Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
루트비히 포이어바흐와 독일 고전철학의 종말
The pamphlet Friedrich Engels published in Die Neue Zeit in 1886, after Marx's death, and in a revised edition in Stuttgart in 1888. It distinguishes the conservative system of Hegel's philosophy from its revolutionary method, puts forward the relation of thinking and being as "the great basic question of philosophy" dividing idealism from materialism, and explains how Marx went on to historical materialism from the point where Feuerbach, having returned to materialism, stopped at an abstract human being. The 1888 edition printed Marx's Theses on Feuerbach for the first time, as an appendix.
In depth
Why did Engels return to Feuerbach after forty years?
Three years after Marx's death, Engels set down briefly the philosophy the two had passed through in their youth. The occasion was a request from the editors of Die Neue Zeit to review a book by the Danish philosopher Carl Nicolai Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach (1885). In the preface to the 1888 edition Engels explained his motive. The manuscript in which the two had settled accounts with German philosophy in Brussels in 1845 was never published; since then they had spoken of their relation to Hegel only here and there, and "to Feuerbach, who after all in many respects forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception, we never returned". Meanwhile Marx's outlook had spread to many countries, and classical German philosophy was enjoying a kind of rebirth in England and Scandinavia.
Auf Feuerbach, der doch in mancher Beziehung ein Mittelglied zwischen der Hegelschen Philosophie und unsrer Auffassung bildet, sind wir nie wieder zurückgekommen.
According to the German Wikipedia, the essay of some fifty pages was written early in 1886 and appeared that year in nos. 4 and 5 of Die Neue Zeit; in 1888 Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz published a revised separate edition in Stuttgart. The book thus finished, forty years later, what The German Ideology had left undone, and as the English Wikipedia notes, it is the only one of Engels's three major philosophical works (Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature and this book) written after Marx's death.
How do Hegel's system and method differ?
Chapter One begins with Hegel. Engels recalls how Hegel's famous proposition, "All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real," was read by the Prussian king and his officials as a blessing on the existing order and by liberals as a defence of despotism. But for Hegel "reality" belongs only to what is necessary, so by Hegel's own method the proposition turns into another: "All that exists deserves to perish." This sentence, borrowed from Goethe's Mephistopheles, shows the revolutionary character of Hegel's philosophy. Truth is not a collection of finished dogmas but an endless process of cognition, and every stage of history, justified in its time, gives way before new conditions to the next.
Der Satz von der Vernünftigkeit alles Wirklichen löst sich nach allen Regeln der Hegelschen Denkmethode auf in den andern: Alles was besteht, ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.
The trouble is that Hegel locked this method inside a system completed in the absolute Idea. Engels explains how this contradiction split the Hegelian school. Through David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, the Young Hegelians moved from the critique of religion to the critique of politics, until Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity of 1841 at one blow put materialism back on the throne. "One must have experienced the liberating effect of this book oneself to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became Feuerbachians for a moment."
What is "the basic question of philosophy"?
The first sentence of Chapter Two was copied into countless later textbooks: "The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being." According to their answer to whether spirit or nature is primary, philosophers split into two camps: those who held spirit to be prior to nature formed the camp of idealism, those who regarded nature as primary the various schools of materialism. On the other side of the question, whether our thinking can know the world, Engels cites the agnosticism of Hume and Kant and answers that it is refuted by experiment and industry, that is, by practice. The moment a chemist produces a substance found in plants, Kant's unknowable "thing in itself" becomes a thing for us.
Die große Grundfrage aller, speziell neueren Philosophie ist die nach dem Verhältnis von Denken und Sein.
Where did Feuerbach stop, and what did Marx add?
Engels credits Feuerbach with answering the basic question as a materialist but holds that, in criticising Hegel, he threw the dialectic overboard as well. Chapter Three opens: "Feuerbach's real idealism comes to light as soon as we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics." Feuerbach did not want to abolish religion but to perfect it as a religion of love between human beings. "But the step which Feuerbach did not take had nevertheless to be taken. The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach's new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development." It was Marx who took that step.
… der Kultus des abstrakten Menschen, der den Kern der Feuerbachschen neuen Religion bildete, mußte ersetzt werden durch die Wissenschaft von den wirklichen Menschen und ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung.
In Chapter Four Engels sums up Marx's method. The dialectic of concepts became merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world, "and thus the Hegelian dialectic was turned over, or rather turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet." He then explains historical materialism, which seeks the driving forces of history behind people's motives in classes and their economic conditions. In a footnote he played down his own share: "Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented." The last sentence declares where the philosophical lineage had passed: "The German working-class movement is the heir of German classical philosophy."
Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung ist die Erbin der deutschen klassischen Philosophie.
How did the Theses come to light, and how has the book been read?
Preparing the 1888 edition, Engels took out the old manuscript of 1845–1846 again, but the Feuerbach section was unfinished and lacked the critique of Feuerbach itself, so it was of no use. Instead he found eleven theses in an old notebook of Marx's and printed them as an appendix, calling them "notes for later elaboration, hastily scribbled down, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook". This is how the Theses on Feuerbach first came to light.
… aber unschätzbar als das erste Dokument, worin der geniale Keim der neuen Weltanschauung niedergelegt ist.
Because Engels edited the theses for print, there are two versions. The eleventh thesis reads in the 1845 notebook "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it (es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern)"; Engels's 1888 text adds "however": "es kommt aber darauf an". According to the English Wikipedia, the 1888 edition became the basis of later reprints and translations. The first Russian translation, by Georgi Plekhanov, appeared in Geneva in 1892 in the Emancipation of Labour group's library, and Lenin praised the consistent materialism it set out in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). The formula of "the basic question of philosophy" was later repeated in textbook after textbook of dialectical materialism, and for that very schematism it also became a target for Western Marxists who sought to separate Engels's philosophy from Marx's.