In accordance with this method, Feuerbach arrived at the thesis that above all made him and his book famous: It is not God who created humanity; it is humanity which created God. God is the image of humanity that in the best case – in a good society – it itself could be. It is only in a world marked by injustices and need that we can imagine a God apart from humanity.
This thesis also contains, as is evident, a criticism of society. In society as it appears today, a person cannot fully develop. In various ways, she becomes disfigured and must therefore seek comfort in a higher reality. The question is how we can have an idea of the essence of humanity when real, empirical humanity provides no support for it. Feuerbach makes use here of Hegel’s concept of alienation (Entfremdung). Because of external circumstances, humanity cannot become what it has the possibility of becoming. Instead, people place the ideal they carry with them in a God who is thus actually an ideal human.
This means that our knowledge is not completely limited to what lies open to the senses. Using what we observe, we can also see the potential in reality. Through our study of history, we can see a development that points towards the perfection of our species. Some day we ourselves will resemble the image of God that the pious now create for themselves.
No matter how far Feuerbach distanced himself from Hegel’s philosophy, central elements from it nevertheless remain. It is as Marx Wartofsky, perhaps his greatest biographer, says,
In an important sense, Feuerbach remained a Hegelian all his life. The unifying theme of his work is the progress of human consciousness, the unfolding of its self-awareness. And it is Feuerbach himself who recognizes that Hegelian philosophy establishes the form of this development, and suggests the mode of its progress (in the dialectic of consciousness with its ‘other’, in the Phenomenology of Mind), albeit in ‘inverted’ or ‘fantastic form’.83
The Essence of Christianity roused Engels’s undivided enthusiasm. In his polemical pamphlet Schelling and Revelation, he declared that ‘a new era has begun’. Much later, in 1886, he remembered that ‘[e]nthusiasm was universal: we were all Feuerbachians for a moment.’84 He adds that Marx also was enthusiastic – something that came out in his writing.
But there was a difference between Marx’s and Engels’s reactions. For Engels, who underwent a long and painful emancipation from the intensely Pietistic environment of his childhood, The Essence of Christianity was the crucial document that finally clarified the religion he had grown up with. Marx was less rooted in his faith; his father had had a simple but scarcely demanding trust in God without emotional outbreaks and threats of hell. His mother had left Judaism only reluctantly, but certainly did not influence Karl with her doubts; he became an atheist in his late teens without any great mental struggle. Instead it was the philosophy of Hegel that became his great passion. We remember how, in the long letter to his father, he described his adherence to Hegel in terms of a conversion. Radical Hegelianism posed no problem as long as he was in a university environment, but it became obviously less manageable in the world of newspapers. Of course, Marx adhered stubbornly to his idealism – ideas govern the world! – but with the reality dominated by the censors, the wood-owning country squires and impoverished wine growers, the feeling for the concrete that had once drawn him to Hegel seemed to demand something more substantial.
Once he had given up the fight with censorship and the future again became an open question, it was primarily a few journal articles by Feuerbach that preoccupied him. Most important for him was ‘Principles of Philosophy for the Future’. Its programme was simple and unequivocal. God had just been revealed as an ideal image of humanity. Now it was a question of revealing Hegel’s philosophy in a similar manner.85
Hegel admitted no transcendent reality. There was no sphere of reality that thought could not grasp and make conceptual. The God that appears in his text cannot be separated from reason. In earlier philosophy, God had been radically separated from humanity, but according to Feuerbach it was not so with Hegel. Briefly put, the thinking person has access to God. Or (a conclusion Feuerbach does not explicitly draw) she actually becomes God.
It goes without saying that Feuerbach’s interpretation of Hegel was not shared by the Right Hegelians. For them, the reconciliation between Christianity and philosophy was the main question. That was what made their ideas so inviting to the Prussian state authorities in the 1830s. Feuerbach was on the other end of the scale.
In customary theology, the external – or material – world was radically separated from God. God had created the visible world, but it was not itself divine. In Hegel’s thinking, matter becomes only a part of the whole, but a different and lower part. In this way, the new Prussian regime’s accusations of pantheism were justified. Pantheism is the logical development of Hegelian thinking.
But the centre of this philosophy is the thinking subject. The God of theism is an object for humanity. In speculative philosophy of Hegel’s model, God is not separated from humanity. It is precisely on this point that Feuerbach made his decisive thrust. Why call this God? Why speak of it as if it were something other than humanity? The same criticism that he recently directed towards Christianity, he now directed towards Hegel. It is not God who is the creator; it is humanity. Nor is there something divine in thinking; it is something human. Theology becomes anthropology. The centre of philosophy is not the divine but the human.
In Hegel, the evidence of the senses – in short, the empirical – is only a preliminary, and often misleading, preliminary stage for thinking. Only through thinking is what we see and hear given a plausible meaning. On the contrary, according to Feuerbach, the senses are the starting point for all knowledge. He does not deny thinking, but thinking is always secondary. The anthropology he wants to put in place of philosophy is an empirical discipline.
