Karl Marx
The German Ideology
Preface
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false
conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what
they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships
according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of
their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed
down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the
ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are
pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach
men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which
correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical
attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and --
existing reality will collapse.
These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern
Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German
public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes
with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and
criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the
aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for
wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic
form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of
these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the
real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the
philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the
dreamy and muddled German nation.
Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were
drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of
gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by
stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be
sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he
fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all
statistic brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was
the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.
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