Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter settles an undischarged debt: a coherent account of Marx and Engels's relation to Hegel and Feuerbach, forty years after the abandoned 1845-46 manuscript The German Ideology was left to the mice. Marx's 1845 Theses on Feuerbach remain the first document of the new world outlook.
Hegel's dialectic contains a revolutionary kernel beneath its conservative shell. His proposition "All that is real is rational" transforms dialectically into its opposite: all that exists deserves to perish. Truth is the process of cognition itself; history is an endless ascent from lower to higher. Yet Hegel's system compelled him to present absolute truth, allowing the conservative side to smother the revolutionary one, producing a tame political conclusion befitting a German philistine. Nevertheless, Hegel showed the way out of the labyrinth of systems to real positive knowledge, ending philosophy in its old sense.
The Young Hegelians' fight against religion became an indirect political struggle in the 1830s and 1840s. Strauss argued gospel myths formed unconsciously; Bauer countered that evangelists fabricated them. Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity pulverised the contradiction between Hegelian idealism and materialism by restoring materialism: nature exists independently, humans are products of nature, and religious beings are fantastic reflections of our own essence. The book had a liberating effect, making all present Feuerbachians. However, Feuerbach smashed Hegel's system without overcoming it; a philosophy must be "sublated," its form annihilated while its new content is saved.
Feuerbach's idealism emerges in his philosophy of religion and ethics. He does not wish to abolish religion but to perfect it, arguing historical periods are distinguished only by religious changes—a claim false for all but the three world religions. His ethics, based on the innate urge towards happiness, yield only rational self-restraint and love: propositions of tenuity and banality. The equal right to the urge towards happiness has never been real under capitalist production. Feuerbach's morality is cut to the pattern of modern capitalist society, where love becomes a wonder-working god meant to surmount all difficulties in a class-divided society, leaving only the cant of universal reconciliation.
The step Feuerbach did not take was taken by Marx in 1845: the cult of abstract man was replaced by the science of real men and their historical development. Feuerbach was a materialist below and an idealist above. The fruitful tendency from the dissolution of the Hegelian school returned to the materialist standpoint, taking Hegel's dialectical method and turning it off its head onto its feet. Dialectics became the science of the general laws of motion of both the external world and human thought. The great basic thought is that the world is a complex of processes, not ready-made things.
To ascertain the real driving forces of history, one must investigate the motives that set great masses into lasting action leading to major historical transformation. Since 1815, political struggle in England and France has pivoted on the supremacy of three great classes—landed aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat—arising from purely economic causes. All political struggles are class struggles, turning ultimately on economic emancipation; the state is subordinate to civil society. The state is the first ideological power over man, but once created it makes itself independent and produces further ideology. Higher ideologies—philosophy and religion—are still further removed from the material basis, but their transformations spring from class relations.
After the 1848 Revolution, educated Germany abandoned theory for practice as large-scale industry replaced manual labour. The new German Empire removed obstacles from petty states and feudalism, but speculation moved from philosophy to the Stock Exchange. Only among the working class does the German aptitude for theory survive unimpaired, free from career or profit concerns. The new tendency, recognising that the key to history lies in the development of labour, addressed itself to the working class and found a response absent from official science. The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy.