The historicisation of the human senses from Feuerbach to Marx

Abstract

This paper identifies and articulates a historicist turn in theorising the human senses initiated by Feuerbach and Marx. Both philosophers retain their predecessors’ view that human needs determine human senses, but they identify historical contingencies of human needs that they treat as introducing historical contingency into the character of the human senses. In accounting for Feuerbach’s and Marx’s respective historicisations of the human senses, this paper challenges some commonplace ideas expressed by Honneth and Joas about German philosophical anthropology in general as well as, more specifically, Marx’s critique of Feuerbach and the philosophical-anthropological legacy of Marxian thought.

Introduction

Human beings have traditionally placed ourselves between gods and animals, treating the intellect as human nature’s divine, higher part and the senses as its animal, lower part. Accordingly, many philosophers have regarded human sensibility or the human senses (like Feuerbach and Marx, I use ‘the senses’ and ‘sensibility’ synonymously here) ¹ as a merely animal component of human beings, holding that even if the human senses are different from other life forms’, they are ultimately nothing more than natural endowments, nothing we could meaningfully change. Call this the ‘mere animality charge’. Traditionally, in accordance with the hierarchical intellect–senses dualism, this charge is accompanied by a denigration of the senses as confusing, misleading, or distracting, and a call to overcome or liberate ourselves from them with our intellect accordingly. ²

This historically commonplace denigration binds together a range of otherwise distinct philosophical positions, like Platonic rationalism and modern scepticism, to say nothing of religious ones. By contrast, even while maintaining the mere animality charge, the German tradition as represented by figures including Kant, Herder, and Hegel has been less concerned about the senses confusing, misleading, or distracting us than with simply addressing the issue of what determines a life form’s senses. Notably, members of this tradition agree that a life form’s senses are determined by its ‘instinct[s]’, ³ or more specifically, by what Kant calls its ‘immediately sensed needs’ ⁴ or what Marx characterises as needs whose satisfaction contributes to satisfying ‘the need to maintain [a life form’s] physical existence’. ⁵ (For simplicity, I use Deranty’s ‘life-needs’ hereafter.) ⁶ A life form’s senses are thereby understood as capacities or ‘forces of representation’ determined by that life form’s life-needs to help that life form satisfy the latter. ⁷

These figures likewise exhibit common ground on the issue of what determines the human senses and differentiates them from other life forms’: While life-needs determine their corresponding life form’s senses, because human beings are not so strongly determined by our life-needs, the human senses are less acute and less specialised than other life forms’, but because they are less tied to life-needs, the human senses and by extension human beings are freer from the human being’s ‘system of instincts’ than other life forms and their senses are from theirs. ⁸ Moreover, although they offer somewhat distinct explanations for this commonly drawn distinction – Kant appeals to human beings’ ability to turn away from the sensuous with the intellect, ⁹ Herder to the diversity of human beings’ ‘sphere of needs’, ¹⁰ and Hegel to the diverse ways in which human beings can satisfy our needs ¹¹ – they all explain the human senses’ distinctively liberated, unspecialised character as a function of human needs’ radical open-endedness, which they understand in accordance with the mere animality change. Perhaps all animals, for example, experience hunger as a life-need, but because human beings can suppress or ignore our hunger (Kant) or satisfy our hunger with a broad range of objects (Herder) or in a variety of ways (Hegel), hunger does not determine our senses as strongly as it does other life forms’. A reptilian obligate carnivore like a snake sees in infrared, and this ‘force of representation’ helps it detect and catch prey and thereby satisfy its hunger, but human beings do not see in infrared, because – in this way of thinking – our hunger is open-ended in a way that does not require infrared vision for its satisfaction. Our open-ended life-needs, including our open-ended hunger, determine our senses in a way that unbinds them from life-needs rather than specialises them to satisfy life-needs.

My aim here is to locate and articulate a break with theorising the determinants of human sensibility in accordance with the mere animality charge in Feuerbach and Marx. This break maintains the logic on which life-needs determine sensibility, but shifts to considering how human needs have historical features that in turn historicise human sensibility, rendering the human senses partly contingent upon conditions within the scope of human agency, thereby challenging the mere animality charge. Further, in articulating this historicist line in Feuerbach and Marx, I challenge three claims in Honneth and Joas’s Human Nature and Social Action. First, while Honneth and Joas describe philosophical anthropology as ‘an enquiry into the unchanging preconditions of human changeableness’, Feuerbach’s and Marx’s philosophical anthropologies historicise and thus render changeable, even if within some naturalistically-fixed parameters, the preconditions of human sensibility – namely, needs – in a way that bears upon the latter’s changeability. ¹² Second, while they characterise Marx as offering ‘a historicisation of Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism’, the latter is already historical. ¹³ Third, while they claim that ‘in the Marxist tradition, the question of what latitude the human being’s organic endowment allows to the cultural and historical shaping of human needs has to a large degree remained unanswered’, the line in Feuerbach and Marx traced here addresses this issue by undertaking ‘a Critique of the Senses’ aimed at illuminating the determinants of human sensibility to, in turn, identify its possibilities, the grounds of its actuality, and, particularly since Marx – for reasons to be appreciated vis-à-vis his critique of Feuerbach – the potential for human sensibility to recursively transform human needs historically. ¹⁴

Honneth and Joas’s critical history of philosophical anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries aims to illuminate the systematic roles that anthropology may play in mediating the relationship between social theory and praxis. ¹⁵ Although they discuss the idea of ‘historical anthropology’ as an important addendum to the history of philosophical anthropology in light of its ability to further concretise anthropology’s social-theoretic and practical significance, they contrast historical with philosophical anthropology while treating the former primarily as a critique of anthropology that emerged in postwar 20th century thought. ¹⁶ Honneth and Joas make a strong case for the systematic role of anthropology mediating social theory and praxis, and are right to affirm that ‘a historicisation of anthropology hardly requires lengthy justification’. ¹⁷ But by overlooking both the historicism of philosophical anthropology at the beginning of their own historical narrative, in Feuerbach and Marx, with respect to the ‘conditions of human changeableness’ and the critical purposes of this historicist philosophical anthropology, they insufficiently attend to the historical and critical potential internal to philosophical anthropology prior to the 20th century historicist critiques they discuss. By shedding light on Feuerbach’s and Marx’s respective historicist philosophical anthropologies, then, I look to improve our understanding of the history of philosophical anthropology and the critical, historicist elements contained within it.

