FOREWORD
“We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice¹ all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification.
Since then more than 40 years have elapsed and Marx died without either of us having had an opportunity of returning to the subject. We have expressed ourselves in various places regarding our relation to Hegel, but nowhere in a comprehensive, connected account. To Feuerbach, who after all in many respects forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception, we never returned.”
¹ É incrível como o homem alemão do século XIX pudesse ser censurado em trabalhos de caráter extremamente “especulativo” (pelo menos assim deveria ser encarado o materialismo dialético na mesma geração de seu surgimento)!
“and even in Germany itself people appear to be getting tired of the pauper’s broth of eclecticism which is ladled out in the universities there under the name of philosophy.”
“Equally, a full acknowledgement of the influence which Feuerbach, more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher, had upon us during our period of storm and stress, appeared to me to be an undischarged debt of honour. I therefore willingly seized the opportunity when the editors of the Neue Zeit asked me for a critical review of Starcke’s book on Feuerbach. My contribution was published in that journal in the fourth and fifth numbers of 1886 and appears here in revised form as a separate publication.”
“On the other hand, in an old notebook of Marx’s I have found the eleven theses on Feuerbach printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook.
London, February 21, 1888
Frederick Engels”
I
“The volume before us [o livro de Starcke citado no prefácio] carries us back to a period which, although in time no more than a generation behind us, has become as foreign to the present generation in Germany as if it were already 100 years old. Yet it was the period of Germany’s preparation for the Revolution of 1848; and all that had happened since then in our country has been merely a continuation of 1848, merely the execution of the last will and testament of the revolution.
Just as in France in the 18th century, so in Germany in the 19th, a philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse.”
O SISTEMA TERMINAL DE TODO DESENVOLVIMENTO – O SISTEMA HEGELIANO: “The French were in open combat against all official science, against the church and often also against the state; their writings were printed across the frontier, in Holland or England, while they themselves were often in jeopardy of imprisonment in the Bastille. On the other hand, the Germans were professors, state-appointed instructors of youth; their writings were recognised textbooks, and the terminating system of the whole development—the Hegelian system—was even raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state! Was it possible that a revolution could hide behind these professors, behind their obscure, pedantic phrases, their ponderous, wearisome sentences? Were not precisely those people who were then regarded as the representatives of the revolution, the liberals, the bitterest opponents of this brain-confusing philosophy? But what neither the government nor the liberals saw was seen at least by one man as early as 1833, and this man was indeed none other than Heinrich Heine.¹”
¹ Engels se referia ao livro On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.
Aplicação da frase “tudo o que é racional é real e tudo o que é real é racional” ao Estado alemão: “The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved.”
Se se passa fome no Brasil em 2021, digamos que a responsabilidade é do “brasileiro metafísico”: “and if [the State] nevertheless appears to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified by the corresponding evil character of its subjects.” Há um momento, entretanto, em que há a intervenção do irreal e do irracional na ‘política’: “The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire, which superseded it. In 1789 the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm.”
A transvaloração de todos os valores é uma necessidade.
“Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained.” “Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so” “The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute—the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.”
DECADÊNCIA: “At any rate we still find ourselves a considerable distance from the turning-point at which the historical course of society becomes one of descent, and we cannot expect Hegelian philosophy to be concerned with a subject which natural science,¹ in its time, had not at all placed upon the agenda as yet.”
¹ Referência a Darwin, realmente? Mas então ou o socialismo estava errado ou a teoria da distância em relação à decadência o estava: a Europa dos sécs. XVIII e XIX já era expressão da decadência e desagregação sociais. Forçosamente devemos reconhecer que essa desagregação apenas continua até o dia de hoje.
“he was compelled to make a system and, in accordance with traditional requirements, a system of philosophy must conclude with some sort of absolute truth. Therefore, however much Hegel, especially in his Logic, emphasised that this eternal truth is nothing but the logical, or, the historical, process itself, he nevertheless finds himself compelled to supply this process with an end, just because he has to bring his system to a termination at some point or other.”
“But at the end of the whole philosophy a similar return to the beginning is possible only in one way. Namely, by conceiving of the end of history as follows: mankind arrives at the cognition of this self-same absolute idea, and declares that this cognition of the absolute idea is reached in Hegelian philosophy. In this way, however, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism.”
