Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

150 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

abject materiality in relation to each of these three protagonists, yet the relation-

ship Marx entertains to these various figures of abjection changes dramatically.

Grounding Feuerbachian Species-Being in Society

In his evolving critique of Hegelian abstraction Marx was inspired by several

contemporaries including Bauer, Hess, and especially Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s

materialist anthropology offered a critique of abstraction in religion, theology,

and speculative philosophy that was exhilarating both in its content and its spir-

ited, earthy idiom. In The German Ideology Marx would fundamentally critique

the limitations of Feurbach’s materialism and replace Feuerbach’s natural and

static conception of species-being with his own understanding of social labor

as the force driving history and leading to eventual human emancipation.^20 Yet

Marx’s attempts to ground his critique in “reality” began well before he arrived

at such a viable theory of historical materialism. Each of the three texts Marx

published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher has its roots in a substantial

Feuerbachian critique of Hegel’s theory of the state that Marx composed in

Kreuznach between March and August 1843.

In the posthumously published Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,

or Kreuznach Kritik, Marx drew on Feuerbach’s method of grounding religion,

theology, and speculative philosophy in a materialist humanism. In his anthro-

pological critique of Christianity (which he considered the essence of religion

per se) in Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity; 1841 and

1843 , in a revised edition with a highly influential preface), Feuerbach identified

the God of Christianity as the mystified projection of the infinity, transcendence,

and perfection that define humanity’s Gattungswesen, or species-being.^21

Classic accounts of Marx’s appropriation of Feuerbach in the Kreuznach

Kritik, such as those by Shlomo Avineri and Richard Hunt, focus on Marx’s

deployment of Feuerbach’s transformative method of correcting an inverted

subject- object relationship.^22 In his socialization of species-being in the Kreuz-

nach Kritik, Marx indeed made a similar move: just as God was the predicate of

humanity, not vice versa, so politics was the predicate of society. Marx faults Hegel

for assigning to the Idea the role of subject, and to the institutions of the family and

civil society the role of predicate. In reality, the relationship is the reverse.^23

As Breckman has shown, however, Marx also crucially appropriates Feuer-

bach’s critique of Christianity as a profoundly self-oriented religion that,

through its emphasis on a personal God and the salvation of individual souls,

hypostatizes collective humanity as discrete sovereign persons. Marx brings

Feuerbach’s transformative method and critique of personal hypostatization to