It is not odd that Marx was so directly captivated by Feuerbach’s ideas. The transition to his standpoint was certainly not lightning quick. During his time with Rheinische Zeitung, the distance from the Young Hegelians’ world of ideas had already grown. Bruno Bauer’s way of writing and thinking seemed more and more foreign. But it was only when his adventure in newspapers was behind him that he took the decisive step. What set it off was the articles in which the same criticism directed against Christianity now fell upon Hegel’s system.
Feuerbach had a powerful influence on his young, radical contemporaries. His mode of expression radiates a remarkable intensity. Not many philosophers had the same talent for aphoristic incisiveness as he did. One only needs to choose a few examples from his article on the philosophy of the future : ‘It is by no means only through thinking that man is distinguished from the animal.’ ‘The true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself. It is a dialogue between “I” and “you”.’ And: ‘The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalized, realized, actualized essence of God. The speculative philosophy is the true, consistent, rational theology.’
Those who were seeking a way out of Hegel’s shadow in the early 1840s found an idealistic guide in Feuerbach. The problem was how to go further. Feuerbach nailed Hegel’s speculative philosophy with formal simplicity, and he pointed to anthropology as the science that could replace philosophy. But what would constitute the area of study for anthropology? Feuerbach said: ‘Truth is only the totality of man’s life and being.’ This is not much of an ‘only’.86
Marx would linger on a few sweeping statements of this kind, but they never confused him in his attempts to master a significantly more concrete reality in his own research.
Jenny and Karl lived in Bad Kreuznach from May to October of 1843. The stylish little spa town – where, according to tradition, Doctor Faust had once been active – became the scene not only for their marriage but for their diverse social life as well. Bettina von Arnim, one of the great female figures of Romanticism, also lived there. She and Karl had already met in Berlin, and Bettina found great interest in having conversations
with the young man whose radical ideas interested her. She saw herself as a Romantic socialist, though she held to her idea of a kind of people’s kingdom.
But for the Marxes, Kreuznach could only be a stopping point. Karl had no future in Prussia; Jenny and he therefore had to imagine a future beyond the country’s borders. After some hesitation, the choice appeared obvious: Paris!
Meanwhile, Marx and Ruge were developing plans together for a Franco-German journal that would build a bridge between both the cultural and linguistic regions. The plans were grandiose; the best writers would be hired. Feuerbach was one important name. Ruge contacted him for collaboration, and Marx wrote a detailed letter in which he specified what the editors wanted. He seems to have understood that Feuerbach was busy with settling accounts with Schelling’s philosophy. Nothing could be better suited, Marx wrote. Feuerbach was ‘Schelling in reverse’, while Schelling was the favourite of the Prussian censors. It was particularly important that the truth of Schelling’s wretchedness be known even in France. There, he had just begun to gain the most unexpected sympathizers. Even ‘the gifted Leroux’ (a leading socialist) was said to be impressed.87
Feuerbach was hesitant. He wrote two different draft letters and also sketched out an article on Schelling. But, in the letter he finally sent, he said no – it was a mistake to ever have occupied himself with Schelling. What he wrote had to have content.88
Marx, however, did not give up hope of associating more closely with Feuerbach. Barely ten months later, in October 1844, he sent a new letter to express, ‘the great respect and – if I may use the word – love’ to the author of ‘Philosophy of the Future’ and other important articles. These, he said, constituted ‘a philosophical basis for socialism’ as well as for communism. Feuerbach had pulled the concept of ‘the human species’ (Menschengattung) ‘from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth’.89
Once again, heaven and earth. Once, Marx had seen Hegel as the down-to-earth antithesis of Fichte and Schelling. Now it was Feuerbach in comparison to Hegel.
Feuerbach clearly intended to respond to the letter. But he never finished his reply. We do not know why. Perhaps he took fright at the prospect of being regarded as the socialists’ and communists’ own philosopher.90 Much later, in any case, he expressed appreciation of Marx’s Capital, Vol. I (1867) as ‘that most interesting and at the same time horrifying and rich work’ in which the virtue in capitalism could be seen as ‘at best a monopoly of the factory owners, the capitalists’.91
But back to Marx’s letters. As a sign of his appreciation, he enclosed an article with the title ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’ (Zur Kritik der hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung). He had published it in the first and only issue of Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which was printed in Paris in February 1844. ‘On the Jewish Question’ – one of Marx’s most controversial articles – also appeared there, as did a few letters between Marx and Ruge, the other publisher.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, the Jewish
Question, and Analysis of the Mystical
During his months in Bad Kreuznach, Marx had been feverishly active. Despite his honeymoon – which he and Jenny spent in Bingen, Hildegard’s small town where the poet Stefan George would also be born a few decades later – and despite the time-consuming conversations with Bettina von Arnim, he managed to read and write a copious amount.92 His most comprehensive work remained incomplete: a criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law. The manuscript fills 130 printed pages and consists of a review of some fifty paragraphs in Hegel’s 1821 work Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right). It is a milestone in Marx’s development. The shorter work included in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher is only a variation on the theme he developed in his manuscript.
