Between materialism and idealism: Marx on “sensuous activity”

In the first Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx writes:

“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.”
                                   

In the above excerpt from the first Thesis, Marx positions himself between materialism and idealism. From idealism (Kant and Hegel), Marx takes the idea that objective reality does not exist independently of man but is formed (constituted) by man’s subjective activity. On the other hand, he takes from Enlightenment materialism (De la Mettrie, Diderot, Darwin) the idea that man is part of nature and is as such passive, subject to the forces of nature. As a true dialectician, Marx fuses these two seemingly contradictory perspectives together, as thesis and antithesis in a dialectical synthesis. The result, the synthesis, is his conception of reality as praxis, as sensuous human activity, which forms a third between human activity and passivity (or in more Kantian terms: between autonomy and heteronomy). This, according to me, explains partly why Marx is still be relevant today. The dilemma between the egocentrism of modern autonomy and the allocentrism of post-modern heteronomy (with its neoconservative and fundamentalist tendencies) is one of the major intellectual and cultural problems of our times. Marx’s dialectic shows a way out.
                                                           Kant's tangle of experience

Kant and Marx on sensuous activity

The difficulty posed by this dilemma can be seen in what appears to be the contradictory, oxymoronic nature of Marx’s term “sensuous activity”. As sensory beings, after all, we are not active but passive, subject to external sensory impressions (caused by the thing-in-itself, in Kantian terms). Thus Kant speaks of sensation as “receptivity” as opposed to the autonomous activity of the mind which he calls “spontaneity”. For Kant, the way spontaneity and receptivity interlock to produce experience of objective reality was a major problem, which he could not solve in a satisfactory fashion (due to the dilemma mentioned above). What Marx announces in the first Thesis, then, is a solution to this problem – a solution that turns on the essential social and practical nature of human sensory experience. As a communist, Marx was of course especially interested in the social character of labor, the collaboration of different individuals, working on nature so as to satisfy human needs. Here, in social labor, lies the primary meaning of Marx’s term “sensuous activity” – and hence the balance between activity and passivity. On the one hand, man is active in his labor: he transforms nature to satisfy his needs, he gives form to matter in accordance with his ideas, thus externalizing his abilities and needs in a product which henceforth functions as a mirror that confirms man’s being. In this way Marx approaches idealism: through his labor on nature man establishes his self-consciousness. On the other hand, however, this labor also testifies to man’s sensuous passivity: man must toil because his body needs food, clothing etc. In labor, man experiences fatigue and the resistance of matter. Moreover, the fact that man gains self-consciousness only through his externalisation in worked upon matter means that his self-consciousness is always decentered, dependent on some extenal object. In that sense, Marx’s focus on the necessity of labor already anticipates the postmodern critique of humanism in terms of the decenterment of the human essence.

Praxis as the interaction of subject and object

But, of course, Marx is neither a humanist idealist nor a postmodernist avant la lettre. For the point of his first Thesis on Feuerbach is exactly that the truth lies in the middle: between idealism and materialism, between humanism and postmodernism. That elusive middle is captured by Marx’s claim that the external object, on which humanity depends, is in turn dependent on the formative power of human activity. In other words: nature determines (causes, affects) man, who in turn determines (works upon) nature. Thus man is indirectly self-determining, mediated by nature. This reciprocal determination of man and nature is what Marx means by “praxis". In the first Thesis, therefore, Marx reproaches traditional materialism for not seeing this fundamental importance of praxis, since it (materialism) sees man one-sidedly as subjected to nature and thus it forgets man’s active intervention in nature – a point repeated by Marx in the third Thesis, where he focuses on the consequences of materialism for social theory: “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing [by which men are changed, PS] forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.”

The esthetic aspect of human labor

The notion of praxis enables Marx to conceive of the interrelation between human subject and material object as a fundamental, ontological interaction, in which neither is primary and on which both are dependent. It is this ontological orientation that allows Marx in the first Thesis to refer to “the thing, reality” itself as praxis, as the realm of sensory activity in which man and nature determine each other reciprocally. Thus the relation between man and nature (subject and object) should, according to Marx, be understood as an internal relation, where the relata do not exist independently, in contrast to an external relation, where the relata influence each other alternately while actually remaining separate. This ontological significance can also be seen from Marx’s notion of “sensuous activity” if it is taken in the epistemological sense of sensory perception. One could say that this epistemological sense is integrated in the comprehensive social-practical sense of “sensuous activity” as the human collaboration in working upon nature. After all, in his labor man also senses himself and his encounter with the world: he sees his objects and tools, he experiences fatigue and the resistance of matter but also the pleasure of his activity and the beauty (or ugliness) of the worked upon object. This esthetic aspect of labor is important to Marx: truly human, ie unalienated labor is for him as much artistic activity as it is the satisfaction of basic human needs, and the unalienated product of labor is ultimately also a work of art. Thus aisthesis (Greek: sensory experience) forms an integral part of Marx’s notion of praxis.

The ontological ambiguity of sensory qualities

So what about the ontological interaction between subject and object that occurs in praxis? Does this also occur in the aisthesis of sensory perception? In fact, it does. This is exactly what Kant tried to explain when he focused on the interaction of receptivity and spontaneity in sensation, where a fusion takes place of subjective activity and passivity before the object. This fusion is shown in the ambiguous nature of sensory qualities such as color, sound, smell, taste, warmth and tactility. On the one hand, such “qualia” are inherently subjective because they exist only in a subject’s perceptual awareness of them. Thus Berkeley’s idealistic formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) surely applies to qualia, which is the reason why the philosophical tradition speaks of them as mere “secondary qualities” (as opposed to an object’s primary qualities, ie those that exist independently of the perceiving subject). Yet, on the other hand, qualia also have something undeniably objective about them, bound as they are to some external object whose properties they are (thus we say: the rose is red, the water is warm). Thus qualia are like a joint membrane between subject and object where they meet and enter into each other. William Desmond, the author of Being and the Between, is one of the very few philosophers who notice this strange ontological status of qualia between subjective and objective. He writes: “secondary qualities have an unyielding equivocity, since their ontological status is finally uncertain. For this status is distributed between “something” in the thing itself, its powers, and the relativity of that “something” to mind.” (Being and the Between, p.74)

Marx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous

The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.