Scope:
Karl Marx believed that with Feuerbach's reversal of Hegel, an important step had been taken in the criticism of religion. But he also believed that Feuerbach was philosophically mistaken in his views on the power of thought to change human life. Marx argued that a more materialistic interpretation of religion and culture was needed, that religion was only symptom of a human alienation that was grounded in social and economic structures. In "On the Jewish Question," Marx develops this idea by engaging the question of Jewish emancipation. He argues that "freedom of religion" is not the answer, that although this might bring the Jews the freedom to participate as equal citizens in the political process, it would not bring them "human emancipation." This form of emancipation, he argues, requires that we overcome the split between citizenship and civil society, which he argues, is essentially a religious distinction.
Outline
I. Karl Marx is the philosopher and social critic who almost certainly has had the most pervasive influence on world affairs of any Western thinker in modern history.
A. Whether or not Marx's socialist ideas have been discredited, he moved Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel and of religion in some interesting and influential directions.
B. He wrote at a time, in the mid-19'" century, when socialist and revolutionary ideas were gaining popularity.
1.The Communist Manifesto,published with Friedrich Engels, was published in 1848, the same year in which a series of revolutions rocked Europe.
2. These weren't the kind of proletariat revolutions Marx and Engels were looking for, and the fact that they mostly failed led the two men to believe even more strongly that revolution from below was necessary.
II. Marx developed and radicalized Feuerbach's critique of Hegel.
A. In his 1843 "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Marx wrote, "For Germany, the criticism of religion has been largely completed."
1. He is referring to Feuerbach's view of religion and his materialistic inversion of Hegel.
2. But Marx thought that Feuerbach's materialism did not go far enough.
3. Like Hegel, Feuerbach overestimates the power of thought and believes in the power of consciousness and reason to overcome our alienation,
4. Marx believes, though, that life is conditioned by the concrete material and social context in which it emerges: The movement of history is not primarily a matter of thought but of human productive activity in the world.
5. Thus he will write, with reference to Feuerbach, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
B. Feuerbach thought that religion is a kind of sickness in which we split ourselves in two by projecting part of ourselves as God. For Marx, however, religion is only a symptom, not the sickness itself.
1. This sickness is inequality and oppression and the miserable material and spiritual conditions these cause,
2. Religion is the symptom of this sickness, but it also is a palliative against it, the "opium of the people."
3. Religion, in other words, makes us forget how miserable we really are and, thus, mystifies our life in the world.
C. Religion, then, for Marx is a form of "false consciousness."
1. Where Descartes, most modern philosophers, and Feuerbach thought that consciousness could be made to be transparent to itself, Marx, to be followed by Nietzsche and Freud, argues that consciousness is not always the master of its own house because it is shaped by forces that it hides from itself.
2. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud each developed modes of interpretation, of cultural and social analysis, that take the appearance of culture — religion, morality, ideals, norms, and consciousness itself — and interpret them, look below the surface to social, material, biological dynamics.
III. Important aspects of Marx's approach to religion are illustrated in his essay entitled "On the Jewish Question."
A. He opens the essay by criticizing a follower of Hegel, Bruno Bauer, who argued that the Jews will be emancipated only when the state is no longer Christian, when Jews give up their Judaism, and when religion is abolished.
1. For Marx, though, this abolishes only the symptom, religion.
2. The correct approach is, instead, to see that we will abolish religion when we change society and politics.
3. This means abolishing the state, which Marx argues, functions much like religion does.
B. The state, much like religion, promises us freedom in the abstract while doing little to make freedom real in our concrete lives.
1. In the Bible, Paul says that there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, yet he also defends the institution of slavery and the subordination of women to men.
2. Marx argues that in similar fashion, the state makes us equal as citizens while allowing deep inequalities to exist in civil society.
3. The state cuts us off from our species being, keeping us alienated from ourselves in the same way religion does.
4. What we need is not political emancipation but what Marx calls "human emancipation," which he says, will be complete only when "the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen."
Suggested Reading:
Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'" and "On The Jewish Question" in The Marx-Engels Reader.
Smart, Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West.
