The
Classics, Engels’ Classics, Part 6b
Feuerbach and the End of German Philosophy
Nine years before the end of his life - he died in 1895 - and
three years after Karl Marx’s death, Frederick Engels returned to the beginning with his undoubtedly
classic 1886 work “Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (downloadable via
the links given below, in two separate files).
This is how Engels confirms the place of our first
“classic”- “The German Ideology” –
which at that point (1886) had not yet been saved (it was not published until
1932) “from the gnawing criticism on the mice”- as the original work of Marxism:
“In the preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin, 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.
The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of
publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances
did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism
of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose —
self-clarification! Since then more than 40 years have elapsed and Marx died
without either of us having had an opportunity of returning to the subject.”
“Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy” is in four parts, of which the first is nominally about George William Frederick
Hegel (1770-1831).
Engels in his (linked below) “Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 1” says
that the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 were each preceded by uproar in the field
of philosophy; but with differences.
Whereas the French pre-revolutionary philosophers had been
banned and proscribed, Hegel had advanced in “a triumphant procession which lasted for decades” and at times had
held “the rank of a royal Prussian
philosophy of state”. In the decade following Hegel’s death, until the denunciatory
lectures of Schelling in 1841 which Engels attended, “‘Hegelianism’ reigned most exclusively.” This reign, and the subsequent
fall, was the well-ploughed philosophical ground in which Marxism grew.
Engels says: “At that
time politics was a very thorny field, and hence the main fight came to be
directed against religion; this fight, particularly since 1840, was indirectly
also political.”
This proxy role played in politics by religion (and
philosophy) in 1840s Germany is the reason for the apparent elevation of the
dichotomy of idealism and materialism, as if this dichotomy explains
everything, when by itself it explains nothing. The relationship is
dialectical, and not absolute.
Lenin wrote: “It is
impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first
chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's
Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood
Marx!!”
Hegel was much more than a John the Baptist to Karl Marx’s
Christ. Hegel had gathered up everything that had gone before and displayed it
as unified history. Hegel also made the methodology that served as Marx’s
constant framework.
Engels writes:
“… with Hegel
philosophy comes to an end; on the one hand, because in his system he summed up
its whole development in the most splendid fashion; and on the other hand,
because, even though unconsciously, he showed us the way out of the labyrinth
of systems to real positive knowledge of the world.”
The third linked item is a return to Engels’ Ludwig
Feuerbach, in its fourth and final part, dealing with Engels’ friend now
deceased friend Karl Marx. Engels writes:
“Out of the
dissolution of the Hegelian school, however, there developed still another
tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. And this tendency is
essentially connected with the name of Marx (1).
“The separation from
Hegelian philosophy was here also the result of a return to the materialist
standpoint. That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature
and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free
from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice
every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts
conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism
means nothing more than this.”
Materialism, covered in the second and third parts of this
work, was crucial to Marx’s theories. Materialism gazed mercilessly at the
objective universe from the point of view of the free individual human being.
But it did not amount to an elevation of the material universe to the status of
a “prime mover” God, progenitor of life and breather of spirit into man.
Materialism means nothing more than reality, as opposed to fantasy; reality,
seen by the human Subject.
The remainder of Part 4 of “Ludwig Feuerbach” becomes one of
those grand sweeping overviews of which both Engels and Marx were capable. In
this case science, philosophy and class politics are interwoven in an
undoubtedly dialectical way.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Further
reading:
Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific, 1880, Engels (16229 words)
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