Another critique of modern industrial society that preceded the development of environmental thought proper is that of Karl Marx. For Marx, the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and philosophy in general is idealism precisely because it is incapable of realizing its ideals. Philosophy effectively plays the same kind of role as religion—it creates an ideal, edifying vision of how things could be as a way of dealing with what is intolerable and intractable in what is. The contradiction between the ideal and the immediate is not sublated in the form of a society with a division of labour based around the ownership of private property and the needs of colonial expansion. Contrary to what Hegel argues, in the symbolic individualism of a constitutional monarchy at war with other states, individual human beings have not reached their fullest potential or realize the possibilities of their freedom through self-sacrifice. The ethical represents what ought to be, not what is, and thus remains impotent. All idealizations of how things are, all positing of something infinite that transcends what is lacking in the immediacy of sense and thought, are projections of the still unrealized possibility for human freedom in response to the intolerable conditions that still restrain it. Such conditions are
rooted simultaneously in the human relationship with nature and in human relationships with one another.
For Marx in the Grundrisse, the capitalist mode of production came about through a change in the way human beings relate to their natural environments. He argues that private landownership ―by the one . . . implies lack of ownership by others‖ (Marx & Engels, CW,
vol.37, p.798, in Foster et al, 2010, p.283) and represents ―the historical dissolution of . . .
naturally arisen communism‖ (1973, p.882, in ibid), and equates with ―dissolution of the relation to the earth—land and soil—as natural conditions of production—to which he [the human being] relates as to his own inorganic being‖(1973, p.497, in ibid); ―the negative of the situation in which the working individual relates to land and soil, to the earth as his own‖ (1973, pp.498-9, in ibid). This process ―tears the children of the earth from the breast on which they were raised, and thus transforms labour on the soil itself, which appears by its nature as the direct wellspring of subsistence, into a mediated source of subsistence, a source purely dependent on social relations‖ (1973, pp.498-9, in ibid). In ultimate value terms, Marx explains that ―In bourgeois economics . . . this appears as a complete emptying-out . . . universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end‖ (1973, p.488, in ibid, p.284).
For Marx, the immediacy of sensuous experience is the reality of nature. One of Marx‘s earliest writings is his dissertation on Epicurus. In it, he writes ―Human sensuousness, . . . is . . . embodied time, the existing reflection of the world in itself‖, and ―In hearing nature hears itself, in smelling it smells itself, in seeing it sees itself‖ (in ibid, p.227). Since, under conditions of private property, it is one‘s own immediate sensuous experience in naturally belonging to nature itself that becomes annihilated, through an uprooting of one‘s place
within it, then the tendency to idealize in response to these intolerable conditions must be a tendency to posit an ideal but now unfulfilled and unrecognisable reality of nature and belonging to it that both recalls an ideal past, and posits an as yet unrealized overthrowing of all the conditions that prevent it. And what do we have in the idea of wilderness as a
posthistoric primitivism? At the same time, as it is the fundamental experience of human existence itself, as a natural being, that is alienated from itself in such conditions, freedom from such conditions is idealized as the human end-in-itself that is the fulfilment of human possibilities and self realization in nature. What is idealized in nature is also idealized in the potential for human freedom and self-realization, against the contradicting reality of human enslavement and alienation from self and nature. Wilderness thus also becomes the pure scene for an idealization of the possibility of human freedom—but necessarily with no association whatever from the human home, human world, and human thoughts that constitute its contradiction in the realities of our enslavement.
―Private property made us so stupid‖, argues Marx, ―than an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, work, inhabited, etc., in short utilized in some way‖, thereby replacing ―all the physical and intellectual senses‖ with ―the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having‖ (Capital III,
1959, p.245 in Fischer & Marek, 1970). However it is not just individual human existence that is alienated from itself and nature under capitalism, for Marx, but human beings who are fundamentally alienated from their interdependent relationship with one another in individual and collective human action in nature. Idealizations projecting beyond such conditions are therefore not only idealizations of nature and individual human freedom, but social, utopian
idealizations. We do not belong to things, to nature, to each other or even to ourselves, because the only values we can see are either use or exchange values. Instrumental rationality becomes the totality of the world, such that we become alienated subjects and objects unable to establish the reality of our immediate sensuous or cognitive experience. It is in utopian visions that an idealized nature outside of the realm of human misery becomes our teacher.
The Received Wilderness Idea—of pure nature-in-itself as uninhabited and unmodified by human beings, a sacred place which human being can only visit and protect from their own destructive impulses, is the ideal place where we can see that we have lost our way, and be relieved from all the burdens associated with civilization. But to say this is not to trivialize it,
for these burdens are real burdens, even if many of the adherents of the received wilderness idea do belong to particularly privileged social classes. Sometimes the guilt of the privileged seeks to atone itself in the noblest and most humbling of causes. At the same time, if we take seriously the problems raised by Heidegger and Marx about our ways of being in modern industrial societies—which do turn everything into commodities and reduce everything to its mere exchange value, and do alienate people from the direct experience of things and each other by the imperative to consume and sell one‘s labour and time on the marketplace, make one‘s own value ultimately only that of exchange—and which do order and enframe things and ourselves as merely for the exchangeable possibilities of their technical utility as ―standing-reserve‖—then we have every reason to see how a reality that gives us sublime experiences outside of these societies might be idealized once we are back within them as the
sole source of access to true reality, true nature, precisely with the idealized form that whitewashes them of any human (all too human) involvement. It could just be that in some respects, despite all the wondrous advantages and possibilities offered by technology and capitalism, and even the possibility for genuinely poetic and sublime experiences within them, things have become so bad that we cannot bear the thought of ourselves anymore, and despise all things human. This would make our idealizations of wild nature as devoid of humans (and yet the impossibly endangered saving power) beckon to us all the more evocatively, seductively, and convincingly.