 11 Theses on Foyerback This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Karl Manchester 2007. 11 Theses on Foyerback by Karl Marx. Translated by Karl Manchester 2007 1. The main deficiency up to now in all materialism, including that of Foyerback, is that the external object, reality and sensibility are conceived only in the form of the object and of our contemplation of it, rather than as sensuous human activity and as practice, as something non-subjective. For this reason, the active aspect has been developed by idealism in opposition to materialism, though only abstractly, since idealism naturally does not know real sensuous activity as such. 1. Foyerback wants sensuous objects, clearly distinguished from mental objects, but he does not conceive human activity in terms of subject and object. That is why, in the essence of Christianity, he regards only theoretical activity as authentically human, whilst practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty Jewish manifestation. He therefore does not understand the meaning of revolutionary, of practical critical activity. 2. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question. 3. Man must prove in practice the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the worldliness of his thinking. Isolated from practice, the controversy over the reality or unreality of thinking is a purely scholastic question. 3. The materialist doctrine that humans are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that therefore men who change are products of new circumstances and a different upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed by men themselves and that it is essential to educate the educator. 4. Necessarily then, this doctrine divides society into two parts, one of which is placed above society, for example in the work of Robert Owen. The coincidence of changing circumstance on the one hand and of human activity or self-changing on the other can be conceived only as revolutionary practice and rationally understood. 4. Fireback starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation and the duplication of the world into an imagined religious world and a real world. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks that once this work is completed the central task remains to be done, but the fact that the secular basis detaches from itself and fixes in the clouds as an independent realm can be explained only by the self-negation and self-contradiction within it. This must be first of all understood in the context of its contradictions, and then be revolutionised by the removal of those contradictions. Thus for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then be theoretically critiqued and practically overthrown. 5. Fireback, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensory intuition, but he does not conceive the realm of the senses in terms of practical human sensuous activity. 6. Fireback resolves the religious essence into the human essence, but the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social conditions. Fireback, who does not undertake a criticism of this real essence, is therefore compelled, one, to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract, isolated human individual. 2. For this reason he can consider the human essence only as a genus, as an internal mute generality which naturally unites the multiplicity of individuals. 7. Fireback therefore does not see that religious sentiment is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form. 8. Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which turned theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the understanding of this practice. 9. The highest point reached by intuitive materialism, that is materialism which does not comprehend the activity of the senses as practical activity, is the point of view of single individuals in bourgeois society. 10. The standpoint of the old materialism is bourgeois society. The standpoint of the new is human society or socialized mankind. 11. Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways. What is crucial, however, is to change it. End of 11 Theses on Fireback.