Theses on Feuerbach

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. IV Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation and the duplication of the world into an imagined religious world and a real world. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks that, once this work is completed, the central task remains to be done. But the fact that the secular basis detaches from itself and fixes in the clouds as an independent realm can be explained only by the self-negation and self-contradiction within it. This must be first of all understood in the context of its contradictions, and then be revolutionised by the removal of those contradictions. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then be theoretically critiqued and practically overthrown. V V Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensory intuition; but he does not conceive the realm of the senses in terms of practical, human sensuous activity. VI Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social conditions. Feuerbach, who does not undertake a criticism of this real essence, is therefore compelled: 1.…