Section 1 accounts for Feuerbach’s transformation of the traditional understanding of human sensibility and his attendant introduction of historical contingency into human sensibility. Section 2 clarifies how Marx’s critiques of and innovations upon Feuerbach’s account stem from his emphasis on the practical. ¹⁸ Section 3 then moves squarely to Marx’s own account of the historicity of human sensibility. The paper concludes by further challenging Honneth and Joas’s first and third claims by gesturing toward continuations of Feuerbach and Marx’s historicist approach to human sensibility by Simmel, Benjamin, and Adorno.

I. Feuerbach’s historicisation of human sensibility

The traditional dualism between the intellect or ‘thinking ego’ as human nature’s divine component and the sensuous as its animal component marks a key metaphysical source of the likewise traditional claim that pursuing the highest goods – truth, goodness, beauty – requires human beings to turn to the intellect and overcome the senses. ¹⁹ Feuerbach inverts this picture in three basic steps. First, he asserts that sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) – not logos or intellectual form – is ‘the principle of life’, in direct opposition to the traditional Christo-Platonic dualistic hierarchy that denigrates the sensuous as vulgar. ²⁰ Second, Feuerbach rejects the sensibility–intellect dualism itself, treating the sensuous as essential to thought (thus characterising his thought as a form of ‘empiricism’) ²¹ and, more famously, the divine as a mere abstract ‘projection’. ²² Thus for Feuerbach, there is no divine–natural dualism in human nature, such that pro tanto, the intellect must be no different from the senses. ²³ But further, third, because Feuerbach criticises the abstract as mere projection rather than, as in the traditional Platonic view, more real and true than the sensible, he thinks that we should intellectually embrace rather than seek to overcome the sensuous. As Feuerbach puts it, ‘true, objective philosophy’ is only possible ‘out of the negation of [pure] thought, out of being determined by the object’, and because the object is given to us via the senses, this requires us to foreground the senses, or the sensuous, in philosophy. ²⁴ By claiming that philosophy must be determined by the object and thus lead with the senses, Feuerbach looks to make ‘anthropology, together with physiology, the universal science’, or to make anthropology first philosophy so that philosophy can illuminate the human condition without the distortions of theology and mentalistic abstraction. ²⁵

Given the general notion that needs determine sensibility, Honneth and Joas make a crucial point for understanding Feuerbach’s historicisation of human sensibility: Feuerbach radically reconceptualises the intellect or ‘thinking ego’ as ‘a corporeal ego endowed with needs’. ²⁶ The foregoing supports their point: As corporealised via Feuerbach’s critique, thought is finite, lacks, and thereby needs, an idea implicitly voiced in Feuerbach’s ‘preponderance of the object’ thesis just noted, to borrow Adorno’s phrase. ²⁷ Because thinking is needy in this way, its freedom and universality rest upon its sensuous connection with objects. Accordingly, for Feuerbach, intellect in its traditionally free and universal standing is not separate from the senses, but is itself ‘universal sense’: It is both predicated and dependent upon the freedom of the human senses. ²⁸

Feuerbach’s naturalisation of the intellect and valorisation of human sensibility for the intellect emphatically returns us to the questions noted above concerning how and in virtue of what human beings’ senses differ from non-human animals’. Feuerbach addresses these questions in a way that both joins with and breaks from his predecessors in the German tradition:

The senses of the animal are certainly keener than those of man, but they are so only in relation to certain things that are necessarily linked with the needs of the animal; and they are keener precisely because of the determination that they are limited by being exclusively directed towards some definite objects. Man does not possess the sense of smell of a hunting dog or a raven, but because his sense of smell encompasses all kinds of smell, it is free and also indifferent to particular smells. But where a sense is elevated above the limits of particularity and above being tied down to needs, it is elevated to an independent, to a theoretical significance and dignity—universal sense is intellect, and universal sensuousness is intellectuality. Even the lowest senses—smell and taste—are elevated in man to intellectual and scientific activities. The smell and taste of things are objects of natural science. Indeed, even the stomach of man, no matter how contemptuously we look down upon it, is something human and not animal because it is universal; that is, not limited to certain kinds of food. That is why man is free from that ferocious voracity with which the animal hurls itself on its prey. Leave a man his head, but give him the stomach of a lion or a horse, and he will certainly cease to be a man. A limited stomach is compatible only with a limited, that is, animal sense. Man’s moral and rational relationship to his stomach consists therefore in his according it a human and not a beastly treatment. He who thinks that what is important to mankind is stomach, and that stomach is something animal, also authorizes man to be bestial in his eating. ²⁹

On the one hand, Feuerbach’s position on how the human senses differ from other life forms’ is essentially an elaborated form of his predecessors’: While life-needs determine sensibility, human beings’ life-needs are radically open-ended, such that human senses are generally minimally determined or limited by need, and are thereby liberated. However, as discussed, Feuerbach treats thinking as needy in a way that calls upon the human senses to play an important role in thought. Indeed, as Feuerbach indicates via counterfactual, the human senses’ freedom with respect to life-needs makes possible our engagement in intellectual activity and thus allows our senses to be directed toward satisfying what Feuerbach, in virtue of his naturalisation of the intellect just discussed, fittingly calls ‘the need of the head’. ³⁰

