Introduction

Karl Marx’s account of human nature appears to overcome the opposition between humanity and nature. Human beings are corporeal creatures who must eat, breathe, reproduce, and transform their surroundings. Labour is not a supernatural power imposed upon the material world but one natural process operating within another. Marx accordingly described useful labour as “an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature” (C1, p. 133). Human history remains part of natural history because even its most elaborate social forms depend upon bodies, materials, and energies that humanity has not created.

Yet Marx compromised this naturalism through the distinction he drew between human and non-human life. Nature supplies the matter, energy, and organic conditions of human existence, but humanity supposedly possesses a unique capacity to make life itself into a conscious project. The animal remains bound to immediate need and reproduces a form of life largely given by its species. The human being can imagine purposes before realising them, transform the conditions of existence, and recognise human capacities in the world produced through labour. Basically, Marx admits humanity into nature while preserving a hierarchy within nature itself. Non-human life remains associated with necessity, immediacy, and repetition, while humanity acquires freedom, universality, and conscious self-transformation.

The difficulty is not that Marx secretly returned humanity to an immaterial realm. His materialism does something much subtler, as powers traditionally associated with spirit are relocated within human productive activity. Nature becomes conscious of its possibilities in humanity, while humanity becomes fully itself by transforming nature according to purposes it can recognise as its own. Capitalism supposedly alienates this power by placing production under the command of capital. Communism, meanwhile, promises its recovery by returning collective productive power to those whose activity sustains it.

This leaves an unresolved ecological problem. For the abolition of capital can remove the economic compulsion to expand production for the sake of value without establishing any comparable principle by which freely chosen human purposes should limit themselves before forms of natural activity that are not human. Marx answered who should control production and why capitalist production expanded. But he gave a much less satisfactory answer to what claims the non-human world might make upon human purposes themselves.

Alienation and the Human-Animal Divide

Marx’s theory of alienation assumes that capitalist labour deprives workers of something more fundamental than comfort, leisure, or control over their immediate working conditions. For if human beings were entirely products of whatever society happened to make them, there would be no deeper human capacity from which wage labour could estrange them. Marx therefore identifies certain powers as characteristic of human life itself: conscious production, cooperation, the ability to give purposes material form, and the creation of shared ends. Capitalism develops these powers on an unprecedented scale while placing their direction beyond the control of the workers who exercise them.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx establishes this character through a contrast with animals. “The animal is immediately one with its life activity,” while humanity “makes its life activity itself the object of its will and of its consciousness” (EPM, p. 276). The distinction does not depend merely upon tool use or technical sophistication, as Marx acknowledges the remarkable productions of spiders and bees. What distinguishes the architect from the bee is that the architect first raises the structure in imagination and only afterwards realises that anticipated form in material. Purpose governs the activity before the object exists.

This reflective distance becomes the basis of human freedom, as the animal supposedly produces under the pressure of immediate need and according to the standard of its own species. Humanity can produce beyond present necessity, adopt the standards appropriate to different objects, and make the surrounding world into an expression of human purposes. The same structure appears in The German Ideology, where Marx argues that human beings “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence,” thereby “indirectly producing their actual material life” (GI, p. 42). Physical organisation conditions this activity, but historical self-production distinguishes human life from merely natural existence.

This gives Marx a powerful account of alienated labour, as the wage worker retains the physical capacity to work but loses authority over the purpose organising that activity. Materials, method, duration, and product belong to another. A capacity Marx regards as distinctively human, the ability to conceive an end and give it material form, becomes the means through which capital realises purposes the worker has not chosen. Labour remains conscious activity, but its organising consciousness increasingly belongs to the system commanding it.

There are plainly important differences between human and animal activity. Language, cumulative technology, institutions, historical memory, and deliberate cooperation permit forms of life unavailable to other organisms. Marx is right that human beings differ from other animals in important ways, but he exaggerates the contrast. Animals do not simply repeat a fixed pattern of life. They respond to changing conditions, learn, adapt, alter their environments, and maintain themselves through complex relations with what surrounds them. By treating these capacities as merely instinctive, Marx makes conscious human production appear to introduce creativity and self-transformation into a nature that was otherwise repetitive. His account of humanity is therefore partly secured by describing non-human life too narrowly.

G.W.F. Schelling and Hans Jonas: Natural Activity Before Human Labour

Marx explains productive activity from the standpoint of the human labourer who consciously gives form to material. F. W. J. Schelling, meanwhile, asks how a being capable of such activity could arise from nature in the first place, and nature therefore cannot be treated as a collection of finished objects waiting for human beings to act upon them. Formation is already taking place before human labour appears: physical processes produce determinate structures, organisms grow and repair themselves, and living beings respond to changes in their surroundings. Human production emerges within this prior activity of nature rather than introducing activity into an otherwise passive world.

Schelling expresses this continuity in the formula that “Nature should be spirit made visible, spirit the invisible nature” (Ideas, p. 42). This does not mean that forests, minerals, or animals possess a hidden version of human consciousness. Rather, his point is that nature and mind cannot be divided into an entirely passive world on one side and an entirely active subject on the other. The capacities that become conscious in human beings have a natural history. Formation, differentiation, and development therefore precede reflective thought. Nature produces organised forms before any human subject deliberately conceives the form that is to be produced.

This changes how human labour is understood. Marx begins with the labourer confronting material, imagining a result, and giving the material the intended form. Schelling asks instead how such a labourer becomes possible. The human body, nervous system, and consciousness are themselves products of natural processes that precede deliberate production. Human beings can consciously form things because they arise within a nature that was already formative. Schelling therefore writes that “The philosopher of nature treats nature as the transcendental philosopher treats the self” (FO, p. 14n). Nature must be understood as active in its own right, rather than merely as the object upon which an already completed human subject acts.

The organism provides the clearest example of what Schelling means. A living being is not a finished object whose identity consists in retaining exactly the same material parts. Its matter is continually changing. It takes in nourishment, expels waste, repairs damage, and responds to disturbances while preserving an organised form through those changes. The body remains recognisably the same living body even though much of the material composing it is replaced. Its identity therefore depends upon an ongoing activity of maintaining itself rather than upon remaining materially unchanged.

Schelling extends the same argument to sensibility, as “sensibility is present before its organ has formed itself; brain and nerves, instead of being causes of sensibility, are themselves already its product” (FO, p. 113). His claim is that sensation cannot be explained simply by pointing to a completed brain or nervous system as though those organs first existed and then somehow generated the capacity to be affected. The organs themselves develop within a living organisation already engaged in receiving and responding to its surroundings. Receptivity is therefore active and selective rather than merely passive. As such, light has biological significance for a lizard in a different manner than it does for a plant, a food source that nourishes one creature may poison another, and physical injury can impair how an organism sustains itself.

With Hans Jonas, the same problem appears in biological terms through metabolism, since a living organism preserves its form only by continually exchanging the matter of which it is composed with its surroundings. That gives life a peculiar kind of freedom from its material constituents, but only at the cost of continual dependence upon the world around it. The organism can change its matter because it must do so in order to remain alive. As Jonas puts it, metabolism involves both this capacity and “the irremissible necessity for it to do so”: its “‘can’ is a ‘must,’ since its execution is identical with its being” (PL, p. 83).

For Jonas, the most elementary freedom of life is therefore inseparable from dependence. The organism is not fixed to the same parcel of matter, but it acquires this freedom only by continually drawing new matter and energy from its surroundings. Its independence is precarious because it must constantly be renewed. A stone can simply remain what it is, whereas a living being must actively continue being itself. Thus, life introduces a new possibility of self-maintenance, but with that possibility comes the permanent danger of failure.

This weakens Marx’s contrast between animal immediacy and human mediation, as living beings are not simply enclosed within a fixed pattern that they reproduce without relation to changing circumstances. They maintain themselves through continual exchange with their surroundings, distinguish conditions that sustain them from those that threaten them, and alter their responses as circumstances change. Human beings carry these capacities much further through memory, language, reflection, and deliberate planning, but they do not introduce activity and responsiveness into a nature previously devoid of them. Marx is right to distinguish human labour from other forms of natural activity, but wrong to make that distinction bear the weight of an opposition between a self-transforming humanity and a merely repetitive natural world.

