Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy
Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy is a book by Friedrich Engels first published in 1886 . According to Engels, the work is supposed to complete the task undertaken 40 years earlier in the work “ Die deutsche Ideologie ”, which was unpublished during Marx and Engels' lifetime , to critically examine German philosophy from a materialistic position. Above all, Engels emphasized the importance of Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach for their own theories.
Hegel's conservative system must be distinguished from his revolutionary method of dialectics. Feuerbach rightly turned against Hegel's idealistic system and answered the "basic question of philosophy" - the relationship between thinking and being - materialistically. But Feuerbach also rejected Hegel's dialectical method, which is why his conception of humans and nature had to remain abstract and unhistorical. It was only Marx who preserved the “rational” of the dialectical method and freed it from its idealistic form. For him, dialectic is no longer the self-movement of the concept, but the real movement in nature and history.
Release history
The 50-page long script was written in early 1886 and was first published in the same year in “ Die Neue Zeit ”, nos. 4 and 5. In 1888, a revised special edition was published by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz in Stuttgart with a brief preliminary remark by Engels contained. In this edition, the theses on Feuerbach , written by Marx in 1845 and edited by Engels, were printed for the first time .