Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (German: Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie) is a short book by Friedrich Engels. It was first serialized in a socialist journal in 1886, and then published in book form in 1888. In this work, Engels explains how the philosophical contributions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach led to Karl Marx and himself developing the theory of dialectical materialism.
According to Engels, the immediate impetus for the book was a request in 1885 (two years after Marx's death) by the editors of the German socialist journal Die Neue Zeit. They asked him to review a new book on Ludwig Feuerbach by Danish philosopher Carl Starcke. Engels welcomed the assignment as a chance to write an analysis of the philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach. The resulting document, which was essentially an extended essay, was published in issues 4 and 5 of Die Neue Zeit in 1886.
In an 1888 foreword to the first book edition, Engels stated that the seed for Ludwig Feuerbach was planted over 40 years earlier when he and Marx were collaborating on "a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy" (this work was unpublished in their lifetime; it finally appeared in 1932 as The German Ideology). Since Marx had died without their returning to Feuerbach's role as a link between Hegel's philosophy and their own dialectical materialism, Engels decided to provide "a short, coherent account of our relation to the Hegelian philosophy ... [and] how we separated from it". Of the three major philosophical works that Engels is known forâÂÂAnti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig FeuerbachâÂÂonly the last was written after Marx's death.
The book is divided into four parts. They were not given titles by Engels, but one English translation supplied the following titles to encapsulate each part's contents:
In a key passage in Part 1 (which is dedicated to Hegel), Engels describes the revolutionary character of Hegel's dialectical philosophy of constant movement and upward development: Engels recalls how the "Young Hegelians" (a group to which he and Marx briefly belonged) were caught in a contradiction brought on by Hegel's system of thought: "While materialism conceives nature as the sole reality, nature in the Hegelian system represents merely the 'alienation' of the absolute idea, so to say, a degradation of the idea. At all events, thinking and its thought-product, the idea, is here the primary, nature the derivative, which only exists at all by the condescension of the idea." Engels then tells of the salutary effect of Feuerbach's 1841 book, The Essence of Christianity:
Engels begins Part 2 by introducing "the paramount question of the whole of philosophy", namely, which is primary, spirit or nature? He says the answers which philosophers gave to that question "split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature...comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism." He lauds Feuerbach for answering the question in a materialistic way, but adds that Feuerbach's materialism was limited: it was "predominantly mechanical" (which Engels attributes to the level of scientific knowledge at the time Feuerbach was writing), and it did not comprehend the universe as a process, "as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development".
In Part 3, Engels argues that Feuerbach allowed elements of idealism to creep into his materialistic outlook, especially "in the philosophy of religion and ethics." Feuerbach's assertion that "the periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes" is attacked by Engels as false: "Great historical turning-points have been accompanied by religious changes only so far as the three world religions which have existed up to the presentBuddhism, Christianity, and Islamare concerned." Engels finds Feuerbach's analysis of the evolution of morality to pale in comparison to Hegel's, and that Feuerbach's understanding of man and nature remained abstract and ahistorical.
In Part 4, Engels recounts how the Marxist worldview was formulated. He writes that Marx started with Hegel's "revolutionary side", i.e., the dialectical method. But for Marx, dialectics was no longer "the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain." Instead, borrowing from Feuerbach's materialism, Marx regarded human thoughts: Engels emphasizes that as long as people are prevented from consciously controlling the social world, it will resemble the natural world "in that its laws will operate beyond the will of human beings." He then points to three breakthroughs in 19th century scienceâÂÂthe discovery of the cell, the transformation of energy, and Darwin's evolution by natural selectionâÂÂand how they necessitated a new synthesis of philosophy and natural science: "a comprehensive view of the interconnection in nature by means of the facts provided by empirical science itself...in order to arrive at a 'system of nature' sufficient for our time." He concludes with a brief sketch of the Marxist theory of history.
After Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie was printed in 1886 in Die Neue Zeit, the Stuttgart publishing house of put out a separate book edition in 1888. The combined length of Engels' four-part essay was only 50 pages. The book added a foreword in which Engels explained the origins of the work. He revised some of the text that had appeared in Die Neue Zeit. He also included as an appendix a set of philosophical notes he discovered among Marx's papers. The notes were from 1845 when he and Marx were writing about the influence of Feuerbach. Engels edited the notes into eleven Theses on Feuerbach. The final thesisâÂÂ"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it"âÂÂwas engraved on Marx's tomb. The 1888 edition, with its revised text and "Theses on Feuerbach" appendix, became the basis for subsequent reprints and translations of Ludwig Feuerbach.
The first Russian translation, by Georgi Plekhanov, was published in 1892 in Geneva by the Emancipation of Labour group in their Library of Modern Socialism series.
The first English translation, done by Austin Lewis, was published by Charles H. Kerr & Co. in 1903. The title was rendered as Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy. In 1937, C. P. Dutt edited a new English translation for International Publishers under the title, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. The 1946 Progress Publishers translation, titled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, is the version posted on the Marxists Internet Archive.
In his philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin praised the "consistent materialism" that Engels articulated in Ludwig Feuerbach.
In a 1974 journal article, Henry Pachter challenged Engels' assumption in Ludwig Feuerbach as to what constitutes progress and development. After noting that we do not call it "improvement" when there's an increase in disease, crime, or pollution, Pachter wrote: