Marx and Spinoza: the anthropological question

[ Abstract]

In his Thesis VI, Marx criticises the Feuerbach's conception of Man, whose essence, abstracted from any historical process and detached from its very reality , which consists in the ensemble of the social relations, is seen as given and inherent in each single individual.    

Written in the Spring of 1845, the Theses on Feurbach come a few months before the German Ideology, where Marx takes definitively leave from the Feurbach's essentialism, and from the same anthropological problem, which is identified with it.

Any attempt to fix a general definition of Man's nature is doomed to be empty. What Man is, depends on the objective processes of history, which  provide a different response, each time in accord with the particular phase it is going through.

The consequences of this turn are relevant. They have been emphasized as the  abandon of the humanistic stance of Marx's youth, in favor of the scientific conception of his mature works.

But what about that world of ideas, feelings, scopes and expectations, which, in Lukacs' words (1), constitutes the "consciousness" ?

The term "consciousness" has two main occurrences, in Marxism: class consciousness and ideological consciousness. Both are standpoints for the theory, and the way it accounts for the cognitive and practical aspects of social  and individual life.

That "consciousness" could be a problem in a perspective where the dialectic between the development of the productive forces and the social relations of production plays the  fundamental role, is firstly shown by Engels, who, in the years in which Marxism was becoming a doctrine after Marx's death, felt the necessity to take a stand against the views that tended to reduce  the consciousness to a mere reflection of the economic structure  (2).

Rather than a mere reflection, consciousness is a a complex territory, where the thoughts and feelings that human beings actually have of their own existence (Dasein), Lukacs says, are quite a different matter from the thoughts and feelings which they would have in a particular objective situation, if, like in class consciousness as Lukacs defines it, they were able to have thoughts and feeling appropriate to that situation.

Seen in relation to the society as a whole, the former is unable to get the driving forces of history, while, at the same time, it allows them to achieve their goals, though in a way that is unaware and unintended.

In the end, notwithstanding his deeper view into the subject, to Lukacs the living substance of ideas, feelings, scopes, expectations, of which our concrete consciousnesses are made, is but pliable material, without any anthropological solidity, always apt to be fashioned by the driving forces of history: it lies at a significant distance from the transcendental standard of perfection provided by the class consciousness, and it is judged by that; its own motivations are irrelevant, its own passions misleading, its same existence just a means to allow the objective course of history to carry out its "mission".

This writing intends to inquiry into this kind of problems and tries to show how a reference to Spinoza's thought (considered beyond the current political use of it, which is nowadays mostly linked to Hardt-Negri interpretations and Biopolitics) , as providing a not-essentialist definition of the anthropological question, could be profitable and desirable for an effective coming to terms with them.

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(1) See the essay Class Consciousness, in History and Class Consciousness
(2) See Engels. Letter to J. Bloch, London., September 21, 1890