Feuerbach’s historicism about the human senses emerges from his view that human sensibility is not only determined-but-in-fact-liberated by human life-needs, but is also determined by ‘the need of the head’. Feuerbach characterises the need of the head as ‘thought’, but what is meant by this, and what renders thought historically contingent in such a way that a ‘need of the head’ could determine human sensibility historically? ³¹ To understand Feuerbach’s view here, it serves to turn to a passage from his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, where he differentiates the senses of medievals and moderns as a function of doxastically-informed differences in their ‘interests’:

To be interested in something is to have the talent for it. The medieval mystics and scholastics had no talent and aptitude for natural science only because they had no interest in nature. Where the sense (Sinn) for something is not lacking, there also the senses (Sinne) and organs do not lack. If the heart is open to something, the mind will not be closed to it. Thus, the reason why mankind in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensuous world and its secrets is because it also lost the sense (Sinn) for them together with the belief in them; because its essential tendency was anti-Christian and anti-theological; that is, anthropological, cosmic, realistic, and materialistic. ³²

While Feuerbach’s appeal to ‘interest’ here may appear ambiguous or obscure, it seems apt to read it in autonomously theoretical as opposed to practical or instrumental terms. In this passage, Feuerbach explains the particular development of the sensibility of ‘mankind in the modern era’ by appealing to the ‘essential tendency’ of that historically-indexed collective, and that tendency is characterised in terms that outline beliefs that the tendency supports, which are themselves historically variable. As such, Feuerbach’s way of explaining the difference he asserts to hold between medieval and modern sensibilities involves appealing to intellectual interest shaped by historically variable doxastic differences. Accordingly, Feuerbach’s ‘need of the head’, roughly, is the need to understand, which differs according to differences in interest differentiated by basic beliefs, and different sensibilities develop to satisfy these differently developed instances of the need of the head. As Feuerbach’s discussion of the human stomach in relation to the human head suggests, the need of the head as such may have a basis in human nature roughly corresponding to Aristotle’s famous assertion that ‘[all] humans by nature desire to know’, and thus may not be entirely historically contingent. ³³ However, from Feuerbach’s discussion of differences between the respective senses of medieval mystics and modern naturalists, the need involves historical contingencies, namely, doxastically shaped intellectual interests, and these contingencies historicise the need of the head’s determination of the human senses.

II. Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology

Honneth and Joas express the relatively common position that Marx both practicalises and historicises Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology. ³⁴ By establishing that Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology has a historicist component regarding the human senses, the foregoing discussion clearly challenges the ‘historicisation’ claim. ³⁵ My basic claim in this section, however, is that Marx’s emphasis on the practical – which corresponds to his discussion of what he calls the ‘chief defect’ of Feuerbach’s thought, namely, that Feuerbachian sensualism ‘is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice’, or labour – lies at the root of his critiques of and innovations upon Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, though the innovations are more squarely discussed in section 3. ³⁶ Said otherwise, Marx takes issue not with unqualified ahistoricism in Feuerbach, but with the fact that Feuerbachian sensualism is confined to ‘the perception of natural science’, that is, to autonomous or ‘contemplative’ sense-perception, and fails to consider ‘industry and commerce’ and their relevance to both life-needs and intellectual pursuits. ³⁷

While Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, as clarified above, advances a historicism about the human senses via Geistesgeschichte or perhaps, as Marx claims, ‘religious history’, Marx’s philosophical anthropology emphasises the practical, and more specifically, the historicity of the social conditions that mediate human beings’ satisfaction of all of our needs, including life-needs, which Feuerbach seems to view, at least for anthropological purposes, as merely animal. ³⁸ Marx advances a historicism with respect to human life-needs, claiming that ‘the production [. . .] as well as the satisfaction [. . .] of these needs is a historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or a dog’. ³⁹ As such, Marx advances that the historical condition of human beings is not limited to the geistig or the contemplative, as in Feuerbach’s account, but that it also pertains to life-needs, which, as we will see in section 3 below, Marx treats as consequential for the human senses. Accordingly, the core and truth of Marx’s critique is not that Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology is ahistorical – indeed, Feuerbach’s account, compared to its predecessors, is radically historical – but that its historicism is restricted to the ‘contemplative’. And it is by way of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach rooted in an emphasis upon the practical, its historicity, and its relation to human life-needs that Marx radicalises Feuerbach’s historicism about the human senses by introducing an additional determinant of human sensibility that, for Marx, introduces further historical contingency: The social conditions in which human life-needs are shaped, concatenated, and satisfied.

To appreciate how Marx’s appeal to the practical is fundamental to his innovations upon and radicalisation of Feuerbach’s view, it serves to recall that for Feuerbach, the human senses are transhistorically liberated because our natural constitution allows us to satisfy our life-needs in a profound variety of ways. This freedom, for Feuerbach, allows us to engage in contemplation: ‘Leave a man his head, but give him the stomach of a lion or a horse, and he will certainly cease to be a man. A limited stomach is compatible only with a limited, that is, animal sense’. ⁴⁰ But one might suspect – as Marx’s emphasis on the practical ultimately indicates – that Feuerbach overstates our freedom with respect to life-needs. This is not to deny Feuerbach’s claims about our natural constitution altogether, but to emphasise that even if our natural constitution allows us, pro tanto, to satisfy our life-needs in a broad variety of ways, we do not directly access this variety in non-human nature, but only mediately by way of social formations. ⁴¹ Accordingly, satisfying our life-needs requires us to engage not simply with non-human nature, but also with our social formations. In other words, satisfying our life-needs is not simply a matter of what our natural constitution enables us to use as means of satisfaction, but also of participating in social formations through which the means of satisfying our life-needs are produced, which Hegel aptly calls ‘the system of needs’. ⁴²

