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FEUERBACH
THE ROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY
BY
FREDERICK ENGELS
TRANSLATED WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
BY
AUSTIN LEWIS
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
Copyright, 1903
By CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
INTRODUCTION.
This work takes us back nearly sixty years, to a time when what is now a
movement of universal significance was in its infancy. Hegel and the
Revolution of 1848; these are the points of departure. To the former, we
owe the philosophic form of the socialist doctrine, to the latter, its
practical activity as a movement.
In the midst of the turmoil and strife and apparent defeat of those days
two men, Marx and Engels, exiled and without influence, betook
themselves to their books and began laboriously to fashion the form and
doctrine of the most powerful intellectual and political movement of all
time. To the task they brought genius, scholarship, and a capacity for
hard work and patient research. In each of these qualities they were
supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social
subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the
lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations
and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception,
which place him in a class by himself. Engels was the able co-adjutor
and co-worker with Marx. He was a deep and acute thinker, a most patient
investigator, a careful writer. More practical than his friend, he was
better able to cope with material problems, and his advice and his purse
were always at the disposal of Marx.
The latter could hardly have worked under more discouraging conditions.
Poverty, inadequate opportunities, lack of stimulating companionship,
and the complete absence of any kind of encouragement and such sympathy
as a man of his affectionate temperament craved fell to his lot. His
most learned works were written for groups of workingmen, his most
laborious efforts were made without the slightest hope of recognition
from the learned and the powerful.
All through these years Engels remained his faithful friend, and helped
him over many hard places when family troubles and straitened
circumstances pressed upon the old revolutionist.
This work is Engels' testimony with regard to the method employed by
them in arriving at their philosophical conclusions. It is the statement
of the philosophical foundations of modern socialism by one who helped
to lay them; it is an old man's account of the case upon the preparation
of which he has spent his entire life, for, this work, short as it is,
represents the results of forty years of toil and persevering effort.
As the "Communist Manifesto" was a gage flung with all the impetuosity
of youthful impatience into the face of constituted authority, so this
is the deliberate statement of the veteran, who has learned the game too
well to leave any openings, and proceeds to the demolition of pet
opinions in a quiet, deadly and deliberate fashion.
Step by step, the argument is built up. The ghosts of old controversies
long since buried are raised, to show how the doctrine imperishably
associated with the names of Marx and Engels came into existence; the
"Young Hegelians," the "Tuebingen School," and finally Feuerbach himself
are summoned from the grave to which the Revolution of 1848 had
consigned them. Still, ancient history as these controversies are from
the German standpoint, such is the backwardness of philosophy among
English-speaking peoples, that we find Engels exposing again and again
fallacies which persist even in our time, and ridiculing sentiments
which we receive with approbation in our political assemblies, and with
mute approval in our churches and conventicles.
The anti-religious note is noticeable throughout, in itself an echo of
controversies long past, when the arguments of the critics of the Bible
were creating now fury, now dismay, throughout Christendom, before the
Higher Criticism had become respected, and before soi-disant sceptics
could continue to go solemnly to church.
Moreover, the work was written in German for German workmen for whom
religion has not the same significance as it apparently still continues
to possess for the English-speaking people, whose sensitiveness upon the
subject appears to have outlived their faith. However that may be,
religious bodies possess a curious and perhaps satisfactory faculty of
absorbing the truths of science, and still continuing to exist, and even
to thrive, upon what the inexperienced might easily mistake for a deadly
diet.
Under the circumstances there is no reason why Engels' remarks should
affect even the timorous, although it must be remembered that a very
able English socialist philosopher is reputed to have damaged his
chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quotation from Mr. Swinburne.
It must be confessed that the occasional bitterness in which Engels
indulges is to be deplored, in a work of so essentially intellectual a
character, but it is little to be wondered at. His contempt for
university professors and the pretentious cultivated classes, who claim
so much upon such slight grounds, is not strange, when we consider the
honest labors of himself and his colleagues and the superficial
place-hunting of the recognized savants. He loves learning for its own
sake, for the sake of truth and scientific accuracy, and he cannot feel
anything but scorn for those who use it as a means to lull the
consciences of the rich, and to gain place and power for themselves. The
degradation of German philosophy affects him with a real sorrow; the
scholar is outraged at the mockery. "Sterility," "eclecticism," these
are the terms in which he sums up the teachings of the official
professors, and they are almost too gentle to be applied to the
dispiriting and disheartening doctrines which are taught to the
English-speaking student of to-day under the name of economics or
philosophy.
In the first part of his pamphlet, for it is little more in size, Engels
gives a short and concise account of the work of Hegel and the later
Hegelian School. He shows how the philosophy of Hegel has both a
conservative and a radical side and how conservatives and radicals alike
might, (as a matter of fact they did), each derive support from his
teachings, according to the amount of stress laid respectively upon the
great divisions of his work, the "System" and the "Dialectic."
The Extreme Left developed through the application of the dialectic,
and applied the philosophic doctrine thus derived to the criticism of
existing political and religious institutions. This resulted in the
gradual throwing away of the abstract part of the Hegelian philosophy,
and in the study of facts and phenomena to an ever-increasing degree.
Marx had, in his youth, allied himself with the "Young Hegelians," as
this school was called, and this fact had no slight influence upon his
subsequent career. His critics lay the blame for much of the obscurity
of language from which "Capital" in particular suffers, at the door of
this training. His painful elaboration of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, his insistence upon the dialectic, and his continual use of
the Hegelian philosophical expressions are due to his earlier
controversial experiences. Still, on the other hand, his patient
investigation of actual facts, his insistence on the value of positive
knowledge as compared with abstract theory, and his diligent and
persistent use of blue-books and statistics, were in a great measure
results of the same training.
Now and again, we find Engels in this work displaying remarkable
controversial acumen, as in his discussion of the phrase, "All that is
real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real" (Alles was
wirklich ist, ist vernuenftig, und alles was vernuenftig ist, ist
wirklich). From this expression, by the development of the Hegelian
argument, he arrives at the conclusion involved in the statement that
the value of a social or political phenomenon is its transitoriness, the
necessity of its disappearance. Hence the abolition of dogmatic
statement and mere subjective reasoning in the realm of philosophy, the
destruction of the old school of which Kant was the chief exponent, and
the creation of a new school the most advanced teachers of which were,
as they still are, the materialistic socialists, of whom Engels and Marx
are the chief.
The object of this historical sketch is to show the origin of
Feuerbach's philosophy as well as of that of Marx and Engels. As the
fight between the Young Hegelians and the conservatives grew hotter,
the radicals were driven back upon the English-French materialism of the
preceding century. This was embarrassing for followers of Hegel, who had
been taught to regard the material as the mere expression of the Idea.
Feuerbach relieved them from the contradiction. He grasped the question
boldly and threw the Hegelian abstraction completely to one side. His
book, "Wesen des Christenthums," in which his ideas were set forth,
became immediately popular, and an English translation, which was widely
read, was made of it by George Eliot under the title of "Essence of
Christianity."
Engels is by no means grudging of expressions of appreciation with
regard to this work, and its effects both upon himself and the educated
world in general. This "unendurable debt of honor" paid, however, he
proceeds to attack the idealistic humanitarianism which Feuerbach had
made the basis and sanction of his ethical theories.
Although Feuerbach had arrived at the materialistic conclusion, he
expressed himself as unable to accept materialism as a doctrine. He
says that as far as the past is concerned he is a materialist, but, for
the future, he is not so--"Backward I am in agreement with the
materialists, forward not"--a statement which impels Engels to examine
the materialism of the eighteenth century, which he finds purely
mechanical, without any conception of the universe as a process, and
therefore utterly inadequate for the philosophic needs of the period at
which Feuerbach wrote; for by that time the advance of science, and the
greater powers of generalization, arising from patient experimentation,
and the development of the evolutionary theory, had rendered the
eighteenth century views evidently absurd.
The "vulgarising peddlers" (vulgarisirenden Hausirer) come in for a
great deal of contempt at the hands of Engels. These were the popular
materialists--"the blatant atheists," who, without scientific knowledge
and gifted with mere oratory or a popular style of writing, used every
advance of science as a weapon of attack upon the Creator and popular
religion. Engels sneers at these as not being scientists at all, but
mere tradesmen dealing in pseudo-scientific wares. He calls their
occupation a trade, a business (Geschaeft). Of the same class was that
host of secularist lecturers who at one time thronged the lecture
platforms of the English-speaking countries and of whom Bradlaugh and
Ingersoll were in every way the best representatives. These secularists
have now ceased to exercise any influence, and the Freethought
societies, at one time so numerous, have now practically disappeared. In
accordance with the theories as set forth by Engels they were bound to
disappear; their teachings had no real bearing upon social progress,
they contributed nothing of any scientific value to modern thought, and
as Engels carefully shows, the reading of history by these lecturers was
vitiated by a lack of scientific grasp, and inability to take a rational
view of the great principles of historical development.
