Even at this early stage of the enquiry it becomes evident that such a view of materialism differs sharply from the mechanistic materialism expounded by Engels in his Dialectics of Nature. By applying dialectics to nature Engels divorces it from the mediation of consciousness. Strictly speaking such a view cannot be termed dialectical at all. Although Hegel included inanimate nature in his dialectical system, for him nature is spirit in self-estrangement.