Chapter 4

THE DETERMINATION OF REALITY

Practice and theory

The determination of reality is the central theme of Marx’s thought, his primary and exclusive preoccupation. It is in light of this impassioned search for what truly exists that Hegelianism is rejected in favor of Feuerbach’s anthropology. With Feuerbach, reality is at first designated as “practice,” to which is opposed “theory.” Practice understood in this way, Feuerbachian practice, has as yet no evident relation to action properly speaking; it designates nothing more than what is real in general, whereas theory signifies, no less generally, irreality, inasmuch as the latter is constituted by “representations.” It is this opposition between reality and representation understood as the opposition between a thing and its image, the original and its copy, being and appearance that is expressed in Feuerbach by the opposition between practice and theory.¹ On the side of representation we find religion, politics, the realm of the imaginary, illusion, the dream in all its forms, the dream which, according to Feuerbach, has no content other than the real universe, which is the real itself but transposed in the light of representation and of irreality.²

What then is the reality which is opposed to representation? What is “practice”? It is sensuous reality. “The real in its reality, that is to say, as real, is the real as the object of the senses. The real is what is sensuous. Truth, reality, sensuousness are identical. The senusous being alone is a true being. Sensuousness alone is truth and reality.”³ It is this definition of the real in terms of sensuousness which motivates both the critique of religion, that is, of the reduction of being to a being-in-thought, and the conception of “true philosophy”: “This philosophy . . . (includes) the eye and the ear, the hand and foot; it does not identify the idea of the fact with the fact itself . . . but it separates the two. . . ; it recognizes as the true thing, not the thing as it is an object of abstract reason, but as it is an object of the real complete man,”⁴ that is, as an object of the senses.

The paralogism upon which Feuerbach’s sensualist ontology rests must now be recognized and denounced. Sensuous being, in terms of which Feuerbach defines what is real, has two clearly distinguished meanings. In fact, it designates two different things: on the one hand, sensuous being as that which is sensed—rocks, the moon, machines—consequently, every being that is part of nature, this nature itself, what Feuerbach calls material being, “matter”; on the other hand, sensuous being means capable of sensing, bearing within oneself the capacity of opening up to external being and, furthermore, actually being this very capacity of opening up, identifying with it, being defined by it. To open oneself up to external being is to receive it, to live in the relation to being, a relation which exists as such, as this possibility of relating to something and as its actualizing, as the pure possibility of experiencing and as experiencing itself, precisely as sensuousness in the sense, that is, of transcendental aesthetics, in the sense of an ontological power which is originally directed to being and to which being gives itself, to which it gives itself “to be sensed.” To the extent that sensuous being designates the rock, the moon, etc., that is, designates beings, it has an ontic meaning; to the extent that it designates the power of opening up to beings, the power of sensing, its meaning is ontological. The ontic meaning and the ontological meaning of sensuousness are not merely different; they are incompatible. Sensuous being in the sense of natural beings does not sense, it is insensible. Sensing can belong only to that being which bears sensuousness within itself in the sense of a transcendental power of opening up and of unveiling, sensuous being in an ontological sense.

Feuerbach continually shifts from the ontic meaning to the ontological meaning of the concept of sensuousness and mixes them up to the point of no longer being able to keep them separate. When he opposes to the object reflected upon by philosophy the real object, sensuous, “material” being, what he has in mind is beings, and it is the ontic concept of sensuousness that underlies his discourse. When he writes: “I feel and I feel feeling . . . as belonging to my essential being . . . as a . . . power,” it is the ontological power of sensuousness that he has in mind and that he considers as one of the “perfections” of man, as that which makes him what he is, a being that maintains a relation to Being. “What would man be without feeling?”⁵

It is the transcendental concept of sensuousness which supplies the elements for the “materialist” critique of religion. Religion, as we know, “immediately represents the inner nature of man as an objective, external being.”⁶ What is this innermost essence of man that religion improperly projects onto God? It is the ontological power of opening up to being, the power of sensing, of feeling. It is because this power is lived by him at one and the same time as his own proper being and as what constitutes the essential character of life in him, as sacred and holy—“that alone is holy to man which lies deepest within him, which is most peculiarly his own, the basis, the essence of his individuality”⁷—that man, who, precisely, experiences this power as a divine possession, projects it onto God, provides himself with a God who is a feeling God. That the essence of sensuousness, the essence of man that man professes in God, has, as transcendental sensuousness, nothing to do with “sensuous” being, which Feuerbach opposes to being as it is thought by philosophers, is unwittingly betrayed in what he says: “Have I any sympathy for a being without feeling? No! I feel only for that which has feeling.”⁸

To what extent a sensuous being, a being which has feeling in the sense of being able to feel, has nothing to do with sensuous being which, as material being, is nothing but an opaque and mute entity, locked up within itself and as such incapable of feeling, “insensible,” this is clearly shown by the context, in which, rather than merely presupposing sensuousness in its transcendental meaning, sensuousness is posited within this determination only as a mediation permitting the development of that which is more than it, permitting the development of feeling itself in its most elevated forms, in its religious forms. For sensuousness enters in, finally, only as a condition for suffering, and the latter, in its turn, only as the condition for loving others. After understanding God’s sensuousness as the possibility of his suffering—“God suffers,” “A suffering God is a feeling, sensitive God”—Feuerbach entrusts to Saint Bernhard the task of unveiling the ultimate teleology of this sensible structuring of being: “Pati voluit, ut compati disceret; miser fieri, ut misieri disceret.” ⁹

It is sensuousness understood in this way as the power of feeling and, consequently, of submission, suffering, and compassion which continues to be the source of the critique of morality that is found in Feuerbach, the source of the philosophy of forgiveness. For, as we have seen, morality is incapable of forgiving.¹⁰ Only compassion, which finds its foundation in sensuousness, can perform an act of clemency and, in the same stroke, reject abstract justice. In presenting a series of religious themes, in which everything in this strange critique of religion is in fact borrowed from Christianity, “material” being is thus finally to be understood as the capacity to feel, the capacity to suffer, the capacity to love. Feuerbach’s materialism does not designate as real being only opaque beings which are opposed to the subjective representation of thought; his avowed theme is subjectivity itself in its original form, as sensuous and affective subjectivity. The concept of materialism thus repeats the basic ambiguity of the concept of sensuousness which identifies “material” beings with the power that allows them to be given as such.¹¹ In this confusion resides the absurdity of Feuerbach’s materialism and of Marxist materialism in general to the extent that the latter is determined by that of Feuerbach. This determination can be observed in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where, in his effort to grasp reality, Marx purely and simply repeats, to the point of appearing to recopy them, the Feuerbachian themes that have just been recalled.

“Man is directly a natural being,”¹² says the third manuscript. But, as the entire context shows, “natural being” is thoroughly equivocal. On the one hand, since reality is defined as sensuous reality, precisely as nature, man is real to the extent that he belongs to nature, to the extent that he himself is reality or, better, to the extent that he is a sensuous object. It is being a part of nature in this way that makes him a “natural being,” no different in this, however, from a stone, a plant, or the sun. But “natural being” does not only mean being a part of nature, bearing within oneself the opaque materialness of what is, possessing the same essence as other beings. Natural being also means opening up to nature, to the totality of beings, maintaining with them a relationship such that in this relationship beings are given to feeling, become sensuous, become phenomena, objects; as Marx himself says in this regard, “Externality here should not be understood as self-externalizing sensuousness accessible to light and to sensuous man.”¹³ Natural being now designates the transcendental sensuousness within which the world becomes a world. It is this sensuousness as the phenomenological opening up to the world which is at work and which makes its essence prevail when man relates to the objects that surround him in such a way as to feel them, as to have them as his objects. “When real, corporeal man, his feet firmly planted on the solid earth and breathing all the powers of nature. . . .”¹⁴ the sensuousness of these sensuous forces secretly determines the reality of this real, corporeal man as a subjectivity, as the transcendental subjectivity that opens up the field of experience and makes it possible, phenomenologically actual, that which makes it “sensuous” experience.

The ambiguity of the “natural being” discussed in the third manuscript is apparent in the fact that it is not just any natural being that is sighted by the problematic and taken as its proper theme. The naturalism in question is inseparable from a humanism. “Consistent naturalism or humanism.”¹⁵ Naturalism thus becomes consistent when, among all natural beings, it surreptitiously comes to consider that particular being for which to be a natural being means to have a nature, to have a world, to live in the intuition of being. It is true that this privilege, which belongs to man, against the background of a transcendental sensuousness in him, is carefully masked by a comparison with plants and the sun, on the one hand, and, on the other—and in a more decisive manner—by a definition of natural being that claims to have a universal bearing and, consequently, to concern every natural being. According to this definition, natural being means having its nature outside of itself, having an object outside itself and, in the same stroke, being itself an object for this external object, for this nature in which the natural being then participates. “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for a third being has no being for its object, i.e. it has no objective relationships and its existence is not objective.”¹⁶ Inasmuch as the natural being is objective, has an object outside itself for which it is itself an object, it is “suffering, conditioned and limited,”¹⁷ even if the forces of nature are also present in it making it—inasmuch as they penetrate it through and through and to the very extent to which they do so—“active” as well. It is here that the plant and the sun enter in; each has outside itself an object for which it itself is an object in turn—the sun is the object of the plant inasmuch as it gives it life; the plant is the object of the sun inasmuch as it displays the force of the latter.

What is meant by the expression “to have an object outside itself” must now be clarified. In the strict sense, to have an object means to have a being before the self, to represent this being to oneself and to do this in the mode of sensuous representation, precisely, to feel it. It is in this sense that man is a natural being and that he has an object outside of himself. This transcendental meaning of exteriority which sights the phenomenological givenness in the form of the object is absent, however, when it is said that “the sun is an object for the plant . . . just as the plant is an object for the sun. . . .”¹⁸ What permits this shift from the transcendental sense, in which the object is an ob-ject, a being given as something sensuous, to the meaning, which is but sheer nonsense, according to which the sun and the plant are objects for one another, sensuous objects—and this in the absence of any sensuousness—is a third thesis, also recopied from Feuerbach and according to which the “object” of a thing manifests the essence of this thing, represents what this thing is in reality. It is in this way that the sun, for example, which seems to be an object common to all the planets is not the same object for each of them; it does not light and warm Uranus in the same way as it does the earth. This is why the earth’s sun is in fact the object proper to the earth, expressing its distance, its position, etc., in short, its own essence. “The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature, for the measure of the size and of the intensity of light which the Sun possesses as the object of the Earth is the measure of the distance which determines the peculiar nature of the Earth. Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.”¹⁹

How does one move from this physical and, as it were, material theory, which, in the vestiges of a medieval vocabulary, expresses nothing but the reciprocal causality of natural bodies, to a philosophy which, while claiming to limit itself to “material” presuppositions, surreptitiously includes transcendental sensuousness among these? This is what is shown by its generalization in Feuerbach. “The essence of a being is recognized . . . only through its object; the object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own revealed being.”²⁰ In a more explicit fashion, The Essence of Christianity had already stated: “But the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective, nature.” The “object” does not only reveal the inner and secret nature of a being—as the plant does with respect to the sun’s life-giving power and to the field of its action—but, precisely, it reveals this nature and makes it actual in phenomenological appearance. This is why that which finds in the “object” the “mirror” of its own essence is no longer just any sort of being, is no longer the sun, but a “subject,” as Feuerbach’s text states; it is man. In truth, the theory of the object as revealing the essence of the subject shows its real sense when it is placed in its context in The Essence of Christianity, at the beginning of the book as a direct introduction to the thesis that is to be demonstrated, namely that God is the object of man. By this what is asserted in the first place is that God’s being exposes the true being of man and itself contains nothing more than this. It is as a comparison, and nothing more, that the earth and the plant were said to be the object of the sun. This is, moreover, an unsuitable comparison. For God does not simply repeat the essence of man, but, precisely, he manifests it and makes it visible, and this is the only reason for the reduplication of man in God, since it adds nothing to man on the level of real predicates. Instead, it adds phenomenality to him. The reduplication occurs as man’s self-consciousness, and the object now signifies this consciousness, signifies the dawning of actual experience. The ambiguity of Feuerbach’s materialism becomes evident: the sensuous object designates manifestation as such. Right after speaking of the sun, the earth, Uranus, Feuerbach writes: “In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted with himself; consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of man.”²¹

The phenomenological meaning of this thesis, according to which it is the object of a being that reveals its nature, remains hidden to the extent that this thesis also means: the object of a being is what is indispensable to it, what it needs; and a being that is part of nature has its object outside of itself inasmuch as it has outside of it what is necessary for its existence. “A being that breathes,” said Feuerbach, “is unthinkable without air, a being that sees, unthinkable without light.” It should be noted, nevertheless, that the natural being in question, one which must seek outside itself the object that it requires, is, precisely, man and that, consequently, need is, as it will be throughout all of Marx’s work—and to begin with the following year in The German Ideology—a subjective need, that the exteriority of the “object” with respect to the being that has need of it becomes once again, in the same stroke, phenomenological exteriority, the exteriority of an object in the strict sense. That is why the theory of “natural, objective, sensuous being” leads in Marx, just as in Feuerbach, to subjectivity, which as sensuous subjectivity constitutes the secret essence upon which consistent naturalism or humanism reposes. As sensuous and affective subjectivity. For to have outside the self the object necessary for existence, but as a sensuous object, that is to say, by experiencing one’s own life as the lack of the object and as the need for it, is to be determined subjectively as suffering; it is to find the essence of one’s being in a subjectivity that is determined affectively and that is constituted by affectivity itself. In the conclusion to his analysis of man as a “natural” and “objective” being, Marx writes: “To be sensuous is to suffer. Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.”²²

The fact that subjectivity, as transcendental sensuousness, is the ground of the “naturalism” of both Feuerbach and Marx is also shown in the theory of the senses, to which what follows in the text refers when it is affirmed that the sensuous object is not the immediate natural object—and by this must be understood an object properly speaking, “natural objects as they immediately present themselves ”²³—but an object coming out of the history of man’s sense, that is, out of the actuality of his subjective development. The thesis of the subjective development of the senses and, consequently, that which serves as its premise, the thesis of the subjective essence of sense in general, are presented at length in two other passages in the third manuscript. Another essential text asserts first of all that under the title of anthropology and of naturalism what is actually thought is nothing other than the structure of being, a structure by virtue of which being is given as a sensuous object to a power which is, as this givenness and this receiving of being, an ontological power, not a mere anthropological determination, the property of a being called “man.” “If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological characteristics in the narrower sense, but are truly ontological affirmations of his essence (nature), and if they only really affirm themselves in so far as their object exists sensuously for them. . . .”²⁴ Because it is sensitive to feeling and to passion, the sensuous object, the natural being, is not a stable being; the modalities of its existence are those of sensuousness and of passion themselves, the modalities according to which they take place in every instance in their concrete subjective effectuation. This is why the being of the sensuous object is in every instance nothing other than an affective determination, a specific mode of gratification. “The mode in which the object exists for them is the characteristic mode of their gratification.”²⁵ As essential ontological affirmations, sensations and passions allow the object to bathe in the freedom of its variable sensuous determinations only inasmuch as they themselves constitute this determination, only inasmuch as this freedom is precisely their own, the freedom of sensuousness and of affectivity as living powers that continually modify themselves and assume one modality or another. Of these powers Marx says, furthermore, that “their mode of affirmation is by no means one and the same, but rather that the different modes of affirmation constitute the particular character of their existence, of their life.”²⁶

Because sensuousness and passion are living powers that continually modify themselves and assume different modalities, they are capable of evolving; they have a history that is none other than the history of the senses, their gradual subjective development. “The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history.”²⁷ The history of the senses, however, is no different from that of the object itself, from the history of nature, to the extent that the object is sensuous, to the extent that nature exists in and through sensuousness. Marx describes this correlation between the senses and nature which is the result of the ontological power of sensuousness and which directly expresses it. To a sense that is not well developed corresponds an impoverished object, that of “crude practical need.”²⁸ It is in this way that someone who “is starving” is incapable of perceiving the sensuous richness of food, its form, its taste, the nuances of its savor, etc., is incapable of sensing but simply grasps something that can stave off hunger, food in “its abstract form.” Likewise, a man burdened with cares cannot see the beauty of a performance, “the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value, and not the beauty and peculiar nature of the minerals.”²⁹ The critique of private property rests on this phenomenology of sensuousness to the extent that the fact of considering something as mine amounts to considering it not as it is in itself, in the unfolding of its own richness, to substituting for the development of all the senses the single “sense of having.”³⁰

Marx attempted to pursue this correlation between sense and nature, which prefigures the noetico-noematic correlations that Husserl was to recognize at the heart of the relation to being as the specifications and the fundamental determinations of this relation. Speaking of sensuous objects as they relate to individuality, Marx writes: “The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the object and the nature of the essential power that corresponds to it; for it is just the determinateness of this relation that constitutes the particular, real mode of affirmation. An object is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eye’s object is different from the ear’s. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence. . . .”³¹ The peculiarity of each essential power is none other than the structure of a sense which, in every instance, determines that of its object. Feuerbach’s thesis, according to which the nature of a being is revealed by its object, finds its evident and precise phenomenological significance when it points to this structural determination of the object by the corresponding sense. Against the background of this determination, however, a history is produced, the history, as we have seen, of each sense, the history in terms of which “the eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object,” and “the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye.”³² Marx attributes the source of this history at times to the development of the senses, at times to that of the object. With respect to the development of the object: “only music can awaken the musical sense in man . . . only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity . . . be either cultivated or created.” This is why the development of the senses depends upon the degree of development of a society, on the types of object that a culture proposes at a given moment of its history. But by virtue of the ontological meaning of sensuousness, the determination of the sensuous object can, in the final analysis, only be that of sensuousness itself, that of the sensuous faculty of which it is the object. “Because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers, i.e. can only be for me in so far as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute (this is because the sense of an object for me extends only as far as my sense extends, only has sense for a sense that corresponds to that object).”³³ In any case, the reference of materialism to subjectivity is evident here in the radically subjective definition of sense by which nature exists only as a sensuous object.

It is this ontology of sensuous reality that constitutes, in 1844, the source of the critique directed against Hegel. It is because Hegelianism understands reality as the concrete being of the Idea, precisely as its reality and, consequently, as an ideal reality, that it allows what constitutes, on the contrary, the essence of true reality to escape it, namely the singularity and the individuality that belong to sensuous being as such. Because being, however, is given as sensuous, that is, in the phenomenological actuality of its singularity and of its individuality, Hegel could not fail to recognize the undeniable character of its givenness, but he interprets it as a moment of the Idea and in this way falsifies its nature, just when he pretends to acknowledge it in its own right. It is on the basis of the universality of thought that singularity and individuality are themselves explained;³⁴ this is so inasmuch as negation constitutes the inner structure of being and as universality, as a result, attains being only against the background of this structure in it, that is, in the concrete and singular being that it posits in order to rise out of its negation. In this, thought recovers and presents as belonging to it, as moments of its own development, what belongs in reality to being, and it is in this way that it claims to reduce being to itself. “Thought overleaps its opposite; this means that thought claims for itself what belongs not to itself but to being. Particularity and individuality, however, belong to being, whereas generality belongs to thought. Thought . . . makes the negation of generality . . . into a moment in thought.”³⁵

The mystification through which being is recognized in its singularity and in its individuality only to be reduced thereby to a moment of the movement of the Idea is apparent in Hegel’s Logic, which claims to restore ideal necessity to this movement. In order to reach truth, that is, to reach phenomenological actuality, the Idea, insofar as it is this actuality, as it is intuition, must, in accordance with the presuppositions that have been sufficiently elaborated on, give itself to itself in the form of otherness, and this other-being, which itself is the reflection of the Idea, is the phenomenon; the immediate in its peculiarity, objective determination, is nature. Marx cites the text in the Encyclopedia where Hegel states how in “its unity with itself,” that is, as “intuition” (Anschauung), that is, moreover, “in its own absolute truth,” the Idea “resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial determination and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflection, issue freely from itself as nature.”³⁶

The truth of this movement of the Idea is not, however, as Hegel believed it to be, its truth in the sense that has just been stated, namely the manifestation and the full realization of a being that would be its own; this truth, on the contrary, lies in what is not a temporary but instead a fundamental insufficiency, the radical failure of the Idea to define being and the necessity in which it finds itself of seeking being outside itself in that which differs substantially from it, in sensuous being. It is in this way that Feuerbach interprets critically the “logical” movement of the Idea, as the necessity of abandoning the Hegelian philosophy of the Idea, idealism, and of substituting for it his own philosophy, a philosophy of nature, “materialism.” Here again Marx follows Feuerbach: the boredom of an empty thought which in itself lacks any ontological signification forces it to seek being outside itself; it is the “longing for a content” that leads it to make itself into intuition—that is, to receive a content which it is, precisely, incapable of supplying by itself—into something other than itself. This inability to constitute being by itself is what designates thought as abstraction, and the way in which thought grasps hold of itself is nothing other than its self-awareness as abstraction. “But the abstraction which comprehends itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing; it must relinquish itself, the abstraction, and so arrives at something which is its exact opposite, nature. Hence the whole of the Logic is proof of the fact that abstract thought is nothing for itself, that the absolute idea is nothing for itself and that only nature is something.” And further on: “This entire transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature is nothing more than the transition—so difficult for the abstract thinker to effect, and hence described by him in such a bizarre manner—from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher from abstract thinking to intuition is boredom, the longing for a content.”³⁷

The thesis that now sums up Hegelianism in the eyes of Feuerbach and of Marx and appears to them as the most obvious and purest illustration of “idealism” is formulated as follows: thought creates the object. A thesis such as this presupposes another, one which is not explicit but which Marx hastens to recognize, namely the prior substitution of thought itself, as process and as the subject of the process, for the only real being that is entitled to fill this double role: man. Or yet again, what amounts to the same thing, the definition of man as self-consciousness. Everything stems from this: “The positing of man = self-consciousness.”³⁸ “For Hegel human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness.”³⁹ “Because man is equivalent to self-consciousness,”⁴⁰ etc. Once consciousness has been substituted for man, every real process is then a process of thought. Yet, still in line with the Hegelian presuppositions, this process is a process of objectification; what it produces is an object and, inasmuch as it is a real process, this is a real object. And thus it is that nature, which designates this object in its reality, is reduced to the objectification of thought. Thought is alienated in nature; it posits itself as other, but this alienation, as a result, is no different from the act peculiar to thought, from its objectification. Alienation and objectification are identical in two ways: thought posits its own self in the form of otherness, thus it itself takes on the appearance of exteriority and of nature, but on the other hand, it itself also performs this positing, this positing of itself in the other. The upshot of this is that what is posited by the objectification of thought is not, in reality, anything other than this thought; it is its product and, what is more, it is itself in another form. So that this other form is a pure appearance, the appearance of an otherness which is, in fact, only thought itself, not a real thing but what Marx calls thingness, that is, on the one hand, a thing for thought and only for thought and, on the other hand, a thing that is still simply thought itself, under the appearance of exteriority and of otherness. And since this exteriority and this otherness, this thingness, do not constitute a true being, a true thing, something truly other than thought, truly external to it, do not constitute an actual content different from pure thought, they are therefore as such, as lacking true actuality, “abstract”—to stick to Marx’s own words—that is, they constitute an abstract exteriority, an abstract otherness, an abstract thingness. “A self-consciousness, through its alienation, can only establish thingness, i.e. an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is also clear that thingness is therefore in no way something independent or substantial vis-à-vis self-consciousness; it is a mere creature, a postulate of self-consciousness. And what is postulated, instead of confirming itself, is only a confirmation of the act of postulating; an act which, for a single moment, concentrates its energy as a product and apparently confers upon that product—but only for a moment—the role of an independent, real being.”⁴¹

Precisely because the process that has just been described and to which we must give its true name, which is the action of thought, is only an abstract process and because what it postulates is merely a pseudo-exteriority, a pseudo-otherness, a pseudo-reality, and in no way a reality really different from thought, because the objectification it produces is only an apparent objectification to the extent that the object is still only thought itself, because alienation is itself only an apparent alienation—for all these reasons, then, thought retains the possibility of taking back what it has postulated, of overcoming its alienation, of reducing to itself this object which is but the appearance of an object, which is nothing but thought itself under this objective appearance. In this way, then, what is before consciousness, before knowledge as its object, is no more than this knowledge itself, is not separate from it, is only in appearance something other than itself. What appears to it as an object is merely itself. When knowledge knows this, it knows precisely that this object is nothing different from it, is but itself and, through this knowledge, knowledge reduces the object to itself, reduces otherness, overcomes the latter and all possible alienation. The supersession of alienation is not only possible, it is identical to alienation itself, or rather it is only the consciousness of alienation. To supersede alienation is indeed no more than this: it is to know that the object which thought posited in its objectification as other than itself, as nature, is in reality nothing but itself. “[Consciousness] knows the nullity of the object, i.e. that the object is not distinct from it, the non-existence of the object for it, in that it knows the object as its own self-alienation; that is, it knows itself—i.e. it knows knowing, considered as an object—in that the object is only the appearance of an object, an illusion, which in essence is nothing more than knowing itself which has confronted itself with itself and hence with a nullity, a something which has no objectivity outside knowing. Knowing knows that when it relates itself to an object it is only outside itself, alienates itself; that it only appears to itself as an object, or rather, that what appears to it as an object is only itself.” Or again, consciousness “in this alienation knows itself as object or . . . the object as itself.”⁴²