In the third part of this little book Engels deals with a very
interesting question which still disturbs the minds of philosophers, and
concerning which much discussion goes on even among the materialists;
that is the question as to the effect of religion upon social progress.
Feuerbach had made the statement that periods of social progress are
marked by religious changes. He uses religion as a synonym for human
love, forcing the meaning of the word religion from the Latin
"religare," "to tie," in order to give it an etymological and derivative
meaning in support of his statement, a controversial trick for which he
is rebuked by Engels. The declaration that great historical revolutions
are accompanied by religious changes is declared by Engels not to be
true, except in a limited degree as regards the three great
world-religions--Christianity, Mahommedanism and Buddhism.
Engels declared that the change in religion simultaneous with economic
and political revolution stopped short with the bourgeois revolt which
was made without any appeal to religion whatsoever. It is evident that
this is not entirely true, for in the English-speaking countries, at all
events, not only the bourgeois but frequently also the proletarian
movements attempt to justify themselves from Scripture. The teachings of
the Bible and the Sermon on the Mount are frequently called to the aid
of the revolutionary party; Christian Socialists, in the English and
American, not the continental sense of the term, as such are admitted to
the International Congresses; and other evidences of the compatibility
of religion with the proletarian movement can be traced.
But in the broader sense of his statement Engels is undoubtedly correct.
The proletarian movement, unlike that of the bourgeois, has produced no
definite religious school, it has not claimed any particular set of
religious doctrines as its own. As a matter of fact, there appears to be
an ever-widening chasm between the Church and the laborer, a condition
of affairs which is frequently deplored in religious papers. The famous
Papal Encyclical on Labor was certainly intended to retain the masses in
the Church, and the formation of trades unions under the influence of
the priests was a logical conclusion from the teachings of the Papal
Encyclical. But such religious movements are in no sense representative
of the working-class movement; in fact they are resented and antagonized
by the regular proletarian movement which proceeds under the leadership
of the Socialists.
Feuerbach's exaltation of humanitarianism, as a religion, is derided by
Engels in a semi-jocular, semi-serious manner, for his statement that
Feuerbach's ideals can be completely realized on the Bourse, cannot be
taken seriously. Engels' clear-sightedness with regard to the
ineffectiveness of a purely humanitarian religion is very remarkable,
although the forty years' additional experience which he had over
Feuerbach was a great advantage to him in estimating the actual value of
humanitarian religion as an influence in human affairs. Since the time
of Feuerbach various experiments in the direction of a religion based
entirely on Love have been tried, and none of them has succeeded.
Positivism or its religious side has been a failure. It has appealed to
a small set of men, some of whom are possessed of great ability and
have accomplished much, but as a religion in any adequate sense of the
word positivism will be admitted a failure by its most sincere
adherents. Brotherhood Churches, the Church of Humanity, the People's
Church, and other like organizations have been formed having the same
humanitarian basis, professing to cultivate a maximum of love with a
minimum of faith, and have failed to impress ordinary men and women.
Theosophy, a system of oriental mysticism based on an abstract
conception of the brotherhood of man, has also put forth its claims to
notice, on the grounds of its broad humanitarianism. None of these
humanitarian religions, however, appear to satisfy the needs of the
times, which do not seem to demand any humanitarian teachings. The only
religions which evidently persist are the dogmatic, those appealing
undisguisedly to faith, and even these do not maintain their proletarian
following.
Engels' remarks appear to be more than justified by the facts of to-day,
for so far from the proletarian forming a new religion representing his
needs on the "ideological" field, he appears to be increasingly
desirous of releasing himself from the bands of any religion whatever,
and substituting in place of it practical ethics and the teachings of
science. Thus we are informed that five out of six of the working
classes of Berlin, who attend any Sunday meetings whatever, are to be
found in the halls of the Social Democratic Party, listening to the
lectures provided by that organization.
The revolutionary character of Feuerbach's philosophy is not maintained
in his ethic, which Engels declares with much truth to be no better than
that of his predecessors, as the basis on which it stands is no more
substantial. Feuerbach fails as a teacher of practical ethics; he is
smothered in abstraction and cannot attain to any reality.
With the last part of the work Engels abandons the task of criticising
Feuerbach, and proceeds to expound his own philosophy.
With absolute candor and modesty he gives Marx credit for the theory of
the materialistic conception of history, upon the enunciation and proof
of which he had himself worked almost incessantly ever since the first
idea of the theory had occurred to them, forty years prior to the time
when he wrote this work. The footnote to the first page of the fourth
part is the testimony of a collaborator to the genius of his
fellow-workman, an example of appreciation and modest self-effacement
which it would not be easy to match, and to which literary men who work
together are not over-prone. Nothing else could bear more eloquent
testimony to the loftiness of character and sincerity of purpose of
these two exiles.
The Marxian philosophy of history is clearly stated, and so fully
explained by Engels that there is no need to go over the ground again,
and there only remains to call attention to some of the modern
developments in the direction of rigidity of interpretation, and to the
exaggeration of the broad theory of the predominance of the economic
factor into a hard and fast doctrine of economic determinism.
When we examine the claims of Engels on behalf of the materialistic
doctrine it will be found that they are not by any means of such a
nature as to warrant the extreme conclusions of subsequent socialist
publicists and leaders. It must be remembered that the subject of the
influence of economic conditions on religious and political phenomena
has been closely examined of late years and continual and accumulating
evidence has been forthcoming respecting the remarkable influence of
economic facts upon all other manifestations of social activity. It is
very probable that the successful investigations in this new field have
led, temporarily, to the formation of exaggerated ideas as to the actual
value of the economic factor.
Marx, in one of his short critical notes on Feuerbach, says: "The
materialistic doctrine that men are products of conditions and
education, different men therefore products of other conditions, and a
different kind of education, forgets that circumstances may be altered
by man and that the educator has himself to be educated." In other
words, the problem, like all problems, possesses at least two
quantities; it is not a question solely of conditions, economic or
otherwise; it is a question of man and conditions, for the man is never
dissolved in the conditions, but exists as a separate entity, and these
two elements, man and conditions, act and react the one upon the other.
This is quite a different position from that taken by Lafargue in his
fight with Jaures. Lafargue there argued that economic development is
the sole determinant of progress, and pronounces in favor of economic
determinism, thus reducing the whole of history and, consequently, the
dominating human motives to but one elementary motive. Belfort Bax, the
well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument
against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of
the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His
remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here
quoted in his own language. He says in "Outlooks from a New Standpoint":
"The endeavor to reduce the whole of Human life to one element alone, to
reconstruct all history on the basis of Economics, as already said,
ignores the fact that every concrete reality must have a material and a
formal side,--that is, it must have at least two ultimate elements--all
reality as opposed to abstraction consisting in a synthesis. The attempt
to evolve the many-sidedness of Human life out of one of its factors, no
matter how important that factor may be, reminds one of the attempts of
the early pre-Socratic Greeks to reduce nature to one element, such as
water, air, fire, etc."
And again:
"The precise form a movement takes, be it intellectual, ethical or
artistic, I fully admit, is determined by the material circumstances of
the society in which it acquires form and shape, but it is also
determined by those fundamental psychological tendencies which have
given it birth."
Enrico Ferri, the famous Italian member of the Chamber of Deputies and
criminologist, appears to be at one with Bax in this matter. He says,
quoting from a recent translation of his "Socialism and Modern Science":
"It is perfectly true that every phenomenon as well as every
institution--moral, juridicial or political--is simply the result of
the economic phenomena and the conditions of the transitory, physical
and historical environments. But as a consequence of that law of natural
causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of
numerous concurrent causes, and not of one cause alone, and that every
effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary
to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this
true idea.
"Just as all psychical manifestations of the individual are the result
of the organic conditions (temperament) and of the environment in which
he lives, in the same way, all the social manifestations of a people are
the resultant of their organic conditions (race) and of the environment,
as these are the determining causes of the given economic organization
which is the physical basis of life."
These may be said to be fairly representative of the views of the
opposition to the extreme of economic determinism.
The whole controversy has spread over a tremendous amount of ground and
involves much reading. Some of the chief results have lately been
summarized by Professor Seligman in his "Economic Interpretation of
History." (Macmillan, 1902.) His written views show a closer
approximation to and understanding of the teachings of the socialist
philosophy on this subject than we have been accustomed to receive at
the hands of official savants, so that it would seem as if the value of
Marx's work was at last beginning to be appreciated even in the foggy
studies of the professors. Two extracts from the writings of Engels are
quoted by Professor Seligman. These extracts apparently go to prove that
Engels by no means contemplated the extreme construction which has been
placed upon the doctrine, and that he would find such a construction
inconsistent with his general views.
