But even if I am active in the field of science, etc. -- an activity which I am seldom able to perform in direct association with other men -- I am still socially active because I am active as a man. It is not only the material of my activity -- including even the language in which the thinker is active -- which I receive as a social product. My own existence is social activity. Therefore what I create from myself I create for society, conscious of myself as a social being.
My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose living form is the real community, society, whereas at present universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition to it. Hence the activity of my universal consciousness -- as activity -- is my theoretical existence as a social being.
It is, above all, necessary to avoid once more establishing "society" as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His vital expression -- even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men -- is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life.
Man's individual and species-life are not two distinct things, however much -- and this is necessarily so -- the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life.
As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats in thought his actual existence; conversely, species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being.
Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual -- and it is just this particularity which makes him an individual totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of thought and experienced society for itself; he also exists in reality as the contemplation and true enjoyment of social existence and as a totality of vital human expression.
It is true that thought and being are distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with one another.
Death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular individual, and seemingly contradicts their unity; but the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and, as such, mortal.
(4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes an alien and inhuman object for himself, that his expression of life [Lebensausserung] is his alienation of life [Lebensentausserung], and that his realization is a loss of reality, an alien reality, so the positive supersession of private property -- i.e., the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man -- should not be understood only in the sense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human elations to the world -- seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving -- in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object. This appropriation of human reality, their approach to the object, is the confirmation of human reality. [Marx's note:
It is therefore just as varied as the determinations of the human essence and activities.] It is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization.
Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses -- the sense of having .
So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty. (On the category of having see Hess in Einundzwanzig Bogen .)
The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. [Marx's note: In practice I can only relate myself to a thing in a human way if the thing is related in a human way to man.] Need or employment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use.
Similarly, senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Apart from these direct organs, social organs are therefore created in the form of society; for example, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ of my life expressions and a mode of appropriation of human life.
Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye, the hum ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc.