Marxism, Religion and Ideology: Themes From David McLellan by David Bates & Iain MacKenzie & Sean Sayers

Author:David Bates & Iain MacKenzie & Sean Sayers [Bates, David & MacKenzie, Iain & Sayers, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138850613
Google: AqXIoQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26536474
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Feuerbach

Regarding the young Marx, David McLellan once asked if Marx was a Feuerbachian.14 Engels had written of The Essence of Christianity, ‘one must have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians’.15 By the Paris Manuscripts, Marx claimed to have moved beyond Feuerbach’s contemplative materialism. Feuerbach had said that ‘In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself’,16 whereas Marx linked this contemplation to productive activity; ‘Man contemplates himself in a world he himself has created’.17

Marx continued this advance on Feuerbach into politics, arguing that human freedom is a practical and not a philosophical, conscious act; a point made most tellingly against Stirner who really believed freedom or ‘ownness’ was a purely conscious affair. In this respect, however, was Marx right to distance himself so much from Feuerbach? Polemically, they have much in common. It would be hard to decide, without knowing, whether it was Feuerbach or the young Marx who wrote the following:

The Philosophy of the Future addresses itself to the task of leading philosophy from the realm of ‘detached souls’ back to the realm of embodied living souls; of compelling philosophy to come down from its divine and self-sufficient blissfulness in thought and open its eyes to human misery.18

As to humanism, McLellan points out that ‘what struck Marx most about The Essence of Christianity was the “humanism” of the book’,19 specifically the notion of man’s integral being:

Feuerbach did not intend to exalt any one aspect of man at the expense of others: he wanted man to reclaim for himself the whole of his being, including the religious itself. Such specific borrowings by Marx, as can be traced to Das Wesen des Christentum all have this slant.20

Feuerbach’s recasting of God’s predicates in human form resurrects aspects of man’s integral nature hitherto suppressed by religious thinking. Feuerbach insists man is a sensual as well as a thinking being. Nor did he fail to include man’s active, dynamic side. On these points, the essay Philosophy of the Future compares Leibniz unfavourably with a theist outlook. To the former, the divine intellect was indeed ‘nothing but pure intellect’, whereas theism ‘directly links sensuous and material effects with the thought and will of God’.21 As to Hegel, Feuerbach asks if his ‘pure and presuppositionless thought is no more than the Divine Being of the old theology and metaphysics which has been transformed into the actual, active, and thinking being of man?’22 ‘The question of being is indeed a practical question’23 says Feuerbach, adding that art and science, (forms of active materialism in the Marxian sense?), inhere in ‘the true being of man’24 as much as religion and philosophy; and that philosophy must ‘unite itself with natural science’.25 Truth itself, concludes Feuerbach, ‘does not exist in thought, nor in cognition confined to itself. Truth is only the totality of man’s life and being’.26 The difference between Feuerbach and Marx’s materialism, in respect of being active, may be one of degree rather than kind.

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