Feuerbach’s Materialism
[Jan van Kessel's Still Life]
In tracing the intellectual development of Karl Marx, Sidney Hook discusses, in addition to G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, foremost critic of Hegel from the left, whose materialism deeply impressed the young Marx. Analogous to Marx’s own critique, Feuerbach complains of Hegel’s idealism that its “method of deducing existence from essence, the ideal from the real, established nothing which it did not already assume at the outset” (226). “Hegel [moreover] could only sustain the appearance of observing this method by systematically distorting the character of sense perception, by hustling it, so to speak, out of the world of space and time and material organisms into a timeless realm of meaning” (226).
In order to substantiate these claims, Feuerbach deploys a pointed critique of Hegel’s systematic philosophy. Hegel’s Absolute Idea, “a meaningful organic totality perpetually renewing itself outside of time,” is, Feuerbach argues, not the conclusion drawn from the supposedly objective, universal, culturally presuppositionless philosophy that Hegel develops, but is rather the “real beginning, [the] real presupposition” with which Hegel starts (227-8). Granted, systematic thought in which the universe is taken as an organic totality—where everything is related to everything, the end is already contained in the beginning and the end necessarily leads back to the beginning—indeed permits the move by which Hegel posits the Absolute Idea in the beginning to find it again in the end (228). Feuerbach contends, however, that this organic systematicity—on which Hegel’s whole philosophy hangs—is neither tentatively adopted nor definitely proven but is instead “an assumption dogmatically begged to begin with [by Hegel] and not submitted to controls of experience” (228).
There are two opposed emphases here: idea and the system for Hegel; experience and sense perception for Feuerbach. As former follower-turned-foremost critic of Hegel, Feuerbach sought to overturn Hegel by standing him up on his feet, asserting the primacy of sense perception. The abstract ideas with which Hegel, standing on his head, begins has, Feuerbach argues, led Hegel to construct a system in which all things (matter) are made to be fitted (thereby distorting their nature or ignoring certain parts) to the developments of an Absolute Idea, which, as Pure Being, has no determination—and thereby no apparent/provable connection to the material world in which, Feuerbach stresses, we live. In order to devise this connection (uniting pure, absolute Idea to the many different things in the world), Feuerbach argues that Hegel distorts the workings of sense perception.
Hegel does this when, through a discussion of the demonstratives this, here, and now (which show that all words connote meanings inexhaustible by the particular context in which they are applied), he rejects particulars (claiming that they are in fact universals) and concludes that “the universal is the truth of sense-certainty and since speech can only express this truth, then in so far as we desire to refer to a sensory fact, it is impossible to say what we mean” (229-30). What Hegel implies by this is that “sense-perception [. . . is really but] a meaningless shadow irrelevant to knowledge, an obscuring veil through which reason must penetrate to discover the truth” (230). Against this, Hegel suggests that “[material] things [. . . are] congeries of universal completely knowable and completely logical,” thereby accessible by/through the pure, absolute Idea, traced through systematic philosophy.
Against Hegel, Feuerbach asserts that sense perception is “the primary medium through which the intractabilities of nature manifested themselves” (226). Thus for Feuerbach philosophy has to start “with life, in all its concrete wants and needs,” with sensory experience as the primary access to it (paving the way to knowledge), without which “there could be no recognition of the differences between things” which is what characterizes them in their materiality (which is the mode in which they begin, where the this and that that Hegel has refuted are, Feuerbach points out, really but logical categories, objects of pure thought whose unreality does not cancel the reality of the objects of the senses that they refer to) (229, 230). Systematic knowledge is of course not possible with sense perception alone. Feuerbach points out, however, that this does not mitigate the fact that sense perception is where the inquiry must begin (as happens in science, in touch as it is with ordinary experience, in contrast to philosophy that seems unable to “derive its problems from practical life,” thereby causing it to regard sense perception “as an obscuring element hostile to thought”) (231).
