From ‘The German Ideology’: Chapter One, ‘Feuerbach’.

Summary

Preface

Men have until now always generated false notions about themselves, about what they are or should be. They have organised their relationships according to their notions about God, about the normal man, and so forth. The inventions of their minds have come to dominate them. They, the creators, have bowed down to their creations. Deliver us from the phantoms, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under whose yoke they languish. Let us revolt against the domination of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these illusions for thoughts that conform to the nature of man; let us teach them, says another, to take a critical attitude towards them; teach them to chase them from their heads, says the third, and – existing actuality will crumble.

These innocent and puerile fantasies constitute the core of recent Young Hegelian philosophy, which the public in Germany receives with terror and awe, and to which, moreover, the philosophical heroes themselves, solemnly convinced that they threaten the world with ruin, attribute an implacable and criminal character. The first volume of this publication has as its aim to unmask these sheep who take themselves, and are taken, to be wolves; and also to show that their philosophic bleatings are simply echoes of the opinions of the German bourgeois, that the braggings of these philosophic exegetes simply reflect the miserable situation in Germany.