Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 17 页

Feuerbach resolves [auflösen] the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inhabiting each single individual. In its actuality it is the ensemble [das Ensemble] of social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter into a critique of this actual essence, is hence compelled: (1) to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment [Gemüt] as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual; (2) essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, mute generality which naturally unites the many individuals.¹⁷

The first thesis does not consider the meaning of ‘the human’ in its redefinition of objective activity as sensuous human activity. The sixth thesis, on the other hand, directly confronts the question of human essence in a fashion that confirms the status of Marx’s materialism as new. What grounds this confirmation, such that a new concept of the human and a new concept of essence emerge – and emerge, moreover, as conceptually dependent on one another – is the fact that Marx explicitly poses this question at the level of actuality [Wirklichkeit].¹⁸ Marx’s concept of the human is not new because this human is actual: to make this claim is to forget Marx and Feuerbach’s indebtedness to Hegel’s position in the Logic that subjectivity resides in the concrete fullness of abstraction within consciousness. Rather, this is a conceptually new human because the actuality is here unequivocally social. Human actuality is, from the outset, an ensemble of social relations. Marx deliberately utilises the French term ‘ensemble’ in order to denote a fluid, open and indeterminate unity which evades, contra Hegel, the ‘hierarchical completeness associated, philosophically, with the German terms for totality (Totalität) and whole (Ganze).’¹⁹ Far from introducing the human as a substance with inherent attributes, the sixth thesis implies that it is how such attributes are relationally produced and distributed that constitutes its essential character. In this manner, the subject in Marx resides in [inwohnendes] the practical unity of the ensemble of social relations. The sixth thesis presents, although it by no means explicitly develops, the possibility of a historical, or better, historicalising, subject, one that prioritises social relations over their relata, and one that remains abstract so long as abstraction is not philosophically and politically actualised within isolated human individuals. Thus the equivalence which Feuerbach establishes between ‘genus-essence’ [Gattungswesen] and ‘nature-essence’ in The Essence of Christianity is for Marx predicated on the abstraction from a sensuously passive, and consequently unnatural, human, despite the fact that Feuerbach is quite concerned with the re-appropriation of human nature as a collective social and political project. The Theses profoundly rework the philosophical contours of essence. They introduce the possibility of granting a historical logic to the relationship between the categories of genusspecies-individual, and that between universal-particular-individual, relationships that largely take the form of unilateral movement in one direction or the other (nominalism or realism). It is the spectre of such a historical logic – unrecognised by Marx in the Theses – that potentially reconfigures the predominant framework through which essence is thought, let alone lived.²⁰ The sixth thesis prefigures, to give two examples, essence ‘lying in’ existence in Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Dasein in Being and Time (1927), and the ‘crisis’ of relations between art and individual artworks in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970).

Consider Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach:

¹⁷ Marx, TüF, 6 (ToF, 423). Marx’s claim that Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence is, to be fair, highly unfair to the complex relationship Feuerbach establishes between theology and anthropology in The Essence of Christianity (1841).

¹⁸ Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 28-9.

¹⁹ Peter Osborne, How to Read Marx (London: Granta Books, 2005), 30.

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