The Illusions of German Ideology

Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution.

Strauss decomposed the Hegelian philosophy which has developed into a universal ferment into which all the “powers of the past” are swept.

In the general chaos, mighty empires have arisen only to meet with immediate doom.

It was a revolution that made the French Revolution seem like child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi [successors of Alexander the Great] appear insignificant.

• Principles ousted one another.
• Heroes of the mind overthrew each other rapidly
• In the three years 1842-45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries.

All this took place in the realm of pure thought.

The putrescence of the absolute spirit is interesting.

The industrialists of philosophy till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit.

• They now seized upon the new combinations.
• Each wanting to retail his apportioned share.

This naturally gave rise to competition which was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion.

Later when the German market was glutted, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by:

• fictitious production
• deterioration in quality
• adulteration of raw materials
• falsification of labels
• fictitious purchases
• bill-jobbing
• a credit system devoid of any real basis.

I criticize individual representatives of this movement, elucidating their common ideological premises.

I oppose these remarks to Feuerbach because he is the only one who has made some progress.

1. Ideology in General, and Especially German Philosophy

A. We know only a single science, the science of history.

History has 2 sides:

1. The history of nature, as natural science
2. The history of men

These two sides are inseparable.

The history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.

The ideology of the history of men is either:

• a distorted conception of this history or
• a complete abstraction from it.

Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.

German philosophical inquiries sprung from the definite philosophical system of Hegel.

This dependence on Hegel is why these modern critics have not criticized the Hegelian system.

Each critique of the Hegelian system and turns his side against:

• the whole system
• against the sides extracted by the others.

They extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-consciousness”.

Then they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique,” “Man,” etc.

Religion was treated as the arch-enemy.

The dominance of religion was taken for granted.

Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc.

On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas.

The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category.

The Young Hegelians criticised everything:

• by attributing to it religious conceptions or
• by pronouncing it a theological matter.

The Young Hegelians agree with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of:

• religion
• concepts
• a universal principle in the existing world.

But one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate.

The Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, and all the products of consciousness as having an independent existence.

• Both they and the Old Hegelians declared the products of consciousness as the true bonds of human society
• And so, the Young Hegelians only have to fight against these illusions of consciousness.

According to their fantasy, the following are products of consciousness:

• the relationships of men
• all their doings
• their bonds
• their limitations

The Young Hegelians logically remove human limitations by imposing the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness.

This demand to change consciousness is really interpreting reality in another way.

The Young-Hegelian ideologists have made “world-shattering" statements.

In reality, they are the staunchest conservatives.

They declare that they are only fighting against “phrases.”

They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history.

All the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.