Marx’s Materialism and the Critique of Philosophy
Saenz de Sicilia, Andres (2025) Marx’s Materialism and the Critique of Philosophy. The Philosopher, 113 (1). pp. 19-23.
Abstract
Should we think of Marx as a philosopher? Certainly not by his own estimation. While both still in their twenties, Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels embarked on a project to ‘settle accounts’ with their ‘former philosophical conscience’, in a set of critical texts that we have since come to know as The German Ideology. In these writings they develop a critique of the philosophy of their time, which they saw as engaged in ghostly battles against illusions of consciousness, far removed from the relationships, conflicts and material (i.e. economic) interests that characterised the real life of real people. In another set of notes composed around this time (the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) Marx famously asserted that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however was to change it. Intimations of this dissatisfaction with philosophy’s abstract and metaphysical concerns had been signalled much earlier in Marx’s life. As a teenage university student Marx composed a poem in which he jibed that ‘Kant and Fichte gladly roam the ether, Searching for a distant land / While I only seek to thoroughly understand What I found in the street.’ Indeed, this commitment to comprehending (and, eventually, to changing) the concrete reality lived by concrete individuals, rather than contemplation of truth or being or consciousness as such, was precisely, as I will suggest in what follows, what pushed Marx’s thinking beyond the limits of philosophy.
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