For Marx, such mediation between us and our life-needs challenges Feuerbach’s transhistorical, merely animal construal of the freedom of the human senses in two steps. First, because social formations change historically and mediate our relations to our life-needs, they introduce historical contingency into human beings’ relations to our life-needs. Marx is quite clear in The German Ideology that historicity goes beyond ‘the need of the head’ to include life-needs: ‘life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs’. ⁴³ Just as Feuerbach suggests that the means of satisfying the need of the head are historically contingent, so too, Marx advances, are those of satisfying life-needs. Second, by introducing historically contingent conditions upon our ability to satisfy our life-needs, natural constitution notwithstanding, Marx’s appeal to social formations challenges the notion found in Feuerbach that the human senses are ultimately transhistorically liberated regarding life-needs. In capitalism, for example, we must receive monetary income and be able to exchange with others to satisfy our life-needs; in such conditions, our ability to satisfy our life-needs is not simply a function of what our natural constitution allows us to use as means of satisfaction, but also of our income and access to markets. Importantly, these historically contingent conditions upon our ability to satisfy our life-needs can be limiting: While our natural constitution may allow us to satisfy our life-needs with a broad variety of means, our income and access to markets might render us without access to such a variety of means and thus less free with respect to life-needs than our natural constitution would otherwise make us. And because, for Marx, these historically contingent limiting conditions are of a collective rather than a merely individual human condition – akin to the scope of historical contingency in Feuerbach’s account (namely, medieval mysticism and modern naturalism) – we can understand them as historically contingent features of the human ‘species-being’ and thus as anthropologically significant.

Marx extends and breaks from both Feuerbach and their shared predecessors by opposing their transhistorical, merely animal construal of the liberation of the human senses in the following terms: ‘“Liberation” is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the [development] of industry, commerce, [agri]culture, the [conditions of intercourse]’, and the like. ⁴⁴ On the one hand, Marx theorises the human senses as determined by life-needs, such that the anthropological significance of the historical mediation regarding human life-needs just discussed pertains to, whatever else, the human senses. But on the other hand, he rejects the traditional notion that human beings should liberate ourselves from our senses by way of the intellect; however, he does not do so in a Feuerbachian way of empiricism or a sensualist conception of thought per se – although he was certainly sympathetic with the latter ⁴⁵ – but rather by insisting that liberation with respect to the human senses is a matter of neither our transhistorical, merely animal constitution nor any merely mental activity, but rather, as discussed in section 3, ‘history [. . .] down to the present’. ⁴⁶ And in this way, Marx likewise breaks from Feuerbach in particular, because for Feuerbach, the historicism of the human senses pertains only to the need of the head and is made possible by the human senses’ purported transhistorical liberation with respect to life-needs in general. Marx considers this position as effectively advancing that the senses are determined by the intellect, partly because, in its autonomously contemplative character (which Marx rejects as ideological), the intellect is in an important sense a product of itself, its need for sensuous objects notwithstanding. ⁴⁷ If liberation is neither transhistorical nor merely mental or theoretical, then liberation vis-à-vis the human senses is neither a transhistorically given feature of the human condition nor a matter of intellectually overcoming the senses, contra both traditional philosophical ideas about liberation and the human senses discussed above. Marx’s use of scare-quotes around ‘liberation’ suggests that whatever results simply from human beings’ natural constitution or intellectual activity cannot be liberation, which must rather come about through practical, socio-material developments in history. In section 3 we will see that Marx endorses a double-sense of ‘liberation’ with respect to the human senses consistent with this practical, historical framing of liberation in general, where ‘the liberation of the human senses’ refers both to change undergone by the human senses and to change effected, at least in part, by the human senses.

Marx’s objection to transhistorical and mentalistic construals of liberation and his appeal to social formations’ mediation of our relations to our life-needs suggest that the human senses are more fundamentally historically determined and less transhistorically free with respect to life-needs than Feuerbach’s account indicates. Accordingly, for Marx, Feuerbach’s merely mentalistic or contemplative historicism about the human senses is to be replaced by a practical historicism about the human senses. ⁴⁸ Thus although defenders of Feuerbach like Deranty credit him with emphasising intersubjectivity and human interdependence, they concede the truth of precisely what I have advanced are the central points of Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach regarding human sensibility, namely, that ‘Feuerbachian “sensualism” is insufficiently historicised and is not sufficiently embedded in social practices (in particular, the division of labour)’. ⁴⁹ More strongly, the discussion above clarifies that for Marx, as one could predict in light of the traditional logic regarding needs and senses, Feuerbach’s sensualism is insufficiently historicised precisely because it is insufficiently embedded in social practices, especially those involved in the satisfaction of life-needs.

