IX

[IX.1.]
--as the reality of man's essential powers and man's species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensual, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived either as a part of that general movement or that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour--that is, industry-activity estranged from itself).

A psychology for which this book, the part of history existing in the most perceptible and accessible form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word--"need", "vulgar need"?

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion, The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence,
[X.1.]

[IX.2.]
 natural science will lose its abstractly material--or rather, its idealistic--tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become, albeit in an estranged form, the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie.

<The nature which develops in human history--the genesis of human society - is man's real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.>

Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the twofold form of sensual consciousness and sensual need--that is, only when science proceeds from nature--is it true science. All history is the history of preparing and developing "man" to become the object of sensual consciousness, and turning all requirements of 'man as man' into his needs. History itself is a real part of natural history--of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
[X.2.]



Send comments to: Lemmaesthetics@freeuk.com, The Hypertext Manuscripts of Karl Marx, Paris 1844, Copyright Gary Tedman 2001-3