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Rethinking Marx and the

SpiritualKevin M. Brien

Published online: 02 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Kevin M. Brien (2009) Rethinking Marx and the Spiritual,Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 21:1, 103-116, DOI:

10.1080/08935690802542473

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Rethinking Marx and the Spiritual

Kevin M. Brien

dedicated to Robert S. Cohen

This essay explores the ‘‘the spiritual’’ in Marx’s thought and, in so doing, interpretsthat thought as an integral whole. A metalevel characterization of the spiritual,

oriented toward a broad spectrum of specific modes of the spiritual, is given. Various

citations from Marx’s texts open up, in a preliminary way, a vista on a humanistic

Marxist mode of the spiritual. Feuerbach’s views on religion are examined, followed

by Marx’s critical appropriation of them, that construes religion as an alienated form

of the spiritual that tears it away from its this-worldly home in the secular domain.

An analysis of Marx’s religion in ‘‘the opium of the people’’ passage is given */with

special concern for the meanings of ‘‘imaginary flowers’’ and the ‘‘living flower.’’ The

essay argues that implicit in this passage is Marx’s recognition of an array of

fundamental existential needs that all people have. Finally, an exposition of how

each of these needs would be manifested in the specific mode of the spiritual at play in Marx’s thought concretely brings it into focus.

Key Words: Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Religion

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 interconnec-

tion 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

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/09/010103-14

– 2009 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

DOI: 10.1080/08935690802542473

1. For those interested, I refer them to my book where I present a sustained case (Brien 2006).

RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY 2009)

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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 witheveryday 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 whicheach 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

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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 dueto 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 Krä fte] 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 standover 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 andthe 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

MARX AND THE SPIRITUAL 105

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(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 mightmean 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 mustremain 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], hishuman 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 towhat 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 constitutesthe 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

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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 limitationssuch 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 theveins 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 spite of the predicate of love, we have the

God */the evil being */of religious fanaticism. (53)

For Feuerbach, God is not an ontologically real, transcendent being; rather, God is the

love that is at play in human relations when these relations are really human.Moreover, for him the I-Thou relationship is confined exclusively to the human

community so he redefines ‘‘God’’ as something like the unity of I and Thou, you

flowing into me and me flowing back into you. Moreover, what is really special,

sacred, and holy for him is love itself: not love as an abstract ideal, but love as a

concrete reality. This is what is sabotaged when God is made into a transcendent,


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threatening force standing over humans. And this, for him, is the vital heart of

Christianity, hence Feuerbach’s paradoxical stance that atheism is the essence of

Christianity.

Turning back to Marx, I draw from his famous ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach’’ for some ofhis critical stances on positions that Feuerbach adopted. Marx writes:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplica-

tion of the world into a religious and secular world. His work consists in

resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But the fact that thesecular basis becomes separate from itself and establishes an independent

realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavage and self-

contradictoriness of the secular basis. Thus the latter must itself be both

understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. (1997, 401;

emphasis added)

Marx would fully agree with Feuerbach that religious self-alienation involves the

duplication of the world into an otherworldly religious world and a this-worldly

secular world. Presumably Marx also would agree that the humanly projected

attributes of God are linked to human needs that find some kind of compensatory

fulfillment in the belief in an imaginary divine being. But Marx does not agree with

Feuerbach that alienation is caused by religious self-alienation. Rather, religious self-

alienation for Marx is a symptom of concrete, historically conditioned circumstances

in which human beings are enmeshed in very secular class conflicts that cause human

beings to be alienated from one another.Here let’s look carefully at Marx’s formulation from the above citation: ‘‘the

secular basis becomes separate from itself and establishes an independent realm in

the clouds.’’ What is it within the secular basis that could possibly become separate

from itself (i.e., the secular basis) and establish an independent realm in the clouds?