Henri Bergson and the Limits of Productive Self-Realisation

Marx is right that productive activity can give a person a powerful experience of agency: a craftsperson can recognise an intention in the object finally produced, just as a teacher may see months of work realised in another person’s understanding, or a builder may watch an imagined structure become inhabitable. Capitalist labour, to his mind, can damage this relation by separating conception from execution, the producer from the product, and cooperative achievement from the workers whose combined activity makes it possible. The difficulty begins when this genuine human capacity is made the privileged model of human fulfilment, as though a person became most fully himself by projecting an intention into the world and recognising his own powers in the result.

The person who enters this productive relation has already been formed by much that he did not choose or make. He is born from another body and cared for before he becomes self-conscious, learns a language invented and transmitted by others, and develops within relationships that precede deliberate choice. Memory, mortality, bodily dependence, and attachments that are only partly conscious shape what he values and what he is capable of doing. These are not materials waiting for an autonomous individual to give them form. Rather, they belong to the history through which any individual capable of forming purposes comes into existence.

For Henri Bergson, this history does not simply lie behind the person as a collection of completed experiences. The past survives in the present, later experiences alter the significance of earlier ones, and actions become part of the person from whom future actions will proceed. Personality is therefore not a finished essence that individual acts merely express. When Bergson writes that “we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality” (TFW, p. 172), freedom concerns the relation between an action and the developing life from which it arises. Control over the materials, purpose, and product of an activity may matter greatly, but it does not by itself determine whether the action is free.

A person may therefore control an activity and still perform it mechanically, from habit or according to a role whose purposes have never seriously been examined. A person may also be transformed through experiences that leave no external product behind. Grief can reorder priorities, forgiveness can change a relationship, and rejecting a role or course of life once taken for granted can redirect the person’s future. Here the limitation of Marx’s model becomes clearer: in purposeful production, the intended result ideally exists in thought before it is realised in material. Human action does not always proceed in this way. A decision can alter the person who makes it, change the meaning of what preceded it, and reveal that the purpose with which the action began was itself mistaken or incomplete.

Creativity consequently belongs not only to making things but to the ways a person can be changed through living. Endurance can alter what matters to someone, an encounter can overturn an established judgement, and restraint may involve relinquishing a purpose that could easily have been carried out. Human beings do not merely possess capacities and then externalise them in the world. They are also affected by what they encounter, and some of the most important changes in a life occur when experience forces an existing desire, interpretation, or purpose to be reconsidered. Freedom must therefore include the capacity to revise the person who acts, not merely the power to realise more completely what that person already intends.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and C.S. Peirce: Nature Beyond Human Purposes

Marx describes nature as humanity’s inorganic body because human life depends upon a world it did not create. Human beings cannot exist without air, water, plants, animals, soil, or the materials they transform through labour. Estrangement from nature is therefore also estrangement from the conditions that sustain human life.

Yet describing nature as humanity’s body still defines the non-human world principally through its relation to us. Nature becomes the wider material world through which human beings sustain themselves, labour, and develop their powers. Marx does not deny that nature exists independently of the human being. The problem is that, in this account, its significance is still described mainly through the part it plays in human life and production.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, developing Schelling’s philosophy of nature, describes nature not simply as what confronts us but as “what supports us” (N, p. 5). Human beings do not begin outside nature and then discover that they depend upon it. Consciousness develops through a body already involved in a world of other bodies, organisms, and material processes. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “Nature outside us is revealed by the Nature that we are” (N, p. 267). The body through which we perceive the world is itself part of that world. Our senses and nervous systems are natural formations, not instruments belonging to a subject standing outside nature.

A cultivated landscape cannot be understood simply by identifying the human purposes that have shaped it. The soil, plants, animals, water, and climate have histories of their own that begin before cultivation and continue alongside it. Even careful and sustainable cultivation does not turn those processes into products of human intention. Managing a landscape intelligently does not mean that we have exhausted what it is. The organisms and processes within it continue according to histories and forms of development that human beings did not create.

For C. S. Peirce, experience matters precisely because the world does not simply conform to what we already think. Reality is not merely something upon which human purposes and concepts are successfully imposed. Experience involves the “forcible modification of our ways of thinking” through “the influence of the world of fact” (EP2, p. 370). Human beings begin with bodies they did not design, languages they did not invent, and habits formed before they were capable of examining them. Experience can then expose the limits of those habits, assumptions, and ways of understanding.

