Abstract
The concept Gattungswesen, while evidently central to Marx’s early thought, has received surprisingly little detailed philosophical examination. An obstacle to progress when it comes to understanding the concept is a tendency to miss the import of the dimension of universality that Marx says is crucial to the concept. It has often been assumed that Marx must have in mind membership of the human species, where this is considered as one species among others. But an examination of the concept Gattung as it figures in Hegel (in particular in his Philosophy of Nature) and as it passes to Marx through Feuerbach helps to reveal that a generality of a different order is involved. I trace this trajectory, giving special attention to early writings by Feuerbach (characterized by an uncompromising Hegelianism) that have been largely ignored, and show how a full appreciation of the generality of the Gattung can help with seeming puzzles that present themselves in the interpretation of the Marx of the early 1840s.
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Notes
- 1.
A recent treatment of Hegel that gives a detailed account of Gattung and its role in Hegel’s logical account of life is Ng 2020.
- 2.
Cf. Rodney Livingstone’s translation: ‘Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species – both is own and those of other things – his object, but also – and this is simply another way of saying the same thing – because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being’ (EW 327). My surmise is that Livingstone’s translation choices, in particular the language of ‘looking upon’, have, in a number of ways, been responsible for various problematic interpretative trends I discuss in Sect. 1. In what follows, I have throughout tacitly emended English translations cited where appropriate.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
I have concentrated here on some instances from the Anglophone literature that I take to bring out something more widespread. I do not mean to imply that there exists no corrective to these tendencies, even within the Anglophone literature. An example of such a corrective is Gould (1978).
- 6.
On the relation between nature and spirit in Hegel, see Schuringa 2022.
- 7.
We know that Marx read Feuerbach’s Vorläufige Thesen, Grundsätze and Wesen des Christentums. We also know that he read Hegel extremely thoroughly, so the kind of Hegelian conception that Feuerbach crystallizes would have been familiar to him as the background to Feuerbach’s talk of Gattungswesen in the texts that he did read. According to Wartofsky (1977: 163) ‘the earliest discussion of this concept [Gattungswesen], in the form in which it becomes central for Feuerbach[,] occurs […] in Philosophy and Christianity’, i.e. in Feuerbach’s ‘last defense of Hegel’ (1977: 160). It is perhaps more accurate to say that Philosophy and Christianity is a transitional text with respect to Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen. Here Feuerbach still locates the Gattung-character of humans in the power of thought, but there is the beginning of the idea that something more than sheer engagement in thought is required of human individuals in order to make good on this Gattung-character.
- 8.
Simon Rawidowicz (1931) gives conclusive arguments for regarding Feuerbach as a devoted Hegelian at the time of the composition of the dissertation. He is followed in this by Kamenka (1970) and by Wartofsky (1977). Earlier readers and editors of Feuerbach’s work such as Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodl had played down Feuerbach’s Hegelianism as much as possible, in an attempt to secure the absoluteness of his originality. This anti-Hegelian strain in readings of Feuerbach continues to be found in non-specialized treatments of Feuerbach. There are of course grounds to take seriously the idea that Feuerbach harboured doubts about Hegel (even on his own idiosyncratic reading of him) even as he was writing the doctoral dissertation. This is evidenced by the ‘Doubts’ of 1827/8 reprinted in FB.
- 9.
Feuerbach, De ratione, §6 (GW 1: 30): ‘cogitans ipse sum genus humanum non singularis homo, qualis sum, quum sentio, vivo, ago, neque certus quidam homo (hic vel ille) sed nemo.’
- 10.
Feuerbach, De ratione, §11 (GW 1: 52). Feuerbach here draws for support directly on Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which he footnotes. The passage from PhG that Feuerbach cites is the following: ‘Denn die vielen Kategorien sind Arten der reinen Kategorie, heißt, sie ist noch ihre Gattung oder Wesen, nicht ihnen entgegengesetzt. Aber sie sind schon das Zweydeutige, welches zugleich das Andersseyn gegen die reine Kategorie in seiner Vielheit an sich hat. Sie widersprechen ihr durch diese Vielheit in der That, und die reine Einheit muß sie an sich aufheben, wodurch sie sich als negative Einheit der Unterschiede constituirt. […]’ [pp. 168–9 of the first edn.; chapter ‘Gewißheit und Wahrheit der Vernunft’] This is ¶236 in Michael Inwood’s translation: ‘For to say that the many categories are species of the pure category means that this latter is still their genus or essence, not opposed to them. But they are already something ambiguous, which at the same time has in itself otherness in its plurality in contrast to the pure category. In fact, they contradict the pure category by this plurality, and the pure unity must sublate them in itself, thereby constituting itself as negative unity of the differences. […]’.
- 11.
Feuerbach, De ratione, §11 (GW 1: 52).
- 12.
Feuerbach, Gedanken (GW 1: 277).
- 13.
Note John Edward Toews’s perceptive remark: ‘Feuerbach appears to have been self-consciously aware of his inability to provide an adequate account in his dissertation of the reconciliation of the individual and the universal. At least he noted in a letter to a Professor Harless at Erlangen that he failed to demonstrate clearly the necessary development from self-consciousness to the universality of thought’ (Toews 1980: 193).
- 14.
Michael Quante has argued that Marx’s conception of gegenständliches Gattungswesen ‘represents a synthesis from three sources: the philosophical-anthropological conception of Feuerbach, Heß’s social vision of unity and the objectification-model of action taken from Hegel’ (Quante 2013: 75). This identification of the sources of the conception is not incorrect; however, where universality is concerned, I want to argue there is a single source in Hegel, filtered for Marx through Feuerbach.
- 15.
Judith Butler draws attention to this usage in Marx. Butler writes: ‘When we speak about the life of the species, das Gattungsleben, we refer to that which commonly characterised both humans and animals’ (2019: 12). What Butler does not note is that, while humans and non-human animals alike participate in Gattungsleben, only the former are Gattungswesen.
- 16.
Arguably, as an anonymous reader pointed out, the problem of bifurcation is present already in Hegel. It would take more effort to show this; here I focus on Feuerbach’s Hegelianism since it exhibits the bifurcation in a particularly stark form.
- 17.
Essential background to this discussion is provided by Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. Here Marx (in one of his discussions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right §307) speaks of the state, on Hegel’s view, as representing an abstract Gattungswesen. ‘It is here, in the sphere of the political state, that the individual moments of the state are related to themselves as to the being of the Gattung, the “Gattungswesen”, because the political state is the sphere of their universal character, i.e., their religious sphere. The political state is the mirror of truth for the various moments of the concrete state.’ (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MECW 3: 107). ‘Hier, in der Sphäre des politischen Staates, ist es, daß sich die einzelnen Staatsmomente zu sich als dem Wesen der Gattung, als dem “Gattungswesen” verhalten; weil der politische Staat die Sphäre ihrer allgemeinen Bestimmung, ihre religiöse Sphäre ist.’ (MEGA2 I/2: 116–17). For a detailed exposition of Marx’s critique of Hegel in this text, see Schuringa (2021).
- 18.
This is the dating given in MEGA2 (IV/2: 758).
- 19.
See Chitty 2009 for the suggestion that what Marx is after is concrete universality.
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Schuringa, C. (2023). Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German Idealism. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_14
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