"a man's animal spirits"...?
Is this a euphemism for emotional states, or was Marx into some kind of mysticism?
I read it more like a convoluted way of saying "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", or in plainer terms "repetitive work with no escape is going to make everyone depressed".
I think it's rather denouncing the monotony of always performing the same task
Recreation is another thing altogether
He may have been a furry.
If the state cannot support the artistic animalistic pursuits of the masses, the masses must howl and rave.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/animal-spirits.asp
"Animal Spirits" refers to the psychological and emotional factors influencing financial decisions during economic uncertainty. Coined by economist John Maynard Keynes, it highlights how emotions like consumer confidence and fear drive market behaviors and investor actions, affecting economic growth and market stability.
Marx does not actually use the term 'animal spirits' here, in that sentence, which is from...
Das Kapital, Volume 1, Part 4, Chapter 14.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm
This is an English translation.
Marx wrote in German.
https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/cap1.pdf
This is a side by side, English to German version.
If you go to page ... slide? ... 1017, by the pdf page count, labelled 903 on the bottom right, you will see the start of the exact sentence from the OP image, it goes onto the next slide/page.
The actual phrase/word that Marx uses is 'Lebensgeister'.
I do not speak German, but as best I can tell, that is more literally 'Life/Living Spirits'.
'Animal spirits' in German would be something more like 'animalischegeister'.
You have to remember Marx wrote in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, in the German of that time, which was then translated into the English of basically the 1900s... and then onward.
Phrasing it as 'Animal Spirits' is... actually a kind of imposition onto the text, done by later English translators, because of the later popularization of the phrase 'animal spirits' by English speaking economists.
The English economist phrase 'animal spirits' focus more on... basically unpredictable/unnacountable behaviors in markets due to ... rumors, fear, hope, panics, crazes, things like that.
They are unpredictable, wild, like wild animals.
It is essentially a precursor to the term 'market sentiment'.
'Animal spirits' was used by a lot of English speaking economists to ... basically describe a kind of fudge factor; if your model isn't predicting things right, ah!, its because of those pesky animal spirits that drive people to do things that are nonsensical/irrational in my model.
While I may not speak German, I do have degrees in Poli Sci and Econ, so hopefully ya'll can take my word that I'm decently summarizing how 'animal spirits' works in econ and poli sci shit written in English.
So anyway tl:dr;
Marx did not actually say 'animal spirits', he basically said 'life spirits'.
That has a lot less potential oddball connotations, and is more directly understandable as something like 'vitality' or 'invigoration', 'life force', something like that, in modern English.
Basically Marx is saying that doing the same kind of thing, over and over again, uh... destroys your soul, makes you depressed, harshes your vibe, numbs you to the world ... those would all be maybe more 'current year' ways to say it in English.
I'm a millenial, I am not fluent in zoomer.
The economist/political scientist meaning of "animal spirit" was first introduced in 1936, 46 years after the translation you linked.
However, "animal spirit" dates back to the Roman period. The 3rd century physician Galen described the "spiritus animalis" as a life force seated in the brain that causes the body to move through the muscles; sort of like a medium for consciousness. Though in Latin, "animalis" means "of life" (or more literally, "of breath")^1^.
Descartes popularized this 17th century, and this phrase was translated accurately into German as "Lebensgeister". See this German dictionary entry from 1793, or more explicitly this one from 1904. However, in English the "animalis" part wasn't translated.
This notion became associated with vitality across (western?) Europe, which is why in English we can say someone "is very spirited today", and in German someone would say that person has Lebensgeister. Or also how someone can "have the right spirit".
So when Marx says alienated labor saps your Lebensgeister, what he's saying is probably just the informal observation that it's draining your spirit. But someone with a more formal philosophical education might naturally have read "Lebensgeister" as a reference to Descartes' formal idea, which in English had always been called "animal spirit".
^1^ this is a translation of the Greek concept of pneuma psychae; literally "psychic breath", though more properly understood as the spirit of the mind. This in turn can be traced more vaguely to the ancient Egyptian concept of "Akh", the part of the soul that governs the intellect, and more generally to the Egyptian concept of a soul being made of distinct parts each responsible for maintaining different parts of the person.
The concept of Akh appears in the old kingdom, though if you've ever heard it before it would be as the Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose name means "mind moved by Aten, the god of the disk of the sun". Akhenaten tried to make Aten the monotheistic god of Egypt.
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