p Schools of philosophy offer widely differing conceptions of the essence and the evolution of man. In this article, theoretical argument is based on Marx’s fundamental ideas concerning man as an object-acting and historically developing entity.
p Strictly speaking, the problem of object-activity, approached in a dialectical manner, turns out to be that of the origin of 133 man as homo sapiens, viz., as a socio-historical subject. [133•1 However, contemporary theoretical knowledge (philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, history, paleontology, etc.) is still incapable of rendering a satisfactory theory for the question. Therefore we must begin with a statement that in one way or another man emerged. From the point of view of our problem, this signifies that nature split into subject and object. Instead of a direct expression of the need through action there arose the goal as the satisfaction of need, mediated by the production of tools and removed to the future. But, then, the goal is something which though not existing in material reality in some manner exists in the subject. At the same time this is also peculiar to objective reality (taken, according to Marx, as a human reality), though not of its actual but of a future condition. The manner in which potential reality exists in the subject is in fact thought, while in its actual being it emerges as objective reality. Simultaneously it is a manner in which the subject of necessity exists for itself (reflects, to use the philosophical term). At this point many complex questions come to the fore, of which we will mention only the following:
p a) Object-activity expresses the identity of the subject and object. At the same time at each moment in this activity the subject and object are determined by opposite means. The state and movement of the object, considered in its opposition to the subject, depends upon its directly preceding condition, that is to say here the past determines the present. In the subject the goal, that is the future, determines his activities in the present. These two counterposed manners of determination lead to the fact that activity is a developing contradiction which is uninterrupted by being solved but is never resolved as a whole.
p b) The instrumental nature of object-activity makes the individual independent of the limited character of his natural organs of action (hands, teeth, etc). When the individual utilizes the objects and forces of nature as tools, he thereby makes nature act upon itself, and such a mode of activity has in principle no limits except nature as such. For this reason Man 134 is potentially a universal and infinite being. Actually he is always limited because at any given moment his tools and sphere of activity are not universal (only recently he had no knowledge of atomic energy, he had not reached the Moon, while today he has no effective cure for cancer, does not know and cannot do much which is even difficult to imagine). His universal substance is conditioned by potentialities as a goal and in turn determines them in the form of incompleteness, that is to say, of the historical process. [134•1 History consequently appears as a process resolving the contradiction between the potential universality of Man and his actual limitations at any given moment.
p Man, however, according to Marx, is a creature whose generic essence cannot be considered a part of his biological heredity. He must become a personality through individual development, actively assimilating the historical forms of material and spiritual culture through his inclusion in the world of human relations. This clarifies the role of all forms of human intercourse. For example, in certain historical epochs the main forms of culture and intercourse through which the individual acquired his generic essence were systems of mythology or religion. The European of the Middle Ages in worshipping the deity thereby communicated with man in his universality albeit in the distorted form of religious alienation. It was only in this sphere that he felt himself to be a human, equal (to be sure in the form of “insignificance”) to all other humans, to humankind (“before God all are equal”). This feeling of insignificance was expressed in self-humiliation and abnegation—the primary virtues of a Christian. But since this insignificance was a form of closeness to and communion with God, to that extent the Christian believed that he belonged to a higher spiritual realm, extended to him and existing within him (the blessing). Therefore, feeling himself to be the slave of God, he could simultaneously look down at the infidel with pity and superiority, as at one not having received the sacrament.
p c) History functions as a complex and contradictory process bearing upon the development of the individual. The latter 135 may be regarded as a goal-oriented subject determined by his own ends rather than by external expediency. In a word, he is a free subject. But the development of the individual into a unique universal personality is possible only given unhindered social intercourse with all other unique and free personalities making up the society of the future. The richer and more universal this intercourse, the richer and more universal will be the individual and the wider will be the opportunity for him, through his existence and free activity, to facilitate the formation and development of other individuals in the collective. In such a collective the value of the human being is internal, it lies in the uniqueness and originality of his personality rather than in the external products of his activity.
From this point of view history may also be represented as a process bearing upon the development of forms of communication.
Notes
[133•1] "The individual is the social being. His life even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carriea out t6gether with others—is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life" (K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 104-05). It should be mentioned that the overwhelming majority of theories on anthropogenesis are unsatisfactory precisely because they are incapable of explaining the origin of the collective, social essence of man.
[134•1] “The individual’s universality, not as a perceived or imagined one but as the universality of his real and ideal relations. Hence also the understanding of his ideal own history as a process and the cognition of nature (as a practical power over it) as a real body in a way" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, Second Russ. ed., Vol. 46, Part. II, p. 35). Counterposing man’s universality as a future task to his limitations under the capitalist division of labour, Marx calls him a “partial” individual in the latter case.