The Classics, Part 1
Marx: Theses on Feuerbach
Any one of the eleven short Theses on Feuerbach
(download linked below) would be adequate on its own as a topic for discussion
in a study circle. The most famous of them is the last one:
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
This shows Marx in 1845 as being firmly in the camp of those
humanists for whom the active, free-willing Subject is the centre and the
starting point of all philosophy and all politics. It puts Marx in the opposite
camp from those “materialists” who regard the human as derivative of, and
secondary to, the purely physical. Marx never shifted from this strong and
logical position. Marx poses the Subject in a dialectical relation with the
Objective universe, but the Subject is the one with the initiative. The Subject
makes things happen. The Subject can change the world – and that’s the point.
This is different from the idealism that ignores the
material world, and it is equally different from the materialism that
prioritises the mechanical over the mental. Thus, Marx settles the controversy over
“dialectical materialism” right here, at the beginning of Marxism.
Ludwig Feuerbach’s intervention into the philosophical
debates of the early 1840s created a sensation in the intellectual crucible
that included Marx and Engels as well as the “Young Hegelians”, with whom Marx
and Engels were in the process of falling out.
Reading the eleven “Theses” reveals that Marx immediately
recognised Feuerbach as a materialist, but also that he at once rejected
Feuerbach’s particular and limited kind of anti-religious and anti-subjective materialism.
Thesis number two says that truth is a practical question.
This is something that is repeated later on in the “classics” of Marxism. This
again reinforces the assertion that the world or universe is a human world or
universe. “It is men who change
circumstances” says Marx in the third Thesis, and “human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally
understood only as revolutionary practice.”
The subsequent Theses develop this understand through to
Thesis 10 which says: “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint
of the new is human society or social humanity.”
This is a good reminder that for Marx in particular, the
term “civil society” only means “bourgeois society”, and that therefore for
Marxists, “civil society” is something to be overcome and transcended, and not
something to be put on a pedestal and worshipped.
Image: Karl Marx
being arrested in Brussels, 1840s.
Please download
and read this very short text:
Theses on Feuerbach, 1845, Marx
(789 words)
Further
reading:
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