It is in this practical, active sphere involving the satisfaction of life-needs that Marx rightly charges Feuerbach, relatedly, with ‘[presupposing] an isolated – abstracted – human individual’. ⁵⁰ Accordingly, despite Feuerbach’s thematisation of intersubjectivity outside the context of material production and the role of Geistesgeschichte in Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, Schmidt rightly notes that ‘Feuerbach’s man does not emerge as an independent productive force but remains bound to pre-human nature’, to a world that is not shaped by human labour. ⁵¹ More to the point at hand, in light of both Marx’s remark about the abstract individual and Schmidt’s interpretive point regarding pre-human nature, Feuerbach’s way of accounting for human freedom regarding life-needs problematically relies upon an implicit utopianism in which human beings, as in Rousseau’s State of Nature, are encumbered by neither a sometimes recalcitrant natural world, inadequate means of productive interaction with non-human nature, nor any form of social organisation that would hinder our ability to satisfy our life-needs. ⁵² Accordingly, without attending to human beings’ practical life, its historicity, and its relation to life-needs, Feuerbach seems from a Marxian perspective to hypostatise as transhistorical features of human beings and human life – like altruism or cooperativeness, as Honneth and Joas helpfully note – that are contingent upon historically-variable social conditions. ⁵³ Marx, we will see shortly, looks to remedy this issue by extending human sensuousness to practical activity with his concept of sensuous activity or labour (sinnliche Tätigkeit or Arbeit), which marks a basic, historically-variable point of interaction between human needs and human senses. Although Marx concedes that Feuerbach demonstrates, against Rousseau’s State of Nature, ‘that [human beings] need and always have needed each other’, this does not mean that human beings have ever or always satisfied our life-needs cooperatively. ⁵⁴ Indeed, as we will see shortly, Marx thinks that selfishness and cooperativeness are historical determinations of human sensibility contingent upon our socio-historically mediated life-needs.

III. Marx on the historicity of human sensibility

In clarifying how Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology emerges from his emphasis upon the socio-historical nature of human productive activity and its mediating relation to human life-needs, we have briefly noted Marx’s appeal to sensuous labour or activity as an innovation upon Feuerbach’s more restricted appeal to sensuous contemplation (to say nothing about the commonplace way in which philosophers construe the senses as passive). Sensuous activity is involved in satisfying human life-needs, and thus marks a fundamental point of contact between human sensuousness and life-needs. While we thus have a sense of where Marx locates both historicity in the determination of life-needs and human sensuousness vis-à-vis life-needs, we have yet to appreciate his account of the historical determination of the human senses.

Toward this end, I want to turn to the first two of three ‘logics of the aesthetic’ (or, of the sensuous) Gandesha identifies in Marx’s thought. ⁵⁵ Gandesha identifies these logics to combat what he criticises as the Marxian tradition’s mistaken sense ‘that Marx simply bypasses or overlooks the aesthetic’, showing Marx to be engaged in aesthetic theorising, including and especially in the capacious sense pertaining to aesthesis or sense-perception. ⁵⁶ The first two logics, as I detail shortly, articulate how the human senses are determined by historically contingent conditions dialectically, in a way that renders them both patients and, in due course, agents of history. Gandesha speaks to this role in the third logic, though because this third logic pertains less to the human senses per se than to aesthetic production and interpretation, I set it aside for present purposes. That said, taken together, these logics clarify what it means for Marx when he says that the ‘forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’. ⁵⁷ While Habermas may be right that Marx means this ‘literally’, addressing this issue via Gandesha’s distinction clarifies that it presents an ambiguity: Namely, for Marx, the human senses are both formed by and formative of history, are both laboured upon by and labour upon history, are liberated and liberate within history. ⁵⁸

The first logic, clearly influenced by Feuerbach, deals with the determination of the human senses by life-needs by way of the sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) of practical activity or labour. ⁵⁹ For our purposes, the key concept to raise in conjunction with sinnliche Arbeit is alienated labour. Although the notion of sensuous (as opposed to mechanical or abstract) labour suggests a near-immediate connection between human beings and our labour, that the latter can nevertheless become alienated indicates, as noted above, that human sensibility is not transhistorically liberated with respect to life-needs, and may instead be misled with respect to them. ⁶⁰ Indeed, Marx’s discussion of the human senses under capitalism (more below) indicates that this is his view, and further, it clarifies that the division recorded above between those who denigrate the senses as misleading and those who appreciate how the senses are tied to the satisfaction of need ultimately rests upon a false dichotomy. That is, although sinnliche Arbeit in capitalism is aimed at satisfying needs – the labourer’s need for a wage, the capitalist’s need for surplus value, or the consumer’s need for some good or service—it is ‘a fact’, Marx says, that the forms of mediation holding between labourer, labour, and the product of labour spuriously dispossess the latter two from the labourer: Because the institution of private property determines the shape of sensuous labour in capitalism and what counts as ‘belonging’ in a capitalist social formation, the labourer’s time and energy as well as the product of labour are neither treated nor sensed as belonging to her. ⁶¹ As such, the senses are misled by the institution of private property into a ‘stupid’, ‘one-sided’ relation to the object, but this relation nevertheless facilitates labourers’ satisfaction of life-needs in a capitalist social formation: labourers would not satisfy their need for a wage, the capitalist’s need for surplus value, or the consumer’s need for a good or service – all of which can be understood as needs mediating our life-needs – unless they treated their labour as not really theirs, which, for Marx, is how it appears to them. ⁶² Alienated labour thereby informs what Gandesha calls ‘the established channels of perception’ under capitalism, which, in accordance with the traditional logic of the needs–senses relation, is determined by life-needs, even if Marx regards them as relatively ‘crude’ under capitalist social conditions, in a way that aids satisfaction of the latter. ⁶³ Thus, Marx’s treatment of the false dichotomy is ambivalent: Prevailing, capitalist social conditions render human needs ill-formed in ways that render the senses ill-formed and unfree, yet suited to promote proper functioning according to capitalist social conditions, which are antagonistic to human beings and yet mediate our life-needs. ⁶⁴

Marx continues his discussion of the determination of the senses by the practical conditions of a capitalist social order in a way that reveals how his emphasis on sensuous activity leads him to a novel understanding of human sensibility’s historicity:

In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses—[all reduced to] the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. ⁶⁵

