KARL MARX

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61 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
published in Switzerland in February 1843 in a collection of essays that
had been censored from Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbucher. In them Feuerbach
applied to speculative philosophy the approach he had already used with
regard to religion: theology had still not been completely destroyed; it
had a last rational bulwark in Hegel's philosophy, which was as great a
mystification as any theology. Since Hegel's dialectic started and ended
with the infinite, the finite - namely, man - was only a phase in the
evolution of a superhuman spirit: 'The essence of theology is transcendent
and exteriorised human thought.' 1 s But philosophy should not start from
God or the Absolute, nor even from being as predicate of the Absolute;
philosophy had to begin with the finite, the particular, the real, and
acknowledge the primacy of the senses. Since this approach had been
pioneered by the French, the true philosopher would have to be of 'Gallo-
Germanic blood'. Hegel's philosophy was the last refuge of theology and
as such had to be abolished. This would come about from a realisation
that 'the true relationship of thought to being is this: being is the subject,
thought the predicate. Thought arises from being - being does not arise
from thought.' 16
Marx read a copy of Feuerbach's Theses immediately after publication
and wrote an enthusiastic letter to Ruge, who had sent it to him: 'The
only point in Feuerbach's aphorisms that does not satisfy me is that he
gives too much importance to nature and too little to politics. Yet an
alliance with politics affords the only means for contemporary philosophy
to become a truth. But what happened in the sixteenth century, when the
state had followers as enthusiastic as those of Nature, will no doubt be
repeated.' 17 For Marx, the way ahead lay through politics, but a politics
which questioned current conceptions of the relationship of the state to
society. It was Feuerbach's Theses that enabled him to effect his particular
reversal of Hegel's dialectic. As far as Marx was concerned in 1843 (and
this was true of most of his radical democratic contemporaries also)
Feuerbach was the philosopher. Every page of the critique of Hegel's
political philosophy that Marx elaborated during the summer of 1843
showed the influence of Feuerbach's method. True, Marx gave his criticism
a social and historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach, but one point was
central to both their approaches: the claim that Hegel had reversed the
correct relation of subjects and predicates. Marx's fundamental idea was
to take actual political institutions and demonstrate thereby that Hegel's
conception of the relationship of ideas to reality was mistaken. Hegel had
tried to reconcile the ideal and the real by showing that reality was the
unfolding of an idea, and was thus rational. Marx, on the contrary, emphasised
the opposition between ideals and reality in the secular world and
categorised Hegel's whole enterprise as speculative, by which he meant