THE FOUNDATIONS

Marx's connections with the Western religious tradition are evident and self-confessed. Although in many respects he reacted strongly against that tradition and reserved some of his severest criticism for the ways in which it had been expressed, he nevertheless remained firmly attached to it, not least in the fact that many of his early insights arose out of reading and accepting Feuerbach's criticisms of Hegel. Certainly, he pushed on much further than Feuerbach in attempting to eliminate vague idealism from human thought and motivation, but he had no doubt at all about the liberating effect of Feuerbach in the first place. In 1843 Feuerbach published his Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy. Marx commented:

Thus although Marx reacted strongly against the ways in which the Western religious tradition had come to be expressed, he remained in a dialectical relationship with it, and he by no means escaped its categories of thought. In connection with suffering, this can be seen immediately in the fact that Marx concentrated, not on suffering as a theoretical problem, but on the actual facts and occurrences of suffering as he observed them.