Ludwig Feuerbach, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Marx came to me as a young man who understood, before almost anyone else, what the inversion of subject and predicate meant for the whole of speculative philosophy. The method I had applied to theology — showing that what Hegel called the Idea, the universal, the infinite, was in truth a predicate of actual finite human beings raised to false independence — Marx applied immediately to Hegel's Philosophy of the State.1
Where Hegel makes the predicates self-sufficient, separated from their actual subject, Marx followed my lead in insisting that one must begin from the actual subject and attend to its objectivization.2 That is the Feuerbachian move exactly: restore the predicate to its true owner. What drew him to me most was the emancipatory force of this inversion — that it vindicated human self-consciousness, the being of man as species-being, as the true and actual subject of all the perfection, infinity, and universality that religion and speculative philosophy had attributed to their highest being.3
And it established nature as primary, self-subsisting, intrinsically real, rather than derivative from some prior Idea.4 He called me the purgatory of the present times, which I take as honest: one passes through fire to get to what is on the other side. But Marx did not stay. In the Parisian Manuscripts he turned back toward Hegel, specifically toward the dialectic of Lord and Slave, and built from it a concept of man constituted by labor, by self-creation through practical activity — and there he judged my standpoint contemplative, too passive, insufficiently historical.5
The sixth of his theses against me says the human essence I describe is an abstraction, that I treat it as something each individual carries rather than as the ensemble of social relations produced between them. On the charge of abstraction I answer from the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: the human being I describe is embodied, sensuous, hungry, turned toward a Thou — a being that can starve is not a contemplative abstraction.
But I will concede the historical point: I gave little account of why religion takes the particular forms it takes in particular societies, why the earthly family produces the holy one in just this shape rather than another. What I will not concede is that interpretation is the easy half. The book that cost me the university was not a pamphlet; it was a sustained reading of Christian doctrine, doctrine by doctrine, showing in each case that what theology states as a predicate of God is a predicate of humanity — that theology is nothing else than an unconscious, esoteric pathology, anthropology, and psychology.6
Marx took that method and redirected it toward political economy. The debt is real, and Engels acknowledged it honestly in 1886 when he wrote that for a time everyone was Feuerbachian. The quarrel came afterward, and it was a quarrel between someone who wanted to understand the religious world and someone who wanted to change the political one. Those are not the same task, and finishing the first does not disqualify it.
Marx applies the Feuerbachian method to Hegel's Philosophy of the State, and ascertains in a language strictly oriented on Feuerbach's terminology and diction: 'Hegel makes the predicates, the objects, self-sufficient, but separated from their actual self-sufficiency, from their subject.'The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, p. 55
'Later the actual subject then appears as a result, while one should proceed from the actual subject and pay attention to its objectivization.'The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, p. 55
this method vindicated human self-consciousness—in Feuerbach the being of man as species-being—as the true and actual subject of all perfection, infinity, and universality attributed by religion and speculative philosophy to their highest being.The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, p. 54
the method of Feuerbach released empirical reality from its subordinate and derivative position, thus establishing nature as primary, self-subsisting, and intrinsically real.The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, p. 54
it is also in the Parisian Manuscripts that Marx drifts away from the contemplative standpoint of Feuerbach and turns directly to Hegel, especially to the Hegel of the Phenomenology.The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, p. 55
theology is nothing else than an unconscious, esoteric pathology, anthropology, and psychology, and that therefore real anthropology, real pathology, and real psychology have far more claim to the name of theology than has theology itself.The Essence of Christianity