What is new is not only that he is so evidently influenced by Feuerbach’s writings. It was here, above all, that he developed a method of interpretation that he would remain faithful to long after the influence from Feuerbach had faded away.
What he had written so far, apart from the poems, was limited to his doctoral thesis and his journalism in Rheinische Zeitung. In his thesis, he is a typical Young Hegelian seeking further radical development of Hegel’s philosophical and historical lectures. Marx the journalist writes on the limitations to freedom of the press in Prussia, and on a proposed law that threatens to further worsen the plight of the poor.
In ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, he uses some of Feuerbach’s central reasoning for the first time. In religion, as in speculative philosophy of Hegel’s type, subject and predicate switch places. The concepts of subject and predicate do not have a grammatical, but a logical sense. In a sentence such as ‘All men are mortal’, ‘all men’ is the subject and ‘mortal’ is the predicate. Something about the subject is expressed explicitly through the predicate, but the subject is the starting point of the sentence and often the active component. But, in speculative philosophy, as in religion, it is the predicate that seems to determine what the subject is. ‘God has created humanity’ says Christianity, while in fact it is the reverse. Hegel presupposed that the Idea is realized in the history of humanity, whereas it is actually humanity that develops ideas of various kinds. In religion, as in speculative philosophy, concrete humanity appears passive while abstractions such as God or the Idea govern its development. The background to this notorious error of judgement is an existence, as unjust as it is merciless, in which people have no possibility of fundamentally changing their situation.
In the ‘Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law’, Marx frequently speaks about subject and predicate in this sense.93 Following Feuerbach, he professes himself an adherent of the world of experiences. Like Feuerbach, he argues that, based on this empiricism, one can come to know the essence of an object – what real, genuine humanity is, for example, or the secret of Christianity.
Marx no more completely abandons Hegel than Feuerbach does. Both would rather find what is valid in Hegel’s philosophy at the same time as they show how his method of making abstract quantities such as the Idea or God into the agents of reality is misleading.
The difference between Marx and Feuerbach that first meets the eye is that Marx analyses and criticizes Hegel’s texts in a much more detailed fashion. Feuerbach’s dispute with this idealist philosophy stops at general statements about Hegel’s inability to bridge the contradiction between thinking and being. Marx, on the other hand, reproduces paragraph after paragraph in Hegel’s account of the state and tackles the majority of them. Even his general assertions have a foothold in specific sections of text in Hegel. Marx’s assiduous excerpting of texts thereby has a direct effect on his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of law, as it did previously in his doctoral thesis.
In one place, he translates Hegel’s philosophical rhetorical prose into the language of the common man. Whereas Hegel says ‘the sovereignty of the state is the monarch’, everyday prose should be content with the assertion that ‘the monarch has sovereign power’. Where Hegel establishes that sovereignty is ‘the will’s abstract and to that extent unfounded self-determination with which lies the final decision’, the man on the street could simply say ‘sovereignty does what it wills’.94
The word criticism has a central position in Marx, but not in Feuerbach. Marx distinguishes between vulgar criticism and true criticism. Vulgar criticism is dogmatic and establishes certain alleged truths in contrast to the idea being criticized. It draws out the contradictions that exist in the criticized idea but it does not seek to understand how they could have arisen. This, on the other hand, is what true criticism is devoted to. It is not satisfied with verifying contradictions in the current constitution; ‘it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity’.95 In short, it makes it understandable why people – or at least certain people – must perceive political reality in a certain way, and it investigates what basis their ideas have. Hegel
and his followers’ view of the state and its relationship to civil or bourgeois society is completely natural – inevitable, in fact – for those who regard society from a certain perspective (here Marx was probably thinking primarily of civil servants, which included university professors).
It is the task of the critic to reveal the ‘mysticism’ that characterizes the Hegelian view of society. The choice of words is a consequence of Marx, in the spirit of Feuerbach, seeing religion as the paradigm for all kinds of illusions that people can form about reality in all its various facets. Political ideas spring from the same source as religious convictions. Reality assumes a distorted form, which is why it puts people into positions where they cannot see clearly and without illusions – at least without the help of the true critic.96
Marx’s criticism is not only a criticism of religion or philosophy, like Feuerbach’s. It also, and above all, pulls society apart. The society Hegel creates a philosophical refuge for is scrutinized and rejected in Marx’s account. Hegel defends not only royal power but the privileges of the nobility as well. It is repugnant that one is born into a certain position in society, Marx objects. More than repugnant, in fact: it creates a false identity between body and soul; the noble body is of a special, more refined type than others. Marx writes contemptuously that ‘[t]he secret of the nobility is zoology’ – they claim to constitute a particular human race. Marx’s use of the word ‘race’ is a sign of how loosely the concept of race could still be used at that time. It is not a question of race in the biological sense. Marx is far from the racial divisions that the German natural scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach created at the end of the eighteenth century. Blumenbach distinguished between Caucasians, Mongols, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays, whereas his followers preferred to use terms of colour (white, yellow, black, red, and brown). The special position the nobility claims, according to Marx, is of a different type.97
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