Zhong Minghua and Lin Zhao: Marx's Discovery of Man and His Transcendence of the Young Hegelians
Changing the world begins above all with discovering the world, and the discovery of the "true human" became the focal point of discussion for a group of radical youths known as the Young Hegelians. Feuerbach, Stirner, and Marx—three students of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin and faithful adherents of Hegelian philosophy—raised questions about humanity that sparked a theoretical war eclipsing even the French Revolution. (In describing the history of the Young Hegelians, Marx once said: "It was a revolution besides which the French Revolution was child’s play; it was a world struggle besides which the struggles of the Diadochi [1] appeared insignificant.") Through this debate, Hegelianism reached its climax and subsequent termination, and the new world-view of historical materialism emerged from the chaos. During this struggle, they all at some point were called, or called themselves, materialists, while accusing their opponents of being idealists. Who, in the end, was the true materialist? Who, as they claimed, discovered the actual human being? Reviewing the debate between Marx and the Young Hegelians helps us understand the emergence of historical materialism and its essential significance.
I. Feuerbach’s Humanistic Reduction of Religion
Among the three, Feuerbach was the eldest and the first to achieve fame. Shortly after graduating with his doctorate in 1828, he was permanently barred from university teaching for an anonymous thesis that offended religious dogma; however, this earned him a towering reputation among intellectual youth. By the time The Essence of Christianity was published in 1841, the rural recluse Feuerbach had become the undisputed spiritual leader of the Young Hegelians. In this book, he performed the most thorough reduction of the idealistic nature of religious theology, demonstrating a critical force even more radical than that of Strauss [2] or Bauer [3]. In his view, Strauss and Bauer had only criticized the myths of Jesus or biblical dogma, whereas he himself "treated Christianity in general—that is, the Christian religion—as the object of criticism, and as a necessary consequence, merely treated Christian philosophy or theology as the object of criticism." [11] That is to say, Feuerbach's aim was not to criticize a specific part of the Christian belief system, but to subject religion in general and the theological foundations of all religion to critique.
Feuerbach once summarized his own thought thus: "My first thought was God, my second was Reason, my third and last was Man. The subject of God is Reason, while the subject of Reason is Man." [12] This aptly demonstrates the achievement of Feuerbach’s philosophy: reducing the secret of religion (theology) to humanistic truth. What is the secret of religion? Feuerbach stated: "The secret of theology is anthropology"; "Man objectifies his own essence and then again makes himself an object to this objectified essence, which has been transformed into a subject, a legal person. This is the secret of religion." [13] Feuerbach successfully proved that all qualities attributed to God are, in fact, attributes of humanity itself. For example, God is considered to possess supreme reason, supreme love, and supreme freedom—but are not reason, love, and freedom of the will the very essence of humanity? As long as we examine humanity non-religiously and materialistically, we find that these qualities are ones humans cannot violate, because ultimately, the capacity for love or rational thought is innate. Humans sense the beauty of these capacities when exercising them and thus long to possess them, subsequently regarding them as the most desirable ends. The reason, love, and freedom of every individual are finite, yet humans can imagine an infinite reason, love, and freedom that exceeds their own limits. Why is this so? Because humans naturally possess consciousness—specifically, "species-consciousness" [4] (Gattungsbewusstsein)—and it is by virtue of this capacity for species-consciousness that humans are fundamentally distinguished from animals. A caterpillar does not feel frustrated that it spends its whole life on a single leaf, but humans are always dissatisfied with a finite life and seek to transform it, because humans are capable of conceiving and imagining a complete and perfect state of existence. The caterpillar only deals with specific individuals, whereas humans, in dealing with individuals, also deal with the infinite whole. In other words, "man has a double life"; he can treat his own species, his own essence, as an object. [14] As soon as humans think or speak, they are dealing with their own essence and exercising species-capacities.
