Discuss Marx's concept of "the sensuous” insofar as it or close analogous to it appear in his writings from its first appearance in those of his writings we have read up to Capital. What does Marx mean by the sensuous?

Sinnlich, the German word for sensuous can be translated back to English as “sensory,” “material world” (sinnliche Welt), and “perceptible by the senses” (sinnlich wahrnehmbar). I became interested in the word as Marx used it, for there seems to be much more encapsulated in it than simply “senses,” while also serving a very specific purpose to Marx in a way I have never quite encountered the word. In this paper I will explore the idea of sensuousness through how its meaning is made, what it is not, and how the idea is developed or utilized by Marx in his letter to his father (1837), his doctoral dissertation materials (1841), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (1845-6), and Capital, Vol. 1 (1867). Because “sensuous” is wrapped up in a host of other terms ranging from alienation to labor-power, this paper will discuss as much as possible but with special semantic attention to “sensuous,” because I am interested in tracing that particular evolution.

Although Marx does not name sensuousness in his very earliest writings, there are certainly seedlings of the concept that will eventually blossom fully and in many directions in his later discussions. In Marx’s 1837 letter to his father, he discusses how “the form becomes embodied in [the theory of material law’s] content” (MECW 15a) before detailing his intellectual and poetic pursuits, leading into the revelation of how embodied form and content was directly applied to his own physical body. There is a rather stark turning point where his “creations [crumble] into nothing” after a glimpse of “the glittering realm of true poetry” (MECW 17e). I imagine he means the way in which poetry attempts to represent truth in both its words and its form on the page, or perhaps how good poetry holds together the contradictory conditions of reality in its precise and honest observations of it. It seems Marx, exposed to some realm and essence of poetry, finds his Scorpion and Feliz and Oulanem “[crumble]” as this self-described idealist art is “without objects that inspire it” (MECW 17d). And then, young Marx realizes he “had neglected nature, art and the world” (MECW 18a) and sets out to fortify his own health. These ideas of poetry, nature, and the body become closely associated with each other. His newfound strength and walking journey through an entire city culminates in a rather dramatic description of an epiphany: “A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed” (MECW 18b).

Idealism is to be thrown away; he will now “[seek] the idea in reality itself” (MECW 18b). He takes observations “made by [his] body” (MECW 18a) seriously. A link is forged between his “anaemic” physical conditions and his failed foray into creative writing—the dissonance between formal, un-true poetry and art that is inspired by objects and “impassioned thought” is now clear to him (MECW 18). He proclaims the high-dwelling gods “now became [earth’s] centre” (MECW 18b). And this idea does not leave Marx. In the foreword to his dissertation a few years later, he demonstrates philosophy’s aversion to theology. And while the stark quote from Prometheus, “I hate the pack of gods” (MECW 30e) is very plainly put, the allusion to this Greek myth and his 1837 declarations about gods makes the sentiment more complex. Prometheus is the titan that stole fire from the gods to bring technology and civilization to humans. Fire is inherently of the earth, with poetic exceptions to the sun and lightning, and it is certainly a physical discovery made by humans, historically speaking. To attribute it to the gods, or even a titan, is denying humanity’s own, actual achievements. To the theologist of Greek mythology that takes this myth for anything more than a story, Marx responds with Epicurus: “he who affirms of the gods…is truly impious” (MECW 30d). But Marx himself names Prometheus as a “saint and martyr” (MECW 31) within the framework of philosophy, a figure who rejects gods. In conversation with the 1837 letter, this foreword’s blunt dismissal of religion as incompatible with philosophy paints a full picture; gods sink down to the earth, become its center, and humans realize they are the gods—the creators of the story and the fire. I believe this to be the conceptual origin of the sensuous as defined by Marx.

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In the capitalist mode of production, Marx is not concerned with only the workers’ lost senses. He posits private property estranges the senses for all. Private property is sensuous insofar as it makes man “objective for himself” (EW 351c), i.e. he is able to create a sensuous object with his own body and with elements of sensuous nature or actually own the sensuous object. At the same time, the striking contradiction emerges: his “own expression of life” (EW 351c) alienates himself from life—the worker’s very own physical activity is what debases his quality of life or ownership of an object is what further disconnects him from everything else sensuous that he does not own. Marx proposes the higher state of private property would be “sensuous appropriation of the human essence” that extends beyond “one-sided consumption, of possession, of having” (EW 351d). Man should redefine his relationship to nature, approaching human-made works, objects, and nature objectively, with his objective senses, or “human relations to the world – seeing, hearing…acting, loving” (EW 351d). To clarify this, Marx writes, “Private property has made us so stupid…an object is only ours when we have it…when we use it” (EW 351f). Our practiced and felt idea of sensuousness, he so scathingly says, has been reduced to ownership or the “sense of having” (EW 352b), which has already replaced our objective senses. And the sense of having is really nothing at all compared to the “confirmation of human reality” (EW 351f).

The subjective “human sense” includes the five senses, spiritual senses, and the practical senses and it can be cultivated and elevated to know appreciation for high art, fine dining, etc. (EW 353). A fully developed society will allow for men “abundantly endowed with all the senses” (EW 354). According to Marx, the philosophical antinomies of subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, etc. resolve themselves in this society, because they are also “real problems of life” that ought to be solved as such, not as “purely theoretical problems” (EW 354). To Marx, estrangement from our own senses, “restricted sense,” is an issue of severe unalignment of our physical activity and its outcomes in our material realities, worsening until the human is hard to distinguish from animal (EW 353).

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Back to the wage-worker, Marx criticizes the dehumanization of the laborer under capitalist production. He alludes to Prometheus once more and says the light he brought to humans in order to “[transform] savages into men” (EW 359d) is denied for the worker, a harrowing example of progress reversal under capitalism. Marx claims, “none of the [worker’s] senses exist any longer, either in their human form or in their inhuman form” (EW 360a) and the worker’s needs are limited to the bare minimum necessary to keep him alive and productive as a laborer (EW 360b). To this, Marx italicizes in sarcastic emphasis: “even this life [the political economist] calls human life and human existence” (EW 360c), criticizing the political economist’s attempt at an artificial science describing the worker’s needs when political economy is better described a “science of wealth” and, subsequently, “the science of denial, of starvation, of saving” (EW 360d). To be the capitalist’s ideal worker is to put your wages into savings and deny yourself life and human needs—sensuous needs. “The less you eat, drink, buy books…love, theorize…” the more alienated you become from your senses and your own life, but all in order to save money (EW 361b). This money and wealth will take on its own living character, Marx says, for “everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you” (EW 361c). However wealth only appears or promises to be sensuous (EW 367b), for sensuousness is certainly not capital. Yes, there is sensuous utility in “glitter of precious metals” as a natural object, but once it is extended beyond that embodied usefulness, the man who supports the market becomes a fetish-worshipper. In other words, a man who calls private property an objective object, as if there is a sensuous quality to ownership, is a fetish-worshipper of the capitalist system, not unlike Catholic devotees. It is a deep inversion of sensuousness to flip private property, a “subjective essence of wealth," into the realm of objectivity and natural truth. (EW 342)

Theses on Feuerbach begins with Marx’s objection to materialism’s conception of sensuousness: it takes form as “the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice” (MER 143). Here, object is juxtaposed with sensuous activity and then contemplation with practice. The latter pair being the “active” side (MER 143)—the activity of the mind and body. Given that the sensuous is objective and not subjective, Marx states, “Feuerbach wants sensuous objects” (MER 143), which is in line with Marx’s ideas about objects: they are objective in their sensuousness. However he points out, at the same time, Feuerbach wants the sensuous object “really distinct from the thought objects” (MER 143), or separate from the realm of theory/contemplation. Which results in only a partially developed understanding of sensuousness on part of the materialists, referencing the very first sentence of Theses. While the sensuous object is objective, the theoretical or the thought object is considered subjective and “genuinely human,” i.e. not sensuous. The thought object is formed through idealism when Marx argues these “active” objects should be tied to materialism. In other words, Marx would like to entangle and define the object, thought, human activity, and practice as sensuous and objective, while Feuerbach deemed all but the object as subjective and not sensuous reality. And while he “appeals to sensuous contemplation” (144d), Marx is still unsatisfied that the activity of the body might not be considered sensuous. It is important to his argument that human activity should also consider “itself as objective activity” (MER 143) because it can’t be emphasized enough that “it is men who change circumstances” (144b). Humans create their own conditions and do not have to accept the sense-less reality they exist in as inherent/scientific/historical fact. It is in that idea Marx’s definition of the sensuous turns away from the idealist’s lens and towards a materialist understanding that ultimately becomes essential to his rationale for revolution.

In The German Ideology, there is a continued development of the ideas of sensuousness we first saw in EPM, albeit TGI is a bit more focused because it has Theses as an outline and Feuerbach’s insistence on abstraction to wrestle with. Marx states, “By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life” (MER 150a). In essence, Marx contends in activity, man constructs his own physical/material conditions. In the most utopic sense of this quote, in producing his sensuous needs with nature, man creates his own sensuous life, which is a succinct summary of Marx’s proposal of objective appropriation in EPM (EW 351d). Of course, this quote can also apply more broadly to the wage-worker’s state of alienation. As Marx writes in the next paragraph, “As individuals express their life, so they are” (MER 150b), arguing that the activity of man, even if seemingly subjective, is objective and sensuous. It is his being.

Marx later introduces the phrase “sensuous certainty” to describe one’s discernment of an object or condition to be scientifically or historically innate or intrinsically objective. This phrase is interesting because it requires the senses of the man to reach that conclusion while destabilizing the notion that the sensuous is fact. Or put another way, it forces a distinction between the sensuous and the ideas pulled out of mere sense(s). The input of data into our mind via our own senses is a perception of the world varying from person to person and from phenomenon to phenomenon. In Marx’s dissertation, this is exactly the two philosophers’ clashing preoccupations. However, the sensuous according to Marx considers more deeply the relations and interactions between nature and man. Back to the original quote, however, Marx uses sensuous uncertainty to make an example of how the sensuous world is a historical product built and rebuilt over centuries complicated by the social and political influences of each generation. This is to say that the current sensuous world, then, is unfixed and changeable.

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Even early on, Marx wondered what we could learn from our own material realities and our own bodies. This led him to the sensation-loving Epicurus for his dissertation and then eventually to Feuerbach’s abstractions, while crafting his own philosophy of the sensuous relating to labor, human needs, and revolution. I find it difficult to conclude that there is only one definition and application of sinnlich, for there are many threads to follow. However one, and I believe quite important, meaning of Marx’s sensuousness is that our own activity is objective, the sensuous truth, so then it is also up to us to decide if our actions are in harmony with the material conditions we want to live in.