"Marx’s Materialism and the Critique of Philosophy": An essay by Andrés Saenz de Sicilia (Keywords: Marxism;Idealism;Praxis; Alienation;Social relations;Revolution)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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

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Marx’s rupture with philosophy did not result from a process of disinterested intellectual enquiry (a philosophical critique of philosophy) but rather as a necessary consequence of his own involvement and intervention in the communist movement of his day; as an integral part of his attempt to produce a theory capable of grasping and guiding a movement of radical social change, of overcoming the aporias, obstacles and contradictions — both theoretical and political— in which the revolutionary movement found itself at the time. For Marx, adequately theorising revolution turns out to require a revolution in theory.

Although this theoretical revolution unfolded across Marx’s life, culminating in his unfinished masterwork Capital: a critique of political economy, its point of departure can be identified in a radicalisation of philosophical critique, whose exemplary form Marx located in Hegel’s idealism.

For Marx, adequately theorising revolution turns out to require a revolution in theory.

Hegel had been fiercely critical of philosophies which set out with a fixed and unproven set of concepts and categories, applying them indifferently to whatever would be encountered in reality. To proceed in this way, Hegel argued, would be to do violence to reality, to recognise only that which corresponded to those concepts and to filter out everything else. By contrast, he insisted that philosophy had to begin with whatever content was given to thinking most immediately – an apparently direct and simple reality or object – in order to uncover the hidden tensions and contradictions contained within it, and to work through these apparent contradictions to establish the underlying conditions that gave rise to them. In this way, philosophy would not impose distorting or reductive presuppositions upon given reality from ‘outside’ that reality, but rather work toward comprehending that reality in its full complexity (what Hegel called its ‘concreteness’) from within – what has sometimes been called an ‘immanent’ critique.

Like many of his contemporaries, Marx had been deeply influenced by Hegel’s philosophy and the model of immanent critique it offered. Yet within a few years he had announced a break with Hegel, whom he treated as the representative of idealism and even, at points, of all philosophy as such. As Marx set out in several detailed and coruscating critiques, the issue with (Hegelian) philosophy was not that it presupposed some particular set of concepts which it then imposed onto the reality it sought to understand, but rather that it presupposed that the truth of reality was ultimately conceptual: that ‘thought’ had priority over ‘being’. Philosophy’s ‘medium of existence’ was the domain of conceptuality. Thus, when taken to constitute a self-sufficient and enclosed system, philosophy could only ever grasp the truth of reality in the terms of concepts and their relations. This form of idealism was, Marx charged, committed to translating every real phenomenon into a thought-form in order for it to count as real: it sought to discover ‘the determinations of the concepts of logic at every point’. Crucially for Marx, this included relations between individuals, political institutions and even the movement of history itself. There were all simply moments of the ‘absolute idea’ in its process of self-actualisation. Hegel’s ‘concrete’, then, remained an idealised concreteness and therefore, Marx insisted not truly concrete at all, but merely reality’s abstract, spiritualised and thus distorted representation.

In what (or where) then, was reality in its true concreteness to be found? How was reality or objectivity to be grasped, if not in the conceptual medium of a ‘self-sufficient’ philosophy?

As Marx developed his attack on idealism he drew on the materialist critique of religion that had been developed by a fellow ‘young Hegelian’, Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach had argued that religion involved a process of inversion. Human beings invented the idea of a supreme being, but then subsequently came to believe that their own creation – god – was the source of their reality and thus unwittingly endowed this abstraction with power over them. This power, however, was nothing more than the alienated and mystified expression of human powers projected onto a non-human entity (these notions of inversion and alienation would remain a central, evolving motif in Marx’s critique of capitalism). In a similar way, idealist philosophy had given abstract ideas priority over the real humans that produced them and on which they truly depended. Materialism sought to bring these spiritual abstractions – philosophical and religious – back down to earth, to show that living, natural, suffering individuals, made of ‘flesh and blood’, were the ‘earthly’ basis of abstract ideas and entities. Reality as a process was propelled not by an unseen supreme being or ‘the idea’, but by the concrete action of natural beings, members of the human species in relation with one another. This seemed a far more appealing perspective from which to theorize revolutionary transformation, and Marx excitedly declared in a letter to Feuerbach that his writings had provided ‘a philosophical basis for socialism’.

Hegel’s philosophy, much like Kant and Fichte’s before him, had made the conscious activity of the subject absolutely central to the constitution of actuality.

Yet Marx soon became disillusioned too with Feuerbach’s materialism. In a short set of fragments from this period, discovered in a notebook after his death, Marx sketched out the limitations of Feuerbach’s outlook with respect to the task of a revolutionary theory. In the first of these ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, we find a critique of both idealism and materialism. Marx notes there that the long-standing tradition of philosophical materialism, of which Feuerbach was only the latest representative, suffered from a consistent defect: it sought to understand all reality in the terms of sensible ‘intuition’, or empirical observation. In doing so, it assumed a relation between a passive, observing subject and an external, material object. Within this ‘materialist-empiricist’ perspective we may grasp reality in terms of how it impinges upon our senses, yet we remain passive bystanders in the face of a mechanical and deterministic universe ‘out there’, existing beyond our thoughts and subjective intentions (and, ultimately, unaffected by them). Things may happen, the world may change, but not because the subject consciously intervenes to make it so. For materialism, such change can only be the effect of external, objective processes and dynamics that we merely become aware of through sensory observation.

