Karl Marx Essay

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.” Comment on this statement in the light of Marx’s views on the social nature of consciousness as expressed in The German Ideology.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a man against the stereotypical flow. With Engels, he came up with The German Ideology which challenges the profound set of German philosophy. Opposing the dogmatic ideas of religion and God, which he believed to have been preventing engagement with material conditions of living, he constructed a model on which society was based, and referred every aspect of it to the material hierarchy. Within this, he has avowed that the use of thought and the idea of The Supreme is a tool to bring forth the above mentioned ladder of social status and social order. As per Marx, the experience of reality defines the idea, unlike the trend in German philosophy wherein it is the Idea that mirrors the experience.
In ‘The social Nature of Consciousness’, Karl Marx contrasts the German Philosophy with that of his own wherein the idea of God, takes off from the material attribute of man. What is imagined to be or what is just an idea in the mind, which may or may not have passed down from other minds, is not Marx’s trajectory. He sets off from the flesh of things and how they echo the ideologies through their actions and experiences. Man is differentiated by the manner in which they produce and thus, somehow, production is one of humans' essential activities; so at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, hence with a change in the mode of production there is a change in the higher social structure.  
The German philosophy is by virtue quite theocentric, i.e. process of thought revolves around the mind and its ideas of God. Thus it became hard for many philosophers such as Fichte and Schelling to give a quantitative...