These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now
Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That
principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The
human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the
sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as
a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in
the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and
limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but
man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God." Feuerbach
personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was
neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were
equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would
be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to
others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was
justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the
teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and
was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism
meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism
disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective.
Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals
were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the
empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even
he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grün passes into
socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing
with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is
the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is
anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated,
externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it,
like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with
the practical God, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical";
humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of
every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social
activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially
to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials
for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or
his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social
possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an
essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as
separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Grün accordingly
says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical
basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to
practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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