These extracts are quoted here for the purpose of further elucidating
the views of Engels and as further explanatory of the position assumed
by him in the last part of the work under consideration.
They form part of a series of articles written for the "Sozialistische
Akademiker" in 1890, and are as follows:
"Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that the younger men
have sometimes laid more stress on the economic side than it deserves.
In meeting the attacks of our opponents it was necessary for us to
emphasize the dominant principle denied by them, and we did not always
have the time, place, or opportunity to let the other factors which were
concerned in the mutual action and reaction get their deserts."
And in another letter to the same magazine he says: "According to the
materialistic view of history, the factor which is, in last instance,
decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life.
More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when anyone
distorts this so as to read that the economic factor is the sole element
he converts the statement into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase.
The economic condition is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure--the political forms of the class-contests, and their
results, the constitutions--the legal forms and also all the reflexes of
these actual contests in the brains of the participants, the political,
legal, philosophical theories, the religions views--all these exert an
influence on the development of the historical struggles, and in many
instances determine their form."
Here we may leave this much disputed matter for the present, as any
involved discussion of controversial questions would be out of place
here. The question in its ultimate form is merely scholastic, for not
even the most extreme determinist would hold that only the economic
argument must be relied upon by the orators and the press of the
proletarian movement. Any one, however, who wishes to pursue the subject
farther can find abundant material in the already great and growing
amount of literature in connection with it.
There is no doubt that the ideas of Marx respecting the basis of
historical progress have already revolutionized the teaching of history
in the universities, although but few professors have been honest enough
to give him credit for it. The economic factor continually acquires
greater importance in the eyes of the student of history, but the
practical discoverer of this factor is still slighted and the results of
his labors are assimilated with a self-satisfied hypocrisy which is,
unfortunately, characteristic of the colleges of the English-speaking
countries.
The bourgeois writers upon socialism generally content themselves with
the bold statement that Marx employs the dialectic method of
investigation and statement. This is so much Greek to the ordinary
reader, and the subject of the dialectic as used by socialist writers
requires a few words of explanation.
The first part of this work is very valuable, therefore, as showing what
Marx and Engels meant when they used the expression, and as declaring
their estimation of that method compared with that in general use in
their day, and always, prior to their time, employed in philosophy,
history and economics.
A fuller and more detailed definition of the dialectic as applied by
Engels is given by that philosopher in his famous reply to Eugene
Duhring known as the "Umwaelzung der Wissenschaft." In that work a more
thorough and patient investigation is made into the sources of
materialistic philosophy of the socialist movement, for the reputation
of his antagonist appears to have acted as a spur to Engels' faculties
which certainly never showed to better advantage than in that work. A
portion of the argument, in fact an abstract of the general train of
reasoning, with the omission of the more obviously controversial parts,
has been reprinted under the title of "Socialism from Utopia to
Science." The following quotation is taken from the translation prepared
for the "People" in 1892:
"We also find, upon a closer enquiry, that the two poles of an
antithesis, such as positive and negative, are as inseparable from as
they are opposed to each other, and that, despite their antagonism, they
mutually pervade each other; and in the same way we find cause and
effect to be conceptions whose force exists only when applied to a
single instance, but which, soon as we consider that instance in its
connection with the cosmos, run into each other and dissolve in the
contemplation of that universal action and reaction where cause and
effect constantly change places--that which is effect, now and here,
becoming, then and yonder, cause, and vice versa.
"None of these processes and methods of reasoning fits in the
metaphysical framework of thought. To dialectics, however, which takes
in the objects and their conceivable images above all in their
connections, their sequence, their motion, their rise and decline,
processes like the above are so many attestations of its own method of
procedure. Nature furnishes the test to dialectics, and this much we
must say for modern natural science, that it has contributed towards
this test an extremely rich and daily increasing material, whereby it
has demonstrated that, in the last instance, nature proceeds upon
dialectical, not upon metaphysical methods, that it does not move upon
the eternal sameness of a perpetually recurring circle, but that it goes
through an actual historic evolution.
"This new German philosophy culminated in the system of Hegel. There
for the first time--and herein consists its merit--the whole natural,
historic, and intellectual world was presented as a process, i. e.,
engaged in perpetual motion, change, transformation and development.
