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KARL AMERIKS
The legacy of idealism in the philosophy of
Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard
The leading figures of the generation that came to philosophical maturity in the
1840s1 stressed, from the start, their sharp disagreements with the systematic
idealism of their predecessors. As Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author
Johannes de Silentio makes clear in Fear and Trembling, the one thing that he is
not writing is “the System,”2 that is, any version of Hegelian idealism. Ludwig
Feuerbach and Karl Marx could have said the same. Their followers, to this day,
understandably emphasize those aspects of their heroes’ work that take them so
far away from German Idealism that they can appear to be an attempt to “leave
philosophy”3 altogether and to replace it with radical critique, revolutionary
activism, and rigorous empirical science. In addition, all three thinkers agree on
the charge that most of German Idealism, like much of modern philosophy in
general, can be dismissed as little more than an alienating effort to carry out the-
ology by other means. Their agreement on this point is all the more remarkable
since it arose despite obvious and deep disagreements: Feuerbach and Marx
came to bury all religion, whereas Kierkegaard aimed to rejuvenate it by calling
for a return to Christian orthodoxy.
This standard self-portrait of the wholesale rejection of German Idealism by
its immediate essors stands in need of correction now that we know much
more about the genesis of these philosophies than mon knowledge
earlier. Hegel’s work in particular e to be understood as a much more
liberating influence than his immediate detractors would have us
Similarly, Marx’s earliest “philosophical and economic manuscripts,” which
became available only in the 1930s, reveal that even the most “realistic” of think-
ers was very concerned with the abstract details of the idealist Even
if the main immediate effect of the philosophies of t