Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 27 页

The answer to this begins with the multifaceted evolution of the transhistorical concept of need [Bedürfnis] in the 1844 Manuscripts. In this text, the social human is specified by the production and consumption of social objects. For Marx, the human being’s relation to these objects is one of appropriation: the human re-appropriates the objectification of its own lifeactivity, and thereby produces a return of itself to itself as a totality. This is the ‘manifestation of…human reality.’⁴⁷ As the bearers of human beings’ essential powers, objects affirm, and indeed give pleasure, to human sensuousness. As opposed to the Theses, an orthodox meaning of sensuousness (via Hegel and Feuerbach) is being invoked here, drawing on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and pointing to the human as an irretrievably receptive, passive and suffering being. In the 1844 Manuscripts, as an objective and sensuous being, the human is not merely a suffering [leidendes], but a passionate [leidenschaftliches], being, insofar as it feels its selfmanifestation qua labour as an affirmation of its essence. These feelings are not mere matters of cognition, but, for Marx, ontologically basic forces which determine the whole being of the human. The interchange of human activities and products cultivates [Bildung] and mediates human sensuousness: ‘…not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses – the practical senses (will, love, etc.) – in a word, human sense – the human nature of the senses – comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature.’⁴⁸ This manifold expansion of the meaning of the senses goes hand-in-hand with Marx’s expansion of the philosophical scope of the object, labour and nature. The power [Kraft] behind this manifold expansion, this conceptual interdependence between the object, labour, nature and the senses, and hence this essential wealth of human being, is sociality itself: ‘the social character is the general character of the whole movement.’⁴⁹

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx’s conception of need is the fullest and most developed representation of this expansive human: ‘the wealthy human is simultaneously the human inneed-of a totality of human life-expression; it is the human in whom its own realisation exists as inner necessity, as need [Not].’⁵⁰ To be ‘in-need-of a totality of human life-expression’ is to be in-need-of the sheer diversity and refinement of the objectification of consciously free human life-activity as genus-activity.⁵¹ It is, as Andrew Chitty contends, the fact that ‘human beings express themselves through the creation of universal objects, and so the need for human life-expression is the need to create such objects for other human beings, i.e. to create objects that can in principle satisfy the needs of any human being...’⁵² – and we might add: for human beings to consume universal objects created by other human beings. In this way, human needs are defined by particular individuals’ needs for one another, the need to be social in the sense of the ‘interchange’ of individuals’ activities and products. But there is another dimension to need here as well. Bearing in mind that Marx’s conception of the human is both an individual already in relation to other individuals and that very relation itself, the totality of human lifeexpression that the human needs is not reducible to an aggregate production and consumption of universal objects, but is equally the very interdependency between objectification (human property), essential activity (labour) and cultivated pleasure (sensuousness) itself. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the human’s need to be a social relation is at once the source of its individuation, without which the unencumbered, consciously free refinement and diversification of needs cannot proceed. When, at a much later date, Marx states that in the future past of communism ‘…labour has become not only the means of life, but life’s first need…’⁵³, this is a speculative call for an indissociable social and individual life, wherein the production of new needs is the reproduction of the human as equally a ‘wealthy’ social relation and particular individual. For Marx, it is because of need that there are individuals, which is to say that need constitutes the ontological basis of the sociality of human individuation (there is no division of labour without need: the division of labour ontologically proceeds from human need).

⁴⁷ Marx, EPM, 139.

⁴⁸ Marx, OPM, 542 (EPM, 137). ‘…established society produces humans in the entire wealth of their being – produces wealthy humans profoundly endowed with all the senses – as their enduring actuality.’ Ibid. This established society [gewordne Gesellschaft] is for Marx the meaning of communism. ⁴⁹ Marx, EPM, 137.

⁵⁰ Ibid. 144. This is a modified transcription of Chitty’s translation of this passage in the 1844 Manuscripts, with ‘human’ replacing ‘man’ and ‘it/its’ replacing ‘he/his’. Chitty’s translation is vastly superior to others because it highlights Marx’s use of Bedürfnis as well as Not. The meaning of the latter revolves between ‘exigency’, ‘necessity’ and ‘distress’. See Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs,’ 26, 30 ft. 6. Marx’s use of Not in relation to Bedürfnis in this passage fills out the relation between human sensuousness and needs in the 1844 Manuscripts.

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