The same theoretical limitation of Feuerbach’s philosophy manifests itself in his treatment of “nature.” Marx criticizes “nature as such,” which Feuerbach is seeking, because this does not exist anywhere. Nature as such, fully separated from humans, is a pure fantastic construction in thinking, which “today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach either.”92 When he talks about nature, Feuerbach is always compelled to abstract it from existing social relations, fleeing into the world of “eternity” with his philosophical intuition. As a consequence, he overlooks the historical process of the formation of nature through the human activity of production.
It is true that Marx in 1844 recognized the necessity to treat nature and humans in their interrelationship: “But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself—nature fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man.”93 However, his remark was only an abstract ontological statement according to which history needs to be understood as a labor-mediated process of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of human beings. In contrast to this early formulation, Marx in The German Ideology emphasizes the historical formation of what counts as “nature.” Nature is not just there, but is constantly transformed through social production, in which both humans and nature work upon and constitute each other. Of course, the statement that humans and nature do not exist in reality without this reciprocal relation still sounds abstract and banal. To avoid this abstractness, it is essential for Marx’s “materialist method” to analyze the process of social and natural formation in capitalism, paying particular attention to its specific historical interaction between humans and nature, mediated by labor. Marx clearly recognized this point in The German Ideology and later analyzed this historical reciprocal process much more carefully with the concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel), as will be shown in the following chapters.
In The German Ideology, Marx does not yet discuss the reciprocal constitution of humans and nature in detail. But in contrast to Feuerbach, he comprehends the antagonistic relationship between humans and nature as a specific modern product that resulted from capitalist industrialization. Furthermore, Marx intentionally formulates this historical development as a critique against Feuerbach:
The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water—to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.94
Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s remarks in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: “That which is my essence is my being.” The being of the fish is its being in water, and from this being you cannot separate its essence. Language already identifies being and essence. Only in human life does it happen, but even here, only in abnormal and unfortunate cases, that being is separated from essence.”95 Marx rejects Feuerbach’s Romantic tone, which only asks for the return to the essence as a countermeasure against the loss of that very essence. If the “water” is always the “essence of the freshwater fish,” there would be no room for a critique of water pollution. By opposing the polluted water to the “natural” fresh water as the essence of the fish, Feuerbach can at best show that the current water condition is “abnormal.” But simply pointing to the abnormality, Feuerbach cannot sufficiently analyze and identify the social cause of water pollution and comprehend the conditions for the cleaning of water. What he shows is that when the “essence” (water) is lost, the “being” (fish) must disappear. This statement is correct but obviously banal. In other words, Feuerbach’s analysis says nothing about the distorted relationship between humans and nature in modern society and laments the situation as an “unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly.”96 Marx argues that this ironic affirmation of alienation is a necessary consequence of Feuerbach’s philosophy, which despite its self-claimed radicality avoids any practical engagement with the negative cosnequences of the modern system of production.
Against Feuerbach’s presupposition of an ahistorical nature, Marx argues that it is always necessary to deal with humans and nature in their concrete reciprocity. So he asks what kinds of social relations make nature undergo various modifications in an antagonistic and alienated manner, and he attempts to reconstruct the specific historical process of social production and reproduction. It is the task of his scientific investigation of history to reveal this point:
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.97
Humans must produce in order to live. Labor as an act of this production is inevitably conditioned by various natural and material factors. Under these conditions, humans also change their environment. According to Marx, any scientific investigation must pay attention to this historical transformation mediated by labor. In other words, Marx’s approach to the problem of the alienation of humans and nature after leaving the Young Hegelian philosophy changed fundamentally. He no longer opposes the alien dominion of capital to the philosophical idea of “humanism = naturalism” but asks why and how an antagonistic separation between humans and nature emerges and deepens under the capitalist mode of production.
This materialist orientation formulated in The German Ideology was only the beginning of a new period of research that lasted for the rest of Marx’s life. Marx’s intensive research in both political economy and the natural sciences in the following years represents nothing but the further development of his project to examine the historically specific mediation under capitalism of the transhistorically necessary act of production. In Marx’s examination of the relationship between humans and nature, the physiological concept of “metabolism” acquires a central role.
Metabolism of Political Economy
All living creatures must go through constant interaction with their environment if they are to live upon this planet. The totality of these incessant processes creates not a static but an open-ended dynamic process of nature. Before Ernst Haeckel called this economy of nature “oecology,” this organic whole that consists of plants, animals, and humans was often analyzed with a concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel).1 This physiological concept became popular and in the nineteenth century was applied beyond its original meaning to philosophy and political economy to describe the transformations and interchanges among organic and inorganic substances through the process of production, consumption, and digestion on the level of both individuals and species.
This new concept in chemistry and physiology also stimulated Marx in the 1850s, and he was even prompted to give it a central role in his political economy, using it to comprehend the dynamic and interactive relationship between humans and nature mediated by labor. Like all other