No other sources and quotes and page number from the articles attached. Answer questions as well.
By noon, post ~500 words responding to the assigned readings. One way to ensure achieving a 5 for any particular posting is to make sure to use quotes to demonstrate your argument (and cite the page number where you found the quote).
Karl Marx was, along with Feuerbach, part of a group of philosophers known as the “Young” or “Left-wing” Hegelians. I.e. they were indebted to Hegel’s thought, but rejected both Hegel’s belief in God and his political conservatism. Because we haven’t talked thoroughly about Hegel yet, and you have only read Feuerbach and we have not yet discussed him, I will offer a brief description of the relationship between these thinkers:
Hegel believed in Christianity, but specifically in a way that argued that most Christians were alienated from the actual truth of Christianity. For Hegel, God was the personification of absolute freedom, and the unfolding of the history of the universe and of human society was the unfolding of the life of God. Most significant for your reading tonight, Hegel believed that the concept of God/AbsoluteFreedom was an idea that needed to unfold throughout history until it was instantiated in all of our socio-political-economic structures. For Hegel, “salvation” was a meaningless term until all of society came to reflect the freedom of Jesus Christ. Hegel believed this freedom had finally arrived in modern Christian democratic capitalism in 19th century Prussia (most of what is now called Germany).
Feuerbach was a “Left Hegelian” in the sense that he, as you’ve already read, rejected the reality of God. He also was more revolutionary than Hegel in that he held mild socialistic views (properly known as social democracy) which is the political philosophy that is more or less enacted in today’s Scandinavian countries and the “socialism” advocated for by Bernie Sanders. Thus, Feuerbach believed that Hegel had the overall flow of human history down correctly, but that he did not realize that the true end (or goal) of history was not in Christian democratic capitalism, but rather in atheistic social democracy.
Karl Marx was a much more radical “Left Hegelian” who believed that both Hegel and Feuerbach missed the true nature of humanity’s alienation from its social progress. For Marx, humanity would not actually be free until it came to understand how it is not ideas that form our social structures (like Hegel and Feuerbach believed), but rather society that forms our ideas. For Marx it was the material conditions–the relations of people to each other and to the economic forces in their society–that actually formed ideas and not the other way around.
For your homework, please read all of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” the short selections from “German Ideology” and “Critique of Hegel” and ONLY mid-p.29-p.35 of the Paris Manuscripts– also called the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” Following the guidelines in the syllabus, please answer the following prompt:
1) What are Marx’s main issues with his fellow atheist and left-Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach? What does he think Feuerbach has backwards? Moreover, on the question of religion, how does Marx understand the function of religion as opposed to Hegel and Feuerbach?
2) In the Paris Manuscripts (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), pp29-35, Marx describes 4 forms of alienation humans experience under capitalist class society. What are these four types of alienation? Please explain them in your own words.
NB: I have also attached a diagram of elucidating Marx’s understanding of the relationship between ideas and material realities.