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Historical Materialism: on Feuerbach and Before

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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Foreword

In 1845 in Brussels, Marx and Engels settled accounts with [their] erstwhile philosophical conscience [Gewissen], opposing German philosophy and achiving their main purpose of self-clarification on the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx.

After German Ideology, neither of them wrote specifically about their relation to Hegel, and to Feuerbach, who made the bridge from Hegel to historical materialism.

Close to 1888, Classical Marxism’s Weltanschauung was making the people intrested to look again into classical German philosophy. Engels thinks it’s because people appear to be getting tired of the pauper’s broth of eclecticism […] under the name of philosophy, which I assume he thinks people were earning for dialectical materialism.

This text is about their relation to the Hegelian philosophy, of how [they] proceeded, as well as of how [they] separated, from it, and the influence of the post-Hegelian philosophers, especially Feuerbach, during the Sturm und Drang.

Hegel

One generation ago — at the time of the writting — it was the period of Germany’s preparation for the Revolution of 1848.

Just as in France in the 18th century, so in Germany in the 19th, a philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse. But how different the two looked! The French were in open combat against all official science, against the church and often also against the state… On the other hand, the Germans were professors, state-appointed instructors of youth; their writings were recognized textbooks, and the termination system of the whole development — the Hegelian system — was even raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state! Was it possible that a revolution could hide behind these professors, behind their obscure, pedantic phrases, their ponderous, wearisome sentences?…

… No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow-minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement:

All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.

was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich, und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.

— Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, § 6

That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings and censorship… According to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality [Wirklichkeit] belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary [notwendig]:

In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.

die wahrhafte Wirklichkeit ist Notwendigkeit: was wirklich ist, ist in sich notwendig.

— Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Zusatz zu § 270

Die entwickelte Wirklichkeit, als der in eins fallende Wechsel des Inneren und Äußeren, der Wechsel ihrer entgegengesetzten Bewegungen, die zu einer Bewegung vereint sind, ist die Notwendigkeit.

— Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, § 147

… According to Hegel, reality is, however, in no way an attribute predictable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times… And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses it necessity, its right of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality — peacefully if the old has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.

alles was entsteht Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht.

— Goethe, Faust, Der Tragödie erster Teil, Studierzimmer

… Precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy […] that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained… Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice [praktisch] all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection [Widerspiegelung] of this process in the thinking brain…

Theses

As said in the Foreword of Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach, these the absolut not intended for publication. Engels did change some things off of the original manuscript, while trying to not remove its essence.