Viewed from this standpoint, the history of mankind no longer appeared
as a wild tangle of senseless deeds of violence, all equally to be
rejected by a ripened philosophic judgment, and which it were best to
forget as soon as possible, but as the process of the development of
mankind itself--a development whose gradual march, through all its stray
paths, and its eternal law, through all its seeming fortuitousness, it
now became the task of the intellect to trace and to discover."
Kirkup, in his "History of Socialism," has this to say upon the
dialectic method of investigation as used by Marx: "In the system of
Marx, it means that the business of enquiry is to trace the connection
and concatenation in the links that make up the process of historic
evolution, to investigate how one stage succeeds another in the
development of society, the facts and forms of human life and history
not being stable and stereotyped things, but the ever-changing
manifestations of the fluent and unresting real, the course of which it
is the duty of science to reveal."
The translator has endeavored to render the meaning of the original in
as simple an English form as possible, and to, generally speaking, avoid
technical terms.
AUSTIN LEWIS.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
In the preface of the "Critique of Political Economy," published at
Berlin, in 1859, Marx explained how we two, in 1845, in Brussels,
intended to work out together the antagonism of our views--that is, the
materialistic philosophy of history, as developed by Marx--to the
ideological German philosophy, and, in fact, to compare it with our
present philosophic knowledge. The design was carried out in the form of
a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two big octavo
volumes, had long been at its intended place of publication in
Westphalia, when we received the news that altered circumstances did not
permit of its being printed. We postponed the publication of the
manuscript indefinitely, all the more willingly, as we had attained our
main object, an understanding of our own position.
Since then more than forty years have elapsed, and Marx has died
without either of us having had an opportunity of coming back to the
antithesis. As regards our position with reference to Hegel, we have
explained that, as occasion has arisen, but, nowhere, as a whole. We
never came back to Feuerbach, who occupies an intermediate position
between the philosophy of Hegel and our own.
In the meantime the Marxian philosophy has found champions beyond the
boundaries of Germany and of Europe, and in all the languages of the
civilized world. On the other hand, the classic German philosophy has
had a sort of new-birth abroad, particularly in England and Scandinavia,
and even in Germany they appear to be substituting the thin soup of
eclecticism which seems to flow from the universities under the name of
philosophy.
Under these circumstances a short, compact explanation of our relations
to the Hegelian philosophy, of our going forth and departure from it,
appears to me to be more and more required. And just in the same way a
full recognition of the influence which Feuerbach, more than all the
other post-Hegelian philosophers, had over us, during the period of our
youthful enthusiasm, presents itself to me as an unendurable debt of
honor. I also seize the opportunity the more readily since the editor of
the "Neue Zeit" has asked me for a critical discussion of Starcke's book
on Feuerbach. My work was published in the fourth and fifth volumes of
1886 of that publication and here appears in a revised special edition.
Before sending this manuscript to press I once again hunted up and
examined the old manuscript of 1845-6. The part of it dealing with
Feuerbach is not complete. The portion completed consists in an
exposition of the materialistic view of history and only proves how
incomplete at that time was our knowledge of economic history. The
criticism of Feuerbach's doctrine is not given in it. It was therefore
unsuitable for our purpose. On the other hand, I have found in an old
volume of Marx the eleven essays on Feuerbach printed here as an
appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled in for later elaboration,
not in the least degree prepared for the press, but invaluable, as the
first written form, in which is planted the genial germ of the new
philosophy.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS.
London, 21 February, 1888.
FEUERBACH
I.
The volume before us brings us at once to a period which, in the matter
of time, lies a full generation behind us, but which is as foreign to
the present generation in Germany as if it were quite a century old.
And, still, it was the period of the preparation of Germany for the
revolution of 1848, and all that has happened to us since is only a
continuation of 1848, only a carrying out of the last will and testament
of the revolution.
Just as in France in the eighteenth, so in Germany in the nineteenth
century, revolutionary philosophic conceptions introduced a breaking up
of existing political conditions. But how different the two appear! The
French were engaged in open fight with all recognized science, with the
Church, frequently also with the State, their writings were published
beyond the frontiers in Holland or in England, and they themselves were
frequently imprisoned in the Bastile. The Germans, on the contrary, were
professors, appointed instructors of youth by the State, their writings,
recognized text-books, and their definite system of universal progress,
the Hegelian, raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian
philosophy of government. And behind these professors, behind their
pedantically obscure utterances, in their heavy wearisome periods, was
it possible that the revolution could conceal itself? Were not just the
people who were looked upon at that time as the leaders of the
revolution, the Liberals, the bitterest opponents of the brain-turning
philosophy? But what neither the Governmentalists nor the Liberals saw,
that saw, at least one man, and that man was Heinrich Heine.
