Genesis and Origins¶
Core Argument¶
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, composed in 1845, is not a systematic treatise but a series of explosive aphorisms that mark a decisive rupture with all previous materialism. The core argument is that existing materialism, including that of Feuerbach, is fatally passive: it conceives reality only as an object of contemplation, not as sensuous human activity, practice. Idealism, by contrast, had the merit of developing the “active side” of thought, but only abstractly, because it did not recognise real, material activity. Feuerbach, in particular, is charged with reducing practice to its “dirty-judaical manifestation”—a polemical swipe at what Marx saw as Feuerbach’s contempt for practical, commercial life—and thus failing to grasp the significance of revolutionary, practical-critical activity.
The second thesis delivers a devastating blow to all epistemological quietism: the question of objective truth is not a theoretical but a practical question. Disputes over thought isolated from practice are dismissed as “purely scholastic”. This is not mere epistemology; it is a declaration that theory must prove itself in transformative action. The third thesis takes aim at mechanistic materialism and utopian socialism alike: the doctrine that circumstances change people forgets that circumstances are changed by people, and that the educators themselves must be educated. The only way to grasp the coincidence of changing circumstances and self-change is through revolutionary practice.
The remaining theses systematically dismantle Feuerbach’s critique of religion. Feuerbach correctly resolves the religious world into its secular basis, but he fails to explain why that secular basis detaches itself and floats into the clouds. The answer lies in the cleavages and self-contradictions within the secular basis itself—that is, in class society. The religious world cannot be abolished by theoretical critique alone; the earthly family must be “destroyed in theory and in practice”. Feuerbach’s conception of the human essence is also rejected: it is no abstraction inherent in the isolated individual, but the ensemble of social relations. Feuerbach, by abstracting from the historical process, ends up with a “dumb generality” that merely unites individuals as a species. The “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and the abstract individual Feuerbach analyses belongs to a particular form of society.
The final theses sharpen the polemic: contemplative materialism reaches its highest point in the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society—the atomised world of bourgeois individualism. The standpoint of the new materialism is human society, or social humanity. The famous eleventh thesis—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is not a dismissal of theory but a demand that theory become a weapon in the revolutionary transformation of the world. The entire text is a polemic against Feuerbach’s contemplative, apolitical humanism, against mechanistic materialism, and against any philosophy that separates thought from revolutionary practice.