The Revolt against the Bourgeois World: Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx

This chapter examines the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Marx's ideas made German philosophy the most directly powerful in historical terms. The dogmatism with which Marx offered simple solutions to difficult problems sprang from a will not only to personal power, but also and especially to social change, and underlying the latter was an understandable indignation at the moral condition of the bourgeoisie. Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) was the most influential among the works of left-wing Hegelians. His magnum opus consists, like Kant's Critiques, of two parts, an analytics and a dialectics. In the first part, Feuerbach seeks to find meaning in religion by revealing its true—that is, its anthropological—essence. In the second, he attacks its untrue—that is, its theological—essence, by trying to uncover contradictions in Christian dogma.