There seems to me to be only one plausible answer to this question: namely, that the

spiritual dimension of human being, as Marx understands this dimension, is in reality a

dimension of the secular basis. However, this dimension undergoes an alienated

orientation away from the secular basis, which is its ontologically real home, and

toward an imagined otherworldly reality that is projected by the religious imagina-tion.

Remember that Marx sees the human being as a natural being. Thus, ontologically

speaking, man is a secular being for Marx: a this-worldly being interacting with other

human beings and with the nonhuman natural world. The alienated orientation of the

spiritual dimension away from the secular basis presumably occurs when the secular

basis is so riven with class, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts that it cannot fully manifest

and express itself in an unalienated way within the secular basis and therefore

retreats to an imaginary religious world. Well, then, if Marx can indeed embrace some

notion of the spiritual, just how is the spiritual dimension to be construed within

Marx’s philosophical framework? What is its content? I begin by citing the famous

passage where Marx writes:

The struggle against religion is . . . indirectly the struggle against that world

whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is the expression of real

suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is

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the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the

spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of

religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real

happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a

demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions . . .

Criticism has

plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the

chain that is without fantasy or consolation but so that he will throw it off

and pluck the living flower. (1997, 250)

Why would Marx speak in such ways if he did not believe that human needs of some

sort are at play in the human construction of religion? I suggest that at play in these

striking formulations (and in many others) is an implicit recognition by Marx of an

array of human needs that are, in his sense of the term, spiritual in character, and

that call for fulfillment from the very depths of the human being.2 Moreover, I suggest

it is spiritual needs that are at play in the ‘‘spiritual forces’’ that assume a ‘‘religious

form’’ in historical conditions of a sort that prevent the full, many-sided, unalienated

expression of human powers. Marx is critical of religion because, in his view, what

usually counts as religion constitutes merely a compensatory ‘‘fantastic realization’’

of spiritual needs that, while giving people some kind of consolation in the context of

oppressive social conditions, also functions like blinders that prevent people from

recognizing the real possibility of the unalienated fulfillment of these needs in

concrete social life.

Next let’s consider Marx’s formulation that criticism ‘‘has plucked the imaginary

flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain that is without fantasy or

consolation but so that he will throw it off and pluck the living flower.’’ What are the

imaginary flowers Marx has in mind here, and what is the living flower?

Above we saw Feuerbach argue that God is ‘‘human nature purified, freed from the

limits of the individual man, made objective */i.e., contemplated and revered as

another, a distinct being.’’ In Feuerbach’s view, our early human forebears, faced

with all the terrors of existence and aware of such terrors once full self-consciousness

had developed, projected a divine being with unlimited Reason, Will, and Love, a

divine being on whom they could depend in the face of the trials and tribulations of

life and in whom they could find comfort and consolation. What did belief in such adivine being, with all its other associated attributes (a moral being, etc.) and its

assorted metaphysical attachments (substantial soul, afterlife, divine justice, etc.),

provide to human beings? Among other things it provided an orienting belief system:

an orienting perspective within which humans could view themselves and try to

understand themselves in relation to nature, to other human beings, and to the Divine

Being of religious belief, and it provided them some kind of value orientation as well,

some kind of ‘‘moral’’ guidance.

Furthermore, however fragile human existence might be, such a belief system

provided a divine ground on which these special attributes of humankind, now‘‘purified,’’ would stand forever secure against the ravages of time, beasts, and other

humans. If one’s particular historical circumstances were cruel, unjust, and lacking in

2. Many formulations with similar import are concentrated in Marx’s early writings (see

especially Marx 1997, 265 /336).


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any genuine community, any I-Thou feeling, one could nonetheless be sure of God’s

love and of having community and interconnection with God. One could also be sure

that God would in the long run mete out divine justice to all human beings who ever

lived so that everyone got their just deserts. Furthermore, if one’s individualhistorical and social conditions allowed one no, or very little, opportunity for

manifesting creative agency, one could nonetheless be sure that the urge to free

agency would be forever sanctified via God’s all-powerful creative will sustaining all

of creation in existence without let or hindrance.