The secret of religion arises from this: man objectifies his essence. Moreover, a more peculiar thing happens: this objectified human essence is endowed with personality; what were originally mere attributes become the Subject, the Supreme Being called "God." We have no way of investigating how all this first occurred, but throughout the long history of humanity, the fact that God is a collection of human essences has been buried deeper and deeper and increasingly forgotten. This phenomenon is "alienation" (Entfremdung); the result of alienation is that God accumulates more and more powerful capacities and beautiful attributes, while man, in contrast, becomes increasingly passive, petty, ugly, and void. In short, "in order to enrich God, man must become poor; in order for God to be everything, man must become nothing." [15] Man has deposited everything that originally belonged to him into the hands of God. The strongest proof of this is that all images of God are intensified human images—images of a "superman" [5]. Has anyone ever seen a god whose nature contradicted human nature? Or a god imagined in the image of an animal? Therefore, Feuerbach said: "Consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man; knowledge of God is the self-knowledge of man. You can know the man from his God, and conversely, you can know his God from the man; the two are one and the same." [16]
The mystical veil of religion, worn for millennia, was ruthlessly stripped away; man no longer needed to fear his own weakness. Feuerbach called his philosophy "pathological" or "physiological"; as a physician, he prescribed a saving remedy for humanity in the name of the "philosophy of the future": "To realize and humanize God is to say: to transform theology into anthropology, to dissolve theology into anthropology." [17] It is not difficult to imagine the enthusiastic sensation this materialist humanistic remedy would cause. In his satirical poem The Triumph of Faith, the younger Engels described Feuerbach as a "stately giant" and a "terrible knight" who "is himself equivalent to a whole troop of atheists," "gliding silently across the earthly sky like a soul-shaking meteor hurled by evil forces." [18] Even Strauss, an elder in the field of atheism who engaged in polemics with Feuerbach, admitted: "Now, and perhaps for some time to come, the entire world of learning belongs to him. His theory is the truth of this era." [19] Feuerbach himself was not modest; he proudly declared: "You can only reach truth and freedom through a 'stream of fire' (Feuerbach, literally meaning a stream of fire); there is no other way. Feuerbach is the purgatory of our time." (It has now been confirmed that this was not said by Marx, but by Feuerbach himself.) [20]
II. Stirner’s Re-reduction of Humanism
The Essence of Christianity excited the revolutionary intellectual youth of the time, who "all became Feuerbachians at once" (in Engels' words). Among the crowd discussing it so heatedly was a secondary school teacher who was no longer young yet remained obscure: Max Stirner. According to the memories of those in his circle, in the clamorous Hippel’s Weinstube [6], the somewhat dull Stirner would suddenly talk volubly when discussing Feuerbach. [21] Stirner and Feuerbach had both spent time at the University of Berlin and the University of Erlangen in quick succession, though they did not know each other. Yet Stirner's subsequent lethal critique of Feuerbach would bind their two names tightly together in the history of thought. The result of this critique was that, on the road to materialism, Stirner took the lead without hesitation.
Stirner astutely discovered that after Feuerbach "dissolved theology into anthropology," he became stagnant; the step he took from theology toward materialism was not nearly as large as he and his supporters imagined. Feuerbach said that the essence of God is man, returning all previously divine qualities to humanity, yet he then dressed humanity in the robes of God—that is, he created a God-like Humanity. This anthropological reversal of theology was, in reality, a linguistic trick, nothing more than taking the predicates previously applied to God and applying them to Man. Formerly, God was rational, benevolent, and holy; now, Man was rational, benevolent, and holy. For the actual individual, their lowly and petty state of powerlessness remained unchanged. Stirner hit the mark: "Man has killed God in order to become 'the sole God on high'"; "Ludwig [7] is dead, but the King remains." [22] The King does not die.
For Feuerbach, essentialism was the insurmountable boundary of his exploration of materialism. He had correctly pointed out that God "is the attributes, the qualities, the determinations, the general determinations," but he then emphasized that "the negation of the subject by no means necessarily entails the negation of the predicate itself," because "predicates possess their own independent significance." [23] In other words, God as an imaginary subject could be discarded, but the qualities of God could not be discarded because they also constituted the fundamental essence of what it means to be human.
Those predicates and the qualities they expressed possessed a noble, unalienable, and precious value. In the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach felt aggrieved at being accused of atheism, saying: "I have merely rescued Christianity from the fraud and trickery of theological contradictions, yet for this, I have committed the great sin of desecrating the holy"; "I have brought theology down to anthropology, which is rather to say I have raised anthropology up to theology." [24] The fundamental reason Feuerbach gave in his own defense was: "I have never said that the word of God is nothingness." [25] This defense precisely reflected the fundamental difference between him and Stirner. Stirner pointed out that what truly rules over man is nothing other than words—words as ideas. Ideas, like spooks [8], possess man, control man, drive man, and negate man. Now Feuerbach had simply replaced the idea of God with the idea of Man, and even publicly admitted that the enslavement by the idea of Man was legitimate—this was something Stirner could not tolerate under any circumstances. He rose to accuse: "Reverence for Man is merely a transformed form of reverence for God. Our atheists are pious people." [26] Although Feuerbach revealed that the essence of religion is Man, Stirner understood that such an essentialist Man was, in substance, still religious.
