FREDERICK ENGELS
LUDWIG FEUERBACH
AND THE END OF
CLASSICAL GERMAN
PHILOSOPHY
FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
First Edition 1976
PEKING 1976
(181x246).GIF)
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FREDERICK ENGELSLUDWIG FEUERBACH
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The present English edition of Frederick Engels' Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy is a translation of the Foreword and text of the German edition of 1888, including Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. This translation follows that of the English edition of Selected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. II, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951, with corrections where necessary on the basis of the original German text in Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 21.
The Appendices consist of Plekhanov's Forewords to the first and second Russian editions of Feuerbach and of his Notes to the Russian editions. The translation of Plekhanov's Foreword to the first Russian edition and of his Notes to the Russian editions follow that of the English edition of Selected Philosophical Works of Plekhanov, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, with numerous and often drastic revisions and corrections where necessary. Plekhanov's Foreword to the second Russian edition was translated from the Russian original in the Selected Philosophical Works of Plekhanov, Vol. III.
The notes on Engels are based on those in the above-mentioned German and English editions. Those on Plekhanov are largely based on those in the English edition of Selected Philosophical Works of Plekhanov, Vol. I and in the Russian edition of Selected Philosophical Work of Plekhanov, Vol. III.
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FOREWORD TO THE GERMAN EDITION OF 1888 |
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LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL |
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KARL MARX: THESES ON FEUERBACH |
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APPENDICES | ||
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PLEKHANOV'S FOREWORDS AND NOTES TO THE RUSSIAN |
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Translator's Foreword to the First Russian Edition |
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page 1
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin, 1859, Karl Marx relates how in 1845 the two of us, then in Brussels, undertook "to set forth together our view" -- the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx -- "as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances its printing was not permitted. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose -- self-clarification. "*
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Since then more than forty years have elapsed, and Marx died without either of us having had an opportunity to return to the subject. We have discussed our relation to Hegel in one or two places, but nowhere in a comprehensive, connected account. Nor did we ever return to Feuerbach, who after all in many respects forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception.
In the meantime the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world. On the other hand, classical German philosophy is experiencing a kind of rebirth abroad, especially in England and Scandinavia, and even in Germany people appear to be getting tired of the pauper's broth of eclecticism which is ladled out in the universities there under the name of philosophy.
In these circumstances a short, connected account of our relation to the Hegelian philosophy, of how we proceeded as well as separated from it, appeared to me to be increasingly in order. Equally, a full acknowledgement of the influence which Feuerbach, more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher, had on us during our period of storm and stress, appeared to me to be an undischarged debt of honour. I therefore willingly seized the opportunity when the editors of the Neue Zeit asked me for a critical review of Starcke's book on Feuerbach. My contribution was published in Nos. 4 and 5 of that journal in 1886 and appears here in revised form as a separate publication.
Before sending these lines to press, I have once again ferreted out and looked over the old manuscript of 1845-46. The section dealing with Feuerbach is not completed. The finished portion consists of an exposition of the materialist conception of history which proves only how incomplete
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our knowledge of economic history still was at the time. It contains no criticism of Feuerbach's doctrine itself; for the present purpose, therefore, it was unusable. On the other hand, in an old notebook of Marx's I have found the eleven theses on Feuerbach which are printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which the brilliant germ of the new world outlook is deposited.
Frederick Engels
London, February 21, 1888
EDITION OF 1888
* Karl Marx, Preface and Introduction to "A Conttibution to the Critique of Political Economy," Eng. ed., Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976, p. 5. Marx referring to The German Ideology. --Ed.
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Printed in Ludwig Feuerbach and |
Original in German |
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The present work[*] carries us back to a period which, although chronologically no more than a generation or so behind us, has become as foreign to the present generation in Germany as if it were already a full hundred years old. Yet it was the period of Germany's preparation for the Revolution of 1848; and all that has happened in our country since then has been merely a continuation of 1848, merely the execution of the last will and testament of the revolution.
Just as in France in the eighteenth century, so in Germany in the nineteenth, a philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse. But with what a difference! The French were in open combat with all official science, with the church and often also the state; their writings were printed beyond the frontier, in Holland or England, while they themselves were often on the point of landing in the Bastille. But the
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Germans were professors, state-appointed instructors of youth; their writings were recognized textbooks, and the system rounding off the whole development -- the Hegelian system -- was even raised, in some degree, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state! Was it possible that a revolution could hide behind these professors, behind their pedantically obscure phrases, their ponderous, wearisome sentences? Were not the liberals, the very people who then passed as the representatives of the revolution, the bitterest opponents of this brain-befuddling philosophy? But what neither governments nor liberals saw was seen by at least one man as early as 1833, and indeed by a man called Heinrich Heine.[*] [1] {1}
Let us take an example. No philosophical proposition has earned as much gratitude from narrow-minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals as Hegel's famous statement:
"What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational."[2]
That was tangibly a sanctification of all things as they are, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, the police state, arbitrary justice, and censorship. That is how Frederick William III understood it, and his subjects too. But according to Hegel everything that exists is in no wise also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary:
"in its development reality proves itself as necessity."
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Therefore a particular governmental measure -- Hegel himself cites the example of "a certain tax regulation" -- is by no means real for him without qualification. However, that which is necessary proves itself in the last resort to be rational too; and, applied to the Prussian state of that time, the Hegelian proposition, therefore, merely means: this state is rational, corresponds to reason, insofar as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears evil to us, but continues to exist in spite of its evil character, then the government's evil character is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government they deserved.{2}
But according to Hegel, reality is in no way an attribute which applies to any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times. On the contrary. The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire which supplanted it. In 1789 the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so denuded of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be abolished by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case, therefore, the monarchy was unreal and the revolution real. Thus in the course of development all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, viable reality takes the place of the moribund reality -- peacefully if the old is sensible enough to go to its death without a struggle, forcibly if it offers resistance to this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition is transformed into its opposite through the Hegelian dialectic itself: All that is real in the domain of human history becomes irrational in the course of time, is therefore already irrational by definition, is infected in advance with irrationality; and everything which is rational
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in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition about the rationality of everything real resolves itself into this other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.
But the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves) lay precisely in the fact that once and for all it dealt the deathblow to the final validity of all products of human thought and activity. With Hegel truth, the cognition of which is the task of philosophy, was no longer a collection of finished dogmatic propositions which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth now lay in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge, but without ever reaching, by discovering some so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further and at which it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze admiringly at the absolute truth it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical activity. History is as little able as cognition to reach a final conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity; a perfect society, a perfect "state," are things which can only exist in the imagination. On the contrary, every successive historical situation is only a transitory stage in the endless course of development of society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But it becomes decrepit and
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unjustified in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb. It must give way to a higher stage which in its turn will also decay and perish. Just as in practice the bourgeoisie dissolves all stable, time-honoured institutions by means of large-scale industry, competition and the world market, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. Nothing final, absolute or sacred can endure in its presence. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything and nothing can endure in its presence except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascent from the lower to the higher, of which it is itself the mere reflection in the thinking brain. Of course, it has a conservative side too: it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only up to a point. The conservatism of this outlook is relative, its revolutionary character is absolute -- the only absolute which dialectical philosophy allows to prevail.
It is not necessary here to go into the question of whether this outlook is completely in accord with the present state of natural science, which predicts a possible end for the very existence of the earth and a fairly certain one for its habitability; which therefore recognizes that for the history of mankind, too, there is not only an upward but also a downward phase. At any rate we still find ourselves pretty far from the turning point at which the history of society will enter a decline, and we cannot expect Hegelian philosophy to be concerned with a subject which in its time natural science had definitely not yet put on the agenda.
But what must in fact be said here is that the above exposition is not found with such clarity in Hegel. It is a
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necessary conclusion from his method, but one which he himself never drew so explicitly. And this, indeed, for the simple reason that he was compelled to build a system and, in accordance with traditional requirements, a system of philosophy must conclude with some kind of absolute truth. Therefore, however much Hegel emphasizes, especially in his Logic,[3] that this eternal truth is nothing but the logical, that is, the historical, process itself, he still finds himself compelled to supply this process with an end precisely because he must bring his system to an end at some point or other. In his Logic he can make this end a beginning again, since here the point of conclusion, the absolute idea -- which is only absolute insofar as he has absolutely nothing to say about it -- "alienates," that is, transforms, itself into nature and later returns to itself in the mind, that is, in thought and in history. But at the end of the whole philosophy a similar return to the beginning is possible only in one way. Namely, by conceiving the end of history as consisting in mankind's arriving at the knowledge of this self-same absolute idea, and by declaring that this knowledge of the absolute idea is attained in Hegelian philosophy. But the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is thus declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction with his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism. Thus the revolutionary side is smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side. And what applies to philosophical knowledge applies also to historical practice. Mankind, which, in the person of Hegel, has reached the point of working out the absolute idea, must have gotten so far in practice too that it can carry out this absolute idea in reality. Hence the practical political demands of the absolute idea on contemporaries should not be exorbitant. So we find at the conclusion of the Philosophy of
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Right that the absolute idea is to realize itself in that monarchy based on social estates which Frederick William III so stubbornly but vainly promised to his subjects, that is, in the limited, moderate, indirect rule of the possessing classes suited to the German petty-bourgeois conditions of the time; with, moreover, the necessity of the nobility speculatively demonstrated for us.