Questions to Consider:
1. What does Marx mean by "false consciousness"?
2. What is the parallel Marx draws between religion and the modern state in "On the Jewish Question"?
Lecture Nineteen — Transcript
Marx — Religion as False Consciousness
In this lecture, we're going to talk about the philosopher and social critic who almost certainly has had the most pervasive influence on world affairs of any Western thinker in the modern history — Karl Marx. Marx's vision for the communist state inspired revolution and political reform throughout the 20th century. It served as the philosophical and political basis for the Soviet Union and its satellites, and for countries such as China and Cuba. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, it led some people to say that Marx's ideas no longer needed to be taken seriously. This is a mistake, I think, because even if one wants to argue that his utopian vision has been discredited, this doesn't mean that we can dismiss without further argument Marx's ideas about materialism, or ideology — or, of most importance to us here, his ideas about religion. The fact remains that Marx was a brilliant social critic whose transformation of ideas that originated with Hegel and Feuerbach produced a method of examining the material and historical conditions for our ideas and our values that continues today to inform social and cultural analysts.
In this lecture, of course, we'll focus on Marx's treatment of religion. After a brief introduction to his life, I'll begin to consider Marx's contribution to the hermeneutics of suspicion, and I'm going to connect his approach to religion with his views of materialism and ideology. I'll then turn to a closer analysis of his approach to religion in his essay "On the Jewish Question," and through this essay I'll show that, for Marx, the problem of religion extends far beyond the institutions and beliefs we commonly call "religious." Marx was born in Trier, Germany, into a Jewish family — and, like many Jewish families in western Europe in the 19'" century, Marx's had converted to Christianity in order to better assimilate into the dominant society. Marx studied law, and he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1841. He hoped for an academic career, but this was not to be because his ideas, his political ideas in particular, were quite radical. Instead, he pursued a journalistic career, and he barely scraped by for most of his life — living in great poverty for much of his life.
As I mentioned in the last lecture, in his efforts to avoid censorship, Marx left Germany and eventually settled in London in 1849 — where he remained for the rest of his life. Of course, Marx is best known for his massive, three-volume analysis of capitalism called Das Kapital. Although for many in the 19th century, as I've mentioned, the economic and social advances that came with the Industrial Revolution were an indication of the superiority of Western civilization, but others, like Marx, were sharp critics of the exploitation and the poverty that they saw as consequences of the new industrial order. This led to the rise of reform movements and socialist movements in the early 19th century, which helped power the emergence of unions throughout Europe. It was in this context that Marx and his longtime partner Friedrich Engels started writing.
Engels published a book called The Conditions of the Working Class in England, where his father owned a textile mill. In 1845 and 1846, Marx and Engels collaborated on a book called The German Ideology, and I'm going to return to this in just a minute. In 1848, together they published The Communist Manifesto, in which they advocated the abolition of private property, and they argued that the key to understanding human history is the conflict between those who own and control the means of production and those who work for them. It just so happens that in the same year as the Manifesto was published, a series of revolutions rocked Europe — from France, to Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany. In part, these were caused by a shortage of food and widespread unemployment.
Another factor was that liberals across Europe were clamoring for more representative forms of government, less regulation of economic life — and, perhaps somewhat inconsistently, for better conditions for the working classes. In this sense, these weren't quite the revolutions of the working class that Marx and Engels were looking for, and the fact that these bourgeois revolutions for the most part failed led socialist thinkers such as Marx and Engels to believe even more strongly that a revolution from below was necessary.
In the last lecture, we explored the topic of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the work of Feuerbach. The hermeneutics of suspicion, as I said, refers to a method of cultural criticism. It's a way of interpreting social and cultural phenomena that tries to uncover hidden mechanisms — to show how various aspects of society and culture are not actually what we think they are, but rather are means by which we avoid the realities of life and oppress others and ourselves. As I said, one of the key assumptions of this mode of interpretation is that human consciousness is, in some sense, not transparent to itself. There are forces beyond consciousness — social, biological, psychological — that shape and determine it and that our consciousness does not control. As a consequence, we do not always know what we are doing or why we do the things that we do.
I' ll come back to this general idea in a few moments, but I want to get there by way of considering some of Marx's basic claims about religion. In 1843, Marx wrote an essay on Hegel's political theory. Marx's essay was called "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right." The first line of the essay reads as follows: "For Germany, the criticism of religion has been largely completed." Marx is writing here about Feuerbach's view of religion and Feuerbach's — what I called in the last lecture "Feuerbach's materialistic inversion of Hegel." With Feuerbach, Marx agrees on the necessity of a materialistic analysis of religion Hegel, if we' ll remember, had given us an idealistic analysis of religion — religion as a mode of thought. Feuerbach is arguing that we need to think about how this thought comes out of material conditions, and Marx agrees with him on this — and that we need an analysis of those material conditions in society and culture. For Marx, this is another way of saying, as he puts it in this same essay, that "man makes religion, religion does not make man," and so, again, Marx here is following Feuerbach.
But Marx argued that Feuerbach's materialism is inadequate and that consequently Feuerbach's atheism is still religious. We can recall again from the last lecture that Feuerbach himself did understand that there was a religious aspect to his atheism. He thought this was a good thing. Feuerbach argued that we need to recuperate those human attributes that we have projected onto God, but he also thought that even as we give up the idea of God, we retain what God and especially what Christ represent. What we had assigned to God, but we had projected into God really for Feuerbach represents the true nature of humanity. Marx disagrees with this, and he also argued that Feuerbach remains religious in another, even more problematic, sense. The problem for Marx is rooted in the fact that Feuerbach, like Hegel, makes consciousness the moving force in history. Recall that Feuerbach followed the Hegelian view of alienation and
reconciliation, and that this is a process that we go through, that consciousness goes through, and that consciousness is the force in recuperating what had been alienated. So, even though Feuerbach is arguing that we have to consider how our thought is rooted in the material world, and that all knowledge and experience are grounded in our sensual engagement with the world, Feuerbach still believed that changing ideas is the means to changing human life. More specifically, he argued that reconciliation of humanity with its species being is a matter of consciousness working on itself to become more self-conscious. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels argued that Hegel and the "Young Hegelians," and this included Feuerbach, ignored the way that consciousness is grounded in, and shaped by, particular material and historical contexts. Feuerbach thought he was doing that — Marx said he did not go far enough. So, Marx writes in The German Ideology:
The Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men.... This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in [a different] way, to recognize it by means of another interpretation.... But it has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.
What Marx is saying here is that German philosophy — a set of ideas — has not recognized that its ideas are conditioned by their material context, and thus that philosophers such as HIegel and Feuerbach over estimate the power of thought, the power of consciousness to change itself, and thus to change the condition of humanity.
For Marx, by contrast, all thought, all life, is conditioned by the concrete material and social context in which it emerges. So, the movement of history is not primarily a matter of thought, thinking itself, becoming more self-consciousness of itself, but rather it's a matter of human productive material activity in the world. So, thought and religion, from Marx's perspective, are both basically surface phenomena. They're symptoms of deeper, materialist processes, and it's these processes that must be changed if human reconciliation is to be a reality — and the failure to realize this, the insistence on the primacy of thought and consciousness is, for Marx, the root of what he calls "ideology."
Here, I'm not going to try to define the concept of ideology too precisely — in part because Marx and Engels never really give us a clear, precise definition themselves, but also in part because since Marx and Engels it has come to mean so many different things. But the basic idea that I want to make here about ideology is that it involves some kind of belief that ideas are independent of social reality. Terry Eagleton, who is one of today's leading interpreters of Marx, puts it like this: "For [Marx and Engels] social illusions are anchored in real contradictions, so that only by the practical activity of transforming the latter [the real contradictions] can the former [social illusions] be abolished." In other words, if we have a false idea about the world — for instance, from Marx's perspective, if we believe in God — the only way to change our ideas is to change what Eagleton calls here "real contradictions" — that is, the social structures and economic realities that are the real causes of these ideas. This requires not philosophy, but political, economic, and social change. If, like Feuerbach, we claim that ideas can change history or that to change things we need to change the way we think or change our morals or our beliefs, we' ll be distracted from the real work for change that needs to be done on this social and economic level. This process of distracting ourselves from this deeper level of reality is the primary effect of ideology.
So, now we can see the first line of Marx's essay on Hegel in a different light. When Marx says that Feuerbach has completed the "criticism of religion," this compliment contains the implicit reservation that intellectual criticism of religion is only a start. It' s only a precondition for real change — which, again, depends on changing deep social and economic structures. Two years later, in a series of 11 "Theses on Feuerbach" that were to remain unpublished during his lifetime, Marx made this point into a general principle that remains one of his most famous aphorisms. The 11th thesis on Feuerbach states: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however is to change it." This change, for Marx, will not come about because philosophers recommend it, but because historical and social forces will bring us to the point where it becomes possible.
