Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right

Early Marx 101 (1)

This year at Philosophy Portal, we will be leading a full course offering seminars on the early writings of Karl Marx. This course will be called Early Marx 101, and starts May 11th. To get involved, see: Early Marx 101.

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This is the first entry in a planned series organised around the Early Marx 101 course. In this series I will be offering introductions to the core books that we will be covering in the course. Here we are obviously starting with Marx’s Critique of the Philosophy of Right. This article represents part 1 of a two part series focused on the introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, which will focus on how Marx thinks about religion, whereas part 2 will focus on politics.

There is something really interesting about the start of this project, namely with the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, we're dealing with a book where the introduction was actually the only materials published during Marx's own lifetime in the 19th century. And it wasn't until the first half of the 20th century in the 1920s, actually after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the entire book, the Critique of the Philosophy of Right was released.

In this context, I think analysing the full book in the course itself, is going to give a remarkable window into Marx’s relationship to Hegel, and specifically diving into an aspect of Marx’s relationship to Hegel, which nobody actually saw in the 19th century because this material wasn’t released. So there's a huge opportunity for thinking here, because on another side, I think that for anyone who's been following Philosophy Portal will know, a lot of our course materials have been focused on Hegel. This gives us a unique opportunity to read into the mind of a young Karl Marx, who is clearly both influenced by Hegel, and seeking a strong differentiation.

In the history of Philosophy Portal, we have completed courses on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and last year we actually completed a course on the Philosophy of Right. The challenge for me as a teacher here, and an underlying motivation for this work, is to think more deeply on the tension point between Hegel and Marx. I have not often shared that, before I started getting into philosophy explicitly and directly, and specifically diving deep into the primary source materials of Hegel, I went through a prolonged phase of identification as a Marxist and a communist (without having read the primary source materials of Marx), but of course, having exposed myself to many thinkers who were trying to revive Marxism during the “rise of the Millennial Left”. I can specifically here cite the works of philosophers like Alain Badiou, David Graeber, and of course, Slavoj Žižek, among many other prominent Marxists in the 2010s. And I think that the path that led me down, and a path that Žižek ultimately got me out of, was actually something I would call an unreflective activism. If we take the starting point for Philosophy Portal, and the reason why we started our work with Hegel, and specifically the Phenomenology of Spirit, is learning about what it takes, what are the conditions of possibility to actually cultivate inside oneself, philosophical mind, before one approaches problems of political economy.

There is a kind of meta process that has been underlying and motivating the work at Philosophy Portal. And so there is a real huge opportunity, I feel, both personally and collectively at Philosophy Portal, to dive into Marx's work from the point of view of a real philosophical cognition. And already I'm getting interesting ideas.

For those of you who have taken courses at Philosophy Portal, you might know that the way I think about Hegel's works in regards to the aforementioned Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Philosophy of Right, is that those books can kind of be categorised using Lacan's triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. I think about the Phenomenology of Spirit as the Imaginary in the sense of traversing the fantasy, in the sense of learning about the different phases and negativities that one goes through in the process of coming-to-be a reflective mind, towards ultimately cultivating philosophical cognition.

And that was actually explicitly written by Hegel as a precondition, even as a very long preface, for entering his Science of Logic.

Entering Hegel’s logic would be the equivalent of the symbolic, where we enter a modernist formulation of logic, and that modernist formulation of logic is trying to accommodate the scientific universe, i.e. scientists had developed a modern science of -insert external substance- physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but not a science of logic. There is a meta-perspective in German Idealism that what is going on in German Idealism is trying to rise or raise philosophy through self-reflection to the level of a science, what Hegel will call the philosophical sciences. In regards to the logic, this is positioned philosophically as a sublation of Aristotle, and to a lesser extent a sublation of Plato, Spinoza and Kant as well. But the core is that Hegel is trying to bring the logic of the ancient world to meet the standards of the modern world and the scientific universe.

This is all to re-iterate that I'm thinking about the Science of Logic as Hegel's symbolic phase, and then all of that is really bringing Hegel to politics in the Philosophy of Right, where he tries to think about the modern state. And of course, Kant and Hegel are both responding to the bourgeois revolutions of 1789 in France, as well as 1776, in the Americas. In framing Kant and Hegel in this historical context, we enhance our capacities for philosophical analysis here, in that we are dealing with the real outbreak of history when we are dealing with politics, we are dealing with world spirit in its most concrete form.

In thinking the modern state, Hegel has a structure, a dialectical model that he is building in regards to family, in regards to community, in regards to state. Throughout the Philosophy of Right course last year, what we were trying to do is see insofar as that dialectical model still applies, or insofar as that dialectical model breaks down in its own historicity in our time, basically. That background will be necessary to understand now Philosophy Portal going into the Critique of the Philosophy of Right with Marx. So far, what is most interesting to me in building this course on the Early Marx, is that Marx’s writings seem to be dripping in Hegelianism, Marx is conceptually Hegelian. At the same time, Marx is focused on, as is common knowledge, inverting, flipping, turning Hegel on his head. However, what is even more interesting to me is where he’s doing it. Marx is zeroing in on the real in Hegel, Marx is zeroing in on the real of politics, world spirit, which, of course, makes sense. We don't think about Marx actually as a typical philosopher. We think about Marx as more a political or an economic thinker.

I've also heard Marxists say that Marx is more of an economic than a political thinker, of course, referring here to the Capital, and actually also emphasising that there's not really a deep political theory in Marx here pointing more towards the mysteries, and some might say the impossibilities, of the Marxist project in regards to “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the dialectical transition from capitalism to socialism to communism and so forth. So I just want to say here that setting the stage for Philosophy Portal having covered in depth Hegel's philosophical attempt to sublate ancient philosophy towards the task of modernity, and here Marx flipping, inverting, playing with Hegel, as is well known, specifically at this level of the real of politics and world history. So that will be, at least from a teaching perspective, how I will be trying to think with Marx.

However, now we are ready to dive more directly into part one of the Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right. We will be specifically focusing on how Marx conceives of religion and theology. There are, and what is remarkable in not only Marx, but in the German Idealist tradition, is that there is a tremendous density to the prefaces and the introductions of the great texts that are produced by this tradition. Famously, the Preface of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the Preface of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, these prefaces and introductions have some of the most well-known phrases and passages, and most well-cited and well-quoted aspects of their work. I think it is the same for Marx’s Critique of the Philosophy of Right. In Marx, there are some tremendously famous passages that we find in the opening of this text.

Here I also want to reiterate that the entire book was actually not even published in the 19th century. So when we are thinking about Marx's perspective on the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, really, all people in the 19th century, and most people in general, are talking about the Introduction to it. And so part of the course and part of the deepening of this investigation will be to flesh out how Marx is struggling with Hegel's system, ultimately, of the family, the community, the state; and how Marx understands the relationships between these terms, specifically how Marx critiques Hegel's thinking about monarchy, about the Idea; and about how Hegel is a philosopher, and how philosophy itself is problematic, for Marx, on the level of politics and world history and, the actually lived experience of human beings and so forth.

To start the Introduction of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, we will be going over many aspects of Marxist thought, which are actually well known, which are actually well cited, which are actually common points of reference for anyone, whether you are a scholar of Marx, whether you identify as a Marxist, or whether you are someone that is a deep critic of Marx, and actually someone who's studying Marx because you think Marx is a dead end, or you think Marx is dangerous, or you think Marx is somehow something that needs to be learned only in an antagonistic relationship so that you can, as it were, defend yourself against Marxist thought, or communist thought. In opening up this text, what we find already is that Marx opens his Critique with the idea that not only is the criticism of religion the “prerequisite of all criticism”,¹ but that this prerequisite was “completed” in Germany.² Specifically here, this is an implicit and perhaps exclusive reference to the German Idealist project. And perhaps specifically here, the work of the Kantian critique, which of course introduces the transcendental philosophy.

From my reading of Hegel, as well as my reading of other philosophers and the entire modernist tradition, we would not be overstating it to suggest that the Kantian project, the Kantian critique, the transcendental philosophy, is actually the core of the German idealist project. Kant is the father of the German Idealist project, and many of the ideas about religion specifically that come out of German Idealism are part of this building within the Kantian critique, building within the transcendental philosophy. And I've made the point in the Christian Atheism course at Philosophy Portal last year, that actually the entire modernist philosophical project, through the lens of the transcendental philosophy, is a kind of “Death of God” theology. In philosophical terms, the “Death of God” can also mean the death of the universal being, or the external referent, whether that is Spinoza’s substance, or Plato’s Idea, or Parmenidean being. After Kant, there is a new relationship internal to philosophy, structured by the transcendental turn. Here I'm referring to transcendental apperception, the a priori categories: this self-reflexive move where one is less sure, uncertain, or even explicitly limited in regards to how much one can know about external being because of the structure of our mind being a fundamental starting point for the way in which we are thinking about the world. Of course, this is also something that Hegel will take up in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a starting point, starting with cognition, starting with sense certainty, and so forth.