Consequently, the inner necessities of the system alone suffice to explain why a thoroughly revolutionary method of thinking produced a very tame political conclusion. Indeed, the specific form of this conclusion arises from the fact that Hegel was a German and like his contemporary Goethe had a bit of the philistine's pigtail dangling behind. Each was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, yet neither ever altogether got rid of the German philistine in him.
However, none of this prevented the Hegelian system from covering an incomparably greater domain than any earlier system or from developing a wealth of thought in this domain which is astounding even today. The phenomenology of the mind (which one may call a parallel to the embryology and paleontology of the mind, an evolution of the individual consciousness through its different stages, expressed in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history), logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, and the latter in its turn worked out in its separate, historical sub-divisions, philosophy of history, of right, of religion, history of philosophy, aesthetics, etc. -- in all these different historical fields Hegel laboured to discover and demonstrate the main thread of development. As he was not only a creative genius but also a man of encyclopedic erudition, he played an epoch-making role in every sphere. It is self-
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evident that owing to the needs of the "system" he quite often had to resort to those forced constructions about which his pigmy opponents raise such a terrible din even today. But these constructions are only the frame and scaffolding of his work. If one does not loiter here needlessly, but presses on farther into the immense building, one finds innumerable treasures which still retain all their value today. With all philosophers it is precisely the "system" which is perishable, just because it springs from an imperishable need of the human mind, the need to overcome all contradictions. But if all contradictions are eliminated once and for all, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth -- world history will have come to an end. Yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do -- hence, a new, insoluble contradiction. As soon as we have realized -- and ultimately no one has helped us do so more than Hegel himself -- that the task of philosophy thus posed only means that a single philosopher should accomplish what can only be accomplished by the whole human race in its progressive development -- as soon as we realize this, there is an end to all philosophy in the hitherto accepted sense of the word. We abandon "absolute truth," which is unattainable along this path or by any single individual, and instead we pursue attainable relative truths along the path of the positive sciences and of the syntheses of their results by means of dialectical thought. With Hegel philosophy as such comes to an end: on the one hand, because in his system he recapitulates its whole development in the most splendid fashion, and on the other, because he shows us, albeit unconsciously, the way out of this labyrinth of systems to real positive knowledge of the world.
One can imagine what a tremendous effect this Hegelian system must have produced in the philosophy-tinged at-
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mosphere of Germany. It was a triumphal procession which lasted for decades and which by no means came to a standstill with Hegel's death. On the contrary, it was precisely from 1830 to 1840 that "Hegelianism" reigned most exclusively and to a greater or lesser extent infected even its opponents. It was in this very period that Hegelian views, whether consciously or unconsciously, most profusely penetrated the most varied sciences and even leavened popular literature and the daily press, from which the average "cultured person" derives his mental pabulum. But this victory along the whole front was only the prelude to an internal struggle.
As we have seen, Hegel's whole doctrine left plenty of room for accommodating the most diverse practical party views, and two things above all were practical in the theoretically minded Germany of the time: religion and politics. Whoever placed the main stress on the Hegelian system could be pretty conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition both in religion and politics. Despite the fairly frequent outbursts of revolutionary wrath in his works, Hegel himself seemed to be on the whole more inclined to the conservative side. Indeed, his system had cost him much more "hard mental plugging" than his method. Towards the end of the thirties, the cleavage in the [Hegelian] school became more and more apparent. In their fight with the orthodox pietists and feudal reactionaries the left wing, the so-called Young Hegelians, little by little abandoned that philosophically refined reserve in regard to the burning questions of the day which till then had insured state toleration and even protection for their teachings. And open partisanship became unavoidable when orthodox bigotry and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne with Frederick
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William IV in 1840. The fight was still carried on with philosophical weapons, but no longer for abstract philosophical goals. It turned directly on the destruction of traditional religion and of the existing state. While the practical ends were still predominantly clothed in philosophical garb in the Deutsche Jahrbücher,[4] in the Rheinische Zeitung [5] of 1842 the Young Hegelian school directly revealed itself as the philosophy of the aspiring radical bourgeoisie and used the threadbare cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship.{3}
But politics was then a very thorny field, and hence the main fight was directed against religion; indirectly, this fight was also political, particularly after 1840. Strauss' Life of Jesus [6] had provided the first impulse in 1835. Bruno Bauer later combated its theory of the formation of the gospel myths by proving that a whole series of evangelic stories had been fabricated by the authors themselves. The controversy between them was carried out in the philosophical disguise of a battle between "self-consciousness" and "substance," and the question whether the miracle stories of the gospels came into being through the unconscious-traditional creation of myths within the bosom of the community or whether they were fabricated by the evangelists themselves was inflated into the question whether "substance" or "self-consciousness"{4} is the decisive motive force in world history. Finally Stirner, the prophet of contemporary anarchism -- Bakunin has taken a great deal from him -- came along and capped the sovereign "self-consciousness" with his sovereign "ego."[7]
We will not go any further into this side of the process of decomposition of the Hegelian school. What is more important for us is that the main body of the most determined Young Hegelians was driven back to Anglo-French material-
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ism by the practical necessities of its fight against positive religion. Here they came into conflict with the system of their school. While materialism views nature as the sole reality, in the Hegelian system nature represents merely the "alienation" of the absolute idea, so to say, a degradation of this idea. At all events, thinking and its intellectual product, the idea, is here primary, and nature is derivative, only existing at all through the condescension of the idea. And they floundered in this contradiction as well or as ill as they could.
Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity.[8] With one blow it dissipated the contradiction by again raising materialism to the throne without any fuss. Nature exists independently of any philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves the products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings created by our religious fantasies are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.{5} The spell was broken; the "system" was shattered and cast aside, and the contradiction shown to exist only in our imagination was dissolved. One must have oneself experienced the liberating effect of this book to have any idea of it. The enthusiasm was general; at once we all became Feuerbachians. It may be seen from The Holy Family how enthusiastically Marx greeted the new approach and how much -- in spite of all critical reservations -- he was influenced by it.*
The very shortcomings of the book contributed to its immediate impact. Its literary, sometimes even high-flown, style ensured a larger public for it and was at any rate refreshing
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after long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same is true of its gushing deification of love, which had its excuse, though not its justification, after the now intolerable sovereign rule of "pure thought." But what we must not forget is that "true socialism,"[9] which had been spreading like a plague in "educated" Germany since 1844, took precisely these two weaknesses of Feuerbach's as its starting point, putting literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge and the liberation of mankind through "love" in place of the emancipation of the proletariat through the economic transformation of production -- in short, losing itself in the nauseating preciosity and love-feasts typified by Herr Karl Grün.{6}
Nor must we forget that while the Hegelian school was dissolved, Hegelian philosophy was not overcome through criticism; Strauss and Bauer each extracted one of its aspects and turned it polemically against the other. Feuerbach broke through the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is not disposed of by simply asserting that it is false. And so powerful an achievement as Hegelian philosophy, which had exercised so enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the nation, could not be disposed of by being abruptly ignored. It had to be "sublated" in its own sense, that is, in the sense that while its form had to be destroyed by criticism, the new content which had been gained through it had to be saved. How this was brought about we shall see below.
But in the meantime the Revolution of 1848 thrust all philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside his Hegel. And in the process Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.
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The great basic question of all philosophy, and especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, who were still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, came to believe under the stimulus of dream apparitions[*] that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death -- from these times men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the external world. If upon death it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occasion to ascribe yet another separate death to it. Thus there arose the idea of its immortality, which in no wise appeared as a consolation at that stage of development but as a fate against which nothing could be done, and often enough as a positive misfortune, as among the Greeks. It was not the religious need for consolation but the quandary arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once granting its existence after the death of the body -- it was this quandary that generally led to the tiresome fiction of personal immortality. The first gods arose in an altogether similar way from the personification of natural forces. In the subsequent evolution of religions they increasingly assumed an extra-mundane form, until finally by a process of abstrac-
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tion -- I might almost say of distillation -- occurring naturally in the course of man's intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, of mind to nature -- the paramount question of the whole of philosophy -- has, no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery. But this question could first be posed in all its sharpness, could first achieve its full significance, only when humanity in Europe awoke from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle Ages. The question of the place of thinking in relation to being, which incidentally had played a great part in medieval scholasticism too, the question, which is primary, mind or nature -- this question confronting the church took the pointed form: Did God create the world, or has the world been in existence eternally?
Philosophers were divided into two great camps according to their answer to this question. Those who asserted the primacy of mind over nature and, in the last analysis, therefore, assumed some kind of creation of the world -- and this creation often becomes far more intricate and impossible among the philosophers, for example, Hegel, than in Christianity -- formed the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belonged to the various schools of materialism.
These two terms, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing but this; and here too we are not using them in any other sense. We shall see below the confusion which arises when some other meaning is put into them.
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But the question of the relation of thinking and being has yet another aspect. In what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of knowing the real world? Are we able to produce a correct reflection of reality in our ideas and notions of the real world? In philosophical language this question is called the question of the identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers answer it affirmatively. With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we know in the real world is precisely its content conforming to thought -- that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independently of and prior to the world. But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is already in advance a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premise. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore also the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind's immediately translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion he shares with well-nigh all philosophers.
In addition there is a set of different philosophers -- those who challenge the possibility of any knowledge, or at least of an exhaustive knowledge, of the world. Among the more modern ones there belong Hume and Kant, who have played a very important role in the development of philosophy. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already
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been said by Hegel, insofar as this was possible from an idealist standpoint; what Feuerbach has added from a materialist standpoint is more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our understanding of a natural process by making it ourselves, producing it from its preconditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then it's all over with the Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself." The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained such "things-in-themselves" until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another; whereupon the "thing-in-itself" became a thing-for-us, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For three hundred years the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand chances to one in its favour, but still always a hypothesis. But when Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Galle really found this planet,[11] the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the Neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian approach in Germany and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where it never died out), this is scientifically a retrogression and practically just a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism while publicly denying it, since they were refuted both theoretically and practically a long time ago.{7}
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But during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach, the philosophers were by no means pushed forward solely by the force of pure thought, as they themselves believed. On the contrary. What really pushed them forward was above all the powerful and increasingly rapid and impetuous progress of natural science and industry. Among the materialists this was plain on the surface, but the idealist systems too filled themselves more and more with a materialist content and attempted pantheistically to reconcile the antithesis between mind and matter, so that ultimately the Hegelian system merely represents a materialism idealistically stood on its head in method and content.
It is, therefore, understandable that in his characterization of Feuerbach Starcke first investigates the latter's position in regard to this fundamental question of the relation of thinking and being. After a short introduction, in which the views of earlier philosophers, particularly since Kant, are described in unnecessarily ponderous philosophical language, and in which Hegel, by an all too formalistic adherence to certain passages in his works, gets far less than his due, there follows a detailed exposition of the course of development of Feuerbach's "metaphysics" itself, as this course was manifested in the sequence of his relevant writings. This exposition is a clear and diligent piece of work, but like the whole book it is loaded with an occasionally avoidable ballast of philosophical terminology, which is the more disturbing in its effect, the less the author keeps to the terminology of one and the same school or even of Feuerbach himself, and the more he injects terms from the most divergent tendencies, and especially from the self-styled philosophical tendencies now rampant.
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Feuerbach's course of development is that of a Hegelian -- never quite an orthodox one, it is true -- towards materialism, a development which at a definite stage necessitates a complete rupture with his predecessor's idealist system. With irresistible force Feuerbach is finally driven to the realization that the Hegelian premundane existence of the "absolute idea," the "pre-existence of the logical categories" before there was a world, is nothing but the fantastic vestige of the belief in the existence of an extramundane creator; that the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality; and that our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind is itself merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. But, having got so far, Feuerbach stops short. He cannot overcome the customary philosophical prejudice, the prejudice not against the thing but against the name materialism. He says:
"For me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but for me it is not what it is for the physiologist for the natural scientist in the narrower sense, for example, Moleschott and indeed necessarily from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with the materialists, but not forwards."
Here Feuerbach lumps together the materialism which is a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the relation between matter and mind with the particular form in which this world outlook was expressed at a definite historical stage, namely, in the eighteenth century. More than that, he lumps it together with the shallow, vulgarized form in which eighteenth century materialism survives in the
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heads of natural scientists and doctors today and which was preached by Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott on their lecture tours in the fifties. But materialism underwent a series of stages of development just as idealism did. It has to change its form with each epoch-making discovery in the sphere of natural science; and since history itself has been subjected to materialistic treatment, a new avenue of development has been opened here too.
The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because of all the natural sciences only mechanics, and indeed only the celestial and terrestrial mechanics of solid bodies -- in short, the mechanics of gravity -- had then come to a certain finality. Chemistry existed only in its infantile, phlogistic form. Biology was still in its swaddling clothes; plant and animal organisms had been investigated only in the rough and were explained by purely mechanical causes. What the animal was to Descartes, man was to the eighteenth century materialists -- a machine. This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes which are chemical and organic in nature and in which the laws of mechanics are, it is true, likewise valid but are pushed into the background by other, higher laws, constitutes one specific limitation of classical French materialism, a limitation which was inevitable at the time.{8}
The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to apprehend the universe as a process, as matter engaged in uninterrupted historical development. This accorded with the contemporary level of natural science and with the metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical way of philosophizing connected with it. Nature, it was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the view then current, this motion revolved, likewise eternally, in a circle and therefore
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never shifted position; it produced the same results over and over again. This conception could not then be avoided. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system had only just been put forward and still passed as a mere curiosity. The history of the evolution of the earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the idea that the living natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of evolution from the simple to the complex could not then be scientifically advanced at all. The unhistorical view of nature was therefore inevitable. We have all the less reason for reproaching the philosophers of the eighteenth century on this account since the same thing is likewise found in Hegel. With him, nature, as a mere "alienation" of the idea, is incapable of development in time but is only capable of extending its manifoldness in space, so that it displays simultaneously and side by side all the stages of development comprised in it and is condemned to an eternal repetition of the same processes. Hegel burdens nature with this absurdity of development in space, but outside of time -- the basic condition of all development -- just when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and organic chemistry were being built up, and when brilliant foreshadowings of the later theory of evolution were everywhere emerging on the basis of these new sciences (for instance, in Goethe and Lamarck). But the system demanded it thus, hence the method had to become untrue to itself for the sake of the system.
The same unhistorical conception also prevailed in the domain of history. Here the struggle against the remnants of the Middle Ages confined people's vision. The Middle Ages were regarded as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of general barbarism; the great advances of
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the Middle Ages -- the extension of the area of European culture, the viable great nations which took form there side by side, and finally the enormous technical progress of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries -- none of this was seen. Thus rational recognition of the great historical interconnections became impossible, and history served at best as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers.
The vulgarizing pedlars who hawked materialism in the Germany of the fifties in no way overcame this limitation of their teachers. All the advances in natural science in the interim served them only as new proofs against the existence of a creator of the universe; and in fact they did not in the least make it their business to develop the theory any further. Though idealism was at the end of its tether and was stricken unto death by the Revolution of 1848, it had the satisfaction of seeing that materialism had for the moment fallen lower still. Feuerbach was unquestionably right when he rejected responsibility for this materialism; only he should not have confounded the doctrines of these itinerant preachers with materialism in general.
Here, however, there are two things to be pointed out. First, even in Feuerbach's lifetime, natural science was still in that process of intense ferment which has found clarification and relative consummation only in the last fifteen years. New scientific data were acquired to a hitherto unheard-of extent, but it has only quite recently become possible to establish interconnections, and thus order, out of this chaos of discoveries coming on top of each other. It is true that Feuerbach lived to see the three decisive discoveries -- that of the cell, the transformation of energy, and the theory of evolution named after Darwin. But how could the lonely
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philosopher, living in rural solitude, adequately follow scientific developments and appreciate at their full value discoveries which natural scientists themselves either were still contesting or did not know how to exploit adequately? The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched conditions in Germany, as a result of which casuistic and eclectic flea-crackers had cornered the chairs of philosophy, while Feuerbach, who towered above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a hamlet. It is therefore not Feuerbach's fault that the historical conception of nature, which had now become possible and which discarded all the one-sidedness of French materialism, remained inaccessible to him.
But secondly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that the simple materialism of the natural sciences is indeed
"the foundation of the edifice of human . . . knowledge, but . . . not . . . the edifice itself."
For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and it too no less than nature has its historical development and its science. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the totality of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist base, and of reconstructing it on this base. But this was not granted to Feuerbach. In spite of the "base," he here remained confined by the traditional idealist fetters, a fact which he recognizes in these words:
"Backwards I fully agree with the materialists, but not forwards."
But it was Feuerbach himself who did not go "forwards" here in the social domain, who did not transcend his standpoint of 1840 or 1844, and again chiefly because of his isolation which compelled him, who of all philosophers was the most inclined to social intercourse, to produce thoughts out
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of his solitary head instead of in friendly and hostile encounters with other men of his calibre. Later we shall see in detail how much he remained an idealist in this sphere.
It need only be added here that Starcke looks for Feuerbach's idealism in the wrong place.
"Feuerbach is an idealist, he believes in the progress of mankind," (p. 19). "The foundation, the substructure of the whole, nevertheless remains idealism. Realism for us is nothing more than a protection against aberrations, while we follow our ideal trends. Are not compassion, love and enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?" (p. VIII.)
In the first place, idealism here means nothing but the pursuit of ideal goals. But these necessarily have to do at most with Kantian idealism and its "categorical imperative"; however, Kant himself called his philosophy "transcendental idealism," not at all because it also dealt with ethical ideals, but for quite other reasons, as Starcke will remember. The superstition that philosophical idealism revolves around a belief in ethical, that is, social, ideals, arose outside philosophy, among the German philistines, who learned by heart from Schiller's poems the few morsels of philosophical culture they needed. No one has more severely criticized Kant's impotent "categorical imperative" -- impotent because it demands the impossible and therefore never attains any reality -- no one has more cruelly derided the gushing philistine enthusiasm for unrealizable ideals purveyed by Schiller than the consummate idealist Hegel himself. (See, for example, his Phenomenology. [12]){9}
In the second place, we simply cannot get away from the fact that everything by which men are moved must find its ways through their brains -- even eating and drinking, which begin as a result of the sensation of hunger or thirst felt through the brain and end as a result of the sensation of
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satisfaction likewise felt through the brain. The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected in it as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions, in short, as "ideal tendencies," and in this form become "ideal powers." Now if the fact that a man generally pursues "ideal tendencies" and concedes the influence of "ideal powers" on him makes him an idealist, then every person who is more or less normally developed is a born idealist, and how, in that case, can there still be any materialists?
In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at the present moment, is by and large moving in a progressive direction has absolutely nothing to do with the antithesis between materialism and idealism. The French materialists no less than the deists[13] Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to "enthusiasm for truth and justice" -- using this phrase in the good sense -- it was Diderot, for example. If, therefore, Starcke declares all this to be idealism, this merely proves that the word materialism, and the whole antithesis between the two trends, has lost all meaning for him here.
The fact is that Starcke is here making, although perhaps unconsciously, an unpardonable concession to the traditional philistine prejudice against the term materialism deriving from long-standing clerical slanders. By materialism the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, carnal desire and ostentatious living, avarice, cupidity, covetousness, profit-hunting and stock-exchange swindling -- in short, all the sordid vices in which he himself secretly indulges. By idealism he understands the belief in virtue,
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universal philanthropy and a "better world" generally, of which he boasts to others but in which he himself believes at most only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary "materialist" excesses. It is then that he sings his favourite song, What is man? -- Half beast, half angel.
For the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of the verbose university lecturers who strut as philosophers in Germany today. Of course, this is important for people who are interested in this after-birth of classical German philosophy, and it may have appeared necessary to Starcke himself. We, however, will spare the reader this.
The real idealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics. He by no means wants to abolish religion, he wants to perfect it. Philosophy itself must be absorbed into religion.
"The periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes. A historical movement is fundamental only when it penetrates the hearts of men. The heart is not a form of religion, so that the latter may also exist in the heart; the heart is the essence of religion" (quoted by Starcke. p. 168).
According to Feuerbach, religion is the sentimental relation between human beings, their relation based on the heart, the relation which has hitherto sought its truth in a fantastic mirror image of reality -- in mediation by one or many gods who are the fantastic mirror images of human qualities -- but which now finds it directly and without any mediation
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in the love between I and Thou. Thus, for Feuerbach sexual love finally becomes one of the highest forms, if not the highest form, of the practice of his new religion.
Now relations between human beings, and especially between the two sexes, have existed as long as mankind has. Sexual love in particular has undergone a development and won a place over the last eight hundred years which has made it the compulsory pivot of all poetry in this period. The existing positive religions have limited themselves to the bestowal of a higher consecration on state-regulated sexual love, that is, on the marriage laws, and they could all disappear tomorrow without changing in the slightest the practice of love and friendship. Thus from 1793 to 1798 the Christian religion actually disappeared to such an extent in France that even Napoleon could not reintroduce it with out opposition and difficulty; and this without any need in the interval for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense. Feuerbach's idealism consists here in the fact that he does not simply accept relations between human beings based on mutual affection such as sexual love, friendship, sympathy, self-sacrifice, etc., as what they are in themselves -- without any recollection of any particular religion -- he, too, consigns such religion to the past; instead he asserts that they will attain their full value only when given a higher consecration in the name of religion. The chief thing for him is not that these purely human relations exist but that they shall be viewed as the new, true religion. They are to have full value only after they have been stamped with a religious seal. The word religion is derived from religare and originally meant a bond. Therefore, every bond between two people is a religion. Such etymological jugglery is the last resort of idealist philosophy. What should count is not what the
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word means according to the historical development of its actual use, but what it ought to mean according to its derivation. And so sexual love and sexual union is glorified as a "religion," solely in order that the word religion so dear to idealistic memories may not disappear from the language. The Parisian reformers of the Louis Blanc trend used to speak in precisely the same way in the forties; they could likewise only picture a man without religion as a monster and used to say to us: "Donc, l'atheisme c'est votre religion! "[*] If Feuerbach wants to establish the true religion on the basis of an essentially materialist conception of nature, it is the same as regarding modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its god, alchemy can exist without its philosopher's stone. Besides, there is a very close connection between alchemy and religion. The philosopher's stone has many godlike properties, and the Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries of our era had a bit of a hand in the formation of Christian doctrine, as the data advanced by Kopp and Berthelot prove.
Feuerbach's assertion that
"the periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes"
is totally wrong.
Great historical turning points have been accompanied by religious changes only insofar as the three world religions which have existed up to the present -- Buddhism, Christianity and Islam -- are concerned. The old tribal and national religions which arose spontaneously did not proselytize and lost all their capacity to resist as soon as the independence of the tribe or people was lost; for the Germans it was suffi-
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cient to have simple contact with the decaying Roman world empire and with its recently adopted Christian world religion which fitted its economic, political and intellectual conditions. We find that the more general historical movements acquire a religious imprint only with these world religions which had arisen more or less artificially, particularly in the case of Christianity and Islam. Even in Christendom the religious imprint in revolutions of really universal significance is restricted to the first stages of the bourgeoisie's struggle for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries and is to be accounted for not, as Feuerbach thinks, by the hearts of men and their religious needs but by the entire previous history of the Middle Ages, which knew no other form of ideology than religion and theology itself. But when the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century became strong enough to have its own ideology suited to its own class standpoint, it made its great and decisive French revolution, appealing exclusively to juristic and political ideas, and troubling itself with religion only insofar as it stood in its way. But it never occurred to the bourgeoisie to put a new religion in place of the old, we know how Robespierre failed when he tried.[14]
Today the possibility of purely human feelings in our intercourse with other human beings has already been sufficiently stunted by the society based on class antagonism and class rule in which we must live, move and have our being. We have no reason to stunt it still more for ourselves by glorifying these feelings into a religion. Similarly, people's understanding of the great historical class struggles has already been sufficiently obscured by current historiography, particularly in Germany, without our needing to make such understanding totally impossible by transforming this his-
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tory of struggles into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. It is already obvious here how far we have moved beyond Feuerbach today. His "finest passages" in celebration of his new religion of love are now completely unreadable.
The only religion Feuerbach examines seriously is Christianity, the world religion of the West which is based on monotheism. He proves that the Christian god is only the fantastic reflection, the mirror image, of man. But this god is himself the product of a protracted process of abstraction, the very quintessence of the numerous earlier tribal and national gods. And accordingly man, of whom this god is the image, is not a real man, but likewise the quintessence of numerous real men, or man in the abstract, therefore himself again a mental image. The same Feuerbach who on every page preaches sensuousness, absorption in the concrete, in the real world, becomes abstract through and through as soon as he begins to talk of any other than purely sexual relations between human beings.
Morality is the only aspect these relations display to him. Here we are again struck by Feuerbach's astonishing poverty when compared to Hegel. The latter's ethics or system of morality is the philosophy of right and embraces: 1) abstract right; 2) morality; and 3) social ethics [Sittlichkeit ], which in its turn includes the family, civil society, and the state. Here the content is as realistic as the form is idealistic. Besides morality the whole sphere of law, economics and politics is here included. With Feuerbach it is just the reverse. In form he is realistic, since he starts from man; but there is absolutely no mention of the world in which this man lives, and hence this man always remains the same abstract man who held forth in the philosophy of religion. For this man is not born of woman; he issues, as from a chrysalis, from
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the god of the monotheistic religions and consequently does not live in a real world which has come into being historically and which is historically determined. True, he has dealings with other men, each one of whom, however, is just as abstract as he is himself. In the philosophy of religion we at least still had man and woman, but in ethics even this last difference vanishes. To be sure, at long intervals Feuerbach advances such maxims as:
"One thinks differendy in a palace and in a hut." "If you have no food in your body because of hunger, because of poverty, then you have no food for morality in your head, in your mind or heart." "Politics must become our religion," etc.
But Feuerbach is absolutely incapable of getting anywhere with these maxims. They remain mere words, and even Starcke has to admit that politics constituted an impassable frontier for Feuerbach and that the
"science of society, sociology, was terra incognita [*] to him."
Compared to Hegel, he appears just as shallow in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. Hegel remarks,
"We believe we are saying something lofty, if we say that 'man is naturally good'; but we forget that we are saying something far loftier when we say 'man is naturally evil.'"
With Hegel evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development is presented. This has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against conditions which are old and moribund but sanctified by custom; on the other hand, it is precisely men's wicked passions, greed and lust for power, which, with the emergence
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of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development, a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.[15]{10} But it does not occur to Feuerbach to investigate the historical role of moral evil. To him history is altogether a weird and dismal held. Even his dictum:
"Man as he sprang originally from nature was only a simple creature of nature, not a man. Man is a product of man, of culture, of history" --
with him even this dictum remains absolutely sterile.
Accordingly, what Feuerbach has to tell us about morals cannot but be extremely meagre. The urge towards happiness is innate in man and must therefore form the basis of all morality. But the urge towards happiness is subject to a double correction. First, by the natural consequences of our actions: after the debauch the "blues," after habitual excess illness. Second, by its social consequences: if we don't respect the same urge towards happiness in other people, they will defend themselves and so interfere with our own urge towards happiness. Consequently, in order to satisfy our urge, we must be in a position to evaluate the results of our conduct correctly and must likewise allow others an equal right to seek happiness. The basic laws of Feuerbach's morality are therefore rational self-restraint with regard to ourselves, and love -- again and again love! -- in our relations with others; from them all others are derived. And neither the most ingenious utterances of Feuerbach nor the strongest eulogies of Starcke can hide the poverty and inanity of these few propositions.
The urge towards happiness is satisfied only exceptionally by a man's preoccupation with himself, and never to his and other people's advantage. On the contrary, it requires pre-
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occupation with the outside world, means of satisfaction, therefore food, an individual of the opposite sex, books, conversation, debate, activity, objects for use and working up. Feuerbach's morality either presupposes that these means and objects of satisfaction are given to every individual as a matter of course, or else offers only inapplicable good advice and is, therefore, just so much hot air to people lacking these means. Feuerbach himself says so plainly:
"One thinks differently in a palace and in a hut." "If you have no food in your body because of hunger, because of poverty, then you have no food for morality in your head, in your mind or heart."
Do matters fare any better in regard to the equal right of others in their urge towards happiness? Feuerbach poses this claim as absolute, as valid for all times and circumstances. But since when has it been valid? Was there ever any talk about an equal right to the urge towards happiness between slaves and masters in antiquity, or between serfs and barons in the Middle Ages? Was not the urge towards happiness of the oppressed class ruthlessly and "legally" sacrificed to that of the ruling class? Yes indeed, that was immoral, but nowadays equality of rights is recognized. Recognized in words ever since and inasmuch as the bourgeoisie was compelled, in its fight against feudalism and in the development of capitalist production, to abolish all privileges of estate, that is, personal privileges, and to introduce individual equality of rights with respect first to private law and then gradually to public law and the courts. But the urge towards happiness thrives for the most part on material means and only to a trivial extent on ideal rights. Since capitalist production sees to it that the great majority of those endowed with equal rights get only what is essential for bare subsistence, it has little, if any, more respect for the equal right of the majority
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to the urge towards happiness than had slavery or serfdom. Do things stand any better with the mental means of happiness and education? Isn't "the schoolmaster of Sadowa"[16] himself a mythical person?
More. According to Feuerbach's theory of morals the Stock Exchange is the highest temple of ethical conduct, provided only that you are always right in your speculation. If my urge towards happiness leads me to the Stock Exchange, and if I gauge the consequences of my actions there so correctly that they bring me only benefits and no drawbacks, that is, if I always win, then I am fulfilling Feuerbach's precept. Besides, I am not interfering with the other man's selfsame urge towards happiness, for he went to the Stock Exchange just as voluntarily as I did and in making the speculative deal with me he was following his urge towards happiness just as much as I was mine. If he loses his money, that by itself proves his action to have been unethical because of his faulty calculation, and by giving him the punishment he deserves I can even slap my chest proudly, like a modern Rhadamanthus.[17] Love rules on the Stock Exchange, too, insofar as it is not a mere sentimental figure of speech, for each finds in others the satisfaction of his own urge towards happiness, which is just what love ought to achieve and how it functions in practice. And if I gamble with correct foresight concerning the consequences of my operations and therefore successfully, I fulfil all the strictest demands of Feuerbachian morality and become a rich man into the bargain. In other words, Feuerbach's morality is cut to fit present-day capitalist society, little as Feuerbach himself might have desired or suspected it.
But love! -- yes, with Feuerbach love is everywhere and always the wonder-working god to help surmount all the
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difficulties of practical life -- and at that in a society which is split into classes with diametrically opposite interests. At this point the last relic of its revolutionary character disappears from philosophy, leaving only the old song: Love one another, fall into each other's arms regardless of sex or estate -- a universal orgy of reconciliation!
In short, it is the same with the Feuerbachian theory of morals as with all its predecessors. It is cut to fit all periods, all peoples and all conditions, and for that very reason it is never and nowhere applicable. It remains as impotent in the real world as Kant's categorical imperative. In reality every class, indeed every occupation, has its own morality, and even this it violates whenever it can do so with impunity. And love, which is to unite all, manifests itself in wars, strife, lawsuits, domestic quarrels, divorces and every possible exploitation of one by another.
Now how was it possible that the powerful impetus given by Feuerbach turned out to be so unfruitful for himself? For the simple reason that Feuerbach cannot find a way out of the realm of abstraction -- for which he himself has a deadly hatred -- into that of living reality. He clings fiercely to nature and man; but nature and man remain mere words with him. He is incapable of telling us anything definite either about real nature or about real man. But from the abstract man of Feuerbach one arrives at real living men only when one considers them as participants in history. Feuerbach resisted this, and so for him the year 1848, which he failed to understand, meant merely the final break with the real world, retreat into solitude. The blame for this again falls chiefly on the conditions then obtaining in Germany, which condemned him to rot away in misery.
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Nevertheless, the step Feuerbach did not take had to be taken. The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach's new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development. This further development of Feuerbach's standpoint beyond Feuerbach was inaugurated by Marx in 1845 in The Holy Family.
Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach -- these were the off shoots of Hegelian philosophy, insofar as they did not abandon the field of philosophy. Strauss, after his Life of Jesus and Dogmatics, produced only philosophical and ecclesiastical historical belles-lettres after the fashion of Renan. Bauer only achieved something in the field of the history of the origins of Christianity, though what he did here was important. Stirner remained a curiosity, even after Bakunin blended him with Proudhon and baptised the blend as "anarchism." Feuerbach alone was of significance as a philosopher. But not only did philosophy, which allegedly soars above all the separate sciences and is the science of sciences synthesising them, remain an impassable barrier, an inviolable holy of holies for him; but as a philosopher, too, he stopped halfway, was a materialist below and an idealist above. He was incapable of disposing of Hegel critically but simply threw him aside as useless, while he himself achieved nothing positive beyond a turgid religion of love and a meagre, impotent morality in contrast with the encyclopedic wealth of the Hegelian system.
Yet one other tendency emerged out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, the only one which has really borne
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fruit. This tendency is essentially connected with the name of Marx.[*]
Here too the separation from Hegelian philosophy was the result of a return to the materialist standpoint. That means the decision was taken to comprehend the real world -- nature and history -- as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it without preconceived idealist crotchets. The decision was taken mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist crotchet which could not be brought into harmony with the facts grasped in their own and not in some fantastic interconnection. And materialism actually means nothing more than this. Only here the materialist world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently -- at least in its basic features -- in all the domains of knowledge involved.
Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, one started out from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But this method was unusable in its Hegelian form. According to Hegel, dialectics is the
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self-development of the idea. The absolute idea not only exists -- we know not where -- from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops itself into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in the Logic and which are all included in it. Then it "alienates" itself by changing itself into nature, where, without consciousness of itself and disguised as natural necessity, it goes through a new development and finally comes again to self-consciousness in man. This self-consciousness now works out its way in its turn in history from the crude form until finally the absolute idea returns to itself completely in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history, that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher which asserts itself through all zigzags and temporary retrogressions, is only a miserable copy of the self-movement of the idea going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with. We comprehended the ideas in our heads materialistically again -- as reflections [Abbilder *] of real things instead of regarding the real things as reflections of this or that stage of the absolute idea. Thus dialectics was reduced to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought -- two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but different in their expression insofar as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also so far for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst
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of an endless series of seeming contingencies. In this way the dialectic of ideas itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical movement of the real world and thus Hegel's dialectic was put on its head, or rather, from its head, on which it was standing, it was put on its feet. And this materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working instrument and our sharpest weapon, was remarkably enough discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.[*]
In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from the idealist trimmings which had prevented its consistent application in Hegel. The great basic thought that the world is to be comprehended not as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes, in which apparently stable things no less than the concepts, their mental reflections in our heads, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, through all the seeming contingency and in spite of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development finally asserts itself -- this great fundamental thought has so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness especially since Hegel's time that it is now scarcely ever contradicted in this general form. But it is one thing to acknowledge it in words and another to carry it out in reality in detail in each domain of investigation. If, however, investigation always proceeds from this standpoint, the demand for final solutions and eternal truths ceases once
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and for all; we are always conscious of the necessarily limited nature of all knowledge gained, of its being conditioned by the circumstances in which it was gained. On the other hand, we no longer permit ourselves to be imposed upon by the antitheses, which are insuperable for the old metaphysics, still all too current, between true and false, good and evil, identical and different, necessary and accidental. We know that these antitheses have only a relative validity; that what is now recognized as true also has its hidden false side which will later manifest itself, just as what is now recognized as false also has its true side, by virtue of which it could previously be regarded as true; that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer contingencies, and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself -- and so on.
The old method of investigation and thought, which Hegel calls "metaphysical," which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable, and the survivals of which still strongly haunt people's minds, had much historical justification in its day. It was first necessary to examine things before it was possible to examine processes. One had first to know what a particular thing was before one could observe the changes it was undergoing. And such was the case with natural science. The old metaphysics, which accepted things as completed, arose from a natural science which investigated dead and living things as completed ones. But when this investigation had progressed so far that it became possible to take the decisive step forward of transition to the systematic investigation of the changes these things undergo in nature itself, then the last hour of the old metaphysics struck in the realm of philosophy as well. In fact, while natural science up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collect-
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ing science, a science of completed things, in our century it is essentially an organizing science, a science of the processes, of the origin and development of these things and of the interconnections which bind all these natural processes into one great whole. Physiology, which investigates the processes occurring in plant and animal organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of individual organisms from germination to maturity; geology, which investigates the gradual formation of the earth's surface -- all these are the offspring of our century.
But, above all, there are three great discoveries which have enabled our knowledge of the interconnections of natural processes to advance in giant strides: first, the discovery of the cell as the unit from whose multiplication and differentiation the whole plant and animal body develops, so that not only is the development and growth of all higher organisms recognized as proceeding according to a single general law, but also the way is pointed out by which, through the capacity of the cell to change, organisms can change their species and thus go through a more than individual evolution. Second, the transformation of energy, which has demonstrated to us that all the so-called forces operative in the first instance in inorganic nature -- mechanical force and its complement, so-called potential energy, heat, radiation (light, or radiant heat), electricity, magnetism, chemical energy, are different phenomenal forms of universal motion, which pass into one another in definite proportions, so that in place of a certain quantity of the one which disappears a certain quantity of another appears in its turn, and so that the whole movement of nature is reduced to this incessant process of transformation from one form into another. Finally, the proof first coherently developed by Darwin that
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the stock of organic products of nature, mankind included, environing us today is the result of a long process of evolution from a few originally unicellular embryonic germs, and that these in their turn have arisen from protoplasm or protein, which came into existence chemically.
Thanks to these three great discoveries and the other immense advances in natural science, we have now arrived at the point where we can demonstrate not only the interconnections of natural processes in particular spheres but also the interconnections of these particular spheres in their totality, and so can present in an approximately systematic form a comprehensive view of the interconnectedness of nature with the facts provided by empirical natural science itself. To furnish this comprehensive view was formerly the task of so-called natural philosophy. It could do this only by putting imaginary, fantastic interconnections in place of the as yet unknown real ones, filling in the missing facts by mental images and bridging the actual gaps by pure imagination. It conceived many brilliant ideas and foreshadowed many later discoveries in the process, but it also produced a lot of nonsense, which indeed could not have been otherwise. Today, when one needs to comprehend the results of natural scientific investigation only dialectically, that is, in the sense of their own interconnections, in order to arrive at a "system of nature" adequate to our time, when the dialectical character of these interconnections is forcing itself against their will even into the metaphysically-trained minds of the natural scientists -- today natural philosophy is finally disposed of. Every attempt to resurrect it would not only be superfluous, it would also be a step backwards.
But what is true of nature, which is thus recognized as a historical process of development too, is likewise true of
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the history of society in all its branches and of the totality of all sciences dealing with things human (and divine). Here, too, the philosophy of history, of right, of religion, etc., has consisted in the substitution of interconnections manufactured in the mind of the philosopher for the real interconnections to be demonstrated in the events; in the apprehension of history in its totality as well as in its separate parts as the gradual realization of ideas, and naturally always only the pet ideas of the philosopher himself. Accordingly, history worked unconsciously but necessarily towards a certain ideal goal fixed in advance, as in Hegel for example, towards the realization of his absolute idea, and the irreversible trend towards this absolute idea constituted the inner interconnection in the events of history. A new mysterious providence -- unconscious or gradually coming into consciousness -- was thus put in the place of the real and as yet unknown interconnection. Here, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, it was a question of doing away with these manufactured, artificial interconnections by finding the real ones -- a task ultimately amounting to the discovery of the general laws of motion which assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human society.
In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature. In nature -- insofar as we ignore man's reaction on nature -- there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting on one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation. Whatever happens -- from the innumerable apparent contingencies observable on the surface to the ultimate results confirming the law-abidingness of these contingencies -- does not happen as a consciously desired aim. On the other hand, in the history of society the actors are all
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endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of specific epochs and events, can not alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For here too, in spite of every individual's consciously desired aims, superficially accident seems to prevail on the whole. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of cases the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization or the means insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions produce a state of affairs in the domain of history entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are willed, but the results which in fact follow from these actions are not; or when they do at first seem to correspond to the end willed, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those willed. Thus by and large historical events also appear to be governed by chance. But wherever accident superficially holds sway, it is always governed by hidden inner laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.
Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, through each person following his own consciously desired end, and history is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effects upon the external world. Thus it is also a question of what the many individuals want. The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. They may be partly external objects, partly ideal motives,
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ambition, "enthusiasm for truth and justice," personal hatred or even purely individual whims of all kinds. But, on the one hand, we have seen that the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than and often the very opposite of those willed, and that therefore their motives are likewise only of secondary importance in relation to the total result. On the other hand, the further question arises, what motive forces in turn stand behind these motives, what are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?
The old materialism never put this question to itself. Its conception of history, insofar as it has one at all, is therefore essentially pragmatic, it judges everything by the motives of the action, it divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious. Hence, it follows for the old materialism that nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history, and for us that in the realm of history the old materialism becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal motive forces which operate there as final causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the motive forces of these motive forces. The inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideal motive forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their determining causes. On the other hand, the philosophy of history, particularly as represented by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and also the really operating motives of men acting in history are by no means the final causes of historical events; that behind these motives are other determining powers, which have to be investigated. But it does not seek these powers in history itself, on the contrary it imports them from outside, from
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philosophical ideology, into history. For example, instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece out of its own inner interconnections, Hegel simply maintains that it is nothing more than the working out of configurations of beautiful individuality, the realization of the "work of art" as such.[18] In passing, he says much about the old Greeks that is fine and profound, but today that does not prevent us from refusing to be put off with such an explanation, which is mere phraseology.
When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the motive forces which -- whether consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often unconsciously -- lie behind the motives of men who act in history and which constitute the real ultimate motive forces of history, then it cannot be the motives of particular individuals, however eminent, so much as those which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people among each people; and this, too, not momentarily for the transient flaring up of a straw-fire which quickly dies down, but for a lasting action resulting in a great historical change. To ascertain the determining causes which are here reflected as conscious motives in the minds of the masses in action and of their leaders -- the so-called great men -- whether clearly or obscurely, directly or in ideological, even glorified form -- that is the only path which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway both in history in general, and at particular periods and in particular lands. Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it takes in their minds depends very much on the circumstances. The workers have in no wise become reconciled to capitalist machine industry, even though they no longer simply break the machines to pieces as they still did in 1848 on the Rhine.
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But while the investigation of these determining causes of history was almost impossible in all earlier periods -- on account of the complicated and concealed interconnections between them and their effects -- our present period has so far simplified these interconnections that the riddle could be solved. Since the establishment of large-scale industry, that is, at least since the European peace of 1815, it has been no longer a secret to anyone in England that the whole political struggle there turned on the claims to supremacy of two classes, the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (middle class). In France, awareness of the same fact came with the return of the Bourbons; the historians of the Restoration period, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet and Thiers, speak of it everywhere as the key to the understanding of French history since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized in both countries as a third competitor for power. Conditions had become so simplified that one would have had to close one's eyes deliberately not to see the motive force of modern history in the fight of these three great classes and in the conflict of their interests -- at least in the two most advanced countries.
