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The Deceptive Materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach

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The Deceptive Materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach chapter 4 The Deceptive Materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach 1 The Divinisation of Reason In the canonical iconography of Marxism, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) has been assigned the role of the ‘ferryman’. It was he who carried Marx and Engels from idealism to materialism but was himself unable to set foot on the Promised Land due to the limitations of his materialism, too confined to the sensibilities of the individual human and not at all open to history. However, he has all the value of a Charon who, by reversing the primacy assigned by Hegel to the spirit and thought into the primacy of matter, took decisive steps towards the historicist accumulation of truth with which great German philosophy triumphantly overflows into the works of Marx and Engels. It was, after all, the latter who, with his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), codified a very simplified version of the history of modern philosophy, presented as the outcome of an unstoppable journey towards the light of the truth that, by means of a continuous series of overturnings, goes from Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx. However, in this sense, Engels did nothing but give a more systematic form to the indications provided by Marx himself. Marx’s relationship with Feuerbach, within the limits of the first phase of his thought, is attested to by three pieces of surviving evidence. The first consists in a letter dated 1844; the second, the references in his Theses on Feuerbach; and the third, The German Ideology, from the spring of 1845. The letter of 11 August 1844 was written by Marx in Paris when he was finishing the draft of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. It perfectly summarises the role played by Feuerbach in the development of his ideas: I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love, which I feel for you. Your Philo- sophie der Zukunft, and your Wesen des Glaubens, in spite of their small size, are certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together. In these writings you have provided – I don’t know whether intentionally – a philosophical basis for social- ism and the communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004307643_005 the deceptive materialism of ludwig feuerbach 137 heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!1 The Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, however, already critically highlight the path taken by Feuerbach towards materialism: the contraposition of concrete and sensuous reality to the abstractions of idealist philosophy and religion is limited to a valorisation of sensibility conceived of as a merely passive faculty of intuition and dependence on the external world. The latter is legitimately seen as a real and autonomous world that cannot be reduced to a mere projection of the Idea. However, what Feuerbach’s only intuitive materialism does not take into account is the active nature of human beings’ sensuous existence; it does not take into account labour as the practical activity of transforming the external world. As a result of this radical insufficiency, it does not see the history of material praxis and its resulting social relations as the privileged subject of interest. Instead, he proposes a merely naturalistic theory of the human essence, from which derives a rhetorical and sentimental celebration of love as the only privileged instrument of emancipation. Marx’s observations, while pertinent, are, above all from a critical point of view, so rapid and schematic that they represent Feuerbach as an incomplete materialist who abandoned the rarefied air of philosophy in order to utilise the concrete nature of life but, through this abandonment, achieved only a naturalistic rather than a historical materialism. In this form, humanity is at last conceived of as a sensuous subject, but still without any recognition of the peculiarities of its practical sensibility. However, we are now separated by more than a century and a half of stud- ies, of philological and critical research, from the simplicity of this canonical representation. The figure of Feuerbach can now be assessed in all its various aspects. Thus, in relation to what interests us here, we can now return to that close confrontation with Hegel’s philosophy which was so important, in his agreements and dissent, in Feuerbach’s thinking, and which the fairly cavalier materialistic reduction of Marx and Engels too radically pushed back into the shadows. What emerges, in my opinion, is the persistent pantheist-humanist system that dominates Feuerbach’s work, at least up to the texts that are of interest due to their influence on Marx. With their fusional-totalising tendency, they have little in common with traditional materialism. Feuerbach’s break with Hegel, rather than being explained in terms of the much celebrated reversal of spirit into matter, appears to be more understand- 1 mecw 3, p. 354..
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