Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks on Superphysics

The Illusions of German Ideology

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Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution.

First Premises of Materialist Method

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2. First Premises of Materialist Method of human history

Our first premises not arbitrary, not dogmas, but real premises which be verified in a purely empirical way.

The existence of living human individuals

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History: Fundamental Conditions Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.

Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man

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By virtue of the qualification “common man”, Feuerbach declares himself a communist (Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2)[26].

But he is deceiving himself.

Communist in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party.

Summary of the Materialist Conception of History

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This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production.

It starts from the material production of life itself.

The basis of all history is then the intercourse with the production of life and the mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages).

The Illusion of the Epoch

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Civil Society and the Conception of History

The existing productive forces at all previous historical stages determined the form of intercourse.

The Ruling Class

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In every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. The class with the ruling material force is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The class which controls material production also has control of mental production at the same time.