So, let's consider what this means for thinking about religion. For Feuerbach, religion is a kind of sickness where we split ourselves in two. We project or alienate part of ourselves into this idea of God as some sort of independent reality. Thus, when we look carefully at human religiosity we see that it is the form taken by our self-alienation. We believe in a God out there. But religion, for Feuerbach, is also the cure of this sickness, because it is through religion that consciousness becomes self-consciousness, and this is the case in Hegel as well. For Marx, though, religion is not the sickness itself, but merely the symptom of a deeper sickness. Recall the passage from Marx that I quoted back in the second lecture. He writes:
The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly, a struggle against that world, whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
There are a number of things to note about this passage. First, Marx writes that the "struggle against religion" is only an indirect struggle against what he calls a "heartless world." So, criticism of religion can only be a first step because the real target of criticism is the heartless world, where people are oppressed. Religion is a symptom of this oppression. It's a symptom of a deeper problem that people cannot see so long as they are bound up in a religious way of viewing themselves and the world. That is to say, religion is ideological because it also functions to hide its own reality as a symptom — and thus hides the underlying causes of religion. It's like a drug that instead of curing us of the sickness, comforts us enough so that we are not compelled to look for the real causes of the sickness. Indeed, it makes us sicker. It's an addiction that makes things worse in the end. So, religion as ideology, for Marx, is a form of false-consciousness. It's a false understanding of the causes of the sickness of religion, the causes that religion claims to address. It' s one that masks the social reality underlying religion.
This brings us back to the idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion, for — as Ricoeur tells us — it is precisely this idea of false-consciousness that helps us distinguish the hermeneutics of suspicion as a method of criticizing religion from Enlightenment approaches. Let's go back to Descartes for just a minute, who proposed a method of radical doubt in order to establish a new, rational foundation for philosophy and science. Descartes doubts things and our perception of them, but in the end does not doubt consciousness itself. He starts with a certainty that is present in consciousness—"I think" — and he believes that he can make consciousness transparent to itself by identifying clear and distinct ideas, such as "I think." In this, Descartes begins a way of thinking about knowledge that we can call a "philosophy of consciousness."
To varying degrees, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are questioning this philosophy of consciousness. They want to claim that consciousness can be false — consciousness can mask its own reality. So, they each develop modes of interpretation of cultural and social analysis that takes the appearances of culture and consciousness—such as religion, morality, ideals, dreams, slips of the tongue — and it traces them to underlying social, material, and biological dynamics. This means that their approach to religion is no longer purely philosophical or theological — it's no longer focused primarily on ideas — it's no longer focused on more reasonable philosophical arguments for or against God or moral arguments against the hypocrisy of the Church and believers. Instead, what becomes necessary is the close diagnosis of the material, psychological, and social grounds and effects of religious thought, religious practices,
religious institutions.
So, what we see here is a significant transformation in Western thought, from philosophy to the social sciences, and Marx made a major contribution to this shift. In Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, more generally, we see major contributors to the emergence of disciplines, such as economics, or psychology, or linguistics and history. To summarize Marx on religion up to this point we can say that religion, for him, is the result of social alienation that itself results from particular material forms of life and the production of the means to sustain that life. Very generally, the suffering of the religious consciousness is a symptom of economic and social inequality and the resulting class conflict that comes out of that inequality. Religion hides these social and economic dynamics by attributing human suffering not to them, but to a permanent human condition of alienation from God. In the remainder of this lecture, I want to try to illustrate this approach to religion a little more concretely, but also to complicate Marx's view of religion somewhat by looking at another one of his early essays: "On the Jewish Question" from 1843.
Recall my treatment of the Jewish Question from an earlier lecture. In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, philosophers and social critics were debating whether Jews could be equal citizens of European nation-states. This question was very much alive during Marx's time, and in this essay Marx addresses the answer given to the question by one of the Young Hegelian thinkers, Bruno Bauer. Bauer had argued that the Jews will only be emancipated when the state is no longer Christian and when Jews give up their Judaism. In other words, for Bauer, the answer to the Jewish Question is let's get rid of religion. From one perspective, of course, Marx is completely sympathetic with this answer because he, too, wants the emancipation of the Jews, and he wants the abolition of religion. But he finds this answer insufficient, for Bauer — according to Marx — is too much like Hegel and Feuerbach; he's too focused on the symptom — the abolition of religion — and not enough on the cause.
Bauer, as Marx reads him, is arguing that once we get rid of Christianity and Judaism, we can realize political freedom because the Christian Church or the Christian religion will no longer be an authority in the political system. But for Marx, this, again, turns things on their heads. It makes the abolition of religion the condition for political freedom — or, as Marx puts it in this essay, it turns a political or secular question into a theological one — when what we need to do is the inverse; we need to turn theological questions into secular or political ones. In other words, for Marx, we' ll abolish religion when we change society and politics.
