The critical value of György Márkus’s philosophical anthropology

I Márkus on Marx’s ‘Philosophical Anthropology’

The subtitle of Márkus’s work is ‘The Concept of “Human Essence” in the Philosophy of Marx’, and the central role the concept will play is developed in Márkus’s own introduction to his text. Márkus (2014: 7) states that his goal is to analyze this ‘human essence’ so as to demonstrate the existence and specify the nature of the link between Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ and his ‘philosophical anthropology’. Márkus argues that tying Marx’s conception of history to his philosophical anthropology avoids two related pitfalls. First it avoids defending communism as the moral adjunct of an a-historical ‘true’ human nature and, second, it avoids a complete dissolution of the human in scientifically determined and rigid laws of historical development. ² In other words, by reading Marx’s human essence as historically developing through conditioned freedom, Márkus charts a third course between the paltry moralism of some humanisms and the value-less anti-humanism of purportedly ‘scientific’ Marxism.

With this basis middle ground in hand, the book is divided into three parts with each building on and extending the preceding analysis. The first part, titled ‘Man as Universal Natural Being’, begins with a sketch of humans as limited natural beings that require an active relationship to their natural surroundings to satisfy their needs. While animals are also active, human activity relates to far wider swaths of their natural environment and the results of this activity are, also unlike other animals, passed on generationally. Humans are the kinds of animals that work together and with nature to satisfy their needs, but significantly, the strategies guiding this work have a history, that is, strategies develop by modifying and building on what came before. In this way humans are natural, social beings that open-endedly generate ‘new active powers’ by developing ever new active relationships with nature. Márkus, who defines and uses concepts precisely throughout, means his ‘universal’ to be taken as a growing set of potentials regarding the active human relationship to nature: ‘Man is essentially a universal natural being, in the sense that he is potentially able to turn any object of nature into the subject matter of his wants and activity…to turn a principally unlimited scope of natural laws and regularities into the principles of his own actions and so to transform his progressively expanding environment to an ever increasing degree’ (Márkus, 2014: 25). Marx’s ‘species’ is figured by Márkus not primarily as a ‘universal’ in the metaphysical-philosophical sense, but rather as an expanding set of strategies for relating to nature.

The second part further determines this universal by developing, as the title indicates, ‘Man as a Social and Conscious Natural Being’. Here, Márkus stresses the human’s ineluctable sociality. Life needs productive capacities but also capacities for communication, norms, and values. The latter specifically include the changing manners of affirmational contact with others, or ‘recognition’, which are all inter-generationally inherited by and determining for each. In this context alienation is also a distinctly social phenomenon and has at its basis the social production of individuals individuated in such a way as to experience their lives, desires, and possibilities as isolated, unmet, and constrained (Márkus, 2014: 38). It is important, however, to stress that these phenomena are driven by objective social structures and developments and are not merely generalizations or aggregations of individuals' psychological experiences or viewpoints. Whether an object of consciousness or not, an individual’s alienation is actually one side of the developing species’ universalization when the direction of universal development is dictated not socially but by either direct violence or the mediated violence of the market.

In developing this interpretation of Marx’s alienation as socially and historically determined, Márkus is also careful to avoid the implication that each concrete human is fully explicable via this social determination. Even while shaping the contours and general limits of individuality, socio-historical determination cannot explain just how any individual chooses to act and thereby externalize and develop their capacities. This is the case because, in addition to being socially determined, human action is also conscious. For Márkus, consciousness is an awareness of activity and its possibilities given the multiple and growing capacities for acting productively with nature. As the species’ universality develops so too do the possibilities of greatly differing consciously guided relationships with nature. Thus, while consciousness is also socially determined, this determination is a continuous development of possibilities. In this light consciousness, mediated by the social structures through which it too is generationally passed on, intentionally directs and organizes activity. The activity of this directing, like the capacities for sensuous activity, also progressively develops its universality. Since in the course of its historical development consciousness permits and directs wider relationships to nature, nature becomes increasingly intelligible not only as potential sources of need satisfaction but as specific objects appreciable for their unique and many-sided individuality. Márkus persuasively shows how this is the best way to read Marx’s somewhat opaque comments on the humanization of the senses. Humanization of nature is then read as epistemic access to the relationally-established rich self-sufficiency of nature and natural objects which are not then merely possible material for human use. ³

The last part, ‘Human Essence and History’, returns to and further develops the central categories already on the table. Here Márkus (2014: 58) begins by responding to a-historical renditions of the human essence and shows how what he thinks as the ‘universal’ attribute of the human is both social and ‘a characteristic of some over-arching historical development’. While work, sociality, and consciousness are also essential human determinants, as ineluctable constants, their socially instantiated forms change tremendously. This holds for ‘freedom’ as well, which emerges historically and is determined not as a metaphysical constant but in relation to concrete possibilities for social action (Márkus, 2014: 85). This means that all the central categories of Marx’s philosophical anthropology require for their content sociological research. Thus, under social relations determined by capital, the human directs strategies for satisfying needs (work) intentionally, that is, consciously, and does so both socially and in a larger, enveloping social organization which are in some particulars free, but all four key determinants (work, sociality, consciousness, and freedom) are limited, pale reflections, or alienated articulations of the species’ historically developed essential capacities. Taken together and in their actual social manifestation, they determine the progression of the universal, which is to say, they determine the ‘unity and continuity’ necessary to think a distinctly human history which progresses, under certain conditions, via alienation (Márkus, 2014: 62). In capitalism the universal’s alienation becomes total, but this is not the same as it being absolute because the determination of isolated, dependent, and alienated individuals is, at the same time, a development of both the technical capacities and social ties requisite for the free, intentional, and social direction of further, post-capitalist developments. Márkus stresses that this positive possibility lying in the depths of alienation is in no way a necessary historical outcome, for human history is the product of nothing but human action, and the appropriation of possibilities for more free, intentional, social, and conscious work developed by but unrealizable in capitalism requires the intentional, and organized work of revolution (Márkus, 2014: 79). Only after such a revolution could the human realize its essence in unalienated form.

II The timeliness of the reprinting

Recent global economic crises and subsequent slow recoveries in western capitalist economies have indeed created some room for the re-investigation of Marx’s thought. In economics, politics, sociology, and theoretical anthropology, to name just a few fields of intellectual production, there has recently been renewed attention to Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism. More specifically, there has been a significant flowering of interest in Marx’s philosophical anthropology and the related problems of alienation under conditions of capitalism. ⁴ The oppressive conditions in Eastern Europe that prompted over a generation of dissident thinkers to explore, expand, and critically apply Marx’s humanism by working with, most prominently, the relatively recently accessible Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Hereafter EPM) are, to be sure, significantly different from those in advanced western capitalist countries today. There were also certainly great differences in and between Polish, Yugoslavian, and Hungarian intellectuals’ taking inspiration from the EPM, but Márkus’s work was certainly seminal in the Hungarian context. Today, the ostensible alternatives of historically failed ‘Marxism’ on one side and an immiserating and repeatedly failing capitalism on the other have produced a will to re-work the ground first cultivated by Márkus and other bold, indeed courageous dissident Eastern European Marxists.

With left theoretical and practical activity re-developing its capacities for critique and struggle, it makes sense that there is an increasing willingness to again explore Marx as a productive resource. With Marx we get an account of the human that, at the same time, includes the possibilities that it is alienated from (and thus cannot realize) but which could be realized given different social relations. This provides resources to move beyond the kinds of value-neutral approaches still dominating social analysis, and think in rigorously critical terms the social relations that constrain existing possibilities from actualization. The possible sources of normative critique are thus not only a live issue for contemporary philosophical research, but Marx’s philosophy, in particular his philosophical anthropology, is quite well suited to help satisfy pressing social-analytic needs. If the rallying cries of diverse movements have repeatedly pointed to the existence of other possibilities, even worlds, a philosophical anthropology that can locate these possibilities as part of the ‘human’ might help secure a shared theoretical basis for developing movements. Doing so might indeed provide practical benefits. Even if not directly, recognizing other possibilities rooted in a constrained and constraining system of social organization can indeed, as Márkus (2014: 50) holds, ‘make new social demands on the individuals involved in [thinking] them and thereby make these individuals to cultivate in themselves new psychic capabilities and wants’. For this reason what Márkus (2014: 81) says of Marx’s anthropology could equally be said of his own work:

the theoretical act itself has an intrinsic practical quality…is not simply a particular ‘interpretation of the world’, an explanation of the social and historical life. This conception [the Marxian concept of ‘human essence’] itself, as theory, is part of the historical struggle for the universalization and freedom of man, for the change and transformation of the ‘world’, of the present state of society; it is part of the proletariat’s revolutionary praxis.

There is another aspect of the timeliness of Marxism and Anthropology that requires mention. Unlike a significant number of other Marxist projects that flourished in Eastern Europe shortly after its initial writing in Russia in the 1950s, Márkus’s text is not explicitly political. At first blush this may sound like a contradiction with the previous line of thought. It is not. In a way that immediate political application would fail to achieve, Márkus’s textual fidelity and exegetical approach to discussing the human essence makes his work applicable far beyond the local conditions of its production. In other words, in providing a textually sensitive interpretation of Marx rather than a critical application of Marx to then existing Hungarian conditions, Márkus provided a lasting resource for a much larger set of critical projects. In his careful unpacking of Marx’s notion of human essence as historically developing, Márkus’s work is more than finely exegetical. In showing how development tracks the changing ways humans work with nature to satisfy and, in so doing, produce new needs, ⁵ Márkus develops the theoretical resources to criticize social conditions that constrain precisely this essentially progressive feature of the human essence (Márkus, 2014: 61 n.12). Since his interpretation of Marx conceives human essence as generating wider social needs and capacities, it can be used as the basis for critical application at any historical juncture. If and when the human essence is conditioned by relations that stifle rather than permit the free development of both needs and strategies for satisfying them, and indeed these can be capitalist or ‘actually existing socialist’ relations, then activity and the structures responsible for such stifling can be criticized as alienating what is most essentially human. In this way ‘Alienation…is nothing but the separation and opposition of man’s essence and existence’ (Márkus, 2014: 72). ⁶ One of the greatest strengths of Márkus’s work is that it limits itself to offering the robust frame of a philosophical anthropology, a frame which indeed requires direct social analysis for its content. It can therefore help us think and object to the structures responsible for alienation from the human essence here and today just as well as when the work was initially produced.

III Honneth and Joas’s introduction

This brings me to the more critical part of my reading, which begins with an appraisal of Honneth and Joas’s newly affixed introduction. Honneth and Joas begin appropriately enough by highlighting the intersubjective and historically developing human essence for both Marx and Márkus. While Honneth and Joas conclude their introduction recognizing a historicized essence, they nonetheless operate in their introduction with more than one a-historical category. In this regard, Honneth and Joas (2014: 2) are incorrect in their account of human development as bringing ‘to realisation the possibilities of freedom naturally present in germinal form’. ⁷ One of the distinct advantages of Marx’s philosophical anthropology, one that Márkus is at pains to stress, is that it moves away from metaphysical notions of essence that seek to render the human intelligible by way of germinal seeds or deep underlying powers or possibilities merely waiting for the right conditions to be realized. While it may seem valuable to define the human as itself containing an inherent germ and thereby immutable orientation towards ‘freedom’, doing so is a significant departure from Márkus’s text. In the section ‘Human Essence and History’, Márkus (2014: 85) makes a point of historicizing just where Honneth and Joas attribute an a-historical nature:

In general, freedom is for Marx not some sort of eternal, existentially given metaphysical quality of man; it is not a fixed fact of human existence but a historical capacity and situation which only unfolds, to an ever growing degree, in social development

