@incollection{Khurana2022,
  author    = {Khurana, Thomas},
  title     = {Genus-being: On Marx's dialectical naturalism},
  series = {Nature and naturalism in classical German philosophy},
  booktitle = {Nature and naturalism in classical German philosophy},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  address   = {New York},
  isbn      = {978-0-367-54172-9},
  doi       = {10.4324/9781003092056-13},
  pages     = {246 -- 278},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}