Feuerbach claimed that humans projected qualities and ideas about themselves onto such an imaginary entity. The human essence, according to Feuerbach, is projected onto something not-human, something supernatural: the idea of God. Feuerbach understood alienation as the misrecognition of our own, that is, human’s essence and applied the term in the context of religion. In the Manuscripts, Marx famously adopts the Hegelian term of alienation, which was further developed by Feuerbach. These early philosophical writings of Marx go beyond both philosophy and political economy and invite the reader to a humanist interpretation, since Marx is concerned with the very fundamental question of how society ought to be organised in order to support human thriving. The influence of German Idealism informs great parts of Marx’s idea of human nature and its state under capitalism, namely the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the more materialistic Ludwig Feuerbach. This condition of being human, as we will examine later, is threatened by what Marx referred to as estranged labor. (p.44) It forms a foundation for Marx’s thinking that a true state of being human can only be achieved in a community, going so far as to claim that an existence in social terms is unavoidable. society is the complete unity of man with nature - the true resurrection of nature - the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.“ (p.44)Įven non-communal activities are necessarily social, since „my own existence is social activity“. „ human aspect of nature exists only for social man for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man - as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him - and as the life-element of human reality. Marx, however, is no advocate of the concept of an anthropological humanism for him, human beings have no abstract essence but are instead constituted in an historically grown environment: „just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.“ (p.44) Society’s and man’s relationship is reciprocal: not only is society produced by human beings, Marx also saw that this man-made society in turn has great effect on the human beings which are born into and inhabit it. In doing so, he perceives history as a process of man’s alienation and its necessary abolition man being history’s subject and labor being man’s essence. In his Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx proposes a potent and extensive philosophical analysis of the human being and its situation under a capitalist system. Sources Marx in 1844 and his Humanistic Influences Marx in 1844 and his Humanistic Influences
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