For Honneth and Joas the ‘germ’ of freedom can only be read as an a-historical, extra-natural postulate, the realization of which requires transcending natural limits. Indeed, they hold as much explicitly: ‘Through the gradual dismantling of instinct-guided behaviour [through work], the human species frees itself from the limits of nature’ (Honneth and Joas, 2014: 2). For Honneth and Joas the human, as distinct from nature, appears after instinctual constraints have been overcome by the disciplining power of work. Indeed, Honneth and Joas hold that ‘in work the human being experiences himself as an agent, a subject of action, who has stepped outside of nature and who follows his own need-dispositions’ (Honneth and Joas, 2014: 3). Marx holds nearly the exact opposite to be the case. Man has a historically developing but no less natural relationship to his desires. Working to satisfy needs does not leave nature behind, but rather progressively determines it. Recognizing as much, Márkus writes:

The historical process of human universalization has a dual character. It appears, on the one side, as the naturalization of man, as the growth of his ‘inorganic body’, the widening of the sphere of natural phenomena and interconnections to which his activity became adapted: his becoming from a limited to an ever more universal natural being. On the other side, this process appears as the humanization of nature. (Márkus, 2014: 28); and

For man, that is, as an object of human consciousness, nature exists only in so far as man enters into a practical relationship with his environment. (Márkus, 2014: 54)

As with ‘freedom’, Honneth and Joas construe ‘nature’ as an a-historical constant. For this reason it is rather misleading to suggest that, for Marx, ‘the human being appropriates his organically possible capacities for action’ (Honneth and Joas, 2014: 2). Capacities for action are historically, not organically possible and appropriable. Indeed when Márkus uses ‘appropriate’ he is sure to signify that that which is appropriated is historically generated. ⁸ Capacities for action are only meaningful when they have been made real possibilities by the historical development of the socially organized and historically developing human-nature relationship.

While the organic constitution of Homo sapiens has traditionally provided a limit to the historical development of natural possibilities, even these limits are being increasingly transgressed by current developments. For Marx, and likewise Márkus, capacities never pass a line of demarcation into the unnatural. On Honneth and Joas’s rendition, however, Marx’s anthropology is natural in a merely biological sense. Further, and in direct opposition to Márkus, Honneth and Joas describe work as nature-transcending. In sum, when these positions are combined with the notion of a germinal freedom, Honneth and Joas can be read as offering an anthropology with a bifurcated nature, teleologically oriented towards realizing freedom as an ontological constant. This position would be ripe for many trans- and post-humanist criticisms. Yet these would be misreadings of Marx, and they are misreadings that Márkus has been careful to avoid. While there are some helpful elements in the introduction, particularly the emphases on intersubjectivity and recognition, at a minimum, Honneth and Joas risk obscuring some central and indeed highly valuable elements of Márkus’s position.

This is clearest when Honneth and Joas misdiagnose what drives Márkus’s critical position. On Honneth and Joas’s reconstruction, critique is rendered possible by a triad of tendencies: the capacities for work, intersubjectivity, and individual consciousness. All three tend to universalization over time. The historical development of productive capacities also broadens human cognitive development, the material practices of work tie producers to each other in increasingly interlocking webs of dependent communities, and consciousness advances because it is increasingly freed from satisfying biological necessities. In making the source of critique universalization, and the ultimate source of universalization human work, Honneth and Joas make work’s trifold tendency towards universality the telos informing their version of critique. Work, it would seem, is essentially fated to such universalization such that conditions precluding an orientation towards this end are criticizable not as engendering alienation from the human essence, but only as non-human. In this way Honneth and Joas exclude alienation from a determination of the human essence. Márkus (2014: 78), however, insists that Marx’s notion of history

excludes a fatalistic predetermination of the total historical process, a determination which would affirm itself over and beyond real human activity…Historical future is not given as the set result of some social causalities or some sort of historical teleology. It becomes actualized only in creative social praxis.

