TY  - CHAP
A1  - Khurana, Thomas
T1  - Genus-being: On Marx's dialectical naturalism
T2  - Nature and naturalism in classical German philosophy
N2  - In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx famously claims that the human being is or has a ‘Gattungswesen.’ This is often understood to mean that the human being is a ‘species-being’ and is determined by a given ‘species-essence.’ In this chapter, I argue that this reading is mistaken. What Marx calls Gattungswesen is precisely not a ‘species-being,’ but a being that, in a very specific sense, transcends the limits of its own given species. This different understanding of the genus- character of the human being opens up a new perspective on the naturalism of the early Marx. He is not informed by a problematic speciesist and essentialist naturalism, as is often assumed, but by a different form of naturalism which I propose to call ‘dialectical naturalism.’ The chapter starts (I) by developing Hegel’s account of genus which provides us with a useful background for (II) understanding Marx’s original notion of a genus-being and its practical, social, developmental character. In the last section, I show that (III) the actualization of our genus-being thus depends on the production of a specific type of ‘second nature’ that is at the heart of Marx’s dialectical naturalism.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63301
SN  - 978-0-367-54172-9
SN  - 978-1-003-09205-6
SP  - 246
EP  - 278
PB  - Routledge
CY  - New York
ER  -