Karl Marx: A Biography

KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

Marx devoted most of the rest of this section to drawing a picture of
unalienated man, man whom he called 'total' and 'multi-sided'. One
should not, he said, have too narrow an idea about what the supersession
of private property would achieve: just as the state of alienation totally
vitiated all human faculties, so the supersession of this alienation would
be a total liberation. It would not be limited to the enjoyment or pos-
session of material objects. All human faculties - Marx listed seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring,
acting, loving - would, in their different ways, become means of appropri-
ating reality. This was difficult for alienated man to imagine, since private
property had made men so stupid that they could only imagine an object
to be theirs when they actually used it and even then it was only employed
as a means of sustaining life which was understood as consisting of labour
and the creation of capital.
Referring to Hess's work on this subject, Marx declared that all physical
and mental senses had been dulled by a single alienation - that of having.
But this absolute poverty would give birth to the inner wealth of human
beings:

The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emanci-

pation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation

precisely in that these senses and qualities have become human, both

subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye when its

object has become a social, human object produced by man and destined

for him. Thus in practice the senses have become direct theoreticians.

They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an

objective human relationship to itself and to man and vice versa. (I can

in practice only relate myself humanly to an object if the object relates

humanly to man.) Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic

nature and nature has lost its mere utility in that its utility has become

human utility.^162

This cultivation or creation of the faculties could be achieved only in
certain surroundings.

For it is not just a matter of the five senses, but also the so-called

spiritual senses - the practical senses (desiring, loving, etc.) - in brief:

human sensibility and the human character of the senses, which can

only come into being through the existence of its object, through

humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all

previous history.^163

For plainly a starving man appreciated food in a purely animal way; and
a dealer in minerals saw only value, and not necessarily beauty, in his