Schelling had likewise leveled a critique against Hegel, but, unlike Feuerbach, from a religious and reactionary perspective. Departing from the idealistic tendency to conceive of nature as a construction of the self, Schelling had asserted that nature is “independent of, [. . .] yet related to, the self” (a position he later reversed as he identified thought and being and asserted that the world was a product of divine imagining), an other self that is “only the visible organism of [human] understanding,” which is to say, of imaginative perception (233, 234). Both Schelling and Feuerbach thus stress “feeling or affective experience as a necessary element in the knowledge process” (236). Unlike Schelling, however, Feuerbach “does not contrast feeling with reason, nor hold it up as a superior organ of intellectual vision capable of giving true conclusions about the world not vouchsafed by science” (236). For Feuerbach, “whatever unity exists in the world must be discovered by the methods of science, not by intuition, imaginative synthesis, or any other surrogate for analysis and experiment” (236). Thus when Feuerbach refers to feeling, he is not using the word as “a mode of knowledge of the One, God, Universe,” but “as a concept of empirical psychology” (i.e. as synonymous with sensation?) (236).
In his philosophical positions, it becomes apparent that Feuerbach subscribed to several different variants of the doctrine of materialism. He did, however, (in early years) attempt to definitively refute one such variant: absolute or metaphysical materialism. While Feuerbach maintains the dependence of mind on body, he is quick to point out that this does not mean that “the activity of mind which we call thought, and in virtue of which we are able to distinguish between body and mind, is itself material and explicable merely as an activity of the brain. ‘Brain activity is only the condition, and not the positive but the negative condition, of thought.’ Without a brain we cannot think [but] we do not think because of it” (238).
Some materialists, Feuerbach explains, are guilty of reaching conclusions that disallow the possibility of the existence of anything other than matter, if not outright asserting that all there is is matter (238). Against such crude and totalizing materialism, Feuerbach asserts that a thing “must be understood in terms of its own activity, its own products, before it can be controlled by a study of its conditions” (239). Thought, being of a different kind from matter, must thus first be encountered on its own terms, and in this “it is the study of ideas which is relevant [. . .] and not the study of the body” (239). Feuerbach moreover asserts that products of matter do not have to likewise be matter. This is the case with thought, which is not matter like the brain that conceived it, but which is nonetheless real (239). Unable to refute their existence, Feuerbach mentions that some materialists instead deny the efficacy of thoughts. Once again opposed to such crude conceptions, Feuerbach recognizes the genuine potency of thoughts (as seen, for example, in suicidal acts) (240).
Even as he asserts its primacy, Feuerbach acknowledges the limitations of sense experience as conveyor of knowledge. “Always of the present,” sense experience, Feuerbach clarifies, “can say nothing about the future” (240). Immediately its own object (with no remove, no detachment; thereby no reflection or anticipation), the senses can also say nothing about their own nature (240). “Experience, which Feuerbach admits is always indispensable, can only check, complete and supplement what thought discovers [where what is discovered is first (i.e. as a matter of chronological and logical priority) sensed], but the act of discovery itself is an a priori one” (my emphasis). The act of discovery is an “act of genius [which] ‘is nothing but the anticipation of experience, the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori’” (where a priori means not knowledge independent of experience nor the condition of all experience, but includes the understanding and sense phenomena, where “sense images [. . .] are used by thought, necessarily stimuli to discovery of the truth but not truths themselves”) (241, 242). Even with a changed position later on, “nature for [Feuerbach] retained an intelligible pattern even when he was not sure whether its intelligibility was an object of the understanding or an object of sensation” (242).
Straddling through different traditions, the materialism that Feuerbach developed is thus one that asserts the primacy of the senses and gives priority to experience, but one which is not total in providing room for thought and recognizing its active role (even if après le deluge). The material with which Feuerbach starts is, however, to Marx a static one. As such, he needs to combine Feuerbach’s materialism with Hegel’s dialectic, thereby enabling him to come up with a truly historical materialism.
Bibliography
Hook, Sidney. From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1950.