If these are some of the ‘‘imaginary flowers’’ to which Marx most likely made

implicit reference, what did he mean by the phrase that the criticism of religion

would prepare the soil so that one could ‘‘pluck the living flower’’? What is the living

flower that Marx means here? I believe that the ‘‘living flower’’ Marx had first and

foremost in mind is what he calls ‘‘free conscious activity,’’ which he takes to be ‘‘the

species character of human beings’’ (1997, 294). Importantly, such activity must be

construed not simply as ‘‘inner consciousness,’’ but rather, as the dialectical

interface between consciousness and human practice.

There are many formulations throughout Marx’s work that point toward the same

‘‘living flower.’’ Consider these, for example.

[Free activity is] the creative manifestation of life arising from the free

development of all abilities, of the ‘whole fellow’. (Marx and Engels 1968,

246)

[Socialism is] a higher form of society, a society in which the full and freedevelopment of every individual forms the ruling principle. (Marx 1967,

2:592)

Free individuality . . . is founded on the universal development of individuals.

(1972, 67)

The rich man [in a socialist context] is simultaneously one who needs a

totality of human manifestations of life and in whom his own realization

exists as inner necessity, as need . (1997, 312)

If ‘‘free conscious activity’’ is the primary ‘‘living flower’’ Marx had in mind when hespoke of plucking the living flower, what, then, about other, associated ‘‘living

flowers’’ */or perhaps various aspects of the primary living flower? Let me point to

what I believe are perhaps the most significant of these other living flowers: (a)

genuine community with other people, as opposed to various sorts of segmental

relations to others */what Marx called ‘‘the illusory community in which individuals

have come together up till now’’ (1997, 457); (b) the felt need to be related to other

human beings as a human being; (c) a many-sided, all-round development of one’s

potentials; (d ) experiencing the development of one’s energies as an end in itself; (e)

the experience of joy and spontaneity in one’s practice; and ( f ) an experience ofwholeness. The brief excerpts from Marx’s text that follow are but a few sample

formulations of Marx’s thoughts along these lines, taken from a pool of countless

companion formulations one might cull from Marx’s writings. (Allow me to continue

with the flower metaphor.) If one takes the above factors (a) through ( f ) as

symbolizing the stems of flowers, and then takes the citations from Marx below as

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symbolizing the blossoms of these flowers, one might then take the whole flowers

from stem to blossom as symbolizing Marx’s notion of a humanized and spiritualized

secularism.

Only in community do the means exist for every individual to cultivate his

talents in all directions. Only in the community is personal freedom possible.

(1997, 457)

In this relationship [of man to woman] is also apparent the extent to which

man’s need has become human, thus the extent to which the other human

being, as human being, has become a need for him, the extent to which he in

his most individual existence is at the same time a social being. (303)

Man appropriates to himself his manifold essence in an all-sided way, thus as

a whole man. Every one of his human relations to the world *

/seeing,hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, perceiving, sensing, wishing,

acting, loving */in short all the organs of his individuality . . . are an

appropriation of the object in their objective relation or their relation to

it. (307)

Beyond it [the realm of necessity] begins that development of human energy

which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can

blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis. (1967, 3:820)

Now that I have given some sense of what I consider Marx to mean by ‘‘imaginary

flowers’’ and ‘‘living flower,’’ I want to suggest that these metaphors point toward

Marx’s recommended way of addressing fundamental spiritual needs that all humans

have, and I wish to refer to such needs as existential needs. The existential needs I

have in mind include the following: the need for some kind of orienting world-view,

the need for some kind of value perspective to guide one’s actions, the need for

existential meaning, the need for interconnection with nature, the need for

community with others, the need for creative expression of potentials, and the need

for wholeness.

