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Thus, Marx appears to say that human nature is no more than what is made by the "social relations". Norman Geras's Marx and Human Nature (1983), however, offers an argument against this position. [3] In outline, Geras shows that, while the social relations are held to "determine" the nature of people, they are not the only such determinant.
Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend is a 1983 book by the political theorist Norman Geras, in which the author discusses the philosopher Karl Marx's theory of human nature with reference to Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach.
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves.Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.
The concept of human nature is the belief that all human individuals share some common features. [141] In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes his position on human nature as a unity of naturalism and humanism. [142] Naturalism is the view that Man is part of the system of nature. [142]
Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen, human nature]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single ...
For Marx, the human nature – Gattungswesen, or species-being – exists as a function of human labour. [ 231 ] [ 232 ] [ 234 ] Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world. [ 235 ]
Marx comments that while Hegel talks as though human nature is only one attribute of self-consciousness, in reality self-consciousness is only one attribute of human nature. [64] Hegel believes that man can be equated with self-consciousness, since self-consciousness has only itself for an object. [63]
First, it argues that humanity’s separation from nature is not inherent to the human condition, but rather that humanity is a part of nature; furthermore, human agency in physically reorganizing nature is part of a long historical process, whereby the physical material of nature is incorporated into human systems of value through labour ...