Because the supersession of alienation is identical to alienation itself, or rather to its conscious grasp of itself by virtue of which consciousness knows that what it opposes to itself in the act of self-objectification which constitutes it is nothing really different from itself, but that in this form of opposition and of exteriority it is in reality itself which it gives to itself—therefore, superseding alienation in this way is identical to maintaining it and allows what is opposed to subsist as it is, in its opposition, since there is no question of really superseding it but only of knowing that what is opposed to thought in this way is still only thought itself, its own objectification. Because the opposite of thought is simply objectified thought, by remaining close to this opposite, thought remains at home with itself. “Consciousness—self-consciousness—is at home in its other-being as such . . . it is therefore, if we abstract from Hegel’s abstraction and talk instead of self-consciousness, of the self-consciousness of man, at home in its other-being as such.”⁴³ Remaining at home with itself in its other-being, indeed naving no need to supersede the latter since this is nothing different from itself, thought must instead maintain and allow to subsist this other-being, which is but the manifestation and the confirmation of thought itself, and this is why, by confirming itself in the other-being, thought in reality confirms the latter; it “reaffirms” it, says Marx, and “restores” it. Thus is recovered the signification of the Hegelian Aufhebung, in which, as the third manuscript says, “negation and preservation [affirmation] are brought together.”⁴⁴ The negation of the negation, the negation of the other-being, is in fact only the negation of the signification it had of being other, but, once its true signification is recognized, the signification it has now for consciousness, that of being itself, it is henceforth posited in this new signification; it is legitimatized and, consequently, preserved. Whether this other-being be nature or the cultural world, it must be said that “self-conscious man, in so far as he has acknowledged and superseded the spiritual world . . . as self-alienation, goes on to reaffirm it in this alienated form and presents it as its true existence, restores it and claims to be at home in its other-being as such.”⁴⁵

Hegel’s “apparent criticism” lies in this restoration of that which has not truly been negated but only in its apparent signification of being other and which, once this signification has been modified and turned into the signification of being the same, is then “preserved.” And it is in this way that everything that was thought as an alienation of consciousness—law, politics, religion—is finally reestablished, insofar as its true signification is unveiled and consequently appears as the confirmation of the being of life, as a confirmation of life reduced to that of consciousness. “Man, who has realized that in law, politics, etc., he leads an alienated life, leads his true human life in this alienated life as such.”⁴⁶ This is also why the Hegelian negation is not a true negation which effectively supersedes its object by showing its illusory character, by positing it as an apparent essence, but quite the opposite—it is the affirmation that this apparent essence has, in reality, the sense of being the realization of true essence, that is of consciousness. And it is in this manner that the apparent essence, that the objective appearance, is no longer the negation of consciousness but its incarnation and thus finds itself reduced to this consciousness; it is in this manner that it has itself become the subject. “In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of true being through the negation of apparent being. It is the confirmation of apparent being . . . or the negation of this apparent being as an objective being residing outside man and independent of him and its transformation into the subject.”⁴⁷

A radical clarification of the critique that Marx levels against Hegel here cannot, however, sidestep the ambiguity of this critique to the extent that it necessarily reflects the ambiguity of the “materialism” which determines it and to which it leads. For as we have seen, when Feuerbach speaks of true being, he fails to distinguish between material reality and its phenomenological actuality as sensuous reality, between beings and their condition as object. The problematic developed in the third manuscript takes on its philosophical significance only when it is considered in the light of the distinction we have just recalled, consequently, only insofar as it does not in fact have one meaning but actually two, which, moreover, are fundamentally different: an ontic meaning and an ontological meaning, which henceforth must be rigorously distinguished.

When Marx declares that the objectification of thought is not a real objectification, that the object it posits is not the real object, something really different from thought, really opposed to it, is not “nature,” the “sensuous world,” “reality,” he means that this object is not a being. The illusion of thought is believing that in the becoming-other of its own alienation, in its self-alienation, it is capable of founding a being that is truly other than itself, natural determination or, yet again, that of the human world, material abundance, etc. This is the “illusion of speculation” in accordance with which “consciousness—knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking—claims to be the direct opposite of itself, claims to be the sensuous world, reality, life.”⁴⁸ In this critique Marx explicitly follows Feuerbach—“Thought overreaching itself in thought (Feuer-bach)”⁴⁹—echoing his very words: “In his Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (§ 30) Feuerbach writes: ‘Hegel is a thinker who over-reaches himself in thought.’ ” How does thought overreach itself? By presenting its own movement as being capable of producing what is not itself, by proposing itself as the power of growth in which, in the ideal development of the Idea, beings are abruptly included and contained. In short, thought presents and conceives of its own action as an ontic, “real” action capable of producing beings and, for this same reason, of superseding them and abolishing them. And since the beings it claims to create thus belong to its own development, they belong precisely to it, they are its “moments” and its self-confirmation. “And because thought imagines itself to be the direct opposite of itself, i.e. sensuous reality, and therefore regards its own activity as sensuous, real activity, this supersession in thought, which leaves its object in existence in reality, thinks it has actually overcome it. On the other hand, since the object has now become a moment of thought for the thought which is doing the superseding, it is regarded in its real existence as a confirmation of thought, of self-consciousness, of abstraction.”⁵⁰ The ontic meaning of the critique Marx levels against Hegel is therefore strikingly clear: what is rejected is this ontic creativity of the action of thought and hence the power of thought to reduce beings to itself. And it is for this reason that intuition is substituted for thought, that is, precisely, a faculty which is not creative but receptive with respect to finite being.

But what is intuition? It does not create beings, it receives them, it gives them. It is the power that tears finite being out of the darkness in which it lies in its very principle in order to offer it to the light and to make it phenomenon. Intuition has this ultimate phenomenological meaning; it is this and no more than this. It unveils beings, it is this unveiling as such. It is due to intuition that being is not simply what is, but that the latter is a sensuous being and this sensuousness characterizing being bestows upon it the positivity, the actuality, the materiality that Feuerbach and Marx recognize in it and by virtue of which it is precisely, for them, being, reality. The phenomenon of intuition upon which Feuerbach’s materialism is founded makes the ambiguity of this materialism clear, since it shows us that the immediate being of a being is precisely its givenness in intuition, its condition of sensuous being. To the ontic meaning of intuition, which has this power to give us beings, is inevitably added its ontological meaning, which refers to this givenness as such. The givenness of beings is intuition itself, transcendental sensuousness as sensuousness which is at one and the same time presupposed and forgotten by “materialism.”

The consideration of intuition as such leads us to the question we shall now raise: what is the ontological meaning of the critique Marx directs to Hegel in the third manuscript? This question must be formulated as follows: in what does the givenness which properly constitutes intuition as such consist? What is the structure of sensuousness? The reply has been provided by all the texts quoted from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and it is unequivocal: beings are sensuous to the extent to which they are objects. “Real,” “material” being is the “sensuous object.” The power which brings about the sensuous is the power to form the object. Sensuous being, Marx said—and this is how he defined “natural being”—means “having an object outside itself.” The essence of sensuousness, intuition as such, resides in the power which gives itself an object outside itself, in the objectification process in which objectivity is objectified. Certainly, the ontic meaning of the critique levelled against Hegel must not be overlooked: the objectification process does not create the object, or rather, the being; it discovers it and it is in this that it is intuition. But this discovery is nothing but the opening up of a dimension of objectivity by which beings are given to us, become sensuous precisely inasmuch as they attain this condition, inasmuch as they are objects. To speak of a “sensuous object” is a tautology: it is as object that being is sensuous.

Thought that defines being as sensuous being—naturalism insofar as it is a humanism—is an ontological thought; it thematizes the structure of being and understands it as sensuousness, as intuition. Insofar as the structure of intuition resides in the process of objectification in which objectivity as such is posited, it is no different from the structure of thought as Hegel understands it. By thought, Hegel in no way means a mere representation of things, giving us only their imitation, their copy instead and in place of their real being. Thought and being are identical for Hegel. This signifies that being exists only as phenomenon and exists as such quite precisely to the extent that it presents itself as an object. This is why the structure of being is objectification. To the extent that he identifies thought and being, Hegel understands being as subjectivity. But Hegelian subjectivity is precisely nothing other than objectivity itself as such. To say that being is subjective is also to say that it is objective and that its concrete fullness is at the same time the unfolding of an objective universe, of an objective history capable of containing everything and of expressing everything because nothing exists outside of this universe and this history. The object of thought is thus not a being-in-thought, a being that is “represented,” imagined or dreamed, a “subjective” being; it is real being and the only possible being. It is not thought which creates being but, quite the opposite, being which makes itself “thought,” “Logos,” which becomes object and does so in order to be, in order to attain the concreteness of its actuality. Thought does not create being, it creates the object. To say that thought creates the object is an assertion that can only be contested as long as one fails to understand it, for this is a sheer tautology. Thought creates the object because it is objectivity as such. It thus creates, if not beings themselves, at least their objective condition, what permits them to give themselves to the senses by manifesting themselves. Insofar as it founds the objectivity by which beings are given to the senses as objects, thought is originally intuition. Insofar as the structure of intuition is at one and the same time that of thought, as Hegel understands it, the critique formulated against him by Feuerbach and Marx has no ontological signification.

This is also why the reproach Marx addresses to Hegel, and this is still in the wake of Feuerbach, of wanting to abolish objectivity, could be formulated only at the price of a complete misunderstanding of both the profound intentions and the explicit presuppositions of Hegelianism. A reproach such as this becomes apparent in the context of a discussion that thematizes the relation between the objectivity in question here and alienation. Hegel is held to have identified objectivity and alienation in such a way that the teleology which directs his entire system, whereby consciousness aims at overcoming every form of alienation, could lead only to the supersession of every form of objectivity and, consequently, to the supersession of objectivity itself as such. “To recapitulate,” Marx writes. “The appropriation of estranged objective being or the supersession of objectivity in the form of estrangement—which must proceed from indifferent otherness to real, hostile estrangement—principally means for Hegel the supersession of objectivity, since it is not the particular character of the object but its objective character which constitutes the offense and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned.”⁵¹ And again, just as explicitly: “The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.”⁵² This claim of radically superseding objectivity is also visible, according to Marx, in the Hegelian conception of nature, which, as has been demonstrated, is merely an appearance of objectivity and, for this reason, is but a temporary appearance. This means that nature’s appearance of objectivity is for the real being of the Idea nothing but a flaw, and the realization of this being can therefore consist only in the complete reabsorption in the self of what for a moment was allowed to go outside it, so that once again here the end of alienation signifies the abolition of objectivity. “Externality here should not be understood as self-exteriorizing sensuousness accessible to light and to sensuous man. It is to be taken in the sense of alienation, a flaw, a weakness, something which ought not to be. For that which is true is still the idea . . . this externality of nature, its antithesis to thought, is its defect . . . it is a defective being. A being which is defective not only for me, not only in my eyes, but in itself, has something outside itself which it lacks. That is to say, its essence is something other than itself. For the abstract thinker nature must therefore supersede itself, since it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.”⁵³

To what extent Marx is mistaken when he formulates this interpretation, which will be repeated blindly by all of his followers and all of his commentators, is sufficiently demonstrated by everything that has been said on this subject, by the Hegelian analyses in general and, in an obvious and irrefutable manner, by the very foundations of the ontology upon which they rest.⁵⁴ All of the fundamental concepts of Hegelian thought bear objectively within them, not as a temporary and incomprehensible moment of a uselessly complicated history but as the essence which is that of realization, which is therefore their own essence, precisely inasmuch as they make a claim to objectivity and actually attain it. It is in this way that nature is not, as Marx believed it to be, a flaw in the Idea; instead the Idea, if it were not nature, not actual and autonomous nature, if it were not “at the same time a presupposing of the world as independently existing nature,”⁵⁵ would be only an abstract concept. Because nature is the reality of the Idea, because, generally speaking, the reality of the Idea is its objectivity and its actuality as objective being, because the Idea of freedom, for example, is nothing “subjective” but the State itself, the world of history, the empires that constitute it, etc., this objectivity in which reality is fulfilled cannot be superseded unless reality itself, as Hegel understands it, is also superseded. This is why the assertion that in Hegel objectivity would be superseded at the same time as alienation is inaccurate. It is true that in Hegel objectivity and alienation, understood in their radical ontological meaning as constituting the internal structure of being, are identical. They are identical inasmuch as they designate in an identical fashion the process by which being is made Logos, objectifies itself in the light of phenomenality. But because this process designates being itself and its realization in phenomenological concreteness, it continually takes place and never ceases to take place, so long at least as being is. Understood in its meaning as identical with objectivity, Hegelian alienation can no more be superseded than can this objectivity itself.

Did Hegel not claim, nevertheless, to put an end to alienation? Is not this alienation overcome when, in absolute knowledge, the consciousness of the object finally coincides with self-consciousness? And yet neither the structure of otherness, which defines ontological alienation, nor that of objectivity, which is identical with that of the former, is absent from absolute knowledge. Quite the opposite, it is in the difference of otherness that the object, which is maintained and preserved by it, offers itself to consciousness with the meaning of no longer being something opposed to it but of being consciousness itself. The supersession of alienation designates not the supersession of the object but the modification by virtue of which it is no longer given as “indifferent” or “hostile” being, as foreign being, but as “the same.” This is why the supersession by which the foreign character of the object but not the object itself is superseded, by which the meaning of being other but not the otherness of its objective presentation is superseded, allows the latter to subsist and presupposes alienation understood in its ontological structure as identical with objectivity as such. Marx’s mistake then becomes evident, as when he writes in the above-cited text: “It is not the particular character of the object but its objective character which constitutes the offense and the estrangement as far as self-consciousness is concerned.”⁵⁶ Because in Hegel the structure of self-consciousness is never other than that of the consciousness of the object, because consciousness signifies in general the objectification of objectivity, its unfolding, this objectivity, the objective character of the object, can in no way be for consciousness offense and estrangement but, quite the opposite, is the confirmation of itself, or rather, its very being. It is for this reason that the object is in reality the Self, that the other being reveals itself to be the same, the being of consciousness, because it is nothing other than its objectification, because the objectification of objectivity, the creator of phenomenality, is consciousness itself.

This is what the text of the third manuscript says in reality under the appearance of its explicit opposition to Hegelianism. For what Marx reproaches Hegel with here is not, in the final analysis, that he does away with the object but that he in fact allows it to subsist. Marx’s deep understanding of Aufhebung has indeed shown us how Hegelian negation was only an apparent negation and how, once the object is recognized in its meaning as being no longer the opposite of but the confirmation of the objectification of consciousness, it then subsists in this role, so that consciousness is henceforth at home with itself in its other-being. Here again one sees that ontological otherness as such is not superseded; only the meaning that it is a foreign being is abolished. It is precisely insofar as ontological otherness subsists, the becoming-other in which consciousness is realized in the form of objectivity, that the latter possesses the meaning, precisely, of no longer being the other but of being consciousness itself, that the consciousness of the object becomes self-consciousness.

A rigorous reflection upon the third manuscript thus places us before this twofold certainty: (1) objectivity is neither absent nor abolished in Hegelianism, where it constitutes, on the contrary, the sphere of all realization and of all actuality, as Marx finally understands when, rediscovering the ontological meaning of the Hegelian dialectic, he grasps negation as Aufhebung, as the very positing of the object; (2) this objectivity interpreted by Hegel as the essence of phenomenality, as “thought,” constitutes at one and the same time the essence of Feuerbachian sensibility upon which the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are in large measure based, the essence of intuition, with the sole reservation that the latter is receptive and no longer creative with respect to the specific content that it displays. Hegel simply confused the ontological meaning with the ontic meaning of intuition and, because beings offer themselves to the senses only as objects, he believed that this creation of the object, the objectification of objectivity, was in the same stroke the creation of the beings that it unveils. This was, as we have seen, the ontic meaning of the critique that Feuerbach and Marx directed at Hegel, the absence of any ontological meaning of this same critique being expressed in the fact that the givenness of intuition is, precisely, nothing but Hegelian objectification.

The fact that the essence of sensuousness is identical with that of thought constitutes the truth of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts . We have seen that Marx, following Feuerbach, understands sensuousness as composed of a certain number of “essential forces” which define the modes of its actualization and which are nothing other than the different senses. In what does the actualization of these forces—that is, properly speaking, the exercise of each sense—consist? “The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and thus also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being.”⁵⁷ It is because as objectification it is identical with thought that sensuousness too offers us a world of objects and finds therein its own self-confirmation, the confirmation and the affirmation of “human essence.” “Man is therefore affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the senses.”⁵⁸ The sensuous world, too, is thus henceforth not a “pure” world, an original nature, but a “human” nature, the product of the objectification of each of the essential forces which define man’s sensuousness. The essential homogeneity of nature and of culture which, in Hegel, permits the movement from one to the other, remains secretly present in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It is not even necessary to state that thought is at work in the first sensuous constitution of nature, which it is held to govern in the sense of an a priori law, since the essence of sensuousness is already that of thought.

Because the essence of sensuousness is at the same time that of thought, we see that the meaning of the concept of sense in Marx’s text is extended in the most peculiar fashion. “Sense” no longer designates simply the traditional five senses, but all the potentialities of subjectivity. Materialism was defined in terms of its opposition to thought; it now includes within itself all the forms of the latter, including its “higher” forms. In his critique of private property, Marx showed that in place of the abstract and impoverished definition of the object as mine had to be substituted a total opening up to being. But this opening up is not simply sensuous; it implies an intellectual opening as well, which is itself understood and defined as a sense. “Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having.”⁵⁹ The designation of having, that is of a theoretical, even juridical, intentionality as a “sense” presupposes as well the extension of this concept to the totality of the modalities of relating to the object, to consciousness understood as this relation. “The inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification”⁶⁰ is structurally the same as thought, is only one of the forms of human “sense,” of the realization of self-objectification that constitutes this sense, man’s humanity. “For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses—all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature.” ⁶¹ And indeed one sees that nature in Feuerbach and in Marx can no longer be opposed to that in Hegel, that the object of sense in no way exists prior to “consciousness,” that it too is the product of its objectification. “. . . immediate sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sense perception. . . .”⁶² This is why nature is part of history, because it exists neither before nor outside of this objectification, neither before nor outside of what Hegel calls “thought.” “Nature as it comes into being in human history . . . is the true nature of man.”⁶³ It is nature as a whole which is “human,” which is “culture.” “It is only when objective reality universally becomes for man in society the reality of man’s essential powers . . . that all objects become for him the objectification of himself . . . his objects.”⁶⁴

Alienation in no way challenges the universal status of the object, nor does it imply any “absolute” object which would be independent of man, which would not be his objectification, but only describes the negative modality through which this objectification takes place. “Nature as it comes into being through industry, although it is in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.”⁶⁵ Here again, far from separating Marx’s thought from that of Hegel, the problem of alienation unites them within a common ontological horizon. Here again, it is in following Feuerbach and his theory of the object that Marx is carried back to the presuppositions of Hegelianism. According to Feuerbach, the object in general, and consequently the sensuous object as well, reveals the essence of human nature because it is the objectification of this essence. “And this is true not merely of spiritual, but also of sensuous objects.”⁶⁶ Because the structure of the object of sense is the same as that of the “spiritual” object, because, against the background of this common structure, the extension of the concept of sense grows to the point of including the totality of the intentionalities of consciousness, which purely and simply coincides with the realm of sense, because the essence of sensuousness appears to be identical with that of thought, the separation of these faculties does not merely pose a problem, it entirely misses the mark. The hostility between sense and intellect, the third manuscript states, is abstract . ⁶⁷

Along with the separation of sensuousness and thought, however, it is the entire problematic of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that is challenged. What indeed was the aim of this problematic, if not to show the reality that Hegelianism had missed? Practice names the place of this reality, the actual relation to being as it is realized within sense. To practice is opposed theory, which formulates the abstract determinations of the object, abstract because in it they are only the objectification of the forms of thought. This is why nature is not the other-being of thought, because its determinations are those of thought, abstract, logical determinations, because nature is merely the objectification of the forms and the potentialities of the human mind. And it is in this way that for the abstract thinker “the whole of nature only repeats to him in a sensuous, external form the abstractions of logic,” and this is also why, when he analyzes nature, he analyzes “these abstractions again.”⁶⁸ But is not sensuous praxis, too, simply the objectification of the potentialities of the human essence? Sensuous nature is not the other-being of these potentialities but their form, the form in which these essential powers attain their self manifestation in and through objectivity, the form in which they attain self-knowledge. “The particular sensuous human powers, since they can find objective realization only in natural objects, can find self-knowledge only in the science of nature in general.”⁶⁹ And what are involved in praxis are not even potentialities different from those of thought, not merely because the “practical senses” include the “spiritual senses”—will, love, etc.—but because the essence of this praxis, of this concrete and actual relation to being, is precisely objectification, that is, intuition, thought. The reason for this is that the effectuation of sensorial praxis is nothing other than the opening up of the field of visibility constituted by objectivity; this praxis is at one and the same time vision, a gaze, intuition, contemplation, and theory. “The senses,” the third manuscript states, “have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis.”⁷⁰ This reduction of praxis to theory, after their apparent opposition, corresponds to the thought of Feuerbach, for whom the realization of reality, the realization of man, is the object that gives man back to himself, reflects his image back to him in the illumination of objectivity, in the theoretic festival of contemplation. “The eye of man alone keeps theoretic festivals. The eye which looks into the starry heavens, which gazes at that light, alike useless and harmless, having nothing in common with the earth and its necessities—this eye sees in that light its own nature, its own origin. The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers. It is the heavens that admonish man of his destination, and remind him that he is destined not merely to action, but also to contemplation.”⁷¹ The reduction of praxis to theory is identical with the reduction of materialism to idealism; it places in evidence their common essence as theoria, as the opening up of being in the transcendence of objectivity. Here is why: because they are founded upon the essence of objectivity which they claim to oppose to Hegelianism and which the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts unconsciously reduplicate.

Starting with the 1843 manuscript, however, Marx knew that Hegel had allowed reality to elude him. To say that reality eludes the presuppositions of Hegelianism means, therefore, clearly and undeniably that reality does not lie in objectivity and is not constituted by it, nor, consequently, is it constituted by Feuerbach’s intuition. In its pathetic striving toward reality, Marx’s thought must make a sharp break with itself insofar as it had believed itself to be capable of measuring up to its ontological project following in the steps of Feuerbach; it must abruptly and radically reject, at the same time and in the same motion, both Feuerbach and Hegel, materialism and idealism, the reduction of praxis to theory and theory in general as being fundamentally incapable of displaying in itself the being of reality. It is not because Marx has just read Stirner that he judges it necessary to abandon ship and to leave Feuerbach behind; it is rather because he finds himself faced with essential and insurmountable evidence, which has now become ours inasmuch as we have been able to repeat the internal movement of his thought, its contradictions and its ultimate exigency: to grasp reality in its unsurpassable opposition to theory, to grasp the original essence of praxis. The “Theses on Feuerbach” are not merely possible, they are necessary.

The original essence of praxis

The decisive importance of the “Theses on Feuerbach” stems from the fact that they furnish a reply to the question that inspires Marx’s philosophical reflection from its very beginning, and this is, in truth, the question of philosophy itself: what is reality? Reality is lost, as we saw, when thought is everywhere substituted for it, when the ideal determinations of being incorporate within themselves being itself. What is given to us by Feuerbach’s intuition is beings, and materialism designates these beings as irreducible to the thought process that produces them, as heterogeneous to the categorical determinations of theoretical consciousness which constitutes them precisely as the set of these determinations, as scientific objects. No doubt Feuerbach contradicted himself on this point, since after having defined being in terms of the immediacy of sensuous presence, he then wanted—due to the many contradictions of this sensuous world, notably its contradiction of our aspirations, our consciousness, and our feelings—to grasp it on another level, on the more profound level of its essence, and this is to be accomplished thanks to a more penetrating manner of seeing, which is nothing other than that of philosophical thought. “He [Feuerbach] must,” says Marx in The German Ideology, “take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which perceives ‘only the flatly obvious’ and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the ‘true essence’ of things.”⁷² But Feuerbach’s error does not lie here. “Feuerbach’s error,” Engels writes in the margin of Marx’s text referring to the passage we have just cited, “is not that he subordinates the flatly obvious, the sensuous appearance, to the sensuous reality established by detailed investigation of the sensuous facts. . . .” Nor does it consist, as Engels himself believes, in the fact “that he cannot in the last resort cope with the sensuous world except by looking at it with the ‘eyes’, i.e., through the ‘spectacles’, of the philosopher.” Indeed, what does it matter whether reality is displayed in its immediate sensuous presentation or through conceptual determinations formulated by theoretical consciousness in its attempt to grasp what truly exists in beings presented in this way and what it is to be understood as the “true” being, as its “essence”? Whatever the case may be, whether beings are taken as what consciousness does not produce or whether their determinations are, on the contrary, posited by consciousness; whether what is involved is thought or intuition, it is through the mediation of objectification which constitutes their common essence, which, before being that of thought, constitutes the essence of intuition, that its givenness is realized, the givenness of a being which makes it an object. The determination of the being of beings as objectivity, the determination of being as a “sensuous” object and then as the object of “thought,” this is the ontological presupposition of Feuerbach’s materialism. And it is due to this presupposition, common to both Feuerbach and Hegel, that the critique of Hegelianism in Feuerbach, as in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, had, precisely, no ontological significance but only an ontic significance. Once again, Marx will never reconsider this last point; the powerlessness of thought to posit a being in its materiality will remain a constant theme of his problematic, one which will be taken up again and continued throughout his entire subsequent work, starting with The German Ideology.

With the “Theses on Feuerbach,” however, something quite different is at issue. What is put into question and, indeed, challenged with respect to its claim to constitute the original structure of being is the intuition itself as the power to receive as its object a being which it has not created. To the ontic meaning of the critique of Hegelianism is added, as the new and really decisive contribution of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” its radical ontological meaning, which no longer refers simply to the alleged creative power of thought with respect to beings but to the capacity to receive them passively in sensuousness, that is, to intuition. What is rejected is “intuitive materialism” (die Anschaung der Materialismus), to borrow Marx’s formulation in the ninth thesis. This critique is radical, decisive, and novel because it dismisses not simply the explicit Hegelianism of conceptual genesis but the very thing that was opposed to it by Feuerbach and, following him, by Marx himself in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, namely the necessity for consciousness to sense being, to make itself receptive in intuition. This is not to say that Marx disputes, either in the “Theses on Feuerbach” or thereafter, the passive character of sensuousness, the radical exteriority of sensuous being. But this exteriority and, consequently, sensuous being, can no longer define being itself in its original nature, can no longer define reality. Reality is not objective reality. This is displayed to us in the ever-deepening meaning of Marx’s thought inasmuch as it is no longer the critique of thought but of the sensuous world, inasmuch as it now rejects “intuitive materialism.”

What is the being that is opposed to intuition, that is no longer dependent on it, that is no longer perceived by it, that is no longer the “sensuous object”? One after the other, the “Theses on Feuerbach” spell it out, untiringly repeating: it is “practice.” But it is then clear that if the concept of practice is to enable us to conceive of what is sighted in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” that is, the radically new and essential ontological horizon that they trace out, it is on the condition of undergoing a decisive mutation. Not just a change in sense, as if the “practical” reality considered by Feuerbach were still abstract: sensuous man in general in his relationship with a sensuous world in general, affective man in his too general affective relationship—love, friendship in general—with another in general. It is as if it were a matter of substituting for these indeterminate determinations something more concrete, no longer “Man” as he relates to the world, In-der-Welt-Sein, but a real man apprehended in the situation that is his own, caught in a network of relations, in the effective web of a preexisting totality, man as part of history and of a given society. Man becomes abstract when he is isolated from the whole within which he is included, and this is when one indeed obtains, as the sixth thesis states, “an abstract—isolated—human individual” which is “Man,” the human “genus,” man defined by a universal essence which itself claims to define each particular man as one of its exemplars, as if this man could be understood on the basis of this essence, this genus, independently of what he is in each case in a determined historical and social structure. And it is in this way that “to abstract from the historical process” permits one, still in the words of the sixth thesis, to comprehend human essence “only as ‘species’, an inner, mute general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way.”⁷³

None of this is false, none of this permits us to understand anything at all about the “Theses on Feuerbach.” It is not by simply reading a few sentences taken out of context, which itself remains unintelligible, that we can gain any insight into what is at stake here. The fact of limiting ourselves to these few sentences is instead proof that the rest has not been understood. What is more, it is the indefinite repetition of the same passage and the interpretation that is immediately proposed which definitively place out of our reach the essential sense contained in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” a sense they hold locked up within themselves like a hidden and, finally, a lost sense. What in fact is the meaning of Marx’s surpassing of Feuerbach according to this partial and distorted interpretation, which has since become the traditional interpretation? It holds that for the abstract man of whom philosophy has always spoken—and in this respect Feuerbach is still only the last philosopher—is to be substituted the real essence of man, that is, the ensemble of social relations.⁷⁴ However, isolated from the global problematic of The German Ideology, which alone can give us the meaning it has for Marx, the expression “the ensemble of social relations” cannot, as we have seen, help but hypostatize a new abstraction which takes the place of reality, namely the living individuals who among themselves have relations such as these. Why the hypostasis of “social relations” entails the complete falsification of reality, of the reality of “living individuals” who alone are “concrete” is fully clarified by the “Theses on Feuerbach.” In the hypostasis of their abstraction, “social relations” name nothing more than objective relations, and it is in this way that they are thematized by a thought that is scientific because it is objective. When the human essence ceases to name, as in Feuer-bach, an essence properly speaking, the genus, the universal and general reality that is found in every individual and that makes him what he is, in order to signify, on the contrary, a totality of objective relations that can be discerned and determined according to the place they occupy and the role they play in the system they form, in a “social structure,” then indeed the ideological concept of “Man” collapses while, at the same time, the thematic field henceforth offered to the free investigation of “theory” opens up. It does not much matter then that someone like Luporini⁷⁵ wishes to correct the formal aspect contained in a structuralist interpretation by reminding us that one can no more consider this system of relations as an in-itself, abstracting from the individuals in which they are embodied, than one can consider these individuals themselves independently of the relations in which they are involved. In this interplay between empiricism and epistemology, the decisive contribution of the “Theses on Feuerbach” is lost as well. Individuals as they are understood in the same way by both Luporini and Althusser, empirical individuals belonging to Feuerbachian reality, to sensuous reality, are recognized and defined in the light of his ontology. The new epistemological field opened and structured by the “scientific” concepts of social relations, etc., is only “the higher way of seeing” which allows one to go beyond “sensuous appearance” in order to reach “a deeper analysis of the concrete state of things” and, finally, to reach its “structure.” Must one then return from the sensuous object back to the object of thought, contrary to the untiring demands of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and confront the ghost of Hegelianism once more in the rags of its contemporary disguises? Or should one recognize that it is only on the ground of sensuous reality and as its determinations that categorial determinations in general, “scientific objects,” are constructed and developed, so that concrete singularities, individuals, can indeed be grasped and known only within these relations, which themselves, however, have no sense except with reference to individuals?

It does not much matter, we said. In sensuous reality just as in the scientific thematization outside of which it is claimed that one is unable to reach this reality—as if sensuousness were not a particular power alongside that of thought— in intuition as in theoretical consciousness reigns sight, the primordial theoria which presents being as what is seen, as an object. ⁷⁶ This structure of being is what is ultimately rejected by the “Theses on Feuerbach.” Such is the radical ontological meaning of the reversal of theory in practice. This reversal has nothing to do with the Feuerbachian reversal which aims at substituting, and in this anticipates Nietzsche, sensuous being for intelligible being, and which recognizes the rights of the givenness of intuition as more fundamental than those of conceptual vision. It is the Feuerbachian framework itself, and consequently the pre-and post-Feuerbachian framework as well, the intuitive relation to being, the intuitive relation or the conceptual relation and this very alternative, the intuitive and conceptual relation as relations that are properly and essentially ontological, which are overturned in the reversal now performed by Marx.

Since what is overturned in this reversal is contained within the problematic, how does it accomplish this reversal and what is the result of the act of overturning? The reversal of the “Theses on Feuerbach” overturns in its own way, overturns and allows what it overturns to remain intact. Neither the sensible object nor the scientific object is set upside down nor is it annihilated. Both subsist just where they are, before us. Only, this “before us” is no longer the theme of the problematic. The problematic which is directed toward the reality of being no longer takes into consideration the seeing of theoria, the seeing of intuition or that of thought, and, allowing this seeing to subsist just where it is, allowing what is seen to unfold just where it is seen, it indicates that the original reality of being lies elsewhere, in some other place, and, henceforth, it consciously directs itself toward this other place. What is this other place? What is it that is no longer “theory” and, as such, is truly, is being? The “Theses on Feuerbach” affirm no less explicitly: it is action. The thesis of the “Theses on Feuerbach” then surges forth with the brutality of its incoercible self-evidence. Feuerbach was mistaken because he believed he could grasp the essence of reality in intuition and, as a result, grasp being as an object, whereas the reality of this being, the reality of reality, lies on the contrary in an original and exclusive manner in practice, which itself designates nothing but activity, pure activity as such. The first thesis declares straightaway: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as . . . activity, practice. . . .”

Why then is intuition incapable of displaying in itself the being of action; why can it not give this being to us? Why must it be rejected and why must Feuerbach be reversed in order for action to be? For action, being means acting. The structural ontological heterogeneity separating intuition and action which Marx brings to light and which is thought by him in terms of this reversal is then made explicit in the following way: acting is not intuiting, it is not seeing, it is not looking. Inasmuch as intuition takes place, inasmuch as we live in it, inasmuch as we “intuit,” we are not acting. The intuition has an object, it is the theory of this object, it contemplates it. But if the intuition intuits the object, if it “sees” and “contemplates,” action does nothing of the sort. No doubt we can well act and at the same time intuit, contemplate the world, the sensuous world; we can also have the intuition of the action we are performing. In this case we look at what we are doing. It may even seem that this looking is a condition for our action; let us understand by this a way of assuring ourselves that our action is indeed going the way we want it to, in the direction of the goal we are pursuing, and possibly providing a way of correcting it. But action, considered in itself, has nothing to do with this gaze of intuition, with the discovery of a spectacle, with the appearing of an object. Discovering a spectacle, contemplating it, living in the presence of an object is, precisely, not acting. Inversely, we can well act without having the intuition of our action, that is to say, without looking at it, without giving it to ourselves as an object. It is, moreover, in this way that we act most often, that we perform most of the motions of our daily life. This is so with respect to everything we “know how to do,” that is, the whole of the professional or private practices which mark out our existence and constitute its fabric, its very substance. This is so of “practice” in general.

This characteristic of practice by virtue of which it is foreign to intuition, whether the latter be sensuous or intellectual, is not, however, to be understood as an habitual characteristic, a property that could be found in most of our actions, that would be present “most of the time.” This is why the proposition formulated previously, according to which we could indeed act without having the intuition of what we do, without representing our action to ourselves, must be specified, grasped in its rigorous meaning after the reversal. We must say: action is possible only inasmuch as it is not intuition, as it is neither intuition of itself nor of any sort of object. There is a contingency attaching to the relation between action and intuition, and this contingency signifies that action has nothing to do with intuition, that its essence is totally foreign to that of intuition, that it does not contain intuition but instead excludes it and does so in a radical manner in order to be possible, to be what it is, that is, in order to act. The structural ontological heterogeneity of action and of intuition is thus uncovered through the rigorousness of eidetic analysis: in analyzing intuition, that is, the appearing of an object, one cannot find action there, but only its contrary, seeing, contemplation. In the same way, in analyzing action, one cannot find intuition there, since if intuition were present in it, it would not act. This is why when intuition takes place at the same time as action, this “at the same time” defined and determined in a rigorous manner signifies “outside,” as this characterizes radical exteriority, signifies that an intuition takes place elsewhere, outside of the action itself. And it is inasmuch as this intuition takes place outside of action and not in it that action can continue, that action, let us say, is possible and real.

The radical exclusion of intuition from action so that action can be possible, so that action can exist, must be carried in thought to its very end. To say that in action there is no intuition, no seeing, means that nothing at all is seen—nor can be seen—in it, means that in it there is no object. What then is action to the extent that in expelling all seeing outside itself, it thereby excludes every object? The first sentence of the first thesis on Feuerbach says what it is: it is subjective. Materialism in all of its forms was, precisely, criticized as grasping reality “only in the form of the object or of intuition but not as . . . activity, practice, not subjectively”⁷⁷ To Feuerbach’s objective intuition—objective in the sense of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in the sense in which man is an objective being insofar as he has outside himself an object with which he is in relation through intuition, in the sense in which “objective” signifies the relation to the object—is radically opposed subjective action, in which subjectivity designates, on the contrary, the absence of this relation, of any intentional relation in general, precisely, the absence and the exclusion from it of intuition.

But what then appears before us is an absolutely new sense of the concept of subjectivity; it is its authentic and original meaning; it is subjectivity itself which allows itself to be glimpsed by us in its very being and in its innermost essence. And it is here that Western philosophy, at least in what it possesses that is most constant and most apparent, is turned upside down. For such is the importance of the reversal performed by Marx in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” the reversal of Western philosophy itself. In this way, far beyond and far short of Feuerbach, it is the horizon within which philosophy has always posed and solved its problems that is shaken; it is the very concept of being that is made to waver. The concept of being is subjectivity. Subjectivity is what permits beings to be. It has always been the case, in the West at least, that subjectivity permits beings to be inasmuch as it proposes them as objects, inasmuch as it is intuition. It has always been the case, from the time of ancient Greece, that the subjectivity of the subject is but the objectivity of the object. When, with Descartes, subjectivity is understood as “thought,” it is still the necessary condition for the object that is sighted; this condition remains the original seeing which shapes and founds objectivity transcendentally, even if the place of this seeing is henceforth located in the intellect and no longer in sensuousness. In the same way, in Kant, the analysis of “transcendental consciousness” is nothing other than a presentation of the a priori structures of any possible subject, that is, precisely, of objectivity as such. It is once again as thought and, precisely, in the wake of Descartes and Kant that subjectivity is interpreted by Hegel, when it is identified by him with being, when it is understood as the being of substance. It is this tradition, which he believes he is opposing, that Feuerbach in his turn continues, if it is true that the intuition in which he wants once again to locate the relation to being simply frees, by restoring its original dimension, the “seeing” which constitutes the essence of this relation. This is why, as has been sufficiently demonstrated, the Feuerbachian critique of Hegelianism in fact had no ontological meaning. After all the others, Feuerbach’s materialism unawaredly takes up again the presupposition which finds its explicit formulation in classical rationalism and according to which being resides in theoria and as such is seen, known, knowable, “rational.” It is with this presupposition, which is handed down to him by way of Feuerbach, that Marx abruptly breaks in 1845. The passage from Feuerbach’s materialism to Marx’s “materialism” is not the passage from one particular conception of matter to another, from a static conception to a dynamic, “dialectical” conception. Nor is it the passage from a philosophy of mind, of the “universal,” which is still present in Feuerbach, to a conception capable of producing actual material reality, to true materialism; it is the passage from a certain conception of subjectivity to another, from an intuitive subjectivity establishing and receiving the object, an “objective” subjectivity, to a subjectivity that is no longer “objective,” to a radical subjectivity from which all objectivity is excluded. According to the first conception, being is an object and, as the objectivity of being is established within the realm of sense, a sensuous object. According to the second, on the contrary, being is nothing that can be presented to us as an object, is nothing objective, nothing sensuous; it is, in a radical—and in a radically new—sense, “subjective.”

Taken literally, the first sentence of the first thesis is unintelligible, undermined by an enormous contradiction. It states: the error of past materialism is to have grasped “the thing, reality, sensuousness . . . in the form of the object or of contemplation,” that is, precisely, as object, as sensuous world. But what it means, beyond this apparent absurdity, is blindingly clear. It says that reality, that which up to the present has been understood as the object of intuition, that is, as object, as sensuous world, and which Marx himself in the wake of Feuerbach names in this way in the first part of the sentence, is originally nothing of the sort, is not constituted in its essence by intuition and so does not present itself as an object, is nothing “objective.” It is this reality foreign to objective intuition that constitutes, precisely, reality, which Marx now calls by its true name of subjectivity, and Marx reaches the concept of this reality by considering the phenomenon of action, of practice, because action is possible, acts, only insofar as it carries within itself no intuition, as it has neither an object nor a world.

The question that has motivated the present work and determined our entire investigation has been the following: what is the ultimate sense of Marx’s critique of Hegelianism? The clear comprehension of the first sentence of the first thesis on Feuerbach gives us the reply. Why does Marx set himself in opposition to Hegel? Because, it is said, Hegel is a philosopher, because he contented himself with thinking the world, that is, with offering an interpretation of what is and what becomes, a philosophy, precisely, of nature, of history, of right, of art, of religion, etc., whereas the question raised by Marx, an entirely new question generating a new attitude in the spiritual life of humanity, was that of practice. This question substitutes for the traditional teleology of knowledge that of action; it no longer implies a recognition of the laws of being but the radical modifications it is to undergo—science, knowledge cannot help but be subordinated to this end which of its essence is “practical.” This is why Hegel was dismissed not as one philosopher among others, as proposing an inaccurate philosophy open to criticism, full of holes and errors, etc., but as the philosopher, as representing philosophy itself. Hegel’s philosophy is philosophy not because it contains all the others in the Aufhebung of absolute knowledge but because it is this knowledge and obeys it as its inner determination. Hegel: a philosopher, all philosophers. It is the teleology of knowledge that the eleventh thesis explicitly challenges at the same time as it opposes to this teleology, no less explicitly, the new teleology of “practice” and of action. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Only, appearances to the contrary, the eleventh thesis does not provide a reply to our question; it does no more than state it. What is more, it states it in an enigmatic form and renders it insoluble. If it is true that, in Marx’s eyes, all philosophies now find their representative in the philosophy of Hegel,⁷⁸ and that it is to Hegel that Marx’s discourse is addressed, the latter is intelligible only insofar as Hegelianism continues to be understood as a philosophy of thought, as a thought of the world. However, this understanding, which is self-evident, has nothing immediate about it; it is dependent on Marx and on Marxism, dependent on our contemporary cultural universe, which since the beginning of the century has had us repeat that Hegel, philosophers, and philosophy in general have only thought about the world, whereas the point is actually to change it. In the “explanation” that is usually given, the eleventh thesis indefinitely presupposes itself, as an empty tautology. Perhaps it is even a totally unintelligible proposition if it is true that Hegelianism is not a philosophy of thought but, precisely, a philosophy of action, a philosophy which states: das Wesen des Menschen ist die Arbeit, the essence of man is labor. It is a philosophy which states that right is not the thought of right but its Idea, that is to say real right, right acting in a given society, determining the ensemble of relations that are produced there, a philosophy which, in the final analysis, is one with these relations, with the social life of which they constitute the very fabric, with the ensemble of social relations. This is a philosophy which revealed its implicit presuppositions precisely with respect to the problem that concerns us, the problem of action; and it did so by the radical critique of traditional morality. By showing that morality, no more than right, is not a thought, the aim of a duty for example, an intention, but that actual morality, which is the Idea of freedom, is “actualized by self-conscious action,”⁷⁹ that it is always a matter of going beyond the representation of the goal by realizing it, of “[translating] something from subjectivity (i.e. some purpose held before the mind) into existence”⁸⁰ and that this “actualized” and “achieved” aim can be so only “by means of its activity.”⁸¹ By showing, too, that this action, consequently, can no longer be understood as a mere “action of thought” but as a real action, an actual modification of the world, imprinting on it its recognizable indelible mark, finding in it at one and the same time the place of its actuality and that of its testimony. “. . . since action,” § 132 states, “is an alteration which is to take place in an actual world and so will have recognition in it. . . .” And again, in § 132: “. . . an action, as its aim entering upon external objectivity. . . .” One could invoke a number of other similar quotations.

These quotations, which have been collected at random in our reading of the Philosophy of Right concern far more than just this single work, one moment— the last—in Hegel’s thought; they contribute to defining far more than just one aspect of this thought. They refer to the fundamental ontology of Hegelianism, and they express its central theme, to the extent that this theme lies in the conception of being itself as action and as production. This is why everything that exists, if it is not to sink into the inanity and the emptiness of the loss of its being, can only be and persevere in being on the condition that it make itself adequate to the condition of being itself, cannot help but act in order to make itself consubstantial to a being that is action and operation. “. . . the act takes place,” states a decisive text in The Phenomenology of Mind, “because action is per se and of itself the essence of actuality.”⁸² This is why the individual acts, in order to be something rather than nothing, and if substance demands this mediation of the acting individual, what it needs is not, in truth, individuality so much as the ontological force of action itself, of operation as such. It is the fact of acting in itself and for itself to which, negating itself, it gives itself over that makes it, in this self-negation constituting being, the being of actual substance and, as Hegel says, its actualization. “What seems here to be the individual’s power and force,” states The Phenomenology of Mind, “bringing the substance under it, and thereby doing away with that substance is the same thing as the actualization of the substance.”⁸³ We know what becomes of individuality that does not act, of substance that does not make itself homogeneous with the operation of being understood as this very operation, as production. The beautiful soul which turns away from the world, that is to say, which does not act, is not the object of an ethical judgment that directs against this soul the negative evaluation it believed it was itself making with respect to things; instead it withdraws from being as such by rejecting its law, and following an ineluctable destiny, through the very will of being which is will and action, it dissolves into the void.

The interpretation of being as production dominates Hegel’s entire thought. The manuscript written by Hegel at Iena in 1803 or 1804 and known under the title of “The First Philosophy of Spirit”⁸⁴ is noteworthy in this respect. We know that Hegel defined the necessary conditions for consciousness here, that is, for being itself. Language, no doubt, comes to be recognized as the first of these conditions, first in that it tears consciousness out of the abysmal night of sensuousness in which was unendingly swallowed up that which in it strove to give being to itself; language substitutes for this ephemeral sensation the name, in which it finds its ideal and continuous existence. This existence, however, is still only theoretical because if the empirical intuition ideally posited in the name acquires in it the transparence of a universality which tears it out of the obscurity of its intrinsic ineffability, it nevertheless remains unchanged in this very naming. This is why language affords only a theoretical mastery, the aptitude to see and to recognize as the “same” what nature offers us that is continually different. A real mastery of nature, that is, an effective transformation which makes it adequate to human need, can only be the result of action, and by this the young Hegel means the labor performed in the “material” process of producing things. In this way, “the theoretical process passes into the practical process”⁸⁵ which alone can give a true reality to consciousness.

Hegel’s entire work celebrates the primacy of praxis over theory and affirms the necessity of action. Because action is constitutive of being, it cannot be the object of a prescription nor present itself in the form of an imperative; it cannot precede itself in an ideal form. The ideal form in which being is unable to precede itself does not only refer to an ethical imperative, the Sollen of having to be; it is philosophy itself as the thought of being or as the thought of the world. To say that action, which constitutes the being of the world, does not precede itself in any way as the thought of being and of the world, this means that it is first realized and that the process of forming reality produces one after the other the successive phases of its own development. This is the reason why Hegelian being presents itself essentially as a process and as becoming. This becoming has been produced and, as Hegel says, the real has matured when the ideal appears before it, when the phases of the process of its formation are reproduced in memory, where they are interiorized, in the empire of the ideas of philosophy. The latter, the ideal form of being, can therefore only state after the fact what has taken place in advance of it. The subordination of theory to practice is inscribed in the structure of being originally understood as production. When one opposes the eleventh thesis—the critique of all of philosophy—to Hegelianism, one forgets that Hegel has already written it, and not just offhandedly but in an effort to convey the substance of his thought, in lines that are quoted too often for them to be really heard: “One word more about giving instructions as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. . . . it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real. . . . The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”⁸⁶

If Hegel and Marx both conceive of being, in an original manner, as production and as action, can the opposition of the second to the first signify anything other than an opposition in the way of conceiving of the being of action, than a radical and final opposition in the way of conceiving of being itself? As long as we are not capable of moving back to this ultimate ontological difference, the reversal that the “Theses on Feuerbach” wish to perform remains incomprehensible to us. How then does Hegel understand the being of action? As early as the Iena manuscript, at the moment when action finds a concrete form in labor, the latter is immediately interpreted as that which permits consciousness to change itself into something objective, namely “into this middle term, the instrument.” The instrument is thus the very existence of consciousness, its stable and lasting being, universal, objective, real and “material” in opposition to the objective yet still ideal being of the name.⁸⁷ It is because the instrument confers upon labor the permanence of real being by situating it in objective universality that Hegel will come to say, paradoxically, of this instrument, which seems to be only a means, that it has a greater value than the end.⁸⁸

This close connection between action and objectivity is recognized in the lena manuscript with regard to the necessity that labor be realized in accordance with a rule that is, doubtless, discovered by the individual, “learned” by him and in this appears as external to him, as “inorganic nature” Hegel says. But the tact that the labor of men conforms to a rule such as this gives it precisely the form of this rule, the form of the universality in which it can alone find its efficiency along with the actuality of recognized-being. This is why this form, this universal method, constitutes the true essence of labor as an objective essence.⁸⁹

The objective universality of labor can also be seen in the fact that the individual does not work directly for the satisfaction of his own need but in view of the needs of all, and that it is only in this way, as “a universal labor for the needs of all,” aiming at need considered a universal, that it “may satisfy his [a particular individual’s] needs”⁹⁰ and, for instance, the needs of the one who performs this labor. This is why labor is not in reality what it is for the individual but what it is for all and so becomes in its being, as in its aim, a “universal.”

The objective universality of labor finds its most manifest expression in the Work, which is always a common work, the work of all. In this work, it is true, each becomes external to himself and thus presents himself to himself as other than himself. But this otherness of the Work is only apparent: in it the true other—inorganic nature—is, on the contrary, annihilated, carried back to the nature of the self, produced by it. “. . . but this outward being is their deed, it is only what they have made it, it is themselves as active but superseded; and in this outwardness of themselves, in their being as superseded, as middle, they intuit themselves as one people; and this their work is their own spirit itself because it is theirs.”⁹¹

The connection between action and objective universality must, however, be grasped in its radical origin. The latter resides neither in the instrument itself as such, nor in the universal method followed by all activity that determines itself as labor; nor is this origin to be found in the Work itself, where labor gives itself in objectivity the actuality of universal being. On the contrary, instrument, method, and work possess the meaning that they have and that they will retain in subsequent texts only inasmuch as they bear within themselves what originally links action and objectivity, inasmuch as they actualize this original tie as what makes them possible and at the same time provides their motivation. The original tie between action and objectivity resides in the very being of action understood as objectification. Action has a radical ontological meaning; it is the unfolding of being itself; what is actualized in it is not this or that, the manufacture of a given object, the production of a given content of experience; it is the arrival of the object in its object-condition; it is the production of this content in the light of being. This very light is itself produced in action. And this is why action is produced—in order that light be, in order that being be. This is why action is produced as objectification, because this light is, according to Hegel, the light of objectivity, objectivity itself as such.

It may at times seem that Hegel is speaking abstractly of action and that, failing to recognize the character peculiar to each of the various actions which together make up the course of the world, neglecting to study the specific laws that direct it, the nature of the processes that they determine, he reduces the grand interplay of society and of history to the monotonous schema of alienation and its sublation. To substitute the “essence” of action, “operating in-itself and for-itself” for the various real “practices” and for the positive analysis of their conditions, is this not pure abstraction? The fact is that Hegel has in view the action of action, what truly takes place in it, its primary reason and its ultimate motivation; in the flash of metaphysical vision, he realizes that production is nothing, produces nothing, if it is not the production of being.

How, for example, does individuality bestow effectivity upon the substance it actualizes? “For the power of the individual consists in conforming itself to that substance, i.e. in emptying itself of its own self, and thus establishing itself as the objectively existing substance.”⁹² This is why the action of the individual is not really his own, it is the action of action, the self-production of being in objectivity, “the development of individuality qua universal objective being; that is to say, it is the development of the actual world.”⁹³ It is in the light of this ultimate ontological proposition that must be read the “self-evident” texts in which the necessity of action is monotonously reaffirmed along with its immediate interpretation as “objective action,” that is, as action which makes what it does enter into the sphere of objectivity and, in this, submits what is done to the laws of objectivity, to its destiny in the world. Paragraph 118 of The Philosophy of Right states that “action is translated into external fact, and external fact has connections in the field of external necessity through which it develops itself in all directions.” And §132 speaks of “an action, as its aim entering upon external objectivity. . . .” §9: “. . . its activity of translating its subjective purpose into objectivity.” §113: “It is not until we come to the externalization of the moral will that we come to action.” And so forth. The critique of subjective will, the radical critique that robs it of the actuality of existence so long as it does not make itself, in action and through it, identical with objectivity and its production, reaffirms, if need be, the ontological meaning of action, its “objective determination.” With respect to duty, Paragraph 149 says that through it the individual “finds his liberation . . . from the indeterminate subjectivity which, never reaching reality or the objective determination of action, remains self-enclosed and devoid of actuality.”

Grasped in its ontological meaning as productive of objectivity in which each thing becomes visible as object, in which each thing becomes conscious, action then allows itself to be recognized as what it is in its ultimate doing; it is the production of consciousness itself. When action allows itself to be recognized as such, when, as objectification, it is, to be more exact, the production of the object, the formation of the object, and, as a result, the view of the object that it perceives in the very act by which it forms it, then one must say: what action does is to see. The opposition between praxis and theory collapses in Hegelianism, where it becomes instead their very identity.

This inner structuring of action which develops as the consciousness of the object and as seeing establishes the latter at the very heart of action, freeing within it a place for thought. For thought emerges and develops within the domain of seeing, and it is properly constituted as thought when what is seen allows itself to be explicitly recognized as the objectification of mind. This situation is realized in culture, where the immediacy of nature is overcome, where the object purified in this way by the negation of its natural immediacy henceforth presents itself in the condition of universality. In culture, the Hegelian substitution of consciousness for action is presented in a striking manner in the form of a substitution of thought for will. A substitution such as this, which signifies nothing other than a radical falsification of praxis in its reduction to theory, becomes conscious of itself within the Hegelian problematic itself; moreover, this is what the problematic explicitly calls for in the significant text of paragraph 21, which describes the formation of culture: “The self-consciousness which purifies its object, content, and aim, and raises them to this universality effects this as thinking getting its own way in the will. Here is the point at which it becomes clear that it is only as thinking intelligence that the will is genuinely a will and free.”⁹⁴

Because action carries within itself the essence of self-consciousness, because it opens up the sphere of thought, it is not separate from the latter. In Hegelianism there is no radical distinction between the diverse modalities of existence, between action, thought, language, art, religion, law, no distinction, as is expressly stated in the text we have just cited, between the will and the intelligence. Intelligence, will, memory, etc. designate the different manners in which the process of the self-objectification of being, in which being becomes, takes place. It is for this reason that the dissociation established by the lena manuscript between language and action has an entirely relative meaning. This dissociation occurs on the basis of a common structure, namely the establishment of stable and permanent being against the background of the abysmal power of the Night. Whether this be the name or the instrument, it is always a question of an objective being. The evolution of the doctrine will only confirm this final ontological homogeneity. In this way, the exchange of roles between language and action is explained. When action fails to produce in objectivity what it intended and when the artist, for example, is disappointed with his work, language exists to state this disappointment. To state, that is, to display in objectivity that which has not yet been able to be accomplished. Conversely, if what is claimed has to be proven by action, this is because action takes place as objectification, thereby allowing its result to be recognized and to be displayed as well in the milieu of being. This is why the dialectics of language and of action are identical and attest to the same destiny.⁹⁵

As to the relation of action to thought, if one wishes to define it at all rigorously, then one must say: this is not, in reality, a question of a relation between two different modalities of existence, but of one and the same thing—of the objectification process in which being produces itself. Action designates this process considered in itself, whereas thought designates the fact that the production of that which is objectified is at one and the same time consciousness of an object. Production is literally the production of thought, action that which makes it possible, produces it, and which finally is thought itself. This action of thought defines the nature and the status of labor in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It is this action of thought, however, that is criticized in these same manuscripts, more specifically in what, according to Marx, is held to constitute the “final chapter” dedicated, in his own words, to a “critical analysis of Hegel’s dialectic and of his philosophy in general.” A deep-lying contradiction permeates the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; it determines Marx’s theoretical work during these decisive formative years and ends in the brutal dénouement of the “Theses on Feuerbach.” What we then understand is the following:

(1) The concept of labor which is developed in the first manuscript and in the first part of the third manuscript of 1844 is the Hegelian concept of action as the action of thought. It is the activity of a consciousness which objectifies itself in a world where it is found and where it finds itself. Where it is found: the production of the object is at one and the same time its consciousness, the advent of beings to the condition of phenomena. Where it finds itself: as the objectification of the generic laws of consciousness, the object reflects back to consciousness its own image; it is the universal elaboration of the inorganic essence of nature. The final obvious result of this text from the first manuscript, in which the distinction between action and intellect is only the means of displaying their common essence, their common origin, is that the praxis which is actualized in labor is identical to consciousness, to self-consciousness, and finally to thought; it is theory. “The object of labor is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.”⁹⁶ The comparison between these texts written in 1844 and the manuscript written by Hegel in Iena in 1803–1804 is therefore not foundationless. Why quote at length from The First Philosophy of Mind when Marx himself had not read it? Because the situation of these two texts is the same. They both represent what we have termed the incursion of German metaphysics into the economy, namely the interpretation of the essence of labor in the light of the Hegelian ontology of the self-positing of being in objectivity.

(2) The “last chapter” of the third manuscript, in which Marx at last consciously and deliberately strikes out at Hegel, unequivocally, vehemently, and repeatedly sets action apart from thought, described as “formal” and “abstract.” “. . . the formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation or self-objectification.”⁹⁷ The action of thought is formal and abstract because thought is not capable of producing beings, of creating them. What produces beings—not, however, by creating them but by receiving them—is not the action of thought; it is intuition.

(3) Inasmuch as the action of thought is eliminated in favor of intuition, the substitution of theory for practice is not merely latent, as in Hegel, but explicit and avowed; and Marx, along the path he is laboriously following in the direction of reality, suddenly understands that he has gone astray. He understands that intuition, which claims to constitute the inner structure of being and to give it as a sensible object, is still only theory—“Feuerbach . . . only conceives of man as an object of the senses . . . he still remains in the realm of theory.”⁹⁸ He understands, in the same stroke, that Hegelian action is only pseudo-action, not because it is incapable of positing beings, but because it is itself a seeing, a theory, and it is for this reason that it is, in reality, incapable of positing beings. Marx rejects both Feuerbach’s intuition and Hegel’s action, and he does this, not by accident, in the mere chronological coincidence of two different movements of thought, but in the unity of a single movement which reverses together sensuous intuition and the action of thought, materialism and idealism, because it reverses the single essence residing in both of them, the essence of objectification, the essence of theory.

But how does Marx perform this reversal? We now wish to say: what are the conceptual means at his disposal with which, setting theory aside, to introduce the essence he has in view? The philosophical materialism available to Marx at the start of the year 1845 is supplied to him by the systems of Hegel and of Feuerbach. It is, precisely, the ensemble of categories, notions, schemata, arguments, and types of arguments which he employed in the writings preceding the “Theses on Feuerbach”—in other words, the ensemble of concepts in which sensible intuition and the action of thought have themselves been conceived. This means: in order to think the absolutely new essence that he had in view, the essence of reality, Marx has no concept available to him. In this way is explained the manner in which he proceeds; in this way the text of the second sentence of the first thesis becomes clear. In order to set aside Feuerbach’s intuition, which decomposes being by handing it over to the condition of object, which substitutes for living reality a universe petrified by the gaze, Marx opposes to it action, which he takes where he finds it, in Hegel to be precise, in idealism, for up until Marx idealism was the sole philosophy to have thought in terms of action, to have thought action.⁹⁹ Moreover, it is in an explicit manner, and with singular lucidity, that Marx refers to idealism in order to reduce the ontological claim of intuition, its claim to produce as objectivity an original manifestation of being. The second sentence begins thusly: “Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism. . . .”¹⁰⁰ Only, Hegelian action is not really action; it is only the production of consciousness and exhausts itself there, in theoria. Cited in its entirety, the second sentence reads: “Hence in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism¹⁰¹—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” After having rejected Feuerbach’s intuition by means of the concept of action borrowed from idealism, Marx is now preoccupied with rejecting the idealist concept of action. “But how?” we ask. By resorting to Feuerbach’s ontology. It is in this way that in the texts we have just quoted, where Marx tries to say what real activity, unknown to idealism, is, he describes it as sensuous. This is to resort to the Feuerbachian definition of being in order to describe the real being of action. Already the first sentence, in which Marx wanted, on the contrary, to reject this Feuerbachian definition of being as sensuous being and to oppose action to it as alone constituting true being, could define the latter only with the help of the definition of being that was to be rejected. Real activity, practice, was said to be a “humano-sensuous” activity. “Human,” “sensuous,” in other words, the very terminology and the ontology of Feuerbach.