In Stirner’s view, the species-essence of man is unreal; such essences can never be used to describe true individuals. Sacred human essences like universal love, absolute justice, and supreme wisdom cannot be found in any actual individual. Thus, Stirner questioned Feuerbach: when he used the predicates of God to define the essence of Man, it would lead to a cleavage between the essential human and the non-essential human, between the ideal human and the real human, and subsequently create a moral cleavage between the "ought" and the "is." In this state of cleavage, the living, breathing individual in reality must necessarily become something substandard, something that fails to meet the criteria—and consequently becomes something worthless, unreal, and something that must be discarded. Stirner provided a powerful example to demonstrate the tyranny of this essentialism in reality: "For thousands of years, have not the prisons been filled with those considered not to conform to 'human essence'—for instance, those we call 'barbarians'?" [27] What is "true human nature"? Stirner would never ask such a question, because all commonalities are unreal, and the pursuit of universality inevitably leads to tyranny over the individual. Stirner wanted to reduce humanism to the individual in reality. The question "What is man?" had already become "Who is man?" and the answer was: I am the Unique One (Der Einzige), "I am my own species." [28] Stirner moved from anti-essentialism to extreme individualism. He repeatedly emphasized that the only real human can only be each concrete, independent individual in reality. To maintain individual freedom, they cannot be ruled by the state, cannot be restricted by law or morality, cannot submit to any slavery or oppression, and will not bow or sacrifice themselves to any power. They have only one identity: the Unique One (Ego); only this "I" as the "Unique One" is the truly "free man."
"My concern is neither the Divine nor the Human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely my own; and it is not a general concern, but is unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!" [29]
III. Marx’s Discovery of the Real Individual and His Transcendence of the Young Hegelians
Although Marx never publicly acknowledged Stirner’s influence on him, he made an obscure reference in the Theses on Feuerbach, written after reading The Unique and Its Property: "In contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism." [29]
Feuerbach’s materialist tendency, which emphasized sensualism and empiricism, had once earned great admiration from Marx, Engels, Hess, and others; however, his materialist mask was now ruthlessly stripped away by Stirner. In the third issue of Wigand’s Quarterly (1845), an anonymous essay titled "Stirner’s Critics" appeared, in which Stirner struck back at his detractors. Regarding Feuerbach, he commented: Feuerbach is certainly no materialist, for while he believes himself to be speaking of real men, he is actually miles wide of the mark. Nor is he an idealist, for while he speaks incessantly of the essence and idea of man, he actually believes himself to be speaking of the "sensuous human essence." Therefore, it is quite fitting that he declares himself neither an idealist nor a materialist. As for Stirner himself? Speaking in the third person, he noted: Stirner does not call himself a materialist either, but in Stirner’s exposition, he is a materialist wearing the clothes of an idealist. [30] To see how much Stirner’s commentary influenced Marx, one need only look at the subtitle of the famous first chapter, "Feuerbach," in The German Ideology: "The Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks." However, Marx was by no means satisfied with stopping at Stirner’s conclusions, nor did he believe that Stirner had attained the height of materialism. In his view, Stirner had gone astray on the path toward materialism and remained a "halfway" materialist. What Marx intended to accomplish was to discover the real human being through a truly materialist method, thereby consigning Stirner and the objects of his criticism alike to the dustbin of "idealism" and "German ideology." [9]
- The Abstract "Unique One." Stirner acutely discovered the illusory nature of essentialism and humanism, yet he turned toward the opposite extreme, taking the solitary individual—unfettered by any social relations, unrestrained by any moral concepts, and capable of wielding all power—as the real human being. Marx soon discovered the illusory nature of this "Unique One" [10] with equal acuity, because the matchless, unique individual described by Stirner simply cannot be found in reality. Just as universal human nature is an imaginary phantom, an individual standing in isolation from the world is an abstract fiction. Marx stated bluntly: "This Stirnerian 'I' is not a 'corporeal individual,' but a category constructed according to the Hegelian method, supported by apposition." [31] Marx saw clearly that although Stirner opposed his teacher Hegel for regarding real individuals as means for the self-realization of the Absolute Spirit, he remained a thoroughgoing Hegelian. His greatest modification of Hegelian philosophy was the substantialization of the Absolute Spirit into the Unique One; its abstractness was not a bit less than the assumptions about human nature enshrined as sacred canons by humanism and liberalism.