But why call these existential needs? Why not just psychological needs? I respond

that such needs are a special class of psychic needs associated with the peculiarexistential situation of human beings that is, in turn, based on the particular kind of

biological organisms humans happen to be. Humans are the sort of biological

organisms whose distinctively human physical and mental practices are not narrowly

programmed by determinate instincts. Rather, humans have reflective self-con-

sciousness and the underlying biological potential for ‘‘making themselves’’ in an

enormously vast spectrum of different ways of being human, all associated with

different modes of the spiritual, depending on the concrete historical conditions

which obtain in a given situation at a given time. This means that the spiritual

dimension is itself historically variable in some important ways (see Brien 1996,222 /59).

But, then, how to understand the particular form of the spiritual, the particular

manifestation of the spiritual forces, that humanistic Marxism would associate with

the sort of revolutionary practice that would have some real possibility of

revolutionizing the secular basis, and of cultivating a cultural transition in the


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direction of a genuine, humanistic socialism? Inasmuch as I view the spiritual as the

domain of the psyche having to do with the lived experience of the various existential

needs indicated above, I go on now to present a sketch of some of the main contours

of a humanistic-Marxist spiritual mode in accordance with Marx’s own recommendedway of addressing the various existential needs he distinguished. It will be seen that

this mode of the spiritual has the potential of fully suffusing everyday human

practice in the world for this mode of the spiritual cannot be reduced to ‘‘inner

consciousness,’’ but must be interpreted as the dialectical interface between human

activity and consciousness. I now turn to a sketch of the specific ways of addressing

the various existential needs that, in Marx’s view, would not be alienated. I ask my

readers to bear in mind, though, that since such needs are not discrete atomic needs,

there will necessarily be some overlaps in the vignettes that follow.

The existential needs for some kind of orienting world-view and for inter-

connection with nature would be expressed in a humanistic-Marxist spiritual mode

via an experiential recognition that the human being is a being of nature

interacting with other human beings and with nature, ‘‘not an abstract being

squatting outside the world’’ (Marx 1997, 250) but essentially a natural being

immersed in the world. By acting in and upon the natural and social environments

in specific ways, human beings make themselves in specific ways and constitute

their powers as real objective powers. Thus, there are ontological bonds among

human subjects as well as between them and the natural world. Moreover,

naturally given resources are shaped by human beings into a vast multiplicity of

objects, which become thereby the repositories of human powers and energies. In

the spiritual mode under discussion, all these ontological interconnections would

be experienced in ways that are life affirming rather than life negating. Thus,

individuals interrelating with one another via the mediation of objects would be

respectful of them as embodiments of the energies of social individuals (see Marx

1967, 1:41 /6; 1997, 325 /7), and would reciprocally affirm each other as they

interrelate (see Marx 1997, 281).

For Marx, the existential need for community with others would be manifest in an

active interrelation between people such that there is an experiential recognition of

human individuals as social individuals *

/both the recognition that individuals becomethe particular kind of social individuals they are by virtue of the particular ways they

interact with each other and the recognition that the most positive development of

human individuals is dynamically bound up with the most positive development of

their social relationships (see Marx 1997, 457). Such a manifestation of the need for

community does not see the connection with others as a hindrance to individual

development, but rather, as a pathway toward full human development. It is a need

for reciprocal, many-sided, life-affirming relations on the part of individuals with

many-sided, life-affirming counterparts in order that everyone may become fully

human.In a humanistic-Marxist practice, the existential need for creative expression of

potentials would be manifested in a many-sided, freely flowing, creative unfolding

of individual powers. This, of course, is not to be understood as anything like the

typical egotism of Western culture for it is qualified by the practical recognition of

oneself and others as social individuals and by the recognition that the freedom of

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each is bound up with the freedom of all. Thus the many-sided, creative unfolding

of individual powers is an unfolding that does not seek to dominate the other, but

does not let itself be dominated by the other, either. Nor is Marx’s affirmation of

individual powers to be understood as an affirmation of the kind of possessiveindividualism that has been so dominant for so long */with all its emphasis on

having and on possessing (money, things, property, etc.). Marx’s concern is not

with having much, but with being much (see Marx 1997, 307 /9).