IV Possible limits of Marxism and anthropology

I hope I have sufficiently stressed the inherent plausibility of the argument, the textual-groundedness, nuance, as well as the value of Marxism and Anthropology to ensure that the following comments are read as friendly amendments rather than challenges. I wish to extend the scope of Márkus’s analysis a bit further than is present in his text because I believe the resources for alienation critique can be applied more broadly than, at least for the most part, Márkus explicitly develops. I will then offer this extension as a possible solution to what appears to me to be an ambiguity or perhaps even an unnecessary problem in Márkus’s text. The issue I have in mind is best described as Márkus’s over-emphasis on the alienation of individuals, the flipside of which is an under-theorization of how alienation, even in the early EPM, can be applied to social organizations or the species, humanity as a whole. ⁹ This relative inattention to the broader applicability of Marx’s alienation critique in the EPM stems from Márkus’s reading of Marx’s relationship to Hegel as prompting a focus on analyzing individual alienation. Márkus writes:

Marx treats this problem [of alienation] in his various works from various aspects: primarily from the point of view of the individual in his early works (this holds true first of all for the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which are characterized by a definite attempt to employ the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology reinterpreted in a materialistic manner) and from the point of view of society as a whole in his later writings. (Márkus, 2014: 66)

Yet, Márkus’s understanding that Marx’s relationship to Hegel prompts an individuation of alienation is pushed too far. In the EPM, Marx criticized Hegel’s method of Aufhebung in the Phenomenology as preserving at a higher level what ought to be negated. Marx further explained how he thought Hegel had inappropriately identified consciousness as the motor for the process of such preserving-negation. For Marx, even when Hegel emphasized sensuousness and sociality he did so within a philosophy of consciousness such that alienation was overcome in the fullness of a reflective, self-realizing idea. For Hegel, according to Marx, social alienation is transcended not in the reorganization of material relations, most fundamentally the social reorganization of active relationships with nature, but in the adequacy of socially-mediated self-conceptions. For this reason, Marx significantly departed from Hegel in the EPM and did so by more than merely translating Hegel into materialist categories. The rejection of resolution in consciousness or self-conception motivated Marx to articulate a version of species essence’s alienation that, beyond individuals, included the historically developing social relations that determine human activity. Since for Marx capacities are socially generated, the problem of alienation is a social problem even when its effects are, at times, emphasized from the point of view of the individual. Put simply, part of what Marx used to separate himself from Hegel in the EPM was the conceptualization of alienation as describing not only individuals but social units or productive communities, as well as humanity as a whole.

For this reason, Marx’s alienation of the species essence as early as the EPM can be used to describe individuals, societies, and the human species as a whole. An example taken from our social context may help illustrate. An individual may be constrained from exercising and honing their capacities to cook fine food due to the necessity of selling their labor power and the paucity of both free time and wages. Likewise, a social organization may be incapable of providing sufficient nutrition for all its members despite a community’s technical ability to do so. Finally, humans as a whole may be unable to quit or effectively modify harmful agricultural practices, the effects of which on the environment can constrain rather than promote the possibilities of continued adequate nutrition, despite both the knowledge of this effect and the technical possibility of beginning to transform such practices. ¹¹ There are two salient issues that all three examples share. First, for each, the logic of the capitalist mode of production is an essential determinant of the inability to actualize real, historically developed possibilities, and, second, these constrained possibilities also diminish individual, social, and universal capacities for further, free development in the future. Due to such constraint, the further development of the capacities of the individual, society, and the whole are also diminished. Alienation from the species is, in this light, alienation from the developed and developmental social possibilities of an individual, a society, or the species as a whole.

While Márkus used his Marxian paradigm of production to develop explicit tools for the analysis of social totalities in another work, ¹² my aim here is to extend the philosophical basis of individual-alienation Márkus here discerns in the EPM to social and universal alienation. Since universality of the species is the scope of its productive possibilities and not a static fact, or an unachieved telos, the species’ universality itself undergoes historical development. While not ‘alive’ in the same way as individuals, as Márkus notes, Marx thinks the human species in some manner as having its own life. Under conditions of capitalism, productive activity increasingly produces the life of the species in the service of the social power of capital, which has the further effect of producing the kind of subjects most suited for this process (Marx, 1975: 276). In other words, it is very much in the interest of capitalist economy to employ alienated individuals in the work of expanding its power. Laboring has always been necessary to secure what is required to reproduce life, but alienating labor does so in a manner that uses the objectified universality of the species for purposes other than universal, human development. In this context the ‘life of the species’ is the actual movement of the species’ universality: it is the life or self-development of the universal, and this life is defined by how the social organization of such capacities varyingly constrains or promotes their realization and development. At this level, an account of the species would be an account of the productive possibilities of a social totality or humanity as a whole, and as such would include both capacities and the socially organized constraints on their realization. Since capacities, their social organization, and the manner of their realization cumulatively determine the movement or life of the universal, the species is always in the process of its historical articulation. Further, since alienation describes a stunted or one-sided articulation, this means that the human essence as a whole can itself develop in alienated form.