Let us take an example. No philosophic statement has so invited the
thanks of narrow-minded governments and the anger of the equally narrow
Liberals as the famous statement of Hegel: "All that is real is
reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real." This was essentially
the blessing of all that is, the philosophical benediction of despotism,
police-government, star-chamber justice and the censorship. So Frederick
William III and his subjects understood it; but, according to Hegel, not
everything which exists is, without exception, real. The attribute of
reality belongs only to that which is at the same time necessary.
Reality proves itself in the course of its development as necessity. Any
governmental act--Hegel himself instances the example of a certain "tax
law"--by no means strikes him as real in the absence of other qualities.
But what is necessary proves itself in the last instance as reasonable
also, and applied to the Prussian government, the Hegel doctrine,
therefore, only means, this state is reasonable, corresponding with
reason, as long as it is necessary, and if it appear to us an evil, but
in spite of the evil still continues to exist, the evil of the
government finds its justification and its explanation in the
corresponding evil of the subjects. The Prussians of that day had the
government which they deserved.
But reality, according to Hegel, is by no means an attribute which
belongs to a given social or political condition, under all
circumstances and at all times. Quite the contrary. The Roman Republic
was real, but the Roman Empire which replaced it was also real. The
French Monarchy had become unreal in 1789, that is, it had lost all the
quality of necessity, and was so contrary to reason that it had to be
destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the
greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the
revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality
becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its
rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality,
peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death
without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. And
so the Hegelian statement through the Hegelian dialectic turns to its
opposite--all that is real in the course of human history becomes in the
process of time irrational and is, therefore, according to its destiny,
irrational, and has from the beginning inherited want of rationality,
and everything which is reasonable in the minds of men is destined to
become real, however much it may contradict the apparent reality of
existing conditions. The statement of the rationality of everything real
dissolves itself, according to the Hegelian mode of thought, in the
other, "All that stands has ultimately only so much worth that it must
fall."
But just there lay the true significance and the revolutionary character
of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the conclusion of all progress
since Kant, we must here limit ourselves) in that it, once and for all,
gave the coup de grace to finiteness of results of human thought and
action. Truth, which it is the province of philosophy to recognize, was
no longer, according to Hegel, a collection of ready-made dogmatic
statements, which once discovered must only be thoroughly learned; truth
lay now in the process of knowledge itself, in the long historical
development of learning, which climbs from lower to ever higher heights
of knowledge, without ever reaching the point of so-called absolute
truth, where it can go no further, where it has nothing more to look
forward to, except to fold its hands in its lap and contemplate the
absolute truth already gained. And just as it is in the realm of
philosophic knowledge, so is it with every other kind of knowledge, even
with that of practical commerce. And just as little as knowledge can
history find a conclusion, complete in one completed ideal condition of
humanity, a completed society, a perfect state, are things which can
only exist as phantasies, on the contrary, all successive historical
conditions are only places of pilgrimage in the endless evolutionary
progress of human society from the lower to the higher. Every step is
necessary and useful for the time and circumstances to which it owes its
origin, but it becomes weak and without justification under the newer
and higher conditions which develop little by little in its own womb, it
must give way to the higher form, which in turn comes to decay and
defeat. As the bourgeoisie through the greater industry, competition,
and the world market destroyed the practical value of all stable and
anciently honored institutions, so this dialectic philosophy destroyed
all theories of absolute truth, and of an absolute state of humanity
corresponding with them. In face of it nothing final, absolute or sacred
exists, it assigns mortality indiscriminately, and nothing can exist
before it save the unbroken process of coming into existence and passing
away, the endless passing from the lower to the higher, the mere
reflection of which in the brain of the thinker it is itself. It has
indeed also a conservative side, it recognizes the suitability of a
given condition of knowledge and society for its time and conditions,
but only so far. This conservatism of this philosophical view is
relative, its revolutionary character is absolute, the only absolute
which it allows to exist.
We do not, at this point, need to go into the question whether this
philosophy is consistent throughout with the present position of natural
science which predicts for the earth a possible end and for its
inhabitability, a fairly certain one; which, therefore, also recognizes
that in human history there is not only an upshooting but also a
down-growing branch. We find ourselves, at any rate, still a
considerable distance from the turning point, where the history of
society begins to descend, and we cannot expect the Hegelian philosophy
to meddle with a subject which at that time science had not yet placed
upon the order of the day.