But what kind of political change does Marx think is necessary? Why isn't Bauer's recommendation enough — namely, that we simply secularize the state by turning the Christian state into a non religious state, a state that doesn't privilege any religion? Marx's very interesting answer is that the state itself, the very form of the state, is already religious or theological — in other words, we must not only eliminate the Christian state, but we must eliminate the state as such. What does this mean?
Lets go back to the idea that religion is both an expression of human alienation and a kind of opium — that is, it's both an expression of suffering and a way of imagining means by which our suffering will be healed, but it's a form of imagination that really has no effect on our worldly condition. So, for instance, God is perfect — we are sinners; life on earth is imperfect — it will be perfect in heaven. This is the religious way of thinking, as far as Marx is concerned, that will not have any impact on this world that looks to another world. Lets take what, from Marx's perspective, might be a concrete example of this kind of thinking in the Bible. Let's go to the New Testament and Paul's Letter to the Galatians, where Paul writes:
For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Paul could say this, yet in other writings could defend the institution of slavery and the subordination of men to women. His basic point is that we are divided creatures. We are divided between what in his Letter to the Romans he calls the "new man" and the "old man." We are saved in Jesus, and so, in this passage, we are equal and free in Jesus — but we' re always at the same time still sinners and enslaved and unequal here on earth. Marx's basic point is that the modern political state divides us in an analogous way. Instead of dividing us, as in Paul, into new man and old man, saved and sinner — the state divides us into "citizens" on the one hand, members of the state proper, and individual members of civil society on the other. As citizens, we' re all equal. We' re all free to participate in the political process without reference to social status or religion — and today we would add race, and gender, and sexual preference. But, of course, we are much more than just citizens of the state. We' re also individuals who participate in civil society — that is, in the economic market and other social activities as particular people whose identities are determined by our status as man or woman, Christian or Jew, black or white, worker or owner, rich or poor.
In the political sphere of the citizen, these characteristics are — at least ideally — irrelevant, but in the sphere of civil society they continue to play a major role. There, in civil society, the freedoms and equalities of the political sphere are not necessarily in force. Your $250,000 salary buys you a lot more freedom and a lot more power than my $50,000 salary. Marx sees this division at the heart of the self as a form of alienation, so he writes:
Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence — celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as
means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in
relation to earth.
So, the political state, in other words, basically plays the same role in the lives of its citizens as Jesus plays for Paul. In Paul, our highest state is one of radical equality, but we can only imagine this happening through the intermediary of Christ. We can't imagine doing this ourselves — we' re sinners. For Marx, the modern state serves a similar function, for it acts as a kind of intermediary that makes possible a certain kind of abstract emancipation and equality while leaving our real lives in civil society in a condition of oppression and inequality. So, the state functions ideologically by keeping us focused on the freedom that we have achieved as citizens in such a way that leads us to ignore, that mystifies, the real inequalities that still exist. Marx puts it this way:
Religion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom.
So, Marx is saying that what many see as one of the great achievements of modernity, the creation of a political state where each citizen is the equal of the other, is not going far enough — and that what we call the freedom of religion and the rejection of the state establishment of religion doesn't mean that the state, in its essence, is no longer religious. In the end, religiosity, for Marx, is not first of all a matter of state religion or even belief in God — it's a matter of a certain division between spirit and matter; species life and individuality; the abstract life of equality; and the real, concrete life of inequality. The modern secular state is predicated, according to Marx, on a continuing divide between political and civil, public and private, by which many of the inequities of life and society remain in force. In this sense, we continue to be separated from our species being. We remain religious — even as atheists — and we remain alienated. Marx writes:
The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious in the sense that man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual existence, as if it were his true life; and in the sense that religion is here the spirit of civil society, and expresses the separation and withdrawal of man from man.
Finally, to get back to Bauer and the Jewish Question, what we need, according to Marx, is not political emancipation, but what he calls in this essay "human emancipation" — which, he says, will only be complete when "the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen." It's not that the Christians are emancipated and the Jews are not — it's that the Christians have a certain kind of political emancipation that the Jews do not yet have, and this is important to Marx. But the real issue is that neither Christian nor Jew have human emancipation, and that is what he's looking for and what he feels can be achieved not simply through a complete secularization, but through the abolition of the state. So, in the end, Marx not only directed a hermeneutics of suspicion against what we ordinarily think of as religion, but his suspicion also uncovered what he claims were religious modes of thought and practice in the very heart of what we ordinarily call "the secular world." In the next two lectures, we'll see a similar claim being made by another master of suspicion, Friedrich Nietzsche.
