My explorations concerning Marx and “the spiritual” in this essay presuppose that there is not a sharp conceptual break between the early and late Marx. The argument that could plausibly establish such a case is much too long and complex to be given here but, in my judgment, the strongest case for holding that Marx’s life work actually is an integral whole involves bringing into play Marx’s mature method of dialectical explanation that moves from the abstract to the concrete to show the interconnection between the early and late Marx.1 In what follows I adapt this method to my explorations of the spiritual in Marx.
To orient my readers let me give the following characterization of the “spiritual” at a metalevel that abstracts from the specific contents of any particular mode of the spiritual. At such a level I project the spiritual as that domain of the human psyche having to do with the lived experience of existential meaning and value, of wholeness and love, of creative agency, and of interconnection with other humans, nature, and reality at large. I interpret this formulation as being intentionally oriented toward a very wide spectrum of specific modes of the spiritual that could be elaborated on more concrete levels of analysis.
Furthermore, I hold that the specific modes of the spiritual at one end of such a spectrum would mostly be oriented toward “inner realms” that have little to do with everyday outward practice, while at the other end of the spectrum would be modes of the spiritual having the potential of fully suffusing everyday human practice in the world. In my view, the degree to which any specific mode of the spiritual would suffuse ordinary everyday practice in the world (or fail to do so, as the case may be) would depend entirely on the specific mode considered. It will come out in what follows that the mode of the spiritual I associate with Marx is one that can fully suffuse everyday human practice.
My discussion begins on quite an abstract level, where I explain Marx’s distinction between “spiritual forces” and the “religious form” they so often assume. Moving to a less abstract level, I cite pasages where Marx uses phrases like “spiritual life” (das geistege Leben) that suggestively point toward his own positive notion of “the spiritual.” Moving to a still less abstract level, I turn to a brief exploration of Feuerbach’s view of religion, which influenced Marx so significantly. In this context I draw from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” to clarify the specific way Marx disagreed with Feuerbach’s view of religious self-alienation. I argue that Marx interprets the alienation of “spiritual forces,” that for him have their proper home within the secular basis, in terms of the secular basis becoming alienated from itself; and that he also points to the practical necessity of transforming the secular basis in a way that involves “spiritualizing” the secular basis itself. I next discuss the “opium of the people” passage where Marx speaks of religion as “people’s illusory happiness” and holds that criticism of religion “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain … [so that people] will throw it off and pluck the living flower” (1997, 250). Going to an even less abstract level, I give an exposition of what Marx likely means by “imaginary flowers” and the “living flower,” arguing that these metaphors point toward Marx’s own positive understanding of the spiritual.
Following this I argue that implicit in the “opium of the people” passage is Marx’s recognition of an array of fundamental needs all people have, which I interpret as existential needs. On a still more concrete level, I specify the particular way in which each of these needs would be manifested in the specific mode of the spiritual at play in Marx’s philosophical paradigm. However, I do not mean to imply the spiritual can be reduced to such needs, especially when seen abstractly. Rather, I construe Marx’s positive notion of the spiritual in terms of the specific concrete form these needs should take as they suffuse associated modes of human practice and are dialectically shaped by such practice. Finally I argue that suffusing a revolutionary praxis with such a this-worldly mode of the spiritual would, on a wide-enough scale, have some real hope of transforming the secular basis in the direction of social justice and a more human future.
Before proceeding, however, a rationale for addressing the spiritual in connection with Marx is appropriate. Why is it important? What is the benefit? In my view, a pandemic crisis of the human person pervades much of planet earth: a crisis of the human spirit manifesting itself in so many diverse ways, a spiritual crisis! Not altogether a new crisis, though, for Nietzsche explored the existential breakdown of traditional Western modes of the spiritual (but without addressing the role of capitalism in generating this breakdown) and codified it in his projection of the “advent of nihilism.” Unfortunately, the crisis of the human person has greatly intensified in many ways and spread very widely in the past hundred years, largely due to the ongoing impact of capitalist systems on peoples throughout the world. In the United States itself, the capitalist system has so warped the human psyche that a looming meaninglessness now hangs over much of the country. Yes, it is blunted and masked somewhat by the torrential gush of consumer goods and services that the system spews out to mollify the people—the contemporary opiate for many of the people. But the system also systematically generates increasing alienation as a very significant dimension of its gross national product. The notion of the spiritual that I associate with humanistic Marxism has the potential not only to address the intensifying crisis of the human person, but also to help in generating a revolutionary agency that could transfigure the system. So far as I am aware, this paper constitutes a creative breakthrough in thinking about the spiritual in relation to Marx.