The main point here is that Marx is also building within this tradition, and he's building within his critique of religion, basically a deepening of the work that has gone on in German Idealism. And so, in saying that the “critique of religion” is the “prerequisite of all criticism”, he is saying, this starting point, critiquing Christianity specifically, and in the German context, the critique of Catholicism as the critique that was Martin Luther’s ground of the Protestant Reformation; all of this is the theological seed form for what makes German Idealism possible. All of this is the theological seed form for what makes Marxism possible.

And I think that that point is important to labor on because there is still this ambiguity about Marxism and religion, which is not at all resolved. And actually, in terms of the performative contradictions and the social contradictions that we can find as Marxist intellectuals in general, we can still feel that there is this deep ambiguity about how to relate to the problems of socialism, the problems of communism, and the reality of religion and the persistence of religion. One might even say there is a struggle with the indestructibility of religion, which is a perspective that I have cultivated in the reading of the difference between Freud and Lacan. In Lacan there is a type of indestructibility in religion, which I feel like Lacan is identifying, and which Freud is perhaps either not aware of or struggling with in a different way than Lacan is.

But that is beyond the point.

The point here is that Marx is working within this sort of German Idealist tradition, which he thinks has completed the critique of religion, which perhaps was started in the Protestant Reformation, and you could say has now reached its philosophical form in the German Idealist thought tradition. And of course, perhaps Marx is also referring to the young Hegelians and perhaps some of the tensions that are emerging among young Hegelians with religion and politics and so forth.

This specifically manifests in the opening of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right with Marx pinpointing a refutation of heavenly speech.³ He is also, I think, getting into the function of heavenly speech. We can think about every Sunday, going to church and hearing the pastor speak on the “Father who art in heaven”. The pastor or priest is speaking from the perspective of the transcendental, speaking as a mediator or a connection to the perfect heavenly reality, to give some hope, to give some direction, to give some transcendental connection, which without—Marx is quick to point out—what we are left with is “profane existence of error”.⁴

Marx says specifically that this “profane existence of error” is “compromised” when this heavenly speech is refuted.⁵ So we get this very important initial distinction on why the heavenly speech is there in the first place? Well, it is there because it is helping us cope with reality, it is an opium, as we will get to. The heavenly speech is a cope for our inability or our perhaps choice not to confront the profane existence of error and everything that we are going to find there. Of course, for Marx, this is placing the seed idea that what we are struggling with and the challenge before us is to move beyond the transcendental illusions of the heavenly speech of even the father. Here again we can invoke Death of God theology, and towards the political, towards the secular, towards the world in all of its profanity, in all of its error, in all of the mistakes that we may find in ourselves and the other in dealing with this world.

Here we are dealing with a problem which I do think also reappears and repeats itself in Freudian psychoanalysis with the “illusions of religion”, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the “bare reality”, the “profane existence”, the “coping with reality”. And I think that most standard interpretations of Freud's relationship to religion would be something like: “let's overcome the childish illusions of religion”. Let's enter into a type of “developmental maturation” in the “scientific universe” where we basically “bite the bullet”, we “overcome the pleasure principle”, and “we deal with reality on its own terms”. For Freud, that is basically what maturation in growing up is, it is facing reality on its own terms without the transcendental illusions of religion.

I would argue that Hegel would not take exactly that point of view. I don't think Lacan would necessarily take that point of view. And certainly someone like Slavoj Žižek wouldn't necessarily take that point of view, although there is a deep truth in that point of view that we need to take on board. And it is a deep truth that we still need to struggle with. What I want to emphasise is more pointing towards here the ambiguity in the way in which we think about the status of religion and the place of Death of God theology in ultimately where we're going to be heading is, of course, the political.

