Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Contents

1. Translator’s Introduction (Austin Lewis, 1903) 34 min 8

   The American socialist Austin Lewis introduces his 1903 translation: Engels’s account of the origins of Marxism in Hegel and Feuerbach, his contempt for the professors and the popular atheists, and his critique of Feuerbach’s religion of love. Lewis warns against turning historical materialism into rigid economic determinism, quoting Bax, Ferri, Seligman and Engels’s own late letters on the economy as decisive only “in the last instance.”

2. Engels’s Preface (1888) 4 min 4

   Engels explains why he wrote the book: he and Marx had settled accounts with post-Hegelian philosophy in an unpublished manuscript of 1845–46 (The German Ideology), but never explained in public their relation to Hegel or their debt to Feuerbach. Kautsky’s request for a review of Starcke’s book on Feuerbach gave the occasion. He adds Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, found in an old notebook, as “the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook.”

3. I Hegel and the Young Hegelians 24 min 12

   Hegel’s philosophy concealed a revolution: “all that is real is reasonable” means that whatever loses its necessity loses its right to exist. Hegel’s dialectical method, for which nothing is final, is revolutionary; his system, which ends in absolute truth and constitutional monarchy, is conservative. The Young Hegelians, fighting religion and the Prussian state, were driven toward materialism, and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841), declaring nature the only reality and God a human projection, liberated them all — though his cult of love fed the sentimental “True Socialism.”

4. II Idealism and Materialism 25 min 9

   The basic question of all philosophy is the relation of thinking to being, and the answer divides philosophers into idealists and materialists. Against Kant and Hume, Engels argues that practice — experiment and industry — refutes the unknowable “thing in itself.” Feuerbach, though a materialist, rejected the name because he confused materialism with the mechanical materialism of the 18th century and the vulgar materialism of the 1850s; isolated in a village, he never applied materialism to society. Engels rejects Starcke’s description of Feuerbach as an idealist because of his moral ideals.

5. III Feuerbach’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics 20 min 9

   Feuerbach’s real idealism lies in his philosophy of religion and ethics: he wants to make human love a new religion, through dubious etymology. Engels replies that great historical changes have coincided with religious ones only for the world religions, and that the bourgeoisie made its revolution with legal and political ideas. Feuerbach’s “man” is an abstraction outside history; his ethics of the pursuit of happiness tempered by love fits the stock exchange; real morality differs by class. The step beyond Feuerbach — to real men in their historical development — was taken by Marx.

6. IV Marx and the Materialist Conception of History 46 min 16

   From the break-up of the Hegelian school came Marx’s materialism, which kept Hegel’s dialectic but turned it right side up: ideas reflect real things, and the dialectic becomes the science of the laws of motion of nature, society and thought. The three great discoveries of 19th-century science reveal nature as a process. In history the conscious aims of individuals produce unintended results governed by hidden laws; the historian must seek the forces moving masses and classes. Modern history shows these to be economic classes formed by changes in production; the state, law, philosophy and religion are ever more remote reflections of economic conditions, sketched through the history of Christianity to the bourgeois revolutions. German classical philosophy’s heir is the workers’ movement.

7. Appendix: Marx on Feuerbach (1845) 6 min 9

   Marx’s eleven notes of spring 1845, in Engels’s 1888 version. All earlier materialism grasped reality only as an object of contemplation, not as human sensuous practice; truth is proved in practice; the doctrine that people are products of circumstances forgets that people change circumstances and that the educator must be educated; religion must be explained by the contradictions of the earthly world; the human essence is the ensemble of social relations; the new materialism stands on the ground of social humanity. And finally: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”