“And so we find at the conclusion of the Philosophy of Right that the absolute idea is to be realized in that monarchy based on social estates which Frederick William III so persistently but vainly promised to his subjects, that is, in a limited, moderate, indirect rule of the possessing classes suited to the petty-bourgeois German conditions of that time; and, moreover, the necessity of the nobility is demonstrated to us in a speculative fashion.”
O CAVALO DE RAÇA QUE SE CONTENTOU COM DAR UMA VOLTINHA DE SPARRING E NÃO COMPETIU PELO OURO OLÍMPICO: “The inner necessities of the system are, therefore, of themselves sufficient to explain why a thoroughly revolutionary method of thinking produced an extremely tame political conclusion.”
“As a matter of fact the specific form of this conclusion springs from this, that Hegel was a German, and like his contemporary Goethe had a bit of the philistine’s queue dangling behind. Each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, yet neither of them ever quite freed himself from German philistinism.”
“As conclusões tão timoratas do sistema hegeliano resultam disso: que Hegel era alemão, e como seu contemporâneo Goethe tinha um quê da tendência filistéia, fio que lhes conduzia os pensamentos. Cada um deles era um Zeus Olímpico em sua própria esfera, mas nenhum conseguiu livrar-se do filisteísmo germânico.”
“The phenomenology of mind (which one may call a parallel of the embryology and palaeontology of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history), logic, natural philosophy, philosophy of mind, and the latter worked out in its separate, historical subdivisions: philosophy of history, of right, of religion, history of philosophy, aesthetics, etc.—in all these different historical fields Hegel laboured to discover and demonstrate the pervading thread of development. And as he was not only a creative genius but also a man of encyclopaedic erudition, he played an epoch-making role in every sphere.”
“A fenomenologia da mente (que pode também ser chamada de uma embriologia e paleontologia paralelas da mente, um desenvolvimento da consciência individual por seus diferentes estágios, disposta na forma de uma reprodução abreviada dos estágios que a consciência do homem atravessara no decurso da história), a lógica, a filosofia natural, a filosofia da mente, cada uma desdobrada em suas distintas subdivisões históricas: filosofia da história, do direito, da religião, história da filosofia, estética, etc. – em todos esses diferentes campos históricos Hegel esforçou-se por descobrir e demonstrar as difusas correntes do desenvolvimento. E desde que ele não era apenas um gênio criativo mas também um homem de erudição enciclopédica, ele desempenhou um papel que marcou época em cada uma dessas esferas.”
“Porém, tudo isso não passa de um verdadeiro prólogo, de uma estrutura ou esqueleto de sua filosofia. E se não nos limitarmos, como os pigmeus de antes, a meramente repisar sobre essas estruturas, sem avançar um só passo, mas nos aventurarmos mais longe nesta imensa edificação preparada, encontraremos inúmeros tesouros que ainda em nossa época possuem um valor não-deteriorado. Com todos os filósofos é justamente o ‘sistema’ o que é perecível; e tudo isso pela simples razão de que tais ‘sistemas’ emergem de um desejo imperecível da mente humana – o desejo de superar todas as contradições. Mas se todas as contradições forem superadas, atingiremos a verdade absoluta – e a história do mundo acaba. Porém, é mister que ela continue, embora não reste propósito algum para ela – eis, pois, uma nova e insolúvel contradição. Assim que nos damos conta – e, a longo prazo, ninguém nos ajudou a darmo-nos conta melhor do que o próprio Hegel – de que a tarefa da filosofia acima descrita nada significa além da constatação de que um único filósofo deve completar aquilo que só pode ser completado por toda a humanidade em seu desenvolvimento progressivo; assim que nos damos conta de que há um fim para toda a filosofia no sentido que nos foi aqui prescrito, a ‘verdade absoluta’ se torna obsoleta, posto ser inalcançável por essa via, ou por qualquer indivíduo em separado. Por outra parte, o filósofo isolado persegue verdades relativas alcançáveis percorrendo a via das ciências positivas, e a consunção de seus esforços mediante o método dialético. Seja como for, com Hegel a filosofia atinge um fim, por uma dupla razão: por uma parte, porque em seu sistema ele consumou todo o seu desenvolvimento da maneira mais esplêndida; e, por outra, porque, embora inconscientemente, ele nos indicou o caminho para fora do labirinto dos sistemas rumo ao conhecimento positivo real do mundo.”
