Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 24 页

Marx’s differentiation of the human from the animal originates with the notion that the human actively produces its means of life, whilst the existence of the animal does not exceed the means it discovers. For Marx, the animal does not produce its means of life, therefore its reproduction is wholly dependent on the discovery of that which it cannot produce, and, thus, of that which it is not and cannot be. Strictly speaking, Marx’s animal is ontologically static: it has no history, nor does it have temporality. This dovetails with Kate Soper’s assertion that ‘all animals reproduce themselves, only human beings hitherto have reproduced themselves in the form of an ever-expanding social and objectively existing patrimony.’³⁹ The animal has no capacity to be more than itself. That which it was, that which it is, and that which it is not yet collapse into one another, rendering the three dimensions of human time meaningless in relation to the animal. To put it another way, the human produces its own temporality, whilst the animal does not. The only temporality to which the human and the animal alike are subject to is a particular temporality of nature: a cosmological time marked by a succession of instants, indifferent to the physiological life and death of all organisms.⁴⁰ The animal is not a social, an economic, nor a historical being: ‘the animal does not enter into “relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation.’⁴¹ In some regards, there is precedence to this differentiation between the human and the animal in The German Ideology. The 1844 Manuscripts declare that the animal ‘produces one-sidedly…produces only itself,’ whereas the human ‘produces universally…reproduces the whole of nature.’⁴² Here, as elsewhere, labour distinguishes the human from the animal. As is well-known, Marx’s philosophical anthropology before The German Ideology is rooted in a deeply Romantic, positive depiction of labour. Labour is the human’s life-activity, its act of self-creation and self-actualisation, its becoming-for-itself, the practice that constitutes its existence and through which its essence, the meaning of human being, is intelligible. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the object of labour – both material and spiritual – is the objectification of the human as the living genus, the materialisation of human activity in what Marx variously characterises as ‘true’, ‘inner’ or ‘human’ property.⁴³ The object of labour is universal because it can be made, and used, by any social individual. Equally, the universality of genus-activity is actualised within each activity itself: each object that is produced by human labour becomes the representative of a particular species to which it belongs.⁴⁴ That is, the human’s existence as a genus-being [Gattungswesen] – qua universal and consciously free being – bestows upon those objects that it creates (itself and other things) the status of species-being. For Marx, this concept of labour is what differentiates the human from the animal.

³⁸ Marx, OPM, 516 (EPM, 112).

³⁹ Kate Soper, On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist perspective (Brighton: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 46. As Marx and Engels state in The German Ideology: ‘…the production, as well as the satisfaction…of needs is a historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or dog…although sheep and dogs in their present form certainly, but malgré eux, are products of a historical process.’ Quoted in ibid.

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