Stirner attempted to defend and preserve the absolute status of individuality within universal human nature, treating "individuality" (Eigenheit, which can be translated as "ownness" or "self-possession") and "property" (Eigentum) as one and the same. But Marx discovered this was merely a word game; the fact is that "I have private property only in so far as I have something saleable, while my own particularity is a thing that cannot be sold at all." [32] Marx already viewed property as a social concept, a universal phenomenon occurring within dynamic social relations, whereas Stirner remained at a static level of thinking about property, which is why he believed every Ego was wealthy. When Stirner reduced all relations between the Unique One and other things to relations of ownership, he also took individuality (self-ownership) as a self-evident theoretical fulcrum. Marx, however, discovered that individuality is by no means primary; it is formed in the process of an individual’s intercourse [11] with their material environment. These relations of intercourse include friendship, love, profession, politics, and so on; together, they constitute a person's individuality. If these relations are stripped away, so-called individuality becomes nothing more than a hollow, void concept. This is precisely what Stirner did. Familiar with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the master-slave dialectic, he transformed all relations into master-slave relations within consciousness: either I possess you, or you dominate me—it's one or the other. Furthermore, the establishment or reversal of the master-slave relationship need only be completed within consciousness. Marx commented on this: "As long as he knows how to possess himself, he is 'his own' 'at all times and in all circumstances.' Particularity here, therefore, has a hypothetical character; it depends on his understanding, on how he understands the slave's sense of right and wrong." [33] Stirner’s Unique One demands control over its completely arbitrary and exclusive property or interests. Such a Unique One totally ignores all other interests and certainly will not acknowledge any universal interest. However, Stirner lacked an understanding of the process by which property and interests are produced and realized. In real history, especially under the social conditions of modern capitalism, all interests are produced through mutual intercourse and realized through the constant gambit between universal interests and individual interests. Whether you are subjectively egoistic or altruistic, you cannot change the fact that you must engage in mutual intercourse with others. Under these circumstances, further incessant arguing for and propagating egoism is actually meaningless. For example, is a mother’s care for her child selflessly born of love for the child, or egoistically aimed at satisfying her own maternal instinct? Such a dispute will never reach a conclusion, nor will it change the fact that mothers always care for their children. In other words, it does nothing more than create one more theory for "interpreting the world." For Marx, a person like the Unique One—who can transform all connections with me into relations "for me," and who finds self-satisfaction and self-enjoyment within these "for-me" relations—simply cannot be found in reality. It can only be a fabricated idol for those fond of Ah Q-style [12] fantasies to worship. Marx had already stood upon a theoretical platform that no member of the Young Hegelians had reached. Looking back from this platform, which is called historical materialism, Stirner’s so-called The Unique and Its Property was merely another myth of the imagination of human nature, concocted by an idealist philosopher.
- Real Individuals. To Marx, whether it was Feuerbach seeking real human nature in the human "species," or Stirner seeking it in the independent Unique One, their descriptions of man were extremely crude. Feuerbach emphasized "man's relation to man" but lacked the ability to analyze these relations. Stirner opposed the oppression of the real individual by interpersonal relations but simply discarded them without dissection. Marx’s approach was entirely different. He acknowledged that oppressive social relations are manifestations of human alienation, yet he still maintained that the real individual can only be found within social relations. For the facts are these: "definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations." Real individuals are "active, engaged in material production, and hence manifesting themselves as active under definite material limits, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will." [34]
The concept of the "species," which had been abandoned by Stirner, was rediscovered by Marx. However, this "species" was not Feuerbach’s mathematical summation, but a synthesis of various organic and complex social relations. This reconstructed human essence, in Marx’s famous phrase, is: "the human essence is the ensemble of the social relations." Each social relation indicates a person's relationship with another "other," and presents itself as an attribute of the person. Social relations are not a negation of the self; on the contrary, they are the constituent elements of the real self. These relations cannot be simply reduced to egoistic relations of ownership as Stirner attempted. For example, "worker" indicates a person's professional nature, behind which lies the congealing of his economic relationship with the capitalist. The capitalist uses the worker to make money for him, while the worker uses the capitalist to pay him wages. While these two types of "utilization" can theoretically be viewed as equivalent master-slave relations, in reality, for the people actually in this relationship, the disparity is as vast as the heavens and the earth.
Stirner emphasized that all altruistic behavior could be explained by egoism, but in the objective world, there is no such thing as an absolutely egoistic or absolutely altruistic person, nor can the individual and society, or personal interest and universal interest, be resolutely separated in practice. People live in society and produce products and property through labor to maintain their lives. Labor necessarily includes stages such as the division of labor and exchange, which in turn cause people to form close social relations. This series of phenomena is inseparable and objectively exists in reality. All descriptions of man must follow this fact; as Marx said, they "are not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination." [35] It goes without saying that real individuals are never isolated from the world; they are born subject to various economic, political, and moral relations. These relations, of course, appear in the human mind in the form of ideas, but they cannot be changed by a mere brainstorm or a revolution of the soul. Stirner and other Young Hegelian thinkers were keen on focusing on the phenomena of alienation in the religious, political, and moral spheres, but they never understood that alienation in the political and ideological spheres is actually merely the result and manifestation of the alienation of economic relations.
