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MECW translation of Engels’ 1888 version — Engels on Feuerbach

Frederick Engels

Feuerbach ^[3]

Source: MECW Volume 5, p. 11;
Written: probably in the autumn of 1845;
First published: in 1932 in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Bd. 5

“Isolated man by himself has not the essence of man in himself “the essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man and man, a unity, however, which depends only on the reality of the difference between I and you. — Man by himself is man (in the ordinary sense), man and man, the unity of I and you, is God” (i.e., man in the supra-ordinary sense) (§§ 61, 62, p. 83).

“the truth that no being on its own is a true, perfect, absolute being, that truth and perfection is only the association, the unity of two beings that are essentially alike” (pp. 83, 84).

§ 1: “The task of modern times was the realisation and humanisation of God, the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.” Cf. “The negation of theology is the essence of modern times” (Philosophie der Zukunft, p. 23).

e) “Being is not a general concept which can be separated from things. It is identical with the things that exist.... Being is posited by essence. What my essence is, is my being. The fish is in the water, but its essence cannot be separated from this being. Even language identifies being and essence. It is only in human life that being is divorced from essence — but only in exceptional, unfortunate case — only there is it possible that a person’s essence is not in the place where he is, but it is precisely because of this division that his spirit is not truly in the place where his body actually is. Only where your heart is, there you are. But all things — apart from abnormal cases — like to be in the place where they are, and like to be what they are” (p. 47).

f) § 48, p. 73. “Time is the only means that makes it possible without contradiction to combine opposite or contradictory determinations in a single being. This applies at all events to living beings. Only thus does here — for example in man — the contradiction make its appearance that now this determination, this resolution, dominates and occupies me, and then a quite different and diametrically opposed determination.”

Source: marxists.org — original. Shared freely for study.