Now, what I think is most important in regards to what Marx is offering here, as his starting point, is that I think he is actually relying on certain resources that one can find within Hegel's phenomenology and logic, which is to help us precisely with error, to help us precisely with flaw or mistake. Conventionally or traditionally, we might think that error, flaw, mistake is actually something that actually takes us further away from the truth, that might take us further away from the perfect Father in heaven. What Marx is saying, and I do think that this is again reflected in Hegel's phenomenology most explicitly, that actually the fear of error, the fear of the profane existence of error, to cover that over with heavenly speech, is actually fear of the truth itself. So there is obviously a tremendous irony in that what conventionally people have thought of as the most true, what conventionally people have thought of as the most high, what people have thought of as the ultimate reality, is actually a way to defend oneself from “the ultimate reality”, which one can find in error, which one can find in flaw, which one can find in mistakes. So this is of course a “bitter pill to swallow”. Ultimately here, what Marx is saying is that once we have overcome the fear of the Death of God, and we are capable of thinking in and with the “profane existence of error”, we are closer and not further from the truth.

I think that is really the core idea that in this tradition that I've been speaking to and speaking with, there is a general agreement. I think there is a broad understanding that this is basically the path to follow here. And of course, in Marx's context, this will lead him down the rabbit hole of how this brings us all to the world historical struggle of political economy, where we find nothing but the errors of profane existence.

Marx continues his critique of religion by suggesting that, as opposed to confronting the error-riddled nature of profane existence and the resulting impotence and weakness of our condition, that we sought a “superman” in the fantastic reality of heaven.⁶ Now, Marx does not necessarily develop the language of human impotence and human weakness. In fact, Marx does have a model of consciousness and self-consciousness, which does seem to point towards our progressive empowerment beyond ultimately capitalism, and in the context of a socialist and a communist reality, which perhaps we can find in the 21st century to be either unbelievable or difficult to grapple with. This is especially true if we are fully taking on board psychoanalysis, and especially if we are fully taking on board the unconscious, and specifically here thinking about the Lacanian insistence on impotence and weakness of our starting condition, and the impotence and weakness where actually we cannot overcome that impotence and weakness, but actually need to embrace that impotence and weakness. I'm also thinking about the works of someone like Todd McGowan, who's developing this idea in a very Žižekian orientation of embracing alienation. This is a theme in Marx which is approached differently traditionally, in the sense of alienation is something that needs to be overcome, and can be overcome in socialism or communism. For Marx, alienation is experienced not because of our bodily impotence necessarily, but because of our socioeconomic conditions and so forth. So again, I really do want to highlight and bring to the surface some of these tensions that I perceive, because I hope it will help us think through and with the early Marx and beyond. But what Marx is emphasizing is that we saw a superman in the images of heaven, and one can infer that the condition of possibility for our desire to seek a superman in heaven, is because we do not feel like a superman in our own bodily and social reality.

This language also points towards an obvious connection with Nietzsche, in the sense that Nietzsche is also very much a Marxist in his spirit. Marx is of course not a Nietzschean in political economy, as of course thinkers like Daniel Tutt will point out. But Marx is a Nietzschean in the sense that there is this striving for an empowerment for Marx, a very deep social empowerment, which is replacing and trying to replace what we previously imagined would be the case in a heavenly reality, in a Christian metaphysics, in an afterlife, ultimately, and trying to bring that to the earth. There is something very Nietzschean about that. Now Nietzsche, of course, is going to be developing not a political economic model of socialism or communism, but he is going to be pointing towards this idea of the overman as this self-overcoming, I think, of the human condition itself.

Here I just want to situate the way I am thinking about this enormous constellation of philosophical thought that we call modern philosophy in order to position the way Marx specifically here is situated in this field. The way I would interpret what Marx is saying here, and again, this might not be the way Marx is interpreting what Marx is writing here, but the way I would interpret this is that the human species feels impotent in relationship to the reality of the world, and the gap between the reality of the world and our condition is actually the ontological structure in which we create fantasies that help us cope with this situation. These fantasies take the form of religion. We create religion. In this sense it is clear that Marx is of the mind that we create religion as opposed to, say, God creating us. Marx is here taking on board the ideas of evolution. It is well known, of course, Marx had been reading Darwin and was influenced by evolutionary ideas in general. Evolutionary thought is itself percolating, is itself a part of the intellectual milieus in which Marx is thinking and writing. But ultimately here what Marx is saying: religion is a coping mechanism for human weakness, and of course where he is attributing the problems of that weakness is in society, is in the state, and we will get deeper into that specifically.

Furthermore, there is an optimism in Marx that even though there is a need for disillusionment, even though there is a need to overcome this seeking of a superman in heaven, and this heavenly speech which is helping us deal with the profane existence of reality, that we still must seek our true reality. We still must seek a better world, and that Marx, perhaps different from Nietzsche, seems to imply that this true reality is not only a socialist reality and a human reality, but is a deeply good and beautiful thing. So there is a way in which the good, the true, the beautiful, of course the Platonic categories, are secularised, they are understood to be of this earth, they are understood to be imminent to the historical process, and that imminent critique internal to our socio-historical reality is something that is ultimately going to bring us towards a good, true, beautiful reality. This dimension of things invokes a type of teleology, which invokes a type of replacement of any supernatural orientation with a more naturalistic orientation and an imminent historical orientation.

There are a lot of potential connections here, and there is a lot of place to play here. Here we need to think more about the relationship between Marx and traditional Christianity, Marx and German idealism, Marx and psychoanalysis, Marx and Nietzsche. There are all of these thinkers, who I think thought in this kind of meta-historical conversation that we need to continue to build, while recognising the ambiguity of the tensions that we find between all of these thinkers and traditions.

Now to reiterate the point that I mentioned briefly previously, that Marx is on the side of man is creating religion.⁷ By man we could say and we will say moving forward, that when Marx is talking in this way he is thinking about society. He is thinking that the state, the society, the social body of man makes religion, and that in religion we find the collective self-consciousness and the collective self-esteem of man.⁸ You could almost say because we are in the nightmare of history, that religion is a kind of symptom of the nightmare of history, that religion is kind of an imagistic covering, an imaginary layer, a protective sphere or bubble, to use language that might be invoked by someone like the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. To push it further, there is a kind of cocoon even, an infantilising protective layer that man as society is making, and that this understanding of religion would lead one to the potential hypothesis that, well, could society be structured other to the point where this religious dimension is no longer needed? That not only is God not eternal and religion is reflecting this eternal true reality outside of us or beyond us, but actually that religion is historical and evolutionary, that religion is something that is created within history, and that religion is created within an evolutionary process, where it is responding to real historical needs and desires of the human species, but nevertheless something that if those historical conditions were different, which is where Marx will like us to think, that perhaps religion will wither away? Perhaps this is not dissimilar to the way Marx will start to theorise the way in which he thinks the state might wither away one day, in the right conditions.

In sum, Marx is saying that religion does not make man, he is getting rid or jettisoning any ontological status of the supernatural.

But another important point Marx is making is that religion is specifically here for self-consciousness who has either not yet won himself—here we could think about the phenomenological unfolding of a developmental dialectic, that someone has not yet come to a deep enough layer of their own self-consciousness—or on the other hand, someone who has already lost himself. In this point, there are two equally important sides. There is religion for someone who does not yet know himself, I am thinking here about people who particularly might have been “indoctrinated” or raised in a religious environment, and have never been encouraged to explore their own self-relation. I think this is something that I have heard, for example, in the work of deconstructive theologian Jim Palmer. For Palmer, when one is raised in a religious environment, one's life and one's entire spiritual aroma is covered in a religious cultus, a religious community, and thus never actually develops a self-relationship to oneself. So one has not “won him or herself”. Hegel's phenomenology tries to deal with this point through coming to self-realisation. For Hegel, there is a coming to self-reflection, which requires an imminent critique and transcendence of the religious illusion.

On the other hand, the having “lost” himself could be more on the level of experiencing deep life negativities, either, at a certain stage of life, or maybe later on in life. Here one starts to rely on religion as a kind of existential crutch, where one starts to rely on religion in order to deal with either the pains of mortality, or the pains of social exclusion, or the pains of not realising oneself in the way one has dreamed, or where one's entire life project has collapsed. The logic is something like: at least I have some safe place where I have some opiate to cope, to keep going on. So there is this at play as well.

Now when Marx is talking about man, he's talking about the world of man, he's saying explicitly man is the world of man, and he is saying that man is state, man is society, man is a social being. Thus when we are talking about man, we're talking about social being, we're talking about society. Moreover we are talking about this on the largest scales of religion, but also politics, nation states, the interrelationships between states, absolute spirit. Here again we can continue to work with Hegel’s model in the Philosophy of Right insofar as Hegel is thinking about absolute spirit, Hegel is thinking about world spirit on that level. Hegel is thinking about this on the level of ultimately the interrelations between states, the impossibility of a world state, the impossibility of world peace, the inevitable tensions, conflicts, antagonisms that arise between states. This is man, this is the world of man. And one can see why Marx would think that religion in this context, that man in this historical tunnel, would need to produce something like religion as what he calls an “inverted consciousness of this world”.⁹

This is another Hegelian term that Marx is using. And to think about religion as an inverted consciousness of the world, he's saying religion is the opposite of the world. It is that the religious world is the heavenly world, earth is not heaven. That in this world, we are mortal, in heaven, we are presumably immortal. In this world, we are born, we die. In the heavenly world, we presumably are not born and do not die. In this world, we are not with God. In the heavenly world, we are with God. So there is an opposite character to this world vis-a-vis religion.

One might conclude that Marx is thinking about this world of man, the world of states and societies, as something that necessarily needs to produce religion in order to cope with war, in order to cope with conflict, in order to cope with death, in order to cope with disease, in order to cope with just the social tensions that characterise and riddle the social body and a social life. Now, consequently, Marx is seeing religion as man’s general theory of the world. In contrast, when we think about, for example, more scientifically inclined thinkers who try to develop a general theory or a theory of everything, what they are trying to do is oftentimes an unconscious creation of their own religion, to replace what was lost in a society without this coping mechanism. However, I do agree with what Marx is saying in that religions are already general theories of the world. He calls religions’ “logic in popular form”.¹⁰

So religion is for the masses. Religion is for what Marx will see as the proletariat, of course. And here, this is so important to understand because, of course, Marx is trying to speak to that populous. Marx is trying to speak to popular form. In fact, the Marxist project makes no sense unless one can speak to the popular form, because without the workers, without the lower classes (which is the large majority of human beings), understanding the illusion of religion and desiring to overcome the illusion of religion, and towards taking control of the means of production towards a different social order, then the entire project isn't going to work. So he's saying here that religion as logic in its popular form towards universal consolation and justification is not just wrong, it is actually an obstacle to emancipation. Again we find an irony where most people think that religion is the key to their emancipation. Marx is saying, no, actually, this is what is blocking the possibility of emancipation.

This ambiguity in Marx with religion, this tension, is something that also needs deeper attention and analysis insofar as one could say that without religion, the popular project that Marx is proposing didn't actually happen. One could say that we have actually already run the experiment in the 20th century, and that what we found is that we just fall into worse political projects, tyrannical, fascistic, totalitarian, however we want to think about that. Or one could say that we just simply fall into an empty hedonism and nihilism, that without religion, we have no capacity to transcend ourselves. So do we need actually a more nuanced model of the relationship between religion and politics? And is Marx here too quickly trying to throw away the “baby in the bathwater”? Is he, on the other hand, expecting too much from the people? Is he expecting too much from the working class? That might be another theme that we might want to stay with, we might want to continue exploring.

However, it is clear that for Marx, religion is a fantasmatic screen. It is, again, an illusory screen, which is actually an obstacle to human essence and true reality. Marx sees true reality as the realisation of human essence in this world, where Marx sees the true reality of human essence in an ultimately political, socialist, democratic project, which is oriented towards something of a social order beyond capitalism. Here he states explicitly that the struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.¹¹ There is a distinctly deconstructive negative relationship to religion that we actually need to overcome religion. And the reason why we need to overcome religion is because that is a necessary precondition for a political project that could actually realise the masses, the logic of popular form.

In conclusion, I think what is most important here to take away is that Marx is writing to and for the popular form. He is, in that sense, distinct from Hegel. He is also distinct from Kant. He is distinct from, one could argue, most philosophers, in the sense that most philosophers are perhaps writing in a way and to an audience that is not necessarily everyone, that there is an idea that actually philosophy is not for the many, that philosophy is for the few. And that has a distinctively exclusive character to it, which, of course, religion doesn't have. Religion is for the masses. Religion is for everyone. And in that sense, Marx is, again, not so much a philosopher as a political and an economic thinker.