Stirner was dissatisfied with the a priori essence set for man by humanism and emphasized that the individual is a "creative nothing." Marx inherited this theory of creativity but repeatedly pointed out that human creation and production are carried out under definite historical conditions. The history of mankind is the history of self-production, and "men have a history because they must produce their life, and because they must do so moreover in a certain way." [36] By "a certain way," Marx indicates that real individuals are always historical and concrete (Dasein). They must inherit the state of the productive forces and living conditions in which they find themselves, because "a certain mode of production or a certain industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or a certain social stage." [37] To speak empty words about human creativity while setting aside these "certain" existing conditions is still to engage in metaphysical philosophical reflection, rather than becoming a "historical science" that attends to reality. The reason Marx confidently mocked Germany for "never having had a historian" and claimed to know "historical science" was that he already possessed an interest and ability in political economy that his Young Hegelian friends lacked.
- Free Humanity. Stirner reached the height of the existential philosophy of the "will to power" even earlier than Nietzsche. He pointed out that freedom exists only in my every action of seizing ownership, while the freedom envisioned by liberals and communists is actually a manifestation of "unfreedom." Liberalism regards freedom as a right that ought to be granted, but granted freedom is fundamentally an illusion because a "right" is nothing more than the manifestation of "power." Communism looks forward to a free social condition and calls on people to struggle for this goal, yet such freedom—as an ideal—becomes a monarch demanding the sacrifice of real individuals. After Stirner had struck down all concepts of rights (Idee) and ideals (Ideal), Marx found himself in a very awkward and difficult position if he still wished to achieve a breakthrough in the theory of freedom.
Dissatisfaction with the lack of real freedom was something Marx, Stirner, and all the Young Hegelians shared; however, they differed immensely in their understanding of how this state of unfreedom was caused and how it might be changed. Marx discovered that the common ailment among Stirner and his peers lay in the belief that the true shackles of humanity exist only in the mind (that man is a slave to ideas), and that the key to breaking these shackles lay in completing a spiritual revolution that would burst through this web of concepts. Marx commented on this: "Because the holy is something alien, everything alien is transformed into something holy; and because every holy thing is a shackle, a fetter, all shackles and fetters are transformed into something holy. From this, Saint Sancho [referring to Stirner] draws the conclusion that for him, everything alien has become a semblance, an idea, and his method of liberating himself from this idea is simple: he protests against it and declares that he does not have this idea." [42] This lengthy critique can be simplified into two famous instances of mockery found in The German Ideology. One is the example from the preface: a "valiant fellow" [13] imagined that people were drowned in water only because they were possessed by the "idea of gravity"; if they were to knock this notion out of their heads, they would be sublimely safe against every danger of water. [43] The other is the image of Stirner frequently depicted in the "Saint Max" chapter: a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Marx stated: "They are only fighting against 'phrases'. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world." [44]
Marx remained committed to the communist ideal of freedom, but after grasping the weapon of historical materialism, he was able to parry Stirner's attacks. First, through actual historical investigation, Marx demonstrated that servitude and oppression do not originate in consciousness, but are the results of real social and economic relations. Consequently, the impetus and goal of revolution do not come from the spirit, but from reality. Marx stripped away the Utopian character inherent in previous communist theories: "In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things." [45] For Marx, communism is not an idea or an ideal, nor is it a fantasy of the "beyond" [14] in our minds; rather, it is the process of transformation actually occurring within the real world. Though communist freedom has not yet been achieved, it can be guaranteed because it does not rely on the powerless "ought" [15] of moral theory, but is based on the iron-clad determinacy of the laws of social development derived through the analysis of political economy. Second, under the condition of communism, the free individual is realized through a free humanity as a whole; "humanity" or "society" is no longer a negation of or a threat to the individual. Marx had already shown that the conflict between the individual and society was actually caused by the individual's inability to control his conditions of labor; because he lacks the means of production, he loses the fruits of his labor. The only way to resolve this conflict is to enable the human being to comprehensively appropriate his conditions of labor. Communism will achieve this by developing the productive forces and subsequently changing the relations of production. Thus, Marx wrote: "Communists do not preach morality at all... they do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as self-sacrifice, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want... to do away with the 'private individual' for the sake of the 'general', self-sacrificing man." [46] Instead, the task lies in revealing the material roots of this antagonism; with the disappearance of the material roots, the antagonism naturally vanishes. As for what a society that has eliminated this antagonism would look like, it is clear to all: a place where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.