Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy
Glossary
"
- "All That Is Real Is Reasonable"
- Hegel's most notorious dictum, seized on by conservative governments as a blessing of the status quo and by liberals as evidence of reaction. Engels shows the dialectic actually reverses it: since only what is necessary counts as truly "real," and necessity itself keeps changing, the statement collapses into its opposite — every existing thing is doomed to become unreal and give way to something new, making Hegel's formula, properly understood, a case for revolution rather than against it.
- Related: Hegel's System vs. Method
- "Man in the Abstract"
- Engels's core complaint about Feuerbach across Sections III and IV: his philosophy talks constantly about "Man" and "Nature" but never engages real, historically specific human beings in real social and economic conditions. "This man is not even the son of a mother," Engels writes; Feuerbach's abstract humanity has "developed from the God of the monotheistic religions" rather than from any actual historical study of society.
- Related: Feuerbach's Ethics, Historical Materialism
B
- Base and Ideological Superstructure
- Engels's account of how the state, law, philosophy, and religion relate to economic conditions, arranged as a chain of increasing distance from the material base: the state as "the first ideological force," law as its formal codification, and philosophy and religion as "still higher ideological conceptions... still further removed from the economic foundations." He stresses each level still connects back to economics, though "the connection of the ideas with the material conditions of existence become more and more complicated and obscured" the further up the chain one goes.
- Related: Historical Materialism, Religion as Ideology
C
- Carl Starcke's "Ludwig Feuerbach"
- The 1885 book by Danish philosopher Carl Starcke whose review Engels turns into this entire essay. Engels praises Starcke's careful documentation of Feuerbach's philosophical development while criticizing his terminology and, especially, his claim that Feuerbach was secretly an "idealist" because he believed in moral progress — a definition Engels dismantles at length as a category confusion that would make every "normally developed man... a born idealist."
- Related: Feuerbach's Materialism
F
- Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums" (Essence of Christianity)
- Feuerbach's book that broke the Young Hegelians' contradiction between idealist inheritance and materialist argument "with one blow," placing materialism back on the throne: "Nature exists independently of all philosophies... Outside man and nature nothing exists." Engels recalls the book's electric reception firsthand: "we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach," including the young Marx, whose enthusiasm (with reservations) is visible in The Holy Family.
- Related: The Young Hegelians, Feuerbach's Materialism
- Feuerbach's Ethics (The Pursuit of Happiness)
- Feuerbach's moral system, built on the desire for happiness checked by self-control and by "the equal right of another to the pursuit of happiness." Engels calls this thin and ahistorical: it says nothing about why the means of happiness are unequally distributed, and taken literally would make the stock exchange "the highest temple of morality" — a system, Engels writes, unknowingly "hewn out of the capitalistic system of today."
- Related: Feuerbach's Religion of Love
- Feuerbach's Materialism ("Backwards, Not Forwards")
- Engels credits Feuerbach with a genuine return to materialism after Hegel's idealism, but faults him for stopping there. Feuerbach's own words capture the limit: "Backwards, I am in accord with the materialists but not forwards." Engels argues Feuerbach confuses materialism as a philosophy with its specific eighteenth-century mechanical form, never grasping that materialism, like idealism, must keep developing alongside new scientific discoveries.
- Related: The Basic Question of Philosophy, The Three Great Discoveries
- Feuerbach's Religion of Love
- Feuerbach's proposal, examined in Section III, to perfect rather than abolish religion by relocating it in human feeling — especially love between people — rather than in belief in gods. Engels mocks the etymological move behind it (religion from religare, "to bind," therefore any human bond counts as religious) as "the last resort of the idealistic philosophy," arguing love and friendship don't need to be renamed religion to exist or matter.
- Related: Feuerbach's Ethics, Wesen des Christenthums
H
- Hegel's System vs. Method
- Engels's opening distinction between two incompatible halves of Hegel's philosophy: a conservative "system" that claims to have reached final, absolute truth, and a revolutionary "method" — the dialectic — which holds that "all that stands has ultimately only so much worth that it must fall." Engels argues the system died with Hegel while the method is what Marx inherited and put to new use, since a philosophy built to end all further development necessarily betrays its own best insight.
- Related: "All That Is Real Is Reasonable", The Materialist Dialectic
- Historical Materialism
- Section IV's central thesis: that economic development — the mode of production and exchange and the class struggles arising from it — is the ultimate motor of history, with ideas, politics, law, and religion best explained as growing out of those material conditions rather than shaping them from outside. Engels states the modern proof plainly: since 1815 in England and since the Restoration in France, all political struggle has visibly been contests "for supremacy between two classes," later three once the proletariat entered the field.
