Spirituality Beyond Man: Toward a Labor Theory of the Soul

Abstract

This essay analyzes Marx’s materialist understanding of spirituality within the context of the Marxian conception of the essence of the human developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884. The relevance of this work is demonstrated through references to Hegel and classical Marxists, such as Georg Lukács or Evald Ilyenkov, and also to recent discussions in contemporary philosophy on the problems of labor, the unconscious, artificial intelligence, and depression. The essence of the human is identified with the soul as understood by Andrei Platonov, as a kind of secret human being inside the body of any species and thus detached from Homo sapiens, or “man” in its traditional sense. This allows us to disengage the human from both essentialism and anthropocentrism. Instead, this impersonal essence is defined by an ambiguous concept of labor that supposes both alienation and emancipation.