A Critique of Feuerbach’s View of Nature — Textual Interpretation Based on The German Ideology

Abstract

In The German Ideology, Marx addresses a critique of Feuerbach’s view of nature. Feuerbach’s understanding of the sensible world is only from the dimension of pure intuition or natural science, but not as a world that interacts with people’s sensible activities, and at the same time, nature is also regarded as a “self-contained nature” that has nothing to do with human activities. Marx pointed out that it is the product of people’s perceptual activities, the result of people’s historical and practical development, and that the nature in which people live is also “humanized nature” transformed by people, which overcame the defect of Feuerbach’s lack of cognition of historical dimension and grasp of subjective initiative in the view of nature.