Marx, the Body, and Human Nature

John Fox

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137507983
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Marx, the Body, and Human Nature shows that the body and the broader material world played a far more significant role in Marx's theory than previously recognised. It provides a fresh 'take' on Marx's theory, revealing a much more open, dynamic and unstable conception of the body, the self, and human nature.

1

Introduction: Evading the Body

In The Devil’s Advocate, Morris West wrote of a priest investigating the life of a man many considered a saint in a remote, poverty-stricken region of northern Italy. In the course of that investigation, this priest had one conversation that has long stood out for me. After briefing the local bishop on his work, the priest questioned the bishop’s use of church lands to model new forms of agriculture. The bishop replied that:

You can’t cut a man in two and polish up his soul while you throw his body on the rubbish heap. If the Almighty had designed him that way, he would have made him a biped who carried his soul in a bag around his neck. If reason and revelation mean anything they mean that a man works out his salvation in the body by the use of material things. (West 1959, 97)

However, at least in the West, debates about what makes for a fully or truly human life have long been preoccupied with the soul, or will, or other non-corporeal aspects of the self. And, in those debates, the body has often been neglected in the manner of West’s ‘biped’, with our essential nature treated as somehow detached or distant from our bodies.

This neglect is particularly true of much social policy in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, especially in relation to income support. There debates have long focused on questions of measurement – of the lines above which one is no longer in poverty. Reams of text have been devoted to determining the appropriate level of intervention which, once passed, renders the body a pliant instrument. Just where that line should be drawn remains central to debate, with some protagonists believing some neglect or discomfort – some small denial or cruelty – is necessary to provide a goad towards engaging in paid employment. We remain locked in what Michel Foucault (Dreyfuss and Rabinow 1982, 196–7) considered a ‘conflict of implementations’: a debate in which the founding assumptions are not contested – only the manner or form of actions in response to them.

This book is an endeavour to challenge the founding assumption that our bodies have only an instrumental role in living a full or truly human life. It is an effort to move beyond dualist models which, by treating our humanity as that of the ‘biped’ carrying ‘his soul in a bag’, enables social policy debates to treat our natures as largely independent of our bodies and the balance of the material world.

This book is also a response to the testimony of so many lives that their disadvantage and suffering were not due to any lack of effort or commitment on their part. It reflects their stories and the hurt and humiliation they have suffered. One meeting with a group of refugees is still fresh in my memory. One man, displaying great courtesy, explained to me how much money he received to support his family. He went on to show me the textbook list from the school his children attended and how he could afford to buy the books for only one child. He asked me how he should go about choosing between them. I had no answer for him then (or now).

Through this book I hope to support a better response and to help provide the foundation for policies and practices that take into account something too often and too easily forgotten: the influence of the material or corporeal world. But that is not all. This book also reflects other influences in my life. In particular, it has been shaped and informed by my experience as a ballroom dancer. In dance I have found a sense of joy and fulfilment in my body and in bodily interactions that multiply those pleasures. To dance is to experience one’s humanity as expanded rather than limited by the corporeal. This book, then, draws on a deepening appreciation of the role of the materiality of my own self, and the centrality of that materiality to human expression. I have felt the expansiveness of my self in my body – and its independence and resistance – and seen it in others, too. As these very words suggest, with their distinction between my ‘self’ and my ‘body’, I have also encountered the lack of an adequate language to express those experiences.

I sought, and found, that better language in Marx’s works. While many others have considered the role of the body, as I canvass below, I turned to Marx because of a shared opposition to liberal theory’s influence on Western society (and particularly on social policy). Today, with the return of the same forms of liberalism that Marx contested, with their vision of the self-reliant, ruggedly independent individual and emphasis on ‘austerity’ measures, Marx’s critique of those ideas has a renewed relevance. Marx (1975e, 390) considered our humanity in unambiguously material terms: he saw us as an ‘objective, sensuous [and therefore] ... suffering being’.

I also turned to Marx because he understood how the devaluation of the body is, in no small part, a response to genuine, common, experiences of bodily limitation and the understandable desire to avoid them and, ultimately, the limits of mortality. This desire to avoid or minimise pain – to somehow express its wrongfulness – grounds the long association between the devaluation of the body and religion (and, as Feuerbach pointed out, philosophy that privileges mind over body). Marx drew on the long-standing materialist tradition and its understanding that those belief systems provide the means by which many are able to bear the ‘weight’ of the body (Bordo 2003) and material world. The comfort inspired by these beliefs suggests an explanation for the tenacity with which they are held and the sometimes still terrifying fury which their challenge can provoke. It explains the infamy of prominent materialists such as Epicurus, Lucretius and Spinoza (whose work I discuss in Chapter 2 and 3). Spinoza was described as ‘a freak (monstrum)’ (Klever 1996, 39–40) and known as ‘the destroyer of all established religion and morality’ (Hampshire 2005, 33). Marx shared a similar infamy. The terms on which that transcendence is asserted may not now be as extreme, but a common-sense instrumental characterisation of our bodies remains:

