The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  However, Feuerbach had also added a new aspect to Hegel’s criticism of Christianity which Marx implicitly takes note of and agrees with. As can be seen from what has just been said, Hegel had emphasized in the Phenomenology that Christianity generates an erroneously negative and demoralizing view of man as a this-worldly being by displacing in thought man’s highest potentials away from himself and instead onto an illusory alien being, God, with the result that man fails to realize himself as a this-worldly being. Hence Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the “unhappy consciousness.” However, Feuerbach, and then following him Marx, not only emphasize this but also something else, namely that Christianity in addition fabricates illusory potentials for man as an other-worldly being, and therefore illusory self-realization and happiness for him as such a being, especially with its doctrines of the immortality of the soul and of the rewards to be expected from going to heaven. In this general spirit, Feuerbach notes, for example, that when the Christian renounces sensual delights “God takes the place of the…delights which have been renounced. The nun weds herself to God; she has a heavenly bridegroom, the monk a heavenly bride.”13 Similarly, Marx already in the Introduction to Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right characterizes religion as “fantasy or consolation.”14

  It is both of these aspects of Christianity—both the more negative and the more (though illusorily) positive—that Marx is attempting to convey when in the same work he already introduces his famous dictum that religion is “the opium of the people.”15

  However, by 1843–4 Marx’s own critique of Christianity had gone even further beyond Hegel’s Phenomenology than that, and indeed beyond Feuerbach as well, namely by incorporating in addition an important idea from Bruno Bauer. In the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) Marx would famously complain that although Feuerbach had (in the general manner already described) provided an account of the discrepancy between religious illusions and reality,16 and also of the pernicious effects of the illusions in question, he had not provided any real explanation why these religious illusions arise and maintain themselves. And Marx would propose that the missing explanation lies in their social source, their source in a sort of social dysfunction or conflict. As he puts it in the Theses on Feuerbach: “Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement…His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis.”17 However, Marx had already developed this explanation by 1843–4 in Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where we read: “Man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because they are an inverted world.”18

  Marx’s thought here, to expound it a bit more precisely, is that religion falsely represents human beings as though they necessarily lack the potentials that they do in fact have due to the very nature of the human and divine conditions, whereas this representation is actually only a highly distorted reflection of the fact that they are contingently prevented from realizing the potentials in question by oppressive social relations, and that this religious illusion, together with the complementary religious illusion that human beings have other-worldly compensations to look forward to, arise in order to serve the function of reinforcing those oppressive social relations by making their negative consequences seem inevitable and tolerable to people, and hence reconciling people to them, so that they submit to them instead of rebelling against them. One of his more detailed statements of this sort of position occurs a little later in “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter” (1847):

  The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat…The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class…The social principles of Christianity transfer the consistorial councillors’ adjustment of all infamies to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, dejection, in a word all the qualities of the canaille.19

  Marx obviously thinks that religious beliefs serve this social function mainly by convincing the oppressed, namely by convincing them that their oppressed condition is an inevitable result of the very nature of things and that it will be compensated in heaven, thereby reconciling them to it and dissuading them from rebelling against it. However, it is probably a mistake to see this as exhausting Marx’s position, as commentators often do.20 For it is striking that in passages such as the one just quoted he leaves his specification of the target audience for Christian beliefs and their implications somewhat vague, which suggests that he probably also sees them as serving the social function in question in part by convincing the oppressors. In other words, they also serve it in part by convincing oppressors of both the inevitability and hence appropriateness, and the relative harmlessness due to forthcoming heavenly compensations, of the oppression that they are engaged in, thereby encouraging them to indulge in it. I want to suggest that this double-sided character of Marx’s critique of religion is a virtue (and that it reappears and remains a virtue within his general theory of ideology).