But how did these classes come into existence? If at first glance it was still possible to ascribe the origin of the great, formerly feudal landed property -- at least in the first instance -- to political causes, to seizure by force, this was no longer possible for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here the origin and development of the two great classes was seen to lie clearly and palpably in purely economic causes. And it was just as clear that in the struggle between landed property and the bourgeoisie, no less than in the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, it was a
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question, first and foremost, of economic interests, to the furtherance of which political power had to serve as a mere means. Bourgeoisie and proletariat had both arisen in consequence of a change in the economic conditions, more precisely, in the mode of production. The transition, first from guild handicrafts to manufacture, and then from manufacture to large-scale industry with steam and mechanical power, had brought about the development of these two classes. At a certain stage the new productive forces set in motion by the bourgeoisie -- in the first place the division of labour and the combination of many detail labourers [Teilarbeiter ] in one general manufactory -- and the conditions and needs of exchange developed through these productive forces became incompatible with the existing order of production handed down by history and sanctified by law, that is to say, incompatible with the guild privileges and the numerous other personal and local privileges (which were only so many fetters for the unprivileged estates) of the feudal order of society. The productive forces represented by the bourgeoisie rebelled against the order of production represented by the feudal landlords and the guildmasters. The result is well known: the feudal fetters were smashed, gradually in England, at one blow in France, with the process still unfinished in Germany. But just as manufacture at a definite stage of its development came into conflict with the feudal order of production, so now large-scale industry has already come into conflict with the bourgeois order of production replacing it. Tied down by this order, by the narrow limits of the capitalist mode of production, industry produces an ever-growing proletarianization of the great mass of the people on the one hand, and an ever greater mass of unsaleable products on the other. Over-production
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and mass misery, each the cause of the other -- such is the absurd contradiction which is its outcome, and which of necessity calls for the liberation of the productive forces through a change in the mode of production.
In modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all political struggles are class struggles, and all class struggles for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form -- for every class struggle is a political struggle -- turn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation. Therefore, here at least, the state -- the political order -- is the subordinate element and civil society -- the realm of economic relations -- the decisive element. The traditional conception, to which Hegel, too, pays homage, saw in the state the determining element and in civil society the element determined by it. Appearances correspond to this. Just as all the motive forces behind his actions must pass through an individual's brain and be transformed into determinants of his will in order to make him act, so also all the needs of civil society -- whichever class happens to be the ruling one -- must pass through the will of the state in order to obtain general validity in the form of laws. That is the formal aspect of the matter, which is self-evident. But the question now arises, what is the content of this merely formal will -- of the individual as well as of the state -- and whence is this content derived, and why is just this willed and not something else? If we look into this, we discover that in modern history the will of the state is by and large determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy of this or that class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces and relations of exchange.
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But if even in our modern era, with its gigantic means of production and communication, the state is not an independent domain with an independent development, but one whose existence as well as development is to be explained in the last resort by the economic conditions of existence of society, then this must be much truer still for all earlier times in which the production of man's material life was not yet carried on with these rich resources, and in which, therefore, the necessities of such production must have exercised a still greater mastery over men. If even today, in the era of large-scale industry and of railways, the state is mainly only a reflex, in a comprehensive form, of the economic needs of the class dominating production, then this must have been much more the case in an epoch when each generation of men was forced to spend a far greater part of its aggregate lifetime in satisfying its material needs, and was therefore far more dependent on them than we are today. As soon as the examination of the history of earlier periods is seriously undertaken from this angle, it most abundantly confirms this; but, of course, this cannot be gone into here.{11}
If the state and public law are determined by economic relations, so, too, of course is private law, which indeed in essence only sanctions the existing economic relations between individuals which are normal in the given circumstances. However, the form in which this happens can vary considerably. It is possible to retain the forms of the old feudal laws in the main while giving them a bourgeois content, in fact, directly insinuating a bourgeois meaning into the feudal name; this is what happened in England, in harmony with the whole national development. But it is likewise possible to base oneself on Roman Law, the first world law of a commodity-producing society, with its unsurpassably fine elabora-
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tion of all the essential legal relations of simple commodity owners (of buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, contracts, obligations, etc.); this is what happened in western continental Europe. In this case, for the benefit of a society which is still petty-bourgeois and semi-feudal, it can either be reduced to this society's level simply through judicial practice (common law), or it can be worked into a special code of law to correspond with this social level through the help of allegedly enlightened, moralizing jurists -- a code which in these circumstances will also be a bad one from the legal standpoint (for instance, Prussian Landrecht ). In which case, however, after a great bourgeois revolution, it is also possible to elaborate so classic a legal code as the French Code Civil for bourgeois society on the basis of this same Roman Law. If, therefore, bourgeois legal rules merely express the economic conditions of existence of society in legal form, they can do so well or ill according to circumstances.
The first ideological power over mankind appears to us in the form of the state. Society creates for itself an organ for the safeguarding of its common interests against internal and external attacks. This organ is the state power. Immediately after its birth, this organ makes itself independent vis-à-vis society, and indeed increasingly so, the more it becomes the organ of a particular class and the more directly it enforces the rule of that class. The right of the oppressed class against the ruling class necessarily becomes a political fight, to begin with a fight against the political dominance of this class. The consciousness of the connection between this political struggle and its economic base becomes dulled and can get lost altogether. While this is not wholly the case with the participants, it almost always happens with the historians. Of the ancient sources on the struggles within the
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Roman Republic only Appian tells us clearly and distinctly what was at issue in the last resort -- namely, landed property.
But once the state has become an independent power vis-à-vis society, it immediately produces a further ideology. The connection with economic facts gets lost for fair among professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists of private law. Since the economic facts in each particular case must take the form of juristic motives in order to receive legal sanction, and since, in the process, consideration must of course be given to the whole legal system already in force, the juristic form consequently becomes everything and the economic content nothing. Public law and private law are treated as independent spheres, each having its own independ ent historical development, and each being capable of and needing a systematic presentation by the consistent elimination of all internal contradictions.
Still higher ideologies, that is, such as are still further removed from the material economic base, take the form of philosophy and religion. Here the connection between ideas and their material conditions of existence becomes more and more complicated and more and more obscured by the intermediate links. But it exists. If the whole period of the Renaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century on was an essential product of the towns and, therefore, of the burghers, this was also the case with philosophy which then awoke from its slumber. Its content was in essence only the philosophical expression of the thinking corresponding to the development of the small and middle burghers into the big bourgeoisie. This becomes dear among Englishmen and Frenchmen of the last century who in many cases were just
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as much political economists as philosophers; and we have proved it above for the Hegelian school.
Nevertheless, we will now deal briefly with religion, since the latter stands furthest away from material life and seems to be most alien to it. Religion arose in very primitive times from men's erroneous and primitive conceptions about their own nature and the external nature surrounding them. Once it has arisen, however, every ideology develops in conjunction with the given conceptual material and elaborates on it; otherwise it would not be an ideology, that is, dealing with ideas as autonomous entities which develop independently and are subject only to their own laws. The fact that in the last analysis the material conditions of existence of the persons inside whose heads this mental process goes on determine the course of this process remains necessarily unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology. Therefore, these original religious notions, which by and large are common to each group of kindred peoples, develop, after the group dissolves, in a manner peculiar to each people, according to the conditions of existence falling to its lot. Comparative mythology has shown this process in detail for a number of groups of peoples, and particularly for the Aryans (so-called Indo-Europeans). The gods thus fashioned within each people were national gods, whose domain extended no farther than the national territory which they were to protect; beyond its borders other gods held undisputed sway. Only as long as the nation existed could they persist in the imagination; with its downfall they fell too. The Roman world empire, the economic conditions of whose origin we do not need to examine here, brought about this downfall of the old nationalities. The old national gods decayed, including even those of the Romans, which likewise
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were designed to fit only the narrow confines of the city of Rome. The need to complement the world empire by a world religion clearly appeared in the attempts to provide recognition and altars for all the foreign gods in the slightest degree respectable side by side with the indigenous ones in Rome. But a new world religion cannot be made by imperial decree in this fashion. The new world religion, Christianity, had already come into being secretly out of a mixture of generalized Oriental, and particularly Jewish, theology, and out of vulgarized Greek, and particularly Stoic, philosophy. What it originally looked like has to be first laboriously discovered, since its official form in which it has been handed down to us is merely that in which it became the state religion after being adapted to this end by the Council of Nicaea.[19] The fact that it became the state religion within 250 years suffices to show that it was the religion corresponding to the conditions of the time. In the Middle Ages, in the same measure as feudalism developed, Christianity grew into its religious counterpart, with a corresponding feudal hierarchy. When the burghers grew, the Protestant heresy developed in opposition to feudal Catholicism, in the first place among the Albigenses[20] in Southern France at the time of the greatest prosperity of the cities there. The Middle Ages had annexed all the other forms of ideology -- philosophy, politics, jurisprudence -- to theology and made them subdivisions of theology. In this way every social and political movement was compelled to assume a theological form. The sentiments of the masses were exclusively fed with religion; it was therefore necessary to give their interests a religious disguise in order to generate a great storm. And just as the burghers, from the very beginning, created an appendage of propertyless urban plebeians, day labourers and servants of all kinds,
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belonging to no recognized social estate, precursors of the later proletariat, so likewise heresy soon became divided into a moderate burgher heresy and a revolutionary plebeian one which was an abomination to the burgher heretics themselves.