While need and sensibility are still tightly linked, for Marx, the social mediation between human beings and non-human nature yields a historical dimension to life-needs’ determination of human sensibility, against his predecessors’ view that the determination of human sensibility by life-needs is merely animal. ⁶⁶ For Marx, essentially all human needs are always already socially-mediated, such that even if human beings’ life-needs do not simply arise from specific social formations and are thusly merely animal, they are always shaped, concatenated, and satisfied through specific social formations. ⁶⁷ In Marx’s hands, as we saw above in his location of ‘the first historical act’, this introduces historicity into the determination of our sensibility at the level of life-needs. More specifically, in the case of capitalism that most interests Marx, even if ‘the need to maintain [a life form’s] physical existence’ transhistorically shapes human sensuous activity, the relations that hold in capitalism render the need for self-preservation, generally, a need to be economically selfish, and to satisfy such a need, as the traditional logic would have it, human beings develop a selfish, possessive sensibility. ⁶⁸ As Marx says, under capitalism, ‘[the human being] is selfish. His eye, his ear, etc., are selfish. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood (Selbstigkeit)’. ⁶⁹ – Ultimately, then, this logic articulates how prevailing social conditions determine sensibility by shaping our life-needs and the ways in which we can satisfy them. More specifically, in light of Marx’s critique of capitalism, it articulates how human sensibility can be historically ill-formed at the level of life-needs, thus posing a direct challenge to Marx’s predecessors’ transhistorical view of the liberation of the human senses with respect to life-needs.

If this first logic invites pessimism by articulating ways in which oppressive social conditions make the human senses ill-formed in ways that help to perpetuate those very conditions, the second logic provides relief as a dialectical counterpoint laying out how oppressive social conditions can nevertheless set the stage for a ‘radical transformation of the senses’ that may in turn help to transform social conditions, including those related to our needs. ⁷⁰ By clarifying how oppressive social conditions can determine the senses dialectically, in a way that not only, as in the first logic, helps to perpetuate those conditions, but that also ‘radicalises’ the senses in opposition to them, this second logic helps to link Marx’s critique of capitalism with his discussion of the revolutionary social transformation through which capitalism gives way to communism.

As noted above, Marx tells us that in capitalist social conditions, the human senses are selfish senses that perceive narrowly and individualistically in terms of possession and exchange as a consequence of the way in which capitalist social conditions mediate our life-needs. ⁷¹ For the senses to become oppositional to capitalist social conditions and conducive to communist ones, there must be within capitalism, following Gandesha,

a fundamental transformation of our very understanding of the senses from capacities that are, within bourgeois society, selfish to ones that are now cooperative: senses that take their bearing from other human beings as well as what Marx calls “inorganic nature” outside of the subject, towards which, in both cases, they are oriented. ⁷²

The issue of how the senses transform under given, oppressive social conditions so as to aid in the latters’ transformation or abolition is essential for understanding this second logic. The moment of mediation in the passage just cited from Gandesha, in which our understanding of our senses changes transforms in a way that in turn contributes to the transformation of the senses themselves, will be legible alongside a similar mediating moment regarding needs discussed below. The basic idea, however, is that in becoming aware of how ill-formed our senses have become because of objectionable, prevailing social conditions, our senses become differently oriented toward the latter, and become better suited for different social conditions that our senses are to aid in actualising. Regarding the specific transition from capitalism to communism, the senses begin to become rightly formed or cooperative when we recognise that they have become selfish and possessive to maintain a ‘system of needs’ that should not be as it is. However, because the senses for Marx are historically determined by socio-material forms of mediation at the level of life-needs, only with the complete ‘transcendence of private property’ is there also

therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object emanating from man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost their egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. ⁷³

Getting a glimpse of Marx’s vision of the liberation of the human senses vis-à-vis the shift from capitalism and communism dissipates some of the pessimism that may follow from appreciating Marx’s account of capitalism’s ‘pre-revolutionary’ historical determination of the human senses, which constitutes the main case of interest in his first logic. But while, in introducing the second logic, we have a sense of what Marx thinks the human senses will actually be like in due historical course, we still need a sense of the moving parts of this logic with some degree of abstraction from the particular transition from capitalism to communism, as well as of how this transition relates to the attendant historical change in the human senses Marx advances.

The passage just quoted from the 1844 manuscripts helps with the former task. From this passage, social conditions in the second logic are understood to change with the senses, whereas in the first logic, social conditions were preconditions determining the senses. Moreover, these social and sensuous changes in the second logic have transformed needs as their consequence. Although this transformation of needs would plausibly reintroduce a developmental pattern akin to the first logic (though perhaps less oppressive of the senses than in the case of capitalism), that transformed needs result from transformed senses and social conditions again re-arranges the first logic, in which social conditions mediate and thus determine life-needs and, in doing so, the senses as well. In the second logic, then, the transformation of the senses itself plays a role in determining human beings’ social existence, specifically, the character of human life-needs in a social formation. This substantiates the ambiguity briefly noted above: The transformation of the senses, for Marx, helps to develop the transformation of social conditions, such that the human senses liberate and are liberated in history.

Taken together, then, these two logics articulate how the human senses are patients of history that also become agents of history, though in keeping with Gandesha’s distinctions, their agency itself is more the object of the third logic than of the first two. But although we have attended to the pre-revolutionary determination of the senses in the first logic and addressed the general need for a revolutionary determination of the senses within the same social conditions that contribute to the pre-revolutionary determination, we still need to address the question of what historically contingent dynamics set the stage for a transformation in the senses in accordance with the second logic, which will in turn help us link the two logics more precisely and get a more unified sense of Marx’s historicism about the human senses. If, that is, the human senses are patients of historical change through which they also become agents of historical change, what about their patienthood or historical determination enables them to be agential or determining?

