Quiz: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

12 questions drawn at random. Score 80% for a silver medal.

1. Where, according to Engels, did the true revolutionary character of Hegel’s philosophy lie? In its theology, which made God into the self-unfolding Absolute Idea In its theory of art In its dialectical method, which sees everything as transient In its conclusions about the Prussian state as the end of history
2. Whose book on Feuerbach was Engels asked to review, giving the occasion for this work? Strauss’s Starcke’s Bauer’s Stirner’s
3. What did Marx and Engels plan to do together in Brussels in 1845, according to Engels’s 1888 preface? Edit a collected edition of Hegel’s works with a materialist commentary of their own Draft a joint programme for the new Communist League and its sections abroad Work out their materialist view of history against German ideological philosophy Write a popular history of the French Revolution for German workers
4. What did Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity do, according to Engels? It defended Christianity against the critics by grounding faith in universal human feeling It put materialism back on the throne: nature exists independently of all philosophy It proved from the Gospel sources that the life of Jesus was largely myth It completed Hegel’s system by reconciling the absolute spirit with revealed Christian religion
5. What role does Engels say religion plays in all ideological matters? A revolutionary force The decisive force in history No role at all A great conservative force, because it carries tradition
6. What does Engels call “the great foundation question of all philosophy”? The existence of God The relation between thinking and being The nature of the good The origin of language
7. Which modern philosophers does Engels name as disputing the possibility of exhaustive knowledge of the world? Hume and Kant Descartes and Spinoza Locke and Berkeley Fichte and Schelling
8. Which famous statement of Hegel does Engels discuss at the start of Part I? “All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real” “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk” “The state is the march of God through the world”
9. What does the third thesis say the materialist doctrine of circumstances and education forgets? That education is useless unless the state first transforms the whole property system That human nature is fixed, so that no circumstances can alter it That men are born good and are corrupted only by the institutions and customs around them That circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated
10. What contradiction does Engels find in Hegel? A revolutionary method led to a tame conclusion, since the system needed absolute truth A belief in endless progress clashed with his claim that history has no direction or end A materialist theory of nature sat beside an idealist account of human history A defence of the Prussian state was combined with a call for its abolition
11. According to the sixth thesis, what is humanity in its reality? An abstraction inherent in each single individual A natural species, defined by its biology alone A spiritual essence The ensemble of the conditions of society
12. Whom does Engels call “the vulgarizing peddlers” of materialism in 1850s Germany? Young Hegelians who had turned Hegel’s dialectic into a weapon against religion English empiricists who reduced all knowledge to the sensations of the individual Catholic theologians who borrowed materialist arguments to attack Protestant rationalism Popular materialists who used science only against the Creator, within the old limits

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