- Related: The Materialist Dialectic, Base and Ideological Superstructure
P
- Praxis
- The concept the Theses on Feuerbach use to fault both idealism and older materialism at once: neither grasps human sensory activity as practical and world-changing. Idealism developed the "active side" of knowledge but only abstractly, since it denies real tangible facts matter; old materialism grasps real facts but treats humans as passive perceivers rather than active transformers of their conditions.
- Related: Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis XI
R
- Religion as Ideology (Christianity's Historical Arc)
- Engels's sustained example of base-and-superstructure analysis: tracing Christianity from its origin as a fusion of Jewish theology and Stoic philosophy, through its adoption as Roman state religion, its feudal hierarchy in the Middle Ages, its splitting into Lutheran and Calvinist heresies as the bourgeoisie rose, and its final displacement by openly secular, rationalist ideology once the French bourgeoisie no longer needed religious cover for its revolution — a religion whose changing forms track class interests at each stage.
- Related: Base and Ideological Superstructure
T
- The Great Basic Question of Philosophy
- Section II's organizing question: the relation of thinking to being, of spirit to nature. Engels sorts all philosophers by their answer — idealists, who hold spirit or thought came first ("in the last instance accepted creation, in some form or other"), and materialists, who hold nature is primary and thought derives from it. He traces the question's origins to primitive humans' ignorant guesses about dreams and souls, long before it took its more sophisticated modern form.
- Related: Feuerbach's Materialism, The Question of Knowability
- The Materialist Dialectic
- Marx and Engels's decisive move: keeping Hegel's dialectical method — that reality must be grasped "in their connection, their sequence, their movement" — while discarding its idealist premise that the Absolute Idea drives history. Engels's famous image: the dialectic "was turned upside down, or rather it was placed upon its feet instead of on its head, where it was standing before," now understood as the conscious reflection of real material development rather than its cause. He credits the same discovery, made independently, to the German worker-philosopher Joseph Dietzgen.
- Related: Hegel's System vs. Method, Historical Materialism
- The Question of Knowability ("Ding an Sich")
- The basic question's second dimension: can our thoughts accurately reflect the real world at all? Engels credits Hume and Kant with denying full knowability, and argues the doubt is refuted not by more argument but by practice: "the chemical substances which go to form the bodies of plants and animals remained just such Dinge an Sich [things-in-themselves] until organic chemistry undertook to show them," and the once-hypothetical Copernican system was proven when Leverrier used it to predict, and Galle to find, the planet Neptune.
- Related: The Great Basic Question of Philosophy
- The Three Great Discoveries
- The nineteenth-century scientific breakthroughs Engels says transformed materialism from static mechanics into a genuinely historical science of nature: the discovery of the cell (unifying the growth of all plant and animal life), the conservation and transformation of energy (showing heat, light, electricity, and mechanical force as interchangeable), and Darwin's theory of evolution. He notes Feuerbach lived to see all three but, isolated in a rural village, never fully absorbed their implications.
- Related: Feuerbach's Materialism, Historical Materialism
- The Young Hegelians
- The left wing of Hegel's students — Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Stirner, and eventually Feuerbach — who took the dialectical method and turned it against religion and the Prussian state, gradually shedding Hegel's cautious system. Engels traces how their fight against orthodox religion drove the "most decided" among them toward English-French materialism, setting up the contradiction Feuerbach's book would resolve.
- Related: Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums", Hegel's System vs. Method
- Theses on Feuerbach
- Marx's eleven short notes, "jotted down in Brussels in the spring of 1845" and printed here by Engels for the first time as an appendix. They argue that Feuerbach's materialism treats reality only as passive object, never as "human sense-activity, praxis" — active, world-changing human labor — and that Feuerbach's dissolving of religion into "humanity" ignores that "humanity... is the ensemble of the conditions of society," not an abstraction inside each individual.
- Related: Praxis, Thesis XI
- Thesis XI
- The closing line of the Theses on Feuerbach, and the essay's real climax: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but the point is to change it." Engels treats this as the hinge between philosophy and Marxist political practice — the declaration that the entire preceding philosophical tradition, materialist and idealist alike, mistook contemplation for the point of thought, when the point was always transformation.
- Related: Theses on Feuerbach, Praxis