and August 1846 script 

by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism 

of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. 

in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, 

Erste Abteilung, Bd. 5 

Volume Il 

CRITIQUE 

OF MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 
ACCORDING TO ITS REPRESENTATIVES 
FEUERBACH, B. BAUER AND STIRNER 

Preface 

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, 
about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged 
their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, 
etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, 
the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate 
them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under 
the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against this rule 
of concepts. Let us teach men, says one,* how to exchange these 
imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; 
says another,’ how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the 
third,‘ how to get them out of their heads; and exung reality will 
collapse. 

These innocent and child-like fancies are the teen of the modern 
Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the 
German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our 
philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its world-shatter- 
ing danger and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume ‘of the 
present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take 
themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating 
merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German 
middle class; that the boasting of these philosophic commentators 
only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It 
is its aim to ridicule and discredit the philosophic struggle with the 

* Ludwig Feuerbach.— Ed. 
> Bruno Bauer.— Ed. 
© Max Stirner.— Ed. 

shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled 
German nation. 

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were 
drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of 
gravity..If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by 
avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be 
sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long 
he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful 
consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. 
This valiant fellow was the type of the new _ revolutionary 
philosophers in Germany.* 

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] There is no specific 
difference between German idealism and the ideology of all the other nations. The 
latter too regards the world as dominated by ideas, ideas and concepts as the 
determining principles, and certain notions as the mystery of the material world 
accessible to the philosophers. 

Hegel completed positive idealism. He not only turned the whole material world 
into a world of ideas and the whole of history into a history of ideas. He was not 
content with recording thought entities, he also sought to describe the act of creation. | 

Roused from their world of fancy, the German philosophers protest against the world 
of ideas to which they [...] the conception of the real, material [...] 

All the German philosophical critics assert that the real world of men has hitherto 
been dominated and determined by ideas, images, concepts, and that the real world is 
a product of the world of ideas. This has been the case up to now, but it ought to be 
changed. They differ from each other in the manner in which they intend to deliver 
mankind, which in their opinion is groaning under the weight of its own fixed ideas; 
they differ in respect of what they proclaim to be fixed ideas; they agree in their belief 
in the hegemony of ideas, they agree in the belief that the action of their critical reason 
must bring about the destruction of the existing order of things: whether they 
consider their isolated rational activity sufficient or want to conquer universal 
consciousness. 

The belief that the real world is the product of the ideal world, that the world of 
ideas [...] 

Having lost their faith in the Hegelian world of ideas, the German philosophers 
protest against the domination of thoughts, ideas, and concepts which, according to 
their opinion, i.e., according to Hegel’s illusion, have hitherto produced, determined 
and dominated the real world. They make their protest and expire [...] 

According to the Hegelian system ideas, thoughts and concepts have produced, 
determined, dominated the real life of men, their material world, their actual 
relations. His rebellious disciples take this [...] 

I 
FEUERBACH