Comments on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.
Marx set down the famous Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, and they were first published in 1888 by Engels. The work can be regarded as the moment of Identity, (containing Difference), between classical German philosophy and Marxism – the moment at which the science of Marxism came into Being. Engels, in the introduction to one of his most important works, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of classical German Philosophy, says of this moment:-
“In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin in 1859, Karl Marx relates how the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about ‘to work out in common the opposition of our view’ – the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx, - ‘to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy.’” (Marx and Engels Selected Works 1970, Lawrence and Wishart, p.584)
“Post-Hegelian philosophy” refers of course mainly to Feuerbach, and the Theses can be regarded as the Essence of this criticism and the seed from which Marxism grew, containing in embryonic form the logic and law of the whole science. They are as follows:-
Thesis I
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism – but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity. Hence, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived as fixed only in its dirty-judaical form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.
Existing materialism failed to understand that we gain as much, indeed often more, information about things when we handle them, change them in some way as in the work process, as we do through passive sense perception. The materialists, having failed to seriously consider the effect of human activity on the rest of nature, left the idealists to advance various theories which make thought primary to being, particularly Hegel’s objective idealist theory of the “absolute idea”.
Feuerbach, while recognising that the thing, (the world), exists independently of us, failed to grasp that human activity is an object for us just as much as any other thing. This is, perhaps, the result of a formal, (anti-dialectical), understanding of things in general, which sees them in their stillness and death rather than their movement and life. Human activity exists objectively as a force for change, and a force is a “thing” no less than the thing it changes. It is part of the movement and life of the thing itself and is therefore truly objective. The centuries old social division of labour between work by brain and work by hand, which is the historical cause of the formal separation of theory from practice, also had its effect on Feuerbach’s thinking. For him it is the theoretical side of our activity which defines us a human, while practical work is “fixed in its dirty-judaical form of appearance”, is nothing but an unavoidable necessity forced upon mankind which has no importance for the process of cognition and results in nothing more that the things produced.
Thesis II
The question whether objective [gegenständliche] truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness, [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
Engels supplies the proof of this empirically:
“For three hundred years the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand chances to one in its favour, but still always a hypothesis. But when Leverrier, by means of data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Galle really found the planet, the Copernican system was proved.” (Op. Cit. P.595. The planet was Neptune, discovered in 1846.)
Thesis III
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstance and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example). The coincidence of the changing circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.
Men make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing. We are presented with a natural world from which we must abstract the things we need in order to live and survive as a race, but that world presents us with only limited possibilities and certain unavoidable necessities. Our material existence is thus determined by the external, natural world, and our conscious, spiritual life is determined in turn by our material existence; social being determines social consciousness, and with that the consciousness of the individual. The external natural world is educator and man is educated.
But by the very practice of abstracting the necessities of life from the natural world we change it, adapt it for our purposes; man educates the world. This changed world now changes man in a changed way. This whole reciprocal inter-action between nature and man is raised to a higher level, proceeds according to an ascending curve, and this raising to a higher level Marx calls revolutionising practice.
However, the materialists prior to Marx, such as Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, had no grasp of the dialectical laws manifested in the relation of man to nature, so that their understanding of it remained one-sided; that nature changes man was self-evident to them, but that man’s practical intervention into nature changes the way nature changes man was not.
To such as Robert Owen it seemed that something had to be done about the condition of mankind, since under unbridled capitalism periodic economic crises, slave labour conditions, poverty, disease and injustice were the norm, and under such conditions the working class had descended to a miserable cultural level and was unable to help itself. It was, therefore up to those who lived under conditions of better upbringing and circumstances, separating themselves out as a superior part of society, to directly impose solutions to these problems. Engels describes this historical tendency as Utopian.
“To crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. The solution of all the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian. The more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.” (F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Our Emphasis)
Thesis IV
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists of the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is really only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of this contradiction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and revolutionised in practice.
The “self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness” of the secular basis is of course only a particular case of the universal law of nature, including human society and thought. According to Hegel’s logic we know it as the law of Negation. Every thing, Identity, is in constant motion and change, a constant process of coming into Being and passing away. Every Identity carries within itself its own Difference, what it is becoming. The “self-contradictoriness” Marx refers to is the contradiction between what the thing is, (Identity), and the different thing it is becoming, (Difference). Difference Negates Identity, that is, it limits it, tends to annihilate it, render it a thing of the past, hence Negation is the active, changing side of nature, and Identity the passive, conservative side tending to resist change. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus expressed this basic law of dialectics very well: “Strife is the Father of all things. The One, sundering itself, coalesces with itself, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre.”
Here, the “secular foundation detaches itself and establishes itself as an independent realm”, or in Heraclitus’ expression, “sunders itself”, and the truth of this movement, this unfolding of Difference within Identity, is the contradiction which drives it, the contradiction between man and the rest of nature. From the earliest times man has been confronted with difficulty in his struggle for survival in the natural world, the dangers of the hunt, the seasonal changes, bad weather, crop failure etc. Erroneous conceptions concerning natural forces and phenomena led man to regard them as conscious entities, hence the worship of the sun and the coming into being of a whole system of gods. With the progress of mankind and the unification of scattered families and tribes into whole nations and empires, the plethora of tribal gods became distilled into the main monotheistic religions which, we note, are nothing but more or less faithful reflections of human social relations which are based on the means and mode pf production. The history of Christianity, with its earlier catholic form which faithfully reflected the top down authority of the feudal system, and the subsequent protestant reformation which mirrored the new capitalist society based on the freedom of the individual, is proof enough of this. The “duplication of the material world into a religious, imaginary, world and the real one” is complete.
Feuerbach failed to grasp this; he merely tried to liquidate religious values into his faulty materialist philosophy and went no further, leaving society unchanged, and the point, as we shall see below, is to change it. “The chief thing still remains to be done.” In order to liberate mankind form the mental prison of reactionary religion it is necessary to criticise, that is to analyse and explain, the secular basis on which it rests, the bourgeois system, and revolutionise that system, to negate in into socialist society. Marx sites the fact that the holy family is a copy or reflection of the bourgeois nuclear family.
Thesis V
Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.
This point, the sensuous nature of practice from which we learn things which cannot come to light through the abstract thought process and sensuous contemplation, that is, empirically, has been dealt with in the remarks with respect to Thesis I. In Thesis II we noted that practice proves the “this-sidedness” of our knowledge, that by changing the world we raised indeterminate hypothesis to certain, determinate knowledge.
Thesis VI
Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently impelled:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment [Gemüt] as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
2. The human essence, therefore, can with him be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals.
Engels explains how Feuerbach attempts to resolve the religious essence into the human essence:-
“Feuerbach’s idealism consists here in this: he does not simply accept mutual relations based on reciprocal inclination between human beings, such as sex love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., as they are in themselves – without associating them with any particular religion which to him, too, belongs to the past; but instead he asserts that they will attain their full value only when consecrated by the name of religion. The chief thing for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they shall be conceived of as the new, true religion.” (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy)
Thus the religious essence is “resolved into the human essence”. But the human essence is the ensemble, or perhaps the resultant, and all the human activity which is necessary for the production and reproduction of human society taken as one whole, and no single individual will mechanically reflect this. Feuerbach, who does not criticise this essence, (that is, does not analyse and grasp it as the essence of the whole of historically developing humanity), makes of it an abstraction which is an inherent quality in each individual. If Feuerbach considers the essence of humanity as a whole at all, he can now only conceive of it as the sum total of all the individual essences, a “dumb generality” which unites us all only in the sense that we share this common quality.
Thesis VII
Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society.
Having failed to grasp the religious sentiment as a social product, Feuerbach fails to comprehend that the abstract individual does not actually exist; only the concrete individual exists – an individual in feudal society, an individual in capitalist society, etc. Hence the religious sentiment supposedly residing in the individual will be different in each society, and there is no such thing as the religious sentiment as such.
Thesis VIII
Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
Social life is essentially the result of the co-ordination of human endeavour in the struggle against nature, in the final analysis the organisation of a highly complex system of the division of labour, taking different forms in different historical periods according to the generally available technology. The term “mysticism” used here by Marx must be understood in strict scientific sense and we may best explain it with this somewhat lengthy quote from Engels:-
“All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were first so reflected, and which in the course of further evolution underwent the most manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples. This early process has been traced back by comparative mythology, at least in the case of the Indo-European peoples, to its origin in the Indian Vedas, and in its further evolution it has been demonstrated in detail among the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans and, so far as material is available, also among the Celts, Lithuanians and Slavs. But it is not long before, side by side with the forces of nature, social forces begin to be active – forces which confront men as equally alien and at first equally inexplicable, dominating him with the same apparent natural necessity as the forces of nature themselves. The fantastic figures, which at first only reflected the mysterious forces of nature, at this point acquire social attributes, become representatives of the forces of history. At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who is but a reflection of the abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism, which was historically the last product of the vulgarised philosophy of the Greeks and found its incarnation in the exclusively national god of the Jews, Jehovah. In this convenient, handy and universally adaptable form, religion can continue to exist as the immediate, that is, the sentimental form of men’s relation to the alien, natural and social, forces which dominate them, so long as men remain under the control of these forces. However, we have seen repeatedly that in existing bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an alien force. The actual basis of the reflective activity that gives rise to religion therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of the alien domination, this makes no essential difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, not protect the individual capitalist from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God, (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production) disposes. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. [Our emphasis]. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes – only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.” (F. Engels, Anti-Düring)
Mystification is the invention of false and fantastic explanations for purely physical phenomena. The sentence we have reproduced in bold type is the key to understanding Thesis VIII. (The italics are Engels’). Practice is the test of all theory. We may remark in passing that here is the answer to all unscientific atheists such a Richard Dawkin, who try to vanquish religion by mere argument. While the material cause of the alienated fantastic reflection remains in being the reflection will be continually renewed. Trying to overcome the reflection without transforming the thing reflected is like trying to change your reflection in the mirror without changing your face. Today, the continued mystification of the uncontrolled effects of social contradictions is driven by the class interest of the capitalist ruling class. At all costs they must conceal the cause of war, unemployment, attacks on rights etc., so as to stave off the social act of political and social revolution as long as possible.
Thesis IX
The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not understand sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in “civil society”.
The point about sensuous practical activity is that it is essentially social activity, since it is carried out according to a highly sophisticated social division of labour. Nobody’s activity is their’s alone as an individual, it is always some shared activity, and we all live in a world of things produced by social sensuous practical activity. Contemplation may be sensuous, but sensuousness is more than mere contemplation. Without an understanding of this the world dissolves into a world of single individuals.
Thesis X
The standpoint of the old materialism is “civil” society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialised humanity.
This short and simple thesis must be carefully considered. First it is necessary to understand what Marx means by “civil society”, and this can best be understood in its relation to the class structure of society and the state. Let us turn to Engels once again:-
“In modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all political struggles are class struggles, and all class struggle for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form – for every class struggle is a political struggle – turn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation. Therefore, here at least, the state – the political order – is the subordinate, and civil society – the realm of economic relations- the decisive element. The traditional conception, to which Hegel, too, pays homage, saw the state as the determinate element, and in civil society the element determined by it. Appearances correspond to this. As all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action, so also all the needs of civil society – no matter which class happens to be the ruling one – must pass through the will of the state in order to secure general validity in the form of laws. That is the formal aspect of the matter – the one which is self-evident. The question arises, however, what is the content of this merely formal will – of the individual as well as of the state – and whence is this content derived? Why is just this willed and not something else? If we enquire into this we discover that in modern history the will of the state is, on the whole, determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy of this or that class, in the last resort by the development of the productive forces and relations of exchange.” (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.)
Civil society, therefore, consists in the totality of all the relations into which individuals enter in the process of production, consumption and exchange, the “realm of economic relations”, in particular the forms of property rights. Throughout history it has taken on different forms according to the stage of development of technology and productive forces, such as barbarism, feudalism and capitalism. The state is little more than the guarantor of these rights. The old materialism confined itself to consideration of civil society, but the concept of “human society” is based on more universal considerations. It is not based on an understanding of the civil societies which result from the development of productive forces, but this developing process itself, the entire history of the human race in its natural context understood from the materialist standpoint. Just as civil society determines the state, so human society determines civil society.
How did the old materialism come to make the mistake of basing itself on the more superficial standpoint of civil society? Marx explains:-
“Alongside the German communists, a number of writers have appeared who have absorbed a few French and English communist ideas and amalgamated them with their own German philosophical premises. These ‘socialists’ or ‘true socialists’, as they call themselves, consider foreign communist literature not as the expression and product of a real movement but as purely theoretical writings which have been evolved – in the same way as they imagine the German philosophical systems to have been evolved – by a process of ‘pure thought’. It never occurs to them that, even when these writings do preach a system, they spring from practical needs, the whole conditions of life of a particular class in particular countries.” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology)
The practical needs and conditions of life of a particular class, or for that matter the whole of humanity, force us to make consideration of human society, not the more superficial consideration of civil society. The writers to whom Marx refers published their work in a journal called Rheinische Jahrbücher, and to prove his point Marx gives the following quote:-
“The French seem not to have understood their own men of genius. German science comes to their aid at this point, presenting in socialism the most reasonable social order …” (Hermann Semmig)
And Marx Comments, not without sarcasm:-
“German science presents here, therefore, a social order, in fact ‘the most reasonable social order’ ‘in socialism’. Socialism is reduced to a branch of that omnipotent, all-embracing German science which is even capable of founding a society.” (Ibid.)
For German science socialism was not a necessary development in the realm of human relations which arises historically out of real material conditions, but something to be invented out of the head. The “new materialism” to which Marx refers was later clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 as the founding document of the First International.
Thesis XI
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
This last thesis sums up the previous ones and marks the turning point in philosophy, from the old, metaphysical, idealist and anti-dialectical mode of thought, to the new, scientifically based dialectical materialism. It places humanity in its proper context in the rest of nature and extends scientific thought to the realm of human society, and affirms that such thought develops in the practical process of changing the world rather that in mere subjective reflection.
Terry Button, September 2007