Marx’s Critique of Feuerbach’s Materialism

[Paul Cézanne's Still Life with Basket of Apples]

Karl Marx explores his relationship with Ludwig Feuerbach in the list of theses that he wrote about the master (the “Theses on Feuerbach”). In From Hegel to Marx, Sidney Hook generously provides the context of these theses (reading them alongside The German Ideology). (The majority of the quotes in this post, including those by Marx, have been taken from Hook’s book—except, that is, for the theses themselves, in which case a T followed by the number of the thesis follows the quote and the translation comes from the McLellan anthology.) By deploying a pointed critique of the materialist tradition that Feuerbach comes out of and considering it alongside (Hegelian) idealism (seemingly its antithesis), Marx came up with a brilliant methodological synthesis that is his original conception of matter and the subject: historical materialism grounded in humanism.

The basis of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach is the objection that, although materialist, Feuerbach’s philosophical approach is (in overlooking man) neither historical nor concrete. In thesis I, Marx makes the bold assertion that all previous materialisms—including Feuerbach’s—had not been able to adequately account for the human subject. Starting from its earliest inception (perhaps with the ancient atomists) and stretching all the way to Hobbes and Locke (British empiricists), Marx claims that materialism had tried to explain (in Hook’s words) “not only the composition of man’s body but the contents of his mind as resultant effects of [material] elements [e.g. atoms] and energies [e.g. either forces of movement or passions/affections] streaming into him from without” in simple cause-and-effect dynamics (274, 275). (Even Feuerbach’s materialism, which provided some active role for thought, still had, in Marx’s view, the tendency (in starting from and relying primarily on experience and the senses) of making of thinking a mere reflective affair.) Thus, in materialism, Marx notes, “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation” (T1). This excluded the possibility, indeed the reality, of the “redirective activity of man,” an activity that, to Marx, is inherent in reality (275). Against this traditional materialist conception, Marx asserts that reality is “sensuous human activity, practice, [. . .] subjective”—a conception at the heart of any revolutionary philosophy (T1).

A way out of mechanical determinism, Marx recognizes, had been sketched by the idealists through their more sophisticated account of subjectivity. “Despite the fantastic and, literally construed, unintelligible constructions of the German idealists from Kant to Hegel,” Hook notes that “their great contribution was their insight into the essential activity of mind” (275). In contrast to the materialist account of thought as a mere effect of mechanical impulse, the idealists (esp. Kant) had asserted that even the simplest perception (at its very description as a mechanical effect) involved “some active subject who approaches it with this category rather than that, with a whole set of values, assumptions, memories and anticipations which, whatever their origin, now contribute to what is seen and thought” (275). Thus “in what-was-given-to-knowledge, something was involved about the subject-to-which-it-was-given,” a subject that was no mere passive receptor of mechanical signals but was rather a subject actively involved in the perception (and perhaps even the constitution) of the object being so perceived (275).

The trouble with the idealist approach, however, was that by virtue of its idealistic activity (which attributed to it a bigger role in perception), the mind was thought to constitute/create the things that it thought about. That is to say, the idealists took not only the character but the existence of the object being thought by mind as deduced/derived from it (275). Hegel did this in the teleological narrative he tells “in which objects and subjects [a]re reconstituted in an interacting process whose constituent elements [a]re materials, furnished by nature and previous history, and activities, resulting from the psycho-physical powers of [the mind of] man in some historical context” in a process that “was supposed to have transpired in a timeless divine Subject” (276) (my emphasis). Feuerbach had, of course, in a significant materialist move, critiqued this idealistic move. Arguing against Hegel, Feuerbach asserted that “the predicates of the divine Subject [that Hegel speaks about. . . a]re nothing more than representations of the powers of the human mind, expressed in the language of metaphor and hyperbole” (alienated from themselves and made transcendent) (276). Thus the activities that Hegel attributes to God, Feuerbach points out, are really but activities of the human mind—some of which (esp. the creation of things), as anyone in a materialist setting would recognize, the mind really cannot do.

While Marx was deeply impressed by Feuerbach’s move against Hegel (in fact he performed an analogous move), Marx finds Feuerbach’s approach itself to be unsatisfactory. This is because, as Marx points out, the man that Feuerbach talks about, whenever he uses the word, is really abstract man taken out of the social and historical contexts that conditioned, among other things, how this man’s mind works. Marx calls Feuerbach’s abstract man “essential man, not men as they existed here and now, in city and country, in high estate or low—but man as such, realiter, a kind of man in which ‘a pack of scrofulous, work-worn, starving men’ were equal to other men, a type of man in the light of whose meaning all historical differences between individuals, groups, and classes were superficial accidents” (277). Thus even while Marx credits Feuerbach for wanting to look at “sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects,” he points out that “he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity” (T1).

This abstraction, Marx notes, led Feuerbach to “a blank confrontation of nature and man [of things and consciousness, which . . .] ended in a blind alley [. . . where Feuerbach, like the earlier materialists,] could not get any process started between the two except by dissolving the latter into the former” (276). Worse, Feuerbach, Marx points out, actually relapsed into (contemplative) idealism. His abstract conception of man was that of an ideal man that “could have been at any time and any place,” which, since it is “not related to the concrete needs of men in the concrete social situations in which they find themselves, [. . .] provide[s] no leverage with which to change the existing state of affairs” (279).

Marx thus found both materialist and idealist approaches troublesome. In both, he saw the common (fallacious) move in which “a relatively fixed element—matter in the one case, the subject in the other—[. . . is taken] as a starting point for the development observable in nature, man and society” (276). Marx, for his part, does not deny that he himself starts with presuppositions. Unlike materialist or idealist presuppositions, however, Marx claims that his presuppositions are “real presuppositions from which we can abstract ourselves only in imagination” (277). This is because, as Marx describes them, they are “presuppositions observable in purely empirical fashion”—thereby “real”—namely the simple fact of “individuals as they actually are, their actions, and their material conditions of life” (277). From this description of the “active life process” of men, history, Marx claims, “cease[s] to be a collection of dead facts, as it still is among abstract empiricists, or an imaginary activity of imaginary subjects as among the idealists” (277).

In his approach, Marx claims, the grand oppositional question between nature and man/mind disappears. This is because the focus is shifted towards concrete, historical needs, which, Marx claims, traverse both the material and the ideal. Hook explains:

The possibility of having needs and satisfying them, that which makes men need-ful creatures, has its explanation in the physical environment of man and the biological structure of his body. The specific forms through which these needs, both of the senses and the mind are gratified, as well as the development of these needs, are attributable to man’s social organi[z]ation. The interaction between physical conditions and social organi[z]ation is history. [. . .] Conditioned as they are by their environment, human beings can change that environment or preserve it because their activity, including thought, is an objective activity having objective effects. (278)

In other words, in shifting the question toward human needs, Marx is able to displace the dichotomy between matter and consciousness. At the same time, by paying attention to concrete needs—which can be both needs of the body and needs of the mind, which are based on both individual biology and social material conditions but, with the help of thought, depending on material conditions, are changeable by man—Marx is able to take account of both.

Towards the end of thesis I and in theses II and III, Marx elaborates on the theory of praxis (or on theory as praxis), which clarifies his philosophical position that straddles materialism and idealism. Praxis, Hook explains, outlines “theory as a guide to action; practice [as] the specific activities which had to be carried out to test the theory” (282). Praxis thus means not simply practicality but selective behavior (for a select purpose) (guided by theory): as Marx says, “‘practical-critical’ activity” (281, T1). More precisely, theory “sets up [. . . activities] in transforming things in behalf of social needs, [. . . whose] meaning is to be found not in what men say but in what it leads them to do or leave undone” and “actual or possible praxis is not only the locus of meaning but also the test of truth” (281). Hook reflects that praxis is really Marx’s account of “how knowledge c[an] give power” (281). It is important to point out, however, that knowledge is not synonymous with theory (or practice with power).

In thesis II, Marx (as Hook reads it) equates the truth with reality (in fact, Marx equates truth not with reality per se but with “the reality and power, the this-sidedness of [one’s] thinking”) (T2). In idealism, truth consisted in coherence with the whole (e.g. Hegel’s system), tested not according to an idea’s correspondence to empirical fact but simply by virtue of its “logical necessity” (282). Materialism (some strands of which questioned the very existence of ideas) on the other hand “could not develop a theory of truth” since even the criteria of correspondence (with an object) required a standard measure of identity, a common measure that to the materialist had to be material and thus implied that ideas were made of the same stuff as things (282-3).

In sketching out his own theory of truth, Marx departed from both views. Unlike the idealist, Marx could not conceive of reality that did not take into account of material conditions. At the same time, whatever conception of reality was to be developed, it has, in Marx’s view, to include “the redirective judgments of the revolutionist whose primary aim [i]s to transform the world,” phenomena excluded by the mechanical materialist account of things (284). Marx’s assertion that “certain actions must be performed if certain desirable consequences are to follow [. . . thus intimate] a type of judgment whose truth could never be established by the idealistic or traditional materialistic theories” (284).

This is the way in which truth, as Marx says, is a “practical question”—in which, since thought is practically involved in the truth of the real situation, questions/disputes about the status of thought itself (e.g. whether it is real or not) is a “scholastic question,” impertinent to (perhaps even distracting from) the task at hand (because removed from practice), and in which what is “real” is not static but can be changed (by man) (T2). As Hook explains, “The truth of any theory depends upon whether or not the actual consequences which flow from the praxis initiated to test the theory are such that they reali[z]e the predicted consequences” at the same time that “what takes place as a result of practice is not a relevant consequence of the theory unless the conditions involved in the meaning of the theory are met” (284, 285). (Compare with Lukács.) And of course for Marx, “a theory of truth, like any method, is to be judged by the concrete applications made of it” (285). These applications are of course to be made by man (hence the status of truth as something to be proven, something that “man must” do) (T2).

In thesis III, Marx adds that this theory of truth (as opposed to reality)—based on praxis—is not just materialistic or concrete but historical (in this way doubly going beyond Feuerbach). He does this by calling attention (in continuation with thesis II) to man, an active material in history, which most strands of materialism overlooked. In this passage, the specific target are the Utopian Socialists, of which Marx considered Feuerbach to be a part. Against “the simple theory of the causal dependence of mind upon matter” supposedly established/recorded by science, Marx (paraphrased by Hook) asks,

If every idea or program[] is a reflection of the existing world, and is only that, how can human reflection be intelligently guided by some ideal which is yet to be [unseen as yet by “science”], which outruns existence and lights up a possible path for its future development? After history has run its course, by looking away from the multitude of occasions on which the consequences of human activity have had a redirecting influence on the stream of events, it is easy to argue that human ideals were nothing but passive, mirror-like reflections of antecedent realities—even though analysis discloses such a mode of speech to be metaphysical nonsense. But when human beings are faced by real alternatives of action—i.e., alternatives both of which cannot be reali[z]ed although both may be attempted—it is impossible to hold that human ideals are “images.” At those moments they are obviously plans of action! (287)

In other words, like the earlier materialists (and like Hegel and his contemplative philosophy, for that matter), in elevating matter/material over thought, the Utopian Socialists conceived of ideas as merely after-the-fact comprehension/rationalization of matter (posited as primary), making of them but mere reflections of history after it has already taken place. The Utopian Socialists were unique, however, in not altogether quashing the revolutionary potential of ideas (and of the power of men to change circumstances) by combining their crude materialism with socialist ideals. The result, however, was this hierarchical view of the world in which the Utopian Socialists stood apart from—and above of—the rest of mankind. That is to say, while the way of thinking of man in general was theorized by the Utopian Socialists as determined by the circumstances and education of the men who hold them—and thereby faulty—the Utopian Socialists themselves, despite of them belonging to the same milieu, thought of themselves as somehow possessing the right eye that could see through historical circumstances and the right mind to develop the true philosophy (287). This is the way in which Utopian Socialist materialism “divide[d] society into two parts, one of which [i.e. their own] is [posited as] superior to society” in which only in their part are “circumstances [. . . able to be] changed by men” (T3).

Against such hubristic claims, Marx retorts that “it is essential to educate the educator himself” (T3). More pointedly, Marx attacks (in Hook’s words) “the cult of leadership among the Utopian groups, their assumption that they could appeal to any social class, from paupers to princes, for support of their ideals, their belief in a cure-all for every evil including natural stupidity” (287). The move of Utopian Socialism is no mere hubristic/cultish mistake, however. Marx notes that the Utopian Socialist argument that “there was no reason why the[ir] ideals could not have been embodied in practice at any time, except for chance and ignorance,” reveals that for the Utopian Socialists, mental conditions had nothing to do with objective material conditions from which ideas arise (288). Thus the Utopian Socialists, for all their talk of material conditions, were—by Marx’s reckoning—actually not materialist enough.

Instead of elevating a select group of special beings, Marx clarifies that “circumstances are changed by men”—i.e. by all men, dependent upon their needs that serve as the lever for the transformation of historical material conditions (T3). For Marx, there is an interacting process between nature, society, and man, in which need (specifically, man’s needs) is the mediating factor between the three, bringing about change. Hook explains:

The development of the forces of production gives rise to new needs. In the struggle to achieve these needs, ideals are forged to guide activity directed towards a transformation of society. These ideals “express” the needs of the groups or classes who rally around them as standards, “express” them in the sense that they are outgrowths, not reflections, of material conditions of need. The struggle to achieve institutional changes produces changes in those who participate in the struggles. The praxis of trying to bring about a new social order, not abstract doctrine, educates the workers. No Messiah can assure them of anything save of that which they can win for themselves. [. . . Thus] human beings cannot change the world without changing themselves. (289)

In other words, situated as they are in objective material conditions (which are historical and intelligible), men, guided by their needs, when these needs change, cause change to be brought about. This does away with the need for any exceptional beings somehow exempt from the material situation (who, by virtue of that lack of situatedness, would actually not be able to cause change).

In thesis V, Marx returns to a more direct critique of Feuerbach. While recognizing that Feuerbach indeed made an advance from idealism by rejecting abstract thinking for sensory thinking (although idealism, as established above, itself presented an advance to the materialist conception of the subject), Marx complains that he does not go far enough. In ignoring the social and historical context that the human is in, Feuerbach, as Marx says, was unable to “conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity” (T5). While Feuerbach indeed grasps “the sense object,” Marx points out that he does not understand it as “a sensory activity” (by man in a practical situation) (294). This is because Feuerbach’s “essential man” takes man out of specific material conditions, which is what characterizes what he senses, i.e. is the content of sensory thinking. If there is no content to sensation, no specificity or concreteness that one senses, then what is being sensed? Sensation in Feuerbach, like idealist thinking, is thus abstract, not to mention empty.

Similarly, while Feuerbach was right to point out that the idealistic “identification of reality with thought” “overlooked the historical materials which were the prior condition,” Feuerbach’s “identification of reality with sensibility or sensation” “overlooked the elements of selective activity determining the concrete character of sensation” (294). In other words, in identifying reality with what is sensed, Feuerbach, Marx notes, overlooks that there are selective activities (practice) that determine the concrete character of sensation. Sensation itself, Marx asserts, is shaped by the social, material context in which it takes place, a context that has been historically determined by specific selective activities by men. Thus even as Feuerbach was led out of “abstract thinking,” the only step he could take was towards “contemplation,” far short of what Marx expects (T5).

In contrast, “for Marx,” Hook explains,

Sensations [a]re not merely experienced effects of things acting upon the body [. . . but a]re effects of an interaction between an active body and the things surrounding it. The sensations which appear to be passively experienced to a large degree depend for their frequency, their specific context, and even their relative intensity upon where the body looks and listens—in short, upon where the body attends as well as upon what it attends. (294)

In other words, body is material contributing to material interactions, mind enables human body to direct attention to one thing rather than another, do something to the thing it is attending to, and do one thing rather than another. These activities are of course selected (chosen, decided upon) by men in their practical material conditions.

Marx goes even further. Pointing out that sensation is not merely biological, Marx emphasizes its social dimension. After all, the same environment can lead men who come from different cultures to different perceptions/actions (294). Moreover, “through social organi[z]ation man is continually modifying his primary natural environment, reducing its role to that of a pure limiting condition” (294-5). Thus, objects, Marx asserts, are not “God-given eternal fact[s] of nature [as much as] a socially mediated object” (295). This of course does not even take into account of the distance/remove between so-called facts and interpretation of them (which determines what one does with them), which is the true terrain of theory (hence the lack of strict correspondence between theory and knowledge).

In thesis VIII, Marx clarifies what he means by the social when he says it is “essentially practical” (T8). Thinking otherwise, Marx points out, is a misinterpretation (directed by a misguided theory). Hook explains:

According to Marx the basic criteria of intelligibility presupposed a common activity in a common world. Somewhere along the line in every theory, a determinate form of behavio[]r exemplified its meaning. The alleged independence of the so-called non-existential sciences is due to a failure to relate their fundamental concepts to the concrete situations and concrete activities out of which they grow and to which they must in some form or another be applied (299).

In other words, thinking that material things/conditions/events are determinate in themselves (have a life of their own, as it were) are, like the idealistic view that the mind has a power to derive/constitute them, reifications of activities that, in truth, took place in the past, activities that, Marx points out, were carried out by men. Hence Marx’s reminder that “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism [can] find their rational solution [or explanation] in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice” (T8).

The concretely social and historically/humanistically materialist conception of the world that Marx forwards informs his philosophical/political attitude. In thesis IX he complains about the inadequacies of “contemplative materialism” and in thesis X he proposes a new materialist approach. “The highest point reached by contemplative materialism,” Marx argues, is “the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society” (T9). Hook translates this into: contemplative materialism “is the point of view of single individuals in a ‘civic society’” (299). The reference here is Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie, the second section of which is entitled burgerliche Gesellschaft. Hook explains this Hegelian conception:

Civic society in Hegel is the complex of organi[z]ed social ties which knot individuals together by the cords of self-interest. The individual in such a society is himself a system (Ganzes) of needs or wants, some of which are an expression of natural necessity, some a result of arbitrary choice. He regards himself, or the fulfillment of his needs, as his sole end, and all other individuals as necessary means to his self-expression. His social and political philosophy is individualism, which assumes that everyone else is by nature self-seeking and free. Whatever social and governmental constraints exist are external to the minds and feelings of those who abide by them. They are compromises which are made necessary by the conflict of activities in the collective pursuit of individual gratifications. (301)

Hegel’s notion of civil society, in other words, is, according to Hook, that of a collection of utilitarian individuals who compromise with each other in order that such a collective be constituted (that allows them to pursue their individual interests). This warrants Marx’s charge (by way of Hook) that “it is Hegelian philosophy and not contemplative materialism which represents [. . .] the highest philosophical expression of capitalism” (300). This is not to say that Hegelian philosophy is contemplative materialism, however. After all, “the culmination of the Hegelian social philosophy is the doctrine of the state in which the abstract rights, the individualism, the conflicts and compromises of sovereignty between different social groups, all flowing from the nature of civic society, are transcended” (300).

Contemplative materialism does tend to follow Hegel in taking the “point of view of single individuals in ‘civic society,’” however (299). This is because some materialists, using the laws of mechanics, assert “the natural tendency of all bodies despite their verbal behavior [. . .] to preserve themselves, and more concretely, to pursue their own self-interest” (301). This is of course but an offshoot of the notion of “mind, together with all intellectual processes like memory and generali[z]ation, [a]s sensation modified and organi[z]ed in such a way as to increase or diminish the basic feelings of pleasure and pain,” a fundamental contemplative materialist presupposition mixed with the utilitarian conception of pleasure (301).

The highest expression of this materialist variant of self-interest theory is, Hook argues, none other than the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Hook explains:

“Interest,” as conceived by Bentham—“whose nose,” says Marx, “must first have an interest before it makes up its mind to smell”—is described as a needless third term introduced between human beings and the varying ways in which they live their life. The reason, however, why all natural impulses are first related to some imaginary interest is that a peculiar set of social relationships has made it impossible to gratify natural desires directly or to lose oneself in activities for their own sake. The existence of a social and economic order in which production is dependent upon a market, upon “free” laborers, upon the expectation of profit, affects every human relationship with it. Everything is vain in such a culture except the “useful.” But to have utility means to be exploitable. The rule of “live and let live” makes way for the maxim “exploit or be exploited.” [As Marx says in The German Ideology,] “The objective expression of this utility is money in which is represented the value of all things, human beings and social relations. (301-2) (my emphasis)

While utilitarianism did attack old feudal forms, Marx complains that “at no time [. . .] did [they] apply their criteria of moral validity to the institutions of capitalism and their consequences,” moral criteria that “became more and more economic” over time (esp. in England) (302). Thus,

The special forms which the division of labo[]r took were justified as the expressions of, and contributions to, social utility. Variations in market exchanges resulting from competition were equated to each other by the use of a least common denominator of relative utilities whose values established themselves only post hoc, i.e., after the exchanges were made. The result was, said Marx, that “its economic content gradually transformed the theory of utility into a pure apologia of the existing order, into a proof that under given conditions the present relations of human beings to each other represent the best and most useful relations possible. All subsequent modern economic theory carries the same character. (302)

Marx’s complain does not only have to do with the utilitarian conception of civil society. He likewise attacks its point of view of the single individual assumed as “a God-given independent whole with private pains, pleasures and interests” for whom “existing social arrangements are [. . . but external] contractual obligations to which each individual commits himself” for, in the end, his own interest (302).

In contrast to this, Marx proposes a new materialism that “emphasi[zes] the historical and cultural determinants of private experience” (302). This, in Marx’s view, would allow for a philosophy that explains any man (in Hook’s rendering) “in terms of what all men are,” a truly “human” standpoint (as Marx says, the “standpoint of [. . .] human society”) (302, T10). “What all men are [. . . is of course] inferred from what they do, from the institutional conditions under which they do it, and the historical forces which have mo[]lded and are reshaping these conditions,” i.e. in their context as “sociali[z]ed humanity” (“social humanity” in the McLellan translation) (302-3, T10). In other words, the standpoint of “human society” (menschliche Gesellschaft) as “social humanity” (vergesellschaftete Menschheit) (T10).

This explains away the problem that individualism/atomism faces, namely the fact that “the consequences of the private pursuit of private interest rarely square[s] with the expectations of pain and pleasure entertained by the overwhelming mass of citizens” (303). In contrast, Marx’s conception, according to Hook, “point[s] to the necessity of direct collective control of all social institutions which influence[] man[, . . .] a control [which] presupposes a theory of social interest which in a human society must give meaning and content to private interest” (303). This is of course within a conception of “sociali[z]ed humanity [. . . that] does not destroy individuality [. . . but rather] modifies its form, enriches its content and makes it a value accessible to all” (303).

Marx’s unique materialist conception and attitude reaches its battle cry in thesis XI, the final thesis. The quick target here are the Young Hegelians, who, “despite their ‘world shattering phrases,’ were [Marx argues] doing nothing more than rebapti[z]ing the world as they found it with a new set of distinctions” (303). The true and more profound target, however, is Feuerbach. Feuerbach, like the other Young Hegelians, “sought the key to social change in the alteration of a personal attitude, in a generali[z]ation of the feeling of love already implicit in much of common-day behavior[]r” (303). This really roots from Feuerbach’s abstract and unhistorical (i.e. non-social) conception of man. “For all his talk about man, humanity, and communism,” Hook explains,

Feuerbach never investigated what the social conditions of men were, to what extent the qualities of humanity which he regarded as ‘essential to the species’ were historical, and what program[] of action his communism laid upon him. [. . .] Since his abstract materialism does not come to grips with the specific causes which produce differentiations in the human species, Marx argued that Feuerbach cannot do justice to the historical elements in culture, [. . . which] are precisely the factors which must serve as point of leverage in social change. Where Feuerbach does pay fleeting attention to historical situations, particularly in religion, he tries to find the key to them in presumably invariant patterns of human feeling and behavior[]r. (304)

Marx further points out the “illusionism” in Feuerbach’s writings. As Hook explains,

[Feuerbach] writes as if the demonstration of a truth were itself a proof that the truth would prevail, as if to have exposed an error were tantamount to passing a sentence of death upon it. Stressing feeling as he does, he nevertheless pays little attention to the social sources of feeling. Despite his criticism of the superficial rationalism which explains all conduct in terms of consciously entertained ideas, he himself relapses into that very position when he expects institutional changes to be affected by his analyses. (304)

This illusionism is perhaps most clearly represented by Feuerbach’s reference to himself as a communist, a term taken as essential rather than social or political—and thereby impotent. About this, Marx complains (in Hook’s words) that

A term whose meaning in use refers to allegiance to a specific political organi[z]ation is converted [by Feuerbach] into a purely abstract category. The abstract category expresses in an abstract way the commonplace that human beings find each other necessary for existence. Nothing is said about the variety of specific forms this necessary relation of one to the other can take and has taken, or about their relative justification at definite historical periods. Finally, the whole purport of Feuerbach’s description is to bring to consciousness an existing fact whereas “the real communist aims at the revolutioni[z]ing of the existing order. [. . .] If the existing facts about the relations of men to each other are natural, or in Feuerbach’s language, are “essential” to the nature of man, then it is nonsense to talk about revolutioni[z]ing them. (305)

Thus while Marx credits Feuerbach for going as far as he could “as a pure theoretician or philosopher [. . .] without ceasing to be” so, Marx challenges the very definition of philosophy itself (305). “The kind of philosophy Marx called for and which his own activity illustrated involved not merely risking an idea but risking one’s whole person in carrying it out,” i.e. a philosophy/theory that has practice—philosophy as praxis—that “involves decision, conflict, an element of partisanship in behalf of one among a number of possible alternatives” (306). (Compare the politicized philosophies of Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze.)

“Without an attempt at carrying out ideas,” Hook (echoing Marx) points out that “philosophy becomes a mere playing with possibilities unrelated both to the quest for truth and the furtherance of the good life—[according to Hook] its professed objectives” (306).

While Feuerbach did in fact recognized this, Marx argues that “his false conception of the nature of practice led him to confine the philosophical activity to thinking about ideas,” thereby identifying “philosophy with passionless thought, i.e., thought unrelated to practice,” in order to (at all costs) avoid thoughtless passion—a distinction that, to begin with, Marx does not accept (306). Rather, Marx asserts that

[While] it is true that there is no action without a violation of some right or interest[, i]t is not true that such action need be blind, uninformed by theory or reason. [While] it is true that one can think without acting directly, [. . .] it is not true that no injustice is thereby done. For existing injustices are tolerated and remain unaltered. Philosophical activity may be conceived as action in behalf of values and interests which have been critici[z]ed by knowledge and reason. The very fact that philosophy is an activity in a world of space, time and incompatible interests, makes it clear that its goals cannot be absolute truth or absolute justice. But the fact that action is thoughtful makes it possible to achieve beliefs which are truer; the fact that thought leads to action makes it possible to achieve a world which is more just. (306-7)

Hence the cry: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point [however] is to change it” (T11).

Bibliography
Hook, Sidney. From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1950.
Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, 171-4. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.