The existential need for meaning would be addressed by adopting modes of

activity that are experienced as meaningful rather than as an onerous means to

some end that is to be realized by the activity */that is, some wished-for goal that

lies outside the activity itself. Such activity is experienced as an end in itself,

even if it may also be activity that is a means to something in fact (see Marx 1997,

294

/5). Thus it is experienced as intrinsically meaningful, as spontaneouslycreative, and as joyful. As Marx puts it, such activity is ‘‘a free manifestation

of life and an enjoyment of life’’ (281). The need for meaning is also manifested

and concretely expressed in direct personal relations when people relate to each

other as whole human beings and treat each other as ends. Marx highlights the

existential importance of such meaningful relations among people when he writes,

‘‘Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man equally acquire */under the

premise of socialism */a human and thus social meaning. It is the passive bond

which lets man experience the greatest wealth, the other human being, as need’’

(312).Some of the ways a humanistic-Marxist spiritual awareness would address the

existential need for wholeness have already been suggested in the remarks above

concerning the need for a totality of human manifestations of life and a many-

sided, all-round development. But it would also be manifested in the need for a

transformation of the various dimensions of the human psyche */cognition,

conation, sensuousness, intuition, sensation */as they obtain in alienated modes

of consciousness, and their subsequent harmonious integration in more holistic

modes (308 /10). It also includes the need to experientially integrate the spiritual

with nature in a holistic way, and to overcome the alienated separation of thespiritual dimension from the body that has been characteristic of much of the

Western cultural tradition (295).

The existential need for some kind of value perspective would be manifested in

a humanistic-Marxist practice that is committed to freely and fully developing

one’s potential. This connotes an active freedom that involves a need for a many-

sided creative activity that constitutes a totality of human manifestations of life,

including, of course, the need to be related to the other as a whole human being

in concrete practice. In such activity one treats others, and oneself also, as whole

human beings, a practice that involves the recognition that the fully developedfreedom of each is tied up with the fully developed freedom of all. A corollary of

this is ‘‘the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a

degraded, enslaved, contemptible, [exploited, dehumanized] being’’ (257 /8). Thus,

it is the sort of activity that does not imply or involve the denial or repression of

the other as it affirms itself.


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Conclusion

Following this sketch, I now address apprehensions that might be felt by those who

are uncomfortable with the term ‘‘spiritual’’ in connection with Marx. Earlier Imentioned the strong association the term ‘‘spiritual’’ has with theistic religion in

Western cultures, but I brought out that there is not an exclusive association of the

term ‘‘spiritual’’ with theism and that Marx used the term ‘‘spiritual’’ many times in

his earlier writings in very positive ways, with no connotation of any otherworldly

reality. It is true that Marx used the term ‘‘spiritual’’ much less often in his later

writings than he did earlier, but I suggest that Marx had reasons for this that for him

were compelling. Here I have in mind positions that Marx and Engels vehemently

criticized in The German Ideology, which used the term ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘spiritual’’ with

Hegelian connotations from which Marx and Engels wanted to dissociate themselves(Marx and Engels 1968, 157 /74). I contend, however, that Marx never dropped the

concept of the spiritual at play in his early writings, even though he used the term

‘‘spiritual’’ [ geistige] much less frequently.

Let me also mention another consideration that might make it easier to embrace

the secularized form of the spiritual I have outlined above in association with Marx. In

view of the strong association of the term ‘‘spiritual’’ with theistic religions in

Western cultures and a consequent reluctance to associate the term ‘‘spiritual’’ with

atheism, it might be well to take the following cue from Marx, when he says that

‘‘atheism no longer makes sense.’’

Atheism as the denial of this unreality [an alien divine being beyond man and

nature] no longer makes sense because it is a negation of God and through

this negation asserts the existence of man. But socialism as such no longer

needs such mediation. It begins with the sensuous perception, theoretically and practically, of man and nature as essential beings. It is man’s positive

self-consciousness, no longer attained through the overcoming of religion.

