Philosophy and Religion,
Part 3b
Ludwig Feuerbach
Frederick Engels’ “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy” was written when he was 66 years old, three years after the
death of his close comrade Karl Marx. It is a retrospective assessment in four
short, powerful parts, for publication in a magazine called Die Neue
Zeit. We considered the first part, headed “Hegel”, in a previous post in
this CU series on “Philosophy and Religion”. To save time, we skip the parts
headed “Materialism”
and “Feuerbach”,
though they are good and useful. The concluding and summarising part of “Ludwig
Feuerbach” is headed “Marx” (attached; download linked below).
Necessity of struggle
in philosophy
Let us now look at the
question of philosophy’s relation to revolution.
In “Ludwig Feuerbach”, Engels
is saying that prior to each great revolution of the past there had been a
period of catastrophic ferment in philosophy. He comes close to saying that a
conscious, public break-up of the pre-existing philosophy is a necessary
condition for revolution. At any rate, this was historically the case in France
prior to the Great French Revolution, and in Germany prior to the upheavals of
1848 that established the modern world’s politics of Bourgeois, Proletarians
and Communists.
Engels is saying that it was
the thorough breaking-up of the philosophical soil that allowed these two great
revolutions to put down permanent roots.
Later on in our CU series on
Philosophy and Religion we will read an argument that says that in the case of
the Great October proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, the philosophical
ground had not been sufficiently prepared, and that is why the Russian
revolution developed the way it did, and why the USSR eventually collapsed in
the way that it did, at the end of the 1980s, just prior to South Africa’s
democratic breakthrough.
This in turn raises the
question of whether it will be possible to have any further revolutionary
advance in South Africa, or anywhere else, let alone any final and permanent
revolution, without a thorough breaking-up of the philosophical ground upon
which we stand today, ground which has hardly been disturbed since the mid-19th
century.
Assuming that we agree that
this could be the case, then we would need to ask, first, how to take stock of
the received philosophical legacy, including its revolutionary component? And then,
having discovered and delineated the frontier from which we will have to
depart, to make out a line of march and begin a campaign. We will attempt to do
this as the series develops, up to its tenth part.
For now, let us begin to
draft a provisional outline of the principal sources of philosophy that would
form part of such an assessment, plan and campaign. It could include the
following, taken in chronological order:
1.
The historical
legacy in philosophy, e.g. Aristotle,
Alberti, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza
2.
Hegel’s works,
especially “Logic” and the “Philosophy of Right”
3.
Explicitly
philosophical unpublished and published writings of Marx and Engels in the
1840s, during the multiple struggles of the “Old Hegelians”, “Young Hegelians”,
Schelling, Feuerbach, Stirner, Bauer, Proudhon et cetera
4.
The remainder of
Marx’s work, which, though not directly philosophical, contains constant
implicit and tacit philosophical determinations
5.
Engels’ late work
on philosophy including “Anti-Dühring”, “Ludwig Feuerbach”, and certain other
short writings
6.
Lenin’s
philosophical grounding, especially as it comes out in “The State and
Revolution”
7.
Critical
reflections on the philosophy contained in the revolutionary “classics”, by
writers such as Christopher Caudwell, Evald Ilyenkov, Cyril Smith and James
Heartfield
8.
Forward-looking
revolutionary philosophy that corresponds with developments in science, taking
for an example the late South African revolutionary Ron Press’s “New Tools for
Marxists”
To all of this we will have
to add a sensitive and wide-ranging assessment of the de facto philosophy
or world-outlook of our South African society today, in its abstract parts and
in its concrete whole. This will be in the nature of active research, because
as we find, so we will have to engage.
Religious Struggle Not
Now So Necessary
Religion was historically
crucial in the case of the 1848 revolutions, as Engels shows. Religion had
become the vehicle or the proxy whereby the revolutionary elements of the
bourgeoisie expressed themselves, and articulated their struggles intellectually,
even though these struggles had a material basis and a basis in class struggle.
In the linked extract from
his “Ludwig Feuerbach” Engels describes the movement in religion in marvellous,
masterful, sweeping paragraphs. Please, read it, comrades. Nothing I say can
improve it, and it does not need shortening because it is already short, tight,
concentrated and clear.
It is not the case that
religion necessarily plays the same role today in South Africa, as it did then
in Germany. On the contrary, religious formations are a strong part of the
National Democratic Revolution. The liberation theologists are our allies.
Worldwide, and as a rule,
religion has long since reconciled itself with science such as the discoveries
of Charles Darwin, for example, which had to do with the evolution of species,
including humans. “Materialism” has won, in that sense. Atheism was never an
issue for Marx and hardly an issue for Marxists in general, and Feuerbach was
religious, even if materialist. There are no texts to be found among the
Marxist “classics” that preach atheism as such.
Thus, though the moment when
Ludwig Feuerbach (see his image, above) published his book “Essence
of Christianity” in 1841 was for Engels a defining one, yet the place
of religion today is not the same as was the place of religion then, and so
Feuerbach’s “materialism” does not now have the force or the purpose that it
had, for a short time, in Engels’ youth. Feuerbach and his “materialism” had
their moment, and it was a short moment. What matters now is freedom, agency,
and the ability to decide. What matters is: Power, to the People!
In 1843 Karl Marx
wrote: “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been
essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all
criticism.” Completed, indeed; and so it is with us today. We may thus
conclude that we have no business making war on religion; and we will come back
to this point soon, with Lenin.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Engels,
Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 4, Marx, 1886.
