In his criticism of Feuerbach, who he nevertheless considers to be the most serious of the “young Hegelians”, Marx notes that Feuerbach is the only one who actually manages to handle the master’s dialectics and his negation of negation; but he criticises teacher and student alike, because their purely abstract studies are based only on the overcoming of religion through (speculative) philosophy, only to end up again with the sublation of philosophy and the restoration of religion and theology. Historically, this means that the atheism of the emerging bourgeois class concludes its parable with a new victory of the religious: in 1844 one called oneself an atheist without fear, today no author dares to do so any more.
Feuerbach here, as Marx explains, follows Hegel: The latter is therefore responsible for the infertility of the bourgeois-critical method. Marx says on this point, while setting up a scheme that unfortunately will soon be interrupted: “Let us take a look at Hegel’s system. We must begin with his Phenomenology, which is the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy.” The scheme works like this: “Phenomenology. A. Self-consciousness 1. Consciousness. […] 2. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of oneself.” We do not need to repeat the schematic and hard-to-digest development here. It becomes clear: For Marx, Hegel’s mistake is to place his enormous speculative construction on a strictly formal, i. e. abstract basis, that of “consciousness”. And as Marx will say so many times, one must proceed from being, not from the consciousness that the I has of itself. From the very beginning, Hegel is in the cage of the hollow dialogue between subject and object. His subject is the I, understood in the absolute sense, and his object, the first object, is for him the “certainty of its self”, as it is also called in other places. “Hegel commits a double error”, which “appears most clearly in the Phenomenology, which is the birthplace of Hegelian philosophy”.
As can be seen from all the meaningful and dense passages, Hegel’s mistake is to start from the thinking subject, the mind that thinks. In the afterword mentioned above, Marx speaks of inverting the Hegelian dialectic, which is upside down. Finally, all bourgeois thinkers who put the historical act of the capitalist class into words succumb to the same mistake. Their I, their human being, their subject, in which they find one and the same absolute expressed, are only a fleeting peculiarity of the bourgeois human being.