As before, Marx certainly emphasizes the importance of praxis in order to radically transform existing social contradictions. However, it is evident that Marx also points out that “a demand to change consciousness” through elucidations and education only ends up producing the “moral postulates” of what ought to be, without actually changing the real problems. He claims that the earlier debates among the Young Hegelians are barren because they are simply trying to discover a “true” philosophical principle for imagining the historical subject, whether “self-consciousness,” “species-being,” or “the ego.”83 Marx thus problematizes and rejects the entire debate within the Young Hegelians after realizing that the demand for another interpretation of the world alone is not at all capable of a radical social transformation.
According to Marx, Feuerbach’s critique of religion may be able to educate the masses about God being a mere illusion whose predicates should be actually prescribed to humans as species-beings. The problem is that Feuerbach’s critique ends there without posing a more substantial question: “How did it come about that people ‘got’ these illusions ‘into their heads’?”84 In other words, God is not a mere illusion that would disappear after its falseness was recognized. Rather, the illusion is an objective appearance produced by social relations. Thus Marx argues against Feuerbach’s optimism that it is most essential to comprehend “the actual material premises as such.” Without a radical transformation of social relations, the religious “illusion” will be repeatedly reproduced as an objective force through social practice. It is not possible to transcend the alienated reality by simply pointing out the alienated inversion of the objective world from a standpoint of philosophy. The real problem is not an epistemic misrecognition of a truth of the world but rather its inversion, which is based on objective social relations and social practice.85 Since individuals are always already conditioned by social relations independently of their will, Feuerbach’s demand to “change consciousness” alone cannot bring about any radical praxis, no matter how correct his critique of religion may be. In this sense, Feuerbach’s concept of “sensuous perception” still remains for Marx within an abstract philosophical discussion, because the way Feuerbach poses questions is a mere epistemic one, trying to discover another “true” foundation that discloses the human “essence” hidden under the alienated reality.
Despite Feuerbach’s assumption, however, there is no privileged standpoint for the philosopher from which the direct access to the “essence” can be guaranteed, as Marx writes in the third thesis:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.86
Marx problematizes the presupposition of “the educator”—obviously he means Feuerbach—because there is no such thing as pure sensuous perception that guarantees access to essence independently of the existing objective social relations. The intuition of philosophy is not outside the world but always already within the inverted world and thus conditioned by it. Therefore Feuerbach’s philosophic idea of “sensuous perception” and “love” remains inevitably abstract, insofar as he does not seriously take social conditions within the inverted world into account. If the philosopher is satisfied with a discovery of “essence,” philosophy only hinders radical praxis by giving another expression to the alienated reality and leaving it unchanged. What it really needs, so says Marx, is a critical investigation of the objective social relations in order to comprehend the possibility of resistance from the really existing contradictions of society itself.
On the contrary, Feuerbach’s idea amounts to a set of abstract theses without any specific social analysis. He does not take the objective force of the inverted world seriously enough, as if the alienated reality could be simply transformed through an alternative philosophical intuition. As a consequence, Feuerbach’s philosophy ironically preserves the current estranged situation of the world, avoiding a serious theoretical confrontation with reality. For Marx, it is much more important to practically confront the existing order of things and radically change it. He emphasizes the significance of a social and historical investigation with regard to how and why the objectively inverted world beyond human control emerges out of social practice, so that the material conditions for its transcendence can be understood.
Because Marx distanced himself from philosophy, he came to acknowledge the limitations of his own earlier schema of 1844. Even though Marx was aware that humans always relate to nature through the mediation of labor and that modern alienation deforms this relationship, his entire project of communism in 1844 was dependent upon a philosophically conceptualized idea of “humanism = naturalism.” Since his critique of alienation still roughly identified “capitalism” with “the system of private property,” Marx inevitably fell into a deterministic understanding of history, one that failed to carefully analyze the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production.
This is a reason why Marx’s project of 1844 still inevitably possessed a “Romantic” tone; it could only oppose to the alienated reality the philosophical idea of species-being that is supposed to realize the unmediated absolute unity of humans and nature.87 The more Marx depended on Feuerbach’s concept of “species-being” to ground his claim for the realization of “humanism = naturalism,” the more abstract his analysis of modern capitalism became. It is because of this that Marx initially envisioned the content of species-being ontologically, with abstract and ahistorical predicates such as “passion,” “sensuality,” and “universality.”88 Consequently, Marx’s own critique of political economy, which was supposed to reveal the specificity of modern society, became invisible, buried under the transhistorical discourse of the Young Hegelian philosophy.
Meanwhile, Marx intensively studied the problem of commodity and money in his Notes on James Mill in his Paris Notebooks, so that instead of falling into a rough schema of human history he actually continued his investigation into the specificity of the capitalist system. In The German Ideology, Marx finally came to be fully conscious of the danger immanent in Feuerbach’s abstractness: “Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always have needed each other.”89 An actual examination of the specific historicity of society is missing in Feuerbach’s philosophy. According to Marx, who had now distanced himself from his earlier project, there is no “essence” in Feuerbach’s sense such as “actual” nature and “actual” human beings, because both nature and humans are already thoroughly conditioned and constituted by social relations. The critical comprehension of the historically specific process of mediation now became the kernel of his scientific analysis:
Because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the actually existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognizing “the actual, individual, corporeal man” emotionally, i.e., he knows no other “human relations” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then idealized. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; therefore … he is compelled to take refuge in the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the species,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry