| |
|
[VI.1.]
Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in
the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal
enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment--i.e.,
activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual
direct association with other men--will occur wherever such
a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character
of the activity's content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.
But also when I am active scientifically, etc.--an activity which
I can rarely perform in direct community with others--then my activity
is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the
material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the
language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social
activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself
for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of
that of which the living shape is the real community, the
social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an
abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The
activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore
also my theoretical existence as a social being.
Above all we must avoid postulating 'society' again as an abstraction
vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social
being. His manifestations of life - even if they may not appear in
the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out
in association with others - are therefore an expression and confirmation
of social life. Man's individual and species-life are not different,
however much - and this is inevitable - the mode of existence of the
individual is a more particular or more general mode of
the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular
or more general individual life.
In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social
life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely
the being of the species confirms itself in species consciousness and
exists for itself in its generality as a thinking being.
[VII.1.]
|
|
[VI.2.]
Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it
is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real
individual social being), is just as much the totality, the
ideal totality, the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society
for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness
and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation
of life.
Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same
time they are in unity with each other.
Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular
individual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual
is only a particular species-being, and as such mortal.
< (4) Just as private property is only the perceptible expression
of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same
time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses
the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life,
that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality:
so, the positive transcendence of private property - i.e., the perceptible
appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life,
of objective man, of human achievements--should not be conceived
merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely
in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates
his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as
a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world--seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing,
wanting, acting, loving--in short, all the organs of his individual being,
like those organs which are directly social in their form,
[VII.2.]
|
|