Rel 198 - 03


 Das Karl 1818-1883

 Brief selection from

KARL MARX [1818-1883]
TOWARD THE CRITIQUE OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

There are two aspects of this selection to consider. For ideas related to chapter 12, start with the fourth paragraph, which begins:  "Religious distress is . . . . " When we get to chapter 14 and discuss Feuerbach, you can come back to look at the early paragraphs. In the last paragraph here, note  "self-alienation." This is where Berger got the idea, though Marx got it from Feurbach, who got it indirectly from Hegel, who got it from Luther, who got it from St. Paul.

In the first line, the translation speaks of the "criticism" of religion.  It would be more accurate in English now to speak of "the critical analysis" of religion.  The next unintelligible paragraph means something like this:  'the existence of this profane [non-sacred] error [which people mistakenly think is really sacred] is discredited when we realize that we should reject its heavenly [sacred] prayers for hearth and and home.  [As Feuerbach teaches us] where we used to think we would find a true Person [God] like us, we will now recognize it is only a semblace [false image] that is really non-human; we will see our need to seek our true humanness instead.

After that impossible paragraph the rest is still difficult.  But you can get Marx's general drift from this.  He is sometimes eloquent to the point of absurdity.

For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is discredited after its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis has been rejected. Man, who looked for the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, the non-human [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man, who either has not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society produce religion, a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore mediately the fight against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation, but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun, which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the saintly form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. . . .