But the way in which Marx is stepping on theological terrain is perhaps understated oftentimes, that actually: is Marx aware of the degree to which his project is theological in essence? Or how is Marx understanding his role as modernist theologian in a political context, secular theologian in a political context? That's another thing that perhaps needs to be more deeply discussed and reflected upon.

Now we come to very famous reflections by Marx, and often quoted reflections by Marx. Marx is aware, and states explicitly, look, religious suffering is real.¹² Religious suffering is an expression of real suffering. This inverted world that we're creating, this cocoon, this imagistic covering that we're creating, it's coming from a real suffering. It's coming from the nightmare of history. It is a protest against that real suffering. He just thinks that it's a misguided protest. He just thinks it's a protest that needs to be put elsewhere. So Marx will say religion is the “sigh of the oppressed creatures”,¹³ suggesting that we are oppressed creatures. He will say religion is the “heart of a heartless world”,¹⁴ suggesting that we live in a heartless world. He will say that religion is the “soul of a soulless conditions”,¹⁵ suggesting that we do live in soulless conditions. And it is in that context where he'll call religion an “opium”.¹⁶ So again, he is suggesting that religion is “copium”, that is justified in a certain sense.

There's a popular logic to it. Marx gets it. He gets why we might go to it. He might get why we need it. But he's also here to say that the absolution of religion as what he'll call the “illusory happiness of the people” here, opium, an illusory happiness, an opiate of happiness, is the “demand for their real happiness”.¹⁷ And for real happiness, Marx is definitely going to be pointing, of course, in a political, in a secular, in an earthly direction.

Here I think we get actually a distinction which I want to highlight between what I think is a real difference between Marx and Freud. Marx is much more optimistic than Freud. Marx thinks that the possibilities for human empowerment and self-realisation seem to be higher than the way Freud's thinking about it. So Marx is basically saying, we cannot just critique religion. And maybe this is also a critique of the German Idealists in the sense of a critical project, like that imminent critique is not for just for endless critique, but a real social reconciliation.

Thus, for Marx, imminent critique is not just so we get rid of religion, and then we're just left with nothing. He is saying, no, we have to critique religion. We have to remove this fantasmatic chain and this fantasmatic consolation in order so that we can really live, in order so that we can create a new world. This new world is something Marx points towards in claiming the criticism of religion disillusions man so he can “regain his senses”, and in regained senses, he can move around himself as his “own true sun”.¹⁸ What he's saying there is pointing towards the socialist world.

For Marx, in talking about man in a socialist world, he is talking about regaining our senses and revolving around ourselves as our own true sun; he is not talking about this in a purely liberal, individualistic way. Marx is talking about a sublation of liberalism towards a reality where revolving around ourself as our own true sun means that we build a socialist reality. This political dimension is something that makes Marx more of an optimist than Freud. And to be fair, Freud is not a political thinker, but a psychoanalytic thinker who dives into social issues. Freud is interested in anthropology, sociology, theology, but Freud is always speaking as a psychoanalyst. But for Freud, he remains within a liberal political horizon, and never develops a socialist politics, which certainly brings us to a productive tension between Marx and Freud.

Moving to a close of the first part of the Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right—and perhaps this brings us full circle in a certain way to how we started with Marx clearly building within the German idealist tradition—is that Marx is also trying to find his perspective on how to relate to philosophy. What is the role of philosophy in all of this for Marx? I think Marx gives us a pretty clear answer, which is that once the other world of truth has vanished, and we must establish the truth of this world—that is, once the religious, theological world of truth has vanished, and we work towards establishing the truth of this world, philosophy's task is in service of history by unmasking the “unholy forms of self-estrangement”.¹⁹ Marx is saying, after the holy forms of self-estrangement have been unmasked—that is, the religious forms of self-estrangement have been unmasked—then we still have the task of unmasking the unholy forms. And I think that this is so crucial, because we live in a culture without religion, and in this culture we do fall, at least in our time, into a type of liberal hedonism, which I think you could call the unholy form. And so philosophy here is indispensable.

Philosophy as the unmasking of the unholy forms—let's say, the liberal hedonistic forms—as an actually necessary and constitutive part of, ultimately, the dialectical historical project of building socialism and pointing towards a socialist reality. So that's ultimately how Marx is thinking about situating the role of philosophy.

