ABSTRACT
In a passage of strongly prophetic color, the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine described the general import of the philosophical revolution that was worked in Germany in the course of his century. For the extraordinary conception of man as a universal being, Marx was indebted to the nineteenth-century German philosophical revolution and particularly to Ludwig Feuerbach. It appears that a certain Herr Krug, supposing Hegel to be attempting in the philosophy of nature to deduce all actual existent objects from the pure Idea, enquired whether Hegel could deduce the pen with which he, Herr Krug, was writing. The elements of a true critique of political economy and philosophy would have to penetrate Hegel's "mystical allure" and resolve "the absolute metaphysical spirit into the real man standing on the foundation of nature". When Feuerbach says that existence in general is an absurdity, an insipidity, he thinks that the absurdity is removed by predicating humanity of Socrates, Plato, and others.
