BRIEF ON “THESES ON FEUERBACH”, by Karl Marx

ABSTRACT ON “THESES ON FEUERBACH”, by Karl Marx

I. Feuerbach’s perception of reality as something to be contemplated excludes the objectivity of human action and avoids his materialism from being revolutionary.

II. To Marx, the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

III. To Marx, the change of structures lays in the individual action.

a. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

IV. Feuerbach points to the duplication of the world into secular and religious, and claims to resolve the religious world through its secular bases, however, Marx says that this process also includes the identification and solution of paradigms of the own secular world, without which it wouldn’t be misused as base for religious purposes.

V. Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation: but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

VI. Feuerbach deals with religion as if it was something of the human essence, without considering the historical process and that the human essence in itself is the ensemble of social relations.

VII. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

VIII. Accordin to Marx, all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

IX. For Marx, the highest point of “contemplative materialism” is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

X. For Marx, the standpoint of old materialism is civil society; and the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

XI. Marx says: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”.