This brings us towards the actual conclusion of the first part of the Introduction of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right. What we're dealing with here is a general perspective that Marx is starting with, which is to critique heaven, to critique religion, to critique theology, is to at the one time move from a history covered in mythology towards a history that is philosophical.²⁰ And again, he is here clearly embedding his thought in the tradition of German idealism. The critique of religion has been the prerequisite for all other criticisms. That critique of religion has been completed in Germany. That means that the critique has been completed in a combination of the Protestant Reformation and the German Idealist tradition. Now the task before us is the critique of earth, the critique of law, the critique of politics, and that this critique is the task of modern philosophy.²¹ And you could ask yourself, well, has modern philosophy moved in that direction? And I think that, by and large, philosophy has moved in that direction: philosophy has become a critique of the earth, a critique of law, a critique of politics, and that continues.²²

Perhaps what needs to be emphasised, however, is the popular form of that philosophy, is what is missing. Perhaps we're missing philosophy as a popular form, and that the condition of possibility for that to be a reality is, according to Marx, the people must be taught to be terrified of itself in order to give it courage.²³ And I think, again, when it comes to the history of Marxism and the history of communism as a failed political project — and stated otherwise, to relate to and reflect on the fact that we live in a very liberal, hedonistic world — that maybe the missing ingredient here is the confrontation with the fear of our own social body, and that that's the truth, that we must fear how terrifying we can be collectively in order to give us courage to confront the realities that we need to confront.

Here, of course, we have now clear historical evidence of the horrors and the terrors that the collective human social body can exert over itself when it comes to World Wars, when it comes to the Holocaust, when it comes to the Cold War, when it comes to nuclear annihilation, when it comes to genocide, slavery, and so forth. So this is what we're dealing with. It is obviously a tremendously difficult problem. It is obviously, I think, still a problem that is very much with us. So, in a way, it might be slightly different than the way Marx is thinking about it and the social reality that Marx is responding to. But certainly, the main tensions and antagonisms that Marx is pointing out to us, regarding religion, are still with us.

And so, in that spirit, I would agree with the Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone when he says that he's not trying to bring us into the 19th century — that is, Cutrone is not trying to bring us into the 19th century — but rather, that we have not left the 19th century in a certain way. I am increasingly of the mind that what the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm suggests about the “short 20th century”, that is, the 20th century from World War I to the end of the Cold War, is actually something where we actually failed to lift ourselves out of the 19th century, and the problems of the 19th century. And there's huge questions there about how would Marx think, actually, about the 20th century, and how would Marx respond to the failures of the Marxist International, and how would Marx respond to World War I and the realities of World War I, and how would Marx respond to the unconscious, and how would Marx respond to all of these things that we now have a full historical retroactive awareness of? So there's a huge challenge there, hopefully challenges the Early Marx 101 course can start to address.

I'll reiterate, this was the first part of covering the introduction of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right. I'll reiterate that this was more, obviously, of a theological and a religious critique, and that in the next article we'll be going more into Marx's political critique. And again, that the Critique of the Philosophy of Right was only released as an Introduction in Marx's time, that the full book wasn't available until 1927, after the Russian Revolution. I think what we're going to be able to explore in the class is a deep dive of the actual text of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, which probably gets overlooked in relation to the powers of the Introduction.

I think what we're going to be able to find if we go into this text, is we are going to be able to find that Marx has a very antagonistic relationship with Hegel. Marx is trying to turn Hegel on his head in a way, and specifically in regards to his system in the Philosophy of Right. I'm interested in what the dialectic of this tension is. And that might have huge ramifications for how we think about religion and politics. And that might have huge ramifications for how we think about structuralism and post-structuralism, to get into distinctions that become salient in post-modernity; and specifically the tensions that we see between Lacan’s structuralism, and Deleuze’s post-structuralism, for example. Or the tensions we might see between a deconstructive theology and a psychoanalytic theology, for example, a distinction we covered in the Christian Atheism course.

I’ll leave it there.

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This year at Philosophy Portal, we will be leading a full course offering seminars on the early writings of Karl Marx. This course will be called Early Marx 101, and starts May 11th. To get involved, see: Early Marx 101.

1. Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. Marxist.org. p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Marx, K. 1844. Critique of the Philosophy of Right. Marxist.org. p. 5.