What must, indeed, be said is this, that the Hegelian development does
not, according to Hegel, show itself so clearly. It is a necessary
consequence of his method which he himself has never drawn with this
explicitness. And for this simple reason, because he was compelled to
make a system, and a system of philosophy must, in accordance with all
its understood pretensions, close somewhere with a definition of
absolute truth. So Hegel, therefore, in his logic, urged that this
eternal truth is nothing else but the logical, that is, the historical
process itself; yet in spite of this he finds himself compelled to place
an end to this process, since he must come to an end with his system
somewhere or other. He can make this end a beginning again in logic,
since here the point of conclusion--the absolute idea, which is only
absolute in so far as he has nothing clear to say about it--divests
itself in nature, that is, becomes transformed, and later on, in
spirit, that is, in thought and in history, comes to itself again. But
in the last philosophical analysis, a return to the beginning is only
possible in one way, namely, if one place the end of history in this
fact, that mankind comes to a knowledge of the absolute idea, and
explain that this knowledge of the absolute idea is obtained in the
Hegelian philosophy. But in this way the whole dogmatic content of the
Hegelian philosophy in the matter of absolute truth is explained in
contradiction to his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dogmatic
methods, and thereby the revolutionary side becomes smothered under the
dominating conservative. And what can be said of philosophical knowledge
can also be said of historical practice. Mankind, that is, in the person
of Hegel, has arrived at the point of working out the absolute idea, and
must also practically have arrived so far as to make the absolute idea a
reality. The practical political demands of the abstract idea upon his
contemporaries cannot, therefore, be stretched too far. And so we find
as the conclusion of the philosophy of Rights that the absolute idea
shall realize itself in that limited monarchy which William III. so
persistently, vainly promised to his subjects; therefore, in a limited,
moderate, indirect control of the possessing classes, suitable to the
dominating small bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in addition, the
necessity to us of the existence of the nobility is shown in a
speculative fashion.
The essential usefulness of the system is sufficient to explain the
manufacture of a very tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly
revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion
springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as
in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine.
Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere,
but they were neither of them quite free from German philistinism.
But all this does not hinder the Hegelian system from playing an
incomparably greater role than any earlier system and by virtue of this
role developing riches of thought which are astounding even to-day.
Phenomenology of the mind (which one may parallel with embryology and
palaeontology of the mind), an evolution of the individual
consciousness, through its different steps, expressed as a brief
reproduction of the steps through which the consciousness of man has
historically passed, logic, natural philosophy, mental philosophy, and
the latter worked out separately in its detailed historical
subdivisions, philosophy of history, of jurisprudence, of religion,
history of philosophy, esthetics, etc. Hegel labored in all these
different historical fields to discover and prove the thread of
evolution, and as he was not only a creative genius, but also a man of
encyclopedic learning, he was thus, from every point of view, the maker
of an epoch. It is self-evident that by virtue of the necessities of the
"System" he must very often take refuge in certain forced constructions,
about which his pigmy opponents make such an ado even at the present
time. But these constructions are only the frames and scaffoldings of
his work; if one does not stop unnecessarily at these but presses on
further into the building one will find uncounted treasures which hold
their full value to-day. As regards all philosophers, their system is
doomed to perish and for this reason, because it emanates from an
imperishable desire of the human soul, the desire to abolish all
contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed
of, we have arrived at the so-called absolute truth, history is at an
end, and yet it will continue to go on, although there is nothing
further left for it to do--thus a newer and more insoluble
contradiction. So soon as we have once perceived--and to this perception
no one has helped us more than Hegel himself--that the task thus imposed
upon philosophy signifies nothing different than the task that a single
philosopher shall accomplish what it is only possible for the entire
human race to accomplish, in the course of its progressive
development--as soon as we understand that, it is all over with
philosophy in the present sense of the word. In this way one discards
the absolute truth, unattainable for the individual, and follows instead
the relative truths attainable by way of the positive sciences, and the
collection of their results by means of the dialectic mode of thought.
With Hegel universal philosophy comes to an end, on the one hand,
because he comprehended in his system its entire development on the
greatest possible scale; on the other hand, because he showed us the
way, even if he did not know it himself, out of this labyrinth of
systems, to a real positive knowledge of the world.