Thèses sur Feuerbach

The main deficiency, up to now, in all materialism – including that of Feuerbach – is that the external object, reality and sensibility are conceived only in the form of the object and of our contemplation of it, rather than as sensuous human activity and as practice – as something non-subjective. For this reason, the active aspect has been developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism, though only abstractly, since idealism naturally does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, clearly distinguished from mental objects, but he does not conceive human activity in terms of subject and object. That is why, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards only theoretical activity as authentically human, whilst practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty Jewish manifestation. He therefore does not understand the meaning of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical activity. II The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. Man must prove in practice the truth - i.e. the reality and power, the worldliness - of his thinking. Isolated from practice, the controversy over the reality or unreality of thinking is a purely scholastic question. III III The materialist doctrine that humans are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, men who change are products of new circumstances and a different upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed by men themselves, and that it is essential to educate the educator. Necessarily, then, this doctrine divides society into two parts, one of which is placed above society (for example, in the work of Robert Owen). The coincidence of changing circumstance on the one hand, and of human activity or self-changing on the other, can be conceived only as revolutionary practice, and rationally understood.…