  The theoretical move beyond Hegel and Feuerbach that I have just described was originally due in all its essentials to Bruno Bauer, who had already argued in The Jewish Question (1843) that oppressive social relations—the oppression of one class in society by another—constitute the source of religious illusions, creating those illusions because they serve the function of reinforcing the oppressive social relations themselves.21 Thus Bauer had written: “Religious prejudice is the basis of civil and political prejudice, the basis which the latter has created, even though unconsciously, for its own benefit.”22

  Marx does revise Bauer’s idea in one modest respect, though. For he in effect notices that there is an inconsistency in Bauer’s formulation of it: if x has created y for its own benefit, then how can y be the “basis” of x? Accordingly, in On the Jewish Question (1843–4) Marx not only takes over the main core of Bauer’s idea but also turns it against Bauer’s conception that religion is a “basis,” in particular criticizing Bauer’s proposal to excise religion from politics on the grounds that religion is really only a symptom of deeper social ills rather than their basis: “We no longer see religion as the basis but simply as a phenomenon of secular narrowness…We turn theological questions into secular questions.”23

  The development of the critique of Christian religion by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer that I have just sketched and Marx’s own early adoption of it with only slight revisions explain and vindicate his claim in the first half of the sentence from 1843–4 with which we began that the critique of religion has already essentially been completed.24

  40.3 THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

  To sum up the philosophical result of this first half of the story, by 1843–4 Marx had taken over what he perceived to be the best critical ideas concerning Christianity in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer, and had thereby arrived at a critique of Christian beliefs that made the following three essential claims:

  (1)Such beliefs, while they do involve a distorted reflection of actual facts rather than simply being invented out of whole cloth, are false; they posit entities, conditions, processes, and so on that do not in fact occur. (Examples are: God; God’s possession of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; human beings’ contrasting feebleness in their potentials for power, wisdom, and goodness; and human beings’ im
mortality, subjection to divine judgment, and reward or punishment in an afterlife.)

  (2)Such beliefs serve the interests of one social class against those of another. (In the case of religion, the interests in question are those of a ruling class against those of the class it oppresses. Religious beliefs achieve this function in two main specific ways: (a) By projecting human beings’ higher potentials away from human beings and onto an imaginary God instead, they mask the responsibility that contingent social relations bear for the failure of members of the oppressed class to realize their higher potentials, instead making this failure seem inevitable, thereby causing the oppressed to resign themselves to it instead of rebelling against the social relations that are really responsible for it (and also causing the oppressors to find the harmful results of their oppression natural, so that any misgivings they might have had about its appropriateness are forestalled). (b) By promising members of the oppressed class survival and happiness in an afterlife, the beliefs in question offer an illusory compensation or consolation for their failure to realize their higher potentials in life, thereby once again encouraging them to put up with this failure instead of seeking to redress it by rebelling against the social relations that are responsible for it (and also forestalling misgivings in the oppressors concerning the human costs of the oppression that they are engaged in).25)

  (3)Such beliefs achieve their grip on people’s minds because they serve that social function.

  Let us now turn to the second half of the sentence from 1843–4 with which we began: “Criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.” Marx’s idea here is that this model of religious beliefs as illusions explicable in terms of their social function can be extended to cover other types of beliefs as well, for example, beliefs in the areas of philosophy, politics, and law. It is this generalizing move that produces Marx’s full theory of ideology. Accordingly, in his most famous mature statement of the theory, from the preface of Toward a Critique of Political Economy (1859), he writes:

  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness…It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict.26

  It is this generalizing move that constitutes Marx’s own main contribution to the development of the theory of ideology.27

  In this generalization, the core of each of the components (1)–(3) remains constant: falsehood of a sort involving a distorted reflection of realities is for Marx an essential feature of any ideology,28 as are serving the interests of one social class against another and occurring because such interests are served. But the generalization is otherwise quite flexible, the further details varying considerably from case to case (i.e. details such as those given for the specific case of religion in the parentheses to (1) and (2) above). One rather obvious sort of flexibility concerns the specific content of the false beliefs involved and the specific ways in which they serve the class interests they serve; clearly, these are not going to be exactly the same in areas such as politics and law as in the case of religion (e.g. they will not include a belief in God or a belief in a happy afterlife that helps to make the oppressed put up with their present misery). Another, less obvious sort of flexibility concerns which class interests are served: Marx is usually interested in ruling class interests, as he is in the case of religion—largely because, as he notes in The German Ideology (1845/6): “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”29 But that is not always so. For example (as we shall see later), in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) he attributes an ideological character to certain false political beliefs that arise from and serve class interests in conflict with those of the ruling class.30 This sort of flexibility is also implied by the passage recently quoted from Toward a Critique of Political Economy, where he says that men become aware of socio-economic conflicts in ideological terms, apparently envisaging a situation in which it is not only the ruling class that has an ideology but also other classes in conflict with it.

  Keeping these points in mind, let us now consider some of Marx’s actual extensions of the model beyond the field of religion. Doing so will in part be helpful for exegetical reasons—allowing us to put some flesh on the bones of the interpretation just sketched, thereby confirming and elaborating it. But it will also in part be helpful for another reason: Marx intends the theory of ideology to be an empirical theory.31 Consequently, for him its plausibility in the end rests on that of the specific applications that it can be given. His primary application of it to Christian religion, as already discussed, seems very plausible.32 But in order to assess its strength overall, it is important to get at least some sense of the plausibility of its other applications (and possible applications) as well. And while a proper critical assessment of these lies beyond the scope of this article, a concise review of them should at least go some way towards showing their plausibility and hence the overall plausibility of the theory.

  Marx actually commends Feuerbach for having already undertaken at least the first steps of an extension of the model from religion to philosophy, in particular Hegel’s philosophy. Thus in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he praises Feuerbach for having recognized that Hegelian “philosophy is nothing more than religion brought to and developed in reflection, and thus is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of the alienation of man’s nature.”33 We have already seen one aspect of this extension of the model to Hegel’s philosophy in passing: Feuerbach’s and Marx’s shared criticism of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit as merely a new version of God. But Marx himself also pushes it much further. Thus he already develops his own version of such an extension to Hegel’s political philosophy in Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where, among other things, he argues in detail and very plausibly that Hegel creates a sort of pseudo-justification of the invidious institutions of the modern state by purporting to demonstrate that they are necessary manifestations of the “Idea” propounded in his Logic. Marx also extends this type of critique to other areas of Hegel’s philosophy. For example, again very plausibly, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he argues that Hegel presents the source of modern human beings’ misery as lying in the nature of their thought—especially, in the sharp divisions that their thought posits between human beings and God, and between subject and object—and that Hegel accordingly presents the cure for this misery as lying in thought as well—namely in the monistic viewpoint of his own philosophy. But Marx objects that this is all an illusion, since the real sources of modern human beings’ misery instead lie in their socio-economic relations,34 and the cure for it therefore needs to be fundamentally socio-economic as well (i.e. communism).35 And he argues that Hegel’s illusory diagnosis and cure not only thus leave the real problem unaddressed, but actually, like religion, make it worse, namely by reinforcing the socio-economic conditions that are its real source by masking the fact that they are its real source and offering an illusory solution in the different domain of thought: “Since the conception is formal and abstract, the transcendence of the externalization affirms the externalization.”36 In The German Ideology Marx extends this sort of critical account of philosophy as ideology beyond Hegel to include other philosophers as well, especially more recent German philosophers influenced by Hegel.

  Marx already announces the extension of the model from religion to politics and law in 1843–4 in Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

  The immediate task…is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked in its holy form. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.37

  Accordingly, concerning politics, in the Econom
ic and Philosophic Manuscripts he describes not only God but also state power as a “mental entity.”38 In On the Jewish Question he characterizes the eighteenth-century concept of human rights, or “the rights of man,” as a sort of illusory projection of what is in fact only the historically local and socially partial egoistic bourgeois as though he were something natural and more universal than his political community.39 And later, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he argues in a similar spirit that the political conceptions of a “republic” and “the rights of man” that were employed as slogans of the Montagne uprising of 1848–51 were illusions (in reality there are no such things), that these illusions arose from the interests of a certain class (in this case, the petty bourgeoisie), and that they served the function of supporting those interests, especially by representing them as though they were general interests instead of merely particular ones.40 Likewise concerning law, he argues in The German Ideology that certain fundamental principles of the civil law of his day are inherently illusory, “juridical illusion,” citing as examples the principles that existing property relationships are the result of a general will and that the individual property owner has a “right of using and consuming [jus utendi et abutendi],” which (as Marx interprets it) implies that private property is based on the private will;41 that the adoption of these illusory principles in the legal systems of modern Europe coincided with, and resulted from, the emergence of a dominant bourgeoisie;42 and that they served the function of supporting the interests of that class, in particular against the interests of a declining feudal nobility, especially by overthrowing previous principles that had supported feudalism, such as the principles that authority ultimately lies in the hands of only a few, and that property rights are based in, and conditional on, one’s standing within a social hierarchy.43