Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley
with the idea of collective identity, the collective interest and the ‘general will’. Rousseau’s ideas, it is supposed, helped fuel the French Revolutionary demands not only for liberté and egalité, but also fraternité or solidarity. However, the emphasis on solidarity or community would find expression in very different forms of communitarianism:
•some conservative, which would seek to preserve elements of the traditional sources of social order and security;
•some reformist, which seek to temper the extent to which unfettered individual freedom might undermine cooperation, sharing and substantive equality between human beings;
•and some revolutionary, which have sought to establish a form of human society founded (and managed) entirely on strictly collectivist principles.
Critical to these kinds of humanism is an acknowledgement that Descartes’ ‘thinking individual’ does not think alone: her understanding of the ever-changing world around her is shaped intersubjectively through her relations with others. And it was supposed by Hegel (1821) that there is something essential to the character of humanity – some ‘absolute spirit’ or mind2 – that drives our shared understandings. This idealist interpretation of the human condition is consistent with a caring and sharing form of social conservatism, as it is with certain religious beliefs. Critics of Hegel – most particularly Karl Marx – adapted Hegel’s insights to argue for social changes that might unlock or realise not some abstract ‘spirit’, but the substantive potential of humanity; its distinctive ‘essence’. During the Industrial Revolution, Marx and Frederick Engels directly influenced the emergence of modern socialism in both its reformist Social Democratic and revolutionary Communist or state socialist variants.
Supremacist humanism might seem to follow from a particular interpretation of Darwin’s (1859) theory of natural selection and an assumption that not only have humans achieved supremacy over other species, but also that the fittest and strongest human beings will, or indeed should, achieve supremacy over weaker and inferior members of the species. However, the seeds of this approach had been sown in Hobbes’ (1651) earlier portrayal of human society as a ‘war of all against all’ and it found explicit expression in the views of Nietzsche (1883), who, having proclaimed that God is dead, contended that human beings are primarily driven by their own ‘will to power’. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, of course, was concerned with a natural process, but if human beings are capable of consciously seeking domination over other members of their own species, then it is through war, conquest, genocide and eugenics that the species might supposedly improve itself or else evolve an aristocratic super-human elite or super-race. The most extreme and by far the crudest illustration of this paradoxically misanthropic form of humanism is fascism (Harari, 2017: 299–300). But central to supremacist humanism is the celebration of greatness and the capacity of great men to exercise leadership, impose order and achieve subservience within the competitive jungle of popular society.
These different humanisms, it may be expected, exhibit rather different understandings of human need and take correspondingly different approaches to social policy. Social policy both as a sphere of public policy making and as an academic subject is currently – whether implicitly or explicitly – informed largely by what Brian Ellis (2012) has identified as a form of progressive ‘social humanism’, which he describes as the ‘moral and political philosophy of the welfare state’. In essence, however, what he describes is in fact liberal humanism, albeit guided by ‘moral principles that are socially derived’. If for the purposes of social policy, however, we are to identify what is distinctively human about our needs, we might wish to re-visit key elements of our story of the human species and draw out elements first identified by Marx when he sought to define the ‘essence’ of humanity in substantive rather than spiritual terms. The work of distilling this analysis from Marx’s early philosophical work was originally begun in the 1960s by members of the Budapest School (see Pickle & Rundell, 2018), and in particular by György Márkus. The humanist strand in Marx’s thinking (Fromm, 1961; Parsons, 1971) has been largely overlooked or overshadowed, partly because Marx’s broader legacy was in practice diluted by democratic socialism on the one hand, and distorted by totalitarian communism on the other. Dominant approaches to and interpretations of Marxist thinking have too often been confined, in Bauman’s words, to a ‘truncated, shrunk and desiccated version of Marxism’ (2004: 33). For the purposes of this chapter, I shall set out the kernel of my interpretation of what has been, or may be, drawn or elaborated from Marx’s account of the constitutive characteristics of the human species.
Species characteristics
The central contention from which we start is the notion of ‘human essence’, which ‘lies precisely in the “essence” or inner unity of the total social development of humanity’ (Márkus, 1978: 63). It represents the ‘ensemble of social relations’; an essence that is neither biological nor spiritual, but precisely human. What characterises the human species and its mode of existence, according to Márkus’ reading of Marx, is human consciousness, work and sociality. And to these three interconnected characteristics should be added the universality and freedom that ‘mark the general direction of the historical progress of humanity’ (1978: 61): or in short, humanity’s historical development. These characteristics, it may be argued, define the human species in relation to other species and in relation to the natural world. But they also define each member of that species as a generic being. We shall consider each in turn.3
Consciousness
The consciousness that characterises the human species is something beyond mere sentience. Around perhaps 70,000 years ago, the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ referred to earlier witnessed the beginnings of thinking: a form of consciousness that made uniquely human action possible in the sense that it is action that has purpose and meaning to the actor; and an intersubjective awareness on the part of members of the species as to their selfhood and identity in relation to the natural world and to each other. It is social being or ‘sociality’ (which we shall discuss further on) which shapes human consciousness.
Descartes’ contention that conscious thinking was essentially independent of bodily functions fuelled an enduring debate concerning the ‘mystery of consciousness’ (J. Searle, 1997). It is a debate that continues to divide scientists and philosophers. Is thinking and awareness of our own existence no more than a neurological activity unique to the human brain, or does it entail something more essential about a human being compared, for example, with a highly trained and emotionally intelligent dog on the one hand, or a highly sophisticated and artificially intelligent robot on the other?
Marx’s answer was that ‘Thought and being are indeed distinct, but they also form a unity’, insofar as an individual’s consciousness is ratified or ‘confirmed’ through her ‘species consciousness’ (1844: 351). Species consciousness was more than the capacity for passive contemplation, or the capacity for reason alone, but the capacity for ‘sense activity’ (Marx, 1845b: 82): for reflexivity, rather than mere reflection. Consciousness is the dynamic relationship between thinking and being that characterises human action and therefore human history. Marx’s understanding of the Agricultural, Scientific and Industrial revolutions was focused on the unfolding of the ‘human essence of Nature and the natural essence of Man’ (1844: