Marx on the Unity of Man

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XXVIII JULY, 1964 No.3 MARX ON THE UNITY OF MAN I. The Discovery of Man A. The Dialectics of Man and Nature 1. The inseparability of man and nature T HE Marxist dialectic aims at the integration of all things in nature into a unitary scheme of endless movement, a process whereby the universe develops its latent potentialities in virtue of an inherent dynamic character.1 In his preoccupation with the dialectics of nature Marx has by no means lost sight of his central concern, which is the nature 1 The thesis of the present paper is that Marx never discovered what man is or why he is one being, although he claimed to have in his possession the first and only key to the real understanding of man. Marx does not reveal the concern with the problems of substance, matter and form, essence and existence, in terms of which a Thomistic solution is proposed to the question of the unity of man. For this reason it is necessary to make inferences, from what Marx actually teaches, and to a certain extent to reconstruct a Marxist theory of man. I have tried to do this in Marx's own terms, but after the attempt I am almost inclined to say that for Marx the unity of man was simply not a problem. What Marx did say about man is presented here and analyzed in the light of the doctrine of St. Thomas. 259 260 JOHN PATRICK REID and cause of man's alienation and the necessary course of social revolution. Not only is man one with the rest of nature in that he is wholly material and has evolved along with the rest of the material universe, according to the laws of the dialectic; but, and this aspect of Marxism is original and distinctive of dialectical materialism, nature has no meaning in isolation from man. For man, nature is nothing other than the environment in which he lives and exercises his properly human faculties; above all, human labor, the transformation of material forces through man's ingenuity and efforts, gives meaning and significance to nature, of which man himself constitutes the highest, most perfect development. Marxism is a thoroughgoing naturalism, a complete identification of man with his physical environment, of human energies with the forces of nature. "The material, sensuously perceptible world to which we belong is the only reality," Engels states as a first principle of "pure materialism ." 2 Marxist naturalism, the ontological equating of man with the physical world, is also a materialism, but a dynamic materialism. This is the first clue in our search for the meaning and definition of man and of human unity. Marx does not flatly deny the existence of spirit nor even in some sense its superiority. But, just as he does not define matter, so he does not define spirit, nor does he tell us clearly what is the relation between them. Of the grossest form of materialism there is hardly a trace in Marx, although Engels does say that "spirit is only the higher product of matter,'; and, more fully: "If the question is raised: what then are thought and consciousness, and whence do they come, it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain, and that man himself is a product of nature, which has been developed in and along with its environment; whence it is selfevident that the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of 2 Ludwig Feuerbach, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works (MESW), II, 364. All references to the writings of Marx and Engels are taken from the authorized English translation of their works published in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Publishing House over the past ten years. MARX ON THE UNITY OF MAN fl61 nature, but are in correspondence with it." 3 This seems clear enough, but Marx does not go so far. The one phrase usually quoted to...