2 - Pars Naturae

Summary

The relation of Marx to Spinoza is articulated around a central thesis that is repeated several times in the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘Man lives from nature’, ‘man is a part of nature’, states the first manuscript, while the third is more precise: ‘an objective being … creates and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, because it is fundamentally nature’; ‘man is directly a natural being’. If the determination of man as a natural being can be attributed to Feuerbach, then the idea of humanity as part of nature can be considered to come from Spinoza. This thesis, central to Spinozism in that it signifies the insertion of humanity within the general and common order of nature, thereby ruining humanity's immediate conception of itself as a ‘kingdom within a kingdom’, is equally central to Marx, and not just to his early writings but as a thesis that is returned to in his later works. Indeed, he returns to the notion in one of his very last writings, ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner's “Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie”’, ‘the last and most lovely text’ according to Althusser, where he writes: ‘[human beings] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., that is not by “finding themselves” in a relationship, but actively behaving, availing themselves of certain things of the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their needs. (They start, then, with production.)’ In this passage, arguing against ‘the natural tendency of a German Professor of Economics’ to imagine that the primary relation of man to nature is a theoretical relationship of knowledge and contemplation, Marx insists that the original relationship of human beings to nature is not an external relationship of knowledge but rather a relationship of implication characteristic of a natural being which, insofar as it has needs, begins by being affected by nature and other natural beings. Affects and passivity are thus primary; they engender human activity and a practical relation with nature which is a reaction and response to this original affection.