that humans and their self-alienation has to be understood in concrete

The demand to give up the

(1804-1872): Religion and Humanistic Atheism The reason, however, why all natural impulses are first related to some imaginary interest is that a peculiar set of social relationships has made it impossible to gratify natural desires directly or to lose oneself into activities for their own sake.

Dominant historical ideals are cut loose from the complex of social conditions and needs of the dominant classes. Die Heilige Familie was written in behalf of the philosophy of “real humanism” – phrase directly out of Feuerbach. 5, p. 192) – is declared to be a needless third term introduced between human beings and the manner in which they live their life. 215.)

those assertions independently.

were part of its essential content. A valid implication of Marx’s position would be that psychology is either the study of animal behavior or social behavior. traced through Locke, Hume, Kant and beyond—produced a number of cit., p.34).

“The chief defect of all previous materialism – including Feuerbach’s – is that the object, reality, sensibility, is conceived only in the form of the object or as conception, but not as human sensory activity, practice (Praxis) not subjectively. Hegel,

Religion, in other

14. It assumes that each individual organism is a god-given independent whole with private pains, pleasures and interests. 9. In a chapter of the section on Feurbach, entitled by Marx himself, Concerning the Production of Consciousness, he writes of his theory of history: “This philosophy of history rests upon the development of the real process of production, taking in fact its point of departure from the material production of immediate life, tracing the forms of social intercourse bound up and produced by this mode of production and conceiving civic society in its various stages as the foundation of the whole of history. Reminiscing in later years about Feuerbach’s magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity, Engels remarked: Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity.

It served as the acid test of the meaning of the theories he opposed. They may not be caused at all, or if caused, they may be caused by other mental events, and not at all by things. See especially, Lectures of the philosophy of Religion, Vol. Also for Hegel, the acceptance of a certain form of religion conditions the development of a corresponding form of political community: a people’s idea of God determines what they are, and accordingly the form of their states.

Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923):

onto the universe, so long as they love the illusion of their dreams more than the reality

But the difficulties could not be evaded – in fact they were multiplied.

It is here that Marx’s own psychology of religion comes into view. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. Feuerbachian elements, not to mention characteristic modes of expression, abound even in the maturest works of Marx.

Writings of Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. He wants to protect those ideals when they are under attack from bad social conditions. potential, God’s power is a projection of human sense of finitude and The first raises the question to what extent the mind, or since Marx, like Feuerbach, does not separate the mind from the body – to what extent man is active in knowing. “Essential man” – not men as they existed here and now, in city and country, in high estate or low – but man as such, realiter, a kind of man in which “a band of scrofulous, work-worn, starving men” were equal to all other men, a type of man in the light of whose meaning all historical differences between individuals, groups, and classes were superficial accidents.

Everything is vain in such a culture except the “useful”. 1966), p.133.

realities with which religion has to do. Man has a certain distinctive reality of his own, in this sensuous world. III, Bd. The first possibility is that the proofs for the existence of God are "empty tautologies," like the ontological argument which Marx stated in the form: "What I conceive for myself as actual is an actual conception for me.

33.). (On Religion, p.

Questions began to be asked about the personality of God and the immortality of the soul. 3. cf.

They have failed to understand Marx because to most of them the philosophy of Feuerbach has been a sealed book.