“And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics. Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion. Hegel himself, despite the fairly frequent outbursts of revolutionary wrath in his works, seemed on the whole to be more inclined to the conservative side. Indeed, his system had cost him much more ‘hard mental plugging’¹ than his method.”
¹ Esforços de conciliação
“The Left wing, the so-called Young Hegelians, [ainda burgueses liberais, e não os socialistas] in their fight with the pietist orthodox and the feudal reactionaries, abandoned bit by bit that philosophical-genteel reserve in regard to the burning questions of the day which up to that time had secured state toleration and even protection for their teachings. And when in 1840, orthodox pietism and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne with Frederick William IV, open partisanship became unavoidable. The fight was still carried on with philosophical weapons, but no longer for abstract philosophical aims. It turned directly on the destruction of traditional religion and of the existing state. (…) in the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842 the Young Hegelian school revealed itself directly as the philosophy of the aspiring radical bourgeoisie and used the meagre cloak of philosophy only to deceive the censorship.”
“Strauss’ Life of Jesus, published in 1835, had provided the first impulse. The theory therein developed of the formation of the gospel myths was combated later by Bruno Bauer with proof that a whole series of evangelic stories had been fabricated by the authors themselves. The controversy between these two was carried out in the philosophical disguise of a battle between ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘substance’. The question whether the miracle stories of the gospels came into being through unconscious-traditional myth-creation within the bosom of the community or whether they were fabricated by the evangelists themselves was magnified into the question whether, in world history, ‘substance’ or ‘self-consciousness’ was the decisive operative force. Finally came Stirner, the prophet of contemporary anarchism—Bakunin has taken a great deal from him—and capped the sovereign ‘self-consciousness’ by his sovereign ‘I’.”
“Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverised the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again.” “Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.” “One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new conception and how much—in spite of all critical reservations—he was influenced by it, one may read in The Holy Family. § Even the shortcomings of the book contributed to its immediate effect. Its literary, sometimes even high-flown, style secured for it a large public and was at any rate refreshing after long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianising. The same is true of its extravagant deification of love, which, coming after the now intolerable sovereign rule of ‘pure reason’, had its excuse, if not justification. But what we must not forget is that it was precisely these two weaknesses of Feuerbach that ‘true Socialism’, which had been spreading like a plague in ‘educated’ Germany since 1844, took as its starting-point, putting literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the liberation of mankind by means of ‘love’ in place of the emancipation of the proletariat through the economic transformation of production”
“the Hegelian school disintegrated, but Hegelian philosophy was not overcome through criticism; Strauss and Bauer each took one of its sides and set it polemically against the other. Feuerbach smashed the system and simply discarded it. But a philosophy is not disposed of by the mere assertion that it is false. And so powerful a work as Hegelian philosophy, which had exercised so enormous an influence on the intellectual development of the nation, could not be disposed of by simply being ignored. It had to be ‘sublated’ in its own sense, that is, in the sense that while its form had to be annihilated through criticism, the new content which had been won through it had to be saved.”
“But in the meantime the Revolution of 1848 thrust the whole of philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.” O que sempre aprendemos da Revolução de 1848 é que já integra o socialismo científico, pelo menos de parte da literatura histórica didática. Talvez porque Marx já fosse vivo e um adulto então?!
II
(*) “Among savages and lower barbarians the idea is still universal that the human forms which appear in dreams are souls which have temporarily left their bodies; the real man is, therefore, held responsible for acts committed by his dream apparition against the dreamer. Thus Imthurn found this belief current, for example, among the Indians of Guiana in 1884. (Note by Engels.)”
“The quandary arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.”
“The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, spirit or nature—that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other—and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity—comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism. § These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense. What confusion arises when some other meaning is put into them will be seen below.”
“What is decisive in the refutation of the views of Hume and Kant has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice, namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable ‘thing-in-itself’.”
“The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such ‘things-in-themselves’ until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the ‘thing-in-itself’ became a thing for us, as, for instance, alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder [garança, planta que dá extratos vermelhos e púrpura], which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar [piche]. For 300 years the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000 or 10,000 chances to 1 in its favour, but still always a hypothesis. But when Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Galle really found this planet,(*) the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.
