The approach of human pathos in Marx, Freud and Nietzsche

Abstract

The following work aims to develop the form through which Marx, Freud and Nietzsche have thought the causes of human pathos —understood it in its double meaning of suffering and passion— from a materialistic approach to the notions of sensitivity and affectivity. Consequently, emphasis will be placed on the concept of «practical sensibility», adopted by the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and on the «will to power» present in the rough draft of «the theory of affections» in the Posthumous Fragments of the last Nietzsche. An encounter that, despite the biographical, theoretical and historical distances, it is possible to draw from the concept of sensitivity and that includes Freud as an intermediary, because from his psychoanalytic perspective he was also concerned in understanding the indomitable nature of our psychic constitution.