What is Man?

This is the primary and main question in philosophy. How can it be answered? The definition is to be found in man himself, and therefore in each single man. But is this correct? In each single man, we will discover what each "single man" is. But we are not interested in what each single man is, which, after all, signifies what each single man is at each single moment. When we consider it, we find that by putting the question "What is man?" we really mean; "What can man become?", that is, whether or not man can control his own destiny, can "make himself", can create a life for himself. Therefore we say that man is a process, and precisely the process of his actions. When we consider it, the question "What is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It stems from what we have thought about ourselves and others, and, relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do "make ourselves", create our own lives and our own destinies. We want to know this "now", in the given conditions of the present and of our "daily" life, and not about any life and about any man.

The question arises and derives its content from special, or rather, determined patterns of considering the life of man; the most important of these patterns is the “religious” one and a given religious one—Catholicism. Actually when we ask ourselves “what is man, how important is his will and his concrete activity in the creation of himself and the life he lives?” what we mean is: “Is Catholicism a true concept of man and of life? In being a Catholic, in making Catholicism a way of life, are we mistaken or right?” Everyone has the vague intuition that to make Catholicism a way of life is a mistake, because no one completely embraces Catholicism as a way of life even while declaring himself a Catholic. A strict Catholic who applied Catholic rules to every act of his life would appear as a monster; and this, when one thinks about it, is the strongest, most irrefutable criticism of Catholicism itself.

Catholics will reply by saying that no concepts are rigidly followed, and they are right. But this only proves that there does not in fact exist historically one rule and no other for thinking and functioning that applies equally to all men. It is no argument for Catholicism, even though this way of thinking and acting has for centuries been organised to this end—something which has not yet happened with any other religion with the same means at its disposal, the same spirit of system, the same continuity and centralisation. From the “philosophical” point of view, Catholicism’s failure to satisfy rests in the fact that despite everything, it roots the cause of all evil in man himself, that is, it conceives of man as a clearly defined and limited individual. It can be said that all philosophies up to the present repeat this position taken by the Catholics; man is conceived of as limited by his individuality, and his spirit as well. It is precisely on this point that a change in the conception of man is required. That is, it is essential to conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality, while of the greatest importance, is not the sole element to be considered. The humanity reflected in every individual consists of various elements: (1) the individual, (2) other men, (3) nature. The second and third elements are not as simple as they seem. The individual does not enter into relations with other men in opposition to them but through an organic unity with them, because he becomes part of social organisms of all kinds from the simplest to the most complex. Thus man does not enter into relationship with nature simply because he is himself part of nature, but actively, through work and through techniques. More. These relationships are not mechanical. They are active and conscious, and they correspond to the lesser or greater intelligence which the individual man possesses; therefore one can say that man changes himself, modifies himself, to the same extent that he changes and modifies the whole complex of relationships of which he is the nexus. In this sense the true philosopher is, and cannot avoid being political—that is, man active, who changes his environment—environment being understood to include the relationships into which each individual enters. If individuality is the whole mass of these relationships, the acquiring of a personality means the acquiring of consciousness of these relationships, and changing the personality means changing the whole mass of these relationships.

But, as stated earlier, these relationships are not simple. Moreover, some are involuntary and some voluntary. Furthermore, the very fact of being more or less profoundly conscious (knowing more or less of the way in which these relationships can be modified) already modifies them. Once recognised as necessary, these same necessary relationships change in aspect and importance. In this sense, recognition is power. But this problem is complicated in still another aspect; it is not enough to know the totality of the relations as they exist in a given moment within a given pattern; it is important to know their genesis, the impulse of their formation, because each individual is not only the synthesis of existing relations but also the history of these relations, the sum of all of the past. It will be said that what each individual is able to change is very little indeed. But considering that each individual is able to associate himself with all others who desire the same changes as himself, and provided the change is a rational one, the single individual is able to multiply himself by an impressive number and can thus obtain a far more radical change than would first appear.

The number of societies in which an individual can participate are very great (more than one thinks). It is through these "societies" that the individual plays a part in the human species. Thus the ways in which the individual enters into relations with nature are multiple, because by techniques we mean not only the totality of scientific ideas applied to industry in the usual meaning of the word, but also "mental" instruments, philosophic knowledge.

It is a commonplace that it is impossible to conceive of man otherwise than as existing in a society, but not all the necessary conclusions, even those applying to individuals, are always drawn. It is also a commonplace that for a given society there must be a given society of things, and that human society is only possible in so far as there exists a given society of things. These organisms apart from individual cases, have up to now been given a mechanist and determinist significance (both societas hominem and societas rerum); hence the reaction. It is essential to evolve a theory in which all these relationships are seen as active and in motion, establishing clearly that the source of this activity is man's individual consciousness which knows, wills, strives, creates because he already knows, desires, strives, creates, etc., and conceives of himself not as an isolated individual but rich in the potentialities offered by other men and by the society of things of which he must have some knowledge (because each man is a philosopher, a scientist, etc.).

