Material Needs and Objective Activity: Young Marx’s Social Cognition-A Critique of Hiromatsu Wataru’s “Predominant Influence of Hess” Thesis

In the effort to reconstruct the history of the intellectual formation of the young Marx, Hiromatsu Wataru approached the subject through the concepts of “human” and the developmental logic of the “human–society” relationship, arguing that the young Marx opened up a new horizon for the materialist conception of history under the profound influence of Hess. Based on textual research and guided by the clue of conceptual development, this research examines the theoretical premises of Hiromatsu’s view by reconstructing the structural settings of “society/communication” in Feuerbach and Hess respectively. Hiromatsu misinterpreted the theoretical positions among Marx, Hess, and Feuerbach; while overestimating the theoretical value of Hess, he failed to pay sufficient attention to Marx’s positive appraisal of Hegel’s philosophy. Consequently, the full image of the young Marx’s thought was obscured beneath Hess’s notion of unmediated social relations. In fact, in the period of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx began from Feuerbach’s idea of “objective activity I” and, drawing on Hegel’s theoretical structure of the “die Sache selbst”, constructed a social theory in which the individual driven by material needs constituted modern commercial society through “objective activity II”. This finding not only clarifies the intellectual associations and differences among the Young Hegelians, thereby offering a substantial critique of the interpretative path represented by Hiromatsu, but also highlights the key role played by Hegel’s dialectics—as an important source of Marx’s thought—in the founding of the materialist conception of history.