(*) The planet referred to is Neptune, discovered in 1846 by Johann Galle, an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory.”
“But during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach, the philosophers were by no means impelled, as they thought they were, solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really pushed them forward most was the powerful and ever more rapidly onrushing progress of natural science and industry.” O que me faz pensar: viveremos uns 300 anos sem filosofia verdadeira com a estagnação das ciências da natureza a despeito do desenvolvimento tecnológico?
“Thus, ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content.”
“The course of evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelian—a never quite orthodox Hegelian, it is true—into a materialist; an evolution which at a definite stage necessitates a complete rupture with the idealist system of his predecessor.” “Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. But, having got so far, Feuerbach stops short.”
“To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but to me it is not what it is to the physiologist, to the natural scientist in the narrower sense, for example, to Moleschott, and necessarily is from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with the materialists; but not forwards.”
“he lumps [the word] with the shallow, vulgarised form in which the materialism of the 18th century continues to exist today in the heads of naturalists and physicians, the form which was preached on their tours in the 50s by Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott. But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism.”
“The materialism of the last century was predominantly mechanical, because at that time, of all natural sciences, only mechanics, and indeed only the mechanics of solid bodies—celestial and terrestrial—in short, the mechanics of gravity, had come to any definite close. Chemistry at that time existed only in its infantile, phlogistic(*) form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; vegetable and animal organisms had been only roughly examined and were explained by purely mechanical causes.” Nem sei o que dizer da atual era de replicantes…
(*) “Phlogistic Theory: The theory prevailing in chemistry during the 17th and 18th centuries that combustion takes place due to the presence in certain bodies of a special substance named phlogiston.—Ed.”
“What the animal was to Descartes, man was to the materialists of the 18th century—a machine.”
“The second specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development. This was in accordance with the level of the natural science of that time, and with the metaphysical, that is, anti-dialectical manner of philosophising connected with it. Nature, so much was known, was in eternal motion. But according to the ideas of that time, this motion turned, also eternally, in a circle and therefore never moved from the spot; it produced the same results over and over again.¹ This conception was at that time inevitable. The Kantian theory of the origin of the solar system(*) had been put forward but recently and was still regarded merely as a curiosity. The history of the development of the earth, geology, was still totally unknown, and the conception that the animate natural beings of today are the result of a long sequence of development from the simple to the complex could not at that time scientifically be put forward at all.
(*) The theory which holds that the sun and the planets originated from incandescent rotating nebulous masses.—Ed.”
¹ Seria o “meu pensamento-mor”, ao contrário de vanguardista em conexão com o eterno retorno, só uma regressão fetichista a esse tipo de sistema cíclico e esférico da natureza ideal? Outra pergunta: se é um ou outro ou nenhum dos dois, realmente importa em algo?! Se dinossauros nunca coexistiram com o homem, e o mundo é o homem, do princípio ao fim, dinossauros sendo eternos fósseis ou tendo vivido e sido abolidos em acontecimentos pré-históricos dedutíveis por nós não seriam uma e a mesma coisa?
“This absurdity of a development in space, but outside of time—the fundamental condition of all development—Hegel imposes upon nature just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and organic chemistry were being built up, and when everywhere on the basis of these new sciences brilliant foreshadowings of the later theory of evolution were appearing (for instance, Goethe and Lamarck).”
“The Middle Ages were regarded as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of universal barbarism.” “history served at best as a collection of examples and illustrations for the use of philosophers. [paradigma Montaigne]”
“Though idealism was at the end of its tether and was dealt a death-blow by the Revolution of 1848, it had the satisfaction of seeing that materialism had for the moment fallen lower still.”
“It is true that Feuerbach had lived to see all three of the decisive discoveries—that of the cell, the transformation of energy and the theory of evolution named after Darwin. But how could the lonely philosopher, living in rural solitude, be able sufficiently to follow scientific developments in order to appreciate at their full value discoveries which natural scientists themselves at that time either still contested or did not know how to make adequate use of? The blame for this falls solely upon the wretched conditions in Germany, in consequence of which cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers had taken possession of the chairs of philosophy, while Feuerbach, who towered above them all, had to rusticate and grow sour in a little village.”