A person is formed not only by carrying purposes into the world but by discovering that some of those purposes are mistaken or inadequate. Nature cannot therefore be understood only as the material through which humanity realises its powers. It is also what resists our expectations, exposes the limits of our purposes, and sometimes requires us to change them.

Human Development, Communism, and Ecological Limits

Marx does not understand human needs as a fixed set of biological requirements waiting to be satisfied. Rather, human capacities themselves develop historically: “The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history” (EPM, p. 353). Education can create desires for forms of knowledge previously inaccessible, musical cultivation changes what a person is capable of hearing, scientific discovery opens further questions, and cooperation makes possible activities that no isolated individual could undertake. Human development therefore creates new needs as it creates new capacities.

This allows Marx to conceive human fulfilment as something richer than mere subsistence, but it also connects the development of human capacities with an increasing power to transform the natural world. In the Grundrisse, wealth involves both “the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature” and “the development of all human powers as such the end in itself” (G, p. 488). The two ambitions sit together: human beings enlarge their capacities partly by enlarging the range of natural processes they can understand, use, and reorganise.

Communism may abolish capital’s requirement that production continually expand for the sake of further accumulation. That does not mean that every reason for increasing humanity’s use of nature disappears with it. Scientific inquiry requires instruments and energy, wider mobility requires infrastructure, medicine develops new ways of intervening in bodies and environments, and new cultural or technological capacities create further activities people may reasonably wish to pursue. Greater efficiency may reduce the resources required for any one activity, but it can also make additional activities possible. An expanding range of freely chosen ends can therefore increase humanity’s demands upon nature even when profit no longer governs production.

The problem runs deeper than the possibility that a communist society might continue to consume too much. Marx judges production principally by the relation human beings have to their own productive powers: who controls them, whose purposes they serve, and whether workers can recognise their activity as their own. Communism resolves alienation by bringing production under conscious collective control, but this still leaves nature on the other side of the relation as the material through which human purposes are realised. If a forest is cleared, a river diverted, or an animal population reorganised according to purposes freely chosen by associated producers, Marx has strong grounds for asking whether the decision is genuinely collective and whether it serves human flourishing. He has much weaker grounds for asking whether the forest, river, or animals place limits upon those purposes independently of human interests. The domination of nature can therefore cease to be alienated without ceasing to be domination. What changes is the subject exercising the power, not necessarily the assumption that the non-human world should remain available for the development of human capacities.

That is why collective ownership is not, by itself, an ecological principle. It can determine who governs humanity’s use of nature without answering whether everything humanity is capable of using ought to be brought within that use. Once other living beings and natural processes are recognised as having histories and requirements of their own, emancipation cannot consist simply in replacing purposes imposed by capital with purposes freely chosen by humanity. Human purposes themselves may be excessive, destructive, or simply inappropriate to the beings upon which they act. Freedom therefore requires more than becoming the authors of our purposes. It also requires recognising forms of life and natural processes that are not ours to author, and before which some human purposes may properly have to stop.

Conclusion: Recursive Naturalism and Freedom Beyond Mastery

Nature is already active and formative before human beings appear. With life, this activity takes a more particular form: an organism must continually maintain itself through exchanges with its surroundings, preserving its organisation while the matter composing it changes. Human beings arise within the same natural history. We depend upon bodies we did not design, languages we did not invent, relationships we did not choose at their beginning, and environments whose existence precedes our own.

What distinguishes human beings is therefore not that we alone act, change, or respond to the world. Our distinction lies more specifically in our ability to question how we are living. A desire can be recognised as destructive rather than simply obeyed. A habit can become visible as a habit and therefore something that might be changed. A social role once accepted without question can cease to fit the person living through it. Purposes pursued for years can be reconsidered when failure, experience, or another person reveals something wrong in them. Human beings do not merely change; they can become aware of how they have been formed and take some part in changing it.

Even this capacity depends upon conditions we have not created. Reflection requires a living body, memory, language, and relations with other people. We can reconsider our histories, but we cannot stand outside them and begin again from nothing. Nor can we ever make every motive, attachment, or influence upon us completely transparent. Human self-formation is therefore real without becoming self-creation.