The Spiritual in Marx
What meanings do the terms “religion” and “the spiritual” have for Marx? Do they have basically the same meaning, or is there a fundamental difference for him between his notion of religion and his notion of the spiritual? Here let me first refer to a section of Capital where Marx is talking about the historical necessity of material production developing through an alienated and antagonistic transitional phase in which the human subject is transformed into an object. In this connection he writes, “It is necessary [for material production] to go through this antagonistic form, just as it is necessary at first to give man’s spiritual forces [die geistigen Kräfte] a religious form by erecting them into autonomous power over against him” (1977, 509; emphasis added). It seems quite clear that Marx is here making a distinction between the “spiritual forces” of human beings, on the one hand, and what he takes to be the alienated “religious form” that these forces can have when they involve the projection of an “independent realm in the clouds” from which they seem to stand over human beings as an alien and autonomous power. In using the phrase “religious form” in this way, Marx seems to be suggesting that religion itself, in the sense in which he means it, carries with it the connotation of an associated alienation of the spiritual forces of the human being and of the spiritual dimension itself. What positive view of the spiritual might Marx embrace, then, and what would constitute an unalienated expression of the spiritual forces for him?
To open some conceptual space, let me first say that there is no philosophically justifiable reason to rigidly limit the term “spiritual” to the relatively narrow ways it is often used in traditional Western settings—especially ways that see spirituality and the spiritual as necessarily involving beliefs in a creator god, a soul, and a supernatural world. I contend that the general term “spiritual” must be seen as orienting one to a very wide spectrum of specific modes of the spiritual that manifest “family resemblances” with one another, rather than some common quality or set of qualities that can be captured via an abstract universal or some Platonic-like essence (Wittgenstein 1953, sec. 67). I mean a spectrum that includes not only theist and dualist modes, but also nontheist, nondualist, naturalist, animist, and even atheistic modes of the spiritual.
Considering the following passages, let us reflect upon what Marx himself might mean by “the spiritual” and whether he embraces some positive notion of the spiritual. Here, though, it is important to note a caveat concerning the term “spiritual” (whether in English translation or in the original German). The term itself does not really matter for a rose by any other name is still a rose. I take the term “spiritual” to abstractly connote a domain of the psyche having to do with certain sorts of lived experience, and I take the passages that follow as Marx’s pointers toward his way of concretely elaborating the particular mode of the spiritual he embraces. So then, some of Marx’s formulations.
Man lives by nature. This means that nature is his body with which he must remain in perpetual process in order not to die. That the physical and spiritual life [das geistige Leben] of man is tied up with nature is another way of saying that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. (1997, 293; emphasis altered)
[Alienated labor] alienates his spiritual nature [sein geistiges Wesen], his human essence, from his own body and likewise from nature outside him. (295; emphasis altered)
For not only the five senses but also the so-called spiritual [die geistigen Sinne] and moral senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense and the humanity of the senses come into being only through the existence of their object through nature humanized. (309; emphasis altered)
These passages make explicit references to “spiritual life,” “spiritual nature,” and “spiritual senses,” and they do so without any implication for Marx that spirituality and religion are synonymous or that his use of the term “spiritual” in these contexts suggests anything like a creator god, a soul substance, or a supernatural world. Moreover, far from being a rejection of the spiritual, these passages seem to point to what Marx believes to be an unalienated expression of this very dimension. To develop this, let me next explore some of the views of Ludwig Feuerbach who had such a significant influence on Marx, especially concerning religion.
In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argues that the notion of God is an external projection of man’s inner nature, and that the humanly projected aspects of God correspond to human needs. According to his account of the origin of belief in a transcendent God, our early Judaeo-Christian forebears noticed in themselves certain qualities that they regarded as very special—qualities like reason, will, and love.
What then is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection. The power of thought is the light of the intellect, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of affection is love … Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature. (Feuerbach 1957, 3; emphasis added)
As Feuerbach sees things, our early forebears abstracted these qualities in their imagination from their own situation and, after removing in thought the limitations such qualities had in their own case, they projected the notion of an all-knowing reason, an all-powerful will, and an infinite love. They then projected a metaphysical subject to which they attached these projected qualities, and the name they gave to the resulting complex made in their own image was “God.” The various attributes of this “divine being” were all attributes of human beings, but with the human attributes “purified” and their limitations transcended. Other projected attributes included God “as a being of the understanding” and “as a moral being” (33–49). Moreover, for Feuerbach all these attributes corresponded to various needs in human nature. All this is the “true or anthropological essence of religion” for Feuerbach: “The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature” (14).
Feuerbach also construes God as the alienated personification of the powers of human beings standing over them as an external threatening force: their own “rejected nature” now purified, objectified, hovering over them in a menacing way, calling for submission, and promising retribution if submission is not forthcoming. “As the action of the arteries drives the blood into the extremities, and the action of the veins brings it back again, as life in general consists in a perpetual systole and diastole; so it is in religion. In the religious systole man propels his own nature from himself, he throws it outward; in the religious diastole he receives the rejected nature into his heart again” (31). Feuerbach’s remedy for this alienated situation goes something like this. Recognize that humans have created God in their own image; do away with the imaginary metaphysical subject that humans have projected; draw back into the human context the powers that they had attached to this metaphysical subject; recognize and embrace the limited nature of these powers in the human context; and then redefine “God” in reference to the context of human relations. Consider, for example, Feuerbach’s attitude toward God and Love.
Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As god has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in ...