My central claim is that Márkus has given us the tools to think social and species articulation as also alienated. The species is alienated when its articulation is beyond the collective control of individuals, social units, and social organization as a whole, the activity of which is responsible for just this articulation. The species can also be thought as self-alienating when in its articulation it determines individuals divorced from abilities to direct just such social developments. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin. In this way individual-alienation and species-alienation are conceptually distinguishable, but intimately tied to each other. As was the case with individual-alienation, species- or social-alienation can serve as a basis for critique when the capacities for developing and satisfying needs are constrained from realization and further articulation, and recognizing individual-alienation would, at least implicitly, also entail the existence of the larger, social-alienation. As earlier, individual and the larger, social or universal determination of alienation from the ‘human essence’ signifies the existence of a gap between capacities and the socially mediated real possibilities for realizing them.

This extension of what Márkus appreciates in the EPM resolves a possible problem in Márkus’s text regarding the overcoming of alienation. For Márkus (2014: 72), alienation is: ‘Nothing but the separation and opposition of man’s essence and existence…And transcending alienation means the elimination of this disaccord and conflict between human essence and existence.’ In posing the solution as overcoming the gap between essence and existence, Márkus risks suggesting that the essence is itself distinct from or unsullied by the existence of impoverished, immiserated, and abstract individuals. Against his better lights, Márkus here could be read as thinking the species’ essence as a set of capacities unencumbered by their concrete generation and objectification by social individuals. While the stress on capacities is certainly correct, especially when Marx is so influenced by Hegel, the essence of the species can never be dissociated from its determination even in highly alienated individuals. That is, the historical development of the set of human capacities (the life of the species) produces itself in alienated form when human activity, individually, in groups, and as a whole is also alienating. Holding an essence distinct from existence would risk being subject to some of the criticisms here levelled at Honneth and Joas. In theorizing the solution to alienation largely from the standpoint of the individual, Márkus may have momentarily fallen behind what his interpretation of Marx’s alienation in the EPM made possible. For Marx, the species’ essence can itself be alienated such that the solution to the problem of alienation can only partially and in one way be understood as a unification of existence with essence. Only when the species itself is not produced in alienated form will it be possible for ‘the historical progress of mankind’ to cease being ‘separated from the development of single individuals’ (Márkus, 2014: 72).

Finally, as others objecting to Marx have noted, it is perhaps risky to make the judgment of non-alienated society rest on the realization of universality and freedom in, as Márkus writes, ‘single individuals’. It might well be the case that productive possibilities far exceed that which even the most talented individuals are capable of concretely realizing. In such a case it would be unavoidable that the species’ essence is wider than any individual’s capacities, but this gap need not be taken as evidence of alienation. In short, Márkus seems to be echoing Marx’s German Ideology dream of man in communist society, and in doing so Márkus sets the bar for non-alienation too high. If individuals, social units, and humanity as a whole can take charge of and direct the further articulation of their capacities and strategies for satisfying newly developing needs, this would produce free, social individuals and an unalienated species, without necessarily producing individuals as many-sided as Márkus, at this juncture, suggests is necessary. As Márkus developed elsewhere and stresses in his conclusion, alienation requires this gap, but also requires a loss of control over the direction and further articulation of the species’ essence. There are, to be sure, political implications to accepting as legitimate a reduced scope of conscious self-direction for individuals in the context of their social or species direction. Yet precisely here, the indispensable value of Márkus’s text is that it provides the philosophical anthropology needed to critique just when such conditions alienate individuals from their human essence.