2. Philosophy and Religion¶
Core Argument¶
In Chapter 2, "Philosophy and Religion," the text argues that every individual possesses a philosophy—a worldview—whether consciously held or not. Those lacking a coherent standpoint merely absorb the dominant prejudices of their society through newspapers, television, and schooling. Philosophy becomes a pressing concern only when social crisis forces people to question values previously taken for granted; understanding the world demands thought that transcends everyday problems.
Religion, the chapter contends, arose from early humanity’s need to explain natural phenomena in the absence of scientific knowledge. Engels demonstrated that tool-making, compelled by necessity, stimulated brain development, not the reverse; abstract thought and language emerged from social production. Early religion took the form of animism, where all things possessed spirit. The notion of a soul separate from the body derived from dreams and the resemblance between sleep and death. Religious explanations filled gaps in knowledge of natural laws.
The division between manual and mental labour began with the formation of a priestly or shamanic caste. Frazer notes that magicians constitute the oldest professional class in human society, found in every known savage tribe. This separation, arising from the division of labour and class society, created a minority freed from subsistence work, enabling theoretical science and civilisation. Yet it also produced an unbridgeable gulf: the intellectual elite monopolised knowledge and power, developing contempt for physical labour, as evidenced in Egyptian and Greek texts. The radical divorce between mental and manual labour deepens the illusion that ideas have independent existence—the heart of religion and philosophical idealism. Feuerbach and Xenophanes argued that humans create gods in their own image; creation myths reflect real historical processes, such as the Sumerians creating land from marsh.
The history of philosophy is a struggle between materialism, which asserts the material world is real and thought its product, and idealism, which sees the world as a reflection of ideas. Idealism’s roots are religious and stem from the division of labour. Early Greek hylozoists pioneered non-religious, rational science. After the medieval dominance of idealism, materialism re-emerged in the Renaissance, leading to British empiricism and French revolutionary materialism. Kant’s criticism led to subjective idealism, which Hegel overcame with dialectics, showing contradictions exist in reality. Hegel’s idealist dialectic was, however, a “miscarriage” that Marx and Engels transformed into dialectical materialism.