SLASHIN' MARX

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

I've already taken one Wolverine-sized chunk out of Brother Karl Marx in this post. Here's my second swipe, courtesy of Martin Buber and his conception of the two fundamental human relations: the "I-it" relation and the "I-thou" relation.

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.

The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.

I'm not nearly as much a Buberphile as I am a Cassirerphile, and I depart from Buber on an assortment of philosophical positions. Still, the above passage from I AND THOU strikes me as a cogent summation of the impossibility of altering human relations so that they are purely a matter of "love for love, trust for trust." I regard Marx's assertion as one grounded in naive idealism as to the nature of human relations. Further, even if human culture could be transformed so that all or even most people related to their fellow humans with Marx's "specific expression," I believe that it would take a lot more than a new economic system to effect such a transformation.

Buber's quote is the more profound of the two, for he admits that it's inevitable that humans will downgrade everything in their compass to the status of things. I believe that Marx and Buber would agree that every "I" possesses what Marx terms "a real individual life," but Marx does not perceive the fundamental dynamic that changes the "thou" to the "it." Rather, he implies in the passage above that to downgrade an item to the status of an "it" runs contrary to the nature of humanity. The "human relation" he describes above is a "Thou" relationship alone. What Buber would term the "it" relationship would therefore be in Marx less than fundamental, perhaps a manifestation of inhuman factors like "market forces" and "commodification," two of the ruling devils in Marx's Pandaemonium.

In the real world human interactions are not determined soley a matter of a given person's "specific expression" of his "real individual life" to another person. In terms of societal function it may be true that no man is an island, but experientially every man (and woman) must be so. Things like love and art break down the barriers between one human and another to some extent, but they can just as easily build up different barriers. Love can certainly go from chrysalis to butterfly and then back to chrysalis. That's why we have divorce lawyers. In the above passage Marx speaks of art as if one's experience of it were a one-way street navigable only once one has become an "artistically cultivated person." In truth "I" find in art what "I" seek or need to find. "I" cannot find it for "Thou," only for "I." "I" can appreciate intellectually that others have different priorities, but as that is merely an intellectual understanding, to some extent that appreciation is also an "I-it" relationship.

Relationships between artists of similar dispositions are not even capable of bridging the gap between "I" and "Thou." First comes what Herman Melville termed the "shock of recognition," as one recognizes that another cognitive being shares some of the same goals that "I" do. But after the shock wears off, one usually gets in its place "the anxiety of influence," as "I" recognize that the apparent "Thou" has separate thoughts or desires that may well reduce the "Thou" to an "It"-- which, if I recall correctly, was what basically happened with Melville and the fellow who inspired his recognition-shock, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Nine times out of ten, when I hear a Marxist rail against the evils of commodification or the culture industry, what he's railing against has nothing to do with evils arising demonstrably from economic causes. What the Marxist rails against is the perception that he's not finding what his "I" wants in all the "Its" out there in, say, popular culture. But it's possible that in many cases the butterflies are really there, hidden in chrysali, and that your Marxist has stuffed his head so full of economics that he doesn't know from basic biology.