contradiction: “As the resolute opponent of the previous form of German political consciousness, the criticism of speculative philosophy of law turns, not towards itself, but towards problems which can only be solved by one means—practice.”79 One finds a certain ambivalence in Marx’s argument. On the one hand he recognized the limitation of a simple opposition of an abstract philosophical idea against the alienated objective reality and emphasizes the primacy of practice more strongly than Feuerbach. On the other hand Marx still followed him, appreciating his concept of “sensibility” precisely as the concrete materialist foundation of revolutionary practice.
The following sentence from the Paris Notebooks represents the same ambiguity. At first glance, Marx’s claim may give an impression that he had already established the primacy of practice against Feuerbach’s philosophical position:
We see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.80
It is true that Marx without doubt acknowledged the necessity of practice for the transcendence of “theoretical antitheses” that reflect the contradictory reality, criticizing that idealist philosophy for failing to make any practical engagement with the concrete objective contradiction. However, his claim still accepted Feuerbach’s schema when he also demanded overcoming the antitheses, such as those between “subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering,” through Feuerbachian “sensuous perception.”81 Since Marx’s critique was directed only against the abstract nature of idealist philosophy from his own standpoint of sensuous perception, he, together with Feuerbach, recommended overcoming these philosophical antitheses with concrete sensuous praxis and, more precisely, “labor” that can actualize the free and universal subjectivity of human beings in the concrete objective world. Thus what Marx problematized in the notebooks of 1844 is essentially dependent upon the return to concrete “sensuous perception” in labor being the true principle of radical materialism, and in this vein Marx demanded that human beings should first correctly recognize their own species-being and then get engaged in revolutionary praxis against alienated reality under capitalism.
It is not hard to understand why Marx highly valued Feuerbach’s concept of species-being. He was convinced that in contrast to Hegel’s “spirit” and Bruno Bauer’s “self-consciousness,” the human subject conceptualized by Feuerbach could function as a real and true basis for the progress of historical movement and show the way to transcend alienation. His critique of philosophy in 1844 principally aims at correcting earlier misrecognitions of the true philosophical principle in a similar way that Feuerbach opposed his species-being to Hegel’s spirit as the true subject of history. In this sense, Marx’s demand for praxis in 1844 still clearly moved within the paradigm of the Young Hegelian philosophy.
On the contrary, in The German Ideology Marx rejects any antitheses that take place within philosophy:
Since, according to their fantasy, the relations of men, all their doings, their fetters and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognize it by means of a different interpretation.… The only results which this philosophic criticism was able to achieve were a few (and at that one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history.82
As before, Marx certainly emphasizes the importance of praxis in order to radically transform existing social contradictions. However, it is evident that Marx also points out that “a demand to change consciousness” through elucidations and education only ends up producing the “moral postulates” of what ought to be, without actually changing the real problems. He claims that the earlier debates among the Young Hegelians are barren because they are simply trying to discover a “true” philosophical principle for imagining the historical subject, whether “self-consciousness,” “species-being,” or “the ego.”83 Marx thus problematizes and rejects the entire debate within the Young Hegelians after realizing that the demand for another interpretation of the world alone is not at all capable of a radical social transformation.
According to Marx, Feuerbach’s critique of religion may be able to educate the masses about God being a mere illusion whose predicates should be actually prescribed to humans as species-beings. The problem is that Feuerbach’s critique ends there without posing a more substantial question: “How did it come about that people ‘got’ these illusions ‘into their heads’?”84 In other words, God is not a mere illusion that would disappear after its falseness was recognized. Rather, the illusion is an objective appearance produced by social relations. Thus Marx argues against Feuerbach’s optimism that it is most essential to comprehend “the actual material premises as such.” Without a radical transformation of social relations, the religious “illusion” will be repeatedly reproduced as an objective force through social practice. It is not possible to transcend the alienated reality by simply pointing out the alienated inversion of the objective world from a standpoint of philosophy. The real problem is not an epistemic misrecognition of a truth of the world but rather its inversion, which is based on objective social relations and social practice.85 Since individuals are always already conditioned by social relations independently of their will, Feuerbach’s demand to “change consciousness” alone cannot bring about any radical praxis, no matter how correct his critique of religion may be. In this sense, Feuerbach’s concept of “sensuous perception” still remains for Marx within an abstract philosophical discussion, because the way Feuerbach poses questions is a mere epistemic one, trying to discover another “true” foundation that discloses the human “essence” hidden under the alienated reality.
Despite Feuerbach’s assumption, however, there is no privileged standpoint for the philosopher from which the direct access to the “essence” can be guaranteed, as Marx writes in the third thesis:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.86
Marx problematizes the presupposition of “the educator”—obviously he means Feuerbach—because there is no such thing as pure sensuous perception that guarantees access to essence independently of the existing objective social relations. The intuition of philosophy is not outside the world but always already within the inverted world and thus conditioned by it. Therefore Feuerbach’s philosophic idea of “sensuous perception” and “love” remains inevitably abstract, insofar as he does not seriously take social conditions within the inverted world into account. If the philosopher is satisfied with a discovery of “essence,” philosophy only hinders radical praxis by giving another expression to the alienated reality and leaving it unchanged. What it really needs, so says Marx, is a critical investigation of the objective social relations in order to comprehend the possibility of resistance from the really existing contradictions of society itself.
On the contrary, Feuerbach’s idea amounts to a set of abstract theses without any specific social analysis. He does not take the objective force of the inverted world seriously enough, as if the alienated reality could be simply transformed through an alternative philosophical intuition. As a consequence, Feuerbach’s philosophy ironically preserves the current estranged situation of the world, avoiding a serious theoretical confrontation with reality. For Marx, it is much more important to practically confront the existing order of things and radically change it. He emphasizes the significance