“It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon. But it did not fall to Feuerbach’s lot to do this. In spite of the ‘foundation’, he remained here bound by the traditional idealist fetters, a fact which he recognises in these words: ‘Backwards I agree with the materialists, but not forwards!’”
“The superstition that philosophical idealism is pivoted round a belief in ethical, that is, social, ideals, arose outside philosophy, among the German philistines, who learned by heart from Schiller’s poems the few morsels of philosophical culture they needed. No one has criticized more severely the impotent ‘categorical imperative’ of Kant—impotent because it demands the impossible, and therefore never attains to any reality—no one has more cruelly derided the philistine sentimental enthusiasm for unrealizable ideals purveyed by Schiller than precisely the complete idealist Hegel (see, for example, his Phenomenology).”
“the conviction that humanity, at least at the present moment, moves on the whole in a progressive direction has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism. The French materialists no less than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau held this conviction to an almost fanatical degree, and often enough made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’—using this phrase in the good sense—it was Diderot, for instance. If, therefore, Starcke declares all this to be idealism, this merely proves that the word materialism, and the whole antagonism between the two trends, has lost all meaning for him here.”
“By the word materialism the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting and stock-exchange swindling—in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy and in a general way a ‘better world’, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary ‘materialist’ excesses. It is then that he sings his favourite song, What is man?—Half beast, half angel.
For the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of the vociferous assistant professors who today go by the name of philosophers in Germany. For people who are interested in this afterbirth of classical German philosophy this is, of course, a matter of importance; for Starcke himself it may have appeared necessary. We, however, will spare the reader this.”
III
“The existing positive religions have limited themselves to the bestowal of a higher consecration upon state-regulated sex love, that is, upon the marriage laws, and they could all disappear tomorrow without changing in the slightest the practice of love and friendship. Thus the Christian religion in France, as a matter of fact, so completely disappeared in the years 1793-98 that even Napoleon could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty; and this without any need for a substitute, in Feuerbach’s sense, making itself felt in the interval.”
“The chief thing for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they shall be conceived of as the new, true religion. They are to have full value only after they have been marked with a religious stamp. Religion is derived from religare and meant originally a bond. Therefore, every bond between two people is a religion. Such etymological tricks are the last resort of idealist philosophy.” “And so sex love and the intercourse between the sexes is apotheosised to a religion, merely in order that the word religion, which is so dear to idealistic memories, may not disappear from the language. The Parisian reformers of the Louis Blanc trend used to speak in precisely the same way in the 1840s.” “If Feuerbach wishes to establish a true religion upon the basis of an essentially materialist conception of nature, that is the same as regarding modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its god, alchemy can exist without its philosopher’s stone.”
“Already here it becomes evident how far today we have moved beyond Feuerbach. His ‘finest passages’ in glorification of his new religion of love are totally unreadable today.” “Feuerbach, who on every page preaches sensuousness, absorption in the concrete, in actuality, becomes thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of any other than mere sex relations between human beings.”
“In form he is realistic since he takes his start from man; but there is absolutely no mention of the world in which this man lives; hence, this man remains always the same abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion.” “In his philosophy of religion we still had men and women, but in his ethics even this last distinction disappears.”
“One believes one is saying something great if one says that ‘man is naturally good’. But one forgets that one says something far greater when one says ‘man is naturally evil’. –Hegel
This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against conditions, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man—greed and lust for power—which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development—a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.”
“after the debauch come the ‘blues’, and habitual excess is followed by illness.”
“Only very exceptionally, and by no means to his and other people’s profit, can an individual satisfy his urge towards happiness by preoccupation with himself.”
Feuerbach nega-se a si mesmo: “Man thinks differently in a palace and in a hut. If because of hunger, of misery, you have no stuff in your body, you likewise have no stuff for morality in your head, in your mind or heart.”
(*) “The schoolmaster of Sadowa: An expression currently used by German bourgeois publicists after the victory of the Prussians at Sadowa (in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866), the implication being that the Prussian victory was to be attributed to the superiority of the Prussian system of public education.—Ed.” Em infantaria: 7 a 1. Mas, em educação: de novo 7 a 1!