Feuerbach's thesis: "Man is what he eats", if taken by itself, can be interpreted in various ways. Interpreted narrowly and foolishly, one could say: "Man is alternately what he eats materially", or—foods have an immediate determining influence on modes of thinking. It calls to mind Amadea Mordiga's statement, for instance, that if one knew what a man had eaten before he made a speech one could better interpret the speech itself—a childish statement and actually one that is alien even to positive science, because the brain is not nourished by beans and truffles but by foods which are transformed into homogeneous assimilable material and which unite to form the cells of the brain; that is, foods have potentially a "similar nature" to cerebral cells. If this statement were true, the matrix of history would be found in the kitchen, and revolutions would coincide with radical changes in the diet of the masses. Historical truth proves the contrary. It is revolutionary and complex historical development which has changed feeding habits and created successive "tastes" in the selection of food. It was not the regular sowing of grain which brought nomadism to a halt but vice versa, it was the conditions developing out of nomad life which forced regular cultivation, etc.

However, since diet is one expression of complex social relationships and each social regrouping has a basic food pattern, there is some truth in the saying "man is what he eats", but in the same way one could say "man is the clothing he wears", man is his habitation, man is his particular way of reproducing himself, or "he is his family", because food, dress, housing, and reproducing are elements of social life in which, in point of fact, the whole complex of social relations are most obviously and most widely manifested.

Thus the problem of what man is is always posed as the problem of so-called "human nature", or of "man in general", the attempt to create a science of man (a philosophy) whose point of departure is primarily based on a "unitary" idea, on an abstraction designed to contain all that is "human". But is "humanity", as a reality and as an idea, a point of departure—or a point of arrival? Or isn't it rather that when posed as a point of departure, the attempt is reduced to a survival of theology and metaphysics? Philosophy cannot be reduced to naturalistic anthropology; unity in mankind is not a quality of man's biological nature; the differences in man which matter in history are not the biological differences (of race, skull formation, skin colour, etc.), from which is deduced the theory that man is what he eats. In Europe man eats grain, in Asia, rice, etc.—which can then be reduced to the other statement: "Man is the country he inhabits", because diet is generally related to the country inhabited. And not even "biological unity" has counted for much in history (man is the animal who devoured his own kind when he was closest to the "natural state", before he was able "artificially" to multiply production of natural benefits). Nor did the "faculty of reasoning" or "spirit" create unity; it cannot be recognised as a "unifying" fact because it is a categorical formal concept. It is not "thought" but what is actually thought which unites and differentiates men.

The most satisfying answer is that "human nature" is a "complex of human relations", because this answer includes the idea of "becoming" (man becomes, changes himself continually with the changing of social relations), and because it denies "man in general". In reality social relations are expressed by diverse groups of men which are presupposed and the unity of which is dialectical and not formal. Man is aristocratic because he is the servant of the soil, etc. It can also be said that man's nature is "history" (and in this sense, history equals spirit, the nature of man is the spirit), if history is given the meaning of "becoming" in a concordia discors which does not destroy unity but contains within itself grounds for a possible unity. Therefore "human nature" is not to be found in any one particular man but in the whole history of mankind (and the fact that we naturally use the word "kind" is significant), while in each single individual are found characteristics made distinct through their difference from the characteristics of other individuals. The concept of "spirit" in traditional philosophy and the concept of "human nature" in biology also, should be defined as "scientific utopias" which are substitutes for the greater utopia "human nature" sought for in God (and in man, the son of God), and which indicate the travail of history, rational and emotional hopes, etc. It is true, of course, that the religions which preached the equality of men as the sons of God, as well as those philosophies which affirmed man's equality on the basis of his reasoning faculty, were the expressions of complex revolutionary movements (the transformation of the classical world, the transformation of the medieval world), and that these forged the strongest links in the chain of historical development.

The basis of the latest utopian philosophies, like that of Croce, is that Hegelian dialectics was the last reflection of these great historical links, and that dialectics, the expression of social contradictions, will develop into a pure conceptual dialectic when these contradictions disappear.

In history, real “equality”, that is the degree of “spirituality” achieved through the historical development of “human nature”, is identified in the system of “public and private”, “explicit and implicit” associations that are linked in the “State” and in the world political system; the “equality” here meant is that which is felt as such between the members of an association and the “inequality” felt between different associations; equality and inequality which are of value because there is both individual and group understanding of them. Thus one arrives at the equality or equation between “philosophy and politics”, between thought and action, Marxism. All is politics, philosophy as well as the philosophies, and the only “philosophy” is history in action, life itself. It is in this sense that one can interpret the theory of the German proletariat, heir to German classical philosophy, and that it can be affirmed that the theory and elaboration of hegemony by Lenin was also a great “metaphysical” event.