Historical Abstraction against the Humanities

In his early writings, Karl Marx appropriated the term humanism , but he emphasized another principle in the idea and history of man. The dialectic between nature and man was given objective reality in the concept of work. Humanism had to be "real" or "concrete." Humanism involved elimination of man's economic alienation that arose with the division of labor and private property: "Communism as a positive elimination of private ownership, as human self-estrangement and therefore as real appropriation of the human being by and through the man. . . . This communism as perfect naturalism equals humanism, as perfect humanism equals naturalism."^[9]

The three varieties of humanism have in common an abstract idea of man that could be developed through scientific research into a rational program for moral education and political action. But if the research is carried out in a scientific manner, it is bound to destroy the inspiration on which it is based. For example, by investigating the Greeks' "noble simplicity and serene greatness" classical scholarship soon compromised the idealistic image of the Greeks. Moral and political values to which liberalism and industrialism are related, and which were expressed openly in the nineteenth century—even in encyclopedias and political dictionaries^[10] —came into question as supposedly authenticated by the historical, social, and political sciences.

So far as scholarship has as its purpose moral and political edification, its consequences are disastrous. The abstract idea of man taken as an absolute idea paves the way to ideologies, which pretend to supply religion on a

[8] Quotations from Arnold Ruge, "Ernst Moritz Arndt {1840}," Sämmtliche Werke , vol. 4, 2nd ed. (Mannheim: J. P. Grohe, 1847), p. 90; "Eine Wendung in der deutschen Philosophie {1842}," Sämmtliche Werke , vol. 10 (1848), p. 444; "Was wird aus der Religion {1841}," Sämmtliche Werke , vol. 3 (1847), p. 224.

[9] Karl Marx, Oekonomie und Philosophie {1844}, in Der historische Materialismus: Die Frühschriften , vol. 1, ed. S. Landshut and J. P. Mayer (Leipzig: Kröner, 1932), p. 294. See W. Rüegg, "Zur Vorgeschichte des marxistischen Humanismusbegriffs," in Anstösse, Aufsätze und Vorträge zur dialogischen Lebensform (Frankfurt am Main: Alfred Metzner, 1973), pp. 181–197.

[10] C. F. L. Hoffmann, Vollständiges politisches Taschenwörterbuch (1849; reprint ed. München/Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1981).

rational basis but in reality undermine respect for human ambivalence and complexity. This danger is even present in some of the great achievements of nineteenth-century scholarship, for example, Theodor Mommsen's Roman History . Mommsen's depiction of Cicero is a caricature because he ignores the ambivalence and complexity of human personality.^[11] On a lower level, reduction of the humanities to a simplified ideal of personality is represented by the German Bildungsphilister .

Thus the dispiritedness of the human sciences, on which Nietzsche remarked, resulted from the emphasis that the Geisteswissenschaften put on the "spirit" of world, nature, and man. The crisis of the humanities did not come from the distinction between nature and freedom, or between nature and history, as Bloom would have it. The Geisteswissenschaften in practice operated to impoverish understanding of human nature. Their penchant for historical abstractions in the service of political or national purpose deprived the humanities of authenticity and deflected them from their true purpose, self-appreciation and understanding.