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[XII.2.]
Feuerbach is unique, the only one who has a serious, critical
attitude to the Hegelian dialectic, the master who has finally demystified
the old philosophy. The greatness of his achievement, and the clear and
simple way with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in stark
contrast to the opposing positions.
Feuerbach's great achievement is:
(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into
thought and expounded by thinking, i.e., another form and manifestation
of the estrangement of man; hence equally to be condemned;
(2) The founding of true materialism and of real science, by
making the social relationship of mankind to mankind the basic principle
of the theory;
(3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the
absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies setting
out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows:
Hegel begins with the alienation of substance (in logic, from
the infinite, the abstractly universal)--from the absolute and fixed abstraction;
which means, put in a popular way, that he sets out from religion and
theology.
Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensual,
real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology).
Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction,
the infinite--restoration of religion and theology.
Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction
of philosophy with itself--as the philosophy which affirms theology (the
transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms
in opposition to itself.
The positive position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained
in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not
yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which
is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore,
is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence--not an acknowledged
[XIII.2.]
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[XII.1.]
How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic
during the act of criticism (Bauer, the Synoptiker), and how little
this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism,
is proved by Bauer when, in his Die gute Sache der Freiheit, he
dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe--"What about logic
now?" - by referring him to future critics. But even now--now that
Feuerbach both in his "Thesen" in the Anekdota and,
in detail, in the Philosophic der Zukunft has in principle overthrown
the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on
the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this, has all the
same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute
criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism,
in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the
relation between the rest of the world and itself (the rest of the world,
in contrast to itself, falling under the category of the "masses")
and dissolved all dogmatic antitheses into the single dogmatic
antithesis of its own cleverness against the stupidity of the world--the
antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the "rabble";
now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own brilliance against
the dullness of the masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical
Last Judgement in the shape of an announcement that the day is
approaching when the whole of decadent humanity will assemble before it
and be sorted by it into groups, each individual mob receiving its testimonium
paupertatis; now that it has set in stone its exhaltation above human
feelings as well as the world, over which it presides in sublime solitude,
only from time to time allowing the sound of the laughter of the Olympian
Gods to fall from its sarcastic lips - even now, after all these delightful
antics of idealism (i.e., of Young Hegelianism) expiring in the guise
of criticism--even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time
was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young
Hegelianism--the Hegelian dialectic--and even had nothing to say about
its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. This shows a
completely uncritical attitude to itself.
[XIII.1.]
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