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Abstract

The presented problems of Marx’s understanding of man from the period of the Manuscripts in the year 1848 and from the period of the so called critical turn represented chiefly by the German ideology express on the whole the chief theoretical philosophical standpoints, in which Marx’s effort to explain the social-historical process on the basis of real, practically acting people is concentrated; human being is inderstood as the practical life of real people in historically definite conditions. The human substance (in contrast to Feuerbach’s non-historical conception) is explained by Marx as a historical product; he conceives the historical reality as a result of the mutual effection among men on the principle of unity of man and nature. Having acquired a critical standpoint towards Hegel’s conception of history, having elaborated and completed Feuerbach's criticism of religious alienation and having discovered the substance of self-alienation of the proletarian in wage-labour, having raised to the standard of a historical importance the practical-material character of labour (in contrast to Hegel’s conception of the spiritual substance of labour), without which the process of man’s self-creation is unthinkable, Marx outlined the foundations of his „philosophy of communism“, delimitated the dimensions of the social substance of man, of the substance of labour and practice. He understands communism as a realization of historically formed human possibilities the substance of which is real and proper to the laws of development of mankind and to the formation of material conditions for its uniting. Marx’s vision of a future society expresses its proper precondition to be a human society, because genetically it stems from the scientific analysis of social changes, from the objective scientific anticipation of development of human history, that is marked by the concrete struggle of concrete social powers and human activities, representing, by their humanizing efforts, the gradual human emancipation. In a humanely emancipated society (by means of a positive abolition of private ownership) arise real preconditions of humane development of man, with an emphasis on his humaneness in Marx’s meaning of the word: that there is no contradiction between his substance and facticity of existence and thus he is not alienated from the realization of the historically formed human possibilities. On the contrary, man becomes a human quality and as such he develops his personal abilities and acquires the proper conditions of life and develops manysidedly. Marx’s idea of man comports as a model of a freely creating and self-developing subject, i. e. as a model of active subject that in the social operation realizes the will of society as what is, on the one hand, “against” his freedom and what, on the other hand, he realizes as himself. His social operation is his self-realization. It is to be noted that this idea of man is unthinkable without instalment of the new community, in which its very principle consists in the maximum grade of realization of humaneness. It is a community with maximum humanity, an era of maximum humaneness: in contrast to „the utter loss of man“ (in the improper human history) it postulates the thesis of “the utter achievement of man” wrhich is possible only in a communist society. This model of man as a human quality does not express, as many of Marx’s interpreters supposed, his idealism from the period of the Manuscripts, but it represents Marx’s optimism in man, his belief that man is a creature constantly improving and self-humanizing. This dynamic conception of man implies his theory of openness of history that yields a broad space for the humanizing self-liberating activity of man.