Feuerbach

by Friedrich Engels

Feuerbach here confuses materialism, which is a philosophy of the universe dependent upon a certain comprehension of the relations between matter and spirit, with the special forms in which this philosophy appeared at a certain historical stage—namely in the eighteenth century. More than that he confuses it with the shallow and vulgarized form in which the materialism of the eighteenth century exists today, in the minds of naturalists and physicians, and was popularized during a period of fifty years in the writings of Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott. But as idealism has passed through a series of evolutionary developments, so also has materialism—with each epoch-making discovery in the department of natural science it has been obliged to change its form; since then, history also, being subjected to the materialistic method of treatment, shows itself as a new road of progress.

The materialism of the preceding century was overwhelmingly mechanical, because at that time of all the natural sciences, mechanics, and indeed, only the mechanics of the celestial and terrestrial fixed bodies, the mechanics of gravity, in short, had reached any definite conclusions. Chemistry existed at first only in a childish, phlogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; the organism of plants and animals was examined only in a very cursory manner, and was explained upon purely mechanical grounds; just as an animal was to Descartes nothing but a machine, so was man to the materialists of the eighteenth century. The exclusive application of the measure of mechanics to processes which are of chemical and organic nature and by which, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also manifested, but are pushed into the background by other higher laws, this application is the cause of the peculiar, but, considering the times, unavoidable, narrowmindedness of the French materialism.

The second special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of the philosophers. Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and therefore never moved from the spot, and produced the same results over and over again. This idea was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system was at first exhibited and considered as a mere curiosity. The history of the development of the earth-geology was still unknown, and the idea that the living natural objects of to-day are the result of a long process of development from the simple to the complex could not be scientifically established at that time. This anti-historical comprehension of nature was, therefore, inevitable. We cannot reproach the philosophers of the eighteenth century with this, as the same thing is also found in Hegel. According to him, nature is the mere outward form of the Idea, capable of no progress as regards time, but merely of an extension of its manifoldness in space, so that it displays all the stages of development comprised in it at one and the same time together, and is condemned to a repetition of the same processes. And this absurdity of a progress in space but outside of time—the fundamental condition of all progress—Hegel loads upon nature, just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and inorganic chemistry, were being built up, and when above all genial prophecies of the later evolution theory appeared at the very threshold of these new sciences (e. g., Goethe and Lamark), but the system so required it, and the method, for love of the system, had to prove untrue to itself.

This unhistoric conception had its effects also in the domain of history. Here the fight against the remnants of the Middle Ages kept the outlook limited. The Middle Ages were reckoned as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of barbarism. The great advances of the Middle Ages—the broadening of European learning, the bringing into existence of great nations, which arose, one after the other, and finally the enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—all this no one saw. Consequently a rational view of the great historic development was rendered impossible, and history served principally as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers.

The vulgarizing peddlers who during the fifties occupied themselves with materialism in Germany did not by any means escape the limitations of their doctrine. All the advances made in science served them only as new grounds of proof against the existence of the Creator, and indeed it was far beyond their trade to develop the theory any further. Idealism was at the end of its tether and was smitten with death by the Revolution of 1848. Yet it had the satisfaction that materialism sank still lower. Feuerbach was decidedly right when he refused to take the responsibility of this materialism, only he had no business to confound the teachings of the itinerant spouters with materialism in general.

However, we must here remark two different things. During the life of Feuerbach science was still in that state of violent fermentation which has only comparatively cleared during the last fifteen years; new material of knowledge was furnished in a hitherto unheard of measure but the fixing of interrelations, and therewith of order, in the chaos of overwhelming discoveries was rendered possible quite lately for the first time. True, Feuerbach had lived to see the three distinctive discoveries—that of the cell, the transformation of energy and the evolution theory acknowledged since the time of Darwin. But how could the solitary country-dwelling philosopher appreciate at their full value discoveries which naturalists themselves at that time in part contested and partly did not understand how to avail themselves of sufficiently? The disgrace falls solely upon the miserable conditions in Germany owing to which the chairs of philosophy were filled by pettifogging eclectic pedants, while Feuerbach, who towered high above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a little village. It is therefore no shame to Feuerbach that he never grasped the natural evolutionary philosophy which became possible with the passing away of the partial views of French materialism.

In the second place, Feuerbach held quite correctly that scientific materialism is the foundation of the building of human knowledge but it is not the building itself. For we live not only in nature but in human society, and this has its theory of development and its science no less than nature. It was necessary, therefore, to bring the science of society, that is the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialistic foundations and to rebuild upon them. But this was not granted to Feuerbach. Here he stuck, in spite of the "foundations," held in the confining bonds of idealism, and to this he testified in the words "Backwards I am with the materialists, but not forwards." But Feuerbach himself did not go forward in his views of human society from his standpoint of 1840 and 1844, chiefly owing to that loneliness which compelled him to think everything out by himself, instead of in friendly and hostile conflict with other men of his calibre, although of all philosophers he was the fondest of intercourse with his fellows. We shall see later on how he thus remained an idealist. Here we can only call attention to the fact that Starcke sought the idealism of Feuerbach in the wrong place. "Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the advance of mankind" (p. 19). "The foundations, the underpinning of the whole, is therefore nothing less than idealism. Realism is for us nothing more than a protection against error while we follow our own idealistic tendencies. Are not compassion, love and enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?"

In the first place, idealism is here defined as nothing but the following of ideal aims. But these have necessarily to do principally with the idealism of Kant and his "Categorical Imperative." But Kant himself called his philosophy "transcendental idealism," by no means because he deals therein with moral ideals, but on quite other grounds, as Starcke will remember.

The superstition that philosophical idealism pivots around a belief in moral, that is in social ideals, arose with the German non-philosophical Philistine, who commits to memory the few philosophical morsels which he finds in Schiller's poems. Nobody has criticised more severely the feeble Categorical Imperative of Kant—feeble because it demands the impossible and therefore never attains to any reality—nobody has ridiculed more cruelly the Philistine sentimentality imparted by Schiller, because of its unrealizable ideals, than just the idealist par excellence, Hegel. (See e. g. Phenomenology.)

In the second place, it cannot be avoided that all human sensations pass through the brain—even eating and drinking which are commenced consequent upon hunger and thirst felt by the brain and ended in consequence of sensations of satisfaction similarly experienced by the brain. The realities of the outer world impress themselves upon the brain of man, reflect themselves there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions, in short, as ideal tendencies, and in this form become ideal forces. If the circumstance that this man follows ideal tendencies at all, and admits that ideal forces exercise an influence over him, if this makes an idealist of him, every normally developed man is in some sense a born idealist, and under such circumstances how can materialists exist?