We have seen that the good life by many accounts has consisted in many forms. The Axial model held that this lower life was one to be escaped by way of enlightenment in favor of a higher, more real realm. Kant held that a meaningful life can be found in the total subordination of the will and passions to the dictates of reason in the form of morality and religion. Hegel saw history as the rational unfolding of God’s autobiography and asserted that meaning can be found in our placing our lives within such a historical narrative in which morality and creativity are in constant tension. Schopenhauer felt that life is insatiable suffering in which, contrary to Kant and Hegel, reason is the unwitting servant of the will and that the most we could ever hope for was to disengage with the world by way of distraction. Marx, we will see, takes up many themes which can be found in Hegel as well as some which are native to Schopenhauer and creates an account of life’s meaning which seems more fulfilling than those we have considered thus far.
The elements of Schopenhauer which can be found in Marx primarily center on his rejection of reason as the fundamental basis of meaning in life. Marx does not see history as the rational unfolding of God’s autobiography, nor does he see history to necessarily have a rational structure to it at all. Furthermore, he does not see reason as providing the only or even best guide to living a good life, contrary to Kant and even much which can be found in the Axial model.
Instead, Marx sees the source of meaning in this life to be the concrete and practical ways in which we engage the world by way of work. The way in which we change the world, and change we will see plays a major role in Marx’s thought, is not by way of thought or knowledge but by way of doing, working and laboring. It is what we do in our day to day life that expresses our natures according to Marx, and what we are is intimately intertwined with what we produce in the world. Of course, this production is necessarily a cooperative enterprise and it is from the network of socioeconomic relations entailed by such cooperative endeavors that culture and its abstract ideas and knowledge are derivative, not the other way around. Thus, while Kant and Hegel thought ideas to be very important, Marx followed Schopenhauer in denying this.
Nevertheless, in pretty much all other aspects, Marx is very Hegelian. It will be remembered that Hegel held that the nature of our selves is determined by the historical context in which we both find ourselves as well as find our selves. These three elements, the self, our view of our self and the historical context in which we find our self, all influence our natures. Furthermore, the early Hegel held that each person needed to be recognized and acknowledged by society at large in a way which was intimately related to Hegel’s notion of rights. If enough of society went unacknowledged, according to the early Hegel, revolution was the remedy.
Marx picks up on this idea and gives it a strongly socioeconomic twist. This lack of acknowledgement or recognition is what Marx calls alienation, a state in which neither the needs nor the potential of human nature is being adequately addressed. Alienation is for a man to find himself in a societal arrangement which does not mirror or speak to him. It is to find oneself in a situation in which one is disconnected from the labors and endeavors in which they are engaged. The epitome of this could be found in Marx’s day in exploitation of workers as founding the unbridled capitalism of industrial England. Such workers found themselves in a situation in life which was not at all nurturing to them and their needs, and yet found themselves without alternatives to turn to. They were utterly alienated from their work and yet had no choice but to continue in such a situation.
There are three ways in which Marx characterizes the non-alienated state of man, thus providing three ways by which we can identify the alienated man as well. In the non-alienated state, a man engages in a productive activity with complete freedom. They choose what to produce, how to produce it and what to do with it once it has been produced. Consequently, the laborer is completely free and self-determining, the very opposite of the manner in which communism was or possibly must be implemented. In such an arrangement the product which the laborer creates is literally an expression of the laborer.
It must be understood how essential the products which the laborer produces are to the very nature of the producer himself according to Marx. What the laborer produces, since they are an expression of the producer’s self, are very much at the core of what it is to be that person, indeed, even more so than the ideas and thoughts of that person. According to Marx, the ideas and thoughts of a man are only the effects and never the causes of that man’s productive activities.
The second characteristic of the non-alienated life is that just as a man’s labors are his own, so too is his time. The non-alienated man owns, manages and is responsible for his own time and does with it as he wills. With such a conception of time in mind, a conception which came to prominence with the division of labor under the industrial revolution, Marx asks two fundamental questions: Does our time belong to us rather than somebody else? Does our time belong to us rather than our belonging to it? With regard to the first question, Marx looks upon capitalist societies in general with disdain seeing them as exploitative and enslaving. With regard to the second question he worries that our belonging to our time rather than the other way around externalizes us in the sense that we are always racing against the clock to be more and more productive. In such a condition, according to Marx, the underlying humanity which is ideally expressed by our work is lost. Our time belongs to us when we do with it what we will
The third way in which he characterizes the non-alienated life is one of relationships which are fully human. In the alienated life man sees others in terms of their socioeconomic roles which they play in relation to him and nothing more. Individuals fade behind their roles as buyer/seller, employer/employee and competitor. Man ceases to see others as humans with individual and unique lives, and instead views them as simply expendable and interchangeable parts in the economic machine. In the non-alienated life man engages in rich relationships with other people, the most important of which being romantic love.
While I worry that Marx may not give ideas enough credit by way of constituting the self, I certainly applaud his attempt to provide an account of meaning in life which does not exalt the philosopher above all others. The clock maker, in Marx’s account, can live just as fulfilling a life or even more so than can the man locked in the ivory tower. Of course one wonders if such a Utopia could ever be implemented in the general population or if Marx’s philosophy instead leads to a never-ending cycle of revolutions as the masses inevitably find themselves being alienated.