(1997, 314)

I believe it is culturally important for our time not only to go beyond traditional

interpretations of theism, and also beyond atheism, but even beyond secularhumanism as it is commonly understood and to adopt what might be called a

spiritualized and humanized secularism for which the question of atheism no longer

arises in an existential way. The solution to the problem that ‘‘the secular basis

becomes separate from itself and establishes an independent realm in the clouds’’ is,

for Marx, not a complete suppression of the spiritual (Marx 1997, 401), but rather, a

revolutionary practice that successfully transforms the secular basis so that the

spiritual dimension can be fulfilled in a this-worldly way that does not require

recourse to an imaginary being.

Let us remember that, in Marx’s view, one of the most essential practicalprerequisites for a successful transition to genuine socialism is ‘‘the formation of a

revolutionary mass . . . a mass which revolts not only against particular conditions of

the prevailing society but against the prevailing ‘production of life’ itself, the ‘total

activity’ on which it was based’’ (432). But such a revolutionary mass doesn’t drop out

of the sky like a deus ex machina. Rather, it comes to be on the basis of a new

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practice */a new praxis guided by right understanding of the real possibilities of a

humanistic socialism, and committed to right effort to cultivate a transition to such a

socialism. As Marx says, it is necessary ‘‘to expose the old world to full daylight and to

shape the new along positive lines’’ (211). In order for this to happen, it is necessaryfor theory to grip the masses: ‘‘The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the

criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But

theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is

capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it

demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things

by the root’’ (257).

I suggest that, for Marx, the root of the spiritual is not to be found in some

otherworldly reality. Rather, it is to be found in this world. Our era is one of those

momentous historical junctures during which the shifting tectonic plates of world

history can induce enormous and unpredictable changes. To emerge from this

historical juncture without degenerating into something like international fascism,

I believe it is practically imperative for the peoples of our era to embrace the spiritual

anew and reclaim it from the clutches of authoritarian, dogmatic, and fanatic

fundamentalist theists, and most especially from extremist and violent religious

fundamentalists */whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever.

Our era represents the time to radically transform the secular basis. Moreover, I

believe a growing understanding of how humanistic Marxism can accommodate the

spiritual dimension could go a long way toward nurturing such a development,

especially in the case of that vast number of people for whom traditional modes of

the spiritual are not viable. Our era is the time to suffuse a revolutionary praxis with a

this-worldly mode of the spiritual that has some real hope of transforming the secular

basis in the direction of social justice as all of humanity faces the daunting crises that

loom throughout planet earth. Our era is the time to humanize the spiritual, and to

spiritualize the secular. Our era is the time for the peoples of the world to unite! Let

the living flowers bloom!

Acknowledgments

I want to gratefully acknowledge Jacinda Swanson and Cecilia Rio for their very

helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

References

Brien, K. M. 1996. Marx and the spiritual dimension. Topoi: An International Review of

Philosophy 15: 211 /23.

*/

*/ *

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*/ */ */. 2007. Marx’s dialectical-empirical method of explanation. Utopı́a y Praxis

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Feuerbach, L. 1957. The essence of Christianity. Trans. G. Eliot. New York: Harper and

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Marx, K. 1967. Capital. 3 vols. Ed. F. Engels. New York: International Publishers.

*/ */ */. 1972. The Grundrisse. Trans. and ed. D. McLellan. New York: Harper and Row.

*/ */ */. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. Middlesex: Penguin.

*/ */ */. 1977. Karl Marx: Selected writings. Ed. D. McLellan. New York: Oxford

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*/ */ */. 1997. Writings of the young Marx on philosophy and society. Trans. and ed. L.

Easton and K. Guddat. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1968. The German ideology . Trans. and ed. S. Ryazanskaya.

Moscow: Progress.

Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New

York: Macmillan.

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