“If my urge towards happiness leads me to the Stock Exchange, and if there I correctly gauge the consequences of my actions so that only agreeable results and no disadvantages ensue, that is, if I always win, then I am fulfilling Feuerbach’s precept.” “In other words, Feuerbach’s morality is cut exactly to the pattern of modern capitalist society, little as Feuerbach himself might desire or imagine it.” “In short, the Feuerbachian theory of morals fares like all its predecessors. It is designed to suit all periods, all peoples and all conditions, and precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable.” “Now how was it possible that the powerful impetus given by Feuerbach turned out to be so unfruitful for himself? For the simple reason that Feuerbach himself never contrives to escape from the realm of abstraction—for which he has a deadly hatred—into that of living reality.” “And that is what Feuerbach resisted, and therefore the year 1848, which he did not understand, meant to him merely the final break with the real world, retirement into solitude.”
“The cult of abstract man, which formed the kernel of Feuerbach’s new religion, had to be replaced by the science of real men and of their historical development. This further development of Feuerbach’s standpoint beyond Feuerbach was inaugurated by Marx in 1845 in The Holy Family.”
IV
(*) “Lately repeated reference has been made to my share in this theory, and so I can hardly avoid saying a few words here to settle this point. I cannot deny that both before and during my 40 years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration. But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and, above all, their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed—at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields—Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name.”
“And this materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.”
“today natural philosophy is finally disposed of. Every attempt at resurrecting it would be not only superfluous but a step backwards.”
“In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim.” Eis o aspecto que supervalorizaram! Conquanto o materialismo histórico antevia bem esse tipo de dificuldade em seu “determinismo dialético”: “Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.” Weber sabia de onde retirar sua “teoria trágica da ação”, se podemos assim denominá-la.
“it follows for the old materialism that nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history, and for us that in the realm of history the old materialism becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal driving forces which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces.” De certa forma esse é o parecer mais correto sobre a história.
“Instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece out of its own inner interconnections, Hegel simply maintains that it is nothing more than the working out of ‘forms of beautiful individuality’, the realisation of a ‘work of art’ as such.”
“The workers have by no means become reconciled to capitalist machine industry, even though they no longer simply break the machines to pieces as they still did in 1848 on the Rhine.” Me pergunto o que Engels diria dos entregadores de aplicativo de hoje em dia…
“Since the establishment of large-scale industry, that is, at least since the European peace of 1815, it has been no longer a secret to any man in England that the whole political struggle there pivoted on the claims to supremacy of two classes: the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (middle class). In France, with the return of the Bourbons, the same fact was perceived, the historians of the Restoration period, from Thierry to Guisot, Mignet and Thiers, speak of it everywhere as the key to the understanding of all French history since the Middle Ages. And since 1830 the working class, the proletariat, has been recognised in both countries as a third competitor for power. Conditions had become so simplified that one would have had to close one’s eyes deliberately not to see in the fight of these three great classes and in the conflict of their interests the driving force of modern history—at least in the two most advanced countries.
But how did these classes come into existence? If it was possible at first glance still to ascribe the origin of the great, formerly feudal landed property—at least in the first instance—to political causes, to taking possession by force, this could not be done in regard to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”
“Overproduction and mass misery, each the cause of the other—that is the absurd contradiction which is its outcome, and which of necessity calls for the liberation of the productive forces by means of a change in the mode of production. § In modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all political struggles are class struggles, and all class struggles for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form—for every class struggle is a political struggle—turn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation.”
“The traditional conception, to which Hegel, too, pays homage, saw in the state the determining element, and in civil society the element determined by it. Appearances correspond to this.” “If the state even today, in the era of big industry and of railways, is on the whole only a reflection, in concentrated form, of the economic needs of the class controlling production, then this must have been much more so in an epoch when each generation of men was forced to spend a far greater part of its aggregate lifetime in satisfying material needs, and was therefore much more dependent on them than we are today.” “The state presents itself to us as the first ideological power over man. Society creates for itself an organ for the safeguarding of its common interests against internal and external attacks.”
“The consciousness of the interconnection between this political struggle and its economic basis becomes dulled and can be lost altogether. While this is not wholly the case with the participants, it almost always happens with the historians. Of the ancient sources on the struggles within the Roman Republic only Appian tells us clearly and distinctly what was at issue in the last resort—namely, landed property.”
