The German Genius

Strauss and others. 17 However, Feuerbach was not content merely to update and polish Hegel: in the new German tradition, he subjected Hegel to a thorough critical analysis. Feuerbach thought that Hegel had made a crucial mistake, that existence comes before thinking. Thought, Feuerbach said, was naturally dependent on a “sensuously apprehended natural world of objects and events.” Humans are part of that world and only by reference to it are meaning and content generated. Philosophy, therefore, cannot begin at the opposite end, as it were, and use pure conceptions as a starting point. 18
    In The Essence of Christianity , Feuerbach tried to show this process operating in religion. Religion, he argued (and this was well before Freud), “implied the projection by man of his own essential properties and powers into a transcendent sphere in such a way that they appeared before him in the shape of a divine being standing over and above himself.” “The divine thing,” he went on, “is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective—i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being.” In worshipping God, man is worshipping himself. But this was not necessarily a bad thing or a dead end. Historically considered, Feuerbach says, worship has helped man to a greater understanding of himself and what he can hope to become . The negative side, he thought, lay in the fact that the idealized conception of the divine inevitably led men to diminish their own status, to a self-impoverishment of the earthly realm. 19 This gap between the possible and the actual was a description of our alienation, and destiny was to be understood “not in terms of the absolute’s return to itself through self-knowledge, but in terms of man’s return to himself through the recognition and realisation of his own powers and possibilities.” This was Kant Hegelianized.
    The young Karl Marx (1818–83) was greatly influenced by Feuerbach (in fact, for a time Feuerbach was more important than Marx). In particular, there was Feuerbach’s idea that anthropology and physiology were the most fundamental of sciences. This contributed to Marx’s central idea—that the “humanisation of nature” and the “naturalisation of man” are what philosophy should seek to achieve. Feuerbach produced in Marx the conception of man “as a being whose very essence is modified by his contact with nature and his fellow men in society.” 20
    And this is how Marx, following Feuerbach, came to regard Hegel’s conception of alienation as central. But while Feuerbach had concentrated on the idea of alienation as central to the religious experience, for Marx, alienation—man’s self-estrangement—was intimately linked to his concrete social situation.
    Another precursor of Marx was Moses Hess, also a Young Hegelian. His Heilige Geschichte was the first expression of coherent socialist thought in Germany. His aim was to explore how mankind “can regain union with God now that the original harmony has been lost,” and it too was an attempt to reconfigure Hegel. 21 In a subsequent book, Die europäische Triarchie , Hess argued that the abolition of private property was essential to any new social order, that “spiritual alienation” could only be removed once the “servile classes” were relieved of economic exploitation. He, like others, believed that revolution would come first (or next) in England because the divisions between wealth and poverty were greatest there. Hess and Marx encountered each other in Bonn in 1841, with Hess subsequently describing Marx as “Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel rolled into one.” 22 “Money,” insisted Hess, “is the worth of men expressed in figures, the hallmark of our slavery.” For Marx, “Money is the jealous God of Israel beside which no other God may exist.” 23 After Marx had moved from Bonn to Cologne in 1842, he and Hess attended the lectures of Bruno Bauer together. Hess shared with Marx the view that Germany was “a more theoretical nation” than any others, and that that too was a form of alienation. For a short time, as David McLellan has observed, Hess was setting the pace.
    “P ERHAPS THE M OST S IGNIFICANT I NTELLECTUAL C OLLABORATION OF A LL T IME”
     
    Marx, says Bruce Mazlish, was one of the “Essenes” of early socialism. 24 This is meant to imply a certain religious and