For Marx, this perspective was completely inadequate to the task of theorising the kind of revolutionary, world-transforming activity that communism called for. Ironically, as Marx went on to note, it was in fact idealism that had sought to grasp the ‘active’ side of reality that traditional materialism had neglected. Hegel’s philosophy, much like Kant and Fichte’s before him, had made the conscious activity of the subject absolutely central to the constitution of actuality; the subject-object relation was thus understood by idealism as an interactive, reciprocally determining process (Hegel even spoke of ‘labour’). Yet for all its efforts, idealism could only conceptualise this activity abstractly, as mental labour, since, Marx pointed out, idealism does not know real, material, ‘sensuous’ activity. It recognised the subject’s active role in shaping the world, but misrecognised this activity as mere thinking, intellectual work. Idealism was thus the bearer of a valid principle which, nevertheless, it distorted and mystified.

Marx, then, identifies both strengths and limitations in idealist and materialist philosophy. Idealism was correct to emphasize the active role of the human subject in shaping reality (as well as being shaped by it in turn), yet it fell short in grasping that activity only in its abstract, immaterial aspect, as intellectual activity, thinking. Materialism, conversely, was correct to insist on reality’s externality and irreducibility to the intellect, its sensuous, living, material character, yet it fell short in failing to acknowledge that the human subject is more than a merely passive contemplator of this material reality (a ‘sensing’ but not ‘acting’ subject). For Marx, revolutionary theory aims at something which would be impossible for either of these philosophies to be able to account for due to their blind spots: an idea of human activity as at once both active and material (or as Marx calls it, ‘sensuous’); A human subject who does not just think or sense an objective reality that confronts it, but is also embedded in that reality as an objective being, capable of objective activity. Marx equates this objective activity with ‘revolutionary’ activity, the thinking of which will demand a new conceptual framework that goes beyond the idealism-materialism opposition.

Indeed, in spite of this apparent opposition between idealism and materialism, Marx’s challenge reveals an aspect in which, counterintuitively, these two systems are in fact in deep agreement. Both idealism and materialism take the binary of thought and being (or thought and matter) for granted, only differing in which of one of the two elements they take as the basis of reality. For idealism, thought is primary and being is to be explained from it; for materialism, matter is primary and thought can only ever be an effect of material processes (as, for example, in modern ‘physicalism’, where consciousness is reducible to physical processes in the brain, such as neurons firing). In this sense, all Feuerbach had achieved was to flip Hegel’s philosophy upside down, placing ‘being’ before ‘thought’.  Marx’s ambitions are far greater.

What each individual human is, and therefore what each individual human does, can only be understood by looking at the relations between individuals in society.

Yet simply affirming that human reality is ‘practical’, which is to say, at once active and material – an interactive, embodied, material relationship with the external world and external others, who are also embodied, living, natural beings – is not enough to push Marx beyond the field of philosophy. After all, this might only be a new kind of general philosophical outlook (albeit a highly original one). Some readers of Marx have indeed called this a ‘philosophy of praxis’ (the German term for ‘practice’). The crucial step that takes Marx beyond the philosophical realm, comes when he conceptualises the human subject behind this practice, the one who is embedded in and interacting materially with the world. For Marx, we cannot explain the human subject by referring to enduring natural laws or regularities, such as biological instincts (e.g. grasping the human subject simply as a member of the species homo sapiens) for this would be to revert to traditional, deterministic materialism. Nor, for Marx, can we explain the human subject by referring to timeless mental laws, reason, logic, general theories of consciousness, etc. for this would be to revert to idealism. Marx’s radical innovation, which would plot his route beyond philosophy (in its idealist and materialist modes) was to reject the idea of a natural or intellectual essence of the human being which would be the same in each and every human, in all places, throughout all history.

Instead, Marx firstly seeks to redefine the human essence as social, or more specifically as an ‘ensemble of social relations’ connecting a multitude of individuals in reciprocal relations of interdependence. What each individual human is, and therefore what each individual human does, can only be understood by looking at the relations between individuals in society (here Marx was building on ideas already set out by Hegel, although in an idealistic fashion). And, secondly, because these social relations can and do change – there are of course different kinds of societies, each with different ways of organising the relationships between their members – the human essence is not only social, it is also historical. Marx thus begins to set out the key aspects of his new theoretical approach: it is a ‘new materialism’, at once practical, social and historical. This pushes philosophical discourse – which in so many of its forms seeks only to discover conceptual and ahistorical truths – to its limits.

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In identifying practical activity and the relations that organise it as the key to social reality, Marx also clearly identifies that which would have to be changed in order for a different kind of social life to be brought about. Human ‘practice’ is what makes and remakes human reality, through our interaction with nature, under given historical and social circumstances, using the tools and technologies available and within the constraints of social institutions, rules, norms, cultural forms, etc. In doing so, humans collectively produce and reproduce themselves as particular kinds of human individuals, living in a particular kind of society. Revolution then, for Marx, implies a revolution in (and through) our practical activity and all of the conditions which structure, constrain and enable it; the way we make and remake the world and ourselves on a daily basis through our material actions. Revolution would be the remaking of society, and as a result, the remaking of human beings.

This practical, revolutionary materialism requires no abstract theoretical or philosophical ‘first principles’ with which to begin. As Marx and Engels declare, ‘the premises are already in existence’, they are the forms in which we live, act, relate to one another and to nature in order to reproduce our lives in our present society. The theoretical foundations of communism are not therefore to be derived from general (philosophical) concepts of ‘the human’, of the physical universe, of reason, of nature, etc. but rather from a rigorous and relentlessly critical interrogation of how our practical, collective existence is already structured, regulated, dominated, incentivised and coerced in particular forms within society that surrounds us. And, as we have seen, the first step towards such an interrogation was the overcoming of the philosophical outlook – its theoreticism, its naïve desire to change the world through abstract ideas (whether of ‘reason’ or ‘matter’) – that gave rise to an abstract account of reality, and so too of the possibilities of its transformation. Marx was driven beyond the realm of philosophical reflection, transcending its enclosed plane of analysis and reflection, by his revolutionary commitments.

Revolution would be the remaking of society, and as a result, the remaking of human beings. 

But what, then, becomes of thinking and philosophy once Marx has reached this point of theoretical development? What becomes the status of concepts and the conceptual sphere in the wake of this new materialism? Marx certainly gives philosophy short shrift in his writings of this time, famously declaring that ‘Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love’. Yet it would be wrong to assume that in his ‘leap out it’ Marx simply does away with philosophy altogether, as a confused and impotent (at best) or counter-revolutionary (at worst) endeavour. On closer examination, it becomes clear that in order to break through the limitations of a philosophical perspective, Marx continually and consistently appropriates, modifies and redeploys philosophical resources, whether ancient Greek ideas of nature, German philosophy’s notion of critique, Feuerbach’s anthropology or, perhaps most importantly, Hegel’s dialectical method (which Marx later claimed as a crucial influence in the development of his masterwork, Capital). Marx thus makes use of philosophical elements (concepts, methods, standpoints) to explode the ‘self-sufficiency’ of traditional philosophical discourse (which would require nothing beyond itself -beyond mere thinking- in order to resolve any and every problem it encounters). At the same time, he fuses these philosophical elements in unprecedented ways with historical, social, natural-scientific and economic elements, as he develops and refines his theoretical framework in response to the task of a revolutionary discourse: the critical comprehension of the real, material conditions that give rise to a particular historical form of life, that sustain the suffering and exploitation of people and nature whilst, at the same time, creating the conditions of possibility, even if only barely perceptible, for something different and better.

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As this practical, materialist outlook – what Marx and Engels at one point call the ‘science of history’ – evolved, it also developed a new perspective on many longstanding philosophical concerns regarding modes of consciousness and the knowledge of reality. For Marx, it is not sufficient to simply resolve – as Feuerbach did – the spiritual and abstract creations of the human mind into their earthly basis, to plainly (and abstractly) assert that everything is practical (in some general, ahistorical sense). As Marx would argue in Capital, ‘the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific’ method, was one which sought to account for why a particular set of material conditions – a particular form of organising practical life – gave rise to particular forms of perceiving (and misperceiving) the world, forms of understanding and consciousness, of what can come to appear as natural or social, truthful or false, plausible and implausible, possible and impossible, etc. This method not only provides the key to unlocking seemingly interminable scholastic debates over truth and the ‘reality or unreality of thinking’, but also (are more importantly) enabled Marx to understand how social conditions constrain the possibilities for a theory to be widely recognised as valid, and thus why a critical rather than positive discourse on social reality might be required for communist theory.

What was achieved by this materialist attack on philosophy left Marx a task yet to be accomplished: to develop an understanding of the process of material life (and its internal contradictions) in its historically specific social forms. This took Marx from the study of the ideological and abstract forms of philosophical thought to the study of the structures of the capitalist economy through which human activity is organised in the modern world. Marx would go on to dedicate his life to the analysis of capitalist social relations, to the study of the ‘capitalist mode of production and the relations of production and exchange corresponding to it’. However, even in his later, so-called ‘economic’ writings, Marx continues to rely on philosophical methods and concepts (essence and appearance, universal and particular, subject and object, etc.) to make sense of and organise his critical investigation of capitalism. Whether we consider this project to be post-philosophical or simply another of the many reinventions that philosophy has undergone matters less than coming to terms with the radical consequences it has for thinking and acting in our world, after Marx.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and a managing editor of The Philosopher. His book, Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society was published by Brill in 2024. He is also a Managing Director at The Philosopher.

First published online on 29th March 2026

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