The answer for Marx seems to largely depend upon ‘radical needs’. Following Heller, radical needs are determined by a social formation and yet are unsatisfiable within that social formation, such that satisfying radical needs entails the social formation’s transformation or abolition. As Heller writes, building on Marx’s 1844 discussion of the senses’ determination under capitalism:

on the one hand, capitalist society reduces to mere ‘having’ and homogenises into ‘greed’ the system of needs [and the sensibility] both of the dominant and of the working class (though in different ways); on the other hand, it generates antagonistic ‘radical needs’ which transcend capitalist society, and whose bearers are called upon to overthrow capitalism. ⁷⁴

Following Heller, radical needs involve ‘consciousness of alienation’ qua alienation – where, for example, we do not regard our labour as not our own, but as something of which we are (wrongly) dispossessed – and alienation and our awareness of it qua alienation are ‘generated by capitalism’. ⁷⁵ As such, while capitalist alienation, as Marx says, involves a reduction of our senses to the sense of possession, it also produces conditions through which we can become aware of our alienation qua alienation, for example, by noticing that we have needs that are ‘antagonistic’ to the existing social order that, as Gandesha would rightly emphasise, expose the pre-revolutionary determination of the senses such that it and eventually the social conditions responsible for it can be transcended. ⁷⁶ That is, if we find that we have needs that cannot be satisfied within the existing social order such that either the social order stands and our needs are unsatisfied or our needs are satisfied and the social order is radically changed or overthrown, we find that we stand opposed to the social order, that we are alienated from rather than harmoniously integrated with it. And in seeing that the social order stands opposed to the satisfaction of our needs, or in seeing that our needs are radical needs to which we have heretofore been wrongly attuned or simply not attuned, we see grounds for the social order to be overthrown. In this way, just as capitalism’s mediation of our life-needs reduces our senses to the sense of having, so too does it produce radical needs that likewise determine the human senses in a way that aids in these needs’ satisfaction: When radical needs are more forcefully represented by way of illuminating and determining the senses, they give rise to revolutionary senses that are capable of contributing to and not merely resulting from historical change.

This picture further clarifies how Marx radicalises Feuerbach’s historicism by emphasising the practical. While Feuerbach holds that the liberation of the human senses is transhistorical and enables us to engage in contemplation that, for Feuerbach, has a historical character that shapes the senses, Marx holds that the liberation of the human senses by way of historically contingent radical needs enables us to engage in revolutionary praxis, which will likewise come to shape the senses. As such, capitalist social conditions mediate our needs in such a way that while some of them are satisfiable according to selfish, individualistic activity that perpetuates those social conditions, they also mediate our needs in such a way that some of them are not satisfiable by activity that perpetuates those conditions, but are only satisfiable when those conditions are transformed or overthrown. In other words, social conditions mediate needs so as to produce both non-radical and radical needs – or so as to render some needs satisfiable and others unsatisfiable within a given status quo – and both of these needs play a role in determining the human senses historically. But importantly, non-radical and radical needs determine the human senses very differently in practical terms: Where non-radical needs render the senses patients of history that help reproduce the social conditions that shape them, radical needs – when ‘borne’, as Heller puts it – render the senses both patients and agents of history, shaped by and capable of shaping historically variable social conditions, representing the social formation as fraught and appropriate to be overthrown. ⁷⁷

Conclusion: the critical historicisation of human sensibility after Feuerbach and Marx

This paper has sought to illuminate a historicist treatment of the human senses in Feuerbach and Marx. Section 1 explicated Feuerbach’s extension of his predecessors’ approach to theorising a life form’s senses as determined by its needs while breaking from their endorsement of the mere animality charge. By embracing his predecessors’ treatment of the human senses as transhistorically liberated with respect to human life-needs, Feuerbach’s sensualist understanding of thought together with his incorporation of Geistesgeschichte into his philosophical anthropology lead him to identify historical contingency in our senses in their deployment toward satisfying ‘the need of the head’. Section 2 clarified how Marx’s critique of Feuerbach is rooted in an emphasis on the practical and principally appeals to the notion that historically contingent, social conditions mediate our life-needs in a way that challenges the notion that the human senses are transhistorically liberated. Section 3 then discussed how, for Marx, historical conditions mediate human life-needs in a way that determines the human senses to be ill-formed, and yet also produces radical needs that determine the senses in such a way that the latter can become properly formed contributors to human liberation in history. By mediating our life-needs such that some are satisfiable and others are unsatisfiable within a given social formation, social conditions determine our senses such that they are contingent upon history, and, in due course, history upon them.

Appreciating Feuerbach’s and Marx’s respective historicist treatments of human sensibility also illuminates how Honneth and Joas’s three claims noted above mischaracterise German philosophical anthropology generally and the relationship between Feuerbach, Marx, and their successors specifically. Against their first claim, the cases of Feuerbach and Marx demonstrate that philosophical anthropologists have concerned themselves with identifying historically contingent, changing conditions of human changeableness. This is especially clear with Marx’s second logic of the aesthetic on the table. Accordingly, against their second claim, although Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology is insufficiently historical by Marx’s lights, it has pathbreaking historical features, meaning that Marx’s advance from Feuerbach should not be understood as a historicisation of Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, but rather as a praxis-oriented radicalisation of Feuerbach’s historicism about the human senses. And against their third claim that ‘in the Marxist tradition, the question of what latitude the human being’s organic endowment allows to the cultural and historical shaping of human needs has to a large degree remained unanswered’, Marx himself addresses this question, albeit somewhat obliquely, by advancing that the human senses develop historically in ways that allow them to contribute to the historical shaping of human needs by facilitating social change that ‘de-radicalises’ radical needs, not necessarily by changing their contents, but by making them, via social change, actually satisfiable. ⁷⁸ Even if the Marxian tradition does not directly advance theories of what internal to human beings’ natural constitution enables human needs to undergo historical change, the historicist line on the human senses that emerges from Feuerbach and Marx advances that the human being is naturally constituted in such a way that human needs can be historically shaped to such an extent that some of the human being’s ‘organic endowments’, like the human senses, can themselves be historically shaped in turn.

