Species-Essentiality

Definition

Species-essentiality (Gattungsmässigkeit; Marx's Gattungswesen, 'species-being') names the generic — the specifically human, universal dimension of activity and objectivation as against the merely particular. For Marx, man differs from the animals in that "his vital activity is conscious"; man "treats the species as its own essential being" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). Heller borrows the category "from Marx, in particular from the Paris Manuscripts" (preface, p. x) and places it at the centre of Everyday Life — acknowledging that it was Georg Lukács who "placed the category of species essentiality at the forefront of discussion" in the first chapter of his Aesthetics (p. xi). In Heller's reworking, all spheres of objectivation are species-essential, divided into those 'in itself' (appropriated as taken for granted — the empirical human universal of tools, custom, language), those 'for itself' (appropriated by free volition and reflection — science, art, philosophy, morals, religion), and those 'in and for itself' (integrations: politics, law). The everyday particularity of most historical persons "bears non-conscious, non-reflected species-essentiality in itself"; individuality is the person who relates to the species-essence consciously. Heller stresses both continuity with and modification of Lukács's interpretation.

Key Thinkers

• Karl Marx — species-being in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: conscious life-activity, free activity, and estranged labour as the alienation of species-being.
• Agnes Heller — the systematic redeployment: species-essentiality as the classificatory principle of all objectivations, and the axis of the particularity/individuality distinction.
• Georg Lukács — the immediate source (the 'everyday thinking' chapter of the Aesthetics, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen); referenced, not paged here.
• Jean Baudrillard — the generic as an effect rather than a ground: man's "double 'generic' face" of needs and labour power "is only man as produced by the system of political economy" (1973/1975) — the Feuerbachian critique of the religious essence turned against the generic essence itself. See labor-power, productivism.

Related Concepts

• Objectivation 'In Itself' and 'For Itself' — the three-way division of species-essential objectivations that structures Heller's entire framework.
• Particularity and Individuality — individuality is defined by a conscious relationship with species-essentiality; particularity bears it mutely.
• Everyday Life — the everyday is the terrain where species-essential objectivation 'in itself' is appropriated and where needs for the 'for itself' are generated.
• Homogenization — the process by which the person is raised to the generic level in a homogeneous sphere of objectivation.
• Ideology — for Heller, the ideological social sciences can defetishize or reinforce the fetishism of everyday thinking.
• Labor Power — the second of man's two generic faces: the conception of labour power as "the fundamental human potential" is produced by political economy, not presupposed.
• Productivism — the "generic definition of man" as producer that Baudrillard relocates from anthropology into the code of political economy.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — the primary source: the Marxian genealogy (preface, ch. 2), the division of objectivations (Part III), and the analysis of every sphere (work, morals, religion, politics, science, art, philosophy) as species-essential.

• 'Everyday Life:' a sui generis ontology? (Paolucci 2015) — the Budapest School lineage and Heller's Lukács inheritance.

• The Human Condition (Arendt 1958) — an adjacent, non-identical vocabulary for the generic/human (Arendt's labour/work/action vs Heller's species-essential activity).

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the generic essence historicized and reversed: the Marxist generic schema of production and needs amounts to "an incredible simplification of social exchange by the law of value," and the generic itself is an effect — "the double potentiality of man as needs and labor power, this double 'generic' face of universal man, is only man as produced by the system of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30). The concept of production is what does the producing: "the concepts of production and mode of production themselves 'produce' and 'reproduce' the concepts of Nature and History as their space time" (ch. III, "Historical Materialism and Primitive Societies," p. 69). See labor-power, productivism.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Heller concedes she "then shared the evolutionism of Marxism in full" (p. ix) and later abandoned the philosophy of history — what remains of species-essentiality once evolutionism is dropped?
• Is species-essentiality a normative category (values worth internalizing) or an anthropological one (the empirical human universal)? Heller's double usage invites the charge of equivocation.
• How does Heller's species-essentiality relate to Arendt's plurality — both name the human-generic, but Arendt's generic appears only between humans (plurality), while Heller's is internalized as values.