As for us today, at the turn of the twenty-first century ... we congratulate ourselves that we are no longer engaged in a flight from corporeality ... we who are no longer repressed in sensual matters as were [our] benighted grandparents. And yet, what are these but directions for the use of the body: we are not our bodies, but we discipline, manipulate, and sell our bodies in order to get what ‘we’, not our bodies, want. (Howe 2003, 97)

To assert that our natures, as human beings, are founded in our bodies and defined by bodily limitation has been to attract infamy, ridicule or casual dismissal. Our bodies have long been treated as secondary – at most as obstacles to the realisation of our character, and often, especially lately, as mere instruments to that end. In debates about what makes us human and what brings out the best of our humanity, matter – whether in the form of our bodies or the larger world – has not mattered. Marx understood the challenge of making the contrary argument. He understood that:

We would not understand a human language. ... From the one side, such a language would be felt to be begging, imploring and hence humiliating. It could be used only with feelings of shame or debasement. From the other side, it would be received as an impertinence or insanity and so rejected. We are so estranged from our human essence that the direct language of man strikes us as an offence against the dignity of man. (1975d, 276–7; emphasis in original)

Marx understood that the influence of the material world makes a materialist understanding of human nature unattractive to many. However, I have found in Marx’s works not only a more ‘human language’, one that embraces our corporeality, but one that suggests how the resistance to that language might be overcome.

This is not to say that this more ‘human language’ is readily accessible. It became apparent to me only after long and sometimes difficult close readings of Marx’s works. Marx left few detailed expositions about human nature, and most of those references were made in passing while addressing other issues. Moreover, even in those express discussions, I found myself sympathising with Pareto’s (cited in Ollman 1971, 3) complaint that that one could see ‘both birds and mice’ in Marx’s works. I found him repeatedly using terms, such as ‘objective’, ‘capacity’, ‘power’, ‘expression’, ‘realisation’ and ‘becoming’, that sat uneasily in their context. On their face they held one meaning, but their context suggested something else. I found that to discover Marx’s meaning, I had to consider the meanings of those, and other, terms. Reading Marx set me on a genealogical enquiry. This book is the outcome of that search.

The flight from the body

I am not the first to seek a better language with which to consider the influence of the corporeal on human nature or, indeed, the nature of any thing or being. A preoccupation with ‘being’ (ousia in Greek), ‘substance’ (substantia in Latin) or ‘nature’ has proved to be a recurring motif in Western philosophy. From the earliest traces of metaphysics, philosophers have set out to say what reality is and what place matter, or the corporeal, has in it. The pre-Socratic philosophers made it a central theme of their works. They sought to determine what composed the foundation of any being or thing and, in the face of the volatility of matter, considered the relationship between that foundation and change (i.e., whether the foundation of being had to be unchanging).

Since that time, many others have wrestled with these questions. Amongst the ancient Greeks, these included Epicurus, Lucretius, Democritus and Aristotle. The works of later philosophers, such as Bacon and Hobbes, also evidence a keen interest in the influence of matter, reflecting the impact of Newtonian science on efforts to understand the world. Natural and Romantic philosophers such as Goethe, Herder and Schelling equally sought to capture the depth and breadth of its influence.

More recently, phenomenology has emphasised the centrality of the material world, with a writer such as Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1948, 1968) highlighting the central role of the senses in shaping human nature. The manipulation of our corporeality has also been a central concern of many postmodern writers, with Foucault (1990a), for example, concentrating on the invasive intimacies of ‘biopower’. Most recently, post-humanist thinkers have renewed interest in the volatility and influence of the material world. They present matter as ‘a transformative force in itself’ (Tuin and Dophyn 2010, 164): one that is engaged in ‘choreographies of becoming’ in which ‘“matter becomes” rather than ... “matter is”’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 10). They highlight the unpredictable or disruptive effects of matter as ‘life within me’ but ‘so much “itself” that it is independent of the will’ and ‘a threatening force’ (Braidotti 2010, 208).

This recognition of the influence of the corporeal has, however, long been overshadowed by those who assert that it is of little or no significance when it comes to understanding human nature. As long ago as Aristotle’s era, Western philosophy gravitated towards a view that the foundation of being had to be unchanging and thereby dismissed the material world. Plato presented the long influential identification of being with ‘forms’, or ‘ideas’, and classified the corporeal as a significant, but passing, burden upon that foundation. Gnostic and Stoic thought amplified this emphasis and presented the corporeal as deficient, even evil, and demanding subordination. These tendencies were amplified by Christian thought, perhaps most famously represented by St Augustine, who treated the flesh as the source of enslavement and shame. Throughout this perspective, the foundation of human being has been located in the non-corporeal, be that called the soul or some aspect of consciousness such as reason or will. More recently, Enlightenment philosophers, such as Kant, maintained this emphasis. Indeed, efforts to then recognise the influence of the corporeal produced the idealist philosophy of Fichte and Hegel and an endeavour to reduce the corporeal to the terms of the non-corporeal.