The indestructibility of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising burghers. When these burghers had become sufficiently strong, their struggle against the feudal nobility, which till then had been predominantly regional, began to assume national dimensions. The first great action occurred in Germany -- the so-called Reformation. The burghers were neither powerful nor developed enough to be able to unite under their banner the remaining rebellious estates -- the plebeians of the towns, the lower nobility and the peasants on the land. First the nobles were defeated; the peasants rose in a revolt which formed the peak of this whole revolutionary movement; the cities left them in the lurch, and thus the revolution succumbed to the armies of the secular princes who reaped the whole profit. Thenceforward Germany disappeared for three centuries from the ranks of the countries playing an active and independent part in history. But beside the German Luther there stood the Frenchman Calvin. With true French acuity he put the bourgeois character of the Reformation in the forefront, he republicanized and democratized the church. While the Lutheran Reformation in Germany bogged down and led the country to rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, in Holland and in Scotland, freed Holland from Spain and from the German Empire and provided the ideological costume for the second act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England. Here Calvinism justified itself as the true religious disguise for the interests of the contemporary bourgeoisie,
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and on this account did not attain full recognition when the revolution ended in 1689 in a compromise between one part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The English state church was re-established, but strongly Calvinized and not in its earlier form as Catholicism with the king as its pope. The old state church had celebrated the merry Catholic Sunday and had fought against the dull Calvinist one, which the new, bourgeoisified church introduced and which adorns England to this day.
In France, the Calvinist minority was suppressed in 1685 and either Catholicized or driven out of the country. But what was the good? The freethinker Pierre Bayle was already at the height of his activity, and in 1694 Voltaire was born. Louis XIV's forcible measures only made it easier for the French bourgeoisie to carry through its revolution in the irreligious, exclusively political form which alone was suited to a developed bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, free thinkers took their seats in the national assemblies. Christianity had thus entered into its final stage. It had become incapable of serving any progressive class any farther as the ideological garb for its aspirations. It increasingly became the exclusive possession of the ruling classes who employ it as a mere instrument of government with which to keep the lower classes within bounds. Moreover, each of the different classes uses its own appropriate religion: the landed nobility -- Catholic Jesuitism or Protestant orthodoxy; the liberal and radical bourgeoisie -- rationalism; and it makes no difference whether these gentlemen themselves believe in their respective religions or not.
We see, therefore, that once formed, religion always contains traditional material, just as tradition constitutes a great conservative force in all ideological domains. But the trans-
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formations which this material undergoes originate in class relations, that is to say, in the economic relations of the people who carry out these transformations. And here that is sufficient.
In the above it could only be a question of giving a general sketch of the Marxist conception of history, at most with a few illustrations thrown in. The proof must be derived from history itself; and here I may be permitted to say that it has been sufficiently furnished in other writings. This conception, however, puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectical conception of nature renders all natural philosophy as unnecessary as it is impossible. In every place it is no longer a question of inventing connections out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts. For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought, so far as it is left over, that is, the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics.
With the Revolution of 1848, "educated" Germany said farewell to theory and went over to the field of practice. Petty production based on manual labour and manufacture were superseded by real large-scale industry. Germany appeared on the world market again. The new little German Empire[21] abolished at least the most crying of the abuses, with which the system of petty states, the relics of feudalism, and the bureaucratic economy had obstructed this development. But to the same degree that speculation abandoned the philosopher's study in order to set up its temple in the Stock Exchange, educated Germany lost the great aptitude for theory which had been the glory of Germany in the days
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of its deepest political humiliation -- the aptitude for purely scientific investigation, no matter if the result obtained is applicable practically or not, or contrary to police regulations or not. Official German natural science, it is true, maintained its position in the front rank, particularly in the held of specialized research. But the American journal Science has already rightly remarked that the decisive advances in the sphere of the comprehensive linking together of particular facts and their generalization into laws are now being made much more in England instead of in Germany, as was formerly the case. And in the sphere of the historical sciences, philosophy included, the old intransigent theoretical spirit has now completely disappeared along with classical philosophy. Inane eclecticism and an anxious concern for career and income, descending to the most vulgar opportunism, have taken its place. The official representatives of this science have become the undisguised ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state -- but at a time when both stand in open antagonism to the working class.
Only among the working class does the German aptitude for theory remain unimpaired. Here it cannot be eradicated. Here there is no concern for careers, for profit-hunting, or for gracious patronage from on high. On the contrary, the more science proceeds in a ruthless and unbiassed way, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of the workers. From the outset the new tendency, which recognized the history of the development of labour as the key to the understanding of the whole history of society, addressed itself by preference to the working class and here found the response which it neither sought nor expected from officially recognized science. The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy.
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The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism -- that of Feuerbach included -- is that the thing [Gegenstand ], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt ] or of intuition [Anschauung ],* but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism -- but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the objects of thought, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche ] activity. Hence, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoreti-
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cal attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty Jewish manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary," of "practical-critical," activity.
The question whether objective [gegenständliche ] truth can be attained by human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. It is in practice that man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit ] of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or unreality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the educator himself must be educated. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example).
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice.
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imagined
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world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is precisely only to be explained by the very self-dismemberment and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter itself must, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then revolutionized in practice by the elimination of the contradiction. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticized in theory and revolutionized in practice.
Feuerbach, not satished with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous intuition ; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.
Feuerbach dissolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter on a critique of this real essence, is consequently compelled:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment [Gemüt ] as something for itself and to presuppose an abstract -- isolated -- human individual.
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2. Thefefore, with him the human essence can be comprehended only as "genus," as an internal, dumb generality which links the many individuals merely naturally.
Consequently, Feuerbach does not see that the "religious sentiment" is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual he analyses belongs in reality to a deterrninate form of society.
Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory astray into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
The highest point attained by intuiting materialism, that is, materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the outlook of single individuals in "civil society."
The standpoint of the old materialism is "civil " society, the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialized humanity.
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
I
* Ludwig Feuerbach, by C. N. Starcke, Ph. D., Stuttgart, Ferd. Encke 1885. [Note by Engels ]
* A bracketed numeral in the text indicates a note written by Plekhanov for the Russian editions and appearing on pp. 103-80 of this book. --Ed. [Transcriber's Note: Since bracketed numerals have consistently been used at this site to set off either author or editor notes, Plekhanov's notes will be set off in braces { }. -- DJR]
* Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956. --Ed.
* Among savages and lower barbarians the idea is still universal that the human forms appearing in dreams are souls which have temporarily left their bodies; the real man is, therefore, held responsible for acts committed by his dream apparition against the dreamer. Thus im Thurn found this belief current, for example, among the Indians of Guiana in 1884.[10] [Note by Engels ]
* "Well, then atheism is your religion!" --Ed.
* Unknown territory. --Ed.
* Here I may be permitted to make a personal explanation. Repeated reference has recently been made to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly avoid saying a few words here to settle this point. I cannot deny that both before and during my forty years' collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, particularly in the realm of economics and history, and especially their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed -- at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields -- Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw farther, and took a broader and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best men of talent. Without him the theory would be far from what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [Note by Engels ]
* I.e., mirror images. --Ed.
* See Das Wesen det menschlichen Kopfarbeit, dargestellt von einem Handarbeiter [The Nature of Human Brainwork, Described by a Manual Worker ]. Hamburg, Meissner. [Note by Engels ]
THESES ON FEUERBACH
I
* Anschauung -- in Kant and Hegel means awareness, or direct knowledge, through the senses, and is translated as intuition in English versions of Kant and Hegel. It is in this sense that Marx uses Anschauung and not in the sense of contemplation, which is how it has usually and incorrectly been translated. --Ed.
|
Written in the spring of 1845 |
Original in German |
|
Notes on |
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[1]
Engels had in mind Heine's comment on the "German philosophical revolution" in the latter's Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Religion and Philosophy in Germany, translated by J. Snodgrass, reprinted by the Beacon Press, Boston, 1959, p. 156).
[p.5]
[2]
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1942, p. 10.
[p.5]