To conclude, I want to briefly extend the challenges to Honneth and Joas’s first and third claims by gesturing toward evidence that this historicist line on human sensibility is extended by twentieth century thinkers in the broadly Marxian tradition. It is instructive to note that both Feuerbach and Marx engage in philosophical anthropology for critical purposes: Feuerbach undertakes a critique of religion and philosophy to lead us ‘from the realm of “detached souls” back into the realm of embodied living souls’, while Marx undertakes a critique of capitalism as an inhumane social formation that ought to be overthrown. ⁷⁹ For both figures, the historical character of human sensibility is crucial for the critical aspect of their respective philosophical anthropologies. Accordingly, such historicism is taken up and further reflected upon by twentieth century critical theorists and their predecessors.

Consider three cases. First, although far from a devout successor to Marx, Simmel extends a number of key Marxian themes in a way that foreshadows and appears to inform their development by Frankfurt School critical theorists, including Marx’s socio-material construal of the transformation of the human senses. For example, Simmel discusses what he calls ‘the blasé outlook (Blasierheit)’ as a change in human sensibility resultant from ways in which urbanisation, industrialisation, and commercialisation come to condition human needs. ⁸⁰ For Simmel, anticipating the Freudian idea of psychological defence mechanisms, the human being cannot handle simply taking in the sensory overload of the metropolis (Großstadt), and out of this historically shaped need, the human being develops ‘a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption’ of the pace and stability of the environments in which it has developed for millennia, corresponding to Blasierheit. ⁸¹ And echoing Feuerbach (and Hegel), Simmel claims that this dulls the senses and therewith intensifies rationality. ⁸² Accordingly, Blasierheit involves ‘an indifference toward the distinctions between things’ in qualitative terms, but – echoing Marx’s critique of the senses under capitalism – quantitative, specifically monetary differences between things and thus their standing as objects of possession and exchange become more forcefully represented: ‘the metropolis is the seat of commerce and it is in it that the purchasability of things appears in quite a different aspect than in simpler economies’. ⁸³

Second, Benjamin flatly advances that the human senses have a historical dimension in a way that corresponds to the historical scale involved in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s historicisms about the human senses:

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. ⁸⁴

And more specifically, Benjamin’s treatment of the ‘withering of the aura’ – where aura is ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’, and is thus an experiential phenomenon constitutively dependent upon, whatever else, sense-perception – is a consequence of a change in the human senses that dulls the representation of historicity and uniqueness, which is itself a result of changes in socio-material conditions related to needs. ⁸⁵ Here the quotation Benjamin offers from Valéry is instructive: ‘Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign’. ⁸⁶ When mechanical reproduction mediates our relations to our needs thusly, for Benjamin, our sensuous attunement to historicity and uniqueness wanes (which contributes to the withering of the aura), and what waxes is both a sense for the quantitative character of objects – evidenced by ‘the increasing importance of statistics’ ⁸⁷ – and a sense for the superficial aesthetic qualities of objects, which Benjamin discusses in terms of ‘presentability’ and ‘exhibition value’. ⁸⁸ As such, we can read Benjamin as critically developing Simmel’s view: Where Simmel takes our qualitative and quantitative sensibilities to correlate inversely with each other as industrialisation, urbanisation, and commercialisation develop, such that the former wanes while the latter waxes, Benjamin takes both to wax under such conditions, while our sense of history, ‘[uniqueness] and permanence’ – or, of the singular object – wanes. ⁸⁹

Third, one may look to Adorno’s treatment of ‘coldness’ as an adaptive transformation of bourgeois sensibility in accordance with historical contingencies of life-needs. For Adorno, ‘mere survival’, which Marx treats as the most fundamental need, becomes conditioned by the ubiquity of violence and suffering characterising bourgeois life and in turn ‘calls for [this] coldness’, that is, requires that we become less sensitive to violence and suffering. ⁹⁰ Accordingly, one could appreciate how Adornian coldness extends both the Feuerbachian-Marxian historicisation of human sensibility in general and Simmel’s discussion surrounding Blasierheit in particular. ⁹¹ Likewise, one can appreciate how Adorno’s view of the transformation of the human senses critically develops Benjamin’s innovation upon Simmel, as Adorno’s treatment of coldness suggests that sensitivity to singularity and the qualitative are far more intertwined than Benjamin’s discussion suggests. That is, coldness describes a sensibility insensitive to violence and suffering, but suffering is a qualitative feature of singular objects or individuals, such that insensitivity to the latter involves insensitivity to the former. ⁹² This helps to clarify why Adorno thinks that philosophy, perhaps in part to remedy the sense-perceptual deficiencies of coldness just noted, should give ‘a voice to suffering’: When coldness prevails, suffering can only be grasped if it is ‘objectively conveyed’ as the ‘most subjective experience’, that is, as a qualitative moment of a singular subject that only transcends singularity in ‘its expression’. ⁹³

To borrow from Buck-Morss, each of these three thinkers can be read as theorising human sensibility’s ‘self-anaesthetisation’ in accordance with socio-historical forms of mediation of our needs, which in turn suggests that each thinker can be read as building off of Marx’s first logic, on which the human senses become ill-formed under the technological and social conditions characteristic of bourgeois capitalism. ⁹⁴ The general point in briefly turning to these thinkers, however, is that Honneth and Joas’s claims about philosophical anthropology in general and the Marxian tradition in particular are challenged not only by Feuerbach and Marx, but also by some of their most noteworthy successors. And insofar as this historicism about the human senses in relation to human needs bolsters these thinkers’ critical projects, we may do well as critical theorists today to return to and further extend it.