The preference for the non-corporeal aspect of our humanity has also lent its influence to postmodernist thought. This book is, in part, intended as a corrective to the manner in which too many within that school of thought have neglected the centrality of the corporeal. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble exemplifies this difficulty, with her emphasis upon performativity and treatment of the human body as the passive and completely plastic means for the staging of those performances.¹ Whilst much attention has been given to embodiment and its variations in postmodern literature, too often, the effect has been to treat the body as so plastic as to effectively erase it. As Fracchia (2005, 57) emphasised in his review of the literature, they have ‘[tended] to dissolve the materiality of the body’.

This preference for the non-corporeal gives insufficient recognition to the ‘weight’ of the body, to borrow Bordo’s (2003) expression. It fails to account for the manner in which the corporeal both limits and enables all our actions in this world. Moreover, it is hardly representative of human experience. In privileging the dominated body and disciplined material world, this perspective reflects the typically white, masculine, ‘able-bodied’, bourgeois experience of the body as an instrument or tool, and the material world as a thing to be dominated and used. It does not reflect the lives of those who experience the corporeal as far more troubling. Many women have presented a different sense of the corporeal and of the self. Most women, from a young age, are regularly reminded of the assertiveness of their body, and the need for its maintenance and care. They experience a life in which the cycles of fertility assert themselves and regularly (absent intervention) contravene the imagined barrier of mind and matter, non-corporeal and corporeal, of dominator and dominated. Feminist writers, such as Bordo (2003), Grosz (1994), Martin (2001) and Shildrick (1997), present women’s experience of a much more resistant, ‘leaky’ body. Similarly, those with different corporeal abilities (‘disabilities’) and different states of health do not experience the ease of corporeal action that is assumed in this model. Further, it does not reflect the lives of those who labour directly with the material world, such as factory workers, who bear the mark of its resistance in their bodies, as testified by writers such as Ehrenreich (2002), Shipler (2004), Shulman (2005), Toynbee (2003) and Wynhausen (2005). To privilege the experience of the domesticated body is, moreover, a myth of eternal youth – a myth that is ultimately, inevitably betrayed by the inescapable and universal ageing of the body.

The treatment of the body and material world as dominated, or requiring domination, retains its place of privilege today. In particular, as indicated above, it frames and limits the terms of social policy, and tends to render that policy an instrument of oppression instead of relief. With limited exceptions, particularly those within the Marxist, feminist and post-humanist traditions, we have not been provided with an adequate way in which to treat the material world as an essential part of being human without still, to some important degree, awarding greater value to the non-corporeal. We have not fully confronted the uncertainties and anxieties and pains that follow from the unstable, volatile character of the material world, nor its influence on what we commonly treat as the non-corporeal. We have not abandoned the flight from our limitations, from their pain and promise.

The Western tradition has long treated the corporeal as having no influence on being (as absent) or as having inappropriate, even contaminating, influence (and so treated as wrongful and with hostility – as something to be subdued and excluded). These characterisations have persisted such that, in the ordinary course of our lives, we have taught ourselves to ignore our bodies. As Shildrick (1997, 168) has pointed out, we have become, too often, deaf to its prompts: so much so that ‘the body is scarcely experienced ... at all’. However, when present:

the body is experienced as alien. ... It is ‘fastened and glued’ to me, ‘nailed’ and ‘riveted’ to me ... the body is experienced as confinement and limitation: a ‘prison’, a ‘swamp’, a ‘cage’, a ‘fog’ ... from which the soul, will, or mind struggles to escape. (Bordo 2003, 194)

It is a view of the body expressed in some of the oldest and most celebrated works in the Western philosophical tradition and remains a defining feature in our time:

[W]e [don’t] need to delve particularly deeply ... to recognize that our culture ... has a profoundly somatophobic streak. The dualism of Western philosophical thinking is almost always hierarchical, valuing the mind (or soul) above the body, despising the body as something wholly other, as confining, as disruptive, as something we must struggle against and win control over. We are not our bodies, but we make use of these unreliable and intractable instruments, or flee their influence so that we can realize our true nature as intellectual or spiritual beings. (Howe 2003, 97)

Defining natures

One key axis on which this treatment has turned, enabling us to flee our bodies and to see this flight as a celebration – rather than a denial – of our very being, has been the tradition of considering particular beings in terms of a feature that provided that being with its permanent, ongoing character, notwithstanding observable changes in its properties (Robinson 2004, 3). Until the seventeenth century, the idea of ‘substance’ played an influential role in this debate (and provided the tradition of argument about human nature from which Marx subsequently drew). As one of the greatest philosophers of that time, John Locke, put it, ‘substance’ is:

the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities, we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist ... without something to support them, we call that support substantia, which ... is in plain English, standing under or upholding. (cited in Robinson 2004, 12)

‘Substance’ assumes the existence of some quality that is separate to – and unaffected by – other, passing observable qualities. Spinoza (2002b, 217) defined it as:

that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Evading the Body
• 2  Early Influences: Pain and Promise
• 3  Spinozas Revolution
• 4  Hegel: Wrestling with Desire
• 5  Feuerbach: Embracing Limitation
• 6  Marxs Objective Being
• 7  Marxs Species Being
• 8  Marx and Species Consciousness
• 9  The Promise of the Body
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index