Freedom has to be understood on those terms, as it cannot mean escaping dependence upon nature, since dependence is a condition of being alive. Nor can it be identified simply with increasing our power to alter the world. A person or society may acquire enormous technical power while remaining incapable of questioning the desires and assumptions directing its use. Freedom lies partly in remaining capable of discovering that a way of living is mistaken and changing it accordingly.

Production can be one expression of this freedom, but it is not its defining form. Making and building can change the person who undertakes them, yet so can preserving something that might otherwise have been destroyed, abandoning an ambition that has proved harmful, attending closely to another person, or deciding not to exercise a power simply because it is available. Human fulfilment does not require every capacity to be exercised or every possibility to be realised. There can be freedom in leaving something alone.

This exposes the deeper problem in Marx’s emphasis upon productive objectification. He brings together two capacities that need to be distinguished: our ability to change how we live and our ability to give external matter a form we have conceived beforehand. Labour can embody human intelligence and purpose, but it does not follow that human beings realise themselves most fully by making more of the world correspond to those purposes. Our more remarkable capacity may appear when the relation runs in the other direction, when an encounter with reality forces us to reconsider what we wanted to do in the first place.

Alienation can then be understood more broadly than separation from the product or control of labour. A person may become trapped within a role, desire, institution, or interpretation that has ceased to be open to question. Someone who has spent decades understanding himself primarily as a successful professional may continue sacrificing health, friendships, and family life because abandoning the career would threaten the identity built around it. Political allegiance can harden in the same way: evidence of corruption or incompetence that would be condemned in an opponent is excused when it concerns one’s own party. Consumption can become a habitual response to dissatisfaction, so that boredom, loneliness, or anxiety is repeatedly answered by buying clothes, upgrading a phone, or booking another holiday without asking what the dissatisfaction actually requires. An intellectual can become similarly enclosed within a theory, treating every awkward fact not as a possible objection but as further evidence that the theory was right all along. In each case, something formed through history begins to present itself as fixed and exhaustive.

Overcoming alienation therefore involves more than taking possession of powers previously controlled by somebody else. It also requires recovering the ability to question the purposes, habits, and identities through which life has become organised. The world does not have to become an expression of ourselves before we can live freely within it. Other beings need not acquire their value by reflecting human purposes back to us, and freedom may sometimes require accepting that what we could transform is nevertheless not ours to remake.

Marx is right to place humanity within nature and to reject any account of freedom that treats us as minds detached from bodily existence. The problem arises when conscious human production is made the decisive point at which nature supposedly becomes capable of freely transforming its conditions. Nature is formative long before labour appears. Living organisms already preserve themselves through change, respond selectively to their surroundings, and alter their behaviour in relation to what they encounter. Human beings develop these capacities in distinctive ways through language, memory, and reflection, but we inherit their natural basis rather than introduce activity into an otherwise passive world.

Nature therefore does not culminate in humanity. Human beings are one form of life in which purposes themselves can become questionable. We can recognise that a desire is destructive, that an established way of life has failed, or that something valuable lies beyond the purposes we have imposed upon it. The same reflective capacity, however, can be used to defend our existing desires and disguise particular interests as universal necessities. Intelligence can correct human purposes, but it can equally provide increasingly sophisticated reasons for refusing to correct them.

An ecological conception of freedom has to take that danger seriously. Greater human power does not become freedom merely because its purposes have been consciously or democratically chosen. Sometimes freedom lies in recognising that a purpose should be revised, limited, or abandoned because of what its fulfilment would require from other forms of life. Human beings do not need to make the world increasingly resemble themselves in order to become more fully human. A world that existed before our purposes arose need not justify its continued existence by becoming the material through which those purposes are fulfilled.

Sources and References

~ (C1) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (Penguin, 1990) by Karl Marx.

~ (EPM) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1975) by Karl Marx.

~ (GI) The German Ideology (International Publishers, 1970) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

~ (Ideas) Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1988) by F. W. J. Schelling.

~ (FO) First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (State University of New York Press, 2004) by F. W. J. Schelling.

~ (PL) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Northwestern University Press, 2001) by Hans Jonas.

~ (TFW) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Harper & Row, 1960) by Henri Bergson.

~ (N) Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Northwestern University Press, 2003) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

~ (EP2) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume II (Indiana University Press, 1998) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (G) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin, 1973) by Karl Marx.