{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","uuid":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","normalized_title":"marxandtheconceptofhistoricaltime","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":216,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Marx%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20Historical%20Time","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/search"},"page":{"printed_page":15,"pdf_page":19,"physical_index":19,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b77dea388bcb56ba8f3dd42e9f330a5e9b52ec5d8a6bbb0ca94dd70a0ecd55d5"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"1.1 A Practical Materialism: the Theses on Feuerbach\n\nThe chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that objectivity [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, is grasped only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism, which naturally does not know actual, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinguished from thoughtobjects, but he does not comprehend human activity itself as objective activity [gegenständliche Tätigkeit]…therefore he does not comprehend the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical” activity.<sup>12</sup>\n\nThe materialist concept of history must initially be approached from the standpoint of Marx’s critical reconstruction of the concept of materialism. Written in Brussels during the spring of 1845, Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach (hereafter Theses) reject the notion that a sensible object of appearance [Gegenstand], and thus actuality and sensuousness, are captured only by intuition or only as an object of knowledge [Objekt]. The first thesis (above) directly targets the ‘old’ or substantialist (which is to say, matter-based) materialism, which is polemically and reductively assigned to Feuerbach, so as to create space for a ‘new’ or practical (which is to say, human-based) materialism. At a basic level, the chief defect of existing materialism is, according to Marx, that it is pre-Kantian: it has no viable concept of the subject. At the same time, and of equal philosophical importance, Marx critiques the character of Kant’s subjective constitution of objectivity [Objektivität] on which Feuerbach’s materialism relies. The Theses are a critical extension of the subject-object relation of modern epistemology as inaugurated by Kant: an extension, because they constitute the first materialism of the subject within the Kantian tradition; critical, because they reject the sensuously passive and hence ideally active character of the subject-object relation in Kant’s transcendental logic. In his declaration that objectivity, sensibility and actuality are not comprehended subjectively by existing discourses of materialism, Marx not only dismisses the old metaphysics of matter in these discourses, but confronts the very dynamic of subjectivity in Kant. The transformation of a sensible object of appearance [Gegenstand] presented to consciousness by intuition into an object of knowledge [Objekt] is a movement – from actual passivity to ideal activity – which defines the subject in Kant. It is a movement that authorises the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding. To suggest, as Marx does, that objectivity, sensibility and actuality are not grasped subjectively by all hitherto existing materialism is to suggest, against Kant, that the subject can be nothing else than sensuous human activity itself, nothing else than practice.<sup>13</sup> As Balibar asserts, in the wake of the Theses, ‘…the only true subject is the practical subject or the subject of practice or, better still, that the subject is nothing other than practice which has always already begun and continues indefinitely.’<sup>14</sup>\n\n<sup>12</sup> Karl Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach [1845] (hereafter TüF), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx Engels Werke (hereafter MEW), Band 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), 5 (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (hereafter ToF), in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 421-22).\n\n15","previous_page":14,"next_page":16}