Yasushi Yamanouchi

At the time that I wrote my Introduction to Max Weber in 1997 I was playing with the idea of writing a further short paperback text, as an extension of that work, entitled Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century. Contrary to the orthodox understanding of Max Weber’s oeuvre, there are moments in which Weber is in complete sympathy with Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of European modernity. Nietzsche read the “ressentiment” of the persecuted slave, within the historical context of the emergence of Christianity. The introduction to Weber’s late work, Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, was an attempt to criticize Nietzsche’s theory of “ressentiment.” However, in spite of this, Weber did not try to evade Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of European modernity as being just simply meaningless. The “stoic ethos of occupational labor” born from European religious reformation – it is this initial principle, a factor which encourages the social order to become mechanical apparatus – this was the critical magma in which the fundamentals of Weber’s thought are located. Weber’s Sociology of Religion contained the following radical insight: looking back to the European religious reformation, Weber claimed that the “ethical foundations” that were formed from it must be relativized. His theory of a “Revolution of World-view,” born from an engagement with Nietzsche, was the crystallization of this radicality.

But what of Karl Marx, who is so often discussed in opposition to Weber? Again, with Marx too, I had thought there was a problem which the generally accepted orthodox understanding of Marx’s work had overlooked. I thought so because in the Third Manuscript of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx’s stance emerges as one attempting to both inherit and pass on Feuerbach’s notion of the leidendes-Wesen – suffering human existence. According to this Feuerbachian moment in Marx, humanity must not be conceived one-sidedly as a comprehensively active being but rather as a passive being, or, in other words, humanity must become self-conscious of itself as a being bearing suffering (Leiden). Not only through the active engagement with the object, but with and including interaction with nature as the original foundation which makes human labor possible. “All the organs of man” would work in cooperation through “seeing, listening, tasting, feeling, thinking, intuiting, sensing, desiring, acting, loving” – sensual objective passivity – man would become a living, real, sensuous, objective organ – this was the Third Manuscript’s image of future society.

After the 1845 Thesis on Feuerbach this view of humanity as leidendes-Wesen appears to have erased itself in Marx’s later work. However, in the opening of the Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, Marx begins a full-frontal critique of the United Workers Party of Germany reversing their claim that “Labor is the source of wealth and all culture... the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” writing that “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor.” The claim that “labor has creative power over and above the restrictions of nature” cannot be the thought of a socialist. This kind of claim is the prejudice bias of the bourgeois classes privately dictating the objective conditions of labor. Here we find “another Marx,” different in tone from the Marx often represented by Capital.

This Nietzschian moment in Weber and this “other Marx” hidden behind his official face – it is through a re-discovery of these forgotten philosophical moments that I had hoped to engage the theme of “Revolution of World-View in the 21st Century.” In a sense, this has been the assignment I had set myself since the late 1970s. However, my engagement with this assignment had been at a standstill until late 2004. It was in 2004 that my Gaze of the Suffering – Reviving the Early Marx was published. It was while completing the finishing touches to that work that I came across an unexpected new theme. This happened when I realized for the first time that Martin Heidegger, in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, had quoted Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and highly praised its theory of alienation. In the letter, Heidegger says the following: that what Marx understood in humanity’s alienation was to “recognize an essential and meaningful sense as man’s alienation goes back to the homelessness of modern man... Marx enters into an essential dimension of history as he discovers this alienation, for that reason the Marxist view of history is superior to other history.” Accordingly, Heidegger, citing both Husserl and Sartre, claims that both fail to “recognize the essentiality of what is historical about be[-ing]” and that “neither phenomenology nor Existentialism enter into that very dimension within which a productive discussion with Marxism would for the first time become possible.” There is no doubt that here Heidegger had recognized the “other Marx.” The Letter on Humanism is probably the only place which Heidegger recorded his sympathy for Marx. But even so, should this rare resonance continue to be overlooked?

Today the so-called “Heidegger Controversy” is becoming a thing of the past and in its place a new current, what one would want to call a “Heidegger Revival,” is emerging, especially in the English-speaking world. Much of this work explores the fundamental – what Heidegger would have called “metaphysical” - rearrangement of modern philosophy in relation to environmental crisis. Surely in the 21st Century, the ongoing theme of “Marx and Weber,” including its connection with Heidegger, will have to be discussed in an all-embracing comprehensive manner. The “Revolution in 21st Century World-View” is already on the start line.

Japanese original at: http://www.iwanami.co.jp/shiso/index.html