Setting aside Feuerbach’s sensuous intuition with the help of the action of thought in idealism, rejecting the action of thought with the help of sensuous intuition, the first thesis seems to move in a circle. This circle is that of the conceptual means available to Marx, means such that each term in its fundamental inadequacy refers to the other, which is, however, itself in the same situation referring us back to the first. What this circle indicates to us in this perpetual back-and-forth reference from materialism to idealism and from idealism to materialism is their common inadequacy with respect to what is to be thought. It would thus be a decisive mistake to take seriously one of the terms between which the first thesis, in the powerless dialectic of its circular movement, ranges. Once again the categories of idealism and materialism have merely a functional significance, each serving only to disqualify the other, each, considered in itself, incapable of claiming any sort of positivity. No more than Marx’s thought can be related to idealism under the pretext that its thematic field includes the problem of action,¹⁰² can the materialist definition of this action be admitted as sensuous human action. The recourse to Feuerbach’s ontology in order to think the reality of action in opposition to the simple action of thought from the standpoint of idealism has no motive other than signifying this opposition, which in itself is pure nonsense if it is true that this ontology of intuition is precisely what Marx means to reject. This is why the concept of sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit must itself be the object of a radical critique; it signifies nothing other than the absurd maintenance of Feuerbach’s terminology just when Marx explicitly assigns himself the goal of reversing Feuerbach’s ontology.¹⁰³

How could Marx have used repeatedly in the 1845–46 texts the term sensuous activity, if the being of action is heterogeneous to that of sensuousness? Heterogeneity means: analytical non-implication, contingent relation. If action is subjective, if it exhausts itself in the internal experience it has of itself, in the radically immanent feeling of effort with which it is fused, if, considered in itself, it is this lived tension of an existence caught up in the ordeal of its act of pushing, pulling, lifting, or grasping, and if, caught up in itself in this way and wholly self-occupied, performing and undergoing its effort without the slightest respite and without being able to take any distance with respect to itself, then it is blind, opaque, and takes place without the gaze of contemplation being able to lighten the burden it is for itself; and yet it is true that the fundamental possibility remains—and this is what is signified by the contingency of the relation between action and intuition—of looking at this action, of seeing it, feeling it, and, in this gaze that is now directed to it from outside, for this theoria contemplating it, action is sensuous action. Action is not sensuous, objective, natural in itself but only inasmuch as it is grasped in intuition, that is, as a content foreign to the power that intuits, as an objective content.

“Sensuous activity” means praxis as it is presented to the gaze of theory. It is the mode of access to praxis inasmuch as it is no longer constituted by praxis itself, inasmuch as it takes place in the intuition, and first of all in sensuous intuition, which defines not the original and inner being of praxis but its objective appearance as empirical. It is, as Marx says, “empirical observation”¹⁰⁴ which renders its object sensuous, empirical. Imagine a runner on the stadium track. As the object of intuition, as empirical, objective, sensuous, natural phenomenon, his race is there for each and every one. But the spectators look on and do nothing. It is therefore not the empirical intuition of the race, its objective appearance, that can define it and constitute its reality; it is nothing but its appearance. The reality of the race lies in the subjectivity of the person running, of the lived experience that is given to him alone and that constitutes him as an individual, as this individual who is running, as a “determined” individual, to speak as Marx does. This is what is signified by the decisive affirmation of the first thesis, according to which practice is subjective. Because practice is subjective, theory, which is always the theory of an object, cannot reach the reality of this practice, what it is in-itself and for-itself, precisely its subjectivity, but can only represent this to itself in such a way that this representation necessarily leaves outside itself the real being of practice, the actuality of doing. Theory does nothing.

The dissociation of theory and practice does not lead to their sheer opposition; instead it receives its most radical formulation in the founding tie that unites them. By virtue of this decisive tie it appears that the world offered to the gaze of theory does not proceed from it; the object of intuition is not its own but, on the contrary, finds its origin in praxis itself. It is first of all in this sense that praxis founds theory: by providing it with the content it displays in intuition. This foundation is realized in two different ways. In the first place, the object of intuition considered as a natural determination is precisely not a determination of nature but a determination of praxis, from which it takes its predicates. “Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno, it presupposes the action of producing this stick.”¹⁰⁵ But Bauer is quickly dismissed in The German Ideology; it is especially in opposition to Feuerbach that the dependence of the sensuous world as a whole is affirmed with respect to praxis, and this is the case because it is precisely the seeing of intuition that is in question. It is because “Feuerbach’s ‘conception’ of the sensuous world is confined . . . to mere contemplation of it . . .”¹⁰⁶ that Marx takes intuitive materialism as the target of his critique, affirming that the sensuous world that seems to be the correlate of intuition and to be defined as such, as that which is seen, is, despite this appearance, nothing of the sort but simply the product of praxis, of what Marx calls industry, commerce, history. “. . . and so it happens that in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-looms were to be seen, or in the Campagna di Roma he finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists.”¹⁰⁷ Thus, the aspect of the world, which is related to seeing, is not related to it. Nevertheless, it is not only this immediate view of the world, its immediate and naïve perception, it is science itself and, consequently, theory in all its forms that finds its ground in praxis and reveals itself to be fundamentally determined by it. “Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this ‘pure’ natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men.”¹⁰⁸

The determination of theory does not consist solely in the fact that what is seen is not the result of seeing and does not find in it, in the nature and forms of sight, in the structure of theory itself, the principle of its nature, of its forms and its own peculiar structure, a principle which lies, on the contrary, in praxis. Or rather, it is the very peculiar manner in which the content of intuition now originates in praxis that determines the second mode in accordance with which the foundation of theory is realized. The “natural” object is here no longer the product of human activity, of “commerce” and industry, is no longer a nature henceforth transformed so that “pure” nature no longer exists: there is no nature in any sense at all, no natural object however much it may be mediated by praxis, but instead it is praxis, human activity itself, that constitutes the “object” of intuitive vision. Feuerbach’s mistake was precisely to have failed to understand that the object of intuition is finally nothing other than praxis, that what this intuition proposes to us as a world and under the sensuous appearance of this world, are in reality the numerous activities of individuals. “Thus he [Feuerbach] never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living, sensuous activity of the individuals composing it. . . .”¹⁰⁹ And again: “. . . he only conceives of him [man] as an ‘object of the senses’, not as ‘sensuous activity’. . . .”¹¹⁰ Because the substance, the reality, the essence, the inner nature of that which is given in intuition as the “sensuous world” is the substance, the reality, the essence of praxis, then the latter, because it constitutes the true being of the world and of that which gives itself to us as such, actually founds it, founds the sensuous world in a radical manner as the very thing that it unfolds as a world, that it represents and without which it would represent nothing, as that which exists in it and without which nothing would be.¹¹¹

In designating praxis as the ground of being, the “Theses on Feuerbach” discover at the same time the original place of truth. It is trifling to say that a true thought, one which grasps hold of objective truth, recognizes the primacy of practice over theory, the anteriority of being to the gaze that is directed to it. In a thought such as this, theory is situated in its proper place and attains the truth about itself. Truth is then still the province of theory, when it is asked to shine light on what exists before it. Moreover, this is the truth of Feuerbach; it is the truth of intuition understood in its fundamental receptivity. The fact that the being received and illuminated in this reception is no longer that of the brute beings of “pure” nature but praxis changes nothing regarding the nature of this illumination, regarding the essence of truth. Radically opposed to the truth which finds its essence in theory, and which is still only the gaze cast on the enigmatic being of praxis, is a new truth which is no longer the truth of thought, of self-consciousness, or of sensuousness but which lies in praxis itself as such. Henceforth, it is not a theoretical proposition that can enlighten us and, through its transcendental meaning, bear a truthful witness to being, give a statement capable of saying what is. The power of revelation belongs henceforth and exclusively to doing; only he who does something knows, by this doing and in it, what being is about—being, which is this very doing. If a theoretical proposition persists in its claim to express truth, this is in a very peculiar way, insofar as this proposition no longer contains the truth and no longer gives it to be “seen” in itself, but indicates outside of itself and as the absolute other in relation to itself the place in which this truth is realized, refers to this realization which it has nothing to do with except to summon it and to invoke it. In a radical ontology of praxis, theory ultimately assumes the form of a prescription.

This is the case with respect to religions, which can be reduced to a theology,¹¹² that is, to a theory of being, only at the cost of an absolute misunderstanding—such as Feuerbach’s, for instance. On the contrary, what characterizes religious saying is the way in which the theoretical content dies out and the commandment abruptly surges forth. “Abruptly” signifies precisely: in the absence of any theoretical context. This, again, is why the religious saying is offered as a naked utterance, an isolated proposition that begins with such and such a word and ends with such and such a different word, and that must be taken as it is. The religious saying resounds from the heavens, erasing the objective universe, arising in doubtful or uncertain circumstances. When the world and its connections are placed out of bounds in this way, who speaks? Is it a man, a prophet, or an angel? Is it Moses or Christ? The word that is heard, the text of the Tablets, the law that is promulgated and bestowed are, in any event, given as absolute, as the divine word. Absolute, divine, the word is bound to nothing, has no extrinsic justification. Does this justification lie in the word itself? But how could an isolated proposition draw a theoretical legitimation from this isolation, which always consists in analytical implication and refers back to the open chain of foundations and final principles? Or instead might not the legitimation lie outside of theory: in practice? Practice and it alone, because it constitutes the original dimension of being, can reveal in itself and in the actuality of its doing what being is about. In prescription, theory says its last word, it negates itself and leads outside itself to a being that it summons, invokes, and does not contain. This is why the claim that was made by Husserl to reduce all normative science to a theoretical science manifests the very illusion of theory.¹¹³ Of course, every normative proposition can be converted into a corresponding theoretical proposition, and instead of saying “a warrior must be brave,” one can always write “only a brave warrior is a good warrior,” or another similar statement. By closing itself up inside of itself, however, theory loses, when it no longer takes the form of normativity, the only tie it can maintain with the original truth of being. Because normativity—when it is not reduced, as Husserl precisely will do, to the apodicticity of the principles of reason—expresses, on the contrary, the decisive limitations of theory; as Idea, it continues to have the value of an ontological index. This is also why the critique of moralism is neither as simple nor as obvious as it seems. This critique forms, as we know, one of the major themes of Hegelianism and we find it again “as is” in Marxism. And in the young Marx too, inasmuch as he is still Hegelian.¹¹⁴ But if the ethical imperative is vain so long as it leaves reality unchanged and remains itself no more than an empty wish, it at least indicates as a simple proposition at the very heart of theory that the place of reality is not to be found here. Inasmuch as the normative principle is indeed presented as a prescription, inasmuch as it is addressed to a doing, it signifies that the place of reality which transcends all theory is precisely that of praxis. “One must” means “one must do” this or that.¹¹⁵ “One must” is then no longer the empty word floating in the air, mistaking reality and making way for knowledge; it is the essential word which, on the contrary, by challenging knowledge as the way of reaching being, refers us back to being in accordance with the way in which this referring back and this access can be realized, in accordance with the fundamental mode of praxis. The critique of moralism in Marx turns out to be the critique of theory, of thought, allowing the “one must” to subsist and, what is more, it is formulated within this principle. After having been directed at German philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century, the eleventh thesis gives us its decisive meaning, the essential connection between prescription and praxis. It tells us that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways and that what one must now do is to change it.

The fact that the original essence of being—and that of truth along with it—lies in praxis, that every true, objective thought—that is to say, thought capable of referring itself to being and of recognizing the place of truth—must recognize at the same time its fundamental incapacity to constitute by itself this place and this original essence of being and of truth, the necessity in which it finds itself to appeal to something other than itself, other than theory, its referential nature, the expression of this essential reference in the “one must” of prescription—all this is contained in the exceedingly dense text of the second thesis, in which the reversal performed by Marx is concentrated, in the ultimate ontological reversal of theory in practice: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”¹¹⁶

The fundamental reference of theory to practice, against the background of their essential difference, opens up the place in which ideology resides and makes the latter possible.