(artigo publicado na coletânea The New Hegelians, Cambridge University Press)

MARX AND FEUERBACHIAN ESSENCE: RETURNING TO THE QUESTION OF “HUMAN ESSENCE” IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

José Crisóstomo de Souza
Department of Philosophy,
Universidade Federal da Bahia,
Brazil.

Abstract: This paper discusses the permanence and development of the originally Feuerbachian notion of a human essence, in Marx’s thought as of 1845-46, mainly through the reading and analysis of the texts in which he is expressly dealing with that subject: “Feuerbach” (first section of German Ideology) and “Theses ad Feuerbach”. The notion of “species essence” is shown here to become - in historical materialism as compared to Feuerbachian humanism - strengthened in its fully “communitarian” dimension, and even, in a way, in its traditional opposition (albeit, in Marx’s case, dialectical) to the related notion of “existence.”

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This paper is part of a larger effort to present what I would call the “unsaid” - or some of what is “unsaid” - in Karl Marx’s theory. By this I am referring to a certain philosophical background made up of presuppositions that are not always completely explicit. This is not an attempt to expose “what Marxism really is,” because I believe there is no such thing in the absolutely univocal sense. Instead, I am attempting to view Marx in another light, principally in regard to the self-representation that Marxism has built up for itself; to view it, in fact, from the basis of a given spirit of (our) time, at the beginning of a new century. I do not presume that a theory can exist without philosophical presuppositions or commitments. The point here is to try to avoid being naïve regarding the presuppositions that may be assumed even when seeking to appro