“It is indeed among professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists of private law that the connection with economic facts gets lost for fair. Since in each particular case the economic facts must assume the form of juristic motives in order to receive legal sanction; and since, in so doing, consideration of course has to be given to the whole legal system already in operation, the juristic form is, in consequence, made everything and the economic content nothing.”
“Still higher ideologies, [than law] that is, such as are still further removed from the material, economic basis, take the form of philosophy and religion.”
“Just as the whole Renaissance period, from the middle of the 15th century, was an essential product of the towns and, therefore, of the burghers, so also was the subsequently newly-awakened philosophy. Its content was in essence only the philosophical expression of the thoughts corresponding to the development of the small and middle burghers into a big bourgeoisie.”
“ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws.”
“But a new world religion is not to be made in this fashion, by imperial decree. The new world religion, Christianity, had already quietly come into being, out of a mixture of generalised Oriental, particularly Jewish, theology, and vulgarised Greek, particularly Stoic, philosophy.”
“The fact that already after 250 years it became the state religion suffices to show that it was the religion in correspondence with the conditions of the time. In the Middle Ages, in the same measure as feudalism developed, Christianity grew into the religious counterpart to it, with a corresponding feudal hierarchy. And when the burghers began to thrive, there developed, in opposition to feudal Catholicism, the Protestant heresy, which first appeared in Southern France, among the Albigenses,(*) at the time the cities there reached the highest point of their florescence.
(*) Albigenses: A religious sect which during the 12th and 13th centuries directed a movement against the Roman Catholic Church. The name is derived from the town of Albi, in the south of France. —Ed.”
“The ineradicability of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising burghers.” “Thenceforward Germany disappears for three centuries from the ranks of countries playing an independent active part in history. But beside the German Luther appeared the Frenchman Calvin. With true French acuity he put the bourgeois character of the Reformation in the forefront, republicanised and democratised the Church. While the Lutheran Reformation in Germany degenerated and reduced the country to rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, in Holland and in Scotland, freed Holland from Spain and from the German Empire and provided the ideological costume for the 2nd act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England. Here Calvinism justified itself as the true religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time, and on this account did not attain full recognition when the revolution ended in 1689 in a compromise between one part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The English state Church was re-established; but not in its earlier form of a Catholicism which had the king for its pope, being, instead, strongly Calvinised. The old state Church had celebrated the merry Catholic Sunday and had fought against the dull Calvinist one. The new, bourgeoisified Church introduced the latter, which adorns England to this day. § In France, the Calvinist minority was suppressed in 1685 and either Catholicised or driven out of the country. But what was the good? Already at that time the freethinker Pierre Bayle¹ was at the height of his activity, and in 1694 Voltaire was born.”
¹ Em breve no Seclusão.
“For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought, so far as it is left: the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics.”
“With the Revolution of 1848, ‘educated’ Germany said farewell to theory and went over to the field of practice.” “The new little German Empire(*) abolished at least the most crying of the abuses with which this development had been obstructed by the system of petty states, the relics of feudalism, and bureaucratic management.
(*) This term is applied to the German Empire (without Austria) that arose in 1871 under Prussia’s hegemony.—Ed.”
“educated Germany lost the great aptitude for theory which had been the glory of Germany in the days of its deepest political humiliation” “Official German natural science, it is true, maintained its position in the front rank, particularly in the field of specialized research. But even the American journal Science rightly remarks that the decisive advances in the sphere of the comprehensive correlation of particular facts and their generalisation into laws are now being made much more in England, instead of, as formerly, in Germany. And in the sphere of the historical sciences, philosophy included, the old fearless zeal for theory has now disappeared completely, along with classical philosophy. Inane eclecticism and an anxious concern for career and income, descending to the most vulgar job-hunting, occupy its place. The official representatives of these sciences have become the undisguised ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state—but at a time when both stand in open antagonism to the working class.” “The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy.” Não é que estejamos órfãos, só não tivemos filhos…
* * *
APPENDIX – THESES ON FEUERBACH (1845)
“Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and revolutionised in practice.”
“The standpoint of the old materialism is ‘civil’ society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialized humanity.”
Seclusão Anagógica 